Francisco de Goya arrived in Bordeaux in 1824. Deaf, debilitated, unable to speak a word of French, without a valet or servant of any sort. Goya’s friends feared the French winter, harsher than that of Madrid, would kill him. Weak and ungainly, he endangered himself when he went out to walk the streets, and yet the very thing that interested him was not to travel by coach, to see the strange and picturesque things that formed, in part, the vision of the world, at once ironic, burlesque, bitter, and cordial, that he had arrived at over the years. In company, Goya was a braggart: he said he might live to ninety-nine, like Titian, and two months before his eightieth birthday, he recollected the bullfights he’d taken part in during his youth, declaring that even now, with a sword in his hand, he would cower in fear before no one. He painted and drew incessantly, and corrected none of what he’d done. But that arrogant old man knew the truth: in a letter to a friend, he confessed he was blind, his pulse was weak, and there was nothing left to him but an excess of will.
It is this hoary Goya, the giant on the verge of collapse, but still powerful, and grander than ever in the final splendors of his passion for doing and being, who draws on black stone with a crayon, most likely with an eye to publishing the results – the technique, lithography, had only just then been invented – a pair of moving albums. The most stunning image they contain is the figure of a robust, bearded man over a black background, reminiscent of Father Time, walking forward, his expression stubborn, determined, with the aid of two canes. The artist’s hand, still sure, has left to preside over the composition a title at once explanation and anthem: Aún aprendo, I am still learning. Yes, Goya is still learning, and not only the technique of lithography. Walled up in in his deafness, he is learning to live at a time when reasonably he should start learning to die.
Learning, if we believe in it, lasts as long as life itself, and breaks off brusquely, should we ever cease to believe.
19 October 1979