Goya
Page 23
The successful whore must not (or not at first) let on that she is a whore: that deflates the romantic illusion. And men do not necessarily want to know the truth. This ancient fact inspired one of Goya’s more mordant Caprichos, plate 7, in which one of Goya’s delicious, sinuous majas is being quizzed by a gallant through a monocle, swaying her hip toward him as he peers, like an infatuated connoisseur, at her face. “Ni así la distingue,” the caption says: “Even like this he can’t make her out.” He has been made purblind by desire.
A recurrent theme in the Caprichos, as in some of Goya’s later paintings, is the corrupt relationship between old and young women expressed in the character of Celestina, the bawd or procuress who gets innocent young girls “on the game” and serves thereafter as their adviser, helped by some access to the secrets of witchcraft. By the 1790s Celestina was a traditional figure in Spanish drama, having been written into existence in La Celestina, a dialog novel by Fernando de Rojas, in the late fifteenth century. Goya’s interest in the girl/Celestina relationship exists on several levels; on a more fundamental one, it is also about the distorted relations between mothers and daughters. Celestina is the Bad Mother, the ruthless old crone who is showing her “daughter” a way of survival, teaching her the tricks that will, in the end, encompass her downfall—making the “daughter” repeat the life of the “mother.” Goya stresses their complicity in Capricho 28. Chitón (“Hush”) shows them sharing a secret: the girl is clearly telling her stooped mother not to blab. “Excelente madre para un encargo de confianza,” says the Prado text, “An excellent mother to trust with a confidential mission.” The Bad Mother (or her equivalent, the Corrupt Aunt) gives her daughter ironical but useful advice. In one of the most beautiful of the Caprichos, plate 17 (this page), a girl is seen checking her stocking to make sure it is not wrinkled, that its seams are straight, before she goes out for the night. The diagonal of her young, outthrust leg is an exquisite form, and it is adapted with no change from a brush-and-inkwash drawing (also this page) in Sanlúcar Album, a notebook Goya took with him on a visit he made to the country estate of the duchess of Alba at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Andalucía in 1796. Despite one’s natural wish to assume the contrary, it almost certainly does not represent the duchess dressing: the remnants of this sketchbook, which was dismembered in the nineteenth century, contain a number of sketches of naked or half-dressed women who are not the duchess, although it may be that some of the missing ones did represent her; we simply do not know. (Because the duchess was so famous, the ones that clearly depicted her might well have been the first to go; only sixteen sketches, recto and verso of eight leaves, remain.) In the print, the old Celestina who watches her supplies the punning commentary that is also the title of the plate: “Bien tirada está,” “It is well stretched”—punning because it also alludes to the girl’s vagina, which will be as smooth and tight as her stocking; and of course the fact that it is “well stretched” confirms that she is no longer a virgin.
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 28, Chitón (“Hush”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 22 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.6)
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 16, Dios la perdone: y era su madre (“God forgive her: and it was her mother”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 19.6 × 14.8 cm. (illustration credit 6.7)
Nothing is necessarily sacred in the mother-daughter bond; it may be as ephemeral as the girl’s liaison with a lover. Such is Goya’s point in Capricho 16, Dios la perdone: y era su madre (“God forgive her: and it was her mother”). The girl, who bears a marked resemblance to the duchess of Alba—her face, which so obsessed Goya, keeps appearing in the Caprichos as their durable image of seductive female beauty—is taking her nightly paseo when she is accosted by a stooped old woman, whose face we do not see. “The young woman left home as a little girl,” runs the explanatory Prado text. “She did her apprenticeship in Cádiz, and then came to Madrid, where she had a stroke of good luck [le cayó la lotería, “she won the lottery”]. She went down to the Prado, where she heard a dirty, broken-down old woman begging for alms. She sent the old woman away.” And then, in the finest melodramatic tradition of popular theater, the girl realizes that the old beggarwoman is her mother. We do not see the (presumably) soon-to-be-guilt-ridden maja making this discovery. Goya shows her in the arrogant efflorescence of her youth, and signals that she is now a prostitute by his characteristic device: the position of her feet, those tiny pointed-toe sex symbols, which are splayed outward and pointing in opposite directions, shorthand (in Goya’s form language) for the opening and spreading of a girl’s legs in the act of sex. Realization will come in a moment. It is foreshadowed by the ominous darkness of the scene: the lumps and clumps of indistinct, near-black shadow, the illegibility of the old woman’s face. (Mama is holding up what appears to be a necklace or more probably a rosary of beads or stones, which may be the remembered object through which her daughter recognizes her after all those years.)
The predominant image of sexual transaction Goya offers is that of “fleecing,” “plucking,” or “skinning.” This happens to both men and women, but mostly it is the prostitutes and their celestinas who exploit their clients, the naïve or rash men. In Capricho 20, Ya van desplumados (“There they go, plucked”), we see it going on. Watched by a degenerate-looking pair of friars, two sturdy prostitutes have finished with their client-victims and are now harrying them out the door with brooms. These wretched creatures with the heads of men and the bodies of plucked chickens look utterly doleful, especially the one leaning into the light of the doorway, trying in vain to take off without a feather to fly with. It may be that the baldness of their bodies is also a reference to syphilis, caught from prostitutes: loss of hair was one of the classic symptoms of advanced pox. In the next plate, Capricho 21, ¡Qual la descañonan! (“How they pluck her!”), the roles are reversed, and the sauce for the gander becomes sauce for the goose or, rather, the hen. A prostitute has fallen into the hands of the law, in the form of a magistrate, a notary, and a policeman. The magistrate, with the above-it-all expression of objective Law etched on his slightly catlike face, spreads his cloak in a parody of protection while each of the lesser officials grips and spreads apart the wings of the bird-prostitute (in the slang of the day, whores were known, among other things, as buhos, barn owls, and lechuzas, small brown owls). The poor bird herself is about to be plucked, and her face bears an expression of pain and terror; the design implies that she is being robbed (“fleeced”) by the servants of the law, under the protection of those whose duty should be to prevent it.
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 20, Ya van desplumados (“There they go, plucked”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21.4 × 15.1 cm. (illustration credit 6.8)
The cruelest image of the whore-as-exploiter is in Capricho 19, Todos caerán (“Everyone will fall”). It invokes a technique of bird hunting that Goya, like any other hunter of his day, would have known well, but which has now almost disappeared. Thirty years ago it was still in use: one could buy from Italian or Spanish hunting outfitters a stuffed owl wired so that when one pulled on a string attached to its body, the bird flapped its wings. This was, so to speak, an anti-decoy, whose job was to repel birds rather than attract them. The hunter fixed it to the branch of a tall tree and waited for a flight of smaller birds—thrushes, robins, quail, sparrows, whatever was usual prey for the larger predators—to fly below it. A twitch on the string, and the owl flapped; terrified, the smaller birds would dive and scatter, but find themselves either caught in birdlime on nearby twigs or enmeshed in a net cunningly set out by the hunter. It sounds an implausible device, but it worked—as this author can testify, having seen it used several times by farmer-hunters in Lazio in 1965, and bought such an owl himself from a rural taxidermist.
In Goya’s print the bird in the tree is a decoy, not a frightener. All sorts of male birds flutter around it, for it is a pretty bird, with abundant black ringlets and generous breasts—more than one writer has noted its resemblance to the d
uchess of Alba, and that of the bird immediately behind it to Goya’s own full-face self-portrait drawing from c. 1795–1800 now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another bird—who, one wonders, might he represent?—wears a military hat and a sword. “All sorts of ugly birds,” comments the Ayala text, “soldiers, commoners, and monks, fly around a lady who is half-hen; they all fall, and the women hold them down by the wings, make them throw up and pull out their guts.” This is what is going on in the lower part of the print, as two women—prostitutes, one infers from the cute little shoes of the one on the right—get to work on a captured male bird while an old celestina goes through the exaggerated gestures of prayer. With expressions of sweet concern and absorption, one of these females is holding the captive bird, already plucked, across her lap, while the other pushes a sharp rod into his anus and dribbles of vomit escape his mouth. This, Goya is saying, is the common fate of all those deluded by the promise of love: all must fall.
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 19, Todos caerán (“Everyone will fall”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21.5 × 14.5 cm. (illustration credit 6.9)
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 9, Tántalo (“Tantalus”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 20 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.10)
Though Goya had the sharpest of eyes for the bitter human comedy of mutual deception entailed in the purchase of young, lovely women by old, ugly men, he was acutely aware of the reverse side: the sadness of old lovers in the face of their own impotence. This is the theme of the infinitely sad Capricho 9, Tántalo (“Tantalus”). A young woman, seemingly dead and rigid as a board, is propped on the knees of an old man, who wrings his hands in grief, his face a mask of inconsolable lamentation. Is he mourning for a wife who died too young? You might suppose so, given that the sharply pitched pyramid behind them is so obviously taken from a funereal memory of Goya’s youthful visit to Rome: it is the Pyramid of Cestus, which was then enclosed by a monumental cemetery. But if she is dead, then why is she dressed so fetchingly, why is her utterly wooden pose (for not even rigor mortis gets that advanced) so unlike those of the many corpses Goya drew, and what is she doing in a cemetery without a coffin? A deeper level of metaphor becomes apparent. Her rigidity is frigidity. She is alive, but what the old man is mourning is his lost power to sexually arouse her. The title of the print supports this.
Tantalus, in Greek myth, was a son of Zeus who had monstrously offended his all-powerful father. There are several versions of his mythic sin. According to one, he had perjured himself in order to steal Zeus’s dog and give it to Hermes. Another has him abducting Ganymede, the cupbearer who was an object of Zeus’s sexual desire. A third, given in Book XI of the Odyssey, was that Tantalus, having been invited to dine with the gods, committed the fearful indiscretion of tattling about the conversation at these banquets and, worse, of having stolen and shared with mortal friends the nectar and ambrosia served at their exalted table. His punishment was to be eternally plagued by hunger and thirst. Though he was immersed in water up to his neck, the river receded each time he tried to drink. A branch full of fruit hung just above his head, but it pulled away whenever he reached for it. His curse was to be “tantalized” forever.
The clergy, of course, do not escape Goya’s lash. Nobody familiar with his early work, with its rich fund of religious imagery, could suppose (as it has sometimes been the fashion to do) that Goya was inherently opposed to religion, an atheist under the skin. Nothing about him is, or was, as simple as that. But he was often anti-clerical. You would need to be blind not to see, at first hand, the extraordinary laxness, hypocrisy, and greed of some of the Catholic clergy in Bourbon Spain. They were as bad as any modern Catholic priests. They praised chastity but groped boys; they praised moderation but gorged and swilled like pigs; they pretended to have access to divine wisdom but imposed the basest superstitions on the faithful to keep them obedient; they preached rubbish from the pulpit and brutally supported the Inquisition. All these bad ecclesiastical habits come under the unpitying eye of the Caprichos, though the remarkable fact is that the Holy Office, when the prints were published at last, made no move to ban them or discipline Goya for making them. (This does not indicate any special degree of tolerance on the Inquisition’s part; rather, it probably testifies to its inefficiency.) Goya always makes it clear, at the very least by implication, that the vices and follies he is attacking do not emerge from the nature of religious faith itself, but are the result of its tyrannous exercise by imperfect men. The mood is given by Capricho 52, ¡Lo que puede un sastre! (“What a tailor can do!”). A young woman falls on her knees, hands clasped in prayer. Behind her are other people, sketchier but equally awestruck. The object of their devotions looms over them, a giant, arms frighteningly raised, swathed in the clerical cloth of a friar’s habit. Look closer, and its hands are branches that sprout leaves: it is a bogeyman, a tree in costume.
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 52, ¡Lo que puede un sastre! (“What a tailor can do!”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.11)
In Capricho 53, ¡Qué pico de oro! (“What a golden beak!”), a group of frailes, or monks, surrounds a pulpit on which a parrot is perched, reverently listening to it as it chatters and squawks its inane theology. Capricho 58, Trágala perro (“Swallow it, dog”), goes after the clergy who force the faithful to give credence to every kind of ludicrous doctrine, and by implication attacks the Inquisition. The title comes from a popular song against authority, chanted by the liberals against the Bourbon absolutists in the 1790s, whose refrain was “We will never cease to sing ‘Swallow it / Swallow it / Swallow it, dog.’ ” But here, trágala carries no liberal suggestion. A terrified man kneels on the ground, imploring mercy from a fanatical monk. None will come; what the monk has in his hands is a clyster, a veritable Long Tom of an enema syringe, which will flush out the poor dissenter’s guts with its load of orthodoxy.
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 58, Trágala, perro (“Swallow it, dog”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.12)
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 79, Nadie nos ha visto (“No one has seen us”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 22 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.13)
Monks preach abstinence and are gluttons in secret: such is the message of Capricho 79, Nadie nos ha visto (“No one has seen us”), with its wine-sodden friars carousing in a cellar. They gorge themselves at table, mouths opening into those voracious chasms of darkness that were for Goya, as they are for us, the most menacing emblems of an unleashed, cannibal orality, those terrifying expressions that stir the same primordial fears as the mouth of Goya’s later Saturn, tearing his child into gobbets, as if echoing King Lear: “The barbarous Scythian / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite.” “Están calientes,” declares the caption to Capricho 13: “They are hot.” This image and its caption open a fan of related meanings. The monks are hot because they are hungry. They are hot because they are randy, “in heat.” The end result of their oral heat is cannibalism. One of the three preliminary studies for this etching (Prado #20) shows the servant in the background with a cooked human head on his tray. “Sueño,” Goya’s inscription runs, “De unos hombres que se nos comían”—“Dream. Of certain men who were devouring us.” The idea that the holy men of the Church actually eat their flock, thus perverting the Catholic belief that the real body and blood of Christ are consumed in the guise of bread and wine in the sacrament of Holy Communion—this is a savagely anti-clerical notion, and it is hardly surprising that Goya left it out of his final plate. A third drawing (Prado #433) is merely obscene, or might have seemed so at the time: the nose of the monk on the left has grown into a penis. This too Goya let drop. It was not part of his plan to lard the Caprichos with too many dirty jokes; they were meant, in an admittedly dangerous and edgy way, and with a few exceptions, to be family fun.
Goya, Sueño de unos hombres que se nos comían (“Dream of certain men who were devouring us”), 1797. Pen
and sepia ink, 24.2 × 16.7 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 6.14)
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 13, Están calientes (“They are hot”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21.5 × 15.1 cm. (illustration credit 6.15)
The last area of priestly activity satirized in the Caprichos was the Spanish Inquisition. It was a subject that Goya would return to, with equal and sometimes greater ferocity, in his sketchbooks after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Fernando VII. But the Inquisition was a bugbear of the ilustrados in the 1790s, too, and Goya devoted several of his most beautiful and pathetic plates to the plight of its victims. It is often said, and will be discussed in these pages later, that the Inquisition of Goya’s time was a mere shadow of its former self: it was much less arbitrary, less free to burn people alive for bad blood or heresy, and had less coercive power over its unhappy victims than it had wielded in the seventeenth or even the early eighteenth century. All that is true, but it remained a detestable institution, a tool of ideological terror, and a loathed symbol of what la leyenda negra, “the black legend” of old Spain, had meant. And Goya, passionate humanist that he was, invoked it with a corresponding hatred. In Capricho 23, Aquellos polbos (“Those specks of dust”), the convicted heretic sits on a platform raised above the voracious crowd, wearing the coroza, or conical dunce cap of infamy, and hanging his head as his sentence is read by the presiding judge. We see in Capricho 24, No hubo remedio (“There was no remedy”), a woman on donkey-back being led through the streets to her burning. Her soft breasts are bare, she is imprisoned in a sort of wooden frame around her neck, the coroza is set on her head, a malignant throng of gapers and arrogant officials surrounds her. There will be other prints in which Goya, no populist, shows his disgust for the crowd, but none more powerful than this.