Naufragios
The order of things is not motionless—Juan Meléndez Valdés, 1773
1.
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, 1773He 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.
Ah,ha,ha!
Are you all Canadian? From Vancouver? Is Hexagon actually a Canuck conspiracy?