Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (26 page)

On returning home, I carefully examine the sketches, use them once more for further experiments. I bring the figures together, agonize over the space, not in the least concerned with the coast in the background. For me this sheet of paper continues to be man’s location. The men and women who used to hire me have turned their backs on me, they have walked off the paper and left it blank. I now trace other figures, who do not come of their own free will nor are they prepared to pay me, they are (or have been) accustomed to posing as models for students studying fine arts or being photographed by tourists. Out of habit they have acquired a false indifference, composed of complacency, a hint of ingenuousness, patience and perhaps a certain disdain. And deep down I am convinced they are intangible. Seated on a packing case, a coil of rope (cable, Mr. Painter, cable) or on an upturned boat, I study them with my eye and draw them, but I have the feeling they are not defenseless. Each of them is independent and self-contained, and at the same time part of all the others and inside all the others. They are the whole and the part of some other totality. Running through them is an invisible (but sensitive) current which links them, which extends and holds (I guess) when they separate for hours or days. More than just the faces, I should like to reach that invisible current behind the faces. I believe that a certain kind of drawing, a certain manner of painting, if only I could master them, would allow me to capture that current through the faces and, once captured, I could then go back to the faces and transform each of them into a manifestation. Painting the bourgeoisie has not prepared me for this task, for this descent to the sun, nor has it robbed me (or could this simply be my intangibility?) of this sixth sense which permits me to capture, although incapable of deciphering it, the subterranean language, the seismal wave, the tremor beneath the epidermis of faces and bodies which are separate from me. And what were those other faces and bodies I painted like? All I can say is that they were just as detached from me. S. was detached from me (and this was how this writing or accounting started), the couple from Lapa were detached from me (and this is how this writing or accounting will end). What am I doing in space which, in its turn, separates people from each other? What does a painter do? When I pick up a pencil or brush and bring them to the paper or canvas, I notice there is a certain similarity in the way they both look at me. In comparing them, I find the same complacency, patience and contempt. And if there is any difference, I believe it to be cunning rather than ingenuousness, perhaps not even cunning but simply utter disdain.

Each and every one of them detached from me. And I from myself. Attention! I need your attention at this moment. I explained that I began writing when I realized I was remote from knowing S. Now I must tell you that I am about to interrupt or bring to an end what I am writing because I am just as remote or even more so from all those other bourgeois inhabitants of Lapa who belong to the same breed as S., although they are two quite different kinds of remoteness, the second being the logical outcome of knowledge and not its absence. Between the one and the other, it was in order to get closer to myself that I continued to write, when the first of these motives had already lost any importance. So what sum could I make, what total could I arrive at or firm conclusions draw? I continue to be as detached from others as before. And having rediscovered this separation from other men, I continue myself meanwhile with this new awareness. But what about this separation from myself? What finally resulted from this attempt to write an autobiography through different channels, combining fact and fiction in equal measure? What edifice or bridge was built? Of what resilient and lasting material? In reply, I can only say that I got close to myself. I adjusted my body to its shadow and tightened the loose screw.

I avert my eyes from the paper and watch my hand move under the light. With certain movements I can see how flaccid my skin has become in certain places, I can see the network of veins, the hairs, the pleated articulations of the fingers, I can feel in my eyes those curved nails, hard as any shield, and I know that I have never felt so little to be so truly mine. I move my hand and know that I am willing this movement, I am this will and this hand. I rest my forearms on the table and feel their pressure against the wood and its resistance. This well-being (to be well, well-being) is not physical or only becomes physical afterward, it is not a point of departure, it is the point I have reached. I reread these pages from the beginning. I look for the place, the situation, the word or space between the lines which might be that certainty which lurks around the corner: with each passing moment I remain the same, with each passing moment I feel myself to be someone different. What I need is a definite pause in time, that point which divides the distance covered from that still to be covered. I need the liquid intermediate state (in memory of those lessons I once received in elementary chemistry) during the transition from the gaseous to the solid, and to pause for a moment to study the process in detail.

The difference between the portraits of S. and the couple from Lapa is my difference: there one sees the difference. No one would ever suspect they had been painted by the same person, or at least would need time before making up their mind. What does the author’s difference consist of? If this stroke is not the same as that one, what is the difference between them? The movement of the wrist, the tightening of the fingers around the charcoal or handle of the brush? Yet there is no difference in the way I shave, although my hand is holding the brush. There is no difference in the way I hold my fork, although it is my hand which is doing the holding. I have just paused to rub my eyes with the back of my hand (a gesture which has stayed with me since childhood) and both the movement and motive remain the same. Yet this same hand has sketched and painted similar things differently: there is no difference between S. and the couple from Lapa, but they were painted differently; the couple from Lapa are, after all, the second portrait of S. and my perception. I sketch and paint. Over the paper and canvas the hand traces out the same invisible network of movements, but the moment it settles on the material the movement is transformed into material, the sign reproduces a different time image, as if the nerves coming from the eye were about to join up with some new region of the brain, immediately contiguous, it is true, but the archive of some other experience and therefore the source of new information.

I finish with considerable effort. I now realize it has been much easier for me to say who I was than to affirm who I am today. This writing could go on to the end of my life with the same sense of purpose or futility there has been so far. I doubt, however, whether the narration of one’s everyday existence without any plan (I mean the narration and not the day-to-day sequence of events) could interest me sufficiently to go beyond probing (if I ever used the word “analysis,” then I was exaggerating). Meanwhile, alone as I find myself, without art or adequate training, a tension builds up inside me which I have already tried to express with words, and this tension does not allow me to stop. The same tension fills my head with ideas and my sketchpad with drawings; the same tension detains me here before the portrait of the couple from Lapa and the picture copied from Vitale da Bologna, just as it draws me to the easel, where I have set up a canvas without being able to make a start. Because I do not know what to paint there. I have been painting for more than twenty years, but it would be wrong to suggest that I have anything like twenty years’ experience: my experience is of repeating the same portrait for twenty years, a portrait painted in primary tones with a few basic gestures. No matter whether the model be male or female, young or old, plump or thin, fair or dark, intelligent or stupid, all it required of me was a somewhat imitative adaptation: the painter imitated the model. I used a different technique for the portrait of the couple from Lapa, or perhaps not all that different after all. Habits do not change, whatever they may be. And a painter’s technique, which is also a habit, cannot be changed at will from one minute to the next. There are no miracles in painting. The portrait I described as having a different technique is more truthful because it resulted from my sudden inability to react when confronted by new models with that mimetic process which had become second nature. I now realize that my first act of rebellion (how I love that extravagant word) was to attempt to paint a second portrait of S. I painted it in secret, allowing no one to see it, especially the model himself. There was much cowardice in that rebellion. Or timidity. In the presence of the couple from Lapa (reminiscent of certain characters in Portuguese novels:
Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca
by Júlio Dinis,
A Morgadinha de Valflor
by Pinheiro Chagas,
Os Teles de Albergaria
by Carlos Malheiro Dias,
Os
Maias
by Eça de Queirós and
O Senhor do Paço de Ninães
by Camilo Castelo Branco) the chameleon did not change its color. If it was brown, brown it remained, and it was with brown eyes that he registered and transposed any colors which clashed or might have clashed with brown. (On taking a closer look at what I have just written, I can find no reason for preferring the one tense to the other.) I doubt whether Goya was opposed to Carlos IV when he painted him surrounded by the royal family (were there any such opposition on his part, I believe this could be broken down into the three or four elements I mentioned earlier: complacency, patience and disdain, the last of these variable). Confronted by that gathering of degenerates, Goya looked at their faces dispassionately, and having decided there was nothing worth improving in his painting, he made everything uglier. This could be described as opposition, but it is only now we can say for certain, because in the meantime history has surpassed monarchal institutions in general, and this one in particular, and because we know what Goya did not yet know in the year 1800 (the date of the portrait of Carlos IV with the royal family): that in the year 1810 he would do a series of etchings entitled
The Disasters of War,
that in 1814 he would paint
The Second of May
and
The Executions of the Third of May,
and that toward the end of his life he would produce the so-called black paintings and
Disparates.
Did I oppose the couple from Lapa? I do not think so. It would be truer to say they opposed me. To oppose can simply imply a change of mood, something which comes and goes and more often than not, in my experience, reflects a sense of dependence or subordination. This is where one begins to discover the relationship between inferior and superior. The next step is to rebel in order to get out of the situation, but if this can be done, then the opposition soon transforms itself into being opposed so that the first impulse is sustained and becomes permanent, a state of constant tension, one foot set firmly on the ground we claim as ours, the other foot forward. A thousand blows, one after the other, open a gap in the wall until the wall finally collapses under the constant pressure applied over a sufficiently wide area: the difference between the pickax and the bulldozer.

This is how I feel today within these four walls or when I stroll through the city: opposed to something. But to what? First, to the portraits I painted and to myself for painting them, but not to what I was when I painted them: I cannot oppose what I was, now less than ever. I wanted to summon what I was (and do believe I succeeded) like someone conjuring up his own shadow, which lingered behind and became soiled and ragged around the edges, barely recognizable in that jaded expression we know so well, but as much ours as sweat or sperm. And also opposed to everything around me. I am convinced this is where most of my tension stems from. I feel like the keen soldier who can no longer wait for the enemy to attack and begins to advance, or like the child whose excess energy has exhausted one game and immediately craves another. I liquidated (cleared out, examined, destroyed, annihilated) my past and my previous behavior and now recognize that I did nothing other than prepare the ground. I threw stones, tore up plants, razed anything which obstructed the view, and in this way (as I have already stated with different words and for other reasons) I created a desert. I now stand in the middle of it, knowing that this is where my house must be built (if it is to be a house) but knowing nothing else.

When Goya retired to his country estate (La Quinta del Sordo, or Deaf Man’s Farm), what desert had he created or had been created in him, deaf and therefore isolated, but not simply because of this infirmity? I have no intention of writing out Goya’s biographical details or of providing a potted history of the Spain of his time. I am speaking about myself, not about Goya, and I should really speak about Portugal (were it not so painful) rather than about Spain. However, men who can be so very different are also very similar, and individual countries are a combination of those differences and similarities, combined
ad infinitum,
at times coinciding beyond frontiers and ages, at other times mutually seeking out or rejecting each other. When, in 1814, Goya painted those two pictures describing the events of May 1808 and Ferdinand VII restored the Inquisition, what had any of this to do with me or Portugal, then or subsequently? Although Portugal is a country which has found itself occupied ten times (by the Americans, Germans, English, French and Belgians) and been dominated by five different monetary policies (monopolist, expansionist, colonial, speculative and fraudulent), we have no May to remember or commemorate in paint or prose, and while this painter may be present, Goya is no longer with us. But if I look back over events in Portugal during my own lifetime and list the names of prominent people—Salazar Cerejeira Santos Costa Carmona Agostinho Lourenço Teotónio Pereira Pais de Sousa Rafael Duque António Ferro Carneiro Pacheco Marcelo Caetano Tomás Moreira Baptista Rebelo de Sousa Adriano Moreira Silva Pais Rui Patrício Veiga Simão Antonio Ribeiro—I am irresistibly tempted to pass Ferdinand VII’s decree here without delay so that part of Portugal’s history may also be explained in passing: “The glorious title of Catholic with which the Kings of Spain were singled out from the other Princes of Christianity, as a reward for banishing from their kingdom anyone who refused to profess the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman faith, has inspired me to strive with all the means God has put at my disposal to be worthy of those epithets. The grave disturbances and war which devastated every province in the Realm for six long years; the presence during all this time of foreign troops of different religious persuasions, nearly all of them contaminated with hatred and aversion to the Catholic Faith; the disorders which invariably come in the wake of such evils, as well as the lamentable failure during these years to nurture religion, gave these sinners complete license to live as they pleased and the opportunity to introduce insidious beliefs which they disseminated among the people by the same methods used to propagate them in other countries. Bearing in mind, on the other hand, the need to remedy these grave evils and to preserve throughout our domain the holy religion of Jesus Christ, which we love and to which my people has pledged its life and happiness, and also taking into account the duties which the fundamental laws of the Realm impose on the reigning prince, and which I have sworn to protect and observe, and because it is the best means of safeguarding my subjects from internal dissension and ensuring their peace and tranquility, I believe it is important under present circumstances to restore the jurisdiction of the Tribunal of the Holy Office. Wise and virtuous prelates and the major guilds and corporations, both ecclesiastical and secular, have reminded us that it is thanks to this Tribunal that Spain remained untouched by the heresies which provoked such trials and tribulations in other nations throughout the sixteenth century, while our country flourished in all the arts and produced great men of valor and virtue; that one of the principal methods used by the Oppressor of Europe to spread corruption and discord to his advantage was the destruction of this Tribunal on the pretext of its being no longer compatible with the enlightenment of the age; and that the so-called Extraordinary General Courts were later to use the same pretext and invoke the Constitution in order to abolish the Inquisition and bring turmoil and sorrow to the nation. For these reasons, we have been loyally counseled to restore the Tribunal. In accordance with this advice and out of respect for the will of the people, whose deep concern for their religion has already led them to take the initiative and restore the functions of some of the important Tribunals, I have decided that henceforth the Council of the Inquisition and the other Tribunals of the Holy Office should be reestablished and continue to exercise their powers of jurisdiction.” Fortunately (unfortunately), the people whose names I cited earlier have been inspired and go on being inspired by such mellifluous and hypocritical words, or fortunately (unfortunately) by those once uttered by our king, Dom João III (the Pious), when he implored the pope to set up the Inquisition here in Portugal. Fortunately (unfortunately) by the words of more recent tyrants, Mussolini and Hitler, who are already dead. But Franco (the mighty general) was almost certainly inspired by Ferdinand III, Salazar by his masters from Coimbra, the disciples and legitimate sons or bastards of Dom João III and his disreputable lineage which has lasted for four centuries. As for Marcelo Caetano, a student all his life, he looks at the world around him and can find no one to follow. The hour of his putrefaction is nigh.