No Tomorrow

“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.