Nobody had ever painted such dark skin, such a white shirt, the Adam’s apple in his throat, all so offensively exact. The weary gaze of the painter was led over all the realistic details of the painting, the cracks in the lips, the stubble of the beard, the deep blue of the background. Nothing is artificial, exclaimed the artist, nothing is artistic here, this is devilry, not its representation, this is the devil because this is pure reality, without art, he cried, possessed now by the terror that surely she and her repulsive lover, the subject of the portrait, wanted to instill in him. There is no art in this, Elisia, this is reality, this portrait is the man himself, reduced to this immobile and trapped condition, transformed into a pygmy by the art of witchcraft. This is not a painting, Elisia, what is it? the painter asked in anguish, reduced to one of her possessions, exactly as she had wanted him to be, as he read the living but motionless eyes, without art, of the man-portrait, disabused, disillusioned, despairing, disturbed, deconstructed, destroyed …
—If you paint me like this, I will let you see me naked …
—But this isn’t painting, it’s witchcraft.
—I know, silly, a witch friend gave it to me, and she told me, Elisia, you come from a flea-bitten town where the princes married to avoid losing taxes, and you will never understand what this is that I’m giving you, you must find a painter or a poet to put a name to this painting that I’m giving you because you are my most loyal pupil …
God forgive you, said the painter, imagining the horror in the triangular union of the aged witch, the young Elisia, and this man who was the devil himself in a portrait.
—But the witch said to me: Elisia, although this man is very handsome and well endowed, I warn you of one thing …
—Good advice.
—This man is not yet born, this is the portrait of someone who does not yet exist, and if you want him you are going to have to wait many years …
—Until your death!
—Then, Paco, you must make me a painting the same as this, so that my portrait and that of this man who has not yet been born can meet someday, and we can love each other, together at last, he and I.
4
He gave up the thought of painting her as he would have wanted but he wanted her as he couldn’t paint her. She was free with her favors and this famous old man amused her, he told her things she didn’t understand, he was held as much by the sexual pleasure that she knew how to give him as by the challenge that he couldn’t accept: to paint her a companion portrait to the one she had shown him and then returned to its place in her chest.
Of course, she didn’t stop seeing Romero in Seville, she returned with him to Madrid, and Goya, who in any case, had to return to “the city and court” (as Madrid is known), followed them. That was the humiliating thing. He had to return anyway, but now it appeared that he was following them. He longed for what he didn’t dare request. Something more than the careless love she gave him and the passionate love—he watched them through a keyhole—she gave the bullfighter. He was an old man, famous but old, deaf, a little blind, over seventy; his own lovers had all died or he had broken with them, or sometimes they had broken with him. But passion’s ring of flames still blazed, and in its center was a man, Francisco de Goya y Lightning, luminance, lucidity. But now he was only Paco Goya y Lucinderella.
He watched the lovers through the keyholes of his canvases. Once he even tried to sneak into the apartment of La Privada, but he could get no farther than a closed balcony where he almost fell down to Calle Redondilla and cracked his skull. Yet he managed to see something, though he couldn’t hear a thing, and they suspected nothing. But he could distinguish once again, so exalted was it, so commanding an act, the orgasmic climax of Elisia’s fainting. But not with him, with him that never happened, for him she never fainted as she was doing now, stiffening and trembling one moment and collapsing in the bullfighter’s arms the next.
Was it only with Pedro Romero that La Privada fainted? Or would people say: —Everyone made her faint with pleasure, except Francisco de Goya y Lost Sensations?
Spying on them, he would have liked to join them through a generous, possible act of communication. He imagined that it would be like carrying the Virgin in the procession. He was unable to see, under that throne, but his feet and his sense of direction told him that all the streets and lanes of Seville communicated with each other, from the Cinco Llagas Hospital to the Casa de las Dueñas to the Patio de Banderas and Huerta del Pilar and, through the tunnel beneath the Guadalquivir, to the glories of Triana. That was the law of water, universally communicating, springs with gorges and rivulets, and those with rivers, and rivers with lakes, and those with waterfalls, and the falls with the deltas and those with the ocean and the vastness of the sea with the darkness of the depths. Why should the beds of the world be any different, why shouldn’t they all communicate with one another, not a single door shut, not a single padlock or clasp, not a single obstacle to desire, to the text, the tact, the satisfaction of the bed?
He wanted the two of them—Elisia and Romero—to invite him to be part of the final, shared lust; what did it matter to them, if he was going to die before them? Romero would retire from the ring, Goya would paint the bullfighter his immortal canvas, more immortal than his immortal manner of awaiting the bull stock-still; she might die before the two men, but that would be an aberration: it would be natural that he, the painter, would die before the others and leave the painted canvas of the loves of Goya and Elisia, of Elisia and Romero, of the three together, a canvas more immortal than that fraud she showed one afternoon in Seville, between servings of cakes and candied egg yolks, which he accepted, still stuffed with ice cream, his belly swelling, about to reply to the world with a sonorous and catastrophic belch. What did it matter to them, if he was going to die before they did? Then he realized, horrified, that the portrait she showed him in Seville was an intolerable thing. A brutal reality, an incomprehensible portrait made by no one, a canvas without an artist. How could it be! Could any canvas surpass that brutal realistic fidelity that La Privada revealed to Goya, saying: —Paco, make me a portrait like this one?
Death was going to cast the three of them to the four winds before love united them. That thought was killing Goya. He was an old man and he didn’t dare ask for what he wanted. He couldn’t endure the scorn, the mockery, the simple denial. He didn’t know what Elisia whispered in Romero’s ear:
—He’s an old tightwad. He never brings me anything. He doesn’t bring me what you do, sweet things, honey and bread …
—I’ve never brought you rich things. Who are you confusing me with?
—With no one, Romero: you bring me sweet things, not sweets but sweetness, because you know I’m endearing …
—You’re a flirt, Elisia …
—But him: nothing. A tightwad, a miser. No woman can love that sort of man. He lacks those attentions. He may be a genius, but he doesn’t know anything about women. Whereas you, my treasure …
—I bring you almonds, Elisia, bitter pears and olives in oil, so you are forced to draw sweetness out of my body.
—Lover, how you talk, how you flatter, stop talking now and come here.
—Here I am, all of me, Elisia.
—I’m waiting. I’m not impatient, Romero.
—That’s what I’ve always said, you have to wait for the bull to get to you, that’s how it discovers death.
The painter didn’t hear them but he didn’t dare tell them what his heart desired.
—But if only I could watch, only watch … I have never wanted anything else …
Did they think of him as they fornicated? At least to this extent: they thought of him when they wanted what a painter could not refuse: a witness.
But he had to be honest with himself. She denied him something else. With Romero, she fainted when she came. With him, she did not. She denied him the fainting.
Then, shut within his estate, with the children shouting insults that he didn’t hear and
scrawling on his wall, he rapidly sketched and painted three works, and in the first the three of them were lying in a bed of rumpled sheets, Romero, Elisia, and Goya, but she had two faces on the same pillow, and one of her faces was gazing passionately at Pedro Romero while she embraced him feverishly, and Pedro Romero also had two faces, one for the pleasure of Elisia, the other for the friendship with the painter, just as she, too, had a second face for the painter, and she winked at him while he kissed her, and at the same time she looked ardently at the bullfighter, and there were frogs and snakes and jesters with fingers at their lips surrounding them, not a triangle now but a sextet of deceptions and betrayals, a gray hole of corruption.
In the second painting she ascended skyward in her actress costume, her bun, and her flat shoes, but with her naked body, defeated, aged, straddling a broom, impaled by death’s own member, and accompanying her in her flight were the blind bats, the ever-vigilant owl, the swallows as tireless as eternal entreaties, and the preying vultures, eaters of filth, bearing the actress up to the false sky that was the paradise of the theater, the cupola of laughter, obscenities, and belches, the snap of whips, the farts, and the hissing that no clamor of paid applauders could silence: La Privada ascended to receive her final face, which Goya gave her, not warning her this time, as he had before (You will die alone, with me and without your lover); but using her as a warning, making her a witch, an empty hide, as her rival La Pepa de Hungría had once described her; he was the final arbiter of the face of the actress who had once asked him to portray her for eternity, as she was, in reality, without art. And that was what the artist could not give her, even though it cost him the supreme sexual gift of the despot: fainting at the moment of climax.
He also finished the third painting, that of Pedro Romero. He accentuated, if possible, the nobility, the beauty of that forty-year-old face, the calmness of the hand that had killed 5,892 bulls. But the spirit of the artist was not generous. —Take my head, he said to the painting of the bullfighter, and give me your body.
He opened a window to let in a little fresh air. And then the actress, the despot, the witch that he himself had imprisoned in the painting, mounted her broom and flew away cackling, chortling, laughing at her creator, spitting saliva and obscenities onto his gray head, saving herself like a swallow on the nocturnal breeze of Madrid.
5
Old and barefoot, his thick lips open and cracked, begging for water and air like a true penitent, he carried the Virgin of Seville on his shoulders.
—Actresses die, but Virgins do not.
That was when he remembered that, as covered as she was, this Most Holy Virgin whose throne he carried was no more modest than Elisia Rodríguez, when La Privada, naked, told him: You never give me anything, so I won’t give you anything either, and she pulled forward her fantastic black hair and covered her entire body with it, like a skirt, looking at Goya through the curtain of hair and saying vulgarly:
—Come on, don’t look so shocked, where there’s hair there is pleasure.
Friday
1
She asked the boys to test themselves alone first, to find out their capacities and then return and tell her their experiences, while she spent her days between cooking chick-peas and running to the henhouse, stopping from time to time to stand with her arms crossed by the wattle fence that separated her house from the immense cattle pastures.
The house should have been very large to hold all those boys, mostly orphans, some still of school age, others already masons, bakers, and café waiters, but all unhappy with their work, their poverty, their short, all too recent childhood, their rapid, hopeless aging. Their useless lives.
But the house was not large; there was little more than a corral, the kitchen, two bare rooms where the boys slept on sacks, and the señora’s bedroom, where she kept her relics, which were just some mementos of other kids, before the present group, and nothing from before that. It was known she had no husband. Or children. But if someone flung that in her face, she would answer that she had more children than if she had been married a hundred times. Parents, brothers, or sisters, who really knew? She had simply shown up at the village, appearing one fine day from among some rocks covered with prickly pear along a chestnut-lined path. Alone, hard, resolute, and sad, so skinny and dry that it wasn’t clear if she was a woman or a man, with a wide hat and a patched cape on her shoulder, a cigar between her teeth, she inspired many nicknames: Dry-Bone, Hammerhead, Boldface, No Fruit, Crow’s Foot, Cigar.
It was easy and even amusing to give her nicknames, once everyone realized that her severe appearance did not imply malice but simply a kind of sober distance. But who could say if those nicknames really fit her. She gave shelter to orphan boys, and when the village was scandalized and demanded that the dry, tall, thin woman give up that perverse practice, nobody else was inclined to take them in, so, through sheer indifference, by default, they let her continue, although from time to time a suspicious (and perhaps envious) spinster would ask:
—And why doesn’t she take in orphan girls?
But there was always some other old lady, even more suspicious and imaginative, who would ask if they wanted to give the impression that they had a whorehouse of young girls in their village.
And there the matter ended.
So they let her continue her solitary labors, taking care of the boys. She stayed alone every night, watching them go off as soon as Venus, the evening star, rose; early in the morning, after her rest, she reappeared at the wattle fence, when Venus was the last light to retire from the sky and the boys returned from their nocturnal roamings. The woman and the star had the same schedule.
So, in a sense, for her every day was Friday, the day of the goddess of love, a day governed by the appearance and disappearance of Venus, the evening star, which in the sky’s great game was also the morning star, as if the firmament itself were the best teacher of a long, eternal pass, like the passes Juan Belmonte made in bullfights she saw when she was a girl. Despite all that, nobody in the town thought of calling her Venus. With her cape and her broad hat, her multiple skirts, and her leather boots, she held on to a single beauty trick, they said—she, as unpainted as an Andalusian midday, with her face cracked by early aging, her eyes buried deep in their sockets, her rabbit’s teeth!—and that was to put two cucumber slices on her temples, which was a well-known protection against wrinkles; but the apothecary said no, it’s a cure for fainting, she thinks that will drive away migraines and faints, she has no faith in my science, she is an ignorant countrywoman. Poor kids.
And although the apothecary added another nickname—Cucumbers—the boys called her Mother, Madre, and when she told them not to and said they should call her Madrina, Godmother, they called her Madreselva, Honeysuckle, by instinct, seeing her as that spreading plant, flowering and aromatic, that was the only adornment of her poor house and was there, like her, for everyone, naturally, like the landscape that spread before the boys’ eyes, from the oaks to the hills to the windswept pass, embracing everything, gardens, houses, and fields, and ending in the prickly-pear-covered rocks through which Madreselva had entered this town to take charge of the unfortunate but ambitious boys.
2
Rubén Oliva waited impatiently for the night. He had the gift of seeing the night during the day, beyond the spreading fields of sunflowers that were the day’s escutcheon, vegetable planets that drew the sun to the earth, sky magnets on the earth, ambassadors of the heavens, flourishing in July and dead in August, scorched by the very sun they mimicked. His land taught Rubén that the sun that gives the day can also take it away; his Andalusian land was a world of sun and shade, where even the saints belonged to one or the other, so that he felt excited but also guilty to realize that his pleasures, his intoxications, were of the night; was it Madreselva’s fault, the children wondered, as they waited for the last candles of the sun to be extinguished before going out to test themselves, when sunflowers became moonflowers, they slipped through
the hedges, leapt the wattle fences, and danced past the barbs in the grazing range, stripped by the bank of the river, its water deep and cold even in the summer, felt the first chilling thrill of the caressing nocturnal water flowing through their legs, and floated along the banks, grasping the corkwood branches, feeling their bodies cooled and refreshed by the liquid breath of the river, and then suddenly they would feel the slap of dung that told them they were nearing what they sought, blindly, gropingly, in the darkest hour of the night, the hour when Madreselva urged them to go out, blind, in search of the beast: groping through the unlit corral, the boys’ bodies brushing those of the calves, which they imagined black, only black, nobody wanted any other color, fighting body to body, bull and matador-child locked in their private dance, bound to each other, if I let the body of the bull elude me, the bull will kill me, I have to cling to that body, Madreselva, remembering the cool water between my legs and on my chest, where now I feel the animal’s throbbing hide, his breath, his mouth by mine the black sweat of his skin brushing my breast, my belly, my nascent male down joined to the sweaty bristles of the calf’s hide, hair to hair, my penis and testicles lacquered, caressed, threatened, painted by the enemy love of the beast that I have to keep pressed against my fifteen-year-old body, not just to feel, Mamaserva, Motherserf, but to survive: that is why you send us here, night after night, to learn to fight without fear, otherwise one cannot be a matador, there must be pleasure bound to that enormous danger, Ma, and I, your newest liege, am only happy fighting bulls by night, thrusting blindly in the dark, with nobody watching, acquiring a pleasure and a vice that will be bound together all my life, Honeysuckle, the pleasure of fighting bulls without an audience, without giving pleasure to anyone except myself and the bull, and letting the bull make the thrusts, letting him seek me, fight me, attack me, so that I feel the thrill of being attacked, immobile, without ever feinting, deceiving my dangerous companion on those nights, my first nights as a man.