And she wished she could read.
“What are you doing out here in the cold, Arabela? Come in, before you get sick.” Juana was standing in the doorway. She pulled Arabela’s shawl around her shoulders and nudged her inside. “What’s that letter?”
“Bad news, señora. Bad news from the colonies.”
Juana took the letter out of her hand. “How do you know it’s bad news?” Juana scrutinized the writing. “It was written by a scribe,” she said thoughtfully. “That much is clear.”
“They’ve written to tell me that my son is …” Sticky tears rolled down Arabela’s furrowed cheeks.
“Do you want me to read it?”
Arabela dropped her chin. “Carlos is …” Juana carefully unfolded the sheet and read aloud.
Esteemed Mother,
I pray that this letter finds you in good health. I am in an excellent state, extremely fit for my age, and with a full and robust beard. In my present position, it would be a boon to know how to read, but a man of my position can hardly sit for lessons like a schoolboy. Nevertheless, I have learned to count and do sums, which is a more important skill for a landowner like me. I have not married an Indian, as you feared, but have taken a wife from among the girls the Spanish king in his goodness has provided. Her name is Yolanda Torvisco, and although she is not a great beauty, she is strong, broad of ass, and a good breeder. She is not yet twenty and has already given me three children, two boys and a girl—blessings from God in spite of my sins. So now you are a grandmother, and you have nothing to be ashamed of because all your descendants are of Old Christian lineage as God has willed, and not only pure-blooded but also rich (Jesus be praised). Yolanda is very competent. She manages the Indian servant-girls with a firm hand and will be able to take care of me in my old age.
In gratitude for my service in the wars against the Mapuche in the south, the king granted me a tract of land, not in Mapuche territory, but far in the north. Although I am still vigorous enough to do battle, I think there is more profit to be made in farming than in warfare. A great many products grow here: coffee, cocoa, sugarcane, rice, corn, plantains, oranges, guavas, coca. If you keep goats, you can easily find a bezor stone in its gut when you slaughter the animal, I mean one of those magic stones that can cure any illness; these stones bring large sums of money, as they are much treasured in Spain. I grow plantains and bananas on my land, which is a hot, humid northern area of Nueva Granada, and do very well indeed. The markets here are excellent. We Americans would rather buy local goods than import from Spain. The Spanish impose taxes on shipping to pay for insurance and defense against pirates, which eats at our profits, so it’s more economical to sell at home. I have accumulated considerable wealth here, Mother, which is why I am able to send you these gold coins.
Life can be difficult here. There is much disease and the constant threat of Indian uprisings. However, a rugged soldier like myself, bred in poverty and used to hardship, can find his paradise. Here in Nueva Granada I have property and servants; a quiet, subservient wife; and plenty of money. I work hard governing my lands, but, God knows, I am no stranger to hard work. Here I am someone—they even call me Don Carlos—while in Spain I was no one.
Mother, we will not see each other again on this earth. May God keep you and give you peace.
Your son,
Don Carlos Yepes
Arabela stared into space, her jaw moving rhythmically.
“Coins?” she said finally. “Did he say there were gold coins?”
“He did. Don’t you have them?”
Arabela looked at Juana blankly.
They found the packet in the sala. Juana stooped to pick it up, then handed it to Arabela, who took it and turned it over and over.
“Aren’t you going to look to see what’s inside?”
Arabela tugged at the end of the thread that someone—perhaps Yolanda—had used to sew the packet together. It slid out easily and Arabela tucked it into her sleeve for future use. She unfolded the cloth carefully. Twenty gold ducats appeared, like glistening crocuses thrusting up through the snow in early spring. Arabela swallowed hard.
“You take them, señora,” she said after a long pause. “I’ve never had money. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“No, Arabela,” said Juana gently. “It’s yours—a gift from your son.”
Arabela wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “My son,” she whispered. “Don Carlos. What can I do with this? Can I buy a house?”
“No, Arabela, but you could rent one for a year, if you wanted to.”
“I don’t … I don’t want to leave you, señora.” Tears trickled down her furrowed cheeks. “My Carlos. Don Carlos,” she kept murmuring. “Even though I neglected him, he didn’t desert his mother. I don’t deserve …”
“Of course you do, Arabela,” said Juana gently. “Keep it. You’ll find a use for it.”
“Use it for my funeral,” said Arabela. “Give me a beautiful capilla ardiente, with lots and lots of candles. A funeral that would make Don Carlos proud.”
It’s better if you can draw from nature—that’s what Velázquez always said—but my eyes have gotten so bad I can hardly see what’s in front of me. The film over my pupils is growing more and more opaque every day. When Velázquez taught me to paint, he started out by showing me how to copy hands from a sketchbook. Then he made me reproduce my own hand. “Hold it this way,” he’d say. Then, “hold it that way.” I’d paint a fist, a pointing finger, a palm turned upward. I’d paint my elbow, my feet, my image in the mirror. I was never good at figure painting, and my self-portraits never looked like me—they looked like some statue in the church garden. What I liked to paint was flowers. I’d position my easel by a rosebush, and I’d paint every petal and leaf, keeping in mind the source of light, the angle of the shadows, just as Velázquez taught me. But now I can’t see the flowers in the garden clearly enough to paint them, so I paint the images in my head. Lately I’ve been trying to paint the messenger—the one who looked like a parrot and brought Arabela her son’s letter. The teal plume, the scarlet-edged jacket. I don’t know if my picture looks like him because I never saw him. It’s just an image I pulled out of my head.
An invented image, just like the face in the mirror.
17
MENINAS
1656–1658
MENINAS—LITTLE GIRLS—THEY FILL YOUR LIFE, AND THEN they’re gone. Only in art can they stay small forever.
Juana knelt by the bed and intoned the verses she had held in her heart since childhood, verses she had learned from Sister Inmaculada decades ago in the Seville Carmel. The old nun had insisted she memorize them. Ever since the ban on reading the bible in Spanish, women had to stow useful passages where the inquisitors couldn’t find them.
“Keep them in your heart, Juana,” she always said. “It’s safer than sewing them into your underwear.”
Juana had chuckled at the time, but she was glad she’d followed the old nun’s advice because now she needed those verses. Now, in this room darkened by drawn curtains and doused embers. Now, in this chamber of moaning and sobs, of rotting flowers no one had the presence of mind to throw out. Now, as always when death crossed her doorstep, Juana’s own words failed her. Only the words of God could express her grief:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
Lamenting and weeping bitterly;
It is Rachel weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted for her children,
Because they are no more …
Arabela pressed her fists to her eyes. Her voice was thick in her throat. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Why didn’t you take me instead? I’m old and I’m ready. Why the child? And why the child of the child?” She shook her head and pulled her shawl more tightly over her shoulders. Francisca’s daughter Ana bowed her head and prayed. Tears dripped onto her cuffs.
The Lord gave, the Lord has taken back.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Sh
e swallowed saliva. “Mamá,” she murmured, “why were you taken from us? We need you here on Earth. But it is God’s will. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Juana wanted to scream, and yet to sink into an abyss of silence. Where, she asked herself, was the little girl that Paquita had been? The hellion who tore through the house and burst like a windstorm into rooms? What lay before them was dead flesh, motionless as a stone. And the baby, the dull, lifeless baby—she looked like a wax doll with painted lips, although she was clearly Paquita’s child, with Paquita’s wan complexion and mousy features, her upturned lips and her tiny nose.
Velázquez stood in the doorway, his features drawn and twisted, his large frame wilted. When his daughter Ignacia had died, he had hardly reacted, but Ignacia had been an infant, without any distinguishable qualities. He had hardly known Ignacia, and besides, babies died in Spain all the time. Infant mortality was so common that no intelligent man would become attached to a young child. But this was different. Paquita had grown into an endearing young woman—bright, witty, and energetic. She was the wife of his associate Mazo and mother of his grandchildren. She gave him joy, and he loved her with tender, paternal devotion.
He surveyed the group: Juana, Mazo, Arabela, Julia, Lidia, Bárbara, Francisca’s six children, their spouses, and their offspring. All of them knelt by the bed where Paquita lay, her eyes closed, her lips parted as if ready to blurt out a wisecrack. The buzz of their prayers hovered over the corpse. Velázquez knew that this scene should calm him. Francisca had died as one should; she had had what the manuals of ars morendi called a “good death.” She had taken all three sacraments and had faded from this earth surrounded by a loving family and servants. But Velázquez found no solace in the image before him. Everything seemed askew and grotesque. There was no equilibrium in it, no beauty. Francisca was not yet forty. She had been a good daughter and a good mother. She had borne six healthy children, but this, the seventh pregnancy, had proven too much for her. This picture made no sense, and Velázquez felt his jaw harden in anger. He knew it was a sin to resist the will of the Lord, and yet he had to ask—how could He let this happen?
It hadn’t been the baby’s fault, the doctors said. A cancer had eaten away at Paquita’s breasts. The woman who had nourished six children was depleted, and she couldn’t nourish the one growing in her womb. The finest Court medics had attended her. They had sweated her and fed her expensive, ground-up bezor stones. They had bled her. But the excruciating pain was too much. Every day she grew weaker, and finally, she stopped eating. Soon after, her heart gave out, and she stopped breathing. Hot tears gathered on the painter’s eyelids. God, he thought, has taken her in payment for my sins. God gave me a son, but He took away my daughter and my granddaughter. “The Lord gives, and He takes back.”
Juana turned to look at him. He was pallid. He caught her gaze and crumpled against the wall.
Not two weeks after we buried Paquita and the infant, Arabela fell ill. One morning, she simply couldn’t get up from her cot. Juana ordered that she be brought from the servants’ quarters to a room in the main house, but Arabela gripped the wooden frame and refused to let go. “I’m too tired and too weak,” she rasped. “With God’s grace I’ll soon be in eternity with my little girls—with baby Ignacia and little Paquita. I’m sure that in heaven she looks as she did when she was eight.”
Juana sank to the ground next to the woman who had raised her, comforted her, guided her, and protected her. The woman who had been a mother to her. She dissolved into sobs. “Please, Arabela, no.”
“It’s time, Doña Juana. I’m an old, old woman. I must be over eighty.”
Juana caressed her hand.
“But don’t forget,” she added. “I want a nice funeral. I sewed the money into my blanket. If there’s anything left, give it to Lidia for her daughter, Jael.” Lidia had named the child for the biblical heroine who seduced the enemy of her people into her tent, then murdered him by driving a peg through his temple. This was exactly the kind of story Lidia liked.
Juana was certain that no other servant had ever had a funeral as sumptuous as Arabela’s. The cortège stretched from Velázquez’s house to the Plaza de las Palmas. Juana gathered servants from the houses of all of her friends and paid the Franciscan orphanage for forty boys with excellent mourning skills, who moaned and wailed as though they had just lost their very own mothers. The luxurious capilla ardiente that Juana assembled in the chapel was fit for a princess. Buckets of tallow had gone into making the hundreds of candles that flickered and danced in the shadows. Laid out in her coffin, old Arabela seemed to smile at the endless stream of mourners who filed by to bid her farewell. “I may be a maid,” she seemed to be saying, “but my son Don Carlos paid for a hell of a fancy send-off.”
A sumptuous feast followed the burial. Even though the neighbors said it was absurd to spend such a fortune on a funeral banquet for a servant, they eagerly partook of the fine meats and pastries that Juana provided.
Juana followed Arabela’s instructions scrupulously except for one thing: she did not use Carlos’s gift. Juana had inherited money from her father, and even though Velázquez controlled it, she could use it with her husband’s permission. It was she who supplied the mourners, the candles, and the rivers of mutton stew. She saved Arabela’s ducats for Jael’s convent dowry. Within three weeks of Arabela’s death, Jael entered the Carmel of San José de Madrid.
Velázquez stayed away. Home was too gloomy. The loss of Francisca had left an abscess in his heart, and Arabela—well, Arabela had been the pillar and mast of the household, and without her everything seemed unhinged and shadowy. Objects melted into space and paintings seeped into the walls. The family cats bumped into furniture and lost interest in mice. Nothing was where it should be. Juana disappeared into her estrado, and the maids forgot their routines, drifting from room to room like feathers in a midnight breeze. Faces merged into one another, and Velázquez forgot the names of the gardener and the laundress. Colors looked dull. Everything looked dull—everything, that is, except the image he held in his mind of the bright, bouncy girl who had been Francisca.
Velázquez took up permanent residence in an apartment in the Treasury House next to his atelier. His rooms, which were connected to the palace by a passageway, gave him easy access to the familiar bustle and bickering that he thought would moor him to life.
As for Juana, she was too immersed in grief even to notice that Velázquez had disappeared. It wasn’t until months later that she began to emerge from her stupor. She picked up a paintbrush and swept it across the canvas. First a vase of roses. Next a basket of lilies. Then a slow, gradual resignation.
“I thought Court life would occupy my mind,” Velázquez told Juana when they could both finally talk about it. “I thought the endless chatter would ease the chill of the nights without you and of the days without Paquita.” He dropped his chin as though holding his head on his shoulders were an unbearable burden. He sighed and went on: “But then I realized that the Court is nothing but an illusion.”
And now the Court was completely disintegrating. Queen Mariana, whose boisterous girlishness had delighted Spaniards upon her arrival in Madrid, was turning sour and demanding. The dwarfs and jesters no longer amused her, and she no longer found pleasure in the theater and balls. One miscarriage followed another, and those children who survived lived only briefly. The king was miserable, and so he did what he always did when he was miserable. He drowned his melancholy in the charms of chambermaids and prostitutes, and he forgot all about the wise advice of Mother María de Ágreda.
Meanwhile, Queen Mariana’s bitterness grew. Her husband was old enough to be her grandfather, and yet as profligate as ever. She hated Spain and everything about it. She hated Haro, the king’s chief advisor, and most of all, she hated María de Ágreda. Everything Spanish was abhorrent to her: politics, mutton stew, rioja wine, mantillas, farthingales, juegos de caña, bullfights. If it was Spanish, she loathed it. She began to wea
r only black, to surround herself with Austrians and Germans, to speak German, to demand schnitzel and apfelstrudel. She became inseparable from the confessor she had brought from home, the sinister Jesuit Johann Eberhard Nithard, who had a face like a goat, with a long bony skull and eyes sunken deep in cobwebby sockets. The queen included Nithard in everything—council meetings, social gatherings, children’s lessons. Rumor had it she was plotting to get rid of Haro and replace him with Nithard as the valido.
None of this made any sense to Velázquez. The Court life that he had coveted was a perverse lie—as strange and disorienting as purgatory. There was the Spanish queen who wouldn’t speak Spanish; the penitent king who spent his nights in the gutter; the goatish Jesuit who prayed in Latin but skulked in the shadows like the Devil; the flamboyant Court with an empty treasury. The festivities in the majestic salons of El Buen Retiro continued, but salary payments to cooks, carpenters, and coachmen had once again been suspended. Velvet capes were patched and re-seamed. Brocade skirts were mended on the underside. After the parties, gold jewelry was returned to the pawnshops. The ducat had been devalued to the point of worthlessness. Everything that appeared elegant and fine was putrid to the core. It was a game of mirrors, reflections of reflections that left you dizzy. Mirrors like the mirror of Venus, whose reflections you couldn’t trust. You never knew what was illusion and what was real.
So Velázquez plunged into his painting. To be sure, the duties of aposentador mayor were important, but only laying color on canvas gave him solace. The king had asked for a portrait of his daughter, the Infanta Margarita Teresa, an exuberant five-year-old with golden blond hair and an ivory complexion, and Velázquez was glad to oblige.
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