“I seem to have touched a nerve,” said Ann.
“Thank God for that,” I said. “I was beginning to wonder if I was still alive.”
Boris cocked his head and looked at me. I smiled charmingly. My boredom was inconceivable. “But really, Ann,” he said, “how much did you get for Landscape?”
Ann looked at me, then back at Boris. They had a lot to talk about, those two, and watching them made me want a friend, someone I could laugh with. Someone I could live this evening with over again on my terms—how annoying Boris was, what a lunatic Ann turned out to be. I closed my eyes and pretended to take a nap.
Ann’s voice fell to a whisper, but I could still hear her. She said, “Really, Boris, you know nothing about her. You might catch something.”
And Boris said something that I couldn’t make out.
“Why isn’t she in school? Where are her parents?”
And Boris said something else.
“Some benefactor you are. I don’t care how old she says she is. She’s still a child. Look at her.”
And then Boris said something that made Ann laugh.
4
That night I pulled out a book on Romanticism off Boris’s shelf. It was a huge, coffee-table book and, by the smell of the pages, had never been opened. On the front page was the inscription, For Boris on his birthday, affectionately, Ann. And then in cramped, insecure writing, a postscript, Don’t worry. Romanticism is not romantic. I opened the book to the section on Goya. I had grown up in a house filled with books like this. My mother had a particular love for Goya and I was familiar with all the faces of the family of Charles IV, their squishy noses and eyes sunk like currants in leavening dough. I loved Goya in my own way. While other children frightened themselves with Dracula comics, I’d been mesmerized by Los Caprichos and the Black Paintings of the Quinta del Sordo.
I turned the pages eagerly, hoping that the editor was not too politically minded (massacres, civil war commentary) and had included my favorite painting, that of the god Saturn eating a child.
Saturn Consuming His Offspring took up a whole page.
I looked at the gaunt and long-limbed giant, his flowing hair. He emerged from the darkness of the canvas, his mad eyes wide, the whites arced impossibly around black pupils, as if he’d been caught in the headlights of a car. Saturn’s hands gripped the body of his headless child. A gash of red dripped slantwise down the child’s upturned arm and neck; it seemed to have been devoured head first, forearm second. The child was raising its cropped arm as if to feed its father, and Saturn chewed his way down to the armpit. The legs and buttocks of the child rose up from between the thighs of Saturn. They disappeared—feet entirely obscured—into shadow, the same shadow where the genitals of the god were hidden. I looked at the twin legs bound close, the rounded buttocks. The child was actually a monstrous penis, Saturn’s penis, and he was eating it.
Was Goya painting the despair of the sexual urge, how copulation—beyond mere monster coupling—begets violence? Or was it just an autofellatic fantasy, and how had I never noticed it before?
This was not what my mother had told me the painting was about. I got the standard story, that Saturn was consuming his child because an oracle had informed him that one of his children would kill him. Each time his wife, Rhea, gave birth, Saturn would eat the baby. Rhea finally managed to hide one child, Zeus. In his place, she gave Saturn a stone in swaddling clothes and Saturn swallowed it, blankets and all. Zeus would kill Saturn, but not before administering a powerful emetic that made him vomit up his other five children. I’d asked my mother about this.
“If he ate them, wouldn’t they all be chewed up, like in the picture?”
My mother shrugged this off. “The Titans were very big. Maybe he swallowed them whole.”
“Then why doesn’t Goya paint it like that?”
“Because that would be boring.”
Zeus, it is interesting to note, continued the legacy of cannibalism. When he heard that his soon-to-be-born daughter would one day supplant him, he swallowed his pregnant wife. Afterward, Zeus was tortured by an intolerable headache. To ease his pain, he called on Hephaestus to split his head open with an ax. Athene jumped out, full-grown and vibrant. She dazzled her father and Zeus loved her more than any of his other children. Athene forgave Zeus for having eaten her and her mother, and Zeus pushed Athene’s possible ascendancy to the throne out of his mind. He loved his daughter, despite what she represented to him. And that she loved him back, the key to familial love, apparently, being the ability to forget.
I took one last look at Saturn. Zeus had turned Lycaon into a wolf for offering him a stew of Mollosian hostage, but he ate his own wife and daughter. They were all cannibals, all of them.
On the next page I saw Goya’s etching Disasters of War. The Carnivorous Vulture. Ann was wrong to think that this was a simple allegory. All vultures were carnivorous but Goya’s walked upright, like a man. Her shriveled wings were more like feathered arms and she stomped—an Iberian Godzilla—onto the landscape. A peasant came at her with his pitchfork and the horizon was crowded with people rising up in a solid bank, like woods or mountains in other paintings. In this picture, surprisingly, the peasants appeared to have the upper hand. The bird’s wings were flung open, her eyes round with fear, her beak empty. This was the aftermath of the slaughter, what descended (vultures swinging in tightening circles) after the rampaging armies had returned to their homes, after the thunder of muskets had stilled and the last of the smoke dissipated.
This was a painting of hunger.
The last two pages in the Goya section were devoted to Scenes of Cannibalism, loose, vibrant sketches of the Jesuit martyrs Lallement and Brebeuf, who were slaughtered by the Iroquois in 1649. The first painting showed wild nudes preparing bodies. A corpse hung from the top of the painting, like bull carcass in a meat locker; another lay prone. The three cannibals were preparing the bodies: eviscerating, bleeding, skinning. These figures crowded the lower right-hand corner of the painting; the rest of the canvas was empty, an imposing intrusion of space. There was no actual eating in the painting, although one nude was hunched over in a very suspicious way. The other painting showed savages around a fire. A central figure (oddly bearded for an Indian) brandished a head in his left hand, a severed hand in his right and—due to the spread of his legs—his genitals. Cannibals seemed more of an opportunity for Goya to paint the nude, some in classical poses and some more natural. Cannibals offered more of an opportunity to paint the human figure than, say, the family of Charles IV. And Goya didn’t seem bothered that his Indians looked no more like the Iroquois than they did like Spain’s royal family.
The Iroquois were not cannibals, despite the legend of Brebeuf. Brebeuf was a Jesuit priest, a missionary to the Indians in the Canadian wilderness, who were not interested in conversion. Brebeuf made friends with the Hurons but had less success with the Iroquois. After torturing Brebeuf for two days (pouring boiling water over his head, thrusting a hot iron down his throat, encircling his neck with burning stones) the Iroquois were impressed by his ability to withstand his trials. They continued, slashing him with knives, pulling off his nails, until they finally tied Brebeuf to a stake and lit him on fire. After the flames died down, the Iroquois warriors cut down Brebeuf’s body. He was a strong man, even if he was wrong-minded, even if he was an ally to the Hurons—the Iroquois’ hated enemy. The Iroquois, suitably impressed, thought they might ingest some of his might. They cut out the great man’s heart and, we are told, ate it.