by Carlos Rojas
THE MONSTERS
The Duchess of Osuna
María Josefa de la Soledad Alonso Pimentel Téllez-Girón Borja y Cenellas, countess-duchess of Benavente and duchess of Béjar, Arcos, Gandía, Plasencia, Monteagudo, Mandas, and Villanueva, princess of Anglona and Squilache, marquise of Javalquinto, Gibraleón, Zahara, Lombay, Terranova, and Marquini, countess of Mayorga, Bañares, Belalcázar, Bailén, Mayalde, Casares, Oliva, Osilo, and Coguinas, viscountess of Puebla de Alcocer, was born in Madrid in 1752. At the age of nineteen she married Don Pedro Téllez Girón, marquis of Peñafiel and ninth duke of Osuna, who was three years younger. The newlyweds were first cousins, and with their marriage the Osunas took in the countship of Benavente, the duchy of Béjar, the arms of Gandía, and the blood of the Borjas (known in Italy as the Borgias), which carried them to the papal throne in the midst of crimes and acts of incest that made even the Renaissance blush. On the other hand, and perhaps because in the house of the Pimentels there were almost as many mansions as in the house of God Himself, they also counted in their lineage the saintly marquis of Lombay and grand duke of Gandía, who swore never to serve masters who turned into worms.
Antonio Marichalar, who two centuries later would be the biographer of Mariano Girón, another duke of Osuna and the grandson of María Josefa, called the Osunas purebred, dissolute and prodigal, and the Pimentels foppish, insolent, and pretentious, very given in each generation to erudition and reading. In the eighteenth century in Spain there were only ten families and one hundred individuals with privileges as ancient as theirs, warranted by both branches since the days of the emperor Carlos V. They used the familiar tú among themselves and kept their heads covered before the king, who must call them cousins. Antonina Vallentin cited a French historian of the period, who spoke of the anxieties of another aristocrat of lesser distinction. “A recently created Grandee begged his whole life for a tú that he would have paid for with his blood, and from his peers he received only a Most Excellent Señor.” The Osuna Pimentels have the right to four teams of mules for their carriage and an escort of four servants with torches. It was probably through Cardinal Prince Don Luis, the king’s brother who was archbishop of Toledo at the age of eight, and at ten wore a cardinal’s purple, that Goya met the Osuna family. By then Don Luis had left the church and its vanities and transmitted his rights to the throne, which he legally possessed, in order to marry María Teresa de Vallabriga, who thought she was a descendant of the kings of Navarre but was actually the daughter of a captain in the cavalry. Goya did an oil painting of the duchess of Osuna in 1785, and another portrait of her with the duke and their three children in 1790. The duchess and the cardinal prince had the talent to pay attention to Goya before he was even aware of his genius. In the rumor mills of the court they began to call her Goya’s mistress, as earlier they had called her the lover of Costillares and especially of Pepe-Hillo. In any case, after his illness, between 1792 and 1793, Goya would abandon the world of the duchess for that of her despised rival: María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana Manuela Margarita de Alba.
In Goya’s paintings, the duchess of Osuna, the Peñafiel, or Loyal Rock, as the painter called her in his letters to Martín Zapater, was a woman with gray eyes, tight lips, and a face like a razor, who reminded Antonina Vallentin of Egyptian queens in their hieratic statues. (“I’m feeling well and drinking well and enjoying myself as much as I can. But my ankle is still swollen, and even more so at night. It doesn’t worry me too much, since I’ve been hunting twice. Once with the Peñafiel, and the other time with other enthusiasts, and on both hunts I’ve been outstanding in killing game.”) Lady Holland called the duchess the most distinguished lady in Madrid, for her virtues and her bon goût. Since she was a very intelligent woman, perhaps the most cultivated in the Spain of her time, one doubts her mental health because of her unpredictable and extravagant acts. She was disappointed with her portrait by Esteve and slashed it with a knife in the presence of the painter. One night the card game at her table was suspended when someone dropped a coin that rolled and jingled on the floor. The duchess lit new candles with a roll of bills and handed the burning candles to the servants. The legate of the Most Christian King invited the Osunas to dine in the French embassy, where they skimped on champagne. When the duke and duchess returned the invitation, María Josefa ordered the ambassador’s horses to be watered with champagne upon their arrival. General Córdoba, who had been present at the burning of the bills, was overwhelmed and called her the haughtiest lady in Spain and the most elegant and highest-ranking one in Europe.
Her thinness, both ambiguous and fragile, contradicted the vitality of the duchess. She would die at the age of eighty-one, many years after surviving the starvation and anguish of the war. As a young woman she would exhaust the strongest horses, riding at a full gallop across her lands. At times, and anticipating the teaching of Giner at the Free Institution of Teaching, she also went to the Guaderrama Mountains alone, climbing the cliffs by day and resting at night beneath the trees. In more daring adventures, and always without an escort, she walked the roads for weeks on end, “not fearing harsh weather or thieves,” sleeping outdoors or in haystacks. On these spirited outings, she must have encountered the farmers of La Mancha as Cabarrús saw them on the road to Madrid, fleeing their homes because of poor harvests and epidemics of fever, begging, half naked. In Cádiz, where she also had properties and spent part of the summer, the duchess de Osuna y de Béjar would encounter the even greater wretchedness of the peasants of Lower Andalucía, which horrified Campomanes. The immense majority of them slept outdoors, lived on boiled bread soup when they were working while their wives prostituted themselves and their children became beggars. María Josefa de la Soledad Alonso Pimentel knew that her family and the other nine, who shared the privilege of using familiar address with one another, controlled all the farming and livestock wealth of Spain through the system of primogeniture. She also knew that the duke’s rents, even reduced by the backwardness of agriculture, were among the highest in Europe, exceeding three million francs a year. María Josefa de la Soledad Alonso Pimentel, countess-duchess de Benavente and duchess de Osuna, would oppose primogeniture with the curious, prudent mental reservations of her teacher in economics, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, who asked that those already established be respected but that the acquisition and bequest of other large estates be prohibited. And yet, above all, María Josefa de la Soledad Alonso Pimentel must have imagined in her deepest skepticism that all of it, the country, the king, her properties, the hunger of the peasantry, and she herself, were merely an almost transparent retable, painted in the air by her favorite artist, Don Francisco Goya Lucientes.
The first Pimentel was a Portuguese knight who died fighting for Alfonso the Wise in the battle of Campo de la Verdad. A descendant of his received the first countship in the family in recognition of his military deeds. As payment for other exploits, the Catholic Kings awarded the Duchy of Benavente to Rodrigo Pimentel. His family would continue calling themselves counts for entire generations, as if the new title were the coat of arms of upstarts. María Josefa Pimentel, duchess de Osuna, also took part in a military action to prove herself. In 1781, by order of the French admiral, the duke of Crillon, she embarked with her husband on the conquest of Menorca. Disguised as a cabin boy, in a scheme devised only by her and her husband, she endured without complaint all the difficulties of her feigned condition and experienced the triumphant naval battle on the first line of fire.
Essentially, however, this woman, full of contrasts as singular as they were inexplicable, was an intellectual. The Economic Society of Friends of the Nation, its Madrid branch presided over by Jovellanos, elected her director of its Council of Ladies, when they were admitted to the organization by royal decree on August 27, 1787. Although he recognized María Josefa’s talents and the invaluable help she had given to the duke de Osuna when he occupied the presidency, Jovellanos himself accepted the king’s decision with ironic caution. “Ladies wil
l never frequent our Councils. Modesty will perpetually distance them. How will their delicate virtue permit them to appear at a meeting of men of such diverse conditions and states, to take part in our discussions and readings, to mingle their refined voices in the tumult of our disputes and arguments?”
Nonetheless, the duchess gave various lectures on economics and professed the science in the Alameda, according to the principles maintained by Jovellanos in his Report on the Agrarian Law. She denounced ecclesiastical amortization, augmented by trusts, benefices, and bequests of the dying. “If in this there is any abuse or any wrongdoing, application of the remedy is the responsibility of the Church. . . . But in the meantime, can the proposal of a means to reconcile the considerations due to so pious and authorized a custom with those demanded by the welfare and preservation of the State seem foreign to our devotion?” In the final analysis, the progress of a country was reduced to the regeneration of all its estates, especially those that sacrificed material privileges to the common good. In economics, the word primogeniture was the one that presented the greatest difficulties, because there was hardly another more detestable in wise, just legislation. The right to transmit private property at death was foreign to the laws and designs of nature. Nonetheless, the Economic Society of Friends of the Nation would always view primogeniture among the nobility with great respect and greater indulgence, and if it could temporize in so delicate a matter, it would gladly do so to avoid the courts and violence. “It seems just to me, ladies and gentlemen, that if the nobility cannot gain estates and riches in a war, it sustains itself with those received by its eldest sons. Let it retain its primogenitures in good health; but if these are a necessary evil, let them be treated as such and reduced as much as possible.”
In 1783 the Osunas bought from Count de Priego his rural properties to the south of Aranjuez, a league and a half from Madrid, close to the Aragón road. The lands, called the Alameda, consisted of a country house and several farms. Two years later, Goya painted his first portrait of the duchess, dressed like Queen María Luisa, who imposed in turn the fashions of the Trianón and Marie Antoinette of France. On the other hand, María Josefa changed the name of her new properties and called them El Capricho. From that time on, as Ortega carefully noted in his incomplete Papers on Goya, that name tended to be repeated in the artist’s correspondence and in documents that referred to him. On January 4, 1794, having recently survived his very serious illness and just completed his Wild Bull, which would soon be copied by Esteve or Vicente López, Goya wrote to Iriarte, the duchess of Osuna’s public poet: “To occupy an imagination mortified by considerations of my ills, and to compensate in part for the great expenditures they have occasioned, I began to make a series of boudoir paintings. In these I’ve succeeded in making observations which commissioned works regularly don’t have room for, and in which caprice and invention have no place.”
The other Caprice, the one belonging to the Osunas, was the convergence of two different worlds under the skies of Goya’s tapestries. On one hand, the somewhat provincial copy of Versailles, with the vast granite staircase, the marble balustrade, the portholes, the tall columns, the wide mirrors, the busts of Trajan and Caracalla, the nude statues, the Chinese tapestries, the golden candelabra, the crystal chandeliers, the concert rooms, the theaters, the conservatories, the colored fountains, the gardens set out in straight lines, the avenues of polished pebbles, the boxwood trees pruned according to the Cartesian Discours de la méthode. On the other, a labyrinth of pleasant paths among poplars and acacias, aviaries, pools, swings, artificial meadows whose green resembled that of Paris, gazebos, Cupids, drawbridges, artificial waterfalls, rose gardens, weeping willows, parasols, fountains, oleander, Alexandrian laurels, midget horses, peacocks, kites, flamingos, and flocks of sheep whiter than snow ever was. At times the two worlds mingled in the theater at the Caprice. Iriarte wrote short artificial plays for that stage, in which the duchess of Osuna always played the principal role, dressed as a shepherdess or a maiden of another time. Her performances inspired pleasure that no doubt had a strong whiff of adulation. She had assurance, a well-modulated voice, and the naturalness of one who perhaps believed that the entire world was just another stage for a farce called history.
The Alameda was the theater, the image and likeness of its owner. As in the palace of those other dukes, the ones in Don Quijote, all was mask and costume in the Caprice, to the greater glory and gratification of madness. The one hundred cousins of the king, those who used informal address with one another, disguised themselves and their wives as lower-class dandies, fops, and blades. In another century, Eugenio d’Ors stressed the distinctions among these categories. The dandies, or chisperos, came originally from the district of Maravillas, where there was an abundance of forges and men of bronze. The fops, or manolos, came from Lavapiés and tended to be workers, though unmannerly and quarrelsome. The blades, or majos, were thugs, but very devout. They lived by gambling, smuggling tobacco, and pimping, but did not shun knife fights in defense of their honor. A blade would sell for one night his wife, his lover, or his sister if the deal were closed with the proper respect, in deference to the idea that from the king on down, no one is more than anyone else in the two Castillas. When times became difficult for procurers, the blade went down on his knees before God and prayed in San Francisco or in the Almudena, pleading for the assistance of heaven in his trade.
For those at the Caprice, blades, fops, and dandies could all be reduced to the people, recently discovered and glorified by the boredom and eroticism of the aristocracy. The ladies of the Alameda wore, like the majas, long black skirts, tight sashes, high bodices, and bolero jackets with tassels. On their heads they wore lace mantillas, among whose folds their breasts peeked out like doves. The gentlemen gathered their hair in nets like those of bullfighters and Gypsies peddling their goods at fairs. They wore a white shirt, a short jacket, breeches tight across the thigh, silk stockings, and shoes adorned with good large buckles. Reality penetrated behind the masks in the parks and the house of the Osunas. Toreros from the slaughterhouse of Sevilla, like Costillares and Pepe-Hillo, were transformed into María Josefa’s preferred guests. They were men who could barely sign their names, but their pride, consisting of conceit and dignity, their heels coming down hard on all marble, and their contempt for death set fire to the ladies like hot embers. The Year of Our Lord 1789 would be, for some, the year of the French Revolution, and for others the year of the ascent to the throne of His Catholic Majesty Don Carlos IV. For devotees of the fiesta brava, it would also be the year when Pedro Romero lifted the gored, unconscious body of Pepe-Hillo up to the box of the Señora Duchess de Osuna and left it at her feet during the great bullfight of the coronation celebrations.
The war would end that Carnival (“Señor Máiquez, Señor Máiquez, this isn’t the theater because here you die for real”). A year before the catastrophe, the duke de Osuna died. The duchess, about whom Jean-François Chabrun would say that she belonged to a species more subtle and perhaps more perverse than that of the blades and coxcombs, opened a public library in her house in Leganitos. The Austrian ambassador brought her forbidden books from Paris in the diplomatic pouch, such as Helen Williams’s English Letters and Rousseau’s Confessions. A French academic, Marius Charles Joseph de Pougens, took charge of buying other, less dangerous works for her, as well as tea from China, Jouy fabric, iris perfumes, and seeds for her gardens. In 1802, when Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme appeared, María Josefa was in a fury because Pougens removed it from the list and did not send it to her, believing it excessively dangerous. The academic offered ample excuses, and the tempest remained in a teapot.
She spent the war in her house in Cádiz, not collaborating with the invader, unlike many other nobles, in spite of her Voltairean and reformist disposition. She survived not only the reigning monarchs but also their son, the Desired One. She was too intelligent not to realize that, although she could save her properties, her t
ime, about which Goya would leave the most complete artistic testimony in the cartoons he made for tapestries, had disappeared in the conflict. In her old age, the duchess de Osuna perhaps would say the era came to an end with the French Revolution of 1789, even though a country as mentally and materially backward as Spain would need another twenty years and the catastrophe of a war to understand that. Wearied and exhausted by so much failure, she died in her palace at La Cuesta de la Vega on October 5, 1833.
November 15, 1975
In “Blind Man’s Bluff” it never grows dark, because the artist has stopped time and the sky is made of paper. But in the gardens of El Capricho, where “Pepe-Hillo” and “Costillares” push the duchess of Osuna back and forth in a swing, night begins to fall slowly on the pools and acacias. Very soon, when it is totally dark, all the figures in this long costume party will be as blind as the false majo who probes the air with his wooden spoon. Then, in the endless shadows that still encircle the country, the eyes of Goya’s monsters will begin to blaze in his own “Caprices”; that labyrinth made to the measure of our recent and eternal history, where everything will always be the same, with reason or without it, because men don’t know the way.