Only Sofia-Elisabete

by Robin Kobayashi

  I was one evening pacing in the dark, worried that I must part ways with my gold wedding ring, when Kitt burst into our dingy apartment. Placing a rush-light in a holder, he called out, “Sofia, where are you?” He had bought us bread and cheap wine to celebrate. In a state of high spirits, he swept me off my feet, and he twirled me three times round.

  “What is it? Oh! What happened?”

  “On my walk, I came upon a Spanish school for children. I spoke to one of its founders, a distinguished elderly man. Do you know who he was?”

  “I can’t even guess.”

  “Leandro Fernández de Moratín.”

  I shrugged.

  “Many years ago, in Madrid, Don Leandro wrote a play where a young woman is deceived into marrying a man in his seventies. He believes in free choice in marriage, and he congratulated you for not marrying Don Fausto. Upon hearing our ages, he mentioned that at twenty, he, too, loved a girl who was just fifteen.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She married a much older man.”

  Don Leandro, being in delicate health, desperately needed an amanuensis—a literary assistant to whom he could dictate a work of translation. After testing Kitt’s knowledge of Spanish and French, he became pleased with this affable and bright young man from Glasgow, although one thing bothered him about the way Kitt spoke.

  “Do you think I speak with a slight or a very noticeable Scottish accent?”

  “My dear Kitt,” and I kissed him, “you have a fine Scottish accent—very dignified and pure. You are the pride of Glasgow.”

  The next evening, we made our way to rue de la Petite-Taupe, a street filled with cloaked prostitutes—the little moles, so called because they burrowed themselves in the darkness of doorways. We joined Don Leandro at a chocolate-house where, in a low-ceilinged back room, Spanish exiles had gathered. Kitt said these ilustrados desired to meet me, the enlightened young lady who refused to marry an ancient nobleman in Madrid. They thought me courageous.

  In the beginning, I hesitated, not wanting to make a spectacle of myself or crow about my adventures. These ilustrados had been my heroes since I was ten years old. Many were intellectuals or politicians; others were brave soldiers. For the first time in my life, I could shout with abandon, “La libertad!”

  Not that I did. There ran an undercurrent of sadness—nay, a bitterness—in their gaiety because these unhappy exiles hadn’t seen their native land in years, and they said they couldn’t return. One of them lamented that French water didn’t taste nearly as good as the water in Madrid. Another ridiculed French theater when nothing could best a Spanish drama. They admitted that they, being enlightened liberals, liked the French better than the French liked them.

  “How did you escape from your home?” one of them asked me.

  So, I explained, “While everyone slept at night, I climbed down a rope that I had tied to the balcony. Then, disguised as a penitent, I rode on a galera to Zaragoza.”

  Someone else asked, “What did you do in Zaragoza?”

  So, I told them, “After praying to Santa Isabel, my patron saint, at the Aljafería, I went to see The Adoration of the Name of God. A friar, with whom I traveled for part of the way, said that if I looked closely at the fresco, I could see him, the angel who swings a thurible, and he was right.”

  This remark about Goya’s fresco stirred up a round of murmurs.

  “Was it not dangerous to travel alone?” Don Leandro asked.

  I nodded. “One time, at a posada, a drunken Frenchman with a potato-nose offered me a real if I were a good penitent and made him beg for mercy. I told him, ‘You stay away from me, Frenchy, or I’ll give you my knife!’ He slurred out, ‘You think you’re muy hombre—very manly.’ Insulted, I gave him a great wallop.”

  The men roared with laughter.

  Kitt, however, wore a frown. “Who was this rude Frenchman?” he whispered in my ear.

  “Jean-Pierre Tessier,” I whispered back. “The man claimed to be a newspaper reporter.”

  Don Leandro interrupted us just then. He requested that I repeat the story about the Frenchman for his old friend, Deaf Don Paco, who had recently survived a serious bout of illness. In the corner of the room, this sordo—the deaf man—sat alone and forgotten at a small table. Thick-set, with a flat snub nose, he resembled an aged bull, one who could still be forceful despite his infirmity.

  The old man’s eyes were dull and weary, his thinning tufts of hair a wiry grey. He wore a white silk neckcloth, brown jacket, brown pantaloons and boots. He tapped his fingers on the table, half-irritable, half-restless, as though he found his deafness or his friends or, perhaps both, very tiresome. What a great bore it must have been for him to be excluded from conversations.

  Don Leandro introduced us, communicating energetically with hand signals. This irked the proud old man, who complained, “Do you enjoy speaking with your hands to show everyone I am a deaf man?” He hated being deaf. He hated it when others weren’t discreet about it.

  Given that, I spoke simply and clearly, with the hope he could understand me. As my story progressed, though, I became more animated. My performance had made the lonely old man howl with laughter, such that the points of his peaked eyebrows smoothed round. He had understood most of it. Don Leandro nodded his approval, and he bustled off, taking my husband with him to discuss their business.

  The old man motioned for me to sit with him. He pointed to a short stack of paper on the table.

  “Place five dots anywhere you like,” and he handed me his pencil.

  It must have been some kind of game. Quickly I dotted each corner, and then the center. Once I surrendered his drawing paper to him, he dashed at it, like a madman, and in a matter of seconds, he connected the dots into a butterfly arranged on the back of a woman’s head. She was a striking woman, whose long dark curls added to her mystery. He must’ve drawn her face hundreds of times.

  “Don Paco?”

  He laughed for some reason.

  I held up five fingers. “Por favor, place five dots anywhere you like.”

  On a new sheet of paper, he drew five dots in a row, some being higher than others. He pushed the paper towards me. Taking his pencil, I drew a caterpillar, with the head of a handsome young man (my Kitt, of course) to complement the butterfly-lady. The old man stroked his chin thoughtfully. Snatching the pencil from me, he made corrections to my drawing, aided by his magnifying glass.

  “My caterpillar was strange-looking, with humps like a camel.”

  He shrugged, not understanding me. Using his pencil, I wrote down what I had said.

  “There are no rules in art,” he declared. “I am seventy-nine and still learning, even though I can’t see and my hands are unsteady. All I’ve got left is will.”

  He signed his sketch, “Sólo Goya,” or Only Goya, for his butterfly lady-love. I nearly cried out at the discovery of it, that he was the painter Francisco de Goya. Ay! Paco is a nickname for Francisco. Oh, stupid, stupid girl.

  In my mind, a painter like Goya ranked as a superhuman, a being not of this world, and thus, not one to waste time with mere mortals. He gave me the butterfly-lady, which I was honored to accept. Shaking his pencil, he motioned to the caterpillar, and so, my boldness having returned, I signed the drawing, “Sólo Sofia-Elisabete.” He broke out into a broad grin. Of a sudden, he whipped out his magnifying glass to examine me.

  “Your features are curiously beautiful and unique. Are you a painter’s model?”

  “Me? Oh, no.”

  “You must be my model.”

  My heart soared. “Truly, Don Francisco?”

  “I insist upon it. Do you not want to sit for me?”

  “Oh yes, please!” but then I recalled the “us” in me. “If my husband agrees to it—”

  “Who?”

  “Mi esposo.” I proudly showed him my gold wedding ring.

  He dismissed that impediment. “I shall paint at night. Come to number 24, cours de Tourny, tomorrow, when it
’s dark. Leocadia will be expecting you.”

  Kitt wouldn’t agree to let me work at night as a painter’s model though we sorely needed the money. He thought it highly suspicious, ridiculous even, that a painter could do any work in such poor lighting. Did I not know that Goya must have had many lovers? Night is the color of amor for a libidinous painter. Kitt tried to reason with me, but I was stubborn.

  “Oh, please, please say yes.”

  His nose twitched with disapproval. “I would be out of my senses to say yes.”

  “It’s one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me—to pose for a great painter.”

  He saw it differently. “You have charmed him. As your husband and protector, I cannot agree to it.”

  Annoyed at him and his manly attitude, I stamped my foot. Unfortunately, his toes got in the way, and he cried out in agony. He refused to hear my apology.

  Pushing me aside, he remarked, “Your foot-stamping is the least charming thing about you.”

  We had gone to bed angry after that. It must’ve been one in the morning when Kitt nestled up against my back and he whispered that he trusted me, that he shouldn’t have doubted our love. He admitted to being jealous of Goya, and he was sorry for it. In my gloomy mood, I pretended not to hear him.

  Stroking my hair, he asked, “Are you awake?”

  He knew I was. Grumpily, I turned round but, in the darkness, I couldn’t see his face inches from my own. I reached out with my hand, only to meet his hand. He entwined his warm fingers with mine. His slow sigh of surrender followed, for I had won him over to my side.

  “I shall escort you there.”

  “Thank you, querido mío.”

  He would, undoubtedly, wait in the dark for me, alone and miserable for hours, his mind and heart uneasy. As it turned out, he didn’t have to do anything of the sort. Leocadia Zorilla, the companion of Goya, invited him into their apartment at Bérard’s hotel, where her ten-year-old daughter Rosario entertained him, or rather, peppered him with questions about Scotland. By the end of the evening, the girl had formed a childish fondness for this young Glaswegian. A blossoming painter herself, she declared him a manly muse.

  I flattered myself that I had inspired Goya. It’s true that he preferred to paint at night when the colors by candlelight were much warmer and lovelier. To this end, he wore a bizarre hat with lit candles stuck into metal tubes that ringed the brim. He also wore spectacles, sometimes three pairs, and he relied on a magnifying glass, given his poor eyesight. Armed with a palette knife and a rag, he painted rapidly, without making a drawing first. Did he not like lines drawn on the canvas?

  That and a thousand other questions for him crowded in my brain. How could I possibly ask anything when he was irascible and explosive and constantly moving about? It occurred to me that Goya’s deafness made him terribly frustrated, because he was a tough-minded old man dependent on those who could hear, which both embarrassed and vexed him. Everyone around him spoke an alien language—one composed of sound and inflection that he couldn’t comprehend. And so, with emotions unchecked, he became doubly fierce and truculent, nearly gone mad at times with his deafness.

  Still, this brusque old man could be gentle. I had observed the tenderness and affection with which he spoke to Rosario, his Ladybird as he called her, whenever she peeked inside the room to watch us. Could she be his natural daughter? She had his eyes and she shared his love for art. I was pondering this, when I happened to notice a disturbing sketch pinned to the wall. It had been rendered with a soft black crayon. In it, a madman, with a hideous evil-eye, sits alone, trapped in murky darkness.

  Goya grunted. “I call that one loco furioso. I saw him in the madhouse, here in Bordeaux.”

  I blurted out, “I am no stranger to madness.”

  He gave me a questioning look.

  “My imagination crossed into the land of insanity,” I told him slowly. “According to my husband, who found me lost in the desert, I believed myself a goose flying from place to place, and catching insects on the wing.”

  He repeated my words, amazed that he had understood everything.

  I continued on, “Once you’ve gone mad, it’s almost impossible to leave that world.”

  “Why?”

  “In the grip of madness, you discover that things needn’t make any sense there. You don’t have to explain yourself; you’re not responsible for anything. You can even hide and stay lost there if you want, which is what I did, to avoid painful truths and the memory of the worst betrayals.”

  “How, then, did you regain your reason?”

  “The mystical stream la Gloriosa cured me.”

  He snapped at me, “What nonsense and superstition!”

  “Upon my honor, the stream was magical. It melted my wings and—”

  “You must never abandon reason. The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

  “Monsters—”

  “Ya, ya, ya, I’m not afraid of witches, hobgoblins, apparitions or boastful giants, nor indeed of any kind of beings except human beings. The worst monster is man.” An ominous shadow crossed his face.

  “Monstrous human beings, like King Ferdinand, monstering others,” I muttered, with contempt.

  He went on, most emphatically, “Imagination abandoned by reason produces these impossible monsters. But imagination united with reason is the mother of the arts and the source of marvels.”

  This made perfect sense to me. Believing in it, I became excited, impatient even, to write those words down in my note-book. This knowledge I would impart to Kitt and, together, we would be the heroes of reason and imagination, slaying those impossible monsters in the world.

  Goya held a viewing of the completed painting for his stunned friends, who had expected another work of gloom and despondency. He was rightly proud of it. Don Leandro thought it most singular—a kind of blurred reality of various shades of blue, a color rarely used by Goya—and unlike anything else in the art world. He said of the painting, “It is supremely confident and calm, tinged with a soft morning light that plays with our fancy.”

  The others teased little Rosario, declaring that she had painted this because, in their minds, no one but the young and innocent could dream of a better world. The winsome girl shook her head and told them, “I would rather paint a Scotsman who has freckles.” Kitt grinned, and I sensed his relief that the portrait had been completed and that I had been safely returned to him. Then there was Leocadia. “Who will buy such a strange painting?” she complained, but she often acted surly towards Goya, for theirs was not a harmonious relationship.

  The portrait measured fifty-two inches by forty-six. In it, I wear a blue-silk morning gown with short full sleeves. I am reclining in a chair, its fabric a delicate blend of whitish-blue and ochre. On the small table next to me sits a cup of chocolate. My honey-brown hair is worn half up and half down—the down part cascading to my hips. From under my skirts peep lilac-kid shoes, very dainty-like, with one foot pointed straight, the other not so inclined. My hands, which rest at my heart, clasp a posy of hyacinths of unchanging blue, a symbol of constancy. My head is slightly tilted to the side; my eyes are raised as though I am watching my lover. An expressive countenance reveals my secrets—profound happiness and hope, love and admiration.

  Goya explained, “It’s a girl who married her true love, and this is her happy luna de miel.”

  His friends recalled that ten years ago he had composed, using brush and India ink, a dark image of a young woman tortured on the rack by the Inquisition because she had married the man she loved. And many years before that, he had made an etching and aquatint of a miserable girl whose father forced her to marry a dwarfish old man more than twice her age.

  “I deplore such a sacrifice in the name of money. This time I’ve painted the complete opposite of an ill-matched marriage.” With a triumphant look, he asked, “Are you astounded, my friends?”

  Don Leandro spoke with his hands. “Paco, I never thought you would create
another work of art as sanguine as this. The bright and light colors, the beauty and simplicity—only you could have painted it.”

  “I don’t repeat myself when it comes to my art,” Goya reminded him. And then he looked at me. “Only Sofia-Elisabete, who had the courage to survive and who married for love, could inspire me to paint something hopeful. Only together could we have done it. I hear her voice.”

  The portrait, on display at the Exchange—a grand marketplace near the quay—sold within three days. Goya didn’t know exactly to whom, but the enthusiastic purchaser, an Englishwoman, who said it reminded her of someone, paid the equivalent of fifty guineas, a remarkable sum for a Spanish painter not known well in England. Tears filled my eyes that the painting was gone. Kitt had taken me each day to view it, and I had hoped it to be mine, at least for a while longer.

  Goya must have felt sorry for me. He made me keep the second-hand morning gown and kid shoes that he had borrowed from a brothel. The brothel-keeper owed him a favor. My worn walking-boots and muslin gown and black cloak that I wore each day must have come to his notice. Nothing escaped his artist’s eye. On the last day we spoke, this otherwise frugal man paid me an extremely generous forty-eight francs for my work as a model, given the huge success of the sale. Kitt and I rejoiced, because we were two guineas closer to saving enough for fare on the Sarah, a cutter that journeyed from Bordeaux to Plymouth every fortnight.

  “Treat yourselves to a French dinner, one with a bottle of clairet and a succulent poularde made with twenty herbs for your health,” he urged me and Kitt, giving us another six francs. He thought us both too lean. It bothered him. And then he dismissed us with a wave of his hand.

  Goya already had plans for a new project, something to do with lithography, and his mind was wholly absorbed with it, completely driven. The only things he sketched nowadays were bulls and bullfights. The bulls of Bordeaux he called them. Soon, he would move to a white-stone house with a small garden on the rue de la Croix Blanche, a poor area where the city met the countryside. I saw how it was. Sofia-Elisabete, the painter’s model, had been cast off. She, who had pretended to be the Tenth Muse, was muse no longer, and she cried softly at her loss.