What did he do in Aragon? He painted, Señora, of course. And there, our mothers did not see him, but his own mother did, doña Gracia, and the daughters of those whom he took to bed, washerwomen from Ebre or whores; we don’t know anything about them because they generally don’t say anything while beating laundry and rolling onto their backs, tending their chilblain and their native shame, obstinate, lips pursed, arrogant, and ruined; but perhaps in an unknown album he drew them, on a gold background, just as he saw them and without question exactly as they were, incomplete, their faces somewhat disturbed, like the face of a river sullied by blue washing powder, their gazes like a pond, and all of their features hesitating between a childhood barely tasted and on the brink of collapse, and eternal old age. No, it is very unlikely that he painted them that way; it’s even unlikely that he’d had them, because he set joy aside for later, for when he would be Mengs or Tiepolo, when condesas are yours for the taking and ceilings are there for you to paint; and his mother told our mothers that he had been a good and proper son, not undisciplined but industrious, swinging open the door to his father’s studio before dawn, his father the master gilder who had been a good and proper husband, thus crossing this studio where his candle illuminated reredoses peopled with paradise and devotional statues of San Isidro, San Antonio, Santiago, all of them staring out at you, blessing you, all of them golden and in perfect relief, bright and true like all that the Señor created. So, said doña Gracia, at dawn he would enter his father’s studio of shrines and crosses, passing through it to reach his very own, much smaller studio that had been granted in a corner of his father’s — because the son could no longer work with Luzán, his master, they had had a falling out; and all day long he wore himself out painting, maybe Venuses and prophets, certainly some San Isidros and some Santiagos too, as fair as el Señor had made them and clearly calling to Him; and when doña Gracia came in with sausage, with chocolate, she found him on his knees in front of his painting, his nose to the canvas, with little strokes ironing out one of those impeccable frocks in which Zurbarán decked out his chartreuse saints, or one of those magical starched cowls that either pious housewives or angels must just have ironed; or yet again, but more sullen this time, as if he had just crushed some reds into the wounds of the Savior, agonizing over the holy hands in the Italian manner, those delicate fingers, happy, visible, in which every knuckle is delineated, bending and caressing the miraculous space, thick and bright; other times he stood as tall as his little body would, with the air of one painting vast backgrounds, insolent but precise, with all the brio of the Venetians: he was playing, said doña Gracia, he was like a child on his father’s shoulders. She didn’t say, doña Gracia, that while the father was gilding a beard or Saint Peter’s sacred keys with his little brush, he might hear a curse from the other side of the studio, a canvas bursting like a drum, and the little fatso laughing cruelly while hacking his stretcher to bits; that sort of thing mothers pretend not to know about. On the other hand, what she said that we do want to believe is that he liked to horse around on public holidays, in their little patch of land in the countryside of Fuendetodos, to thrash around with the feverish athleticism that seems to take particular possession of fat men; in the company of the little toughs his age he pestered some baby bull and sometimes even a grown one, some thoroughly real, thoroughly black beast, although this was probably in an impromptu arena with an impromptu cape, some red rag still dripping with dye; but with a real sword too, made of iron that cuts. Even in a place as lost as Fuendetodos there would have been bulls to slay. This we all know, because later he prided himself on it, as though he had passed his insouciant jeunesse at such play, fighting bulls with only cape, dress culottes, and pink stockings, not fiddling desperately with Italian draperies and Sevillian frocks in a studio jammed with vermilion saints destined for use in the sundry chapters; and he talked as though the spectacle had always taken place in the light of day, in the light of the July of his youth, a youth invented for the benefit of others and perhaps even for himself. But we, we didn’t see him fighting bulls; and nothing prevents us from thinking that beneath the confusion of a rainy March sky of his twentieth year, he thought he witnessed a perfect disaster, perfectly in keeping with our botched Creation: it rained that day on Fuendetodos, on the smoking black fur, the soft nostrils; slipshod hooves lost their footing, mud splattered everywhere; something suffered there, as likely the sky and its rain as the beast and its matador; the matador wiped his eyelids with his forearm to see the beast clearly so he could stab it with his rapier; no sun burst forth at the final blow,
la mise à mort, no flurry of blows, only something that dripped a little, like a bad painting one would happily destroy. And around this heap of ruined black meat that one would happily destroy, heavy and formless, with blue cheeks, conceived during one of those rapid, furious couplings in the fields, the Aragonese peasantry shouted lifeless curses into the rain, dancing a jig as old as time, all gray but for scarlet on one of their shoulders, the cape which already was fading. One doesn’t fight bulls in the rain, Señora? Ah, of course. The impeccable chests of white horses rise up through the blue of the ceilings. Winged creatures leave their weights to the land and carry their shapes and songs above, into the eternally clement heavens. Yes, said doña Gracia, he fought bulls on public holidays, but during the week he took great care to paint pretty paintings. He was industrious.