— 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!