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!”
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.
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!
I like the threads of thought here... the Calderón reminds me of Chassignet, not that many years earlier, in his Tourbillon from Le Mépris de la vie et consolation contre la mort:
Qu’est-ce de votre vie ? un tourbillon rouant
De fumière à flot gris, parmi l’air se jouant,
Qui passe plus soudain que foudre meurtrière.
Bonnes fêtes!