Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  Then I was in the rooms that hold the so-called Black Paintings lifted from the walls of the House of the Deaf Man and fixed on to canvas. I did not yet know that Goya was deaf, but I remember it was the sound of the paintings that struck me first: a great hollow booming reverberation like a mixture of thunder and human voices. And it seemed to me then as if it was the paintings themselves that were brave; as if they had dared to look into the face of all this and had survived.

  30

  There was a big storm last night. The trees, still heavy with autumn leaves, were struggling in the noisy darkness. The rain clattered like a cascade of sharp stones. The wind panted around the walls of the house and sucked at the windows and doors. The house closed in upon itself, waiting for the danger to pass.

  The storm has been continuing all day and it is too drenching wet to go outside. I keep thinking of Goya in the House of the Deaf Man; contained within it like the beating heart inside a living creature, Jonah inside the whale.

  I think of him walking through those painted rooms, surrounded by the dark and flickering images that are spread across the walls from the ceiling to the floor. They all compete for his attention. Some call out to him in savage, urgent voices, others entice him with their silence and their longing. He potters among them, holding a branched candelabra in his hand so that he can observe them more clearly. The little flames of the candelabra illuminate the faces that peer out at him, making their features shift and change with a ghostly animation: an eye blinking shut, a mouth stretching open, a hand about to grasp. He does not give names to his paintings or words to the stories they tell, but he sometimes talks to them, asks them questions and watches for an answer.

  In the big room on the ground floor he pauses in front of the ancient couple hanging above the far door, who eat soup from a single bowl. It is as if he has never seen them before. He wonders why they want to keep themselves alive, when their bodies are as dead as skeletons, their faces as cruel as skulls. He turns back and walks towards the painting of the woman who looks like Leocadia. The contours of her naked body are tangible under the black covering of her dress; even her sadness stirs him with a tremor of desire. He runs his hand over the rough surface of the paint.

  In the big room upstairs he goes at once to the dog’s head which peers up into an expanse of yellow light. He has always loved dogs, especially little hunting dogs like this one. The shimmering dappled yellow light makes him think of a tree in the sunshine with a thousand restless birds hidden out of sight among its leaves.

  He laughs with the two women who are laughing at the masturbating man. The man’s mouth is opening slowly and he can hear him groaning as he labours towards his pleasure.

  Sometimes he takes his family with him through the rooms of the house. In more peaceful times Leocadia took Rosario to the fair or the circus whenever she could and now, when going anywhere is dangerous, the paintings have become the spectacle of a wider world. They stop and look and think their own thoughts and the two adults smile to reassure the child. They listen to the blind man who plays the violin and to the roar of the crowd who follow in his wake. They are shocked by the hungry giant who is eating a human being and frightened of the woman who holds a knife. ‘Who will win?’ Goya asks Rosario in his deaf man’s monotone, pointing at the two men who are hitting each other with long clubs. She grins and shrugs her shoulders because she does not know.

  The three of them were there in the House of the Deaf Man when the liberal Constitution government collapsed in 1823. King Ferdinand was welcomed back. He made a triumphant entry into Madrid, riding on a chariot that was pulled by twenty-four young men. ‘Long Live the Inquisition! Death to the Constitution!’ cried the people.

  The King rewarded those he felt had been on his side with new titles of nobility. There was now a Marquis of Loyalty as well as a Marquis of Royal Appreciation. He quickly inaugurated a new wave of bloody reprisals to punish everyone suspected of having been against him. The old liberals were referred to as ‘the blacks’ and there was the wish to destroy whole families of them, down to the fourth generation. Men and women were openly set upon in the streets. The organisation known as The Exterminating Angel introduced the old Inquisition practice of denouncing anyone suspected of having the wrong beliefs and the priests and other members of the church worked together to root out evil. A man seen carrying a yellow handkerchief had the side whiskers and moustaches stripped from his face and he was paraded through the streets with a cowbell tied around his neck, because yellow was known to be a colour of the liberals. A woman could be shaved, tarred and feathered for wearing a yellow ribbon.

  The thousands of men and women who were under threat of imprisonment or execution went into hiding or tried to flee the country. Some managed to escape but others were not so fortunate. A schoolmaster called Cayetano Ripoll was condemned to be hanged for not attending Mass on Sundays and a barrel painted with flames was placed under the gallows as a reminder of the old Inquisition practices. General Riego, who had once been a fêted hero of the people, was captured while trying to escape over the Portuguese border. He was put into a basket and dragged through the streets tied to a donkey’s tail. He was publicly disembowelled before he was hanged. A guerrilla leader who had fought bravely against the French during the Peninsular War was meticulously tortured in prison and brought out every market day in a cage of iron, so that he could be mocked before he died.

  Goya and his family watched the changes. In August 1823 he drew up a deed of gift, making the house and the grounds over to his seventeen-year-old grandson, Mariano, ‘to give proof of the affections which he felt for [him]’. In this document the improvements he has made to the house and the garden are all listed, but there is no mention of the paintings which cover the walls.

  In 1823 Leocadia’s son Guillermo went into exile in France. Although he was only thirteen years old, he was said to be a member of the Militia who were fighting against Ferdinand and so his life was in danger. Leocadia was also under threat as a result of her own liberal views and on account of her son, so she was obliged to go into hiding, ‘to escape persecution and insults of every kind’.

  In January 1824 a system of organised repression established ‘permanent military commissions with executive powers to judge the enemies of absolute power’ and laws of strict censorship were imposed. In that same month Goya went into hiding in the house of the Aragonese priest Father José Duaso and he put Rosario in the care of the gentle-faced architect Tiburcio.

  On 1 May 1824 a brief amnesty was declared and on the following day Goya applied for leave ‘to take the mineral waters at Plombières in France, to alleviate the sufferings and infirmities which are such a burden to his old age’. The permission was granted by royal authority on 3 May and on 24 June the Sub-Prefect of Bayonne informed the French Minister of the Interior that ‘D. Francisco de Goya, Spanish artist whose papers are enclosed, has this day been granted a provisional pass for Paris, whither he is travelling for medical consultations and for the purpose of taking the waters thereby to be prescribed’.

  Goya turned his back on the House of the Deaf Man with no idea of when he might be there again. He knew that the paintings could not withstand the onslaught of the weather for too long; eventually the cold and damp of winter would eat through the mud walls and erupt in broken blisters and swirling patterns of mould across the painted surfaces. But he had not made the pictures to last, not to be sold and passed on from one owner to the next, not to outlive him into some uncertain future. The house and everything it contained was as fragile and mortal as a human being. It was just a question of time. And now he was leaving and going to another country to begin a new life for as long as life was granted to him.

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  I have had one house in my life which I loved more than any other. The place made time stand still for me; as if the uncertain trajectory of my own destiny could somehow be contained and held safe within the walls of a building. I even presumed I would eventually be bu
ried in the garden beside the pear tree and, without any particular sadness, I often stood on the patch of grass under which I could imagine myself lying: stiff and silent and beyond caring.

  When I had to leave that house it was as if I was being separated from the shell of my own body and from the accumulation of dreams and memories that had gathered there around me. I remember walking from room to room, watching how the sunlight fell through a pane of glass, looking at the gently breathing surfaces of the walls, staring out of the window from which I could see the pond and the window from which I could see the pear tree. I remember closing the door: the finality of it, but also the strange exhilaration that comes from such a huge change.

  At the age of seventy-eight, Goya abandoned the house that had become so much a part of him. He left the earth he had cultivated, the vines he had planted, the hares on the hill, the scent of leaves and flowers, the view of Madrid shimmering like a mirage on the other side of the Manzanares River and the paintings which clung to the plaster surfaces of the walls as if they were complex lichens that had grown there under the gaze of his eyes.

  He had not been away from Spain since a visit to Italy almost sixty years before and he had never been to France. Now he planned to go to Bordeaux where there was already a community of Spanish exiles. The journey of some three hundred and fifty kilometres could be accomplished in less than a week if there were no delays, and once again because there is no account of his particular journey I will describe something of the road he took and what he could have seen on the way.

  He probably booked a seat on the Catalane mail coach which was a huge and cumbersome contraption painted bright red and pulled by a team of ten mules, their manes threaded with bells and their bodies shaved so that they looked like giant mice. The carriage’s suspension was a cat’s cradle of knotted rope and it had room for about a dozen passengers who sat inside on faded pink satin cushions. The drivers carried blunderbusses. They wore pointed hats trimmed with velvet and silk pompoms, sheepskin trousers, embroidered gaiters, lambskin jackets and a red sash tied across their chests. A postillion rode ahead on horseback to look out for trouble. Brigands made brave by the recent war and by their intimate knowledge of the mountains were the main threat. But the mules themselves could be dangerously temperamental, especially if they met with more mules coming from the opposite direction and they had to pass each other on the narrow road.

  So here is old man Goya in the month of June, sitting on pink satin cushions, turning his back on one life and trundling off towards an unknown world. He watched as the carriage passed through the wide and barren land that still surrounds Madrid: grey boulders breaking out of the yellow earth like the ruins of some ancient civilisation. In the distance he could see the solid bulk of the Escorial and the storks floating in dreamy circles above this vast edifice that was both royal palace and royal tomb.

  When they reached the first range of mountains a team of six oxen was harnessed ahead of the mules to haul the coach forward. They stopped at the village of Guadarrama. Too many soldiers had already come this way, escaping or being pursued, and by now, although people were still living there, most of the village was in ruins. That night I’ll give Goya a thin soup made of goat’s milk, served to him by a woman wearing a thickly pleated skirt of red cloth and a tight black velvet bodice braided with gold thread. The story of the devastation of war could be seen in her eyes.

  In the city of Segovia they might have visited the Moorish castle: the walls smeared with angry graffiti and excrement, the mosaics on the floor smashed and almost obliterated. A marble slab had been used for executions and the ground was still scattered with little splinters of bone from human skulls.

  In Santa Maria of the Snows, the houses were nothing more than mud huts; they had a single opening for a door and a hole in the roof through which the smoke could try to escape. The weather was cold at this height and the people were dressed in thick brown woollen cloth that made them look as though they had been rolling in the mud. A line of men stood against a wall as if they were waiting to be shot, but all they were doing was basking like dogs in the pale sunshine.

  The town of Olmedo was in ruins, with tufts of long grass pushing up out of the confusion of shattered houses. But I’ll have them stopping at an inn at the edge of the town and while they were eating a big woman walked in carrying a basket on her hip. She sat down and out of the basket she produced a little cream-coloured puppy which she suckled at her breast. She was a wet nurse on her way from Santander to Madrid and the puppy would keep her milk flowing until she had found work.

  In Valladolid a pole had been erected outside the entrance to the town and a man’s head was fixed to the pole and left to suffer the battering of the weather. The women here wore yellow petticoats embroidered with birds and flowers.

  The city of Burgos was crammed with beggars wearing cloaks which they pulled back, like the curtains on a stage, to reveal the spectacle of their particular deformity. The little children were also wrapped in cloaks and so were the convicts, who made no attempt to escape but were busy sweeping the rubbish of the streets into heaps. Some of them curled up to sleep on the nests they had created.

  The journey continued. Goya dozed on the satin cushions, woke and dozed again, his body jolted and shaken by the cobblestones and the rough surfaces of the mountain roads. They stopped at the village of Cubo where the wine was a purple black colour and tasted more of goats than of grapes. The men wore wolf skin caps and the women had thickly braided tails of hair that hung down to the small of their backs and looked ready to twitch and curl at any moment.

  There were many soldiers in the city of Vitoria, their wounds strange and terrible to see. The local theatre put on a show in which a woman dressed as a butterfly walked a tightrope, a strong man twisted metal bars and a very old couple danced the fandango as if it was the last dance of their lives.

  On the next day Goya might have seen an ox being hoisted off the ground in a specially made sling, so that new shoes could be fitted to its feet. They passed mules carrying baskets filled with the horseshoes that were made in this part of the country and taken to all corners of Spain. They passed mules carrying women who were accustomed to travelling in pairs, sitting in baskets slung one on either side of the animal’s back.

  At an inn in the town of Tolosa I would have Goya eating the same food that I was served there: a bright red soup, followed by an omelette cooked with dried cod and then pieces of ox cheek with little patches of black hair still clinging to the seared flesh. The smiling girl who served me, and who could have served him, had Leocadia’s perfect oval face and thin nose. When they left the town in the morning little beggar children raced after Goya’s coach on bare feet and hurled posies of wild flowers in through the open window.

  They arrived in Irun. They rumbled over the low wooden bridge that was painted ox-blood red and they entered France. A few hours later at Bayonne they changed to a different coach drawn by a team of horses, the thick wheels better suited to the flat and sandy tracks that lay ahead. Goya presented himself and his deafness to the depot-master at Bayonne and a passport was duly granted to ‘D. Francisco de Goya, Spanish artist whose papers are hereby enclosed’.

  They went through the town of Saint Jean de Luz where all the wooden houses were also painted blood red, but by now they were in a different world. They were no longer climbing and descending the toppling waves of mountains and hills, but were surrounded by a landscape that was spread out like a vast blanket. Sometimes the road was imprisoned by lines of pine trees, their trunks marked with a flesh-pink gash where they were being tapped for resin. And then the trees stepped back to reveal an expanse of soggy marshland and heavy-winged birds rising like ghosts from out of the mists and miasmas. At one point Goya must have thought he was dreaming when he saw four men walking like giant wading birds on tall stiff legs, driving a flock of scrawny sheep across the marshy land. The men stopped in a cluster together in and he saw that they were wearing wooden st
ilts; several of them were busy knitting socks as they talked together.

  After a further thirty-six hours of travelling the coach reached Bordeaux and Goya’s friend, the poet Leandro Fernández de Moratin, was there to meet him. ‘Goya has arrived,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘deaf, old, clumsy and weak, without one word of French, without a servant (and no one needs a servant more than he) and yet he is very pleased with himself and so eager to see the world.’

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  I realise with a strange shock that I have arrived at the final stage of this story. Goya has only four more years to go. His eyes are bad, his head hurts, his digestive system is in a terrible state and he is as deaf as a stone. Nevertheless, in a letter he sent to Javier, he wonders with a sort of baffled curiosity if, like his fellow painter Titian, he might yet live to reach the age of ninety-nine. That is why he needs to be careful with his money, he says, just in case.

  Within the few years that are still left to him he manages to visit Paris and to return twice to Madrid in spite of the enormity of such journeys. In Bordeaux he moves house at least four times, but never complains about the inconvenience of yet again packing up his wordly goods. He obviously enjoys the city, with its rootless population of sailors and foreign traders, political exiles and unemployed soldiers, beggars and entertainers and prostitutes. He must feel at home in the atmosphere of shifting uncertainty. He quarrels with Leocadia but seems to be as happy with her as she is with him, and there is no one here to accuse them of immorality. He treats Rosario as his daughter and is hugely proud of her skill as a young artist. They roam the streets together in an endless search for more things to see.