by Carlos Rojas
The Ursulines did not educate María Teresa and neither did the Royal Salesians. Her grandfather the duke of Alba had maintained a long correspondence with Rousseau. He admired Émile and debated by letter with the Genevan philosopher regarding botany. Doña María Ana de Silva painted, wrote plays and verses, translated, and spoke several languages. On the walls of the house one could see a prodigious private collection that included a Raphael, a Correggio, and Velázquez’s Venus with a Mirror. Inevitably the popular street airs, between Lavapiés and the Rastro, would also enter this fiefdom of very cultivated nobles who were as free in their thinking as in their customs. In short, during this time the aristocracy began to imitate the common people, as Ortega rightly pointed out. The duke’s parents banished their wigs and wore long pigtails like those of bullfighters, much to the despair of Jovellanos. Soon they would pepper Castilian with phrases from the slums, which couldn’t catch up to the archaizing American Spanish language. In the next generation, when María Teresa was already a woman and the duchess of Alba, no one would know whether The Naked Maja was her portrait as an undressed slum dweller or the nude of an actual lower-class woman, disguised in the unclothed image of María Teresa de Silva, duchess of Alba and of Huéscar.
Don Fernando Francisco de Paula de Silva y Álvarez de Toledo died suddenly on Thursday, April 26, 1770, on the seventh day after being attacked by a “stabbing pain in his side in the house or palace of Barquillo, which his father had just purchased,” according to the death certificate. María Teresa was eight years old at the time, and people were already talking about her beauty and daring wit. Her mother, Doña María Ana, consoled her widowhood by having an affair with the marquis de Mora, lover as well of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, and the actress Mariquita Ladvenant, with whom he had four children. In spite of his lubricious youth, the young marquis had been recommended to Voltaire himself by D’Alambert, and three or four times a year he would make his pilgrimage to Château-Ferney to kiss the hands of the maestro. He died of consumption, spitting blood, in Bordeaux in the autumn of 1773. Doña María Ana then became engaged to the count de Fuentes, the widowed father of the marquis de Mora, a long, erect, silent figure described by Ossun, the French ambassador. María Teresa, in the meantime, had been promised to the eleventh marquis de Villafranca, Don José Álvarez de Toledo Ossorio Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno. And so the uncommon circumstance occurred that on the same day, January 15, 1775, mother and daughter were married in Madrid’s Chapel of San José.
María Teresa was barely thirteen on her wedding day. The marquis de Villafranca was almost nineteen. Twenty years later Goya would leave us his portrait, leaning against the edge of a table and holding the score of four songs by Joseph Haydn. By now the marquis was the duke consort of Alba and looked ten autumns older than his thirty-nine years. His hair turned gray prematurely and receded high on his forehead. He had the sad gaze and circumspect expression of very resigned cuckolds. Beneath his dark eyes and long eyebrows, his nose and cheeks were thin. His lips, however, were small and sensual, though pale. Within a year he would be dead, and with no anxiety he probably had a presentiment of it now. Joined to a woman completely different from him, with whom he could not have children, this solitary man avoided other people and took refuge in music, his only passion. From Vienna Haydn sent him quartets for violin, cello, viola, and piano. By mutual agreement oboes, trumpets, and other wind instruments, which neither of them liked especially, were excluded.
In the year of the two weddings the count de Fuentes and the old duke of Alba, María Teresa’s paternal grandfather, died. At the request of the deceased, his jester occupied a place of honor in the funeral rites and wore on his chest the most valuable of the dead man’s decorations. Madrid was infuriated, but María Teresa would always admire the eccentric distinction of the old man. Very soon, barely an adolescent, she would create an even greater scandal. “In 1788,” wrote Godoy in his memoir of exile, “the Duchesses de Alba and de Osuna fought over Joaquín Rodríguez (Costillares) and Pedro Romero, the leading bullfighters of the time. No one talked of anything but this ignoble licentiousness. The incidents, the acts of passion, and the generous gifts of each rival were recounted.” In the end, with the hypocrisy or cynicism of a vindictive lover, the old satyr concluded with a shrug: “But that immorality did not scandalize anyone.”
Costillares was the favorite of the gray-eyed duchess de Osuna. A Sevillan, he invented the volapié and the veronica. The flashy bullfighter had great success with the ladies, who dreamed of being lively chestnut sellers like those in the farces of Don Ramón de la Cruz. Jovellanos wanted in vain to prohibit the national fiesta, “that barbaric amusement.” In 1805, after mature reflection in the Council of Castilla, Godoy would believe he had done away with “fights to the death with both mature and young bulls.” When the war was over, Fernando VII reestablished them. “They were granted in exchange for the liberties and all the rights the heroic people of Spain had won with their blood,” Godoy would write when he recalled the moment. “Bread was not given to anyone, but bullfights were . . . The wretched common people believed they had been well paid!” Almost half a century earlier, Tomás de Iriarte, the poet for hire of the duchess de Osuna, lamented in vexation: “We live now among Costillarists and Romerists. Nothing else is talked about from the time we get up in the morning until we go to bed at night.” María Teresa dispensed her favors to the Romero brothers, Pedro and José. Goya painted both of them before following them between the same sheets. Pedro Romero, creator of the Rondan school, killed more than five thousand bulls without being gored. In his portrait, which is certainly one of Goya’s best, a man contemplates us with his graying sideburns and stylized features and the instinctive distinction that only the lowest class has at times. His eyes reveal an intelligent, indefinable sorrow: that of a mathematician facing the square root of darkness, or a surgeon searching for the soul.
María Teresa, that woman born in the heart of the flashy lower classes, did not confine herself to rivaling the duchess de Osuna. Circumstances led her to measure herself against the queen, who would always proclaim her fierce animosity. When María Luisa was still princess of Asturias, they shared the same lover: a handsome, harebrained soldier, Juan Pignatelli, son of the count de Fuentes, the stepfather of the duchess de Alba. Boastful and indiscreet, Pignatelli gave María Luisa a little gold box adorned with diamonds, a gift from María Teresa, in exchange for one of her stepsister’s rings. The fool then showed the ring to the princess, who snatched it away in a rage. Soon afterward, in a hand-kissing ceremony, María Luisa extended her hand, adorned with that ring, to the duchess. Then María Teresa gave the gold box to her French hairdresser, who is also the princess’s hairdresser, to take to the palace, filled to the brim with cosmetics when he went there to make up María Luisa.
Carlos III died after a long death agony, interminable hours when he sometimes could find no one to bring him a bowl of hot broth, in that court where efficiency was limited to the ceremonial, as it would later be reduced to intrigue. When the months of obligatory mourning were over, the new queen ordered the latest fashions from the Parisian modistes. María Teresa copied them and went out riding through the Prado in an open carriage with her maids, all of them in identical clothes, hats, and muffs. A short time later a sudden fire burned down the palace that the duke and duchess de Alba had built on Calle de Alcalá. María Teresa laughed when she was asked at a ball to comment on the incident. “Next time I’ll burn down the house myself. I don’t want to give others the pleasure of destroying it whenever they choose.”
Posthumous diagnoses, a century and a half after her death, called her both sterile and frigid. Her high bosom, too opulent for her height, now suggested some endocrine disturbance. She gave herself to men as if she were blindly looking for herself in them. Another woman, Antonina Vallentin, stated that in María Teresa voluptuousness was inseparable from compassion. In her an anguished sense of justice combined with flesh and mercy. She protecte
d defenseless animals, the old, the crippled, the mad, the mendicant, the wretched. All the rest, from the monarchs to her own servants and herself were, to María Teresa, the true rabble. At her table in Sanlúcar she sat Goya, her deaf lover, prematurely aged and dyspeptic, next to the sexton and the village idiot. She had taken into her house Brother Basilio, a very old and lame friar with a stammer, whose naïveté provoked the mockery of the footmen and lady’s maids, to the immense pleasure of the guests. María Teresa was furious. “This riffraff will make me think that Brother Basilio and I are the only decent creatures!” Referring specifically to the domestics, she said to the duke, terrified by her rage: “This trash will make me think that even we are better than they are!” Goya painted her full-length portrait in 1795. Standing on sandy ground or on a beach, the duchess points with her index finger at the respectful signature of the painter, written on the ground with a twig: “To the Duchess de Alba, Fr. Goya.” The year follows in highly visible figures. María Teresa wears white, with red bows on her chest and in her hair. Her two-strand necklace and wide sash are also red. If once she dressed her maids in the queen’s fashions, now she dresses herself like her spaniel. At her feet and beside the painter’s name, the little animal wears a twist of silk on its paw the color of her mistress’s bows. In 1797, when the duke was already dead, Goya painted her again in Sanlúcar. They were lovers now and the entire painting proclaimed their love. On her right hand she wears a wedding band and a ring; the first says Goya and the second Alba. So that no one could allege fraud, another inscription in large inverted letters also says, on the ground crowding the little silver shoes of María Teresa: “Sólo Goya.” As if time did not concern the lovers, the date appears in smaller figures, facing the viewer, almost going over the edge of the canvas. Again the duchess points at the name of the man she believes is her beloved. “Sólo Goya.” One would say that María Teresa herself bears witness to this in the sand so that the deaf man cannot doubt it. Goya also makes some sketches of his stay at Sanlúcar. In a charcoal drawing his mistress tousles her hair in front of the mirror in an outburst of childish rage before the sardonic eyes of her lover. “She tears her hair and stamps her feet because the priest Picurris told her she looked pale.” In another the duchess takes a siesta, fully dressed and on her back, while a maid removes a chamber pot from under the bed. Finally, with her arms spread and her back to a fierce bull, she nonchalantly incites the animal, which, motionless and sad, contemplates her as if it cannot believe she is real.
At times jealousy became apparent in the Sanlúcar sketchbook. The duchess had fainted or pretended to faint beside a low wall. Two maids take part in the game, opening her bodice and fanning her with their hands. An attractive young man holds her by the shoulders and looks at her chest while she embraces his slim banderillero’s body. On an incline a masked figure in a three-cornered hat dozes and next to him sits María Teresa. Delicately she adjusts her mantilla at her waist and steals sideways glances at the man. A dandy pursues the duchess with his compliments. At the bottom Goya asks: “Who is more smitten?” and responds: “Neither one. He is merely a charlatan of love who says the same things to each woman, and as for her, she thinks only of the five appointments she has made between eight and nine o’clock and that it’s already seven-thirty.” The hours were also diminished for Goya in the duchess’s inconstancy. When he returns to Madrid, withdrawn into his deaf man’s silence and with the portfolio of sketches under his arm, his affaire d’amour à la mode canaille has had its stormy ending. María Teresa has become Godoy’s mistress and Goya denounces her fickleness in sketches and caprices. “Birds of a Feather,” “Not Even Now Can You See the Difference,” “May God Forgive Her,” “Good Advice,” “Three bullfighters pick up the Broken Pieces of the Duchess of Alba, who finally loses her Mind because of Inconstancy,” “Dream of Lies and Inconstancy.” Then the former lovers arrange a truce and become good friends. On her way to a ball, the duchess appears one afternoon in Goya’s studio and asks him to paint her a face she can wear as a disguise. Goya agrees to the game, and to judge by a letter to Zapater, his only confidence regarding that affair, they enjoy each other again in memory of the old days. In 1798, when he is working on the frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida, María Teresa drops in unexpectedly one morning. “Goya! Goya!” she calls to him, laughing, without his being able to hear her or see her lips from the high scaffold. “You painted all the whores of Madrid in this dome to celebrate a miracle of the saint!”
Another affaire beaucoup plus canaille, the one between María Teresa and Godoy, ends in blazing rancor. He will despise her as perhaps he had never hated anyone, not Fernando VII or the men who one day will drive him through the streets of Aranjuez with blows from their cudgels and slashes from their knives. In April 1800, the queen, always jealous, writes to Godoy: “The Alba woman left us this afternoon; she had lunch with General Cornel and left: she’s a wreck; I don’t think what happened to you before will happen now, and I also believe you’re very sorry about all that.” On September 5 of that year Godoy proclaimed his anger and rage very loudly in a letter to the queen. “Alba and all her supporters ought to be buried in a vast abyss. Cornel, who ever since his affair with Alba has taken her part, should not exist.” Lieutenant General Antonio de Cornel y Ferraz would be María Teresa’s last lover. An Aragonese like Goya, a knight of the Order of Santiago, fiftyish and very well read, he maintained an elegant appearance in spite of his age. His legend preceded him and dazzled women. It was said that he remained a bachelor to keep a vow of celibacy made twenty-two years earlier, when his fiancée burned to death in the fire at the Teatro de Zaragoza. He had been an aide to the count de Aranda, and in the Rosellón Campaign he rose to the rank of field marshal to celebrate the war of the French villages after the women had been violated by the pious soldiers of Cataluña. Godoy’s circumstances fell in the stormy spring of 1798, and Saavedra replaced him as president of the Council of Castilla, and Urquijo, an intimate friend of Cornel, inherited from Saavedra himself his position in the Ministry of Finance. When Urquijo moved on to govern, he would make Cornel his minister of war. In December 1800, Pedro de Cevallos, Godoy’s political messenger, took power. Urquijo and Cornel found themselves in prison. The Prince of Peace did not forget to take his revenge, although in the end, and in his memoirs, he pardoned all his enemies with the exception of the duchess de Alba.
A sudden and unexpected hidden death carried off María Teresa. When she was unconscious, she received the Holy Sacraments and died at two in the afternoon on July 23, 1802. By the expressed desire of the deceased, she was buried without pomp and at night in the Oratory of the Missionary Fathers of the Savior. On August 6 they opened her will in the presence of her brothers-in-law the marquis de Villafranca and the count de Miranda. She left her immense fortune to her servants and the poor, not forgetting her jester Benito, who received a pension for life with an executor to administer it for him. A separate bequest was made to the son of Don Francisco de Goya Lucientes.
The gossips of Madrid repeated the rumor that the duchess de Alba had been poisoned by Godoy and María Luisa. On July 25, the night before María Teresa’s funeral, the public prosecutors of the Council of the Treasury would inventory her estate on the pretext of a claim brought against her because of a late payment of taxes on her estate in Oropesa. They took her jewels and had them appraised, and then the queen appeared wearing them. An order from the king to Godoy himself demanded the record and confiscation of María Teresa’s documents, using base reasons as an excuse. “The magistrate, who heard the case against the suspects in the inheritance, has been able to determine that disloyal servants removed papers from the Duchess’s strongbox at the moment she expired.” Godoy took advantage of the process to acquire everything the queen rejected, including Velázquez’s Venus with a Mirror, along with all of María Teresa’s other paintings. The beggars, the servants, the son of Don Francisco de Goya Lucientes, and the jester Benito would never see any part of ev
erything that legitimately belonged to them.
When the estate of the Prince of Peace had been sequestered in 1808 and then in the uprising of Aranjuez, his canvases were moved into the Cristales storehouse and his works of art inventoried. Entry 122, published in 1919 by Aureliano de Beruete, describes: “Two paintings five feet, four inches high by six feet, ten inches wide, one representing a nude Venus on a bed, the other a clothed maja, painted by Francisco de Goya.”
October 25, 1975
Marina found Sandro sitting on the steps at the foot of the mill, his elbows leaning on his knees and his hands crossed under his chin.
“He’s gotten worse,” she said in an indifferent tone, not looking at him. “At noon he heard Mass and received extreme unction from the palace chaplain. Perhaps he’s died.”
Sandro was silent, absorbed, unmoving. His gaze lost among the hillocks of the woods, he did not seem aware of her presence. Marina thought of a man ironically turned into salt while he looked ahead, past the trees and brambles along the riverbank.
“Who received last rites?” he asked suddenly, looking at her in confusion. “What did you come out here to tell me?”
She did not reply. The only sunbeam that crossed the poplar grove disappeared, and the autumn light turned the air to a gray somewhere between quartz and slate. Observing Sandro, Marina told herself that they both must be the same age, but he looked twenty years older. Before another five had passed—ten at the most—she had a presentiment she would survive him. All her conscious life, “if a Spanish woman could ever have a conscious life,” as Sandro himself would have commented, had been spent intertwined with that man’s, even if at times, and in a Guadiana manner, other couples and an entire generation might come between them. However, the slightest retouching of the destiny of either one, or for that matter a circumstance distant from them both, such as the nonexistence of R., would be enough for their fates to disengage. Now, in spite of her own protests and the revulsion that Sandro’s drunkenness inspired in her, she knew with certainty she would never leave him, just as he would never succeed in finishing the book on Goya. She would have sworn to any of those hypothetical realities with identical certainty. She repeated silently, as she had so many times before, that they were both equally sterile: two lost creatures numb with cold on the banks of the torrent of life that they would never even graze with their fingers. It was R. who had shaped their common destiny to resemble a design unknown to her and to Sandro. R. introduced them beside the tiny water lily pond. R. found them the bedroom where they had their first encounters and the place where Marina miscarried the only child she might have had. R. joined them again, almost thirty years later, and they were living in his house even though Sandro had promised her that by now they would be in the United States. It was through R. that Sandro got the contract for the life of Goya and even the grant from “that foundation that bore the name of the leading pirate of the Mediterranean.”