I only see illuminated and unilluminated bodies, planes that advance and planes that retreat, reliefs and depressions. —Francisco de Goya y Lucientes
21.X.1776
In the second painting, Goya is at his easel in the studios of Don Antonio Rafael Mengs, First Painter of His Majesty. Next to him at their own easels are his brothers-in-law, Francisco and Ramon Bayeu, whose sister, Josefa, Goya returned from Italy to marry three years ago — three years, two dead sons and a miscarriage ago — not out of love or lust so much as to secure his place. This place.
Unlike the copiers dutifully copying copies around him, he is, for the first time since coming to Madrid, creating something that did not already exist: a pretty maja selling oranges and perhaps herself to five foppish men picnicking on the banks of the Manzanares River. Despite owing much to Watteau, and even more to Tiepolo, this is his first true “invention”—this is the word he uses in the invoice he is writing: “Yo, Francisco Goya, having executed this painting (of my own ynbención), which serves as model for a tapestry to decorate the piece wherein dine the Prince and Princess of Asturias in the Palacio del Pardo, no longer needs to mimic my so-called masters, for I have mastered them, their tired conceits and guile, and learned by rote the hard fluent facts of the city and the court and am putting this on display, ten feet and ten fingers wide, nine feet and fourteen fingers high, for all the world to see and know, at the insulting price of seven thousand reales, of which less than half will ever see the inside of my pocket.”
After, he will scan what he has written, and tear it up. Too arrogant, even for an Aragonese. He takes a fresh sheet of paper and starts a new one.
29.VII.1886
The third, multiple scenes within a single frame, shows Goya at forty-two shaking with ague, for which he just swallowed a swig of wine laced with lemon juice, rose leaves, and an excessively strong decoction of Jesuit bark from Peru, a pound of which he procured from the Royal Pharmacy. Despite his fever and chills, in all outward appearances, he is the very picture of bourgeois robustness and good trim, dandily dressed in the latest Brummellian fashions from London and Paris — long hair unpowdered under a cocked black hat, dark grey frock coat, tight yellow buckskin breeches with tassels at the knee over white stockings and high leather riding boots — and propped up, rigid with fear, against the lazyback on the dickey box of his newest gig, a gilded and enameled English four-seater with giant blue wheels. One of only three in Spain, it is the lightest carriage on the market and frighteningly fast; when the man from whom he just bought it, who is sitting next to him, money pouch still clutched in his hands, asks Goya if he wants to learn to turn, or rather, as it turns out, to overturn, “a la napolitan,” Goya gladly hands over the reins. They have already galloped two leagues out of the city and are racing across the Parque de El Capricho, which is now the international airport, but at the time was a vast, fountain-filled garden planted with rare trees from around the world. Goya wants to show off his new ride to his best patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, who own this land and all the lands around and have built a house here exclusively for his own use. But they won’t ever see the gig, for the poor horse, already frothing under its tack, is whipped cruelly, and off they go even faster, careening through the curve and cartwheeling down an embankment. The money is lost, scattered in the air like the papers in the Hokusai woodblock, and Goya’s right leg is smashed in four parts. A large bone tumor will be found in the same leg four decades later. He will limp from now on, until the final day of his confinement, and the first day of his death.
21.I.1793
In the fourth picture, he is an invalid yet again, struck down by mysterious ailments the very day that Louis XVI, the Spanish king’s French cousin, received the guillotine blade at the Place de la Révolution so ineptly that the stroke did not slice through his neck but through the back of his head and jaw, and then, aided by the full weight of the executioner standing on the blade, through his spine.
Goya here is forty-seven years old and in Cadiz, a hundred leagues from his wife and son, lying torpid in a small bed in the library of his friend and patron Sebastian Martínez. He is deluged with what he thinks is colic pain, or perhaps yellow fever — there are twenty-five quarantined ships in the harbor — but is probably the result of his ten-year over-ingestion of chinchona (the Jesuit bark mentioned above), which contains high levels of quinine, which, in too large doses, causes vision and hearing loss, vertigo, tinnitus, headache, delirium, arrhythmia, anemia, abdominal pain, nausea, and diarrhea. Impotent, depressed, half-paralyzed, wholly deaf, three-quarters blind, aching in every joint and cavity, Goya lies in the dark, visited by dark visions, too poorly and too disoriented to lift his head to look at the prohibited books in the library, or the erotic prints and paintings in every nook and niche on the walls, including the three overdoors he himself painted and delivered last year, of sleeping maidens in varying states of undressed reverie. Too poorly and too disoriented to even know, not unlike the poor king of France, as he will write tomorrow to his friend Martín, “if my own fucking head is still on my fucking shoulders.”
0.XI.1808
The fifth shows a man in his sixties, no longer a self-described “capon” but an undomesticated cock, endowed anew with mercurial balls. This transformation is due to a twice-daily dosage of Canary wine infused with boiled valerian root, reinforced, this week, by a jujube of minced testicle from a live fox captured by his brother Tomás last week in Fuendetodos, and a bitter pill of dried blister beetle from the Caspian Sea, which, yesterday, a physician in Zaragoza assured him, will afford any man “carnal treatment a hundred times on the trot”; after which, if not spat out immediately, it will turn his skin black and kill him dead on the spot.
This change in erectability has not visibly increased his hardihood on this particular cold night as he returns by coach to Madrid under escort by the French Imperial Guard to begin a portrait of the new king of Spain, the Corsican usurper José Napoleon. Pepe Botella — he was said to like wine — was restored to the throne just three days ago, seven months after his brother, Louis Bonaparte, the Emperor of the French, kidnapped and sequestered the previous two. He is the fourth king under which Goya has dutifully served.
Five months ago, the French lost a fifth of their troops and control of Madrid. Poor José was forced to pack up his looted gold and art and flee. Last month, however, the French, under Ney, after amassing a quarter of a million men on the Ebro — the river where, as a boy, with Martín, whose grave he visited last night, fished for catfish and carp—successfully besieged, stormed and laid waste to Zaragoza, whose gate Goya has just left—the same gate where he encountered King Carlos III and the future Carlos IV fifty years ago, and where, for all the months he was holed up here (three? four? five? six?) or near here (it is close to certain that he spent most of it six leagues away, hiding in the house of his brother, in their hometown of Fuendetodos), typhus killed four hundred people every day, and two thousand French artillery shells showered down daily from the sky.
Despite his newly grown pair, he is sorely afraid. He wonders if his wife and son are alive. He wonders if his studio has been ransacked — there is an unfinished equestrian portrait of Fernando VII, the second of the kidnapped kings, on one of the easels. He wonders if his French escort will go through the satchel he is clutching to his chest, which is filled with the sketches of atrocities and abominations he has observed, imagined, or invented, on the besieged streets of Zaragoza. He wonders if his French escort can protect him, for outside the city’s gates, on this road, in these dark hills, guerrillas butcher soldiers and string up collaborators, cut off arms and legs, slice off pricks, and stuff them in their victims’ mouths.
17.VI.1819
Sixth, a narrative series again, in three consecutive frames. Goya is seventy-three, widowed seven years, shot through with fever. He is reluctantly eating through a straw while watching his grandson and daughter squabble in the main room of his casa de campo, a draughty farmhouse on a squat blue hill near the Manzarenes River. Last night’s dream is smudged on the wall: the naked fleshless god Saturn, skin stretched over bones, eyes flashing, the bleeding body of his son held in his hands, about to bite off its arm. He has already bitten off his son’s head. He, however, Goya, possessed of few serviceable teeth, is sucking minced ham, mashed carrots, apple sauce, and wine, a ghastly invention of Leocadia, who is obviously trying to send him early to his devil.
She was in a particularly foul mood this morning: her sons, Guillermo and Joaquín, drifted off into the woods yesterday, probably to join the Republicans, and have not returned. And Javier is somewhere south of Madrid, fighting with the city’s volunteer militia against the Royalists.
Leocadia’s last words to him, delivered with her usual severity as he clumsily tried to button her dress, were: “Make sure Rosarito does her music and reads her German. And don’t put any more damn paint on the walls.”
“They’re my walls, woman.”
She glares at him. Then at the monstrosities on the closest walls: two whores cackling at an old imbecile furiously masturbating, his face contorted with spasms of pleasure; two exhausted and bloodied men dressed in rags, stuck up to their knees in mud, clubbing each other with cudgels.
“Go,” he says. “Find your sons. All will be fine.”
An hour later, Mariquita, having hummed a bagatelle with her lips pressed against his skull — so he could hear it, too, she explained — and his grandson, Marianíto, who hates this peasant girl because she’s the daughter of Leocadia, his mother’s orphaned half-cousin, a puta who sleeps in his grandfather’s bed — are throwing blobs of paint at the broad frieze of bucolic eyesore — flat sheep, dingy shepherds, and trees — painted by or for the previous occupant, and still on the mildewing walls a year later.
“Green,” says the old man, perching his glasses back on his nose.
Marianíto — who he still calls Nanito — gingerly scoops two fingers of green paint from a pot on the floor and flicks it feebly at the painting. The old man pounds his stick and
“Black!” he shouts.
Mariquita races to the black pot, which is bigger than the rest, sticks both fists in up to her elbows and hurls huge dripping gobs of black paint at the wall. Goya pounds his stick with approval.
“Well?” he asks.
Nanito stares at the meager splatters on the wall in front of him. “A foot?” he says. He hates this game. “And a face. An old lady.”
Mariquita cocks her head and stares hard at her inventions. “A giant billygoat. With a beard. Wearing a long gown like a priest, like what Father José wears, and sitting on his butt, talking to a bunch of crazy old witches.”
He beams, pounds the stick, picks up a paintbrush, and holds it out to his daughter. “Uncle Paco, you promised!” she says, trying to pull him out of the chair. He sighs, lets himself be lifted. Nanito steps unhappily to the side as he shuffles past him on two sticks, studying the patterns of wet paint, needing to piss, thinking what on earth he will say to the girl’s high-strung mother, who runs his home and his heart. He smears the blobs on the wall with his fingers and a brush into faces, feet, and a giant he-goat. The girl watches, transfixed.
22.IV.1827
The last one now, the best, the darkest. Goya, eighty-one years old, exiled in Bordeaux, a year away from the ultimate gift: dying not for a cause but in bed, peacefully, and for no good reason, without having been shot, stabbed, garrotted, or poisoned. He is still on the felon king Fernando VII’s payroll, still official painter to this despotic vindictive incompetent chain-smoking stew-chewing vulgar deformed obesity whom he loathes, who loathes him, who bankrupted the country and lost the empire, who drove out, jailed or murdered every forward-looking man and woman in Spain, and who wanted him, the greatest painter in Spain — in Europe! — to stand in front of a tribunal of mothballed clerics and defend his work and beg for their forgiveness.
His exile, however, is self-imposed; his glowering portrait, painted a year ago by López, the king’s new favorite, hangs in the royal collection in Madrid; and were his legs not gone he would be free to come and go as he pleases; and he still paints and draws as he pleases; and if he leans in close the doubled spectacles, a gift from the banker Gallos, bring the perceivable world into workable view. But he relies mainly on memory and imagination and accident: a puddle of water on a drop of paint, a drop of paint on a puddle of water. Nearer to the end, in just a few months, he won’t be able to see, not even through a loupe, how the paint hits the canvas or pools in water on the miniature’s ivory, or how a murderous bull let loose in a panicking crowd emerges from scraped-away crayon on a lithographer’s stone. Gored through with cancer and poison, beset by aneurysmal strokes, he will be too frail to stand and pace at the easel.
However, it will be a fall that will dispatch him, less than a year from now, a fall down a flight of stairs that will spare him his second childishness; and we too will spare him that indignity, and pose him instead here, resurfacing from an afternoon nap, and staring at his hand, which is stained with black crayon; holding it close to his face, willing a tremor he can’t see to subside. Let this then be the last scene before the death mask and the burial plot, before his final, headless sleep (somewhere between deathbed and coffin his head was severed by the autopsists and then stolen, or borrowed and mislaid), with the rosary in his hands and the painter’s palette on his stilled breast, waiting patiently to join his beloveds — Martín, Josefa, his brothers and sister and his parents and all his dead children, the names of whom he has long ago forgotten, but who nevertheless haunt him still.
His living son, however. The itch of dissatisfaction revives him. Javier, too busy in Madrid to visit, has obviously forgotten him or cruelly pushed him from his mind. What business Javier might have, beyond spending money that is not his, that was meant for the grandson, and selling off his property, his prints and paintings, his legacy, confounds him. His daughter-in-law loathes him, loathes his Leocadia, refuses to allow Nanito to visit. Leocadia is distracted by her sons. Brugada annoys him. Younger Moratín, too, with his lecherous stares and his Shakespeare and his father this and his father that. Only the company of his daughter Mariquita provides pleasure. She brings him warm cups of chocolate cut with wine and sits with him for hours, listening to his nonsense, copying his sketches, learning his secrets, mastering his craft. He has had her copy his most recent paintings, portraits of the bankers Muguiro and Gallos. Bankers, bankers, bankers. She also helped him blot out José Napoleon’s face and replace it with the mayor’s. Now he has her copying from nature: a bottle, a ceramic figurine of a bull, a milkmaid, two fading flowers from the garden, an apple with a bite out of it. And another bite. And one more. She does this quickly, he doesn’t notice, except for the movement.
“Be still, girl.”
He has stopped making lithographs. Miniatures are beyond him. But he is still sketching. He scrawls a line from Cervantes under the image of an old man looking upward: “In last year’s nest there are no birds this year.” He looks always forward and there is one more invention to come, a new series, which he will call Ars moriendi. The art of dying, or maybe the dying of art. The idea is inspired by the old book now open before him, a sixteenth-century Spanish translation with German woodcuts, a gift from Jovellanos, recuperated during his visit to Madrid last year. He holds it to his nose, the glass pressed to his best eye. Deathbed vigils. Consoling angels. Tempting demons. Monsters of avarice, pride, and despair.
And, in the background, almost hidden, the last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history.