The Museum-Goer
by María DeGuzmán
He has been wandering the dappled gardens of El Retiro in a cable-melting, climate crisis July afternoon in Madrid. He leaves the park, passes westward by the Prado’s north side. Remembering the two hours of free entry on late afternoons, he veers into the museum’s Puerta Alta de Goya entrance. Drawn as if by an invisible force, he walks southward down the wide, vaulted-ceiling, central corridor and turns left into Sala 12, a spacious octagonal prism displaying a core collection of Velázquez’s paintings. If he remembered an island of wooden benches in the center, there were none now, only an expanse of marble flooring. Swaying slightly on tired feet, in a trance of heat exhaustion and accumulated lifetimes, he stands before the portrait of a man on horseback.
He imagines the hand of the painter laying down the layers of oils composing the Rubenesque man—wide-brimmed hat, marshal baton in leather glove, wary eyes fixing the viewer in an over-the-armored-shoulder glance—atop a muscular chestnut horse in levade above a landscape of mountains, rivers, trees, and fields turned into battlefields. The painter’s hand closes in upon itself, calculating between eulogy and mockery of its patron. Now this closed hand seems to have become a set of knuckles knocking on the backdoor of the museum-goer’s mind. That mind is drifting past the horse and rider to an ambiguous landscape where ravine and field blend strangely and some figure is bent to the ground. Whether slain horse & soldier or exploited peasant deep in debt, he cannot tell. He wonders if a river is sliding past the distant mountains or whether the lighter stretch is a deforested plain—scrubland where vast forests once stood before they were slashed and burned by charging armies, chopped for charcoal, and cleared for grazing sheep, goats, and cattle. How oblivious to the dangers of these practices was the 17th century statesman? Swaying in a museum gallery in the second decade of the 21st century on a July afternoon of record-breaking heat, the man ponders these things. Though inside the museum, he still indexes, from the gallery’s translucent skylights, the white heat outside its walls. His attention shifts back to the self-assured figure on horseback, trying to read the inscrutable mustachioed face of a man courting the public eye. Perhaps because the museum-goer is, in fact, more dehydrated than he realizes, the scene unmoors from its canvas and frame.
Before his eyes, flash mountains and lakes, reservoirs of water, as well as different versions of the face of that mustachioed man—a ghostly head, a profile limned in light and shadow. Even a miniature of a horse’s head off to the lower right! The white haze over the mountains brings with it an electric shock centered in his chest. Then he knows. Honors, titles, awards, silver reales, gold escudos, estates, libraries, men, horses, armies, fleets, even the diamond-studded relic of a saint’s heart all disintegrate into the void. What does it profit a man if he gains the realm and loses a legacy of living water, life itself? The equestrian statesman and his wife outlived the children they had together. A daughter, their last hope, died a teenager shortly after marrying. The museum-goer finds himself staring at the face of a young woman regarding him from the shadows, her soul emanating from her mouth, about to push off into one of the lakes.
The man in the gallery, 7 o’clock shadow on his chin and his head wrapped in a strange wave of emotion, is feeling quite peculiar. He does not want to admit it, but, with a slight buzzing in his ears, it dawns on him that he might faint. At first the buzzing is like faint radio static. Then, he swears he begins to hear words, anguish washing in on the spectral tides of history whispering a confession in his ears: “If only I had done this, if only I hadn’t done that … if only, if only, if only.” Echoes of the death-bed regret of a dying man or an undead one. The museum-goer blinks his eyes to clear them. He notices a person in a sable diving suit clutching an orb like a pearl. A pearl diver diving for the pearl of great price? For the Philosopher’s Stone? Effective remedy against the realm’s decline? Or one mistaken for such? How can you tell when your eye is in darkness?
The scene shifts again. What was previously a long face with an eclipsed eye has become a half shell. In the sheen of the shell’s inner surface, the museum-goer glimpses his own anxious face, on the right, peering out from behind a curtain, one eye visible under a thick eyebrow. Beside that intent eye, a column, or perhaps a funnel of dark air, moves across dusty plains under white glare. He hears the sound of the wind, the fierce winds over the plains of Castilla, the winds that rattled the window blinds of the capital’s buildings at night, the winds that made their way into his childhood dreams. And, then, silence. Silence and stillness. Stillness in the eye of the storm. Stillness punctuated by the cries of migrating swallows circling the skies, diving down to drink from rivers as they fly. All at once, he spots a personage like something escaped from a royal aviary. But, it is not a bird. It is a person, holding a globe of water in one hand and gesturing toward him with the other, like Judith holding the head of Holofernes. An emissary from elsewhere transfixing him with her stare, motioning to him with compelling signs that exceed his present capacity to comprehend.
María DeGuzmán is a scholar, conceptual photographer, writer, and music composer / sound designer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA). She has published photography in Abstract Magazine, The Grief Diaries, Coffin Bell, Typehouse Literary Magazine,Map Literary,Two Hawks Quarterly, Harbor Review, The Halcyone, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Ponder Review, Alluvian, streetcake: a magazine of experimental writing, Galdrar of Tempered Runes Press, The Closed Eye Open, and Gone Lawn; creative nonfiction photo-text pieces Oyster River Pages, La Piccioletta Barca, and Tiny Seed Literary Journal; photo-text flash fiction in Oxford Magazine, Bombay Gin, Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts; photo prose poetry in Landlocked Magazine; visual poetry in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics (forthcoming) and Roanoke Review (forthcoming); poetry in Empty Mirror; and short stories in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Sinister Wisdom, and Obelus Journal. Her SoundCloud website may be found at: https://soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.