Here Comes the Bogeyman
What can have made Lot consent to receive from his daughters all the cups of wine they kept mixing for him, or perhaps gave him unmixed? Did they feign excessive grief, and did he resort to this consolation in their loneliness, and in the loss of their mother, thinking that they were drinking too, while they only pretended to drink?—Augustine of Hippo
Goya studied his brother’s face long enough to understand what was being requested. “How much money do you want?” he said, cutting him off in mid-sentence. The crops again or the ice sheds, he wasn’t sure, he didn’t care, and he made sure that Tomás saw this. “Your sister was just here with her hand out. Seems she can’t organize her household, either.”
He watched his brother’s eyes narrow.
Tomás, his parent’s favourite. The only one allowed in his father’s workshop. The only one allowed to enter the guild. The only one not to fall prey to the priests.
He pointed at the slate. “I have work to do, just write what you want,” he said, handing Tomás a piece of chalk, knowing that he couldn’t write. Tomás looked at the slate, started talking again. Was he angry? Goya stopped following what the lips were doing and studied instead their shape, and how Tomás thrust them forward—especially the lower—like a monkey.
Tomás’s wife, Maria, was Goya’s first love. He slept with her four times, and she became pregnant. Was she having sex with Tomás at the same time? She had been with Martín, too. Martín had bragged about it. “Smell this,” he had said, holding his finger to Goya’s nose. And this,” he said, laughing as he cupped his crotch.
Maria was the only reason he gave Monkey Face any money. Why have I never painted him, he wondered. Or any of his siblings. He sighed and turned away and called out for Juana.
“If there is any money left from what I gave you yesterday, give it to my brother here,” he said to her. He liked the image this conjured, Tomás accepting his maid’s loose change. “And bring me my banking ledger.” When he turned back, he pretended to be surprised to see Tomás had not moved.
“Is there something else?”
He read the hurt and frustration in his elder brother’s face.
“Yes, Paco. But it is more a question for Pepe. About my daughter.”
The other Maria. He had given her and her deadbeat husband money the winter before. And now she was pregnant again.
“She is not made for farm work, but she is good with her hands,” said Tomás. “She used to help with the gilding, but the guild now prohibits women in the workshops.”
He asked Tomás to repeat, pretending he hadn’t understood, then said, “To live with us?”
Tomás shook his head. “Just long enough to learn from Pepa how to cut and sew.”
“And how much money do you want?” he said again, showing his impatience.
Pepa swatted his shoulder, startling him. Had she been there the whole time? She said something to Tomás. They both had their back to him. He waited for them to turn, to acknowledge his presence. His authority. Instead, they walked out of the room.
His family, bleeding him dry.
He took up his pen.
Later, when Juana returned, he asked her what Tomás and Pepa had discussed. She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not your spy, old man,” she said.
He asked her for his tobacco and a glass of brandy and started another letter.
Dear Martín.
Your silence shatters the windows. What have I done? As you haven’t answered any of my last three letters, I will write another and another and another until you drown in my dulled pettiness. Why are you still in Zaragoza? Everything is business with you, which does not feed the soul. Why are you not here? I need my protector. My family is again conspiring against me. They once saw me as their golden goose, but now that I am almost out of eggs, they’re preparing me for the spit. And the Holy Office wants my head on a pike. Could you speak to someone again? Or we could run away. A tent in the woods, near a stream. I feel like the toro de Fuego we saw last year in Seville, running in terror, flames leaping from my tarred horns, the fire burning for hours, burning my flesh, the horns burnt down to the skull, I smash against the walls, the picadors stab me with their knives, the mob screams for my blood.
Whatever you have given my sister, I will repay when I see you next. In money, in blood, in sweat and seed. You decide. But when? I will paint you a new portrait, with me at your side, surrounded by hares and lambs and grouse, on clouds supported by the breath of angels, and naked as the day god brought us into the world.
Till then, think of me each time your hand descends below your navel.
The man that loves you,
Paco.
Maria moved in the following week. Goya kept away from her at first. Then he asked her to pose for him. She had the same face as her mother. He was curious to see the rest of her. Her mother was the first female he had been inside. When they were thirteen. Tomás married her a year later. Goya refused to attend the ceremony. From that day on, she never again looked at him in the eye. Nor did she ever ask him for anything. Only Tomás did this. Tomás and the other members of his family.
And now he was thinking about his niece, and how she looked exactly like her mother, the first girl he had ever seen naked. And how disturbing these thoughts were. He made the sign of the cross, and later that day, he went to Mass.