by Carlos Rojas
Even if I didn’t know the original, I would swear that in the world there is no representation of a wild bull more powerful. Possibly there never will be. Picasso’s minotaur and the horned bull in Guernica are effeminate versions of this incomparable beast. (When I showed it to Marina in the catalogue, to ask her whether she would like to see the painting, she shook her head of a doll that had forgotten to age. “No, absolutely not,” she told me. “I’d be afraid of going blind afterward.” I was right then not to doubt it, because this head of a bull is at the same time the head of the Gorgon, who even when decapitated blinds men with her dead eyes.)
The painting is not dated. Josep Gudiol believes Goya probably painted it during his slow convalescence, following the illness that deafened him and kept him for an entire year, between 1792 and 1793, on the brink of death. Toward the end of that agony, and permanently deaf, he wrote his most quoted letter to Zapater: “I’m the same as far as my health is concerned, sometimes raging with a temper that not even I can stand, at other times more moderate, like this moment when I have taken up the pen to write to you, although I’m already tired. I’ll tell you only that on Monday, God willing, I’ll go to see the bulls and I would like you to accompany me next Monday, even if I said foolish things about your having gone crazy. Your Paco.”
The greatest artist of the two centuries that his life spanned never learned syntax or orthography. To become Goya he would have to forget the drawing he learned in his youth, first from José Luján, and then from his brother-in-law Bayeu. In this way he broke and eliminated contours and outlines. In the only reality, he affirms, triumphant and in anticipation of Cubism: “I do not distinguish more than luminous bodies and dark bodies; planes that advance and planes that retreat; reverses and concavities.” After the illness that enclosed him in the silence of deafness, Goyaesque harmony was not reduced to the limits of “divine” reason but became centered in the total truth of creatures. To be is to know you are other. To know you are, for example, this black, wounded bull, blood flaring in the whites of his eyes.
Human reason, the reason in which Goya had believed with the faith of the convert two years earlier (“I have gotten it into my head that I should maintain a specific idea and maintain a certain dignity which man ought to possess, and this, believe me, does not make me very happy”), human reason, I repeat in order not to lose my train of thought, was found outside the painting and was identified with the painter, and with us when we shared his point of view face to face with the animal. By way of contrast, the bull would be nature, fierce, brutal, and dark, with the blood of another on the tip of his horn, though paradoxically vulnerable in his monstrous power. (“Oh white wall of Spain! / Oh black bull of grief!” “Have you shot world-famous Spanish writers?” they asked Franco. “The truth is that in the first moments of the revolution in Granada, that writer died mixed in with the agitators; these are the natural accidents of war. Granada was under siege for many days and the madness of the Republican authorities in distributing weapons to the people gave rise to flare-ups in the interior, and in one of them the Granadan poet lost his life. . . . As we have said, we did not shoot any poet.”) The confrontation of nature and reason would be enough to catalogue the painting if the eyes of the animal were not so obsessive. Goya would have painted this head with a very different, less intriguing gaze before his illness, when according to Cardadera he would go to the bullfights wearing a soft broad-brimmed hat, frock coat, a cape draped across his shoulder, and a dress sword, to talk at length with the bullfighters beside the barrier. Now, with the labyrinth of his ear sealed off, and lost in the delirium of his mortal illness, he learned to believe in the specters of his nightmares as he did in himself. Long before Freud denounced his fellow men for parricide and incest, Goya discovered Saturn inside himself, devouring his children at a witches’ sabbath. The eyes of this fighting bull belonged to the choir of monsters that populated his soul and inhabited the man. He had seen them in the absurdities of his hallucinations as he approached death. If Gudiol dated the painting correctly, as soon as Goya knew he would survive he rushed to paint them from memory, beneath the horns of the beast.
The eyes of the minotaur that Picasso sketched among his notes for Guernica were those of Picasso himself, which were not too large or too dark, according to Brassäi. They seemed enormous due to his singular ability to open them very wide, even above the iris, where the light glitters and is reflected on the sclera. (“Screams of children, screams of women, screams of birds, screams of flowers, screams of pieces of wood and of stones, screams of bricks, screams of furniture, of beds, of chairs, of curtains, of casseroles, of cats, and of papers, screams of odors that scratch one another. . . . In Granada they murdered Federico García Lorca, in Salamanca they shouted ‘Death to intelligence!’ ‘Enfin la verité sur la mort de Lorca! Un assassinat, certes, mais dont la politique n’a pas été le mobile.’”)
The eyes of this bull of death came from deeper abysses. They were the eyes of Saturn, which Goya saw in fits of fever, and which he would paint a quarter of a century later in the dining room of the Quinta del Sordo. They were equally large and savage, although those of the animal filled with blood and those of the monster glinted with bestial hunger. (Marina feared going blind in the presence of that painting. A few days ago I took her when I was drunk, howling for my children. Then we fell asleep in each other’s arms. She woke me hours later, because my shouts frightened her. I lied when I told her I remembered nothing of my nightmare. I had forgotten the images but not the voices of that dream. One, that seemed to be mine when I recalled it, was exclaiming: “There’s no need to scream like that. I already told you I read lips!” Someone, I don’t know who, replied: “I’ll scream all I want. You outlived your wife, who was good only for bearing you the children you destroyed with your syphilis, but I don’t know how you could outlive your own duplicity and indecency. I mean to say, I do know, since with your cowardice, they made you in the image and likeness of our people.”)
If this fighting bull had been Saturn before, it would soon be transformed into the ragged man murdered in The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid: The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill. The eyes of the horned beast became the eyes of the man who was told he would be executed at dawn. The bloody gaze of the animal, who had charged and gored there, is brightened here and illuminated by the beam of a gigantic lantern. We pass from the monster to the bull; from the bull to the man sacrificed by his fellow men. The monster was Saturn or Time, father of the gods and devourer of his own children. They called the animal the bull of death and it was prepared and raised for goring and sacrifice. The man was unemployed, a beggar, a muleteer or a mason. He died proclaiming the injustice of that crime and paradoxically shouting: “Death to liberty! Long live our chains!” To the greater glory of the faith of his people, perhaps he also shouted: “Long live the Inquisition!”
(“It’s finished; what happened? Look at his figure: / death has covered him with pallid sulfur, / has placed on him the head of a dark minotaur.” La Estafeta Literaria, October 13, 1956: “At last, we must say, the rock of scandal has been broken. For twenty years using the death of García Lorca as a political tool! Of course this is an international action, neither unique nor original. But after all, the fact of the death of the Granadan poet had to be exploited without scruples or honor, even at the cost of committing the most painstaking, vile, and systematic deception of people of good faith. Those public acts, those solemn recitals of his works, that constant waving of his name as a victim, those crocodile tears. Who does not remember?” Along the path of the same first-rate prose, so typical of this beautiful nation of sun and lies, as my friend Carlos del Valle Inclán would have written, the anonymous commentator continued: “At last, the French writer J. L. Schonberg, author of the most comprehensive and documented biography of the poet, has come to Spain several times between 1953 and 1956, has traveled through Andalucía, visiting towns close to Granada, has spoken with those he has deemed appro
priate or necessary. He has done research in archives, inspected locations. And, at last, he has reached this conclusion: De politique, pas question. La politique, s’etait alors la purge que vous évacuait sans preámbule.”)
If the bull of death was transformed into the prisoner in The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid, twenty years later The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill became, in turn, the palimpsest of the most savage bullfight. On various occasions Goya had declared that his great teachers were nature and Velázquez. The plane of lowered bayonets, held by the firing squad in The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid, could be a horizontal version of the Velazquean lances in The Surrender at Breda. It could also be seen as the repeated metaphor of the long straight horns of the bull painted by Goya twenty years earlier. In fact, in the Fierce Bullfight of the People in the Plaza Partida, an oil executed around 1810 and today in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, another black bull, with horns almost as slender and parallel as the bayonets of the firing squad, charges a picador mounted on a white horse.
The myth of the minotaur is almost as ancient as the myth of Saturn. The monster, for the Greeks, child of a bull and the queen of Crete, had a human body and a horned head. Ovid calls him semibovenque virum, semivirumque bovem. Dante believed he was a bull with the head of a man. In the seventh circle of hell, where the violent suffer, the poet encountered the beast wearing the mask of a person: “en su la punta della rotta laca / l’infamia di Creti era distesa / che fu concetta nella falsa vaca.” Borges supposed the legend was the expurgated result of other older, more terrible ones that were then mysteriously forgotten. In reality everything must have happened in reverse, because the myth of that monster was the augury of greater horrors.
The firing squad in Goya’s painting lacks faces and almost lacks forms. Seen from the back and in the light of the lantern, it is almost impossible to decide how many soldiers are in it. In this way the squad becomes a compact ensemble of greatcoats, knapsacks, and straps, almost completely dehumanized. The rifles, lengthened by the bayonets, appear beneath the dark shakos and outline the image of a herd of long-horned bulls, wounding the air in their charge. The knapsacks of this troop, hunched to better assure the shot, heighten the illusion of the humps of bulls crammed together as they charge. Only their arms, legs, and feet in ordinary shoes belong to men, while torsos and heads are transformed into the loins and necks of fierce bulls. A herd of furious minotaurs springs up simultaneously in the dark to consummate a sacrifice.
(“The cow of the old world / passed its sad tongue / over a muzzle of bloods / spilled in the sand, / and the bulls of Guisando, / almost death and almost stone, / bellowed like two centuries / weary of walking the earth.” On March 11, 1937, a certain Luis Hurtado or Urbano Álvarez, who at one time boasted of an old friendship with Federico García Lorca, and of “blood shed in the most intense exposure of a battlefield,” wrote in the Falangist paper Unidad, of San Sebastián: “Your body fell, forever, and your laughter was erased from the maps; and the earth trembled through your agonizing hands when it felt the arrival of your spirit. And yet I cannot resign myself to believing that you have died; you cannot die. The Falange awaits you; its welcome is biblical. Comrade, your faith has saved you. No one like you to harmonize the poetic and religious doctrine of the Falange, to gloss its points, its aspirations. They have murdered the best poet of Imperial Spain. Spanish Falange, with its arm on high, pays homage to your memory by hurling to the four winds its most powerful HERE PRESENT. Your body now is silence, silence nonexistent and dark: but you continue living, intensely alive in the forms that throb and the life that sings. Apostle of light and of laughter. Andalucía and Greece remember you. UP WITH SPAIN!!”).
“We have seen,” writes Moratín, “a man sitting in a chair or on a table, with shackles on his feet, place the banderillas and kill a bull.” Martincho, or Martín de Barcáiztegui, a native of Oyarzun immortalized four times by Goya in his Tauromachy, set the banderillas in the manner of Melchor Calderón, that is, divided in two and driven in like daggers or blows, on occasion going down on his knees as he incited the bull. The prisoners in The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid also die on their knees. Their executioners made them kneel to humiliate them before shooting them point-blank. In the muleteers, beggars, unemployed, farmhands, and laborers, the men of the Legion de Réserve, also from the depths of society, found even humbler victims whom they obliged to abase themselves when it was time to sacrifice them. This murder in an open space does not maintain the appearance of executions in Christian, civilized countries. Here there is no surrendering of weapons or coups de grace. Prisoners are sentenced in clusters and allowed to sauté in their own blood, while others are herded together at bayonet point to be destroyed with more shots, three steps from their eyes. Only the time of the crime is the correct one for real shootings, as Hugh Thomas so carefully reminds us. Which is to say, before dawn, at the hour of the minotaur.
In a lecture delivered in 1926, Don Ventura Bagüés commented on another etching from the Tauromachy, in which the aforementioned Martincho, inciting the bull with movements of his body, places the banderillas. According to this critic, that kind of placement belongs to an old kind of banderillero called topa-carnero, which soon fell into disuse. In this primitive, fearsome variant, the body movements were not indicated until the bull entered the bullfighter’s territory and lowered its head to charge. It is very well known that Martincho set pairs in this way, kneeling, without ever being gored. On his knees before the minotaur, the human monster with several shako heads and bayonets for horns, Goya’s ragged man raises his arms and opens his palms, as if he were inciting the monster in order to pierce him with invisible bandilleras. In the unreason of despair, this supposedly rational martyr, who perhaps dies cheering the Holy Office, refuses to surrender to the monstrosity that is half bull and half man, which is the final and most sarcastic dream of reason. The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid, must therefore be the great bullfight painted by Goya to celebrate the return of the most undesirable of kings, Fernando VII. That bull of 1793, the one with the blood on its horn and the salmon pink cape on its hump, has been transformed into this squad of executioners. If the ragged man they are going to execute or murder, supposing that the terms are not synonymous (“How awful with the final / banderillas of darkness!”) were to extend his hands instead of raising them, open, in the night, he would brush against the bayonets of the firing squad, as we could have touched the horns of that fighting bull.
(“But now he sleeps without end. / Now the mosses and the grass / open with unerring fingers / the flower of his skull. / And now his blood comes singing: / singing through marshes and meadows, / slipping along horns numb with cold, / slipping soulless through the fog / finding thousands of hooves / like a long, dark, sad tongue.” They killed him at daybreak on August 20, 1936, along with two banderilleros, a lame teacher, and his son. The crime took place on the road from Viznar to Fuente Grande, Ainadamar in Arabic, Fountain of Tears. José Luis Vila-San Juan cites the authorized view of the commander of military interventions and the civil governor of Granada at that time, José Valdés Guzmán: “All teachers are reds.” The teacher for the Paulines was missing a leg. He had been detained by a police officer with whom he had quarreled. When his son tried to protest, they took him away too. Neither one could have foreseen then that a few days later, both would be killed along with Federico García Lorca. Nobody knows with certainty where their bones lie, among the olive trees or in a ravine that served as a grave for hundreds of victims. An old gravedigger believes he recognized the teacher’s corpse because of his one leg, and remembers Lorca’s very well because of his ascot. Many years later he told Ian Gibson: “You know, those things artists wear.” The death certificate for the poet attributes his death to “wounds produced by an act of war.” There could not be a better title, or a more sinister euphemism, for one of the crimes that Goya etches in his Disasters.)
Hugh Thomas writes that Goya’s ragged man, the an
onymous martyr who incites the minotaur with invisible banderillas, is going to die immediately. Nothing or no one can save him. In an instant a volley will sink him into eternity, as the dry thrust of the horns of a wounded bull might have done.
Yet the volley has been delayed for more than 200 years. For more than 160 years that man has defied it on his knees and with his arms open wide. His moment of truth, perhaps at the brink of hell, is eternalized in the longest of agonies. In 1939 the prisoner, the dead, their killers, and the night that envelops all of them, almost disappeared when another war was about to devour the painting. Evacuated with the entire museum to save it from the bombing raids on Madrid, The Third of May, 1808 was taken to Las Torres de los Serranos, in Valencia. From there it was sent to Cataluña, where it and the Prado followed the withdrawal of the Republicans, first to France and then to Geneva. In an open truck the canvas crossed a bombarded Mataró. The metal railing of a balcony, broken and twisted by shrapnel, tore the canvas behind the squad’s lantern. In the Castillo de Peralada and in the so-called Museo del Vidrio, Mateu’s collection of crystal, the steward’s grandmother’s nightgown was sewn onto the back to restore the painting.
In one of Borges’s tales, “The Secret Miracle,” a Jewish scholar is condemned to death in Prague by the Nazis. The night before his execution he is overcome by the terror of being shot to death. Hanging or beheading would not have frightened him in the same way; but the circumstances of his death seem more terrible to him than his own irrevocable destiny. The scholar prays to God that if in some way He exists, if He isn’t an erratum or a repetition of Divinity, he be allowed to conclude his play The Enemies before he is killed. He begs for only a year to finish it. Facing the firing squad he hears the command, sees the officer raise his arm (Borges has a somewhat operatic sense of Hitlerian executions, which tended to be less ceremonial), hears the order to fire, and sees the arm suspended in air in a truncated gesture.