by Carlos Rojas
Goya believed in “Divine Reason,” as he called it in The Caprices. If he seemed to identify morally with the victims here, ideologically he was on the side of the executioners. André Malraux’s often-cited phrase from his Saturne. Essai sur Goya, describing The Disasters of War, is still valid: “The notebook of a Communist at the moment his country has been invaded by the Soviet Union.” The Disasters, The Shootings, and May 2, 1808, in Madrid were also the testimony of a deaf syphilitic who saw more deeply than any of his contemporaries into the dark labyrinth that occupies and, in the final analysis, summarizes human nature. There he also discovered the ironic monster that inhabits man and obliges him to kill in the name of the noblest social abstractions: Liberty, Faith, Progress, and Reason itself. As a man he believed himself to be as guilty as his fellow man, regardless of the language in which he expressed himself at the moment of the executions, which always preceded a dawn that was, perhaps, impossible. Perhaps even guiltier, because Goya knew himself to be both violent and cowardly in the chaos of war. May 2, 1808, in Madrid, The Executions, and The Disasters were much more than the testimony of a supporter of the French at the moment his country had been invaded by the Napoleonic Legion de Réserve. They were the terrible examination of conscience by a rationalist Christian in the name of all his brothers, the killers.
March 26, 1828
I’m recovering little by little and in no time I’ll be like new, at the age of eighty-two. If my daughter-in-law and grandson would come right now, I’d be fine. This miracle is due to valerian, ground up fine in the mortar, which Leocadia gives me every noon. I even found the strength to go to Galos’s house, all wrapped up and in a carriage, to sign receipts for the last remittances. The trip did not tire me as much as I feared, and I plan to repeat it in April on my own feet. With Leocadia’s help I walk a little around the house every morning and then, comfortably stretched out in the armchair filled with pillows, I draw events that happened thirty years ago or even more, using a board as a table. It may be an illusion of mine, but I believe that even my sight improved this week. Sometimes I dispense with the magnifying glass to draw my sketches, using only eyeglasses with metal frames. A real painter should be able to reproduce the most distant memories with a pencil or a dry point needle. When I can’t do that, I’ll be blind or I’ll have died.
Dear Xavier: I’m dying of impatience as I wait for my dear travelers. You gave me the greatest pleasure when you said in your last letter that they wouldn’t go to Paris in order to spend more time with me. They’ll enjoy it here, and if you come in the summer, my happiness will be complete.
On Saturday I was in Galos’s house and received the two monthly stipends. I also have in my possession the other draft for 979 francs. As soon as you send the next pair of stipends, I plan to invest the income, some 12,000 reales annually, in a country house for Marianito and his descendants. What do you think of the idea?
I’m feeling much better and hope to be as healthy as I was before the attack. My improvement is due to powdered valerian; but the best remedy for all my ailments will be the visit from my dear travelers. They will help me to recover completely. Goodbye for now, my son, from one who loves you very much . . .
I reread my own letter several times, now with the help of the magnifying glass. Though I’d give my eyes to have my daughter-in-law bring Marianito to me and not to live waiting for their arrival, I scrawled the note to Xavier, not really paying attention to what I had written. Lightning bolts of memory repeatedly returned me to that spring of 1796 or 1797 and to the house on the slope of Sanlúcar Hill. Months earlier, back when María Teresa began to go to bed with me, she had become a widow. She went to Sanlúcar to hide her mourning and I joined her there, on the pretext of painting her full-length portrait again, as we had agreed earlier in Madrid. In reality even our few precautions were excessive because in whispers and behind my back, the back of a deaf man, the entire court was saying we were lovers. Josefa must have known all about it, though she never reproached me for anything. She must have imagined in silence that the affair between a peasant and a woman of such high nobility, and twenty years his junior besides, would end like the rosary at matins: in a scandal destined to be forgotten as soon as María Teresa chose another lover. And in fact, that’s what happened, although Josefa would never guess that I, the oldest of the three and a sick man, would outlive all the women in this purgatory.
I see María Teresa’s house again, halfway up the slope that leads to the village, as I sketch it rapidly in the notebooks on the board. My hand does not tremble, even though ten days ago it was stiff, and now it transfers memories to paper at full speed. (Valerian will condemn me to live for a century, like Titian, and die painting! Vous êtes un grand homme, un peintre de la Chambre. On va vous soigner!) It was midafternoon, and beneath the bedroom window the Guadalquivir slipped out to sea past the inlets. On its way to setting, the sun turned an orange-red that set the water on fire beneath the shrieking gulls. Couples in boats crossed the gleaming river. The men rowed, shirtless, and the women protected themselves from the glare with flowered parasols and wide straw hats decorated with glass grapes. I made love to María Teresa, and she smothered me again, anticipating her cries when she climaxed, which the servants would listen to, smiling, behind the door. At times, and before I left the bedroom after dressing, she would call the maid with a bell and ask her to change the stained sheets. I asked her how she dared humiliate the girl in that way, and looking me in the eye, she replied:
“What I don’t understand is why she lends herself to being humiliated. If these people are as despicable as we are, what sense do our lives make, or theirs?”
We fell asleep in each other’s arms in the dazzling afternoon. I awoke after an interminable dream in which I had seen the Prince of Peace, surprisingly aged and badly dressed, playing with some children in gardens that a thunderstorm erased from memory. María Teresa was still lying naked, facedown on the bed, her jet-black hair spilling over her shoulders and the sheets. It must have poured while we were sleeping, because the sky was still cloudy on the other side of the wet glass. A fantastic rainbow crossed the sky and the inlets. It came to us through the window and illuminated María Teresa’s back with all the lights of the prism. I woke her and said:
“I dreamed I saw Godoy in a park where I’d never been. He was very old, but I recognized his features because I never forgot a face. Sitting on a bench and dressed like someone unemployed, he was talking with other old men as poorly attired as he. At times the children would approach him and he lent them his walking stick so they could ride it around a pond. The dream washed away in a storm. I don’t understand it, but I’m afraid it is a harbinger of misfortunes.”
Curled on the bed, her hands crossed under her chin, María Teresa seemed to pierce me with her eyes. Her gaze was lost in the void, following a Godoy very different from the omnipotent favorite of an earlier time, in whom she scorned excessive power, satanic ambition, and the roguery that led him to satisfy them. The account of my dream must have evoked in her an abandoned and impoverished man submerged in a misfortune as incredible as his earlier fortune. At that moment I realized I had lost her forever. Not long afterward she became the concubine of the greatest of satyrs, the Prince of Peace, who, ironically, would always favor me with his affection. In one of my Caprices I portrayed María Teresa, in mourning and flying through the air, standing on three monstrous squatting figures. In another drawing that I did not have the courage to engrave, “Dream of the Lie and Unconsciousness,” I portrayed her again with two faces, like Janus, embracing me but at the same time looking at a stranger who approached slithering along the ground. To begin with I drew a snake holding a turtle spellbound in order to devour it. The Caprices were published thanks to the authority of Godoy, who probably never understood them. Engraving them freed me from my jealousy, because for me, art was always my redemption from madness. By then, María Teresa had tired of the Prince of Peace and he did not pursue her body, o
nly the plunder of her estate.
Leocadia arrived holding Rosarito by the hand and I immediately closed my sketchbook. I shared my jealousy with others, but my memories were as much mine as the silence of my deafness. She told me that Moratín had come to say goodbye, because tomorrow he was returning to Paris. (No doubt he had given up waiting for my death and was leaving now, at a calm, empty time, because only the burial of other exiles revives our hope of seeing Spain again.) We invited Moratín to have lunch with us: Madrid garbanzo stew and suckling pig. He accepted very courteously and enthusiastically praised Leocadia’s cooking with the irritating discretion of an effeminate man. We had lunch right in the bedroom, and I ate with Rosarito on my lap, the drawing board serving as our table. Looking at Moratín, I suddenly asked him:
“Leandro, how old are you now?”
“I’ll be sixty-eight.”
“No one would ever guess. You look almost twenty years younger,” Leocadia chimed in.
The hunger he would have suffered recently in Paris had made him thin and pale, although he had always had that whitish color touched with pink so typical of conch shells and girls. He had been the librarian and personal friend of the Intruder King, and had been obliged to follow him into exile. Joseph Bonaparte gave almost his entire personal fortune to create a pension fund for destitute supporters of the French. Now the Bourbons had confiscated those funds. One day he’ll die in Paris and someone will have to give up part of his own grave for him. He will turn into ashes and his theater into silence. In this world of madmen, our personal fate is undoubtedly something that happens only once.
“I’d also take you for half a century if I hadn’t known you since the days when we would get together in the Fonda de San Sebastián, where I heard you talk about the Encyclopedists for the first time. Half a century badly lived, in fact, because if that were your age you’d look older. I’d like to paint another portrait of you to know for certain who you are.”
“Did you find that out about yourself?” He smiled, carving the meat with those thin, sensitive hands, as white as mushrooms very well hidden in the bush.
“No. The fact of the matter is I never could find out, and the older I get, the less I know about it.”
Vous êtes un grand homme, un peintre de la Chambre. Everything was clear to the doctors: I was a former painter of kings to whom they gave powdered valerian in order to keep him alive. “We know each other too well,” I said to His Majesty the last time I spoke with him. The fact is that nobody knows anybody, as the title of one of my caprices says: that masked ball where everything is false, the people, their words, and even their disguises. The king laughed like a parrot imitating men. And yet he thought he was Saturn, devouring our people. That’s where he was wrong, because I too supposed I was Saturn, and we couldn’t both become the same monster. In Sanlúcar, when I painted the portrait in which María Teresa wore two rings without our names, she said to me: “You immortalized me twice. I’ll live forever in people’s memory for having been your mistress and because you made this painting of me.” At least, that’s what I thought I read on her lips, because I could no longer hear her voice. In a few days she was Godoy’s, as she had once been mine, with the same cries I never could hear, though she was in my arms, the same kisses, the same bites. Now she has been ashes for more than twenty years and I don’t know what could have happened to her portrait with the two rings. The queen and the Prince of Peace stole it, along with everything that was hers, after her death.
“That’s precisely why we grow old and die,” said Moratín: “to forget who we are if we ever knew it.”
“Grandfather, are you going to die soon?” Rosarito asked, sitting in my lap.
“Rosarito! How dare you say terrible things like that?” said a furious Leocadia. “What will Don Leandro think of you?”
“Don Leandro doesn’t think, Señora,” Moratín said with a smile, speaking very slowly, as he usually does. “Don Leandro is in exile, just like yourself, for having dared to think.”
“That’s enough, Leocadia,” I intervened in order to cut short these fits of rage, so sudden and so exasperating. “The girl isn’t to blame for thinking freely, in her innocence. Don’t attempt to be more than the despot. Go on, pour me a little wine.”
The wine was poured and I drank; but we didn’t resolve anything. I am less and less sure of knowing who I am, more and more suspicious in the most tortured way that I’m beginning to be someone else. For thirty-six years I haven’t heard a human voice, including my own, reading other people’s lips to discover what they are saying to me. And yet, with a start that I can barely manage to control, at this very moment, I heard in my mind the words of an unknown woman: “I’ll never know who I could have been, since no woman knows that who hasn’t been a mother,” she says to me. “For that matter, I also don’t know what I’m doing here with you. It’s all like a nightmare that goes on too long.” I would have liked to smother this faceless voice; but she replied: “I’ll go when I like. After all, it’s all the same whether I go or stay with you, because any relationship between us never made any sense.” Then she stopped speaking and I needed a few moments of quiet to get used to her silence. Moratín’s gestures got me out of the critical moment, for he was talking to me and trying to look me in the eye.
“To continue with our sad exegesis of old age, I ought to confess an almost unimaginable I adventure had in Paris, shortly before my trip to Bordeaux. One Sunday I was walking alone through the Tuileries gardens, and I ran into the Prince of Peace.”
“Godoy? I thought he was dead,” said Leocadia.
“Grandpa, who’s the Prince of Peace?” Rosario asked, turning her head so I could see her lips.
“The Prince of Peace is the devil,” responded Leocadia.
“Don’t be stupid,” I interrupted her, “and don’t talk about someone you don’t believe in. I see no reason to teach the child to hate in vain. When she’s a woman, no one will remember Godoy. The Prince of Peace, my little ladybird, is a man your grandfather knew in Spain. He tried to have everything in this world, where almost nothing is worth the effort; but now he suffers as we do, because he has to live far from Madrid and his country.”
“He didn’t seem to be suffering too much when I ran into him,” Moratín continued. “He was taking the sun on a bench, near the pond, speaking very bad French with other old men. It turned out to be a get-together of retired actors and trapeze artists who met there every Sunday. With them, and with no touch of irony, because he never had any, the Prince of Peace said he had been a Spanish clown. Some of those old men would go to the Tuileries with their grandchildren. The children showed an instinctive affection for Godoy, and he more than reciprocated. They climbed on his knees and brought him their toys and balls so that he would lend them his walking stick of varnished cane. Although I had often seen him before the war, I didn’t recognize him then. There are people who age badly, whom the winters not only blur but disfigure as well. He was one of those. Time had bent his back and made him so thin that nothing remained of his insolent bearing. Moreover, I never could have imagined him so modestly dressed in badly pressed clothes shiny with wear, and a shirt darned on the front. It was he who approached, limping, after saying goodbye to his friends. Smiling, he extended a trembling hand, spotted by the years. ‘You’re Moratín, aren’t you? I’m the Prince of Peace.’”
“What else happened, Leandro? What else happened? For God’s sake, don’t stop now!”
My heart pounded in my chest, the way fulling mills pounded cloth. Moratín had experienced and was recounting the dream I’d had in the distant spring of Sanlúcar. This Godoy, eaten away by old age and poverty, was the same man I had dreamed thirty years earlier. The man whom María Teresa could have loved now, as she had loved me when syphilis had deafened me, as she had loved beggars, lepers, blind men, orphans, the destitute, as she had left all her goods to the poor, before the queen and Godoy himself had stripped her bare after her death.
> “Don’t you feel well? Why are you so upset?” Leocadia and Moratín asked at the same time, astonished by my agitation and the impatience of my words.
“I’m perfectly fine. Go on, Leandro! Go on!”
“There isn’t much to tell,” he said with a shrug. “We walked for a time through the garden and Godoy spoke almost the whole time about himself. He had a singular Italian accent, which he had brought from Rome, where, as he told me, he kept a vigil over the death agony of Queen María Luisa. He added that the Princess of Peace had died in Madrid, in 1820, without ever answering his letters. Their daughter, Carlota, also refused to write to him. ‘She doesn’t want to know anything about me, alive or dead,’ he repeated dispassionately, as if he were accustomed to thinking of that ingratitude. He lived on the fourth floor, near the Tuileries, thanks to a modest pension from the French government. When the Princess of Peace died, he married Pepita Tudó in order to recognize the son he’d had with her. ‘On that fourth floor,’ he said with a smile, ‘we were all waiting for the death of the despot, also known as the Desired One. I think he’s very sick again.’ I told him that a people who called Fernando the Desired One had no forgiveness from God. He nodded his agreement in the twilight: ‘No, no they don’t, not even in hell.’ I was going to reply that Spain was hell, when he muttered in a very quiet voice: ‘I consider my current wretchedness well spent, because it is the guarantee of my conscience. I at least did not have the opportunity to experience that war in which Spaniards found themselves obliged to betray or defend the rights of a traitor, committing all kinds of atrocities.’ I replied that I had been librarian to King José, precisely in order to serve my country. He smiled, shaking his head. ‘That’s your affair, Moratín. I congratulate myself because destiny forced me to withdraw.’”