Goya's Glass

by Monika Zgustova

  I didn’t even look at the painter. I let my eyes wander over the jottings and pieces of paper full of sketches. The painter noticed the direction of my gaze and with a single movement of his elbow he swept away all the picturesque disorder that was on the table. Then, with a few kicks, he nudged the faces of those unbearable women I so often meet at the queen’s soirees, and those of the foolish men who stick to me like the plague with all their tedium and mediocrity. As if aware of my sudden aversion, the painter stood in front of these pictures; he looked ashamed. Of his untidiness? Of the worthless people thanks to whom he made his money? I glanced at him. I started to tremble once more. In order to give myself time to get over it, I asked the painter to have a fire lit.

  The royal painter, in his elegant suit, even if it was a little too tight a fit, contrasted strangely with the untidiness and the intimacy of his studio. He prepared the fire himself, saying that the servant used up too much wood. Oh, he was so tight fisted, that stout little man from Aragon! We still hadn’t looked at each other.

  A long cobweb stretched between two canvases, and there were more in the corners of the room. Next to the fireplace I discovered a half-written letter: Amigo Martín, Maldita sea, hijo de tu madre, what rubbish you write about my Aragonese relatives, you ass . . . This man is untidy, blasphemous, and what is more, doesn’t have a full grasp of grammar, I thought. You could hear the crackling of the fire and the whispering of the damp wood where the flames started to lick it. The pieces of wood were like his arms; the pieces of wood were like his peasant’s fingers. The greedy flames licked them; the flames sucked them.

  The man was watching the fire. I raised my veil. He didn’t stop watching the flames, but as he did so I had the feeling that he was looking straight at me, that in that fire he could see the slightest movement of my face.

  “Don Francisco, he venido . . .” I said to interrupt his scrutiny. “I’ve come because . . .”

  But the painter went out of the room without a word. After a short while, a servant entered with a tray laden with cheeses, little cakes, and a carafe of wine. The painter closed the door behind him. With one of the sleeves of his Sunday suit he cleaned the table, which was covered in colored stains, and offered me the repast.

  “Help yourself, please.”

  He sat down in front of the fireplace. He still hadn’t so much as looked at me.

  “Don Francisco, I’ve come because . . .”

  “Whatever your Highness says,” he said, interrupting me as he moved his chair closer to the fireplace.

  “I have come in order to ask you to paint me.” He stayed seated, without moving.

  “I want you to paint . . .”

  The painter looked at the fire, as if he hadn’t heard me. “I want you to paint my face.”

  “Madam, I do not do portraits of . . .”

  Did he say dolls? I wasn’t sure, because I had interrupted him.

  “I am not asking you for a portrait, rather . . .”

  “Now I am painting the portrait of the Marchioness of Pontejos,” he said without turning round, “as well as a portrait of the family of the dukes of Osuna, and I have six more commissions.”

  Any closer and he would have fallen straight into the fireplace.

  “Don Francisco, you have not understood me. I have come so that you can make up my face. Paint me, as you have never painted anyone so beautifully. I have to dine with the queen, and I wish her to die of envy.”

  Now he looked straight at me. His self-assuredness was cracking. I laughed and he became a little infected by my hesitant joy. At that moment he appeared to me as a totally inexpert lad.

  Although a milky light was gushing through the window, he lit a few candles, let fall a few drops of wax on a zinc plate and pressed the candles to them. With this improvised candleholder he lit up one side of my face. I offered him the basket in which I carried my boxes of powders and paints. In silence he picked a color, mixed it with others, and drew a frame around my eyes. Like me, when I was little and used to paint my doll, I thought. What would he see when he paints me? The color of pomegranate with that of muscatel on the cheeks, the forehead, and the chin. Then he set about mixing ochre with a little silver and gold powder. He dipped the brush in it; he removed it. He ran his fingers full of color along my upper lips. Then his little finger, with a long nail, along the lower one. He saw me as an anonymous landscape. I felt his powerful fingers walking across my face, pausing at my eyes, my lips. And his breath so close . . . I couldn’t even clench my teeth, or bite my lip, or move a single muscle. I drove my nails into the palms of my hands; that, he could not see. With one hand, the painter held my lips so that they stayed tense; with the other, he modeled their shape with the help of a brush. He did so conscientiously. He looked at me from a distance and then so close up that his eyelashes were almost touching my teeth. Then he began to mix a new color.

  He took off his waistcoat. His shirt gave off a tart smell, like bitter almonds. I drove my nails further into the flesh of my palms. He mixed something up with the gusto of an alchemist, and a moment later he was leaning against me. I could do nothing else but close my eyes and let myself be carried away by the caress of the brush on my lips, as I had been, so long ago, by the caressing of the dying roe deer . . .

  “There you are! What do you think of this silvery tone on the lips, the cheeks, the eyebrows?”

  He held a hand-mirror up to me, but I looked at myself in the mirror of his face: it was there that I wanted to see myself, as he saw me. The only woman in the whole of Spain. I looked him straight in the eyes. He was the first to break the almost palpable tension, with his hoarse voice. I don’t know what he said. My reflexes had gone. I turned to leave. He didn’t accompany me. I went back to him, with questioning eyes. Instead of answering my look he took my hand and pressed it fleetingly, as if not daring to. A single gesture on my part would have been enough then for him to take me in his arms. But I made no gesture, just as dolls do not. I left his studio as if I were fleeing a fire.

  Once in the street, I was unable to say a single word. I hid my face behind your shoulder, María, so that the passersby could not see it, so as to conserve within me the atmosphere of what I had just experienced. I don’t know how long I was submerged in that delight. I lived the next few days as if I were under a bell jar that preserved me from the outside world the way a greenhouse preserves a rare flower.

  Every day I went to sleep and woke up under this bell jar. I filled my days with soirees and receptions, banquets and literary teas, but I was living as a prisoner, like a fly that has been caught up in a cobweb and can’t get out, the cobweb of his look and his breath, and the contact of his arms, which I still didn’t know and nonetheless seemed to me to be ever present. I obliged my husband to organize more and more musical evenings. Don Francisco and his wife were usually invited, but my efforts when searching for that rough, shadowy face among those present were in vain . . .

  In the same way today I search for it in vain next to my deathbed, among the faces that surround me so they can watch this life ebbing away from close quarters. To know what dying is, how everything comes to an end, it matters not. The busybodies of Madrid have spent enough time reveling in bullfights and society gossip, so now they have come to see another spectacle: the death of the Duchess of Alba. They would do better to pay attention to health and youth, and ignore the sick and dying. Or even to expel them from good society, as I hear they have started to do in France. I have always thought that is how things should be. And now? We are the sick, the dying, the pariahs, the banished. If I had known that I would have to die early, I would have lived in an entirely different fashion. María, tell the doorman not to let in Don Francisco should by any chance he decide to come!

  Do you remember, María, how, much against your will, you brought him my personal invitation to an evening together just me and him? To Don Francisco: I will be waiting for you this evening at the Caracol Loco tavern, in Manolería, not far from my pa
lace. María Teresa. Do you remember with what aversion you looked at me when the servants squeezed me into the dress of a maja, with its plunging neckline? When they did my hair with a little fringe, which I hardly ever wear and made me up with bright colors so that people wouldn’t recognize me? In your hand you clutched your cross, which, as you know, has never been able to tame my will.

  On the way to the Caracol you let me have one of your sermons, inspired by centuries of piety, although you knew that as far as I was concerned your God could make himself scarce, that I wanted a man, passion, and tenderness. Were you capable of imagining my desire, you who had been born to live as a spinster and deny life?

  But that evening there was something you didn’t know: that apart from Francisco, I had invited a pair of admirers of mine to the Caracol, two foolish little students. One was studying medicine and the other, theology, so you could imagine what kind of stuff they were made of. What was more, each was jealous of the other and eager to find out on whom I would bestow my friendliness. As I say, silly little boys, but young, good-looking, with beautiful, noble faces, qualities that stocky Paco from Aragon could not hope to match. That is, he could not from his point of view. From my own, well, you know the answer.

  Surrounded by majos and majas, street merchants and humble craftspeople, I was sipping cheap, sour wine in the company of the two students when Francisco appeared at the threshold. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, through my black lace veil which was lowered so that it only covered my eyes. He saw me and was about to throw himself at me, but drew himself up short when he saw the attractive young men on either side of me. He stayed by the bar and ordered a jar of wine. Like the first time, when he passed my crystal glass along his lips and took a little of the water into his mouth so that when he had finished he could leave without swallowing the liquid, so today he filled his mouth with the wine that he passed over his tongue. He didn’t take his eyes off me; he didn’t care for the wine.

  I made out that I hadn’t seen him, but the presence of the man thrilled me so much that I began to dance, first with one of the young men, and then with the other. While I danced I pressed myself up against them, as I would have liked to press myself up against the man who was leaning on the bar. My desire grew. I thrust my breast against the young theologist, my waist up against his belly, our legs became entwined, and the inside of our thighs kept touching. We lost the feel of the rhythm. With quick glances I saw the Adam’s apple of the man at the bar move as he drank the wine in fast little sips. Meanwhile, my theologist had forgotten where he was and his hands passed over my body; his fingers drove into my skin through the thin cloth of the dress. Then I felt his nails and his teeth taking my skin. I melted under these caresses and closed my eyes to enjoy the presence of the man standing at the bar. I let go a sigh and almost fell. Never before had I felt what this painter, who was no longer at all young, made me feel at a distance.

  Something broke on the tiled floor. The racket brought me back to my senses to make out the painter’s back at the door, which he slammed shut, making more noise. I got rid of the young man and tread on the shards of pottery and the wine spilled on the floor as I went out into the street. I could see Francisco’s curved back in the darkness and his head sunk in his jacket collar, as he turned the corner . . . and then I thought that I had lost him. Maybe forever.

  It was not until much later that I found out.

  María, draw back the curtain! The one covering the pictures! And stop complaining. Off with you, you and your cross. Wait behind the door. When I am ready to see the most hidden picture of them all, I will call you so that you may press the button. Come on, out with you! Don’t let me hear you grumbling, you’re distracting me!

  The maja dressed. After a time, I discovered that when Francisco arrived home that night, without even changing his majo costume, he went straight to the studio. He took the largest canvas he had and started to paint . . . to paint a provocative woman, inciting beyond belief, dressed in such a way that the transparent veil makes her more naked than if she had been nude. Who was he painting, when he painted that woman? She isn’t me, hers isn’t my face. She is all the women that he has had in his life—in luxurious bedrooms and back rooms, in shady districts where you can smell the stink of the drains—and women he has desired without ever having them. A man possessed by desire, who releases himself by painting, but his eagerness only grows.

  María, come in! I want to see the picture underneath. Don’t grumble just press the button! Good, and now be off with you.

  The maja nude. The man tears away the veils that enfold the desired body of the woman with the brush, so as to possess it. I know that he kept me at a distance, as I did with him. He possessed the woman who pursued him while he worked and while he slept. The body of the woman in the portrait does not correspond to the laws of anatomy that Francisco knew so well. She is an expression of a voluptuousness that knows no law. Francisco took over my body and then had little more to do than add a languid expression of love.

  María, come, draw the curtain back again. Now I will leave you in peace. There is no need for you to show the cross to that poor painted girl!

  Francisco had me. He had me in a way that for him was essential: he painted me. I think that never again, not even when he was pressing my body in his arms, did he love it so much as when he painted it. When his passion painted it.

  María, come in. Add the following words to my testament: María Teresa Cayetana de Silva, thirteenth Duchess of Alba, bequeaths her crystal glass to Don Francisco Goya, Royal Painter.

  Have the notary sign it and seal it at once. And one other thing. I don’t want Don Francisco to know of the state I am in. Do this in any way you wish, but the news must not reach his ears. When everything is over, go see him and tell him that I wanted him to design my mausoleum. There’s more: it is my wish that, when deceased, he paint me in the same posture as the two majas, half-sitting, half-lying. Let it be his nostalgia that guides his hand, just as desire guided it when he painted the two majas.

  Do I want to be celebrated? Legendary? Immortal? Even my beloved Madame du Châtelet, whom I have not had the pleasure of knowing personally, writes about the pleasure that fame brings. The love of glory as a source of pleasure. More or less she says: “There is no hero who wishes to distance himself completely from the applause of posterity, from which he expects more justice than from his contemporaries.” This vague yearning that they talk about us when we are no longer there. . . .

  I want it known that the Duchess of Alba was the model for the two majas. I want María Teresa Cayetana de Silva to live forever, as she emerged from the hands of Goya. I am sure that my beloved descendants will fight tooth and nail to deny it; I can even imagine them having me exhumed and bribing a few know-it-alls to certify according to all their knowledge that the proportions and pose of my poor bones do not match those of the painted woman. But they won’t get away with it. And, even if they did get away with it, scientific treatises are always forgotten sooner or later, whereas art is alive and always will be. And I, the Duchess of Alba, will not die so that my passions and the love which consumed me may die with me, as happens in the case of other beautiful women, but so that they may live forever on canvases that I and only I was capable of inspiring.

  Do you know what it is like to have a new lover every day? You can imagine that, can’t you, you nun, hiding yourself behind that cross that I’d like to have you crucified on? It is so much work it leaves you exhausted, and what is more, it is tedious. Those two students I’d left standing the night of the Caracol Loco—I went back to look for them and I brought them to my house, remember? I raised a toast to Francisco with them. I drank to forget, for a new meeting, and yet again to forget. When they were drunk, I sent them on their way.

  I had other students. The ones who excited me especially were the theologians because when I embraced them I imagined them dressed in black, unloading a sermon on morality from the pulpit. I had generals and
common soldiers, writers, and musicians who were even more unbearable and egocentric, more divos than the literati, but, above all, I had a fair quantity of majos. To get rid of them, I made them believe I had a jealous husband. I had them leave through the window; I pretended I was helping them to escape, but I forced them to jump from the first floor and then set the dogs on them to make them run. How ridiculous they were when they jumped and yelled! What fun I had! But deep down the whole thing tired and bored me, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I wanted to ridicule Queen María Luisa, I would have abandoned that particular form of amusement.

  At that time María Luisa had that French lover who looked like an actor, or rather, an Italian opera singer. Wasn’t he Italian, after all? I decided I would take the queen’s concubine away from her. I went against the queen’s characteristic bad taste as regarded music—Lully, how dreadful!—by arranging that Gluck and Haydn were played to and appreciated by Madrid, in the same way I managed to get Costillares, the bullfighter, accepted despite the general predilection for Romero—even though both of them were more obtuse than the bulls they killed—so it was that I managed to take the queen’s lover away from her. At one dinner I made him sit next to me. To topple the royal lover from his pedestal I had only to rub his left thigh with my right leg, gently and not so gently, and to inform him after dinner of the well-known confidential fact that my husband did not fulfill all my needs. I took him to my chambers. All of this was nothing but cheap maneuvering, but really the queen’s lover required little else. I left him so hungry for more that over the next few days he came like a whining dog wanting only that I would let him lick my hand alone, but I refused to receive him until he sent me a gift: a box of gold encrusted with diamonds, one of the gifts that the queen had given him.

  Afterward I was able to do with him as I pleased, but I didn’t once really sleep with him. To allow into me one who had drooled over the queen would have disgusted me. Meanwhile I gave the gold box to my hairdresser, the same one who also looked after the queen’s coiffures, and I suggested that he use it to keep one of the rare pomades he used when arranging the royal hairs. It was thanks to this small amusement that the first attempt to burn down my palace in the Moncloa was made. The queen’s retaliations were never very subtle.