Saturn Devouring His Son

I was getting a feel for how the next two weeks of touring would go. My mother and I had rested scrupulously on our fourteen-hour flight and arrived in Spain very early. We took a taxi to an InterContinental hotel and immediately began to wait. Our group, two dozen society ladies in catalog travel-wear, needed a lot of time to find the elevator down from the rooms where they had installed the previous night. We waited for them to trickle into the gilt lobby, greeting each of them with modulated enthusiasm. We waited while, in series, they recalled and then went to retrieve from upstairs their enormous leather bags that overflowed with tissues, tablets, pills, and pens. There were only two elevators, which were slow. We waited then for them to find the bathroom, use the bathroom, fix their makeup in the bathroom mirror, and then come out and inform each other of the location of the bathroom. We waited for, sorry, very quickly, just one brief international call, it can’t be avoided, and for the follow-up call which must be taken. Each delay was achieved in a cheerful, bustling way, as if the whole purpose of travel was the pleasure of mismanaging one's personal logistics.

Outside the plate window we saw the charter coach arrive to obstruct the cobbled street. We lined up without any hurry. The ladies each wanted to ask the bus driver questions on the way in. Who was his contract employer, what was the nature of his license, and did he have a wife? Any children? They found seats on the bus, but once they had settled many of them wanted to switch their seats. We waited until Laura, who had hired the coach, could count everyone two times- there were to be 26 of us. Two were missing in the count and needed to be found. Many helpfully clucked out their own headcounts before Laura was satisfied she hadn’t left anyone behind and the coach finally lumbered into midmorning traffic.

Laura was a tan, game professor of Spanish art history in Dallas. She had authored the itinerary and sourced the participants. A few of our unhurried gaggle were pursuing expensive advanced degrees in art history, while others were affiliated with the university museum. Like my mother, these tended to over-adornment and late middle age.

I was fighting moderate distress. Beyond being the junior outlier of the leisure-travel contingent of the group, I estimated I was 30 years below the median age. My gratitude ebbed painfully, and rallied only when the reel of city scenery outside the window began to animate.

My invitation to tour Spain was, I gathered, a reward for ongoing adventurousness, physical fitness, social grace, and, chiefly, good humor. I was here as a world-beating accessory: companion, attendant, and trophy.

The bargain was explicit: I would enhance my mother’s latest experience of Europe in the following ways: I would talk with her when she wished for conversation. If she did not want to talk to me, or if she wished to talk about me, I would be courteously invisible and deaf. I might be picturesquely solitary, but must never be sullen or unavailable. I could be shy but not antisocial, fashionable but not sexy, engaging but not conceited, amusing but not ridiculous. Makeup and jewelry were strongly encouraged. My sensible shoes had been discussed and approved before we left Dallas. I was also expected to make scenery sketches at the advanced amateur level and allow anyone to look at them who asked. I would speak Spanish, even when the person I was speaking to had good English. I had no money, but I would not ever ask for any. I would always be overwhelmed with gratitude and, when possible, visibly amazed.

Our first stop was the Prado museum. The joyful matrons climbed down from the bus and meandered duck-like across a broad, sunny plaza. We stopped inside the front door for a long time while two of them shuffled back to fetch forgotten accessories. Many of us needed to visit the bathroom again before the group coalesced, quieted, and turned flushed, painted faces to the young museum guide, patient with his plastic microphone, at the entrance to the Prado galleries.

I had considered declining the invitation to Spain. My mother, I know, is self aggrandizing and pedantic. Raised in California, she has a transatlantic accent, to the confusion of everyone. Since escaping home years previously, I had mostly avoided her, and bore her prattle and insults like a hair shirt. When she asked me to travel with her again I doubted that I could get along, or that I wanted to.

Despite myself, I found that I couldn’t refuse. I couldn’t remember the last time I had left Texas. This educational tour would comprise sixteen museums in eleven cities, North to south along the Eastern border. There would be churches, monasteries, castles, cafes, mountains, plains, the sea. On day 12 we were going to a beachside resort. The otherwise unimaginable opportunity of five-star travel, I reasoned, merited a heroic effort of peacekeeping between my mother and myself. I didn’t have a camera, but I had my notebook, and thought I might even have a lot of fun.

I despise guided tours generally but I stayed dutifully with the Prado group, plastic amplifier pressed to my ear to hear the guide’s soft monologue. From this speaker also echoed coughs, groans, and footsteps as we trailed him, echoing, through the grand galleries.

Each time the ladies pooled in front of a painting, I composed my face: pleasant, open, expectant. I angled my body towards my mother to allow her to catch up to me. She gripped my arm above my elbow and squeezed it. Her wrinkled finger thrust into my eyeline. “See?!” she’d hiss, as if I were blind, or very stupid. I widened my eyes and nodded reverently, mouthing, “Wow!”

There were so many great paintings here that I had read about in books, and I wanted to discover some new ones, I was eager to get on my own. But our guide was disappointingly thorough, and it was almost an hour before we edged together in a subdued cluster in front of Las Meninas. The massive canvas provoked a surge of intimacy: the exhilarating feeling of meeting a favorite celebrity.

In the center the blonde child princess was too smug. Was she judging our huddle of aging, overdressed women? I ignored her and turned instead to study the brunette menina who leaned over the princess but looked out at us. A lady-in-waiting. Attentive. Smooth hands, careful curls, and an astute expression gave her an air of grace. She has a job to do, I thought. She knows things, but keeps them to herself. She has her own thoughts.

After a while, I caught my mother watching me. She raised both her pencilled eyebrows. I duly pointed at the painting and made an impressed face. She strode over and repeated verbatim in my ear what the guide had just said.

I could have shoved her.

I have the capacity, independently of guides, to experience the romantic sublimation of my human essence before a great painting. To commune with the absent artist in a way that has little to do with facts or history.

If I note the name of an artist, the year, or a subject, it is to lead me to similar work to enjoy, and being able to name my favorites helps me find other spirits as triumphant and subtle as mine, so I write them down.

My mother, on the other hand, collects tidbits, which she deploys strategically to impress and intimidate. She speaks four languages and is an expert in pre-modern European art. Most modern and contemporary art she despises as degenerate. Her memory for names and events is capacious but badly indexed, and she gets terribly muddled by dates and numbers of all kinds. The more she knows about something, the more she likes it. She treated most of the famous canvases with the enthusiasm of a fanatic, but the Naked Maja reclining happily on her pillowed sofa got a scoff. “That was Goya’s mis tress” she said to everyone and no one, twisting hatred into the word. The maja’s breasts stuck up at a funny angle, and her neck looked cramped.

As the tour dragged, she kept jumping in to add information. “This museum had dirt floors when it was first opened to the public by Ferdinand the Seventh,” she informed the group, confusing the guide by stepping up to stand next to him. She dropped her voice and leaned forward with a happy look. “He married his first cousin. They couldn’t have children. So then he married his niece!”

I trailed around the edges and looked outward, pretending to be shy.

There was a whole room of Bosch. At The Garden of Earthly Delights, my mother was, miraculously, nowhere to be found. She may have wanted to avoid the embarrassment of being near both me and the sexiness of Bosch. Laura hung back with me instead, lingering in examination of the triptych’s tiny joys and perversions. She winked.

Being unfree was an annoyance, but as we walked through the galleries I eventually couldn’t help but feel holy. We saw Goya’s frantic Saturn urgently chewing on his son and Ribera’s huge Prometheus with meaty muscles twisted in shadow as a bird tugged at his intestine. The slow, shuffling pace was just starting to wear me out when we passed by a huge painting that I had never seen before: A tall, dark woman stood on a lonely bluff, surrounded by indifferent people, and stared in despair at a coffin. It was breathtaking. I stopped, but the tour guide apparently didn’t plan to address this one. My mother came and tugged me along.

At lunch in the museum cafe, the atrium thrummed with the excited voices of people who no longer had to whisper. We sat down at a dirty table with our Spanish tortillas and our salads, and my mother’s chosen special friends of the moment. She preferred these women because they were good listeners, and because she knew something about each of them that provoked her pity. Deborah was a career woman who had never married. Sadie had succeeded and was married to a rich man. She was “sweet”, which is my mother’s personal euphemism for earnestly stupid.

I made an exhausted attempt to configure my features into a look of attractive naivete, I simply can not believe my luck to even be here. Then I did my best to tune into the French family at the next table, who were discussing their favorite umbrellas.

Proximately, my mother had unleashed a signature flood of steady speech. “Ahh, I could just live here. I simply don’t need anything but great art.” Her tone was like someone plinking their two index fingers heavily on piano keys, exultant and wandering. “I did bring my sister Fern to Spain right after her divorce, to cheer her up, you know, and that was wonderful. And I brought my other daughter, Nina, when she graduated from college, as a reward, but she was awful, always complaining, ‘my feet hurt, I’m hungry!’”

This possibly for my benefit.

“Isn’t it simply divine though? Every time I come to the Prado I discover something new and magnificent! It’s like stepping back in time! Can you just imagine all the people who have walked through these rooms? Hundreds of years of life, of history! Kings and queens!”

I was running out of wows, but supplied one here to bridge the disinterest of her audience, Sadie and Deborah.

“I’m so glad we came on this trip.” She continued, “I really needed some cheering up. Our dear Labrador, la pobre Doña Carmencita Infanta Gloriosa Del Camino,” she paused for effect, and possibly applause, “very recently departed this mortal life.” She was performing a little melodrama about the dog which I had seen workshopped several times already. It was only a cafeteria, but I locked eyes on my flatware and focused on practicing continental style.

“By the time I found her sitting in a puddle of her own filth- vomit and diarrhea, I knew it was time to let go. We had her euthanized last month.”

“It was just like that with our dear Fifi,” piped Sadie helpfully, a shred of arugula extending from the corner of her mouth, “It hurts so much to see them in pain.”

“I want to go into the galleries,” I said. “May I meet you in the lobby at three?”

My mother turned on me. “I want to go with you.” she cried, and issued an unambiguous “Wait!”

She turned back to her friends, made a “what can you do?” gesture, and hurried back into the script.

“But now the flow of my bleeding heart is staunched by new love, because we have a beautiful, sweet dog. She’s just like Carmen, almost identical, in fact. We call her Incarnation Segundo del Carmina. She’s a rescue lab, of course, I just think everyone should rescue their pets, don’t you? A magnificent specimen of canine life.”

“Oh good-” Deborah began, but she didn’t stand a chance.

“She’s a little out of control.” My mother spoke right over her. “You know, a puppy. So she’s at doggie boot camp. And she'll be back in six weeks with some discipline!” She laughed, pleased at something. “Do you have a dog, Deborah?”

“I have a Shih-Tzu”

“Well, Is he trained? We didn’t even have to drive our Inacarnation; they came right out and took her for us. The place is wonderful. I’ll send you the information.”

My egg tortilla was gone. I was fighting again with the corrosive suspicion that I had made a catastrophically bad decision to join this group for such a long time. I kept remembering the painting of the despairing woman. I wanted to be with her. My resolve to be pleasant failed. The left side of my lip tugged upward and I turned away to hide the sneer.

Across the lobby from the cafe, a class of young kids leaned against a wall, slumped over their backpacks, waiting for something. Most chattered or played, but one girl sat apart at the end of the row. She had soft-looking, round cheeks that glowed pink. Her dark hair was smooth and straight and parted on the side over a high, round forehead. She looked up at the people who walked by without seeing her. She scanned them each with dark eyes. Her mouth twisted down and her chin pointed gently.

I was saved from my ennui. She was at least as beautiful as anything I had seen that day. I carefully drew her face in my notebook and got a good likeness on the first try, though the drawing was only cute. I looked at her again, and at my drawing, and closed the book.

When we reentered the galleries I couldn’t remember how to get back to the painting I wanted to see, whether it was upstairs or downstairs, or who painted it. I looked in every room, but my mother kept grabbing me: “Come look at this!”

I entertained detailed lectures on Goya, Zuloaga, and Pacheco. When I strayed, she called me b