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AN ORIGINAL GLANCE AT GOYA
27November
Articles

AN ORIGINAL GLANCE AT GOYA

Goya and the Voices of Dawn, by writer Reyes Caceres Molinero, assumes an original contribution to a topic that art mavens, researchers and historians have time and again gone over in one of Goya’s paintings: the celebrated “The Prince Pius Mountain Firing Squad Executions” or “The May 3 Firing Squad Executions.” The originality is clearly visible in the very first pages. Goya speaks to the reader, and so do the main characters of his canvas, the victims and the victimizers. And so speak the mountains, the sky or the lamp whose ghostly dimmed light lets us take a look at the killing. They tell us their own versions of the story being told there, their views of what’s going on. We must first place that terrible scene in its historic context, a scene that literarily stalks Reyes Caceres. And it’s not just for the sake of informing the reader, but also because out of that context, a firing squad execution will be nothing but one of the many bloody and stunning events that wars bring about. The May 3 firing squad executions were a painful consequence of a heroic deed staged by the people of Madrid and that was meant to be the call for a large nationwide demonstration that panned out to be an outstanding event in our history. From the spirit of those days of May 1808, the 1812 Constitution saw the light of day four years later. That marked the onset of our constitutional history that brought about no less than the recognition of the national sovereignty in the people. It’s no overblown reality to say the old Spanish nation, that had boasted centuries of unity in the past, was going through a recreation, a conformation from within that new reality of a sovereignty rooted in the people’s democratic representation. We have a lot to learn from the heroic deeds of May 2, 1808 in Madrid, of the persecution and the war that followed that day. It was a people’s rally. Paradoxically, the Napoleonic Army –the world’s most powerful military at the time– was arriving in Spain to occupy the nation with tricks and treaties pulled off in the court halls that had formerly stood for the “Freedom, Equality and Fraternity” revolutionary trilogy. This development sparked a popular reaction against it that eventually led to the kind of freedom, equality and fraternity that were picked up in both the spirit and the letter of our very first Constitution. The patriots who fought until 1814 on behalf of a captive king in Valencay, who sooner rather than later crushed their hopes, were the same ones who time and again asked that king to swear in the Constitution that had been proclaimed in Cadiz when it was being persecuted. The genuine main character in Reyes Caceres’ book is the people of Madrid, represented by those who were executed in the firing squad and were depicted in Goya’s celebrated canvas. And by extension, it’s also the Spanish people. It’s a plural, shared, multicolor preponderance that’s very attractive from a literary and historic standpoint. Reyes Caceres, a Spanish author with a valuable poetic work under her belt, who has come to us in the pages of magazines and anthologies, and through her book Living in Amber (2007), is also an outstanding journalist who had worked for radio stations, newspapers and newsrooms. She’s also a literary critic. But this time around she’s coming up with Goya and the Voices of Dawn that now ranks among the undisputed volumes that have delved into the Prince Pius Mountain Firing Squad Executions. And she does so with originality and good sense. In an effort to make clarifications or just to shore up her own fiction, she introduces texts by writers related to those developments, such revealing authors as Alcala Galiano, Conde de Toreno, Blanco White, Moratin, Mesonero Romanos, Baroja, Manuel Machado. They all speak to us, accompanied by the victims’ choir. The author also provides the reader with documents, letters and reports written by Murat and Napoleon himself. In the background, Goya speaks out for himself. The book touches the right chord. The glimpse it provides about one of the most famous of Goya’s canvases is not only original, but also very bold. It’s a delight for the reader in terms of pure literature and writing. It’s written with grace, with knowledge, and the characters’ stories are all luring and sometimes gripping. I riveted my attention on it from the first page to the last. What else can you expect from a book that’s nothing but sheer complicity between the author and the readership? And in this book, that complicity is paramount. I cannot end without thanking Reyes Caceres for more than a reason. I’m the descendant of a very young frigate ensign who disobeyed his higher-ups’ orders and fought –and was wounded– in the struggles of the Monteleon Park on May 2, a man who then became a liberal, so for quite a long time he remained on the French side during the war, just like Goya and many others did. Perhaps because of this genealogical circumstance, I feel good about the way those heroic deeds have been portrayed now. My devotion for the 19th century history, and more specifically for the controversial rule of King Fernando VII, has every so often made me look into the equally controversial political realm of Goya –and he had one. Just because it’s in the blood running through my veins and due to the force of affinities, we shouldn’t be stunned to read the yarn that Reyes Caceres spins in Goya and the Voices of Dawn. It’s so close to home, better yet, so very close. I wish this book the very best sailing through the stormy and enthralling ocean of the letters. Goya and the Voices of Dawn: Reyes Caceres Molinero, Sial Edi- ciones, 2nd edition, Madrid, 2009.