Now I see it
Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a man sees? — Job: 10.4
Warning: This is in Hexagon’s Goya section. It does not contain information about France, Paris, politics or food. If you’re looking for something on one of those subjects wait for next Sunday’s post or head here.
Meanwhile…
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.
Very terrifying.