Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  The coach passed a white crucifix made out of human skulls, built into the wall of a church. It passed a flock of scavenging birds swirling into the air from the body of a dead horse on which they were feeding and for a moment they were a crowd of demons, their harsh voices all the more malevolent because he could not hear them.

  They stayed at an inn run by two women. One had naked feet, so deformed it was painful to look at them, the other had a black beauty spot, placed just below the empty socket of her blind eye. They stayed at another inn where a cow and her calf stood beside the table where they were eating and a child and a dog, both covered in sores, sat side by side on the floor, salivating with hunger. When they left in the morning a pig rushed out to greet the painter like an old friend, sniffing at the chocolate he kept in his pockets and dancing around him on stiff legs.

  After five days of travelling they reached the barren plateau on which the city of Madrid was built. The old forests had been cut down when Philip II was busy making a navy and a palace for himself and all that was left now was a scattering of cork oak, evergreen oak and low bushes.

  They entered the noise and confusion of the city. In the Plaza Real Goya watched the cries of the water carriers who sold drinking water kept cool in earthenware beakers and the shouts of the fire sellers carrying smouldering torches for lighting cigars. He watched the orange sellers and the ice sellers and the women selling their bodies. He watched the beggars selling their infirmities and the relic sellers who offered a scrap of bone from a saint’s leg to mend a broken arm, or a prayer wrapped up as small as a pill, to be swallowed at night when the deadly Madrid colic was racing from house to house, killing people in a rush of vomiting and fever.

  He entered the tree-lined avenue of the Prado where there was a marble fountain showing a goddess riding on the back of a lion at one end and Neptune embracing his wife and surrounded by dolphins at the other. This was where the people of the city came to flaunt their possessions. A woman walked by with a dog that had been dyed bright pink. A coachman was wearing a livery made of gold lace. The jingling harness on a team of mules was all of crimson velvet. Goya remembered his own carriage and how the people had stared.

  He stood in front of the Natural History Museum, which housed a human skull with a pair of horns sprouting from the temples; an Egyptian mummy; a dress that had belonged to the Emperor of China and the fossilised remains of a monstrous and unnamed beast found embedded in rocks near Buenos Aires: six feet high at the shoulder, with a long neck, stout legs and terrible claws.

  He came to the Street of Dangers which got its name because it was so narrow a man must cower in a doorway if a carriage drove by, and then here was his own Street of Disenchantment where once four men had pursued the figure of a lovely woman dressed all in white, but when they caught hold of her and tore her clothes they saw that she was nothing but a corpse.

  When I went to the Street of Disenchantment it was partially demolished. Everything was covered in a layer of thick grime. The few cafés and shops were boarded up and a half-eaten loaf of bread and a half-empty bottle of beer were set on the ledge of a smashed window, as if someone had been interrupted while eating a simple meal. Two very young prostitutes, wearing high-heeled shiny boots that reached up their naked thighs, stood talking together, but apart from them there was no one around. Goya’s house had disappeared long ago; even in his time this was a poor neighbourhood.

  His house was above a perfume and liquor store on the corner of the street. I would have him about to open the door at the exact moment when all the bells of the city’s churches and convents rang out together in one jangling voice, to signal the ending of the day. As soon as people heard the bells, they stopped what they were doing: carriages came to a halt, women veiled themselves, men raised their hats and waited. Goya in his deafness could not at first understand why time had been made to stand still like this, until he remembered the tradition of the bells.

  I wonder if his wife Josefa knew he was on his way home. Did she hear the key in the lock, the footsteps on the stairs? Did he call out her name into his own silence and did she answer him?

  It is not easy to see Josefa. Goya referred to her occasionally in passing when he wrote to Zapater: she was in bed after another miscarriage, she was in bed after a difficult birth; he had given her a dress – but never anything more personal. There is a portrait dating from the late 1790s which was once thought to be of her. It shows a pretty young woman in a blue dress, her expression both querulous and acquiescent, her hands resting in her lap, her blonde hair tied in a loose bun. But she is much too young and untouched by life and could not be someone in her fifties who had carried so many babies and had been married for almost thirty years. So that leaves only the one little drawing of her, made in 1802.

  Nevertheless, let Josefa now come towards her husband, speaking to him in a voice he once knew well. She has also been very ill during the last year, so they can recognise the suffering in each other’s familiar but altered faces. Their twelve-year-old son, Javier, can be there too and the three of them can embrace.

  Goya is still weak and easily disorientated. He gazes wistfully at his wife and child as if he cannot immediately recollect who they are or where he has seen them before. He wants to avoid speaking because of the shock of not being able to hear the sound the words make. He smiles apologetically. It is so odd to realise that there can be no talk about what has happened during the recent months, and how drastically things have changed.

  11

  One room in the houses of my childhood was always permeated with the pungent sweetness of the smell of turpentine and linseed oil. Empty jam jars were filled with brushes like bunches of dead flowers that had lost their petals. Scraps from summer skirts and dresses were torn up to be used as rags that stiffened into miniature mountain ranges. Tubes of paint lay twisted and contorted in a private agony. Palette knives and palettes were made ancient by the splattering of layers of dried paint. A tray filled with bottles of rainbow inks was next to a human skull stained yellow by the earth in which it had been buried, next to a horse’s skull that was as huge and clean and white as an angel’s wing.

  For a number of years during a time when she was very sad and her life was very chaotic, my mother wanted her paintings to speak on her behalf and give shape to her worst fears. She would cover a canvas with a wild soup of colours and then she would search for signs of life, allowing whatever terrifying images were lurking there to emerge and make themselves known. Suddenly a screaming man would hatch from one dark corner of the canvas and divide his body in half like an amoeba. Two naked figures sat side by side in a yellow desert and howled. A woman with a headdress made of horns did not notice the rat climbing out of the box behind her, its whiskers twitching.

  (illustration credit 11.1)

  As a child I was sure that when the door of this room was closed then everything that lived here would begin to chatter and fidget in a cacophony of mysterious voices, a blur of movement. I would creep in as quietly as I could in order to catch them unawares. I would stand as still as a statue and wait for the brushes to dance, the tubes to pulsate, the skulls to blink their eye sockets and the faces in the paintings to meet my gaze and speak.

  Goya was back on the Street of Disenchantment and in the studio that had lain fallow for such a long time. He looked at the canvases that had been stacked against the walls and turned some of them round to face him. He pressed the stiff bristles of a paintbrush into the palm of his hand and twisted it slowly, feeling it move like a living thing. He began a series of cabinet paintings that were done primarily for himself, ‘to occupy my mind mortified by illness’ was how he explained it in a letter. He used small pieces of tin cut with scissors to roughly the same rectangular size and on them he built up layers of brown underpainting from which pale, glimmering human forms emerged out of the darkness.

  There is a fire and no one can hope to escape; a shipwreck that leaves the survivors stranded on a rock in the fierce
wide ocean; a group of sinister travelling players whose faces are masks and whose masks are faces. There is an assault by bandits on a coach in the mountains and everyone has been killed apart from one last man who is about to die. There is a scene in a lunatic asylum.

  It is thought that Goya’s aunt and uncle had been inmates in the Zaragoza asylum for a while and the painting was based on a childhood recollection. The lunatics are in a yard that is dark and yet illuminated by a drifting light coming in through a barred door and down from a colourless sky overhead. Two men dressed in rough shifts catch you with their wild stares, pulling you into the space that holds them prisoner. Two naked men wrestle together, while an attendant stands close by and prepares to separate them with a blow from the curved whip he holds in his hand. Everyone here is helpless, trapped within the thick walls of the building. Some are rocking backwards and forwards in a daze of isolation; others mutter incoherently to themselves. They are all deaf to the world.

  12

  Goya was back in the south of Spain in 1796. He was still suffering from the aftershocks of his illness and yet he needed to make a living. He wanted to do more portraiture and more work of his own invention.

  I see him moving through the streets of a southern city, passing from the sharp blaze of sunlight into sculpted pools of shadow. The deafness has affected his balance, making him walk with hesitant, awkward steps; he steadies himself with a hand against a wall, he stands wavering on his feet. He is easily frightened by the way people erupt into view as if they have dropped from the sky, the way they rush in a silent torrent around him, whisper and laugh, creep up behind him and breathe on his neck. Everyone seems to mock his vulnerability except for those who are themselves vulnerable: the cripples, the very old, the mad, who immediately recognise him and accept him as one of their own.

  It is thought he went to Cadiz to make arrangements about a commission for a church painting and to Seville to visit a friend who was also an art collector. It is possible that he was in Seville during the time when one of his patrons, the Duke of Alba, was dying, or during the days immediately after his death. If so then that would explain how he met the newly widowed Duchess and came to accept an invitation to stay with her at her farmhouse on the estuary of the Guadalquivir River.

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  Maria del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva, the thirteenth Duchess of Alba, had thirty-one Christian names. She owned seventeen palaces and vast tracts of land from Avila in the north to Doñana in the south; it was said that she could walk the length of Spain without ever stepping off her own estates. Her family was more wealthy than the Bourbon kings, but she was the last of an ancient line; she had no uncles or aunts, no brothers or sisters and no children of her own and when she died of a mysterious wasting disease it was presumed she had been poisoned by order of the Queen, Maria Luisa.

  She had the feet, hands and face of an exquisite china doll. Her waist was so tiny a man could clasp her round the middle, the tips of his fingers touching. Her dark hair cascaded in a torrent of curls down to the small of her back like a physical embodiment of the burden of wealth, beauty and power which she must always carry with her.

  After the death of her father when she was eight years old, she was brought up for the most part by her grandfather, the twelfth Duke. They shared the same perfectly oval face and the same arched eyebrows that gave them a look of permanent surprise. He had a crippled dwarf called Padillo who had been tortured by the Inquisition and who would hobble beside him carrying his master’s medals pinned to his own deformed chest. Later she too had a dwarf, whom she called Love.

  The Duke was a close friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his granddaughter was given a liberal education and was brought up in the Rousseau mould, despising convention and believing in the romantic ideal of natural innocence and the noble savage. She learnt what she knew from the people she met and from the books she read in the Piedrahita Palace where the walls were lined with silk and damask cloth.

  At the age of twelve she was married to the Marquis of Villafranca, a sombre and isolated nineteen-year-old, who agreed to take on the Alba name, and who played the knee-fiddle and collected clocks. The Duchess’s mother decided to remarry at the same ceremony, taking as a new husband the aged father of a young lover who had recently died. I try to imagine the strange theatre of this double wedding. I see the two teenagers standing side by side, looking old and stiff with formality, while the other two are giggling together as if they were the children with all of life ahead of them.

  Already from the early years of her marriage, the young Duchess had begun to collect outcasts who did not belong in society for one reason or another and on whom she could pour her love and devotion. As well as her dwarf, she had the constant companionship of Brother Basil, an old, lame, stuttering monk. She provided him with a docile mule so that he could go riding with her. One day when she was out with a large party she suddenly realised he was not at her side. She turned back to search for him and found him floundering in a muddy ditch, with onlookers laughing and taunting him and no one offering to help. When he was heaved out of the mud she took him in her arms, covering him with kisses. Turning to her husband and the others who had gathered to watch she said, ‘This friar and I are the only good people here. I understand him. I knew from the first day that he had a soul like mine.’

  Later the Duchess looked after a little black girl whom she would nurse on her lap like her own child and whom she called Mary of the Light. Luisito, the young son of her estate manager, was given the task of carrying her perfume and make-up for her wherever she went and when she wrote him a letter she called him the ‘beloved of her life’ and her ‘own dear son’. There was also the idiot Benito, a black woman called Trinidad and an old woman known as the Blessed One because she would never stop praying. And I suppose it could be said that for several months a painter, who was still recovering from the shock of becoming deaf, was taken on as another member of this circus troupe of misfits.

  They had probably first met in the late 1780s, through Goya’s association with another powerful family, the Osunas, who bought a number of paintings from him. In 1795 he made a portrait of the Duchess’s husband leaning wearily against a square English piano and holding a sheet of song music by Haydn in his hand, and one of her, dressed in white, standing in an open landscape, the sky as blue as a vision of heaven and a miniature white dog at her feet. The red ribbons tied in her mane of hair, pinned to her breast and tied tight around her waist, mimic the little red ribbon attached to the dog’s hind leg. She stares out from under the weight of her hair with an expression that mixes innocent naivety with a haughty self-assurance.

  The Marquis of Villafranca was thirty-nine years old when he died, killed, so it was rumoured, by the enthusiasm of his doctors. Goya made a drawing which looks like him on his deathbed, attended by two sinister donkeys in white doctors’ gowns and with the tiny and desolate figure of the Duchess perched on the edge of the bed between the animal bulk of their bodies.

  She was often apart from her husband pursuing her own pleasures and had been in Madrid during the months preceding his illness. But she might have got to Seville in time to share his final hours or to see his cold embalmed body before it was consigned to the Alba family vault. As soon as the necessary rituals were completed she went to her house at Doñana.

  It might be that she met Goya at the deathbed or at the funeral or perhaps she wrote to him once she was ensconced in that solitary retreat, surrounded by the noise of birds. Anyway, she summoned him and he was obedient to her command.

  I see him travelling in a little carriage pulled by mules across the flat landscape of that region. A dog barks as he approaches the house; maybe it is the absurd white dog that consented to the indignity of having a ribbon tied around its hind leg. A servant calls out that the carriage has arrived and another servant answers. The starlings are singing like mad things, perched in a dense line along the tiled ridge of the roof.


  The carriage is led into the central courtyard where the floor is paved with narrow bricks that seem to tremble with the movement of their own broken lines. A crowd of potted plants are gathered around the elephant leg of a tall palm tree. There are doves bobbing and cooing in a dance of courtship. A cat disappears through an open door.

  Goya must realise in these first moments that he has come to a quiet place and he has a great need of quiet, in spite of his deafness, or even because of it. The Duchess appears at a window. She leans over the metal balcony dressed only in a white shift, her black hair pouring in a torrent over her shoulders. Her chambermaid Catalina is beside her. The two of them have such a similar build they could easily pass for sisters. They welcome him with their smiles and he enters the house.

  13

  Sometimes, in the moment when you are confronted by the reality of the place they once inhabited, people come alive with a logic of their own. You see them in the garden, talking, quarrelling, laughing together. You see them in the house, moving from room to room, looking out of a particular window at the sky in the first light of dawn, the sky on a summer’s day unblemished by a single cloud, the sky at night.

  I had imagined the Duchess of Alba’s house at Doñana to be grand and intimidating. I had anticipated the apparition of an eighteenth-century palace, painted yellow and white perhaps, with marble lions to guard the steps and marble torches flaming from the top of an icing-sugar façade. I had thought of bushes cut into careful shapes, of peacocks screaming and an ornamental lake swimming with golden carp old enough to have eaten bread from Goya’s hand.