ONE
• • • • •
Paris
1953
Irène Lagut
Pablo Picasso, my lover, the greatest artist who ever lived, almost didn’t.
At birth, he was a blue-and-white wax statuette of a newborn who didn’t move, didn’t cry. “Stillborn,” the nurse whispered. His mother was almost too exhausted from the birth to notice. But an uncle who had been pacing in the hall with Pablo’s father had never seen a stillbirth before and was curious. He leaned over the infant, so close that the burning tip of his cigar touched the baby.
Pablo, white and blue, squirmed. He whimpered. His face turned angry red. He wailed lustily. The greatest artist who has ever lived—and that’s not just my opinion, I assure you—decided to live. Fire brought him to life. Fire keeps him alive.
“Born of fire,” I say.
“What was that?” Pablo, many years after that miracle birth, turns away from the washstand mirror and glares at me with those all-seeing black eyes. We had dined together at Café de Flore and spent the night at his studio in the Quai des Grands Augustins. We had bedded down among the crates and canvases and statues, decades of his work crammed into the one space he had hoped would be safe from the Germans during the occupation. Mostly, it had been. In fact, they had come sometimes to buy from him, though their regime had declared him a decadent. He sold them a few paintings.
And he listened. Listened very carefully, in case he heard anything useful for the resistance. He made jokes to those German soldiers who marched down our avenues and sat in our cafés during the occupation, jokes in secret French slang, which the soldiers only pretended to understand. Those jokes insulted them, as Pablo intended.
People used to say of my lover that he lived only for art, that women and politics did not matter to him the way his art mattered. But people change. When Franco and Hitler destroyed that Spanish town, Guernica, Pablo changed. You cannot look at that painting, at the screaming mothers and murdered children and violence of it, and think, This is a man who does not care about people and politics.
And I have seen how his face changes when he speaks of Françoise, the woman who is leaving him.
“I think it will be a fine day,” I said. “But come back to bed, Pablo. It is still early.” I smoothed and patted the rumpled sheet that was still damp from our little bacchanal.
“The car will be here soon. If I’m not ready, Paulo will honk the horn and make a scene in the street. He’s as mad as his mother.”
“Has Olga really turned insane? I always thought she had that tendency. Though you are enough to madden any woman. Why don’t you just divorce her?” I wonder what my life would have been had I married Pablo when we were young. Not happy, I think. No, I made the right choice. But still . . .
How good it is now to be away from maids and menus and all the domestic duties that eat away at a woman’s life, that make it so difficult to work at her art. We aren’t allowed closed doors, the way men are.
Pablo returns his gaze to his own image in the mirror and studies it, drawing the razor through the white foam on his cheek and making a curve, olive flesh showing through a white background. Another work of art.
“Hurry up and get dressed,” he says. “Olga won’t give me a divorce. You know that.”
“So you have said for years. Perhaps it is very convenient, having a wife who lives separately and keeps you from marrying any other woman.”
He throws a wet towel at me. “Get up. The car will be here soon.”
“Listen to you, my love. A car. A chauffeur. I remember when you had holes in your boots, when you were my young love.”
“That was long ago. And he’s not a chauffeur, he’s my son.”
“Yes, much has changed.” I roll over and light a cigarette, and the sheet falls away from my naked breasts.
I see where his eyes are, and they are not on my face, so I lift my shoulders and give my breasts a gentle push.
He grins. Gazes from Pablo are like brushstrokes. Some are long, lingering, full of texture and pigment. Some are short, shallow, even accidental. His gaze on me now falls somewhere between the two.
Once, his gaze would have found enough for an entire painting. He would have seen flesh, and the bone and muscle under the flesh, the question or certainty of the eyes. He would have seen past, present, and future and painted them in a way that made time irrelevant.
Yes, that was how he painted me. Everything and at once, all the angles and geometry of the body, and he made of me something eternal and always beautiful. That is what an artist can do for a woman. When most men looked at me, all I saw in their faces was desire, the urge to possess. When Pablo looked at me, his face filled with wonder waiting to be translated to lines and brushstrokes.
Spring, the second year of the Great War. I wasn’t twenty yet, and had returned from cold, starving Moscow, where a loaf of bread cost as much as a silk dress. My protector, the Russian grand duke, had taken to sitting in his garden under the bare despairing trees and wringing his hands. He sensed his own ruination approaching. Most of the old aristocracy did. I did not care enough for him to face ruination with him. Back to Paris for me!
When Pablo first saw me, I was sitting on the rim of the Wallace Fountain in Place Émile, face turned up to the sun like a basking cat, enjoying the fine day and wondering what adventure I might find, and if my new love would be a man or a woman, and if they would have anything good to eat. It was early summer. I had stolen a bunch of cherries at Les Halles and a roll, but my stomach rattled.
I still had a fur cape I could sell, but I would need that for winter. I had a pearl necklace, but it looked so pretty on me that I could not part with it, not even for a good meal.
Pablo found me. I opened my eyes and there he was, this little handsome Spaniard with the black eyes, staring at me as if he had never seen a woman before.
I looked behind me to make sure there was nothing in the fountain capturing his attention like that, but no, he was looking at me. I sat up straighter and turned my face slightly to show off the better side.
Pablo and his friends had just finished lunch. I could smell the rosemary of a stew on their breaths. But while his friends were sloppy with cheap wine, Pablo was sober as a stone.
“Come with me,” said this boy-man, extending his hand.
“I will not. Why should I?” I took a step backward, pretended I was not interested.
“Because I will paint you and make you live forever.” He stepped closer and put his arm around my waist.
“Before or after bed?” I laughed, leaning away from him. I had no objection to bed, but I had just left a grand duke who gave me pearls before breakfast. Why take up with this fellow— an artist, judging by the paint under his nails—who probably hadn’t a sou to his name?
I stepped out of his embrace and walked away. But we both knew something had begun.
Did he follow me or did I follow him? For a week, we bumped into each other almost daily—Paris is not so large that artists do not know where to find other artists, and I also had paint under my nails—and each time he said the same thing. “Come with me.” And I said no.
Late one Saturday evening, I was returning to my room on Rue Lepic—I was singing in a café then, in exchange for free meals—when my handsome Spaniard crept up behind me and pushed me into a carriage. I was curious, not frightened. Where would he take me? What kind of lover would he be?
We went to an old villa outside of Paris. Missing doors, the smell of cat piss, ivy growing through broken windows into the faded, damp-stained rooms. When he opened the villa door for me to reveal those ruins, I laughed in his face. To go from a grand duke to a hovel! When he went out to find supper for us, I made my way back to Paris.
A week later, I still hadn’t found any other adventure to my liking, and I kept thinking of his black eyes and the way he looked at me, the strength in his arms. I thought of sharing with him the bread and oranges he would put on the table, the slices of ham. I was more curious than ever to know what he would be like as a lover. So I found my way back to the villa, to Pablo. He was there waiting.
“I knew you would come back,” he said. “I knew when I first saw you, this is a woman who wants to live forever.”
He began a painting of me as soon as the oranges were finished, before we went to bed.
Thirty years ago.
“Would you like to paint me again?” I ask, getting out of bed and posing in a chair, one leg draped over the side, the other at an angle that the cubists used to adore.
He studies me. And then, “No, your face is too familiar. There is nothing new in it.” But I can see his eyes moving, his right index finger drawing a small circle in the air. Some line in my posture has caught the artist’s eye.
I laugh. “I will not let that hurt me, because that is what you intended to do. I will always be younger than you, Pablo. Remember that.”
Some of last night’s tenderness returns to him, and he smiles at me.
The razor still in his hand, he turns to stare back at the foam-covered face of the man in the mirror.
“At this moment of the morning, Françoise comes into the bathroom with my son, Claude. I make them laugh by dragging my finger through the shaving cream and making a sketch on my face. A clown with question marks over my eyes.”
Pablo puts his razor down on the edge of the basin, and there is a suggestion of sadness in his proud face.
He does not spend a great deal of time in Paris, this older Picasso. There is the house in the south, the sun, the woman, the children. He says the light is better there, but I think, too, the heat and sun feel good on his skin. We are both at an age of wanting comfort.
He tells me stories of the woman, Françoise, to make me jealous. Because he once asked me to marry him and I refused, his need for revenge is always there, in the background of whatever else we are feeling.
Françoise Gilot, dark-haired, black winged brows, long, strong limbs. His flower-woman. He has painted her, sketched her, sculpted her. Hundreds of times. Good paintings. I am jealous of the paintings.
Françoise, with whom he has lived for almost twenty years, who has given him two children, is threatening to leave him.
Poor little Marie-Thérèse, his lover before Françoise stepped in for the role. She was seventeen when Pablo first stopped to speak with her in front of the Galeries Lafayette. And she had never heard of him! He began painting her immediately, though, for decency’s sake, did not bed her till she was eighteen. In his paintings of her, she is transformed into plates of fruit. The edible woman, the domestic woman.
Marie-Thérèse has been waiting for him to come back to her for years, and if she has heard the rumors, she must be ecstatic. Wrongfully so. He won’t be returning to Marie-Thérèse or any of the others. When Pablo is done, he is done. Except for me. He comes back.
Still. Françoise leaving him? Impossible. Or is it? And who, I wonder, will be the next new woman, shiny and bright and devoted? Has he already chosen her?
Pablo, still standing before the mirror, finishes carving through the foam to reveal his face. An older face, but women still turn to look and whisper together as he passes.
Françoise is also an artist, and of all the portraits that have been made of him, hers is the best—even I admit that. She captured the look of his eyes: dark, large, questioning, assessing. Seeing and not seeing, because an artist only allows himself to see what will be useful for the art.
And only feel what is necessary for the art.
“Do you remember our villa?” I ask. “When you carried me off?” Of course he does. But I want a word of remembered love from him, a sentiment. After all these years, my pulse continues to race when I look at him. No other man has affected me like this, and I want his pulse to race, too. I want more than the artist’s gaze: I want longing. But it is not there. Friendship, sometimes lust. That is all.
Suddenly restless, I leave the chair and, sheet draped around me, wander through the studio, the old wood floor creaking as I move. In one corner there is a row of canvases carefully placed back to front, front to back, in order of size. A thick layer of dust covers the top edges of the paintings, and as I look through them, motes climb up like swarms of tiny insects.
Some of them I recognize, cubist paintings mixed in with the semiclassical works. Early 1920s, I think, placing their chronology the way other woman remember the birthdays of nieces and nephews. All born about the time he did that painting of me, the one he called The Lovers.
“It’s not you,” he insisted, even as I was posing for it in his studio. “It’s a woman I cared about. How could it be you?”
“Well, it’s certainly not Olga or Dora or Marie-Thérèse or any of the other hundred or so. And that is my nose; those are my eyes,” I told him. “You did care. Once.”
“You’ve always been vain. Now be quiet and tilt your head. You’ve got the pose wrong.”
“Yes, my master,” I said, but in our lovemaking, I made him plead for mercy, not vice versa.
I want that painting as badly as I ever wanted a man. I want the me of that painting, the young, adored woman. And so I look for it in the studio, hoping, disturbing the dust on row after row of canvases
“Is it true you sold my painting to Sara Murphy’s sister? That is what the dealer Kahnweiler told me.”
“None of your business,” he says, rinsing off his razor and packing it into his battered leather kit.
I am almost finished looking through the row of paintings when I find one that halts me. A girl sitting in a chair, looking to her right at something the viewer cannot see. The lines of her face are tender, delicate. Her folded hands rest in her lap, and there is a curve to her neck and throat that is almost heartbreaking in its perfection.
“Pablo, who is this?” I hold up the painting.
He is buttoning his shirt now. He stops, lowers his head like a bull.
“A girl I knew,” he says, turning away.
“That much is obvious.” And from the way he hid his face, his feelings for her, or at least the memory of those feelings, are also obvious.
“What happened to her? Who is she?”
Pablo pauses. Just for a second, but there is much happening in that second. It is the second that artists hate because the subject changes. It becomes an image of before and after, an image that cannot be painted. Well, not quite true. It is an image that Pablo could paint, but no one else, Pablo who can paint yesterday, today, and tomorrow in a single image.
“She disappeared. That is all I know.” He finishes folding a shirt into the valise and slams it shut, pretending to be distracted by a piece of paper that has fallen to the floor, because he does not want me to see the emotion that crosses his face before he can erase it.
So. Another woman who left him. Pablo does not like to be left, and let’s face it, he is more often the one doing the leaving. It is always so in these affairs. One loves more than the lover. Pablo’s women usually loved him more than he loved them. Was it different for him with this girl?
He opens the window and peers out into the street below. Gray. But no rain. “I can’t wait to get back to the sun,” he says. “Why is Paris so gray?”
The city, since the war’s end, remains a sad place, a place where everyone is still hungry and tired and trying too hard to unlearn the vocabulary of the past years, to forget the unforgettable images, the roundups and the starvation, the German soldiers marching down the avenues, the sandbags in front of the statues and monuments of Paris protecting them, the camps where so many of our men were deported to for forced labor, the camps where those hundreds of thousands died. We are trying to pretend that life has gone back to normal. It hasn’t. It won’t. War is one of those things that can’t be undone, not even in Paris.
Now the streets and bars are filled with American boys and men who fought, survived, found their way to Paris, stayed. For the nightclubs and girls, the first taste of absinthe. The Left Bank, across from Shakespeare and Company, is lined with easels and amateur painters trying to capture the glint of leaden silver on the rippling Seine. Terrible work, most of it.
I go to the window and stand next to Pablo. I put my arm through his and rest my head against his shoulder.
Thirty years before, after the Great War, we leaned out a window in Paris and for the first time saw American GIs, mostly, still in uniform, full of hope while drowning in pain:physical, emotional—both from battlefield wounds. It was a different war. But somehow the people seemed the same.
Except for Sara, that rich girl from Long Island who came to Paris after the war, in 1922. There was a flood of Americans after the war, coming for the art, the food, the inexpensive apartments, the escape from that new-world Puritanism. A boy from Omaha explained it to me one night at Café de Flore, that sense of someone always looking over your shoulder, ready to judge. “In Paris,” he said, “no one gives a damn. Do they?”
Sara said something similar when I met her. “I breathe easily here. My children laugh louder here,” she said. “I love Paris. I love France. I think Gerald will paint here. He is an artist, you know.”
“And what of you?” I asked her. “Are you an artist?”
She had laughed. “Me? No. I wish to be the one who makes art possible.”
Sara, with her yellow hair and blue eyes, was more than pretty, as if she carried her own private sun and it radiated from her, drew people to her.
But not even well-bred, well-educated, and well-traveled married mother of three Sara could control the look in her eyes when she looked at Pablo. How had Gerald not seen it? Perhaps he had. And looked away.
Standing now with my head on Pablo’s shoulder, I want to go back to that other painting of the girl, but my instinct warns me not to. He will be gone soon. Again. Let some memories sleep while I still have even a little of his attention.
The studio smells of turpentine and oil and smoke, a lovely perfume. I hope this is what heaven will smell like. But because I am trying to forget the painting that made Pablo hide his face, it is all I can think about, and the memory floats up, unwanted.
Cap d’Antibes. The girl who never spoke, who kept her eyes on the ground. The girl who stayed in the shadows, the way people had learned to do during the war, who smiled only when Pablo smiled at her.
A honk from down in the street. Paulo is there waving up at us, laughing, ready to take his famous father back to the sun, to the sea, to Françoise, who may or may not be there waiting for him.
“When will I see you again?” I ask, keeping my voice light. He does not answer. No matter. I will go home to my husband and think of other things. And what will Pablo think of? Françoise, who is leaving him? The girl in the painting? There is a deep crease between his brows. If I painted him now, it would require a thick black line.
“What happened to her?” he wonders aloud.
“The girl in the painting? Do you care?”
“No,” he says. “Just curious.”
He is lying. Curiosity for a painter usually ends when the painting is finished. He still thinks of her and wonders. Pablo is self-absorbed and can be cruel. Nothing matters to him more than his art, his work. Yet he is not without feeling. I’ve seen the love and pleasure in his eyes as he watched his children playing, seen the pity sometimes when he speaks of Olga.
“Pablo,” I ask him, “did you really sell my painting? The Lovers?”
“It was never yours,” he says.
“I sat for it, as you recall. You promised it to me.”
“Time for you to leave,” he says. “Out, out,” and waves his arms at me as if I were a flock of wayward geese.
“Without breakfast?”
“Without anything.” He grabs me playfully by the hair, pulls my head back, and plants an exaggerated kiss over my protests.
“What will you do if Françoise leaves you?” I ask, leaning into the strength of his arm.
“What I always do. Find another woman. Put your hat on. Paulo will be here any moment, and I want to lock up the studio.”
I reluctantly stand before the little cracked mirror next to the door and pull the brim of my hat a little lower over my right eye. I can tell he saw me searching again though the piles of canvases as he rummaged around the studio looking for something he needed to take back with him. A toy horse, crudely carved, puppy gnawed.
“What do you want that old thing for?” I laugh. “Do you now carry good luck charms?”
He growls something I can’t understand, something in Spanish, and flings my gloves at me. “Go,” he says. “I’ve had enough of you.” Those, from Pablo, are love words. They are the same words I used when I refused to marry him, the words with which I dismissed him . . . and then called him back for more of what we had between the sheets. Husband, no. Lover, yes.
He means those words, I see. He really wants me to leave. He is standing by the door, holding it open.
Hat tilted rakishly over one eye, I clatter down the stairs, laughing and throwing Russian insults over my shoulder at him, curses still remembered from my time with the grand duke.
“Till next time, my love,” I call, clattering down the stairs and into the street.
He’s watching from the window. I can feel his eyes on my back, those huge black eyes that take in everything, including the way one of my shoes is pinching my toes and making me walk a little lopsided.
Will he now go back into the studio, those piles of canvases, and slide out what I had been looking for and couldn’t find? The Lovers. My painting. A man and a woman, forever young and beautiful, forever in love. The young man looks at his beloved. She looks off to the side, modestly, submissively, as if she has not yet said yes. But a perceptive viewer sees it in her expression, the willingness, the desire.
The woman is me. Me, forever young and lovely and loved.
From the street behind me, an automobile horn blasts through the misty morning air. Three loud honks, and Paulo, his son, shouts up.
“Hey, Paulo!” I wave at him. He looks my way, gives a half-hearted wave, pretending he knows who I am.
“Come carry the cases,” his father calls down to him.
When I first met Paulo, he was naked except for the sand covering most of him and carried a toy bucket and shovel. He was two, I think, and playing busily with Sara Murphy’s children at the little beach in Antibes. La Garoupe, it’s called. A postage stamp of a beach, though now it has been greatly enlarged to accommodate the tourists. Sara, the stylish avant-garde queen of the social scene had started a stampede south after that summer when she and her family went to Antibes.
Paulo’s a grown man now, in his thirties, taller than his father, with brown rather than black hair. Good-looking in a predictable kind of way. He lacks Pablo’s charisma. One can see it even from the way he walks, slightly leaning forward as if a strong wind pushes him back. Perhaps the wind pushing against him is his divorce from his wife, just completed I’ve heard. The Picasso men don’t seem made for marriage, at least not loving ones or long ones. They seem unable to combine the two.
Paulo comes out of the building carrying two of his father’s heavy valises, and he has the same worried expression on his face that he had thirty years ago when he was carrying that little toy bucket. He is one of those reminders of time past, the years that have flown by like migrating birds, except those birds don’t return.
“Doves don’t migrate,” Pablo told me once when I made some misinformed comment about them. They stay all year. They are constant, like the north star.
The few times I’ve seen Pablo grow nostalgic, even a touch close to sentimental, is when he talks about doves, and by doves, he means the pigeons of his childhood, those cooing, prancing birds of the Spanish piazzas, where he and his father threw bread crumbs for them. He was a loved child, Pablo. He grew up in the sureness of that love, a child who was always picked up when he fell, rocked when he wept. Is that his strength?
My husband, the doctor, thinks that strength comes from good digestion. Pablo agrees, I think. He is careful with his diet, with his body. He intends to live a very long time. Pablo and his pigeons that do not migrate.
When the war ended and Pablo was asked to make a lithograph for the 1949 Peace Congress, he gave them The Dove of Peace. A white bird against a black background. Simple, naturalistic, memorable.
You see it everywhere now, even on Russian stamps.
But the print has its own secrets. Pablo drew not a dove but, yes, a pigeon, a pet bird that had been given to him by his friend Matisse. And the pigeon is an homage to his father, his first art teacher. José had taken him to the square in Málaga and taught him to draw doves when he was probably the same age as Paulo when he toted his little bucket.
The pigeon/dove is Pablo’s symbol of peace, but also of himself.
There’s confidence for you.
If I had married him, he would have destroyed me. That’s what gods do, because we let them. No, better to be a good doctor’s wife. Pablo will go back to his little villa in the south, and Françoise will or will not be there. For his sake, I hope she is. I will go back to my husband, who may not even have noticed I was away. ...
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