Part 1 of 2

I had been told that in Dublin, the rain doesn’t get you wet. That’s not the case. When it rains in Dublin, you don’t have to carry an umbrella--true. But even if you do, you are guaranteed to get wet. See, the water falls so slowly that even with an umbrella up, you are bound to walk into the drops. The drops, though, they aren’t the drenching, Big Gulp-sized things we get here, not the kind of drops that will soak you in minutes. In America, we say, “It’s raining cats and dogs”; in Dublin, they say “It’s a soft day,” meaning, it’s gray and misty. Most days are soft days. You can get wet in Dublin, it just takes longer.

I had been there long enough. Studying at Trinity College for the year, I was in a rut—lonely, isolated. At the start of Moby-Dick, Ishmael says that he heads to sea whenever it is “a damp, drizzly November” in his soul. It was December in Dublin and it had been a damp, drizzly November in my soul since mid-October. It had also been raining since then. Since water was precisely the problem, I decided to take to the sky instead of the sea. I booked a cheap flight to Spain--I was going to fly into Madrid, travel down into the south of the country, and then fly back to Dublin.

After a week in Madrid with an American companion, we parted ways—he left back for America, I left on a bus for the south, to a little town outside of Granada. I had to take two buses to get to this town, the name of which I can’t remember. Once I got off the bus, I was picked up by a British ex-pat named Paul Hands, who drove me to his small farm—about half an hour away, isolated on the edge of a valley. In exchange for room and board, I was going to help him harvest olives. This had been arranged over the Internet, via email. Paul’s wife, Rachel, was the one with whom I’d been emailing. She signed all of her emails Love, Rachel.

I had plenty of free time at the farm. Paul—grizzled, about fifty—had an aching back and was a firm believer in the Spanish siesta. (It would eventually come out that Paul was an ex-pat less by choice than by necessity—he was some kind of felon in the UK, though it was never quite clear what kind. It seemed he’d come to Spain to mellow out. He was extremely friendly, felon or no.) Even with a two-hour siesta in the middle of the afternoon, I was usually done with work (chopping wood, digging holes, brushing olives off the trees) around 4:30. One evening, free to do whatever, I ventured off into the valley. I decided to bring my camera—the sun was setting, the light good. I took this photo:



When I saw it on a computer screen, I realized:



This was a painting I’d seen the week before, at El Prado in Madrid. It’s called The Dog and it’s by Francisco Goya. Goya was born in 1746 in a tiny town in the northeast of Spain, and he died in 1828. In 1792, he fell ill and became deaf--the lead in his paint may have been the cause. Either way, his paintings took a darker turn after that. The Dog was painted around 1820 (just a year after Herman Melville was born).

Both images—my snapshot and Goya’s painting—are marked by negative space, a looming emptiness, a sense of isolation. That dog is doomed to drown is some strange sea beneath a sky the color of sand—a taunt, to have the illusion of salvation everywhere above. That I would accidentally reproduce the image—in rural Spain, a few days before Christmas, depressed and confused and with no one I knew within thousands of miles—makes sense.

Wait, though, is that even a dog? Look: the nose is someone’s left hand at the end of an outstretched arm; ditto the ear for the right hand; in the middle, a head. Goya painted his most famous dark works on the walls of his home. Though I’ve been using the term “painting,” fresco is the word. All the frescoes were stripped from the walls, taken far from their home to hang in El Prado. None of the frescoes are easy to read—cracked and aged as they are. Here’s this, though, the top half of an etching, again by Goya:



It’s called “They Have Flown.” She is the same shape as the dog’s head. Maybe The Dog depicts no dog at all, but someone flailing, arms outstretched, trying to keep afloat—to try to fly out of all that wet. I wouldn’t blame them.