Goya's Glass (6 page)

What did I want? That he, the painter, would stay? My aim was to become the mistress and lady of this man.

Francisco glanced at me, full of hatred, and made a gesture as if he wanted to smash the crystal glass against the wall—like the jug against the tiles on the floor in the tavern—then controlled himself and left without saying anything.

Satisfied, I stopped thinking about the painter. At night I noted in my dairy: “I will not stop smuggling the French encyclopedists into Spain because no one can do anything against the Duchess of Alba, not even those of the Inquisition. In my bedroom I will hang nude portraits, banned in Spain, including the Venus of Velázquez and others that represent me myself. Let the grand inquisitor come to see them in person, to feast his eyes on them if he will! He can do no harm to the Duchess.”

María, come here with your cross. You wouldn’t want them to hang me up on it, would you? What did Don Francisco do after that ball on the terrace, María?

I remember that over the following weeks he didn’t reply to the invitations to sessions with me. Exceptional shamelessness. He could not be seen anywhere. He did not turn up to the teas, the dinners, or the balls.

One day I was walking through the woods with the little black girl, the water spaniel, and the monkey. From a distance
I saw a man kneeling next to a huge oak. He was taking off the bark and examining it. I felt sure I had spotted Francisco, but as I had recently been spotting him in every man I saw, especially in the grooms and the men in the coach house, I wasn’t sure. Then he embraced the trunk of the tree, as if he wanted to measure it. He remained like that for a while: a colossus, although not a very tall one, embracing another. Was it a coincidence that I liked to walk in those woods where he usually spent his time? I sent the little black girl back home with the dog and the monkey.

He turned around. We looked at each other without blinking. I walked a few paces closer to him, then he approached me. We were separated by the distance of a few thick trees, the branches of which barely touched each other. We looked at each other without moving. He took a few fast steps toward me, stopped, took me by the hand and set off walking again, dragging me behind him exactly as a father might do with a naughty little girl.

“Come on, there!” he grunted, menacingly.

He frightened and pleased me.

“Come on, come on!” he said and pushed me through the door into the little house he had his studio in.

In the cool, damp room there were a few canvases covered with pieces of cloth. Once again he looked me straight in the eyes, and smiled with a satisfaction full of malice. He surely read the terror in my face, the feeling that I had fallen into a trap and that, nonetheless, I felt all right there. The man laughed in an . . . animal-like way, I would say. Then, he really did make me afraid.

“Here!”

And with a violent gesture he tore off the cloth that covered one of the canvases. It represented an
aquelarre
, a witches’ sabbath, presided over by an enormous phantasmagorical billy goat. The witches’ faces were blurred. Only one had clear-cut features: I recognized my own face.

I was unable to control myself. My blood was boiling. I was eaten up by the desire to rip up the canvas with a knife, to destroy it with my bare hands, to spit on it. Furious, I glanced at the painter. He wasn’t looking at me. In front of his work, he had forgotten me. Resplendent, he examined his picture, the masterpiece he had created. The fury and the terror ceased. But the joy, too. I looked at him again: this man was ignoring me, he was alone with his creation. Puzzled, I went over to another canvas, and, little by little so as not to disturb him, I uncovered it.

Two women, young and beautiful; a man with an expression of total surrender on his face hands a generous bunch of grapes to the dark one. The blonde one, with her gray eyes, watches him with tenderness. Envy and generosity come together in her face. The dark one feels honored: she knows that from now on the man’s heart belongs to her. A little boy, a brown angel, takes a grape from the basket. It is Javier, Francisco’s son. The blonde one is his wife, Josefa. The dark one is myself, rejuvenated, enhanced, good-looking. The man with the expression of surrender, who gives up his person together with the grapes, is Francisco.

The painter has forgiven me, then. He has managed to forget my madness the other night. How has he been able to do that?

Another canvas. A
majo
, covered by a cape, walks with a
maja
. From all directions, other men stick their heads out of the
undergrowth to look voluptuously at the girl. She, however, has eyes only for her
majo
, and turns to him with a seductive expression; her body seems to dance instead of walk. But she has no need to make an effort in order to captivate her escort. Although his face is not visible, it is clear: his posture shows that he is smitten by the girl. The
maja
is myself, I recognize my smile, my behavior, and my posture, a little strange—no one knows that I have always had to hide a physical blemish. The
majo
, who seems violent, but underneath is a mass of tenderness, is him, Francisco. I recognize him under his cape.

What I had seen was quite enough for me. Yet, the painter was still enthralled by his own work. I slipped out as lightly as if I had grown wings.

The sessions started a few weeks later. My husband was usually present because he appreciated Francisco as an artist, loved him as a person, and got on well with him. Godoy, who had come to visit us, was also present on two occasions. If Rembrandt’s
Venus
is an angel, as is that of Titian, then the woman in Francisco’s picture is a demon. Each one of her hairs is a poisonous snake that twists convulsively. The expression on her face is imperious, the posture of her body despotic. The innocence of the white of her dress acts as a foil to her perfidious nature. Goya’s picture of Venus is the portrait of a monster, of something that is even more inauspicious for being also beauty incarnate. But, only I know that Francisco saw me as I was: a woman lacking protection, so defenseless that she covers her nude body with the black
mane of her hair, in an arrogant posture and a way of being that is ceremonious and provocative at the same time. He saw me as an abandoned woman who floats in a vacuum and has nothing to hold on to. Although nearly all Spain belongs to her, she has nothing.

María, María! Where has that damned old woman gone to? Consuelo, I want my
aya
here! What, where has she gone? How shameless of her! Consuelo, go and see her and ask her what happened after the summer at Piedrahíta, when the royal painter painted me dressed in white with a red sash. Run, my memory is slipping!

My husband was proud of that portrait. He organized soirees in which first he played the harpsichord, then invited everyone to dinner, and after coffee and liqueurs, as the culmination of the evening’s entertainment, he gathered the guests in the salon to show them my portrait. On the opposite wall hung the portrait that Goya had painted of him, of Don José, Marquis of Villafranca. People cried out in their enthusiasm and, who was it that day? Osuna perhaps? Somebody said, amid the silence that fell after the exclamations: “What an ideal couple, the Duchess of Alba and the Marquis of Villafranca! How they resemble each other, what a match! It doesn’t surprise me that they live in perfect harmony together.”

In more than one face I saw a grimace of mockery.

I replied: “Now then, dearest friend! How could I compete with my husband? I have the face of a wild animal, though not as
much as you do, my dearest, whereas Don José has the eyes of a deer, which are nothing if not the expression of his soul.”

That is what I thought then of José, yes. Osuna had to shut up; José shone.

But I didn’t think that when they engaged me to him at the age of eleven, and married me to him when I was thirteen. At that time I was standing in front of the altar next to Mama and her bridegroom. Any man there seemed to me to be more masculine than my bony scarecrow with his big brown eyes. Even Miguelito, the son of our laundrywoman, had bigger muscles. Oh, how I loved playing with him in the granary! We took off our clothes and then swam together in the grain. One day I told my grandfather about our games and he quoted me something so beautiful I’ve remembered it ever since. A philosopher, Diderot, I think, told him:

That is how I wrote it down and I took it seriously. I spent my wedding night with Miguelito in the granary. We swam nude among the corn, even though it was very cold. When my friends came to see me, I usually received them in the nude, following the advice of the French philosopher regarding good taste, and when the girls were frightened and about to flee, I made them a present of that wise sentence and added that I would dress
myself with my hair, so as not to alarm them. At that time my hair reached down to my knees. But I never received Don José like that. Soon, he stopped coming to visit me and preferred to spend nights playing the piano and the harpsichord, the viola and the violin. Only after a long time did I receive him, almost fully dressed because I find men’s bodies repulsive. I wanted a little child to play with, but he was unable to give me one. He wasn’t even capable of doing that.

“Hey Consuelo, what does my
aya
say?”

“Milady, Doña María says that she is ashamed to answer your question.”

“Wonderful, let her be ashamed, the pious thing. But did she give you an answer or didn’t she?”

“Milady, she says that after you came back from Piedrahíta you became friends with Don Manuel de Godoy, the
Príncipe de la Paz
.”

“Heavens, was it then? Yes, it’s true. At that time I wanted to kill two birds with one stone, and the only thing I managed to achieve was to injure myself. Go, go, don’t bother me now, girl.”

Finally! How hard it is to get rid of these gossipmongers. It was at a soiree in my palace. I had very few candles lit. My husband played Haydn for the guests and he managed to make me sad. I realized that year after year my life was slipping away, years lived uselessly, without aim, without emotion. Nothing attracted me, nobody needed me. I sang
tonadillas
, I acted in plays, people applauded me, admired my beauty and my talent, but none of that meant anything to me. That evening Don José played, no, in fact it wasn’t Haydn; he was playing something on the viola. I
think it was Marin Marais,
Les Folies d’Espagne
. The same melody was repeated, grew like a wave, and then suddenly settled back again to rise quickly into a crescendo. Godoy stood behind my chair and whispered into my ear that never had any woman, that the affection he felt for me . . . that because of me he had neglected affairs of state . . . that I, that I, that I . . .

In short, the most common sort of praise. At the same time he tickled me in the most delicious fashion on the nape of my neck as he played with my necklace. My melancholy began to fade and I began to have the feeling that I was in heaven, full of music and of words and caresses.

The king and queen were seated in the first row according to protocol, and Godoy should have been seated next to María Luisa, as prime minister and her prime lover. But he had stood up to move away from her and approach the wall behind me. After a while the queen turned—the salon glittered with the brilliance of her jewels, so much so it seemed as if the candles had gone out—she saw everything. She went red with anger while I put on a listless expression so that my dear María Luisa should have no doubt about what was happening. Godoy became alarmed and wanted to go back to his seat, but I made him burn up inside with a furtive look that said now or never. He hesitated. I rose a little as if preparing to leave and immediately he nodded: yes, I’m ready. While waiting for me he went red as a prawn and his fingers ran over my skin with greater strength. He caressed my naked shoulders under my hair. My mother-in-law, dressed as ever in a ubiquitous pearl gray with platinum around her neck and silver in her hair, turned toward me to whisper that after the
music we would dine with their majesties king and queen in a small group, but maybe I didn’t hear her. The music was reaching its culmination, the wave grew. The music gave me strength. I got up, making a signal to Don Manuel. As he followed me, he reddened and paled by turn. I left a message for my husband saying I felt indisposed and that Don Manuel had been called away unexpectedly and needed to leave most urgently. So the intimate dinner with their majesties did not take place in order to avoid a somewhat uncomfortable situation in which two of the main heroes would be missing, the tenor and the soprano, and what was more, each from a different duo. The king, who never understood anything, didn’t understand what was happening then either. I can imagine him perfectly, patting my husband on the back and saying how it was high time they played together, while Don José bit his lip—first from imagining the clumsy king in comparison to his refined fingers, which didn’t play so much as produce magic, and second, when he realized the reason why his wife and the queen’s lover were missing after the concert.

Once in my chambers, the spell that I had been under a moment before disappeared altogether, but I attended Godoy’s amorous petition. The hope that I was hurting the queen with my action was a consolation to me. What was more, in some hidden corner of my soul I was feeding the illusion that Francisco, who had not come to any supper or musical evening at my little salon in the Moncloa, was a friend of Don Manuel. I had no reason to believe that Godoy was not discreet, and I hoped that this juicy piece of social news would reach Francisco’s ear and if it didn’t hurt him, that it would at least graze him. Graze
him, the only man who did not respond to my challenges. The untamable man.

On the afternoon of the following day my chambermaid brought me an ochre-colored envelope which contained a letter.