Nineteen ninety-two was the year with the least precipitation in the period 1985-2010 in Spain. The winter was cold, long, but dry. Throughout the year, there were 137 frost days. The first was on October 5 and the last on June 5. We cannot know if on April 22 of that year, the day he flew for the last time to Madrid from London, Francis Bacon had a window seat from which to see Spain from above, to see Spain as a giant albero, a landscape ochre and frosty. If so, did Bacon feel pleased? Did he think that the barren land dotted with cold-wounded olive trees was a sublime image? Did he remember by contrast the island where he was born, Ireland, always humid?
Did Bacon know he was coming to Spain to die? To agonize in solitude? The death of Francis Bacon in Madrid, in the spring of 1992, is news that still seems recent because of how fascinating it is. Javier Santiso now recreates it in Mortally Alive (published by La Huerta Grande), a book that is in its own way a novel, an essay, and poetry, and at the same time, a mirror for Spanish readers that reflects an almost forgotten image of their country. Forgotten but still attractive.
"The last or almost the last thing Bacon painted was a series of bullfighting scenes. Obviously, there was that ochre sand, that yellow-brown of Spain," Santiso recounts. "Spain has probably been the most important foreign country for Bacon in every sense. As an artist, because he obviously revered Velázquez and never missed an opportunity to go see him at the Prado Museum until his last time, his last trip out of love. Spain is the discovery and infatuation with Velázquez's Innocent X, but it is also Goya and Zurbarán. Bacon became a painting cannibal in Spain. He devoured painting, made it his own: there are muscular legs that appear even in his last triptych and come from Velázquez, from a Mars god that he had been seeing for years. The obsession with Innocent is very early, it is with him even before being a painter."
What did Spain give Bacon that Italy, for example, did not? "There is a tearing in Bacon's painting, something very brutal and violent that, I believe, he found in Spain. It is a rugged aspect that he did not find in Italy. Even the Italian language is softer than Spanish, which is much more rugged. And with Spanish painting, the same happens, if we make an exception for Caravaggio. There is a particular violence, a tragedy of life, and a fury of life that attracted Bacon to Spain. Céline could be a good comparison to understand that disposition."
-To me, it sounds a bit like Jean Genet.
-Also. Actually, in those 30s, 40s, and 50s, in the central period of Bacon's life, there were many authors who shared a rugged, violent, and nocturnal vision of Spain. It is found in Genet and in Bataille, both focused on Barcelona, with a component of tragedy and fury for the life they love.
"Fury for the life they love" could be the hypothesis of Mortally Alive. The essay part of Santiso's book deals with that, explaining that the brutality of Bacon's paintings was a way of loving life. "This is not a baconian text in the sense that it is tortured, tragic, or dark. It is not that, what I wanted was to show the light in Bacon, the joy of living. Bacon painted in a ruthless way because life shook him, pierced him, and he wanted it that way... In the end, we are flesh. We are bodies that degrade, that sink, that shrink. And loving life from that certainty is a tremendous and ruthless form of humanism."
And the novel part? The poetic prose thriller? The first thing Santiso does is define his character in its ambiguities. "The image that was built around Bacon was born because it suited everyone. It suited his gallery owners and Bacon himself. The violent, evil, drunken homosexual... It wasn't real. If Bacon was anything, he was a bon vivant. He loved life, enjoyed a glass of champagne, was a partygoer, loved to laugh, was a cheerful man... For commercial reasons, the other Bacon appeared with his black leather jacket, smelling of urine, with that face of a hooligan who had just left the pub after fighting with everyone, biting one's ear and breaking another's nose... That was a theater."
"There are many testimonies that speak of an exquisite man, charming in his manners," Santiso continues. "He could be very harsh if the person in front of him did not interest him. Then he could be merciless. Otherwise, he was much more of a gentleman than a hooligan."
Did he know he was coming to Spain to die? "No. But when he left London, he traveled against the doctor's advice. He was forbidden to take the plane, he was told he was not in a condition to do so. But in Spain, there was a Spaniard, a banker who was not even 40 years old at the time, whom he had fallen madly in love with. And he decided to go see him. He invented a work trip to prepare an exhibition at Marlborough, a trip that was not yet necessary, and he came. Risking his life to travel for love, for the only reason in the world worth risking life for... That is loving life in the most radical way."
In Santiso's book, Bacon's lover is named El Español, but the author recalls that his identity is no secret. José Capelo, still a resident of Madrid today, has been identified as the painter's last lover in books, journalistic chronicles, and even on Wikipedia. The New York Times spoke of his intermittent relationship with the painter and his visits to the Cock bar, behind Gran Vía, but Capelo has denied that their friendship was romantic or sexual. In Mortally Alive, the story progresses like a quest around that elusive lover who did not accompany or could not accompany Bacon in his agony.
And here comes the other key character of Mortally Alive: Mercedes, the nun who attended to the painter during his five days of agony and solitude at the Ruber clinic. "The irony of the story is that Bacon was an undisputed atheist who ended up connected to a nun. Their conversations must have been quite... colorful, can we say it like that? He did not have family around. El Español did not get to see him. The only person who was with him until the end was that woman, just as women accompanied Christ when he died. The men, the apostles, had fled. Bacon did not believe in transcendence, but he undoubtedly realized that there was something very Christ-like in his way of dying."
And the poetry? "Bacon did not like to gloss over his painting, he avoided it. But he had phrases that were sometimes like lightning. There is one that is tremendous: 'I have the smell of blood in my eyes'." That sounds almost like Lorca, doesn't it? "I used that phrase for a short novel I wrote about Camarón de la Isla. It is a good analogy. Neither Camarón nor Bacon theorized or were interested. It came from their guts, it was like Lorca's duende."