José Cueli: Gooooyaaa!

T

had such strength The word Goya , which in the 1950s, university cheerleader Palillo would shout: "Goya!" and students at the faculties (previously Ciudad Universitaria) already knew meant going to the Goya cinema and getting in for free. Today, it's the cry in stadiums, at academic ceremonies, and in the inner lives of university students: "Goooooyaaaaa!"

In the grocery store on the corner of my childhood home, the shopkeeper, wearing a beret, sporting a mustache, and lisping, had a reproduction of a Goya painting behind the cash register, colored with grease and grime. The painting stood on its own, and the truth is that, without any need for scholarly assistance, the Goya work occupied the top spot in my childhood attention.

My eyes turned toward him with irrepressible anxiety and an intense, inexplicable terror. A willful desire not to look, having to look, nonetheless, despite everything. In my opinion, Goya's painting appeared as a tragedy of incomprehensible cruelty, a window open to the painful spectacle of life. The revelation of that mystery of the world that I later, little by little, refined: the irredeemable fatality of evil.

Sunlight glimmered through a window on the side of the store, covered by a curtain drawn to mitigate its rays. But the light was purified by those well-timed veils, and the crowded atmosphere was prepared for the incipient flight of my childish imagination. The curtain, bathed in sunlight, attracted my eyes with compelling force.

Goya's painting showed me the reverse of life and the sun: death and shadows. A new expansion of life-death, but on the side of sadness and guilt, terror and evil.

The desperate appearance of those men who were about to receive the bullets from the rifles at point-blank range. That man who, like a madman, spread his arms in a cross so that the executioners could better shoot him. The line of assassins aiming with infernal ferocity at the light of the gloomy lantern.

The horror and fear that the vicious killers inspired in me, I transferred this week to my poor, powerless compatriots, sadistically beaten by the American police. Time had not passed; I once again felt the same childhood horror and fear. Life-death as terror and evil, the irredeemable fatality of evil.

Years later, I learned that Goya's bullfighting drawings, The Bullfight, and his work in general, belonged to the same Aragonese artist who brilliantly made me feel human cruelty, evil, and the need for omnipotence, to crush and make others suffer. The greater the suffering, the greater the omnipotence.

The United States, as a symbol, squeezes us, shoots us by the light of a lantern, beating us, strangling our economy, or excluding us from a television frame. Goya, 200 years earlier, painted sadism with the magic of his brushes, light and color in shadows.