Ever since I had the strength to gnaw a bone, I have had the desire to speak, to say things that I stored away in my memory; but once in there, old and numerous, they either got mouldy or I forgot them.—Dialogue of the Dogs, Miguel de Cervantes, 1617
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.
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.