by Carlos Rojas
FURIOUS ABSURDITY
THE DREAM OF REASON
A Quarrel with Cudgels
Xavière Desparmet Fitz-Gerald included a catalogue of Goya’s works, edited by Antonio Brugada at the time of the painter’s death, in his book, L’Oeuvre de Goya. Catalogue Raisonné. Brugada called the painting Two Foreigners, a title that the catalogue of the Prado changes to one much more precise and expressive: A Quarrel with Cudgels. The scene was painted in oils directly onto the wall on the second floor of the so-called Quinta del Sordo, the house bought by Goya in February 1819, behind the del Rey and Segovia Bridges. Between 1821 and 1822, Goya decorated the walls of both floors with eleven paintings, all of them in oils, in addition to the Quarrel: Leocadia, Judith and Holofernes, Saturn, The San Isidro Excursion, Two Friars, The Witches’ Sabbath, Two Old Women Eating Soup, The Great Goat, The Reading, Two Women and a Man, and Destiny or the Fates. As André Malraux described them, the dark roads that lead from Carnival Tuesday to the Day of the Dead, or in this case, to July 18, 1936, passing through May 2, 1808, all cross one another in the labyrinth of these paintings, which the nation calls black.
The Quinta del Sordo no longer exists. When Eugenio d’Ors, still very young, looked for it early in the century in the environs of San Isidro Hill, no one could tell him anything about the house. Sixty years later, Saint-Paulien visited the tiny railroad depot erected on the property. La station fut baptisée Goya. De Goya on peut aller à Móstoles, Navalcarnero, Alberche, Almorox: 148 kilomètres aller et retour. Up the Manzanares one finds the reconstructed hermitage of the Virgin del Puerto, the fountain in honor of Juan de Villanueva, and the tea gardens that once belonged to La Bombilla, where Joselito sometimes went to dance. Even farther away the guidebook of Juan Antonio Cabezas indicates a fenced grove, with six cypresses and an iron cross on a granite pillar. Here lie those shot on the slopes of Príncipe Pío Hill at daybreak on May 3, 1808.
The Quinta del Sordo no longer exists. In 1912, when Hugh Stokes tried to find Goya’s house, he couldn’t locate it. No one visits the cemetery of the executed either. Rafael Canedo, occupation unknown; Juan Antonio Martínez, beggar; Julián Tejedor de la Torre, blacksmith; Manuel García, gardener; Manuel Sánchez Navarro, court employee; Martín de Ruicarado, stonecutter, and all their companions can rot in peace. Charles Yriarte did get to see the villa in its final years. In his book Goya, sa biographie, les Fresques, les Toiles, les Tapisseries, les Eaux-Fortes, et le Catalogue de l’Oeuvre, Paris, 1967, he stated erroneously that Goya bought the house when he was working on the frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida. On the same page, which is the ninth in his work, Yriarte presented a drawing of that residence behind a rather overgrown garden. At Goya’s death it passed to his son Xavier, who would bequeath it to the painter’s grandson, Mariano Goya Goicoechea. Along with the property, Mariano inherited everything that had belonged to his grandfather except his talent. Unlike his father, who was prudent and circumspect, like the Bayeus, Mariano was reckless, a womanizer, and profligate in the extreme. He survived several duels, was sewn together with scars, amassed and lost fortunes, and gradually sold off Goya’s paintings. In 1860 he sold the property on the Manzanares plain to Robert Courmont, a Frenchman. Seven years later the house, long uninhabited, was in a state of disrepair, and a new owner, Segundo Colmenares, acquired it at a good price. By then Mariano Goya, indifferent to his last name, invested the last of his fortune in buying his title from a penniless noble, the marquis de Espinar. A short time later he faded away in obscurity, like smoke at night, recounting lies and memories of his celebrated ancestor, who had immortalized him in three portraits.
Segundo Colmenares directed Eduardo Gimeno to restore the oil paintings in the Quinta del Sordo. Nevertheless, in 1873 the country house was sold, passing to another Frenchman, Baron Émile d’Erlanger, a banker. The new owner, obsessed with Goya’s paintings, wanted to send slabs of the wall to Paris. A Madrilenian architect dissuaded him and put him in touch with the Martínez Cubells brothers, conservators from Valencia. They transformed the paintings, transferred them to canvas, and rescued them from the slabs of two walls. D’Erlanger’s patriotic aim was to give his private, Goyaesque hell to the Louvre. First he exhibited them in Paris and at the Universal Exposition of 1878. The reaction of the general public and the critics was absolutely negative. Both the devotees of impressionism and those who saw painting as a luminous adornment conforming to the esthetic standards of the bourgeoisie rejected the mauvais goût of that descent to the depths of man. In that same year, the reaction of an English scholar, P. G. Hamerton, expressed the feeling of the French:
The mind of Goya is debased in his own odious hell, a horrendous, repulsive swamp, devoid of sublimity, conceived in the form of chaos, bestial in its coloring and its denial of light, where the vilest monsters ever imagined by a sinner reside. Goya surrounds himself with these abominations, pursuing in them I can’t imagine what diabolical pleasures while he revels in the audacities of an art entirely devoted to his repulsive subjects, in a manner that is, for me, completely incomprehensible. The most reprehensible of these monsters is his Saturn. He devours one of his children with the voracity of a starving wolf, and the painter does not omit a single detail of this horrific banquet. What has already been said suffices to demonstrate that Goya has retreated to a wild beast’s lair, as the hyena hides with his carrion.
Infuriated by such a degree of incomprehension, Émile d’Erlanger gave the black paintings to the Prado.
In I can’t remember which story by Borges, a man attempted to sketch the entire universe in the sand on a beach. When he completed his work, in which all the rivers, mountains, and forests of the earth were diagrammed, he discovered in terror that the immense labyrinth was actually his self-portrait. With Goya in the Quinta del Sordo, I suppose that just the opposite occurred. Alone in his silence, the artist prepared to paint his innermost depths on the walls of his house, to take refuge in the bare center of his being. The result, however, was totally unforeseen, because it reproduced not his secret identity but rather the most brutal and truthful image of the land where it was his fate to be born. I imagine his last lover, Leocadia Weiss, walking with him through the rooms in the house and then telling him: “All of this, clearly, is our country seen from the inside: the burning heart of a volcano.” Goya would protest then; he would even swear that the black paintings were his own nightmares, dreams as inalienable as the sleeping eyes that saw them. She would agree with a gesture. “We’re both saying the same thing, aren’t we? To recount the senseless history of this Spain of ours is equivalent to confessing all one’s secret sins.” Then I also imagine (not knowing why I’m obliged to imagine it) a still older Goya speaking alone with Fernando VII, perhaps in their final meeting. “I can pardon your actions but not your sins of thought,” the king said to him with a smile. “I am your Saturn, devouring my people.”
Whoever Saturn was—time, Satan, the Desired One, or a syphilitic Goya fathering children for death—its horror in the Quinta del Sordo was comparable only to the Quarrel with Cudgels, a rectangle measuring 1.12 centimeters high by 2.66 centimeters wide. Xavier de Salas stated that duels with cudgels between two immobilized men were frequent in Aragón. The painting, however, is as far from the anecdotal as it is from the estheticizing. I recall a quote by Jean Grenier, cited by Edith Helman in her book on The Caprices. “Every intellectual of necessity has the idea of a Paradise Lost.” In the Quinta del Sordo, Goya tacitly renounced all paradises in order to come face to face with his own hell, in the name of the truth that, according to another visionary, ought to have made us free. In the end, and three centuries before Goya, Eustache Deschamps had written the sentence that R. showed me one day: “You have the rights that God Himself gave you, you have castles and keys, you have executioners and swords; but truth still exists on earth.” Like the Quinta del Sordo, Eustache Deschamps would be renowned in his time not because of that sentence but because of his ugliness. With the passage of tim
e, and south of the Pyrenees, in the country where The Shootings on May 3 and Guernica, the coronation of Carlos IV and the return of Fernando VII, the fatal gorings of Pepe-Hillo and of Joselito, all coincided under the sign of Taurus, Goya would ask himself in anguish, perhaps without knowing it, whether our ultimate truth could not be reduced, plainly and simply, to being a country of murderers.
Two peasants, sunk into the mud to their knees, fight with cudgels. More than trapped in that swamp, one might say their legs were amputated and they stood erect on the stumps. The land, however, clamored for them and held them, demanding that the duel be to the death. The dispute, with no witnesses but us, has already begun when we stop in front of the painting. The rustic judges, in other words their fellows, buried them and left them to their fate. Cudgels raised, both were prepared to beat each other again and at the same time, to our fascinated horror. One of the combatants is bleeding from his forehead and chest. One of his eyes, resembling that of a dying Cyclops, looks at us wildly. His mouth, deformed by blows, is a dark stain reduced to silence. His adversary, younger, almost a boy, is practically unscathed. With his left arm and elbow in front of him, he covers his nostrils and jaw, conscious of the setback. The inhuman battle had a beginning but lacks an ending, like life sentences. While just one final man contemplates this painting on canvas that once had been part of a wall, the two peasants will continue to break each other’s head with their cudgels, just as a tuna ends up in the net or despicable people in the pillory. Just as, certainly, the execution of May 3 will continue to be suspended in the face of the ragged man with his arms spread wide.
To us the world seems more ferocious than the fight. I made bloodthirsty, thinking trees of the antagonists, condemned to destroy each other. Unique trees, naturally, in this landscape. The plain turns in on itself toward the horizon, curving into hills where at times the sand turns green, with flashes of enamel. Dry, more desolate sierras rise in the distance. A reddish hill, perhaps an old, exhausted quarry, precedes mountains, sienna, blue, and purple, rising skyward on the right. The sky is as pitiless as the land itself. Great livid, ashen clouds, apparent brothers to the mountains, cover it almost completely. In apparent sarcasm, the high clouds break apart twice, and twice a candid, translucent blue appears in those clear spaces. Finally, at the far end of the valley, one can see a herd of black bulls. They graze in front of the low rise of red clay, and distance diminishes them until it transforms them into black pinpoints. The cattle and the two peasants, bestialized by a hatred that even animals do not know, are the only living creatures in these barren lands.
The fight and its landscape are not true and do not attempt to repeat a theatrical curtain, as was the case in Blind Man’s Bluff. Duels with cudgels between two men buried in a swamp may have been frequent in Aragón, and it is even possible that the Goya family had witnessed them. But this painting represents not an incident but a nightmare. It also does not matter very much whether Goya dreamed it or not before painting it. A nightmare belongs to the one who sees it, and this one becomes ours as soon as we stop in front of the canvas. It seems undeniable, although so far it has not been written down, that the scene, its sky, its landscape, and the herd of bulls are part of a bad dream that is ours because we are looking at it. Incidentally, the same interpretation could be applied to the rest of the black paintings. The twelve oil paintings in that first-floor room in the Prado, therefore, would not be Goya’s madness (the madness of the hyena delighting in his carrion, as an ass has said) but ours as we look at them.
In this way Goya would present his Quarrel with Cudgels from a perspective analogous to the one Velázquez obliges us to adopt before Las Meninas or Picasso in front of Guernica. In the first, we make the monarchs’ point of view ours in the artist’s studio. In the second, we are obliged to share the vision of those who destroy the supposed monsters. In the Quarrel with Cudgels, or Two Strangers, as Brugada or the Prado wanted to call it, Goya obliges us to take possession of the nightmare of the Quinta del Sordo. Nonetheless, every nightmare is also the most intimate mirror of our consciousness. In other words, which are the words of Goya, the sleep of reason produces monsters. The bulls, land, sky, men, and clubs of this canvas are the reflection in synthesis of our interior world. They silently denounce the fanatical, ferocious battle that in a lucid or inadvertent way we bring with us to the Iberian arena. A constant, uncivil struggle, increasingly tragic and absurd, that has nothing to do with justice, as Antonio de Onieva so correctly pointed out.
Another justice, this one certain although oblique and hidden, presided over the incredible destiny of the Quarrel with Cudgels and all the black paintings. Goya did not conceive of them as paintings but as a bequest on the walls of his house to those of his blood. An instinctive caution, which at times contradicted his rashness, made him reserve this mirror of his entire nation for his intimates and descendants. The house, however, changed owners several times after his death, while the oil paintings deteriorated on the walls. Its last owner, a Frenchman, acquired it with the sole purpose of taking the paintings to Paris, without the Spanish authorities doing anything at all to stop him. The Baron d’Erlanger could hardly imagine the uselessness of his undertaking. Circumstances completely unforeseen by him, like the unthinking rejection by French critics and the brutal mockery of the Parisian public, obliged him to give the black paintings to the Prado instead of the Louvre. Now on canvas, they returned to the museum founded by Fernando VII. (“I am your Saturn, devouring my people.”)
More than half a century later, when the last civil war transformed the Quarrel with Cudgels into an ironic redundancy, the oil would return to France on its way to Switzerland, along with the entire Prado. With the imperial peace, that of the National and Proletarian Empire and God, as we are assured that Álvaro Cunqueiro said, the empire in which Franco affirmed that he would take Spain to the heights or leave with his feet toward God, facing forward, the black paintings were reduced to returning silently to the Prado. There, not too far from where the Quinta del Sordo once stood, the Quarrel with Cudgels now hangs in vain. Perhaps no more accurate X-ray of another nation exists. Perhaps none more useless exists either. Over and over again, during so many years that were all alike, we passed in front of the painting without recognizing ourselves, because in Spain, as Goya himself stated with certainty in his handwriting of an old rustic, no one knows himself. No one ever knew himself, and hence our history.
April 16, 1828
His Majesty the king poured a little cognac into our empty glasses.
“Señor, you do me honor.”
“Always at your service, old man.” He pinched my cheek, smiling, as if I were a kitchen scullion or an apprentice groom. “Servus servorum Dei. That’s what I am, and this Latin, along with the Latin of the Mass, is all I remember of the teachings of the bishop of Orihuela. It could have been less and it might have been worse, don’t you agree?”
I didn’t reply because he wasn’t listening to me then either. He sank into the armchair as if it were a bathtub, and scratched his private parts again. Then he rinsed his gums with a mouthful of the spirit, seemed to belch, and spat on the floor, wiping away the saliva with his foot. I never could decide whether that kind of shameless behavior was authentic or the actions of a clown whose part he liked to play precisely as a caricature. Sprawling in his cushioned chair, he looked at the portrait I had just painted of him, half closing those dark, intelligent eyes, where the bright trail of a mocking secret always seemed to be losing its way.
“Naturally you must have noticed that the ermine cloak, embroidered in gold, the scepter, and even the fleece are from the theater,” he said suddenly, pointing at the portrait on the easel, next to the cold fireplace. “Very good imitations, no doubt, but it’s all from the theater.”
“No,” I said in surprise. “I didn’t notice that when I was painting Your Majesty. Perhaps I didn’t want to see it either. Everything I paint is pure truth for me. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be worth
perpetuating.”
“That’s why you painted me the way you did.” He smiled as he lit a cigar, which he moved away from his face so I could read his lips. “I should have had you garroted, or better yet, garrote you myself, as if it were a jest. At least you would die at the hands of a friend. I can swear that to you.”
“Yes, that’s why I painted you as I did, Señor. I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way, since this is how you are.”
“It’s very possible that this is how I am; but I’m not sure I know who I am. On the day of the opening of the Constitutional Parliament, imposed by the Riego revolution, they demanded that I inaugurate it wearing the royal mantle and crown. You revolutionaries are sometimes ridiculously conservative regarding protocol. I remember that I understood then why in France they decapitated a king in order to crown an emperor.” He shook his head and shrugged his narrow shoulders. “In any case, I laughed in their faces; in their hearts they wanted to cut off my head too, and I comforted myself by telling them the most ironic of truths . . .”
“The most ironic of truths, Majesty . . . ?”
“I told them there was no mantle, no crown, and no scepter, because the French had stolen them when they withdrew. Your friend the Intruder King would share his bread with you in the war, but he took even the chandeliers from this palace. They decided then that I should attend Parliament in the uniform of a captain general. On a large chair beside the throne, they placed a mantle, a scepter, and a crown, taken from the statue of San Fernando in the Plaza de la Armería.”
He burst into wholehearted laughter, his eyes closed and his long, thick, black brows wrinkled. He looked like a different man when he laughed—much taller, with a broader chest and shoulders. He unexpectedly recalled his dead father, whom he did not resemble in his physique or his features. (Allora, appena il crepuscolo, il giorno comincia a scolrire e nel traspasso dei colori tutto rimane calmo. “No one can resist my punches, the hardest grooms fall like ninepins. When you come back we’ll fight with rods in the stables and then I’ll play the violin for you, if you like.”) How many years had gone by since the day when Josefa and I were presented to his parents and his widowed grandfather, long before he was born? Fifty? Perhaps more? Time grew thin in the distance, like rivers in their beds in the late afternoon. More often than not, one could say that the past had never existed. It was like one of those fairy tales that we anticipate, knowing we’ll never get to live them.
