And this wage that they hadn’t yet pocketed — the maja told us — they were already well into it that day at the Auberge du Coq. The afternoon is waning, the sun is changing, and now the tricornes are fully in the sun, are resting on the tablecloth, are absorbing all this light without a wrinkle, as black as they were before, when the green arbor shaded them at midday More wine arrives. They’re ripe, our brigands. Until then they had been talking about reales, ducats, about brushing elbows with princes, about all the babies’ hands they’ll kiss and the big sashes they’ll fasten; there was a small dispute when they had divvied up their booty: Ramón is Bayeu’s brother, del Castillo is the oldest; whereas Francisco, what has he done other than his cartoons — very beautiful, certainly — for the tapestry weavers of Santa Barbara? So his share will be a quarter, still a nice piece of change, right Francisco? He held me tighter, said the girl, and higher up, and by God I let him, the wine, all the sun on the table, the green leaves. His other hand was crumpling the tablecloth. He groused a little. And they let him, promising him a bit more and then he relented, probably the wine, or friendship, and Roberto’s big arm around the shoulders of the angry little guy: Oh come on Francisco, the King’s chamber! Now — but all of this is growing hazy, says the maja, I can barely hear them — it’s not nickels and dimes they’re talking about, not reales, it’s another sonorous species they speak of now, weighty names buzzing around with the weighty wasps and all the wine in our heads, they’re brawling over the big names, they’re dividing up the work, our thieves, you get Murillo, you get Velazquez, I take Ribera, says del Castillo. At the next table, cattlemen are having at each other too, over cows. Goya is in the midst of shooing a wasp with his hand, the other hand, when they suggest he take Velazquez: that’s fine, him or someone else, he’s not too into the conversation since they promised him 2,500 in cash, his hand has been busy with me, he looks above us at the inn’s sign, a great rooster of white iron, wings spread, and so I look up at it too, no longer in control of myself; you might say that it’s singing, like when someone had disowned I can’t remember whom; Francisco leans toward me, tells me, squinting, that with some dove feathers and some pink roses we’d have an angel presiding over a paradiso: he described it all, cattlemen, drunk painters, wasps fallen in wine, trees of paradise, and me with him, at his side. He laughs, his head in his arms on the table, amongst impeccable black hats and the carafes. He’s had a lot to drink. I turned my head, no one was looking at me. The tricornes aren’t moving, night is coming; there is no more wine in our glasses; I smooth my dress. He lifts his head, he laughs until he is crying, he says: Oh sure, Velazquez. Poor Francisco.
Off they went to the Pardo, the next day or a week later. You can imagine them, Señora, just as I see them, entering the great gate, early one morning in May. They’re on horseback, Goya is lagging behind, he doesn’t ride well, he’d be happier on foot, but they have horses just the same, gaudy ones, isabels or piebalds, as different as you can get from the donkey that took you to the Carthusian monasteries lost beneath their bells on the fringes of forests, and that you preferred to the piebald, but now on which you wouldn’t want to be seen. The morning coat is à la française, the vest quilted, the gloves butternut yellow, and this handsome, fresh green redingote that befits spring: he’s gotten decked out to see the king, even if the king isn’t there; at least that’s what he thinks. So he rode through the gates. What beautiful weather. Bells are rising, he feels as light. There are Flemish guards everywhere, grooms, turnkeys, stewards; you don’t salute them, one after another the doors open marvelously before your steps, one after another; you toss the reins of your horse to some bit player, you don’t look at these nameless faces since you are who you are, Francisco Goya, who in ten years will be Tiepolo and who already is climbing this staircase where the king walks every day of every winter. At last inside the square, the final guard bows deeply because this one, he’s a prince — what else would he be, here? He leads you down the long, perfect corridors, and through great windows the day falls straight onto things that shine, of gold, Saint Isidros and San Fernandos, mirrors in which reflection after reflection moving behind three bean poles there’s the same little, plump, leaf green redingote and that curly hair, tricorne in hand; so day falls through the great windows onto the thick, purple draperies, some of them emblazoned with all the Flemish and Spanish lines, the Flemish lines lost but present, the Great Indies lost but present, all the epic bric-a-brac from all corners of the Earth in which kings make their nests. All the ceilings are painted, who cares, he’ll repaint them. Goya smiles: so this is all there is to it? Yes; but this is as good as it gets in this world, and in ten years it will all be his. At last, the final fat key turns the final fat lock, this must be it, the antechamber where the Bourbon king dresses amongst quaint paintings, his dead Hapsbugs; the room is poorly lit, it’ll be hard to work in here. The prince, who as it turns out is no more than an attendant, bids them enter; why does it seem so somber; there are plenty of big windows in here as well, and daylight; he blinks a little, he lifts his head: he’s in a cave, and all over the walls are monsters.
AND HERE, SEÑORA, WHEN the attendant left and closed the door, not one of us knows what came over Francisco Goya. The linen maids who saw the painters prancing in the courtyard don’t enter this place, and the princesses are in Aranjuez, gathering jonquils. Let us imagine then. What would have overcome him, at the very moment when he casually tossed his tricorne onto a footstool and took off his gloves? It certainly wasn’t Velazquez, he knew him, he had seen a thousand etchings; and anyway, painting itself couldn’t have overcome him because he knew it, too. Nonetheless, paintings were all that was there. What sun went out? What dipped this chamber in dark, light falling in little heaps, while in painting after painting beautiful blues were gamboling, reds and jasmine whites and torrents of pearls, and yet this gray overshadowing the white? It’s something immobile high above, you say, but why then does it affect him so, why does all this immobility and exhaustion wrap him up so furiously in deepening shadow, so suddenly? No, Señora, these horses aren’t wild, aren’t bucking the child princesses and their rattles, terrified and impassive, their count-dukes, terrified and brave, their captains vanquished and captains victorious, terrified: they aren’t moving at all, they’re just wooden horses. And no, the farthingales aren’t turning, nor the little dolls they ring that seem so unhappy, and would you have them dance? So where is all this wind coming from? Not from those dead mountains, those sierras over there, and not from these trees that are as tired as these men, they won’t move a leaf during the tempests of Judgment. Perhaps it’s this black that rushes and blusters, all this black in foreground and back, all this black that blows by them, pierces them, empties them, this lightness or this lead in the shoddy skin of these painted children, of the count-dukes, of Philippe IV and the midgets he made counts. Yes, you’re right, Señora, they are laughing too, these sad sires, perhaps because of all this wind in their blood. That inner wind, it leads us away. But we’ll never understand, so we leave. Let us go then, you and I, into this Sevillian cauldron, into this blackness where pieces of princes, of children, are whirling around with a sad king’s mustache, a pearl glove, and some Andalusian jasmine; let us go where the name Diego Velazquez is swimming within the fifty crumbling canvases of his corpse; and where little Goya in his leaf green coat is swept up like a whisp of straw, into this cauldron where we read what will be.