In these fraught times, with elusive despots on the run issuing defiant injunctions for their own people to slaughter each other only a couple of hundred kilometres away, a little distraction is indeed a most welcome oasis in a newspaper filled with misery and woe. Such a snippet of distraction was the news that the present Duchess of Alba was about to marry a third husband, a man 25 years younger than herself.
When one thinks that Cayetana Alba is 85 the mind boggles. That she was in her heyday a great beauty is beyond dispute, however, time is ruthless and its depredations unable to be remedied despite the Botox and silicone.
The 18th duchess is already listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most titled human being on earth. This by default because it was her cousin Mimi, Duchess of Medinaceli, who should have been listed with an astounding 57. What happened was that when La Medinaceli found out that she was to be listed along with freaks, daredevils and members of “the common people”, she petitioned the king to pass on 17 of her titles to her sons, bringing the total to a round 40, thereby passing on the honour to La Alba with 41.
The Duchess of Medinaceli was convinced that Cayetana Alba, “with her English blood”, would like the publicity. The English blood in question was, by the way, royal: Fitzjames-Stuart, as the Albas are directly descended from the Duke of Berwick, illegitimate son of James II with Arabella Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough’s sister.
It seems that La Medinaceli was right as, at 85, the Duchess of Alba is not only determined to possibly feature in the Guinness again but determined to outdo in notoriety her celebrated ancestress and namesake: the 18th century Cayetana Alba who stares haughtily out of Goya’s portrait of her wearing white and fiercely guarded by the tiniest of crimped and permed Maltese terriers and the Cayetana Alba who, in a black mantilla, points imperiously at the sand beneath her silk-shod feet at the legend “Solo Goya”. She definitely was not, however, either of the Majas, dressed or undressed. That was a courtesan by the name of Pepa Tudo who was said to have borne a great resemblance to the Duchess, which I simply cannot see.
Some things never change do they? Human nature remains unchanged despite our avid addiction to iPhones, iPods, iPads and the rest of the razzmatazz that sometimes make us feel like gods as information is power and, compared to even our immediate ancestors, the wealth of information available at the touch of a button is unimaginably large. It is, however, the ability to retain this knowledge in our brain and to connect it to other facts that are lodged in our subconscious in some logical theoretical sequence that makes the acquisition of knowledge through technological means worthwhile if not vital.
What I have just written about the two duchesses was written without the aid of Wikipedia, possibly because I found the stories so entertaining that I did not need to look up anything but my own memory. What I fear is that one’s brain can actually become lazy and far too dependent on a memory bank in one’s pocket to be able to retain facts, images, dates, figures and anything else that would be absorbed as a matter of course by our cyberless forbearers.
Despite the astounding amount of telephone numbers stored in my phone, I remember hardly any. I cannot be bothered to, for, like most of you, I depend on my phone to do the work for me. Yet, in illo tempore, when mobile phones were still science fiction, I used to remember most telephone numbers and, probably, if you are over 30, so did you!
If you are like me, a bookworm, you would have probably read many a biography in which love stories like that between the 18th century Duchess of Alba and legendary artist Francisco Goya was celebrated in informed prose. That is what most literature is about, starting from Abelard and Heloise to Bonnie and Clyde. These great love stories are based on the evidence found in diaries and letters and other documentation, which is why many of these biographies still require a prodigious amount of research and are rewritten every so often if and when new historical evidence emerges.
Who can compare today to the letter-writing abilities of the Duchess of Orleans née Princess Palatine whose eagle-eyed insights and observations of the court of her brother-in-law Louis XIV are rivalled, only just, by the diaries of the gossipy Duc de Saint Simon? Who and what in 50 years’ time would we be reading or researching when writing or even reading about the biography of media darlings like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie or the Beckhams, by all accounts today’s aristocracy? What would we know in half a century’s time about the octogenarian Cayetana Alba’s swansong of faded botoxed glory?
Seriously, in a world where Wikipedia can be edited anyhow and altered by anyone to distort facts, controversial issues can be dangerously manipulated. We cannot return to the written word exclusively as before; it is far too late. Maybe it is time to revamp and legitimise the vast and limitless jumble of information that is on cyberspace and make it more reliable lest our natural propensity to misunderstand each other as a matter of principle becomes more of a tragic epidemic than it is already.