by Carlos Rojas
“I always lived crucified,” she replied very slowly so that I could see the words on her face. “I didn’t want to be born.”
The absurdity astonished me, for I always thought María Teresa was more full of life than any other creature on earth. Then I realized how far apart two lovers can be, even when they roll around on the floor, as far apart, in fact, as María Teresa seemed to have lived from herself. At the same time, and in a separate light, I realized I would always be much closer to my art than to any person, including my dearly loved son Francisco Xavier Pedro. In the meantime, María Teresa dressed before the mirror of my self-portraits. She wore a widow’s veils and clothes because the mourning period for her husband, the duke, had not yet ended. With the complicity of a coachman and a maid, that afternoon had been her first secretive excursion since the funeral. On that day we also arranged my visit to Sanlúcar and her anticipated trip to the salt marshes, where we would meet in secret.
In May of 1801, María Teresa had only a year to live, though neither of us could have believed it then. We had not been lovers for some time, but we became good friends. I advised her regarding the purchase of paintings, and she came sometimes to cry in my studio, during the time when Godoy imprisoned her last lover, Lieutenant General Cornel. María Teresa was not at the bullring on the second Monday of that month, when Pepe-Hillo, José Romero, and Antonio de los Santos were to fight in a great corrida. I was there and kneeled like everybody else as soon as the king and queen entered their balcony. Then, when they were settled, we stood to applaud them. Looking at them I remembered them in my dream and in the portrait of the August Family I had painted the previous summer. As in my distant dream, His Majesty the king leaned sideways against the railing of the box and smiled, just as he had done in the empty arena of my delirium. Yet now he was a distracted old man with blue eyes, his former robustness turned into rounded fat. He aged as ghosts must age: gradually losing their appearance and their memory until they definitively disappear. Beside him the queen also made an effort to greet us with her toothless mouth that seemed to sink her jaw into her skull. She despised bullfighting and came to the bullring because of royal duty.
Pepe-Hillo wore a blue costume with silver braid. He saw me and approached the barrier to talk to me. He too had aged prematurely over the winter. He was never very tall, but the proximity of half a century made him even smaller. His face had bloated, and his swollen belly protruded over the top of his breeches, while a dewlap, sister to his goiter, crowned the lace trim of his shirt. Between drooping lids his eyes still shone like two heads of a pin, but large, sickly circles under his eyes turned his skin purplish down to his cheekbones. Beside him, José Romero seemed like a giant resplendent with youth and titanic strength, like all the men of his lineage.
“Pepe,” I said to El Hillo,” why don’t you leave the circus? Is it so hard for you to follow the example of Costillares and Pedro Romero and retire in time?”
We were connected by a certain friendship, the one I always had with all the bullfighters, and it wasn’t my purpose to irritate him. Indefinite presentiments had begun to trouble my spirit since the start of the parade around the ring. Although deaf, I couldn’t silence those confused voices inside me. They became real webs of muffled howls, whispers, and whistles, woven together by the apprehension in my chest and throat.
“Where would I retire, da cemetery?” Pepe-Hillo asked, smiling. “I don’ fight ta die but ta earn my living.”
Then he told me the bulls would be good even though they were Castilian, from Peñaranda de Bracamonte. Sunday morning, after Mass, he had gone to Arroyo Abroñigal to take a look at them. He liked them all for their high, well-proportioned horns, but especially one called Barbudo, which he told them to put aside for him. They would run him in the afternoon, and El Hillo added that the beast and he had been born for each other, “like lovers in da theater.”
“When I’ve controlled ’im, I’ll toss away da cape and fight him wit’ my watch, so he’ll see it’s his hour dat’s come, not mine.”
The bugles sounded immediately afterward and the fiesta began. In the morning the bullfighting went on without major incident, although a gray bull with greenish horns, wearing Briceño’s colors, knocked Pepe-Hillo down and must have scratched his leg, because in the afternoon he came out limping slightly, his calf bandaged under his stocking. (“Maestro, that bull and I are born for each other, like lovers in da theater.”) A corrida seen by a deaf man resembled theater more than bullfighting because of the silence in which the spectacle took place. A tragedy where you died for real, as Costillares once said, but a tragedy after all, and therefore the representation of a secret drama whose meaning and outcome none of us knew. Barbudo came out, the sixth or seventh of the afternoon. I realized right away that El Hillo had made an incomprehensible mistake when he chose him. The bull was large and very black, with good horns, but dangerous and inelegant because he was skittish and dim. He took three lances, slipping away from all of them, and three pairs of banderillas. I remember an excellent one, the charge of Antonio de los Santos, always superb at that part of the fight. The death call sounded, and Pepe-Hillo made a couple of passes in their natural order. Barbudo became agitated at the second one with the excessive speed that made him wound because he was nervous, and trapped El Hillo at the barrier. El Hillo got out of the difficulty in part with a chest pass but was to the right of the bullpen, his head tilted slightly toward the barrier, prepared for the kill. He hadn’t tossed away the muleta to fight with his watch, as he used to do in the days of his spats and rivalries with Pedro Romero. Later his banderillero, Manolo Jaramillo, told me El Hillo was in a great deal of pain at noon from the fall he had taken that morning. His cuadrilla told him not to fight in the afternoon under these circumstances, but Pepe-Hillo refused to listen to them; he had a contract with the Puerta de Alcalá bullring, and for him those commitments were as sacred as if he had sworn to them before the Virgin del Baratillo.
With Barbudo trapped in the worst place, beside the right-hand door to the bullpen, Pepe-Hillo rushed forward to give him a running sword thrust in the old style of Costillares. The thrust did not go all the way through and was on the wrong side, and at the same time the bull’s horns caught on his breeches. With one butt of his head, the animal turned him around and threw him into the ring on his back, dazing him with the blow. Everyone in the bullring stood and shouted in horror, waiting for the goring that would draw blood, their shouts of terror as soundless to me as the cries of María Teresa in my arms. Barbudo buried his entire left horn in the belly of Pepe-Hillo, as if looking for his watch by way of the watch chain. Having threaded him in this way, he rocked him back and forth and swung him around for interminable seconds, while Pepe-Hillo was dying, conscious now and crazed with pain, clutching at the other horn with tormented hands. Juan López was the first to hurry to attract the bull and save El Hillo, and while a bullfighter made passes with the cape and the muleta, he came at him with a lance and thrust it into the bull from a rearing horse. Antonio de los Santos and Manolo Jaramillo carried El Hillo in their arms, the three of them as red with blood as firebrands as they tried to hold his intestines inside his ripped belly. In the royal balcony, His Majesty the king remained motionless, leaning on the railing where a tapestry with the banner of Castilla was hanging, just as in my dream, but open-mouthed with astonishment now. The queen was turned to one side, hiding her face in her hands. In the ring the cuadrilla were using capes to change the position of the bull. They were so confused that one left his cape caught on Barbudo’s banderillas. Only José Romero, with the vigorous, almost inhuman dignity of the bullfighters in his family, kept a cool head in misfortune. As soon as he had cornered the animal, with the tip of his own sword he pulled out El Hillo’s and Barbudo didn’t budge. While Romero prepared for the thrust at the boards, I looked at the bull looking right at me across the passageway between the barrier and the first row of seats, and over the barrier.
With no asto
nishment I recognized him then. He was the living image of the bull I painted when I had come out of my delirium and entered into my deafness. The bull of death in my nightmare, which I waited for, holding my watch, placed in the center of the ring by those I had imagined or judged. Barbudo’s blazing, jet-black eyes looked into mine, as if he was also making an effort to recognize me. The fresh blood of Pepe-Hillo ran down his horn and dripped along his left shoulder. In the pauses in his panting, he licked his snout with the tip of his tongue, as red as vermilion. “Who are you?” I asked without moving my lips, but also without moving my eyes away from his. “The dead king asked me to paint his portrait so he could learn who he was. You can’t fool me because we’re too much alike. You’re not only a bull. Pepe-Hillo himself knew that when he chose you in the Arroyo Abroñigal so you could kill him.” There was nothing else because José Romero came between us and stabbed him from the inside out, plunging in the sword up to the hilt. He repeated the maneuver, burying the entire blade from the tip to the cross-guard. Barbudo fell, his legs already stiffened by death, with no need for the final dagger.
Throughout the night of the Second of May, 1808, we heard in my house the volleys of the executions. In the small hours the next day, before dawn, I took my servant to the Príncipe Pío Hill, where, according to the whispering neighbors, the French were still firing. Josefa tried to stop me with weeping and words that, fortunately, I could not hear. In the doorway she was still embracing me, more agitated than I had ever seen her before. Controlling her despair, with all the force of her slimness resembling that of a playing card, she spaced the words on her lips so I could read them without difficulty. She told me that we had achieved a comfortable, respectable position, almost in our old age. We had a barouche, a coach for horses and another for mules, when many nobles had nothing but a calash. We had a grown son after having buried four others. Now it would all be lost if I had myself killed in the street like a dog. What would become of her as a widow? How would she manage to take care of her son, the carriages, and the mule team? Ironically, she was the one who would starve to death in the war that was just beginning, not me. She looked as narrow as a thorn in the child’s coffin, beside which Xavier and I would hold a vigil on another, not too distant night.
It was close to dawn and the moon was almost full. We didn’t see anyone on the street, although near the Palacio de Oriente, as Isidro told me, you could hear the sound of mounted patrols. The lantern trembled so much in his hand that I finally snatched it away from him in a rage. From then on I held it, leading the way, while I kept the portfolio and papers tightly under my other arm. My servant followed me like a beaten dog, the two of us moving forward as if in a dream toward San Antonio de la Florida and the Príncipe Pío Hill, step by step past the Convento de los Padres Agonizantes, the Escuelas Pías, the Casa Real de las Recogidas, the Convento de Mercedarios Descalzos de Santa Bárbara, the Huerta de la Beata María de Jesús, and the Saladero de Carnes. As I told Moratín yesterday, as we approached the slope of the executions, I began to smell the fragrance of early-blooming rockrose. We also saw flocks of crows flapping their wings over the corpses and a pack of street dogs, lapping the blood and dew around the victims. We drove the dogs away with blasphemies and stones. We could only shout at the crows and rebuke them with our fists. Isidro told me they responded with an uproar of cawing and that the dogs barked at us from the darkness. I wondered whether those animals thought we were two ghosts gone mad. Some fifty men were lying on one side of the hill. Curled up on the ground, fallen on their stomachs or their backs with their arms opened wide, as if they had been shot one on top of the other. My servant, who at the time was little more than a boy, vomited and wept at the feet of the dead. I slapped him like a madman and he huddled next to the lantern, holding his head with both hands, still shaken by trembling and sobs.
Long afterward, in the second or third year of the war, I looked for and met José Suárez, a transporter at the Tobacco Custom House, about whom it was said that he fled in the middle of those killings. He was a small thin man who seemed as agile as a monkey. Kneading his cap with the tips of his fingers and smiling constantly, he told me the details of the terrible night. He spoke with mocking indifference about those atrocities, as if the delight of knowing he was alive diminished the horrors he had experienced. Among the victims was a friar, whom I recognized because of his tonsure though he wore no habit. José Suárez told me he was the chaplain at the Monasterio de la Encarnación. He was the one who told them when they were going to be shot. “Father,” the mule driver pleaded, “absolve me before they kill us.” “My son, if God isn’t blind He’ll see that we’re innocent.” “Father, and if He’s deaf to our voices like these executioners who kill us and can’t understand us?” Then he remembered my own deafness, which obliged me to look at his lips and not his eyes when he spoke to me. “I beg your grace to forgive me, I meant no offense. I wasn’t referring to your impediment but to God’s. At that moment I would have sworn He didn’t hear or understand our language. Then it turned out that I was the one who would be spared.” He recounted how the squad crowded them all together, sticking them with their bayonets and forcing them down on their knees. “That’s how they controlled us, and insulted us too, because they didn’t have ropes to tie us.” In the end they were divided into groups of five or six men, shot point blank, then they pushed the next ones forward with bayonets and killed them on their knees as well, among the dead bodies. When José Suárez saw that it was his turn, he jumped up not to escape but in order to die on his feet, as he himself indicated in his account. In the face of that unexpected gesture there was a moment of uncertainty on the part of the firing squad, and impelled by his instinct to survive, he began to run. They shot at him several times but couldn’t wound him, and the monks took him in and hid him in San Antonio de la Florida.
In fact he wasn’t telling me anything new; but he helped me to be exact about my memories and to understand my own painting years before creating it. The fallen on Príncipe Pío Hill were piled up, mangled as if gored by a gigantic bull. The soldiers in the firing squad were a monstrous, repeated beast, their bayonets the horns on its forehead. The morning itself, when it was darkest and clouds hid the almost full moon before dawn, took on the color of the bull I painted while convalescing from my death agony. I planned then to name the canvas For This You Were Born, which is what I would later call one of the etchings in The Disasters of War. In a corner, among the shadows, behind the men who were going to die, I imagined Josefa almost hidden, with Vicente Anastasio in her arms, both of them turned into the sfumato sketch of how I would see them in the bullring of my dream. The same bull that had emerged from my encounter with death and was completed in two sessions, when I could barely manage to stand, reappeared in the arena of the Puerta de Alcalá to disembowel Pepe-Hillo and fix his eyes on me, from the ring to my seat, before José Romero stabbed him with a sword. Born in the delirium of an invalid, the beast passed from my nightmare to my painting and from my painting to the bullring like a salamander through fire: without destroying or denying himself. On Príncipe Pío Hill and in his final incarnation, he sprang up multiplied into a minotaur with eight heads armed with horns as long as bayonets. As he passed, men, cut to ribbons, fell into a lethargic heap beside a slope. María Teresa confessed to me that this bull made her feel like a rag doll, and naked to the marrow of her bones. The dead men in a heap that Isidro and I saw in the small hours twenty years earlier looked like rag dolls too. Only the crows flapping their wings as they waited to peck out their eyes, and the stray dogs lapping up their blood, knew instinctively that those dolls had been born of woman.
“Señor,” my servant, still sobbing, asked me, “why do you want to draw the terrible things that men do to other men?”
“To tell them once and for all not to behave like brutes,” I replied, sitting in the light of the lantern as I sketched the men who had been shot.
Five years later, when I painted The Third of
May, in Madrid, I knew that a rag doll lived in other people and in me. I also knew that the same puppet could become someone resembling El Hillo, his entrails spilled out in the bullring, or the prisoners fallen at the bottom of that slope, or other marionettes dressed in full regalia, like the royal family itself, may God bless them and keep them in His glory, when I painted their portrait in Aranjuez. The truth is I began to think that our country, now so distant because of my exile, was alternatively the land of the monster or the moron. Their moments followed one after the other, ravaging or retarding our history. At times the bull attacked the puppets brutally and destroyed them, as if they hadn’t also been men. On other occasions, when it was the time of the simpletons, he meekly licked their hands when they offered them to be kissed. A long time ago now, Moratín pointed out that the celebration of the coronation of His Majesty Don Carlos IV coincided with the French Revolution, the one that would enthrone reason on an altar in the name of liberty. I had believed in liberty and above all in divine reason with as much faith as Moratín. When they finally reached our country, the land of the bull and the puppet, they had been transformed into the minotaur, disguised in the cloaks of the Napoleonic army, which gored mule drivers with thrusts of their bayonets. The day I finished The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill, on the eve of the return of the Desired One, Isidro asked me if it was the picture I had decided to paint in 1808 to tell men for all time not to be savages.
“No,” I replied, shaking my head filled with evil presentiments. “This is the painting I made for the king so he doesn’t hang me for having collaborated with the invaders.”
