Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (31 page)

—Did you envy Pedro Romero, Paco?

—I wanted to live to be a hundred, like Titian. I died at eighty-two, and I don't know if I had already lost my head.

—Romero died at eighty.

—I didn't know that. He doesn't reside in our district.

—He retired from the ring at forty.

—Hold on, I know that story better than anyone.

—That's enough, old woman, you'll fall clean out the window, you'd better get yourself off to bed.

—Oh, I know all about it.

—Come on, don't be childish.

—Oh, let me tell Don Paco the whole story, before I die of frustration …

—Who do you think you are, Aunt Mezuca, the morning paper?

—Listen here: Pedro Romero was the greatest bullfighter of his day. He killed 5,588 fierce bulls. But he was never touched by a single horn. When he was buried at eighty, his body didn't have a single scar, see, not even a little scratch this big.

—It was a perfect body, a nearly perfect figure, with a muscular harmony revealed in the soft caramel color of his skin, which accentuated his body's classic Mediterranean forms, the medium height, strong shoulders, long upper arms, compact chest, flat belly, narrow hips, sensual buttocks over well-formed but short legs, and small feet: a body of bodies, crowned by a noble head, firm jaw, elegant, taut cheeks, virile emerging beard, perfectly straight nose, fine, separated eyebrows, clear forehead, widow's peak, serene, dark eyes …

—And how you know that, Don Francisco?

—I painted him.

—All of him?

—No, only the face and a hand. The rest was just his cape. But to fight bulls, Pedro Romero, who stood to receive the bull as no one had ever done before, and who froze for the kill as nobody had ever done either, and who, between stops and commands, bequeathed us the luxury of the most beautiful, uninterrupted series of passes that had ever been seen …

—And olé …

—And recontraolé …

—Well, to fight bulls that way, Pedro Romero had only his eyes, those were his weapons—he looked at the bull and thought as he faced the beast.

—Just his eyes!

—No, also a way of fighting bulls by making them see their death in the cape. He invented the encounter, the only one permitted, my Cádiz friends, between the nature that we kill to survive and the nature that for once excuses us for our crime … only in the bullring.

—And in war, too, Paco, if you consider how we excuse our crimes here in Cádiz.

—No, old man, a man never has to kill another man to survive; to kill your brother is unpardonable. If we don't kill nature, we don't live, but we can live without killing other people. We would like to receive nature's pardon for killing her, but she denies us that, she turns her back on us, and instead condemns us to see ourselves in history. I assure you, my Cádiz friends, that it's in our loss of nature and our meeting with history that we create art. Painting, I …

—And the bullfight, Romero …

—And love, La Privada …

—I invented both of them.

—They existed without you, Goya.

—All that remains of Romero is a single painting and two engravings. Mine. Of Elisia there remain a painting and twenty engravings. All mine.

—Simply lines, Paquirri, just lines, but not life, not that.

—Where do we find lines in nature? I see only light and dark bodies, advancing and receding planes, reliefs and concavities …

—And what about those bodies that approach, Don Paco, and the ones that recede, what about them?

—Where's the body of Elisia Rodríguez?

—She died young. She was thirty.

—And what did you give her, Goya?

—What she didn't have: age. I painted her wrinkled, toothless, wasted, absurdly persisting in using unguents, vapors, pomades, and powders to rejuvenate herself.

—Until death!

—Surrounded by monkeys and lapdogs and gossips and ridiculous fops; the final few spectators of her faded glory …

—Wait till you've been anointed!

—But La Privada escaped from me, she died young …

—Her final fainting, Paco.

—La Privada who denied you the pleasure of seeing her dazed in your arms when you made love …

—Oh, listen, listen to this, everyone, window to window: Elisia Rodríguez never fainted with Don Paco de Goya, with everyone else, yes …

—Shut up, damn it …

—Hey, Don Paco, don't get worked up, here in Cádiz we laugh at everything …

—Nothing between us …

—I gave you everythin', but you, nothin'.

—And that's the way it was!

—No, the reason La Privada didn't faint for me was that she had to stay wide awake to tell me things about our people, she wanted me to know them; listen, her fainting was just a pretext so she could sleep anyway, and not be bothered, once she had got what she …

—And did they let her sleep in peace?

—Except for a few dense fellows who would shake her by the neck trying to wake her …

—Poor La Privada: how many times was she doused with cold water to wake her from her trance!

—How many pinches on the arm!

—How many slaps on the rear!

—How many times did she get her feet tickled!

—But not with me. With me she always stayed awake to tell me things. She told me about a little dog she loved that fell in a well where no one could get it, he couldn't grab the ropes they lowered, bulls have horns but dogs have only the eyes of sad and defenseless men, which call to us and ask our help, and we can't give it …

—Elisia Rodríguez told you that?

—As if to a deaf man, shouting in my ear, that's the way she told me her stories. How was she going to faint with me, if I was her immortality!

—And the witches' Sabbath, Goya …

—And the starving beggars, cold soup dribbling down their lips, the infinite bitterness of being old, deaf, impotent, mortal …

—Keep going …

—She told me how the people in her town amused themselves by burying the young men up to their thighs in sand and giving them clubs to fight to the death, and how that torture became a regular custom and then, without anyone forcing it on them, the men took it up as a way of resolving disputes of honor—buried, clubbing each other, killing each other …

—What didn't La Privada know…?

—Daughter of those flea-bitten towns where the princes went to marry to spare the most miserable districts from taxes …

—Stop shouting, you old fool…!

—Daughter of centuries of hunger …

—You'll never escape!

—She was a child of misery, misery was her true homeland, her dowry, but she had such intelligence, such strength, such will, that she broke through the circle of poverty, escaped with a Jesuit, married a trader, reached the highest heights, was celebrated, loved, and she exercised her blessed will …

—All fall down!

—They all fall, and if she didn't give me her fainting, Elisia gave me something better: her memories, which were the same as her vision, both bright and bitter, realistic, of the world …

—You have a golden beak, Paquirri!

—Because I might have had that black vision, since I was old and deaf and disabused, but that she, young, celebrated, desired, that she possessed it, and not only that, that she, at twenty, knew the cynicism and corruption of the world more clearly than I with all my art, that brought more to my art than all the years of my long life: she saw first, and clearly, what my broad pallet brushes then tried to reproduce in the deaf man's estate. I think La Privada had to know everything about the world because she knew she was going to leave it soon.

—Of what illness did she die?

—What everyone died of then: obstructed bowels, the miserable colic.

—It's called cancer, Paco.

—There was no such thing in my time.

—Why was she so sensitive?

—She had no choice, if she wanted to be what all the generations of her race had not been. She existed in the name of the past of her village and her family. She refused to say to that past: You are dead, I am alive, you can go on rotting. Instead, she told them: Come with me, sustain me with your memories, with your experience, let's even the accounts, no one will ever make us lower our eyes again while they take the bread from our hands. Never again.

—Nobody knows himself!

—She did. She was my secret sorceress, and I didn't deny her that image: I painted her as a goddess and as a witch, I painted her younger than she ever was, and I painted her older than she would ever be. A sorceress, friends, is an esoteric being, and that curious word means: I cause to enter, I introduce. She introduced me, flesh in flesh, sleep in sleep, and reason in reason, for each of our thoughts, each of our desires and our bodies, has a double of its own insufficiency and its own dissatisfaction. She knew it: you think that a thing is yours alone, she told me between bites of cookies (she was very fond of sweets), but soon you discover that only what belongs to everyone belongs to you. You think the world exists only in your head, and she sighed, sticking a candied yolk in her mouth, but you soon learn that you exist only in the head of the world.

—Oh, you're making me hungry.

—I see Elisia on the stage, and I see her and feel her in bed. I see her strip off her clothes in her bath and at the same time I see her carried in a litter so that the people of Madrid, who can't afford the theater admission, can render her homage. I see her alive and I see her dead. I see her dead and I see her alive. And it's not that she gave me more than she gave others; she just gave me everything more intensely.

—You mean, as they say these days, in a more representative manner?

—Exactly. Cayetana de Alba came down with her charms to the people. Elisia Rodríguez
ascended
with her charms, thanks to the people, because she was one of them. She didn't hide her disillusionment, bitterness, and misery from the people when, despite her fame and fortune, she was plagued with them. I was witness to that encounter: the popular, famous actress and the anonymous people from whence she came. That's why I follow her, even though I'm headless, I can't leave her alone, I interrupt her lovemaking, I frighten her new lovers, I trail her in her nocturnal affairs through our cities, so different from before, but secretly so faithful to themselves …

—And you, Goya, who came from Fuendetodos in Aragón …

—A town that makes you shudder just to look at it!

—Yes, I follow her in her nocturnal affairs, in search of love, in the free time this hell where we live grants us to leave and roam outside. She doesn't want to lose the source, she returns, and that keeps her alive. I keep my sanity to surprise her when she's with someone else and plaster her face with pigment, to disfigure her and frighten the poor unwitting stud she's picked up for the night, huddled under the sheets.

—Two of a kind!

—Don Francisco and Doña Elisia!

—The painter and the actress!

—May they never rest in holy ground!

—May they always want something!

—May they always have to leave their graves at night to find what they're missing!

—The third party.

—The other.

—The lover.

—Pedro Romero.

—He got away from them.

—He lived eighty years.

—A bullfighter who died in bed.

—Not a scar on his body.

—Him they did bury in consecrated ground, even though he was, in his way, both artist and actor.

—Lie: nobody escapes from hell.

—Sooner or later, they all fall.

—Death merely confirms the laws of gravity.

—But we ascend, too.

—We all have a double of our own dissatisfaction.

—Don Francisco Goya y Lost Scents.

—You think that you put the world in your canvases and you created the world in your art and nothing remained of that mud except this dust. What do we know except what you taught us!

—This dust!

—I didn't invent anything, Christ! I only showed those who showed themselves. I made known the unknown who wanted to be known. Come high, come low: see yourselves. Ladies, gentlemen: see yourselves, see yourselves.

—Here comes the bogeyman.

—They dug you up five times, Paco, to see if your head had reappeared.

—Nothin'.

—But Romero, nobody was curious to see if his skeleton was all there or if his bones had invisible cuts.

—Nothin'.

—And she?

—She, yes, everyone wanted to know if she, who had been so beautiful and had died so young, was going to outlive death. What would her remains be like? To ask that was secretly to ask: What would her ghost be like?

—Goya and Romero agreed to bury her secretly, so that the curious could not find her. Isn't that true, Don Paco?

—Not only true but sad.

—Look, Goya, only in death did you complete your
ménage à trois.

—No, we didn't want others to see her, and we didn't want to see her either. But some years later, when nostalgia erased the sins of La Privada, her miserable natal town, which, although exempt from taxes, remained impoverished, tried to benefit from the enduring fame of the actress. The village leaders said they were sure Elisia Rodríguez had left something in her will for the town of her birth. She was faithful to her origins, you know that. But nobody found any such paper. Had she been buried with the will in her hands? Exhumation was requested. All the curious came to see if the beauty of the famous entertainer—or tragédienne, as she preferred to be called—had overcome death. Romero betrayed the secret of her grave; he said he was always ready to aid the authorities. He was old, established, respected, the founder of a dynasty of bullfighters.

—Did you go along with him, Don Francisco?