Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  One day in 1815 Goya was summoned to appear before a tribunal so that he could be questioned about which side he had been on during the war and which side he was on now. But since he could not hear the questions, how could he be expected to give an answer? A few trusted acquaintances agreed to testify on his behalf. They explained his deafness and isolation. They also swore to his patriotism and his allegiance to King Ferdinand. He escaped punishment and for the time being he was left alone. He had to be careful; many of his friends were less lucky.

  In the following year he was told he must appear before the court of the Inquisition. They wanted to question his motives for doing a painting in 1800 in which a nude woman lies so shamelessly on white pillows and a white sheet. And to ask about the Caprichos etchings and what they might mean.

  There is no record of this trial having ever taken place and so presumably it was indefinitely postponed. The deaf man was not pushed through the streets of the city in a cart, his hands bound together, a tall pointed cap on his head and his crimes written on the yellow cape that covered him. He was not made to sit in the Inquisition chamber, where a judge could pronounce your guilt even before you opened your mouth to speak and where a sea of indifferent faces were quick to decide what punishment was most appropriate.

  Goya made a series of drawings of the victims of such purges. One man is condemned for having been born in a foreign country, another is found guilty because he is a cripple and has no legs. A woman is chained by the neck against a wall, because she is a liberal. When Goya writes comments underneath his drawings, it is as if he is passing through the barrier of prison guards and prison walls, and sitting beside the prisoners talking to them. He tells a woman it is better if she does not open her eyes to see what is happening. He tries to comfort a man who is weeping.

  In 1815 he made a portrait of himself. He must have sat at the easel and leant out sideways so that he could stare at the reflected image that confronted him in a mirror. He is sixty-nine years old. His curly hair is grey around the temples, but it becomes black within the swirling darkness that surrounds him. His white shirt is open to reveal the vulnerability and unexpected softness of his ageing skin, the weight of the flesh around the jaw, the thickening of the neck. The expression of the face is tired and serious but curiously detached; it is as if the man who is being painted is preoccupied with his own thoughts and quite unaware of the fact of being observed so closely.

  He was also making paintings of young and beautiful women who seemed not to realise they were being looked at. Two of them sit side by side on a balcony, while the dangerous shadows of two men can just be distinguished behind them. One leans forward against a balcony rail, as enticing as a ripe fruit, and ignoring the presence of the old woman crouching beside her, as ominous as the figure of Death itself. Two women stand together in the sunlight. One of them is reading a letter and people say she has Leocadia’s perfect oval face. She is very young, her skin is firm and smooth, the solid flesh of her body is clearly visible under the black cloth of her dress.

  Leocadia was the youngest daughter of wealthy parents of Basque origin, but her father died when she was four years old and her mother when she was six. She was brought up by guardians and probably spent much of her childhood in a convent. In 1807, at the age of nineteen, she married Isidoro Weiss, the son of a Bavarian jeweller. According to the complicated clauses of the marriage settlement, she and her husband agreed to live in the house of her father-in-law and her large dowry was incorporated into the family business. A first child, a boy, was born in 1808 and a second son, Guillermo, in February 1811. However, the marriage was already in serious difficulties and in October of that same year Isidoro claimed power of attorney over his wife, accusing her of ‘unlawful dealings’ and later of ‘infidelity, illicit relations and bad behaviour’. He also claimed that she had a ‘high-handed and threatening disposition’.

  In 1814 she gave birth to a girl, Rosario, who was registered as ‘the daughter of Don Isidoro Weiss and Leocadia Zorilla, his lawful wife of the same address’, but it is likely that by then the two of them were living apart. It is also likely that Goya was the child’s father, and that the ‘unlawful dealings’ and infidelity referred to the start of the affair between the old man and the young woman. That would explain why Goya’s wife wanted to make a joint will just before her death, safeguarding the future of her only son at the expense of her husband. It would also explain the root of Javier’s hatred of Leocadia which persisted so fiercely throughout the time that she shared his father’s life and even after his father’s death.

  26

  I went to a bullfight in Zaragoza. Goya had been to the bullring many times when he was living in the city and in his mind he often returned to watch the fights he had seen here, as they unfolded themselves step by step in his memory.

  He sees the matador arching his back and rising on his toes as he prepares to lunge forward with the sword. He sees the muscles rippling in the bull’s shoulders as it twists its heavy body towards the fluttering enticement of the cape. The massed energy of the crowd has congealed into a many-tentacled creature that roars and sighs with a single voice. The shadow of the man and the shadow of the bull have merged together to make a third presence that dances in the sand and fights for its life.

  I watched as the muttering pool of faces began to fill up the rows of narrow-tiered seats. I could smell the human smell of cigar smoke, sweat and perfume and the animal smell of horses and bulls. A perfect circle of clear blue sky was hanging above the bowl of the amphitheatre and the perfect circle of yellow sand had been raked as smooth as a beach at low tide.

  I imagined wandering through the labyrinth of narrow corridors that lead into the ring and entering one of the little cubicles in which each bull is kept in darkness before being driven out into the dazzle of sunlight. For a moment my fingers could feel the marks made by the tips of horns battering into the heavy wood of the closed doors.

  It was Easter Sunday and almost everyone gathered here was in their best clothes, full of talk and laughter. I searched among the mass of spectators for someone whom Goya might have noticed or someone who could be mistaken for him.

  A few seats to my left and sitting very much on her own, there was a woman dressed in the costume of a maja: a black lace shawl pulled around her small shoulders, red ribbons plaited into her black hair, gold hoop earrings, white powder, red lipstick. She was no longer young and her face was tired under its mask of make-up, but still she was beautiful and defiant in the knowledge of the power of her beauty. She stared fixedly ahead and hardly seemed to notice her surroundings; she could have been watching the rain falling on the other side of a closed window.

  Immediately on my right and so close I could breathe the sweet taste of wine on his breath, there was a man blinking through hooded eyelids, like an owl. He was also traditionally dressed in a black suit and a white shirt and he also appeared to be oblivious of where he was. He kept looking at the woman, but although she must have been aware of his gaze, she never acknowledged it. I thought perhaps they had once been lovers and I invented stories of what had happened between them.

  And then a blind man carrying a white stick was herded carefully forward among a group of friends. They went to sit in the front row and he settled himself in readiness for the fight, his arms resting on the wooden balustrade, sniffing the air like a dog as he followed the babble of sounds all around him. I decided that I could put Goya next to him; the blind and the deaf side by side.

  Suddenly there was a fanfare of music from the orchestra and the sun glinted on the metal of trumpets and cymbals as the men who were going to do battle with the bulls made their entrance. The seven matadors were all dressed in sombre clothes, six of them in black and the seventh, who looked like nothing more than a child, in a dove-grey suit that clung to his slim body as tightly and softly as a layer of skin.

  The music stopped and the ring was again empty. I saw the blind man listening to the silence while the
deaf man watched the mounting tension of anticipation. Then the first bull appeared, bursting into view like a flock of startled birds, its hooves skittering on the sand as it raced around the circumference of this new prison.

  From the total of seven bulls waiting to be killed on that afternoon, two were black, one brown, two dapple grey and one was a gentle honey colour with even paler rings around the dark pools of its eyes. It was like watching a miracle in reverse, seeing each one of these sparkling vivid creatures being transformed into something as lifeless as the broken branch of a tree. It never took long to move from life to death, perhaps twelve minutes at the most, and when it was over the team of mules with bells jingling in their harness came to drag the corpse away and the sand was again raked clean.

  One of the matadors was fifty-six years old and he kept dipping terribly close to the bucking head of the bull as if he was testing his own destiny. Then he was briefly thrown to the ground and as the crowd held its breath he lay there limp and helpless, the animal lowering above him and time refusing to move forward. He got back on his feet and continued with the fight, a streak of bright blood across his white hair.

  The boy was the last to enter the ring. He was sixteen years old but looked much younger, his suit grey and his skin petal-fragile. He reminded me of my own son and that made my fears for his safety much more urgent. He worked with a black bull, the two of them sweeping and turning in perfect unison. Even the killing was part of the choreography of a dance, the bull leaning the full weight of its body on to the tip of the sword held by the boy; the bull kneeling down before him, as if dying was a final act of obeisance.

  In that moment the crowd of men and women and children roared together in a single voice of exultation. And in that moment Goya could hear them. The sound vibrated along the wooden bench on which he was sitting. It seeped into the bones of his buttocks, it rose up through his spine, tickling him like the stirring of sexual desire, and it burst into his head, making him roar with the rest of them.

  Goya at the bullfight, absorbing what he sees: the old matador lying on the sand as if he was asleep and the bull breathing on his neck; the pale boy and the black bull dancing together; the shifting configurations of shadows on the sand.

  He looks up at the tiered rows of faces, rippling and swaying together. He sees that this crowd has the same questing, hungry energy as a crowd of pilgrims approaching a shrine, as soldiers going to battle, as men gathered together to witness an execution. He sees the fickleness of the crowd, calling for blood and revenge in one moment and begging for mercy and salvation in the next.

  Between the years 1815 and 1816, when the war was over but the savagery inherent in a war was still evident throughout the country; when the universities were closed to students but the bullrings were again open for the people, Goya made fifty red crayon drawings on the art of bull-fighting and from these he developed a series of thirty-three etchings. He illustrated the early history of the art of bull-fighting when men had pitted their ingenuity against the strength of wild bulls in the fields and showed how first the Moors and then Spanish kings and emperors had learnt to fight bulls from horseback. He illustrated the stages and passes of the modern bullfight and showed the exploits of a number of famous matadors, many of whom he had seen himself. And somehow in the quiet visual language of his work, he was also able to explain his own view of humanity.

  Here is the ring at Zaragoza and the matador Martincho sitting on a chair, his ankles manacled together and his sword pointing at the bull that charges towards him. Here, in the same ring, the horseman Mariano Ceballos looks like a galloping centaur as he confronts his bull, putting spear against horns. Here is Ligereza in Madrid, vaulting over the bull’s head and their two bodies merging into one wild shadow.

  In 1801 the matador Pepe Illo was gored to death in Madrid. The bull caught him unawares at the start of the fight and lifted him up on its horns, tearing through his stomach and exposing sixteen ribs. Goya made three etchings to commemorate this tragedy. In two of them, which he rejected, the matador is shown in the act of being gored by the bull. In the third, which was included in the series, he has already been fatally wounded and lies on the sand as voluptuously as a sleeping woman while the bull nuzzles at his side as if seeking to comfort him.

  (illustration credit 26.1)

  In the fight that I saw in Zaragoza one of the bulls leapt over the barrier around the ring, but there was another and higher barrier separating it from the watching crowd. In a fight that Goya witnessed a bull also broke through the barrier and caused havoc among the spectators. People are shown rushing this way and that in the panic of escape. Some have already been wounded and the body of one man is draped over the bull’s head. The creature stands there, huge and merciless under an empty sky, turned now into a terrible hybrid monster, half-human being and half-animal.

  27

  In 1819, when he was seventy-three years old, Goya bought himself a country house on a hill and moved there with Leocadia and her two youngest children. Officially she was his housekeeper and that protected them from too much malicious gossip, but those who knew them together later referred to her as his wife.

  The house was situated a little to the west of Madrid and just on the other side of the wide sweep of the Manzanares River, where the washerwomen came in their hundreds to rub the dirt from the clothes and sheets of the city and stretch them out in long fluttering lines like the tents and flags of an army encampment. Men came here too, to watch the women as they worked with their sleeves rolled and their skirts up above their knees.

  The house was known as the House of the Deaf Man, not because of Goya’s condition, but because the previous owner had also been deaf. I like to think he chose it for its name.

  It was a very simple summer residence, built from adobe bricks which tended to become damp and crumbly in the wet weather. It stood on about twenty acres of good red earth, some of it laid out as informal gardens and vegetable plots. A little stream flowed through it to join the Manzanares and five white poplars grew alongside the stream. There was drinking water from a well on the patio and perhaps there was also a fountain, but it is hard to be sure; all traces of the house disappeared long ago, swallowed by the spread of the city. An idea of what it might have been like can only be pieced together from the description in a sales contract and from a few passing comments made by people who saw it during the brief time when Goya was there or later, after he had gone. There is a sketch of the building made by a Frenchman in the 1860s and a photograph was taken in 1901, but that shows a much more sophisticated construction.

  From the house Goya had a detached view of the city that had held him for so long: the light from the setting sun catching on the glass in the windows of the rich, making it look as though whole buildings were being consumed by flames.

  Over to the left he could see the pale domed roof of the church of San Antonio de la Florida, where twenty years ago he and an assistant had spent four arduous months decorating the arched ceilings with softly coloured frescoes. In the central cupola he had illustrated the story of how Saint Anthony brought a murdered man back to life so that he could reveal the name of his murderer. He placed the scene in a mountain landscape and the rough crowd of men and women gathered to watch the miracle look as though they have come to see a fairground attraction. They hardly notice the saint or the pallid corpse who is whispering a few words to him. The smiling angels in the vaults around the cupola are all so beautiful and sensual in their butterfly robes of red and green and blue that they look like the dancers from a seraglio.

  Next to the church Goya could see the tops of the trees surrounding the royal hunting lodge. The deer and partridge were undisturbed by the war and the famine and only recently Goya had been prevented by the royal guards from going hunting in their peaceable kingdom. Not that it mattered any more, now that he could hunt on his own land and fish from his own stream. He could also paint whatever he chose to paint, free from the watchful eyes of King Fer
dinand’s men who might again want to accuse him of immorality or some other crime, and from the watchful eyes of his son and daughter-in-law who seemed to value his paintings only in terms of what they might be worth and who bitterly resented the recent changes to his way of life.

  Beside the hunting lodge there loomed the solid marzipan bulk of the Royal Palace. Looking at it Goya could remember his first trepidation at being led like a prisoner into the enclosed courtyard, past the royal apothecary, through rooms dazzled by mirrors, rooms thick with portraits, rooms glistening with blue tiles, under ceilings heavy with the weight of well-fed gods and goddesses and the fat clouds that served them as beds and chairs.

  He could remember the honour of kissing the hand of an ugly red-faced man who punched him in the ribs and cracked jokes he could not hear. Now that man was in exile in France, stripped of all his power and close to death but still keen to go hunting whenever the opportunity arose.

  He could remember bowing low before the soft-bodied, pallid-faced Queen, her stomach grotesquely distended by the physical demands of at least twenty-one pregnancies and the falseness of her teeth immediately apparent. She wore a diamond tiara designed to look as though Cupid had shot one of his arrows among the greying hairs on her head and Goya had made a portrait of her wearing it. He also made an etching of someone very like her: an old crone admiring her withered reflection with that same distinctive tiara perched on her head.