He was thirty-two years old, this little wisp, when he was finally led inside. And no one was the wiser for it. Castillo and Ramón Bayeu didn’t notice, they were busy sketching Murillos and extravagant Riberas, all manner of pretty pictures, at the other end of what he took to be the king’s antechamber but which was something more like the lazaret of a slave trader’s vessel on the hundredth day of the crossing, upon the passing of the Frontier, and in which little Goya was preparing to row forever, not with oars of ash he’d once used to apply blues straight out of Tiepolo, but with oars of lead. He looked over at both of them for a little while, his accomplices, over there at the edge of this great darkness, leaning over their drawings, perhaps erasing this line, or perhaps not, perhaps going over it again, passionate and unconstrained, but with an air of authority, the pencil held grandly like a sceptre, a rattle. Their necks were probably already stiff from peering at the paintings above: people aren’t meant to look so high; and also they aren’t made to release their pencils and rattles, to drink and fall beneath the painted skies, to groan a little and do somersaults in court attire beneath Las Meninas. What good are these two, unless you’re a man made of paint? Goya took the tricorne from where he had set it on a footstool and sat down gently, hat in his hands, at which he looked. He began to think peaceful thoughts. He thought about a donkey doubtless long dead and tossed to the dogs, this donkey to whom he had, somewhat ashamed of himself, spoken of Raphael, doubling over with laughter and collapsing onto the animal’s big ears; he thought about a blind dog that was afraid of Francisco Goya’s gimpy saints; he though about peasants in Aragon, the blue beards, about Hapsburg princes with blond beards, about Bourbon princes, blue beards; he thought about muddy princesses and limpid flesh, about the desire one has for women and how it disappears when you paint them, how it becomes vulnerable, fallen, inglorious, so valiant and carefully made up to mask their terror; he thought about an old man from Saragossa who modestly applied a little film of gold between the world and man; about a dead woman who had noiselessly brought hot chocolate to this boy who one day would be painter to the king, noiselessly withdrawing, muddy in his memory, muddy on the earth when she was still alive; he thought that kings are better or worse than other men, if every morning when they get up they need to be buried beneath an avalanche of ghosts. He thought about how far he had come, for this. He thought that the penal colony in Saragossa was about to open all over again for him, but this time without recourse, without a Madrid to look forward to, without a king to give him pardon, without ceilings to poke holes in, without anything. He let all of that spin through his thoughts while he turned the tricorne mechanically in his hands. Finally he lifted his head toward these big, emphatic things that appeared to be men.
Men, without a doubt. Space weighs on us, the earth is old, the skies are filled with clouds, are as weighty as space; we are between them, we look high above or at the ground beneath our feet, we are elsewhere; sometimes only the finery, the tulle gowns, the uniforms and their stripes, sometimes only they exist, brightening something furtive: a soul, perhaps, which shines intermittently in the little mother of pearl buttons on their vests, along the folds of lace mounting toward some sort of paradise, cascading and playing over epaulettes, and it is to that soul, to its hand that we cling, and which we wear, black and damnable, in our tricornes. But this body visited by wind, what room would it have for a soul? Certainly it wouldn’t flee, all this wind holds it there. It’s not even a full portrait, its soul is both far above and firmly below on this ground where this soul, as best it can, carries on. On two feet however, like burros that prop their forelegs on a low wall and patiently graze at tender leaves. This body is passionately distant, it doesn’t know whether to lean down lower to pick up what has fallen or to tip back its head and beg for manna, getting only rain; it just doesn’t know; and so, undecided, it remains there and stares at you, and it should, since you’re painting it, but it isn’t looking at anything. Wasn’t it only yesterday that we were calling that the Fall, Señora? Isn’t that it? — some muddy light and the stately somersaults of motionless bodies — is that what keeps falling from these bodies that themselves can’t fall because of their farthingales and armor? Do you really believe that it’s only the Flanders sky that weighs heavily upon the tired courtesies offered between two rows of posts, from captain to captain? These Spinsters are just a painting in front of which the little fatso is sitting, you know only too well what they’re spinning, Señora: the bobbins are heavy and full, the women are careful, they spin, they unwind, they cut, all are finishing but they have no end; after one, there’s always another. Enough, you say; these empty words are tiring, these big paintings are driving you to your death. Take a last look: at the corner of the painting they call Las Meninas, this square of thick air, this haggard room in which midgets stand around, a hellhound waiting calmly, unfortunates who fall forward and old kings in the background like summer mist in a void, the dead Sevillian painter palette in hand, with an undecided look, gloomy as a Hapsburg, distant as Saturn, not looking at anything and pretending to look at Goya in his Sunday best, in May, 1778.
GOYA LOOKED AT WHAT HE would never be able to paint and which for this reason he henceforth would have to paint. If he had wanted to pit himself against what was most impenetrable, he hadn’t missed his chance: but whether he had wanted to or not, that was how it had worked out, it had rushed and fallen into the little fat redingote like it had once fallen into the armor of the House of Austria; and he, who didn’t have the Sevillian palette that can depict that fall, he had to depict it nonetheless, with what he had, with his Aragonese palette cobbled together from the Venetians, with his minimal understanding and his bluff, where the Sevillian master seemed to have understood everything and had never had to fake it. Because this is how the beaux arts works, Señora: ancestors paint the world, they despair, they know that the world isn’t anything like the way they see it, and even less like the way they paint it; but then the grandsons come who suddenly see the world the way the old saw it, and also somehow like they themselves believe they see it, who between the two either fall to pieces or fall silent, fat moths between two lanterns, asses from Buridan, who suffer and who paint. So it went, from father to son, from living dwarves looking to do as well as the dead giants, from the dead to the living, this game of giant dwarves. The prince of the Bon Retrait, the quiet Sevillian who now is no more than the shadow of a cypress or the sound of a clock in the gardens of Buen Retiro, Velazquez, walking in the gardens of Buen Retiro, airing his old cloak in the cool of evening, he wanted to make the grade too. And perhaps his personal prince, his secluded master was the painter-duke of Flanders who did bloody sides of beef and women so white, lost in the Fall, growing fat off the Fall, or on the contrary this Greek from Toledo who rowed against the current, who painted so as to fall less, and all of whose flesh returns to its source, is barely flesh, wings, fraises of lace, air and rustling of air; perhaps it was Titian, whose sunbeams are pure gold, or Tintoretto, who made his out of absinthe: and since he held neither gold nor absinthe in his hand, only perhaps a bit of Earthly honey, perhaps that is why he broke down at night beneath the cypresses of Buen Retiro, something that made him abandon all words that weren’t sycophantic, that made him eat from the hand of a king and made him accept these mercenary titles, Great Chambermaid, Great Turnkey, Great Master of Palatial Lodging, Knight of Santiago, such that at last he succeeded in some way, he who failed to conceive an unbridled Fall or even the flight. But not even he would admit that; he did what he could; he didn’t paint the debauchery of the Fall, or the vertiginous Ascension, those things that only the giants paint; but somewhere in between, men of flesh who wouldn’t get to enjoy the Fall, and who all the same would never get to Heaven.