Death was going to cast the three of them to the four winds before love united them. That thought was killing Goya. He was an old man and he didn’t dare ask for what he wanted. He couldn’t endure the scorn, the mockery, the simple denial. He didn’t know what Elisia whispered in Romero’s ear:
— He’s an old tightwad. He never brings me anything. He doesn’t bring me what you do, sweet things, honey and bread …
— I’ve never brought you rich things. Who are you confusing me with?
— With no one, Romero: you bring me sweet things, not sweets but sweetness, because you know I’m endearing …
— You’re a flirt, Elisia …
— But him: nothing. A tightwad, a miser. No woman can love that sort of man. He lacks those attentions. He may be a genius, but he doesn’t know anything about women. Whereas you, my treasure …
— I bring you almonds, Elisia, bitter pears and olives in oil, so you are forced to draw sweetness out of my body.
— Lover, how you talk, how you flatter, stop talking now and come here.
— Here I am, all of me, Elisia.
— I’m waiting. I’m not impatient, Romero.
— That’s what I’ve always said, you have to wait for the bull to get to you, that’s how it discovers death.
The painter didn’t hear them but he didn’t dare tell them what his heart desired.
— But if only I could watch, only watch … I have never wanted anything else …
Did they think of him as they fornicated? At least to this extent: they thought of him when they wanted what a painter could not refuse: a witness.
But he had to be honest with himself. She denied him something else. With Romero, she fainted when she came. With him, she did not. She denied him the fainting.
Then, shut within his estate, with the children shouting insults that he didn’t hear and scrawling on his wall, he rapidly sketched and painted three works, and in the first the three of them were lying in a bed of rumpled sheets, Romero, Elisia, and Goya, but she had two faces on the same pillow, and one of her faces was gazing passionately at Pedro Romero while she embraced him feverishly, and Pedro Romero also had two faces, one for the pleasure of Elisia, the other for the friendship with the painter, just as she, too, had a second face for the painter, and she winked at him while he kissed her, and at the same time she looked ardently at the bullfighter, and there were frogs and snakes and jesters with fingers at their lips surrounding them, not a triangle now but a sextet of deceptions and betrayals, a gray hole of corruption.
In the second painting she ascended skyward in her actress costume, her bun, and her flat shoes, but with her naked body, defeated, aged, straddling a broom, impaled by death’s own member, and accompanying her in her flight were the blind bats, the ever-vigilant owl, the swallows as tireless as eternal entreaties, and the preying vultures, eaters of filth, bearing the actress up to the false sky that was the paradise of the theater, the cupola of laughter, obscenities, and belches, the snap of whips, the farts, and the hissing that no clamor of paid applauders could silence: La Privada ascended to receive her final face, which Goya gave her, not warning her this time, as he had before (You will die alone, with me and without your lover); but using her as a warning, making her a witch, an empty hide, as her rival La Pepa de Hungría had once described her; he was the final arbiter of the face of the actress who had once asked him to portray her for eternity, as she was, in reality, without art. And that was what the artist could not give her, even though it cost him the supreme sexual gift of the despot: fainting at the moment of climax.
He also finished the third painting, that of Pedro Romero. He accentuated, if possible, the nobility, the beauty of that forty-year-old face, the calmness of the hand that had killed 5,892 bulls. But the spirit of the artist was not generous. — Take my head, he said to the painting of the bullfighter, and give me your body.
He opened a window to let in a little fresh air. And then the actress, the despot, the witch that he himself had imprisoned in the painting, mounted her broom and flew away cackling, chortling, laughing at her creator, spitting saliva and obscenities onto his gray head, saving herself like a swallow on the nocturnal breeze of Madrid.
5
Old and barefoot, his thick lips open and cracked, begging for water and air like a true penitent, he carried the Virgin of Seville on his shoulders.
— Actresses die, but Virgins do not.
That was when he remembered that, as covered as she was, this Most Holy Virgin whose throne he carried was no more modest than Elisia Rodríguez, when La Privada, naked, told him: You never give me anything, so I won’t give you anything either, and she pulled forward her fantastic black hair and covered her entire body with it, like a skirt, looking at Goya through the curtain of hair and saying vulgarly:
— Come on, don’t look so shocked, where there’s hair there is pleasure.
Friday
1
She asked the boys to test themselves alone first, to find out their capacities and then return and tell her their experiences, while she spent her days between cooking chick-peas and running to the henhouse, stopping from time to time to stand with her arms crossed by the wattle fence that separated her house from the immense cattle pastures.
The house should have been very large to hold all those boys, mostly orphans, some still of school age, others already masons, bakers, and café waiters, but all unhappy with their work, their poverty, their short, all too recent childhood, their rapid, hopeless aging. Their useless lives.
But the house was not large; there was little more than a corral, the kitchen, two bare rooms where the boys slept on sacks, and the señora’s bedroom, where she kept her relics, which were just some mementos of other kids, before the present group, and nothing from before that. It was known she had no husband. Or children. But if someone flung that in her face, she would answer that she had more children than if she had been married a hundred times. Parents, brothers, or sisters, who really knew? She had simply shown up at the village, appearing one fine day from among some rocks covered with prickly pear along a chestnut-lined path. Alone, hard, resolute, and sad, so skinny and dry that it wasn’t clear if she was a woman or a man, with a wide hat and a patched cape on her shoulder, a cigar between her teeth, she inspired many nicknames: Dry-Bone, Hammerhead, Boldface, No Fruit, Crow’s Foot, Cigar.
It was easy and even amusing to give her nicknames, once everyone realized that her severe appearance did not imply malice but simply a kind of sober distance. But who could say if those nicknames really fit her. She gave shelter to orphan boys, and when the village was scandalized and demanded that the dry, tall, thin woman give up that perverse practice, nobody else was inclined to take them in, so, through sheer indifference, by default, they let her continue, although from time to time a suspicious (and perhaps envious) spinster would ask:
— And why doesn’t she take in orphan girls?