Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  Instead I found a simple farmhouse at the end of a long sandy track; a few trees, a view of the estuary and a sense that this was a place that would make no demands on a person and would allow any number of layers of unease to drop away.

  The house is now at the centre of a carefully protected nature reserve that is one of the last homes of the European lynx. Even with my passport, a letter of introduction and an invitation to arrive at a certain time, I had to wait at the high metal gates while officials discussed my presence over their walkie-talkies. Then I was allowed to enter an almost featureless landscape: a flat plain in all directions and the same low bushes growing everywhere, their grey-green leaves occasionally illuminated by delicate yellow flowers which I at first thought were butterflies. A pair of white-headed eagles spiralled up into the sky.

  The track crossed through a forest of umbrella pines and then there was the house, close to the water’s edge. A group of eucalyptus growing near to one of the white walls looked as though they had taken several hundred years to reach such a majesty of size, but I was told they were planted in the 1900s and so I had to take them out of the picture. But I could keep the old locust tree, huge and gnarled and dangling clusters of those long sweet bean pods that pigs love so much, and an ancient cork oak, its unharvested bark cracking and splitting as if the tree inside was trying to break free and stretch into a new form. Two trees bearing witness to another time; along with the sunlight on the shallow water, the clumps of reeds, birds and insects and the house itself.

  The ground was littered with dung beetles. I have never seen so many: dead ones and live ones pretending to be dead, some pushing at the weight of a ball of dung bigger than their own bodies, some locked together, mating or fighting, others setting off on obscure adventures, their rhinoceros horns bristling with defiance. I picked one up to feel the clockwork movement of the waving legs, the grip of the feet, the determination contained in such a small thing.

  The sand around the house turned to mud as it drew close to the shallow tidal waters of the river and this mud was marked with a tracery of little eddies and tinged red from the samphire that grew there. Over towards the west, umbrella pines and low bushes came down towards the water’s edge. The sky was a milky turquoise.

  I realised that I was looking at the background to the portrait Goya made of the Duchess, dated 1797. She is standing on this sand with the river behind her, the red of the samphire, the eddies in the mud, the trees. She is dressed in the black of mourning, but with a bright red and gold sash tied tightly around her waist, pointed gold shoes and a golden bodice that glitters through the lace like the final moments of a sunset.

  The Duchess in the portrait is as light and gaudily feathered as a bird. It would not be surprising if she flew into the air, and if she walked with careful halting steps across the sand, you feel her little shoes would leave a trail of bird’s footsteps.

  She is imperious in her gaze and yet she looks as though she might at any moment switch over into wild laughter. She is sophisticated and childlike, defiant and helpless. She points with the index finger of her right hand at the words Only Goya, which have been drawn into the soft sand. Did she write that, or did he? And what made him remove the word only with a thin layer of paint not long after the picture was completed so that it was only discovered years later when it was being restored? His name appears again on the ring she wears on the pointing finger and ‘Alba’ is on the ring that lies next to it.

  As I was looking at this empty expanse of land and water and at the fragile shifting image of a woman projected upon it, I became aware of the noise of birds. Thousands of glossy starlings had come to settle on the roof of the house and the branches of the trees and they were burbling, whistling and whooping. Then there was the creak and swish of swans flying low overhead, the gaggling of wild geese, the panicky cry of the moorhen, the lament of oystercatchers, the crowing of a cock, and I could suddenly hear the shimmering figure of the Duchess beginning to laugh because of this absurd, almost deafening chorus of sound. And Goya is laughing with the contagion of her laughter, although he cannot be sure of its cause.

  The two of them were here together with the noise of birds, the rustling of reeds and the intimacy of silence and isolation for how long? Seven months certainly and it could have been more.

  14

  Goya must have always made drawings. In 1775 he wrote a letter to the landlady of an inn in Zaragoza in which he referred to himself as ‘the young painter from Fuendetodos who scribbled on the tables and the walls’, and in the letters he sent to his friend Zapater he sometimes included wild doodles in which eyes and noses, a cup, a dog, a woman’s vagina, a man’s buttocks, a gun, float like surreal balloons among the written words. But apart from the Italian sketchbook with its copies of Old Masters and a few preparatory drawings for paintings, nothing else has survived until the time when he stayed at Doñana and filled a little notebook with a series of beautiful pen-and-ink drawings. They are like a visual diary which seems to describe the Duchess and her servants and the life they were leading. The Duchess sits with Mary of the Light cradled on her lap, the darkness of the little girl’s skin answered by the darkness of the woman’s hair. The Duchess, or someone very like her in build and proportion, leans out of an open window, dressed only in a white undergarment. She bends forward to pull up a stocking in a gesture of infinite grace. She lies under a thin sheet with her knees raised. She dances, she weeps, she adjusts her hair while being watched by another woman lying languorously on an unmade bed. She writes a letter, she sweeps a courtyard.

  The mood flickers and changes from joy to sadness, from maternal tenderness to a gentle eroticism. Occasionally there is an edge of sexual danger. The Duchess, or someone very like her, looks over her shoulder with a face that is a grinning carnival mask and she lifts her long skirts to reveal her bare bottom. She sits naked with her back to us, one hand sliding between her thighs while two sinister old men stare at her. She swings her body out of bed and another naked woman leans against her, so that the two seem to be joined like Siamese twins, each looking a different way.

  It was midsummer. The white curtains hanging lifeless in the still air. The need to move stealthily in order to avoid the sticky embrace of the heat. The relentless whirring of the cicadas. Pine cones bursting like distant gunshot. The cry of a bird. The smell of the sea and the smell from the marshes combining into a mixture of sweet and salt as intimate as the smell of lovemaking.

  Everywhere she goes the Duchess is followed by children who are not her own. Luisito and Mary of the Light cling to her skirts. Pepito the foundling follows her like a stray dog longing for a new owner. And there are others, a stream of small children all waiting their turn and eager to show affection.

  The deaf painter is the latest addition to the Duchess’s family. She welcomes him. She leads him excitedly along the corridors of the house from room to room, past windows that look out towards the enormity of the river’s estuary and the sea and past windows that look into the enclosed containment of the courtyard, the rows of starlings always busy on the rooftops.

  She calls for her maidservant Catalina, whose face and body are so like her own. The two of them lead Goya by both hands. They laugh together as if they were children with a new playmate, whores with a new client.

  They walk out into the sunlight of the garden. The old woman Eufemia, the Blessed One, dressed all in black with a white cap on her head, flaps into the distance like a big awkward bird. Brother Basil steps tentatively towards them, weaving his way between the tufts of reed that grow on the sand. He is crippled with age and his stuttering mouth struggles to produce the shape of a greeting. The idiot Benito is crouching in the shade of the locust tree, watching the dung beetles. The dwarf whose name is Love leaps out at them from behind the splitting trunk of the cork oak.

  ‘Look!’ the Duchess cries delightedly, turning to Goya who is mesmerised by the movement of her lips. ‘Look, here is Love: I thought I had lost him,
but he was only hiding from me. Dear Love, how I have missed you!’

  ‘And look,’ says the Duchess to anyone who cares to listen. ‘Here is the painter, the famous painter Francisco Goya. He has come to stay with us. And he cannot hear a thing! Not a word! You must speak to him in signs, or write messages on the sand with a stick. Or not speak to him at all, but watch him and let him watch!’

  With that she turns and puts her arms around him, pressing her little body lightly against him and covering his tired face with butterfly kisses, just as before she kissed Brother Basil when he was pulled out of the ditch.

  (illustration credit 14.1)

  * * *

  It is almost irrelevant to wonder whether Goya had an affair with her. Some say he did and others are sure he did not. There is no proof of anything beyond the fact of the intimacy of the drawings he made of her while he was at Doñana, and the bitter sexual rage which roars through so many of the images he made of her later, when he was no longer in her company. Perhaps it was because of her innocence that she let him watch her dressing and undressing, waking and sleeping. Or perhaps she invited him to share her bed and to listen to what her body had to say in the hot dark silence.

  One night I would have him caught in a nightmare and dreaming that he is blind. People with the faces of monsters and monsters with the faces of people crowd around him. He can feel the deformity of their noses, their eyes, their mouths, their ears, but he can see nothing. He knows he was screaming when he woke, because of the pain the sound made as it tore at the back of his throat. The Duchess tries to comfort him, but she is afraid of so much fear.

  Goya had left Doñana before the winter of 1796. He might have stayed with his friend Sebastian Martinez or he might have rented a house of his own in Cadiz. He was definitely back in Madrid by 1 April, when he gave in his notice to the academy, saying that the severity of his deafness made it impossible for him to continue his work as a teacher.

  He started a new notebook in which the first thirty-nine pages were all drawings of women. These women have long dark hair, small pointed feet and tiny waists. They whisper secrets to each other. They are dangerous and deceitful, eager to betray their lovers and sell their bodies. Men cluster around them like flies. Terrible things happen. The shadows of the world creep and slant on all sides and the uncertain darkness is brimming with danger.

  15

  In February 1797 the Duchess of Alba sat down to write her will. She allocated her entire fortune to people who were in no way related to her, either by blood or class. To Carlos, a childhood friend, to her estate manager, to the two family doctors she had trusted, her maidservant Catalina, the idiot Benito, the black woman Trinidad, to Mary of the Light and Luisito who carried her make-up and Pepito the foundling. To numerous other children and to the poorest of her servants.

  The last beneficiary on this long list was Javier, the twelve-year-old son of ‘D. Francisco Goya’. He was to receive the sum of twelve reales a day for the rest of his life. It was the only occasion on which her side of the relationship with Goya was referred to at all.

  It was said that soon after Goya had gone, she began an affair with the bullfighter Pedro Romero. She gave him a tight sequinned costume which he wore when he was fighting in the ring. Then she had an affair with the Queen’s favourite, Manuel Godoy, who was known as the Sausage Maker. And with others. She apparently married a field marshal called Antonio Cornel just before her death, but never got round to writing a new will which included him.

  She died in July 1802, carried off by a wasting sickness. She was thirty-nine years old. The obituary in the Gazeta de Madrid praised her gentleness and kindness, her noble generosity and her charity. Within a week of her death, Queen Maria Luisa was wearing her rival’s pearls and diamonds as if they were trophies she had won in battle. Godoy was given the use of her palace in Madrid and he took possession of her collection of paintings, which included the Rokeby Venus by Velazquez and perhaps the Naked Maja by Goya, whose soft and voluptuous body was supposed to be hers although the face belonged to someone else. It was almost forty years before the estate was distributed to the chief heirs named in the will, and by then most of them were dead.

  Goya watched it all from a distance. He kept his silence and talked to himself in images. In one of the Caprichos etchings the Duchess can be seen with a butterfly sprouting from her head, her arms outstretched and her black shawl spread like wings. She is being carried through the air on the back of three crouching men, one of whom can be recognised as the bullfighter Pedro Romero. There is no trace of violence or triumph in her face; she looks as if she is being swept along by a destiny over which she has no control.

  In the drawing and the etching called ‘Dreams of Lies and Inconstancy’, she is a double-headed creature, turning one face towards Goya who clasps her tenderly in his arms, while the second face stares abstractedly into the night sky. A double-headed woman lies across her lap and offers her hand to a new lover who is approaching on his knees, holding his finger to his lips. Again a butterfly sprouts from the Duchess’s head. A snake and a toad stretch open their mouths to swallow each other. A mask with a drooping phallic nose is propped between two saddlebags. In the murky distance you can see the outline of a castle that looks as if it has been carved from sand. It is a nightmare from which the woman cannot escape.

  (illustration credit 15.1)

  When the Duchess died, Goya mourned her loss in a drawing he made for a sepulchre that was never built. Her limp body in a white shift is being lifted into a tomb by three figures dressed in white, their faces hidden so deep within the folds of their hoods that you could think they had no faces at all. She looks exhausted and yet serene, as if she is is glad to be taken from the world.

  Talk about the cause of her death continued from one generation to the next. In 1945 her remains were exhumed in order to ascertain once and for all if she had been poisoned and to compare the structure of her bones with the soft flesh of the Naked Maja. A photograph was taken of her, showing a reptilian skull, partially covered by old skin, peering out from a swirling tangle of disintegrating cloth.

  Three doctors performed the autopsy and decided that she had died naturally from a lymph infection, followed by encephalitis. And yes, the proportions of her skeleton could be made to fit into the body of the painting known as the Naked Maja. There were plans to publish these investigations in full, but this never happened.

  The three doctors also discovered that the Duchess of Alba had no feet. In 1843 she had been disinterred in order to move her to the San Isidoro Cemetery in Madrid. Apparently the new coffin provided for her was three and a half inches too short and so the problem was solved in a simple and practical way. The severed right foot was placed at her side, but the left one had disappeared.

  16

  A friend has lent me an old copper etching plate. The stamp on the back says it was made by J. Borel, metal planisher, Montparnasse, Paris. It has finely bevelled edges and I can just hold it in the stretched palm of my hand. The surface is without scratch marks, but it shows signs of time and neglect in the mottled landscape of discoloration that spreads outwards from one corner.

  When I polished the plate with Brasso, the unblemished areas came alive with a soft orange-pink glow. I propped it up like a mirror and stared into it. Whereas a silvered glass mirror throws back a reflection without a moment’s hesitation, the copper seemed to take possession of the image of my face, holding it inside itself.

  In 1797 Goya bought about sixty etching plates that must have looked very like this one, all cut to the same size with their edges made smooth and individually wrapped in cloth or newspaper.

  He takes one and places it, naked and shining, on a piece of felt. He strokes the cold surface with the tips of his fingers. He breathes on it and rubs away the mist of his breath on his sleeve. He searches for any tiny indentations made by the mark of a hammer, any hair-thin scratches. As he stares into the metal his own face seems to rise to the surface
like some creature coming up for air. He feels the contentment of setting out at the start of a long road. He feels the energy of the drawings preparing to overflow into the energy of this other medium.

  The studio has been made ready for the change. A pile of little glazed pans stands next to the charcoal brazier. An earthenware basin is filled with water. A bunch of tallow candles hang by their wicks from a hook on the wall. The shelves are crowded with pots and bottles, all carefully labelled. Two types of varnish, hard and soft, are next to the sulphuric acid, vinegar, ammonia salts, ordinary salt and the powdered lees of turpentine. A clothesline stretches across the ceiling, hung with little pieces of white muslin that will soon be black. A window is open in preparation for the acrid biting stink of the acid, the fumes from the turpentine, the smoke from the tallow candles, but there is no breeze entering the room. It was said in those days that the air in Madrid could kill a man but was not capable of guttering a candle.

  There must be a small hand press somewhere in the studio as well, its rollers still clean. The design has hardly changed since the idea of printing an image from metal to paper was first invented in the fifteenth century. Goya thinks of Rembrandt. He has a collection of Rembrandt’s etchings that were given to him by a friend and he listens to what they have to say to him, just as someone else might listen to a poem or the reasoned argument of a philosophical debate. Sometimes the pictures speak to him of such deep things that it brings tears to his eyes.

  He is wearing spectacles. He cleans the copper plate with water and a whetting stone and then again with pumice and charcoal powder made from beechwood. He rubs on a dab of ink with his finger and wipes the ink away with a scrap of muslin cloth to see if any fine scratches can be discerned. He takes the plate to the window and holds it at an angle to the light. The surface is clear of any blemish. He polishes it with a few drops of oil, humming to himself the words of an old song: