And of course he toiled away dutifully; because without such industry, he wouldn’t have landed the little commissions that we know he honored in Sobadriel, in Remolinos, in Aula Dei, and with the Carthusians, little towns just a stone’s throw from Saragossa, less than a morning away by donkey from the studio filled with golden saints, and there in the monasteries, in the little palaces of parvenus, in forgotten, tumbledown churches, other portraits of saints were waiting for him, this time his own portraits, though scarcely less golden; saints whose commissioners were looking for an easygoing dauber who was unpretentious, not Italian in his ways but who painted in the Italian manner, who preferred the soul to the shape, as one says in the provinces, in short someone suitable, someone deferential to his assistants and, toward the churchwarden, polite. What more particular merit won him his commissions? Please Señora, no, not his talent, which perhaps a few clairvoyants had perceived when the rest of the world had its eyes closed; not the royal palette that he did not yet have, nor the great spirit that perhaps he never had; not the gift of divine and eccentric observation that the ignorant ascribe to artists: come now, even we have eyes. No particular merit, then, but his willingness, the way he understood that by rejecting his project one year someone was accepting it the next, the overzealousness apparent in coming from Saragossa on his own ass rather than on one of the abbey’s, and the speed with which he animated a face, altering it with minute and disastrous additions that a prior — keen on antiques, who long ago had made the trip to Saint Peter’s and therefore had seen it all — suggested paternally, and not without feeling. He was in hell, really: not because he didn’t know how to paint, because he had learned all that, something half mankind can learn, indeed, anyone, with practice; but because a real interest in painting — a field in which, who knows why, he had been tossed like a bull into an arena or each man into his own life — had eluded him; but nonetheless he loved painting, as every man loves his own life, and perhaps as even a bull loves his arena; there are those who have said that what exasperated him in those days was having to throw a tribe of angels onto a wall or toss up a meeting between the Living God and his humble little Witnesses, and they note how well he painted those humble folk, and go on to talk our ears off about how he loved only the humble. And we all know that it exasperated him equally to have to toss some muddy washerwomen and some local crazies into a little album, later on: we all know that painting, what he called painting, was always unattainable for him, and that was why he painted. Well, not exactly: it brought money, too, had fattened the priceless Mengs and the more reasonable but equally unreasonable Giaquinto, and he wanted to fatten up, he too, the little fatso. So, in order to fatten himself up, you understand, in the little Carthusian monasteries in the countryside, he put a little Tiepolo into the blue skies, a little Zurbarán into draperies that fall to Earth and break; he made clouds upon which to sit when one is Up Above, and victorious wings clinging to angelic shoulder blades like Mardi Gras masks; a general indifference prevails in the humble little witness, the saints martyred and mitered, drawn and quartered or painted in purple, as if none of them is there at all. He fiddled with things to make them look pretty, not that he even knew the meaning of such a word, Señora, what we mean when we call something pretty. He exaggerated everything, even modesty, because he thought that a day would arrive when he would do as Mengs or Tiepolo had, that is, would pocket what they had pocketed; but without question, most of the time, his exaggerations took the form of absolute fury, invisibly, or of absolute laughter, the sound of which we are perhaps wiser to ignore; and if that poor old woman who polishes the gold of the altar and changes the spoiled lilies in the vases had entered the chapel and heard this laugh, and, though forbidden to, had lifted her head to look at the frescoist, holding onto his scaffold with two hands, beneath another gaggle of archangels, she really would have had to ask why he was laughing. “Oh,” Francisco would have said, “that old half-blind sick-dog-of-a-prior stared a little too long at my Saint Jerome and just took off with his tail between his legs, as if the saint had walked out of the woods and bitten him.” And at this the poor woman would have laughed too.
This for ten years. His hour came, that little hour when he said to himself, at around thirty years of age: Well then, maybe I’ll be Mengs, with God’s help. God helped him in the unexpected form of a man whom you do not remember, Señora, but who long ago had been a painter, very much of the court, and who would have been more so had he not wasted his time being jealous of his shadow; a man who, upon meeting the little fatso, found him inoffensive, took an interest in him and decided to push him before the world, as a foil and as a valet; yes, God put someone in Goya’s path who was more smug than Tiepolo the Younger, more silver-tongued than a Neapolitan, and more useless than Mengs— the great Francisco Bayeu.
ABOUT THAT, THIS LITTLE TOSS of loaded dice, we know everything that one can know, because poor Josefa told us about it, or she kept so quiet about it that she said just as much, Josefa Goya, née Bayeu; Josefa with her meagre little braid rolled into a bun at the nape of her neck, her hair that was neither exactly blonde nor precisely red, and her other ambivalent features, her weak smile and her kind eyes; Josefa who gave him forty years of her life until death, her own, and to whom were given the alms of a single small portrait of her, one in forty years — this portrait, which she kept devoutly, which I saw in her room, and before which she was sitting with her hands clasped in front of her and with the same timid smile that the portrait captured, clasped hands and timid smile, perhaps thanking God for this miracle, or excusing herself for her immodesty: he had painted her once, with the same colors and the same hand, he who painted the queen and the cardinal dukes, infants and their toys; Josefa whom he called Pepa and who was as necessary to him as the big brush from Lyon and the smoky black that filled backgrounds and that one didn’t notice but that were the painting, were space, without which the richly brocaded princes of the foreground might as well disappear into nothingness; Pepa whom perhaps he loved, as she didn’t dare say and didn’t dare think, whom he knocked up ten times for nothing, except that one time when little Javier was born, Javier who wasn’t to rush double-time to join his brothers and sisters in the grave, lifeless despite their perfect forms, completed like some painting, who ended up rotting away like their father’s paintings; mother of all these little cadavers and of Javier’s living body, Javier who was smug and who was doted on by his father, who had his own son Mariano — who was even more smug, if that’s possible, and was adored by his grandfather; Josefa, the despised sister of Francisco Bayeu, who passed into the hands of a Francisco Goya who really wanted her, in the middle of July, in the middle of Madrid, or almost — in the little church of Santa Maria in a Madrid suburb.