Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  I attended a class for people who were learning to use sign language. The teacher had curly eyelashes and a round clown’s nose. He enunciated his words so carefully it was as if his mouth was full of some adhesive substance that tugged at his lips and stuck to his tongue. When he made signs with his hands I could almost understand what he was saying, simply because of the intensity of the gestures and the way he stared into my face.

  One old man sat apart from the rest of us. He had been deaf since birth. He was wearing a garish striped jumper and a striped woollen hat. He was swaying from side to side and muttering to himself, so apparently oblivious of his surroundings that I thought at first he must be simple-minded.

  People took it in turns to sit on a chair facing him, so they could practise talking in signs. Once they were there within his line of vision, he came alive with concentration and intelligence. He answered the fluttering movement of hands with his own hands, but whereas those who were addressing him kept silent, he was noisy with the effort and satisfaction of communicating. Loud grunts, groans, sighs and even a sharp and mysterious clicking, bubbled and tumbled out of him. And because he was being understood he smiled and laughed with a wild pleasure.

  I once knew a deaf man. He became deaf when he was eight years old and had never learnt to use sign language but he was able to lip-read. His wife was an actress with red hair and when she spoke to him in a rapid and inaudible whisper, he could follow every word she said. I remember watching them together; how his eyes never left her, how he feasted on the movement of her lips.

  And then she died and when I went to see him again his desolation was as black and thick as smoke. It was as if he was now blind as well as deaf.

  We crossed a busy street together and before I could stop him he walked straight into a hooting line of traffic without pausing to look left or right. We entered a café where a football match roared from a television screen and people were shouting to each other and banging their glasses on the zinc table tops. I can see him now, sitting on a stool at the bar, hunched and silent and closed in upon himself, like a bird of prey on a perch in a cage. I place Goya next to him, the two of them side by side.

  7

  Goya went deaf in Cadiz. He was staying there with his friend Sebastian Martinez, a successful merchant in a city full of successful merchants, the port bristling with the masts of their ships.

  Martinez collected paintings and owned a number of Piranesi etchings in which men are shown trapped and helpless in dark labyrinthine prisons, the stairs leading only to more stairs and the doors never taking you back to the outside world.

  In the portrait Goya made of his friend, he wears canary-yellow satin trousers with silver buckles and silver buttons and a beautiful gold-blue-green satin coat. A froth of white lace bubbles around his neck and a very neat white wig contrasts with the blackness of his eyebrows. He has an expression of tranquillity, kindness and intelligence.

  Martinez might have lived on the newly built Street of Isabella the Catholic perhaps, or the Street of Humanity, or the Street of Costa Rica, in one of those tall eighteenth-century houses that still dominate the centre of the city today. Many of them have metal studs on their heavy doors and the delicate hand of a woman wearing a wedding ring with which to knock on the wood and make your presence known.

  You go through into an entrance hall decorated with patterned white and blue tiles, the azulejos first brought here by the Moors in the eighth century. The treads of the main staircase are made from white marble and the ceilings are supported by fat wooden beams from the conquered trees of the New World.

  I stayed in such a merchant’s house in Cadiz, although its grandeur was very faded. The Pension Argentina it was called, the name written in neon lights that had lost their electricity. The open door on the street led you into an enclosed courtyard where a jumble of plants stood looking rather abandoned in pots. The well in one corner of the courtyard was carved from a single lump of marble, but it had been painted with so many layers of white and green gloss paint that it seemed like a huge fungus that had erupted from the floor and burst open, sticky and shining. The place smelt of neglect, olive oil and bad drains.

  The man who ran the pension on the second floor wore such thick spectacles that the eyes behind the lenses were magnified into strange blinking creatures, drifting away from his face. He was full of knowledge about the city. ‘Goya?’ he said. ‘Ah yes, he was here painting a mural in our Convent of Saint Augustine, but unfortunately he fell from the scaffolding and hurt his back.’

  ‘This is a merchant’s house,’ he said and he asked me to examine the thickness of the walls and to appreciate the quality of the marble pillars. He explained that there was a layer of sand above each beamed ceiling, but at that moment my Spanish failed me and I could not understand what the sand was doing there.

  The big rooms on the second floor had been divided into a warren of little guest rooms, separated from each other by thin walls. There was just enough space for a rickety bed, a sink and a tall cupboard. I imagined Goya being here, looking out through the same metal bars on the window and down into the same street. I imagined him being ill in this room and then recovering.

  The first bout of illness had already hit him while he was in Madrid, working much too hard to keep up with the demands being made of him. But he recovered sufficiently to make his way down to Cadiz. He came to visit Martinez and probably also because he wanted to sort out a commission he had been offered to paint a mural in a church (but not on the walls of the Convent of Saint Augustine; it was the painter Murillo who did that many years before and fell from the scaffolding and hurt his back).

  Shortly after Goya had arrived, the illness returned with a new fury. He could not see, hear or speak. He could not swallow food or drink. His body was wracked by cramps that pulled him into a tight foetus of pain, and then, much worse than that, came a total paralysis that froze him into a protracted spasm of helplessness. Once, by mistake, I walked into the wrong room in a hospital and saw a man in a condition like that. He was suspended in a sort of hammock and only his eyes were able to move. I felt ashamed of seeing him, ashamed of having been seen.

  Goya lay in a bed in a house in Cadiz, swamped by the hallucinations that come with a high fever. Not knowing if he was alive and in the hands of the Inquisition or dead and in the hands of all the fiends of hell. Not recollecting his own name, his place of birth, the face of his wife, or the fact that he was by now a celebrated painter who had made portraits of the King and Queen of Spain.

  Martinez presumed that his friend was dying and wrote letters to say so. But after several long weeks, the invalid shuffled his way back from the edge of mortality and then, battered and exhausted, he waited while the broken fragments of his health returned to him.

  He lies very still and becomes aware of the shadowy image of a prison hanging like a window to another world on the wall of his room. He watches the yellow light of the day shimmering behind the prison bars of the window. A black cat appears suddenly out of nowhere and settles on his belly. He strokes its slippery fur and it responds by digging its claws into his flesh. ‘Just like one of those whores with sharp fingernails,’ he thinks to himself as he strokes it again.

  Martinez with the gentle, intelligent face has been nursing him all this time. He enters now, carrying a bowl of clear soup and a cup of wine diluted with water. He helps his friend to rise into a sitting position with cushions behind his back. He is shocked to see how the illness has aged him.

  Goya, with one foot in his dreams, picks up the spoon and holds it glinting in his hand. He is fascinated by the globules of fat swimming on the surface of the soup. A yellow chicken’s foot is submerged in the liquid like a drowned thing, a creature in its own right, redolent of despair. The wine spins through his head, as strong as old brandy.

  The days of his convalescence continue. He feels like a traveller who has been on a long journey across many countries and oceans, but who is finally coming home.
The dangers which beset him have subsided and the landscape around him is becoming increasingly safe and familiar. The faithful hunting dogs of his five senses, which had scattered and disappeared, are returning one by one. Taste, touch, sight and smell are already here, he only waits now for the sense of hearing.

  His head is filled with crackling, roaring sounds, battling together like monsters. And sometimes there is a rustling, rhythmic sweep which reminds him of waves breaking against a shingle beach. He is impatient for these inchoate noises to clarify, so that he can again recognise the babble of life in the street outside the window, the miaowing of the cat, the voice of Martinez come to wish him good morning and to hope he slept well.

  But the noises that surround him remain stubbornly incoherent and beyond them he is aware of a cave of silence stretching to infinity, as huge as the night sky when the moon and all the stars have disappeared.

  8

  At that moment Martinez enters the room. No footsteps, no creak of an opening door, just this sudden presence looming down at him with an enquiring smile. Martinez opens and closes his mouth like a fish. He bends forward and his lips brush against Goya’s right ear, so that he can feel the edge of stubble and smell the warmth of the skin.

  A doctor arrives. He produces a bell, a shiny brass bell, and a wooden stick. He holds the bell dangling from a piece of string and he strikes it with the stick. He watches the deaf man’s face for the miracle of recognition to take place, but there is no miracle, just a blank stare.

  Goya begins to realise what has happened to him. It is like waking into a nightmare, this surfacing into a world that is still trapped under something like a lid. He pushes a finger into both ears, twisting them as deep as he can reach, as if there was a barrier that could be broken through to release a floodgate of real sound.

  He speaks to himself, one hand feeling the movement in his throat, the other hovering above his mouth to touch the words as they are produced. He shouts as loud as he can until Martinez comes running to his aid and he goes on shouting while his friend holds him and rocks him like a mother trying to calm an hysterical child.

  (illustration credit 8.1)

  ‘Will it come back?’ he asks, the question groping blindly for an answer.

  ‘I hope so,’ Martinez writes in pencil on a piece of paper, and then taking the paper again he adds, ‘You must be patient.’ He underlines the word must several times because he feels so helpless.

  By now Goya has become strong enough to dress himself and even to take a few halting steps. Martinez writes to a friend, saying that he has managed to walk down the stairs unaided.

  He sits on a chair outside the front door watching the mime of daily life unfolding before his eyes. A little boy runs towards him with his mouth wide; perhaps he is screaming. A dog on a chain opens its jaws and throws back its head, the soft folds of the jowls trembling, while a glistening thread of saliva drops to the ground.

  He walks arm in arm with Martinez through the streets of Cadiz. They follow the line of the fortress walls built by the Moors, each stone looking as soft as a lump of dough. They reach the edge of the sea and gaze at the silent waves crashing against the rocks. A quarrelling flock of silent gulls swoops down to fight over something that bobs and floats on the water’s surface.

  They set off back towards the centre of the city and they are just turning the corner that leads to the cathedral square when a team of mules pulling a heavy cart draws up behind them. The mules have red and yellow ribbons threaded through their manes and tails. Swirling flower patterns have been shaved into the glossy hair of their flanks and silver bells shake on their harness. The driver is dressed like a bullfighter. He wears blue silk trousers and an embroidered waistcoat. His hair is tied in a long pigtail that has also been threaded with red and yellow ribbons. The clatter of hooves and the grinding of metal wheels on the cobblestones is deafening.

  Just as the cart is about to pass them by, Goya turns and steps out into the street and he would have been knocked over had not Martinez managed to grab hold of him and pull him back to safety. He stands there grinning sheepishly at the jingling colours and at the mule driver who is shouting insults at him, and then he begins to cry.

  He cries because he is excluded from the noise that makes things alive. He has become different from everyone else and yet that difference is not visible. He feels he should wear a placard proclaiming his infirmity, like those wooden placards hung around the necks of the men and women found guilty by the Inquisition. He remembers the trial he saw when he was a child in Zaragoza: a man tied to a chair, his bowed head crowned with a dunce’s hat and his crimes on a placard around his neck and written all over his clothes; his accusers watching him from within the anonymity of their pointed hoods, the reptile eyes glittering through the holes cut into the cloth. He remembers the Easter Week processions, the men beating their drums until their hands were sticky with blood, the flagellants whipping their naked backs so that the blood splattered on the watching crowd like drops of rain.

  9

  Last night in a dream I was with my mother who died several months ago. We were sitting facing each other across a round table that I knew from my childhood and the sunlight was coming in through a window. I was trying to explain something very important to her, but although I kept opening my mouth to speak, no words would come.

  When I woke up I remembered again with a sudden clarity the process of her dying. At first she had wanted to talk and talk, urgent with all the things that needed to be said before she was ready to leave the world. But then at a certain moment something went quiet within her. She lay there with her strangely changed face and she watched my face. Throughout the years before those final hours I had always been afraid of confronting her gaze, but now there was no threat or challenge in it, just the fact of seeing and being seen. It was as if we were having a silent conversation in which the accumulation of experiences we had shared during our lives floated up to the surface and we were able to observe them without effort.

  I suppose I have often mistrusted the spoken word. You give a quick tug on the line and out they come from the dark containment of the mind, those little rafts of sound that jostle together shoulder to shoulder and are supposed to be able to give shape to what you really think, or feel, or know. But words can so easily miss the point, they drift off in the wrong direction or they insist on providing a clear shape for something that by its very nature is lost when it is pinned down.

  Perhaps that is why I have been drawn to Goya, this man who could not hear the sound of his own voice, or what it was that people were trying to communicate to him from within a gesticulating silence. Before his illness he had said how much he longed to have quiet, to be left alone, free to get on with the work that pleased him. And now his wish had been granted with a terrible precision.

  The first shock of the isolation of deafness combined with physical weakness to leave him completely disorientated. ‘My dearest,’ he wrote to Zapater, ‘I am on my feet, but so bad I don’t know if my head is on my shoulders, with no desire to eat or anything else. Only, only your letters please me, and only you.’

  Some months later he wrote, ‘As for my health, I feel the same. At times I am in such a raging mood that I can’t bear my own company. At other times, like now, I am more calm, but even as I take up my pen to write to you, I am already tired.’

  He began to learn to work within the dimensions of his changed state; no longer needing to be disturbed by the disparity that can lie between what a person says and how they look when they are saying it. No longer needing to explain himself in words, or listen to the explanation of others.

  10

  Goya must have left Cadiz during Carnival Week in the spring of 1793. The people danced and sang. The men dressed up as women with breasts as big as melons, the women became as brazen as any man and full of obscenities and savage laughter. They carried grotesque puppet figures raised high on poles and wore masks big enough to cover their shoulders. Ju
st before the fasting of Lent began there would be the ceremony called The Burial of the Sardine, when half a pig made to look like a huge fish was lowered into a grave and covered with earth.

  The coach to Madrid followed the battered tracks of the south in the direction of Cordoba. The orange trees were already in bloom and the little tips of young grass and spikes of new barley showed as a blur of green over the red earth. But these were hard times, the harvests had been particularly poor since the revolution in France almost four years before. Everyone had noticed that the sunsets had become much more bloody than they used to be; they said it was as if the skies were bearing witness to the human chaos spreading like a disease across all the land. There was even less food than usual for the people who lived in the mountain villages of the south and during the freezing cold of winter they travelled like migrating birds to the big cities, to crouch exhausted at the side of the roads, displaying their poverty and desperation and begging for charity.

  I don’t know what Goya saw or did not see on his journey to Madrid, but I have taken a few images from travel books of the time, and these I can scatter around him, to notice or ignore. First a tree. At a village without a name on the edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, there was a big old elm tree that had been lopped and cut into the shape of a crucifix with two branches stretched out like arms and the face of Christ, as wild as a carnival mask, carved into the trunk.

  Next a funeral procession in which the body of a dead girl dressed in white lay in an open coffin in an ox cart, the mourners following her like crows after the plough. With his eyes Goya could listen to the grinding of the metal wheels on rough stone, the heavy breathing of the oxen, the shrill cries of the women, the chanting of the priests.

  Then suddenly six dwarfs emerged out of the mist, riding in pairs on three donkeys, and all dressed as bullfighters. They were on their way to the bullring at Seville. They carried sharp goads in their hands because their legs were too short to strike at the sides of their donkeys. They waved and smiled, showing their square flat teeth, before vanishing like phantoms back into the mist.