— What are you saying, Paco? We’re lolling in the lap of luxury here.
— Don’t interrupt, Uncle Corujo.
— Hey, aren’t we all part of the gang here, Aunt Mezuca? What’s wrong with a little gossip?
— And who said anything about being part of the gang, you stunted old fool?
— It’s okay, part of the gang, old wives’ tales, old men’s chatter, call it anything you like, what are you going to do here in Cádiz, where the streets are so narrow, and hotter than in Ecija, and lovers can touch fingers from one window to the next …
— And have to listen to the chatter of gossipmongers like you, Uncle Soleche …
— Shut your mouth, you old hen …
— Don Francisco was saying …
— Thanks for the respect, son. A lot of times we dead ones don’t even get that. I just wanted to say that my case is not unique. Science takes absolute liberties with death. Maybe scientists are the last animists. The soul has gone, to heaven or hell, and the remains are just vile matter. That’s how the French phrenologists must have seen me. I don’t know whether I prefer the sacred fetishism of Spain or the soulless, anemic Cartesianism of France.
— The eyes of St. Lucy.
— The tits of St. Agatha.
— The teeth of St. Apollonia.
— The arm of St. Theresa in Tormes.
— And that of Alvaro Obregón in San Angel.
— And where is the leg of Santa Anna?
— The blood of San Pantaleón in Madrid, which dries up in bad times.
— Yes, in England, my skull might have been the inkwell of some romantic poet.
— Did what happened to you, Paco, happen to anyone else?
— Of course. Speaking of England, poor Laurence Sterne, with whom I often chat, because his books are something like written premonitions of my Caprichos, though less biting, and …
— You’re digressing, Paco …
— Sorry. My friend Sterne says that digression is the sun of life. Digression is the root of his writing, because it attacks the authority of the center, he says, it rebels against the tyranny of form, and …
— Paco, Paco, you’re straying, man! What happened to your friend Sterne?
— Oh, nothing, except when he died in London in 1768 his corpse disappeared from its tomb a few days after his burial.
— Like your head, Paco …
— No, Larry was luckier. His body was stolen by some students from Cambridge, knockabouts and idlers the way they all are, who were celebrating the rites of May in June, whiling away their white nights, using him for their anatomy experiments. Laurence says nobody needed to dissect him because he was more dried up and full of parasites than mistletoe, but since he had written so brilliantly of prenatal life, he approved of someone prolonging his postmortal life, if you can call it that. They returned it — the corpse, I mean — to its tomb, a little the worse for wear.
— Then your case is unique.
— Not at all. Where are the heads of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, of Sydney Carton and of the Princesse de Lamballe?
— Oh, crime, how many liberties are committed in your name!
— And the wheel keeps on rolling, Roland!
— You bet. But Byron, who’s my neighbor these days — though not a sociable one — had his brains stolen when it was discovered that they were the biggest in recorded history. And that’s nothing. There’s a guy who’s more sullen than anyone in my parts, he looks like a Ronda highwayman, a masher and slasher for sure. Dillinger he’s called, John Dillinger, and I always think Dildo-ger, because when they cut him down leaving a theater …
— It was a movie house, Paco.
— In my day we didn’t have those. A theater, I say, and when they did the autopsy they found he had a bigger dick than Emperor Charles V had titles, so they lopped it right off and stuck it in a jar of disinfectant, and there is the outlaw’s John Thomas to this very day, in case anyone wants to compare sizes, and die of envy.
— 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?