The last days of Francis Bacon in Madrid, according to the poetic fiction of Fernando Beltrán

At the age of 82, on April 28, 1992, the painter Francis Bacon died in Madrid. He went to the Ruber clinic for a heart condition, and it was a surprise: it was not known that he was in the city. “Asthmatic, Francis Bacon died of heart failure, agitated by difficult breathing, with his lungs fatally deteriorating at the end of his life. He painted less and less and every day the root of his skepticism became more accentuated, at the end of his life,” journalist Juan Cruz wrote then in this newspaper.

This surprising fact now serves Fernando Beltrán (Oviedo, 67 years old), one of the most recognized poets on the contemporary Spanish scene, the rapt poet whose eyes water when he recites, the one who best squeezes the hearts of the public, to thread a small poetic, cerebral, very heartfelt novel, where one reflects on “the abyss and the beauty” of artistic creation: Bacon sin Bacon (Árdora Editions). It is his first experience in narrative, but it is a narrative that is almost a poem about this Bacon, who was not a star of the rock n’ rollbut “a star of cadmium orange and devastation,” as Beltrán writes.

The British painter, of Irish origin, wayward like the everlasting curls that fell on his forehead, did not want any funeral ceremony or any act of artistic recognition, as he explained in his will. Now Beltrán, author of poems such as The fantastic week, Hotel Living or the torrential The heart does not die (all published in Hiperión), with whom he shares the initials FB (something that is poetically noted in the text), he dialogues in his imagination with the rapt artist and fictionalizes parts of those last solitary days in the capital, where he probably went to say goodbye to his lover. , against the advice of doctors (although this detail is not discussed in the work).

“I received Bacon’s slap,” says the poet, referring to the first time he saw his work. “If Bacon doesn’t make you uncomfortable, you haven’t understood anything,” he adds. For Beltrán, Bacon tells us about the “fatal destiny of the human condition, the brutality of the events, the decay of the body, of life, which ends badly.” After those first virulent contacts, the relationship between the Asturian poet and the British poet’s work was reaffirmed when the former took a train from Madrid to visit the latter’s exhibition, which opened at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2016.

“Interestingly, that morning the exhibition was empty, so I was able to be alone with the artist,” he recalls. And, of course, from “the sum of passion and obsession” the text began to emerge in spurts, focused on that enigmatic solitary visit of Bacon to Madrid, which ended in his death, accompanied, as Beltrán refers, by a nun to whom that I didn’t know. “He, the great atheist!” says the author. Bacon was also a lover of Spanish culture and, of course, addicted to the work of Goya and Velázquez that is exhibited in the Prado Museum (from Seville he covered, even more terrifyingly, the portrait of Pope Innocent X).

The salvation of metaphors

Beltrán experienced the same loneliness that Bacon experienced, also on the edge of the abyss, also in a hospital; It was early April 2020, when the coronavirus crisis was claiming more lives. One week admitted and 56 days convalescing at home. “I saw a lot of people die around me, and people who in principle were better off than me,” he remembers. That’s where he saw his initials on a piece of paper, FB, and realized they were the same as Francis Bacon’s. He was approaching on April 28: the day the painter had died. “I thought maybe he was destined to die on the same date as Francis Bacon,” he recalls.

He got ahead thanks to his immune system and medical care, but also to Chet Baker’s jazz, his poetic look at the light that came in every morning (it meant another day alive) and the observation of the disheveled blackbirds that perched on window. That did not prevent him from shock post-traumatic feeling that the experience left him: it took him many months to stop having nightmares about the hospital. “I was saved by metaphors,” he says.

In Beltrán’s novel, now pure fiction, Bacon takes a taxi that takes him to the wrong place, a seedy tavern, in a basement near the Manzanares River. A very appropriate setting given his reputation as a hard drinker and bohemian. “The basement as a metaphor for the inner fire of creation,” the poet explains. There the painter finds that fiery inspiration for one of his famous triptychs: on one side, a couple kisses in a dark corner of the bar; On the other side, a lonely drunk at the bar, staring into space; In the middle, the old painter, sick, also lost. It will be his last triptych.

In the work, of a fragmentary nature, rather than events happening, thoughts happen, which zigzag in the painter’s mind and on the paper (sometimes distantly reminiscent of the prosody of the Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse, although without so much obsession), and that sometimes mix with those of the author himself, who enters and leaves the text, like a strange demiurge. Sometimes the protagonist voice realizes that he is being handled by an external narrator, and complains about this “strange narrator, infamous goliard” who pulls his tongue, taking advantage of his last days. Some camouflaged verse from the poet even infiltrates Bacon’s voice, only evident to those most knowledgeable about the Asturian’s work: “The dog that bit our leg, and was to support the life that would come later”, first appeared in the poem The garbage truck.

An internal monologue, coming from a Beyond from which the painter remembers his existence, where different issues are discussed: the nature of art, the difficulties of explaining inspiration and meaning in discourse (“I don’t understand painting, I only paint “says the main voice, which always searches, without success, the right word of Flaubert), the odious commodification of bacon; of course, life, love and death. For example, childhood traumas, the acceptance of his homosexuality or the loss of a lover. “Bacon is the most disturbing painter of the 20th century,” says Beltrán, “and for me poetry is disturbance.”

“What is your father?” they once asked one of Fernando Beltrán’s daughters. “Poet and namer,” she replied. That is another of Beltrán’s trades, that discipline of which he was a pioneer in Spain and which was later called we (a term that Beltrán does not like). His studio was called The Name of Things, and thus created well-known brands: Faunia, La Casa Encendida, Amena, Opencor, Rastreator, Aliada. He once named the first three steps of a staircase: come in, ancle y at home. Perhaps it was Beltrán who first inspired the care for names, poetry and ingenuity, an ingenuity that in these times already seems to be overwhelmed when it comes to naming. Another of his jobs is that of the architect of the Aula de las Metáforas, a library and poetic space in the Asturian town of Grado, where his family comes from, and through which names such as Amancio Prada, Luis Eduardo Aute or Víctor Manuel have passed, always at the service of astonishment in poetry.