Goya's Glass

by Monika Zgustova

  “What is death in comparison with an incomplete life?” I answered him with a question. The suspicion in his eyes had turned into an incrimination.

  “Is there anyone whose life is not incomplete, in the end?”

  “You yourself,” I answered, tersely. An accusatory look sprung up in his eyes like the spire of a cathedral.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “You have a reason for living,” I said with conviction.

  “As do you, your duenna, and your deceased husband.”

  “You paint.”

  “I paint? Hmm. I try to earn my daily bread, as do most men, in fact.”

  “You are an artist.”

  “You do not know how many things I have to take in silence from aristocrats like yourself in order to earn my living with what I like doing.”

  “You, take anything in silence? With your character? I don’t believe it.”

  After a moment’s pause I insisted: “You are an artist, you have a mission.”

  “What do you mean, I have a mission? I am an artisan, and I do my job in the best way I can.”

  “You are not an artisan. Artisans do not interest me. You are an artist.”

  “In the end, perhaps you too are an artist, an artist of life.”

  “What does an artist of life mean?”

  “To live off what we have in the here and now,” he said, slowing down.

  From time to time he kicked the little pine cones that covered the ground of the wood.

  “I pursue something absolute, that is to say, undefined. The closer I get to it, the faster it runs away from me. As I want to have everything, I will never have anything.”

  The suspicion in his eyes had given way to a reflective look. I longed for him to tell me something about life. He had to tell me, he was fifteen, twenty years older than I! But he talked about painting. For him life was painting.

  “There are no rules in painting,” he said, “and the oppression or the servile obligation of having young people study or go all in the same direction is a great impediment for them and for all those who profess this difficult art, which is diviner than any other given that it signifies what God has created.”

  The moon had already travelled far enough to be directly over our heads. I felt that it shone for us alone. Now we were walking slowly over the sand of the Guadalquivir. I took off my shoes. The painter fell silent and I listened to the music that was weeping in some distant place. It was a flute. I pointed it out to the painter. He didn’t hear it. I sighed. He was so involved in his own reflections that he didn’t even notice that his new shoes were sinking into the sand. In silence, I pointed at the moon. The man leaned back so as to contemplate the sky.

  “What profound and impenetrable mystery is hidden in the imitation of divine nature, without which nothing is good, and not only in painting!”

  I listened to the enthusiastic tone of his voice and the flute that accompanied it. I thought once more of Madame du Châtelet and her reflections on happiness. Truly rich and noble people who have been used to comfort all their lives do not know how to savor happiness and even less, how to find it. On the other hand these . . . these men and women from the villages, the majos and majas, know happiness. Why, indeed, do I look at Francisco as if he was an uncultured donkey? Paco, a coarse and brutal man? No, it is I who wishes to see him like this. If I saw him as a refined intellectual, the magic would disappear. I would begin to find him dull.

  “I see nothing more than bodies and forms which are illuminated, and bodies and forms that are not,” he went on, looking at the cypress and pines, which shone as if someone had poured a basin full of mercury over them.

  “Dimensions that move forward and dimensions that fall back; reliefs and depths. My sight never discovers lines or details. I do not count the hairs on the beard of the passerby or the number of buttons on his suit, and my brush must not see any better than I do.”

  “That is true, but why do you tell me this right now, Don Francisco?”

  “I tell you that nature is the only master of a painter and any other artist. Unlike nature, the candid masters see details in the whole and their details are always false and conventional. Nature is the only drawing master . . . ”

  He did not know how to tell me what I wanted to hear. Why did he insist on not seeing me as a woman? In that enchanted moment, his monologue on art seemed to be sterile. Why, art was nothing in comparison to what we were living! I had the feeling that he was younger than I. Perhaps I would grow tired of him very soon. Nonetheless, I envied the fact that he had something to live for.

  He spoke to me of Aragon, of the desert of stones in which he had grown up. He described the white nuances of the Aragonese sky to me and I found myself, instead of in a pine wood flooded by moonlight, in thirsty, stony terrain whipped by wind and forever implacable.

  “Whenever I feel distressed,” he said, “which is something that happens to me fairly often, I feel like an animal that is sinking into that Aragonese sand and wants to save itself, but does nothing except sink ever deeper. It pants, but the sand spills up over and drowns him.”

  “You feel like an animal?”

  “Like a dog.”

  We walked for a while in silence. I wanted to tell him about the roe deer of my childhood and of the dreams in which it reappears. But when I looked at him, I ran once more into a wall of suspicion. I said nothing.

  “The death of a person close to us makes us more human,” I said, instead of telling my story. But, did I really say it or do I just think I did? Yes, at the time I was silent. It was he who spoke.

  “The death of a person close to us makes death intimate . . . It surprises us how we can live with so many deaths all around us.”

  I wanted to protest, but he looked at me in such a way as to indicate that I had no right to talk of such things.

  “Don Francisco, why have you come here?”

  “If only I knew!”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  I touched his hand.

  “I am happy that you don’t know.”

  Suddenly I felt like a hot air balloon from which ten bags of sand have been thrown and which goes up and up. To better concentrate on my thoughts, I asked him about his painting. He began to talk about it at length; I put my hand under his arm. He probably didn’t notice. Words and more words poured out of him.

  “What a scandal it is to despise nature in comparison to the Greek statues, if the comparison is done by one who knows neither one thing nor the other. What form of statue can there be that was not copied from divine nature? No matter how excellent a professor he is who has made the copy, will he cease shouting that one is the work of god and the other of our miserable hands?”

  I wasn’t listening to him with any particular interest, and if I asked him a question from time to time, it was to make conversation.

  “Don Francisco, why don’t you seek inspiration in the Greek masters? Did they not create beauty?”

  “I shall explain this at once to Your Highness.”

  “My name is María Teresa.”

  “Madam, he who wishes to distance himself from nature . . . ”

  We were returning along the bank of the Guadalquivir. No, I didn’t want to distance myself from nature. I felt the muscles of his arms; I heard the melody of his words and the sounds of the flute.

  The moon moved into the other half of the sky. Now it was shining like an old silver trinket. It pushed against my back and made me walk with a light step. Francisco sank into the wet sand of the riverbank.

  The moon had set earlier. The servants were already asleep. I took him into the kitchen; he preferred a modest ambience, given that as a good Aragonese peasant, elegance and sumptuousness, dazzled him. We found some wine of an extremely dark red color, olives, and cheese. Francisco was hungry and I served him more and more wine. He made jokes, laughed. Now it was he who wasn’t listening to me. When he drank, he heard even less than h
e usually did. I also savored that rustic wine with a smattering of oak wood in its taste. Time came to a halt.

  Suddenly, I noticed that the kitchen began to fill with a pinkish light. After blowing out the candle I went out into the garden and bathed in the first light of the sun, which still hadn’t come out. Francisco followed me with the carafe of wine and a glass. I sat on the swing that hung from the branches of two enormous eucalyptus trees. He swung me, so strongly that the trees shuddered and my skirt flew up over my head. He sat on the lawn and watched me; from time to time he took a sip. Now, finally, he was looking at me like a man. Avidly. He sat and contemplated me, in ecstasy. But then the painter in him woke up and his look took on an edge that was more analytic, aesthetic, and dreamy. I threw one shoe at him and then the other; he caught them in midair, waking up from his dreaminess. I jumped to the ground to run back to the house with him behind me. I went up the stairs, we chased each other through the corridors. Then I entered the alcove of my bedroom and sat on the sofa. He lay down there, resting his head in my lap.

  “I am completely drunk!”

  I caressed his disheveled hair with the palm of my hand.

  “What are you going to do with a drunk?” he shouted.

  I put fingers over his lips so that he fell silent. He still wanted to say something. He didn’t stop laughing, but I didn’t take my hand away. I pressed against his lips with my fingers. I released the pressure as he calmed down. Suddenly I felt something wet in my palm: it was his lips which were taking me, all of me. At length, avidly. Insatiably.

  When, after a long time, I opened my eyes, my bedroom was full of sunlight.

  “Drunks have to sleep. Come on, get out! Sleep off your hangover!”

  I pushed him into the corridor, drunk as he was, and not just with wine. I locked the door. That unexpected happiness did not allow me to sleep anymore.

  There was no sign of him all day. He didn’t turn up for dinner.

  I went to bed, but could not get to sleep. I tried to make out all the sounds I could hear. I lit the candle.

  Then the door opened. I pretended to sleep. I know that he observed me for quite a while. Then, delicately, he took off my summer nightgown, and looked at me once more. I felt him kissing my feet; he started at the toes. He did so slowly, like a drunk eager for more wine. Interminably, as he had done with the palm of my hand the day before. I dug my nails into the bed. He took a long time to reach up from my feet to my lips.

  Every day in the evening we went to look at the sunset on the coast of Sanlúcar. I dressed like a maja; Francisco wore peasant’s trousers, a shirt and a waistcoat, and always brought along a sketching block and a pencil. He drew the fishermen and the majas who flirted with them, children with their mothers, people’s faces. He was beautiful when he drew, and happy. I let myself be charmed, looking at him framed in the last rays of the sun which dyed his hair an orange color, and watching the people from the village who, in the twilight, looked like orchids. I enjoyed the present moment, looking forward to the evening, the night, the awakening. I didn’t think about what would happen afterward, the future had ceased to exist. I didn’t want to spoil those moments thinking about the meaning of my life and about what I could give people and the world. In this way, I was able to be happy. The awareness that I was filling the man drawing beside me with happiness was enough for me. There is no other happiness, I knew it, I know.

  After the sun had set, we walked along the harbor, out of the town, in silence, absorbed in the nature around us that was preparing to sleep, and we listened to the tranquility. Amid the silence and the hot, dark air, we were visited by desire. Oh, that southern air, salty and sweet at the same time, which at nighttime still holds the perfume of the sun and decomposing fish and seaweed! That air would revive me, even now when death surrounds me. In that air I would be cured, yes, but only if he were there, if everything could be as it was then.

  One day, in the evening, Francisco complained about the mugginess. I told him that women do not suffer so much: the light and transparent cloths that we wear uncover us and let the air run along our skin. Francisco, in his obtuseness, didn’t understand anything, so I stepped ahead of him and, with my back to him, I hitched up my skirt and petticoats to show him my nakedness which the air could caress. I stayed like that for a while; after a moment, I turned my head and gave him a fleeting, teasing glance. He was as still as if he had been turned to stone, and looked at me as if stunned. And when he had recovered a little I understood that he was trying to engrave that image in his memory. Only after a little while did he start to chase me. He took me in a wild, fast way, and was eager to go back home already. Once there, he went straight to his improvised studio. After a long time, he went down to the kitchen, served himself a large glass of wine, and cut himself a piece of cheese.

  Another day, I was sitting, nude, next to the fountain in the park of the palace and pouring water over myself. It was siesta time and everybody was resting. I thought I was alone and, intoxicated by the sun, the air, and Sanlúcar’s shining white sky, I sat with my legs open and played with the water, my body, my hair. Suddenly something moved in the undergrowth and I saw Francisco’s disheveled head.

  “Susanna in the bath,” I laughed.

  “Susanna and the old men,” he answered.

  “Who is the other old man?”

  “I am both one and the other,” he replied, devouring the image with his painter’s eyes. He took me up in his arms and carried me to the grass amid the pines. But he left soon so as to place on paper the image that he had kept inside him. Meanwhile I woke up my chambermaid so that she could clean away the thorns that had gotten stuck to my back.

  The days went by. We went horseback riding; through the rays of low morning suns, we headed for the little chapel of Nuestra Señora del Rocío. On other days we reached the bright white villages splashed with women in black—Almonte, Sanlúcar, Coria del Río. Each time, we came back home full of beautiful impressions. Francisco grew fond of making expeditions to the lagoon of Santa Ollala and decided to paint it. He placed me in front of one of the streams that run into it. I soon grew impatient standing still. I preferred to ride, to walk, or to have tea on the sand while he drew with his fingers. I inscribed the words SÓLO GOYA there. From time to time I went back to renew the inscription after the wind had erased it. Francisco saw it and included it in a picture in which there is a tree with silky branches, a sandy stream near the lagoon. On the sandy bank, however, there is a human figure. The Muslims fear the representation of the human figure. For that reason, in their paintings the human element is missing. And, like them, I also believed, superstitiously, that if Francisco placed me in his picture, something would go wrong.

  María, don’t spy on me from behind the door. Come in and tell me if you remember the milky light of Sanlúcar in which, at twilight, particles of golden dust glided. You don’t remember? How is that possible? You’re a silly old thing. You remember all my headaches, my pain and suffering, my jealousy and my dissatisfaction, and yet happiness has fled from your memories? Nobody is interested in happy love affairs. And the same thing happens to you as to the rest: when lovers overcome all obstacles, they are no longer good to play. The performance is over. Go away, go away, you silly old thing.

  We didn’t want to know anything about the world, but the world had decided that it would not leave us in peace. Francisco received letters with commissions from his customers. He answered them, putting everything off for an indefinite period of time. I received messages from the court, in which they called for me to present myself there urgently. My mother-in-law, the Marquess of Villafranca, wrote me especially strict letters. I had to return so as to observe the period of mourning prescribed by etiquette, she told me. I ordered my lady-in-waiting to answer these letters, saying that I was not well and would be indisposed for some time. One day in early December, Francisco received a letter from Madrid, from his wife. She complained that she had not seen her husband for a long
time, that their youngest daughter had fallen ill, and that she was all alone with all the children. Would she have to find herself in that situation over Christmas too? She asked her husband to come home as soon as possible.

  I did not abandon Francisco when my husband was dying. Now, Francisco ought to have done the same as I did then, less than a year ago. But he got his baggage ready to depart urgently for Madrid.

  “Francisco, if you leave me now, you will never see me again,” I told him.

  He mumbled something about the responsibility he felt for his family and continued getting his things ready.

  “Very well. This is what you want. Today you have seen me for the last time.”

  I locked myself in my chambers. In the morning I got up before dawn. I was sure that, in the end, Francisco would be incapable of leaving, that he would stay with me, for me. It didn’t happen like that. He had already left, the evening of the previous day.

  Never will I forgive him for leaving that day. I understand him: by leaving, he hoped to turn himself into the master of the situation, to enslave me completely. And I allowed him to do it. I, who had been brought up in an atmosphere of liberty, equality, and fraternity, with the spirit of freedom, just as Rousseau had wanted it for men. Francisco’s image pursued me wherever I went. I imagined him with his wife, whom he never stopped loving and whom he appreciated more than any other person.

  Although my aya María wanted to convince me not to, I could not do otherwise; immediately I sent him a letter:

  Come back at once. I am gravely ill.

  María Teresa

  I myself gave the letter to the messenger so that he made a superhuman effort and flew like the wind, to catch up with Francisco on the way and make him come back.

  It was all in vain. He didn’t come back. No, I will never forgive him that. That Christmas a lukewarm, pleasant sun made the days cheerful, but I saw in front of me just the cold darkness. I didn’t leave the house. The aristocrats and the wealthy bourgeoisie of Cadiz and Seville came to see me often enough, but I didn’t receive anybody.