Xavière Desparmet Fitz-Gerald included a catalogue of Goya’s works, edited by Antonio Brugada at the time of the painter’s death, in his book, L’Oeuvre de Goya. Catalogue Raisonné. Brugada called the painting Two Foreigners, a title that the catalogue of the Prado changes to one much more precise and expressive: A Quarrel with Cudgels. The scene was painted in oils directly onto the wall on the second floor of the so-called Quinta del Sordo, the house bought by Goya in February 1819, behind the del Rey and Segovia Bridges. Between 1821 and 1822, Goya decorated the walls of both floors with eleven paintings, all of them in oils, in addition to the Quarrel: Leocadia, Judith and Holofernes, Saturn, The San Isidro Excursion, Two Friars, The Witches’ Sabbath, Two Old Women Eating Soup, The Great Goat, The Reading, Two Women and a Man, and Destiny or the Fates. As André Malraux described them, the dark roads that lead from Carnival Tuesday to the Day of the Dead, or in this case, to July 18, 1936, passing through May 2, 1808, all cross one another in the labyrinth of these paintings, which the nation calls black.
The Quinta del Sordo no longer exists. When Eugenio d’Ors, still very young, looked for it early in the century in the environs of San Isidro Hill, no one could tell him anything about the house. Sixty years later, Saint-Paulien visited the tiny railroad depot erected on the property. La station fut baptisée Goya. De Goya on peut aller à Móstoles, Navalcarnero, Alberche, Almorox: 148 kilomètres aller et retour. Up the Manzanares one finds the reconstructed hermitage of the Virgin del Puerto, the fountain in honor of Juan de Villanueva, and the tea gardens that once belonged to La Bombilla, where Joselito sometimes went to dance. Even farther away the guidebook of Juan Antonio Cabezas indicates a fenced grove, with six cypresses and an iron cross on a granite pillar. Here lie those shot on the slopes of Príncipe Pío Hill at daybreak on May 3, 1808.
The Quinta del Sordo no longer exists. In 1912, when Hugh Stokes tried to find Goya’s house, he couldn’t locate it. No one visits the cemetery of the executed either. Rafael Canedo, occupation unknown; Juan Antonio Martínez, beggar; Julián Tejedor de la Torre, blacksmith; Manuel García, gardener; Manuel Sánchez Navarro, court employee; Martín de Ruicarado, stonecutter, and all their companions can rot in peace. Charles Yriarte did get to see the villa in its final years. In his book Goya, sa biographie, les Fresques, les Toiles, les Tapisseries, les Eaux-Fortes, et le Catalogue de l’Oeuvre, Paris, 1967, he stated erroneously that Goya bought the house when he was working on the frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida. On the same page, which is the ninth in his work, Yriarte presented a drawing of that residence behind a rather overgrown garden. At Goya’s death it passed to his son Xavier, who would bequeath it to the painter’s grandson, Mariano Goya Goicoechea. Along with the property, Mariano inherited everything that had belonged to his grandfather except his talent. Unlike his father, who was prudent and circumspect, like the Bayeus, Mariano was reckless, a womanizer, and profligate in the extreme. He survived several duels, was sewn together with scars, amassed and lost fortunes, and gradually sold off Goya’s paintings. In 1860 he sold the property on the Manzanares plain to Robert Courmont, a Frenchman. Seven years later the house, long uninhabited, was in a state of disrepair, and a new owner, Segundo Colmenares, acquired it at a good price. By then Mariano Goya, indifferent to his last name, invested the last of his fortune in buying his title from a penniless noble, the marquis de Espinar. A short time later he faded away in obscurity, like smoke at night, recounting lies and memories of his celebrated ancestor, who had immortalized him in three portraits.
Segundo Colmenares directed Eduardo Gimeno to restore the oil paintings in the Quinta del Sordo. Nevertheless, in 1873 the country house was sold, passing to another Frenchman, Baron Émile d’Erlanger, a banker. The new owner, obsessed with Goya’s paintings, wanted to send slabs of the wall to Paris. A Madrilenian architect dissuaded him and put him in touch with the Martínez Cubells brothers, conservators from Valencia. They transformed the paintings, transferred them to canvas, and rescued them from the slabs of two walls. D’Erlanger’s patriotic aim was to give his private, Goyaesque hell to the Louvre. First he exhibited them in Paris and at the Universal Exposition of 1878. The reaction of the general public and the critics was absolutely negative. Both the devotees of impressionism and those who saw painting as a luminous adornment conforming to the esthetic standards of the bourgeoisie rejected the mauvais goût of that descent to the depths of man. In that same year, the reaction of an English scholar, P. G. Hamerton, expressed the feeling of the French:
The mind of Goya is debased in his own odious hell, a horrendous, repulsive swamp, devoid of sublimity, conceived in the form of chaos, bestial in its coloring and its denial of light, where the vilest monsters ever imagined by a sinner reside. Goya surrounds himself with these abominations, pursuing in them I can’t imagine what diabolical pleasures while he revels in the audacities of an art entirely devoted to his repulsive subjects, in a manner that is, for me, completely incomprehensible. The most reprehensible of these monsters is his Saturn. He devours one of his children with the voracity of a starving wolf, and the painter does not omit a single detail of this horrific banquet. What has already been said suffices to demonstrate that Goya has retreated to a wild beast’s lair, as the hyena hides with his carrion.
Infuriated by such a degree of incomprehension, Émile d’Erlanger gave the black paintings to the Prado.
In I can’t remember which story by Borges, a man attempted to sketch the entire universe in the sand on a beach. When he completed his work, in which all the rivers, mountains, and forests of the earth were diagrammed, he discovered in terror that the immense labyrinth was actually his self-portrait. With Goya in the Quinta del Sordo, I suppose that just the opposite occurred. Alone in his silence, the artist prepared to paint his innermost depths on the walls of his house, to take refuge in the bare center of his being. The result, however, was totally unforeseen, because it reproduced not his secret identity but rather the most brutal and truthful image of the land where it was his fate to be born. I imagine his last lover, Leocadia Weiss, walking with him through the rooms in the house and then telling him: “All of this, clearly, is our country seen from the inside: the burning heart of a volcano.” Goya would protest then; he would even swear that the black paintings were his own nightmares, dreams as inalienable as the sleeping eyes that saw them. She would agree with a gesture. “We’re both saying the same thing, aren’t we? To recount the senseless history of this Spain of ours is equivalent to confessing all one’s secret sins.” Then I also imagine (not knowing why I’m obliged to imagine it) a still older Goya speaking alone with Fernando VII, perhaps in their final meeting. “I can pardon your actions but not your sins of thought,” the king said to him with a smile. “I am your Saturn, devouring my people.”
Whoever Saturn was—time, Satan, the Desired One, or a syphilitic Goya fathering children for death—its horror in the Quinta del Sordo was comparable only to the Quarrel with Cudgels, a rectangle measuring 1.12 centimeters high by 2.66 centimeters wide. Xavier de Salas stated that duels with cudgels between two immobilized men were frequent in Aragón. The painting, however, is as far from the anecdotal as it is from the estheticizing. I recall a quote by Jean Grenier, cited by Edith Helman in her book on The Caprices. “Every intellectual of necessity has the idea of a Paradise Lost.” In the Quinta del Sordo, Goya tacitly renounced all paradises in order to come face to face with his own hell, in the name of the truth that, according to another visionary, ought to have made us free. In the end, and three centuries before Goya, Eustache Deschamps had written the sentence that R. showed me one day: “You have the rights that God Himself gave you, you have castles and keys, you have executioners and swords; but truth still exists on earth.” Like the Quinta del Sordo, Eustache Deschamps would be renowned in his time not because of that sentence but because of his ugliness. With the passage of time, and south of the Pyrenees, in the country where The Shootings on May 3 and Guernica, the coronation of Carlos IV and the return of Fernando VII, the fatal gorings of Pepe-Hillo and of Joselito, all coincided under the sign of Taurus, Goya would ask himself in anguish, perhaps without knowing it, whether our ultimate truth could not be reduced, plainly and simply, to being a country of murderers.
Two peasants, sunk into the mud to their knees, fight with cudgels. More than trapped in that swamp, one might say their legs were amputated and they stood erect on the stumps. The land, however, clamored for them and held them, demanding that the duel be to the death. The dispute, with no witnesses but us, has already begun when we stop in front of the painting. The rustic judges, in other words their fellows, buried them and left them to their fate. Cudgels raised, both were prepared to beat each other again and at the same time, to our fascinated horror. One of the combatants is bleeding from his forehead and chest. One of his eyes, resembling that of a dying Cyclops, looks at us wildly. His mouth, deformed by blows, is a dark stain reduced to silence. His adversary, younger, almost a boy, is practically unscathed. With his left arm and elbow in front of him, he covers his nostrils and jaw, conscious of the setback. The inhuman battle had a beginning but lacks an ending, like life sentences. While just one final man contemplates this painting on canvas that once had been part of a wall, the two peasants will continue to break each other’s head with their cudgels, just as a tuna ends up in the net or despicable people in the pillory. Just as, certainly, the execution of May 3 will continue to be suspended in the face of the ragged man with his arms spread wide.
To us the world seems more ferocious than the fight. I made bloodthirsty, thinking trees of the antagonists, condemned to destroy each other. Unique trees, naturally, in this landscape. The plain turns in on itself toward the horizon, curving into hills where at times the sand turns green, with flashes of enamel. Dry, more desolate sierras rise in the distance. A reddish hill, perhaps an old, exhausted quarry, precedes mountains, sienna, blue, and purple, rising skyward on the right. The sky is as pitiless as the land itself. Great livid, ashen clouds, apparent brothers to the mountains, cover it almost completely. In apparent sarcasm, the high clouds break apart twice, and twice a candid, translucent blue appears in those clear spaces. Finally, at the far end of the valley, one can see a herd of black bulls. They graze in front of the low rise of red clay, and distance diminishes them until it transforms them into black pinpoints. The cattle and the two peasants, bestialized by a hatred that even animals do not know, are the only living creatures in these barren lands.
The fight and its landscape are not true and do not attempt to repeat a theatrical curtain, as was the case in Blind Man’s Bluff. Duels with cudgels between two men buried in a swamp may have been frequent in Aragón, and it is even possible that the Goya family had witnessed them. But this painting represents not an incident but a nightmare. It also does not matter very much whether Goya dreamed it or not before painting it. A nightmare belongs to the one who sees it, and this one becomes ours as soon as we stop in front of the canvas. It seems undeniable, although so far it has not been written down, that the scene, its sky, its landscape, and the herd of bulls are part of a bad dream that is ours because we are looking at it. Incidentally, the same interpretation could be applied to the rest of the black paintings. The twelve oil paintings in that first-floor room in the Prado, therefore, would not be Goya’s madness (the madness of the hyena delighting in his carrion, as an ass has said) but ours as we look at them.
In this way Goya would present his Quarrel with Cudgels from a perspective analogous to the one Velázquez obliges us to adopt before Las Meninas or Picasso in front of Guernica. In the first, we make the monarchs’ point of view ours in the artist’s studio. In the second, we are obliged to share the vision of those who destroy the supposed monsters. In the Quarrel with Cudgels, or Two Strangers, as Brugada or the Prado wanted to call it, Goya obliges us to take possession of the nightmare of the Quinta del Sordo. Nonetheless, every nightmare is also the most intimate mirror of our consciousness. In other words, which are the words of Goya, the sleep of reason produces monsters. The bulls, land, sky, men, and clubs of this canvas are the reflection in synthesis of our interior world. They silently denounce the fanatical, ferocious battle that in a lucid or inadvertent way we bring with us to the Iberian arena. A constant, uncivil struggle, increasingly tragic and absurd, that has nothing to do with justice, as Antonio de Onieva so correctly pointed out.
Another justice, this one certain although oblique and hidden, presided over the incredible destiny of the Quarrel with Cudgels and all the black paintings. Goya did not conceive of them as paintings but as a bequest on the walls of his house to those of his blood. An instinctive caution, which at times contradicted his rashness, made him reserve this mirror of his entire nation for his intimates and descendants. The house, however, changed owners several times after his death, while the oil paintings deteriorated on the walls. Its last owner, a Frenchman, acquired it with the sole purpose of taking the paintings to Paris, without the Spanish authorities doing anything at all to stop him. The Baron d’Erlanger could hardly imagine the uselessness of his undertaking. Circumstances completely unforeseen by him, like the unthinking rejection by French critics and the brutal mockery of the Parisian public, obliged him to give the black paintings to the Prado instead of the Louvre. Now on canvas, they returned to the museum founded by Fernando VII. (“I am your Saturn, devouring my people.”)
More than half a century later, when the last civil war transformed the Quarrel with Cudgels into an ironic redundancy, the oil would return to France on its way to Switzerland, along with the entire Prado. With the imperial peace, that of the National and Proletarian Empire and God, as we are assured that Álvaro Cunqueiro said, the empire in which Franco affirmed that he would take Spain to the heights or leave with his feet toward God, facing forward, the black paintings were reduced to returning silently to the Prado. There, not too far from where the Quinta del Sordo once stood, the Quarrel with Cudgels now hangs in vain. Perhaps no more accurate X-ray of another nation exists. Perhaps none more useless exists either. Over and over again, during so many years that were all alike, we passed in front of the painting without recognizing ourselves, because in Spain, as Goya himself stated with certainty in his handwriting of an old rustic, no one knows himself. No one ever knew himself, and hence our history.
April 16, 1828
His Majesty the king poured a little cognac into our empty glasses.
“Señor, you do me honor.”
“Always at your service, old man.” He pinched my cheek, smiling, as if I were a kitchen scullion or an apprentice groom. “Servus servorum Dei. That’s what I am, and this Latin, along with the Latin of the Mass, is all I remember of the teachings of the bishop of Orihuela. It could have been less and it might have been worse, don’t you agree?”
I didn’t reply because he wasn’t listening to me then either. He sank into the armchair as if it were a bathtub, and scratched his private parts again. Then he rinsed his gums with a mouthful of the spirit, seemed to belch, and spat on the floor, wiping away the saliva with his foot. I never could decide whether that kind of shameless behavior was authentic or the actions of a clown whose part he liked to play precisely as a caricature. Sprawling in his cushioned chair, he looked at the portrait I had just painted of him, half closing those dark, intelligent eyes, where the bright trail of a mocking secret always seemed to be losing its way.
“Naturally you must have noticed that the ermine cloak, embroidered in gold, the scepter, and even the fleece are from the theater,” he said suddenly, pointing at the portrait on the easel, next to the cold fireplace. “Very good imitations, no doubt, but it’s all from the theater.”
“No,” I said in surprise. “I didn’t notice that when I was painting Your Majesty. Perhaps I didn’t want to see it either. Everything I paint is pure truth for me. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be worth perpetuating.”
“That’s why you painted me the way you did.” He smiled as he lit a cigar, which he moved away from his face so I could read his lips. “I should have had you garroted, or better yet, garrote you myself, as if it were a jest. At least you would die at the hands of a friend. I can swear that to you.”
“Yes, that’s why I painted you as I did, Señor. I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way, since this is how you are.”
“It’s very possible that this is how I am; but I’m not sure I know who I am. On the day of the opening of the Constitutional Parliament, imposed by the Riego revolution, they demanded that I inaugurate it wearing the royal mantle and crown. You revolutionaries are sometimes ridiculously conservative regarding protocol. I remember that I understood then why in France they decapitated a king in order to crown an emperor.” He shook his head and shrugged his narrow shoulders. “In any case, I laughed in their faces; in their hearts they wanted to cut off my head too, and I comforted myself by telling them the most ironic of truths . . .”
“The most ironic of truths, Majesty . . . ?”
“I told them there was no mantle, no crown, and no scepter, because the French had stolen them when they withdrew. Your friend the Intruder King would share his bread with you in the war, but he took even the chandeliers from this palace. They decided then that I should attend Parliament in the uniform of a captain general. On a large chair beside the throne, they placed a mantle, a scepter, and a crown, taken from the statue of San Fernando in the Plaza de la Armería.”
He burst into wholehearted laughter, his eyes closed and his long, thick, black brows wrinkled. He looked like a different man when he laughed—much taller, with a broader chest and shoulders. He unexpectedly recalled his dead father, whom he did not resemble in his physique or his features. (Allora, appena il crepuscolo, il giorno comincia a scolrire e nel traspasso dei colori tutto rimane calmo. “No one can resist my punches, the hardest grooms fall like ninepins. When you come back we’ll fight with rods in the stables and then I’ll play the violin for you, if you like.”) How many years had gone by since the day when Josefa and I were presented to his parents and his widowed grandfather, long before he was born? Fifty? Perhaps more? Time grew thin in the distance, like rivers in their beds in the late afternoon. More often than not, one could say that the past had never existed. It was like one of those fairy tales that we anticipate, knowing we’ll never get to live them.
“The whole country is made of shadows and theater,” I said when he stopped laughing, because before that he wouldn’t have heard me. “Here there never was and never will be anything real. Not even grief, because in the long run, that’s forgotten too.”
“Oh no, old man! You’re wrong!” he replied, sitting up quickly. “When you paint, you must see what no one else can; in other words, what you call the truth. But sometimes, when you speak, you don’t seem deaf but blind. In the final analysis, the country will have three undeniable realities: the people, you, and I.”
“Why we three, Señor?” Even without hearing my shouts, I knew that I was shouting. “What moral right can accompany us when we deny everyone in times of trial? If God sits in judgment, you will be condemned just like the people and just like me.”
“From this I ought to deduce that if you were God, you wouldn’t absolve any one of the three.”
“Your Majesty can deduce whatever you like best. Besides, in this case, you are absolutely right. I am nobody, but I know very well that you share in our condemnation.”
“We’re very different, old man, and naturally you’re more heartless.” He shrugged again. “With no remorse to speak of, I thought I was a tiger because I never pardoned any of my enemies. Not my mother, who’s dead; or Godoy, in exile now; or Riego, after executing him; or Napoleon, in hell for having dispossessed me and insulted me when I was defenseless. All of them humiliated me as if I were a beaten dog, and to them I shall always be a rabid dog, in this life or any other. If the ghost of my first wife were to appear, the human being I loved most, and begged on her knees that I pardon any of them, including my mother, I’d turn my head so I wouldn’t hear her.” He made an effort to smile, as if trying to soften the severity of his tone. “You never thought I was so obstinate, did you? Rancor is another virtue I share with my people.”
Rancorous, of course I knew that. But I also wondered who he thought the people were. Perhaps individuals like the Gypsy, his mistress Pepa de Málaga, or her charming former pimp, Chamorro, or like Ugarte, the odd-job man; the rabble who, as they said, would use tú with him when he was alone and call him master? I was convinced he would feel much closer to that scum than to all the kings of Europe. At the same time I was certain this was not my idea. It belonged to that man, who perhaps without knowing it was me in a time that had not happened yet: the man foretold in the circus on the Rue du Manège by the Living Skeleton.
“Even more than those dead and Godoy himself, who is dying in Paris, the people taunted and abused you when they assaulted the palace six years ago. You seem to have forgotten that.”
“It was much worse afterward, when I withdrew my confidence from the government and precipitated the crisis, hoping that the hundred thousand Sons of Saint Louis would reach Madrid in time and rescue me from the claws of the liberals. The mob entered howling like demons, while the Royal Guard looked up to heaven or fraternized with them. With their sticks they smashed the cut-glass drops on the lamps because the clinking amused them, and they ripped open the sofas with their knives. We had to hide in a garret filled with brooms and old straw mats, and from there we heard them shouting for my neck and shrieking at the queen that they would send her back to a brothel in Germany. Imagine my poor wife, the third one, the pious one! The one who wrote verses to the Vespers Service on the Day of the Conception! Even greater humiliations were waiting for us that summer, when Parliament removed me from the throne, saying I was mad. They sent us to Cádiz from Sevilla in a closed carriage because the hundred thousand Sons of Saint Louis had already entered Andalucía. On the road, and as we passed through the towns, droves of peasants assaulted the carriage and forced us to push up against the windows in order to spit at us. Inside the heat was infernal, a heat I can’t even describe to you when I remember it. The queen fainted several times. I even thought she had died . . .”
“And still you forgave them everything.”
“That same people returned us in triumph to Madrid, after freeing us from the troops of the duke de Angoulême. By then I could have strolled alone and unarmed through the streets and the people would have argued over my feet in order to kiss them. In the churches they worshiped my plaster image, wrapped in a theatrical cloak. I pardoned the people for the same reasons that, long before, I had pardoned you for your treason when you collaborated with the Intruder King. For precisely the same reasons that I always absolved my own felonies. You and I and the people are identical. In this world of dreams we are all that’s certain. To save our life we would pardon everything, our honor and our soul, because we are deeply convinced that no reality, at least on earth, exists beyond ourselves . . . I don’t know whether you understood everything I said.”
“I understood very well, Señor. But I also remember your taking revenge.”
“The people celebrated the tortures, which were public and very much applauded. I showed no mercy to the truly seditious, those who hadn’t committed treason in order to survive but to impose delusions like liberty and the rights of man. Along with Torrijos and his people, they arrested a boy of twelve who acted as messenger for the conspiracy. I remember that when they invaded the palace in order to impose the Constitution on me, they showed me another boy and roared that he was the son of General Lacy, whom I’d had shot earlier. Then I wrote in my own hand the order to execute Torrijos and his band. I put a note at the bottom: ‘Have them kill the boy too.’ Are you shocked, old man?”
“You don’t shock me, Señor; but I prefer knowing I’m the one responsible for the death of my children and not of that boy.”
“There are no disputes in questions of taste, my friend.” He smiled and stretched out in the chair again. With his moistened fingertip he caressed the rim of the glass over and over again, absorbed in delight, until the glass shrieked like a rusty knife blade against the whetstone.
“Señor, I beseech you!”
“Ah, forgive me! I thought you heard absolutely nothing.”
“Those shrieks I can hear. And claps of thunder sometimes, when they’re very far away.”
“In dreams I hear the voices of the emperor and my mother in the castle of Maracq, when they forced me to renounce the crown. I don’t see them, I only hear them and always as close as if I had returned to that Dantesque day. Vous êtes très bête et très, très mechant! that bandit roared, and my mother shrieked at me in Spanish: ‘Bastard! Bastard!’” He smiled, shaking his head, as if he wanted to drive away all the nightmares of the memory. “I was more afraid for my life at that moment than at any other time, including the journey from Sevilla to Cádiz. Yet even in my panic, I thought that my mother and Napoleon were as awful as they were grotesque. They were speaking languages that weren’t theirs and anger made their Italian accent seem coarse.”
“Your Majesty should have resisted that pillage by every means possible. Blood had already been spilled in Madrid and you, Señor, were not unaware of the uprising. You renounced the throne while men killed or were shot dead invoking your name.”
“In Maracq they would have murdered me if I had refused to abdicate. History is nothing but forgetting all the blood spilled in vain. In the end, the result was almost the same, although now my brother would be king instead of me. In that case the Holy Inquisition would have been reestablished, and you would be living not in exile but in its dungeons, because he would have brought back autos-da-fé in the Plaza Mayor and burned people at the stake. My brother is a fanatic. I’m only a frightened man.”
“What inheritance can your fear leave us?”
“The museum I’ll open in the Prado,” he exclaimed, suddenly becoming animated and slapping me on the knees. “The museum I’ll create to your glory with the paintings from the Real Casa!”
“Tomorrow people will forget that you founded the museum, but they’ll remember your betrayals and the gallows in the Plaza de la Cebada. In France Moratín once read to me a quotation from Shakespeare that you have no right not to know. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. This is the fate of power, but yours could have been different . . .”
“Why would it have been?”
“When you returned from Valençay you were the Desired One, the Only One. I doubt that any other man on earth has been awaited with more fervor in his own country. Do you remember the mob that kissed your hands and sobbed on the way to the San Isidro fountain? Then you could have started from nothing and truly been the king of all of us. This is a nation of beasts and imbeciles that will never begin to find itself until it recognizes its ferocity and stupidity and overcomes them. It was up to you to help them, Señor, because an opportunity like yours will not be repeated. Your grandfather, who never had it, would have grasped it immediately. The illusion of an entire people is the most powerful force in the world, and you were ours. An uncommon destiny allowed you to bring us peace, harmony, work, and above all hope. But you left us hatred, fanaticism, poverty, and despair. If God doesn’t prevent it, you’ll leave behind a century of civil wars. This is your legacy: the law of the garrote, which was going to transform this madhouse into an arcadia, as you told me on the way to San Isidro. Now you can’t even guarantee dynastic succession. Once again we’re living between terror and uncertainty, because your days are almost as numbered as mine. You’re not yet fifty and you look like a man almost my age.”
“Did you stop to think that perhaps I couldn’t redeem the people, as you say, precisely because I spoke their language and came from them?” he asked without warning, looking at me intently. “Despots like me do not improvise and are not fully responsible for their governmental actions. They are the inevitable consequence of the scars and leprosy of all of you. I come out of this people, like heat from a fire, and together we have touched bottom. About this, at least, we agree.”
“Yes, Majesty,” I nodded. “About this, at least, we agree.”
He stopped speaking and sank back into the armchair and his reflections, biting his lips above his equine jaw, where the shadow of his beard was beginning to turn his chin blue. He drank the cognac in his glass in a sudden mouthful, grimacing as if it repelled him. Then he began again to rub the lip of the glass with distracted persistence. He finally produced that shriek of a swift that penetrated my deafness like a needle.
“Possibly we won’t see each other again,” he said with a sigh, facing me again. “The truth is that in spite of everything I said, I believe I feel closer to you than to the people.” He burst into laughter when he noticed my confusion. “Yes, yes, closer to you, and not because I appreciate your painting even more than you can value it, but because at one time we both loved the same woman.”
“The same woman, Majesty . . . ?”
“Someone who died a long time ago. It seems incredible to think that if she had lived, she’d be a very old woman.”
“Yes,” I nodded again, as my memory wove shadows in time. “It seems incredible.”
“I was referring to María Teresa,” he explained unnecessarily, laughing now like a madman. “Do you remember her, old man?”
“I think about her often, Majesty.”
“My mother thought she was the very devil. I haven’t thought about her for some time. Years, perhaps. I don’t know why you obliged me to remember her tonight, without realizing it. When she was your mistress, I was a little boy, but I adored her in silence. That is, I was mad for her. Good God, you rogue, you didn’t deny yourself anything in those days! You were a satyr in my parents’ court! I would have liked to become you, down to the marrow of your bones, just to know I was hers! I began to desire her then as I would desire only my own life when they tried to snatch it away from me. And what a beautiful filly she must have been in bed! Isn’t that right? If I close my eyes I see her again as clearly as I see you now, chipped by age. Women like her don’t exist nowadays, do they? They broke the mold!”
Before I died I had to lose my speech as well. My entire right side, from my cheek to my foot, must be dead because I can’t feel it. I look at my right hand on the sheets and again it seems to belong to someone else. Perhaps it belongs to that man whose voice sometimes sounds inside me from a time that hasn’t happened yet. I return now definitively and forever to the “Frenzied Absurdity,” which is life itself. Mine in this bed or in a book that he’ll write in another century. In any case, I won’t survive the Desired One, who at times had that look of a wounded fawn that my María del Pilar Dionisia had in the cradle. And I won’t return to Spain alive, where he told me that letting himself die is man’s greatest madness.
Xavier arrived and I still had time to embrace him before the final stroke. Then, when I was mute and crippled, he went to an inn with my daughter-in-law and Marianito, because his wife could not tolerate the sight of my agony. Leocadia told me everything when I asked for my son and my grandson. What she didn’t tell me is that she herself is hiding Rosarito to spare him the interminable death of an old man. Leocadia herself, very thin and aged by her vigils, sits with me at all hours without mentioning my family or my inheritance. (“You’re so blind you don’t even see your own stupidity! You dumb bastard! Don’t you understand that they came only to be sure you hadn’t changed your will? They don’t give a damn about your blood, your name, even your life, if they’re certain they’ll inherit your money, your house, and your paintings. If they could count on all that now, they’d let you rot in exile without seeing the whites of your eyes . . .”) Leocadia went to bed tonight too, exhausted. Only people who are almost strangers sit with me. The two French doctors (Vous êtes un grand homme, un peintre de la Chambre. On va vous soigner!); the owner of this house, José Pío de Molina, the former mayor of Madrid after the victory of Riego, and a student of mine at the Academia de San Fernando who followed me into exile: Antoñito Brugada. I’d like to tell them that I’ll soon be in the presence of Velázquez.
After my voice I lost my sight. In a sense, now the silence around me has become absolute, because I can no longer read lips. Yet I can still distinguish their shapes and, in a confused way, their faces. The doctors wear black frock coats. They have Van Dyke beards. They milk them, caress them, and comb them, according to their mood. They gave me valerian again, but valerian no longer cures anything. They applied leeches and the leeches didn’t take hold. They rubbed me down, auscultated me, painted me with iodine, burned me with mustard plasters. I think they didn’t sprinkle me with holy water and exorcize me because it didn’t occur to them. Antoñito Brugada, who bustles all around the room, is a boy (to me he’s still a boy even though he must be getting on in years by now) who paints very good seascapes. When I could still make out his features, I saw his eyes and nose reddened from crying so much. He leans over the bed and looks at me straight on, in profile, and from God’s point of view. Whatever his sorrow, which I believe is very sincere, art has greater sway over him than grief, and he is preparing to sketch me when I’m dead, though perhaps he isn’t aware of his own intention.
José Pío de Molina is tall, sad, and as thin as an official of the Holy Office. He is also the freest and most generous man I have ever known, though I came to know him well only in exile. I’m going to leave unfinished the portrait of him I was doing when I fell ill. As he was sitting for me, I recounted part of my last conversation with the Desired One. (“When you returned from Valençay you were the Desired One, the Only One. I doubt any man on earth has been awaited in his own country with greater fervor. Do you remember the mob that kissed your hands, sobbing, on the way to the fountain of San Isidro? Then you could have begun from nothing and truly been the king of all of us. This is a nation of beasts and imbeciles who will never begin to find their future until they recognize their ferocity and stupidity in order to overcome them. It was your responsibility to help, Señor, because an opportunity like yours will not be repeated.”) “It is sad for a people to await the death of a man in order to find its future,” said Pío de Molina, “because the dead only bury the dead. Christ himself said they aren’t useful for anything else.” I asked him whether he had not considered the possibility that we had no future at all and that in a century or a century and a half, two Spaniards like us, also exiled in Bordeaux, would repeat our doubts and our words. “It is possible,” he replied, half-closing his narrow inquisitor’s eyes, “because one would not call our destiny true; it is written instead in a madman’s novel where everything is repeated in different centuries.”
Yes, I would like to tell them that I’ll soon be in the presence of Velázquez. When I was very young, long before His Majesty Don Carlos III and the prince and princess of Asturias granted me their first audience in response to his petition, my oldest brother-in-law took me to the palace to show me the paintings by Velázquez in the royal collection. Francisco Bayeu was the court painter then, and his contemptuous pride did not permit him to praise anyone in my presence. Which was why I was very surprised when he said to me: “Today you’ll see the paintings of someone I could never envy, just as I don’t envy God for having created light and air.” It wasn’t air or light that Velázquez created but man. This was the undeniable center of his universe, where the heavens were sometimes transformed into tapestries and sometimes into mirrors. Before his paintings and in spite of his intrinsic and almost distracted serenity, I felt a blow in the middle of my heart. If I had been alone, I would have burst into tears, and only the presence of Francisco Bayeu could stop me from doing that. “This man was a jester and a clerk in the court of Felipe IV. His name was something like Diego de Acedo y Velázquez, but they called him The Cousin, mocking his supposed family connection to the painter,” my brother-in-law told me in front of the portrait of a seated dwarf, with a large book on his knees and a still life of notebooks, papers, pens, and inkwells all around him. “Notice the insistent disproportion between the smallness of his diminutive hands and the enormous size of the book, a quarto edition on fine paper, that he’s holding on his tiny legs. And also his head, very large in comparison to his body, grows even bigger thanks to the black broad-brimmed hat he wears pulled far down on one side of his head.” On the same wall and next to the portrait of that clown hung one of another buffoon, sitting on the floor and facing us. In the foreground, the soles of his tiny shoes were as clean as if he were wearing them for the first time. “About this one we don’t know much more than his name,” my brother-in-law continued. “He was Sebastián de Morra, the jester of Prince Don Baltasar Carlos. They say that once, when the queen sent a lady-in-waiting to buy sweets, the shopkeeper refused to give them to her because the palace owed too large a bill. The lady, in tears, happened to meet the buffoon on her way back from the shop, and he gave her a cuarto so that the sovereign would not be deprived of her dessert. Notice the disparity of his limbs in relation to his head, with its large forehead, and his tall man’s torso.” I was enraptured before the eyes of the jesters. One would say that Velázquez had begun by painting them in the middle of the empty canvas, as if it were the obligatory center of those unlikely creatures. Their eyes, streaming deep inside in long, moist glances, humanized the monsters born and trained to make others laugh, like the jugglers’ dogs or tamed monkeys at court. When many, very many years later, the Desired One spoke to me about our people, deformed and grotesque like those unfortunates, I thought of the eyes of Velázquez’s dwarfs and asked myself whether, in his long road to his own center, he would ever find his true reason for being and his authentic freedom.
From the jesters, Francisco Bayeu led me to Las Meninas. At that time it was in a room only slightly higher than the painting, covered by long draperies. When they were pulled back, the light came in from a railed balcony where starlings wandered. Not even in Italy, in the Sistine Chapel, had I felt greater emotion before the work of a man. I wanted to shout, fall on my knees, bite at my hands until I ripped them to pieces. Velázquez, who had died more than one hundred years earlier, crushed me with his merciless superiority; but it made me proud to think that a creature born of woman, like me, had been able to conceive of such perfect beauty. Velázquez had suspended an ordinary moment in the heart of the court, the moment when a lady-in-waiting offers a cup to the princess. I told myself convincingly that any moment, even the most apparently insignificant, deserves the greatest of paintings to celebrate it. In May 3, 1808, in Madrid, I suspended all of time in the shout and gesture of the man they are going to execute. (“Father, what if God was deaf to our voices, like these executioners who kill us without being able to understand us?”) Not until I had finished the painting did I understand that I had painted the reverse of Las Meninas, and that May 3, 1808, was my response to Velázquez’s serenity at the time of the greatest of tragedies. Or perhaps I didn’t understand it, properly speaking, but rather the one who even now lives inside me as I’m dying.
After losing my voice, I lost my sight. I no longer see Brugada, or Pío de Molina, or the doctors. I never had supposed that death was this peace, this improbable lucidity that seems to have come from a book rather than from the authentic agony of a flesh-and-blood Christian. (“It’s possible that this is so, because one wouldn’t call our destiny true but written in a madman’s novel where everything is repeated in different centuries.”) Moratín once quoted to me a phrase of Casanova’s from his memoirs: It isn’t bold to imagine a judicious pen describing a true fact when the writer thinks he is inventing it. Perhaps the other man, the one I think I am sometimes, believes he is describing an improbable death, which is at the same time my real agony now, in the small hours.
Now, before daybreak, when I distinguish only light and shadow, the phantoms come out and scheme in the penumbra that envelops me. My paintings, starting to move, are only the fleeting passage of the history of my time. The flashy boys and girls of Blind Man’s Bluff dance, as they will prance around my tomb in San Antonio de la Florida. The fop with the long spoon and blindfolded eyes is transformed into my Wild Bull. Blindly and in vain he turns around and charges the dancers with long thrusts. They withdraw their bodies from his horn thrusts, ducking or sidestepping them with bends of the waist, laughing constantly. Nearby Martincho places banderillas a topa-carnero (his waist bending, his feet unmoving) in another black animal with wide horns that comes like a gale from the boards. In the ring Barbudo gores Pepe-Hillo in the pit of his stomach, while Juan López is late in luring the bull away and José Romero jumps the barrier to go to the aid of his rival. (“When I got him under control, I’ll t’row away the muleta and fight ’im wit’ my watch, so he sees it’s his hour that’s come, not mine.”) A very Madrilenian crowd, all classes pressed together and getting along, celebrates the fiesta of their patron saint in the San Isidro meadow. They play circle games and cards, converse, stroll, and flirt among unmoving barouches and berlins. On white cloths spread on the grass, the wine from Valdemorillo flows at lunch, among white parasols, silvered jackets, red boleros, flannel jackets, and plumed two-cornered hats. (“The greatest of portents does not consist in transforming the present but in anticipating its future changes. In this way our ashes will become our portraits, just as paint on a palette becomes a cloth in a mirror.”) In a room in the palace, Carlos IV and his family group together, smiling, and prepare to pose for my painting. In the center, the king takes a step forward and the rest step back. The Infanta María Luisa, princess of Bourbon Parma, holds her firstborn son, almost a newborn. Princess María Antonia turns her head and looks away at another painting, hanging on the wall behind them, where three giants, a man and two women, are taking their pleasure naked. I am the man. The queen raises her chest and smiles at me with her toothless mouth. (“We’ll have to find a bodice for this boy. He’s almost growing breasts like a girl.”) Dressed in mourning and with her face doubled, like Janus, María Teresa embraces me at the same time that she contemplates a stranger, who sneaks closer, creeping along the floor. María Teresa herself, still in mourning, flies through the air on three squatting monsters. (“If these people are as base as we are, what sense do our lives make, and theirs?”) In the Puerta del Sol the Mameluke cavalry charges the crowd. The entire square is a whirlpool of men, horses, spilled blood, torn flags, swords, knives, neighs, blasphemies, silent screams and shouts. (“That was a war we were all going to lose irremediably.”) Another mob, this one composed of the crippled, the drunk, the eyeless, the hungry, the leprous, the deformed, comes up a slope preceded by a blind man strumming a large guitar. Although I don’t hear their voices, I know they are hailing the Desired One and slavery. Gradually the crowds at that excursion, María Teresa, the flying monsters, the family of Carlos IV, the groups on the meadow, Barbudo, Pepe-Hillo, Martincho, all of them crowd and cluster around the circle in Blind Man’s Bluff to watch them dance. In the midst of the dancers, constantly charging with eyes identical to those of Saturn and now blindfolded, my Wild Bull pursues the air with useless thrusts of his horns.
(“My paintings, put in motion, are nothing but the fleeting passage of the history of my time.”) When all my characters, including my own self-portraits, where I repeat myself and grow old, as well as preliminary sketches and drawings, have gathered around Blind Man’s Bluff, the darkness unexpectedly sweeps them away as the shadows abruptly change direction. Now in a glass fishbowl that probably measures no more than three spans on each side, a black painting, initially unknown, comes to life. Slowly I begin to make out a Madrid very different from the one I knew and treasured in my memory. In the night, because it’s late at night, perhaps fairly close to dawn, I recognize the palace and the Plaza de Oriente in the glass background. The plaza is the esplanade with gardens that the Intruder King flattened during the war, knocking down houses and clearing away alleys so that the cannon could shoot down any revolt like the one in May. The city, however, grew more than the trees. Extremely tall buildings that resemble the dream of a crazed master builder rise in a crowded noisy palisade against the sky. Large, many-armed streetlamps whiten the darkness between their bare branches.
An interminable procession of three and even four people abreast crosses the plaza and seems to lengthen by entire leagues. Improvised metal railings keep to one side that endless serpent that slowly penetrates the Palacio de Oriente. Men and women are dressed in a manner never seen before, as if all of Madrid (this Madrid of gigantic apiaries) had put on identical unknown masks. Enveloped in strange overcoats they tremble with the cold, press against one another, rub their hands, numb with cold, slap their arms with their palms, and spew out frozen breath with their voices. Suddenly, and with no surprise on my part, I heard their words, as clear and distinct as if I had never been afflicted with deafness. “He was like a father to the country,” says an old man. “I’ve spent all night here, I haven’t slept; but I won’t leave without seeing him lying in state in the palace.” “They say some priests are blessing the body as they pass. Some people cross themselves. Others fall to their knees.” “We’re the Gypsies from Pozo del Tío Raimundo. For us too he was a good man.” “Do you think they’ll let me give him a kiss when I get there?” an old woman keeps repeating.
The people around her are not unknown to me. In all of them I see the same crowds that hailed Godoy, the Desired One, the Intruder King, Riego, the Obstinate One. They are also the ones who dragged down Godoy in Aranjuez, knifing his legs; the ones who led Riego to the scaffold in a charcoal seller’s basket and then stoned the quarters of his body, cut up by axes and displayed on the spires of twenty cities in a future Chile; the ones who disemboweled the Obstinate One with goads and razors while he was handcuffed in a cage and danced with joy while the executioner burned his remains; the ones who invaded this same Palacio de Oriente with ropes to hang the Desired One, and on the road to Cádiz obliged him to kiss the windows of his carriage so they could spit in his eyes. I recognize them, as any painter would recognize them, the cut of their features and that light in their eyes, resembling the gaze of Velázquez’s dwarfs. I have seen them in the excursions and picnics on San Isidro, in church, at the bullfights, in roadside inns, in boarding houses, in taverns, at weddings, in fights, in brothels, in prisons. I heard them cheering the Inquisition, chains, freedom, the Constitution, the crown, the faith, the Revolution, death, prisons, the homeland, treason, vengeance, mercy, ignorance, absolutism, rebellion, the wild bulls, and the wine at Mass. They applauded not only the Prince of Peace, Fernando VII, Rafael Riego, and Juan Martín the Obstinate One, but also Costillares, Pepe-Hillo, Pedro Romero, José Romero, Joseph Bonaparte, Murat, the duke of Angoulême, the English, and the one hundred thousand Sons of Saint Louis. Now they will all go to the Palacio de Oriente to bid farewell to a dead man whom perhaps none of them has ever seen in the flesh. But at bottom they are not going to the palace, or anywhere, because as I always said to myself when I thought about them, they don’t know the way and they don’t know themselves.