Still learning (Nothing to learn).
"No one so far knows what the body can do...
That is, experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do from the laws of Nature alone, insofar as Nature is only considered to be corporeal. — Spinoza
He wishes it would work, Moratín’s hallucination machine, sent to him from Paris along with a set of fancy Senefelder pens, an illustrated treatise on sign language, and more reams of velum than he could use in two lifetimes—how marvellous that would be, transmit a thing into a prism that traps its visible essence and magically casts forth its perfect form, eliminating the need for conjuring—just fill in the lines and shade in the shadows.
But it doesn’t work and this enrages him.
Though disabled by fate he still has most of the major faculties, including the most fundamental perception of all—that of his own existence—and he can still paint and draw better than most everyone whose work he’s seen in Madrid, in Paris, and now in Bordeaux. Just look at the clumsy nonsense of his daughter’s teacher, and then look at his Muguiro portrait, or the milkmaid, or the bullring works, or any page of the albums you care to choose.
But he’s eighty-two, exiled in a land whose tongue he can’t speak or hear, nearing his last breath (though he does secretly half-think he’ll live like Titian to ninety-nine), too vexed by blindness to sharpen his own pencils, half-asleep most of his waking hours and wholly awake most of his sleepless nights, but rich enough and famed enough not to give a rat’s ass, confident that his legacy will support his household for generations to come and that his best work, like Titian’s, like Velazquez’s, like Raphael’s, will survive for centuries.
But, at the same time, he is chronically restless.
So, decided in his heart and mind to wear out, not rust away, he tries again, slips the double glasses over his nose and puts the large magnifier in place and his better eye in the hole at the top of the brass rod until the bottom half of his clouded pupil is directly above the four-sided glass prism, poised at its upper edge, and the likeness of Mariquita, his daughter, posed sideways before him in the washerwoman dress, spectrally re-appears bright and glimmering on the piece of paper beneath his hand.
He blinks, she disappears. He tries again, tries to bring her into focus, but she doubles, darkens, shifts into teary blur.
He lowers his eye, finds the angle, finds Mariquita, traces her quickly with a pencil. Eyes, nose, mouth. He takes his eye away, the illusion disappears. The paper is marked with unsure, shuddering lines.
A trick of light, then. Pointless.
“Don’t move, Mariquita.”
He pushes the camera Lucida’s rod away and sketches her likeness straight, dimmed eye to palsied hand.
There.
He shows it to her, she cocks her head, studies it carefully.
“So fast. And it’s good.”
He is surprised by his pride and says what he always says, “If you can’t sketch a man who has thrown himself out a fourth-floor window”—Mariquita joins in, mimicking his gravelled voice—“in the time it takes for him to hit the ground, you’ll never do anything worth looking at.”
He grumbles, leans in to kiss her cheek.
“But, uncle Paco… it doesn’t look a thing like me.”
He raises his hand to swat and she laughs and turns to the page before, on which a bearded man in a white tunic is sketched, stooped over two walking sticks, tottering forward on arthritic joints.
“Is that you?” she says, giggling. “Is that supposed to be you?”
Aún aprendo—”I’m still learning.” Father Time. He’d seen something similar by Blake in a book on painting by Fuseli and a Renaissance version misattributed to Michelangelo, and Mariquita had been reading Dante’s Convivio to him, and he had written this down— “The good walker reaches his goal and finds rest; the errant wanderer never reaches it; his mind and soul wear out with great effort as he forever looks ahead with greedy eyes”—which he wants to add to the facing page of the folio when he makes it into a print. Which will be when? His sentiments are in flux. Too much wine. Too much coffee. Too old. Too stupid. To bestially stupid and coarse.
Aún aprendo. Aún no estoy aprendiendo.
Another Moratín’s gift, a sun drawing by Niépce, who he met at Daguerre’s diorama last year, makes him even uneasier. In the accompanying letter, which Mariquita translates, Niépce described the process. A thin coat of bitumen tar, the same which Goya uses for his blacks in paintings and to scratch upon for his etchings, is dissolved in lavender oil and applied to the etching plate or the lithographer’s stone. Once dry, the inked image is laid over the surface and the two are left outside for hours or days, depending on the clarity of the sky and the power of the sun’s rays—the bitumen is less soluble when left exposed to light. Solvent then rinses away the unhardened tar shielded by the etching’s lines and dark areas. The now bare surfaces are burned in acid for an etching, or the remaining bitumen serves as the water-repellent material for a lithograph. No scratching, no labour. No artistry. No artist.
Niépce also described a newer process with a camera obscura that requires no etching or drawing and produces permanent heliographic pictures. Original works from actual things miraculously transmitted, not mere copies. The Frenchman seeks an audience with Goya’s banker Galos. He also mentions a combustion machine, self-perpetuating.
He examines the quality of the paper. He is tired. He flips idly through the sign-language book, looking for gestures with folded hands or interlocking fingers. There is none. He asks for hot chocolate, which he will take in his room. Mariquita helps him out of the chair. He waves her off at the stairs, grasps the banister with both claws, and pulls himself up to the first landing. He stops and sits. The blood in his heart and head pound.
Thanks for reading. There’s an audio version of this story under the paywall. Become a paid subscriber!
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Hexagon to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.