Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  Goya saw a monk on his hands and knees in prayer turned into a strange four-legged animal by the folds of his garment. The scattering of thin blue stars painted on the walls were like tiny bubbles of thought. In places the walls were stained black by the smoke from candles and flaming lanterns. He could just distinguish the carved figure of a naked woman whose arms were crossed over her breast. She looked much older than the church that held her.

  He climbed the stairs and returned to the world outside, the sunlight flickering on the nervous leaves of the elms, glinting on the hair of the women. It was like a practice for dying, this transition from light into darkness, from darkness into light.

  It was probably while he was staying in the Alley of Love that Goya made the painting known as The Milkmaid of Bordeaux. Some people have suggested that it might be a portrait of Rosario, but it seems unlikely since she was only thirteen, while this woman must be several years older. Her smile holds a delicate balance between sadness and joy. Maybe he watched her going by every morning on her donkey and asked her to pose for him, or he might have caught her face in his mind’s eye and turned to it later when he was alone and working. There is no way of finding out more; all that has survived from this time are a few fragments of information: there were young elm trees planted along the Alley of Love; Leocadia once referred to the painting as The Milkmaid; she kept it in her possession for as long as she could, after Goya died.

  Another year was coming full circle and in July 1827 Goya was once more making the journey to Madrid to collect his money: his old bones rattling in the carriage, his eyes straining to see whether that was a procession of people or a line of scraggly bushes in the distance, a fortified town or the peak of a mountain. Once again he left the flat monotony of marshlands and pinewoods and crossed the steep barrier of the Pyrenees. Here the land belonged to the Basques who had been glad to kill the English as well as the French during the war. Their houses were like prisons, with the heavy shield of each family sculpted over the doors. Goya could watch the crackling energy of their speech without making any attempt to read the foreign language that was on their lips. He remembered the Andalusian joke: a Basque writes the name of Solomon and pronounces it Nebuchadnezzer. He thought of Leocadia, who would shout at him in Basque when she was particularly exasperated by his age, his stubbornness and the deafness that enclosed him.

  He must have stayed with his son on the Street of the Green Valley and while he was there he painted the portrait of his grandson Mariano who had just turned nineteen. There is the defiance of youth and the triumph of youthful beauty in the face of this young man, and also perhaps an element of disdain. Later he will buy himself the title of the Marquis of Espinar from a broken-down nobleman who has no more use for it, and he will sell all the paintings he has inherited and he will lose all the money that has been so carefully accumulated on his behalf.

  While Goya was in Madrid I would have him visiting the House of the Deaf Man. Officially it belonged to Mariano, but it was being kept under the watchful eye of Javier who had all sorts of plans for improving it and making it into a grand country residence. Once his father had died the paintings on the staircase walls were obliterated when a new branching pine staircase was constructed, and the colour of the walls was made to match the pink marble bust of the artist which stood on the landing. But for now the house was empty and unused and Goya was free to go there.

  When my mother was approaching her own death she said she wanted to visit the house where she had lived for the last twenty years. She slowly made her way from room to room. She sat in the chairs she had always sat in. She gazed out of the windows at the garden she had tended through the seasons. She talked to the cats who had been her sole companions for such a long time. She hardly seemed to notice the paintings. Later she said, ‘I felt like a ghost. I kept asking myself who the place belonged to and where had they gone. I had no sense of it being my house, none at all, although the cats seemed to recognise me.’

  So Goya entered the house that he had once inhabited. He stood in one of the big rooms and waited until he had grown accustomed to the dim light. According to the inventory which was drawn up later, a child’s armchair was placed between the painting of the Sabbath and the painting of the cudgel fight. He sat down in it now and tried to remember what it had been like to live here and the person who he had been then.

  I would like to think that it was while he was in the House of the Deaf Man that he wrote a letter to Leocadia. It is the only letter from him to her that has survived, the only chance of hearing how he spoke to her, how he viewed her. The letter bears no date, but it is presumed that it was written in Madrid in the summer of 1827.

  ‘My dearest friend,’ he wrote, his spelling and punctuation as erratic as ever and his hand shaking from the effort of holding the pen.

  My dearest friend,

  I have just read your most beautiful letter right through and it has made me so happy that even if I tell you it has made me completely better I am not exaggerating at all. A million thanks … I am most grateful for all you tell me about the carriage and much more about the friendship which my Rosario has established with Madame, the companion at the draughts board, to whom through you I send my respects and a thousand thanks on my knees. I repeat that you should address the envelope to this house because that way I shall have more time for writing without going out … A thousand kisses and a thousand things from your most affectionate Goya.

  By September he was ready to trundle back to Bordeaux with his royal pension in his pocket. It was raining hard when he arrived and it went on raining; the streets of the city were like shallow rivers. Moratin had been waiting to say goodbye to him. He was about to go to Paris to help set up a Spanish school there. He was not well and would die only a few weeks after Leocadia wrote to tell him of Goya’s death. Once he had left Bordeaux there were no more of his gossipy letters to friends, describing how Goya spent his time.

  Around the beginning of 1828, the pharmacist who owned Goya’s house and the house next door in the Alley of Love decided that he wanted to have both buildings demolished and something much larger erected in their place. So, once more, the little family was on the move.

  They were offered the use of several rooms in an apartment being rented by a good friend called Pio de Molina. The house was number 39, Fosses de l’Intendance, now called the Cours de l’Intendance, a fine street in the centre of the city, facing the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame and close to the Grand Theatre which Goya had never bothered to visit because the performances were too serious and not to his taste.

  On the ground floor there was a jewellery and goldsmith’s shop on one side and a bookshop on the other. The woman who owned the bookshop lived here with her two children and so did the woman who ran the lottery shop next door. The owner of the house was a widowed carpenter who lived on the first floor with his two sons. On the second floor, which had the tallest and most decorated ceilings and the biggest marble fireplaces, there was a Mexican heiress, her husband and her young baby. The details of her inheritance were just being arranged in the first months of 1828, turning her into one of the wealthiest individuals in the whole city. Molina and the Goyas seemed to have shared the next floor and nobody has worked out who was living in the attic.

  A stone staircase with a decorated iron banister led the way from one floor to the next in an elegant sweeping curve. I see the old man making the long climb with slow steps, gripping tightly to the cold metal, and pausing to catch his breath on each landing. Once he had reached his own apartment, he could look out of the back window at an enclosed courtyard with just a glimpse of the sky, or out of the tall front windows which commanded a view of a busy street and the sharp spire of the cathedral. This was his home for the few months that were left to him.

  39

  None of Goya’s many houses has survived, except for the one where he was born in that village with its wide and empty landscape and the one where he died, in a room on the third floor of
a late eighteenth-century building, right in the crowded heart of a city.

  When I went to see number 39, Fosses (now Cours) de l’Intendance, it was in the process of being turned into the Spanish Cultural Institute of Bordeaux, but, even though everything was in a state of upheaval, the Director of the Institute said he would show me around.

  The front door is sandwiched between a smart dress shop and a shop selling candles and frilly household goods. A brass plaque fixed to the outside wall shows Goya in profile, glancing with a weary eye at all the activity going on around him.

  Passing from the busy street into the narrow entrance hall I was swamped by a babble of sound from several radios playing different music, men in overalls shouting to each other, the whizz of drills, and the bump and crash of heavy things being moved about. The air smelt of fresh paint and plaster. The looped intestines of new electricity cables lay in heaps on the unfinished concrete floor, along with ladders and trestles, sheets of plastic and open cardboard boxes.

  I was shown the old wine cellar where a central heating system was being installed. The muffled space was bright with strip lighting and all the walls were smooth and white apart from one small patch which had been left untouched. Here, someone long ago had written the Spanish word for blood, sangre, in lamp black on the old plaster. No way of knowing who wrote it or why, just the fact of this strangely disembodied fragment floating across the barrier that separates time past from time present. I wonder if they decided to preserve the word, or to cover it over.

  Back in the entrance hall I looked up at the staircase rising almost miraculously through the three floors of the building. And there was old man Goya, gripping with his left hand tight on the banister rail as he pulled himself from one shallow stone step to the next, grunting from the effort. Someone said he once stumbled and fell on these stairs, but they are not steep and he was not badly hurt.

  I followed him as far as the second floor landing where I stopped to peer into the grand suite of rooms which had been rented by the Mexican heiress. I could not enter because the floors had just been varnished, but I could see five narrow French windows leading on to a balcony, and the marble fireplace where the heads of two Grecian caryatids were peering tentatively out of the swathes of plastic sheeting in which they had been wrapped.

  On the next floor, where Goya and his family had lived with Pio de Molina, a group of men in overalls were sitting around a trestle table and eating lunch. The front rooms were less grand than those downstairs and there were no Grecian maidens decorating the fireplace, but a few curling acanthus leaves instead. The walls were a pale green and the smell of cooked meats and cigarette smoke mixed with the smell of emulsion paint.

  There was such a sense of emptiness and absence here that I did not know what to do to bring it back to life, so I placed the thought of an easel right in the centre of one of the rooms and around the walls I leant a few small unframed canvases, the little still lifes that Brugada said Goya produced in the time it took him to smoke two cigarettes. They have all since disappeared without trace, but I could imagine a group of soft-skinned peaches, the almost human body of a pear, a dried codfish, along with several other fleeting images of reality that he caught and held. In 1831 a painting Goya had made of a dog was offered as a prize in a local raffle and in 1832 a family living in the Alley of Love bought one of his pictures from a secondhand dealer at the Saint Fort fair. This one showed a dog motionless with fright in front of a snake. The family kept it hanging above their fireplace, but no one has seen it since.

  Now in a corner of that empty, pale green room, I place the image of a bed. It is a single bed, of the style known as French Empire, made out of polished walnut wood, with a solid curved back and deep sides so that it looks like a little boat. There is a drawing made shortly after Goya’s death which shows him lying on a bed just like this and that is why I can picture it now. I would never have recognised him from the drawing; he looks nothing like my idea of him.

  The bed does not seem to belong here in the front room so I trundle it over the polished wooden floors and into one of the small rooms at the back, with a window out on to the enclosed courtyard. The problem is that no one knows which of the rooms he was using or where he was when he died. I abandon the bed.

  Now I bring in the piano that Goya rented for Rosario so that she could take lessons. Leocadia said it was Rosario’s chief recreation and she was very sad when it was taken away. There is a velvet stool in front of the piano and Rosario is sitting on it, her feet not quite able to reach the pedals and her small hands struggling to span the notes. The delicacy of her features and her naturally pale skin make her look troubled already, even before the troubles have come. The future is gathering around her like storm clouds.

  But now she plays and old man Goya stands beside her and smiles and watches the music she is making. The piano lid is open and he leans forward to place the palm of his hand on the vibrating strings, hoping to catch the melody that is passing through them. But he catches nothing. ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘nothing,’ and Brugada who is also in the room remembers this scene and describes it later.

  Pio de Molina walks in. He is a man in his early fifties. His face has the pallor of a southern skin, his hair is black and his features are big and strong. In 1823 he was the ‘Constitutional’ mayor of Madrid, but now he is simply another foreign exile. He is wearing a black jacket over a white shirt and Goya is in the middle of painting his portrait, although the work will never be completed.

  Goya at his easel, Molina sitting still, Rosario playing the piano, Brugada watching it all, Leocadia cooking a meal perhaps; a gathering of friends and family, poised on the edge of change. They are all very aware of the old man. They can see how he grows weaker and more vulnerable day by day. There is no hope of recovery for him now and a little fall or a brief fever could topple him like a bullet in his heart.

  They see the effort it takes for him to hold a paintbrush or a piece of chalk, the effort of lifting a spoonful of soup to his lips and the shame of spilling it. They see him trying to light a cigarette with wavering fingers clenched on the match. They note each tremor that passes through his body, the way his left eyelid droops, the trembling of the lower lip, the struggle that is needed for him to rise to his feet, take a few steps and sit down again. Sometimes when he is in a chair, his eyes closed and the skin of his face cold and luminous, it is as if he has gone already.

  Leocadia, who was once infuriated by the erratic swings of his moods, is now pleased when he is impatient or irritable, because it pulls him back into the world. It is his distance and his indifference that frightens her, his absence when she is sitting close beside him. She does not want him to die; none of those who know him here want him to die. Even the big-boned Molina is as solicitous as a mother towards him.

  In the afternoon Goya takes a siesta, lying on his single bed, his mind drifting out into the vastness of sleep. Leocadia comes and stares at him, shocked by how far away he is and how casually he is able to desert her like this, without even pausing to say goodbye. She is tempted to touch the parchment skin of his face and hands. She bends close to listen to the reassurance of his breathing, to watch the flutter of movement behind his eyelids.

  During these last months, Goya very much wanted to see his son. It was as if he wanted the child from his first family to come and see him here with his second family, to give him the blessing of acceptance, in spite of everything. He invited Javier repeatedly. He offered to pay all the expenses. He extolled the benefits of Bordeaux, especially the financial benefits. And finally, in January 1828, Javier said yes, he would come, probably in the summer. In the meantime he would persuade his wife Gumersinda and his son Mariano to visit the old man.

  On 17 January, Goya wrote a letter to Javier: ‘I am overjoyed with the news about … your travellers. So they are coming to spend a few years [sic] here and you too when you are able. I shall be happy and won’t have to travel to see you.’

  On 3 M
arch, Javier wrote to say that the trip had been cancelled and on 12 March Goya wrote back, offering to pay all the expenses for them ‘here and in Paris’, and he added, ‘and you must come too’. On 26 March the mother and son were indeed on their way and Goya wrote, ‘I am impatient for my dear travellers to arrive … They should enjoy themselves here and if you come this summer it will be everything I could have wished for.’

  He went on to tell Javier that he had been unwell but was feeling much better now and hoped soon to be as he was before. He said, ‘I owe my improvement to Molina who has been telling me to take powdered valerian herbs and I am very pleased to now be in a good condition to receive my beloved travellers.’

  Gumersinda and Mariano arrived on 28 March. Leocadia had made rooms ready for them in the apartment. Goya was quite overwhelmed by the excitement, and as he said in his next letter to Javier, ‘So much happiness has affected me a bit and I am in bed. God knows how I would like to go and see you, go and fetch you and then my happiness would be complete. Your Father, Francisco.’

  On 1 April they all lunched together, but the food troubled him and he went to bed immediately after the meal. When he woke at five on the following morning he was unable to speak, and although his voice returned to him within a few hours, he remained paralysed down one side of his body. Not much time left now.

  40

  It took Goya thirteen days to let go of life. On the first day, once the power of speech had returned to him, he was clear and lucid. He realised that this was different from all the other occasions when he had wavered on the edge of mortality; this time he was not going to be able to pull himself back.