As the griffon vulture flies, there is no great distance between the arid plains of La Mancha and the semi-arid slopes of Aragon, in northern Spain. There was no great distance either between the life-tracks of the hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha and Cecilia Giménez, widow of the town of Borja, for all their superficial difference. Both kept up appearances as best they could, on modest incomes. And both were dreamers—he immersed in books of chivalry and she, beyond housework, in flower painting—who decided on their own initiative to sally out and right wrongs. He, though withered and almost 50, went forth with his rusty lance to win the love of the beauteous but unseen Dulcinea del Toboso. She, though 81 and getting stiff in the legs, went out with her brushes to please the Virgin of Mercy, the patron of her parish church, who had pointed out a job that needed doing.
Cecilia’s life was a struggle. Her two sons, Jesús and José, had both been born crippled: Jesus with muscular dystrophy, José with cerebral palsy. Jesús had died at 20, but José, in his 60s, still needed her full care. To bring in money, she worked in a bar. To comfort herself she volunteered in her local church, the beautiful Santuario de la Misericordia, which sat at the top of a hill reached through vineyards. She loved this church; she had been married there, and her sons had received their First Communion. But it had no funds, so parishioners helped out with the smaller jobs. As a painter, she would dab on a little where necessary.
The task the Virgin pointed out to her was the sorry state of the “Ecce Homo”, Christ in his crown of thorns, that was painted on a pillar in the nave. It had been done in 1930 by Elias Garcia Martínez, who spent his summers in Borja and left it behind as a gift. But he had not primed the stone, so time, and salt, and damp from the aquifer that underlay the church had made the oil paint flake away. Much of Christ’s tunic and shoulder had gone, and his sad lovely face was disappearing. So in August 2012 Cecilia set to work. She had not exactly been authorised, but she had often touched it up a bit before; the priest knew, and nobody stopped her. Applying all the love she could, she now meant to transform the painting into her own work of art.
It proved harder than she thought. Once she had repainted the tunic, easy enough, she wet the whole thing with big strokes of her brush. Having hardly ever painted portraits, she needed to think how best to do it. Then, disaster, she went off for a two-week holiday. When she returned, the Borja Studies Centre had seen her unfinished work and, with the artist’s family, had raised the roof.
Much worse, the whole world, through the internet, had heard about it. Her half-done picture was everywhere, with its slit eyes, greenish flat face and a shaggy hood of hair. People were calling it “Monkey Jesus” and “Ecce Mono” (Behold the Monkey). Memes were flying by the thousand. Her Jesus-face replaced the Mona Lisa’s and the man’s in Munch’s “The Scream”; it morphed into Homer Simpson’s and Mr Bean’s. Just as Don Quixote was universally dubbed a madman, she was called a crazy old woman who couldn’t paint. And just as his misplaced do-gooding was followed, as often as not, by a hail of stones or a vigorous beating up, Cecilia was thrashed in the modern style, online. That world she barely knew hurt her dreadfully. She, a widow, found herself running away from the press in her own street. For days, utterly humiliated, she wept and refused to eat. She lost six kilos. Then, felled by panic and anxiety, she took to her bed.
Yet not so long afterwards, a wonder occurred. It was not, at first, as potent as Don Quixote’s precious Balsam of Fierabras, which could set him almost instantly to rights, no matter how his ribs were pulverised. It was simply some flowers, and a card with a nice message. More came. Then visitors began to stream into Borja, not to torment her but to see her painting for themselves. In the first year 40,000 came, and in the years following the figure still settled at 15,000-20,000. (In earlier years 5,000 had been the norm.) The church charged one euro for entry at the start, soon raising it to three, and set up a shop selling “Ecce Homo” t-shirts, mugs, pencils, fridge magnets, flash drives and wine. The revenue helped both the Santuario and the Sancti Spiritus Hospital for impoverished elderly folk. Although the immediate talk in 2012 had been of restoration or plain painting over, even the artist’s family came at last to accept that Cecilia’s version should stay. It was such a boon to Borja that it could not possibly disappear.
She benefited herself, of course. Half the profits from the shop went to her, and whatever money she did not need she gave to muscular-dystrophy charities. There was talk of naming a square after her. But that was not the most satisfying part. The greatest hurt from the global firestorm had been the jibe that she was no painter, but now that perception changed. The shop at the church was also an Interpretation Centre that took her “Ecce Homo” seriously. Art critics, too, began to change their tune. Some found the painting’s very simplicity moving, the work of a devoted believer. Others compared her to Goya, Modigliani and the German Expressionists. Her name was known. She had shows, and prices for her paintings rose into thousands of euros.
An artist’s imagination had to be the final judge. Don Quixote knew of a painter in Úbeda who, when asked what he was painting, would reply “Whatever emerges”. What emerged was sometimes so bizarre that he would put a notice beside it explaining “This is a cockerel”, or “This is a fox”. The intrepid knight himself freely imagined in his wanderings that inns were turreted castles, that dissolute wenches were fair princesses and that a dented barber’s basin was the golden helmet of Mambrino. In the same way, Cecilia Giménez imagined her portrait was suffering Jesus, so it was; and the miracles it wrought in Borja were surely firm evidence of that. ■