The Burial of the Sardine
"Every man is the son of his own works."—Miguel de Cervantes
1.
—Papá?
Bent at his desk. The boy approaches. Is his father sleeping or working? He taps his shoulder, which makes him jump, which makes the etching needle skate across the wax on the copperplate. Which makes Goya bellow, “Damn!” Which makes Javi flinch and run.
Later:
—Don't shout at the boy, Pepa writes this in the Conversation book.
—I didn't shout—he ruined the blasted plate.
—He wanted to ask you something about his drawing.
—...What?—irritated, not looking up from the scratch in the wax. Thinking he can mask it with crosshatches. Or maybe add another figure to the mob. Another woman or faces in a crowd.
Pepa puts the open book beneath his gaze and taps the written phrase with her finger—He wanted to ask you something about his drawing.
He reads it, snorts, pushes the book aside, looks down at the wax.
Ruined.
Pepa leaves the room.
Goya scrapes the plate, gives it to Juana, makes a mental note. Get the boy a teacher.
2.
—Papa?
—...Yes.
—Is it true they come at night in carriages with silent wheels?
—Who?
—The priests.
—Who told you that?
—Pilar.
Pilar. The cow.
—I wouldn't know. But I doubt it. I don't think they come at all.
—Papá? Tugging again.
—You mustn't bother your father when he is working, Javi.
The boy is staring hard at his own drawing. Two snakes, coiled around a madroño tree.
—Is it an animal? asks Pepa.
He pretends not to hear.
3.
Javi looks at the pictures fastened to the strings that the assistants have slung between the walls of the studio like the clotheslines crisscrossing the street out the window. Why does his father make these? Where does he see them? They make the boy shudder, as much as they would if they were real.
He likes the portraits. He likes the dogs especially. But the images on the strings are demonic. This was what Pilar said. Demonic and disgusting and evil. Abominations from the brain of a sinner.
—The more frightful, the more diabolical, the more this demon-man delights in them. She made the sign of the cross as she said this. “Why would anyone bring these into the world, unless they were wicked, unless they were depraved?”
—Pray with me, she said to the boy, forcing him to his knees. Pray for his soul.
4.
The library, where Goya keeps his books and prints stored away for some imaginary day when he won't be so bloody busy doing and making, being something, building a life for his family, the library is Javi's secret place. His refuge. No one goes there. His mother refuses to cross the threshold and the servants are forbidden entry.
Javi takes whatever books or sheaves he wants over to the table and leafs through them. Today, he is leafing through the Leonardo again, which is kept behind a grill with other priceless books. That was his father's word, priceless, inestimable.
Some of the faces are almost as ugly as his father's faces, but they are all real faces, not imagined faces like his father's faces. His father's faces are different.
5.
—Mamá?
—Yes.
—But must I go?
—Go where?
—Hunting with Papá and Uncle Martin.
—You don't want to?
—No. I'm not like Papá. I don't like dead things.
6.
—Stay in bed, he says. She is pale, she hasn’t eaten. She pulls her hand free, shakes her head, closes her eyes.
—Arrieta says it is not the disease or the pest, he tells Moratín fifteen minutes later as they walk towards Fuencarral through a haze of smoke and sulphur. Javi is with them, against Pepa’s wishes. He clutches his father’s finger and asks if Pepa is going to die.
Moratín writes the question in the Conversation Book.
—Eventually, says Goya.
He has made many mistakes with Javi, and as a result, he is spoiled and lazy. Pepa blames him for this.
He will not spare the boy the realities of the world. Nor the next.
7.
The street is crowded with casks and water-butts. There are animals everywhere. Half-wild pigs, chickens, a kennel of dogs.
—It is her blood, he says, which is sapped.
—Then what she needs is organ meat and bull’s testicles, says Moratín.
The disease is vómito negro, which Arrieta says is spreading again in the southern ports. More than a hundred deaths a day. They talk about this, and the pest outbreak in the Black Sea, and the siege in Cadiz, and the slave riots in Puerto Rico and Cuba.
They turn onto Fuencarral and see the crowd shrieking at a figure with two heads and four feet. Javi clutches the finger tighter; his father laughs. A firebreather next, followed by the skull-faced Prosecutor, stumbling drunk through the smoke. He is playing some sort of trumpet; after every lurching hop in his backward dance, he hikes up his black gown and horn farts, first at a priest leading three altar boys tethered at the ends of ropes, then at a horned Goat-Devil, then at the giant sardine hanging from a pole, held aloft by three stilt-walking penitents in dunce caps.
The boy is staring wide-eyed at a dancing nun with rosy cheeks and a giant papier-mâché vagina. The nun is grotesquely peeling and licking figs and oranges, the skins of which she flings in the faces of the dozen drunken women dressed as picaros that surround her, and at the majo rogues with cudgels that throw squibs and lumps of burning pitch between the legs of those in their way, taking special aim at pretty girls in petticoats and old women in black, who shriek and cluck tongues and make obscene signs of the cross.
Next are the pregnant men, lustily lamenting their widowhood, and women dressed as monks with giant vegetable erections. They chase boys and girls on the sidewalk.
8.
Deafness saves him from the infernal canticle. This morning, Moratín wrote in the Conversation Book:
Fie, fie, fie, the sardine died
the priests and the devils
are to burn her
while we make love in the ashes.
Behind the lead party are several hundred young men wearing sheep and donkey heads. Others are dressed as Roman soldiers, others as purple-hooded Christs and Marys with staring eyes and curled-up lips, beseeching the crowd to save them from the grace and goodness of God. These and others—saints and holy men, whores and devils, jealous hermits, clerics with sacks of money—succumb to every evil of licentiousness as they picture forth every possible position and moment of carnal love, from first love to the last disdainful betrayal. Four men with manta rays on their shoulders carry a cage filled with screeching bats; a group of majas toss a straw manikin in a blanket high into the air; others, wretches of the worst description, hold longs poles lifted like standards with bells on them of all sizes, or half-dead black cats tied to the tops by their tails or paws. Nuns with blood-red faces and brazen virgins—half of them men, half of them women—with red petticoats and high plaits of whitened hair stir hyssop brooms in caldrons and sprinkle and slap wine on the crowd. Others leap about like monkeys, pricking each other with pins.
Next is the Carnival King, the undertaker of the sardine, leading a cortege of palanquins.
9.
The miserable fish will be buried tonight in a deep grave on the riverbank in a giant coffin confected of turron.
He looks down at Javi. Pepa will be upset. Not fit for children, she will say. It is chilly, but not cold; the boy is wearing a thick quilted jacket buttoned to the throat, grey trousers, black buckled shoes. Is he having fun? Is he scared? What does he make of this?
He squeezes the little hand in his, which is mottled and knuckly, twisted with age.
—Do you want to take your coat off, Javi?
The boy shakes his head.
A bier passes, borne on the shoulders of four Don Quixotes. It carries a straw effigy. Two donkeys follow, carried on the shoulders of fat friars.
10.
Later, after eating grilled sardines and drinking wine at a stall in Plaza del Sol, he tells the boy not to say anything to Pepa. It will only upset her. The boy looks up at him, uncomprehending.
On the walk home, they see a “Mortus” banner abandoned on the ground. The boy asks what it says.
—Death, he tells him.
The boy laughs.
Thank you for reading. Hexagon is two years old today.
The seed sown on rocky ground is the one who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since he has no root, he remains for only a season. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away. The seed sown among the thorns is the one who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. But the seed sown on good soil is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and produces a crop—a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold.” — Matthew 13:20
"Why would anyone bring these things into the world?" This is what I think every time I walk through this city looking at condo construction, and what I think walking down most grocery aisles, and what I think of every shopping mall on earth... I just never had a line for it, but now I do. Merci!