My paintbrush should not see this any better than I do. — Francisco de Goya y Lucientes
1.
In this city, eighteen days after this date and two days after Goya’s autopsy (during which, for reasons unknown, Laffargue sawed off his head), the dead painter was carried from the Eglise Notre-Dame-du-Chapelet to an open grave in La Chartreuse cemetery, where he was buried, sans tête, and forgotten, for seventy-two years.
2.
Then, on his birthday in 1900, his coffin was dug up and shipped by train to Madrid, where, over a period of thirty-seven years, he was reinterred, disinterred, reinterred, disinterred, and reinterred once more.
3.
Now it is time to resurrect his soul.
4.
If ever our Lord or the Devil or Hecate the moon goddess were to grant this dead man’s spirit the right to return from their hereafters, and we the spiritual authority to address it, and ask of it the names and attributions that best described its foregone being, and the physical means to adjoin to these our own, taking advantage of what we know, which it most certainly does not (ghosts have no access to textual authorities, nor the instrumentality of the senses), what terms would appear on this final registry, and in what descending order?
Artist followed by noble. He was proud of his illiterate mother’s hidalgo roots. Aragonese. Father. Grandfather. Then, packed together like wild horses: deaf, exiled, Spanish, hunter, Madrileño, son, lover, husband, self-made (but classically trained), Catholic, agnostic, bisexual, libertine, machista, brother, prudent, hypochondriac, free-thinker, watchful, precipitable, persecuted — by this stage his riders have sole possession of the field, and he is rolling fast toward consciousness — for he is asleep, and old, and enfeebled, and exhausted.
5.
Closed off from the world. Most cruelly forgotten. Never properly remembered.
6.
His life and work all but blanked out. His paintings mouldering in cellars and garrets. His prints and plates sequestered in the salas reservadas of the felon king or hidden in the walls of his houses in Madrid, or in his farmhouse on the Manzanares, or his present apartment in Bordeaux, or the house in the suburb of Saint-Seurin that he and his mistress were forced to vacate last September, when the landlord, a Freemason, declared that renovations were “urgente et immédiatement necessaire.”
7.
His church reliquaries and altars were hacked to pieces by the French. His portraits of the French were hacked to pieces by the partisans.
8.
His intimates are incarcerated, executed, dead or defiled — in fact, he just learned, from Brugada, just yesterday, while leaning on the young man’s arm as they inched their way towards his eighty-second birthday lunch at Braulio Poc’s chocolate shop on the rue de la Petite-Taupe, that the Holy Office’s henchmen, following the vindictive orders of their felon king, had removed the remains of Francisco Cabarrús from his tomb in the Cathedral of Seville and thrown them into the Guadalquivir river. Cabarrús, who turned that very river into a navigable waterway, linked it to the ocean and made it wide enough for shipping. Who brought clean drinking water to the city of Madrid. Who invented Spain’s central bank and printed its first legal tender. Who safeguarded the country and the colonies’ finances through the headiest years of King Carlos III and the earliest missteps of King Carlos IV, and then again, two decades later, during the first turbulent years of the intruder king Bonaparte.
9.
Cabarrús! An avatar of progress, a creator of stability and civility on a scale that the bankrupting felon and his exhausted elite — mothballed, resentful, corrupted, inbred — never dreamt of, let alone dreamt possible. And where is this good man, this great man Cabarrús now? Abob in the North Atlantic.
Fortune confiscated. Heirs dispossessed. Country buried.
10.
Reason and truth burnt to ash.
11.
Does Goya care? Not by this point. For in his spectral mind — intelligence is a purely spiritual faculty, the Church Fathers taught us this, independent of the sensory faculties — he is simply grateful to still be here, on the last night of the month, the night of the new moon and, coincidentally, the most recent solar revolution since his birth, seated comfortably at the deipnon meal of Hecate and her restless dead, alive but barely alive, barely real, eighty-two-years-old, stone deaf for thirty-six, a fawning hireling of the Royal Courts of Spain for sixty, almost blind for seven, exiled in France for four, constipated since Tuesday, incontinent since June, impotent since the last century. Riddled with gout, beset by gastritis, paresis, stomatitis, enterocolitis, paralysis of the bladder, tumors of the liver, kidney, lung and right femur, thickening and hardening of the bowel wall and a bewildering besiegement of other arteriosclerotic and neurological disorders — “those who do not perceive that they are wasted by serious illness are sick in mind” (Hippocrates) — , the underlying cause painter’s colic, resultng from lead poisoning or mercury poisoning, or cadmium, arsenic, antimony, tin, cobalt, manganese, and chromium poisoning, or venereal and bacterial infections, or chain-smoking, or a weakness for wine, or a love of laudanum, or all of these; but mainly, he thinks, sleeplessness. Lifelong, debilitating, monstrous, incurable. Una vida insomne e insensiblemente triste. This is what he thinks. I cannot sleep, he thinks, because of the unbearable sadness around me. I cannot sleep, he thinks, because the world has been torn from its orbit, because time itself is unstuck, it has burst like a pustule, the dead are blunged in with the living, the past is no longer the past, it is a trembling spilth infecting and enslaving the present and no doubt the future, and everything within and beyond, all reality, all history, all being, all of which are irredeemably falsified; and my oversized skull, this is what he thinks, and how he sees it, my colossal head, which flops and wheels like a dandelion blow-ball at the end of the outstretched neck of a plucked goose, is filled, inexplicably, day and night, with caterwauling nonsense, with screeching lynxes and swarms of bats and malevolent parliaments of giant great horned owls. Which is intolerably awful. I cannot sleep, he thinks, but suddenly, sí, de repente, suddenly, he realizes that somewhere in the manifold coreness of his vital force an incandescent light has unexpectedly turned on, and in startled haste the frenzied bats and owls have taken wing, and the giant baleful cats have slunk off into the shadows; and he, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Court Painter of His Majesty the Felon King of Spain and three kings before, is precisely that which he had thought he would never again be — asleep! — and beside himself to thus find himself, so bursting with bliss that he is almost tumescent, and instinctually he touches his groin and then tries to cross himself, to make the sign of the cross, and give deaf voice to this bright blessing — “en el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo” — but does not because he cannot, not because he no longer believes in God or the Trinity, nor because God knows and sees his onanistic shame, nor because he is a reanimated wraith. He cannot bless himself, cannot physically make the sign of the cross and recite the Trinitarian formula, which he has done at least once every week since he was three years old, for the simple reason that he is dozing in an armchair, with his arms folded under his massive head on the cool surface of a writing desk.
12.
¡Dormido!
13.
The word sends quivers from the top of his head to the marrow of his heels. No cats, no birds, no bats, and except for the quivers he is senseless, inert, his consciousness suspended, his world forgotten, the past no longer puddled but back where it belongs, disappearing downstream, the future far, far ahead, the present a slow-moving bark gently lapped by waves of mere and sheer oblivion. ¿Cómo es posible? He is not sure. ¿Dónde estoy? Not in his bed or his mistress’s bed but in an armchair, not in his bedchamber or his mistress’s bedchamber but on the landing, just below the landing’s south-facing window, from which, were he not sleeping (and just as blind as the just-fled bats), he would be able to see the bell tower of Eglise Saint-Michel, and the twin towers of the cathedral of Saint-André — the half landing between the two floors on which he and his so-called second family — Leocadia Weiss, née Zorrilla, his mistress; Mariquita, his daughter; and Guillermo, his stepson — have lived for the last nine months of their miserable four years in Bordeaux.
14.
No.
15.
This is not true, and this is the place for the truth, he says to himself, the solid testimony of truth.
16.
Así que, ayúdame.
17.
His time in Bordeaux has been the opposite of miserable. New friends, new inventions, new techniques. New freedoms. Charges against him dropped. The Secret Chamber of the Inquisition dissolved. His finances in order. His legacy assured. His mistress, if not happy, happier. A visit just now from his beloved grandson, Marianito. A precocious and talented daughter, Mariquita, who favors him with kindness and unqualified love, who hangs upon his every word, and who is perhaps the greatest phenomenon in the world of art at her age, and has astounded all the painting professors in Madrid and Bordeaux, and whose forgeries of his works are flawless. And he, eighty-two, still alive, still working every day, covering with his genius every scrap of paper, wood or carton he can get his shaking hands on.
18.
Often, he repaints these the next day.
19.
At his present stage of decrepitude, the world rarely arranges itself into a picture. Pero no está tan mal y mucho más peor por venir. Much worse pain, fewer pleasures, much more forgetfulness; and, then, suddenly, si, repente, just like that, dead.
20.
¡Muerto! Si. In just over two weeks. Not of the above bewilderment of besiegements, of which his French doctors are desperately ignorant, of which all existing medical science is gropingly blind, but of a hematoma, subacute, intracranial, undetected, described in Laffargue’s autopsy report, which goes missing, as does his head — ¡será enterrado sin su caraja cabeza! — as a pooling of blood in the brain during what is now called the “lucid interval,” this is what doctors call it today, when a victim falls prey during what is now called the “talk and die” period to delayed but devastating bleeding inside the skull at the brain stem, which regulates consciousness, breathing, and the heart, and links the brain to the body's most important motor and sensory nerves. All because of a fall. His fault entirely, a clownish bungle that will occur in four minutes, down these very stairs, backward, head over heels, like a straw manikin tossed on a blanket at Carnival — he has painted this, the painting is in the Prado, you can see it tomorrow — four feet from the armchair in which he is now so serenely snoozing.