August 17, 2002

When the painter Francisco de Goya was 46 years old he suffered a severe illness that left him stone deaf for the rest of his long life. This was a deafness of the inner ear — it was as if a switch had been pulled, severing all contact between him and the world of sound.

It was not only that he was deprived of the ordinary human interaction of conversation, but everything else that provides the audio dimension of our existence was suddenly snatched away from him as well. No more barking of dogs in the distance, no footsteps approaching, no rumbling of thunder to mark the onset of a storm, no gunshot during a battle, no birdsong, no rustling of leaves on a tree.

It is said that deafness is the most isolating of all sensory deprivations and the one that can bring you closest to loneliness, paranoia and despair. People creep up on you when you are not expecting them, the expression on their faces can seem menacing or grotesque, you are quick to suspect they might be talking about you or laughing behind your back within the conspiracy of their silence. And when you are on your own, you are deprived of the reassuring sound of your own breathing, coughing, the scratching of pen on paper, the ticking of a clock. It must make you feel like a ghost: a creature without substance or shadow.

I used to be friendly with the poet David Wright, who has been deaf from the age of seven. I remember the effort of trying to talk to him,enunciating each word so that he could read the movement of my lips, how meaningless light conversation became and how far away he seemed, as if he was stranded on an island. He wrote a wonderful book about his condition, simply called Deafness, and I used it a lot when I was busy with Goya.

Wright explained the way the eyes learn to compensate for the lack of hearing. “Suppose it is a calm day,” he said, “absolutely still, not a twig or leaf stirring... Then comes a breath of air, enough to unsettle a leaf; I will see and hear that movement like an exclamation.”

Or again, “I take it that the flight of most birds must be silent... yet it appears audible, each species creating different ‘eye music’ from the nonchalant melancholy of seagulls to the staccato flitting of tits.”

When I was first confronted by Goya’s so-called Black Paintings in the Prado, Madrid, it was the noise of them that impressed me immediately. I had the impression that those two big museum rooms were like the tropical bird house in the zoo, filled with loud rustling, roaring and babbling sounds. It was as if Goya was able to paint what his eyes had heard as well as what they had seen. Even the head of the dog peering out of the darkness and into a shimmering yellow light seemed to be imbued with a soft skittering sound.

Since I felt that Goya’s deafness was the touchstone from which I could begin, I started my research by going to sign language classes. It was fascinating to learn how people can communicate without the use of sound.

When there is no speech you are free to examine the faces of strangers much more closely. The teacher said that a deaf person can always judge if someone is telling lies because the deception is so visible on their faces; he said that politicians could become hilarious. That made me think of Goya’s portraits of people with the authority of power and wealth in which his understanding of their real personality is so clearly visible, whether it is the complacent cruelty in the face of Queen Maria Luisa, or the smugness in the face of her lover, Manuel Godoy.

While writing Old Man Goya I would sometimes become very aware of my lack of proper qualifications, but then I would tell myself it didn’t matter, so long as I kept it simple and worked within the parameters of what I did know. I have had no training as an art historian, but I spent hours of my childhood pouring over the Capricho etchings, and my mother was a painter, so I grew up with the smell of linseed oil and turpentine and often watched the alchemical process that brings life to a blank canvas. I was always strangely comforted by the knowledge that Goya left so little information about his private life, because it made it easier for me to concentrate on the images he produced, letting them speak for themselves.

And when I wanted to understand something of the tangled history of Spain at that time, I found myself searching for the human details he would have noticed, whether it was the sight of a woman breast-feeding a puppy, or a soldier’s account of amputated arms and legs lying in a heap in a field during the Peninsular wars.

I wanted to see the places Goya had known. I began by going to Fuendetodos, “the fountain that belongs to everybody”, which is the name of the village in Aragon where he was born in 1746. The tiny stone house of his childhood is now a museum and the landscape is wide, empty and beautiful. I was in the area during Easter and was able to witness some of the Tamboradas festivals, when the people in the towns and villages dress in the terrifying costumes of the Inquisition and parade through the streets beating on drums as if their lives depended on it.

The ceremony begins with the “breaking of the hour” at midnight on the eve of Good Friday and continues until Easter Monday. As I listened to the anarchic rolling of drums, saw the masks and processions and the men whose hands were bleeding from beating on the taught drum skins, I felt as if I was seeing the spectacle of one of Goya’s paintings unfolding before my eyes.

In the city of Zaragoza, where Goya spent his youth, I went to a bullfight. Quite by chance a blind man came and sat on the bench just in front of me and “watched” what was happening in the ring by listening to the fanfares of music, the trampling of hooves, the swish of sand and the jingling of little bells when the mules came to drag the carcass of each bull away.

In the south of Spain, near Cadiz, I went to the farmhouse of Donana, where Goya stayed with the Duchess of Alba shortly after the devastation of his illness. The house is much as it was and from the garden I could see the glittering estuary of the Guadalquivir river, which forms the backdrop for that wonderful portrait of the duchess wearing black lace and pointing with her index finger at the muddy sand on which is written the words “Only Goya”. It was a curious pleasure to look at the old locust-bean tree, the flocks of chattering starlings and the sleepy perambulations of the dung beetles, knowing that Goya had also seen all this.

Finally I went to Bordeaux, the city of exile where the painter spent the last four years of his life. He moved from one rented accommodation to another, in the company of his young mistress Leocadia and her daughter Rosario, who was surely his daughter too. The house in which he died was in the process of being turned into the Spanish Cultural Institute, but I could imagine him there, watching Rosario playing the piano, working on the portrait of his friend Pio de Molina and looking out through the tall windows towards the spire of the Cathedral and beyond that towards the cemetery where he was first buried.

Before I felt that I had got to know him better, I presumed Goya was a tormented man who often teetered on the precarious edge of madness and despair, but as I followed him through the circumstances of his life and the savage chaos of the times he was living in, he emerged in my mind as a man possessed of a remarkable good humour and a defiant sanity. He was able to look without flinching at the cruelty he saw in the world and, without remorse, at its beauty.

The affliction of deafness, which for others might have been a calamity, was something he used to his own advantage; a way of concentrating his vision, undistracted by what anyone might want to say to him.

Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn is published in the UK by Jonathan Cape.—Dawn/Guardian Observer service