by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
According to the Prado map, about half of the museum showcases Spanish painters. I beeline it for the second floor where Velázquez keeps company with his fellow greats: Rubens, Titian, and of course, Caravaggio, who was so influential in Velázquez’s work that most of his pieces are described in artsy circles as “Caravaggioesque.” Mars, God of War, completed in 1640, is just such a painting. Unlike Diego’s self-portrait, the background is mostly black, and Mars appears in a wash of light that shines on his bare arm and leg as if revealing something true and mysterious in all those layers of muscle. With the dark background now forgotten, I stare at his physique. Wearing his helmet, and nothing else, he sits on an unmade bed in a swath of pink silk with his loins covered in bright blue fabric. This is not the eternally youthful and triumphant Mars, or Mars in the garden wooing Aphrodite. No, this is Diego indulging his love of paradox—Mars, the god, waking up from a disappointing one-night stand.
His shield and weapons lie in a heap at his bare feet, and his right hand holds the handle of something that finishes off canvas. It could be an axe, a mace, or a toilet plunger for all I know. After reading the placard I learn it’s a general’s baton of command. Obscured in shadow are his eyes, but lo! What a mustache! The same handlebar style as Velázquez himself. I cannot take my eyes off him.
Like many of Velázquez’s paintings, I want to step inside the world he has created. I want to ask Mars if he would like a few aspirin and a café bombon, the Spanish coffee confection designed to cure all ills, and to tell him in frank terms that this will do nothing to win Aphrodite’s love. She will drop him like a hot rock if she finds out about his escapades. Maybe I’d tip back his helmet to see his eyes, or sit on his lap Santa Claus-style and ask him for a pony that I don’t really want. More than likely, I’d be glancing sidelong looking for an isolated corner in which I could lure Diego during the afternoon siesta. It grieves me that I can do none of these things.
A group of kindergartners in matching red jackets enters the room with nary a glance to Mars. Instead, they sit cross-legged in front of another Velázquez prize, The Thread Spinners. Mars, dejected, looks at them forlornly as they point out the spinning wheels, the balls of yarn, and the ladder in the background. It’s all part of their culture curriculum which includes nothing but ambivalence toward the war god. People file in and out, read his placard, glance at him, leave. Even the school children rise, get into their hand-holding-stay-together formation, and move on.
For a moment, we are alone. I lean toward the slate gray walls, the braided keep-at-least-two-feet-back cord grazes my kneecaps. I lean into Mars and his brushstrokes. “Give them twenty years,” I whisper. “They’re too little to understand. Would you want to explain to them this hot mess you’re in?” The second wave of red jackets interrupts us, and we both know how this is going to play out. We watch as they form a semicircle in front of The Thread Spinners, their eyes focused on nothing but their teacher. After a lengthy goodbye I linger another moment, blow Mars a kiss, and head for the next salon where I know Diego is waiting.
Just through the door is the biggest room in the building that has an art deco skylight roof. The gray floor tiles give way to a red-and-gray marble streaked with blue. Unlike the area with Mars and The Thread Spinners, this room is a hive of activity, chatter, and the clicking of camera shutters even though photos are strictly forbidden. Voices bounce off the walls and floor, all indiscernible, even when standing within arm’s length. This room, like the four previous, is dedicated to Velázquez. Here, his work as a court painter shines. I scan the walls: Philip with his dog and hunting rifle, Philip standing at a desk, Philip standing and looking important. It’s a Philip IV parade with few exceptions.
It wasn’t Mars or Diego’s self-portrait, the one with the short hair, the funky collar, and the singular gloved hand, that made me fall so hard for my conquistador of the canvas. It was his most celebrated work, the last painting he is known to have completed, Las Meninas, finished in 1657. It’s here, in front of the masterpiece, that I find my troop of five-year-olds wedged in among the tour groups and budding artists, staring up at Princess Margarita who could have been, in another time, their classmate.
Velázquez creates the same dark background as Mars, and places Margarita in the foreground in high light. She is surrounded by two attendants and flanked by two of the court dwarves. Behind them, her chaperone and a palace bodyguard shun me as they peer through the shadows whispering secrets to each other. If only they gave me a chance, I could give them so much more to whisper about. But they don’t, and in the humdrum of palace life, the dog falls asleep at the dwarves’ feet. All of the action takes place in the bottom third of the canvas, culminating in a scheme of blues, whites, and browns. The illusion of light streams through a nearby window, and also from an open door at the back of the room, where José Nieto Velázquez, the Chamberlain of tapestries, has paused, like me, to look in on the sitting.
The dark top presses down on the figures, punctuating their diminutive statures and the pressure that is already on Margarita, who is only five years old. Little does she know that in ten years she will marry The Holy Roman Emperor, have four children, and die before she turns twenty-two. Here, she’s infected with a boredom that can only be cured by chasing a cat through the garden, or by throwing pebbles in the fountain. She’d likely give anything to don a red coat and clasp hands with an assigned buddy for the remainder of the Prado visit. Her loyal attendants continue their coaxing. One curtsies while the other offers Margarita a red cup, and for just a moment they get her to stand still. She looks at neither of them, pinning her curious gaze on the group of her fellow kindergartners. I watch her, waiting for the moment when she runs across the room.
What is most striking about this painting is all the pictures within it. Most are shadowed copies of portraits lining the back wall. A mirror shows the King and Queen of Spain. Some argue that it is a reflection of a painting, but I think they are there, standing shoulder to shoulder with me, keeping an eye on their little girl, and quite possibly offering up a 1650s Spanish equivalent to the ice cream sundae if she’s good. Their presence only confirms my suspicions about her desire to dart off and play, to go outside and get dirty.
On the bottom left, behind a canvas twice his height, stands Velázquez with brush in hand.
We stare at each other. Time and space do that romantic-comedy movie thing where everything slows down, and the man’s laughter next to me stretches out like a line of taffy. A woman raises her map in dramatic slow-motion speed. Jaws hang agape. My heart thuds in my chest as the room around me slowly comes back into focus. The Japanese couple move on to Phillip with his dog and rifle. The school children find the red cross painted on Velázquez’s chest. They don’t know it, but it represents the Order of Santiago bestowed upon him by the King’s decree in November of 1659 just a few short months before his death. I watch fifteen pairs of eyes focus on the painter who stares back at us, at them, and at me.
There he stands in his black coat with the gray satin undershirt, his high waisted belt, and like his statue outside, a palette rests on his left arm. I gaze upon his oval face, the curly hair and crazy collar, and of course, that mouth-watering mustache that started everything. Finally we are together, and in that split second I realize there is no hope of us ever being alone.
It’s then that I imagine Velázquez’s voice in my head, breaking the ice with this, “They want to call this painting Las Meninas, but I think Meta Velázquez is more appropriate. Who else but me could paint a picture of me painting a picture of the royal family?” Then he laughs, but not an evil genius laugh, the laugh of an uncle who always plays pranks and knows coin tricks. I wonder if he knew how controversial his statement would be. By painting himself with Margarita, he claimed the status of the artist, and art itself, was just as significant as royalty. He must have known, that sexy rebel.
“Can you believe this? I am surrounded by a circus of children, dwarves, sleeping dogs, and the K
ing of Spain. It’s a crazy gig,” he goes on. I wonder what his wife thought of it, and of me lusting after her husband. Did she appreciate his facial hair like I do? Did she wish he would paint her? How could she not?
Diego considers the beholder. A profound statement lies curtained off behind his lips. Who wouldn’t want to sit for that guy who peers out from behind the canvas? The one who stares you straight in the eye, not looking over his brood of models, but straight at you, the viewer.
“Step inside,” he says. “Come into my world.”
Who am I to resist?
Kelly Chastain is a graduate of Pacific University with a B.A. in Creative Writing. She works in both fiction and non-fiction, and has been published in The Burrow Press Review, Isthmus Review, Cactus Heart Press, Outside In, Silk Road Review, and others. Currently, she blogs at kellychastain.com, and is working on a historical novel, a series of memoir vignettes about growing up on a farm, and travel writing essays from a recent trip to Portugal.
KATHERINE JAMIESON
Woman Rain
She was a weather system unto herself.
When speaking of the Georgetown car park, the central hub of transportation for their country, Guyanese use the word “chaotic,” which they pronounce with a hard “ch,” like “charge.” “Da place chaotick! Watch for the teefman, he’ll pick ya pocket quick, and gone!” my friends warned me. In the car park, rats scurried between mountains of trash, music blasted from thirty different minibuses, and every so often a madman stormed the market screaming about Queen Elizabeth. Still, I went there often; I could not stay away. It was the most vital place, the filthiest place I had ever been.
Once I stayed past nightfall and lost my bearings in the dark. Bodies thronging in the thick evening air, mosquitoes biting through my sunburn, and the rising smell of sweat, sewage and trash overwhelmed me. I was in tears when a young woman saw me. “Gyal, what ’appened to you?!” she asked as she took my elbow and pushed me onto a bus. I thanked her, but I could not explain. What had happened to me?
I had come to Guyana three months earlier to work as a teacher for teenage girls at the May Rodrigues Vocational Training Center of the YWCA. There was no headmistress at the school and no one to help me define my job, ostensibly to set up some kind of “Youth Development” project. After an initial burst of energy, during which I attempted to catalogue the entire library of donated books, my idealism was waning. When school let out I spent the rest of my days wandering through the city and here, at the car park, watching.
“White gyal! White meat! Nevah eat a white meat yet!” the men would yell at me. I had learned to signal to them, to give a half-complicit wave to their calls and then forget that I had been noticed at all. This allowed me to watch without feeling that I was being watched, to imagine that I somehow blended into the scenery, though I was likely the only white here among thousands. It was a camouflage of ignorance; and though I couldn’t admit it then, I was camouflaged only to myself.
The day I met Eulis, I was standing on the outskirts of the melee in front of a branch of Guyana’s local fast food restaurant. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a short figure approaching me in a black-and-white checked housedress. We made eye contact, but I looked away quickly, pretending I had not seen her. She took a long time to reach me, listing side to side as she walked, while schoolchildren wove around her as they ran by. Eventually I had no choice but to acknowledge the four and a half-foot woman inches away in the dust of the street. I stood on a little concrete plateau of cracked sidewalk and braced myself for the lilting demand of the Georgetown beggars: “Sistah, ya ’ave a little piece for me, sistah?”
“Hello, good aftah noon, Miss!” she said, laughing. “Ya must watch ya don’t get buhn up in this sun! Sun hot, hot!” Another giggle.
“I’m alright,” I said, shading my eyes to see her better. Smiling, she revealed a mouth full of gapped and broken teeth. Though she must have been at least seventy, her high rounded cheekbones made the skin of her face look smooth. She gripped a faded umbrella in her left hand, and a glass Coke bottle poked out of the wrinkled, black plastic bag in her right.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to pre-empt her. “I don’t have many dollars, but I can give you this.” I offered her a few small bills. She frowned when she saw them, her dark skin puckering into deep wrinkles.
“Ya ’ave a husband? Y’all could use a cleaning lady for wash de wares an’ so! I used to clean ’ouse for a nice white lady, and she was very pleased with my work,” she said puffing up her chest.
“No, I don’t have a husband. I have a roommate, and we’re really not looking. . . .”
“But y’all must need someone for dust, an’ sweep up, an’ scrub walls, an’ beat rug?” The woman cocked her head to the side skeptically. “Ya must be busy, ya ’ave job with the Embassy or so? I could come when y’all are at work, just one day a week, do every, every ting.”
I hesitated. Though I had only lived here briefly, the demands of cleaning in Guyana had been impressed on me early. The jungle exists in vast tracts throughout 95 percent of the country, and life on the coastland is always imperiled, plant and animal perpetually on the verge of reclaiming that lost 5 percent. Ants and cockroaches swarm at any crumb that reaches the floor. I took my showers with salamanders and frogs. Tarantulas and centipedes skulked in my cupboards. In rainy season, waves of black and gray mold grow over any moist surface, and during the dry season dust from the unpaved roads billows in through the windows. I had seen small clouds puff up when people sat down on our sofa.
“No, we really don’t need a maid, but thank you,” I said. The woman screwed her face up in a look of mixed dejection and disgust.
“All right then, but if ya change ya mind, I’m shopping ’ere in da mawrning,” she said, reaching down to her umbrella and pushing it up over her head. “Good aftah noon,” she said, and listed back in the crowd where she was quickly lost in the rush of people and animals.
All afternoon I couldn’t forget her plaintive questioning, her queer, high-pitched voice, her unnerving cackle. But my real discomfort with the woman’s offer originated in the possibility of hiring a “servant” in a country where I was supposed to be serving. Having a maid seemed like something an ex-pat would do, not someone with a mandate to “live at the level of the people.” I wanted to believe that I could do my own work, like a Guyanese woman. I remembered my family’s maid growing up, a very sweet Salvadoran woman named Edis who still cleaned for my parents. She had become something of a family friend, inviting my parents to her wedding, her children’s christenings, and her own naturalization ceremony. The fact remained though: she scrubbed our toilets.
I was relieved that I had not given in to the woman. It was much easier than grappling with difficult questions about service, privilege, and poverty. Better just to scrub our own shower, mop our own floors. I liked the illusion of solidarity with the Guyanese that I had been cultivating and this strange woman had disrupted it; I resolved to avoid the car park in the mornings.
A few hours later, though, on a tree-lined neighborhood street, I saw a familiar short figure approaching. By the time I thought to turn around, she was waving her umbrella and walking as fast as she could in my direction. “Miss! Miss! Like the good Lord brought us togeder again! Who could believe it, to see you ’ere so soon aftah we fuhst meet. . . .” she laughed and laughed. And then she was before me again, a short woman who seemed to take up my whole field of vision.
“Yes . . . what a strange coincidence,” I faltered, noticing the heightened desperation in her eyes. She told me she had gone by her nephew’s to see if he had a “little piece” to spare, but he couldn’t give her anything this month.
I had no crowd to protect me now, no bustle and honking to distract me from her palpable need. “Ya sure ya don’ need some help with the house. . . .” she asked, her wide brown eyes fixed on me, her face twisted into a hopeful grin.
My decision had nothing to do with a clean hous
e. It was simply that she was old and poor, and I was young and rich. Guilt played a part, and pity also. Looking at her stocky, compact body and wrinkled face, made me think of my own grandmothers living in retirement communities in Florida and Maryland, not out begging to clean houses. Some vague economic principle occurred to me: job creation as the truest expression of development. What could be so wrong in offering work to this woman? Wasn’t that better than leaving her to beg on the streets?
“Well, I’d have to ask my roommate Maureen. . . .” I began.
“Oh Miss!” she laughed, clapping me on the arm. “Ya won’t sorry, Miss! Y’all gon’ like having a nice, clean house!” She pumped my hand in a strong, vigorous grip, laughing as she introduced herself: Eulis Idina Saunders, age 65, resident of the St. Luke’s Catholic Home on Vlissengen Road. With the tropical sunlight fading into the evening sky and the whistling frogs beginning their song from the trenches, I could almost believe that I had made a good decision.
“You hired us a maid?” Maureen said when I told her the news over dinner. “Why?”
“Well, she seems like she has a lot of experience,” I explained, looking down at my plate. “And it’ll be helpful for us. We won’t have to worry about the house getting so dirty.”
“Were you worried before?” Maureen asked, raising her eyebrows. Of the two of us, she was much more likely to be found scrubbing the black mold off the windowsills. The second of five children from a working class, Irish-Catholic family in Cleveland, she had been responsible, like all her siblings, for her own regimen of household chores. For her, having a clean house was a matter of pride and propriety, as important as applying make-up and styling her hair, which she did every day of our two sweltering years in Guyana. Maureen had already mastered the art of hand washing, bleaching and ironing loads of laundry, including towels and sheets, every week; the challenges of cleaning in Guyana did not intimidate her.