by Carlos Rojas
“Señor, you forget I can read your lips.”
He was the deaf man then, or at least he wasn’t listening to me. His legs crossed, inner thighs touching, he stretched out in his chair, contemplating the Tiepolo ceiling with half-closed eyes while he smoked, drawing slowly on his cigar. To one side of the cold fireplace, on an easel, was the portrait of him I had just painted. I looked at it with cold lethargy, as if someone else had done it, and felt satisfied. It was his legacy to men, not mine.
“The day my mother passed, my sister María Luisa wrote to me from Rome,” he sighed suddenly, scratching his privates. “My mother had almost died in Godoy’s arms, so to speak. For an entire week he watched over her constantly as she lay dying, the two of them alone in that room. The night before she died my mother called for María Luisa and said: ‘I’m going to die. I recommend Manuel to you. You can have him and be certain that you and your brother Fernando will not find a more affectionate person.’ He burst into strident laughter, shaking that head of his, too long and flattened at the temples, on his narrow shoulders. “When my sister saw that things were going badly, she removed the sausage-maker, who was crying like a penitent woman, from my mother’s side, and summoned the priests. They gave her the viaticum, unction, and every spiritual aid. They would do her little good in the next world, I tell myself.”
“Señor, you forget that I can read lips.”
“What do I care what you read or what you hear, old man!” he screamed without warning, as red as a cider apple. “Have you forgotten that I’m the king and you’ll rot in the grave, like my parents and your children?” In one of his typical sudden changes, which happened so often, he smiled at me disagreeably and placed a hand on my knee. “You won’t be angry with me, will you? Remember how often you deserved the garrote and I pardoned you. You’d deserve it again now, for painting me as I am and not how I’d like men to see me. It’s fitting that you’re as deaf as a post, because when all is said and done, you look at the world and your fellow man with eyes more truthful than mirrors. I’m going to confess something that nobody else knows. My mother left her entire personal fortune to her lover, the sausage-maker. Naturally, I never allowed Godoy to see a penny of his inheritance. He’ll end his days in Paris, rotting in poverty, I assure you of that.”
He smiled and seemed to withdraw into the pleasure that paralyzed him. He crossed his hands, rubbed his palms, and cracked his knuckles. His hands were too short, puffy and plebeian, with thick nails and flattened fingers. Exactly like those of my son Xavier. Suddenly I was struck by the obvious revelation that His Majesty the king could also be my son. A son deformed in soul and body as he was, blemished in his flesh and his spirit by my blood, poisoned before he was born. The French disease, which I contracted at some brothel in my youth, and that thirty-four or thirty-five years ago had made me deaf, perhaps had made me conceive of him as he really was in life and in the portrait: a kind of potbellied, grotesque buffoon, his head and body too long, his arms and legs those of a small straw-filled dummy, illuminated by the malicious glance of his pale eyes, where one read as if in a book his betrayals, his cowardice, and his extreme cruelty. What then was his freedom, if in my own way I had condemned him by fathering him? Could it be frighteningly true, as the king himself declared, that only those who never existed are free, because even the dead suffer in hell for other people’s crimes?
Back when I was young and beginning to paint for the Royal Tapestry Workshop, our son Vicente Anastasio was born. “He’s a very handsome, robust kid,” I wrote to my friend Zapater, “and his mother is in satisfactory condition.” The next morning the boy was found dead in his cradle, already as yellow as a relic and with a thin line of blood on his lips. Hours before he had nursed hungrily, and as my wife recounted afterward, he even seemed to smile. Two years later Josefa gave birth to my María del Pilar Dionisia. She had a gigantic head, almost as large as a man’s, though her forehead was sunken like a macaque’s. As soon as she was born and had been washed, after an interminable delivery, I was told it was a misfortune because fluids were pressing on her brain in the huge skull. That was why I gave her a name as resonant as that of a duchess, in contradistinction to her deformity and above all her destiny. She was a sweet monster, all smiles, simpers, and affection. She horrified Josefa, but I spent hours bending over her little cradle, seeing myself in her eyes like a wounded fawn’s. She died when she was a year old and also in silence, like Vicente Anastasio. Another daughter, Hermenegilda, was born dead and we had time only to baptize her before putting her in the ground. When my wife became pregnant with Francisco Xavier Pedro, after the sudden death of Francisco de Paula, I managed to arrange, through my brother-in-law Bayeu, for a physician from the Royal House, the same one who brought His Majesty into the world, to visit us and find the sickness in our seed. He discovered the disease in my blood. He said the affliction had no cure, because the only thing anyone knew about it was its origins. The conquistadors contracted it in Peru, fornicating with llamas when they wearied of raping Indian women. I was transmitting it to my babies in my semen, though it might happen, with heaven’s help, that by dint of trying, we might conceive one who was healthy. Silently, just as my children always died, I decided to kill myself immediately if we lost the one we were expecting. It was the cold, unbreakable decision of an immovable Aragonese, which I would have carried out even against my own instincts, always thirsty for life. There was no need because we were successful with Xavier. He was so handsome and healthy that, as I wrote to Zapater, one would say all of Madrid doted on him because he was so beautiful.
I must have been lost in thought and my own chimeras because I almost jumped when His Majesty the king patted my knee. His dark brows frowning, he looked at me with an expression of curiosity mixed with commiseration. His breath smelled of tobacco and decay when he said to me:
“What’s wrong, old man, are you asleep or distracted? You’re as white as snow.”
“Señor, years ago I built a house on the lowlands of the Manzanares, between Móstoles, Navalcarnero, and Alberche. In Madrid they called it the Deaf Man’s Villa, and soon it will belong to Xavier, because I’m leaving it to him in a bequest. I closed it up two years ago, when I left this country, and it won’t be opened again until after my death. I’d advise you to go and see it then, even in disguise and incognito, which they say you do occasionally at night. The house is my legacy, as I suppose the portrait I’ve just made of you will be yours. On its walls I’ve painted the examination of my own conscience turned into a nightmare, although perhaps you might believe I painted the demons inside me, demons that are beginning to be as familiar to me as your subjects must be to you, and as their jesters were to your forebears. If the walls displease you, don’t go into the dining room, because Saturn is there devouring his children.”
He burst into laughter again, with that laugh that sometimes resembled the laugh of a woman in heat and sometimes the laugh of a parrot imitating men. In Bordeaux, Moratín told me about a letter His Majesty’s mother-in-law wrote when he was married to his first wife. “He is false, crafty, despicable, and almost impotent,” said the queen of Naples about her son-in-law. “At the age of eighteen, my daughter feels absolutely nothing with him. Patience and cures are like sowing in sand; their efforts fail and give no pleasure.” Then she described him as a hoax that did not reach the princess’s shoulders, all body, almost no legs, and the head of a dwarf.
“Don’t tempt fate, old man, you might end up with my benevolence,” he replied, laughing. “I forgave your serving the French during the war and then I forgot about your chats and contacts with your liberal friends, the leprosy that is trying to destroy me. I even allowed you to go into exile, when you feared for your head, just as I gave you permission now to return. I can pardon your actions but not your sinful thoughts. I am your Saturn, devouring my people.”
“In this case Your Majesty is mistaken. Saturn is my self-portrait, and I realized that only tonight. This was precis
ely the reason I told you that my idea of happiness on earth is to die before my son Xavier. I consumed the others when I gave them life, for the disease that is rotting me doomed them. I became aware of this speaking to Your Majesty, when I realized that because of your age, you could be my son too. Perhaps I’m not being clear. I’m deaf, and maybe I ought to be mute. Painting is enough for me to know I’m alive.”
“You’re very clear, and it pains me to understand you. I didn’t know you were sick, because I always saw you as an oak. Besides: the viciousness you can do to yourself with that kind of thinking hurts me almost as much as the harm that could be done to me.”
“Perhaps that’s true, but I can’t believe it because you always lived for the sake of hatred. I give credence only to the fact that I returned to Spain before I died, and in order to realize that I was Saturn and had to confess that to you. As for the rest, disposing of my goods after I died and revisiting the places where I lived my conscious life were an oblique excuse for my true purpose. It’s strange that a man can live for eighty years and then see that his earlier actions had very different aims from the ones he thought they had. Perhaps no one in the world knows who he is, because he doesn’t know for certain who he might have been.”
“Perhaps it’s too late to find out in your case and in mine,” he interrupted with a shrug. “Take comfort in the thought that when you’re gone, your art will remain.”
“Michelangelo already said that, Señor: men pass, their art remains.”
Suddenly he looked at me, and his expression changed. Without even being aware of it he hated me then because he envied me for everything: my paintings and my fame, which prevented him from garroting me or throwing me into a dungeon, as he liked to do to his enemies and would have done to his own mother if she had lived. He even envied me for my age, perhaps because he was afraid he wouldn’t reach it, and for the French disease that had made me deaf and was devouring me, and even for my dead children because they weren’t his.
“Your art is great but you’re good for nothing! You were wicked enough to sell me and you even sold the French. During the invasion you painted the portrait of the Intruder King, and you offered to choose paintings for him to take to Paris. By any chance did you think, you doddering old coot, that I was in a perpetual daze? Then, to mock me even further, you painted The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill and The Second of May in the Puerta del Sol, those gigantic canvases that adorned the triumphal arch prepared for my return in the Puerta de Alcalá, while the rabble cheered me, howling ‘Long live our chains!’ and ‘Execute liberty against the wall!’”
“You don’t have to yell that way! I’ve already told you I can read your lips!”
“I’ll yell as much as I want to,” he insisted. “You outlived your wife who was good only for giving birth to the children you destroyed with your syphilis; but I don’t know how you could outlive your own duplicity and shamelessness. I mean, I do know, since your cowardice made you in the image and likeness of our people.”
“The image and likeness of Your Majesty! In the Escorial you denounced your accomplices so your lies would be forgiven and even threw yourself into the arms of Godoy, pleading with him to save you from the wrath of your own father!”
“Also my image and likeness. So be it. You also betrayed out of fear. We’re very similar, though in your pride you refuse to believe it. We both despise our fellow men, though, strangely enough, we fear them at the same time.”
It was true, and against my will I found myself nodding in agreement. Then I remembered, as if I had painted it in my memory or was seeing it again with the eyes of half a century ago, the day Josefa and I were presented at court, before he was born. His grandfather, Carlos III, was still on the throne; I would paint his portrait a short time later. My brother-in-law had arranged the audience, which took place on a winter afternoon filled with light. The widowed king, with the face of a small-eared sheep and a gaze shining with intelligence tinged by sadness, received us, half sunk into the pillows of a couch, raising a lavender-scented handkerchief to his nose because the Sierra winds had given him a cold. The princess of Asturias (“I’m going to die. I recommend Manuel to you. You can have him and be certain that you and your brother Fernando will not find a more affectionate person”) was sitting beside him. I met her then when she was young and still beautiful, tall and high-breasted, with the dark skin and sloe eyes of an Italian. Her husband, the prince, who ten years later would inherit the throne, remained standing next to the seat. He was the strongest man I’ve ever met and even then, in spite of my confusion, I was surprised by the width of his shoulders and the roots and branches of his muscles, visible at the edge of his ruff and under his silk stockings. His smile, which was always at the ready, though no one could forget the fury of his rages, half-closed his pinkish eyelids over eyes so blue they were almost transparent. Josefa’s resigned timidity became reconciled to the grandeur of the moment. Prudently and moderately, she spoke to the king and his children as if they were blood relatives, distant, but very close in their respectful esteem. I, on the contrary, trembled with fear when I kneeled on the marquetry of the floor to kiss the august hands of that family. The prince obliged me to stand, taking me by the elbows. His palms were small, but hard and lined like those of an old blacksmith. It surprised me that, being who he was, they were so roughened, and that he was accustomed to working with his hands. His Majesty the king spoke a little of Mengs, of Tiépolo, and of my brother-in-law. The princess said something to me in Italian when she learned I had lived in Rome. She praised our manners, as if we were children, and smiled. Saper fare e condursi a quel modo. Then the monarch also intervened in Tuscan. He remarked on the light at that time of day, as one painter would to another. After having spent so many years in Naples, where the twilights are shorter, he marveled at dusk in Madrid. Allora, appena il crepuscolo, il giorno comincia a scolrire e nel traspasso dei colori tutto rimane calmo. Don Carlos, the prince of Asturias, put his arm around my shoulders to lead me to the door. I supposed this was his way of ending the audience; but I could still kiss the hands of the princess and His Majesty again, on my knees and very quickly. I hadn’t taken ten steps when the prince almost broke my back with a huge slap on my shoulder that resounded like thunder throughout the room. At the age of thirty, I weighed 175 pounds and boasted of bending an iron bar with my hands and a coin, a real, with my fingers; but breathless and stumbling I fell flat on my face, while the prince said: “Well, well, my dear friend, I hope we’ll see each other again very soon.” Then he began to guffaw as he held out his hand and I, gasping and servile, echoed his loud laughter. The princess laughed too, although unwillingly, as if that farce, repeated so often, bored her by now. Josefa looked at us with the same withdrawn mystery as when she accepted infidelities and the births and deaths of her children. His Majesty the king sighed, closing his eyes and placing the handkerchief in his sleeve. “No one can resist a slap from me,” the prince of Asturias gloated, “the hardest stablemen fall like ninepins. When you come back we’ll fight with pikes in the stables and then I’ll play the violin for you, if you like.” I agreed to everything, like a scoundrel who’d been beaten with a cudgel. I would have sold my soul at any offense in order to be court painter. (Afterward I was, unexpectedly, thanks to Godoy, when I had almost lost all hope.) That same night I wrote to Zapater: “If I had more time, I’d tell you how the King, the Prince, and the Princess honored me. Through the grace of God I kissed their hands, I’ve never had such good fortune before.” At that time I felt vulnerable and intimidated by men, in the double uncertainty of my youth and my destiny. But I wouldn’t learn to really fear them until many years later, when I discovered the monsters that lived inside them.
“Why did you bring me to the palace? Why did you insist on my painting your portrait when they told you I was in Madrid?” I was overcome by a fit of rage against His Majesty for having obliged me to conjure up the dead. I was surprised to find myself shouting at him in that
voice of mine that I would never hear again.
“You’re a part of my past that I don’t want to forget. From those years I value only your memory and that of my first wife in her final days. At the beginning of the century, when you painted our family, you looked us in the eye, one by one, and we all lowered our heads. ‘This is the only man,’ I said to myself then, ‘whom you could truly respect.’ Then I thought that in the final sessions we posed all together for you, like actors on a stage, and it seemed reasonable. The day you allowed us to see the finished painting, while my parents outdid themselves making up base compliments to please you, blind to the horror of that parade of ghosts and monsters reflected on the canvas as if in a mirror, I thought: ‘It hardly matters now what we do or fail to do, action is worth as much as refraining from action, because this painting will outlive us. Here we are all judged and condemned, even the children, because any blind man would see that María Isabel and Francisco de Paula are not my father’s children but Godoy’s.’”
“Señor, leave the dead in peace.”
“I didn’t pass judgment on them, you did.”
“I painted your August Family as I saw them at the time.”
“You painted us as we were and now you’ve portrayed me again as I am. This is your own punishment, old man: to paint the truth.” Enraged again, he crushed his cigar in a dish. “The dead, as you call them, made me what I am and turned my life into a shameful nightmare! Do you know the name the queen of Naples gave my sister Isabel when they married her to the queen’s son? The epileptic bastard, yes sir, the epileptic bastard! Do you know what my sister Carlota replied shortly after her betrothal to the prince of Portugal, when she was reproached for her collection of lovers? ‘I don’t want a single favorite, because I’m not prepared to have him attached to me like Godoy was to my mother.’ Do you know what it means for a boy of sixteen, exactly my age when you painted my family, to read the stolen copy of a memorandum from the French ambassador, where he says, with all the fairness in the world, that no drunken soldier would have dared to humiliate a prostitute in the way Godoy treated my mother? Do you want me to spell out my suffering back then, recalling that my father, the king, was incapable of buying a watch without seeking the advice of Godoy himself?”