The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill
The canvas, housed today in the Prado, is one of the most important and largest of Goya’s paintings. It measures six feet, six inches wide by nine feet, ten inches high. In the absence of Fernando VII, who would return to Madrid two months later, Goya offered his services to the regent of the kingdom, to honor his return and his victory over the French. Presiding over the regency was the cardinal Don Luis de Borbón, primate of all the Spains, brother of the countess of Chinchón, and Manuel Godoy’s brother-in-law. Six years earlier, on May 22, 1808, he had written to Napoleon, assuming “the sweet obligation of spreading at the feet of the Emperor the homage of his respect and fidelity” and entreating His Imperial and Royal Majesty to put his obeisance to the test. Now, on March 14, 1814, the cardinal primate employed a very different language when he dictated the sanction approving Goya’s project:
“Let it be known that on the twenty-fourth day of this past month D. Francisco Goya, H. M.’s Court Painter, directed to the Regency of the Kingdom a statement of his ardent desires to perpetuate by means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions or scenes of our glorious insurrection against the tyrant of Europe, and making manifest the state of absolute penury to which he finds himself reduced and as a consequence the impossibility of his defraying alone the expenses of so interesting a work, he requests that the public treasury provide him with some assistance to carry it out. With this in mind, and with Your Highness taking into consideration the great importance of so praiseworthy an enterprise and the well-known ability of the aforesaid practitioner to carry it out, I have deemed his proposal a good one and have consequently ordered that while the aforesaid D. Francisco Goya is employed in this work, he be paid by the central Treasury, in addition to what his accounts indicate was invested in canvases, materials, and paints, the amount of fifteen hundred copper reales a month as compensation.”
The order was issued that same day, and Goya signed the receipt. Two months later, on May 11, 1814, May 3, 1808, in Madrid: The Executions at the Príncipe Pío Hill and May 2, 1808, in Madrid: The Battle Against the Mamelukes adorned a triumphal arch erected next to the Alcalá Gate, to celebrate the return of Fernando VII, nicknamed The Desired One. In La Gaceta that morning a royal decree annulled the Constitution voted into effect in Cádiz two years earlier, as well as the Parliament, and all its resolutions. On the Calle de Alcalá, the crowd cheered the king, roaring “Long live the Inquisition!” “Long live Fernando VII!” “Long live our chains!” On the Plaza Mayor the mob invaded the Casa de la Panadería, destroyed the memorial to the Constitution of Cádiz, and dragged the pieces in a sack past the prisons and barracks crowded with imprisoned liberals. Goya, who had signed the effigy of the Intruder King, Joseph Bonaparte, in his Allegory of the City of Madrid, and then painted portraits of his generals Guye and Querault and his minister of police Manuel Romero, accepting the Order of Spain and Joseph I from the hands of the usurper, was not interfered with on that day of festivities and persecutions. No doubt he was sheltered by secret, personal orders from Fernando VII, the only one who could protect him under such circumstances.
It has been said that May 3, 1808, in Madrid: The Executions at the Príncipe Pío Hill was an unexpected act of contrition. Jean François Chabrun correctly pointed out that if this were the case, no greater repentance could be imagined. Further, Goya could not have painted that slaughter and May 2, 1808, in Madrid in two months’ time. The drawings of The Disasters of War, whose date is unknown, are intentional or unintentional drafts for The Executions. Two sketches for May 2, 1808, in Madrid survive: an oil on paper, currently the property of the duke of Villahermosa, and another oil on wood, which had been in the Lázaro Galdiano Museum.
The Executions at the Príncipe Pío Hill take place at daybreak, probably just before dawn, the preferred time for executions in every civilized country, as Hugh Thomas so correctly says. Antonio de Trueba took the statement of an old servant of Goya’s, who perhaps confused true lies with incredible truths when, more than half a century later, he recalled that night. The old man told Trueba that Goya had witnessed the slaughter through a window at his villa on the banks of the Manzanares, by the light of the moon and with a spyglass. The anecdote is baseless, since Goya did not acquire the Deaf Man’s Villa, the Quinta del Sordo, until 1819. In 1808 Goya was living in a house he owned on Calle de Fuencarral at the corner of San Onofre. It may be true, however, that Goya insisted on going to the Príncipe Pío Hill, escorted by his servant, to sketch those who had been killed. Like someone conjuring all the monsters in the dream of reason, he would entitle one of the Disasters of War “I saw it.” In another, at the foot of a pile of corpses, not very different from the pile of dead in the painting, he would write his denunciation to the impassive universe: “This Is Why You Were Born.”
“We sat on a rise, with the dead at the bottom, and my master opened his portfolio, placed it on his knees, and waited for the moon to come out from behind the thick black cloud that hid it. At the foot of the rise something fluttered, growled, and panted. I . . . I confess I was shaking like a leaf; but my master remained perfectly calm, preparing his pencil and pasteboard almost by touch. Finally the moon shone as bright as day. Surrounded by pools of blood, we saw corpses, some facedown, others faceup, one in the posture of someone who kneels and kisses the ground, another with his hands raised to heaven pleading for vengeance or mercy, and some hungry dogs feeding on the dead, panting in their eagerness and growling at the birds of prey that flew in circles above them, wanting to compete for the prize!”
Isidro, the servant, recounted asking Goya why he insisted on painting the savagery of men. “To have the pleasure of telling them for eternity not to be barbarians,” his master replied. Regardless of the invention of the servant or of Trueba himself, in this account based on fact, the victims, covered in their own blood, some facedown on the ground, others fallen, looking up at the firmament, and almost all of them with their arms spread, seem to agree with the old man’s testimony. But Goya does not confine himself to depicting the dead he saw at the foot of the Príncipe Pío Hill; he also portrays the executions themselves, which he could not have seen from the Quinta del Sordo. The shooting and the shouting were over when he reached the place with Isidro; but Goya painted the killers he did not know from the back, and at the same time he painted the howls of death he would never hear.
Some have died. Others are going to die irremediably. The same men who killed the first were now preparing to kill the rest. No one can accuse them because neither the painter nor we will ever see their faces. And we do not know the names of many of the victims, although the features of some of these men about to be shot would be forever unforgettable. All of them, in fact, the executioners and the condemned, probably belonged to the same social class and to very similar worlds. But they spoke different languages and would never understand one another. The shouts of the condemned were as impenetrable to the firing squad as they were to Goya himself in his deafness, which in a sense we share with him before his painting.
In his book Goya: The Third of May 1808, Hugh Thomas describes the soldiers in detail. They are Frenchmen and belong to the Napoleonic armies, for they wear the drab trousers that sometimes replaced the troops’ gaiters during the imperial period. This was when the shako was imposed, imitating the helmets worn by the Polish cavalry serving France. The sword with a rectangular hilt was typical of the period and of Napoleon’s officers. The members of the firing squad were probably from the Legion de Réserve, which a short time before had guarded the Atlantic coast, or any of the twenty “provisional regiments” that the emperor sent to Spain, a total of thirty thousand men, when he still supposed that second-rate forces would be enough to take control of the country. It is also possible that these soldiers come from the Italian, Swiss, German, or Polish detachments of the French army. In any case, they would have been humble, perhaps illiterate creatures forced to wear a military uniform because of orders they did not understand or a poverty they knew all too well. Hugh Thomas rejects the possibility that the executioners in the painting formed part of the Garde Impériale, which at the time was protecting Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law and the interim viceroy assigned to Madrid.
The day before, once the popular uprising in Madrid had been crushed, the first executions began at three in the afternoon against the walls of the convent of El Buen Suceso. The shootings continued until well into the following morning in the Prado, the Buen Retiro, before the walls of the Convent of Jesús, in the Casa de Campo, along the banks of the Manzanares, in Leganitos, in Santa Bárbara, and at the Puerta de Segovia. Between four and five in the morning (the preferred time for official massacres in the name of civilization) the last forty-three men were shot to death on the slopes of the Príncipe Pío Hill. One of the condemned, Juan Suárez, managed to escape at the last moment. Pursued by shots, he was lost from sight in the dark and finally took refuge in the Hermitage of San Antonio de la Florida, whose frescoes Goya had painted eighteen years earlier and where the artist’s decapitated corpse now rests. The names of some of the canaille executed in the name of reason, law, and order in the clearings on Príncipe Pío have reached us. Rafael Canedo, occupation unknown. Juan Antonio Martínez, beggar. Julián Tejedor de la Torre, blacksmith. Manuel García, gardener. Manuel Sánchez Navarro, an employee of the courts. Martín de Ruicarado, stonecutter. Juan Loret, shopkeeper. Antonio Macías de Gamazo, unskilled laborer, seventy years old. Domingo Braña, muleteer employed by the Tobacco Custom House. Fernando de Madrid, carpenter. Lorenzo Domínguez, saddler. Domingo Méndez, mason. José Amador and Antonio Méndez Villamil, hod carriers. Also on the list is a cleric, Francisco Gallego Dávila, chaplain at the Monastery de la Encarnación, who is probably the friar awaiting death, kneeling, with his hands tightly clenched, on Goya’s canvas.
All or almost all of them were men who could have shared the hungers of the disinherited with those who were shooting them. (An exception was a boy of a more comfortable class who dies there: Antonio Alises, page to Prince Don Carlos María Isidro.) It is also very likely that not all the victims were innocent. When on March 23 Murat had entered Madrid at the head of his troops, the people gave him a welcome reserved for an ally. Somewhat disconcerted, the crowd courteously applauded that marshall of the empire with his long black curls, Siberian fox jacket, crimson shako with peacock feathers, and scarlet boots. The cuirassiers of the Garde impériale deserved great huzzahs. The infantry (the Legion de Réserve or the forces of the “Provisional Regiments”) was welcomed with baffled pity. No one could have imagined imperial troops so exhausted and badly dressed, or in worse formation. The same men the public felt sorry for then formed the firing squads. The day before, Sunday, May 2, many of those soldiers, isolated in the labyrinth of streets surrounding the Plaza Mayor or the Palacio de Oriente, would be gutted with knives. In a French military hospital, Madrilenian attendants coldly slit the throats of the patients and the wounded.
If the victims in The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill had survived that night, as Juan Suárez did, on the following day they would have turned into executioners. Goya could have entitled his painting With Reason or Without It, the name he would give to the second etching in his series The Disasters of War, in which other soldiers of the Legion de Réserve hack at guerrillas with their bayonets. In the next print, it is the guerrillas who cut up the French with axes and pikes. This etching has a two-word caption written in Goya’s somewhat trembling hand: “Lo mismo,” The Same Thing.
Undoubtedly forced by the firing squad, the stonecutter, the beggar, the mason, the court clerk, the manual laborers, and all the other prisoners die on their knees. This is why the dead lie with their arms spread wide, trying in vain to brush away the darkness of an impossible sky, the same sky that the friar perhaps persists in attempting to capture between his hands. Civilization will subsequently teach us to shoot people who are standing, which is much more dignified, modern, and honorable for the accused. Perhaps this reform began in our war for independence. Etchings 15 and 38 offer us two of the favored variants of the period. In the first, “and there’s no solution,” the prisoners are executed on their feet, tied to a post, and blindfolded. The contrary method, “Savages,” consists in riddling with bullets the back of a man tied to another post, or perhaps the same one, in this way salvaging the handkerchief that would have been used to blindfold him.
In the human center of The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill, placed a little to the left of the spectator and the geometric center, Goya’s ragged pauper shouts eternally. Fired by rage, to judge by his expression, he is the only one who does not plead for clemency or mercy. He dies with his eyes open wide, challenging his executioners or proclaiming beliefs that for him are sacred. His right palm is clearly pierced and perhaps his left as well, as Folke Nordstrom indicates in Goya, Saturn, and Melancholy. The same writer interprets the vague, blurred figures to the left and behind the prisoners as a Pietà, in which the Virgin hides the face of her Son against her breast to spare him the Calvary of these men. It should be remembered that Goya always headed his letters with a cross, even though he was fervently anticlerical and perhaps no longer believed in the immortality of the soul. Almost at the end of The Disasters, a skeleton returned from death identifies it in writing with nothingness. The epigraph emphasizes this: “Nothing. The event will tell.”
Goya believed in “Divine Reason,” as he called it in The Caprices. If he seemed to identify morally with the victims here, ideologically he was on the side of the executioners. André Malraux’s often-cited phrase from his Saturne. Essai sur Goya, describing The Disasters of War, is still valid: “The notebook of a Communist at the moment his country has been invaded by the Soviet Union.” The Disasters, The Shootings, and May 2, 1808, in Madrid were also the testimony of a deaf syphilitic who saw more deeply than any of his contemporaries into the dark labyrinth that occupies and, in the final analysis, summarizes human nature. There he also discovered the ironic monster that inhabits man and obliges him to kill in the name of the noblest social abstractions: Liberty, Faith, Progress, and Reason itself. As a man he believed himself to be as guilty as his fellow man, regardless of the language in which he expressed himself at the moment of the executions, which always preceded a dawn that was, perhaps, impossible. Perhaps even guiltier, because Goya knew himself to be both violent and cowardly in the chaos of war. May 2, 1808, in Madrid, The Executions, and The Disasters were much more than the testimony of a supporter of the French at the moment his country had been invaded by the Napoleonic Legion de Réserve. They were the terrible examination of conscience by a rationalist Christian in the name of all his brothers, the killers.
March 26, 1828
I’m recovering little by little and in no time I’ll be like new, at the age of eighty-two. If my daughter-in-law and grandson would come right now, I’d be fine. This miracle is due to valerian, ground up fine in the mortar, which Leocadia gives me every noon. I even found the strength to go to Galos’s house, all wrapped up and in a carriage, to sign receipts for the last remittances. The trip did not tire me as much as I feared, and I plan to repeat it in April on my own feet. With Leocadia’s help I walk a little around the house every morning and then, comfortably stretched out in the armchair filled with pillows, I draw events that happened thirty years ago or even more, using a board as a table. It may be an illusion of mine, but I believe that even my sight improved this week. Sometimes I dispense with the magnifying glass to draw my sketches, using only eyeglasses with metal frames. A real painter should be able to reproduce the most distant memories with a pencil or a dry point needle. When I can’t do that, I’ll be blind or I’ll have died.
Dear Xavier: I’m dying of impatience as I wait for my dear travelers. You gave me the greatest pleasure when you said in your last letter that they wouldn’t go to Paris in order to spend more time with me. They’ll enjoy it here, and if you come in the summer, my happiness will be complete.
On Saturday I was in Galos’s house and received the two monthly stipends. I also have in my possession the other draft for 979 francs. As soon as you send the next pair of stipends, I plan to invest the income, some 12,000 reales annually, in a country house for Marianito and his descendants. What do you think of the idea?
I’m feeling much better and hope to be as healthy as I was before the attack. My improvement is due to powdered valerian; but the best remedy for all my ailments will be the visit from my dear travelers. They will help me to recover completely. Goodbye for now, my son, from one who loves you very much . . .
I reread my own letter several times, now with the help of the magnifying glass. Though I’d give my eyes to have my daughter-in-law bring Marianito to me and not to live waiting for their arrival, I scrawled the note to Xavier, not really paying attention to what I had written. Lightning bolts of memory repeatedly returned me to that spring of 1796 or 1797 and to the house on the slope of Sanlúcar Hill. Months earlier, back when María Teresa began to go to bed with me, she had become a widow. She went to Sanlúcar to hide her mourning and I joined her there, on the pretext of painting her full-length portrait again, as we had agreed earlier in Madrid. In reality even our few precautions were excessive because in whispers and behind my back, the back of a deaf man, the entire court was saying we were lovers. Josefa must have known all about it, though she never reproached me for anything. She must have imagined in silence that the affair between a peasant and a woman of such high nobility, and twenty years his junior besides, would end like the rosary at matins: in a scandal destined to be forgotten as soon as María Teresa chose another lover. And in fact, that’s what happened, although Josefa would never guess that I, the oldest of the three and a sick man, would outlive all the women in this purgatory.
I see María Teresa’s house again, halfway up the slope that leads to the village, as I sketch it rapidly in the notebooks on the board. My hand does not tremble, even though ten days ago it was stiff, and now it transfers memories to paper at full speed. (Valerian will condemn me to live for a century, like Titian, and die painting! Vous êtes un grand homme, un peintre de la Chambre. On va vous soigner!) It was midafternoon, and beneath the bedroom window the Guadalquivir slipped out to sea past the inlets. On its way to setting, the sun turned an orange-red that set the water on fire beneath the shrieking gulls. Couples in boats crossed the gleaming river. The men rowed, shirtless, and the women protected themselves from the glare with flowered parasols and wide straw hats decorated with glass grapes. I made love to María Teresa, and she smothered me again, anticipating her cries when she climaxed, which the servants would listen to, smiling, behind the door. At times, and before I left the bedroom after dressing, she would call the maid with a bell and ask her to change the stained sheets. I asked her how she dared humiliate the girl in that way, and looking me in the eye, she replied:
“What I don’t understand is why she lends herself to being humiliated. If these people are as despicable as we are, what sense do our lives make, or theirs?”
We fell asleep in each other’s arms in the dazzling afternoon. I awoke after an interminable dream in which I had seen the Prince of Peace, surprisingly aged and badly dressed, playing with some children in gardens that a thunderstorm erased from memory. María Teresa was still lying naked, facedown on the bed, her jet-black hair spilling over her shoulders and the sheets. It must have poured while we were sleeping, because the sky was still cloudy on the other side of the wet glass. A fantastic rainbow crossed the sky and the inlets. It came to us through the window and illuminated María Teresa’s back with all the lights of the prism. I woke her and said:
“I dreamed I saw Godoy in a park where I’d never been. He was very old, but I recognized his features because I never forgot a face. Sitting on a bench and dressed like someone unemployed, he was talking with other old men as poorly attired as he. At times the children would approach him and he lent them his walking stick so they could ride it around a pond. The dream washed away in a storm. I don’t understand it, but I’m afraid it is a harbinger of misfortunes.”
Curled on the bed, her hands crossed under her chin, María Teresa seemed to pierce me with her eyes. Her gaze was lost in the void, following a Godoy very different from the omnipotent favorite of an earlier time, in whom she scorned excessive power, satanic ambition, and the roguery that led him to satisfy them. The account of my dream must have evoked in her an abandoned and impoverished man submerged in a misfortune as incredible as his earlier fortune. At that moment I realized I had lost her forever. Not long afterward she became the concubine of the greatest of satyrs, the Prince of Peace, who, ironically, would always favor me with his affection. In one of my Caprices I portrayed María Teresa, in mourning and flying through the air, standing on three monstrous squatting figures. In another drawing that I did not have the courage to engrave, “Dream of the Lie and Unconsciousness,” I portrayed her again with two faces, like Janus, embracing me but at the same time looking at a stranger who approached slithering along the ground. To begin with I drew a snake holding a turtle spellbound in order to devour it. The Caprices were published thanks to the authority of Godoy, who probably never understood them. Engraving them freed me from my jealousy, because for me, art was always my redemption from madness. By then, María Teresa had tired of the Prince of Peace and he did not pursue her body, only the plunder of her estate.
Leocadia arrived holding Rosarito by the hand and I immediately closed my sketchbook. I shared my jealousy with others, but my memories were as much mine as the silence of my deafness. She told me that Moratín had come to say goodbye, because tomorrow he was returning to Paris. (No doubt he had given up waiting for my death and was leaving now, at a calm, empty time, because only the burial of other exiles revives our hope of seeing Spain again.) We invited Moratín to have lunch with us: Madrid garbanzo stew and suckling pig. He accepted very courteously and enthusiastically praised Leocadia’s cooking with the irritating discretion of an effeminate man. We had lunch right in the bedroom, and I ate with Rosarito on my lap, the drawing board serving as our table. Looking at Moratín, I suddenly asked him:
“Leandro, how old are you now?”
“I’ll be sixty-eight.”
“No one would ever guess. You look almost twenty years younger,” Leocadia chimed in.
The hunger he would have suffered recently in Paris had made him thin and pale, although he had always had that whitish color touched with pink so typical of conch shells and girls. He had been the librarian and personal friend of the Intruder King, and had been obliged to follow him into exile. Joseph Bonaparte gave almost his entire personal fortune to create a pension fund for destitute supporters of the French. Now the Bourbons had confiscated those funds. One day he’ll die in Paris and someone will have to give up part of his own grave for him. He will turn into ashes and his theater into silence. In this world of madmen, our personal fate is undoubtedly something that happens only once.
“I’d also take you for half a century if I hadn’t known you since the days when we would get together in the Fonda de San Sebastián, where I heard you talk about the Encyclopedists for the first time. Half a century badly lived, in fact, because if that were your age you’d look older. I’d like to paint another portrait of you to know for certain who you are.”
“Did you find that out about yourself?” He smiled, carving the meat with those thin, sensitive hands, as white as mushrooms very well hidden in the bush.
“No. The fact of the matter is I never could find out, and the older I get, the less I know about it.”
Vous êtes un grand homme, un peintre de la Chambre. Everything was clear to the doctors: I was a former painter of kings to whom they gave powdered valerian in order to keep him alive. “We know each other too well,” I said to His Majesty the last time I spoke with him. The fact is that nobody knows anybody, as the title of one of my caprices says: that masked ball where everything is false, the people, their words, and even their disguises. The king laughed like a parrot imitating men. And yet he thought he was Saturn, devouring our people. That’s where he was wrong, because I too supposed I was Saturn, and we couldn’t both become the same monster. In Sanlúcar, when I painted the portrait in which María Teresa wore two rings without our names, she said to me: “You immortalized me twice. I’ll live forever in people’s memory for having been your mistress and because you made this painting of me.” At least, that’s what I thought I read on her lips, because I could no longer hear her voice. In a few days she was Godoy’s, as she had once been mine, with the same cries I never could hear, though she was in my arms, the same kisses, the same bites. Now she has been ashes for more than twenty years and I don’t know what could have happened to her portrait with the two rings. The queen and the Prince of Peace stole it, along with everything that was hers, after her death.
“That’s precisely why we grow old and die,” said Moratín: “to forget who we are if we ever knew it.”
“Grandfather, are you going to die soon?” Rosarito asked, sitting in my lap.
“Rosarito! How dare you say terrible things like that?” said a furious Leocadia. “What will Don Leandro think of you?”
“Don Leandro doesn’t think, Señora,” Moratín said with a smile, speaking very slowly, as he usually does. “Don Leandro is in exile, just like yourself, for having dared to think.”
“That’s enough, Leocadia,” I intervened in order to cut short these fits of rage, so sudden and so exasperating. “The girl isn’t to blame for thinking freely, in her innocence. Don’t attempt to be more than the despot. Go on, pour me a little wine.”
The wine was poured and I drank; but we didn’t resolve anything. I am less and less sure of knowing who I am, more and more suspicious in the most tortured way that I’m beginning to be someone else. For thirty-six years I haven’t heard a human voice, including my own, reading other people’s lips to discover what they are saying to me. And yet, with a start that I can barely manage to control, at this very moment, I heard in my mind the words of an unknown woman: “I’ll never know who I could have been, since no woman knows that who hasn’t been a mother,” she says to me. “For that matter, I also don’t know what I’m doing here with you. It’s all like a nightmare that goes on too long.” I would have liked to smother this faceless voice; but she replied: “I’ll go when I like. After all, it’s all the same whether I go or stay with you, because any relationship between us never made any sense.” Then she stopped speaking and I needed a few moments of quiet to get used to her silence. Moratín’s gestures got me out of the critical moment, for he was talking to me and trying to look me in the eye.
“To continue with our sad exegesis of old age, I ought to confess an almost unimaginable I adventure had in Paris, shortly before my trip to Bordeaux. One Sunday I was walking alone through the Tuileries gardens, and I ran into the Prince of Peace.”
“Godoy? I thought he was dead,” said Leocadia.
“Grandpa, who’s the Prince of Peace?” Rosario asked, turning her head so I could see her lips.
“The Prince of Peace is the devil,” responded Leocadia.
“Don’t be stupid,” I interrupted her, “and don’t talk about someone you don’t believe in. I see no reason to teach the child to hate in vain. When she’s a woman, no one will remember Godoy. The Prince of Peace, my little ladybird, is a man your grandfather knew in Spain. He tried to have everything in this world, where almost nothing is worth the effort; but now he suffers as we do, because he has to live far from Madrid and his country.”
“He didn’t seem to be suffering too much when I ran into him,” Moratín continued. “He was taking the sun on a bench, near the pond, speaking very bad French with other old men. It turned out to be a get-together of retired actors and trapeze artists who met there every Sunday. With them, and with no touch of irony, because he never had any, the Prince of Peace said he had been a Spanish clown. Some of those old men would go to the Tuileries with their grandchildren. The children showed an instinctive affection for Godoy, and he more than reciprocated. They climbed on his knees and brought him their toys and balls so that he would lend them his walking stick of varnished cane. Although I had often seen him before the war, I didn’t recognize him then. There are people who age badly, whom the winters not only blur but disfigure as well. He was one of those. Time had bent his back and made him so thin that nothing remained of his insolent bearing. Moreover, I never could have imagined him so modestly dressed in badly pressed clothes shiny with wear, and a shirt darned on the front. It was he who approached, limping, after saying goodbye to his friends. Smiling, he extended a trembling hand, spotted by the years. ‘You’re Moratín, aren’t you? I’m the Prince of Peace.’”
“What else happened, Leandro? What else happened? For God’s sake, don’t stop now!”
My heart pounded in my chest, the way fulling mills pounded cloth. Moratín had experienced and was recounting the dream I’d had in the distant spring of Sanlúcar. This Godoy, eaten away by old age and poverty, was the same man I had dreamed thirty years earlier. The man whom María Teresa could have loved now, as she had loved me when syphilis had deafened me, as she had loved beggars, lepers, blind men, orphans, the destitute, as she had left all her goods to the poor, before the queen and Godoy himself had stripped her bare after her death.
“Don’t you feel well? Why are you so upset?” Leocadia and Moratín asked at the same time, astonished by my agitation and the impatience of my words.
“I’m perfectly fine. Go on, Leandro! Go on!”
“There isn’t much to tell,” he said with a shrug. “We walked for a time through the garden and Godoy spoke almost the whole time about himself. He had a singular Italian accent, which he had brought from Rome, where, as he told me, he kept a vigil over the death agony of Queen María Luisa. He added that the Princess of Peace had died in Madrid, in 1820, without ever answering his letters. Their daughter, Carlota, also refused to write to him. ‘She doesn’t want to know anything about me, alive or dead,’ he repeated dispassionately, as if he were accustomed to thinking of that ingratitude. He lived on the fourth floor, near the Tuileries, thanks to a modest pension from the French government. When the Princess of Peace died, he married Pepita Tudó in order to recognize the son he’d had with her. ‘On that fourth floor,’ he said with a smile, ‘we were all waiting for the death of the despot, also known as the Desired One. I think he’s very sick again.’ I told him that a people who called Fernando the Desired One had no forgiveness from God. He nodded his agreement in the twilight: ‘No, no they don’t, not even in hell.’ I was going to reply that Spain was hell, when he muttered in a very quiet voice: ‘I consider my current wretchedness well spent, because it is the guarantee of my conscience. I at least did not have the opportunity to experience that war in which Spaniards found themselves obliged to betray or defend the rights of a traitor, committing all kinds of atrocities.’ I replied that I had been librarian to King José, precisely in order to serve my country. He smiled, shaking his head. ‘That’s your affair, Moratín. I congratulate myself because destiny forced me to withdraw.’”
“He probably was right,” I interrupted. “On May 2, in ’08, when the Mamelukes ran down women with their horses, when French soldiers shot men in clusters, those of us not born to be butchers should have abstained from collaborating with the invader. That was a war all of us would lose, hopelessly, regardless of how it turned out. Our obligation was reduced to maintaining the integrity of our personal dignity, but unfortunately we lost that along with the conflict. The day when Fernando VII, recently returned to Madrid, summoned me to the palace to tell me he absolved my past, I felt the same sorrow I had suffered when my children died. I would have preferred a thousand times over to be exhibited in a cage, like the Undaunted, and then executed.”
“The king didn’t have the right to absolve anybody, because nobody could pardon a wretch like him for his greatest sin: having been born,” said Leocadia.
“You sound very Calderonian, Señora,” said Moratín, with a caustic smile. “I don’t know how this predestination can accommodate your liberalism.”
“Grandpa, what’s liberalism?” asked Rosarito.
I preferred to ignore her question, for if I responded I would have to tell her that Spanish liberalism had been reduced to waiting for the death of a man who would, perhaps, outlive us all except her. Perhaps she would understand it by herself one day, or maybe she would never understand it at all, which is what would happen to most of our compatriots. That’s how it is today and how it will probably be the day after tomorrow, when we are ashes and the eternal despot had changed his name in order to be reincarnated with the same ambition and cruelty he’d always had.
“When I went to Zaragoza, after the first siege, I saw the naked corpses of guerrillas impaled on trees along the road by the soldiers of the same king for whom you were librarian and I an incidental painter,” I said to Moratín. “They were in every field, amputated and castrated by saber blows, their eyes empty and eaten by birds. Undoubtedly Godoy was right. It was a lucky man who could withdraw when those horrors were occurring.”
“Do you know what our people did? Do you know about their atrocities during the war?”
“Of course I know about them!” I protested in a rage. “I told you already that as far as I’m concerned, all those slaughters were the same crime. They murdered with reason or without it. Our side did the same.”
“No, it wasn’t the same,” he replied with a passion not at all usual in him. “Our closest neighbor, the one we instinctively tend to identify with in this labyrinth, is from our country and speaks our language. It becomes as difficult to absolve him as to forget one’s personal faults, because he too is the object of our individual conscience . . .”
“Who can talk about conscience nowadays? Who, really, when we all sold ourselves for a dish of lentils?”
“I can!” He interrupted me. “I could pardon the French for those naked, profaned corpses, just as I pardon the crows that devour their eyes. But I cannot forget the crimes of my own people, because in a certain sense they are my own crimes. In Santa Cruz de Mudela, between Valdepeñas and Desdeñaperros, in the small hours of June 5, 1808, horsemen from Castaños surprised two hundred sleeping Frenchmen. Before killing them with axes and pikes, the women cut off their ears and their private parts as they had done earlier in Lerma. Then they cut them all into pieces, one by one, and threw their remains to the pigs. In Cádiz, cradle of our Constitution and our useless freedoms, ten thousand French prisoners were piled into ten old hulks with barely enough room for a thousand. Dysentery, gangrene, scurvy, typhoid fever, and finally cholera reduced their number to six hundred. Many committed suicide and more lost their minds. When sea breezes blew, the stink from the ships infected the entire city.”
“Forgive me, Leandro, but I’m taking the child away. I want to spare her this savagery,” Leocadia intervened.
“But Grandma, I like it very much,” Rosarito protested. “It’s like a fairy tale.”
“It is a fairy tale, my child,” Moratín insisted, while Leocadia looked at him in a quandary. “All this happened in a very distant, very remote country: our country, which according to your grandpa never existed. One day all of us will have to invent it. In the meantime, we should limit ourselves to keeping in mind a past that never should have been. It is believed that sixteen thousand French soldiers and officers were deported to the island of Cabrera,” he continued, staring at me so I wouldn’t lose a single word from his lips. “A Mallorcan was supposed to supply them, but he made a fortune selling the provisions in Palma. On Cabrera, as on the old ships in Cádiz, the prisoners died of hunger, of cholera, of scurvy, of gangrene, and of typhoid fever. The commanders ordered the corpses burned because their companions would dig them up to eat them. Although at that time I was cataloguing the books of the intruder king, I feel responsible for these horrors because they were committed and tolerated by my compatriots. And all this, in whose name? Well, in the name of God and the Desired One.”
“And meanwhile, the others impaled living peasants in order to free them from the Holy Office, or shot them on Príncipe Pío Hill to the greater glory of reason. Nations always justify their crimes in the name of history. Then history transforms their crimes and sacrifices into sarcasm. When I became deaf and spent two years at death’s door, I discovered in the solitude of my silence that a monster lives in each man. Much later I would see the beginning of the tragedy in the Puerta del Sol, through the windows of my studio, as the Egyptian cavalry charged, shooting their guns and wielding their swords, into a crowd armed with shouts and razors. Did you ever stop to think, Leandro, about the spectacle of a war seen by a deaf man? I couldn’t hear the shouts, the shots, the neighing, and the artillery fire that filled Madrid that day. In that sinister quiet, which seemed to split my skull, the battle in the street took on a distant, unreal air, as if life insisted on plagiarizing the nightmares of my dying. Those who killed one another in silence, a silence as interminable as the silence of insomnia, looked more like marionettes than people. Then I understood that if a monster lived inside each man, the monster was always a puppet.”
“Is that when you conceived of the painting of the charge in the Puerta del Sol, which you then painted for the Desired One?” he asked, smiling.
“I conceived of absolutely nothing then. I limited myself to recognizing my true nature as vampire and clown. Almost twenty years later I would buy the Quinta del Sordo and decorate the walls of the house with my image and likeness: monsters that resembled puppets. I believed I had painted my confession and contrition, but perhaps I made a mistake.”
“Why would you make a mistake?”
“Because perhaps I painted the entire history of my country there without realizing it, as Leocadia once said.”
“Perhaps you did.”
“But I wanted to confront history in the early hours of May 3, when I went to the clearings on Príncipe Pío with my servant to sketch the carnage. In the moonlight, crushed to the ground or looking toward heaven with eyes wide open, all the puppets were dead. The whole hill smelled of early rockrose in that dawn filled with hungry dogs and crows.”
Moratín left, not consenting to my accompanying him to the stairs. We said goodbye in the bedroom, and he embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks as if we were Frenchmen. For a moment I tried to ignore the presentiment that we would never see each other again. Leocadia preceded him as she accompanied him to the staircase, and I fell back in the easy chair with Rosarito on my knees. The child was silent and looked at me, expectantly, her large, dark eyes fixed on mine.
“Grandpa,” she said at last, “if men are puppets, who’s playing with them?”
“Time, my little ladybird, time that devours everything, just like mice and wood borers. Only you will remain forever, like an eternal flower, in the middle of the universe and beneath the stars.”
“The Living Skeleton told me at the circus that one day I’d teach a queen to draw.”
“It must be true, ladybird, because he spoke all languages.”
“The child will be the art teacher of a sovereign, Maestro,” Claude Ambroise Lurat repeated to me in a corner of his tent on the Rue du Manège. “She’ll probably do that because your grace has adopted her. One afternoon, on the way to the Royal Palace, she’ll run into an uprising or a riot. She’ll race back home as fast as she can and die of fright a few days later. She’ll have just turned twenty-six. Don’t be angry with me, Maestro, je vous en prie. I read only the back of the cards.” Rosarito fell asleep on my lap. Leocadia looked in the half-open door and I signaled to her impatiently not to wake the child and to leave us alone. She left and closed the door slowly. I made Rosarito a drawing of the Living Skeleton, leaning on a bamboo cane and wearing a chef’s hat on his smooth, hairless head. Naked, except for an apron to hide his private parts, he resembled a boiled, fleshless mummy. All his bones and cartilage were visible beneath his whitish skin. He was small and pigeon-chested, but his thinness sharpened him like a shadow. He told me he had been born in Narbonne and was the son of the count de Saint Germain, the man who never spends two days in the same city and is believed to be six hundred years old. The Skeleton never learned to write, and he read only cards, but he could speak all languages, as if the Pentecostal flame had descended over his kitchen cap.
“Pardon me, your grace, for what I said about the girl. I can’t take it back, though I should have kept silent. To prove my good will, I’ll deal the cards free of charge and your grace can read your good fortune on my lips.” I laughed and asked him what future could await an old man of my age, and Claude Ambroise Lurat shrugged. “One never knows, because the only truth is in the cards. My presumed father, the charcoal seller Lurat, from Narbonne, had no faith in the cards and died not knowing that my mother had conceived me with the count de Saint Germain while he was shoveling burned charcoal. My mother told me all about it on the day of my first communion, when she taught me to lay the cards. She could specify the day and time of any future évenèment if it fell in a leap year. I’m not that good, but I get by in the circus. Let’s sit down, Maestro, and I’ll tell your good fortune right now, bien entendu que pour rien, absolument pour rien.” That was when he said he saw in the cards a man and a woman who did not exist yet. The man was attempting to write a book about me, and the Living Skeleton seemed very disturbed by those messages. “Give me ten sous, Maestro, so I can drink a thimbleful of burgundy.”
Ten days ago I told Moratín that Spain did not exist and was only one of my Absurdities, set up in the depths of the night of history. I sensed immediately that those words were not completely mine. At the back of my deafness and with the ears of the spirit, I thought I knew they had been said by a man at once very different from and very similar to me, perhaps in a century that did not yet exist. I wonder now whether that stranger could have been the same one the Living Skeleton saw in the cards, just as the Prince of Peace I dreamed of in Sanlúcar thirty-two or thirty-three years before turned out to be the same Godoy, old now, and with a darned shirt front, that Moratín ran into this winter, on a Sunday, in the Tuileries. (“You’re Moratín, aren’t you? I’m the Prince of Peace.”) Perhaps in another time and in another world, because each era is a universe as dissimilar from the previous one as the moon can be from earth, a man waits for me and extends his hand to me in the emptiness in order to say: “I’m the one you have been.”
To distract Rosarito, a few days ago I sketched a caricature of myself for her: an old hunchback, all wild hair and whiskers, emerging from the shadows and leaning on two canes. “What are you saying in the drawing?” inquired the ladybug, and at an angle I wrote: “I’m still learning.” Then I began to wonder what I could be learning and concluded that my whole life as a painter was nothing but a search for myself, a clumsy attempt, which always failed, to recount my entire existence in my art. Then I thought of the man who, according to the cards, was struggling to write my biography. Was he perhaps pursuing himself while he believed he would gradually discover me in my paintings?
Ten years ago I painted the walls of the Quinta del Sordo. There, behind the Segovia Bridge, I supposed I would close myself away forever with my frescoes and my paintings. I was in the midst of that when I met Leocadia in I don’t remember whose house. As it turned out, she was from the Aragonese family of the Monegros and a distant relative of mine. When very young she had married a certain Isidro Weiss, son of a Bavarian watchmaker and a Jew, who abandoned her and her two recently weaned children, who by now were a man and a woman. As well read as she was liberal, she was involved in the conspiracies of Mina, Porlier, Lacy, and finally of Riego to impose the Constitution of 1812 on Fernando VII. From politics and its plots she had inherited only debts, sorrows, and the subjects of long tirades about the intrigues plotted in the Café Lorencini or the Fontana de Oro. “Come live with me, in my house in the Manzanares lowlands,” I said to her one day in the Cruz de Malta. “I’m old and lost among my paintings and my servants. I need a housekeeper and someone to talk to, although I can’t hear your voice or mine.” She followed me and I painted her at the entrance to the house, self-absorbed, an elbow on a rock, covered with a veil, among deaf, howling friars, decapitated kings, witches’ sabbaths, crowds of monsters, Fates, buried dogs, drunkards, phantom horses, disputes with sticks, knives, illusions, skeletons, flying wizards, blind men, madmen, witches, phantoms, idiots, and masturbators. When I finished, I asked Leocadia what she thought of it. I was hoping she would tell me that the house was my self-portrait, but to my surprise she replied: “All of this, clearly, is our country seen from the inside: the burning heart of a volcano.” I argued that I had been mistaken, then, since I had wanted to paint on the walls my own nightmares and the hell that lived inside me. Leocadia agreed with a gesture. “We’ve both said the same thing, isn’t that so? Recounting the history of this Spain of ours is the same as confessing hidden transgressions.”
The child fell asleep in my arms and I was surprised to find myself nodding. In the half-sleep of this nap, the lips of María Teresa and the Living Skeleton spoke to me. “If these people are as despicable as we are, what sense do our lives, and theirs, make?” And then: “In 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 in a blur, accompanied by a woman, in a house next to a river that runs over a riverbed of very white stones. Neither the man nor the woman exist yet; but in the cards, he struggles to write a book about your grace” . . . The dream is a river that carries me gradually to the center of the earth. I know I’m asleep and I feel like another man. I’m sitting on the last of three stone steps at the foot of a mill door. But I almost don’t recognize myself, though deep in my soul I find my own being hidden in a different man. The house and landscape are new to my eyes, or at least I would swear I had never seen them. The walls of the mill, made of large stones faded by time, are gilded in the sun of a winter sky. Nearby a stream rambles by, the sound repeated in my ears as if the dream had freed me of deafness. The door is oak, cracked and blackened by a lightning bolt that had twisted the latch and the bolt. In front of me is a poplar grove, all the leaves gone, with large stones half buried among the bushes. Inside I again hear the words of that unknown woman. “I’ll never know who I could have been, as no woman knows who has not been a mother. In fact, I also don’t know what I’m doing here with you.” Again I tried to silence her deep inside, as I had done before when I was talking to Leocadia and Moratín. “I’ll go when I choose to. After all, it’s all the same whether I leave or stay with you, because every relationship between us was always senseless.” Then I become aware of her presence beside me and her voice sounds no longer in my consciousness but in my ears. She says in a different tone:
“If you really want to write the book, let’s get away today. Let’s go wherever you say and I’ll follow you, if that’s what you want. But let’s leave here right away, before it’s too late for all of us!”