going on inside of a person. Deaf as he was, he saw and understood everything.
How he tortured me, that man, doing everything the opposite way of what I wanted it to be. I, who entered a room and the musicians stopped playing! I could enter his house a hundred times and Francisco never stopped playing. That made me suffer, which amazed me. If I was in good health now, I would dispose of my life in another fashion. This slow death and the awareness that life is leaving me have taught me how to live. Too late!
It is too late for anything, even for Francisco. He, deaf as he is, is at the height of his powers and will still show the world how crapulous, libertine, dissipated, licentious, and debauched was the Duchess of Alba! Not only ungrateful, but perfidious. All that, but she was beautiful, charming, sublime. Make sure that nobody will forget it, Paco! Paint a portrait of the woman so that the generations to come will regret never having been able to have her! Because I am going. Paco, I know that we will never meet again, my old stocky, grumbling, so-often-unbearable Paco. The only person I will catch up with will be my husband. I will meet José some place in the underworld, in the kingdom of shadows. I don’t want to be buried in his tomb to lie by his side for evermore . . . No!
Please, María! Back you come to me with a bunch of flowers. Throw them into the garbage and stop bothering me, you wicked woman. So old, so ugly, and even you will outlive me! No, I don’t want to know who has sent me this stinking mess. The devil take them all, all of them! I’m fed up, especially with you. Come on, María, little old thing, don’t be offended by a few words from a dying woman, eh? Sit here with me. No, not on the bed, you disgusting old woman! Here, on this low chair.
Tell me, why did Francisco come to Piedrahíta, and not alone but in the company of his wife and children? What happened there? Yes, you’re right, it was at the time of that extraordinary heat wave worthy of a tropical country. One day at a dance—we organized them every week, didn’t we, on Tuesdays?—to which, in addition to the local minor nobility, we had invited some people from the village, I grew tired of dancing with the local faith-healers, and as for the nobles, well, you yourself know how little I cared for all those princes and dukes and marquesses! So I ended up sitting next to my husband. The whole time he followed me with those deer eyes of his, and I think he envied my vitality. He always envied it because he didn’t know what an effort it was for me to get up every day, and if it wasn’t for my obligatory attendance at the official lever I would probably never have been capable of getting up in the morning. But once I was up, I didn’t want people to discover my aversion to life, so I put on the face of an enthusiastic little girl. But you knew how to look behind the mask, didn’t you? I sat next to those deer eyes that I became used to seeing in the portrait that Francisco had painted of my husband, which we had hung in the salon, and I drank fresh lemonade.
“I want my own portrait, a portrait more beautiful than that of my mother, which was painted by Mengs. I want people never to forget it once they have seen it. I want a picture that makes me famous everywhere and forever.”
“That portrait by Agustín Esteve . . .”
“Don’t mention that name, qué vergüenza, Don José! Do you not know that in all Spain, Italy, and France, that is to say in all the world, there is only one painter capable of doing it? Do you yourself not have eyes to see your portrait hanging in the salon? Yes, José, what do you think is going to happen to you when you die? Who will remember your expression, your eyes? While your mother lives, with a bit of luck you will live on in her, with a little bit more luck, you will in me. But once we are dead, you will die completely and forever! Only in Goya’s portrait will your deer eyes continue to move the viewer;