I lay down on my daybed and chewed it, and no out-of-body experience this time, nothing freaky, except the colors seemed to get a little sharper and brighter, the edges between patches of color sort of glowing, and that kitten-licking thing in my head, and I was sitting in psych class, late spring in my sophomore year in a classroom in Schermerhorn Hall, warm breezes in through the windows and the professor gabbing on about how human existence was just a lot of operant conditioning, the mind was an illusion, and the rest of that tedious and fallacious story, and I was ignoring him and concentrating on drawing a girl sitting across the aisle from me, terrific neck, like Nefertiti, and her hair piled up on her head, streaky blond, with bright little pennants from it tossing in the breeze from the open windows, a slight overbite to the mouth, very nice, pale eyes, she knows I’m drawing her and she’s holding the pose. I’m working with a soft pencil on cartridge paper, using my thumb to blend it in; the chin’s a bit weak, but I’m correcting that, the magic of drawing, it’s what she wishes she looked like, but still a fair likeness, as the professor drones on, though now his voice slips into a lower register and he’s reading from the lives of the saints, St. Cecilia, whose day it is, and I’m drawing the king of Spain.
The friar reads on and from a distance sounds the plashing of a fountain; I’m in a room in the Alcázar. To one side is a lectern at which stands the Dominican reading, in front of me His Majesty and a tall canvas I have primed with glue and black-lime mixture, and over that a priming of red earth, tierra de Esquivias, as they do here in Madrid. I am painting his face. His Majesty wears a suit of black, as is customary at court, with a narrow white ruff.
The friar comes to the end of his chapter and looks up to see the king’s pleasure. His Majesty tells him to retire, for he wishes to converse with this painter.
So we speak. I am speaking with the king of Spain! I find I must grip the brush hard and my stick is trembling against the canvas. His left hand at hip, weight on left leg, an easy pose, a paper of state in his right hand. He graciously asks me of my home and family, of Don Pacheco, of Don Juan Fonseca, and how things pass in Seville. Then we speak of paintings: the king wishes to have the finest collection in Europe, surpassing that of the king of France, and we speak of which painters are best for which subjects. I believe I do not make a complete fool of myself, nor yet vaunt myself about my station. He is younger than I by three years; I think he is not eighteen.
A courtier enters, whispers to the king. He says he must leave me and says further he has enjoyed our conversation and looks forward to the next time he sits for me. And smiles. Then, coming around to view my work, he studies the painted face, which of course I have spent the most time upon, and he says, “Don Diego, I know what I look like. See you paint me as I am.” And touches me lightly upon the shoulder. The king has touched me! I am all in a sweat as he leaves. The Dominican gives me a baleful look and sweeps out too. My shoulder tingles still, and I realized I had slumped down in my chair and the edge of the computer desk was cutting into my shoulder.
I checked the clock on the machine. I’d been gone eight minutes, although I’d experienced at least an hour in subjective time. So then I thought, Okay, I was drawing as Velázquez but my canvas is still blank, could I maybe make myself actually do a painting in the here and now while I was having a Velázquez hallucination? Maybe if I stood in front of the canvas with my brush in my hand and took some more salvinorin? And maybe the stuff was cumulative, maybe I’d get deeper into it.
Into the mouth with my other dose, ten minutes of staring at the blankness, and then I started to draw. It’d be a group scene, I decided, eight guys just sitting around a saloon, no, at an outdoor party, like a wedding, just a bunch of regular guys who liked a belt or two after work, and the drawing went very fast, no detail, just blocking in the relative positions of the figures. After I’d got that down I mixed up a big batch of flake white and added a little ochre and azurite to it to make a neutral gray, and then I blocked in the outlines of the figures.
They say I can do only heads, and this is my answer to them. Carducho and the other royal painters, they mock me as an upstart who knows how to imitate nature but has no conception of how to make a true painting with ideas, in the Florentine style. All of them, Carducho, Caxés, and Nardi, will never forgive me for having won the competition His Majesty ordered for a painting of the expulsion of the Moors, and I have heard they were joking that I only won because I am a Moor myself, being from Seville, where there is so much impure blood.
Yet I am painter to the king and I am usher of the chamber, and will rise higher still. If these calumnies on my blood reach the king, he will not hear them; besides, I am well in with his grace the count-duke of Olivares, and his word should sustain me against all slanderers.
I finish the outlining and return to my apartment. I am short with Juana, as I always am when I am on a new painting and I go to bed early. Again these strange dreams of hell, monsters of noise and light that’s neither from sun nor candle, infernal light that warps all colors into impossible shades. I go to mass early and pray that these dreams may cease, and then back to work, this time with models.
I have Antonio Rojas today, a mason, and I give him as much wine as he wants. He grins like an ape at me and I take his likeness quickly and then dismiss him with a clap on the back and fifty maravedí. Then comes in a butcher from the royal kitchen who I paint as my Bacchus.
When he has left me I look at the unfinished painting. There is something wrong with it, but I don’t know what it is-perhaps the figures are too crowded together in the foreground, as if they were all sitting on a rail. I have tried to correct the composition, but it is still unsatisfying. The faces and figures are from nature and full enough of life, but the space they’re in is not real space. There is a secret here I don’t know, and none of the fools who paint in this kingdom can advise me. Not that I would ask. Yet, God willing, His Majesty will like it, I think, and it’s still better than anything Carducho ever did.
A boy comes in with a message from His Majesty and I must leave this and change my clothes to be fit for his presence. I believe he must have decided on the portrait of his late father that he mentioned on Friday last. That arm is not right either.
I came out of it walking down Canal Street in a cold rain, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and no shoes. When I got back to my loft I was not surprised to see my canvas was full of Los Borrachos, or The Feast of Bacchus, by Velázquez, not the completed painting, but the underpainting and two almost completed faces, the Bacchus and the guy in the middle with the sombrero and the drunken grin. The paint was still a little wet and you could see where he, or I, had repainted the peasant on the extreme right, giving him a new head, and where the figure in the back had just been painted in, in a failed attempt to give the whole thing more depth. I could see what he meant about Bacchus’s arm-it was set into the shoulder a little wrong and the foreshortening was off a hair. The face was terrific, though.
I took a shower, changed my clothes, and carefully made myself a Gibson with my dad’s silver shaker. Pearl onions are among the only foodstuffs in my refrigerator, those and olives, because sometimes I prefer a martini.
Thinking back, it occurred to me that I must’ve spent a couple of days at least in Velázquez’s life this time, given the work on the painting, and so I was curious to see how much time I had actually spent in…can I still call it real time? The little screen on my answering machine told me that approximately thirty-four hours had passed since I had set up the canvas, something my belly was starting to confirm, and the Gibson was having an unusually powerful effect on my brain and balance. There were fifteen messages on my machine, said the little lights, and I ran through them and answered the one from Mark Slotsky.