We looped back round, passed the Judaic swimming pool, the high walls of the cemetery, the complicated Last Judgement above the entrance porch of the cathedral where Goya’s funeral was held and eventually we reached the wide square which holds the church of St Michael with the sharp-tipped Tower of St Michael standing next to it.
We sat in a little café on the edge of the square and drank mint tea from glasses decorated in twirling golden patterns. A picture of the Black Stone of Mecca hung on the wall. A woman’s voice was singing guttural lamentations on the radio. At the next wobbly table a man with a voluptuous creased face grinned at us, revealing a row of golden teeth. Goya returned the grin.
There was a street market laid out on the paving stones around the church and its tower. A man wearing a woollen cap and several damp-looking jumpers over his long white robes was selling an aluminium saucepan and a record player that had lost its lid. A man in a fez was standing guard over a pile of knitwear that was tangled irredeemably together as if it had been washed up in a storm. A woman with a high turbaned headdress, barefoot in the puddles, walked by with a baby tied to her back by a long patterned cloth. Everybody was very slow and quiet and preoccupied. Goya liked this place, felt at home, made drawings with the greasy crayon that he always used.
He could not be persuaded to enter the dark containment of the church, but together we walked around the tower to see if there was still a way of getting into its subterranean vault. In the old days the custodian of the tower and his family used to do their cooking at the mouth of the vault and were always ready to show visitors inside. By the light of a lantern you were led down a spiral staircase until you reached a floor that was soft and spongy underfoot. The air smelt sweet and sickly. When your eyes had adjusted to the flickering light, you saw that the walls on all sides were lined with the mummified bodies of human beings. There were about forty of them standing upright, including a general in full military regalia who had been killed in a duel, an entire family poisoned by mushrooms and a porter who had died while attempting to lift a heavy weight. The bodies were mummified naturally in the vault’s cold, dry atmosphere. Some had been here for several hundred years, others, like the mushroom eaters, were quite recent additions. The ones that had fallen to pieces had been piled up in a crumbly heap in the middle of the floor. In the 1840s the writer Théophile Gautier described this vision of mortality as something ‘more monstrous than Goya’s Caprichos’, but for Goya the scene held no fascination; the living interested him, not the dead.
In the spring of 1825 he was in very good humour. In January he had managed to obtain a further six-month permit to stay France, claiming that ‘the doctors say that if I could take the waters and frequent the baths at Bagnères, they are hopeful my health will be restored’. But he had no intention of taking the waters at Bagnères or anywhere else and according to Moratin his health could not have been better. ‘He enjoys the city, the countryside, the climate, the food, the independence and the tranquillity. Since he came here he has had none of the [medical] troubles which bothered him over there …’
But when spring was moving towards summer he became seriously ill. The weather that year was very hot and apparently everyone thought that he was going to die, but he pulled back and recovered. He was then able to use the illness to its full advantage because once again his permit was about to run out. The two doctors who had attended him prepared a written declaration that he was suffering from ‘hardened bowels, paralysis of the bladder and a large tumour on the perineum’. They concluded that the illness, compounded by the loss of the senses of hearing and sight, ‘is incurable and it is at present absolutely impossible for the patient to do any exercise whatsoever’. This statement was translated into Spanish and countersigned by the Commissioner of Police and the Deputy Mayor. It was sent to Javier in Madrid who duly presented it to the authorities on his father’s behalf. As a result a full year’s extension was granted.
However, already by mid-June Goya had completely shaken off the effects of his illness and was back at work, ‘very full of himself and rather arrogant, painting like nobody’s business without ever correcting what he has done’. It was true that a cardiac disturbance made his hand tremble and he needed to use a magnifying glass as well as the spectacles to see the details of his own work, but as he said in the letter to Ferrer, he had nothing but will power, which he had in abundance.
In the autumn of 1825 he and his family left the hotel and moved into a house on the Street of the White Cross, not far from the church of St Seurin where the old basset hound was out for a walk. In Goya’s time this area was on the edge of the countryside with a view stretching to the north over meadows and vineyards and kitchen gardens.
The house has gone, but there are many others just like it: a row of sandstone buildings, only one storey high and as neat as family mausoleums in a cemetery. The neighbourhood is as poor now as it was then and the street is wide enough to be choked by lorries and streams of cars. Goya’s house had its own little bit of a garden and upstairs the light came in from the north and the south. The road was used every morning by the milkmaids who passed on their donkeys, bringing milk and cheese to the markets.
It was here that Goya began to do lithography, working in a fury of energy during the months of October, November and December. He got materials and whatever technical help he needed from a man called Cyprien Gaulon who had been a primary school teacher and then a soldier in Spain but had recently started a lithographic studio.
Close to the north-facing window, Goya placed a limestone slab vertically on a strong wooden easel, as if it was an ordinary canvas. He covered the stone with a uniform grey tone and worked with scrapers to bring in the first miracle of light. Then he used the greasy crayon to strengthen the shadows and give energy to the figures he was making. He remained standing, walking backwards and forwards every other minute to judge the close and the distant effect of what he was doing.
(illustration credit 36.1)
It was here in the Street of the White Cross that he made the wonderful series of lithographs known as ‘The Bulls of Bordeaux’. I like to think that when he looked out of the window he could gaze so far into the distance across the wide expanse of countryside that he could see the province of Aragon and himself as a child and as a young man there. He could see the bulls in the bullring, the people watching them and the people fighting them. He could see it and could hold the moment like a note of music, catching the muttering energy of a crowd, the glint of sunlight on a sword, the sliding smile on a face, and above all else, the solemn confrontation between the one who is about to kill and the one who is about to be killed.
In early December he wrote a letter to Ferrer and enclosed ‘an attempt in lithography which represents a village bullfight’, saying ‘if you find it worthy of being circulated, I will send you as many prints as may suit you’. Two weeks later, when Ferrer had not shown much enthusiasm, Goya suggested ‘giving them to a dealer in prints for a modest price, without mentioning my name’.
The prints were not sold and life went on and then, in May, with his leave again running out, Goya became restless and decided that he wanted to go to Madrid. As Moratin said, ‘the journey will be booked three or four days in advance as usual … He is going alone and is dissatisfied with the French … If he has good fortune and arrives safely then you can welcome him; if not then don’t be surprised, the least setback could leave him dead in the corner of some inn.’
He left on 10 May and arrived safely eight days later. He stayed with Javier and his wife and son Mariano, in the house on the Street of the Green Valley. On 30 May he wrote a letter to King Ferdinand, asking if he might be given a retirement pension, in view of his years of service. On 22 June 1826 his request was granted, with the acknowledgement that ‘his advanced age promises that for natural reasons, the period in which he may enjoy these privileges will be short’.
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I wonder if Goya became a different person when he was
in the company of his son and his son’s family. I wonder if the tone of his voice changed as he entered the house that he had given to them and looked at the furniture that had been his, the books which he had acquired over the years, his most loved paintings hanging from the walls and staring at him with reproach because he had deserted them, or, worse than that, with complete indifference because they no longer remembered him. And did he notice that some of the paintings had already gone, while others had been taken down and put to one side in a corner, waiting for the opportunity of being exchanged for a sum of money?
I suppose he might have walked into the house with a sense of proprietorial authority; after all he had paid for everything here and he was still paying. But somehow I think it is more likely that in crossing this threshold he was turned into an intruder, an uninvited guest, an old man who should have been dead long ago. I see him suddenly becoming fragile and querulous as he leans on the arm of his daughter-in-law, complaining about the ache in his leg, the weakness of his eyesight, the problems he has when he passes water, the alarming irregularity of his heartbeat. Leocadia’s body, Rosario’s laughter, the smiling whores on the Alley of Love, the circuses, the fairs, the theatres and the restless curiosity of each new day in a foreign land, it all becomes as insubstantial as a dream. Instead, there is the solid and tangible apparition of this, his legal family: the three of them standing in front of him and watching him with something close to hunger. ‘They want me to die,’ he thinks and with that he feels the presence of Thin Death at his side, the face covered by a sackcloth hood and the eyes behind the slits in the cloth glinting like the eyes of a snake.
‘I have a present for you,’ he says to Javier, and he gives him some drawings he has made in Paris and Bordeaux. Javier flicks through them like a banker counting notes. Later he will stick them on to pieces of pink backing paper and change their numbers and move them into different sequences. He wants to have the most saleable ones together.
Goya takes his son’s hands in his own, holds him in a tight grip and pulls him close, blood of his blood, the one surviving child from a long marriage. He feels the exhalation of this other man’s breath on his cheek as he examines the face for what it shows and what it is trying to conceal. He sees a middle-aged man who looks older than his forty-six years, the features slack and heavy with an accumulation of disappointment and resentment. Javier does not want to be interrogated like this; he disentangles himself from the hands and from the eyes.
Money can be so complicated, especially within a family. It rustles and turns and whispers in the dark. It makes promises it cannot keep. It gets into people’s bones and will not leave them alone for a moment. Javier had never needed to work in all his life. He did nothing except count his father’s money, write letters to his father’s bankers and creditors, and deal with the sale of his father’s possessions, especially the paintings and the drawings. In the portrait that Goya made of him on the eve of his wedding in 1805, he appears like a young aristocrat, jaunty and carefree, excused of all responsibility because he has youth and beauty. But in the little drawing made almost twenty years later, he has changed completely. He has the same heavy profile as his mother, the same closed, inward stare.
In 1811, when the war had just ended and the famine was about to begin, Goya and his wife had made their joint will which had such a lasting effect on Javier’s destiny. It is possible that Josefa had known she was going to die soon and knew also that her husband had started or was about to start an affair with Leocadia. That would explain why the terms of the will were so drastic and so uncompromising.
With Josefa’s death, Goya relinquished most of what he owned. It was like a reversal of roles, in which he was the young man who was free to escape from the confines of his home as long as he took nothing with him, while Javier stayed behind surrounded by all the material securities that would protect him through the years that lay ahead. Goya began his life with the beautiful Leocadia, who was five years younger than his own son. He moved from the city to the countryside, from Spain to France, from one rented accommodation to the next, and the outpouring of work never ceased except when he was ill and on the edge of death. Meanwhile Javier stayed where he was, with his wife and his child who was no longer a child, and he did not even manage a visit to Bordeaux until his father was dead and buried.
I wonder if the ghost of Josefa sometimes came to Goya in his dreams, shouting angrily into his deaf ears that he had only married her because her family helped with his career, that he had never loved her or shown tenderness to her and then as a final insult he had betrayed her irrevocably by setting up house with that woman. Did she make him remember how much she had suffered with each new pregnancy: the miscarriages, the stillbirths, the funerals? And now there was only Javier left, the one inheritor of the family name who must be protected at all costs.
So Goya dedicated himself obediently to the support of his son and his grandson, securing investments on their behalf and making sure that they would always be safely provided for. Perhaps it was for their sake, more than his own, that he struggled with such dogged determination to keep his income as Court Painter, even though he despised the King and the Court whose favours he begged with such obsequious devotion. Once he was in Bordeaux, he hardly touched this monthly salary, but passed it on to his bankers who invested it for him. At first he relied on the financial assistance of Javier’s father-in-law Martin Goicoechea. When he died in 1825, Goya’s affairs were handled by a family friend and then by the French banker and entrepreneur Jacques Galos who was amassing a considerable fortune from a number of private enterprises, including the sale of arms to South America.
Goya had an annual income of twelve and a half thousand francs, which was about four times more than his friend Moratin managed on. By living simply and in the poorest districts of the city and by selling the work he was producing in Bordeaux, he was able to save a great deal. Javier’s letters to his father are full of detailed questions about what was happening to the money and Goya answered him, point by point, with an almost childlike openness. ‘I was at Monsieur Galos’s on Saturday and I received the two months’ pay cheques you sent me, I still have the other inscription of nine hundred and seventy-nine francs and if you send the [other] two pay cheques I think I should be able to invest up to twelve thousand reales a year, which is, is it not, a perpetual estate for Mariano and his descendants.’
In one of these letters to Javier he mentioned that when he died he wanted to be buried in the brown robe of his patron saint, Francis of Paolo. This hermit saint, who was said to be able to read people’s minds, who comforted King Louis XI of France when he was ill and terrified of dying, was famous for his austerity and his humility. He owned nothing and he needed nothing and the religious order he founded was called the Minims, the least brethren. Somehow Goya was able to feel that he was poor even though he was rich. The wealthy man existed only for the benefit of Javier and Mariano, while the poor man lived a simple life in Bordeaux, with Leocadia and Rosario. So when he died he was wrapped in those brown robes, even though the sum of sixty thousand francs was rustling and whispering in his French bank accounts – enough to acquire one of those exquisite country mansions that look as delectable as an iced cake and bear such names as My Desire or My Pleasure.
It’s very complicated, this business of trying to disentangle Goya from his money, but I will end with two contrasting images. During his short stay in Madrid in the summer of 1826, he agreed, at the request of the King, to have his portrait painted by the celebrated and very academic Court Painter, Vicente Lopez. Here Goya sits with heavy self-assurance in a chair, holding his brushes in one hand and his palette in the other. He wears a grey silky suit and a white frilled shirt. His left eyelid droops slightly, perhaps as the result of a mild stroke. His expression is stubborn and defiant, but he is unmistakably a member of the establishment, a respected public figure.
But also while he was in Madrid he must have used his old etching press to
produce a series of etchings. One of these – the old man on a swing – seems to be a self-portrait, especially if you compare it with the portrait made by Rosario at around this time. The old man wears a rumpled suit and a white shirt. His feet are bare and his calves are knotted with muscles. His face is filled with a look of wild and private joy. In the next moment he will have swung himself out of the containment of the picture and into the black eternity that lies beyond.
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And then what? Goya was back in Bordeaux in July and by the end of the year he had moved again; this time from the Street of the White Cross to the Street of St Seurin, which was in the same district, but closer to the church. The houses were small, solid, two-storey buildings and several of them were used as brothels, which was why the street was more commonly known as the Alley of Love. The land had previously been the site of a large cemetery and when people dug their gardens they often came across human bones. Goya had a well in his garden which he shared with some of his neighbours. Monsieur Dubédat, the pharmacist who owned the house, lived next door.
From the back window he could see the heavy, crouching form of the church, as firmly rooted in the ground as an old tree. From the front window he could watch the whores. I am sure he liked the contrast. I am sure he enjoyed walking through the tree-lined street where women sold their bodies and men bought them, until he had reached the church which was full of the bodies of the dead. A beggar would be holding out his empty bowl in the arched shadows of the entrance and when Goya passed into the building he could feel the quietness enclosing him like a forest.
A subterranean crypt lay in the deep heart of the church. The warden unlocks a metal gate and you go down stone steps that have been weathered into smooth hollows by the feet of all those who have been here before. You enter the crypt, a pocket of cold space smelling of age and incense. The air is so still it is as if time with all its hungers has never been allowed to intrude. The floor is littered with decorated marble tombs, like the chrysalides of huge insects, waiting for the moment when they can break out of their shells, spread their wings, fly away.
Old Man Goya Page 14
