1.
“How rich is this hijo de puta?”
2.
He is standing next to the exiled Spanish banker, one of Moratín’s last remaining patrons, in the largest room in the banker’s house on rue Esprit-des-lois. Leocadia and their daughter are with him. Gawking. Brugada too. Moratín somewhere.
The rich banker has bad breath. The room stinks of perfume and formaldehyde.
3.
He can feel Leocadia’s eyes on him. Hijo de puta. He said it to himself, in his head, in his half-dead deaf head. Or under his breath, a spat whisper. Either way, he doesn’t give a shit. Earlier, he farted. No one dared acknowledge it.
4.
The room is a pentagon. The walls are beautiful. Iridescent red and blue enamel, embellished with delicately embroidered gold flowers that make him want to cry.
He is tired.
5.
An ornate Chinese wall cabinet, its four dozen gilt drawers lined in bright green velvet, occupies two of the room’s five walls. French mirrors and English clocks hang above it. Chinese porcelain plates hang on two of the other walls, which are lined with panels of Indian silk and exotic wood.
Satyrs chase nymphs across the milk-coloured tiles on the floor, on which stand ebony cabinets inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl.
The motherfucker must have turned his back on God, how else could he have accumulated all this wretched wealth?
6.
He yanks open the drawers. This makes the rich banker nervous. Jewel-coloured scarabs. Precious stones. Shakespeare’s First Folio. Codices dating back to the Spanish Conquest. South Sea bracelets. Crystals. Bird skulls. The skeleton of a giant bat.
He wants to see the bat smash through the glass, grow new flesh and fur, and fly out the fucking window.
8.
Does he swear too much? Leocadia says yes. His wife said yes. His son says yes. Rosarito just laughs. Rosarito understands him.
9.
The banker tries to tell him of the provenance and significance of each object, but he deliberately keeps his head turned away so as not to see the man’s lips move, and yanks opens another drawer. He is tired. He wants to sit. He wants to go home, he wants to go to sleep, he wants to be curled next to Leocadia, cradled in her arms.
10.
He revisits an image of four sleeping women in a dark prison cell.
“Do not wake them,” says his inscription, “sleep is often the only comfort of the unfortunate.”
11.
He wants Leocadia. He wants to make her laugh. He wants to see her throw her head back and shake and glow. He wants to see her legs thrash. He wants to see her burn with fire.
12.
The banker is waiting patiently, or perhaps impatiently — it makes no difference, he will wait — powdered and poised in his ridiculous striped-green velvet and white silk brocade, holding, as if perusing, an open edition of Quevedo. He’s never read a fucking word of Quevedo. On the desk beside him, Shakespeare, Gracián, Goethe, Locke, and Hobbes, and a gleaming Italian comet-finder, which has never found a comet, nor ever been pointed in the direction of a comet.
Quevedo. I am a was and a will be and an exhausted is.
He laughs. The others look at him. Fuck the others, he cackles.
Does he swear too much? Leocadia says yes. His wife said yes. His son says yes. Rosarito just laughs. Rosarito understands him.
He makes the sign of the cross.
13.
The painted sun chariot of Helios hurtles past frescoed divinities and cyclamen pink clouds on the ceiling, from which hangs, on invisible wires, a taxidermied constellation of lizards, crocodiles, and serpents. Legless birds of paradise rim the cornices above a Persian mosaic frieze. Next to a wooden Virgin on a pillar of red jasper, an exact replica of the Virgin and pillar in the Basilica in Zaragoza, is a filigreed rosewood table, on which sits an automaton of Minerva with her owl. Goya watches the metal owl rise up behind the deity and circle slowly around her head. Minerva pulls back the string of her bow. He again thinks of Leocadia.
The centre of his being, the fiery red ball at his hell core.
14.
His attention returns to what he was looking at before, a painting by Titian, a study for the Entombment of Christ, hung on the fifth wall above a French escritoire. No blood, no gore. No hysteria. The Holy Mother is an old woman in agony, buckled by grief, held standing by the puta. Or maybe it is Martha propping her up, mantling her in striped yellow drapery, with streaks of red that match the streak of light in the sky above them. Joseph is draped in dark red and green. The dead Christ too, slack, the flesh thin, without the usual leaden colour, instead a cold colour under a brown ground, neither purple nor green, some red. The lights are warm.
He lowers himself into the desk’s chair and slides open its top drawer, which is filled with more bird and bat skeletons, a golden Aztec knife, and a French snuff box.
What if he were to take the snuff box?
He slams the drawer shut.
15.
He is tired. Tired of bankers. Should he pose this motherfucker at his desk like Jovellanos, fingers interlocked under the Quevedo, a wearied look on his jowly mug, maybe a bat or two behind his head, Minerva on the rosewood table and a portentous skull in the bottom corner?
Tired. Tired of portraits. Tired of the arrangements, the staging, the pretense, the pose. He wishes he could drop the curtain. He wishes he could sleep. Dormir, tal vez soñar. Shakespeare has been rattling around in his half-dead head since yesterday, at the chocolaterie, when Moratín read them his seven ages of man.
Última escena de todas, Que termina esta extraña y movida historia, Es la segunda infancia y el mero olvido, Sin dientes, sin ojos, sin gusto, sin nada.
16.
As you like it? As you like what? Sans everything. Eighty-two years old and again a child. Still a child, always a child.
17.
Leocadia and the banker are still talking. Is she flirting? She is dressed provocatively. He has never seen this dress before. He can’t see what they are saying. He doesn’t care. The banker, whose pirate family’s wealth comes from slave sugar and palm oil, seeks what all his ilk are after, painted affirmation of his princely tastes and abiding glory, purchased this time not just with money — two thousand gold napoleons, more if Goya includes the man’s puny hands — but also a property investment scheme paying monthly dividends. Which will be signed over to the children.
Maríanito and Rosarito. We haven’t met them yet. We don’t know what to think about them.
He watches Rosarito set up the easel and the table for his brushes and paint. He needs to change his will to include her. And her mother. This thought further exhausts him. The last attempt, drawn up with Moratín two weeks ago, offered both a sizeable and fair sum — fair, more than fair — more than enough to live on.
Leocadia tore it to pieces.
18.
He takes a sip from a pocket flask given to him by his neighbour-in-exile Molina, the first constitutional mayor of Madrid — whose portrait he just finished, and who he voted for four years ago, which seems like two lifetimes ago. The flask contains valerian powder and syrup confected from Malaga wine, saffron, laudanum, cinnamon, and cloves.
He enjoys drunkenness. What it is about disordered oblivion that so invigorates the senses? More: is essential to self-possession, serenity, equipoise.
Work — not this toadying, this shoring up — wine, laudanum, hunting, fighting, fucking, even the bilious fever that keeps returning. All are preferable to the interminable day-to-day. Almost a century’s worth — like Titian, this is what he is now thinking, he will live to be ninety-nine. He is sure of it. And then he will be dead.
And the ghost will wander off. And be gone like a dream.
19.
Ars moriendi. The art of dying. He searches for the right word. Oblivion is too metaphysical. Escape is too grandiose. Isolate. Retreat. Hide in emptiness, in futility, a self-contained world, a world of his own contriving. This is what matters. The facts are not the essence. This is why he must get in close when he creates, there can be no separation, physical or moral, no space for judgment, everything and everyone, every participant, every subject, every artist, every spectator, every horizon, every drape and colour must be on the same plane of vision. No distance means no indifference. All the world and all the players. Bankers, princes, fools, witches, ghouls. Mere mortals all. Hijos de putas. He among them. If he did not have to boot-lick, if he did not have to pretend to listen, if he were able to call up into supremacy the more divine part of his being, not the merely human, the merely brutal.
Or is the opposite true?
The thought stops there. He is tired. All five are now staring at him, waiting. He needs this world still. He needs to make a living, secure a life for his son’s family and keep his cock up, and eat well — during the war, like everyone else, they ate whatever was available, cat, rat, horse — but all this energy now, even in these relatively fat years, just to balance a book, make the ends meet, cover the expense of being. And then.
Dead.
20.
Still, nothing to stop him from putting his head down again. Rest his mind. Dream a bit. Pull a few images from the fire.
22.
He needs to piss. His hands tremble. His leg aches. He rubs his eyes, scratches the temples with his fingernails, and hears the sound of the scratching in his half-dead skull.
23.
The desk is worth more money than his father made in his entire life. He puts his head on its surface. It smells of leather, ink, rust, blood. He closes his eyes.
15 IV 1828. Bordeaux.
NEXT
Chapter 3: Las siete edades del hombre