Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  Because of her infidelities, the Queen was known as the Whore, and because she had the misfortune to lose all her teeth she was also referred to as the Toothless Whore. She had three attendants whose job was to manage the well-being of her false teeth, to adjust the plates and to make them as comfortable as possible.

  There was a lot of very savage gossip about Maria Luisa. The Russian Ambassador said she had the ‘hectic mask of a ravaged courtesan’, and Napoleon described the shock of meeting her when she and her husband were on their way to exile in France. She was by then in her early fifties with yellow and red flowers tucked in her grey hair and wearing an orange crêpe dress she had managed to borrow from the Empress Josephine. ‘She has her past and her character written on her face,’ said Napoleon, ‘and it surpasses anything one dares imagine.’

  It might be possible to presume that many of the stories told about Maria Luisa were based on political malice, were it not for her own letters to Godoy. She wishes that the Duchess of Alba would be thrown into a pit. She describes a daughter-in-law as ‘this slut who fans the flame … a diabolical serpent, the phlegm that crackles in the fire’, while her son Ferdinand is a ‘spiked vine of cowardice’. In an image that could have been illustrated by Goya, she says she wants to ‘take them both in hand and cut their wings’.

  In the year 1799 Goya was in high favour at Court. ‘The Kings are crazy about your friend,’ he said to Zapater. In September he made the portrait of the Queen in the traditional black lace outfit of a maja, which was in fashion at that time, and of the King in hunting dress. In October he was appointed as First Painter to the Court, with a salary of fifty thousand reales a year and the promise of a new house. In that same month he painted portraits of the King and Queen on horseback. He never seemed to enjoy painting horses and these two are heavy amphibious creatures that might have been ridden by the god Poseidon. The Queen was delighted with the image of herself. ‘It is an even better likeness than the one in the mantilla,’ she said to Godoy.

  Then, in the spring of 1800, Goya was asked to ‘do us all together’ and so he began the preparatory work for that painting called The Family of Charles IV, in which a dynastic nest of thirteen Bourbons are gathered in a stuffy-looking room. The light from a high window pours down on them from one side, to illuminate the nakedness of their faces, the intricacy of their costumes and decorations and the watery darkness of the shadows they cast and stand in.

  (illustration credit 18.1)

  The work was done at the Aranjuez Palace and Goya made four journeys there by carriage, carrying his canvases, stretchers and painting materials. During May and June he completed ten studies from life of the principal members of the family, doing their heads and shoulders against a red ochre background that has the colour of dried blood. All the sitters declared themselves delighted with the result, even the King’s brother and sister who both look as grotesque as they do mad.

  Goya captures his subjects one by one, and when he knows them well enough he is ready to crowd them all together like a flock of perplexed sheep, huddled into a corner of the Ariadne Room, waiting to be told what to do next. No conversation is possible; just the request to move a little closer, to hold still, to turn the face slightly towards the slow river of daylight that falls from the window.

  The Queen dominates the stage. She is adorned like a church relic with a diamond Cupid’s arrow shot into her hair. Her mouth hangs slightly open, as if she was listening with it, as a snake does. The King is stiff, red-faced and solemn; a glittering constellation of medals shines on his chest. Ferdinand, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Asturias, seems burdened by the unnatural size of his head and the smallness of his body; it is tempting to say that his anger and resentment are already becoming visible. Then there is the princess who will soon die and the princess whose body is partially crippled and all the others with their backs to the wall as they wait for the painter to execute his craft. In the palpable darkness that lies around them, you can see Goya, a silent witness who makes no comment, but gives a shape to everything he sees.

  19

  Goya continued to receive a salary as First Painter to the Court, but he made no further portraits of the King and Queen. They were far too busy with the muddled confusion of family intrigues and resentments. No time to sit for a portrait that would only show how they were growing older and more ugly. No time to notice that war was creeping closer, step by step, a predatory animal with a smile on its face watching a country and its people, preparing to pounce, to bite, to tear things limb from limb.

  Goya kept silent within his own silence. His life was going well. In 1802 he moved to a new house on the Street of the Green Valley which was on the corner of the Street of Disenchantment. He had plenty of money: jewellery to lock in a safe, paintings by Correggio and Tiepolo, prints by Rembrandt, a copy of a painting by Velasquez. He had forty-one upholstered chairs and a sofa covered in yellow satin. There was food and drink in the cupboards. Javier, his son, had survived childhood and was becoming a man. Josefa, his wife, had survived childbirth and was becoming an old woman. He was approaching his sixtieth year. He wore his stovepipe hat. He drank sweet chocolate milk, flavoured with cinnamon.

  This was the year in which the Duchess of Alba died and everyone presumed she had been poisoned. Goya had the painting of her dressed in black hanging on the wall. Looking at the youth and defiance in her face, his thoughts flew silently inside his head like birds.

  He painted people: face after face staring out into the world. He made portraits of his friends and of new clients who were prepared to pay him more than ever before. There were those who complained he painted too fast and was not always concerned with the end result. He charged extra for hands. He had no objection to wiping one face off the canvas and replacing it with another, adapting the details of a costume accordingly.

  In 1804 there was a sense of gathering doom, although no one as yet knew what form that doom might finally take. They said the sky rained blood. Rivers burst their banks and whole villages were swept away. Yellow fever was killing people in Andalusia in the south and the plague was spreading along the coast from Barcelona to Cadiz. The price of wheat had almost doubled and the poor were on the move, trying to escape the threat of starvation which galloped after them like the phantom carrying a scythe. The country roads had always been dangerous, but now they became almost impassable because of the bands of robbers who took possession of different stretches of territory. The cities were full to overflowing with homeless beggars, competing with each other in the display of hunger, deformity and despair.

  In 1805 Goya’s son Javier was married to Gumersinda Goicoechea, the daughter of a rich merchant. A pretty seventeen-year-old girl called Leocadia Zorilla was related to the bride’s family and must have been at the wedding, but her story does not become relevant until several years later. Goya provided the new young couple with a fine house on the Street of Kings, right in the centre of the city. He made a portrait of Javier, stepping forward with a long stride, as lean and fashionable as any dandy, with a small lapdog dancing at his heels. And one of his daughter-in-law with an even smaller dog. And then a miniature of Josefa done in profile as part of a series of miniatures which included the parents of the bride and her sisters. They all share the same round, comfortable, well-fed faces, and the same curiously bland stare, as if their heads were empty of everything apart from thoughts about what money can buy and a vague mistrust of the human race.

  At this same time Goya was also keeping a vivid record of what was happening in the city. He went out into the streets and he used his eyes. He no longer needed to draw the monsters of his imagination because the streets were filled with monsters. Cripples struggling to drag themselves forward; fat men burdened by the obscenity of their greed; desolate women not knowing how they would be able to protect their children when things got even worse. People running, falling, fighting, screaming; the whole heap of struggling humanity trying to keep afloat.

  I am s
ure he could see more clearly what was happening and what was about to happen because he was not disturbed by the usual babble of talk. He was free to read the anger and the fear, free to walk through the streets and smell the approach of a storm.

  As well as the street scenes he made two wonderful etchings: one of a tree bent by the wind, with a high arched bridge in the background; the other of a huge boulder set in front of a waterfall. But he destroyed both these plates later, cutting them up and using the backs of them for part of the series that became known as The Disasters of War.

  (illustration credit 19.1)

  20

  I have been trying to think about war, but I have no experience of war. I have been trying to imagine seeing heaps of people lying dead in a landscape of pale hills and stony fields or among the broken ruins of their houses, but I have no experience of such death.

  I was born in 1948. As a child I used to ask my parents what they had seen and done during the last war. My father was a conscientious objector. For a few months he stoked coal in the boiler room of a merchant vessel that was travelling around the Orkney Islands. He showed me the copy of Proust he was reading at the time, the pages covered with black smudges. He remembered coming out on deck when the ship was going past an island in the sunset and how beautiful it was. Later he was in the Fire Service during the Blitz. He told me that after a bombing raid he picked up a metal helmet that was still warm from the heat of the blast and there were fragments of a man’s skull inside it. This was his only recollection of violence.

  During that same time my mother was working as a secretary in a branch of the Admiralty. She went to numerous parties and for the rest of her life she preserved her favourite party dress in a plastic bag smelling of mothballs. It was a glistening tube of black velvet, topped by a band of white fox fur. When she died I did not know what to do with it and so I threw it away, the fur a faded nicotine-yellow but the velvet still strangely alive.

  (illustration credit 20.1)

  She kept a diary for each year of the war. They are tiny books in which there is just enough space for a dentist appointment in the afternoon and a supper in the evening. Between 1939 and 1945 she made no mention of bombs dropping, friends taking their leave, the movement of armies or the deportation of peoples, but she drew a little star against every night that she made love, the pages spangled with stars. Her paintings during this period were of crowded forests with no room for a path between the thin trunks of the trees and human faces divided into segments like oranges, the mouths open and the eyes wide with fear.

  Goya’s war came to the Iberian Peninsula in 1807 and stayed there until 1812. As I understand it, it was really a war between England and France that happened to be fought on Spanish and Portuguese soil. It was a war of random slaughter and terrible confusion in which as many soldiers were killed by hunger, disease and exhaustion as by gunshot and the sword. It was a war in which the women in the towns and villages could expect to be raped by their English allies as well as by their French enemies and anyway they found it hard to tell the difference between the two invading armies of foreigners, although they noticed that the English cavalry cut the tails of their horses much shorter than the French.

  As the mindless attrition of the years moved on, everyone began to have a reason to want to take revenge on everyone else; savagery was answered by even more savagery and the land was littered with grotesquely mutilated corpses. One man kept a bag full of the ears and the fingers of the soldiers he had ambushed and killed. A mule driver was hung from an open window as a punishment for stealing an apple, the offending fruit rammed into his mouth. In the neglected fields and the desolate countryside, the arms and legs of the dead could be seen bursting out of their shallow graves as if they were a crop that had been planted as seeds in the autumn and was now sprouting into life. A town and all its inhabitants was burnt to the ground by the soldiers who had come to liberate it. Two thousand horses were shot and thrown into the sea at La Coruña, just so that no one else could ever ride them.

  When I read about the Peninsular War I find myself floundering among accounts of military strategy, dynastic ambition and all sorts of unnecessary betrayals. Right at the beginning the royal families of both Portugal and Spain manage to escape to a safe place and then new rulers come and go, battles are won and lost and it hardly seems to matter which side you are on since there is no way of disentangling right from wrong, the just from the unjust; there is only cruelty answered by more cruelty.

  A while ago I made a study of Napoleon at the end of his life when he was a prisoner on the island of Saint Helena. I watched him pacing through his windswept garden, lying for hours in the bath and fervently dictating page after page of memoirs as he tried to work out where his plans had gone wrong. He seemed to see history as a simple equation, with himself on one side and a mass of soldiers, women and children, kings, queens and generals, cities and roads, snowstorms and famine on the other. He decided in retrospect that the invasion of Spain had been a mistake.

  21

  But what did Goya think of it all? Goya crouching like a toad, or was he more of a dragon by now, with his dragon’s hoard of fine jewels and upholstered chairs, his newly acquired houses, his royal salary and his well-paid portrait commissions? What did he think of what he saw in the city and in the countryside and in the faces of the living and the dead?

  He remained in Madrid for most of the war. It is possible, but not certain, that he witnessed the first precipitation of violence on 2 May 1808 when riots broke out between angry demonstrators who were armed with sticks and stones and pitchforks and foot soldiers and men on horseback who were armed with rifles and swords.

  On the following day all the people suspected of being in some way involved in this riot were herded together in groups. Some were lined up to be shot in the streets, others were taken to be shot in the fields of Moncloa on the outskirts of the city.

  Even if he was not there for the actual killings, Goya must have seen the evidence of what had happened: the smeared blood of men and horses, the marks made by bullets biting into stone, torn fragments of clothing, discarded shoes, broken windows, women weeping, children staring, men turning their backs. Much later, when the war had ended, he painted two famous works to commemorate the events of those two days that had marked its beginning.

  In August 1808 he went to Zaragoza. The city had been besieged by enemy forces for three months and, against all the odds, the enemy had been driven back. Now there was a temporary respite during which everyone was busy preparing for a second and more violent siege. The thick city walls were being fortified with earth and sandbags. There were barricades erected across the streets. The living had stored the necessities of life in the relative safety of underground cellars while the dead were being hastily buried. Cartridges were manufactured in the monasteries and convents and women and children were busy washing bucketloads of soil from which they could collect saltpetre to be made into gunpowder. Paving stones, roof tiles and broken glass were already piled into heaps, ready to hurl at the enemy.

  During the first siege the French attackers had lost three thousand five hundred men, while the Spanish defenders lost perhaps twice that number. Many of the dead were the women and children who were fighting in the doorways and front rooms of their own homes.

  The second siege began in November and produced a total of almost seventy thousand corpses. Once the outer walls of the city had been broken, the houses were destroyed block by block and their ruins formed the advanced position for the next wave of bombardment. The lunatics from the city asylum were set free so that they could join in the fight. Many of the people trapped in cellars and underground passageways were killed by fever, dysentery and typhus and when they were defeated and forced to emerge from their hiding places it was like seeing the dead rise on a terrible Day of Judgement.

  Goya was invited to visit Zaragoza by the defending general, José de Palafox, who wanted him to paint his portrait. He went there on his o
wn, travelling through a familiar landscape towards this place of his childhood. He smelt the sweet stink of putrefaction where the dead were left to rot in the fierce heat of the summer sun, and the sharp stink of burnt houses and flesh. He saw the silence of broken furniture scattered on the road as if it had been carried and dumped by the winds of a hurricane. He saw overturned carts harnessed to the bloated bodies of oxen, their legs thin and stiff in the air. The vultures were well fed and wolves and scavenging dogs were busy in the trampled fields.

  When he arrived in Zaragoza an army of new recruits was being trained for the next battle. People were half-mad with the fervour of anticipated bloodshed and the desperation of their situation. An angry mob turned on a man who was suspected of cowardice or treachery and they beat him to death in the street. A child was seen kicking the corpse of a dead soldier as if it could be forced to feel more pain.

  Goya made drawings and the first preparatory sketches for the portrait of General Palafox. He took his leave of the city before the November siege and went to stay for a few weeks with his brother who was living in that farmhouse on the edge of Fuendetodos. The travelling carnival of war did not pay any attention to a little village called ‘The Fountain that Belongs to Everybody’ and it must have seemed as if there was no war and never had been.

  In February or March he made his way back to Madrid. Almost half a million hungry soldiers were now moving like swarms of insects across the landscape. It was a very cold winter and the mountain roads that led from one battlefield to the next were littered with the bodies of the dead and the dying, the snow stained with their blood.