Free Goya's Glass by Monika Zgustová, Matthew Tree

it!—had not wanted to accompany.
    “José, my love!” I threw myself on him. “You can’t do this to me, José! You can’t do this to me, no!”
    Exhausted, I sat on the bed again. My head felt empty. My eyes rested on something that was on the bedside table. A letter.It was from Joseph Haydn. My letter was not there. How could it have been, if I hadn’t written any to him? But in the end, what could I have told him? Les petites bagatelles de la vie des salons? Haydn’s letter began: “ Mon tres cher ami José ” and informed him that he was working on his oratorio La Création . He hoped that this would be his masterpiece and enclosed a few pages of the score so that José should give his view. My José had been judging the work of the greatest of living composers!
    “José,” I shook his body, light as that of a little boy. At that moment I had the feeling that it wasn’t my husband who had died but my son, a boy to whom I had never paid enough attention, a child for whom I had never wanted to sacrifice anything, in the same way that my mother never paid attention to me.
    “José! I am with you, I am here. I have come just as I promised you! You wanted to go with me someplace to be alone together. Let us go then now, let us go!”
    The body, like a rag doll, fell back on the pillow. I thought of my first doll, which I transformed into my mother, how it floated of its own accord in the bath while one piece of cloth after another emerged from its belly. I thought of my father in his coffin, of my grandfather, my aunt, my stepfather, my mother. Why did everyone abandon me? At that moment I understood why my grandfather had married me off so young. He sensed that everyone would abandon me and had looked for someone who would protect me. He could have found no man better than José, I am sure of it. José, who admired me at a distance and in his generosity, wished me to have my amusements. How I would like to be with him now, to hear him play the harpsichordand the piano—one was an instrument of the past, the other an instrument of the future, he used to say. We would have gone together to visit Joseph Haydn. José would have been proud of me, and I would have been proud of his talent. But nothing was possible any longer. The time you have not lived is dead forevermore.
    Some time earlier, in the period when my roe deer died, my life became full. It was able to become full because until then it had been empty. It was in the eyes of the tender animal, full of tears, that I learned to see the world in vivid colors. Now, when José’s deer eyes closed, life became empty once more and the world, empty of meaning. And now I was alone. An orphan, abandoned. All living beings were against me.
    “José you can’t do this to me!”
    “Madame!” The icy voice of José’s mother, up until then my only ally, interrupted my lament. “Madame, your mourning clothes are ready. It is time that you changed and prepared yourself to receive the condolences of visitors.”
    The next day I had another dream. I remember it quite clearly. It was the day that they took the coffin to Monasterio de Jerónimos de San Isidro del Campo. No one went up to the deceased; the decomposition had started and, in the Andalusian July heat, was simply dreadful. I wished to melt into that smell, to impregnate myself with it. The Marquess of Villafranca said to me, in an icy voice I had never heard her use before, “You are a true witch, and you provoke horror.” She herself looked like a deadwoman; her face and hair and skin had taken on an ashen hue. She did not want to live after the death of her son. That is love. Yes, that day I knew what love was. I, a witch.
    That night, I had a curious dream. The roe deer of my childhood came to see me. It dragged itself up to me with the last of its strength. It was full of scratches, with one mortal wound next to the other. I was absolutely astonished: I suddenly realized that it was I who had caused