A framed photograph taken in the 1930s shows the village schoolmaster in his classroom and nine small, solemn-faced children, related to Goya on his mother’s side, standing in a line beside him. Another photograph is of a short stocky man with his hands in his pockets, next to his short stocky wife and their four short stocky daughters. Then there is an aged couple whose name would translate as Mr and Mrs Fat and whose ancestor was Goya’s godmother.
Coming back one day from the noise of the drumming, I went for a walk in the low hills close to the village. The land was quiet and peaceful. Pale boulders emerged out of the pale ground. Pale stone walls flanked the old mule track that still leads directly to the city of Zaragoza some thirty miles away. The little wheat fields looked like washing laid out to dry in the sun.
I saw solitary circling eagles and a crowd of vultures. The beautiful hoopoe bird, with its powder pink face and its crest like a lady’s fan, kept appearing out of nowhere and calling its own name. There were partridges running on red legs and many signs of wild pig. I could imagine Goya out hunting with a dog – he loved to hunt – zigzagging among the pine and the evergreen oaks; the air filled with the scent of wild thyme and rosemary; larks throwing themselves ecstatically into the clear blue sky and the rest of the world far away. I could see him riding on the back of a mule, his feet in walnut stirrups and a wineskin tied to the saddle as he followed the track that would lead him to Zaragoza.
I came to the ruins of a house and realised that this must be what was left of the farm that Goya gave to his older brother Tomas, once he had accumulated enough money to make such gifts. He stayed there for several weeks in 1809. He had been to Zaragoza and had witnessed the chaos of the start of Napoleon’s long war in Spain: the heaps of men and women and children lying dead and as yet unburied among the ruins of their shattered houses. Now he was returning to Madrid, but he paused in the familiar landscape before going any further: sitting with his back to a stone wall and looking out across the undulating hills and peaceful fields towards the two towers of the village church of San Antonio and the cluster of pale houses gathered around it. A deaf man in need of quiet; thinking about war and the horror that war brings.
On the next day I happened to go through a town called Belchite. The road passed two grain silos, a depot behind a high metal fence and a few desultory modern houses, but then it turned abruptly to the left and another much older road continued straight ahead and went under an ornate archway made of bricks that looked as though they had been partially devoured by termites. A little notice beside the archway explained that the old town of Belchite had suffered very badly during the Civil War and its ruins had been left undisturbed as a monument to what had taken place here and elsewhere across the country.
You enter a narrow street. The houses on either side have pretty wrought-iron balconies and the heavy wooden eaves under the roofs are carved in intricate patterns. The glass from the window frames has gone, but bedraggled shreds of curtains still hang in some of them. The doors of the houses have been violently thrown open to reveal rooms flooded with rubble and their own collapse. I saw the remains of an elegant chaise longue that seemed to be trying to escape up the steps of a shattered staircase. A palm leaf from an Easter procession long ago was still hanging across one of the balconies.
I have often in my dreams walked through empty streets and entered empty houses to see what or who they contained. This now was like walking through a dream; the buildings had become a solemn crowd of dispossessed people who were displaying the wounds the war had given them.
A tiny, wrinkled woman dressed all in black came tottering towards me, supported on either side by her grey-haired daughters. She was obviously returning to Belchite after a long absence. Perhaps she last saw it when the fires were still burning and the people were still crying. She chattered continuously as she moved through the streets, giving a name to a broken fountain, to the side of a house, to a heap of stones, while the spirits of the dead bobbed and turned around her like hungry pigeons.
Belchite had several fine eighteenth-century churches and the people must have run to them for shelter and sanctuary. But the bullets and the mortars followed them in, setting fire to the roofs, cracking and splintering the surprised faces of the angels, smashing the stained glass in the big rose windows and gnawing at the marble pillars that were veined like slabs of meat.
I stayed until the pink and yellow mist of a beautiful sunset began to drift through the skeleton of the town. The silence was broken when a group of shepherds arrived with a flock of sheep, their bells tinkling and their almost human voices calling to each other.
That night, sleeping in Fuendetodos, I had a dream in which I opened a door and a dead woman was standing there, looking at me. I closed the door and opened it again and she was still there.
5
Goya the deaf man makes me think of a toad. I see him with his softly ageing skin, blinking and gulping in a corner of my mind, his eyes as bright as jewels. But before he was deaf he was able to hear and before he was old he was young.
He must have been about four when the family moved to Zaragoza. They could have made the journey in a day, with a couple of mules and a cart to carry their belongings, taking their leave of the pale land and the croaking of frogs in the village pond and entering the old city surrounded by high and crumbling walls that would not be able to withstand the battering of war, when war came.
There is a photograph taken around 1900 which shows the house they lived in. It stands on the corner of a narrow street and looks bleak and naked, without even the ornamentation of a little balcony. A line of washing hangs from one of the windows and a wooden notice, like a shop sign, announces that Goya lived here. Two women dressed in black are hurrying past so fast that the camera has blurred their faces and bodies into something like a swirl of smoke.
Goya’s father again took work as a gilder, but when he died in 1781 he left no will because he had nothing to leave. Goya’s mother was said to be proud to be a member of the hidalgo, or ‘son of somebody’ class, but she had no money to match her status, even though the family crest was carved above one or two of the houses in Fuendetodos. When her son the painter left home, she presented him with a notebook in which she had written the names of all the important people in Madrid and over the years he painted most of their portraits and ticked off the names, one by one.
He was sent to Father Joachim’s school for the poor and there he met Martin Zapater, who became a close friend. For twenty-five years he sent letters to Zapater full of spelling mistakes, exclamation marks and doodles, full of talk of sausages and chocolate and hunting dogs and private jokes about whores and the pleasures of masturbation. He told his friend how much money he was making, how many partridges and hares he had shot, how well his life was going, how famous he was becoming. Sometimes when he was overwhelmed by the hectic demands of commissioned work, he suddenly longed for Zapater to be there beside him, in his arms, in his bed, as if the two of them were lovers. ‘I am licking my fingers just thinking of you,’ he said. ‘I am calling you with my finger and with that same finger I am yours,’ he said and he smeared a thick line of black ink across the page. Occasionally, in between the elation of so much success, he admitted to feeling unwell, unhappy, he said his head hurt, his wife was bleeding after another miscarriage, the money did not last because he kept on spending it and all his relatives were so greedy.
The friendship continued until after the illness that left him completely deaf, but around that time something must have changed between the two of them because the letters become infrequent and less intimate. And then it came to an abrupt end because Zapater died when he was still in his early fifties.
At the age of fourteen Goya was sent to study drawing under the guidance of a man who was employed by the Inquisition as their Reviewer of Dishonest Paintings, which meant his job was to conceal human nakedness in the work of the Old Masters, using a carefully added swirl of cloth, a shadow or the floatin
g presence of a leaf. In later years Goya made several paintings and etchings of naked men who have no genitals to conceal and people have written studies about what that might mean. They have also wondered about the picture of Saturn devouring his son in which the mad god apparently had an erect phallus that vanished when the painting was removed from the wall and fixed to a canvas. And about the man smoking a pipe while holding his penis in the other hand and the man who seems to be masturbating while two women watch him and laugh.
At the age of eighteen and again at twenty, he applied for a scholarship from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, but on both occasions he was rejected. He spent two years studying painting in Rome. He came back to Zaragoza and became a friend of the much respected painter Francisco Bayeu. He married his friend’s sister Josefa and moved with his new wife to Madrid. At first they lived with her brother on the Street of the Watch and then they bought a house on the Street of Disenchantment.
The Bayeu family’s connections helped Goya to obtain an appointment as Court Painter to the old Bourbon king Charles III, who tended to spend most days out hunting unless matters of state kept him back for an hour or so.
(illustration credit 5.1)
In a letter to Zapater Goya wrote, ‘If I had more time I’d tell you how well the King, the Prince and the Princesses treated me … I showed them four paintings and I kissed their hands. I have never had such a good time. I am beginning to have more powerful enemies and more envious ones too.’
He worked for the Royal Tapestry Manufactory, producing dozens of painted cartoons of country scenes, weddings and picnics, dances and fairs, in which the images of contentment and perfection were often edged with a sense of danger. He painted a fresco for the ceiling of the Cathedral of Mary of the Pillar in Zaragoza and I looked for it when I was in the cathedral, but there were so many people eager to kiss the pillar on which the diminutive silver figure of the Virgin is standing, that I lost my concentration and left without having seen anything apart from the faces of the crowd.
Goya’s portraits were much in demand. His clients liked the way he could show the quality of cloth, the value of jewellery and the glittering weight of medals. They did not seem to mind if some of their faces looked ugly or frightened or filled with despair.
At the age of thirty-seven Goya was commissioned to paint the portrait of the Count of Floriblanca. He included himself in profile: a very young-looking man with a pigtail and a snub nose, dressed in black with silver buckles on his shoes and breeches and a silver clasp at the nape of his neck. He emerges out of the darkness, kneeling before the bird of paradise apparition of the Count who shimmers in his fine feathers of red and blue and gold.
By the age of thirty-nine Goya had become Deputy Director of Painting at the same academy which had twice refused him as a student. By the following year he was Painter to the King, which was a further step up the ladder from Court Painter. He wrote to Zapater:
I went hunting twice with His Majesty. He is a very good shot. The last time he let me have a go at a rabbit. ‘This little painter is even more keen than me,’ he said. I have spent a whole month with these gentlemen and I do think they are wonderful. They gave me one thousand duros as well as a frock, all of silver and gold, for my wife. According to the wardrobe people it’s worth at least thirty thousand reales.
He said, ‘Seven kisses on my arse is what you would give me if I could show you how insanely happy I am to be living here.’ He said, ‘I am as contented as the happiest man … My work is appreciated.’
He bought himself a patented gilded carriage made in England. There were only three like it in all of Madrid and people stopped to stare when he drove past. But one day the carriage turned over and almost killed a man walking in the street and so he got rid of it and acquired a pair of mules instead. He asked Zapater not to tell anyone he was getting the mules, in case they laughed at him. He suspected they were already laughing.
He made a study of his family history, especially on his father’s side, and finally he found enough nobility in a distant Basque relation to justify calling himself Francisco de Goya, which sounded better in the company he was keeping. He practised the new flourishes of his signature.
His wife had diamonds and fine clothes. He wore an English stovepipe hat which sat heavily on his head and made him look like a rather untrustworthy businessman. He had a pair of boots especially made for him in England and was very disappointed when his feet still got wet on a hunting expedition. He had a gold watch which he lost and found again two years later. He put his money into new investments, he had good hunting dogs and guns and as much sausage and chocolate as he could eat.
But he also had poor relatives who were endlessly making demands, his investments went wrong, he had headaches and dizziness and the sensation that his head was filling with water. And although his wife was often pregnant she had numerous miscarriages and of the seven babies who were born full-term, only one survived into adulthood.
He said, ‘If I have not written, I have my reasons. The Daughter I had here died and I was a bit sick myself.’ He said, ‘They do not leave me alone. I do not know how to cope. I am working a lot, I do not have any fun.’ He said, ‘My friend, I am out of my depth. My wife is ill and the child is even worse, even the kitchen maid has got a fever.’ He said, ‘I have suddenly become old with a lot of wrinkles and you would not recognise me were it not for my flat nose and my sunken eyes.’
And so he went on, swinging backwards and forwards between elation and despair, between energy and exhaustion, until illness forced him to sit still and silenced the demanding hubbub of the world.
6
Goya used to complain that his head was filling up with water. There were rushing sounds in his ears, he said, and he often felt dizzy and faint. Then in 1792, when he was forty-seven years old, he became very ill. No one is sure what the cause of the illness was: it might have been a form of lead poisoning brought on by the white base-paint that he used, or a variation of Meniere’s disease, or something else. The worst of the attack lasted for several weeks.
He recovered his strength slowly, but for the rest of his life he remained deaf. As deaf as a house, as deaf as a stone, as deaf as a dead man who will not be woken from his cold sleep no matter how loudly you shout.
This was deafness of the inner ear. Something within those delicate sea-shell cavities had been irreparably damaged and nothing would bring them back to life again. He could not amplify the weak signals from a voice with the help of an ear trumpet. He could not, like Beethoven, hold one end of a stick clenched between his teeth and rest the other end on the top of the piano so that when the notes were played they were channelled directly into his skull. There were no good days following the bad days, no remedy for his condition, no way of making it less extreme.
He had entered a place without birdsong or music, without footsteps approaching or dogs barking in the distance. Deafness is said to be the most shocking of all sensory deprivations. It locks you inside a cage and, since you cannot share the communication of language, it threatens to turn you into an idiot. The real world becomes strangely two-dimensional and empty, because nothing exists within it beyond your own immediate field of vision. You must use your eyes like a torch in the darkness and learn to read the truth from what you see and not from what you are told to see. And if the silence that envelops you becomes terrifying and people appear like so many gesticulating phantoms, then all you can do is withdraw into the privacy of your own being and wait for the storm to pass.
With one sense gone, the others must do their best to compensate for the loss, the whole body straining to catch the sounds the ears have been deprived of. The soles of the feet can feel the sound of cannonballs ricocheting against the walls of a city, of a huge crowd roaring in one voice, of the crack of thunder. The eyes can hear the sweet movement of a bird flying, a woman smiling, leaves turning in the breeze. They can listen to the silent hieroglyph of a hanged man, a sleeping child, a crowd
holding its breath. Each image becomes imbued with a sonorous quality that clings to it like the melody of a tune.
I close my eyes and I am blind, but when I go to sleep I can see again. I close my eyes and I am blind, but when I let my thoughts drift the faces of people I have known, houses I have lived in, landscapes I have walked through, appear before my eyes as vivid as daylight.
But how can I know what it means to be deaf? Do the deaf dream the sound of the rush and hiss of waves breaking? Do they dream of dogs barking or piano music playing? Do they listen to voices speaking to them and wake with the belief that the power of hearing has been miraculously returned? Or do they wake like Caliban on his island of noises, crying to dream again?
Because I wanted to get closer to this idea of deafness, I bought myself a box of earplugs: little pellets of pink wax swaddled like strange eggs in a thin mist of cotton wool. You lift one out and make it warm between your fingers. You shape it to a conical point and press it gently into the ear’s orifice.
Once I had closed both ears as carefully as I could, the world did not turn silent as if a switch had been pulled, but it did become very muffled. Everything took a step back. There was no ticking of the clock. My breathing became so remote it ceased to be my own. The chair on which I was sitting did not answer the shifting weight of my body with the groan and creak of wood. I did not hear the door being opened and when someone tapped me on the shoulder I was suddenly afraid. For as long as I remained even partially deaf I felt myself to be close to an unfamiliar dimension of loneliness and isolation.
Old Man Goya Page 2