The Gypsy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Maja_desnuda#/media/File:Goya_Maja_naga2.jpg The Prado in Madrid a cool tent of marble set back from the Retiro Park. I have come to see the gypsy girl. Goya painted her twice. Maja Desnuda is her soul the other, the clothed version, only a mannequin. She is not shy, though she reclines naively adopting a position of demure sexuality, a gauche enticement. Her eyes are calculating, perhaps she is figuring her pay by the hour? I stand as near to her as Goya would have. I feel the space between us- it is pressed and curved like the tip of a brush. Her belly button is inwards; running vertically from it a line of fine hair, a genitive gravity that leads the eye downward to her womanhood. A less uncompromising artist would not have painted that delicate trail yet it is his master stroke, he has set a lioness into a purse of flesh. A finger points to a moon that only gypsies can read from the dark surface of this world.