is . . . Thank you and go!”
Where to look for freedom and independence? Among people, I didn’t find it, nor in solitude and silence. I insisted on living in my isolation. I grew heavier and heavier inside. The fog around me grew thicker. I was living a long night.
On the morning of a rainy day they brought a huge packet to the house: they were pictures. How strange, I thought. It has been a long time since I commissioned any. I had them unwrapped, and waited with indifference. Then they opened the door; they brought them into my room and I saw two of them. They represented two magnificent majas. The dressed one seemed even more provocative and naked than the undressed one. Beautiful women, masterpieces. A whole series of questions immediately sprung to mind: Where could I hang them? Who had sent them to me? What did it mean? Was it a joke? Or a mistake? All of a sudden I knew the answer: they were not two majas, but one—a woman who included all the other women in the world and everything tempting, dangerous, and seductive that the feminine sex had; the woman was me and Francisco had painted her, had painted me. It was his hand! It was a declaration!
I had the pictures hung in my bedroom. I observed my reclining body with Francisco’s eyes and felt the excitement he did.
And one day afterward, I walked over to his studio. I had the keys. I went without having said anything to him; I hoped the painter wasn’t there. But at the same time it is true that some hidden part of me was looking forward to the idea that the painter had spent the night painting and that I would still find him there.
I turned the key. He wasn’t there. So I was able to look at the engravings in my own time; I saw they were all over the place, out of order. Each image bore a title, inscribed at the foot of the picture. Volaverunt. A woman—transformed into a witch, in whom everyone can recognize the Duchess of Alba, beyond a doubt—flies over the bodies of her lovers to a sabbath of witches and wizards. Todos caerán: the same duchess, painted as a bird of prey with a woman’s head and breast, tempts bird-men to approach her; Goya’s face, when he was young and adult, can be recognized in more than one bird-man. After their inevitable fall, the woman plucks the feathers off her victims as if they were chickens. The woman, the duchess. El sueño de la mentira y la inconstancia: while Francisco looks lovingly and imploringly at his beloved, she takes his hand and embraces it. The woman, here too, is without doubt the Duchess of Alba. The woman turns into a double and her other half receives letters, looks, and messages from other men. ¡No hay quien nos desate!: a man uses all his energy to free himself from his beloved who holds him in her grip, like the chimera of a nightmare. The man is he, the painter. And more and more etchings, all of treacherous women, sometimes depicted as cheap prostitutes, other times as brides or rich ladies who are for sale. And, what is more, all kinds of enchantresses and witches, all with the beautiful face and exuberant figure of the duchess. And then asses and chimera, monsters and priests. And the queen. Yes, the queen too, ridiculous and deserving of pity.
This, then, is the new masterpiece that all Madrid is talking about, I thought. Caprichos, a series that is unprecedented, so they say. It is the testimony of the emotional suffering of the artist, they say. Of the hell of love that Goya has lived through. Everyone says this, and maybe everyone is right. But they do not know one thing: that this series of engravings is above all an act of vengeance. Goya transformed the Duchess of Alba—the most beautiful, the most admired and the most celebrated of the noble ladies of Spain, the woman for whom, whenever she entered a salon, the music would stop—into a crude, ordinary libertine, into a dissolute woman deserving of disdain. Yes, Paco. You have in your hands a weapon, which is more dangerous than any of the arms that the second most powerful woman in Spain has at her disposal.
The days that followed were marked by visions of the etchings. I wanted to meet up with the painter. I