The members of his two families had always kept separate from each other, but now here they were gathered around him: his daughter-in-law and grandson on one side, his mistress and her child on the other. And because he knew he was really dying, he announced to them that he wanted to make a second will, a document to acknowledge his relationship with Leocadia and to make sure that she and Rosario were provided for financially after he had gone. His daughter-in-law was quick to reassure him. There was no need to worry, she explained, he had done it already. Everything was in order. He must have believed her and Leocadia certainly believed her as well.
He began to slip further away. When he spoke his words were often nothing more than a soft babble of drifting associations, almost impossible to understand. But he could still recognise the people who came into the room, their solemn faces hovering above him like pale balloons.
The paralysis down one side of his body had left him as helpless as a fish out of water. When he tried to smile, a corner of his mouth lifted in a crooked grimace and one eye was unable to close so that it continued to stare with unblinking intensity, even when he slept. But his other eye could follow a person’s movement, his hand could answer the pressure of another hand and his deaf man’s voice, even more hollow and toneless than before, could still enunciate a name or the stumbling words of a short sentence.
Goya was performing a slow and quiet death and everyone who was close to him in one way or another was caught up in the process, a witness to the effort, the struggle and the seriousness of what he was doing. Leocadia sat beside him. She offered him a sip of water, a spoonful of thin soup. She wiped the sweat from his face with a damp cloth, she helped wash his limp body, she held his hand, she held his gaze. Rosario approached like a wild animal, trembling with fear and disbelief, holding back her tears until she had escaped from the room. Molina, whose portrait would now never be finished, and Brugada, who would have no portrait at all, hardly ever left the apartment. The woman from downstairs who ran the bookshop, the carpenter from the first floor who owned the building, and the Mexican heiress came to say goodbye. Braulio Poc from the chocolate house came as well and I imagine him with a bushy moustache and smelling of strong tobacco, even though I have never seen a picture of him, only a reproduction of his twirling and confident signature.
Goya watched faces as he had always done; reading who they were, what they wished for, what they were afraid of. He looked at Gumersinda and for a moment he confused her with his dead wife Josefa; there was something similar in their closed and resentful stare. He looked at Mariano, who had become such a fine young gentleman, a real aristocrat in his manner and way of dressing. But then a wave of anxiety passed through him like a fever because Javier was nowhere to be seen. ‘Where is my son? Has he not been told that his father is waiting for him? Someone must fetch him at once! Ask Moratin to go … But where is Moratin? Why is he not here either?’
(illustration credit 40.1)
And suddenly from within this imagined scene of confusion I find myself again sitting at my mother’s bedside and she is also drifting on the edge of death. Just like Goya she has suffered a partial paralysis which has given her a lopsided smile, an unblinking eye and a voice that is held in a flat monotone, rather like the voice of the deaf. Her face has the monumental solemnity of a mask. She is concentrating all her energy on what is happening to her, her own irrevocable departure.
She stares at me as if from a huge distance. There is a gentleness about her which I have not known before. Perhaps it was always there, but hidden under layers of rage and sorrow and only now has it been laid bare. I moisten her mouth with water on a little sponge. I dip my finger into a pot of honey so that she can suck the sweetness.
‘How is Goya?’ she asks in that blank, deep voice and I tell her again that he is fine, I am enjoying his company.
‘Goya,’ she says, trying out the sound of the word. And then, ‘How old when he died?’
‘Eighty-two,’ I reply.
‘Same as me,’ she says and a lopsided wisp of a smile passes over the carved stone of her face.
‘I went to the Prado,’ she announces and in that moment she has fallen back into a restless sleep.
A few days after Goya’s death, Leocadia wrote a letter to Moratin in Paris, telling him the stages of how it had happened. She described getting the apartment ready for the arrival of his grandson and daughter-in-law, the lunch, the illness, the paralysis, the desire to make a new will, the slow decline.
She said that on the night of 15 April she was in the room where he lay, but standing at a distance because by then he was breathing so heavily she could not bear to bring herself close to the bed. Molina and Brugada were beside him and a doctor was also present, but she made no mention of Gumersinda and Mariano.
Around midnight, Goya’s body went through some sort of crisis, but by half past twelve he was calm and peaceful, as if he was sleeping. He died at two in the morning. The doctor said his resilience had been astonishing. He also said that he had not suffered at the end, but she doubted his reassurance.
I imagine Leocadia sitting silently in that room, waiting for the first light of the dawn to reveal the face of the old man she had lived with and loved. He had not asked for a priest to come and give him the Last Sacraments and forgive him his sins. He had died with the same stubborn independence he had used for living. I wonder though if his expression had softened, now that he had lost the need to hold on.
Leocadia helped to wash him and dress him in fresh white nightclothes with a cap on his head to keep him warm. His arms lay stiffly at his sides, on the clean, tightly folded sheets. People came to pay their last respects. The lithographer Gaulon arranged for a young painter called Francisco de la Torre to make a drawing of the deceased that would be turned into a limited edition of prints.
Molina and a friend went to the Town Hall to register the death. They got Goya’s age wrong, stating that he was eighty-five years old and this mistake was repeated on the memorial stone.
The businessman Don Santiago Galos, whose portrait Goya had painted in 1826, went to the undertakers to arrange the details of the funeral and the burial. Goya was going to share the family tomb of Javier’s father-in-law Martin Goicoechea, who had died three years previously. It just needed to be opened up to be ready to receive a new guest and Galos paid the total cost of one hundred and fifty francs himself.
On that same day the Spanish Consul came to the apartment on the third floor to certify that he had seen the corpse of the painter. With Molina and another man as witnesses, the Consul asked Mariano and Gumersinda what the deceased’s estate consisted of. They replied, ‘He left nothing’, and this was duly written down and signed. That evening Goya was placed in his coffin, wrapped in the brown robes of a hermit monk.
The funeral took place at ten o’clock on the morning of 17 April in the church of Nôtre Dame. Brugada, Molina and Braulio Poc were among the pallbearers and Mariano and Gumersinda were the family mourners. I don’t know what role was given to Leocadia and Rosario or to the young Guillermo who suddenly reappeared at his mother’s side during Goya’s final days. It was said that all the Spanish exiles, all the artists and many of the people of the town followed Charles IV’s Court Painter to his final resting place. I would like to think that an acrobat, a dwarf, a few prostitutes and a destitute soldier who had lost his legs in the Peninsular War were also there among the crowd.
The hearse made its way to the high-walled Chartreuse Cemetery where tombs and vaults and ornate family mausoleums stand in ordered lines along their named streets, like rows of neat little houses in a city for the dead. In those days it was still customary to pay for professional weepers to attend the burial ceremony. These were children between the ages of twelve and fifteen, dressed in strange coats made out of three layers of black capes, their legs bound in black stockings and their heads almost hidden under large felt hats decorated with crêpe ribbons – a good subject for a drawing done in greasy crayo
n and chalk.
And now I can’t help seeing Leocadia standing in the spring sunshine beside the newly dug earth of the grave. She also is dressed all in black, with a black veil misting her face, and she looks just as she looked in the portrait that Goya made of her on a wall in the House of the Deaf Man, six years before. But the desolation on her face has increased with the passing of time.
41
I was not in the room when my mother died, but I was with her shortly afterwards. I had never seen a dead person before, never known the echoing solemnity of such an encounter. She looked very distant and private now that there were no uncertainties flickering like shadows across the surface of her face, no restless dreams to wake her, no questions needing to be asked or answered. She had become a stranger I had never seen before even though her features were as startlingly familiar as my own reflection glimpsed in a mirror.
Over the days and weeks that followed, I was busy with the task of settling her affairs. There were letters to write and documents to sign. There was an empty house brimming with possessions that had suddenly lost their purpose: chairs wanting to be sat in; curtains waiting to be drawn; cupboards and boxes ready to be opened and closed again. The paintings hanging on the walls, standing in racks in the studio and rolled in tight bundles in the dark, were all calling for attention like hungry animals demanding to be fed. As I walked from one room to the next I became increasingly aware of how little I knew of the person who had lived here.
(illustration credit 41.1)
* * *
Once Goya had been stilled and silenced and placed in a coffin next to Javier’s father-in-law the banker, he also became a stranger to me. In the telling of his story I had tried to keep up with the stages of his life, sometimes bobbing alongside him for a little while, sometimes staring at his hunched figure striding ahead of me. I had grown accustomed to the fierceness of his jutting lower lip, the droop of his eyelid, his habit of muttering loudly to himself and not caring who was listening and I was caught up in the spinning energy of the man as he hurtled relentlessly through the years.
He was always busy with his work. He never stopped or even slowed down except on the occasions when he was knocked off his feet by illness and then he would emerge from his bed still weak and shaking to return to work with even more ferocious intensity. I even wonder if he noticed the people who were close to him, who offered him food or money or admiration, an arm to lean on or a bed to sleep in, or was he too preoccupied to acknowledge their existence? It sometimes seems to me as if all the love and compassion, the indignation and fascination, the horror and the fear that he felt towards his fellow human beings was sucked directly into the pictures he made, leaving nothing over for those who shared their lives with his.
As I looked at Goya lying dead, I suddenly felt angry with him. I wanted to shake his cold body and shout into his deaf ears. I wanted to hammer on the side of his coffin, demanding an explanation from him. Why had he not bothered to sort things out before the end came? Was it because he didn’t care about anyone?
None of this matters, of course; it is the work that is the thing; it is the work that transcends all the petty confusions of a life. It’s just that after Goya had gone I felt so sorry for Leocadia. I don’t know how close she was to him, and I don’t know what he promised her in the way of love or eternity. It might be that she had simply imagined hearing him say on his deathbed that he wanted to write a new will that made provision for her and her daughter. And then she must have also imagined that Gumersinda told him not to worry, everything was in order.
Anyway, when he died there was no evidence of a second will. I suppose it is possible that Gumersinda had it in her possession, but crumpled it up and burnt it because she was cruel and greedy and then she told Javier what she had done and he was glad because he was cruel and greedy too and he had always resented Leocadia and was afraid that she was planning to steal his inheritance. But then why did Goya not arrange things with his lawyers and bankers, since all his other affairs were so well managed and his hoard of money was proliferating comfortably in trusts and bonds and private accounts? Did he choose to ignore the fact that old men must die eventually? Was he ashamed of taking responsibility for his mistress and his illegitimate child? Or did he not want to bother himself with thoughts about what would happen to those around him, once he had gone?
After the first shock of grief and the first flurry of practical necessities that surround a death, Leocadia must have asked Gumersinda if she knew where the will could be found. She must have explained that she had no money of her own, that the rent for the apartment was only paid until the end of the month and even the piano that Rosario loved to play was only rented and would have to be returned soon. And Gumersinda must have said not to worry, her husband Javier was in charge of such things, he would be here any day now, such a pity he had not been able to arrive in time to say goodbye to the father he loved so much.
Leocadia wrote two letters to Moratin in which she confided the predicament she was in. She said she had to keep going for the sake of Rosario who was in a state of despair. She said that Molina was ‘concerning himself’ with her situation and he had already gone to Madrid to talk to the son and to find out if there was anything in the will. She said that in the meantime she was looking for a cheaper apartment.
Javier would have received the news that his father was dying by 10 April at the latest. If he had set out immediately he could have reached Bordeaux in time to accompany the funeral cortege to the cemetery. But there were a lot of practical things he wanted to do before he made the journey.
On 15 April he obtained a copy of his own birth record and on the 16th he took this, along with the will written by his parents in 1811, to have it certified by the Royal Notary. On the 17th the French Consul General added his signature to the documents and Javier was ready to leave.
In Bayonne he crossed paths with Molina and so he learnt that Goya was already dead and buried. He arrived in Bordeaux on the 23rd and went straight to the lithographer Gaulon who introduced him to a solicitor and a sworn translator. He was told that the will did not conform to French requirements and even though it declared him to be ‘our unique and universal heir’ he would need to have everything validated again in Madrid, in the presence of four credited witnesses.
Before pursuing the next stage of the legal proceedings, Javier went to confront Leocadia. She described their meeting to Moratin:
He came to see me three times and after having taken the silver dinner service and the pistols he asked me what accounts his father kept and told me, ‘Since you are in a foreign country, this is in case it suits you to return to your own; here you have an order for a thousand francs and you can keep the clothes and furniture.’
Moratin was in Paris and could do little to help her; he was seriously ill by now and would be dead within a few weeks. Molina had gone; he must have realised that there was nothing to be achieved in Madrid. Galos and Brugada were both keen to help Javier. Leocadia had no one to turn to. In her second letter to Moratin she explained her state of mind and something of her attitude towards Goya.
Our sadness increases – no small thing given the uncertainty in which we live. And in spite of his genius, our pain will be eternal, no matter what Destiny has in store for us.
Javier had just enough time to arrange for his father’s memorial stone to be prepared, but not enough time to notice that Goya had been given the wrong age. He then returned to Madrid to begin the third round of solicitors and notaries. On 10 May his four reliable witnesses, including an uncle and a brother-in-law, testified that he had ‘the legal right to the entire estate of the late Francisco de Goya y Lucientes and the late Josefina or Josefa Bayeu, his parents’. Back in Bordeaux on 24 May, he deposited the necessary documents with the Royal Notary and the monies began to be released. Goya had left an estate which was valued at some four hundred thousand francs.
Leocadia found herself a cheap place to rent in a rundown stree
t near Braulio Poc’s chocolate house, the same street where so many of the destitute soldiers from the Peninsular War were living. Pierre Lacour, who had previously given Rosario drawing lessons, was the only person who tried to help her and her daughter. He had them provided with food and took on responsibility for the young girl’s education, at least for a while.
Leocadia had kept twenty of Goya’s drawings, including the series known as The Madmen of Bordeaux, but she must have sold them or given them away before she left France. In 1869 they appeared at an auction, bound in red silk covers, and fetched the sum of one franc ninety-five centimes.
She gave Lacour her copy of the Caprichos with an explanation of the etchings translated into French and written out in her hand, but it has since disappeared without trace. For a while she kept the painting known as The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, but already in 1829 she was thinking of selling it, as she explained in a letter to a friend of Goya’s who had previously expressed interest:
You insisted a great deal that I should give you The Milkmaid and that I should tell you what I wanted for it. I said I did not plan to sell it and that if some day I were to sell it because I was in need, I would prefer to sell it to you. We are in that situation now. The deceased told me I should not accept less than an ounce [of gold].
In 1831 Leocadia made an appeal for charity to the French government: ‘She now finds herself and her daughter reduced to a state of poverty and seeks the aid which in its generosity the government accords to women of her class’. She was going to receive one franc fifty centimes a day, but then the award was cancelled.
She returned to Madrid in 1833, after the political amnesty which allowed many of the exiles to go home. By some strange coincidence of destiny, she went to live on the Street of Disenchantment and that was where she died in 1856.
Old Man Goya Page 16