But the days went by and Francisco didn’t come. More than once I prepared to go and look for him myself, but afterward I was grateful to you, María, for refusing to bring him my messages and when on our way to see him, you ordered the coachman time and again to turn around and head for home. Meanwhile everything followed its usual course: the Duchess of Osuna came to visit me and I returned her visit, I took part in the lever, the elaborate mourning ceremony of the queen—the hypocrisy of the court has no limits!—and also in her teas, dinners, chocolate sessions, round tables, and walks. I listened to the king scratching at his violin, as well as to the Haydn quartets and sonatas that my husband played, my talented if henpecked spouse, that little-slipper husband whom I put on and removed with a kick as it struck my fancy. I appeared to listen to the queen’s gossip about the Duchess of Osuna while knowing perfectly well that each and every one of them was exchanging gossip about me with great delight. I scoffed at them all because I had nothing better to do, and even laughing at them had long since become tedious to me.
Brother Basilio! My poor little one, my little hunchback! How old must that sanctimonious soul have been? Any figure between twenty and sixty. He was lame and stuttered; I would have devoured him with kisses. I loved him more than my dog and my monkey, more than María de la Luiz, my little black girl. That day, it was summer in Piedrahíta, when we had gone out for a walk and he fell behind on his little donkey. How worried I was about him! Did you come with us that day, María? No, you were old already; you couldn’t ride. You were at home praying, confess it! That day we went out and, once in the wood, my husband and I found ourselves alone. We waited and my Basilio didn’t turn up; we also appeared to have lost the servants. I followed the path back and I saw Basilio, sunk in the mud in a hole. He was waving his crutch and with each move he made he sunk a little more. The other crutch was swimming in the mud, far from him. The man was barely able to move any longer, he was sunk in right up to the waist. And my servants all around him, haw haw haw! ha ha ha!, doubling up with laughter, to the point of tears. Instantly I made all of them go into the muddy hole to get him out! Consuelo, our cook, and then my confidante, told me that Basilio had seen a little calf that was drowning in the mud and not far away her mother who was mooing in the saddest of ways. Basilio went into the mud, pulled out the calf, and then the cow began to frighten him. Apparently she threatened to charge him with her horns. She took the calf from him, and then forced Basilio back into the muddy hole. Haw haw haw! Consuelo burst out laughing.
I slapped her so hard that she herself almost fell into the mud, and then I went from one servant to another, slapping them all and spitting in their faces. When my husband tried to calm me down, I became even more furious and he too was slapped on the cheek, in front of all the servants.
I summoned my carriage and had Basilio sit, and we went back together to the palace. I myself disrobed the hunchback, bathed and dried him, rubbed him with scented oils, dressed him again, and all the time I didn’t stop giving him little kisses. Once we were sitting on the sofa of the salon eating cakes washed down with muscatel, Basilio confided to me that my servants talked about me saying that he, the cripple Friar Basilio, was one of my lovers. That these scum spoke badly of me, the same people to whom I behaved like a friend and had wanted to bequeath my worldly goods to in my testament, made me indignant to the extent that I then made Basilio my lover. María, do you remember a night when I vomited without stopping, and when there was nothing more to spew? I vomited saliva mixed with blood?
I am getting senile, María. At that period I hadn’t even met Francisco! As I come closer to death now, my sense of time falters. Or maybe I did know him then? Wasn’t that when he painted that picture that seems playful at first glance, in which he depicts me as a bride and Basilio as a repulsive bridegroom who follows me tamely, poor thing? Francisco didn’t know anything; gossip didn’t interest him. And yet, he saw clearly everything that was going on inside of a person. Deaf as he was, he saw and understood everything.
How he tortured me, that man, doing everything the opposite way of what I wanted it to be. I, who entered a room and the musicians stopped playing! I could enter his house a hundred times and Francisco never stopped playing. That made me suffer, which amazed me. If I was in good health now, I would dispose of my life in another fashion. This slow death and the awareness that life is leaving me have taught me how to live. Too late!
It is too late for anything, even for Francisco. He, deaf as he is, is at the height of his powers and will still show the world how crapulous, libertine, dissipated, licentious, and debauched was the Duchess of Alba! Not only ungrateful, but perfidious. All that, but she was beautiful, charming, sublime. Make sure that nobody will forget it, Paco! Paint a portrait of the woman so that the generations to come will regret never having been able to have her! Because I am going. Paco, I know that we will never meet again, my old stocky, grumbling, so-often-unbearable Paco. The only person I will catch up with will be my husband. I will meet José some place in the underworld, in the kingdom of shadows. I don’t want to be buried in his tomb to lie by his side for evermore . . . No!
Please, María! Back you come to me with a bunch of flowers. Throw them into the garbage and stop bothering me, you wicked woman. So old, so ugly, and even you will outlive me! No, I don’t want to know who has sent me this stinking mess. The devil take them all, all of them! I’m fed up, especially with you. Come on, María, little old thing, don’t be offended by a few words from a dying woman, eh? Sit here with me. No, not on the bed, you disgusting old woman! Here, on this low chair.
Tell me, why did Francisco come to Piedrahíta, and not alone but in the company of his wife and children? What happened there? Yes, you’re right, it was at the time of that extraordinary heat wave worthy of a tropical country. One day at a dance—we organized them every week, didn’t we, on Tuesdays?—to which, in addition to the local minor nobility, we had invited some people from the village, I grew tired of dancing with the local faith-healers, and as for the nobles, well, you yourself know how little I cared for all those princes and dukes and marquesses! So I ended up sitting next to my husband. The whole time he followed me with those deer eyes of his, and I think he envied my vitality. He always envied it because he didn’t know what an effort it was for me to get up every day, and if it wasn’t for my obligatory attendance at the official lever I would probably never have been capable of getting up in the morning. But once I was up, I didn’t want people to discover my aversion to life, so I put on the face of an enthusiastic little girl. But you knew how to look behind the mask, didn’t you? I sat next to those deer eyes that I became used to seeing in the portrait that Francisco had painted of my husband, which we had hung in the salon, and I drank fresh lemonade.
“I want my own portrait, a portrait more beautiful than that of my mother, which was painted by Mengs. I want people never to forget it once they have seen it. I want a picture that makes me famous everywhere and forever.”
“That portrait by Agustín Esteve . . .”
“Don’t mention that name, qué vergüenza, Don José! Do you not know that in all Spain, Italy, and France, that is to say in all the world, there is only one painter capable of doing it? Do you yourself not have eyes to see your portrait hanging in the salon? Yes, José, what do you think is going to happen to you when you die? Who will remember your expression, your eyes? While your mother lives, with a bit of luck you will live on in her, with a little bit more luck, you will in me. But once we are dead, you will die completely and forever! Only in Goya’s portrait will your deer eyes continue to move the viewer; only through his painting will the public of the future know that you admired Haydn, that you wrote to him as if he were your beloved, your adored one without whom you could not live, that you played the violin and the harpsichord like no one else in the entire country. All that can be read in your expression and in the shape of your hands, your fingers, the pose of your body, but much more in the picture than
even in real life . . .
A week later, at the ball organized on the terrace of the Piedrahíta palace, I danced for the first time with Francisco.
He looked at me crudely. Although we danced separately, I felt that he was holding me firmly, that he was pressing me against him. I remember just one sensation: I am a piece of ice in the palm of a warm hand, I am melting, I am turning into liquid, into warmth, into boiling water, into steam, heat, fire . . .
“We shall have our first session, Don Francisco.”
“Yes, tomorrow, if you wish.”
“No, right now.”
“But . . .”
I took him away with me under the fire of incredulous eyes. Everyone was gawking, not at what was happening, but at how it was happening.
I had Francisco sit in a low armchair in my chamber. Among the objects on the bedside table, he discovered my crystal glass; the other time he had filled it with wine and drank. He turned the glass in his fingers and watched the circles made by the wine as if I were not there.
“Don Francisco, do you know who Monsieur Le Nôtre was and what he asked of the pope?”
He shook his head.
“Le Nôtre was an architect of the last century who designed the gardens at Versailles. But that is not of importance either. What is, is that Monsieur Le Nôtre was received by the pope. I think it was Innocent XI, but that isn’t important either. The most interesting thing about their meeting was what the architect asked of the pope. Do you know what it was? That instead of an indulgence, the pope grant him temptations. Don Francisco, what we should ask of God is passion, passion, and more passion.”
He narrowed his eyes, he looked at me . . . Go away, María, and take your cross with you. What I am about to recall is not for your ears . . . While he poured himself more wine, I unfastened my bodice. He continued with his eyes half-closed, looking me up and down from behind his eyelashes, with a painter’s eyes and the look of a man who knows how to appreciate what he sees.
“Does the lady Duchess wish me to paint her like this?”
I nodded.
“The décolletage should be smaller.”
“Why?”
“This is not for . . .” he mumbled, caressing my breasts with his eyes.
“What are you saying, why?”
“No one should see this . . .” he grumbled in a low voice.
I felt that all of me had been reduced to my breasts. My face, my arms, my chamber; everything ceased to exist. There were only my heavy breasts, which the painter had absorbed in his memory so as later to give them to all the women in his paintings and engravings.
“Why, sir royal painter?” I asked him once more, with a touch of ironic disdain. Perhaps by ridiculing him, I wanted to hide the fact that not even nude could I dominate this man.
“For reasons of composition,” he declared, finally.
I approached him until I felt his breath against the skin of my breasts and said to him: “Then arrange my décolletage in accordance with these reasons.”
Was that how it happened? Or have I dreamt it? Perhaps I only wished that it had happened like this. Or perhaps it is only now that I know what I should have done. I never felt any shame when I disrobed in front of the students; their sense of decency amused me. But at that moment, was it not I who was standing confused in front of that man who seemed to me a little brutish? I only know that I leaned over displaying the full weight of my body in front of the painter, who was savoring me with his eyes. I took the glass from his fingers to take a sip and then . . .
“I am sorry, sir royal painter, but now I remember that I must attend to a visit.”
Did he hear me? Or is it that he didn’t want to understand? Did he know that it was a lie, that man who saw everything, before whom it was impossible to hide anything? That rough, brutal man . . . Rough and brutal? Really? Francisco was not like that, but I needed to think of Paco as rude and bestial.
“It would not be good if my visitor this night were to find me here with you,” I repeated with words and gestures, so as to make sure that he understood.
What did I want? That he, the painter, would stay? My aim was to become the mistress and lady of this man.
Francisco glanced at me, full of hatred, and made a gesture as if he wanted to smash the crystal glass against the wall—like the jug against the tiles on the floor in the tavern—then controlled himself and left without saying anything.
Satisfied, I stopped thinking about the painter. At night I noted in my dairy: “I will not stop smuggling the French encyclopedists into Spain because no one can do anything against the Duchess of Alba, not even those of the Inquisition. In my bedroom I will hang nude portraits, banned in Spain, including the Venus of Velázquez and others that represent me myself. Let the grand inquisitor come to see them in person, to feast his eyes on them if he will! He can do no harm to the Duchess.”
María, come here with your cross. You wouldn’t want them to hang me up on it, would you? What did Don Francisco do after that ball on the terrace, María?
I remember that over the following weeks he didn’t reply to the invitations to sessions with me. Exceptional shamelessness. He could not be seen anywhere. He did not turn up to the teas, the dinners, or the balls.
One day I was walking through the woods with the little black girl, the water spaniel, and the monkey. From a distance I saw a man kneeling next to a huge oak. He was taking off the bark and examining it. I felt sure I had spotted Francisco, but as I had recently been spotting him in every man I saw, especially in the grooms and the men in the coach house, I wasn’t sure. Then he embraced the trunk of the tree, as if he wanted to measure it. He remained like that for a while: a colossus, although not a very tall one, embracing another. Was it a coincidence that I liked to walk in those woods where he usually spent his time? I sent the little black girl back home with the dog and the monkey.
He turned around. We looked at each other without blinking. I walked a few paces closer to him, then he approached me. We were separated by the distance of a few thick trees, the branches of which barely touched each other. We looked at each other without moving. He took a few fast steps toward me, stopped, took me by the hand and set off walking again, dragging me behind him exactly as a father might do with a naughty little girl.
“Come on, there!” he grunted, menacingly.
He frightened and pleased me.
“Come on, come on!” he said and pushed me through the door into the little house he had his studio in.
In the cool, damp room there were a few canvases covered with pieces of cloth. Once again he looked me straight in the eyes, and smiled with a satisfaction full of malice. He surely read the terror in my face, the feeling that I had fallen into a trap and that, nonetheless, I felt all right there. The man laughed in an . . . animal-like way, I would say. Then, he really did make me afraid.
“Here!”
And with a violent gesture he tore off the cloth that covered one of the canvases. It represented an aquelarre, a witches’ sabbath, presided over by an enormous phantasmagorical billy goat. The witches’ faces were blurred. Only one had clear-cut features: I recognized my own face.
I was unable to control myself. My blood was boiling. I was eaten up by the desire to rip up the canvas with a knife, to destroy it with my bare hands, to spit on it. Furious, I glanced at the painter. He wasn’t looking at me. In front of his work, he had forgotten me. Resplendent, he examined his picture, the masterpiece he had created. The fury and the terror ceased. But the joy, too. I looked at him again: this man was ignoring me, he was alone with his creation. Puzzled, I went over to another canvas, and, little by little so as not to disturb him, I uncovered it.
Two women, young and beautiful; a man with an expression of total surrender on his face hands a generous bunch of grapes to the dark one. The blonde one, with her gray eyes, watches him with tenderness. Envy and generosity come together in her face. The dark one feels honored: she knows that from now on the man�
�s heart belongs to her. A little boy, a brown angel, takes a grape from the basket. It is Javier, Francisco’s son. The blonde one is his wife, Josefa. The dark one is myself, rejuvenated, enhanced, good-looking. The man with the expression of surrender, who gives up his person together with the grapes, is Francisco.
The painter has forgiven me, then. He has managed to forget my madness the other night. How has he been able to do that?
Another canvas. A majo, covered by a cape, walks with a maja. From all directions, other men stick their heads out of the undergrowth to look voluptuously at the girl. She, however, has eyes only for her majo, and turns to him with a seductive expression; her body seems to dance instead of walk. But she has no need to make an effort in order to captivate her escort. Although his face is not visible, it is clear: his posture shows that he is smitten by the girl. The maja is myself, I recognize my smile, my behavior, and my posture, a little strange—no one knows that I have always had to hide a physical blemish. The majo, who seems violent, but underneath is a mass of tenderness, is him, Francisco. I recognize him under his cape.
What I had seen was quite enough for me. Yet, the painter was still enthralled by his own work. I slipped out as lightly as if I had grown wings.
The sessions started a few weeks later. My husband was usually present because he appreciated Francisco as an artist, loved him as a person, and got on well with him. Godoy, who had come to visit us, was also present on two occasions. If Rembrandt’s Venus is an angel, as is that of Titian, then the woman in Francisco’s picture is a demon. Each one of her hairs is a poisonous snake that twists convulsively. The expression on her face is imperious, the posture of her body despotic. The innocence of the white of her dress acts as a foil to her perfidious nature. Goya’s picture of Venus is the portrait of a monster, of something that is even more inauspicious for being also beauty incarnate. But, only I know that Francisco saw me as I was: a woman lacking protection, so defenseless that she covers her nude body with the black mane of her hair, in an arrogant posture and a way of being that is ceremonious and provocative at the same time. He saw me as an abandoned woman who floats in a vacuum and has nothing to hold on to. Although nearly all Spain belongs to her, she has nothing.
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