Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  He examined this bright pool to see the mysteries it held, and then he fished out what he could find; scratching and wiping until he had made a woman with her skirts billowing in the wind; a man eating from a dish of leeks; a man searching a dog’s belly for fleas; an old man and a young woman; an almost naked woman leaning against a rock, her body as soft as dough.

  I imagine Rosario sitting beside him as he works, listening as he talks in a rumbling monotone to himself and to her and to each exquisite new creation as it hatches out of the pool of darkness. Rosario staring up at the old stubborn face, the eyes hidden behind three pairs of spectacles, the heavy crease running from the nostril to the chin, and then down at the piece of ivory that spins with life. The two of them grinning because this is like a conjurer’s trick at the fair, and when he has finished they plan to go to the fair, to see if they can find the donkey that can walk upright on its hind legs like a man.

  Goya said in a letter that he had produced forty such ‘exercises’. There would have been more, but he did not have enough ivory and so he sometimes wiped away one image for the sake of the pleasure of producing another. They are all like miniature versions of the Black Paintings; filled with that same savagery and energy, even though each one is so small.

  Because he did not trust his skill or his patience as a teacher and because there was apparently no eager answer from Ferrer offering to take the little girl under his wing, Goya sent Rosario to art lessons in Bordeaux. First she studied miniatures under Antoine Lacour, who was the drawing master at the Royal Deaf and Dumb School, and then she went to classes given by his more celebrated brother, Pierre. She was taught lithography and instructed in his ‘complete course of drawing from the simplest elements to composition’, which included learning something called an ‘alphabet of landscape’, Goya took her to the classes every day and was seen walking up and down among the rows of easels, muttering his dissatisfaction as he examined the precise and academic work that was being produced.

  Maybe Rosario had such a natural facility that she became an imitator rather than a painter in her own right. Or maybe the struggle of life was simply too much for her. After Goya’s death she and Leocadia were destitute and she needed to earn a living in any way she could: by painting wallpaper motifs, taking on commissions for miniature portraits or giving drawing lessons. In 1833 a change in the political climate in Spain made it possible for her to return to Madrid with her mother and brother. There she received several commissions to make copies of Old Masters which she did with such skill that one unscrupulous dealer began to sell her work as originals. The Duchess of San Fernando was said to have been so disconcerted by the quality of her Velazquez imitations that she forbade her to do any more.

  In 1842 she was named drawing mistress to the young Queen Isabel, but in the June of the following year she got caught in a street uprising as she was leaving the palace and as a result she suffered from a ‘terrible inflammation’ which caused her death at the age of twenty-eight.

  Very little of Rosario’s original work survives. There is a pencil self-portrait from which I took her blonde curls and the fragility of her appearance, and a portrait she made of her mother. It shows a woman with a long thin nose, a pale oval face and an expression of terrible sadness. It was done after Goya’s death, when Leocadia had many reasons to be sad.

  35

  Last night I had a dream in which a group of dwarfs were dancing together in a low-ceilinged room. I could not hear the music that was playing, but I could see it in the rhythm of their bodies. They danced on stiff legs which made them rock from one foot to the other and they held their arms awkwardly out from their sides like the wings of penguins. I think I remember that they were all men, but I cannot be sure; certainly they all had narrow foreheads, widely spaced eyes and solemn, theatrical faces. They were turning and turning in that low room, as if they had always been there and would never leave.

  A few days before I had seen the 1930s American film called Freaks. It is set in a circus. Most of the actors are real circus performers and include those who were known as ‘sideshow oddities’. There is a bearded lady, a hermaphrodite, a group of ‘pin-heads’ who are herded about like a flock of geese, a woman without arms, a pair of Siamese twins who move together as if they were following the careful choreography of a dance, and a black man whose entire body is nothing more than a torso, bound in a knitted sack. There is a scene in which this man lights a cigarette using only his lips and teeth to perform the complicated manoeuvre and he does it with such a slow dignity you feel he has delivered a long speech about the strangeness of life and death and the human condition.

  I would have Goya sharing my dream of dancing dwarfs and recognising them as his own. I would have him watching the film about the circus. The story is a simple one of love and betrayal and so easy to follow that he can forget he is cut off from the words that are spoken and the music that is played. He can seem to hear the high-pitched serious voice of the midget, the tinkling laughter of the Siamese twins, and everything that the man without arms or legs says, as he stares unblinking into the lens of the camera.

  I would have Goya watching the film with such intensity that when it was finished he could easily lift it out of his memory and play it again and again before his closed eyes. He makes drawings of the faces that spoke to him most directly. He takes a piece of black chalk and touches the paper so softly you can see the crisscrossing wire marks of its surface showing through. He uses a sharp-tipped greasy crayon to emphasise line and outline and to bring the image into hectic life with a scattering of serrated edges like sparks of energy. He never corrects what he does. I would have him smiling as he works, always smiling, and writing comments at the foot of the drawings: ‘True Love’, for the midget sitting like a china doll on the broad lap of the trapeze lady; ‘Everlasting Friendship’ for the Siamese twins whose bodies are joined together from the armpit to the thigh.

  According to the poet Moratin, Goya in Bordeaux ‘entertains himself with his sketchbooks, walks, eats and takes siestas’. He also reads the local newspapers avidly, to find out what has happened or is about to happen and what new entertainments are coming to town.

  Bordeaux was full of entertainments. Polito’s Grand Menagerie arrived in ten coaches drawn by twenty-six horses and erected a tent in the Place Richelieu big enough to hold two thousand people. Every night at seven o’clock you could see the ‘Most beautiful lion ever seen in Europe having his dinner in all his ferocity … accompanied by a dog who never leaves his side.’ The same show was proud to present the Ethiopian Zebra and the Ferocious Hyena of the Cape of Good Hope.

  As well as the travelling menageries there were several local organisers of animal fights. Monsieur Duco’s team of Bordeaux mastiffs was set against bulls, bears and even wolves. The performances were held in an improvised ring and on several occasions the dogs escaped and caused havoc.

  There were two big annual fairs, one in the early summer and one in the autumn. At the October fair of 1824 Goya made a drawing of ‘three dwarfs performing … the one in the short trousers is eighteen inches high and of the other two (who are husband and wife) she is twenty-one inches and he is twenty’. He sent the drawing to the Countess of San Fernando in the hope that she might like to buy it and perhaps she did. The picture has since disappeared.

  For one such fair the local newspaper announced the arrival of a ‘superb collection of live snakes: a boa, a twenty-four-foot-long Anaconda; the eighteen-foot Embroidered Snake; the Terrible Rattle Snake, and several live Crocodiles’. Two weeks later a Living Skeleton was on show, ‘the only one of its kind, twenty-eight years old … 5 foot 3fi inches high and he weighs only 3 stone 5lbs, his bones being completely without flesh and covered by no more than a thin skin’. This was Claude Ambroise Seurat, on his way back from a successful London tour. He was accompanied by his mother-in-law who carried him in her arms when he needed to go upstairs.

  (illustration credit 35.1)

  Goy
a made a drawing of a man in a turban and long flowing robes, balancing a ‘crocodile’ on his gloved right hand, although the crocodile looks much more like a large lizard. And one of a very elegant black man who holds a boa constrictor draped in muscular curves across his bare head and along the length of his arms. He also drew the Living Skeleton, a look of blank despair on his face and his grotesquely emaciated body quite naked apart from a loincloth.

  At the Olympic Circus Goya could see aerial acts such as Satan on Horseback Defeated by the Exterminating Angel, the winged horseman Avillon performing on the high trapeze with Madame Rosalie, or Hercules the tightrope walker, who danced blindfold on a slack rope.

  In December 1824, one of the small popular theatres in the Allées de Tourny advertised the ‘extraordinary phenomenon’ of Yocko the Monkey Man from the Coast of Africa, although they did not explain what it was that made him extraordinary and worth the price of a visit. A few doors further on the famous dog Munito was on view. He could copy texts, solve arithmetical problems, play dominoes and he knew the colours. One of the Bordeaux sketches shows just such a ‘literate animal’ holding an open book in its huge clawed hands and looking as serious as a judge, as preoccupied as a philosopher. Behind its back a hideous old man armed with a stick watches and grins dangerously.

  The petomanes were very popular. These were men who made everyone laugh with their farting skills; they could even play tunes with their anal sphincters. The shows were based on a simple story about eating and vomiting and defecating, and one such ‘engastrological sketch’ was performed by Monsieur Dufour the Sick Glutton, who might have been the inspiration for Goya’s series of drawings of a man eating from a big bowl, a man about to be ‘treated’ with an enema almost as big as himself and a man sitting on a lavatory.

  Goya also illustrated local events he had seen reported in the newspapers, such as the two old men who had a fight over the ownership of a chair, the madman who escaped from the asylum and tried to murder a priest, the rivals who killed each other in a duel in the Allées de Segur after a quarrel about a prostitute, or the peasant, Jean Ramut, who was given a reward of two hundred francs and a silver medal after he fought with a bear, although in Goya’s picture the man’s bravery is put in question since the bear is no bigger than a dog and lacks any hint of savagery.

  The same people who went to the circuses and fairs would go to see the spectacle of a public execution. The newspapers reported the time and the place and an eager crowd would turn up to watch the prisoner being brought to the guillotine on the ‘cart of the condemned’ and to see how well he or she performed the act of dying. One man was applauded because he showed such earnest repentance, another was mocked when he struggled with the executioner and his assistants. Goya made two drawings of what he called ‘French punishment’. In one of them the man who is about to die has his shirt pulled back to expose his naked shoulders and a stranger’s hand is lightly touching the back of his neck as if testing its vulnerability, and the ease with which it will be sliced open.

  And then there was the lunatic asylum, the Hospice for the Mentally Ill in the Rue St Jean, surrounded by a wooded area and formal gardens and run by the Sisters of Charity. For a long time the mad had been kept in cages or rooms with barred windows, where, like another circus show, they were regularly exposed to public derision. In 1802 there is a reference to visitors paying two sous to come and see them, and if they proved to be too quiet and docile on that day, then the wardens would beat them to make them more entertaining.

  In 1818 the first plans for a new building and a more humane establishment were drawn up, but the work was not completed until 1829. Until then the old building, which was said by now to be in ruins, the walls crumbling, ‘the living conditions not unlike a sewer’, continued to be used. Visitors were no longer welcomed, but they could obtain special permission to come and view the hundred or more lunatics who were kept there.

  Goya made a series of drawings of the madmen of Bordeaux, in which he shows the many faces of mania and alienation. There is the ‘happy man’, so lost in himself that he is oblivious of his dark captivity; the raving lunatic whose rage is like a chemical reaction transforming his body into a shapeless mass; the man screaming in a delirium; the man bowed down by the weight of his paper helmet; the African trapped in a cage; the emaciated figure who had managed to stick his thin head and one long thin arm out of the cage’s bars. A drawing called ‘Mad by Mistake’, might refer to a case reported in the newspapers in 1825, in which a man was bringing legal action against the asylum where he had been unjustly detained and treated against his will.

  Goya could end a day of entertaining himself with his sketchbooks by visiting the Spanish chocolate house on the Street of the Little Moles. This was where the exiles gathered in a back room to drink thick, sweet, cinnamon-flavoured chocolate, to talk about the homes and families they had lost, to curse King Ferdinand, to talk politics, tell stories, sing, dance and smoke. The shop was owned by a man from Aragon called Braulio Poc. He had fought against Napoleon’s invading troups at the Siege of Zaragoza, but with the return of Ferdinand, like so many of his countrymen, he had been forced to escape to France. His patrons included intellectual liberals and aristocrats who had supported Napoleon’s brother when he ruled in Madrid, but the majority were old soldiers and resistance fighters who had no pay now that the war was over but were afraid to return to Spain. A number of them were wanted by the police and so were known only by their nicknames: the Doctor, the Grandfather, One-Arm, Waistcoat and the Shepherd. Braulio Poc’s chocolate manufacturing business was doing well and so he would often feed his hungry clients, providing them with a big pot of meat and vegetables, into which everyone could dip with a wooden spoon. He liked to sing and play the jota or other gypsy music on the guitar and then the people forgot their troubles and danced, turning and turning in that low-ceilinged back room, just like figures in a strange dream.

  36

  I was in Bordeaux in November. It rained a great deal from a sky that kept growing black and heavy with still more thunderclouds. The elegant eighteenth-century façades of the houses looked as though they had been fashioned out of wet sand and the wildly grinning faces carved above many of the doors and windows glistened with a strange life. At night the tarmac streets took on the appearance of shallow rivers.

  I stayed in a hotel on the Rue Huguerie and asked the lady who ran it where I might find the Street of the Little Moles. ‘Oh, but this is it,’ she said. ‘They changed its name.’ And blushing with her own outspokenness, she explained shyly who the little moles had been, until the street outside was full of women in dark capes and hoods, beckoning from doorways.

  Breakfast was served in a long room without windows at the back of the building. The walls were hung with modern tapestries done in a woollen cross-stitch and murky colours. I sat underneath some huge fleshy foxgloves being assaulted by bees as big as dinner plates. Since I did not know the number of Braulio Poc’s chocolate house, I thought that this could well be it and the muffled room became the place where all the exiles gathered. Goya was hunched in a corner opposite me, glowering at the foxgloves.

  I went out into the wet street and he followed. ‘… this Goya will never leave me alone, he follows me everywhere,’ said Moratin with a mixture of pride and exasperation.

  We entered the Place de Tourny where there had once been so many popular theatres, but now there were none. Goya was almost knocked down by a car, but he did not notice its close passing, or the blast of the horn. ‘Probably Bordeaux suits him better than Paris,’ said Moratin, ‘for with his deafness he is in real danger in the middle of all this hurly-burly.’

  We reached the Cours de Tourny which has been renamed after the politician Clemenceau. The hotel where Goya stayed for almost a year has gone. Near the Grand Theatre he paused for a moment beside a funfair carousel that had been abandoned on a patch of grass. He stared at the brightly painted horses, their square teeth and their frightened eyes. H
e put his hand on the shining flank of a painted mule that was carrying two big baskets, such as the women in the Pyrenees used to ride in, long ago. ‘I have always preferred the mule to the horse,’ he said. I noticed that he moved with awkward swaying steps as if he was on the deck of a ship and trying to compensate for the rolling of the waves. When Brugada accompanied him on such a walk he steadied himself by leaning on the young man’s arm, but as soon as they reached a secluded backstreet where there was no one to watch and maybe to laugh, he struggled to manage unaided and almost toppled over from the effort. ‘After eighty years I am being carried around like a child!’ he said. Later on that same day, Brugada made too much of a show of the signs with which they communicated and Goya was suddenly furious. ‘Can’t you make your signs more discreetly … Do you enjoy showing everyone that old Goya can neither walk nor hear?’

  The rain had stopped by the time we reached the church of St Seurin, approaching it through a tree-lined park that had been known as the Alley of Love because there were more prostitutes here as well. But now there were no signs of life apart from an ancient basset hound who was taking himself for a solitary walk. His coat was moth-eaten, his balls were very naked and he looked unfairly burdened by the weight of his huge jowelled head that he could hardly keep lifted above the ground. ‘Another old man like me,’ said Goya.