Durmiendo sobre un caballo. José Luis Cremades

Durmiendo sobre un caballo. José Luis Cremades

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The times I’ve gone down that road!

The story sets down camp in the evening and steps out into the night when the moon rises. With white wine from albilla grapes in the mouth, the story goes that we used to walk down from Calle Olmo to the Prado to see a painting. And that one day, on our way down, we veered off the straight and narrow path and never got there.

Velázquez painted his Christ after having painted the deer’s head and before the drunkards. Every picture opens and closes a bracket on either side of it. We used to go down to see his Christ or, more than the Christ itself, to see its background. A layer of dark-green almost black oil. Evidently the background of something—of a lake, a room, a body that no longer bleeds—a ground that gives meaning to the form the most famous body in History—so that the picture can tell us what is going on there. We go down once again to see that between the green ground and the body drained of colour there is a shadow, an even darker green or perhaps completely black that turns the rest of the ground into light. The background of the lake, light. The background of the room, of the no longer living body, light. The background of the painting.

The small hours find us with the white grapes and, in the morning, we go down for fruit sold by a mute greengrocer across the street. Surrounded by courgettes, he teaches my daughter words with his hands. We go back up. The daughter falls silent as if a language has been passed down to her. It stays with her all morning.

Only recently have words been written in black ink. Smoke black, and the word ‘smoke’ is anchored. Ivory black. It takes hold, and so, sometimes, words contradict each other. I fall silent too. We look.

Coal-black green with leaden yellow. Warm tones come to the fore in the eye, cold ones recede in the canvas. It makes sense for the background of the painting to be a cold and concave tone so that it recedes, but the smoke and lead green is warm and vibrant and comes out at us, and we see—this is why we’ve come—that it refuses to recede in the canvas and we see how it lingers, convex and still alive on the cloth. A green that had already been rehearsed in the skin of the resuscitated Lazarus.
The dead rises and, ashamed of the green, hides away at the back of the family home.

Lunch. The daughter talks. She keeps gesticulating as she talks and her little fingers make meaningless shapes in a dance of phalanges.
She clearly said fried egg and now she is playing. She hides under the table and, as always when she’s getting ready to make a funny entrance, she says “don’t look!”

I don’t look. Christ rises from the dead and when he meets someone who, on recognizing him, goes to hug him says noli me tangere , a “don’t touch me” that says I have come back from
another place and from now on can only be imagined. We eat and imagine that he says noli me videre, because he hasn’t come back to be seen either, once his form has faded into the greenish-black ground of all eyes.

In the evening we go down and, for the first time, we enter the greengrocer’s house. A rectangular stone house. He shows it to us. Inside we learn more signs. I imagine him dancing. I follow him. I see
him dancing. I hear him with my eyes. Sometimes I don’t understand him. I grab his shoulder when the straight line of the hallway turns. Around the corner, I see a small reproduction of the painting hanging on a doorjamb. He sees me observing it and speaks to me with a sign I recognize, it means “very good”.

As we leave, a thick fog cushions the place where winter’s bone rubs up against spring’s bone. We are inside. We are always surrounded by something vast.

_Javi Cruz, March 2025.