He had always been somewhat afraid of her. In a letter to Martin: “She is finely developed and jealously independent, reluctant to take unreasonable service with her employees.” He tried to kiss her once, out of gratitude. She stiffened at the approach of his face and pulled back.

He did a painting of her black grandfather, surrounded by menacing dogs and dead English soldiers. She refused it. She also refused to respond to Juanita, the diminutive of her name.

She had no children that he knew of. He thought of her as a daughter. She thought of him as a daft old man. He taught her to draw, grind colours, mix paints, prepare and prime canvases, and fill in base colours.

Her portrait of him shows him squatting naked, with the thorax and legs of a toad.

2.

Three days before, Juana had laid and pumiced the second layer of red priming for the ground – the first layer had been laid three months before – and this morning, she transferred the sketches of the king and queen’s faces onto it. Then, for four hours, she stood in for the queen while Goya filled in the dress and jewellery.

When he finished, she took off the headdress, the Order of the Starry Cross sash, the medallion, the necklace, the earrings, and the rings. Each was taken in the gloved fingertips of the queen’s attendant as if her touch had ruined it.

Goya and Ramon winched her up and out of the brocaded dress. Back on the ground, she ducked under the farthingale’s whalebones. The hoops were wider than her outstretched arms.

Naked, her third month. She slipped back into her linen shift.

What was left? The arms, which an assistant would start. The silver-buckled shoes, which Goya would paint. She eyed the rest critically. The dress’s gold lace collar was deftly executed. As was the silver and gold trim. For the folds and highlights and the trim’s braid and frills, Goya had applied lead white with a reed pen in short, curved strokes. The long gold necklace was the last element added, a single twisting stroke, executed in seconds, that could have undone all the work if it faltered. Juana drew a breath, amazed he could still surprise her.

Then he removed it. Along with the sash and the rings. The fisherman and his wife after a big catch. That was his title for it.

The fingers were too cylindrical and stubby, like half-stuffed sausages. She found the palette and the brushes and returned to the easel to fix them. Goya bellowed at her.

3.

Later, after he calmed down, she looked over his shoulder at what he was working on, a drawing, with a brush, in black iron-gall ink, of a fat naked woman, who slightly resembled the queen – “deformed by dropsy,” said Goya. Naked demon-men were holding her aloft: one sucked contentedly at her breast; a second was wrapped around her, cradling her head tenderly with his left hand and grinding his groin into the back of her skull; the third, splay-legged on the back of a giant-winged owl, held up the bulk of her swollen mass in his stretched-out arms. A cat holding a parasol hovered above the group, protecting it from the sun’s rays. A city was down below, far off in the distance. “Donde va mamá?” is written at the bottom of the sheet.

“Whose mama, yours?” she asked.

Goya laughed. “I’m not sure,” he said.

She looked at it for a moment longer. Goya, sensing her, rustled through some sheets and pulled out a sketch of a young woman with a fan gazing out at the viewer, ignoring the old crone next to her, clutching a rosary and begging for alms.

Juana read the title under the drawing: “God forgive her. And it was her mother.”

“She’s her daughter,” he said, “and she’s gone off and become a rich woman by marrying someone, or by selling herself, or by doing both, and she doesn’t recognise her poor mother. Something like that.”

He opened his Conversation Book and read aloud what Moratín suggested. “The young lady left home at a very young age: she did her apprenticeship in Cádiz, then came to Madrid, where she won the jackpot. She goes down to the Prado and hears a filthy, decrepit old woman begging for alms; she pushes her away, the old woman insists: the fancy lady turns round and realises - who knew? - that the poor woman is her mother.”

Juana didn’t say anything.

What is beauty? Once, while Goya was walking towards the deafman’s farm alongside a copse of oaks, he spied in a nearby wheat field – early evening, a Sabbath day, he had been drinking all afternoon at Moratín’s club, the sun was beginning to slip lower than the pink and blue hills in the beyond – and there he saw it, a circle of naked women dancing, and she, his Leocadia, at the centre, moving and swaying with such energy and abandonment that it made him stop in his tracks, whereby he saw some of the women to have satyrs’ feet, cloven feet like oxen or goats, and he being astonished with shock and awe did cry out, and laugh, and say Mary, mother of God. And no sooner had he said this but they all vanished except her, his Leocadia, la brujita, whom a little after he saw snatched up into the air, and his self was also driven so forcibly with the wind, that it made him almost lose his breath, and he woke up face down in the flattened wheat.

His pen, now, in his hand, leaking cuttlefish ink onto the desktop. Mosquitoes whine around his unregenerate head, which for a full hour has rested awkwardly on his folded arms. How many pictures persist inside the wretched thing? Does it still house visions? Can any be unseen? An image is an idea, he supposes, or near enough, and visions, too, imagined out of nothing, from something eaten or drunk, or a story told. The latter rarely happens anymore. Communication with his outside world, beyond the chalkboard around his neck, all but finished. What is good, what is beauty, all signals, even the whining buzz of the blood-feeding insects in the room, are blocked by the ringing silence in his head.

And yet still the pen is in the hand and the mosquitoes hover and whine. One spirals down onto the exposed skin of his arm, just above the cuff of his coat. He feels its weight and its bite, and he opens his eyes to it, and pinches the skin with his fingers on both sides of its mouthpart, and watches it engorge on his blood until it explodes. A being, now vaporised, leaving an angry, itching welt. Is it evil? The insect, its killing or the welt? Is viscera and excrement evil? Where is the sin, is there sin? They are not forms, these are things that we see, without contrary, part of the natural order.

The smug stench of it, 
my dream’s last leaf as it falls, 
one last parting fart? – Kyöon, 1234

The sketch is of a bear at first. He has an image of it attacking a man, the bear of Madrid, up on its hind legs, shaking scarlet red berries with creamy-white bells from an arbutus tree – the strawberry tree, el madroño, which Bosch planted in The Garden of Earthly Delights next to a three-headed lizard and a three-headed bird, a two-legged dog and a monkey on the back of an elephant.

According to Aristotle, after at least forty days and nights of hivernal concealment, the starved bear’s first course of action is to feed on the roots of the wild arum lily, which distends the bear’s emptied belly, causing it to expel whatever noxious spirits found roost therein during the long long winter.

This idea appeals to Goya. He is not sure why.

Later this night, though, for the first time since he was abandoned to his suffering during the darkest days of his enfeeblement, now six years old but still fresh as a new wound, the Virgin Mary came to him – or rather, he saw the Virgin Mary, or a vision of the Virgin Mary, draped and crowned in gold and standing on the blood-red pillar on which she first appeared to the Apostle on the bank of the river in his hometown. As a child, at the urging of his mother, he waited in line for hours every feast day to kiss this same pillar – the Virgin Mary and her host of angels left it behind as testimony of their visitation – through a tiny oval-shaped opening in its red velvet mantle. As a man he represented it in countless sketches, prints and paintings, including the frescoes on the vaults and domes in Ventura Rodríguez’ new basilica chapel, which replaced the chapel of his childhood, itself the third replacement of the chapel that replaced the chapel that replaced the chapel that replaced the original chapel built by St James on the very spot on the river that he first saw this jasper pillar, with the immaculate mother of god standing upon it, garbed in the light of the sun, her arms opened wide.

The deafman’s farmhouse is plain and square. It has none of the cathedral’s highest art, where each of its thousands of details is beautiful in itself, each whisper of beauty echoing the next, all similar, converging as one to serve the greater unity of the whole. In the natural order, too, from the simplest polyp, a mindless, vase-shaped sac with a maw, to the highest, man, the most complex. If you cut the polyp into pieces, as he has done, each piece lives. Turned inside out, its skin becomes its stomach, and vice versa. Every part is interchangeable with every other part with indifferent facility, a democracy of organs, for none is essential, each is sufficient unto itself. In man, however, ever glorious, every part is assigned its distinct office, every organ its irreplaceable role. That is the highest form, the form of unity, wherein the manifold serves the one, and the one is glorified by the manifold.

What is good? What is beauty? He is besieged. No rules can be laid down. Asleep again, his dream again agitated by the blood-red pillar of El Pilar in the Cathedral in Zaragoza. It is the most kissed rock in the world. In the future, more than a hundred years after his death, aerial bombs will drop on it, but miraculously, it will not explode. A new thought surges: the world destroyed most of his Marys. His first commission, paintings of the Blessed Virgin in the Sacristy cupboard of the parish church of Fuendetodos, were destroyed by anarchists. The French destroyed his Immaculate Conception with their sabres in the church of the College of Calatrava in Salamanca. Elsewhere, in churches and cathedrals, most are so darkened by candle soot you can’t see her figure.

To him, again, this is what he says to himself inside his slumber, the polished red pillar looks like raw meat. Again, he stops this thought and replaces it with the pillar of jasper, held aloft on a billowing cloud by a thousandfold of angels. This is more satisfying, more beautiful and good. Mosquitoes circle and whine, the bite grows itchy and enraged, but he is consoled, reconciled with Our Lady of the Pillar in the fold and embrace of righteousness and faith, and held aloft, like Mary herself, the Virgin Mother of God, the Queen of the Martyrs, she who is at once here and eternal, with him and in him, passed beyond death and judgement and living wholly in the Age to Come and in his deafman’s farmhouse and the Basilica in Zaragoza and on the bank of the Río Ebro in Caesaraugusta, now known as Zaragoza, the capital of the Kingdom of Aragon, with the Apostle James – the taller Apostle James not the shorter James who is the brother, half-brother or cousin of the son of God, but James the Great, the son of Zebedee and the brother of John, on his knees on the floor next to the table, trying to trim his lamp and failing, praying to the Virgin Mary and failing, converting the heathens of Hispania and failing.

James, forget your lamp, this is what his unregenerate head is now saying, and lift your eyes, lift them up to the apparition before you, look with mortification and fear upon the immaculate mother of God, the Virgin Mother, multilocating before you four years before your decapitation on a cloud carried by angels. This is Beauty and this is Good, and there is no other light, no other guide, for this is the only miracle. This is the image he should render once again. Mary the Virgin Mother of God, the Queen of the Martyrs, the new Eve, Our Lady of the Bloodstone Pillar, draped head to toe in golden garments and standing on a pillar of red jasper marble that looks and smells – stop! – like red meat, clutching absent-mindedly in her limp left the chuckling baby, whose bald unhaloed head is monstrously huge and as wrinkled as an old man’s – stop! – ball sack.

Something is urgently wrong. He tries not to see it, not to think it, he stares into the darkness, seeking the light which can only come from his soul, from his own heart, but that is presently shadowed by darker clouds, unobservable and obscure, for what he sees instead are donkeys; he sees that the angels carrying the cloud are donkeys, reared up and dancing on their hind hooves.

It comes from the hill out of which this stone is taken, this red bloodstone, which dwelt and was situated upon Mount Sion in Jerusalem, and this stone was produced without hands, without man's seed, without man's help and nature; it came out of the foresaid hill; for the Christ took his flesh from no earthly father, but only of the substance of Mary his mother, of whose breasts the said flesh was nourished afterward. Christ was conceived of the Holy Ghost, not the Father; and like all loving mothers Mary kissed the chuckling baby Jesus on the mouth and wiped his shitty bottom. Did not the Lord create this hostile carousel of lust and love with his own hands? Which is worse, a handful of hours spent on the cross or nine months cooped up in the womb of an adulterer, like an anchorite in his filth-filled cell? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one. Surely I was brought forth in iniquity; I was sinful when my mother conceived me. So many Marys. A lifetime of Marys. Now, in a blue gown with her hair unbound, reading from the Book of Hours, oblivious to the Holy Ghost impregnating her. Joseph oblivious in the next room, impotently drilling holes in a plank of wood, the back of a cuckoo clock – or maybe a mousetrap, or a spiked stumbling block that gashes the legs of the punished sinner who walks with it hanging from a cord around his waist, he has seen these used by the Holy Office – oblivious to the Holy Ghost drilling his wife-to-be next door, fulfilling and enflaming her with the love of God more burning than ever before, and feeling that she had conceived, she kneeled and thanked God as her womb trembled and swelled at the touch of the Holy Ghost, and her knees buckled, and her spirit rejoiced, and her womb flowered. And in the next panel, his patrons, the Osunas, are down on their knees in the garden praying and peeking through the half-open door at the divine infusion, the immaculate incarnation. He thinks of a painting, maybe an etching, of Bernardo de Claraval, kneeling and praying before the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary holding the chuckling infant and squeezing one of her breasts, squirting breast milk in a geysering stream into his mouth, granting him wisdom, and into his eyes, curing his infection. For the infection is sin and ignorance, and the milk of the Blessed Virgin cures it, bestowing upon him pure sight and the illumination of wisdom.

Stop.

He was once a crack shot, but he hasn’t hunted animal flesh in seven years, since his sickness. He misses the copses and streams of Aragon. He misses the smell of blood-dampened fur.

The bear again, he tries not to think of it, and yet the cursed thing comes to his mind.

So many animals. Stags, cows, wild boars and birds. How many has he killed? Eighteen in a single day, a rabbit, two hares, five partridges, and ten quail. His best day ever, and only one shot missed.

The last time he was out, he killed fifty-four birds to the king’s four. This mattered more than how he dressed, what he thought, or what he read. His views are his own, but they change; they vary depending on the rank and discretion of his company, just like his clothes and his hats. How or why, he is not sure.

He does not know if there is more to things than meets the eye. He repeats little prayers to himself, he makes the sign of the cross every day and he draws crosses at the top of his letters, along with hearts and cocks and balls.

Does he believe? He sees faith as a palliative, a way to whet and curb the appetites. This world, this hell and heaven, not the next, with his two living children and his nineteen dead, is more than enough.

He is conservative in some ways, liberal in others. In all things, he is discreet; this is the key to his success. Not his success, his survival. He has acquaintances on every rung of every social ladder, and he calls them all by their Christian names.

He thinks of Bosch again. Bosch, the forest, the dark wood. Hieronymus, after St Jerome the ascetic, who spent his time in Rome surrounded by women in the pursuit of his lust for nothingness, and in the desert hiding from them in his quest for plenitude and bliss.

On the puddled paper beneath his head, a phrase from Horace:

If a painter chose 
to put a human head 
on a horse’s neck 
and multi-coloured feathers 
on a jumble of limbs, 
so that a beautiful woman 
at the top ended repulsively 
in the tail of a black fish: 
asked to view such a work, 
could you hold back 
your laughter, my friends? 

The bear becomes a pig-horse, lying on the road, covered with flies, its bloated belly pooled out in the dirt. There is hardly any light left in its eye. The fight in it, its monstrous fierceness, is gone. Naked corpses disgorge from its mouth. The stench is overpowering. Where did it come from? From last night’s indulgences?

There is no potential to corrupt if everything is unseen, locked away. So this is what he does when these things come to him, when they haunt and infest, when they dwell inside. He releases them, pushes them out into the world. The inside thing, the thing imagined, the monstrous thing, he makes it manifest. Turns it into drawing. Prepares the plate, bites it with strong water, makes a single print. And then he puts it all away. Hides it and its consequences. Shuts it up inside a wall.

'You look as if you wished the place in Hell,'//My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,//I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.//'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

A fuck-up for sure, old Phil, a drunken, abusive, racist bigot sexist wanker blah blah with, fortunately for him, the poor rotten-begotten-every-evening-competely-sotten bastard, his old mum and dad to sop up most of the blame.

They may not mean to, but they do.//They fill you with the faults they had//And add some extra, just for you.

Old Phil didn’t have kids, though, did he? They’ll do you a doozy.

"Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like. Once you started meeting grown-ups life was much pleasanter. Children are very horrible, aren't they? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes." – Larkin’s interview in The Observer, 1979.

2.

“What an awful time of year this is! Just as one is feeling that if one can just hold on if it just won’t get any worse, then all this Christmas idiocy bursts upon one like a slavering Niagara of nonsense and completely wrecks one’s entire frame.” — Larkin’s letter to Judy Egerton, December 1958.

“The thought of Christmas depresses me… Every year I swear I’ll never endure it again, & make you promise to be sensible, & now here you are talking about duck again, just as if I had never shouted and got drunk & broken the furniture out of sheer rage at it all… To hell with Christmas. Let us have peace, & not all this blasted cooking and eating (and washing up!)” — Larkin’s letter to his mum, November 1971.

Okay, got those off the chest. Time for cheer. Who doesn’t love Christmas? We’ve so much to be thankful for, especially now that the godawful King’s Singers are no longer lofting bemoaningly out of the kitchen speaker. And just look at all the delicious Christmas mince and manna!

But just as I’m about to don me now here comes scroogy old Phil again:

Man hands on misery to man.//It deepens like a coastal shelf.//Get out as early as you can,//And don’t have any kids yourself.

Jesus.

Isolate rather this element / That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.

And that damn duck again: “I’m afraid I was not a very nice creature when at home. I wish I could explain the very real rage & irritation I feel: probably only a psychiatrist could do so. It may be something to do with never having got away from home. Or it may be my concern for you & blame for not doing more for you cloaking itself in anger. I do appreciate your courageous struggle to keep going in the old way, and am aware of your kindnesses – I did enjoy the duck, and all the other things – but I am worried about how long you can carry on without help.” – Larkin’s letter to his mum, December 1970.

Fuck duck. We’re having turkey.

3.

“From St. John’s, news of another garden party (at the last I was so boozed I made advances to someone’s wife, pissed in a bath, & read the opening paragraph of The Wings of the Dove) in June. From the grave - how many miles? Brrr.” – Larkin’s letter to his friend Patsy Murphy, January 1958.

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once⁠—she had tried it⁠—the sense of the slippery and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centrepiece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room⁠ – the hundred like it or worse⁠ – in the street. Each time she turned in again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the tablecloth and the centrepiece and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense, at least, of neither shirking nor lying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet⁠ – as including, in particular, the interview for which she had prepared herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be sad, so as not to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn’t be sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a “lot” at a common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere mean, stale feelings? – Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (opening paragraph), 1902.

4.

"May God forgive you for the harm you inflicted by endeavouring to restore to reason the most entertaining madman the world has ever known." – Miguel de Cervantes.

The Christmas before, a consumptive gentleman told him of spirits who become visible through the sheer force of their imagination. Lacking subtlety, they usually choose the most predictable: beautiful virgins, noble knights, mystical druids, old trolls, drunken sailors, lovers astride horses, sad fishermen and suicidal cobblers. Domestic animals are also popular, as are toads1, river fishes, worms, and common garden snails. “But only the debased re-appear in animal forms,” said the wheezy gentleman. “Mostly, we return as what we are, what we know. Men as men, women as women, with the usual number of limbs, but often with fewer orifices.”

He sighed at this point, threw up his arms, and turned into a tree.

That Yule night, Goya read to his son about the cobbler of Breslau who, despite having betrayed God’s will by slitting his own throat, was granted repose in sanctified soil. The desecration did not grant him peace; instead, his tormented spirit arose to haunt the townspeople and, especially, his family, who had sought, in vain, to conceal the grisly truth of his death from the world. Even the poor man’s dog, a loyal companion in life, was so haunted by its master’s visitations that it consumed its tail, and the family had it turned into a clock.

Finally, the grieving widow beseeched the magistrate to exhume her wretched husband’s corpse. Eight months passed, and on the seventh of May, 1592, the grim task was undertaken by the cobbler’s two brothers-in-law who, to their and everyone’s astonishment, found the body uncorrupted. Its form was as pristine as the day it was laid to rest. The self-inflicted wound in its throat gaped but was not putrid, and it had a magical mark – an excrescence in the shape of a rose – on the right big toe.

They removed it from the grave, cut off the head, arms, and legs, opened the back to take out the heart (which was as fresh and whole as a newly killed turkey’s) and burned everything, along with the cadaver’s trunk and shoes, in a giant pyre, until only ashes and femur fragments remained.

The widow swept the remains into a sack and poured them into the river, after which the spectre was never seen again.

Curiously, the cobbler’s maid appeared within eight days after her death to her fellow servant, “laying so heavy upon her as to cause great swelling in her eyes.” The wraith grievously handled a child in the cradle, and if the nurse had not come to its aid, it would have been spoiled. The nurse called upon the name of Jesus, and the spirit vanished. The next night, she appeared as a chicken, which grew into a "vast bigness" and caught a maid by the throat with its beak and talons, leaving her unable to eat or drink for a goodly while. The wraith continued her disturbances for a month, striking some so smartly that passers-by heard the blows. She pulled beds out from under others, threw bricks and stones, and took on different shapes – a woman, a dog, a cat, a toad, an owl, a duck and a black-feathered turkey. But at last, her body was dug up and burned, and the apparition was never seen again.

Once the child was fast slumbering, Goya got out of its bed, went to his worktable, and, in pencil and coal, drew a scene he had witnessed when he was 14: a woman slumped on a stool wearing a blindfold and dunce cap – a capirote – painted with flames and demons. Next to her, he drew an empty candle holder, a symbol of violated faith, and, clutched in her clenched fists, an unlit candle, which probably means something, too.

Behind, a dark mob, barely delineated blobs of black ink, howl for her blood.

Earlier, as she was paraded through the streets, the holy officers, to silence her blasphemies, shoved a cloth in her mouth and beat her with cudgels. They stripped off her clothes and shaved her head. Now, in his depiction, her ankles and toes are tied to her neck, wrists and thumbs. Pulleys link the ropes.

On her sanbenito, across her chest to her crotch, Goya scrawled:

Yo la vi en Zaragoza à 
Orosia Moreno 
Por que sabia hacer 
Ratones

Because she knew how to make mice. Because a neighbour accused her of filling his house with them. Because another said that she had given him a piece of sausage, which turned into a stick.

The other charges against her were soliciting with the devil, lying for money, casting spells, selling fake papal indulgences and having sex with heretics.

For these crimes, she will be “tormented” for precisely 38 minutes, twisted to the edge of unconsciousness. Then she will renounce. The next day, they will give her 200 lashes and sentence her to life in the madhouse. This is where he thinks he saw her next, straitjacketed in the asylum yard when he visited his incarcerated aunt and uncle there two years later.

Other penitents in Álbum C were accused of other crimes.

Galileo for discovering the movement of the Earth.

Another for having sex with his donkey.

Another for “moving his tongue in a different way.”

Another “For not having legs.”

Another “For being a jew.”

Another “For not having written for fools.”

5.

By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them – that, and the voice above

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

– Philip Larkin, from "Faith Healing" The Whitsun Weddings, 1960.

6.

Well, I must say, that feels better. Apologies to the trigger-hapless. Thanks for putting up.

Happy holidays, one and all!

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In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. – Mary Shelley, 1818

He was surprised to find himself still at his worktable, still in the high-backed chair, yet slumped forward, his face flattened against the sketch he had started working on the day before. The images confused him, and he felt sick.

He often felt sick. Not just in body but in spirit. He was sick of banalities and pretensions. He was sick of things. Sick of lying, sick of recreating lies. Sick of fawning and flattering, though let us be clear: he never fawned or flattered. He solicited work and position but always on his terms. He painted kings and bankers but also dwarves, saints, rebels, and prostitutes; it didn’t matter, he showed them as they were, sufferers and sinners alone in the world. But the sickness grew stronger. Sick of surfaces. Sick of status. And then sick in his stocky peasant body, physically sick. He was wracked with fevers, visions, voices, demons.

The drawing under his nose, on which pooled his drool, was first intended to be the frontispiece of Los Caprichos. The man in it, him, slumped like him, sitting at the desk in the high-backed chair alone in the night, a black spot, his left eye, turned towards us. His fingers are interlaced as if he is praying, and a dark solar aura, radiating strokes of black ink, flows out of his body. Pale beings float in the emanations: bats and owls under the cross-hatchings, two donkeys above, and a vortex of grotesques rise out of the black lines and out of him, and three of the faces are his own, including one, wrinkled and limp, elongated as if in a distorting mirror, like Michelangelo’s slack, empty face smeared onto the flayed skin of St Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel.

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What is the owl with the pen whispering into his ear? Scribbled in his notes: "Title page for this work: When men do not hear the cry of reason, everything becomes visions. Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders."

The cry or the scream? Are bats and owls impossible monsters? He is tired of resemblances. He is tired of one thing calling up another. He loathes comparisons. The symbol of wisdom, the owl, and the symbol of folly. Of sorcery. Of corruption. Of serenity. Leviticus puts it in all its manifestations – the little owl, the eagle owl, the fisher owl, the long-eared owl, the short-eared owl, the screech owl, the great owl, the desert owl, the horned owl – first among the unclean birds. Abominations not to be eaten, touched, or even looked at. But he, he loved owls, didn’t he? Didn’t he love owls? Didn’t he love all birds? And these ones, have they just landed, or are they about to take flight? And the bats, the great black cloud, also on the list of Leviticus, were they flying towards him or away?

He had laid his head down to relieve his anguish, but it clung to him, unmoved. This he knows, this vital congruity, which was described in the book he feebly skimmed just the day before, Un antídoto contra el ateísmo, a gift from Jovellanos ("for the amusement and elucidation of my enlightened friend and fellow witch hunter").

Other words rose in the air. He felt himself to be divisible and impenetrably solid yet surrounded and confounded by the indivisible and penetrable. Substance and its opposite stretched out, filling space, just like the orb of light in the top left corner of the sketch beneath his head. This light made it possible to distinguish things and beings from one another. It, too, was extendable and penetrable. A knife could not divide it; no part was separate from the whole. Any change at its core in colour or brightness altered its every aspect. Was it the sun? No. The sun was not yet up or had already gone down. The moon, then.

Moratín had recently told him, in fact, he had written this down in a letter that he still had somewhere, that it is the custom of the Issedones, an ancient people of Central Asia, that whenever a male elder dies, all his kinfolk bring dead owls and bats of every stripe, and cut up the flesh along with the flesh of the dead man, and throw it all in a giant stew pot for a feast. As for the dead man’s head, it is stripped, cleaned, gilded and preserved as a holy relic, to which a solemn offering is made every year.

This is what he wants for his head.

Demused. Emused. Femused. Gemused. Hemused. Which calls to mind page 689 of Ulysses.

Sorry. I’m slightly out of sorts as I’m four weeks into my Breton farm retreat and nowhere near finishing the writing goal I assigned myself.

An opera. About the writer Raymond Roussel. In French.

Excuses? Editing and writing assignments have got in the way, and these Hexagons take their weekly toll. Plus, there are the sheep and the goat to feed, and the lawns to cut, not to mention coastlines to explore, beaches to swim, forest trails to run, oysters to shuck, crêpes de blé noir to eat, and ridiculously delicious cider to drink.

Nothing to complain about, right? And I’m not so brazen as to use this to beg you for financial support – even if that support costs less than a single Breton buckwheat crêpe a month. No. Never.

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Besides, I’ve made considerable headway. Scenes are taking shape and are funnier and weirder than I expected. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Roussell was bemusingly colourful. He thought fame – "La Gloire” – shone directly out of his forehead onto the typewritten page. He thus worked in the dark, with the curtains drawn, because his writing was “so powerful that the light from it would blind the world.”  

He visited every continent except Antarctica but stayed at his typewriter almost the entire time, rarely venturing out because he “didn’t want life to get in the way of my imagination.”

Imagination he had. A play of his based on his novel Impressions d’Afrique had scenes in which an earthworm played the zither, an imaginary substance called bexium powered a “thermomechanical" orchestra, a one-legged flute player played a flute made out of his own tibia, and a statue of a Spartan slave made of whalebone corset stays rolled across the stage on rails made of veal lungs. (I’ve found a spot for the whalebone corset Spartan slave and the veal lung railway tracks, and I’m working on the others.)

He never wore a shirt, socks, cuffs, or underwear more than once. He ate one meal a day, five hours long, 20-35 haute-bourgeoise courses.

He saw Tristan and Isolde a hundred nights in a row. Always in the same seat. Accompanied by a woman his mother paid to pretend to be his mistress.

His mother was just as bemusing: she had a window put into her coffin – just in case, and always travelled with it, even on a voyage to India, which she had always wanted to see and which ended when her yacht reached sight of its coast and she said, “there, it is” and had the captain turn the boat around and sail home.

Anyway, the libretto is coming together, piece by piece. I think I have entire structure figured out. I can see it in my head. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, heard, or thought about. And I have a week left.

In the meantime, here’s our old friend Goya, who we haven’t heard from in two months.

This is the second plate in Los Caprichos. Goya’s smirking self-portrait, which precedes it, was an afterthought, a replacement for the more dangerous image of the man slumped in the chair succumbed to the sleep of reason. Is this image not as dangerous? It depends on how we interpret it.

A young woman climbs a darkened flight of stairs. A mask of a dog’s face covers her eyes. A rat’s face or a dog’s, worn like a bridal comb, covers the back of her head.

A woman pretending to be an animal. Getting hitched.

¿Qué carajo?

Other Caprichos treat similar themes:

Goya here is quoting a Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’ poem from a play about marriage, and this is why we are climbing the steps with the pretty young bride and her decrepit groom, up out of the shadows and the jeering mob toward the dark altar at the back of a half-lit cave, a grottoed church whose only light comes from below, not from torches but from hell itself, the ever-replicating hell of his most hellish images.

How many, oh Alcinda, yoked to marriage,
Envy your fate! How many seek the yoke of Hymen
To secure their fortune,
And without using reason nor considering
The merits of their suitor,
Say yes and extend their hand
To the first who arrives! What evils
This cursed blindness brings!
I see the wedding torches extinguished
By Discord's infamous breath
At the foot of the altar, and in the chaos
Toasts and cheers of the wedding feast,
An indiscreet tear predicts
Wars and disgrace for the poorly united.
I see the marriage veil torn by a reckless hand,
And with imprudent head held high,
Adultery runs from one house to another.

“The ease with which many women agree to marry, hoping to live with more freedom.” This is the caption in the Prado manuscript, probably written by Goya and worded to mask the work's riskier meanings. Elsewhere, he wrote: “Art, like love, to be faithful to truth, must have no expectations, except to be free.” The Bibliothèque Nationale's edition is more scathing: “Marriages are regularly made blindly: brides, trained by their parents, mask themselves and dress up nicely to deceive the firstcomer. This one is a princess with a mask who will later be a bitch to her vassals, as indicated by the back of her head imitating a comb: the foolish dupes applaud these unions, and behind comes a liar in priestly garb praying for the happiness of the nation.” No one knows who wrote this. Nor this, below:

“Her parents are with her. They seek to disburden themselves of this daughter and have thus trained her to say yes to the first man who comes along, in this case, the impotent old goat behind her, to whom she has eagerly given her hand, for her desire to escape her parents’ suffocating discipline easily outweighs her repugnance, as is made clear by the way she has furtively thrust her fingers inside the folds of his gown, where they are fruitlessly engaged in resuscitating his lolling untumescence.”

Her frowning father clutches the other hand, and up the gallows stairs they go, past the seething mob, out of which a man's grotesque head and torso emerge like a breaching whale, his clouting stick raised to strike. Higher still is the head of another predator, a grinning giant with a bearish snout who licks his lips and eyes the young bride lasciviously. Two toothless Januses look back at him nervously, down at the braying mob, and forward at the altar. Behind them, a pretend priest, hands clasped, pretends to pray.

The parents behind are pleased with the arrangement. The mother is devoted to excess and frivolity. She has neglected the girl's Christian education. She has replaced her mantilla and basquiña with an Empire gown. She has taught her to speak French and dance and have elegant manners.

But what precisely drives these two towards the wedding bed? A unity of will? Lust? Greed? Is the deception mutual? And who is the old crone bent over her cane? Or is the young bride the witch? The masks betray hypocrisy but also cunning. She bends to survive the winds and the wages of sin in a sinful world. Everyone sees this except the seething sea of witnesses below.

“Here, as everywhere else, the most beautiful have always the first chance of success. Most obtain several dowries at once. These objects of monastic favour are often the concubines of amorous priests. Each girl, at the approach of a certain critical period, is provided with a husband who only takes her for the sake of the money. What was once the father's property becomes the husband's property.”

Who wrote that?

Who also wrote: “There was a time once when a sense of shame gilded their crimes and covered timidly the ugliness of vice.”

He does not regard marriage as the sole union between the sexes where desire does not degrade its participants or violate moral law. He believes that in a union, each has the right to control and use the other, body and soul. He believes that true human love is genuinely blind, making no distinctions. However, isn't this, too, merely appetite, where people are things to use? Where is the goodwill, affection, the pursuit of shared joy, the delight in another's happiness? If there is only desire, everything else is forsaken. Desire, in its quest for satisfaction, is indifferent to the misery it may cause. It cares only for its fulfilment, discarding everything once sated, like the bones of a carcass. Only in friendship between equals is there true restoration.

Love draws us too close; respect keeps us a proper distance apart. Our friends are flawed, just as we are, but we learn to accept those flaws. Our dignity remains intact, as does our trustworthiness, honesty, and conscientiousness. Martin was right never to marry. Even when it works well, like his once did, the two fused into one, it is a hideous folly, the most terrible addiction of the human race.

We are animals, he thinks. Animals pretending not to be animals. Sometimes, we have to be reminded of this. Sometimes, we have to return – or be returned – to our truth.

He remembers a scene in Younger Moratín's play with Mariano Querol, who died before paying for his portrait, playing the servant Munioz hiding under the sofa to eavesdrop to the young married couple's conversation.

What does he hear? He can't remember. He still had his hearing then, but he can't remember.

When? He thinks of how, just yesterday, sitting outside in the sun, he moved behind Leocadia so that she blocked the sun from his eyes. Using her as an object for his convenience. Was that so terrible?

Womb. Weary.

He rests.

With?

Leocadia, like Pepa before her, is weaker physically and emotionally and thus depends on him for protection. She lacks his powers of reason. She is all sense and intuition. She has no principles. She will only do a thing if it is pleasing to her.

Did he think this, or was it just something he read? Was he that alone? Did he feel that abased? The masked bride is free, just as he is. She is her own person, not mere property. She can follow her will, just as he can. They can live as they please.

Lose yourself in this other person, give yourself fully, and get yourself fully back. This “I” here, he says out loud, and this “her”. The old man in exile, the bride on the stairs. Wife, husband, host, guest. In the dark bed. They know not, neither will they ever understand; they sleep on in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are out of course.

They are everyone.

Where?

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1.

He could hear Beethoven: 
Black yew, white cloud, 
The horrific complications. 
Finger-traps—a tumult of keys. — Sylvia Plath

1.

Beethoven’s neighbours called him “The Spaniard” because of his turbulent temperament, short stature and swarthy pigmentation. His grandmother, like Goya's, was Basque.

In 1798, he began to lose his hearing, five years after Goya lost his. Soon, he could not hear the upper registers of sound — a girl singing, the trilling blackbirds in the trees, a shepherd playing the pipe during a walk in the country, or his own Spanish guitar. Conducting became a bewildering farce, the baton waving madly, the musicians thrown from the beat into confusion and chaos. Soon, he could no longer hear the lower registers, except with a pencil in his mouth, with the other end pushed up against the soundboard to feel the note’s vibration between his front teeth. Soon, he could not hear whether his students were progressing or the music he was writing, the sound of the strings, or the different movements and rhythms of the motifs, except in his imagination.

Soon, he could hear nothing.

“Ah, how could I admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others.”

2.

This is from one of Beethoven's Conversation Books, which hung around his neck: “Paper. Barber’s razor. Archduke’s receipt. Watch. Suspenders. Blotting paper. Shoe-horn for Karl. Chamber pot.”

This is from one of Goya’s: 1 barrel from Navarra, 1 local barrel (not soured or adulterated, please!), salt cod, and anchovies.

3.

Neither would survive in this world. They believed no pleasure should be forbidden, provided it caused no harm. They believed in an immaterial life force beyond language transcending every conception. They increasingly saw the world as a dark funnel. They emptied bottles of wine at breakfast. They roamed the streets, muttering and moaning off-key. They visited brothels and bought sex from streetwalkers. They had florid, froward, bellowing faces and wild hair that they packed inside hats — when they remembered to wear them. For this, they were stared at in astonishment. They said everything in such loud voices that those with them would cringe, and passersby would look at them with alarm as if they were monstrous brutes or deranged — which they were. They showed signs of paranoia. They entered into states of manic exaltation. They were prone to fits of sudden rage and violent shifts of mood.

4.

Like most artists of the period — or any period — they were enamoured of power. Which, then as now, was most often wealth, circulating in its tokenised form as money. The potential scarcity of which, and the worries this engendered, were their common currency.

They practised the art of pleasing. They were consummate toadies and fawners. They disdained the clergy but kissed the rings and grovelled for commissions. Their relationship with the ruling class was as reciprocally dependent as it was advantageous. The perceived value of their art enhanced their patrons' status and cultural influence, and their patrons' status and cultural influence enhanced the perceived value of their art.

5.

They were the same height as Napoleon, whom they initially believed was the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, the sole modern successor to the great consuls who brought freedom and world domination to Ancient Rome.

“Composo per celebrare la memoria di un grande uomo, il ‘Prometeo’ della nostra epoca” is the phrase the composer scrawled on the frontispiece of his Third Symphony, which we know as Eroica, just beneath the composition's title, “Grande Sinfonia Intitolata Bonaparte,” and above his Italianised name, “Luigi van Beethoven.”

A day later, informed by his secretary that the “Prometheus of our times” had crowned himself Emperor, Beethoven scratched out “Bonaparte”, rubbing so hard he tore through the page.

“Is he then just another ordinary mensch? Now, he, too, will trample on all human rights and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others and become a tyrant!”

They expressed revolutionary ideals, but only when they were judicious. They favoured at least the concept of freedom but performed for tyrants and nobles. They dressed like them and imitated their voice and manners. They taught their children. They lived on their table scraps.

6.

Beethoven's nobiliary participle, his van, like Goya's de, points to the vaunting yearning of his self-image. Unlike Goya's de, Beethoven's van already existed—his father and grandfather used it. However, he sought to give it new gloss in the salons of Vienna, where he loudly lay claim to Dutch baronial lineage.

In reality, both their father were middle-class drunks.

6.

Only an annuity from an Archduke and two Princes kept Beethoven from accepting, in 1809, the offer of Napoleon’s brother Jérome, the first king of the new kingdom of Westphalia, to become the kapellmeister of Kassel. Goya's fortunes were equally mercenary. His court pension was maintained and raised by the French invaders of 1808. In 1810, he was commissioned to paint official portraits of Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte, the new King of Spain. When the French were routed and forced to decamp in 1812, Goya rubbed out Joseph’s faces and replaced them with those of Wellington and Fernando VII.

They were victims of the phrenology craze sweeping Europe. Their heads were lost within days of their deaths, which were less than a year apart.

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1.

The Hinternet today tells us that literacy “has had a good run for the past 5,000 years, but it’s over.” So, too, as of a few hours, is the “révolution macroniste”, which was first announced in a 2016 book, about which Aditya Chauhan of India wrote, on 5 February of last year, on the Amazon site:

Takes Readers on a Journey of Enlightenment and Intellectual Rejuvenation

Emmanuel Macron's Revolution is an epic ode to the possibility of transformative change, a literary marvel that truly takes the reader on a journey of enlightenment and intellectual rejuvenation. From the first page to the last, the book is a masterclass in eloquence, overflowing with poetically complex language that elevates the reader to a state of sublime contemplation.
The writing style is nothing short of a work of art, each word woven together with such precision and care that it is impossible not to be drawn into the intricacies of Macron's vision for the future. The narrative is thought-provoking and deeply insightful, capturing the essence of the revolutionary spirit and its capacity to ignite change.
The author's passion for his subject is palpable, his love for France and its people evident in every word he writes. His vision for the future is nothing short of a revolution, an outpouring of creativity and positivity that has the potential to transform the world.
In conclusion, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a literary gem that deserves to be treasured and shared, a testament to the power of the written word and the transformative impact it can have on our lives. If you are looking for a book that will inspire and challenge you, look no further than Emmanuel Macron's Revolution. It is a five-star masterpiece that deserves to be celebrated and admired for generations to come.

Moving on, then.

2.

We’re all children, my mother liked to say, with a tsk of the tongue and a shake of the head. By this, she meant that we were all, figuratively speaking, alone with an experimenter in a small room in front of a table on which stood a cake tin containing a small marshmallow and a pretzel stick. “Which would you prefer?” the experimenter would ask.

Then, we would be told to wait.

3.

“The 50-59 age group voted 40% for the Rassemblement National [extreme right], while the 18-24 age group voted 48% for the Nouveau Front Populaire [left-wing]. Ensemble, the presidential camp [centrist], led the 70+ age group, with 32% of the vote.” — France Info, Sunday, 30 June 2024

2.

My mother was 83 when she left this plane and jumped this ship, and passed away, and died. Fortunately, that was a little over two decades ago, so she was spared this latest phoenixing of the extreme right, the death mentioned above of reading and writing, and our regression from children to babies to zygotes to AI-generated primordial germ cells.

4.

Perhaps I’ll have something cogent to say about the second round of the legislative elections when they fall with a loud and hideous shriek next Sunday. Not bloody likely, however, as I’ll be travelling to Bamfield, British Columbia, in search of instant gratification. No pretzel sticks or marshmallows for this brat — fresh seafood, cold beers, beach swims and walks in the woods.

5.

To gain some perspective, let’s go back to Goya. But first, a word from our sponsor:

As I see her, it is all the same to me whether it be through walls or windows, or gaps in the wall or garden gates, that whatever ray of the sun of her beauty may reach my eyes will enlighten my understanding and strengthen my heart, so that I may be unique and without equal in discretion and courage. — Cervantes

To make the dress her own, Leocadia removed the bows, lowered the bustline and wore it with a lace shawl and bonnet. In the study, as in the painting, she is standing with her back to us; we can’t see her face or her bosom, which we know from La Leocadia (1819), the mural at La Quinta del Sordo, in which she wears the same dress and mantilla, and from Goya’s correspondence with Younger Moratín, to have been “impresionantemente amplio.”

Behind her, in the top left corner of the frame, is Mariquita, her daughter. Their daughter. Leocadia is holding her by the shoulders and telling her to be brave and strong while Goya’s doctor, Eugenio Arrieta, sits facing them in a heavy wooden chair next to a table covered in medical equipment — leech jar, stem pessary, packet of herbs (probably pennyroyal), bleeding bowl, bloodletting glass cup — and, clutching poor trembling Mariquita by the wrist, uses a long, pen-like lancet to inoculate her arm with milkmaid pus.

The lancet reminds Goya of the pens Munárriz gave him a quarter-century ago.

Leocadia was 32 years old when this sketch was made. Mariquita was five. Arrieta was 50 and would be dead within a year. Goya was 73 and almost dead: he started the painting three months after Dr Arrieta cured him of fiebre manchada — spotted or relapsing fever, which in this century is more typically referred to as typhus. In Goya’s Spain, it had several names: “lenticular” (because of the lentil-sized spots on the skin), “punticular” (spots), “pulicularis” (derived from fleas) or “tabardillo”. This last term either derives from the rash that covers the victim’s body like a tabard, a sleeveless jerkin or a short coat worn with or without a belt and consisting of front and back pieces only, with a hole for the head, or from the Latin tabes, which means rot, because the victim’s blood was thought to rot or corrupt. The term first appeared in 1489 and again in 1492, during the Christian sieges of Muslim Granada — the final war of the Reconquista — which was won not by spear, pike, long-bow, or harquebus flintlock, nor by the new strategies for killing developed by Queen Isabella and her engineers from France and Italy, nor cross-bows armed with arrows dipped in a solution of aconite, nor 12-foot-long Lombard cannons firing 14-inch balls of stone, but by body lice, which brought “El Tabardillo” to the fortress, which killed 18,000 thousand people, thus ending two centuries of Islamic rule in Spain, and breaking, perhaps forever, the Moorish hold on Europe.

(It also resulted in the total expulsion of the last remaining unconverted Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile Leon and Aragon.)

In Goya’s day, epidemic typhus, which wiped out Napoleon’s “Grande Armée” and ended his ambitions for a French-ruled world, was thought by most medical experts of the day to be the same as typhoid fever, as the symptoms and conditions are similar, if not identical. In fact, typhoid means typhus-like. The terms were coined by the French physician François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix, a friend of the Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl von Linné, in Nosologia Methodica, a 1763 treatise that classified diseases into ten major classes of disease, several dozen orders, almost 300 genera, and 2,400 species. Before Sauvages, as he is known in medical literature, typhus and typhoid were called "camp fever," "ship-fever", or "flea-bite fever," as the bacteria that causes them flourishes best in crowded and unsanitary conditions — in gutters alive with rats and cobblestones littered with waste, or in communal latrines only emptied, if ever, long after they overflowed. Both diseases vector quickly: in the case of typhus, through rodents to humans by way of body lice, fleas or mites, and in the case of typhoid fever, through what epidemiologists call the faecal-oral circuit, the consumption of food and water contaminated with bacteria-laced faeces. The English poet Abraham Holland called typhus "the ague with a hundred names" and succumbed to it in 1626, two years after John Donne wrote his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and severall steps in my Sicknes, twenty-three meditations on his bout with typhus, which he called “purple fever,” one for each day. Thirty years earlier, when Donne was still writing pornographic and erotic verse—is there a difference?—his brother Henry, then 19 (a year younger than John), was put in Clink Prison in London for harbouring a Catholic priest, and therein succumbed to typhus, at the time called "gaol fever" or “the shits.”

Though it takes up to two weeks for typhus to incubate, the onset of the disease is very sudden. The first sign is the eruption of spots, coupled with high fever. The rash begins at the centre of the corporeal sphere and then emanates outward with growing intensity across the abdomen to the furthest tip of every extremity. This phase is so painful that victims often have to be tied down to stop them from killing themselves — this was the case for John Donne and Francisco de Goya — especially when the rash hits the genitals, which can become gangrenous. Lucretius and Thucydides before him, in their accounts of the Plague of Athens (429-426 BCE), now believed by most medical historians to have been typhus (a word derived from the Greek tulphos meaning smoke, mist, fog, senselessness or stupefaction caused by fever), describe how victims were known to “save their lives by castrating themselves." 

(Some medical historians believe that the Athenian plague was caused by smallpox. Some war historians believe typhus killed more Christians than Moors.)

The rash is followed by crushing headache, dizziness, chills, enfeeblement, loss of appetite, tears of blood, inextinguishable thirst, anxiety, nausea, vomiting, roughness and blackness of the tongue, myalgia, more vomiting, melancholy, fear, horrifying delusions, sadness and fainting accompanied by a burning fever inside so intense that the victims cannot bear to wear even the lightest clothing, but must go naked, and horrible apprehensiveness and agony; then hematuria (when the urine turns red and cloudy. In the Devotions, Donne describes the "sudden red waters, rivers of blood", which probably alludes not just to the reddish tinge of his urine but also to the first of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, which caused the Nile to turn blood red, probably because of an algal bloom, and the Phlegethon in Dante's Inferno, the river of blood in the Seventh Circle of Hell that boils the souls of murderers like Padre Biva), sensitivity to light and tinnitus, followed by re-eruptions of rash, sleeplessness and noisy dementia, which soon transforms from being a symptom into a state of continuous muttering and delirious rambling, with the victim talking loudly and incessantly, singing and roaring and making animal noises night and day, but more especially during the night. This is usually attended with a tremendous morbid watchfulness and an insatiable desire to communicate, to describe and recollect each symptom as it arises, a cerebral over-activity that is all-encompassing and exhausting. The victim cannot sleep, cannot rest, cannot empty mind of fret and think of nothing but must remain utterly focussed on every moment of consciousness, and wishes nothing more acutely than to describe every phase in word spoken or written. Yet Goya, like Donne and most typhus victims, could not speak as he endured unspeakable pain from the typhus pustules in his mouth, on his tongue and in his throat, which made this phase of the sickness especially intolerable. Unlike Donne, however, and unlike most victims of this deadly disease, one of the most deadly enemies ever known to man, which has killed more men, women and children than the bubonic plague ever will, Goya, being deaf, was spared the discomfort of hyperacusis — noise sensitivity, where everyday sounds seem agonizingly loud, though he did suffer from tinnitus — this was his constant torment from the first day of his first illness in 1793 till the day of his death in two weeks—but he never had to endure the constant ringing of bells, as Donne did, which continually tolled (“ask not for whom”) throughout London for the dead and dying (“they toll for thee”). Goya, too, was spared the treatments Donne and other victims endured. Pigeon carcasses, for example, were never strapped to the soles of his feet. Arietta’s techniques were more conventional: cold water baths, tinctures of this and that, bloodletting, purgatives, and a special, secret oil from Florence or from Sienna, which he used to lubricate the palms and soles of Goya’s feet, and his wrists and the area near his heart; and as payment for these and other medical services, he accepted another painting, Goya a su médico (1820), which is now in the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Based, like the painting of Mariquita being inoculated against smallpox, on an actual event — Arietta’s treatment of his friend Goya for typhus—but, again, entirely invented, recollected from memory, it shows the doctor and his pale, grimacing patient surrounded by what looks like doomed souls, ashen-faced ghouls from the afterworld. Or perhaps priests. Written across the bottom, in Goya’s wavering hand, is the following inscription: “Goya gives thanks to his friend Arrieta for the expert care with which he saved his life from an acute and dangerous illness which he suffered at the close of the year 1819 when he was seventy-three years old. He painted it in 1820.”

In 1822, the painting was returned to Goya, or rather, to Javier, who had taken over Goya’s inventory and apartments in Madrid, as just a few days after Arrieta inoculated Mariquita with cowpox, the Veinteañista government—this was during the brief moment of power of Riego’s radically liberalizing exaltados — sent Arrieta on an expedition to study the Eastern sickness in Africa, where, six months later, he contracted the disease — today we call it the bubonic plague — and died.

Javier sold the painting in 1840.

The words in the inscriptions startle and embarrass Francisco José de Goya. Their clunkiness. He does not remember writing them. He does not remember making the sketch. He remembers the climax of his sickness—typhus victims remain conscious but physically helpless—and his own feeling of moral spottedness, the cough that preceded it, and the rash that followed the cough, that inclined him to consumption, and the many evacuations and exits that ended it. And he remembers the first, still dangerous days of his recovery, and the first sketched lines of the inoculation, and the lancet, and walking with the doctor, drinking hot chocolate with the doctor, and meeting the milkmaid, and the pustules on the milkmaid’s hands, and her smile.

On the sketchbook’s facing page are four quick sketches in iron gall ink and pencil of a pretty young woman on a swing. In each, the girl’s forward swing is at its maximum amplitude. In two, she is wearing nothing under her flimsy cotton dress. In the other two, she is completely naked.

[T]his proves beyond cavil that in 1820 Goya was a committed, indeed passionate liberal and anti-clerical… So fierce are the drawings on prisoners and the Inquisition, so explosive the joy at the Revolution of Riego, so merciless the exultation at the unfrocking of monks during the secularization, that the inner Goya seems as much of an exaltado as his mistress’s son.

Excerpt from: Gwyn A. Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution, 1984

In January 1824 a system of organised repression established “permanent military commissions with executive powers to judge the enemies of absolute power” and laws of strict censorship were imposed. In that same month Goya went into hiding in the house of the Aragonese priest Father José Duaso and he put Rosario in the care of the gentle-faced architect Tiburcio.
On 1 May 1824 a brief amnesty was declared and on the following day Goya applied for leave “to take the mineral waters at Plombières in France, to alleviate the sufferings and infirmities which are such a burden to his old age”.

Excerpt from: Julia Blackburn, Old Man Goya, 2003

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Father, ease our pain and eat us; you who clothed us with this sad flesh; we beseech you: be the one to strip it away.—Dante Alighieri

“Let us frankly march, and I first of all, along the constitutional path.” So announced the chastened king in March of 1820, three years before France, backed by all the royalist powers of Europe, marched on Spain and savagely crushed its revolution. Goya sketched this as an endless procession of staggering friars, priests and nobles, eyes closed, roped together, blindly leading each other into an abyss.

The blind leading the blind. Hieronymus Bosch stumbled his two into a stream.1 Cornelis Massijs had his four fall in a hole.2 Pieter Brueghel, the year before his death, piled together six, eyes diseased or missing, the faces raised

as toward the light
there is no detail extraneous

to the composition one
follows the others stick in
hand triumphant to disaster3

Goya’s are smaller, off-kilter, dwarfed by the rock. Ignore them, the Bible told him. So, too did his liberal friend Bartolomé José Gallardo y Blanco: “The light of wisdom must illuminate the ways of virtue if we are to follow them with a sure step. Understanding guides the will; with blindfolded eyes and a chained foot, one cannot get very far along the path of perfection.”4

He strips kings of understanding
and leaves them wandering in a pathless wasteland.
They grope in the darkness without a light.
He makes them stagger like drunkards.5

Elsewhere, however, mobs gathered, attacked, and dispersed. He followed their movements, eager for patterns, which he cut through with stories he was told or imagined, or images and ideas he stole. He filled albums with all manner of suffering and sin, waves of violence transformed into mass and line—faces, bodies, weariness, pain.

He was good at this; his eye was good, his memory.

Never his own life, however, never anything personal. The aperture of his intellect was misted and narrowed to everyone but those closest to him—his family and friends, his dogs and his cat. Sometimes, he wondered if there was not indeed a kind of veil over the perceiving faculty of his soul, a thwarting and absorbing cataract of his spirit. For elsewhere, everywhere really, he saw beings he did not know and therefore could not feel anything for, surely cannot have been expected to love, could only observe and outline. He sketched their surfaces with precision. And then he turned the page. Or he looked elsewhere.

At the Dante, for example, the ninth circle, with the Flaxman images, that Moratín had given him. At the things not seen there, not illustrated, the things Flaxman did not dare show, that no one shows, the eating of people, for example. Did he want to see this? Did he want others to see this? The Saturn6 he sketched many times, devouring his sons and daughters, or the shipwrecked, the set adrift, or Conde Ugolino in the ice of the second ring of the lowest circle, eyes askew, gnawing on the wretched skull of the Archbishop like a dog.

I saw two shades frozen in a single hole
packed so close, one head hooded the other one;
the way the starving devour their bread, the soul
above had clenched the other with his teeth
where the brain meets the nape. — (Canto XXXII, lines 124–29)

The Count, teeth scraping and grating on the Archbishop’s ravaged skull, raising his head, wiping his mouth on what little hair persists on the Archbishop’s scalp and saying, “And then my hunger overpowered my sorrow.”

… And I,
Already going blind, groped over my brood
Calling to them, though I had watched them die,
For two long days. And then the hunger had more
Power than even sorrow over me— (Canto XXXIII, ln. 70–73)

Did the Cannibal Count eat his dead children? In the Flaxman, in the Blake and Fuseli, the Count, driven mad by hunger, gnaws his own fingers to the bone. In his little oil, the children clutch their father, who gazes up at the high-up window at the bright metal shaft of the sun. “We hope for light, but there is darkness; for brightness, but we are in gloom.”

We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.

Something like that. No saben el Camino, “They do not know the Way,” stolen from Blake, who stole it from Flaxman, the enchained procession of cloaked and hooded monks descending the crooked path, bound for the fires of hell. Ruin and destruction in their wake. The way of peace they have not known, there is no justice in their tracks.7

Dante was wrong. He was a slave to time, a slave to the world. The inferno—countless infernos—are in this world, not in the next.

Countless infernos. In Camino de los Infiernos, the goblin mob pulls the figure to the fire.

In Populacho —“Rabble”—another is dragged naked through the streets to the scaffold.

In the next one, the same dragged screaming. Lo Merecia— “He Deserved it”.

The king’s chariot was carried on the shoulders of the people to shouts of “Death to the Nation”. General Riego was dragged through the streets and disembowelled by the mob. Leocadia and her son, who had served in the exaltado militia, disappeared.

Goya focussed on his blackest paintings. He started hoarding food and wine. He hid all his engraving plates and prints in the walls.

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1

2

6

7

The order of things is not motionless—always, 
in gentle succession the sky drives each towards us: 
After rosy dawn, the blazing sun begins its run, 
even while blind night stretches out under its black mantle.
—Juan Meléndez Valdés, 1773

Meléndez is a flat-headed idiot. His poetry is execrable, everyone knows this, his plays worse, his politics naive, his Frenchified nonsense too tedious for words. He describes the order of the universe and the admirable chain of its beings as if they laid him in swaddling clothes and offered him suck. He sputters nonsense about the imagination, the nobility of art, art freed of preconceptions and rules and absolute claims, but the only thing that makes him crawl forward out of his own filth is a naked quest for a higher post in Madrid—he’s on the chancery court in far-forgotten Valladolid. He will do whatever abject act necessary to secure one: slink after the over-solicited Jovellanos like a grovelling dog, sic his poor wife on each court flunkey he encounters and tell all in every tertulia he slithers through that his next volume of simpering verse is dedicated to them alone.

Man is one, but from this comes 
the hot-blooded Senegalese, whose giant lip 
fills a face blacker than ebony. 
What is there between this low-born 
and the well formed German blond?… 
The wilful, repulsive Hottentot 
and the sociable, sensitive Frenchman…? 
The stupid African, from formless, shapeless mud, 
presents us with our ugliest deity.
—Juan Meléndez Valdés, 1773

He writes the vilest stuff. Goya is anew of this opinion after travelling by coach with him to Cadiz in the company of Cean Bermudez, two strangers, a pretty girl of seventeen and a slave boy of 12, and then on to Sanlucar, all the while exposed to his flatulence. Goya was the most fortunate, as he didn’t have to hear it; he only had to endure a few penned lines thrust under his nose. “I can’t find my glasses,” he lied. The man’s odour, the state of his fingernails: enough to make one retch. Goya begged Cean to make him stop, tapping his thigh, elbowing his rib, kicking his foot, but each remonstration was met with bemusement, as if the appeals insincere. What is it with writers? Is anything of theirs of lasting value? Will a single word of Valdés or Cean be remembered?

No painter worth his mettle seeks political office. Painters seek only the power and position necessary to pursue their craft. This is their freedom. Writers work within their living language exclusively for its practitioners, its constituents. Painters exist within the universal. Their work, at its best, is unbounded.

This thought, this line of thinking, was interrupted—annihilated—by the dreadful realisation that he could no longer see anything out of his left eye. How long has this been the case, he asked himself. Parts of himself were disappearing.

He tried to escape this depressing development and the toad’s toadying through any and all available diversion, and finding the pretty young girl sitting across from him the most pleasing, he settled his good eye on both of hers, which were unshrinking but not immodest, and wonderfully expressive; and this led to a further appreciation of her other features—teeth, nose, ears and neck, breast, arms and feet. His pencil bounced and scratched over pot-holes and loose spots, but her form soon took loving shape on the cuaderno page. Feminine beauty—a lifelong devotion, obsession—once again his salvation.

At one point on this road, they passed a human rosary of eight barefoot men beaded together on a rope, their necks and limbs in chains, driven forward at speed beyond their capacity to maintain by two dingy men on horseback armed with horse muskets and swords, who told them that the men, all black-skinned and scarred and naked to the waist, were condemned to the galleys for mischief and rebellion, and had been walking on the road from Madrid since a fortnight. Goya sketched what he saw, for he had never seen such utterly destroyed souls, and he pleaded for their release. Again, this elicited only laughter.

And after laughter came tears, for this pretty young girl was made most upset by this encounter.

“Hush, now, please,” said her mother. “You’re making a spectacle.”

He woke to see the sharp white contours of Cadiz rimmed with blue, shimmering in the distance.

2.

He is not looking for a slave. If he were, he would have no trouble finding one. There is a market once a fortnight and newspaper announcements, such as this in yesterday’s El Diario:

A black man aged 13 to 14, English Creole, whose language he speaks with regular proficiency, as well as Castilian. He was raised a Christian and has talent enough to learn any trade whatsoever. The asking price is 7,000 reales, and whoever needs him will go to Calle del Mar Menor, Number 2, where they can negotiate with the owner.

There are 6,000 slaves in the city, all with cutting scars or fire-branded marks on their faces or breasts, indicating proper preparation and docility. A quarter of these sold-and-bought souls belong to the king and bear his name: Carlos de Borbón. Though now officially “set free from bondage”, they remain annotated in the ledgers as merchandise in service to the royal household and the dominion and kingdom of Spain.

He is intimate with a dozen. Of these, his late friend and teacher, the royal painter José Carlos de Borbón, who superintended Tiepolo’s studio, and, later, Mengs’. As much as Luzan and more than Bayeu and more than Mengs, this African man, 54 years a slave, made Goya the painter he is today.

José painted theatre sets for the Teatro del Buen Retiro and delivered cartoons to the Royal Tapestry Factory. He shared with Goya his technical specialty—shipwrecks—which Goya in turn imparted to students at the Academia.

Goya replaced his mentor as a cartoon painter unofficially when Borbón, too frail and blind to continue, was removed from the Casa de Negros in the Palacio Nuevo, which housed the king’s 2,000 slaves. A few months later, he was buried in an unmarked grave, as was his brother, Antonio Carlos de Borbón, the royal architect who designed the Caballerizas Reales and La China, the Royal Porcelain Factory, both in Madrid.

Why are his thoughts now on this? He did not think of this once when painting his shipwreck last year, but now he sees it clearly before him, just as he saw those enchained galley slaves.

The difference between his shipwreck and that of José Carlos de Borbón? Goya’s shipwreck has survivors. He is one of them. He is the woman with her hands and face lifted to the heavens, begging for mercy.

What follows below, after the Four Horses of Goya, is set in Spain, which, bizarrely, I haven’t set foot in since 2014 – and that was only overnight.

It is also set mainly in the 19th century, which I missed entirely.

Like all of my weird Goya inventions, it is a stand-alone piece – part of a cycle of texts linked by character, time and place, but otherwise entirely self-contained.

If you haven’t read any yet, you can start here.

You certainly don’t have to read them in order.

(Because there is no order.)

Of course, you don’t have to read them at all.

But I’d like you to.

I’d also like you to let me know what you think of them, and if you like them to share them with others.

And if you haven’t yet:

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He finds horses less compelling than the men that subdue them, the lands they gallop through and the crowds they trample. This is perhaps because he has never had a meaningful relationship with a real horse, though he was once thrown and knocked senseless by one, an old dray from the farm that reared and panicked at the sight of a brigand’s head just then cresting the nearest hill haloed in blinding sunlight. This was in the autumn of 1773 and he was on the road to his first official position in Madrid, a paid apprenticeship in Mengs’ studio. He had barely left the gates when the old dray started, threw him to the ground and would have crushed him under hoof – and with him our story – if the brigand, who he later saw executed in the Plaza del Sol, hadn’t picked up the loose reins, soothed the skittered animal with soft words and led it away, along with his filled-to-bursting saddlebags, which contained not only food, water, clothing and money but a miniature of the Our Virgin Lady of the Pillar and two portraits of his parents, which to this day have never been recovered. He drew on the experience for the composition of Conversion of Saul of Tarsus (1788-90), the largest of his three frescoes in the Archbishop’s Palace of Alcalá de Henares, which were all destroyed by fire during the Spanish Civil War.

All his subsequent investigations of horses did not come directly from nature but were prismed through other painters’ works, most notably the foreshortened perspectives in the Royal Collection’s Titian (Emperor Charles V on Horseback), Velazquez (the Equestrian portrait of Philip IV, Equestrian portrait of Margarita de Austria and Equestrian portrait of Isabel de Borbón) and Wouwerman (Horses startled by a Dog), and the chalk studies he did in Rome of the Carracci frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese.

This dependency on his predecessors embarrassed him. “I do not follow methods.” He would say this but not exactly believe it to be true. “There is little point, and much poison, in burdening tender youth with rules, with the dull and servile study of trickeries gleaned from textbooks and applied to plaster models of Greek statues. Art requires passion first, then freedom, not servitude, oppression and imposition. This is true of painting and all noble endeavours.”

“God, devil, heaven and hell, here the painter’s brush invariably outperforms the poet’s pen,” he wrote across the bottom of a pencil rendering of an angel on horseback. “This is not just a young man winged but the captured and created angel of the Lord, with the power to move men, redeem sinners, and convert the wicked to the path of goodness.”

The horse, however? It is a botch.

To him, for reasons we nor he will ever fully know, horses are among nature’s most mysterious creatures. Mere tools, means of haulage and transport, power for ploughs and carriages; and at the same time inexpressibly noble, the embodiment of animal grace. Thus unfathomed, he is, therefore, unable to represent them to his satisfaction in anything even approaching their truth, nor capture even the barest essentials of their character – terrible and sublime, swallowing the ground with fierceness and rage, necks clothed with thunder, steam emanating from their forelocks and the quivering power of their flanks, and place these properly into the picture plane with any emotive force. As vivid flatnesses, they fail. He can’t equipoise them realistically and dramatically into two-dimensional space the way any half-talented Old Master could with his eyes closed. This is the harshest truth. Human, equine and other – anatomy has never been his strong suit. He is particularly bad at hands and arms. The effortless perfection in Renaissance academies and studios unnerved him when he first encountered it in Italy, as did the works he spent his days and nights with while cataloguing the masterworks in the royal residences. He knew at a young age that no matter how hard he strived, he would never match the mastery of Titian or Tintoretto, and David, his contemporary, could best him with a brush held by his feet. Such heights were not available to him. Carracci, who had revived painting that since the time of Raphael had fallen into decline, whom Goya championed for the liberality of his genius as a teacher who left each disciple free to proceed following the inclination of his spirit without determining for any to follow his style or method, and made only those corrections intended to attain the imitation of the truth, would not have given him a place in his Academia.

“You perhaps think too much.”

Mariquita said this, jarring him out of his daydream.

“And you not enough.”

The girl took his hand and daubed the spittle at the side of his chin.

“Where were we in your lesson?” He said.

“You were telling me what is important,” she said.

“And what is not important. Perspective, for example, and geometry. These will come later. As for anatomy. You and I are artists, not doctors. We don’t learn anything more by putting our hands into the dead man’s excavated entrails.”

Meanwhile…

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1.

Ya la percibo. Now I see it, now I see her, now I see what she is, now I know her.

He wrote this under the drawing and then erased it, replacing it with Ni asi la distingue. Not even this distinguishes it. Even thus he cannot make her out. Even so he cannot recognize her. Which is it? He is tired. He rests his head on the desk, puts his hands under his forehead, closes his eyes and drops away almost instantly into a dream about how the Christ ascended to Heaven, every part of Him, even those bits no longer attached to His Body, including the Holy Foreskin, which rose into the cosmos in a whirlwind and expanded into the rings of Saturn.

He will sketch this.

“Never forget,” a poet said to him once, “there are thigh bones of our Blessed Virgin all over Europe, including seven or eight alone in churches in Spain.”

The Virgin centipede. He will sketch this.

2.

The first that anyone took notice of was the likeness of a pig he scratched onto a wall with a stick of charcoal. This was in Fuendetodos. On the wall of the church. His mother says it was in Zaragoza but he remembers it clearly. He was six or seven years old. His mother said he was fourteen, but she was wrong. He hadn’t met Martin yet. He had a black dog with three legs. He played with a girl named Maria de Pilar. The friar who caught him—he was sitting on a basket of wheat that he was supposed to deliver to the monks, sketching the pig’s giant cock and balls in charcoal—broke his vow of silence to tell the boy to finish what he had started. Goya obliged, finishing the cock, even adding stubbly hairs to the balls. Upon completion, the monk nodded his approval, then beat him with a stick and marched him to his parents’ house.

“What has he done?” said his father.

“God harvests where he has not sown and gathers where he has not scattered seeds,” the monk said.

His father didn’t understand. “If he needs hiding I’ll be the one to give it,” he said as he untied his leather belt. He had respect for the church, but he was proud.

“He may have a god-given talent,” said the monk. “It would be a sin to leave it buried in the ground.”

“Buried?”

“We must use it wisely, and let it grow.”

His father was still holding him by the scruff of his neck. “Enough church riddles, father,” he said.

“Entrust him to me,” said the monk. “We will secure him a master, and see what we can find in him.”

His father whipped him three times and let him go.

Goya followed the monk back to the charterhouse. He was fourteen. Martin had seen the monk coming and ran away.

“Give and it will be given to you,” said the monk. He remembers this. “A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap.”

Then the monk took off his cowl and stripped the boy naked.

3.

Or did he? His mind plays tricks, pulls things like this out of nowhere, out of the air. Imaginations. Inventions. Whims. Don Felix was a good man, a man of God. It was Don Felix who introduced him to José Luzan, the Holy Tribunal reviewer and the best painter in Aragon, with whom he studied for four years. Copying etchings, painting over indecencies, amending doctrinal errors. Then the boy fled. Why? Where did he go? There are apocryphal stories. He joined gangs, stabbed someone, was stabbed by someone. Travelled with bullfighters, fought in arenas, ran off to Italy, kidnapped a nun.

Is he asleep? Is he mad? The old saw. Hunched over, dreaming, like Joachim in the desert. No angel overhead, no lambs on the hills around. How would he sketch this?

4.

The unimaginable doesn’t appear to exist. The unthinkable is everywhere. He will fill albums with lunatics he saw or imagined. In his first madhouse painting, his first representation of madness, done four years ago at the urging of the poet Valdez, he made himself the beleaguered warden he saw on his first visit, surrounded by raging madmen, furiously whipping two naked lunatics with a lash. This, when he sent the painting to Iriarte for benediction and protection from the Tribunal, he said he had witnessed. But did he? Did he see this yard, with its high, whitewashed walls? Did he see the naked and the chained, the brawling madmen, the lunatic pope, the insane soldier, the mad violinist? Did he see mad, blind Ana Orosia Moreno selling her lottery coupons for pleasures: “freedom”, “health”, “sleep”, “indulgence” and “happiness”?

What did he see? Who did he see? The horse biting into the neck of the monk as it straddles the donkey on which the monk is riding? He said he saw this, too, in Zaragoza, when he was a boy.

He’ll be in his seventies when he draws what he said he saw when he was ten—the cruel bailiff Lampiños stitched up inside the gutted belly of a dead horse, his terrified face sticking out of the animal’s anus surrounded by a taunting mob of students and prostitutes whom he had persecuted and robbed.

Lampiños survived the night. In the morning, the mob pulled him out, shoved a hose up his ass and filled him with quicklime.

He later did a series of martyrs killed by centurions. The Romans were endlessly inventive. Laurus disembowelled. Prisca split open and stuffed with wild barley and eaten by pigs. Fausta nailed to a board and sawn in two from vulva to skull. Catamites, starving feral dogs, dwarf gladiators, upside-down crucifixions, serrated dildos, burning helmets, and spit-roasted children, all beneath the spectators’ gaze.

He will burn this album, too.

5.

Looking, not seeing, not wanting to see, forcing to see. What he knows and shows, what he has learned to calibrate and quantify, in infinite descent, is that you can’t trust your eyes. You can’t believe the things you see, not in the way you can in things you don’t see—things not seen. Not only because seen things are exterior, but because they are not real. You cannot trust or believe your own eyes because what you see, what you read, what you paint, who you surround yourself with, the world you circulate in, the people you know and the people who know you, are disguises worn and roles played and lies told ad infinitum. This is the inverted, crepuscular world of the owl and the bat, where sweet becomes sour, white black, love power, honour contempt, punishment exoneration.

He thinks back to the Mass he attended for the death of his child.

            The Lord be with you.

            And with your spirit.

            Lift up your hearts.

            We lift them up unto the Lord.

            Let us give thanks unto the Lord, our God.

            It is right and just to give him thanks and praise.

6.

“As the ass said to the cabbages.” This is what he had wanted to say. That everything is birth and death. That Jesus was the son of Mary and Joseph, nothing more. That the sacrament was flour and water, nothing more. That you might as well go and confess to a tree as to priests and monks, as they, like all mortals, live in a state of sin, so can not absolve the sins of others. That there is no punishment after death. That devotion to Mary is a false doctrine, as is the cult of the saints and the use of images and idols. That transubstantiation is a confidence trick.

That indulgences are evil. That the cross is a post. That faith exists solely in the brains of men. That hope of life eternal is something to amuse idiots with. That everything said about hell is done to frighten little children.

That God would never let his only child become the son of man.

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

Plant the seed

That is, experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do from the laws of Nature alone, insofar as Nature is only considered to be corporeal. — Spinoza

He wishes it would work, Moratín’s hallucination machine, sent to him from Paris along with a set of fancy Senefelder pens, an illustrated treatise on sign language, and more reams of velum than he could use in two lifetimes—how marvellous that would be, transmit a thing into a prism that traps its visible essence and magically casts forth its perfect form, eliminating the need for conjuring—just fill in the lines and shade in the shadows.

But it doesn’t work and this enrages him.

Though disabled by fate he still has most of the major faculties, including the most fundamental perception of all—that of his own existence—and he can still paint and draw better than most everyone whose work he’s seen in Madrid, in Paris, and now in Bordeaux. Just look at the clumsy nonsense of his daughter’s teacher, and then look at his Muguiro portrait, or the milkmaid, or the bullring works, or any page of the albums you care to choose.

But he’s eighty-two, exiled in a land whose tongue he can’t speak or hear, nearing his last breath (though he does secretly half-think he’ll live like Titian to ninety-nine), too vexed by blindness to sharpen his own pencils, half-asleep most of his waking hours and wholly awake most of his sleepless nights, but rich enough and famed enough not to give a rat’s ass, confident that his legacy will support his household for generations to come and that his best work, like Titian’s, like Velazquez’s, like Raphael’s, will survive for centuries.

But, at the same time, he is chronically restless.

So, decided in his heart and mind to wear out, not rust away, he tries again, slips the double glasses over his nose and puts the large magnifier in place and his better eye in the hole at the top of the brass rod until the bottom half of his clouded pupil is directly above the four-sided glass prism, poised at its upper edge, and the likeness of Mariquita, his daughter, posed sideways before him in the washerwoman dress, spectrally re-appears bright and glimmering on the piece of paper beneath his hand.

He blinks, she disappears. He tries again, tries to bring her into focus, but she doubles, darkens, shifts into teary blur.

He lowers his eye, finds the angle, finds Mariquita, traces her quickly with a pencil. Eyes, nose, mouth. He takes his eye away, the illusion disappears. The paper is marked with unsure, shuddering lines.

A trick of light, then. Pointless.

“Don’t move, Mariquita.”

He pushes the camera Lucida’s rod away and sketches her likeness straight, dimmed eye to palsied hand.

There.

He shows it to her, she cocks her head, studies it carefully.

“So fast. And it’s good.”

He is surprised by his pride and says what he always says, “If you can’t sketch a man who has thrown himself out a fourth-floor window”—Mariquita joins in, mimicking his gravelled voice—“in the time it takes for him to hit the ground, you’ll never do anything worth looking at.”

He grumbles, leans in to kiss her cheek.

“But, uncle Paco… it doesn’t look a thing like me.”

He raises his hand to swat and she laughs and turns to the page before, on which a bearded man in a white tunic is sketched, stooped over two walking sticks, tottering forward on arthritic joints.

“Is that you?” she says, giggling. “Is that supposed to be you?”

Aún aprendo—”I’m still learning.” Father Time. He’d seen something similar by Blake in a book on painting by Fuseli and a Renaissance version misattributed to Michelangelo, and Mariquita had been reading Dante’s Convivio to him, and he had written this down— “The good walker reaches his goal and finds rest; the errant wanderer never reaches it; his mind and soul wear out with great effort as he forever looks ahead with greedy eyes”—which he wants to add to the facing page of the folio when he makes it into a print. Which will be when? His sentiments are in flux. Too much wine. Too much coffee. Too old. Too stupid. To bestially stupid and coarse.

Aún aprendo. Aún no estoy aprendiendo.

Another Moratín’s gift, a sun drawing by Niépce, who he met at Daguerre’s diorama last year, makes him even uneasier. In the accompanying letter, which Mariquita translates, Niépce described the process. A thin coat of bitumen tar, the same which Goya uses for his blacks in paintings and to scratch upon for his etchings, is dissolved in lavender oil and applied to the etching plate or the lithographer’s stone. Once dry, the inked image is laid over the surface and the two are left outside for hours or days, depending on the clarity of the sky and the power of the sun’s rays—the bitumen is less soluble when left exposed to light. Solvent then rinses away the unhardened tar shielded by the etching’s lines and dark areas. The now bare surfaces are burned in acid for an etching, or the remaining bitumen serves as the water-repellent material for a lithograph. No scratching, no labour. No artistry. No artist.

Niépce also described a newer process with a camera obscura that requires no etching or drawing and produces permanent heliographic pictures. Original works from actual things miraculously transmitted, not mere copies. The Frenchman seeks an audience with Goya’s banker Galos. He also mentions a combustion machine, self-perpetuating.

He examines the quality of the paper. He is tired. He flips idly through the sign-language book, looking for gestures with folded hands or interlocking fingers. There is none. He asks for hot chocolate, which he will take in his room. Mariquita helps him out of the chair. He waves her off at the stairs, grasps the banister with both claws, and pulls himself up to the first landing. He stops and sits. The blood in his heart and head pound.

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Writing to Stendhal in 1829, Prosper Mérimée describes how Fernando VII’s third queen and second cousin, Maria Josepha of Saxony, was so overcome on her wedding night by her husband’s monstrous appearance and appendage that she soiled the sheets of their marriage bed.

The poor girl, a sixteen-year-old Saxon princess who spoke only German, was untutored in the more unpleasant realities of the animal kingdom. Her only love, pastoral poetry, furnished her with but the most fanciful notions of natural truth and the elemental character of man. Vowed since her first flowers to chaste devotions, she was, according to Mérimée, “so Christianly elevated as to be unaware of even the simplest things of this world, the sort of things that every little girl in Spain learns before they are eight years old.”

As was the custom, on the night of the royal nuptials, the First Lady of the Bedchamber was assigned the task of instructing the newly queened on what was expected from a hymeneal bride on her day of days. And what to expect from the groom.

However, according to Mérimée, “the old whore protested that she had never paid much attention to what her husband was doing to her, so she could hardly be expected to explain it to others, and as a result, the queen was put into her marriage bed without the slightest preparation.”

Enter the king, her now husband, a swarthy and bloated satyr smoking a cigar clenched between black teeth in a slack mouth above a jutting lower lip and a prognathous jaw whose absurd prominence, on a face as long and gray as a donkey’s, was barely counterpoised by the enormity of its nose and the tininess of its squinting piss-hole eyes.

Generations of interbreeding had endowed craniofacial dysostosis, which deformed the royal skull, and macrogenitosomia, which, according to a sister-in-law, produced “a royal manhood as thin as an asparagus spear at the base, as fat as Pedro Romero’s fist at the end, and as articulated and long betwixt as the front leg of a bull.”

He was, moreover, the rudest and most shameless scoundrel in his kingdom.

Faced with this horrible sight, the girl thought herself fainted and clutched in the most horrifying dream of her life; or perhaps she had died a sinner and gone to hell; and unable to understand the bleats of the beast attacking her, and incapable of ascertaining the aspirations of his fondling exertions or what in god’s name the wielded club attempting to impale her even was, the best she could do was do her best to drive it off, which only incensed it more. So she ran, the priapus in heated and heavy-stepped pursuit.

Goya told what is described thus far in three etched and aquatinted prints, long since lost, but renowned for their brilliant hue and warm saturation. In the fourth print, which, like the rest of the series, borrows heavily from Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode and the libertine scenes of Fragonard, the king pursues his queen; but, as she is young and agile and he obese, heavy with gout, he trips over a settee.

In the next, the enraged and engorged king puffs angrily on his cigar, which is almost as long and thick as his ashamedness, while in the next chamber, two women—his sister-in-law has joined the old crone—explain to the horrified queen her conjugal duties.

In the sixth, the donkey-faced is almost upon his paled prey, who shows no signs of resistance, except her mouth is gaped, her eyes rolled back, and she holds her belly as if in pain.

The seventh and final print showed the king in flight, his face contorted in fury, horror, or both. Beneath it read the caption: “At his first effort to open a door, the next door opened quite naturally and stained the sheets a very different color from what is expected after a wedding night. This created a terrible odour. Queens, it seems, do not enjoy the same properties as civet cats.”

Though Saxon princesses were renowned for their fertility—Maria Josepha of Austria, for example, who bore both Maria’s grandmother and Fernando’s grandfather, along with at least fourteen other children—the queen could not be persuaded to open any of her doors for her king ever again. Not even a personal letter from Pope Pius VII, whom, as a child of eight she had seen levitate in ecstasy while conducting mass for her family during his and their imprisonment by Napoleon at Fontainebleau, could enjoin her ever again to share her bed with the king. She withdrew from public life to the palace in Aranjuez and died ten years later in 1829. Six months after her death, she was expeditiously replaced by the king’s niece.

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The passions of her husband, Pepa thinks, are mostly fuelled by his art, which he refers to as his “truth”, followed closely by the shooting and trapping of small animals, which in turn is equalled in her view by an unsettling desire for sensual gratification, mainly through overindulgence—food, wine, coffee—but also sex, which deserves its own category, as while it concerns her intimately (and her all-seeing God), it also occupies a part of his life and being that she doesn’t know anything about, nor wants to. He goes out, she says nothing; he comes home, he says nothing; he comes to her bed, neither says much at all.

What passes between them there and then physically is trapped in scruples and self-consciousness. And tonight, she can’t turn it off, can’t ignore the dark thoughts, long after he rolls away and passes out. The rosary doesn’t help, nor does the story of Lope Ruíz and the three hundred goats he must boat across the river one by one. So she returns instead to further and angrier reflections on her husband’s undisciplined appetites—until something even more disturbing materializes: taps and clicks at the wall and a scuttling across the floor.

She sits up sharply just in time to see the curtain shift, just slightly, and—though this is perhaps only her imagination—a long, black tail disappear behind it.

She shrieks.

Goya, of course, being deaf, doesn’t hear. She rains down on his chest with both fists, which only makes him roll over onto his stomach. So up she gets, barefoot on the cold, glazed tiles, seized with fear but advancing somehow, willing her legs to the fireplace, grabbing the first thing that comes to hand—a poker—and moving slowly, cautiously, towards the window. Her eyes by now have adjusted to the darkness, but she sees nothing. Carefully, she pulls the curtain open with the poking stick.

“There it is!” screams Goya behind her, doubly startling her, as the gargantuan black rat also seizes this moment to reveal itself, squealing hideously and leaping directly at her, racing right up the poker handle, which Pepa drops, and the fat rat shrieks and jumps, snagging the skirt of her nightclothes with its long fangs, shredding the cloth, holding on for dear life.

Pepa screams again. Goya is out from under the blankets but instead of racing to her aid is up on the bed, hugging a sheet as if it were a toreador’s cape. Pepa spins and kicks and the rat shakes loose and flies across the room and hits Goya’s sheet; Goya shrieks and kicks it away; it hits a chair, falls to the floor, flips over, paws up in a defensive crouch, red beady eyes flashing. It shrieks and rears and jumps again at Pepa, who stops its trajectory with a swing of the poker, sending it sailing into a wall. It falls to the floor with a thud and lies there, bleeding, pulsing with terror. Pepa takes a step towards it; it snarls and snaps and shrieks hideously and disappears under the bed.

By now the commotion has raised the entire house. Javier is the first in. “Get out, boy!” his mother screams. Juana the maid is next.

“Get it, Juanita! Kill it!”

The girl calmly takes the poker from her mistress, lowers herself to her knees and peers under the bed. A thin, half-curdled shriek is heard. Then three soft thumps. Then, silence.

The girl rises to her feet, proudly displaying the skewered, still-twitching rat at the poker’s end. It is the biggest yet, easily the size of a cat. Juana can barely hold it aloft.

Goya and Javi examine it closely. It has a wet coat like the others, and the same clouded eyes.

Juana takes it to the window and flings it out onto the street.

7.VI.1793

After a year bathed in moonlight, images are appearing in the day’s brightness. This morning he did six grey-wash drawings in red chalk. Including the pokered rat, shrieking Pepa, and him cowering behind his toreador’s cape a foot in the air above the bed.

Maybe a few words at the bottom. To set the mind off in a new pursuit. Or confuse it. Keep it moving, keep it borderless.

No one is in the house except Pepa, who is cutting cloth, new dresses for a politician’s wife, so off he goes himself, with a pomander stuffed in the sleeve of his embroidered cuff. It is March, the streets are miasmatic. His neighbours—his servants too—empty chamber pots into the gutters below his window. The plague has ascended from the docks and is upon them.

No one in the house to be trusted with even a simple task like this, ordering copperplate and burin blades from the Frenchman. Thirty printers in Paris, not one in this backwater. Pepa too busy, do your own bidding she said, so off he went, dressed in an old buttoned-up tail-coat and tapered trousers, the artisan son of an artisan father, bowing under his hat to his neighbours just as night is falling, not just to the tradesmen and clergy but to the women; of course to the women, he will draw the lot of them, in various stages of undress, from memory, from imagination, from the teeming throng inside his head.

A new route this time up past the closed market stalls admiring the silent birds in the trees, taking in the bustle of the streets, men and women shopping, hawking, flirting, oblivious to their emptiness and insignificance. Good lord. What presumption. Oh, to be so emptied! Of responsibility, expectation, want.

His nerve-endings are exposed, that is how he will describe this, his mind is raw. He has lost his taste for words, his trust in words, particularly adjectives, woeful, abject, empty. This happened before the illness. But it is worse now. The majestic eagle, the noble horse, the faithful dog. Attributes undo the forms, he has tried to explain this intelligently to Martin and his poet friends, how all their lofty, high-born twaddle, assemblages of this and that and their corresponding correspondences, sterilise the imagination. But he never quite manages to make articulate sense of it. The lumpish predicates weigh down the essences.

Conjured forth with his brush, however, animal, muscle, sinew, power, how they soar, gallop, howl. And yet here now these words, spilling out. A court flunkey, a designer of tapestries, a flatterer of the merchant class. Sick, deaf, dying, soon to be forgotten.

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Language, conversation, writing—the writing of his contemporaries—cannot compete with his eye’s capacity. It sweeps past all. His deafness is a godsend. All those books, all that learning he never received. No need to classify and document. Instinct, not technique. His text of truth is nature, the world, the people.

But in the end, really, all these flattened visions—his life work—shapes and surfaces tricked inside rectangular frames—what does it amount to? He has seen the works of painters better than he, masters of the highest calling, render heaven and hell ridiculous. Are his any better?

In the end, then, he has decided to make pictures as if no one would ever see them. Sketch and paint them on a page or on a wall, uncorrected—he never tries to fix things, improve the way he first sees them, first creates them. Mind to the hand through the eye.

No more copying. No more slavish imitation. Mind to the hand through the eye. Unburden the imagination, release the swarm. Then move on. On to the next.

“Let us speak plainly,” he wrote in a letter to Martin, “if one must live in this world so briefly, then one should live according to one’s pleasures.”

That then. That is it.

But it was Martin, not he, who lived according to this rule. And always had. Because he could afford to. Goya had always inhabited a different world. He could not stay still for very long; he could not simply enjoy a moment; the present and future were often difficult and dangerous; he had to think about keeping his household afloat, his career on track, his position, his pension. Martin could proceed as he saw fit. He was a gentleman, a country squire. Goya could never stray too far from the umbilical cord of gold.

When they were children, they were physically inseparable, but other realities divided them. Goya’s parents had borrowed from the parish to renovate the building they owned in Zaragoza and could not make the payments. They lost the other apartments, then their own. They fought constantly. When he wasn’t at school or in Luzan’s studio, his mother shooed him out onto the street. He didn’t mind, he hated being at home. Home. Not a word he used. And Martin could get away with things Goya would never dare attempt. Once, at school, Martin let a dozen crickets loose on the teacher’s desk, another time two frogs and a grass snake. The priest shrieked at the sight of the snake, higher and longer than any human he had ever heard, and stepping back quickly slipped and fell and cracked his skull and broke his arm. Martin laughed; the rest of the boys were terrified.

The deadly factual. El vergonzoso. The shamefaced one. This was the morning’s last drawing. Greedy for sex, gluttonous for food. Here, in the depiction, he wears his currutaco breeches as a coat, arms thrust through the pant legs as if they were sleeves, the waistband around his crown, the flap at the front, his prick-long nose poking out of his crotch face. Spooning slop from a bowl into the toothless mouth. The smiling man he squats upon holds the bowl and a cloaked figure with a deformed face hovers in the background, clenching his fists and leering as he shits into a different bowl.

The relationship between the three is not clear. 

Viewers have suggested several scenarios, based on the obtained commentaries:

“There are men whose face is the most indecent thing on their entire body, and it would be good if they would hide them away in their underwear.”

“Men with big noses tend to have giant cocks and fat balls. As they are often sodomites, this one is depicted wearing his underpants as a hat, with his verguenzas hanging out of his fly as he lies on top of a poor devil and hikes up his shirts.”

Who wrote these? Most name Valentín Carderera, the first biographer, and Moratín. On the preparatory sketch, however, in which the cock-faced man—the spitting image of big-nosed Martin in the portrait he just finished—is naked, stripped even of the upside-down trousers, Goya scribbled, in his unmistakeable hand, “This is a man who because he was told he had an indecent face put his underwear on his head, and only when eating does he reveal himself.”

He, Goya, is actually large of body—his mind goes off like this, like a shot—the head larger still, well outside the accepted canon of proportions, and stiff-jointed; and he wears whatever is laid out for him. This is not to say he is not particular about how he appears to others. Like the truly vain, he thinks himself above vanity. And his complexion is pale, deprived of light. Etiolated was the word Moratín used to describe him later that night at Lady Holland’s tertulia. “Eres tan etiolada, Paco,” the poet said when he clapped eyes on him in the library. Moratín sheathed in a long green coat with grey velveteen cuffs, a short blue jacket with a great number of small metal buttons, a particoloured silk waistcoat, black velvet breeches, blue stockings, and long quartered shoes with large glittering buckles. “Como una lanza de espárrago blanco.” Like a spear of white asparagus.

Of course, Goya didn’t hear a word of this. He was turned toward the Duquesa of Benevente. She started to laugh, he turned. The others tittered. His pale face reddened. He walked out of the room, descended the stairs, retrieved his hat and his stick, and took his leave.

Killed by words, murdered by words.

Which of these deformados is he? He hears it slop into the pot in his mind. He is almost always present somewhere in his pictures. Revealed by the sun and its brightness, concealed by the night. His face, if it is indeed his face, in or out of countenance cannot be construed, as it is hidden from our view. His head is indeed pale—palely depicted, barely sketched out. Lifeless, drained of blood, or bathed again in moonlight.

No more newspapers. No stories about yellow fever in the ports and the massacres in France.

No rats. No politics. No thought. No commentary. No hours to waste.

The pen, the brush, the spear of asparagus and its depiction, these he can control.

“¡Sereno!” he shouts, and the lantern approaches, and the man with the keys emerges from the darkness. The watchman studies his face, opens the door, and lights his way to the third floor, where they bid each other goodnight.

“Love and be loved! I neither want more nor aspire to greater fortune.”—Leandro Fernández de Moratín

Love.

Recently, Goya had come to consider Moratín less as a national treasure and more as a source of nettling vexation. This was principally because the poet, still called Younger Moratín (though he was 68), was always asking Goya for money and, worse, couldn’t keep his eyes off Leocadia. He stared just as lasciviously at Mariquita, who was only 17 and by far the most luminous object in Goya’s universe.

Younger Moratín’s father, the even more debauched Elder Moratín, used to stare at Pepa the same way. But his son had his purposes. Chief among these were his introductions to the rich, portrait-requiring émigré community in Bordeaux, which had grown tenfold in size after the Spanish royalists, backed by the French army, restored the felon king Fernando to absolute power.

Moratín also brought news and gossip from Madrid and a steady stream of thoughtful gifts, such as the double loupe binocles through which, just before falling asleep, Goya had been studying an etching in Point de Lendemain (No Tomorrow), a novel written and illustrated anonymously by Baron Denon in 1777 and given to Goya by its author on the opening night of the Salon de Paris, exactly a year before the Baron’s death, on the very day that Goya purchased the armchair in which he was now sitting, and the matching writing desk on which he was slumped over, asleep.

The plate in the book depicts an elegant couple sitting on a grassy bank in a terraced garden next to the Seine. They are dressed in the formal manner of the French court: he in a powdered wig, tricorne hat, embroidered silk coat, waistcoat and knee-breeches; and she in a thigh-length caraco—a long-sleeved jacket-like bodice open at the front and worn with a boned stomacher and an embroidered petticoat.

A wide-brimmed summer hat of straw with elaborate trimmings is pinned to her hair, which is piled into a high pyramid shaped with pomatum and supplemented with gauze, feathers, ribbons, two birdcages, a naval warship and several strands of Tahitian pearls. Her long gloves, which require, as does her dress, a second set of hands to put on or take off, are lying on the grass next to her; to Goya, the gloves looked like white snakes or blindworms, he could imagine their hiss; and he thought to himself, just before losing consciousness, I would have included a small snake in this picture, though it is not in the story, an adder or a viper poised to strike the hand of the woman, who is smiling enigmatically with her mouth slightly open and her gaze off into the distance, and at the same time relentlessly focussed on the viewer, or, perhaps, looking right through the viewer.

The composition is similar to Watteau’s Le Faux-Pas, which is itself a detail of that painter’s La Danse Paysanne, and to Jan Steen’s Rustic Lovers, or any of the embracing couples in Ruben’s Kermesse, except spun 90 degrees—and the woman in Denon’s illustration isn’t resisting the man’s efforts to lay her down on the grass; if anything, she is the more aggressive party.

Her expression, Goya thought, is as charged and unabashed and shameless as it is impenetrable, and her right arm is entwined proprietarily around the man’s slender waist, while her left hand dangles idly near the grass, exactly where he would have put the lethal snake. Her other hand, which is the focal point of the image, is closed tightly around the man’s erect penis, which is sticking straight out of his unbuttoned britches. His eyes are closed, his mouth just slightly open, his lips pursed from passion, disgust, shame or terror, it is impossible to tell, and his unseen right hand, a counterpoint that moves our gaze despite its unseenness, is inside her petticoat.

Meanwhile, old, deaf, blind, exiled and unconscious Goya, two weeks from death, was dreaming that it was his carajo in the woman’s left hand and that it was not comical, nor soft and shrivelled, nor marred by chancre scars, but unblemished and vital; and he was dreaming, too, or rather thinking, that it was he, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, and not Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, that created this picture, not in an etching but as a drawing in red chalk on antique Japanese laid paper, darker and starker, and coarser, without shading or shadows or Watteauesque sentimentality, and with a lethal viper in the bottom left corner, near the hardened gland in the woman’s hand; and that once he had finished it he had fallen fast asleep at his worktable—in his old studio on Calle Desengaño in Madrid—with the preparatory drawing under his folded arms, on which his over-proportioned head was now resting, and that his work chair—not a twiddly French fauteuil but a proper wooden work chair, a stout, three-legged stool—was now surrounded by a swarm of cats, owls and bats; and that, layered simultaneously over top of these adventitious elements—book, hat, penis, gun, stool, petticoat, sex, owls, bats, cats—he, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Court Painter to His Majesty, the First Painter to the King of Spain and the most important Spanish artist since Velazquez and Ribera, was stalking deer in the Cantabrian Mountains with his grandson Marianito, and grouse and pheasant near the Ebro with Martín, and tapirs in the Yucatán with the conquistadors, and passenger pigeons with Thomas Jefferson in the Indiana territory, in numbers so numerous that as they cross the sky they blot out the sun for days at a time, as if by eclipse, and which fall, 50 at a shot, with each unaimed blast of his musket; and, finally, that he is a tiny, naked figure that he never noticed before, deftly brushed in tempera into the background of Giotto’s The Dream of Pope Innocent III, which he first saw in a transept chapel of the church of San Francesco in Pisa in Italy in 1771 when he was a 25-year-old art student, and then was shocked to see again, on August 25th, 1824, during his first and only trip to Paris, in the “primitive” section of the Italian wing of the Musée du Louvre, in the company of its former director, Baron Dominique Vivant Denon.

This was a half-awake dream by now, a reverie soon to be yanked to full-blown consciousness by Leocadia, who was standing over him in a shimmering silk dress, which Goya thought too revealing (“You wear what you like, so will I,” she had written earlier in the Conversation Book), frowning as she tugged at the sleeve of his drooled-upon jacket.

“Get up, old man,” she said.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should sit in a corner in silence, content that I can breathe. —Franz Kafka

Later, settled into a different armchair, unsure what had just happened, the blood pooling in his head imperceptible to the frenzy of guests eating his food and drinking his wine, his focus returns to the hazy figure of his mistress as she makes her way through the crowded room, charming the men by rebuking them and ruffling the feathers of their tight-laced wives. He imagines the looks she gives, the bewitching flash in her grey-green eyes as she steers to a new prey, leaving the last one silenced and flushed. Leocadia Weiss is rarely the most beautiful woman in a room, but almost always the most attractive. What is she saying? She bends down to him, close enough for him to see her frown, and stares into his eyes. Then she writes something in the Conversation Book, which is on his lap, and disappears into the unfocussed mass.

He can’t find his reading glass, can’t read what she has written.

When he was younger, he often complained about the people he loved. Who, he was sure, loved him just as much in return, but who refused him their favours. After all these years with Leocadia, he understands this better, but this doesn’t decrease his frustration. Desire, to live, must be denied, and love, in all its forms, is like a pheasant disappearing in the brush.

His thoughts aren’t clear. His head is pounding.

Why has he never been able to paint Leocadia’s likeness? Why couldn’t he paint his wife’s? He must change his will. Or has he done this already? Leocadia and Mariquita. Juana, too, his maid. His assistant. He will speak today with Galos the banker about the terms. Javier, his son, will make a fuss, but there is more than enough money and property for everyone. At Javier’s age, he had nothing. He paid for his father’s funeral, paid the family debts, supported his siblings and his nieces, and, at his wife’s insistence, took in his half-scrambled old mother, who shared a room with Javier, filling the poor boy’s head with stories of witches and brujos until she was finally moved to his brother Camilo’s house in Chinchón. Which he also paid for.

And then, he remembers, it was not just Cabarrús’s remains that Brugada had told him about. All at once the rest of the tale comes to him, so focussed had he been that day on trying to walk without Brugada’s support, his feet ablaze with pain from gout—halfway to the shop he bellowed at the young man, who was signing the story with one hand, as the other was occupied with Goya’s shifting, unstable heft, “Can't you make your gestures more discreetly? Do you take pleasure in allowing everyone to see that old Goya is neither able to walk nor to hear?”

He had completely forgotten the other horrific part: the fate of Floridablanca, the disgraced chief minister who first introduced Goya to the court and gave him his first commissions. Floridablanca’s corpse, which had been interred in the next pantheon to Cabarrús in the Cathedral of Seville (he died in 1808, Cabarrús in 1810), was exhumed by the feral king’s henchmen and tossed into the common grave in the Caliphate courtyard of ablutions, where executed criminals were buried. Floridablanca! Who freed the universities and the press and expelled the Jesuits. Who brought gaslights to the streets of Madrid. Who gave his life and his freedom to his country. Who embraced all things liberal, and then, when necessary, when the calamitous events in France required, abandoned and vigorously repressed them.

Where are his portraits of them now, old Goya wonders, old Cabarrús and Floridablanca. Painted so long ago, before the revolutions and the bloodshed, before his deafness and his plagues. Full-length both and among his best, what sad fate had befallen them? Should he ask? Ask who?

Leocadia and Mariquita are in front of him, close enough that he can almost read their lips. Realizing, he is sure of this, they turn away. What is being said about him? Why are all these people here?

Ask who? He has no friends in the present Council and his sworn enemies still thrive. They hold positions backed by absolute power and lie in wait to strike.

He hid from the mob in the priest Duaso’s house four years ago, painting portraits for his room and board before the amnesty allowed him to flee to France. Since, nothing. Twice welcomed home to Madrid, the court generous, his retirement accepted, his pension guaranteed. His portrait by López in the front hall of the new Royal Museum. But there are enemies everywhere and spies everywhere. And who would he ask, anyway? Ghosts know only the past and the future, never the present. This is their only recompense.

Dante learned this from his sworn enemy, Munárriz told him this story, of Farinati, who died in exile and whose corpse the Inquisition dug up two decades later, tried for heresy and burned to ash, along with his dead wife, for publicly celebrating the pleasures of the flesh, for telling all who would listen that they should sup on only the best and most delicate viands, not on dry crusts of bread, and eat without waiting to be hungry, because nothing lasts, and the soul dies the same death as the body.

When the Poet meets this embittered wraith proven wrong, sweltering for all eternity in its fiery coffin in the sixth circle of hell, it spits at its fate and its punishers; and, knowing what the future holds, tells Dante of his own imminent exile: "But the face of Hecate, who reigns in Hell, shall not be 50 times rekindled in its course before you learn what griefs attend that art.”

Mariquita returns with his glasses, helps him perch them on his nose. She opens the Conversation Book. He peers at Leocadia’s last entry: “I will explain that you are tired and that it is time to move the party to Braulio’s shop. Juana will take you to bed.”

He squeezes Mariquita’s hand. She stares at him blankly. Eighty-two and still nothing, still stupid. Why was he not wise? His daughter was lost, he couldn’t see anything but he could see this, and he had nothing to tell her. Not even that she was his daughter.

She who reigns in Hell is Hecate the moon goddess. The mother of angels, the protector of boundaries. Goya painted her for the Duchess of Osuna’s bedchamber 40 years ago, naked but for a leaf crown, a torch in one hand, a viper in the other. “Hecate,” he wrote under the image, as though it were an ex-voto offering from the New World, “the far-reaching one, the source of hag and hex, served by eunuchs and revered by witches.”

On the last night of each month, the night of the new moon, Hecate feeds the spirits of the unavenged, the erroneously executed and the wrongly sacrificed, accompanied by the ravenous dogs of the underworld. He painted her thus, too, for Manuel Garcia de la Prada, in the same batch as his La casa de locos, Escena inquisitorial, Procesión de disciplinantes and the grotesque El entierro de la sardina, with the restless dead and the dogs, but larger and more rapidly, not with more assurance but as if in a fever—X-rays show no pentimenti—with thin layers of black over an orange-rust ground, and tiny drops of white over long swift strokes with a palette knife for her gossamer gown.

Juana will bend down to him soon, help him up with her strong arms.

When Floridablanca and Cabarrús were still in office he did Hecate’s triple-bodied form, the Hekataion, for Jovellanos, standing guard at the shadowed crossroads at nightfall, torches, keys, daggers, and serpents in her six raised hands, watching over the dismembered dead hanging on posts under a portentous sky filled with bats and owls, surrounded by evil-eyed lynxes and snarling hounds of hell. In another, she has the faces of a dog, a polecat and a boar. She is a lasting obsession. Farinati, in his burning tomb: “But the face of Hecate who reigns in Hell shall not be 50 times rekindled in its course before you learn what griefs attend that art.” Goya ponders this anew. Forty-nine lunar revolutions. Forty-nine new moons. Four years and one month. The precise length of Goya’s exile, which will end, as has just been decreed, in 18 days, with his death.

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What can have made Lot consent to receive from his daughters all the cups of wine they kept mixing for him, or perhaps gave him unmixed? Did they feign excessive grief, and did he resort to this consolation in their loneliness, and in the loss of their mother, thinking that they were drinking too, while they only pretended to drink?—Augustine of Hippo

Goya studied his brother’s face long enough to understand what was being requested. “How much money do you want?” he said, cutting him off in mid-sentence. The crops again or the ice sheds, he wasn’t sure, he didn’t care, and he made sure that Tomás saw this. “Your sister was just here with her hand out. Seems she can’t organize her household, either.”

He watched his brother’s eyes narrow.

Tomás, his parent’s favourite. The only one allowed in his father’s workshop. The only one allowed to enter the guild. The only one not to fall prey to the priests.

He pointed at the slate. “I have work to do, just write what you want,” he said, handing Tomás a piece of chalk, knowing that he couldn’t write. Tomás looked at the slate, started talking again. Was he angry? Goya stopped following what the lips were doing and studied instead their shape, and how Tomás thrust them forward—especially the lower—like a monkey.

Tomás’s wife, Maria, was Goya’s first love. He slept with her four times, and she became pregnant. Was she having sex with Tomás at the same time? She had been with Martín, too. Martín had bragged about it. “Smell this,” he had said, holding his finger to Goya’s nose. And this,” he said, laughing as he cupped his crotch.

Maria was the only reason he gave Monkey Face any money. Why have I never painted him, he wondered. Or any of his siblings. He sighed and turned away and called out for Juana.

“If there is any money left from what I gave you yesterday, give it to my brother here,” he said to her. He liked the image this conjured, Tomás accepting his maid’s loose change. “And bring me my banking ledger.” When he turned back, he pretended to be surprised to see Tomás had not moved.

“Is there something else?”

He read the hurt and frustration in his elder brother’s face.

“Yes, Paco. But it is more a question for Pepe. About my daughter.”

The other Maria. He had given her and her deadbeat husband money the winter before. And now she was pregnant again.

“She is not made for farm work, but she is good with her hands,” said Tomás. “She used to help with the gilding, but the guild now prohibits women in the workshops.”

He asked Tomás to repeat, pretending he hadn’t understood, then said, “To live with us?”

Tomás shook his head. “Just long enough to learn from Pepa how to cut and sew.”

“And how much money do you want?” he said again, showing his impatience.

Pepa swatted his shoulder, startling him. Had she been there the whole time? She said something to Tomás. They both had their back to him. He waited for them to turn, to acknowledge his presence. His authority. Instead, they walked out of the room.

His family, bleeding him dry.

He took up his pen.

Later, when Juana returned, he asked her what Tomás and Pepa had discussed. She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not your spy, old man,” she said.

He asked her for his tobacco and a glass of brandy and started another letter.

Dear Martín.

Your silence shatters the windows. What have I done? As you haven’t answered any of my last three letters, I will write another and another and another until you drown in my dulled pettiness. Why are you still in Zaragoza? Everything is business with you, which does not feed the soul. Why are you not here? I need my protector. My family is again conspiring against me. They once saw me as their golden goose, but now that I am almost out of eggs, they’re preparing me for the spit. And the Holy Office wants my head on a pike. Could you speak to someone again? Or we could run away. A tent in the woods, near a stream. I feel like the toro de Fuego we saw last year in Seville, running in terror, flames leaping from my tarred horns, the fire burning for hours, burning my flesh, the horns burnt down to the skull, I smash against the walls, the picadors stab me with their knives, the mob screams for my blood.

Whatever you have given my sister, I will repay when I see you next. In money, in blood, in sweat and seed. You decide. But when? I will paint you a new portrait, with me at your side, surrounded by hares and lambs and grouse, on clouds supported by the breath of angels, and naked as the day god brought us into the world.

Till then, think of me each time your hand descends below your navel.

The man that loves you,

Paco.

Maria moved in the following week. Goya kept away from her at first. Then he asked her to pose for him. She had the same face as her mother. He was curious to see the rest of her. Her mother was the first female he had been inside. When they were thirteen. Tomás married her a year later. Goya refused to attend the ceremony. From that day on, she never again looked at him in the eye. Nor did she ever ask him for anything. Only Tomás did this. Tomás and the other members of his family.

And now he was thinking about his niece, and how she looked exactly like her mother, the first girl he had ever seen naked. And how disturbing these thoughts were. He made the sign of the cross, and later that day, he went to Mass.

A hammer lands on the cobblestones. The sound startles him. This is before his deafness, he is in his early forties, working mainly on tapestry cartoons. He has just stepped into a doorway out of the rain to light a pipe. He looks up to see where the hammer came from— was it thrown?—just in time to see a half-naked man high up on a scaffold lose his footing and fall, arms windmilling, and land on the street with a wet thud.

Now it lies there, a corpse, face down next to the sewer.

He’s too far away to see if there is any blood. Two men emerge from the shadows and walk towards it slowly, barely lifting their feet, as if half dead themselves. One nudges the fallen man with his foot and says something that makes the other laugh mechanically. He watches the laughing man’s shoulders twitch.

He is not yet deaf; the year is 1787, five years before the poisoning; but he is too far away to hear what is being said.

The first man bends over stiffly and rolls the body over. At first, he thinks the bent-over man is going to rifle the fallen man’s pockets; but there are no pockets; the fallen man is wearing only a white shirt, stockings and slippers, no breeches. One of the men points at his cock and balls and laughs.

The two of them are fully dressed, their clothing is ragged. Goya suddenly sees himself, the inappropriate absurdity of his get-up: a large blue hat and a blue velvet coat over a braided and embroidered toreador’s jacket, with three sparkling emeralds concealed against theft in the right pocket. Under this is a white cambric shirt, tight grey toreador trousers and black leather boots from Russia, printed over with bright blue spots. They would most certainly rifle his pockets. He steps into the shadows.

The fallen man opens his eyes and looks around, bewildered, uncomprehending. He raises his right hand to the side of his head, then holds the hand in front of his face. It is covered with blood. The other two men find this hysterically funny. The first points again at the fallen man’s penis, and the other man laughs even harder.

The fallen man cups his groin with both hands and closes his eyes. The bent-over man says something. The fallen man chuckles. The bent-over man stumbles forward, trips over the fallen man and falls himself. The standing man laughs. The tripped man sticks his tongue out the side of his mouth and closes his eyes, pretending to be dead. Then he gets up, dusts himself off, bends down again and raises the fallen man to a sitting position. He slaps the fallen man gently in the face, which is bloated and sun-burnt; they talk; the fallen man nods. The bent-over man places one arm behind the fallen man’s shoulder and the other arm under the injured man’s knee. The standing man bends down and places one arm behind the fallen man. He grasps the bent-over man’s shoulder, then places his other arm under the fallen man’s knees and grasps the bent-over man’s wrist. They lift the fallen man; he leans back against their arms with his head slumped forward. Blood oozes from the wound on the left side of his head. The formerly standing man says something that makes the formerly bent-over man laugh; they drop the fallen man. He falls in a heap on the ground, shaking with laughter. Or is he crying? They lift him again and swing carry him down the street in the heavy rain.

Goya goes home and tells Pepa of what he has seen. “Was he drunk?” she asks. He hadn’t thought of this. After supper, he goes upstairs to his study, closes the door, lights a lamp and sits at his desk, which is actually a large, elaborately carved prie-dieu with the altar on top removed, bought at an auction of goods seized from the Society of Jesus by the Holy Office. He likes the smell of the wood. He often lays his head on it, the surface is always cool. Often, too, in this position, he falls asleep. Now, however, although it is late, he is wide awake.

He sketches out the image of the two drunken men swing carrying their drunken friend, with the scaffolding in the background. No rain, blue sky broken by billowing white cloud. The three figures remind him of drawings he has done of girls on swings, their skirts open, legs apart. He flashes on the Titian in the Palacio Real, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea in the mouth of the cave, carrying the body of Christ, watched by Mary Magdalene and Saint John the Evangelist. Should he put other figures in the background? He makes a quick, small version in oil, using the colours prepared for the king’s Banco de España portrait on the easel. Browns, blues, green, dirty grey and yellow and white.

He will present it to the tapestry factory later in the week. He painted a tapestry cartoon similar to this earlier in the year — two oxen pulling a cart carrying a giant stone; in the background, a half-built church; and in the foreground, two men carrying an injured worker. It is being woven now at the factory. Don Pufiadas wants two more, one for the Prince of Asturias dining room at El Pardo, the other for the bedroom of the infant don Gabriel in El Escorial. Why are the fallen man’s friends laughing? His hair is wet with blood. His slippers have no heels and no toes and are held together with a cord. His stockings have fallen around his ankles. His white shirt is similar to the one he will put on the kneeling victim of the firing squad in the El Tres de Mayo, except it is tattered and soiled. His arms, too, are raised in a similar fashion, except the kneeling figure surrounded by the already executed is not supported by the arms of two comrades. He stands alone, a look of defiance on his face. Is it defiance? Terror? It is impossible to say. He has filled notebooks with these, most dredged up from inside his head. Others that he has witnessed. Men carrying men, one by the legs, one by the body. Men carrying women. Fallen men, fallen women. Women holding dying men in their arms. Women with children, women with brigands, women during the war. He’ll keep this one for himself. Maybe do something with it later. For the tapestry cartoon, no smirks, no laughter. Sombre faces. There are new royal decrees, norms for proper scaffolding, aid for injured workers, damages to families paid by master builders who face jail time and heavy fines should they be found negligent. This is the new social order. This is the dignity of man. He had a dream recently, similar to a recurring one he had as a young man, of a terrified young woman in a white dress carried away by two hooded men. Sometimes the men are monks. Sometimes they are bandits. Sometimes they are death. Sometimes the girl’s legs are tied together with a rope connected to a pulley. He did a small oil sketch of this for Cayetana, the Duchess of Alba — she wanted him to do something like it for the Alba family pantheon in the Noviciado church on Calle de San Bernardo. Why? The woman’s arm is draped over the shoulders of the man holding her waist, whose face is buried in her breasts. The other man, the paid accomplice, holds her legs at the ankles in the crook of his arm and lifts her off the ground like a sacrificial offering.

She can’t move. Does she know her assailants, is that why their faces are covered? There is nothing she can do. She throws her head back as if to scream but no sound comes out of her mouth. Does she not want to be heard? She was walking alone in the emptied meadow of San Isidro, the festival crowds had left. Did he see this? We know why we see what we see, what desire provokes, what lust provides. He sent the sketch to Cayetana, accompanied by a hastily written poem: “The woman who does not want to or know how to take care of herself is the first they snatch, and if there’s no remedy for this, we admire those that take her.” The friar in the back and the coarse farmhand up front doing the heavy lifting, grabbing her around the shoulders, telling her to shut up. She wasn’t asking for it. But what was she thinking? What was he thinking, drawing this, writing this, sending this? She never should have been all alone out in the night dressed like that. Like what? She should have known better. Bad instincts. She knows all sorts of things. Look how she screams. The mouth, gaping. And they carry her away. A crime of passion? A rape. Did he see this? Where did the tree go? He remembers seeing a tree, drawing a tree. Where are the ropes around her legs? Was he present? The tree is missing, the rooftop is missing, the rope around her legs, and the pulley, and the face of the man holding the rope and hoisting her, feet first, into the air, all gone. He is asleep at the desk again. Sometimes he is one of the two hooded figures. Sometimes he is the young woman. Sensations like these are not controlled by reason. He has known terror. He has known anxiety and panic, and anger, and courage. He will experience more of these emotions. He has fought bulls, he has scaled walls.

Thanks for reading.

In late November, Goya and Zapater won three lottery prizes, and with their combined winnings paid for a lavish Christmas Eve feast at the Goyas’ home on Calle Desengaño — “served by ladies,” Goya insisted, “not by loonies (zambombos)”.

Zapater, who won 7,500 reales to Goya’s 2,000, sent a coach-load of seafood, wine, cakes and brandies from Zaragoza. For the after-party, he rented a balcony on Plaza Mayor, so the assembled could watch the Nochebuena run of the bulls and “rest from the fatigues of celebrity.”

A last-minute business meeting in Zaragoza kept Zapater from making the three-day journey to Madrid. Goya, disappointed, drank more than usual and made sure his guests’ glasses were always full.

“Peace on earth,” he shouted repeatedly.

Napoleon’s troops had swept across the Italian States. Venice had fallen. Austria had capitulated. The English were on Spanish soil.

“And goodwill toward all men!”

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2.

In their will, the Goyas asked to be buried in the simple sackcloth habits of Saint Francis. Those thus shrouded, through the time-honoured papal indulgences attached to the purchase of the order’s tunics and belts, benefitted from the intercession of the saint and reached heaven almost immediately after death, even if they had never taken monastic vows.

The Goyas also commissioned the celebration of twenty high masses for each of their souls. They bequeathed twenty reales to each of the four hospitals of Madrid, and twenty more to the Holy Places of Jerusalem — the Tomb of the Virgin Mary, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, three cathedrals, twenty-three other churches and chapels, the grotto and garden of Gethsemane, and the Via Dolorosa. The rest of their wealth and possessions they left to their son Javier.

3.

At the after-party, Goya dictated the following letter to Zapater:

Oh Most Mighty, Generous, and Splendid Gentleman Martín Zapater. Our Dear Sir, to whom all veneration and respect. Overwhelmed by our appreciation and acknowledgment of the bountiful generosity of yr Exc., and how much more of the exquisite delights, delicate Wines and sweet Liqueurs, with which on yr Lordship’s orders we have celebrated the happiness that Luck has seen fit to sanction your enviable state and fortune, we cannot give yr Exc. (as is our obligation, which we hereby acknowledge and admit) such fulsome and expressive gratitude as that of which yr magnanimity and generosity is worthy: Who might have thought, or imagined, that a mean, hard-hearted villain such as yr. Exc. would with such bounty surprise our spirits, disposed (and so concerned) to celebrate, and applaud yr happiness; no-one; which explains why we became so enthusiastic as to be immoderate in our enjoyment: Oh, the toasts! Oh, the repetition of bottles! Ma fois! The coffee plus que café! What bottles, what glasses gracing the air! When I tell you, the glassware of the House was replaced and still and all were heard the merry cries of Viva Zapater! A good fellow, and greater Friend: Viva, and again Viva, let us have more Lots and Lots more, My God but you have true Friends who celebrate your fortune, and give thanks to the Almighty that He should exercise his bounty with men so worthy of it; and as we brought to a fitting conclusion the celebration in unbounded joy and good cheer, what new surprise awaited us! A servant brings a Cab and a missive from the same Gtlemn who has invited us all, to the effect that we have a Balcony over the Borough reserved for our diversion, and for us to rest from the fatigues of such rejoicing. Oh Great day, oh Happy day, on which such excellent sallies, such happiness and such generosity have been applauded: yr Exc. shall no doubt receive this present in quite the same spirit. How you shall applaud! How you shall celebrate it! And as you admit they are true Friends and that they desire nothing other than the satisfactions of yr Exc., your happiness and delight, we remain Sir your grateful Friends and Servants. Whose Humble Respects They Pay.

4.

All the men at the Christmas feast, except Javier, who ate more cake and threw more glasses over the railing than all the other guests combined, signed the letter at the bottom of the first page. The two women present were relegated to the back of the last page. The first, Nicolasa Lázaro, praised the meat pie “as big as a cartwheel.” Under her signature, Goya drew her scantily dressed and blowing a trumpet.

His wife wrote “Que rico pastel dengila escelente” below the drawing, just above a small square of Dutch paper, which fills what space remains at the bottom of the card. On the square of paper is a drawing by Goya of a man bent over with his trousers pulled down to his shoes. His testicles pendulate between his legs; and in the space where his anus should be winks a small, unlidded eyeball — el ojo de culo — the eye of the arse, brazenly meeting the viewer’s gaze.

5.

The “excellent eel cake” was a sweet cake shaped like an eel, not a savoury pie filled with actual eels. Why such confections were given such a shape is answered in Leviticus: “Anything in the seas or rivers that has not fins and scales, whether among all the swarming things or among all the other living creatures in the water, is an abomination to you. They shall remain an abomination to you, of their flesh you shall not eat, and you shall detest their carcass.”

To this day the lowly eel, despite its fins and scales, is a forbidden animal, largely because it resembles the detestable snake that corrupted Eve. Its raw blood is poison, and, like the fly and the worm and the conch, it has no sexual organs, neither gonads nor ova, but generates spontaneously out of putridity, emerging fully formed from sea-foam, river mud and rainwater, and the manes and tails of horses.

In the fifteenth century, after the forced conversion of the Jews, the Cistercian nuns of Toledo, whose order emphasized devotion to contemplation, manual labour, and self-sufficiency, converted the bread rooster of Aragon into the marzipan eel of Castilla, as a means of observing who would consume it in good faith and who would view it as an abomination.

6.

Many philosophers and anchorites, to lead a chaste life, gouged the eyes from their face, because it is through these that one swallows the poison of vice. But was ever scandal, unrest or war brought into the world through the peaceable and virtuous eye of the arse? It is the fellow traveller of the reproductive organs, while the eyes of the face neighbour with lice, head dandruff and earwax.

                                                                                                            —Francisco Quevedo

7.

Why is it here? It is a disconcerting sight, especially on a Christmas card. No doubt Francisco de Quevedo’s poem, “Que tiene ojo de culo es evidente”, from Gracias y desgracias del ojo del culo (“Graces and misfortunes of the eye of the arse”) published in 1627, is at least partially responsible.

That you have an eye in your butt is plain to see,
It’s your red sun, your reeking bunch of hemorrhoidal keys,
and the pile in the pupil of that nether eye
burns hard and hot when you squeeze.
Naturally it’ll discharge its rheumy goop,
spike the lashes like prickly burrs,
and wink, all yellowed and blurred
every time you propel out a poop.
Will your farts brass better
than a mangy Majorcan heffer’s?
I can’t prove or admit this. Whatever.
Your piss is piss, and yes, your shit is shit,
This alone is true, in the end that’s it,
I’m in knots, and it costs too much to sit.

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8.

The eyes of the face, the eyes we display, the corruptible eyes that entice, sparkle and flash; and the honest eyes of the ass, through which we pass gas, but never lies nor sin. Assholes and all that they produce, which in the natural order of things cannot be produced for another by another, but only by oneself, were, at this stage of his life, he is fifty-one, and once again, though deaf, comfortable, both financially and spiritually, an obsession.

The series of drawings he is working on, which will become the etchings of Los Caprichos — by far his most ambitious private work to date, uncommissioned, unprotected, born out of delirium and fever, worked on daily and late into every night (just this morning he finished seven sketches, of which we will only enumerate one, Sopla (1798), below —

— which depicts an old crone standing in the darkness of night before a hovering owl and a naked woman with a bird’s head and wings, pumping a niño-fuelle — a child doubled over and turned into a pair of farting chimney bellows, with the air pumping out of his arse — to blast and fan her witching torch — he is still calling, on Jovellanos suggestion, Los Sueños, a title borrowed from Calderón’s play of 1635:

What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
a shadow, a fiction,
and the greatest good is small;
as all life is a dream,
and even dreams are dreams.

9.

The title also borrows from Quevedo’s 1625 work, Sueños y discursos de verdades descubridoras de abusos, vicios y engaños en todos los oficios del mundo (“Dreams and discourses of truth revealing abuses, vices and deceptions in all the world’s occupations”). Both the Calderón and Quevedo works were in Sebastían Martínez’s library in Cádiz. So, too, was the 1667 treatise by Manuel Marti, the vicar of the Cathedral of Alicante, Oratio Pro Crepitu Ventris habita ad Patres Crepitantes ab Emanuele Martino Ecclesiae Alonensis Decano, (“Discourse in Defence of the Fart, delivered before the Farting Fathers”).

While sitting for his portrait, dressed in a shimmering, high-collared coat of blue and green striped silk taffeta and satin, Martínez read to him passages from the Quevedo, translated from the original Latin on the spot.

And Goya the next morning, when he awoke, was deaf.

10.

Quevedo, here as elsewhere, writes about matters theological, philosophical, and philological, and provides a compendium of useful expressions for the mind, soul and, especially, the body, and most especially the bawdy, including dozens of alternative phrases for farting: “the nightingale of sodomites”; “the releasing of a prisoner from jail where the ass is warden”; “the plucking of a feather, as if the ass was a partridge”; “Between boulder and boulder at dawn, the roar of the river echoes”; and “Between two giant boulders, a monk cries out;” and so on. He also wrote panegyric odes in its honour, such as this:

Someone once asked me... what is a fart?
and I answered very seriously: A fart is a fart,
with air for body and wind for heart.

The fart is like a soul laid waste,
it sometimes thunders, and sometimes blows,
and like water, it flows
with great power, in great haste.

The fart is like a fumigating cloud that flies
and where it lands it decontaminates
It is what lives and what dies
what entertains, distracts and animates.

The fart moans, the fart weeps,
the fart is air, the fart is noise
and sometimes it comes out by accident
and sometimes with a sparkle.

The fart is power, it impresses,
banged into being by the entire world.
because in this world a fart is life
because even the priest lets them rip.

There are educated and ignorant farts
adult farts and farts that toddle,
There are fat farts and there are thin farts,
all depending on the size of the nozzle.

If someday a fart knocks on your door
don't close it, leave it ajar
let it blow, let it spin
see if there is anyone who can breathe it in.

And know, too, that farts are well-raised
They even graduate from those with top grades.
But there is indeed something monstrous about the fart,
for if you endure it, it leads you to the pit.

This poem is finished,
with so much farting I've shot myself through.

And there I’ll leave you, as I head to the kitchen to begin preparations for our cena de Nochebuena. No eel cake, tristemente, as it take three days to make. But many eructation-inducing dishes all the same.

Thanks for reading. See you New Year’s Eve!

¡Felices fiestas!