In July 1800, Goya receives the fee for the most celebrated of his portraits, The Family of Carlos IV. According to the date payment was made, Josep Gudiol deduces that the artist would conclude his canvas that spring, the first of the century. Goya begins by making a sketch, a “rough,” of each member of the royal family against a red-wash background. Those of Infanta Josefa and Infante Antonio Pascual, the king’s sister and brother, are in the Prado. In these studies, which are authentic paintings, the painter leaves clear evidence of his moral purpose in portraying the entire ensemble. He will not idealize or caricature his models. He feels as far from mockery as he does from flattery. He limits himself to representing the monarchs and their kin as Velázquez painted court jesters: detailing their physical flaws in order to reveal their inner world. And yet the results achieved by Velázquez and Goya are completely antithetical. While Felipe IV’s buffoons reveal their sensitivity and tragic sense of life through their deformities, Goya’s royal imbeciles, as Aldous Huxley will call them in another century, lay bare in their features the stupidity, ambition, and duplicitous cunning that dwell within them.
Almost all the “roughs” contain a complete depiction of the subjects. The only exception is the sketch of the head of Prince Don Carlos María Isidro, who will ignite the so-called Carlist Wars in the next generation when he competes with his niece, Isabel II, for the throne. In the sketch a boy’s head looks out at us, with blond eyebrows and a glance almost as obscure as that of his brother Fernando, the crown prince, though much more willful and devoid of the glint of sadness that in the eyes of the firstborn is mistaken for rancor. In the family portrait, however, Don Carlos, pale and half hidden behind Fernando, seems an extraordinarily and prematurely aged adolescent: almost a dwarf, mockingly invested with the blue-and-white sash of Carlos III, his features withered and arrested on the verge of puberty.
Although the king stands in the center of the painting, a step ahead of the others, the queen is the real protagonist in this grotesque tragedy. Wearing a low-cut dress, her bosom, wig, and ears heavily bejeweled, she smiles disagreeably with tight, almost invisible lips. At the time that Goya is painting The Family of Carlos IV, in March 1800, the French ambassador writes to Napoleon: “The Queen arises at eight, receives the nursemaids of the younger children, and arranges their outings. She writes every day to the Prince of Peace, telling him everything. After the King’s breakfast, the Queen is served hers. She eats alone and has a special cuisine because she is missing all her teeth. Three experts continually retouch her false teeth. The entire royal family attends the bullfights. The Queen is so superstitious that she covers herself with relics during a storm.” A great, ugly mythic bird from The Caprices seems to metamorphose into the head of María Luisa right in the middle of the canvas. Napoleon is enthusiastic about that august head when he conquers Madrid. “It is incredible! Never before seen!” he usually says and then laughs when he describes the canvas. The monarchs, on the other hand, are pleased with Goya’s work. On June 9 of that year, María Luisa writes to Godoy: “Goya begins my portrait tomorrow. The rest, except for the King’s, are already finished and show a great resemblance.” Two weeks later she writes to him again: “Goya has done my portrait. He says it is the best of all. Now he is preparing the portrait of the King, in La Casita del Labrador.”
In the center of the canvas, treated with a resinous solution and painted in oils as transparent as watercolors, María Luisa has her arm around Infanta María Isabel and holds the hand of Infante Francisco de Paula. Court gossip attributes their paternity to Godoy. At this time the infante is only eight years old. Antonina Vallentin notes on his face a tenacious, somber look, inexplicably perverse on the face of a child. His resemblance to the portrait of Godoy in his youth, the work of Esteve, is startling. Two years later, Infanta María Isabel will marry the prince of Naples. Her mother-in-law, Queen Carolina, confesses to Alquier, the French ambassador, that the Infanta is manifestly Godoy’s daughter and has inherited his appearance and expressions. The Neapolitan sovereign does not think highly of her son-in-law, the prince of Asturias: “The Prince does nothing, he does not read, he does not write, he does not think, nothing. Nothing . . . And this is deliberate, for they wanted him to be an idiot. The vulgarities he commits constantly, with everyone, are mortifying. The same is true of Isabel. They were allowed to grow up in the greatest ignorance, and what was done to them is a disgrace. Since María Luisa rules despotically in Spain, she always fears that someone will want to meddle in politics or her affairs.”
The king looks like a wax statue of himself. He is now fifty-two, two years younger than Goya, who portrays himself at the other end of the painting, like Velázquez in The Ladies-in-Waiting, painting it and painting himself. Yet one would say the monarch is much older than the man who immortalizes him in this portrait. He has put on weight and aged prematurely after having been very vigorous. His blue eyes, lost in vacancy like those of a blind man, are somewhat darker than those of his brother, Infante Antonio Pascual, who, peering out from behind His Majesty, resembles the caricature of a caricature. When Princess María Antonia of Naples, now Fernando’s fiancée, eventually gives birth to a stillborn child, her only one, María Luisa again writes to Godoy: “The child was smaller than an anise seed. To see him the King had to put on his reading spectacles.” María Antonia herself is found between Fernando and María Isabel, her head turned toward the paintings on the wall. She has not come yet from Naples, and Goya cannot complete her profile without seeing her. He will never paint her, and the portrait is still incomplete. Behind Fernando and María Antonia appears the head of the ancient Princess María Josefa, sister of the king and Infante Antonio Pascual. An observer would think that one of those mirrors in which Goya’s old witches look at themselves, while winged time prepares to sweep them away, has brought the image of one of those sorceresses back to life. Adorned with long gold earrings and peacock feathers on her head, the apparition is smiling. She has a blemish on one temple and eyes as blue and glassy as those of her brothers.
Four beings crowd together at the right. We see only the profile of the monarchs’ oldest daughter, Princess Carlota. She will be queen of Portugal, and one of her daughters, Isabel de Braganza, will rule in Spain, wed to her uncle Fernando VII, in his second marriage. The duchess of Abrantes says that Carlota is quite deformed: one leg is longer than the other, and she is hunchbacked as well. In front of Carlota we have her sister, María Luisa, holding a child in her arms. She has small features and an artless glance. Her face is pleasing without being beautiful. A pillow on which she holds her baby does not hide her twisted waist. She is accompanied by her husband Prince Luis de Borbón Parma, heir to the duchy of that name and María Luisa’s nephew. A tall, blond boy with lively eyes and fleshy lips, in whom there is already a suggestion of obesity. He is also an epileptic.
In the background of the painting are two other paintings; as in the background of The Ladies-in-Waiting, there is a mirror, which perhaps is also a painting although it could be taken for a window. In The Family of Carlos IV, two large canvases hang on the wall behind the fourteen figures. Both are by Goya in Goya’s canvas, though they do not appear in Gudiol’s complete catalogue. One is a trivial blurred landscape, perhaps a work of his youth, when the painter believed he accepted the world as his time seemed to accept it, in the glow of the enlightenment and at the hour of Blind Man’s Bluff and outings along the Manzanares. In the other, darkened by time, are three indistinct figures. Until 1967 no one paid very much attention to it. However, it contained the final moral key to The Family of Carlos IV.
In June 1967, the Prado decided to restore Goya’s canvas. In December, the surprising results of that undertaking were made public. In the painting represented in the background, along with the landscape of the stream and birches in the glow of enlightened harmony, there appeared a confused orgy of giants. In that canvas within a canvas, with large brushstrokes that come from Velázquez and precede or at the same time invent impressionism and expressionism, Goya displays a naked titan frolicking with two half-naked women as enormous as he is. The male’s face is undoubtedly Goya’s, according to Xavier de Salas, director of the Prado. No one dares to contradict him.
When Goya paints The Family of Carlos IV in 1800, he has been almost completely deaf for eight years, and living on loans of life. In 1792, the syphilis that perhaps he hadn’t known until then he had contracted in his early youth, infects his inner ear and has him at death’s door for two long years. Malraux compares him then to one of those sick people who, saved in their death throes, become mediums. At the end of the crisis, imprisoned in his silence, Goya would have an aura of the next world. The truth is precisely the opposite, because Goya conjures living specters, not dead phantoms. This is why his monsters seems so vraisemblables, so believable, to Baudelaire. In his deafness he describes the dark night of the soul, where life hides its most terrible truth. Death will reveal itself to him from the outside, sixteen years later and on another principal date in his life, May 2, 1808, when the savage battle in the Puerta del Sol between the Spanish people and Murat’s Mamelukes is recounted to him.
From his brush with death Goya has learned to judge so that he may be judged. Faced with reason, which, after all, dreams of hobgoblins and monsters in its nightmares, Goya proclaims the truth of man, inhabited by monsters, incapable of reconciling with the world if he does not reconcile first with himself. Like death, truth is common to everyone; like syphilis, it is also contagious. Nineteen years later, Goya, the old convert to enlightened harmony and the idealist of reason, will record all the demons of his people on the walls of his house, so that neither he nor history can forget them. His belief in truth as the only measure and synthesis of man is passed on to the monarchs, who willingly accept seeing themselves as Goya saw them, not as they believed they were. The only compromise between the painter and his models is reduced to hiding Princess Carlota’s hump behind the Prince de Borbón Parma. But the deformed waist of her sister María Luisa is as visible as all the flaws of her kinfolk.
In the painting at the back of the room, Goya leaves his own confession. There, and in his orgy with the two prostitutes, this deaf man silently proclaims his condition as a man, since nothing human is alien to him. He does not condemn the flock of dressed-up caricatures he has just portrayed for posterity, because he does not imagine himself as better or worse than any of them. He knows very well that in a similar orgy he contracted the syphilis that gnaws at him, deafens him, and has destroyed four of his children. His guilt, the guilt of Saturn, presides over this last judgment, which is, at the same time, the noblest document of the eighteenth century. A last judgment of the living, more profound than Michelangelo’s judgment of the dead, according to Ramón Gómez de la Serna. A century and a half later we read in a now forgotten book: “With Goya’s eyes we are to see ourselves in his goblins and in his Monarchs, in the two waiting rooms of our destiny. Goya’s ethical precept opens each day with the doors of the Museum. It is the first principle of an indispensable, even incomprehensible dialectic, in which he attempts to anticipate the final salvation of man: ‘You will love your neighbor, the monster, as yourself.’”
March 16, 1828
And His Majesty the king said to me:
“What is your idea of happiness on earth?”
“Dying before my son Xavier,” I replied immediately. “My wife and I had already buried four others before I had to bury her too during the wartime famine. I don’t want to lose this one.”
He burst into laughter without letting go of the cigar he held between his teeth, as yellow as a lamb’s. He was close to, or had already turned, forty. Only when I painted him, for the last time and at his request, did I become fully aware of how deformed his face was, large-jawed, fat-cheeked, asymmetrical beneath his long black eyebrows. And yet in his slightly crossed eyes gleamed a guile that was in no way dim-witted. He had been the most loved man and was the most despised in this country that always charges forward when it is time to kill or reproduce. I supposed that our hatred and our love made him equally proud. In fact, he almost confessed as much to me on the previous afternoon, when I finished his portrait. He said: “You were a traitor and pro-French during the invasion. I overlooked it then, twelve years ago now, as I have forgiven you this time when I learned you were returning from exile, because you are even greater than Velázquez. Tomorrow you return to the palace to dine alone with me.
“You’re a cynic. You believe in nothing. Nothing at all. ‘Nothing’ says the paper that the skeleton brings back from death in one of your etchings. There was a time when you would have been burned at the stake for much less.”
“I’m not going to believe in you and your divine right over all of us. We know each other too well.”
The truth was that everybody knew him. Before the war, and at the trial in the Escorial, when he and his coterie were accused of conspiring against Godoy, our sausage-maker and Prince of Peace, he wrote incredible letters to his parents, the king and queen, which would be repeated afterward by all the gossipmongers. ‘Mama, I regret the horrific crime I have committed against my dear parents and sovereigns and beg with the greatest humility that Your Majesty deign to intercede with Papa so that he will allow his grateful son to kiss his royal feet.’ His mother shouted that he was a bastard, and to confirm his status he denounced all his accomplices. During the war and in the Castle of Valençay where, according to him, the French held him prisoner, he again betrayed those who had conspired to liberate him. At the same time, he congratulated Napoleon for his triumphs in Spain and asked that he make him his adoptive son by marrying him to a princess of the Imperial House. Then we also learned that in Valençay he received music and dance lessons when he wasn’t hunting, fishing, or riding horses in the castle’s parks, and dedicated his evenings to his favorite leisure activity, embroidery with beads and bugles. And yet, if we think about those times, perhaps it would be better not to recall him or any of us, for that matter. When remembering them, one could say that only murderers knew how to preserve their dignity in this unfortunate land of ours.
“We know each other too well. No doubt about that,” he agreed with slow nods, suddenly pensive or regretful. “You didn’t want to bury your children. I was never happier than when I learned my parents were dead. It’s been almost seven years since my mother died in Rome, and ten days later, in Naples, my father followed her to hell. Only then, and for the first time in my life, did I feel free. Then I told myself no, to really be free, they would never have engendered me. Only those who have never lived are free, because even the dead suffer their punishment. The rest of it, including the crown, is a line in the water and the intrigues of courtiers.” He paused for a moment, looking into my eyes, and belched. “It’s a gift to speak to a deaf man: like confessing to a brick wall.”
“Señor, you forget I can read your lips.”
He was the deaf man then, or at least he wasn’t listening to me. His legs crossed, inner thighs touching, he stretched out in his chair, contemplating the Tiepolo ceiling with half-closed eyes while he smoked, drawing slowly on his cigar. To one side of the cold fireplace, on an easel, was the portrait of him I had just painted. I looked at it with cold lethargy, as if someone else had done it, and felt satisfied. It was his legacy to men, not mine.
“The day my mother passed, my sister María Luisa wrote to me from Rome,” he sighed suddenly, scratching his privates. “My mother had almost died in Godoy’s arms, so to speak. For an entire week he watched over her constantly as she lay dying, the two of them alone in that room. The night before she died my mother called for María Luisa and said: ‘I’m going to die. I recommend Manuel to you. You can have him and be certain that you and your brother Fernando will not find a more affectionate person.’ He burst into strident laughter, shaking that head of his, too long and flattened at the temples, on his narrow shoulders. “When my sister saw that things were going badly, she removed the sausage-maker, who was crying like a penitent woman, from my mother’s side, and summoned the priests. They gave her the viaticum, unction, and every spiritual aid. They would do her little good in the next world, I tell myself.”
“Señor, you forget that I can read lips.”
“What do I care what you read or what you hear, old man!” he screamed without warning, as red as a cider apple. “Have you forgotten that I’m the king and you’ll rot in the grave, like my parents and your children?” In one of his typical sudden changes, which happened so often, he smiled at me disagreeably and placed a hand on my knee. “You won’t be angry with me, will you? Remember how often you deserved the garrote and I pardoned you. You’d deserve it again now, for painting me as I am and not how I’d like men to see me. It’s fitting that you’re as deaf as a post, because when all is said and done, you look at the world and your fellow man with eyes more truthful than mirrors. I’m going to confess something that nobody else knows. My mother left her entire personal fortune to her lover, the sausage-maker. Naturally, I never allowed Godoy to see a penny of his inheritance. He’ll end his days in Paris, rotting in poverty, I assure you of that.”
He smiled and seemed to withdraw into the pleasure that paralyzed him. He crossed his hands, rubbed his palms, and cracked his knuckles. His hands were too short, puffy and plebeian, with thick nails and flattened fingers. Exactly like those of my son Xavier. Suddenly I was struck by the obvious revelation that His Majesty the king could also be my son. A son deformed in soul and body as he was, blemished in his flesh and his spirit by my blood, poisoned before he was born. The French disease, which I contracted at some brothel in my youth, and that thirty-four or thirty-five years ago had made me deaf, perhaps had made me conceive of him as he really was in life and in the portrait: a kind of potbellied, grotesque buffoon, his head and body too long, his arms and legs those of a small straw-filled dummy, illuminated by the malicious glance of his pale eyes, where one read as if in a book his betrayals, his cowardice, and his extreme cruelty. What then was his freedom, if in my own way I had condemned him by fathering him? Could it be frighteningly true, as the king himself declared, that only those who never existed are free, because even the dead suffer in hell for other people’s crimes?
Back when I was young and beginning to paint for the Royal Tapestry Workshop, our son Vicente Anastasio was born. “He’s a very handsome, robust kid,” I wrote to my friend Zapater, “and his mother is in satisfactory condition.” The next morning the boy was found dead in his cradle, already as yellow as a relic and with a thin line of blood on his lips. Hours before he had nursed hungrily, and as my wife recounted afterward, he even seemed to smile. Two years later Josefa gave birth to my María del Pilar Dionisia. She had a gigantic head, almost as large as a man’s, though her forehead was sunken like a macaque’s. As soon as she was born and had been washed, after an interminable delivery, I was told it was a misfortune because fluids were pressing on her brain in the huge skull. That was why I gave her a name as resonant as that of a duchess, in contradistinction to her deformity and above all her destiny. She was a sweet monster, all smiles, simpers, and affection. She horrified Josefa, but I spent hours bending over her little cradle, seeing myself in her eyes like a wounded fawn’s. She died when she was a year old and also in silence, like Vicente Anastasio. Another daughter, Hermenegilda, was born dead and we had time only to baptize her before putting her in the ground. When my wife became pregnant with Francisco Xavier Pedro, after the sudden death of Francisco de Paula, I managed to arrange, through my brother-in-law Bayeu, for a physician from the Royal House, the same one who brought His Majesty into the world, to visit us and find the sickness in our seed. He discovered the disease in my blood. He said the affliction had no cure, because the only thing anyone knew about it was its origins. The conquistadors contracted it in Peru, fornicating with llamas when they wearied of raping Indian women. I was transmitting it to my babies in my semen, though it might happen, with heaven’s help, that by dint of trying, we might conceive one who was healthy. Silently, just as my children always died, I decided to kill myself immediately if we lost the one we were expecting. It was the cold, unbreakable decision of an immovable Aragonese, which I would have carried out even against my own instincts, always thirsty for life. There was no need because we were successful with Xavier. He was so handsome and healthy that, as I wrote to Zapater, one would say all of Madrid doted on him because he was so beautiful.
I must have been lost in thought and my own chimeras because I almost jumped when His Majesty the king patted my knee. His dark brows frowning, he looked at me with an expression of curiosity mixed with commiseration. His breath smelled of tobacco and decay when he said to me:
“What’s wrong, old man, are you asleep or distracted? You’re as white as snow.”
“Señor, years ago I built a house on the lowlands of the Manzanares, between Móstoles, Navalcarnero, and Alberche. In Madrid they called it the Deaf Man’s Villa, and soon it will belong to Xavier, because I’m leaving it to him in a bequest. I closed it up two years ago, when I left this country, and it won’t be opened again until after my death. I’d advise you to go and see it then, even in disguise and incognito, which they say you do occasionally at night. The house is my legacy, as I suppose the portrait I’ve just made of you will be yours. On its walls I’ve painted the examination of my own conscience turned into a nightmare, although perhaps you might believe I painted the demons inside me, demons that are beginning to be as familiar to me as your subjects must be to you, and as their jesters were to your forebears. If the walls displease you, don’t go into the dining room, because Saturn is there devouring his children.”
He burst into laughter again, with that laugh that sometimes resembled the laugh of a woman in heat and sometimes the laugh of a parrot imitating men. In Bordeaux, Moratín told me about a letter His Majesty’s mother-in-law wrote when he was married to his first wife. “He is false, crafty, despicable, and almost impotent,” said the queen of Naples about her son-in-law. “At the age of eighteen, my daughter feels absolutely nothing with him. Patience and cures are like sowing in sand; their efforts fail and give no pleasure.” Then she described him as a hoax that did not reach the princess’s shoulders, all body, almost no legs, and the head of a dwarf.
“Don’t tempt fate, old man, you might end up with my benevolence,” he replied, laughing. “I forgave your serving the French during the war and then I forgot about your chats and contacts with your liberal friends, the leprosy that is trying to destroy me. I even allowed you to go into exile, when you feared for your head, just as I gave you permission now to return. I can pardon your actions but not your sinful thoughts. I am your Saturn, devouring my people.”
“In this case Your Majesty is mistaken. Saturn is my self-portrait, and I realized that only tonight. This was precisely the reason I told you that my idea of happiness on earth is to die before my son Xavier. I consumed the others when I gave them life, for the disease that is rotting me doomed them. I became aware of this speaking to Your Majesty, when I realized that because of your age, you could be my son too. Perhaps I’m not being clear. I’m deaf, and maybe I ought to be mute. Painting is enough for me to know I’m alive.”
“You’re very clear, and it pains me to understand you. I didn’t know you were sick, because I always saw you as an oak. Besides: the viciousness you can do to yourself with that kind of thinking hurts me almost as much as the harm that could be done to me.”
“Perhaps that’s true, but I can’t believe it because you always lived for the sake of hatred. I give credence only to the fact that I returned to Spain before I died, and in order to realize that I was Saturn and had to confess that to you. As for the rest, disposing of my goods after I died and revisiting the places where I lived my conscious life were an oblique excuse for my true purpose. It’s strange that a man can live for eighty years and then see that his earlier actions had very different aims from the ones he thought they had. Perhaps no one in the world knows who he is, because he doesn’t know for certain who he might have been.”
“Perhaps it’s too late to find out in your case and in mine,” he interrupted with a shrug. “Take comfort in the thought that when you’re gone, your art will remain.”
“Michelangelo already said that, Señor: men pass, their art remains.”
Suddenly he looked at me, and his expression changed. Without even being aware of it he hated me then because he envied me for everything: my paintings and my fame, which prevented him from garroting me or throwing me into a dungeon, as he liked to do to his enemies and would have done to his own mother if she had lived. He even envied me for my age, perhaps because he was afraid he wouldn’t reach it, and for the French disease that had made me deaf and was devouring me, and even for my dead children because they weren’t his.
“Your art is great but you’re good for nothing! You were wicked enough to sell me and you even sold the French. During the invasion you painted the portrait of the Intruder King, and you offered to choose paintings for him to take to Paris. By any chance did you think, you doddering old coot, that I was in a perpetual daze? Then, to mock me even further, you painted The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill and The Second of May in the Puerta del Sol, those gigantic canvases that adorned the triumphal arch prepared for my return in the Puerta de Alcalá, while the rabble cheered me, howling ‘Long live our chains!’ and ‘Execute liberty against the wall!’”
“You don’t have to yell that way! I’ve already told you I can read your lips!”
“I’ll yell as much as I want to,” he insisted. “You outlived your wife who was good only for giving birth to the children you destroyed with your syphilis; but I don’t know how you could outlive your own duplicity and shamelessness. I mean, I do know, since your cowardice made you in the image and likeness of our people.”
“The image and likeness of Your Majesty! In the Escorial you denounced your accomplices so your lies would be forgiven and even threw yourself into the arms of Godoy, pleading with him to save you from the wrath of your own father!”
“Also my image and likeness. So be it. You also betrayed out of fear. We’re very similar, though in your pride you refuse to believe it. We both despise our fellow men, though, strangely enough, we fear them at the same time.”
It was true, and against my will I found myself nodding in agreement. Then I remembered, as if I had painted it in my memory or was seeing it again with the eyes of half a century ago, the day Josefa and I were presented at court, before he was born. His grandfather, Carlos III, was still on the throne; I would paint his portrait a short time later. My brother-in-law had arranged the audience, which took place on a winter afternoon filled with light. The widowed king, with the face of a small-eared sheep and a gaze shining with intelligence tinged by sadness, received us, half sunk into the pillows of a couch, raising a lavender-scented handkerchief to his nose because the Sierra winds had given him a cold. The princess of Asturias (“I’m going to die. I recommend Manuel to you. You can have him and be certain that you and your brother Fernando will not find a more affectionate person”) was sitting beside him. I met her then when she was young and still beautiful, tall and high-breasted, with the dark skin and sloe eyes of an Italian. Her husband, the prince, who ten years later would inherit the throne, remained standing next to the seat. He was the strongest man I’ve ever met and even then, in spite of my confusion, I was surprised by the width of his shoulders and the roots and branches of his muscles, visible at the edge of his ruff and under his silk stockings. His smile, which was always at the ready, though no one could forget the fury of his rages, half-closed his pinkish eyelids over eyes so blue they were almost transparent. Josefa’s resigned timidity became reconciled to the grandeur of the moment. Prudently and moderately, she spoke to the king and his children as if they were blood relatives, distant, but very close in their respectful esteem. I, on the contrary, trembled with fear when I kneeled on the marquetry of the floor to kiss the august hands of that family. The prince obliged me to stand, taking me by the elbows. His palms were small, but hard and lined like those of an old blacksmith. It surprised me that, being who he was, they were so roughened, and that he was accustomed to working with his hands. His Majesty the king spoke a little of Mengs, of Tiépolo, and of my brother-in-law. The princess said something to me in Italian when she learned I had lived in Rome. She praised our manners, as if we were children, and smiled. Saper fare e condursi a quel modo. Then the monarch also intervened in Tuscan. He remarked on the light at that time of day, as one painter would to another. After having spent so many years in Naples, where the twilights are shorter, he marveled at dusk in Madrid. Allora, appena il crepuscolo, il giorno comincia a scolrire e nel traspasso dei colori tutto rimane calmo. Don Carlos, the prince of Asturias, put his arm around my shoulders to lead me to the door. I supposed this was his way of ending the audience; but I could still kiss the hands of the princess and His Majesty again, on my knees and very quickly. I hadn’t taken ten steps when the prince almost broke my back with a huge slap on my shoulder that resounded like thunder throughout the room. At the age of thirty, I weighed 175 pounds and boasted of bending an iron bar with my hands and a coin, a real, with my fingers; but breathless and stumbling I fell flat on my face, while the prince said: “Well, well, my dear friend, I hope we’ll see each other again very soon.” Then he began to guffaw as he held out his hand and I, gasping and servile, echoed his loud laughter. The princess laughed too, although unwillingly, as if that farce, repeated so often, bored her by now. Josefa looked at us with the same withdrawn mystery as when she accepted infidelities and the births and deaths of her children. His Majesty the king sighed, closing his eyes and placing the handkerchief in his sleeve. “No one can resist a slap from me,” the prince of Asturias gloated, “the hardest stablemen fall like ninepins. When you come back we’ll fight with pikes in the stables and then I’ll play the violin for you, if you like.” I agreed to everything, like a scoundrel who’d been beaten with a cudgel. I would have sold my soul at any offense in order to be court painter. (Afterward I was, unexpectedly, thanks to Godoy, when I had almost lost all hope.) That same night I wrote to Zapater: “If I had more time, I’d tell you how the King, the Prince, and the Princess honored me. Through the grace of God I kissed their hands, I’ve never had such good fortune before.” At that time I felt vulnerable and intimidated by men, in the double uncertainty of my youth and my destiny. But I wouldn’t learn to really fear them until many years later, when I discovered the monsters that lived inside them.
“Why did you bring me to the palace? Why did you insist on my painting your portrait when they told you I was in Madrid?” I was overcome by a fit of rage against His Majesty for having obliged me to conjure up the dead. I was surprised to find myself shouting at him in that voice of mine that I would never hear again.
“You’re a part of my past that I don’t want to forget. From those years I value only your memory and that of my first wife in her final days. At the beginning of the century, when you painted our family, you looked us in the eye, one by one, and we all lowered our heads. ‘This is the only man,’ I said to myself then, ‘whom you could truly respect.’ Then I thought that in the final sessions we posed all together for you, like actors on a stage, and it seemed reasonable. The day you allowed us to see the finished painting, while my parents outdid themselves making up base compliments to please you, blind to the horror of that parade of ghosts and monsters reflected on the canvas as if in a mirror, I thought: ‘It hardly matters now what we do or fail to do, action is worth as much as refraining from action, because this painting will outlive us. Here we are all judged and condemned, even the children, because any blind man would see that María Isabel and Francisco de Paula are not my father’s children but Godoy’s.’”
“Señor, leave the dead in peace.”
“I didn’t pass judgment on them, you did.”
“I painted your August Family as I saw them at the time.”
“You painted us as we were and now you’ve portrayed me again as I am. This is your own punishment, old man: to paint the truth.” Enraged again, he crushed his cigar in a dish. “The dead, as you call them, made me what I am and turned my life into a shameful nightmare! Do you know the name the queen of Naples gave my sister Isabel when they married her to the queen’s son? The epileptic bastard, yes sir, the epileptic bastard! Do you know what my sister Carlota replied shortly after her betrothal to the prince of Portugal, when she was reproached for her collection of lovers? ‘I don’t want a single favorite, because I’m not prepared to have him attached to me like Godoy was to my mother.’ Do you know what it means for a boy of sixteen, exactly my age when you painted my family, to read the stolen copy of a memorandum from the French ambassador, where he says, with all the fairness in the world, that no drunken soldier would have dared to humiliate a prostitute in the way Godoy treated my mother? Do you want me to spell out my suffering back then, recalling that my father, the king, was incapable of buying a watch without seeking the advice of Godoy himself?”
“Your Majesty ought to forget the dead or at least be silent when you remember them.”
“Can you forget the children you buried and your French disease?”
“No,” I said, “no I can’t.”
“Then we’re even, because nobody’s more than anybody else.”
Memories became entangled like cherries; they settled, and then suddenly a memory caught fire and blazed like a torch, at the back of time. Looking at his recently completed portrait, I saw the boy he had been so many years ago, when I painted the portrait of the family. He wore gray stockings, sky-blue breeches and coat, his chest crossed by the sash of Carlos III. Even then he had the prominent belly of a prematurely aged man beneath his narrow shoulders. In the presence of everyone the queen said to me: “We’ll have to find a bodice for this boy. He’s almost growing boobs like a girl.” He controlled himself, not protesting and not blushing; but beneath his eyebrows, as long and thick then as they are now, I could see the gaze of a wounded fawn that my María del Pilar Dionisia had in her cradle. Then, in no time, the light in his eyes hardened into an expression of hatred mixed with hypocrisy. With the same rancor and shrewdness in his eyes, I painted him with his family. A few nights later, I dreamed he was looking at me in that way, as if he were confronting his mother, and I woke up shouting the useless howls of a deaf man. When I uncovered the painting, he was the only one who refrained from praising it. Standing apart from the others, it seemed he was smiling at the celebration of the portrait, and not its veracity. Yet in the eyes of his father, His Majesty the king, there were tears of joy. He hit me again on the back, guffawing and congratulating me at the same time.
More than a quarter of a century had passed since our first meeting, and his slap was no longer the blow that knocked me down that day, for the years had aged him very quickly. He had put on weight, his muscles had weakened beneath his skin, and his goiter spilled over onto his chest. Nonetheless, he still woke at five o’clock every day of the year, and never used wine, coffee, or tobacco. He slept alone, and they said he no longer visited the queen at night. It was rumored that after the queen lost the ability to become a mother, he feared being damned if he carried out his conjugal duties for pleasure. The king heard two masses every morning, read the lives of the saints, had breakfast, and went down to the palace workshops. There, in shirtsleeves, he worked as a blacksmith, a clockmaker, a carpenter, a locksmith, or a saddler. He was very skilled, and sometimes he offered foreign ambassadors a pair of shining boots that had recently left his hands. Then he would visit the stables and fight the stable boys with rods. At one time he could defeat them all, but later on they allowed him to win because he lost his breath before his strength. At eleven he received the royal family and the minister of state for a quarter of an hour. Then he ate lunch with great appetite, and always alone. He went hunting every afternoon if he wasn’t leading a procession. He was escorted by the captain of the guard, the master of the horse, a gentleman-in-waiting, the beaters, a surgeon, and another physician. When he returned he dispatched with all his ministers in half an hour. Later he would offer a violin concert to some intimate friends, accompanied by the cellist Dupont. I was told that he played very badly, although he thought himself a virtuoso. He would skip entire lines of the staff, which Dupont in turn attempted to ignore. After the music there was a card game, during which the king tended to fall asleep holding his cards. He had supper at nine with the queen and went to bed at eleven sharp. I remember that I tried to kiss his hand to thank him for his compliments, but he hugged me to his chest. “Someday we’ll see if you’re as good at fighting with rods or at Leonese wrestling as you are at painting,” he said to me, laughing. “Come back one morning and try it with me. Then I would play the violin for your pleasure, if you weren’t deaf.” By reading his lips and in a flash of conscience, I was surprised to find myself wondering: “God of heaven and divine Reason, why are we alive?”
“When he was young your father, Señor, was the strongest man I knew. And he was always the one with the simplest soul and best heart. If he had been born a cobbler or a tanner, perhaps he would still be alive and happy.”
“At his age. And if he had been born a tanner or a cobbler, he probably would have starved to death in the war, like your wife,” His Majesty replied. “Thanks to you liberals, we’re entering an era that exempts neither kings nor rabble. Now we’re all made of the same ashes.”
“You’re probably right, although guilt for the times we live in lies with all of us. At times I fear being immortal, when I think of the horrors I have survived. During the war and the invasion, people died of starvation on the streets of Madrid. Twice a day they picked up the corpses in the gutter and took them away in creaking wagons, pulled by scrawny mules, from the parish churches. The very old and the very young were the first to die. Nursing infants with monstrously swollen bellies, and old people reduced to skin and bone, like mummies, who dragged themselves, trembling, away from the doors to their houses so they would not die in the presence of their families. They were followed by the men and then by the women, who were the strongest. They paid for loaves of onion and flour, moldy hardtack, and even scraps of garbage with their jewels. Then they traded entire houses for a handful of acorns. We ate rats and dead people, because there were many cases of cannibalism, not only on the Rastro but on the Prado as well. The rabble chewed on their dead, but so did some nobles whose blood was almost as pure as yours. In the meantime, Señor, you were taking music and dance lessons in Valençay.”
“The Intruder King saved your life. I know that very well.”
“King José baked in the palace, although it’s obvious he was almost as destitute as we were. His servants would distribute part of that bread to the people, and on occasion he did that himself. Thanks to his kindness, Josefa did not die of hunger that fall. She succumbed the following spring, along with twenty thousand other Madrileños, but by then there was no more flour or wood, even in the palace. Once, unannounced, King José came to our house to bring us a brazier that was still warm. I gave him a glass of water, all that I could offer him, and he confessed his despair. The crown was a sentence he did not wish to serve at that price. ‘Dans ce pays de Malheur, je reve toujours des peres et des frères aupres des cadavres de leurs femmes et de leurs enfants sur la chaussée.’ He had written to his brother, the emperor, to present him with his resignation. Napoleon did not even bother to respond.”
“Stories of thieves and their lackeys,” His Majesty said with a yawn.
Spots of yellowish spittle dried at the corners of his lips. He lit another cigar after biting off the end and spitting it on the floor.
“You ceded those thieves the crown when you returned it to your father, so that he in turn could hand it over to Bonaparte. If you, Señor, had remained steadfast and not given in to the demands of the emperor in Bayonne, the war would not have taken place. Naturally, in that case they would not have welcomed you in Valençay but thrown you into some dungeon.”
“And what was I going to do in France, imbecile, in the hands of that bandit we all thought was invincible? Let myself die? This is man’s greatest madness. Cervantes himself says so in Don Quijote, though I don’t remember anything else from that book. You didn’t die then either, not from hunger and not in the war. You had the indecency to survive because you were too much in your right mind to die or kill in my name. You and I are alike, cut from the same cloth, as I said. Let’s allow the dead to bury the dead and look each other in the eye. I need you just as every man needs a mirror, so I won’t go mad. You, and for that matter the entire country, are mine, because I didn’t end up better or worse than my subjects. That’s why you’ll have to wait for my death, the death of a despot who doesn’t want to die or abdicate now, in order to free yourselves from me!” His exaltation diminished somewhat after reaching the point where he was shrieking. Soon, smiling and pulling my ear as if I were a hunting dog, he said to me: “I don’t think I’ll allow you to return to Bordeaux. I can’t do without you.”
“If you want to arrest me, Señor, you should do it personally and right away. Here, in Madrid, I always sleep with a cocked pistol under my pillow. I’ve made my will, disposed of my possessions, and every night I think about Saturn so I won’t forget who I am. In a few days I’ll take the stage back to France. Before that, if they come at dawn one day to arrest me, I’ll fire a bullet into my brain at the precise moment they break down the door.”
I didn’t hear my voice and he didn’t seem to listen to me, though he took careful note of the hard conviction in my words. He lowered his eyes and with the hand that held the cigar he gestured as if he were driving away absurdity or tedium.
“Why would I look for your destruction when it pleased me so often to prevent it? You have very powerful enemies, but I’m not one of them.”
“I humbly beg Your Majesty to allow me to continue. When the war was over, I painted the portrait of Juan Martín Díez, the Undaunted. He was a peasant from Castillo de Duero, almost as strong as your father in his youth. In May 1808 he took to the mountains and fought the French, at the head of a band of shepherds. When peace came, he commanded thousands of men, and the Central Junta had made him a general. He read with difficulty, but his eyes burned with intelligence, and he had a natural talent for describing this hell that tomorrow they’ll call our history. He told me how, in your name and to defend your divine rights, they had put out the eyes and cut off the ears of a woman, then paraded her naked on the back of a donkey through Fuente de la Reina, with a sign on her chest that read: ‘This is the end that whores to the French always come to,’ and then they nailed her while she was still alive to the door of the church. Twice he was defeated and his forces decimated in the field and twice the villages of Guadalajara emptied out to follow him. In those lands people adored him almost as much as you because he had given them a reason to survive and to murder. The French governor himself learned to respect him almost as much as he feared him. The Undaunted sent him a letter, written in his own hand, inviting him to join his guerrillas ‘because it was always more honorable for a soldier to serve liberty than a tyrant’s ambition . . .’”
“What’s the point of all this? He soon betrayed me and had to be executed, just as he had crucified that woman on the door of the church. That’s all there is to it.”
“He made the mistake of still believing in liberty after your return, and he was one of those who imposed the Constitution on you in 1820. Last year, your divine absolute power restored, with the help of other French troops he was arrested in Castillo de Duero. Locked in an iron cage and carried in a cart, he was displayed for weeks on end to his own neighbors, and in all the villages where they first set fire to the houses and the harvests to follow him, as if he were a god. The same men who fought in his bands spat on him, stoned him, jabbed him with their pitchforks, shouting ‘Long live slavery! Long live the absolute King!’ He struggled like a rabid dog behind the bars, perhaps more enraged by the irrationality of men than desperate over his own fate. Still on the scaffold, almost dead, he fought with the executioner before he was garroted. There, in the public square, they burned his remains to the cheers of the crowd. The stink of burned flesh must have reached all the way to the palace.”
“It didn’t, but when I learned he had been executed, I exclaimed: Long live the Undaunted!” He smiled. “It was my tribute to a dead enemy.”
“It was what it was; but I’ll never end up like that, not your victim and not sacrificed by this country, where you say you can look at yourself as you can in my eyes. That’s why I sleep with a pistol, ready under my pillow.”
“Sleep however you like and go back to Bordeaux whenever you feel like it.” He yawned openly, his mouth filled with smoke. “I had hoped you’d die here, as an old man, so I could give you a funeral worthy of Apelles. I would have displayed your body in the Puerta de Alcalá, watched over by the royal halberdiers and mounted troops. In single file, all the way to the Ventas del Espíritu Santo, people would have waited nights on end to see you dead. The rabble comes to both executions and funerals. All ceremonies are part of the same circus.”
Circus. Almost two years have passed since I last saw His Majesty the king, and now I’m dying in Bordeaux. One of my hands froze this dawn. I saw it lying rigid on the coverlet, as distant and immobile as if it belonged to someone else. I didn’t try to wake Leocadia so as not to upset her with my dying, which I thought would be brief. Two or three hours later I unexpectedly recovered the use of my fingers, but I couldn’t control their sudden tremors. At the same time my eyelids became heavy and I supposed that death was half-closing them. “It doesn’t matter very much,” I said to myself, “because this winter I was going blind. I drew with the help of a magnifying glass, though I kept my hand very steady until last night.” Leocadia was frightened by my pallor and sudden fits of stammering. The doctor came and then returned later with a colleague. His grave, pensive air confirmed my belief that my case was hopeless. I turned my face away on the pillow in order not to read on their lips the foolish things they were saying to me. Vous étes un grand homme, un peintre de la Chambre. On va vous soigner! Then Moratín turned up here, Leocadia must have brought him up to date regarding my difficulties, because he hadn’t visited me for days. For the first time I noticed that his hair, a blond between sandy and straw-colored, was graying and turning white. He seemed uneasy, but he could not hide his feminine curiosity about my dying. He sat near the bed, close to the pillow so that I could read his lips. “Leandro,” I said, “this is ending. Take care of Leocadia and little Rosarito for me when I’m gone. I’d just like my son and grandson to come before I’m dead. Do you think I’ll get to see them?” “Death is something that always happens to someone else,” he said ironically. “You and I have the duty to outlive the despot so we can return to Spain.” “Spain? Spain does not exist. It’s one of my Absurdities, established long ago in the dark depths of time.” He smiled, moving his graying head. “I’m not far from thinking the same thing.”
“Spain does not exist. It’s one of my Absurdities, established long ago in the depths of memory.” Why am I assailed, now and then, by the conviction that these words are not mine? Another man is saying them, perhaps very different from me in appearance, in another century that hasn’t existed yet. In this case my voice is his, although he doesn’t exist yet. Spain does not exist; but perhaps Moratín is right. It is our duty to return there when the despot, Moratín, and I are ashes. It will truly be like returning to one of my Absurdities, to the “Ridiculous Absurdity” or the “Raging Absurdity.” I’ll be a different man on that tomorrow, although our witches’ sabbath of a country is basically always the same. I’ll be someone who before being incarnated appropriates my voice, perhaps to try it out. As I said to His Majesty the king, at our last meeting, it is strange that a man may last for eighty years and then realize that his earlier actions have ended very differently from what had been intended. Perhaps no one knows himself in this world because no one knows exactly who he might have been.
Circus. I’ll never go back to the circus on the rue du Manège, where I would take Rosarito to forget about myself, watching the acrobats suspended for a moment between heaven and this hell we call earth. There animals turned into clowns and men played with beasts, as in the garden of earthly delights. Elephants, tigers, lions, crocodiles, serpents, and bears punctually recited their lessons. They seemed to know everything; but they had forgotten how to kill. There Claude-Ambroise Seurat, the Living Skeleton, told fortunes in any language and said to Rosarito that one day she would teach drawing to a queen. Then he shuffled the cards, took me aside, and predicted that the girl would live only to the age of twenty-seven. I became furious but the Living Skeleton shrugged. He only read the future. He didn’t condemn or flatter anyone.
That day he insisted on telling my fortune. I told him it wasn’t worth the effort, because an old man like me had his hours numbered. He refused to give me reasons, but he assured me that something in me disconcerted him very much, but he did not know precisely what it was. I yielded to the persistence of Leocadia and Rosarito, or at least I believed then that I was submitting to their pertinacity. Claude-Ambroise Seurat shuffled the cards, dealt them out on the table, and nervously picked them up again. Then, ignoring us, he spent an eternity contemplating the French deck, his head sunk between his long, bony palms. “It’s all very strange, Maestro,” he finally said to me. “At these points I don’t see you but another man, whose name I don’t know because perhaps he hasn’t been born yet. I see him confusedly, accompanied by a woman, in a house beside a river that runs over a bed of very white stones. Neither the man nor the woman exists yet; but, in the cards, he is trying to write a book about your grace.” He shook his insolent head, as if making an effort to frighten away the shade of an absurdity. “Give me ten sous, Maestro, so I can drink a thimbleful of burgundy.”