Rubén Oliva licked the gummed edge of the envelope and cut his tongue.
Thursday
1
The deaf old man recalled how as a boy, when he came from Fuendetodos to Zaragoza to watch the procession, he had wanted to be under the throne, alongside the porters, hidden by the corduroy curtains of the float, peering through them to spy the legs of the women on the balconies, especially when the procession would stop for some reason, and the tolling of the bells was like a holy dispensation to listen more closely to the rustle of petticoats and the rubbing of legs and the wagging of hips and the tapping of heels, and he imagined couples embracing in the streets, loving …
But in Seville, said the deaf man, when a pause is imposed by the street song, la saeta, it’s like a cry for help in the desert, everyone disappears, and only the Virgin and the person who is singing to her remain. Seville becomes invisible then, and of all the invisible ones the most invisible of all are those who carry the throne of the Virgin, as he is doing now, the ones who can feel themselves alone with the Virgin, carrying her like Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders, along with the symbols of Holy Mary, palm and cypress and olive, mirrors and stairs, fountains, doors, enclosed gardens, the evening star, the entire universe, and, above all, the tower, the tower of David, the ivory tower, the Giralda, which he glimpsed, looking for legs and finding legs, looking through the panting line of porters and finding, if not the erotic life that he had imagined, at least the popular life that was once again the material sustenance of life itself. In Seville, as in Madrid, in this year of grace 1806, on the brink of all the disasters of war, the past century’s libertine dream was capriciously prolonged—its festive and egalitarian customs, the people and the nobility all mixed together—for the nobility had taken to imitating the people, going to popular fandangos, thronging into bullrings and theaters, adulating bullfighters and actresses, the dukes dressing up like banderilleros, the duchesses like chulaponas, and in the center of this whirlwind, before history claimed its due and festival turned to warfare and warfare to guerrilla struggle and guerrilla struggle to revolution and revolution, ah, revolution to government and constitution and law, and law to despotism, before all that, it was he, it was Don Francisco de Goya y Lost Senses, who showed the people to the aristocracy, and what is more, who showed the people to themselves.
He left Madrid amid the waving washerwomen, the peddlers, the jugglers, the chestnut venders whom he had endowed with faces and true dignity for the first time, and now in Seville he was welcomed with waves and cheered through the streets by guilds of dyers and silk mercers, weavers of linen and dealers in gold thread, all those who labored in the making of the cloaks and mantles, skirts and hoods, veils and tunics of all that divine seraglio: La Virgin del Rocío, La Señora de los Reyes, La Macarena, and La Trianera; in the old deaf man passing among them wearing a crowned hat and a gray frock coat the workers recognized one of themselves, the son of a gilder from Fuendetodos, the artisan who was who he was because he had done what he had done: canvases, engravings, murals, independent of any explanation, felt rather than revealed: he has presented us to the world, and, more important, to ourselves, who lived like blind people, not recognizing ourselves, not recognizing our strength …
But he, Don Francisco de Goya y Light Sensors, didn’t want to hear about recognition this Maundy Thursday night in Seville; all he wanted was to take off his hat and his frock coat, to be again what he wanted to be, a worker, a gilder, an artisan, a member of the guild, in his shirtsleeves, his shirt open at the neck, unkempt and sweaty, barefoot, carrying the tower that was the Virgin alongside the porters, hidden from those who applauded him because they recognized themselves in him, when he secretly wanted them to recognize something else, the way he had exposed the excitements of perversion and imaginative sexual intimacy. He introduced the most obscure people to themselves, but especially he introduced man and woman in darkness he put them beneath this float and this procession, wrapped them in sheets as if in sacred robes and sighs, and showed them, as he was doing now, carrying the weight of the world, wrapped in the sheets as the porters scrambled beneath the skirts of the Virgin and as the whole town mingled in the narrow lanes of Seville.
He felt alone and soiled and tired. He had to prove that he was still strong. Strong not just as an artist but also as a man. He bore the throne of the Virgin and panted among the panters, protected by the billowing skirts of the Virgin, the virgins of Seville: he saw nothing. And then he remembered that he was the king of the keyhole, the most lucid and cruel spy ever. As a reward, he was allowed to look through locks, to glimpse flesh drained of color, clenched in carnal embrace by the side of the sepulcher, to expose in black and white what that flesh could do in its mad effort to hold back time, to drive away death and consecrate life.
2
This, many years later, is what the old man saw through the keyhole of his canvas. A fresh, bare one, though already populated in his mind by a jumbled confusion of sheets and flesh clamoring to emerge, and again he paused before the empty canvas like a village gossip in front of the lovers’ door at the hour when a nocturnal wind from the Levant silenced the rest of the world, and the lovers too, and the old man hesitated: Should he allow them to appear or not? Should he let them inhabit his canvas? And he looked at them through that keyhole—at her, coated with a lubricating oil like a second skin over her totally naked body, with the exception of her sex, which was covered by a butterfly, inviting her masculine companion to bring close his own sex, a scythe of flesh, or rather a swallow, a black swooping bird that never rested, that never ceased its flight, that ate and fornicated in the air, to bring that bird to the butterfly, as if she, the woman of thick eyebrows and tight lips, bathed in oil, could gore him: dragonfly against dragonfly, wing against wing, you will find I am not defenseless, you will find I am not as before, an unshielded, lubricated hole; now the scythe of your sex must first defeat my butterfly, and my butterfly bites, be careful, and soars, and pricks, and punctures, I warn you, never again will you find me defenseless, and then he takes her by the waist and turns her over with a single motion, places her face-down with a single stroke, exposing to the lover and the watcher her avid buttocks, lubricated, easy to penetrate, and he enters her from behind, not in the anus but in the sweet vagina, proffered, half open, oiled, shaved, reduced to the impalpable and invisible down of puberty, the shaved mons veneris covered by the butterfly, which now flew away to keep from being crushed, revealing the woman’s pubic mound, already darkened, despite the morning shave, by a heavy, quick rebirth of stubble, member and membrane rejoined; you also have a hole: as if obeying its mistress, the butterfly alighted between the man’s small, raised buttocks and tickled him there, and he came and came again, praising her, thanking her for his victory, Elisia, Elisia, you can transport me with nothing but a look, how can you give me more than this, for which I can never repay you; yes, Romero, do me as you would a bull, stick me, Romero, as you would like to stick the bull but don’t dare, macho bullfighter, because you don’t want to admit that the bull is your stud and you are two lost fags, except the bull wants to impale you and you don’t want to be impaled, now stick me as you would stick the bull, make me come as you would make that impossible couple, the butterfly and the bull, come together, Romero, the unchanging sun and the moon that waxes and wanes to become a claw, rend me Romero, your claw, love me, your whore, only a claw, lover, and then again to swell, to grow, aren’t you jealous, sun, constant one, immutable, in your suit of eternal lights, while the universe whirls in circles around your waist, and although your rays scorch them all you cannot reach them with your shaft of fire, for the night renders you impotent?
—The shame, the shame …
—I gave you everything, and you, nothing.
—The shame, the shame.
—Make me dance naked for you, murmured La Privada, and at the very moment of orgasm she fainted in the arms of Pedro Romero.
The painter, watc
hing the scene through the white view hole of his canvas, felt a twinge of sadness and envy, it was proper that there should be so much envy in Spain, where there was so much to be coveted, but nothing as much as this, the desirable body of the bullfighter embracing the waist of the inanimate, desirable body of the actress, who appeared dead, giving the matador this supreme trophy, the reenactment of the agony in each act of love, because that is what Goya most feared and most envied: that this serious woman of joined brows and downy upper lip, Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, fainted every time they made love.
Who could stop adoring her after knowing that?
Men would leave her but they would neither forget her nor stop loving her passionately, never, never.
—No man has ever left me. I have sacrificed all my best lovers so as to be the first to break away. Everything comes to an end …
Pedro Romero and Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, remained asleep, naked, arms around each other, barely covered by a heavily starched sheet that seemed to have a life of its own, bodies and clothes soiled by a bath of oil that was like the blood of the two of them, their bodies joined by a pleasure that separated them, all the secrets of the bodies slipping away in a perpetual flight that the old painter paused to contemplate as one contemplates a Muslim patio where the stone is constantly turning to water, returning to stone, and in water and stone finds no face or object other than the word of God …
This he saw, his heart steeled, faithful witness to the love-making of the matador Pedro Romero and the actress Elisia Rodríguez, his eyes coldly watching, but his heart bitter and his gut wrenched with fire.
This he saw. What he rapidly rendered on his canvas was black-and-white, drained of color, a double-washed sky, dark gray and impure white, the black stone of a cemetery in place of the starched bed, and the bodies dressed, standing, but the man dead, dressed in white frock coat and tie, and white shoes, stockings, and pants, as if for his First Communion, but the occasion was death, the corpse of the man with his eyes closed and his mouth open in agony, without grace, without butterflies, without adornment, held by the unkempt woman, close-browed, emaciated, grasping the head and the waist of the dead man. He, fainted forever, dead in Goya’s engraving, not she, awake in her sorrow.
For once she had been abandoned.
He signed it in the corner and titled it Love and Death.
He looked at the drawing, the drawing looked at him. The dead man opened his eyes and looked at him. The woman turned her head and looked at him. There was no need for words. They had appeared, they were going to appear, with or without him. They had defeated him. They needed him only to form the triangle that would make the act more exciting: the old man watched the act only to excite the young lovers. With or without him, they were going to appear. In 1806, when all this happened, or in 1821, when Goya painted it in his Quinta del Sordo, or even today, when all this is happening.
3
Don Francisco Goya y Lost Census bought a pistachio ice cream in the sweet shop on the Plaza del Salvador, turned down Villegas, and entered the small plaza of Jesús de la Pasión, where the famous actress Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, was performing this Holy Saturday of the Resurrection. Out of the corner of his eye the old painter, licking his green ice, saw the bridal shops that were the dominant businesses in the square, which was called the Plaza del Pan when Cervantes wrote there, and he mockingly compared the organdy and tulle outfits with the hoods and long skirts of the Virgins carried in procession through Seville. Of course, the skirts that draped the Virgin from waist to ground, like those on the mannequins in the shops, only served to cover a taper, the underlying wooden structure of the image, which has features carved only on its face and hands.
La Privada, Elisia Rodríguez, in contrast, was dressed as a Maja, with low-cut Empire gown and shoes of silver silk, her splendid body not reduced to hands and face. Had he seen her? Of course he had, he had even painted her. But it would be truer to say that, because he had painted her, he had seen her. But now the painter was crossing a patio rimmed with orange trees whose dropped fruit lay rotting on the cobblestones, coming to see the model, to ask her to pose nude for him.
She received him out of curiosity. Is he famous? she asked her lover, Pedro Romero, and the bullfighter said he was, he was a famous son of Aragón, a peasant, but also a painter of the court and all that; they said he was a genius.
Is he amusing? At times, answered Romero, when he paints attractive things, festivals, parasols, kids playing, girls running, bulls in the plaza, all that. He paints kings—very ugly he paints them, but if they like it, what can you do? And then he paints dreadful, awful things, women with monkey faces, women selling their daughters, witches, old women fucking, horrible things. And you, has he painted you? Once, from a distance, awaiting the charge in the ring, and another time, killing. He’s told me he wants to do a canvas that will make me immortal. Well, my immortality is no more than two passes of the cape and a flourish over the head of the bull. The rest, Elisia, I will never see, nor you either. Come on, dance naked just for me.
He took off his high hat. He wasn’t going to hide his years. His hoary crest sprang out, freed from its high, narrow prison. They exchanged banalities, sweets, drinks, thanks, compliments, praises, candied egg yolks, and then he repeated that he wanted to paint her. And she said she already knew that, through Romero. And he said that Romero neither knew nor, perhaps, approved of what he wanted. And what was that? Then the old deaf painter, looking at her in a way that seemed to say “I have eyes, all the rest has failed me, but I have eyes, and my blood throbs,” said simply that actresses die. She knew that; he ate an egg yolk as if to seal the comment. They die, he continued, and if they get lucky they die young and beautiful, but if their luck fails them they lose their youth and beauty: then they are nothing. I know that, replied La Privada, that’s why I live for today, and that is my message every time I love or sing or dance or eat: there is nothing better waiting for me, this is today and tomorrow; and only today is real for me—only today. No, but there is a way of surviving, continued the old man. I know, she said, a painting. Yes, but nude, señora.
—You’re asking for yourself? she asked him, suddenly switching to the familiar form of address.
—Yes, and for your lover, too. Someday, one of you will die. The two bodies that are so drawn to each other will be separated. Not by choice, not in anger, not at all, but by something that cruelly crushes our will and our whim. We are born separate, we meet, and in the end, death will separate us again. That is intolerable.
—For you, perhaps. I, truthfully …
—No. Elisia … I may call you Elisia?… For your lover and, yes, for me, too, it would be so, it would be intolerable to cease to love only because death intervened.
—So you like me?
—I desire you.
—Then you may have me, Paco, you may take all of me for yourself, in fact and not in a painting, but on one condition sweetie …
Sitting there, a little stooped over, his high hat in his gnarled, agile hands, the serious hands of an artist and a teamster, the deaf man felt stripped. The actress ran to an ornate Tabasco wooden chest she had gotten from her servant Guadalupe, knelt down, opened it, poked among the clothes, releasing an intense smell of musk, and she extracted something that was wrapped in lace shawls, and from inside that, a green velvet case, and, with sensual urgency mixed with religious respect, with the delicacy of her long, loving, digging fingers, which could be claws when she wished, feathers if she pleased, the actress finally pulled from the case a portrait, which she showed to the painter. His eyesight already faded, he held it in front of his nose, smelling, more than anything, the whiff of sulfur that clung to the portrait, an odor that even a heretic like Don Francisco de Goya y Lucifers associated with the Malignant One, Asmodeus, Beelzebub, Satan, and was this his portrait, the portrait of the devil himself? Why not? Intense green eyes set in dark sockets dominated his fine features, giving them a kind of resignatio
n that Goya associated with his own demons, and looking from the portrait to the woman who offered him that diabolic image, Goya leapt from painting to grammar, only the non-possessive pronoun defined this otherwise ordinary and unusual man, who had been captured in a portrait of repulsive fidelity.