by Carlos Rojas
(In R.’s library a few nights ago, I consulted the passage while Marina was sleeping and the tramontane howled as if it wanted to pull out our souls by the roots. Until that point, the account proceeded essentially as I remembered it. Having reached the secret wonder, the shooting and the earth halted in time, I read, shuddering in astonishment: “The wind had ceased as in a painting.” Only much later, when the other wind had also ceased, the one that crashed against the walls and windows of the house, did I notice that R. had underlined that phrase in red, to remind me of it. There could be no doubt, and before I could anticipate it, he had focused on the hidden origin of The Secret Miracle, the painting that a blind writer would silently transform into one of his fables.) Time is suspended and the prisoner concludes the play. Then a volley erases him from the face of the earth. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, when, before another firing squad preparing to shoot him, Colonel Aureliano Buendía recalls his life and the history of a paradise founded and lost by his people, Gabriel García Márquez also breaks with Borges and The Secret Miracle, although afterward no one executes him. These literary versions are marginal and contingent. They would not have existed if Goya had not painted The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid. In contrast to what happened in Las Meninas, in which Velázquez captures only a fleeting instant between instants, Goya paralyzes time when the ragged man on his knees spreads his arms before the muzzles of the rifles. That is what one of those birds from another age, immobilized forever in amber in midflight, would say.
Naturally, the time that is arrested is not only historical; if it were, The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid would be a simple act of propaganda. The painting transcends the circumstances of its commission, as Goya survives Fernando VII. At the same time, the amber of its time attracts other beings and destinies and identifies them with those who remain immobilized there. A bull, painted twenty years earlier (which in another evolution of its species will become Saturn) is transformed into the man who rebukes the firing squad with his arms spread wide. Two lines by Lorca, “His eyes did not close / when he saw the horns approach” combine this prisoner sentenced to death with a poet murdered 123 years later. Another pair of Lorquian lines from the same poem (“How awful with the final / banderillas of darkness!”) move the crime from the canvas to a bullfight. That ragged man, who was a bull, who was Lorca, is transformed now into Martincho inciting the bull with banderillas at topa-carnero. Two banderilleros fall with Lorca on the Ainadamar road without anyone drawing up a document regarding their “death caused by an act of war,” because all the dead are pugnacious rabble and all the teachers are reds. By means of another of Goya’s bulls that three years earlier charged a white horse, the firing squad in The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill is transfigured into a repeated minotaur, with bayonets for horns.
“There’s not a single being on earth capable of knowing who he is,” R. said on the morning I met Marina, before I knew that the phrase wasn’t his but Léon Bloy’s. The entire theory of evolution, the unanimous metamorphosis that goes from fishes to men like Fernando VII and Franco, passing through all monsters, and from The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid to One Hundred Years of Solitude, through The Secret Miracle, seems to confirm that certainty, in art and in life.
Silently, with restrained shock, I wonder who I might be and who Don Francisco Goya Lucientes might have been.
March 27, 1828
The bullring burned in the sun and the tiers of seats were deserted. Up above, an oceanic midday blue, without clouds and without birds. A blue so uniform and radiant I thought it opened over the exact center of the firmament.
On the king’s balcony, facing the bullpens, His Majesty Don Carlos IV smiled distractedly and, like a majo, a lower-class dandy, leaned his elbows on the railing, adorned with a tapestry that had the standard of Castilla embroidered on it. Queen María Luisa, in black and enveloped in tulle, fanned herself and looked at the sky. Among the very Catholic sovereigns, I saw the deceased monarch Don Carlos III, may God bless him and keep him in His glory. He was yellowed and seemed to have as bad a cold as in the first audience he granted me in my youth. I thought I hadn’t known until then that ghosts were subject to ailments and caught cold in the middle of the summer. From time to time the dead king extended a translucent hand and Doña María Luisa would hand him a lace handkerchief that she took from her bosom. Then His Majesty would blow his nose very delicately, with only two fingers, and spit into the bullring. Then he would return the handkerchief to his august daughter-in-law, as if he were giving her his hand to kiss, and she kept it, crumpled into a ball, between her breasts. When he blew his nose, Don Carlos would show me his profile of an exhausted phantom. Death had made him thinner, raising his cheekbones and brows beneath his pale skin. A long blue vein, like the sky itself, crossed his neck from ear to jabot. “As a young man they took me for a hungry greyhound, and now I resemble a poorly grazed sheep,” he said to me with a smile as I prepared to paint him in a hunting outfit. “How are you going to portray me so I finally know who I am?”
My Josefa sat next to the queen. Her lips were pursed, like two withered petals, and her eyes were fixed on the empty stands. I looked at the deep, sharp eyes of the entire Bayeu family: the stare of people descended from ancient shepherds on dry, barren land, accustomed to brooding a great deal and jealously guarding their thoughts. A shout choked back in the middle of my gullet burned my mouth and jaws as I watched her. Now Josefa held our dead children on her lap. There was Vicente Anastasio, as white as he was that dawn when we found him stiff in his cradle, a thread of blood between his lips. There were my two unfortunate little girls, María del Pilar Dionisia, with her gargoyle’s head and flattened forehead, and poor Hermenegilda, the one they baptized in a great rush because Josefa brought her into the world asphyxiated. There was my Francisco de Paula, the one who died laughing in my arms, as if an unseen bolt of lightning had snatched him away. From time to time the queen turned to the shades of the children to smile or caress their heads with the edge of her fan. Then the backing of her fan would open and close, close and open to the clicking sound of the ribs.
They had smoothed and cleaned the sand as if preparing it for a bullfight. But the barriers and projections called out for a good coat of paint, and the enclosures were split by horn thrusts. Alone in the center of the arena, under the eyes of the living and the dead, I felt naked and diminished among the empty rows of seats. Avoiding the eyes of my children, I lowered my head and saw my shadow grow pointed on the ground, like a tongue or a pike. In my right hand I held my watch, attached to a long gold chain. It was the one my father had given me when I came back from Italy in my youth. It never gained or lost a second, and it had never stopped. I always carried it attached to my cummerbund, my shirt, or my frock coat. Every night when I went to bed I wound it completely and put it under my pillow. Then I fell asleep listening to its sound of a tiny stream forever returning to its own sources. With that tick-tock beneath our pillows, Josefa and I conceived our dead children; we dreamed about them as adults before they were engendered and wept for their deaths, licking away each other’s tears. With that tick-tock under my ears, my eyes open in the dark, my neck resting on my crossed hands, one insomniac night I imagined my paintings of time through the passing of the seasons, The Flower Girls, The Threshing Floor, The Grape Harvest, and The Snowfall, to illuminate the nuptial chambers of Prince Gabriel, in El Escorial, when he was betrothed to Doña María Ana. In the meantime, and in the brilliant stillness of the empty bullring, the queen’s fan opened and closed, closed and opened, bringing together and separating the ribbing of her fan there on the royal balcony.
I didn’t notice another sound then because the watch had stopped at twelve sharp, just at noon. I carried the mute disk to my ear, then held it in my palm and looked at it, baffled. My astonishment was no greater when I realized I was standing and that my heart had stopped in my chest. I tried to beg for the assistance of the living and of the specters in the box, as they had be
gun to call the balconies at bullfights then, but they seemed to disregard my mute pleas. The old dead king looked at his nails and smiled to himself. (Allora, appena il crepuscolo, il giorno comincia a scolorire e nel traspasso de colori tutto rimane calmo, he had told me about twilights in Madrid at my first audience). In the arena, however, it was midday, and at precisely twelve, exactly twelve, my watch stopped. At that bewildered point I remember saying to myself that perhaps everything was happening in reverse, and the watch hadn’t stopped, but time. It was held back this way in each of those pictures of mine, painted for the prince’s wedding, in which the hours stood still in four moments of four seasons.
His Majesty Don Carlos IV, fortunately reigning, still leaned on the railing like a picador on the planks. (Saper fare e condursi a aquel modo. “No one can resist my blows, the hardest grooms fall like ninepins. When you return we’ll fight with the bar in the stables, and then I’ll play the violin for you, if you like.”) Suddenly he raised his hand and the queen closed her fan. Josefa held our dead children even closer, and the specter of the old king shook his cold-ridden head with tiresome fatigue. The doors of the bullpen had just opened by themselves, and out came a black bull with wide-spread horns; he would carry away the barrier on half of his forehead. He charged straight ahead, bellowing, his tongue visible at the side of his muzzle. He came toward me, staring at me, as a man would whose brother had just castrated him. His eyes were enormous and shining, the whites filled with blood and the pupils jet-black with fury. I realized that this bull was my executioner and that my own children had condemned me to this death for having sired them dead, and the sovereigns for daring to judge them while they were alive. I wasn’t afraid and I didn’t try to flee during those hurried, interminable moments. It satisfied me to feel that the hand holding the watch by the chain was firm, and to know that the beating of blood in my chest was regular and calm.
The dream must have cut off my shout and transformed it into panting, because the first gleam of consciousness was to realize I hadn’t heard it. I sat up in my nightshirt among the tangled sheets and blankets on the bed, while Dr. Arrieta had his arms around my shoulders, making an effort to hold me down. Josefa, upset and thinner than ever, was trying to wipe the sweat from my hands and forehead with a towel that had long fringes. Gradually, with the labored confusion of a half-sleeping animal, I recognized my own bedroom, as if I were returning to the room after a very long absence. There was the marble-topped bureau in whose drawers my wife scented the clothes with quince, and the image of the Virgin del Pilar, which Josefa brought to the marriage with her dowry, and my parents’ crucifix. Also on the wall was the cartoon of El Parasol, in a copy I had made for Josefa when I was working in the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara. Two adolescents looked at me from the picture. The boy protected the girl with a green sunshade, its cap round and pink, while a little black dog, curved like a whiting, slept in the girl’s skirts. Behind the couple, the breeze made a willow tree sway.
Slowly I was remembering what had happened: the Calvary of my illness, at the end of which I had just regained consciousness. It all began with sudden, terrible headaches that seemed to set my brains on fire inside my skull. There was no chamomile, no vinegars, heat, or medicines that could relieve the pain. Then it got worse as it passed from my forehead and temples to my ears, as if two scorpions had taken shelter in the wax of one ear only to make their way very slowly to the other. Then I lost consciousness and sank into an interminable nightmare, though I retained the memory only of some fragments of that delirium. I saw part of what I would etch in The Caprices and The Absurdities. Two old bawds and a pair of seductive girls sweeping away three plucked chickens with shaved human heads. The same old hags and flashy girls impaling another live chicken with a human face beneath a shrub where birds with known features were perched. One, fan-tailed and with large open wings, was me, wearing a ruff, a rapier hanging around my neck, and a low-crowned hat with a rolled brim. Another, a pigeon with a woman’s breasts, hair tied back with white ribbons, seemed the living image of María Teresa. Skeletons with parchment-like skin, followed by ancient harpies, persisted in raising the tombstones of their graves beneath a setting sun as red as an egg. A girl dressed in white rode a bay with an extremely long mane, standing in the saddle and secured by glossy reins. The horse, in turn, stood on a slender rope that bent under the hooves of that mount with a robust gait. Some Turks were teaching a chestnut elephant how to read in a book as big as the tablets of the law. Aged, open-mouthed friars crowded in ecstasy at the foot of a pulpit where a parrot preached from the railing. The bird, pompous and full of himself, raised a claw in the shadows to emphasize the profundity of his sermons. In a landscape of processions and spires, two naked devils were in animated conversation. Half the head and chin of one were human, but the face resembled a bird’s, with an eye and a brow in the middle of the beak. The other had very long, fine-drawn lines; his ears drooped like those of a Dalmatian dog. With closed eyes and hands piously crossed, he at once resembled a mastiff, a pig, and a friar. Both monsters were mounted on donkeys with the torsos and hooves of hairy gorillas. Dawn was breaking behind the hill of the witches’ sabbath, while distance made a town on the plain smaller. In the air a cretin sat astride an owl, while a pair of sorcerers settled an obese naked woman on their shoulders. A cat, grasping a tiny open umbrella, ascended with them toward the orgy. A flashy girl, half her face covered by her shawl and her eyes looking to the side, stretched on tiptoe on an adobe wall to pull out the teeth of a hanged man, while a monkey intoned madrigals for a donkey, accompanied by a large guitar and the men’s applause.
Monsters, executed criminals, penitents in sanbenitos, witches, devils, whores, fops, duennas, chimeras, lovers, goblins, monks, maidens, streetwalkers, hunchbacks, bailiffs, prisoners, bandits, misers, bullfighters, painters, muffled men, men in mourning, notaries, executioners, barbers, beggars, street vendors, men with huge heads, giants, Arabs, clowns, blood-letters, masqueraders, men sentenced to hard labor, tailors, fetuses, overly pious women, decrepit old men, lions, owls, cats, sheep, bats, cockatoos, sparrows, hedgehogs, male goats, donkeys, turkeys, spiders, leopards, chimpanzees, dogs, chicks, bears, foxes, rats, worms, fireflies, elephants, tigers, fish, eagles, horses, moles, rabbits, turtles, salamanders, wolves, falcons, lizards. In a moment of darkness, that rout suddenly melted into the empty bullring, except for the monarchs’ box, where I awaited the defeat of the young, high-horned bull, my watch hanging from its chain. Awake, I recalled with complete clarity that final dream at the end of my delirium, and reliving it I noticed that the pain in my temples and ears had disappeared, leaving my skull feeling empty. Yet I believed I was witnessing another nightmare with my eyes wide open. Josefa and Dr. Arrieta were talking to me and smiling without my being able to hear their laughter or their words. My voice was also denied me when I tried to answer them. Opening and closing my mouth like a fish, I felt submerged in silence. One might say I was swimming under invisible waters, lit by the sun through the bedroom window, where everything had been unalterable quietude since the dawn of the world. With more astonishment than despair, I realized then that I had been left as deaf as a post.
The first thing I painted during my convalescence was the forehead of that huge black bull. I made it life-size and as close as I had seen it at the end of my nightmare: some three feet from my chest and within reach of my hand. If a painter cannot repeat his dreams perfectly in a painting, he won’t be able to paint from memory either. If he can’t paint from memory, he isn’t a painter but a dauber with badly painted pictures. I also confirmed that the silence of my deafness, to which I never could and never can become accustomed, had not diminished my faculties though it did change my manner with the brushes. Now it was much more sparing and expressive with colors, more succinct in the design. Lines and outlines had disappeared from my art because they had never found enough space in my consciousness. I noticed, too, that I had known everything about light but learned
then about darkness. With the shadows in my own spirit scraping at my dreams and my memory like a man digging a trench in the center of his being, I created that bull as bestially human as Velázquez’s buffoons.
I put blood on one horn without knowing whose it was. I added bandilleras, placed and twisted beneath the withers, and a cape caught on the back of his neck, along its dark nakedness. When I finished, when the last brushstrokes were still fresh, I said to the beast: “Now charge, you bastard.” I repeated it without anger or boasting, emphasizing a duty of his that seemed obvious if he was really as alive as I felt him to be. Then I shook my head in discouragement when I realized I had painted him deaf, in my own image and likeness. When I showed the head to María Teresa, in my studio, asking her if she thought I was crazy, she replied, terrified in part and in part scandalized:
“Of course you are. Absolutely mad. How did you risk inciting him to leave the painting and really gore you, you fool?”
Since I didn’t understand her, because I wasn’t yet used to reading lips and she always spoke very quickly, she scribbled everything nervously on a piece of paper. Then she added: “This bull makes me feel naked down to my bones. He looks at me as if I were a rag doll.” I burst into laughter, I pulled her to me, and we made love on the floor, beneath the skylight, since in my studio there was no other place for it. After seeing her call out with pleasure, without hearing her, I told her that in my silence her cries seemed to be of incredible pain, as if she had been crucified.
