My Suit is Red

The last time we saw Mr. PA, he was in a room in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, standing before a Panini. (see FMR 5, Panini's Kaleidoscope of Rome) Now he’s one room over, looking at a little boy dressed in red. The painting is Portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, by Goya. The thrill he experiences springs from what was there in the canvas, certainly, but also from a number of details accumulated over time and his own personal experience. Thus, alongside the memorable red of the little boy’s suit and the frankly ravenous stare which three cats level at a magpie on a leash, Mr. PA’s awareness that the child Manuel was fated to die at age eight (as if he’d only ever been born so he could be painted), or his recollection of a cat from his own childhood, combine to make the seventy-year-old Mr. PA linger before that Goya, troubled but happy to be alive.