Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  The people in the little towns and villages who had no faith in this war, and who saw themselves being killed without mercy or reason, were beginning to take their own form of revenge. They hunted the enemy with the same cunning and perseverance they used in hunting wild boar or the wolves which attacked their flocks. If they had no rifles, then they had pitchforks and knives. They castrated the soldiers who had raped their women and once they had stripped a human carcass of its covering of clothes they punished it further by hacking off the limbs. Mutilated bodies were hung among the branches of trees, as a warning to others. And then the men who had killed were punished in their turn, making it hard for a stranger to tell the nationality of one dead body from another. Some of the foreign soldiers had their wives and even a child or two with them, but the people who lived here had their whole families to lose and that made them more fierce and compensated for their lack of weapons.

  Back in his studio in the house on the Street of the Green Valley, Goya produced a series of little paintings of murder, rape, shootings, prisoners, fire. The victims of each fresh attack shine with a luminosity which seems to emanate from the fragility of their bodies. He also made formal portraits of anyone who was prepared to pay his fee. He could no longer collect his royal salary now that the royal family was in exile. He sold some of his jewellery to pay for the necessities of life.

  (illustration credit 21.1)

  Two years after his journey to Zaragoza he began work on the series of etchings known as The Disasters of War. Materials were hard to come by and so he used any copper plates he could find, even if they were of poor quality or disparate sizes. He took the plates on which he had etched two landscapes resonant with tranquillity and he cut them in half. On the reverse sides he scratched and burnt and dug into the surface of the shining metal until he had made four images: a woman being raped by soldiers; a man being dragged backwards up a ladder towards a gallow’s noose; a man blindfolded and tied to a post; and a terrible tangle of dead women caught in the act of tumbling through the ruins of a broken house, in which only a single, elegant, carved chair remains intact, everything else being shattered and beyond all hope of recovery.

  22

  Goya, in the silence and solitude of his studio on the Street of the Green Valley, looked at his country. He painted soldiers, tiny in the landscape that surrounded them, and he painted what he saw looming above them: the vast, muscular, naked torso of a giant, as indifferent as a ghost, his fist raised for a new fight, his head turned away and his legs dissolving like smoke in the blueness of the sky.

  He moved closer and made a drawing of a grotesque, swollen animal lying like a hill on its side, gorged with the bodies of dead men that are crammed into its open mouth.

  This was a war that went on long enough for soldiers to fight in fields where the ground was already covered with human bones from an earlier battle. For them to try to dig pits to bury their dead, only to find the earth already full of corpses.

  The soldiers raped the women and girls they found hiding in the houses and then killed them afterwards to wipe out the memory of what had been done. They stole gold and silver from the churches and then ate the bullocks that pulled the carts that carried the treasure, leaving glittering crucifixes, golden caskets and paintings cut from their frames scattered like rubbish on the ground.

  Everyone was hungry and the hunger increased as the land became increasingly neglected. The soldiers tried to grind the heads of sheaves of wheat into an edible paste. They smashed mahogany tables, fine carriages and chairs to make fires on which they could roast a few potatoes. They shot domestic cattle and pigs when they were lucky and ate cats and rats and dogs when there was nothing else. After the Battle of Talavera a fire sprang up among the long dried grasses where the dead and the dying lay and men were ashamed because their pangs of hunger increased with the smell of roasting meat.

  They drank water from muddy pools and leeches festooned the inside of their mouths. They drank water from wells in which corpses had been thrown. They were sick with brain fevers and dysentery and malnutrition and anything else that came their way and their wounds festered with maggots during the heat of the summer and became black and gangrenous during the cold of the winter. A soldier described approaching a convent that was being used as a hospital: a heap of amputated limbs lay along the outside wall while more arms and legs kept flying out of the windows where the doctors were still at work.

  In between the fighting the Duke of Wellington found time to go fox-hunting in the hills north of Madrid, using a pack of hounds he had brought from England for that purpose. He went hunting for wolves in the mountains around Talavera and one of his officers took pity on three orphaned wolf cubs which he cared for until they had become as docile and playful as kittens. Another officer had a pet baboon.

  The women and children who accompanied the army struggled to keep up with their menfolk on the long marches across the high mountain passes and through land that had already been laid waste by those who had gone before. They stood to one side during the chaos and noise of the battle and then, once it was over, moved forward to examine the bodies of the dead and the wounded, searching for a familiar face.

  When the regiments of two opposing armies were camped close together by a tributary of the River Tagus, they had swimming and jumping competitions. They exchanged tobacco for brandy and sat up talking through the night, the fires from the burning villages illuminating the sky. There were many lizards in that area and black snakes.

  A victorious regiment went through the streets of a ruined town where the troops of the defeated army were sick and starving and they handed out supplies of biscuits from their own meagre army rations. A wounded man was nursed back to health by the men who had wounded him: they kept him for fifty days and then let him go. Deserters were made to dig the trenches into which their bodies would fall when they were shot. The triumphant soldiers who came to liberate the town of San Sebastian towards the end of the war became so drunk and savage with their victory that, following a night of killing and rape, they burnt the town to the ground.

  Goya remained in Madrid. After the eruption of violence on 2 and 3 May there was not much bloodshed here, just the shifting of power from one hand to another, the sense of bated breath as people wondered fearfully what would happen next and the distant but relentless hubbub of slaughter and atrocity that was blowing this way and that across the land like a pestilential wind.

  (illustration credit 22.1)

  Food became increasingly scarce in the city until there was an entire year of famine, the ‘hunger year’ as it was called. It lasted from September 1811 to August 1812 and caused the death of some twenty thousand people.

  Walking through the streets, Goya saw the sound of people’s desperation. He saw men, women and children lying in silent heaps like fish caught in a net, their eyes wide open and startled by the arrival of death. He saw the heavy, noisy carts that came rumbling on metal wheels over the cobblestones twice a day to collect the fresh victims of hunger, tumbling them all together, young and old, male and female. A young woman was heaved into the cart by her feet, her body so relaxed and beautiful it was as if she was asleep and dreaming of sexual pleasure.

  Walking through the streets, Goya saw all the madness and hysteria that suffering brings in its wake. A crippled dwarf being carried on a stretcher so that women and children could kiss his deformity for good luck. Men who were whipping their naked backs into a froth of blood in order to appease a savage and speechless god. Two women fighting over the possession of a chicken’s head which could be cooked to provide a whole family with the illusion of nourishment. Young girls whose breasts had not yet ripened and prim careful housewives offering their bodies for sale to anyone who could give them a little bag of millet or a loaf of stale bread in return.

  He saw the shivering hallucinations of hunger. People swayed as they walked as if they were on a ship at sea. Some bodies were grey and puffy and hollow-looking, others had lost
all flesh so that the workings of the skeleton was revealed.

  Goya made drawings of what he saw in the streets and in the dark shelter of archways and cellars. He turned his drawings into the next eighteen etchings for The Disasters of War.

  23

  During that same time when sudden and unnecessary death was spreading everywhere across the country and the rustle and scratch of famine was beginning to creep through the streets of Madrid, Goya made a series of still lifes. There were known to be twelve of them in total, although only ten have survived. They were all painted on the same sized canvas and it is thought that they were probably hung on the walls of the dining room in the house on the Street of the Green Valley.

  One of these still lifes is a traditional composition of a bowl of fruit, a row of bottles, a wooden cask, three loaves of bread, and five slices of salami. The others are nothing like that. They are intimate portraits of dead birds, animals and fish that have, each in their own way, been killed by an act of violence. Those that still have eyes stare with a disbelieving gaze at a world they can no longer see. The body of a salmon has been cut into three chunks of anonymous flesh. Part of the head of a sheep is propped against two sections of its own carcass. A turkey has been stripped of its feathers to reveal the nakedness and vulnerability of its pink skin. All the other creatures are not visibly damaged, but are made limp and helpless by the fact of their own death.

  Goya paints what he sees. In The Disasters of War the dead are piled like a crop of turnips in a field, their dismembered body parts are hung like fruit from the trees, they are left to rot in abandoned houses. You have to look at what he shows you and yet you cannot look without looking away, ashamed of what you have seen.

  In the still lifes Goya confronts mortality without the burden of horror or the confusion of shame. You pick up a wounded bird. It weighs almost nothing in your hands. You marvel at the layered beauty of the feathers, the perfection of the waxy beak, the delicate miracle of the feet. And then, as you watch, the bright eyes grow dim and you bear witness to that amphibious moment when the flicker of life is extinguished like the flame of a candle. You see how the body changes once the life inside it has gone. You feel you have learnt something about the fact of dying.

  In Still Life with Golden Bream, six little fishes lie heaped up on each other. They are so recently dead that they are still gleaming with life and their round staring eyes are without the glaze of absence that will come in the next moment. The darkness of the night is illuminated by the moon that catches on the breaking foam at the edge of the sea behind them. The moon also shines on their wet and glistening bodies that are as golden as the sun.

  Then the intimacy of the Still Life with Woodcocks; again there seems to be six of them, although it is hard to disentangle one from the next. Their feathers are soft enough for you to feel them brushing against your lips. Two of them lean their heads together and look as though they are engaged in a dance of courtship.

  A plucked turkey suspended by its feet is as limp and vulnerable as that woman who was being lifted into the famine cart. And another turkey, dressed as finely as any king in its coat of glossy black and white feathers seems to be asleep, with legs extended, eyes closed, and the wings lifted and outstretched in a dream of flight.

  For these works Goya painted with his fingers and with a palette knife as well as using brushes. Some areas of the canvas are tinted with a gloss of colour that is as thin and transparent as varnish, others are covered with a thick paste of paint. Into the deep pool of grey and white light on which the body of the feathered turkey is resting, he has written the four letters of his name with the tip of his finger. Into the dark sand where the little fish are lying, he has written his name in the same way. His signature is also to be found in a tiny blood-red script under the mutilated head of the sheep. You can almost hear him grunting and sighing to himself as he works.

  24

  Goya in his house remained deaf. In 1812 his wife Josefa died after thirty-nine years of marriage. There is only the one drawing that is known to represent her, which shows her in profile so she does not meet her husband’s gaze. She wears a ribboned cap and a pale shawl is pulled around her heavy sloping shoulders as if to conceal the outline of the body underneath. She appears to be closed in upon herself.

  When she was dead an inventory was made of the contents of the house on the Street of the Green Valley. According to the instructions of the will which had been drawn up by the couple the year before, Goya and his son were to take an equal share of the assets. As a result of this division Javier inherited some money and jewellery, some furniture, silver and linen and he also became the owner of the house itself, his father’s library of over two hundred books and the complete collection of his father’s paintings and drawings. He marked each picture with a cross and a number.

  Goya for his part was left with the use of his own house, for which he agreed to pay a small rent. Most of the furniture, linen and silver was undisturbed and he had a great deal of money and jewellery.

  He remained where he was. He made drawings of what he saw happening in the world around him and he wrote comments under the drawings as a way of talking to himself and anyone else who wanted to hear what an old deaf man had to say: ‘Be quiet, time changes the hours’ under the image of a woman sitting desolate by a tombstone. ‘Less savage than some’ for a wild black man dressed in skins and feathers. ‘What horror for the sake of revenge’ for a man tied by his feet to a tree, his face contorted with the shock of what is being done to him.

  Goya continued his work on the etchings for The Disasters of War, moving from the famine of 1812 to the events which took place after the famine when the madness of the savagery of the war was followed by the madness of the savagery of King Ferdinand who took control of the country once the war was over. The people themselves had also gone mad from too much suffering and from the taste of blood which kept driving them into a frenzy of more killings. ‘Death to Liberty!’ they cried when they welcomed the King into their city. And in response to their welcome he closed the universities, opened a new school of bull-fighting, brought back the power and authority of the Inquisition and began the first of many purges against anyone who might be an enemy. People could be arrested for wearing ‘liberal clothes’, for owning a recently published book, for being denounced by their neighbour for one thing or another. The King’s henchmen broke into houses at night to make their arrests. Some were sent to prison without trial while others were tortured and garrotted in public places. Many of those who knew they were in danger went into hiding and later escaped as exiles.

  Goya was an old man. He heard nothing, he kept quiet and he was left alone. He made paintings for himself which he hung on the walls of his house: an Inquisition trial; a procession of flagellants; the massed crowd at a bullfight; the massed crowd at a carnival; a lunatic asylum in which one of the naked inmates wears the horns of a bull, another wears a tricorne hat and shoots an invisible rifle at an invisible enemy and a third, wearing a crown of playing cards, holds a sceptre and sings to himself with his eyes tight shut.

  (illustration credit 24.1)

  Goya produced commissioned work when it was asked of him. In an equestrian portrait he rubbed out the face of the deposed Bonaparte King Joseph and replaced it with the face of the Duke of Wellington, recently victorious. He made another and more intimate portrait of Wellington during that same time in 1812: the long equine face staring blankly outwards as if seeing a ghost. Maybe he was seeing the corpses from so many battles heaped up fresh in his mind, the sound of their dying loud in his ears.

  The Duke was so pleased with this portrait that he insisted on taking it with him on his final and most terrible campaigns in the north of the country. The canvas was not yet quite dry and it was forced into a frame that was too small. It was returned to Goya a couple of years later so that he could retouch the damaged areas and add the glittering array of extra medals and honours that the Duke had accumulated by the end o
f the war. Goya did his best; the red cloth of the military uniform bristles with swirls and lumps of new paint. In a private notebook he drew a little caricature of the Duke as a strutting peacock of vanity.

  In 1808 he had had the brief opportunity to make a pencil sketch of Prince Ferdinand who later became Spain’s new king. The drooping weight of the chin and the narrow split of the mouth give the face the look of a ventriloquist’s dummy; the widely spaced eyes are blank and malevolent. Goya must have referred to this drawing later when various cities commissioned a royal portrait as proof of their loyalty and obedience, but the unpleasantness of the face was camouflaged by the presence of fine costumes, swirling curtains, a sword in the King’s hand and a sleeping lion at the King’s feet.

  Goya in his house remained deaf. People writing about him say that by now he must have been a disllusioned man, horrified by what he had seen and tormented by the phantoms of his own imagination. But perhaps not. After all, he had the power to turn every thought, every fear, every painful confrontation with the reality of daily life, into images that sang and danced and triumphed over the limitations of human existence. He protected himself from the danger of madness by daring to look into its eyes. He saw how men, women and children were being humiliated, tortured and killed, and by showing what he saw he gave them a voice, even after they were dead.

  And anyway he must have by now started an affair with Leocadia. She was forty-two years his junior and the two of them often quarrelled, but she was with him until his death.

  25

  Goya silent in a silent house. At night he could feel the uneasy heartbeat of the city in the muffled darkness. The echoing crackle of movement in his own joints and ligaments was like the sound of the approach of danger. The hiss and rush of blood coursing through his body was like the sound of whispered fear. Doors were being broken open and doors were being slammed shut, people were made to disappear but the streets were empty of witnesses and even the nightwatchmen who called the passing of the hours were nowhere to be seen.