Goya's Glass (11 page)

He looked at my lips.

“I hear nothing,” he said in a hoarse voice, “only the echo of the tide in my head.”

“My love, what can I do for you?”

He read the question on my lips. With the last of his forces he said with a grating voice: “Don’t go out for a ride with that conceited oaf. Stay with me.”

“Francisco, the Duchess of Alba never changes her plans. You didn’t change yours either, before Christmas. But what does this matter? What matters is that I am with you!”

“I can’t hear you. I’m as deaf as a post. But I know what you are telling me. I will never hear you again; all I have left is this dreadful tide,” he said, hoarse. He covered his ears with his hands and turned face down.

“Paco, my love, you will always be mine, only mine,” I whispered desperately, even though the man who was lying down could not hear me.

I had María come in so that she could take care of him.

I went with Godoy to see the sunset by the sea, but I was restless and came back quickly.

I ran up to Francisco’s chambers. His portrait, cut into slithers, stared at me. The drawing album and the portrait of the black
maja
had disappeared. As had Francisco. Instead of him I found a self-portrait. He had done it with ink and brush. I know of no other painting so full of disgrace and unhappiness as this one. The curls of Francisco’s hair, the chin covered with the hair of his beard, the face of a destroyed man. And what eyes! It was as if they were looking straight into hell itself, as if they saw a dance of monsters such as those he often saw everywhere. Or, what is worse, as if he were looking at any empty space that cannot be filled in any possible way. In that look there is all the
horror that a man is capable of feeling. And something in it that was addressed to me. The face of a destroyed man.

“María! Where is Goya?”

“The royal painter left an hour ago.”

“For Madrid? A messenger, fast!”

“Perhaps for Seville, or possibly for Cadiz. Or for Madrid, who knows? The royal painter was not feeling at all well. I think he is seriously ill. But no human effort could have kept him here.”

“María, I’ll make you pay for this. You should have stopped him no matter what! Wicked thing! Monster!”

“Your Highness knows perfectly well that no one can do anything against the will of the royal painter.”

“Harpie! You are the cause of my disgrace!”

That same evening I got rid of that conceited fool Godoy. The next morning I went to Madrid. I didn’t find Francisco there and nobody could give me any news of him.

I wanted to wait, but time for me had ceased to exist.

A little later I went to Italy to make time reappear.

While abroad, I decided to start a new life again. It was the most reasonable thing to do. When I came back to Madrid I went to live in my little palace in the Moncloa, where I had yet to reside ever. I was determined not to let myself be plagued by memories. To be free, independent, like before! I bought new furniture so as to get rid of the old. I changed the paintings on the walls. I had new dresses made up for me. In the mornings I, who had adored tea and coffee, stayed in bed until late having chocolate and lady fingers, and looked out the window at the clouds chasing each other. Midday, the obligatory
lever.
In the afternoon, conversations to which I invited new people, young poets, painters, philosophers. I received piles of banned books from Paris, which I read aloud at these sessions. Nothing could happen to the Duchess of Alba, even though a hundred wretched consciences might decide to denounce her to the Inquisition.

And one day Goya’s name came up. Without wanting to, I paid attention. They said that the painter had just made a new series of etchings and that it was something never seen before in Madrid, in Spain, or in all Europe. Each of the etchings was blasphemous in its own way. General interest in them continued to grow, said my fellow conversationalists. Madrid spoke of nothing else but these etchings, which showed the perfidy of women, the corruption of priests, and the ridiculousness of those in power. In vain I tried to change the subject; nobody was interested in anything else. The past appeared to me, drawn in vivid colors. There was no way I could escape it. I could not free myself from it, I saw that clearly.

I shut myself up in my palace with a few servants and no one else. I told everyone not to come looking for me because I felt indisposed and needed rest.

It was winter. I stayed in bed all morning. At midday I made an effort to get up, but didn’t have enough energy to so much as do my hair. Little by little I even stopped washing myself. I sat in the salon with a book on my knee, which I was unable to read. I focused on a space on the wall. I could spend hours and
hours doing that. But I didn’t know how the hours passed. I only know that all of a sudden it started to get dark and night fell. I had the feeling that as soon as it was daytime, the evening and the shadows were already on their way. It was as if I were barely alive in an endless night. I couldn’t get up, I weighed so much. In the evening they brought me dinner, which I either left without touching or ate little without hunger, just to give me something to do. I went to bed early, and in the darkness, I counted the seconds as they passed. And so my days were spent. Sometimes I saw visions: the monstrous owls and billy goats of Francisco’s pictures pecked at me and tore me open with their horns. The nights left me exhausted and I didn’t get up until after midday. On other days I had the horse saddled up so as to find forgetfulness in the speed of the ride. I found it, certainly, for half an hour, an hour at most, but as soon as I stopped the owls of the nightmare came in flocks, herds of chimerical asses and goats besieged me, bleating and howling.

One day, as usual, I was sitting in bed with my arms by my side and looking at nothing in particular. I thought of a few words that Madame de Sévigné had written over a hundred years ago:
“Je dois à votre absence le plaisir de sentir la durée de ma vie en toute sa longueur.”
How absurd! I thought. The French are comical, they even glean
plaisir
from melancholy and sadness. Nonetheless I would like to be French so as to know how to turn pain into beauty. To your absence, Francisco, I owe the pleasure of feeling the length of my life to its full extent. Magnificent!

I asked the maid to bring me the book and, once I had found the sentence, I let my eyes wander a few lines down:
“Pour moi je
vois le temps courir avec horreur et m’apporter en passant l’affreuse vieillesse, les incomodités et enfin la mort.”

I couldn’t go on reading. The pages fell to the floor, the draught chased after them. It does not matter, I thought. Nothing matters. I had to take off my stockings before going to bed, and I couldn’t. I managed to take off the left one, but had no energy left to remove the right one: a sad, unbeautiful Pierrot.

“María! Come here and sit next to me. No, I don’t want to scold you, I just want to get to the bottom of something. Come on, sit down. And now tell me how things really went that time when . . . But first you have to give me your word of honor that you will tell me the truth and nothing but the truth. Do you remember my long illness, when I didn’t even leave the house? Good. Did you say something to Don Francisco or was it he who . . .”

“Your Highness, I would never have dared to speak of it, but as you wish me to . . . Your Highness surely does not realize that . . .”

“Leave the highnesses out of it and get to the point. You are a walking headache.”

“Milady, your condition was very serious. Spiritually, I mean. I went to see the royal painter and told him about the state you were in. Goya did not hesitate for a moment. Immediately he sat down and wrote you a letter. He told me that it was an invitation for you to come and see his latest work. He told me that he was very proud of it and that it was the best thing he had created up until that moment. He was concerned about your health. I was
pleased about that. I knew that a man like him wouldn’t let me down because he carried the Saint Pilar of Saragossa with him wherever he went.”

“María, when talking about himself, Francisco would never, but never, have used the verb ‘create.’ You know that I have an aversion to that type of grandiloquence. What else? And the
majas
?”

“Your Highness, pardon milady, I have told you all that I know. If, at the time in question, I hid from you that fact that I had gone to see the royal painter on my own initiative, it was because I sensed that my visit would have irritated. If I did it, it was only and exclusively for the good of milady.”

“‘Only and exclusively for the good of . . .’ Come off it, you clown. I asked you what you knew of the
majas
?”

“I did not know anything about them. The royal painter told me only that I was not to deliver the letter to you until the day afterward. An order that I obeyed.”

“Ooh! Oh! Getting something out of you is . . . Thank you and go!”

Where to look for freedom and independence? Among people, I didn’t find it, nor in solitude and silence. I insisted on living in my isolation. I grew heavier and heavier inside. The fog around me grew thicker. I was living a long night.

On the morning of a rainy day they brought a huge packet to the house: they were pictures. How strange, I thought. It has been a long time since I commissioned any. I had them unwrapped, and waited with indifference. Then they opened the door; they brought them into my room and I saw two of
them. They represented two magnificent
majas
. The dressed one seemed even more provocative and naked than the undressed one. Beautiful women, masterpieces. A whole series of questions immediately sprung to mind: Where could I hang them? Who had sent them to me? What did it mean? Was it a joke? Or a mistake? All of a sudden I knew the answer: they were not two
majas
, but one—a woman who included all the other women in the world and everything tempting, dangerous, and seductive that the feminine sex had; the woman was me and Francisco had painted her, had painted me. It was his hand! It was a declaration!

I had the pictures hung in my bedroom. I observed my reclining body with Francisco’s eyes and felt the excitement he did.

And one day afterward, I walked over to his studio. I had the keys. I went without having said anything to him; I hoped the painter wasn’t there. But at the same time it is true that some hidden part of me was looking forward to the idea that the painter had spent the night painting and that I would still find him there.

I turned the key. He wasn’t there. So I was able to look at the engravings in my own time; I saw they were all over the place, out of order. Each image bore a title, inscribed at the foot of the picture.
Volaverunt
. A woman—transformed into a witch, in whom everyone can recognize the Duchess of Alba, beyond a doubt—flies over the bodies of her lovers to a sabbath of witches and wizards.
Todos caerán
: the same duchess, painted as a bird of prey with a woman’s head and breast, tempts bird-men to
approach her; Goya’s face, when he was young and adult, can be recognized in more than one bird-man. After their inevitable fall, the woman plucks the feathers off her victims as if they were chickens. The woman, the duchess.
El sueño de la mentira y la inconstancia
: while Francisco looks lovingly and imploringly at his beloved, she takes his hand and embraces it. The woman, here too, is without doubt the Duchess of Alba. The woman turns into a double and her other half receives letters, looks, and messages from other men. ¡
No hay quien nos desate!
: a man uses all his energy to free himself from his beloved who holds him in her grip, like the chimera of a nightmare. The man is he, the painter. And more and more etchings, all of treacherous women, sometimes depicted as cheap prostitutes, other times as brides or rich ladies who are for sale. And, what is more, all kinds of enchantresses and witches, all with the beautiful face and exuberant figure of the duchess. And then asses and chimera, monsters and priests. And the queen. Yes, the queen too, ridiculous and deserving of pity.

This, then, is the new masterpiece that all Madrid is talking about, I thought.
Caprichos
, a series that is unprecedented, so they say. It is the testimony of the emotional suffering of the artist, they say. Of the hell of love that Goya has lived through. Everyone says this, and maybe everyone is right. But they do not know one thing: that this series of engravings is above all an act of vengeance. Goya transformed the Duchess of Alba—the most beautiful, the most admired and the most celebrated of the noble ladies of Spain, the woman for whom, whenever she entered a salon, the music would stop—into a crude, ordinary
libertine, into a dissolute woman deserving of disdain. Yes, Paco. You have in your hands a weapon, which is more dangerous than any of the arms that the second most powerful woman in Spain has at her disposal.

The days that followed were marked by visions of the etchings. I wanted to meet up with the painter. I would not say that I knew his work, I decided. If he shows it to me, he will see nothing but an expression of the most absolute indifference. Why do I wish to see the man who has humiliated me, I asked myself? Because he is more powerful, stronger than I? I love him because he is stronger and has me at his mercy.

I went back to his studio.

For the last time. How many times have I pronounced these words as a threat? I used to think of them as words like any others, insignificant, featherweight. I played with them as a child plays with her doll, like a lady with her fan. Only on that one occasion, when I said them in front of him, did these words become the chimera of a nightmare, a monster with bat’s wings and donkey’s ears, with a beak and claws designed to inflict punishment, and when it has finally abandoned its horrible task, flies off with a heavy heart, as if reluctantly leaving a trail of incense and sulfur.

For the last time . . . There was just one candle lit. The light avoided the corners, the walls dripped with humidity and darkness.
I thought that I had come in vain. The emptiness without his presence frightened me at first, but then left me feeling relieved. I had made the journey to his house on foot at a hurried pace, stopping every now and again, determined each time not to go one step further. I had gotten rid of my carriage because I couldn’t simply sit there without doing anything, just shouting at the driver to go faster and thinking, heaven help me, let him run over whomever in the happy crowd might be blocking our path. The happiness of others struck me as unbearable, out of place, and I jumped from the carriage so as to go ahead on foot. I was desperate.