Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  He could remember the effort of always having to agree with each royal request and needing to produce so much work: dozens of designs of light-hearted subjects that were to be turned into tapestries to decorate the vast walls of one palace or another; images of happy country people busy with their happy country pastimes and their simple pleasures. It is true that he sometimes included an edge of danger: in the angry despair of the three peasants in the snow, in the malice lurking in the smile of a young child or in the grotesque pig’s face of a man about to marry his pretty bride. But maybe no one noticed.

  Goya sat in front of his house built of mud and admired the view. To his right he could see the steep slope of the meadow of San Isidore, where there was a shrine dedicated to the city’s patron saint. Every year on 15 May, the people of Madrid made a pilgrimage here, to drink the healing water from the fountain and pray to the image of a holy man who was said to be able to help those in need.

  In 1788 Goya had completed a tapestry design of the meadow on the saint’s day. It was to have been hung in the bedchamber of the two royal princesses, the one with the humped back and crooked face and the sickly one who died when she was still young. The tapestry was never woven, but the painting was kept rolled up in the palace and it survived the passing of time and the upheavals of politics. It shows a huge crowd of men and women, settled like a chattering flock of birds in the curved bowl of the hillside. They are feasting and laughing and dancing and flirting, while the sky above them is a luminous eternity of pink and blue and the distant outline of the city appears like a vision of paradise.

  Such a world could not survive the war, or the bitter hysteria that had followed yelping at its heels. Nevertheless the saint still had his day and so I imagine Goya working in his garden and watching as a crowd of men and women made their pilgrimage to the holy shrine. Their frivolity had all gone. They walked painfully up the steep slope, muttering their troubles and their fears. They begged the saint to give them some guidance in this present uncertainty and when the saint remained silent then some of them might continue to the crest of the hill, where it was rumoured that witches gathered at night and Satan stood before them in the shape of a monstrous he-goat. Perhaps the powers of darkness could help, when the powers of light had failed.

  The people must have all been so desperately tired. After the war there had been the famine and after the famine came the onslaught of yellow fever, also known as the black vomit. It had moved inland from the southern ports and had got as far as Madrid.

  The sickness has two stages. First there is severe vomiting and the skin changes colour because the liver is affected. Then there is a lull followed by a fever which can push the temperature as high as 108°F. Until the discovery of the part played by mosquitoes in standing water and the use of quinine, there was no treatment apart from bleeding and purging, cold water and ice and prayers to keep the demons at bay.

  Goya became ill towards the end of 1819. He witnessed the horror of his own body as it emptied itself of foul liquids, as it changed colour, as it stank. He lay in bed and stared at the rough surfaces of the adobe walls, while images floated across the cracks in the mud and erupted among the flowering patterns of the damp. Perhaps he saw his own creation, the monster of war, a fat animal gorged with the bodies of the dead men spilling from its mouth. Or the rat with bulging eyes, swallowing a creature as big as himself. Perhaps he saw men tied in sacks, people perched like birds on the winter branches of a tree, a giant leering down at him from the ceiling as huge and terrifying as the papier-mâché giants who paraded the streets on saints’ days.

  Once again Goya was made to enter the familiar subterranean territory of delirium. Leocadia sat beside his bed and watched over him. The child Rosario appeared like a ghost at the door. Doctor Eugenio Arrieta arrived every day, dressed in a green jacket, his long serious face touched by an almost maternal tenderness. They all did what they could and waited.

  Goya is caught up in the jostling crowd of his own nightmares. He sees men and women whose mouths are wide with screaming. Their leader is a blind man who sings and plays the guitar, his head lolling on one side. Another crowd has reached the top of the hill. The black silhouette of Satan the He-Goat is on the left and the whites of everyone’s eyes slide into view as they stare at him. Goya pulls away from the horror and sees a woman sitting quietly in a chair on the right-hand side of the image. He recognises Leocadia. She is watching over him and protecting him from harm.

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  The child Rosario has slipped into the room and she stands beside the bed looking at this man whose face is yellow and bristled with grey stubble, whose mouth is gaping, whose eyelids flicker with a succession of dreams.

  For a moment he wakes and catches sight of her. ‘I am burning,’ he says, ‘bring me ice: hielo, hielo, hielo.’

  But it is too late in the year for ice. The ice houses are all empty until the snow comes again. So Rosario goes to the well and lets the bucket down to the full length of the rope, bringing up the coldest water it holds. She dips her hands into the water, feeling it biting at her skin and bone.

  When she returns to the room Goya is still calling for ice, ice, ice, but his words have become the lost cry of a bird and he is back in the closed world of his fever. He sees the ice houses that stand like stone beehives on the empty land around the village where he was born. He follows the white stone path that is scattered with sheep’s droppings and alive with jumping crickets. As he approaches the ice house a hoopoe flies so close that the tip of its wing brushes against his cheek. The crest of feathers on its head opens and closes like a woman’s fan.

  He pushes open the low wooden door. He stands as a child on the threshold and he can smell the ice that is stored there, lying far beneath him in this deep well of stone. Sleeping lumps of ice cut from last year’s snow and wrapped safe in layers of straw.

  He follows the spiral of stone steps that lead down inside the curved wall. There is no railing and so he must steady himself with the palm of his hand pressed against the stone. The smell of wet straw and frozen water grows stronger as he makes his slow descent. It enters his nostrils like sharp needles.

  When he reaches the last step he falls face down on to the mushy floor. He can feel the cold belly of the ice quenching his burning skin. He turns his head to look up at the white square of the open door, as distant as the moon, and then he tumbles into a changed sleep.

  When Goya woke in the bedroom of the House of the Deaf Man, the fever had passed. Leocadia was still sitting beside him, her face worn and sad as if she was already mourning his death. Rosario took his hand and moved the loose skin with her small fingers. She turned the hand over, palm upwards, and put a scrap of paper into it. She had used his charcoal to make a drawing of a bird with a long beak.

  The doctor arrived, wearing that same green jacket. He saw at once that his patient was going to live. He helped to raise him into a sitting position and gave him a glass of brown liquid to drink. A lizard raced from a corner of the ceiling down to the open window, its pale throat pulsating.

  28

  I have been staying in a house in Italy, in the foothills of high mountains. At night my dreams are fed by the sound of the river muttering in the valley, by the sudden cry of owls, by the weight of the moon pressing against the thin curtain in the open window, by the scratching of beetles.

  Yesterday evening an owl flew low across the terrace, as soft as a ghost; I could have reached out to touch it if I had known it was coming. This morning I sat and watched a toad standing upright against the exposed roots of an olive tree, its old-man legs stretched to their full length, its old-man fingers splayed against the rough surface of the bark.

  Later I was looking at an illustration of a painting from the House of the Deaf Man in which two men are up to their knees in mud or sand, hitting each other with long cudgels. According to the footnote next to the picture, cudgel-fighting was once a sport in Salamanca: the men like blood-splatte
red cockerels in a ring and nothing can pull them apart until one is dead and the other is victorious. I could hear wood thudding into soft flesh, cracking against bone; I could see blood dripping down the wood, blood on hands and faces, blood soaking into the earth. A crowd had gathered around, grunting and shuddering with each fresh blow.

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  I read a chapter from a book about the history of Spain in the nineteenth century. It told me how King Ferdinand’s power was taken from him in January 1820 and the liberal Constitution was established. When the King appeared before this new government and swore that he would abide by its rules he wore a blue coat embroidered in gold thread and crimson velvet breeches. His breast glittered with diamonds. The leader of the Constitution party was a man called Rafael del Riego. ‘Down with the King! Long live Emperor Riego!’ the people cried.

  Now everyone was in a turmoil of excitement, discussing what should be done next, and every street corner and café was full of orators declaiming their vision of the future and how it must be shaped. The liberals demanded the death of the priests, while the priests demanded the death of the liberals. Those who lived in the countryside tended to be conservative, and those who lived in the city tended to be progressive, but whenever a crowd gathered it quickly transformed itself into a mob, hungry for revenge and changing allegiance with the direction of the wind. A mad priest who had plotted to bring back the King was dragged out of prison and beaten to death with a hammer. An angry crowd swarmed like ants up the walls of the Royal Palace, screaming at the windows and demanding the surrender of the King so that they could tear him to pieces. People everywhere were dying sudden and violent deaths. It was like a continuation of the war, but now the enemy had made his home within the heart of the country. My history book explained that this was the real beginning of the Civil War which would take more than a hundred years to burn itself out: the vendetta of murder and betrayal bouncing mercilessly down through the generations. For a moment I was back in the town of Belchite where the ghosts of the dead and the wounded were still so busy, the evidence of bloodshed embedded like fossils in the broken walls of the buildings and the paving stones on the streets.

  Goya in the House of the Deaf Man was out of the immediate reach of danger and he could watch the confusion of the times unfolding. In April 1820 he went with other members of the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando to swear his allegiance to the new Constitution. But already by July 1821, that government was in complete disarray and it became obvious that this was going to be only one more chapter in the long narrative of chaos.

  Goya, in the House of the Deaf Man, arranged for new drains to be dug, fences to be erected, vines to be planted and living quarters to be built for a gardener. He went fishing in his own stream, hunted for hares on the crest of the hill where the witches were said to gather and looked at the city that glimmered silent in the distance. He went down to the banks of the river to watch the washerwomen who told each other rude jokes he could only follow by the gestures that accompanied them.

  He had returned to the childhood recollection of the scent of the earth after rain, the smell of cut grass and crushed walnut leaves, the beauty of the image of a beetle poised on a flower, a long-eared owl flying across the luminous disc of the full moon. At night he slept beside Leocadia, pressing his skin against hers, warming his cold feet between her thighs. The little girl Rosario was six years old in 1822. He called her his Ladybird and was already delighting in her precocious aptitude for drawing and painting.

  It was probably around this time that he completed the final plates for that beautiful, mad, wild and wise series of etchings knew as the Disparates – a difficult word to translate because it means something between folly and dream. A man rides into the night sky on the back of a creature that is half-horse and half-monstrous bird. A huge empty-faced ghost, wrapped in a shroud, looms above a group of terrified soldiers, a smiling giant plays the castanets, an elderly man, who looks like an old reptile, sits on a chair and ignores the people who mock and gesticulate around him. A horse carries the weight of a big sensual woman by gripping her skirt between its teeth. She swings next to its flank like a baby in a sling and smiles in a private ecstasy of pleasure.

  No prints were ever taken from these plates and when Goya had to leave Spain they were wrapped up and put away in a cupboard. No one knew of their existence until long after his death.

  29

  Once Goya had recovered from the illness which almost killed him, he set to work with a relentless intensity. He had decided to use the walls of his house as a series of canvases on which to make new paintings. I can see him passing excitedly from room to room, running the palm of his hand across the uneven plastered surfaces as if he was stroking the flanks of huge animals, putting his face close as if he was breathing in their warm life.

  The House of the Deaf Man had two main rooms, one above the other and both measuring about thirty feet by fifteen. There was only one or perhaps two windows for each of these rooms in spite of their size, and so they must have always been as dark and cool as a cave, even during the hot summer months.

  I imagine Goya enjoying the luxury of one of these large dim spaces; moving slowly this way and that like a fish in a pond. A rectangular pool of light from a window lay floating on the wooden floor and the faint shadows of the leaves of the trees in the garden shook themselves softly within this pool.

  The silence here was quite different to the silence he had known in the city. It was not the private isolation of his own deafness, but something as strong and pervasive as the scent of jasmine flowers in the evening and whoever was in the house shared this silence with him.

  He went to the window and looked out on to the patio: the stone well, the plants in pots, the pencil-thin leaves of the mimosa, the waxy leaves of the lemon tree, the flickering silver leaves of a white poplar. He was reassured by the fact that nothing dramatic had been happening just beyond the reach of his eyes. It was not like being in his house in Madrid where he could step on to the narrow shelf of a metal balcony to be confronted by the shock of a human river in full flood in the street below: soldiers displaying the wounds of war; water sellers and orange sellers, beggars, orators and madmen, familiar faces and strange ones, all shouting and crying and making demands. Here the silence was real.

  He returned to the walls. He began the necessary preparations. He had done this sort of work before in the church of San Antonio de la Florida and in other churches as well.

  He fetched scaffolding planks, ladders and trestles. He draped cloths over the floor and over the larger pieces of furniture. He used a big earthenware bowl to mix up a first batch of fresh plaster according to his own recipe. He applied a layer of this stuff on to one of the walls, using a trowel to spread it in sweeping strokes and then working at it with a stiff brush to produce the thick striation of ridges known as the tooth, because of the way it will bite hold of the paint. The damp smell of the plaster made the room even more like a cave.

  He worked on his own although perhaps Leocadia and the little Rosario came to watch him and to help if he asked for their help. The limited light source from the windows had to serve as the painted light source in the pictures. The inherent darkness in the rooms had to be used as an aspect of the work. He wanted to show what the darkness could contain.

  I used to know a painter who covered his canvases with dangerous words: acts of violence, murder and suicide, the name of his ex-wife and other names of people he hated; a terrible inventory of maledictions all huddled up against each other like creatures trapped on the edge of an abyss. Then, once he felt he had said everything he needed to say, he would dip his finger into black oil paint and eradicate the words, letter by letter. The final image was completely abstract and yet it still had a sinister power as if you could feel the secrets it held, clamouring just beneath the surface.

  And now here is an odd thought. It would seem from the evidence of recent radiography and statigraphy per
formed on the paintings from the walls of the House of the Deaf Man that with most of them Goya began by laying out a number of wide, brightly coloured landscapes. He created a sweet-smiling natural world in which the sky was blue, the earth was green and the sun shone down on contented people who were busy with their simple lives. Then, in the reverse procedure of my friend with his strings of maledictions, he began to hide his first creations, obliterating the day and turning it into a thick night, covering the bright colours with shades of black and ochre, spreading fear like a pestilence across each new image.

  Underneath the painting known as The Pilgrimage to San Isidoro, in which a terrible crowd of men and women blunder through the moon-dark hills following a blind guitar player, there are traces of a wide panorama of mountain ranges where a great bridge with three arches crosses a river.

  Underneath the god Saturn, his body emaciated by age and an insatiable hunger, there is the just discernible outline of a man performing a simple peasant dance, his arms raised above his head and one foot lifted for the next step.

  And underneath the solemn portrait known to represent Leocadia, dressed all in black with a black veil shielding her face and leaning against the railings of what looks like a freshly dug grave, there is another Leocadia whose face is not hidden and who has little pompoms on her shoes and rests her arm on the corner of a mantelpiece.

  Goya surrounded himself with the companionship of this work. He made a total of fourteen paintings in those two main rooms and then moved on to paint the wooden panels in several smaller rooms and the walls around the staircase that connected the ground floor with the upper floor.

  I went to the Prado Museum for the first time a few years ago. I stopped in front of Goya’s portrait of the royal family in which they stand like actors after a performance waiting for the applause that will never come. I stopped in front of King Ferdinand with his mad sullen stare and huge flat chin; the little paintings of the madhouse, the Inquisition trial, the flagellants, the bullfight, the self-portrait in which the artist sees old age creeping up on him like a cold wind.