She did not say that she was happy, Pepa, on this 25th of July. But telling of it twenty-five years later still made her blush, not as you blush, Señora, but the way unassuming blondes are wont to, self-effacing themselves to featurelessness, confused by their pleasure and its manifestation, then losing that pleasure for others having seen it, such that the recollection of their joy is so insignificant, since this great, departed emotion prompts no envy from others, is barely of interest, is but a simulacrum of comprehension, is pity; they’re used to it, these self-effacing blondes, they talk about it. So she told us how happy he had been, him, her Francisco, this 25th of July, wearing his pearl gray morning coat à la française that was a little tight on him, certainly too small, but that made him look taller, and not as fat as they said, but chubby cheeked, yes, like a child, and like a child enjoying everything, getting married, seeing a magpie fly over Santa Maria when the bells began to ring, the little children of honor all in red who were getting tangled up in their bouquets of white gladiola, in their little approximations of the motions of men, and these round eyes they suddenly have, these tears they spill who knows why — because a cloud passed over the sun, because the step to the square is too high to reach, because the world doesn’t stop at the instant of their joy. He was like them, Pepa said. And if he was delighted, it wasn’t because he was joining the Bayeu clan, as spiteful gossips call it, by some mix of calculation and barbarism; it wasn’t because he was now nearly in Madrid, at its very gates; it wasn’t because he suddenly became — as if by the touch of a magic wand, by the taking of a poor girl’s virginity— the brother-in-law of Francisco Bayeu, the king’s painter, Mengs’s favorite disciple and his assured dauphin, sharp tongued and omnipresent, incapable, strong; and it wasn’t because on the same occasion, in the same bag, he became brother-in-law to Ramón and Manuel Bayeu, no less painters and no less incapable, but milder, with duller features and duller wills, long since stuck in the gloomy palette of Bayeu-le-Grand, foils both of them and errand boys, of a certain sort; “No,” said Pepa, “this is all just malicious gossip: he was happy to enter into my brother’s family, that is true, but it was because he liked him, my brother, whom he admired and listened to talk about painting — he knew everything, my brother — and my fiancé still had a few things to learn. He was, perhaps, also happy to marry me, but that, I don’t know.”
Just look: they’re leaving Santa Maria, on this beautiful July morning in Madrid, when the heat is already building, but is still young. Their tricornes are in their hands; Bayeu is wearing a deep brown morning coat and ochre yellow breeches, he is just behind Goya and, since he’s taller, he puts a hand on Goya’s shoulder and gestures at the fine weather. The two look up, and all of this charms them as much as it does us: painters surround them and even some counts, the embroidered vests of majos, great blue sashes spanning ducal chests à la française, liveries more manifest than their coats of arms, a thousand dresses, this one à la française, that one in maja; and up above, bells are leaping, delicate monsters of heavy bronze that are to the ear what flowers are to the eyes, and just like flowers they turn their heads modestly but unfailingly to greet the great, immodest dome of the sky; fans and tricornes too are flowers, says Bayeu, leaning on Goya’s shoulder. But what’s this? Is the groom frowning, and what is the bride about to shout? What’s happening suddenly, Señora, above these nuptials? A shower? In the middle of July, when the skies were just so clear? It can’t be that God is angry, as they say; he doesn’t bother with us any more, he wouldn’t show his face now. And it can’t be the Inquisition swooping down with pyres and carts, sanbenitos and thunderous, chanted Latin exhortations; the Inquisition is nowhere in this storm, of course. Where is this execrable grandeur that is falling on their heads coming from? Whose poor brushwork is this? Tricornes are rising into the Boreas, and it isn’t the wind that has taken them, they are climbing, blackly, toward all this black so within reach, with a flap of wings they are there, because the sky is no higher than the shortest of Santa Maria’s spires, such strange birds flying above, and you say, now, that it’s a death knell we hear? And the poor guests on the stone steps, how helpless they seem, everything falling from their hands, everyone bending to pick things up, bending, pits of shadow falling across their faces, their brutish chins, their fleshy ugliness, their beastly mouths, Señora, that twist and turn outward, deepening, displaying teeth and tongues, they are past speech, not from some ugliness of the soul, no, it’s not hunger or lust — in this weather! — and not fear because they knew that the gust of wind would come: it’s sorrow, Señora, it’s such sorrow. The sky weighs on their shoulders like a great sack. We bear it as best we can. And what now? Who has killed this woman, bound on the steps, head dangling down? And the water running over her hiked skirts, on her unfortunate face, in her hair, neither blonde nor red, on her meagre belly from which Javier won’t come, from which ten little corpses and semi-corpses won’t either. Bayeu and his brothers, his friend Zapater, the dukes, the old master gilder who came jubilantly from Saragossa in his Sunday best — all these Nebuchadnezzars around her on all fours, who graze and who are painters, who graze and who are dukes, who above all certainly are crying, but how can you tell in all this rain. It must be the wind that felled them, come now, it’s not madness, it’s not wickedness. Is it them? Go see. They all look alike; you can’t tell who’s devouring whom. But the little fatso over there who’s running away down the lane wearing his pearl gray morning coat, dripping wet, dripping beneath the cloudbursts like the palette of some slob, this tubby imp exulting beneath the gush from the rain gutters, it seems that we recognize him, his kindness, his joie de vivre, his modesty, and the big knife in his skirts. A knife, where? In any case, not in the hands of Francisco Goya who turns while smiling toward Francisco Bayeu and says: yes, flowers, everywhere, fans and white mantillas blooming like hawthorns, toy dogs, majos and their ponytails and the buckles on their breeches, red bows on the Swiss tricornes, women’s hands budding phalanx upon phalanx as though petal to petal, and look, brother, these little children all in red watching us with their eyes so clear, as though they’re posing for us: he’s exaggerating, of course, as usual, but that’s a small sin. Come on, it was just a dream. A bizarre dream that came to me. Without them, life would be a bad dream. No, it’s beautiful out, look closer, Señora, all is quiet in the church square, everyone is gleaming with color and joy, a perfect sky out of Tiepolo is above them, deep, far: the Creator made all this blue and he left nothing there for us to retouch. Thus we may marry in a pearl gray morning coat, we may have sons. Nothing need be repeated. And the white and the black of the magpie sitting in a tree in Santa Maria Square, frozen— its beak suspicious and sharp, its eyes round and clearly drawn, this white and this black are so clearly delineated by such majestic lines, white feather against black feather, in careful little strokes, never blending together, never blending into the leaves either, nor into the big blue leaves high above. Goya watches this magpie.
He holds Pepa gently by the arm.
He moves down the stairs, he hesitates and puts his tricorne back on, then takes it off again, then decides finally, yes: he sets foot upon his parcel of worldly bliss. You know what bliss is, Señora? These periods in life, quite frequent during youth, though not so frequent that one may count on them, when you have faith in yourself without having to believe you’re someone other than yourself, when you hope that in a year, in ten years, you’ll have made it, which is to say you’ll have arrived, you’ll have what you wanted, once and for all you’ll be what you wanted to be, and you’ll remain that way; but right now you suffer, you’re a little less or a little more than yourself, but in ten years you’ll be there, there where you should be: bliss is such a small thing to suffer, and we all know that during these five or six years Goya was happy. He was patient, he chided himself for his mediocrity, he applied himself to making his name; and he was a little bit sneaky on this count, a touch of talent and a touch of imposture, a talent for color, for low bows to the princes, bowing and scraping, stuffy or spirited discussions about masters, technique, finishing touches, profits: this with Bayeu who thought he was Mengs; with Mengs who was already dying but who was sticking to the belief that he was the word made paint; with young colleagues no less talented or sneaky than he, who wanted to fatten themselves as well, have their own carriages, paint well, to be Mengs or Tiepolo one day, depending on whether their tastes and their palettes drew them toward angels as stiff as popes or to those more suave and ambiguously fleshed. And of this so-called imposture: if you succeed at making clear distinctions between things, is it imposture? Why wouldn’t painting be a farce, since life is one, if marrying poor Pepa and toadying to Bayeu gets you princely commissions, and the glances of duchesses? Come on, it was a pleasure destroying those stretchers long ago in Saragossa, a pleasure to die of laughter inside when Mengs was talking about the Golden Proportions. All of that was child’s play; it was a betrayal of the brotherhood of painters, of painting, perhaps, and of the very working of things: imagine an augur laughing in the face of a great captain, serious and nervous, leaning over some chicken guts over which other augurs are nodding, interpretively. The great captain loses his battle, the augurs are hunted down, everyone knows that his misfortune is meaningless, who gains from any of it? No: what is meaningful, what painting means, is to toil like a galley slave on the sea, with that furor, with that helplessness: and when the work is done, when the penal colony opens for an instant, when the painting is hung, then say to everyone, to the princes who’ll believe it, the people who’ll believe it, the painters who won’t believe it, that it came to you in one fell swoop, against your will and miraculously in harmony with it, a spring day blooming from your brushtips, that something took possession of your hand and carried it like angels draw chariots with a single finger, something like Tiepolo returned to Earth, all of la pittura flowing through you, all the beauty of mother nature in your grasp (can you hear, Señora, the great, silent guffaws in the heads of painters everywhere?) — that art just came to you, winged like an angel, easy as a maja. Why not imagine a galley slave on the bridge of his galley, a ball and chain on each foot, hands dead, swearing that the sea itself had kindly moved his oar for him, had purged him of his pain, had cradled it — and why not, since it is the source of his pain?