Goya's Glass Read Online Free PDF Page A

window, he lit a few candles, let fall a few drops of wax on a zinc plate and pressed the candles to them. With this improvised candleholder he lit up one side of my face. I offered him the basket in which I carried my boxes of powders and paints. In silence he picked a color, mixed it with others, and drew a frame around my eyes. Like me, when I was little and used to paint my doll, I thought. What would he see when he paints me? The color of pomegranate with that of muscatel on the cheeks, the forehead, and the chin. Then he set about mixing ochre with a little silver and gold powder. He dipped the brush in it; he removed it. He ran his fingersfull of color along my upper lips. Then his little finger, with a long nail, along the lower one. He saw me as an anonymous landscape. I felt his powerful fingers walking across my face, pausing at my eyes, my lips. And his breath so close . . . I couldn’t even clench my teeth, or bite my lip, or move a single muscle. I drove my nails into the palms of my hands; that, he could not see. With one hand, the painter held my lips so that they stayed tense; with the other, he modeled their shape with the help of a brush. He did so conscientiously. He looked at me from a distance and then so close up that his eyelashes were almost touching my teeth. Then he began to mix a new color.
    He took off his waistcoat. His shirt gave off a tart smell, like bitter almonds. I drove my nails further into the flesh of my palms. He mixed something up with the gusto of an alchemist, and a moment later he was leaning against me. I could do nothing else but close my eyes and let myself be carried away by the caress of the brush on my lips, as I had been, so long ago, by the caressing of the dying roe deer . . .
    “There you are! What do you think of this silvery tone on the lips, the cheeks, the eyebrows?”
    He held a hand-mirror up to me, but I looked at myself in the mirror of his face: it was there that I wanted to see myself, as he saw me. The only woman in the whole of Spain. I looked him straight in the eyes. He was the first to break the almost palpable tension, with his hoarse voice. I don’t know what he said. My reflexes had gone. I turned to leave. He didn’t accompany me. I went back to him, with questioning eyes. Instead of answering my look he took my hand and pressed it fleetingly, as if not daring to.A single gesture on my part would have been enough then for him to take me in his arms. But I made no gesture, just as dolls do not. I left his studio as if I were fleeing a fire.
    Once in the street, I was unable to say a single word. I hid my face behind your shoulder, María, so that the passersby could not see it, so as to conserve within me the atmosphere of what I had just experienced. I don’t know how long I was submerged in that delight. I lived the next few days as if I were under a bell jar that preserved me from the outside world the way a greenhouse preserves a rare flower.
    Every day I went to sleep and woke up under this bell jar. I filled my days with soirees and receptions, banquets and literary teas, but I was living as a prisoner, like a fly that has been caught up in a cobweb and can’t get out, the cobweb of his look and his breath, and the contact of his arms, which I still didn’t know and nonetheless seemed to me to be ever present. I obliged my husband to organize more and more musical evenings. Don Francisco and his wife were usually invited, but my efforts when searching for that rough, shadowy face among those present were in vain . . .
    In the same way today I search for it in vain next to my deathbed, among the faces that surround me so they can watch this life ebbing away from close quarters. To know what dying is, how everything comes to an end, it matters not. The busybodies of Madrid have spent enough time reveling in bullfights and society gossip, so now they have come to see another spectacle: the death of the Duchess of Alba. They would do better to