I, Juan de Pareja: Chapters 5–7

We went up a broad stairway and down another arcade and so came to our studio, where there was always a guard in the King’s livery.

We often saw his favorite, the big bluff Duke of Olivares, who stormed or stamped his way into the studio several times a day when he was in Madrid.

He is invariably kind, but he is taciturn and thinks of nothing but his painting.

But Master’s quietness, his few gestures, and infrequent words perhaps were a comfort to the King, as he began coming often to the studio, for His Majesty must have had to put up with many endless hours of frivolous talk and of hollow praise.

The King very early gave orders that we were excused from obeisances; we had only to make our first bows when he came in.

I hovered about as inconspicuously as possible, most careful not to intrude my presence by any sound.

His eyes were very dark and deep-set, so that it was hard to tell what he was thinking. Besides, he disciplined and controlled his face, making it impassive.

Master was as coolly dispassionate as a portrait himself, with a face that did not change expression.

And Master unwound the scarves he had been wearing around his neck all winter and shed, one by one, the heavy garments that had given him a false appearance of corpulence.

He always painted prodigiously in summer.

And my voice deepened and grew resonant. Master loved to hear me singing as I went about my work.

He will bring a great retinue of servants and slaves, and I am assigning them all apartments in the palace.

He was a great, florid, handsome man, broad in the shoulders and in the girth, with curly reddish-gold hair and a golden beard and mustache.

He was a great, florid, handsome man, broad in the shoulders and in the girth, with curly reddish-gold hair and a golden beard and mustache.

“His Majesty is very delicate about such things. We might visit the studio of an image-maker I know of, who sometimes uses lightly draped male models, though our sinewy, sunburned country folk who model are not likely to show the porcelain and rose flesh tones your own canvases display,” he added deprecatingly.

The Duke of Olivares swaggered forward with his rolling gait and tossed his wide-brimmed plumed dark green hat back on his head, so that the feathers hung down on his collar.

I sidled away, but before Master returned, one of the apprentices came up to me and whispered, “They brought in a dying man, and Master hung him up on the cross and he died there. We all sketched. The Duke saw to it.”

Cruelty did always fill me with loathing.

“I thought Art should be Beauty,” he muttered.
“No, Cristobal. Art should be Truth; and Truth unadorned, unsentimentalized, is Beauty. You must learn this, Cristobal.”

Say to yourselves, ‘I would rather paint exactly what I see, even if it is ugly, perfectly, than indifferently paint something superficially lovely.’

When they demanded a third song, she sang a slow deep lament, intense and full of suffering.

I am sure that Master divined my passion and thought of sending me with the message so that I could be near the girl who had won my heart.

He made all his own medicines and unguents and would allow no one to help him for fear they might make a mistake.

Any distant singing, or silvery twanging on a psalter, brought that desolate cry into my mind: “Mistress will tire of me...and sell me....”

I was always taking their warm little hands to lead them back to their mother, who often felt ill and listless and could not run after them all day.

And yet the terrors of that first journey over the same road returned to me, and almost I feared coming upon the grinning gypsy again, with his treacherous smiles and his whip.

The rest of us, Master’s family and all the Pacheco family and relatives and retainers, became a melee of kissing and weeping and exclaiming, while servants ran about trying to sort out the baggage and get the children to their rooms to bathe and cosset them, and to hear all the news of Madrid and of the court.

The rest of us, Master’s family and all the Pacheco family and relatives and retainers, became a melee of kissing and weeping and exclaiming, while servants ran about trying to sort out the baggage and get the children to their rooms to bathe and cosset them, and to hear all the news of Madrid and of the court.

I gave up the idea of looking for Brother Isidro, but I asked Mistress to watch out for him and to help him with some oranges or bread, if she could. This was not impertinence; I had done a thousand charitable errands for her always, and I knew her generosity.

He was most horribly seasick all the way, as the dirty little ship wallowed and swayed through the water, with respites only when we put into Málaga and a few other small ports.

Master was pale and frankly terrified, but this voyage was much less arduous and we passed it fairly well, though he would take nothing to eat but a little wine and dry bread.

Master made it clear to me that during our journeys through Italy I was to lie on a pallet in the same room with him; he did not want me far from his side.

As Master and I explored the great galleries and visited painters, I grew daily more inarticulate with admiration.

It was wrong, what I was doing, I knew. Worse, I intended to continue it secretly. But my guilty joy was tremendous. It was hard for me to reconcile those two things in my mind.

I had even more opportunity to practice by myself when we went to Naples, for the Infanta was haughty and would not have me in the same room with her when she was being painted.

In this city, while Master was in the great fortress-castle there, with its towers and portcullis, studying and painting the Infanta, I made countless drawings, for I had soon decided that until I could manage the outlines of objects, delineate their shape and their positions in space, there was no point in trying to paint.

Venice, of course, built along canals of sea water, where the tides rose and fell all day, was different from anywhere else, and it cast an opulent Oriental glow of its own.

Even the Negroes I saw in Italy (for there were many, both slaves and freed men) were flamboyant and haughty.

They were scornful of me, with my plain dark clothes, and my quiet, cool, unpretentious Master.

He merely lay on his bunk, pale and apprehensive, and would not eat until our ship tied up at the Seville wharf.