Goya's Glass by Monika Zgustová, Matthew Tree Read Free Book Online

remember your expression, your eyes? While your mother lives, with a bit of luck you will live on in her, with a littlebit 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; only through his painting will the public of the future know that you admired Haydn, that you wrote to him as if he were your beloved, your adored one without whom you could not live, that you played the violin and the harpsichord like no one else in the entire country. All that can be read in your expression and in the shape of your hands, your fingers, the pose of your body, but much more in the picture than even in real life . . .
    A week later, at the ball organized on the terrace of the Piedrahíta palace, I danced for the first time with Francisco.
    He looked at me crudely. Although we danced separately, I felt that he was holding me firmly, that he was pressing me against him. I remember just one sensation: I am a piece of ice in the palm of a warm hand, I am melting, I am turning into liquid, into warmth, into boiling water, into steam, heat, fire . . .
    “We shall have our first session, Don Francisco.”
    “Yes, tomorrow, if you wish.”
    “No, right now.”
    “But . . .”
    I took him away with me under the fire of incredulous eyes. Everyone was gawking, not at what was happening, but at how it was happening.
    I had Francisco sit in a low armchair in my chamber. Among the objects on the bedside table, he discovered my crystal glass; the other time he had filled it with wine and drank. He turnedthe glass in his fingers and watched the circles made by the wine as if I were not there.
    “Don Francisco, do you know who Monsieur Le Nôtre was and what he asked of the pope?”
    He shook his head.
    “Le Nôtre was an architect of the last century who designed the gardens at Versailles. But that is not of importance either. What is, is that Monsieur Le Nôtre was received by the pope. I think it was Innocent XI, but that isn’t important either. The most interesting thing about their meeting was what the architect asked of the pope. Do you know what it was? That instead of an indulgence, the pope grant him temptations. Don Francisco, what we should ask of God is passion, passion, and more passion.”
    He narrowed his eyes, he looked at me . . . Go away, María, and take your cross with you. What I am about to recall is not for your ears . . . While he poured himself more wine, I unfastened my bodice. He continued with his eyes half-closed, looking me up and down from behind his eyelashes, with a painter’s eyes and the look of a man who knows how to appreciate what he sees.
    “Does the lady Duchess wish me to paint her like this?”
    I nodded.
    “The décolletage should be smaller.”
    “Why?”
    “This is not for . . .” he mumbled, caressing my breasts with his eyes.
    “What are you saying, why?”
    “No one should see this . . .” he grumbled in a low voice.
    I felt that all of me had been reduced to my breasts. My face, my arms, my chamber; everything ceased to exist. There were only my heavy breasts, which the painter had absorbed in his memory so as later to give them to all the women in his paintings and engravings.
    “Why, sir royal painter?” I asked him once more, with a touch of ironic disdain. Perhaps by ridiculing him, I wanted to hide the fact that not even nude could I dominate this man.
    “For reasons of composition,” he declared, finally.
    I approached him until I felt his breath against the skin of my breasts and said to him: “Then arrange my décolletage in accordance with these reasons.”
    Was that how it happened? Or have I dreamt it? Perhaps I only wished that it had happened like this. Or perhaps it is only now that I know what I should have done. I never felt any shame when I disrobed in front of the students; their sense of decency amused me. But at that moment, was it not I who was standing