Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  I went to the sea to get oranges,

  But that is something the sea does not have.

  I returned soaking wet,

  Battered this way and that by the waves.

  O, my sweet love.

  He blows life into the brazier. He takes down a bottle filled with Florentine varnish made according to Bosse’s recipe and he pours some into a glazed pan, heating it over the glowing charcoal, smelling the sharpness of the resin, the sweetness of the nut oil.

  He warms the copper plate and pours a puddle of the honey-golden liquid on to it, spreading it in a thin layer with a spoon filled with flocks of cotton and wrapped in a cloth.

  He leaves the studio abruptly and goes to the kitchen to eat bread and strong sausage from Asturias. He holds one side of the mill-wheel loaf against his belly and slices into it with a knife, like a peasant. When his son Javier enters he stuffs the loaf under his shirt and staggers around the room groaning as if he was about to give birth. He holds the sausage to his face like a long red nose, then dangles it obscenely between his legs. His son laughs at the jokes and he laughs too, aware of how laughter splits his face wide open at the mouth, turning it into a grotesque mask.

  He returns to the studio. He takes the self-portrait done in red chalk, in which he is wearing a top hat and seen in profile. He rubs the back of the drawing with the same red chalk and places that on the varnished plate. He follows the lines of the drawing with a steel point, careful not to pierce the paper. He removes the paper and there he is.

  He uses the steel point to draw over the chalk lines and into the varnish, being careful not to scratch the plate itself, not yet. All the lines are broken, a rhythm of movement; the solidity of the big hat, the curl of the hair, darkness in a calm sea around the profile, an urgent sweep of shadow behind the shoulders.

  He changes the expression on the face. The single eye that was staring forwards is now glancing sideways, watching the man at work, just as later it will watch the viewer.

  When he has gone as far as he wishes to go with this stage, he fills a wooden dish with the smoking acid mixture, and immerses the plate in it, using wooden tongs so as not to burn his fingers. The liquid fizzes and steams as it bites into the metal. He lifts the plate out and uses a goose feather to wipe away the bubbles that cling to the exposed lines of copper. He uses a magnifying glass as well as spectacles, reading the depth of the bite. He submerges the plate in the acid again, takes it out, examines it, seems satisfied.

  Now to remove the varnish with charcoal made from willow and mixed into a paste with water, rubbed gently over the copper until the metal looks dirty. Then acid diluted with two parts water. And rubbing and polishing and holding it to the light to see the tracery of lines that has been made.

  He uses Rembrandt’s technique of painting acid directly on to the plate with a brush to achieve the effect of drawing with diluted Chinese ink. He uses dry point to enlarge the traces not made sufficiently clear by the acid and a tool called a burin to make wider, rougher lines.

  For the shades of broken grey light which give him so much pleasure, he uses aquatint. He has a little cloth bag filled with a fine powder made from the lees of turpentine and this he taps over the areas which he wants to have covered. He heats the powder so that the resin melts and congeals. Then he immerses it in the acid which bites through in tiny broken dots.

  More aquatint, a few more lines cut directly into the metal. Polishing one area to make it so smooth that the ink will not hold to it at all and scraping another to create a thick darkness, stopping out areas with varnish when the acid there has bitten deep enough, moving round and round from one detail to the next.

  The air is filled with the smell of resin and ammonia, of acid and charcoal, of tallow candles and sweet oil. The intensity of the work is turning him into a somnambulist. He wakes with the recollection of what he left unfinished the night before; he goes to sleep with the plans of what he will do in the morning buzzing around him like flies. Day after day his head is filled with an image in reverse, a complicated explosion of lines that will only become clear once the process is completed.

  When the first state is ready, then he must coat the rollers on the press with the thick ink made from lamp black. He wears gloves to protect the purity of the paper as he sets it in place on the plate. He turns the heavy wheel that moves the two rollers, clamping the metal and the paper against each other in a tight embrace.

  He must be infinitely careful when he peels the paper away from the plate, so as not to smudge it. He carries it to the window, adjusts his spectacles, then gazes at the picture he has brought into existence.

  The appearance of his hands is changing. Each fingernail holds a black crescent of ink. The tips of the fingers have a deathly pallor because they have been stained yellow by the action of the acid. The skin is dry. The lines on the palms marking the length of a life, the nature of a mind, the role that fate has to play within the time that is allocated, all these lines are etched in black, as if the hands themselves were waiting to be printed.

  17

  There is a mask on the kitchen table. It is a dark red plastic mask made in the traditional commedia dell’arte style, with a long curving beak of a nose and a thick fold of imitation skin across the forehead and around the holes that are the eyes.

  Even when lying on its side in the daylight next to a vase of flowers and today’s newspaper, the mask has a malevolent presence. I don’t like having it in the house. I feel it might at any moment blink one of its empty eyes and say something in a sour voice, regardless of the fact that it has no mouth with which to formulate the words. And at night it might decide to creep up the stairs to enter the room where I am sleeping, settling on my face like a bird, holding on with sharp claws, refusing to let go. I consider shutting it up in a box and burying the box deep in the ground. Foolish thoughts.

  I put on the mask and go to confront the mirror. The eyes that look back at me have become strangers, gazing out from the imprisonment of the shining plastic which encircles them. My mouth and chin are almost lost behind the savage curve of the nose. The transformation is so simple and easy and so devastating in its effect.

  I raise the mask until it nestles in my hair, the nose pointing its accusatory finger at the ceiling. I have become two-faced. I shift the mask round to the back of my head and with the help of a second mirror I can see a new and horrible creature that has hair growing inside the cavities of the eye sockets.

  I remove the mask and the spell is broken. I again turn the pages of the paperback edition of the Caprichos, or ‘foolish things’, that has been with me for so long. Here is the woman who wears a black mask over her eyes and nose, while a hideous and grimacing second face is fixed to the back of her head. And here is the woman whose features are hidden behind a sheep’s-head mask and the mask of an old man is on her lap as if it has sprouted there, the nose like a huge penis. A man with the face of a bird rides a bear with the face of a donkey. A rat in monk’s robes is in the company of a judge with closed eyes. The dead come alive while the living look as though they are already dead. I remember once seeing a woman who had been beaten by her husband and she walked into the room with both her eyes so swollen and bruised that her face had become a mask. I remember a nightmare I used to have when I was a child in which chanting heads were growing from the stumps of trees, a whole terrible forest of them.

  Now I am looking at a book of modern photographs, called Hidden Spain by Cristina Garcia Rodero. It is filled with images of saints’ days and carnivals, of Easter processions and burials, marriages and bullfights, but all taken from small remote villages where few foreigners ever go.

  A man stands on the side of a dirt road. His face is concealed behind a mask that is as white as the moon, with big sorrowful eyes, tears running down the smooth cheeks and thick pouting lips. The man is wearing high-heeled shoes, and a flesh-coloured knitted suit under a shiny bikini. His artificial breasts bulge like ripe melons. His arms are stretch
ed out as if in supplication and he holds what appears to be a white egg in each hand. There is no caption to explain what is happening, just the name of the village and the date on which the photograph was taken. It must have been carnival time and the cold weather would account for the need of a knitted suit.

  (illustration credit 17.1)

  A man whose face is hidden behind a plate-shaped mask is walking along a sandy track. His eyes are painted white circles, his teeth are long wooden spikes, two feathers stick up from the top of his head like rabbits’ ears. He holds what might be a riffle in his hand, or is it a whip? Three thin dogs are slinking by his side in the early morning mist. The devil out hunting.

  A young woman with her breasts bared dances down a street, while men clap their hands and laugh. A young man dances with a gourd held like a huge penis between his legs and the dangling testicles are made from castanets. The women clap their hands and laugh.

  I remember again the Easter festivals in the towns and villages near to where Goya was born. A man grinning as he examined the sticky blood on the palms of his hands. A man carrying a wooden crucifix, smoking a cigarette and flirting with a woman who was wearing a veil of black lace and carrying a banner on which a bleeding heart had been painted. The stuff of dreams and fantasies, made as real and as tangible as ordinary daily life.

  18

  I have been reading about the Bourbon kings. They had long, lugubrious noses, heavy chins, bulky bodies and surprisingly small hands. They had the habit of intermarriage which made many members of the family mad or simple-minded, ugly or slightly deformed. You can see that quite clearly in the big family portrait that Goya made in 1800, in which thirteen of them are gathered together.

  The old king, Charles III, filled the apartments of the Alcazar Palace in Madrid with musical clocks and exotic birds in cages of gilded wire. You can imagine the air thick and nervous with the whirring melodies of the clocks and the burbling cries of the birds. A scarlet macaw imitates the chiming of little bells. A rufous-browed peppershrike repeats a monotonous sequence of notes that will only stop when darkness falls. A painted bunting makes the sound of tinkling water. A myna bird cries out sharply like a member of the palace guard.

  The soft-fleshed gods and goddesses are busy with one another on the high ceilings. The furniture glistens. The solemn faces of royalty gaze out from walls hung with cloth of gold and silver. The Elysian fields of the carpets and the shimmering inlaid surfaces of the polished marble floors are scattered with the husks of seeds and little drifting feathers. Servants patter about on soft shoes, winding up the delicately ticking mechanisms of the clocks. They move from birdcage to birdcage, changing food and water and checking that the pretty prisoners are still alive and healthy. Sometimes they must remove the limp body of one whose colours have faded and whose round eyes have gone blank and opaque.

  So much for the past. In the present I went to the palace quite late in the afternoon and walked in a hurry through the ornate and echoing rooms, swept along with other tourists. I had forgotten to bring a pencil, but a guard lent me one and watched as I made notes in the room in which two violoncellos, two violins and a viola, all made by Stradivarius, were held in glass cases like a collection of stuffed birds, beautifully preserved and as mute as if they were carved from stone.

  These instruments had belonged to Charles IV. He used to enjoy playing the violin, he even played something for Goya, in the days when the Court Painter was still able to listen. But the King was so unskilled at his music that when he played to an audience, a second violinist would be stationed behind a curtain, to accompany him and carry him over the difficult bits.

  What else do I know about this King? He still believed that the English owned the American colonies, twenty years after the War of Independence. Like his father, he collected timepieces, but watches rather than clocks, and he had a servant to wear the ones he was not wearing himself because they always worked better if they were kept warm.

  The King’s brother, Don Antonio Pasque, was an epileptic and an imbecile; you can see him looming over the royal shoulder in that group portrait, like the reflection from a distorting mirror. The King’s sister, Dona Maria Josefa, was described as being ‘not very tall, but a little deformed and having an ugly face’. She is there too, only a few weeks before her death, with a huge beauty spot floating on the surface of one cheek like a ragged island.

  Above all things, the King loved to go hunting: summer and winter, morning and afternoon, every day of the year when he was not interrupted by state ceremonies, by the need to sit for a portrait, or, eventually, by the invasion of Napoleon’s troops and the outbreak of the chaos of the Peninsular War. Two hundred and fifty persons usually accompanied him on an ordinary hunt, but on special occasions as many as two thousand soldiers were lined up with their guns, to decimate the game as it attempted to escape.

  In the gardens of Charles IV’s palace of Aranjuez, high scaffolds were erected for servants to stand on and count the number of birds killed by their king. A big green net was draped over the fruit gardens, not so much to keep the birds off as to hold them in a canopied trap for when the King felt like shooting finches. If he had nothing better to do he would launch an attack on the rooks, crows and vultures that fed on the pile of old carcasses left there especially for that purpose. Once he sent home a cartload of horns to be used as decoration for the palace and people made jokes about his wife and her many infidelities, but he took no notice of what people said.

  He liked to travel as fast as possible in his coach. Three of his guards were killed and four more were seriously wounded as they did their best to hurtle along the track just ahead of him.

  Every year he moved from one palace to the next according to tradition and the seasons and whatever ceremonies needed to be attended to. A vast retinue of courtiers and hangers-on moved with him. In 1802, when a double wedding for his son and his daughter was held in the city of Zaragoza, it was estimated that some eighty thousand people accompanied the King and the Queen from Madrid. They spread out across the land like a rehearsal for the invading armies of the French and the English who would soon be coming. They slept in the woods and burnt down the trees, using the hollow trunk of an ancient and famous cork oak as a fireplace and almost setting the entire forest alight in the process. They stripped the fields of crops and killed the domestic animals they came across as well as the wild ones. Anyone who claimed to be connected with the royal entourage had the right to appropriate other people’s horses, mules, donkeys and oxen as well as their hospitality. Coaches were stopped on the road and their occupants were ordered to get out and were left stranded with their luggage.

  Whenever the King passed a bridge, a crossroads or some other landmark that caught his eye, the place was marked with the royal sign, declaring that His Majesty had gone this way. When he stayed as the impromptu guest in the house of one of his subjects, he might leave behind a special chain that could be hung above the door, indicating the honour that had been bestowed.

  The King made jokes. He turned on the hosepipes in the water gardens at San Ildefonso and sprayed everyone who had gathered there to watch him. He had inherited his huge physical bulk from his mother’s side of the family and used to enjoy hitting or punching people in a friendly way, but with such force that it caused them to buckle up with pain. That made him laugh until the tears came to his eyes. He was fond of a test of strength in which you try to force your opponent’s fingers backwards, but when an opponent played him and won, the King hit the man in the face.

  Every year he was obliged by ancestral custom to spend sixty-three days in the grim monastic building of the Escorial. But there was good hunting to be done in the park, where great herds of deer and wild boar lived undisturbed among the cork and beech trees. He tried to make the palace more light-hearted by filling the upstairs apartments with tapestries, bright paintings and the gaudy decorations of which he and his wife were so fond. But he still could not avoid the weekly visit to his
dead forebears; down the steps of granite and polished marble and into that cold octagonal space called the Pantheon, where the walls were lined with royal tombs like larvae in a beehive. The first of the black and gold caskets held Philip II and then there were the rest of the Spanish Hapsburg line, followed by their close relations, the Bourbons. The King’s own casket was already in place, named and waiting to receive him.

  His favourite palace was Aranjuez, just south of Madrid, and he was always busy arranging for more ground to be levelled, more banks to be smoothed, more pagodas and railings to be erected. He had what he called a Labourer’s Cottage built in the garden. It was a decorative brick pavilion, with walls lined in panels of silver and floors laid out in patterns of mosaic. He would cook meals for himself in the kitchen of his cottage and then go to visit the workshops of the royal carpenters and armourers, turning the wood for them and giving the finishing touches to the metal. In that way he could see himself as a simple man, proud of the deftness of his little hands.

  Charles had married his cousin, Maria Luisa of Parma, when he was sixteen and she was only fourteen. She bore him twenty-two children of whom six survived. The youngest was rumoured to be sired by her favourite, Manuel Godoy, sometimes known as the Sausage Maker (because the area he came from was famous for its sausages and because of rude jokes as well). Godoy began his career as a royal bodyguard and once he had found favour with the Queen she heaped him with gifts, honours and decorations. He also became established as the King’s trusted friend and right-hand man, responsible for telling him how things were going in the country and the world around. He was made Commander-in-Chief of the army, and Universal Minister, and the title Prince of Peace was bestowed upon him. His servants wore red stockings – a privilege previously reserved for members of the royal household. In the portrait Goya made of him he exudes the smug sleekness of a well-fed, neutered tomcat.