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WOMAN TRIUMPHANT
(LA MAJA DESNUDA)
BY
VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
BY
HAYWARD KENISTON
WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY THE AUTHOR
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
Copyright, 1920,
BY K. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
First printing March, 1920
Second printing March, 1920
Third printing March, 1920
Fourth printing March, 1920
Fifth printing March, 1920
Sixth printing March, 1920
Seventh printing March. 1920
Eighth printing March, 1920
Ninth printing April, 1920
Tenth printing April, 1920
Eleventh printing April, 1920
Twelfth printing April, 1920
Thirteenth printing April, 1920
Fourteenth printing April, 1920
Printed In the United States of America
INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION
The title of this novel in the original, _La maja desnuda_, "The Nude
Maja," is also the name of one of the most famous pictures of the great
Spanish painter Francisco Goya.
The word _maja_ has no exact equivalent in English or in any of the
modern languages. Literally, it means "bedecked," "showy," "gaudily
attired," "flashy," "dazzling," etc., and it was applied at the end of
the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth to a
certain class of gay women of the lower strata of Madrid society
notorious for their love of dancing and their fondness for exhibiting
themselves conspicuously at bull-fights and all popular celebrations.
The great ladies of the aristocracy affected the free ways and imitated
the picturesque dress of the _maja_; Goya made this type the central
figure of many of his genre paintings, and the dramatist Ramón de la
Cruz based most of his _sainetes_--farcical pieces in one act--upon the
customs and rivalries of these women. The dress invented by the _maja_,
consisting of a short skirt partly covered by a net with berry-shaped
tassels, white _mantilla_ and high shell-comb, is considered all over
the world as the national costume of Spanish women.
When the novel first appeared in Spain some years ago, a certain part of
the Madrid public, unduly evil-minded, thought that it had discovered
the identity of the real persons whom I had taken as models to draw my
characters. This claim provoked a scandalous sensation and gave my book
an unwholesome notoriety. It was thought that the protagonists of _La
maja desnuda_ were an illustrious Spanish painter of world-wide fame,
who is my friend, and an aristocratic lady very celebrated at the time
but now forgotten. I protested against this unwarranted and fantastic
interpretation. Although I draw my characters from life, I do so only in
a very fragmentary way (like all the great creative novelists whom I
admire as masters in the field of fiction), using the materials gathered
in my observations to form completely new types which are the direct and
legitimate offspring of my own imagination. To use a figure: as a
novelist I am a painter, not a photographer. Although I seek my
inspiration in reality, I copy it in accordance with my own way of
seeing it; I do not reproduce it with the mechanical servility of the
photographic camera.
It is possible that my imaginary heroes are vaguely reminiscent of
beings who actually exist. Subconsciousness is the novelist's principal
instrument, and this subconsciousness frequently mocks us, leading us to
mistake for our own creation the things which we have unwittingly
observed in Nature. But despite this, it is unfair, as well as risky,
for the reader to assign the names of real persons to the characters of
fiction, saying, "This is So-and-so."
It would be equally unfair to consider this novel as audacious or of
doubtful morality. The artistic world which I describe in _La maja
desnuda_ cannot be expected to have the same conception of life as the
conventional world. Far from believing it immoral, I consider this one
of the most moral novels I have ever written. And it is for this reason
that, with a full realization of the standards demanded by the
English-reading public, I have not hesitated to authorize the present
translation without palliation or amputation, fully convinced that the
reader will not find anything in this novel objectionable or offensive
to his moral sense. Morality is not to be found in words but in deeds
and in the lessons which these deeds teach.
The difficulty of adequately translating the word _maja_ into English
led to the adoption of "Woman Triumphant" as the title of the present
version. I believe it is a happy selection; it interprets the spirit of
the novel. But it must be borne in mind that the woman here is the wife
of the protagonist. It is the wife who triumphs, resurrecting in spirit
to exert an overwhelming influence over the life of a man who had wished
to live without her.
Renovales, the hero, is simply the personification of human desire, this
poor desire which, in reality, does not know what it wants, eternally
fickle and unsatisfied. When we finally obtain what we desire, it does
not seem enough. "More: I want more," we say. If we lose something that
made life unbearable, we immediately wish it back as indispensable to
our happiness. Such are we: poor deluded children who cried yesterday
for what we scorn to-day and shall want again to-morrow; poor deluded
beings plunging across the span of life on the Icarian wings of caprice.
VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ.
New York, January, 1920.
WOMAN TRIUMPHANT
PART I
I
It was eleven o'clock in the morning when Mariano Renovales reached the
Museo del Prado. Several years had passed since the famous painter had
entered it. The dead did not attract him; very interesting they were,
very worthy of respect, under the glorious shroud of the centuries, but
art was moving along new paths and he could not study there under the
false glare of the skylights, where he saw reality only through the
temperaments of other men. A bit of sea, a mountainside, a group of
ragged people, an expressive head attracted him more than that palace,
with its broad staircases, its white columns and its statues of bronze
and alabaster--a solemn pantheon of art, where the neophytes vacillated
in fruitless confusion, without knowing what course to follow.
The master Renovales stopped for a few moments at the foot of the
stairway. He contemplated the valley through which you approach the
palace--with its slopes of fresh turf, dotted at intervals with the
sickly little trees--with a certain emotion, as men are wont to
contemplate, after a long absence, the places familiar to their youth.
Above the scattered growth the ancient church of Los Jerónimos, with its
gothic masonry, outlined against the blue sky its twin towers and ruined
arcades. The wintry foliage of the Retiro served as a background for
the white mass of the Casón. Renovales thought of the frescos of
Giordano that decorated its ceilings. Afterwards, he fixed his attention
on a building with red walls and a stone portal, which pretentiously
obstructed the space in the foreground, at the edge of the green slope.
Bah! The Academy! And the artist's sneer included in the same loathing
the Academy of Language and the other Academies--painting, literature,
every manifestation of human thought, dried, smoked, and swathed, with
the immortality of a mummy, in the bandages of tradition, rules, and
respect for precedent.
A gust of icy wind shook the skirts of his overcoat, his long beard
tinged with gray and his wide felt hat, beneath the brim of which
protruded the heavy locks of his hair, that had excited so much comment
in his youth, but which had gradually grown shorter with prudent
trimming, as the master rose in the world, winning fame and money.
Renovales felt cold in the damp valley. It was one of those bright,
freezing days that are so frequent in the winter in Madrid. The sun was
shining; the sky was blue; but from the mountains, covered with snow,
came an icy wind, that hardened the ground, making it as brittle as
glass. In the corners, where the warmth of the sun did not reach, the
morning frost still glistened like a coating of sugar. On the mossy
carpet, the sparrows, thin with the privations of winter, trotted back
and forth like children, shaking their bedraggled feathers.
The stairway of the Museo recalled to the master his early youth, when
at sixteen he had climbed those steps many a time with his stomach faint
from the wretched meal at the boarding-house. How many mornings he had
spent in that old building copying Velásquez! The place brought to his
memory his dead hopes, a host of illusions that now made his smile;
recollections of hunger and humiliating bargaining to make his first
money by the sale of copies. His large, stern face, his brow that filled
his pupils and admirers with terror lighted up with a merry smile. He
recalled how he used to go into the Museo with halting steps, how he
feared to leave the easel, lest people might notice the gaping soles of
his boots that left his feet uncovered.
He passed through the vestibule and opened the first glass door.
Instantly the noises of the world outside ceased; the rattling of the
carriages in the Prado; the bells of the street-cars, the dull rumble of
the carts, the shrill cries of the children who were running about on
the slopes. He opened the second door, and his face, swollen by the
cold, felt the caress of warm air, buzzing with the vague hum of
silence. The footfalls of the visitors reverberated in the manner
peculiar to large, unoccupied buildings. The slam of the door, as it
closed, resounded like a cannon shot, passing from hall to hall through
the heavy curtains. From the gratings of the registers poured the
invisible breath of the furnaces. The people, on entering, spoke in a
low tone, as if they were in a cathedral; their faces assumed an
expression of unnatural seriousness, as though they were intimidated by
the thousands of canvases that lined the walls, by the enormous busts
that decorated the circle of the rotunda and the middle of the central
salon.
On seeing Renovales, the two door-keepers, in their long frock-coats,
started to their feet. They did not know who he was, but he certainly
was somebody. They had often seen that face, perhaps in the newspapers,
perhaps on match-boxes. It was associated in their minds with the glory
of popularity, with the high honors reserved for people of distinction.
Presently they recognized him. It was so many years since they had seen
him there! And the two attendants, with their caps covered with
gold-braid in their hands and with an obsequious smile, came forward
towards the great artist.
"Good morning, Don Mariano. Did Señor de Renovales wish something? Did
he want them to call the curator?" They spoke with oily obsequiousness,
with the confusion of courtiers who see a foreign sovereign suddenly
enter their palace, recognizing him through his disguise.
Renovales rid himself of them with a brusque gesture and cast a glance
over the large decorative canvases of the rotunda, that recalled the
wars of the 17th century; generals with bristling mustaches and plumed
slouch-hat, directing the battle with a short baton, as though they were
directing an orchestra, troops of arquebusiers disappearing downhill
with banners of red and blue crosses at their front, forests of pikes
rising from the smoke, green meadows of Flanders in the
backgrounds--thundering, fruitless combats that were almost the last
gasps of a Spain of European influence. He lifted a heavy curtain and
entered the spacious salon, where the people at the other end looked
like little wax figures under the dull illumination of the skylights.
The artist continued straight ahead, scarcely noticing the pictures, old
acquaintances that could tell him nothing new. His eyes sought the
people without, however, finding in them any greater novelty. It seemed
as though they formed a part of the building and had not moved from it
in many years; good-natured fathers with a group of children before
their knees, explaining the meaning of the pictures; a school teacher,
with her well-behaved and silent pupils who, in obedience to the command
of their superior, passed without stopping before the lightly clad
saints; a gentleman with two priests, talking loudly, to show that he
was intelligent and almost at home there; several foreign ladies with
their veils caught up over their straw hats and their coats on their
arms, consulting the catalogue, all with a sort of family-air, with
identical expressions of admiration and curiosity, until Renovales
wondered if they were the same ones he had seen there years before, the
last time he was there.
As he passed, he greeted the great masters mentally; on one side the
holy figures of El Greco, with their greenish or bluish spirituality,
slender and undulating; beyond, the wrinkled, black heads of Ribera,
with ferocious expressions of torture and pain--marvelous artists, whom
Renovales admired, while determined not to imitate them. Afterwards,
between the railing that protects the pictures and the line of busts,
show-cases and marble tables supported by gilded lions, he came upon the
easels of several copyists. They were boys from the School of Fine Arts,
or poverty-stricken young ladies with run-down heels and dilapidated
hats, who were copying Murillos. They were tracing on the canvas the
blue of the Virgin's robe or the plump flesh of the curly-haired boys
that played with the Divine Lamb. Their copies were commissions from
pious people; a _genre_ that found an easy sale among the benefactors of
convents and oratories. The smoke of the candles, the wear of years, the
blindness of devotion would dim the colors, and some day the eyes of the
worshipers, weeping in supplication, would see the celestial figures
move with mysterious life on their blackened background, as they
implored from them wondrous miracles.
The master made his way toward the Hall of Velásquez. It was there that
his friend Tekli was working. His visit to the Museo had no other object
than to see the copy that the Hungarian painter was making of the
picture of _Las Meninas_.
The day before, when the foreigner was announced in his studio, he had
remained perplexed for a long while, looking at the name on the card.
Tekli! And then all at once he remembered a friend of twenty years
before, when he lived in Rome; a good-natured Hungarian, who admired him
sincerely and who made up for his lack of genius with a silent
persistency in his work, like a beast of burden.
Renovales was glad to see his little blue eyes, hidden under his thin,
silky eyebrows, his jaw, protruding like a shovel, a feature that made
him look very much like the Austrian monarchs--his tall frame that bent
forward under the impulse of excitement, while he stretched out his bony
arms, long as tentacles, and greeted him in Italian:
"Oh, _maestro, caro maestro!_"
He had taken refuge in a professorship, like all artists who lack the
power to continue the upward climb, who fall in the rut. Renovales
recognized the artist-official in his spotless suit, dark and proper, in
his dignified glance that rested from time to time on his shining boots
that seemed to reflect the whole studio. He even wore on one lapel of
his coat the variegated button of some mysterious decoration. The felt
hat, white as meringue, which he held in his hand, was the only
discordant feature in this general effect of a public functionary.
Renovales caught his hands with sincere enthusiasm. The famous Tekli!
How glad he was to see him! What times they used to have in Rome! And
with a smile of kindly superiority he listened to the story of his
success. He was a professor in Budapest; every year he saved money in
order to go and study in some celebrated European museum. At last he had
succeeded in coming to Spain, fulfilling the desire he had cherished for
many years.
"_Oh, Velásquez! uel maestro, caro Mariano!_"
And throwing back his head, with a dreamy expression in his eyes, he
moved his protruding jaw covered with reddish hair, with a voluptuous
look, as though he were sipping a glass of his sweet native Tokay.
He had been in Madrid for a month, working every morning in the Museo.
His copy of _Las Meninas_ was almost finished. He had not been to see
his "Dear Mariano" sooner because he wanted to show him this work. Would
he come and see him some morning in the Museo? Would he give him this
proof of his friendship? Renovales tried to decline. What did he care
for a copy? But there was an expression of such humble supplication in
the Hungarian's little eyes, he showered him with so many praises of his
great triumphs, expatiating on the success that his picture _Man
Overboard!_ had won at the last Budapest Exhibition, that the master
promised to go to the Museo.
And a few days later, one morning when a gentleman whose portrait he was
painting canceled his appointment, Renovales remembered his promise and
went to the Museo del Prado, feeling, as he entered, the same sensation
of insignificance and homesickness that a man suffers on returning to
the university where he has passed his youth.
When he found himself in the Hall of Velásquez, he suddenly felt seized
with religious respect. There was a painter! _The_ painter! All his
irreverent theories of hatred for the dead were left outside the door.
The charm of those canvases that he had not seen for many years rose
again--fresh, powerful, irresistible; it overwhelmed him, awakening his
remorse. For a long time he remained motionless, turning his eyes from
one picture to another, eager to comprise in one glance the whole work
of the immortal, while around him the hum of curiosity began again.
"Renovales! That's Renovales!"
The news had started from the door, spreading through the whole Museo,
reaching the Hall of Velásquez behind his steps. The groups of curious
people stopped gazing at the pictures to look at that huge,
self-possessed man who did not seem to realize the curiosity that
surrounded him. The ladies, as they went from canvas to canvas, looked
out of the corner of their eyes at the celebrated artist whose portrait
they had seen so often. They found him more ugly, more commonplace than
he appeared in the engravings in the papers. It did not seem possible
that that "porter" had talent and painted women so well. Some young
fellows approached to look at him more closely, pretending to gaze at
the same pictures as the master. They scrutinized him, noting his
external peculiarities with that desire for enthusiastic imitation which
marks the novice. Some determined to copy his soft bow-tie and his
tangled hair, with the fantastic hope that this would give them a new
spirit for painting. Others complained to themselves that they were
beardless and could not display the curly gray whiskers of the famous
master.
He, with his keen sensitiveness to praise, was not long in observing the
atmosphere of curiosity that surrounded him. The young copyists seemed
to stick closer to their easels, knitted their brows, dilated their
nostrils, and moved their brushes slowly, with hesitation, knowing that
he was behind them, trembling at every step that sounded on the inlaid
floor, full of fear and desire that he might deign to cast a glance over
their shoulders. He divined with a sort of pride what all the mouths
were whispering, what all the eyes were saying, fixed absent-mindedly on
the canvases only to turn toward him.
"It's Renovales--the painter Renovales."
The master looked for a long while at one of the copyists--an old man,
decrepit and almost blind, with heavy convex spectacles that gave him
the appearance of a sea-monster, whose hands trembled with senile
unsteadiness. Renovales recognized him. Twenty years before, when he
used to study in the Museo, he had seen him in the same spot, always
copying _Los Borrachos_. Even if he should become completely blind, if
the picture should be lost, he could reproduce it by feeling. In those
days they had often talked together, but the poor man could not have the
remotest suspicion that the Renovales whom people talked so much about
was the same lad who on more than one occasion had borrowed a brush from
him, but whose memory was scarcely preserved in his mind, mummified by
eternal imitation.
Renovales thought of the kindness of the chummy Bacchus and the gang of
ruffians of his court, who for half a century had been supporting the
household of the copyist, and he fancied he could see the old wife, the
married children, the grandchildren--a whole family supported by the old
man's trembling hand.
Some one whispered to him the news that was filling the Museo with
excitement and the copyist, shrugging his shoulders disdainfully, raised
his moribund glance from his work.
And so Renovales was there, the famous Renovales! At last he was going
to see the prodigy!
The master saw those grotesque eyes like those of a sea-monster, fixed
on him, with an ironical gleam behind the heavy lenses. The grafter! He
had already heard of that studio, as splendid as a palace, behind the
Retire What Renovales had in such plenty had been taken from men like
him who, for want of influence, had been left behind. He charged
thousands of dollars for a canvas, when Velásquez worked for three
_pesetas_ a day and Goya painted his portraits for a couple of
doubloons. Deceit, modernism, the audacity of the younger generation
that lacked scruples, the ignorance of the simpletons that believe the
newspapers! The only good thing was right there before him. And once
more shrugging his shoulders scornfully, he lost his expression of
ironical protest and returned to his thousandth copy of _Los Borrachos_.
Renovales, seeing that the curiosity about him was diminishing, entered
the little hall that contained the picture of _Las Meninas_. There was
Tekli in front of the famous canvas that occupies the whole back of the
room, seated before his easel, with his white hat pushed back to leave
free his throbbing brow that was contracted with a tenacious insistence
on accuracy.
Seeing Renovales, he rose hastily, leaving his palette on the piece of
oil-cloth that protected the floor from spots of paint. Dear master! How
thankful he was to him for this visit! And he showed him the copy,
minutely accurate but without the wonderful atmosphere, without the
miraculous realism of the original. Renovales approved with a nod; he
admired the patient toil of that gentle ox of art, whose furrows were
always alike, of geometric precision, without the slightest negligence
or the least attempt at originality.
"_Ti piace?_" he asked anxiously, looking into his eyes to divine his
thoughts. "_È vero? È vero?_" he repeated with the uncertainty of a
child who fears that he is being deceived.
And suddenly calmed by the evidences of Renovales' approval, that kept
growing more extravagant to conceal his indifference, the Hungarian
grasped both of his hands and lifted them to his breast.
_"Sono contento, maestro, sono contento."_
He did not want to let Renovales go. Since he had had the generosity to
come and see his work, he could not let him go away, they would lunch
together at the hotel where he lived. They would open a bottle of
Chianti to recall their life in Rome; they would talk of the merry
Bohemian days of their youth, of those comrades of various nationalities
that used to gather in the Café del Greco,--some already dead, the rest
scattered through Europe and America, a few celebrated, the majority
vegetating in the schools of their native land, dreaming of a final
masterpiece before which death would probably overtake them.
Renovales felt overcome by the insistence of the Hungarian, who seized
his hands with a dramatic expression, as though he would die at a
refusal. Good for the Chianti! They would lunch together, and while
Tekli was giving a few touches to his work, he would wait for him,
wandering through the Museo, renewing old memories.
When he returned to the Hall of Velásquez, the assemblage had
diminished; only the copyists remained bending over their canvases. The
painter felt anew the influence of the great master. He admired his
wonderful art, feeling at the same time the intense, historical sadness
that seemed to emanate from all of his work. Poor Don Diego! He was born
in the most melancholy period of Spanish history. His sane realism was
fitted to immortalize the human form in all its naked beauty and fate
had provided him a period when women looked like turtles, with their
heads and shoulders peeping out between the double shell of their
inflated gowns, and when men had a sacerdotal stiffness, raising their
dark, ill-washed heads above their gloomy garb. He had painted what he
saw; fear and hypocrisy were reflected in the eyes of that world. In the
jesters, fools and humpbacks immortalized by Don Diego was revealed the
forced merriment of a dying nation that must needs find distraction in
the monstrous and absurd. The hypochondriac temper of a monarchy weak
in body and fettered in spirit by the terrors of hell, lived in all
those masterpieces, that inspired at once admiration and sadness. Alas
for the artistic treasures wasted in immortalizing a period which
without Velásquez would have fallen into utter oblivion!
Renovales thought, too, of the man, comparing with a feeling of remorse
the great painter's life with the princely existence of the modern
masters. Ah, the munificence of kings, their protection of artists, that
people talked about in their enthusiasm for the past! He thought of the
peaceful Don Diego and his salary of three _pesetas_ as court painter,
which he received only at rare intervals; of his glorious name figuring
among those of jesters and barbers in the list of members of the king's
household, forced to accept the office of appraiser of masonry to
improve his situation, of the shame and humiliation of his last years in
order to gain the Cross of Santiago, denying as a crime before the
tribunal of the Orders that he had received money for his pictures,
declaring with servile pride his position as servant of the king, as
though this title were superior to the glory of an artist. Happy days of
the present, blessed revolution of modern life, that dignifies the
artist, and places him under the protection of the public, an impersonal
sovereign that leaves the creator of beauty free and ends by even
following him in new-created paths!
Renovales went up to the central gallery in search of another of his
favorites. The works of Goya filled a large space on both walls. On one
side the portraits of the kings and queens of the Bourbon decadence;
heads of monarchs, or princes, crushed under their white wigs; sharp
feminine eyes, bloodless faces, with their hair combed in the form of a
tower. The two great painters had coincided in their lives with the
moral downfall of two dynasties. In the Hall of Velásquez the thin,
bony, fair-haired kings, of monastic grace and anæmic pallor, with
their protruding under-jaws, and in their eyes an expression of doubt
and fear for the salvation of their souls. Here, the corpulent, clumsy
monarchs, with their huge, heavy noses, fatefully pendulous, as though
by some mysterious relation they were dragging on the brain, paralyzing
its functions; their thick underlips, hanging in sensual inertia; their
eyes, calm as those of cattle, reflecting in their tranquil light
indifference for everything that did not directly concern their own
well-being. The Austrians, nervous, restless, vacillating with the fever
of insanity, riding on theatrical chargers, in dark landscapes, bounded
by the snowy crests of the Guadarrama, as sad, cold and crystallized as
the soul of the nation; the Bourbons, peaceful, adipose,
resting--surfeited--on their huge calves, without any other thought than
the hunt of the following day or the domestic intrigue that would set
the family in dissension, deaf to the storms that thundered beyond the
Pyrenees. The one, surrounded by brutal-faced imbeciles, by gloomy
pettifoggers, by Infantas with childish faces and the hollow skirts of a
Virgin's image on an altar; the others bringing as a merry, unconcerned
retinue, a rabble clad in bright colors, wrapped in scarlet capes or
lace mantillas, crowned with ornamental combs or masculine hats--a race
that, without knowing it, was sapping its heroism in picnics at the
Canal or in grotesque amusements. The lash of invasion aroused them from
their century-long infancy. The same great artist that for many years
had portrayed the simple thoughtlessness of this gay people, showy and
light-hearted as a comic-opera chorus, afterwards painted them, knife in
hand, attacking the Mamelukes with the agility of monkeys, felling those
Egyptian centaurs under their slashes, blackened with the smoke of a
hundred battles, or dying with theatrical pride by the light of a
lantern in the gloomy solitude of Moncloa, shot by the invaders.
Renovales admired the tragic atmosphere of the canvas before him. The
executioners hid their faces, leaning on their guns; they were the blind
executors of fate, a nameless force, and before them rose the pile of
palpitating, bloody flesh; the dead with strips of flesh torn off by the
bullets, showing reddish holes, the living with folded arms, defying the
murderers in a tongue they could not understand, or covering their faces
with their hands, as though this instinctive movement could save them
from the lead. A whole people died, to be born again. And beside this
picture of horror and heroism, in another close to it, he saw Palafox,
the Leonidas of Saragossa, mounted on horseback, with his stylish
whiskers and the arrogance of a blacksmith in a captain-general's
uniform, having in his bearing something of the appearance of a popular
chieftain, holding in one hand, gloved in buckskin, the curved saber,
and in the other the reins of his stocky, big-bellied steed.
Renovales thought that art is like light, which acquires color and
brightness from the objects it touches. Goya had passed through a stormy
period; he had been a spectator of the resurrection of the soul of the
people and his painting contained the tumultuous life, the heroic fury
that you look for in vain in the canvases of that other genius, tied as
he was to the monotonous existence of the palace, unbroken except by the
news of distant wars in which they had little interest and whose
victories, too late to be useful, had the coldness of doubt.
The painter turned away from the dames of Goya, clad in white cambric,
with their rosebud mouths and with their hair done up like a turban, to
concentrate his attention on a nude figure, the luminous gleam of whose
flesh seemed to throw the adjacent canvases in a shadow. He
contemplated it closely for a long time, bending over the railing till
the brim of his hat almost touched the canvas. Then he gradually moved
away, without ceasing to look at it, until, at last, he sat down on a
bench, still facing the picture with his eyes fixed upon it.
"Goya's _Maja_. The _Maja Desnuda!_"
He spoke aloud, without realizing it, as if his words were the
inevitable outburst of the thoughts that rushed into his mind and seemed
to pass back and forth behind the lenses of his eyes. His expressions of
admiration were in different tones, marking a descending scale of
memories.
The painter looked with delight at the gracefully delicate form,
luminous, as though within it burned the flame of life, showing through
the pearl-pale flesh. A shadow, scarcely perceptible, veiled in mystery
of her femininity; the light traced a bright spot on her smoothly
rounded knees and once more the shadow reached down to her tiny feet
with their delicate toes, rosy and babyish.
The woman was small, graceful, and dainty; the Spanish Venus with no
more flesh than was necessary to cover her supple, shapely frame with
softly curving outlines. Her amber eyes that flashed slyly, were
disconcerting with their gaze; her mouth had in its graceful corners the
fleeting touch of an eternal smile; on her cheeks, elbows and feet the
pink tone showed the transparency and the moist brilliancy of those
shells that open their mysterious colors in the secret depths of the
sea.
"Goya's _Maja_. The _Maja Desnuda!_"
He no longer said these words aloud, but his thought and his expression
repeated them, his smile was their echo.
Renovales was not alone. From time to time groups of visitors passed
back and forth between his eyes and the picture, talking loudly. The
tread of heavy feet shook the wooden floor. It was noon and the
bricklayers from nearby buildings were taking advantage of the noon hour
to explore those salons as if it were a new world, delighting in the
warm air of the furnaces. As they went, they left footprints of plaster
on the floor; they called out to each other to share their admiration
before a picture; they were impatient to take it all in at a single
glance; they waxed enthusiastic over the warriors in their shining armor
or the elaborate uniforms of olden times. The cleverest among them
served as guides to their companions, driving them impatiently. They had
been there the day before. Go ahead! There was still a lot to see! And
they ran toward the inner halls with the breathless curiosity of men who
tread on new ground and expect something marvelous to rise before their
steps.
Amid this rush of simple admirers there passed, too, some groups of
Spanish ladies. All did the same thing before Goya's work, as if they
had been previously coached. They went from picture to picture,
commenting on the fashions of the past, feeling a sort of longing for
the curious old crinolines and the broad mantillas with the high combs.
Suddenly they became serious, drew their lips together and started at a
quick pace for the end of the gallery. Instinct warned them. Their
restless eyes felt hurt by the nude in the distance; they seemed to
scent the famous _Maja_ before they saw her and they kept on--erect,
with severe countenances, just as if they were annoyed by some rude
fellow's advances in the street--passing in front of the picture without
turning their faces, without seeing even the adjacent pictures nor
stopping till they reached the Hall of Murillo.
It was the hatred for the nude, the Christian, century-old abomination
of Nature and truth, that rose instinctively to protest against the
toleration of such horrors in a public building which was peopled with
saints, kings and ascetics.
Renovales worshiped the canvas with ardent devotion, and placed it in a
class by itself. It was the first manifestation in Spanish history of
art that was free from scruples, unhampered by prejudice. Three
centuries of painting, several generations of glorious names, succeeded
one another with wonderful fertility; but not until Goya had the Spanish
brush dared to trace the form of a woman's body, the divine nakedness
that among all peoples has been the first inspiration of nascent art.
Renovales remembered another nude, the Venus of Velásquez, preserved
abroad. But that work had not been spontaneous; it was a commission of
the monarch who, at the same time that he was paying foreigners lavishly
for their studies in the nude, wished to have a similar canvas by his
court-painter.
Religious oppression had obscured art for centuries. Human beauty
terrified the great artists, who painted with a cross on their breasts
and a rosary on their sword-hilts. Bodies were hidden under the stiff,
heavy folds of sackcloth or the grotesque, courtly crinoline, and the
painter never ventured to guess what was beneath them, looking at the
model, as the devout worshiper contemplates the hollow mantle of the
Virgin, not knowing whether it contains a body or three sticks to hold
up the head. The joy of life was a sin. In vain a sun fairer than that
of Venice shone on Spanish soil, futile was the light that burned upon
the land with a brighter glow than that of Flanders: Spanish art was
dark, lifeless, sober, even after it knew the works of Titian. The
Renaissance, that in the rest of the world worshiped the nude as the
supreme work of Nature, was covered here with the monk's cowl or the
beggar's rags. The shining landscapes were dark and gloomy when they
reached the canvas; under the brush the land of the sun appeared with a
gray sky and grass that was a mournful green; the heads had a monkish
gravity. The artist placed in his pictures not what surrounded him, but
what he had within him, a piece of his soul--and his soul was fettered
by the fear of dangers in the present life and torments in the life to
come; it was black--black with sadness, as if it were dyed in the soot
of the fires of the autos-de-fé.
That naked woman with her curly head resting on her folded arms was the
awakening of an art that had lived in isolation. The slight frame, that
scarcely rested on the green divan and the fine lace cushions, seemed on
the point of rising in the air with the mighty impulse of resurrection.
Renovales thought of the two masters, equally great, and still so
different. One had the imposing majesty of famous monuments--serene,
correct, cold, filling the horizon of history with their colossal mass,
growing old in glory without the centuries opening the least crack in
their marble walls. On all sides the same façade--noble, symmetrical,
calm, without the vagaries of caprice. It was reason--solid,
well-balanced, alien to enthusiasm and weakness, without feverish haste.
The other was as great as a mountain, with the fantastic disorder of
Nature, covered with tortuous inequalities. On one side the wild, barren
cliff; beyond, the glen, covered with blossoming heath; below, the
garden with its perfumes and birds; on the heights, the crown of dark
clouds, heavy with thunder and lightning. It was imagination in
unbridled career, with breathless halts and new flights--its brow in the
infinite and its feet implanted on earth.
The life of Don Diego was summed up in these words: "He had painted."
That was his whole biography. Never in his travels in Spain and Italy
did he feel curious to see anything but pictures. In the court of the
Poet-king, he had vegetated amid gallantries and masquerades, calm as a
monk of painting, always standing before his canvas and model--to-day a
jester, to-morrow a little Infanta--without any other desire than to
rise in rank among the members of the royal household, to see a cross of
red cloth sewed on his black jerkin. He was a lofty soul, enclosed in a
phlegmatic body that never tormented him with nervous desires nor
disturbed the calm of his work with violent passions. When he died the
good Dona Juana, his wife, died too, as though they sought each other,
unable to remain apart after their long, uneventful pilgrimage through
the world.
Goya "had lived." His life was that of the nobleman-artist--a stormy
novel, full of mysterious amours. His pupils, on parting the curtains of
his studio, saw the silk of royal skirts on their master's knees. The
dainty duchesses of the period resorted to that robust Aragonese of
rough, manly gallantry to have him paint their cheeks, laughing like mad
at these intimate touches. When he contemplated some divine beauty on
the tumbled bed, he transferred her form to the canvas by an
irresistible impulse, an imperious necessity of reproducing beauty; and
the legend that floated about the Spanish artist connected an
illustrious name with all the beauties whom his brush immortalized.
To paint without fear or prejudice, to take delight in reproducing on
canvas the glory of the nude, the lustrous amber of woman's flesh with
its pale roses like a sea-shell, was Renovales' desire and envy; to live
like the famous Don Francisco--a free bird with restless, shining
plumage in the midst of the monotony of the human barn-yard; in his
passions, in his diversions, in his tastes, to be different from the
majority of men, since he was already different from them in his way of
appreciating life.
But, ah! his existence was like that of Don Diego--unbroken, monotonous,
laid out by level in a straight line. He painted, but he did not live.
People praised his work for the accuracy with which he reproduced
Nature, for the gleam of light, for the indefinable color of the
atmosphere, and the exterior of things; but something was lacking,
something that stirred within him and fought in vain to leap the vulgar
barriers of daily existence.
The memory of the romantic life of Goya made him think of his own life.
People called him a master; they bought everything he painted at good
prices, especially if it was in accordance with some one else's tastes
and contrary to his artistic desire; he enjoyed a calm existence, full
of comforts; in his studio, almost as splendid as a palace, the façade
of which was reproduced in the illustrated magazines, he had a wife who
was convinced of his genius and a daughter who was almost a woman and
who made the troop of his intimate pupils stammer with embarrassment.
The only evidences of his Bohemian past that remained were his soft felt
hats, his long beard, his tangled hair and a certain carelessness in his
dress; but when his position as a "national celebrity" demanded it, he
took out of his wardrobe a dress suit with the lapel covered with the
insignia of honorary orders and played his part in official receptions.
He had thousands of dollars in the bank. In his studio, palette in hand,
he conferred with his broker, discussing what sort of investments he
ought to make with the year's profits. His name awakened no surprise or
aversion in high society, where it was fashionable for ladies to have
their portraits painted by him.
In the early days he had provoked scandal and protests by his boldness
in color and his revolutionary way of seeing Nature, but there was not
connected with his name the least offence against the conventions of
society. His women were women of the people, picturesque and repugnant;
the only flesh that he had shown on his canvases was that of a sweaty
laborer or the chubby child. He was an honored master, who cultivated
his stupendous ability with the same calm that he showed in his business
affairs.
What was lacking in his life? Ah! Renovales smiled ironically. His whole
life suddenly came to mind in a tumultuous rush of memories. Once more
he fixed his glance on that woman, shining white like a pearl amphora,
with her arms above her head, her breasts erect and triumphant, her eyes
resting on him, as if she had known him for many years, and he repeated
mentally with an expression of bitterness and dejection:
"Goya's _Maja_, the _Maja Desnuda_!"
II
As Mariano Renovales recalled the first years of his life, his memory,
always sensitive to exterior impressions, called up the ceaseless clang
of hammers. From the rising of the sun till the earth began to darken
with the shadows of twilight the iron sang or groaned on the anvil,
jarring the walls of the house and the floor of the garret, where
Mariano used to play, lying on the floor at the feet of a pale, sickly
woman with serious, deep-set eyes, who frequently dropped her sewing to
kiss the little one with sudden violence, as though she feared she would
not see him again.
Those tireless hammers that had accompanied Mariano's birth, made him
jump out of bed as soon as day broke and go down to the shop to warm
himself beside the glowing forge. His father, a good-natured
Cyclops--hairy and blackened--walked back and forth, turning over the
irons, picking up files, giving orders to his assistants with loud
shouts, in order to be heard in the din of the hammering. Two sturdy
fellows, stripped to the waist, swung their arms, panting over the
anvil, and the iron--now red, now golden--leaped in bright showers,
scattered in crackling sprays, peopling the black atmosphere of the shop
with a swarm of fiery flies that died away in the soot of the corners.
"Take care, little one!" said the father, protecting his delicate
curly-haired head with one of his great hands.
The little fellow felt attracted by the colors of the glowing iron, till
with the thoughtlessness of childhood he sometimes tried to pick up the
fragments that glowed on the ground like fallen stars.
His father would push him out of the shop, and outside the door--black
with soot--Mariano could see stretching out below him in the flood of
sunlight the fields with their red soil cut into geometric figures by
stone walls; at the bottom the valley with groups of poplars bordering
the winding, crystal stream, and before him the mountains, covered to
the very tops with dark pine woods. The shop was in the suburbs of a
town and from it and the villages of the valley came the jobs that
supported the blacksmith--new axles for carts, plowshares, scythes,
shovels, and pitchforks in need of repair.
The incessant pounding of the hammers seemed to stir up the little
fellow, inspiring him with a fever of activity, tearing him from his
childish amusements. When he was eight years old, he used to seize the
rope of the bellows and pull it, delighting in the shower of sparks that
the current of air drove out of the lighted coals. The Cyclops was
gratified at the strength of his son, robust and vigorous like all the
men of his family, with a pair of fists that inspired a wholesome
respect in all the village lads. He was one of his own blood. From his
poor mother, weak and sickly, he inherited only his propensity toward
silence and isolation that sometimes, when the fever of activity died
out in him, kept him for hours at a time watching the fields, the sky or
the brooks that came tumbling down over the pebbles to join the stream
at the bottom of the valley.
The boy hated school, showing a holy horror of letters. His strong hands
shook with uncertainty when he tried to write a word. On the other hand,
his father and the other people in the shop admired the ease with which
he could reproduce objects in a simple, ingenuous drawing, in which no
detail of naturalness was lacking. His pockets were always full of bits
of charcoal and he never saw a wall or stone that had a suggestion of
whiteness, without at once tracing on it a copy of the objects that
struck his eyes because of some marked peculiarity. The outside walls of
the shop were black with little Mariano's drawings. Along the walls ran
the pigs of Saint Anthony, with their puckered snouts and twisted tails,
that wandered through the village and were supported by public charity,
to be raffled on the festival of the saint. And in the midst of this
stout procession stood out the profiles of the blacksmith and all the
workmen of the shop, with an inscription beneath, that no doubt might
arise as to their identity.
"Come here, woman," the blacksmith would shout to his sick wife when he
discovered a new sketch. "Come and see what our son has done. A devil of
a boy!"
And influenced by this enthusiasm, he no longer complained when Mariano
ran away from school and the bellows rope to spend the whole day running
through the valley or the village, a piece of charcoal in his hand,
covering the rocks of the mountain and the house walls with black lines,
to the despair of the neighbors. In the tavern in the Plaza Mayor he had
traced the heads of the most constant customers, and the innkeeper
pointed them out proudly, forbidding anyone to touch the wall for fear
the sketches would disappear. This work was a source of vanity to the
blacksmith when Sundays, after mass, he went in to drink a glass with
his friends. On the wall of the rectory he had traced a Virgin, before
which the most pious old women in the village stopped with deep sighs.
The blacksmith with a flush of satisfaction accepted all the praises
that were showered on the little fellow as if they belonged in large
part to himself. Where had that prodigy come from, when all the rest of
his family were such brutes? And he nodded affirmatively when the
village notables spoke of doing something for the boy. To be sure, he
did not know what to do, but they were right; his Mariano was not
destined to hammer iron like his father. He might become as great a
personage as Don Rafael, a gentleman who painted saints in the capital
of the province and was a teacher of painting in a big house, full of
pictures, in the city. During the summer he came with his family to live
in an estate in the valley.
This Don Rafael was a man of imposing gravity; a saint with a large
family of children, who wore a frock-coat as if it were a cassock and
spoke with the suavity of a friar through his white beard that covered
his thin, pink cheeks. In the village church they had a wonderful
picture painted by him, a _Purísima_, whose soft glowing colors made the
legs of the pious tremble. Besides, the eyes of the image had the
marvelous peculiarity of looking straight at those who contemplated it,
following them even though they changed position. A veritable miracle.
It seemed impossible that that good gentleman who came up every morning
in the summer to hear mass in the village, had painted that supernatural
work. An Englishman had tried to buy it for its weight in gold. No one
had seen the Englishman, but every one smiled sarcastically when they
commented on the offer. Yes, indeed, they were likely to let the picture
go! Let the heretics rage with all their millions. The _Purísima_ would
stay in her chapel to the envy of the whole world--and especially of the
neighboring villages.
When the parish priest went to visit Don Rafael to speak to him about
the blacksmith's son, the great man already knew about his ability. He
had seen his drawings in the village; the boy had some talent and it was
a pity not to guide him in the right path. After this came the visits
of the blacksmith and his son, both trembling when they found themselves
in the attic of the country house that the great painter had converted
into a studio, seeing close at hand the pots of color, the oily palette,
the brushes and those pale blue canvases on which the rosy, chubby
cheeks of the cherubim or the ecstatic face of the Mother of God were
beginning to assume form.
At the end of the summer the good blacksmith decided to follow Don
Rafael's advice. As long as he was so good as to consent to helping the
boy, he was not going to be the one to interfere with his good fortune.
The shop gave him enough to live on. All it meant was to work a few
years longer, to support himself till the end of his life beside the
anvil, without an assistant or a successor. His son was born to be
somebody, and it was a serious sin to stop his progress by scorning the
help of his good protector.
His mother, who constantly grew weaker and more sickly, cried as if the
journey to the capital of the province were to the end of the world.
"Good-by, my boy. I shall never see you again."
And in truth it was the last time that Mariano saw that pale face with
its great expressionless eyes, now almost wiped out of his memory like a
whitish spot in which, in spite of all his efforts, he could not succeed
in restoring the outline of the features.
In the city his life was radically different. Then for the first time he
understood what it was his hands were striving for as they moved the
charcoal over the whitewashed walls. Art was revealed to his eyes in
those silent afternoons, passed in the convent where the provincial
museum was situated, while his master, Don Rafael, argued with other
gentlemen in the professor's hall, or signed papers in the secretary's
office.
Mariano lived at his protector's house, at once his servant and his
pupil. He carried letters to the dean and the other canons, who were
friends of his master and who accompanied him on his walks or spent
social evenings in his studio. More than once he visited the locutories
of nunneries, to deliver through the heavy gratings presents from Don
Rafael to certain black and white shadows, which attracted by this
sturdy young country boy, and aware that he meant to be a painter,
overwhelmed him with the eager questions born of their seclusion. Before
he went away they would hand him, through the revolving window, cakes
and candied lemons or some other goody, and then, with a word of advice,
would say good-by in their thin, soft voices, which sifted through the
iron of the gratings.
"Be a good boy, little Mariano. Study, pray. Be a good Christian, the
Lord will protect you and perhaps you will get to be as great a painter
as Don Rafael, who is one of the first in the world."
How the master laughed at the memory of the childish simplicity that
made him see in his master the most marvelous painter on earth!...
Mornings, when he attended the classes in the School of Fine Arts, he
grew angry at his comrades, a disrespectful rabble, brought up in the
streets, sons of mechanics, who, as soon as the professor turned his
back, pelted each other with the crumbs of bread meant to wipe out their
drawings, and cursed Don Rafael, calling him a "Christer" and a
"Jesuit."
The afternoon Mariano passed in the studio, at his master's side. How
excited he was the first time he placed a palette in his hand and
allowed him to copy on an old canvas a child St. John which he had
finished for a society!... While the boy with his forehead wrinkled in
his eagerness, tried to imitate his master's work, he listened to the
good advice that the master gave him without looking up from the canvas
over which his angelic brush was running.
Painting must be religious; the first pictures in the world had been
inspired by religion; outside of it, life offered nothing but base
materialism, loathsome sins. Painting must be ideal, beautiful. It must
always represent pretty subjects, reproduce things as they ought to be,
not as they really are, and above all, look up to heaven, since there is
true life, not on this earth, a valley of tears. Mariano must modify his
instincts--that was his master's advice--must lose his fondness for
drawing coarse subjects--people as he saw them, animals in all their
material brutality, landscapes in the same form as his eyes gazed upon.
He must have idealism. Many painters were almost saints; only thus could
they reflect celestial beauty in the faces of their madonnas. And poor
Mariano strove to be ideal, to catch a little of that beatific serenity
which surrounded his master.
Little by little he came to understand the methods which Don Rafael
employed to create these masterpieces which called forth cries of
admiration from his circle of canons and the rich ladies that gave him
commissions for pictures. When he intended to begin one of his
_Purísimas_, which were slowly invading the churches and convents of the
province, he arose early and returned to his studio after mass and
communion. In this way he felt an inner strength, a calm enthusiasm,
and, if he felt depressed in the midst of the work, he once more had
recourse to this inspiring medicine.
The artist, besides, must be pure. He had taken a vow of chastity after
he had reached the age of fifty, somewhat late to be sure, but it was
not because he had not known before this certain means of reaching the
perfect idealism of a celestial painter. His wife, who had grown old in
her countless confinements, exhausted by the tiresome fidelity and
virtue of the master, was no longer anything but the companion who gave
the responses when he prayed his rosaries and Trisagia at night. He had
several daughters, who weighed on his conscience like the reproachful
memory of a disgraceful materialism, but some were already nuns and the
others were on the way, while the idealism of the artist increased as
these evidences of his impurity disappeared from the house and went to
hide away in a convent where they upheld the artistic prestige of their
father.
Sometimes the great painter hesitated before a _Purísima_, which was
always the same, as if he painted it with a stencil. Then he spoke
mysteriously to his disciple:
"Mariano, tell the gentlemen not to come to-morrow. We have a model."
And when the studio was closed to the priests and the other respectable
friends, with heavy step in came Rodríguez, a policeman, with a
cigarette stub under his heavy bristling mustache and one hand on the
handle of his sword. Dismissed from the gendarmerie for intoxication and
cruelty, and finding himself without employment, by some strange chance
he began to devote himself to serving as a painter's model. The pious
artist, who held him in a sort of terror, nagged by his constant
petitions, had secured for him this position as policeman, and Rodríguez
took advantage of every opportunity to show his rough appreciation,
slapping the master's shoulders with his great hands and blowing in his
face, his breath redolent with nicotine and alcohol.
"Don Rafael, you are my father. If anybody touches you, I'll fix him,
whoever he is."
And the ascetic artist, with a feeling of satisfaction at this
protection, blushed and waved his hands in protest against the frankness
of the rude fellow with his threats for the men he would "fix."
He threw his helmet on the ground, handed his heavy sword to Mariano,
and like a man that knows his duty, took out of the bottom of a chest a
white woolen tunic and a piece of blue cloth like a cloak, placing both
garments on his body with the skill of practice.
Mariano looked at him with astonished eyes but without any temptation to
laugh. They were mysteries of art, surprises that were reserved only for
those who, like him, had the good fortune to live on terms of intimacy
with the great master.
"Ready, Rodríguez?" Don Rafael asked impatiently.
And Rodríguez, erect in his bath robe with the blue rag hanging from his
shoulders, clasped his hands and lifted his fierce gaze to the ceiling,
without ceasing to suck the stub that singed his mustache. The master
did not need the model except for the robes of the figure, to study the
folds of the celestial garment, which must not reveal the slightest
evidence of human contour. The possibility of copying a woman had never
passed through his imagination. That was falling into materialism,
glorifying the flesh, inviting temptation; Rodríguez was all he needed;
one must be an idealist.
The model continued in his mystic attitude with his body lost in the
innumerable folds of his blue and white raiment, while under it the
square toes of his army boots stuck out, and he held up his grotesque,
flat head, crowned with bristling hair, coughing and choking from the
smoke of the cigar, without ceasing to look up and without separating
his hands clasped in an attitude of worship.
Sometimes, tired out by the industrious silence of the master and the
pupil, Rodríguez uttered a few grumbles that little by little took the
form of words and finally developed into the story of the deeds of his
heroic period, when he was a rural policeman and "could take a shot at
anyone and pay for it afterward with a report." The _Purísima_ grew
excited at these memories. His hands separated with a tremble of
murderous joy, the carefully arranged folds were disturbed, his
bloodshot eyes no longer looked heavenward, and with a hoarse voice he
told of tremendous beatings he administered, of men who fell to the
ground writhing with pain, the shooting of prisoners which afterwards
were reported as attempts to escape; and to give greater relief to this
autobiography which he declaimed with bestial pride, he sprinkled his
words with interjections as vulgar as they were lacking in respect for
the first personages of the heavenly court.
"Rodríguez, Rodríguez!" exclaimed the master, horror-stricken.
"At your command, Don Rafael."
And the _Purísima_, after passing the stub from one side of his mouth to
the other, once more folded his hands, straightened up, showing his
red-striped trousers under the tunic, and lost his gaze on high, smiling
with ecstasy, as if he contemplated on the ceiling all his heroic deeds
of which he felt so proud.
Mariano was in despair before his canvas. He could never imitate his
illustrious master. He was incapable of painting anything but what he
saw, and his brush, after reproducing the blue and white raiment,
stopped, hesitating at the face, calling in vain on imagination. After
futile efforts it was the grotesque mask of Rodríguez that appeared on
the canvas.
And the pupil had a sincere admiration for the ability of Don Rafael,
for that pale head veiled in the light of its halo, a pretty,
expressionless face of childish beauty, which took the place of the
policeman's fierce head in the picture.
This sleight-of-hand seemed to the boy the most astounding evidence of
art. When would he reach the easy prestidigitation of his master!
With time the difference between Don Rafael and his pupil became more
marked. At school his comrades gathered around him, recognizing his
superiority and praising his drawings. Some professors, enemies of his
master, lamented that such talent should be lost beside that
"saint-painter." Don Rafael was surprised at what Mariano did outside of
his studio--figures and landscapes, directly observed which, according
to him, breathed the brutality of life.
His circle of serious gentlemen began to discover some merit in the
pupil.
"He will never reach your height, Don Rafael," they said. "He lacks
unction, he has no idealism, he will never paint a good Virgin--but as a
worldly painter he has a future."
The master, who loved the boy for his submissive nature and the purity
of his habits, tried in vain to make him follow the right way. If he
would only imitate him, his fortune was made. He would die without a
successor and his studio and his fame would be his. The boy only had to
see how, little by little, like a good ant of the Lord, the master had
gathered together a fair sized future with his brush. By virtue of his
idealism, he had his country house there in the village, and no end of
estates, the tenants of which came and visited him in his studio,
carrying on endless discussions over the payment and amount of the rents
in front of the poetic Virgins. The Church was poor because of the
impiety of the times, it could not pay as generously as in other
centuries, but commissions were numerous, and a Virgin in all her
purity was a matter of only three days--but young Renovales made a
troubled, wry face, as if a painful sacrifice were demanded of him.
"I can't, Master. I'm an idiot. I don't know how to invent things. I
paint only what I see."
And when he began to see naked bodies in the so-called "life" class he
devoted himself zealously to this study, as if the flesh caused in him
the most violent intoxication. Don Rafael was appalled by finding in the
corners of his house sketches that portrayed shameful nudes in all their
reality. Besides, the progress of his pupil caused him some uneasiness;
he saw in his painting a vigor that he himself had never had. He even
noted some falling-off in his circle of admirers. The good canons, as
always, admired his Virgins, but some of them had their portraits
painted by Mariano, praising the skill of his brush.
One day he said to his pupil, firmly:
"You know that I love you as I would a son, Mariano, but you are wasting
your time with me. I cannot teach you anything. Your place is somewhere
else. I thought you might go to Madrid. There you will find men of your
stamp."
His mother was dead; his father was still in the blacksmith shop, and
when he saw him come home with several duros, the pay for portraits he
had made, he looked on this sum as a fortune. It did not seem possible
that anyone would give money in exchange for colors. A letter from Don
Rafael convinced him. Since that wise gentleman advised that his son
should go to Madrid, he must agree.
"Go to Madrid, my boy, and try to make money soon, for your father is
old and will not always be able to help you."
At the age of sixteen, Renovales landed in Madrid and finding himself
alone, with only his wishes for his guide, devoted himself zealously to
his work. He spent the morning in the Museo del Prado, copying all the
heads in Velásquez's pictures. He felt that till then he had been blind.
Besides, he worked in an attic studio with some other companions and
evenings painted water-colors. By selling these and some copies, he
managed to eke out the small allowance his father sent him.
He recalled with a sort of homesickness those years of poverty, of real
misery, the cold nights in his wretched bed, the irritating
meals--Heaven knows what was in them--eaten in a bar-room near the
Teatro Real; the discussions in the corner of a café, under the hostile
glances of the waiters who were provoked that a dozen long-haired youths
should occupy several tables and order all together only three coffees
and many bottles of water.
The light-hearted young fellows stood their misery without difficulty
and, to make up for it, what a fill of fancies they had, what a glorious
feast of hopes! A new discovery every day. Renovales ran through the
realm of art like a wild colt, seeing new horizons spreading out before
him, and his career caused an outburst of scandal that amounted to
premature celebrity. The old men said that he was the only boy who "had
the stuff in him"; his comrades declared that he was a "real painter,"
and in their iconoclastic enthusiasm compared his inexperienced works
with those of the recognized old masters--"poor humdrum artists" on
whose bald pates they felt obliged to vent their spleen in order to show
the superiority of the younger generation.
Renovales' candidacy for the fellowship at Rome caused a veritable
revolution. The younger set, who swore by him and considered him their
illustrious captain, broke out in threats, fearful lest the "old boys"
should sacrifice their idol.
When at last his manifest superiority won him the fellowship, there were
banquets in his honor, articles in the papers, his picture was published
in the illustrated magazines, and even the old blacksmith made a trip to
Madrid, to breathe with tearful emotion part of the incense that was
burned for his son.
In Rome a cruel disappointment awaited Renovales. His countrymen
received him rather coldly. The younger men looked on him as a rival and
waited for his next works with the hope of a failure; the old men who
lived far from their fatherland examined him with malignant curiosity.
"And so that big chap was the blacksmith's son, who caused so much
disturbance among the ignorant people at home!... Madrid was not Rome.
They would soon see what that _genius_ could do!"
Renovales did nothing in the first months of his stay in Rome. He
answered with a shrug of his shoulders those who asked for his pictures
with evident innuendo. He had come there not to paint but to study; that
was what the State was paying him for. And he spent more than half a
year drawing, always drawing in the famous art galleries, where, pencil
in hand, he studied the famous works. The paint boxes remained unopened
in one corner of the studio.
Before long he came to detest the great city, because of the life the
artists led in it. What was the use of fellowships? People studied less
there than in other places. Rome was not a school, it was a market. The
painting merchants set up their business there, attracted by the
gathering of artists. All--old and beginners, famous and unknown--felt
the temptation of money; all were seduced by the easy comforts of life,
producing works for sale, painting pictures in accordance with the
suggestions of some German Jews who frequented the studios, designating
the sizes and the types that were in style in order to spread them over
Europe and America.
When Renovales visited the studios, he saw nothing but _genre_ pictures,
sometimes gentlemen in long dress coats, others tattered Moors or
Calabrian peasants. They were pretty, faultless paintings, for which
they used as models a manikin, or the families of _ciociari_ whom they
hired every morning in the Piazza di Espagna beside the Sealinata of the
Trinity; the everlasting country-woman, swarthy and black-eyed, with
great hoops in her ears and wearing a green skirt, a black waist and a
white head-dress caught up on her hair with large pins; the usual old
man with sandals, a woolen cloak and a pointed hat with spiral bands on
his snowy head that was a fitting model for the Eternal Father. The
artists judged each other's ability by the number of thousand lire they
took in during a year; they spoke with respect of the famous masters who
made a fortune out of the millionaires of Paris and Chicago for
easel-pictures that nobody saw. Renovales was indignant. This sort of
art was almost like that of his first master, even if it was "worldly"
as Don Rafael had said. And that was what they sent him to Rome for!
Unpopular with his countrymen because of his brusque ways, his rude
tongue and his honesty, which made him refuse all commissions from the
art merchants, he sought the society of artists from other countries.
Among the cosmopolitan group of young painters who were quartered in
Rome, Renovales soon became popular.
His energy, his exuberant spirits, made him a congenial, merry comrade,
when he appeared in the studios of the Via di Babuino or in the
chocolate rooms and cafés of the Corso, where the artists of different
nationalities gathered in friendly company.
Mariano, at the age of twenty, was an athletic fellow, a worthy scion
of the man who was pounding iron from morning till night in a far away
corner of Spain. One day an English youth, a friend of his, read him a
page of Ruskin in his honor. "The plastic arts are essentially
athletic." An invalid, a half paralyzed man, might be a great poet, a
celebrated musician, but to be a Michael Angelo or a Titian a man must
have not merely a privileged soul, but a vigorous body. Leonardo da
Vinci broke a horseshoe in his hands; the sculptors of the Renaissance
worked huge blocks of marble with their titanic arms or chipped off the
bronze with their gravers; the great painters were often architects and,
covered with dust, moved huge masses. Renovales listened thoughtfully to
the words of the great English æstheticist. He, too, was a strong soul
in an athlete's body.
The appetites of his youth never went beyond the manly intoxications of
strength and movement. Attracted by the abundance of models which Rome
offered, he often undressed a _ciociara_ in his studio, delighting in
drawing the forms of her body. He laughed, like the big giant that he
was, he spoke to her with the same freedom as if she were one of the
poor women that came out to stop him at night as he returned alone to
the Academy of Spain, but when the work was over and she was
dressed--out with her! He had the chastity of strong men. He worshiped
the flesh, but only to copy its lines. The animal contact, the chance
meeting, without love, without attraction, with the inner reserve of two
people who do not know each other and who look on each other with
suspicion, filled him with shame. What he wanted to do was to study, and
women only served as a hindrance in great undertakings. He consumed the
surplus of his energy in athletic exercise. After one of his feats of
strength, which filled his comrades with enthusiasm, he would come in
fresh, serene, indifferent, as though he were coming out of a bath. He
fenced with the French painters of the Villa Medici; learned to box with
Englishmen and Americans; organized, with some German artists,
excursions to a grove near Rome, which were talked about for days in the
cafés of the Corso. He drank countless healths with his companions to
the Kaiser whom he did not know and for whom he did not care a rap. He
would thunder in his noisy voice the traditional _Gaudeamus Igitur_ and
finally would catch two models of the party around the waist and with
his arms stretched out like a cross carry them through the woods till he
dropped them on the grass as if they were feathers. Afterwards he would
smile with satisfaction at the admiration of those good Germans, many of
them sickly and near-sighted, who compared him with Siegfried and the
other muscular heroes of their warlike mythology.
In the Carnival season, when the Spaniards organized a cavalcade of the
Quixote, he undertook to represent the knight Pentapolin--"him of the
rolled-up sleeves,"--and in the Corso there were applause and cries of
admiration for the huge biceps that the knight-errant, erect on his
horse, revealed. When the spring nights came, the artists marched in a
procession across the city to the Jewish quarter to buy the first
artichokes--the popular dish in Rome, in the preparation of which an old
Hebrew woman was famous. Renovales went at the head of the
_carciofalatta_, bearing the banner, starting the songs which were
alternated with the cries of all sorts of animals; and his comrades
marched behind him, reckless and insolent under the protection of such a
chieftain. As long as Mariano was with them there was no danger. They
told the story that in the alleys of the Trastevere he had given a
deadly beating to two bullies of the district, after taking away their
stilettos.
Suddenly the athlete shut himself up in the Academy and did not come
down to the city. For several days they talked about him at the
gatherings of artists. He was painting; an exhibition that was going to
take place in Madrid was close at hand and he wanted to take to it a
picture to justify his fellowship. He kept the door of his studio closed
to everyone, he did not permit comment nor advice, the canvas would
appear just as he conceived it. His comrades soon forgot him and
Renovales ended his work in seclusion, and left for his country with it.
It was a complete success, the first important step on the road that was
to lead him to fame. Now he remembered with shame, with remorse, the
glorious uproar his picture "The Victory of Pavia" stirred up. People
crowded in front of the huge canvas, forgetting the rest of the
Exhibition. And as, at that time, the Government was strong, the Cortes
was closed and there was no serious accident in any of the bull-rings,
the newspapers, for lack of any more lively event, hastened in cheap
rivalry to reproduce the picture, to talk about it, publishing portraits
of the author, profiles, as well as front views, large and small,
expatiating on his life in Rome and his eccentricities, and recalled
with tears of emotion the poor old man who far away in his village was
pounding iron, hardly knowing of his son's glory.
With one bound Renovales passed from obscurity to the light of
apotheosis. The older men whose duty it was to judge his work became
benevolent and extended kindly sympathy. The little tiger was getting
tame. Renovales had seen the world and now he was coming back to the
good traditions; he was going to be a painter like the rest. His picture
had portions that were like Velásquez, fragments worthy of Goya, corners
that recalled El Greco; there was everything in it, except Renovales,
and this amalgam of reminiscences was its chief merit, what attracted
general applause and won it the first medal.
A magnificent debut it was. A dowager duchess, a great protectress of
the arts, who never bought a picture or a statue but who entertained at
her table painters and sculptors of renown, finding in this an
inexpensive pleasure and a certain distinction as an illustrious lady,
wished to make Renovales' acquaintance. He overcame the stand-offishness
of his nature that kept him away from all social relations. Why should
he not know high society? He could go wherever other men could. And he
put on his first dress-coat, and after the banquets of the duchess,
where his way of arguing with members of the Academy provoked peals of
merry laughter, he visited other salons and for several weeks was the
idol of society which, to be sure, was somewhat scandalized by his faux
pas, but still pleased with the timidity that overcame him after his
daring sallies. The younger set liked him because he handled a sword
like a Saint George. Although a painter and son of a blacksmith, he was
in every way a respectable person. The ladies flattered him with their
most amiable smiles, hoping that the fashionable artist would honor them
with a portrait gratis, as he had done with the duchess.
In this period of high-life, always in dress clothes from seven in the
evening, without painting anything but women who wanted to appear pretty
and discussed gravely with the artist which gown they should put on to
serve as a model, Renovales met his wife Josephina.
The first time that he saw her among so many ladies of arrogant bearing
and striking presence, he felt attracted towards her by force of
contrast. The bashfulness, the modesty, the insignificance of the girl
impressed him. She was small, her face offered no other beauty than that
of youth, her body had the charm of delicacy. Like himself, the poor
girl was there out of a sort of condescendence on the part of the
others; she seemed to be there by sufferance and she shrank in it, as if
afraid of attracting attention, Renovales always saw her in the same
evening gown somewhat old, with that appearance of weariness which a
garment constantly made over to follow the course of the fashions is
wont to acquire. The gloves, the flowers, the ribbons had a sort of
sadness in their freshness, as if they betrayed the sacrifices, the
domestic exertions it had taken to procure them. She was on intimate
terms with all the girls who made a triumphal entrance into the
drawing-rooms, inspiring praise and envy with their new toilettes; her
mother, a majestic lady, with a big nose and gold glasses, treated the
ladies of the noblest families with familiarity; but in spite of this
intimacy there was apparent around the mother and daughter the gap of
somewhat disdainful affection, in which commiseration bore no small
part. They were poor. The father had been a diplomat of some distinction
who, at his death, left his wife no other source of income than the
widow's pension. Two sons were abroad as attachés of an embassy,
struggling with the scantiness of their salary and the demands of their
position. The mother and daughter lived in Madrid, chained to the
society in which they were born, fearing to abandon it, as if that would
be equivalent to a degradation, remaining during the day in a
fourth-floor apartment, furnished with the remnants of their past
opulence, making unheard-of sacrifices in order to be able in the
evening to rub elbows worthily with those who had been their equals.
Some relative of Doña Emilia, the mother, contributed to her support,
not with money (never that!) but by loaning her the surplus of their
luxury, that she and her daughter might maintain a pale appearance of
comfort.
Some of them loaned them their carriage on certain days, so that they
might drive through the Castellana and the Retiro, bowing to their
friends as the carriages passed; others sent them their box at the Opera
on evenings when the bill was not a brilliant one. Their pity made them
remember them, too, when they sent out invitations to birthday dinners,
afternoon teas, and the like. "We mustn't forget the Torrealtas, poor
things." And the next day, the society reporters included in the list of
those present at the function "the charming Señorita de Torrealta and
her distinguished mother, the widow of the famous diplomat of
imperishable memory," and Doña Emilia, forgetting her situation,
fancying she was in the good old times, went to everything, in the same
black gown, annoying with her "my dears" and her gossip the great ladies
whose maids were richer and ate better than she and her daughter. If
some old gentleman took refuge beside her, the diplomat's wife tried to
overwhelm him with the majesty of her recollections. "When we were
ambassadors in Stockholm." "When my friend Eugénie was empress...."
The daughter, endowed with her instinctive girlish timidity, seemed
better to realize her position. She would remain seated among the older
ladies, only rarely venturing to join the other girls who had been her
boarding-school companions and who now treated her condescendingly,
looking on her as they would upon a governess who had been raised to
their station, out of remembrance for the past. Her mother was annoyed
at her timidity. She ought to dance a lot, be lively and bold, like the
other girls, crack jokes, even if they were doubtful, that the men might
repeat them and give her the reputation of being a wit. It was
incredible that with the bringing up she had had, she should be so
insignificant. The idea! The daughter of a great man about whom people
used to crowd as soon as he entered the first salons in Europe! A girl
who had been educated at the school of the Sacred Heart in Paris, who
spoke English, a little German, and spent the day reading when she did
not have to clean a pair of gloves or make over a dress! Didn't she want
to get married? Was she so well satisfied with that fourth-story
apartment, that wretched cell so unworthy of their name?
Josephina smiled sadly. Get married! She never would get to that in the
society they frequented. Everyone knew they were poor. The young men
thronged the drawing-rooms in search of women with money. If by chance
one of them did come up to her, attracted by her pale beauty, it was
only to whisper to her shameful suggestions while they danced; to
propose uncompromising engagements, friendly relations with a prudence
modeled on the English, flirtations that had no result.
Renovales did not realize how his friendship with Josephina began.
Perhaps it was the contrast between himself and the little woman who
hardly came up to his shoulder and who seemed about fifteen when she was
already past twenty. Her soft voice with its slight lisp came to his
ears like a caress. He laughed when he thought of the possibility of
embracing that graceful, slender form; it would break in pieces in his
pugilist's hands, like a wax doll. Mariano sought her out in the
drawing-rooms which she and her mother were accustomed to frequent, and
spent all the time sitting at her side, feeling an impulse to confide in
her as a brother, a desire of telling her all about herself, his past,
his present work, his hopes, as if she were a room-mate. She listened to
him, looking at him with her brown eyes that seemed to smile at him,
nodding assent, often without having heard what he said, receiving like
a caress the exuberance of that nature which seemed to overflow in
waves of fire. He was different from all the men she had known.
When someone--nobody knows who--perhaps one of Josephina's friends,
noticed this intimacy, to make sport of her, she spread the news. The
painter and the Torrealta girl were engaged. That was when the
interested parties discovered that they loved each other. It was
something more than friendship that made Renovales pass through
Josephina's street mornings, looking at the high windows in the hope of
seeing her dainty silhouette through the panes. One night at the
duchess' when they were left alone in the hallway, Renovales caught her
hand and lifted it to his lips, but so timidly that they scarcely
touched her glove. He was afraid after his rudeness, felt ashamed of his
violence; he thought he was hurting the delicate, slender girl; but she
let her hand stay in his, and at the same time bowed her head and began
to cry.
"How good you are, Mariano!"
She felt the most intense gratitude, when she realized that she was
loved for the first time; loved truly, by a man of some distinction, who
fled from the women of fortune to seek a humble, neglected girl like
her. All the treasures of affection which had been accumulating in the
isolation of her humiliating life overflowed. How she could love the man
who loved her, taking her out of that parasite's existence, lifting her
by his strength and affection to the level of those who scorned her!
The noble widow of Torrealta gave a cry of indignation when she learned
of the engagement of the painter and her daughter. "The blacksmith's
son!" "The illustrious diplomat of imperishable memory!" But as if this
protest of her pride opened her eyes, she thought of the years her
daughter had spent going from one drawing-room to another, without
anyone paying any attention to her. What dunces men were! She thought,
too, that a celebrated painter was a personage; she remembered the
articles devoted to Renovales because of his last picture, and, above
all, a thing that had the most effect on her, she knew by hearsay of the
great fortune that artists amassed abroad, the hundreds of thousands of
francs paid for a canvas that could be carried under your arm. Why might
not Renovales be one of the fortunate?
She began to annoy her countless relatives with requests for advice. The
girl had no father and they must take his place. Some answered
indifferently. "The painter! Hump! Not bad!" evidencing by their
coldness that it was all the same to them if she married a
tax-collector. Others insulted her unwittingly by showing their
approval. "Renovales? An artist with a great future before him. What
more do you want? You ought to be thankful he has taken a fancy to her."
But the advice that decided her was that of her famous cousin, the
Marquis of Tarfe, a man to whom she looked upon as the most
distinguished citizen in the country, without doubt because of his
office as permanent head of the Foreign Service, for every two years he
was made Minister of Foreign Affairs.
"It looks very good to me," said the nobleman, hastily, for they were
waiting for him in the Senate. "It is a modern marriage and we must keep
up with the times. I am a conservative, but liberal, very liberal and
very modern. I will protect the children. I like the marriage. Art
joining its prestige with a historic family! The popular blood that
rises through its merits and is mingled with that of the ancient
nobility!"
And the Marquis of Tarfe, whose marquisate did not go back half a
century, with these rhetorical figures of an orator in the Senate and
his promises of protection, convinced the haughty widow. She was the one
who spoke to Renovales, to relieve him of an explanation that would be
trying because of the timidity he felt in this society that was not his
own.
"I know all about it, Mariano, my dear, and you have my consent."
But she did not like long engagements. When did he intend to get
married? Renovales was more eager for it than the mother. Josephina was
different from other women who hardly aroused his desire. His chastity,
which had been like that of a rough laborer, developed into a feverish
desire to make that charming doll his own as soon as possible. Besides,
his pride was flattered by this union. His fiancée was poor; her only
dowry was a few ragged clothes, but she belonged to a noble family,
ministers, generals--all of noble descent. They could weigh by the ton
the coronets and coats-of-arms of those countless relatives who did not
pay much attention to Josephina and her mother, but who would soon be
his family. What would Señor Antón think, hammering iron in the suburbs
of his town? What would his comrades in Rome say, whose lot consisted in
living with the _ciociari_ who served as their models, and marrying them
afterward out of fear for the stiletto of the venerable Calabrian who
insisted on providing a legitimate father for his grandsons!
The papers had much to say about the wedding, repeating with slight
variations the very phrases of the Marquis of Tarfe, "Art uniting with
nobility." Renovales wanted to leave for Rome with Josephina as soon as
the marriage was celebrated. He had made all the arrangements for his
new life there, investing in it all the money he had received from the
State for his picture and the product of several pictures for the Senate
for which he received commissions through his illustrious
relative-to-be.
A friend in Rome (the jolly Cotoner) had hired for him an apartment in
the Via Margutta and had furnished it in accordance with his artistic
taste. Doña Emilia would remain in Madrid with one of her sons, who had
been promoted to a position in the Foreign Office. Everybody, even the
mother, was in the young couple's way. And Doña Emilia wiped away an
invisible tear with the tip of her glove. Besides, she did not care to
go back to the countries where she had been _somebody_; she preferred to
stay in Madrid; there people knew her at least.
The wedding was an event. Not a soul in the huge family was absent; all
feared the annoying questions of the illustrious widow who kept a list
of relatives to the sixth remove.
Señor Antón arrived two days before, in a new suit with knee-breeches
and a broad plush hat, looking somewhat confused at the smiles of those
people who regarded him as a quaint type. Crestfallen and trembling in
the presence of the two women, with a countryman's respect, he called
his daughter-in-law "Señorita."
"No, papa, call me 'daughter.' Say Josephina to me."
But in spite of Josephina's simplicity and the tender gratitude he felt
when he saw her look at his son with such loving eyes, he did not
venture to take the liberty of speaking to her as his child and made the
greatest efforts to avoid this danger, always speaking to her in the
third person.
Doña Emilia, with her gold glasses and her majestic bearing, caused him
even greater emotion. He always called her "Señora marquesa," for in his
simplicity he could not admit that that lady was not at least a
marchioness. The widow, somewhat disarmed by the good man's homage,
admitted that he was a "rube" of some natural talent, a fact that made
her tolerate the ridiculous note of his knee breeches.
In the chapel of the Marquis of Tarfe's palace, after looking
dumbfounded at the great throng of nobility that had gathered for his
son's wedding, the old man, standing in the doorway, began to cry:
"Now I can die, O Lord. Now I can die!"
And he repeated his sad desire, without noticing the laughter of the
servants, as if, after a life of toil, happiness were the inevitable
forerunner of death.
The bride and groom started on their trip the same day. Señor Antón for
the first time kissed his daughter-in-law on the forehead, moistening it
with his tears, and went home to his village, still repeating his
longing for death, as though nothing were left in the world for him to
hope for.
Renovales and his wife reached Rome after several stops on the way.
Their short stay in various cities of the Riviera, the days in Pisa and
Florence, though delightful, as keeping the memory of their first
intimacy, seemed unspeakably vulgar, when they were installed in their
little house in Rome. There the real honeymoon began, by their own
fireside, free from all intrusion, far from the confusion of hotels.
Josephina, accustomed to a life of secret privation, to the misery of
that fourth-floor apartment in which she and her mother lived as though
they were camping out, keeping all their show for the street, admired
the coquettish charm, the smart daintiness of the house in the Via
Margutta. Mariano's friend, who had charge of the furnishing of the
house, a certain Pepe Cotoner, who hardly ever touched his brushes and
who devoted all his artistic enthusiasm to his worship of Renovales, had
certainly done things well.
Josephina clapped her hands in childish joy when she saw the bedroom,
admiring its sumptuous Venetian furniture, with its wonderful inlaid
pearl and ebony, a princely luxury that the painter would have to pay
for in instalments.
Oh! The first night of their stay in Rome! How well Renovales remembered
it! Josephina, lying on the monumental bed, made for the wife of a Doge,
shook with the delight of rest, stretching her limbs before she hid them
under the fine sheets, showing herself with the abandon of a woman who
no longer has any secrets to keep. The pink toes of her plump little
feet moved as if they were calling Renovales.
Standing beside the bed, he looked at her seriously, with his brows
contracted, dominated by a desire that he hesitated to express. He
wanted to see her, to admire her; he did not know her yet, after those
nights in the hotels when they could hear strange voices on the other
side of the thin walls.
It was not the caprice of a lover, it was the desire of a painter, the
demand of an artist. His eyes were hungry for beauty.
She resisted, blushing, a trifle angry at this demand which offended her
deepest prejudices.
"Don't be foolish, Mariano, dear. Come to bed; don't talk nonsense."
But he persisted obstinately in his desire. She must overcome her
bourgeois scruples, art scoffed at such modesty, human beauty was meant
to be shown in all its radiant majesty and not to be kept hidden,
despised and cursed.
He did not want to paint her; he did not dare to ask for that; but he
did want to see her, to see her and admire her, not with a coarse
desire, but with religious adoration.
And his hands, restrained by the fears of hurting her, gently pulled her
weak arms that were crossed on her breast in the endeavor to resist his
advances. She laughed: "You silly thing. You're tickling me--you're
hurting me." But little by little, conquered by his persistency, her
feminine pride flattered by this worship of her body, she gave in to
him, allowed herself to be treated like a child, with soft remonstrances
as if she were undergoing torture, but without resisting any longer.
Her body, free from veils, shone with the whiteness of pearl. Josephina
closed her eyes as if she wanted to flee from the shame of her
nakedness. On the smooth sheet, her graceful form was outlined in a
slightly rosy tone, intoxicating the eyes of the artist.
Josephina's face was not much to look at, but her body! If he could only
overcome her scruples some time and paint her!
Renovales kneeled down beside the bed in a transport of admiration.
"I worship you, Josephina. You are as fair as Venus. No, not Venus. She
is cold and calm, like a goddess, and you are a woman. You are
like--what are you like? Yes, now I see the likeness. You are Goya's
little _Maja_, with her delicate grace, her fascinating daintiness. You
are the _Maja Desnuda!_"
III
Renovales' life was changed. In love with his wife, fearing that she
might lack some comfort, and thinking with anxiety of the Torrealta
widow, who might complain that the daughter of the "illustrious diplomat
of imperishable memory" was not happy because she had lowered herself to
the extent of marrying a painter, he worked incessantly to maintain with
his brush the comforts with which he had surrounded Josephina.
He, who had had so much scorn for industrial art, painting for money, as
did his comrades, followed their example, but with the energy that he
showed in all his undertakings. In some of the studios there were cries
of protest against this tireless competitor who lowered prices
scandalously. He had sold his brush for a year to one of those Jewish
dealers who exported paintings at so much a picture, and under agreement
not to paint for any other dealer. Renovales worked from morning till
night changing subjects when it was demanded by what he called his
_impresario_. "Enough _ciociari_, now for some Moors." Afterwards the
Moors lost their market-value and the turn of the musketeers came,
fencing a valiant duel; then pink shepherdesses in the style of Watteau
or ladies in powdered wigs embarking in a golden gondola to the sound of
lutes. To give freshness to his stock, he would interpolate a sacristy
scene with much show of embroidered chasubles and golden incensaries, or
an occasional bacchanalian, imitating from memory, without models,
Titians' voluptuous forms and amber flesh. When the list was ended, the
_ciociari_ were once more in style and could be begun again. The
painter with his extraordinary facility of execution produced two or
three pictures a week, and the _impresario_, to encourage him in his
work, often visited him afternoons, following the movements of his brush
with the enthusiasm of a man who appreciated art at so much a foot and
so much an hour. The news he brought was of a sort to infuse new zest.
The last bacchanal painted by Renovales was in a fashionable bar in New
York. His pageant of the Abruzzi was in one of the noblest castles in
Russia. Another picture, representing a dance of countesses disguised as
shepherdesses in a field of violets, was in the possession of a Jewish
baron, a banker in Frankfort. The dealer rubbed his hands, as he spoke
to the painter with a patronizing air. His name was becoming famous,
thanks to him, and he would not step until he had won him a world-wide
reputation. Already his agents were asking him to send nothing but the
works of Signor Renovales, for they were the best sellers. But Mariano
answered him with a sudden outburst of bitterness. All those canvases
were mere rot. If that was art, he would prefer to break stone on the
high roads.
But his rebellion against this debasement of his art disappeared when he
saw his Josephina in the house whose ornamentation he was constantly
improving, converting it into a jewel case worthy of his love. She was
happy in her home, with a splendid carriage in which to drive every
afternoon and perfect freedom to spend money on her clothes and jewelry.
Renovales' wife lacked nothing; she had-at her disposal, as adviser and
errand-boy, Cotoner, who spent the night in a garret that served him as
a studio in one of the cheap districts and the rest of the day with the
young couple. She was mistress of the money; she had never seen so many
banknotes at once. When Renovales handed her the pile of lires which
the impresario gave him she said with a little laugh of joy, "Money,
money!" and ran and hid it away with the serious expression of a
diligent, economical housewife--only to take it out the next day and
squander it with a childish carelessness. What a wonderful thing
painting was! Her illustrious father (in spite of all that her mother
said) had never made so much money in all his travels through the world,
going from cotillon to cotillon as the representative of his king.
While Renovales was in the studio, she had been to drive in the Pincio,
bowing from her landau to the countless wives of ambassadors who were
stationed at Rome, to aristocratic travelers stopping in the city, to
whom she had been introduced in some drawing-room, and to all the crowd
of diplomatic attachés who live about the double court of the Vatican
and the Quirinal.
The painter was introduced by his wife into an official society of the
most rigid formality. The niece of the Marquis of Tarfe, perpetual
foreign minister, was received with open arms by the high society of
Rome, the most exclusive in Europe. At every reception at the two
Spanish embassies, "the famous painter Renovales and his charming wife"
were present and these invitations had spread to the embassies of other
countries. Almost every night there was some function. Since there were
two diplomatic centers, one at the court of the Italian king, the other
at the Vatican, the receptions and evening parties were frequent in this
isolated society that gathered every night, sufficient for its own
enjoyment.
When Renovales got home at dark, tired out with his work, he would find
Josephina, already half dressed, waiting for him, and Cotoner helped him
to put on his evening clothes.
"The cross!" exclaimed Josephina, when she saw him with his dress-coat
on. "Why, man alive, how did you happen to forget your cross? You know
that they all wear something there."
Cotoner went for the insignia, a great cross the Spanish government had
given him for his picture, and the artist, with the ribbon across his
shirt-front and a brilliant circle on his coat, started out with his
wife to spend the evening among diplomats, distinguished travelers and
cardinals' nephews.
The other painters were furious with envy when they learned how often
the Spanish ambassador and his wife, the consul and prominent people
connected with the Vatican visited his studio. They denied his talent,
attributing these distinctions to Josephina's position. They called him
a courtier and a flatterer, alleging that he had married to better his
position. One of his most constant visitors was Father Recovero, the
representative of a monastic order that was powerful in Spain, a sort of
cowled ambassador who enjoyed great influence with the Pope. When he was
not in Renovales' studio, the latter was sure that he was at his house,
doing some favor for Josephina who felt proud of her friendship with
this influential friar, so jovial and scrupulously correct in spite of
his coarse clothes. Renovales' wife always had some favor to ask of him,
her friends in Madrid were unceasing in their requests.
The Torrealta widow contributed to this by her constant chatter among
her acquaintances about the high position her daughter occupied in Rome.
According to her, Mariano was making millions; Josephina was reported to
be a great friend of the Pope, her house was full of Cardinals and if
the Pope did not visit her it was only because the poor thing was a
prisoner in the Vatican. And so the painter's wife had to keep sending
to Madrid some rosary that had been passed over St. Peter's tomb or
reliques taken from the Catacombs. She urged Father Recovero to
negotiate difficult marriage dispensations and interested herself in
behalf of the petitions of pious ladies, friends of her mother. The
great festivals of the Roman Church filled her with enthusiasm because
of their theatrical interest and she was very grateful to the generous
friar who never forgot to reserve her a good place. There never was a
reception of pilgrims in Saint Peter's with a triumphal march of the
Pope carried on a platform amid feather fans, at which Josephina was not
present. At other times the good Father made the mysterious announcement
that on the next day Pallestri, the famous male soprano of the papal
chapel, was going to sing; the Spanish lady got up early, leaving her
husband still in bed, to hear the sweet voice of the pontifical eunuch
whose beardless face appeared in shop windows among the portraits of
dancers and fashionable tenors.
Renovales laughed good-naturedly at the countless occupations and futile
entertainments of his wife. Poor girl, she must enjoy herself; that was
what he was working for. He was sorry enough that he could go with her
only in her evening diversions. During the day he entrusted her to his
faithful Cotoner who attended her like an old family servant, carrying
her bundles when she went shopping, performing the duties of butler and
sometimes of chef.
Renovales had made his acquaintance when he came to Rome. He was his
best friend. Ten years his senior, Cotoner showed the worship of a pupil
and the affections of an older brother for the young artist. Everyone in
Rome knew him, laughing at his pictures on the rare occasions when he
painted, and appreciated his accommodating nature that to some extent
dignified his parasite's existence. Short, rotund, bald-headed, with
projecting ears and the ugliness of a good-natured, merry satyr, Signor
Cotoner, when summer came, always found refuge in the castle of some
cardinal in the Roman Campagna. During the winter he was a familiar
sight in the Corso, wrapped in his greenish mackintosh, the sleeves of
which waved like a bat's wings. He had begun in his own province as a
landscape painter but he wanted to paint figures, to equal the masters,
and so he landed in Rome in the company of the bishop of his diocese who
looked on him as an honor to the church. He never moved from the city.
His progress was remarkable. He knew the names and histories of all the
artists, no one could compare with him in his ability to live
economically in Rome and to find where things were cheapest. If a
Spaniard went through the great city, he never missed visiting him. The
children of celebrated painters looked on him as a sort of nurse, for he
had put them all to sleep in his arms. The great triumph of his life was
having figured in the cavalcade of the Quixote as Sancho Panza. He
always painted the same picture, portraits of the Pope in three
different sizes, piling them up in the attic that served him for a
studio and bedroom. His friends, the cardinals whom he visited
frequently, took pity on "Poor Signor Cotoner" and for a few lire bought
a picture of the Pontiff horribly ugly, to present it to some village
church where it would arouse great admiration since it came from Rome
and was by a painter who was a friend of His Eminence.
These purchases were a ray of joy for Cotoner, who came to Renovales'
studio with his head up and wearing a smile of affected modesty.
"I have made a sale, my boy. A pope; a large one, two meter size."
And with a sudden burst of confidence in his talent, he talked of the
future. Other men desired medals, triumphs in the exhibitions; he was
more modest. He would be satisfied if he could guess who would be Pope
when the present Pope died, in order to be able to paint up pictures of
him by the dozen ahead of time. What a triumph to put the goods on the
market the day after the Conclave! A perfect fortune! And well
acquainted with all the cardinals, he passed the Sacred College in
mental review with the persistency of a gambler in a lottery, hesitating
between the half dozen who aspired to the tiara. He lived like a
parasite among the high functionaries of the Church, but he was
indifferent to religion, as if this association with them had taken away
all his belief. The old man clad in white and the other red gentlemen
inspired respect in him because they were rich and served indirectly his
wretched portrait business. His admiration was wholly devoted to
Renovales. In the studio of other artists he received their irritating
jests with his usual calm smile of affability, but they could not speak
ill of Renovales nor discuss his ability. To his mind, Renovales could
produce nothing but masterpieces and in his blind admiration he even
went so far as to rave naively over the easel pictures he painted for
his impresario.
Sometimes Josephina unexpectedly appeared in her husband's studio and
chatted with him while he painted, praising the canvases that had a
pretty subject. She preferred to find him alone in these visits,
painting from his fancy without any other model than some clothes placed
on a manikin. She felt a sort of aversion to models, and Renovales tried
in vain to convince her of the necessity of using them. He had talent to
paint beautiful things without resorting to the assistance of those
ordinary old men and above all, of those women with their disheveled
hair, their flashing eyes and their wolfish teeth, who, in the solitude
and silence of the studio, actually terrified her. Renovales laughed.
What nonsense! Jealous little girl! As if he were capable of thinking of
anything but art with a palette in his hand!
One afternoon, when Josephina suddenly came into the studio she saw on
the model's platform a naked woman, lying in some furs, showing the
curves of her yellow back. The wife compressed her lips and pretended
not to see her, listened to Renovales with a distracted air, as he
explained this innovation. He was painting a bacchanal and it was
impossible for him to proceed without a model. It was a case of
necessity, flesh could not be done from memory. The model, at ease
before the painter, felt ashamed of her nakedness in the presence of
that fashionable lady, and after wrapping herself up in the furs, hid
behind a screen and hastily dressed herself.
Renovales recovered his serenity when he reached home, seeing that his
wife received him with her customary eagerness, as if she had forgotten
her displeasure of the afternoon. She laughed at Cotoner's stories;
after dinner they went to the theater and when bedtime came, the painter
had forgotten about the surprise in the studio. He was falling asleep
when he was alarmed by a painful, prolonged sigh, as if some one were
stifling beside him. When he lit the light he saw Josephina with both
fists in her eyes, crying, her breast heaving with sobs, and kicking in
a childish fit of temper till the bed-clothes were rolled in a ball and
the exquisite puff fell to the floor.
"I won't, I won't," she moaned with an accent of protest.
The painter had jumped out of bed, full of anxiety, going from one side
to the other without knowing what to do, trying to pull her hands away
from her eyes, giving in, in spite of his strength, to Josephina's
efforts to free herself from him.
"But what's the matter? What is it you won't do? What's happened to
you?"
And she continued to cry, tossing about in the bed, kicking in a nervous
fury.
"Let me alone! I don't like you; don't touch me. I won't let you, no,
sir, I won't let you. I'm going away. I'm going home to my mother."
Renovales, terrified at the fury of the little woman who was always so
gentle, did not know what to do to calm her. He ran through the bedroom
and the adjoining dressing room in his night shirt, that showed his
athletic muscles; he offered her water, going so far as to pick up the
bottles of perfumes in his confusion as if they could serve him as
sedatives, and finally he knelt down, trying to kiss the clenched little
hands that thrust him away, catching at his hair and beard.
"Let me alone. I tell you to let me alone. I know you don't love me. I'm
going away."
The painter was surprised and afraid of the nervousness in this beloved
little doll; he did not dare to touch her for fear of hurting her. As
soon as the sun rose she would leave that house forever. Her husband did
not love her. No one but her mother cared for her. He was making her a
laughing stock before people. And all these incoherent complaints that
did not explain the motive for her anger, continued for a long time
until the artist guessed the cause. Was it the model, the naked woman?
Yes, that was it; she would not consent to it, that in a studio that was
practically her house, low women should show themselves immodestly to
her husband's eyes. And as she protested against such abominations, her
twitching fingers tore the front of her night dress, showing the hidden
charms that filled Renovales with such enthusiasm.
The painter, tired out by this scene, enervated by the cries and tears
of his wife, could not help laughing when he discovered the motive of
her irritation.
"Ah! So it's all on account of the model. Be quiet, girl, no woman shall
come into the studio."
And he promised everything Josephina wished, in order to be over with it
as soon as possible. When it was dark once more, she was still sighing,
but now it was in her husband's strong arms with her head resting on his
breast, lisping like a grieved child that tries to justify the past fit
of temper. It did not cost Mariano anything to do her this favor. She
loved him dearly, so dearly, and she would love him still more if he
respected her prejudices. He might call her bourgeois, a common ordinary
soul, but that was what she wanted to be, just as she always had been.
Besides, what was the need of painting naked women? Couldn't he do other
things? She urged him to paint children in smocks and sandals, curly
haired and chubby, like the child Jesus; old peasant women with
wrinkled, copper-colored faces, bald-headed ancients with long beards;
character studies, but no young women, understand? No naked beauties!
Renovales said "yes" to everything, drawing close to him that beloved
form still trembling with its past rage. They clung to each other with a
sort of anxiety, desirous of forgetting what had happened, and the night
ended peacefully for Renovales in the happiness of reconciliation.
When summer came they rented a little villa at Castel-Gandolfo. Cotoner
had gone to Rivoli in the train of a cardinal and the married couple
lived in the country accompanied only by a couple of maids and a
manservant, who took care of Renovales' painting kit.
Josephina was perfectly contented in this retirement, far from Rome,
talking with her husband at all hours, free from the anxiety that filled
her, when he was working in his studio. For a month Renovales remained
in placid idleness. His art seemed forgotten; the boxes of paints, the
easels, all the artistic luggage brought from Rome, remained packed up
and forgotten in a shed in the garden. Afternoons they took long walks,
returning home at nightfall slowly, with their arms around each other's
waists, watching the strip of pale gold in the western sky, breaking the
rural silence with one of the sweet, passionate romances that came from
Naples. Now that they were alone in the intimacy of a life without cares
or friendships, the enthusiastic love of the first days of their married
life reawakened. But the "demon of painting" was not long in spreading
over him his invisible wings, which seemed to scatter an irresistible
enchantment. He became bored at the long hours in the bright sun, yawned
in his wicker chair, smoking pipe after pipe, not knowing what to talk
about. Josephina, on her part, tried to drive away the ennui by reading
some English novel of aristocratic life, tiresome and moral, to which
she had taken a great liking in her school girl days.
Renovales began to work again. His servant brought out his artist's kit
and he took up his palette as enthusiastically as a beginner, and
painted for himself with a religious fervor as if he thought to purify
himself from that base submission to the commissions of a dealer.
He studied Nature directly; painted delightful bits of landscapes,
tanned and repulsive heads that breathed the selfish brutality of the
peasant. But this artistic activity did not seem to satisfy him. His
life of increased intimacy with Josephina aroused in him mysterious
longings that he hardly dared to formulate. Mornings when his wife,
fresh and rosy from her bath, appeared before him almost naked, he
looked at her with greedy eyes.
"Oh, if you were only willing! If you didn't have that foolish prejudice
of yours!"
And his exclamations made her smile, for her feminine vanity was
flattered by this worship. Renovales regretted that his artistic talent
had to go in search of beautiful things when the supreme, definitive
work was at his side. He told her about Rubens, the great master, who
surrounded Elène Froment with the luxury of a princess, and of her who
felt no objection to freeing her fresh, mythological beauty from veils
in order to serve as a model for her husband. Renovales praised the
Flemish woman. Artists formed a family by themselves; morality and the
popular prejudices were meant for other people. They lived under the
jurisdiction of Beauty, regarding as natural what other people looked on
as a sin.
Josephina protested against her husband's wishes with a playful
indignation but she allowed him to admire her. Her abandon increased
every day. Mornings, when she got up, she remained undressed longer,
prolonging her toilette while the artist walked around her, praising her
various beauties. "That is Rubens, pure and simple, that's Titian's
color. Look, little girl, lift up your arms, like this. Oh, you are the
_Maja_, Goya's little _Maja_." And she submitted to him with a gracious
pout, as if she relished the expression of worship and disappointment
which her husband wore at possessing her as a woman and not possessing
her as a model.
One afternoon when a scorching wind seemed to stifle the countryside
with its breath, Josephina capitulated. They were in their room, with
the windows closed, trying to escape the terrible sirocco by shutting
it out and putting on thin clothes. She did not want to see her husband
with such a gloomy face nor listen to his complaints. As long as he was
crazy and was set on his whim, she did not dare to oppose him. He could
paint her; but only a study, not a picture. When he was tired of
reproducing her flesh on the canvas they would destroy it,--just as if
he had done nothing.
The painter said "yes" to everything, eager to have his brush in hand as
soon as possible, before the beauty he craved. For three days he worked
with a mad fever, with his eyes unnaturally wide open, as if he meant to
devour the graceful outlines with his sight. Josephina, accustomed now
to being naked, posed with unconscious abandon, with that feminine
shamelessness which hesitates only at the first step. Oppressed by the
heat, she slept while her husband kept on painting.
When the work was finished, Josephina could not help admiring it. "How
clever you are! But am I really like that, so pretty?" Mariano showed
his satisfaction. It was his masterpiece, his best. Perhaps in all his
life he might never find another moment like that, of prodigious mental
intensity, what people commonly call inspiration. She continued to
admire herself in the canvas, just as she did some mornings in the great
mirror in the bedroom. She praised the various parts of her beauty with
frank immodesty. Dazzled by the beauty of her body she did not notice
the face, that seemed unimportant, lost in soft veils. When her eyes
fell on it she showed a sort of disappointment.
"It doesn't look much like me! It isn't my face!"
The artist smiled. It was not she; he had tried to disguise her face,
nothing but her face. It was a mask, a concession to social conventions.
As it was, no one would recognize her and his work, his great work,
might appear and receive the admiration of the world.
"Because, we aren't going to destroy it," Renovales continued with a
tremble in his voice, "that would be a crime. Never in my life will I be
able to do anything like it again. We won't destroy it, will we, little
girl?"
The little girl remained silent for a good while with her gaze fixed on
the picture. Renovales' eager eyes saw a cloud slowly rise over her
face, like a shadow on a white wall. The painter felt as though the
floor were sinking under his feet; the storm was coming. Josephina
turned pale, two tears slipped slowly down her cheeks, two others took
their places to fall with them and then more and more.
"I won't! I won't!"
It was the same hoarse, nervous, despotic cry that had set his hair on
end with anxiety and fear that night in Rome. The little woman looked
with hatred at the naked body that radiated its pearly light from the
depths of the canvas. She seemed to feel the terror of a sleep-walker
who suddenly awakens in the midst of a square surrounded by a thousand
curious, eager eyes and in her fright does not know what to do nor where
to flee. How could she have assented to such a disgraceful thing?
"I won't have it!" she cried angrily. "Destroy it, Mariano, destroy it."
But Mariano seemed on the point of weeping too. Destroy it! Who could
demand such a foolish thing? That figure was not she; no one would
recognize her. What was the use of depriving him of a signal triumph?
But his wife did not listen to him. She was rolling on the floor with
the same convulsions and moans as on the night of the stormy scene, her
hands were clenched like a crook, her feet kicked like a dying lamb's
and her mouth, painfully distorted, kept crying hoarsely:
"I won't have it! I won't have it! Destroy it!"
She complained of her lot with a violence that wounded Renovales. She, a
respectable woman, submitted to that degradation as if she were a street
walker. If she had only known! How was she going to imagine that her
husband would make such abominable proposals to her!
Renovales, offended at these insults, at these lashes which her shrill,
piercing voice dealt his artistic talent, left his wife, let her roll on
the floor and with clenched fists, went from one end of the room to the
other, looking at the ceiling, muttering all the oaths, Spanish and
Italian, that were in current use in his studio.
Suddenly he stood still, rooted to the floor by terror and surprise.
Josephina, still naked, had jumped on the picture with the quickness of
a wild cat. With the first stroke of her finger nails, she scratched the
canvas from top to bottom, mingling the colors that were still soft,
tearing off the thin shell of the dry parts. Then she caught up the
little knife from the paint box and--rip! the canvas gave a long moan,
parted under the thrust of that white arm which seemed to have a bluish
cast in the violence of her wrath.
He did not move. For a moment he felt indignant, tempted to throw
himself on her but he lapsed into a childish weakness, ready to cry, to
take refuge in a corner, to hide his weak, aching head. She, blind with
wrath, continued to vent her fury on the picture, tangling her feet in
the wood of the frame, tearing off pieces of canvas, walking back and
forth with her prey like a wild beast. The artist had leaned his head
against the wall, his strong breast shook with cowardly sobs.
To the almost fatherly grief at the loss of his work was added the
bitterness of disappointment. For the first time he foresaw what his
life was going to be. What a mistake he had made in marrying that girl
who admired his art as a profession, as a means of making money, and who
was trying to mold him to the prejudices and scruples of the circle in
which she was born! He loved her in spite of this and he was certain
that she did not love him less, but, still, perhaps it would have been
better to remain alone, free for his art and, in case a companion was
necessary, to find a fair maid of all work with all the splendor and
intellectual humility of a beautiful animal that would admire and obey
her master blindly.
Three days passed in which the painter and his wife hardly spoke to each
other. They looked at each other askance, humbled and broken by this
domestic trouble. But the solitude in which they lived, the necessity of
remaining together made the reconciliation imperative. She was the first
to speak, as if she were terrified by the sadness and dejection of that
huge giant who wandered about as peevish as a sick man. She threw her
arms around him, kissed his forehead, made a thousand gracious efforts
to bring a faint smile to his face. "Who loved him? His Josephina. His
_Maja_ but not his _Maja Desnuda;_ that was over forever. He must never
think of those horrible things. A decent painter does not think of them.
What would all her friends say? There were many pretty things to paint
in the world. They must live in each other's love, without his
displeasing her with his hateful whims. His affection for the nude was a
shameful remnant of his Bohemian days."
And Renovales, won over by his wife's petting, made peace,--tried to
forget his work and smiled with the resignation of a slave who loves
his chain because it assures him peace and life.
They returned to Rome at the beginning of the fall. Renovales began his
work for the contractor, but after a few months the latter seemed
dissatisfied. Not that Signor Mariano was losing power, not at all, but
his agents complained of a certain monotony in the subjects of his
works. The dealer advised him to travel; he might stay awhile in Umbria,
painting peasants in ascetic landscapes, or old churches; he might--and
this was the best thing to do--move to Venice. How much Signor Mariano
could accomplish in those canals! And it was thus that the idea of
leaving Rome first came to the painter.
Josephina did not object. That daily round of receptions in the
countless embassies and legations was beginning to bore her. Now that
the charm of the first impressions had disappeared, Josephina noticed
that the great ladies treated her with an annoying condescension as if
she had descended from her rank in marrying an artist. Besides, the
younger men in the embassies, the attachés of different nationalities,
some light, some dark, who sought relief from their celibacy without
going outside diplomatic society, were disgracefully impudent as they
danced with her or went through the figures of a cotillion, as if they
considered her an easy conquest, seeing her married to an artist who
could not display an ugly uniform in the drawing rooms. They made
cynical declarations to her in English or German and she had to keep her
temper, smiling and biting her lips, close to Renovales, who did not
understand a word and showed his satisfaction at the attentions of which
his wife was the object on the part of the fashionable youths whose
manners he tried to imitate.
The trip was decided on. They would go to Venice! Their friend Cotoner
said "Good-by," he was sorry to part from them but his place was in
Rome. The Pope was ailing just at that time and the painter, in the hope
of his death, was preparing canvases of all sizes, striving to guess who
would be his successor.
As he went back in his memories, Renovales always thought of his life in
Venice with a sort of pleasant homesickness. It was the best period of
his life. The enchanting city of the lagoons,--bathed in golden light,
lulled by the lapping of the water, fascinated him from the first
moment, making him forget his love for the human form. For some time his
enthusiasm for the nude was calmed. He worshiped the old palaces, the
solitary canals, the lagoon with its green, motionless waiter, the soul
of a majestic past, which seemed to breathe in the solemn old age of the
dead, eternally smiling city.
They lived in the Foscarini palace, a huge building with red walls and
casements of white stone that opened on a little alley of water
adjoining the Grand Canal. It was the former abode of merchants,
navigators and conquerors of the Isles of the East who in times gone by
had worn on their heads the golden horn of the Doges. The modern spirit,
utilitarian and irreverent, had converted the palace into a tenement,
dividing gilded drawing rooms with ugly partitions, establishing
kitchens in the filigreed arcades of the seignorial court, filling the
marble galleries to which the centuries gave the amber-like transparency
of old ivory, with clothes hung out to dry and replacing the gaps in the
superb mosaic with cheap square tiles.
Renovales and his wife occupied the apartment nearest the Grand Canal.
Mornings, Josephina saw from a bay window the rapid silent approach of
her husband's gondola. The gondolier, accustomed to the service of
artists, shouted to the painter, till Renovales came down with his box
of water-colors and the boat started immediately through the narrow,
winding canals, moving the silvered comb of its prow from one side to
the other as if it were feeling the way. What mornings of placid silence
in the sleeping water of an alley, between two palaces whose boldly
projecting roofs kept the surface of the little canal in perpetual
shadow! The gondolier slept stretched out in one of the curving ends of
his boat and Renovales, sitting beside the black canopy, painted his
Venetian water-colors, a new type that his impresario in Rome received
with the greatest enthusiasm. His deftness enabled him to produce these
works with as much facility as if they were mechanical copies. In the
maze of canals he had one of his own which he called his "estate" on
account of the money it netted him. He had painted again and again its
dead, silent waters which all day long were never rippled except by his
gondola; two old palaces with broken blinds, the doors covered with the
crust of years, stairways rotted with mold and in the background a
little arch of light, a marble bridge and under it the life, the
movement, the sun of a broad, busy canal. The neglected little alley
came to life every week under Renovales' brush--he could paint it with
his eyes shut--and the business initiative of the Roman Jew scattered it
through the world.
The afternoons Mariano passed with his wife. Sometimes they went in a
gondola to the promenade of the Lido and sitting on the sandy beach,
watched the angry surface of the open Adriatic, that stretched its
tossing white caps to the horizon, like a flock of snowy sheep hurrying
in the rush of a panic.
Other afternoons they walked in the Square of Saint Mark, under the
arcades of its three rows of palaces where they could see in the
background, by the last rays of the sun, the pale gold of the basilica
gleaming, as if in its walls and domes there were crystallized all the
wealth of the ancient Republic.
Renovales, with his wife on his arm, walked calmly as if the majesty of
the place impelled him to a sort of noble bearing. The august silence
was not disturbed by the deafening hubbub of other great capitals; no
rattling of carts or footsteps of horses or hucksters' cries. The
Square, with its white marble pavement, was a huge drawing room through
which the visitors passed as if they were making a call. The musicians
of the Venice band were gathered in the center with their hats
surmounted by black waving plumes. The blasts of the Wagnerian brasses,
galloping in the mad ride of the Valkyries, made the marble columns
shake and seemed to give life to the four golden horses that reared over
space with silent whinnies on the cornice of St. Mark's.