by Zoe Valdes
Bernard walked, tall and slim, taking quick, youthful steps, just ahead of me. I followed, studying his movements, trying to commit every detail about his appearance to my memory.
“Let’s go up to my house, I want to show you Dora’s painting, her famous rugged landscape.”
The painting was hanging on one of the walls of the kitchen. I couldn’t tell if it was a landscape or a fanciful Surrealist abstraction. The colors—greenish hues, blues, browns, blacks—formed a disgusting splotch in my mind, like a five-dimensional construction, difficult to grasp. It was a gloomy, dark painting, and I found its gloom at once repellent and intoxicating. The light entering through the window toned down the sadness that dominated the scene, in that bachelor’s kitchen.
“Why did you say you were interested in me? You told me already, didn’t you,” Bernard said.
“Because you could have written Dora’s story, but didn’t,” I answered, quickly, reverting to the formal tone; I still resisted his familiar attitude.
“Well, yes, I always wanted to be a writer, but I don’t think I am one.”
“No? After all you’ve written, you’re not a writer? Your screenplays, at least.”
“Not a great writer. I never wrote a great work, that’s what I mean. I’m talking about my habitual lack of focus, bah, it isn’t worth the trouble, I don’t know.… Not that I’m all that unfocused or uncommitted to my own ideas. Those are just excuses for my habitual laziness.” Bernard crossed the hallway and glided toward the living room.
The discreet servant offered me coffee or some liquor, perhaps a cognac, I don’t remember exactly what sort of drink it was, but I do recall how I replied to his politeness. “No, thank you,” I murmured; “I’ve got to rush home to send that article to the newspaper,” I was thinking. “I’ve got to rush home and finish my womanly chores,” I joked aloud. Bernard smiled, getting my satiric meaning, as he indicated with an ironic glance.
“Women aren’t what they used to be, that is all too obvious.”
“Well, now tell me about the men.”
“We men are still the same, nothing about us has changed, there are no surprises. We’re just that, nothing but men.”
Why are there no surprises? Because all men are focused on courting power. Women are a secondary target of seduction for them now. Above all, first off, they need, or desperately want, to seduce power. There’s no need to wonder why. The answer is simple: women have also begun to covet it. And to capture it.
Dora. Venice, 1958
She arrived in Venice on a May Day. She hadn’t even settled into her hotel when she jotted in her diary, “Arrived May 1, International Workers’ Day.” It was ten past noon. Almost everyone was apparently asleep, because the city was shrouded in an odd, dense silence. But no, not asleep: resting, perhaps hiding from her; she guessed they were trying to avoid her. She smiled to herself. Why did everything have to revolve around her? At least, that was the way she always thought. She smiled to herself whenever she started to feel she mattered to someone else. She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. It was a gesture she’d had for years, a private habit that reminded her of why Maya Walter-Widmaier, Picasso’s first daughter, had called her “Lady Slobber.”
She opened the window in her room. The sun bathed her cheeks. She closed her eyes. “Every honest story takes place through an open window and with eyes closed,” she told herself. In November she would turn fifty-one, she suddenly recalled, and a hot flash shot up her neck.
Her face was brimming with peacefulness, as shown by the sunlight, her clear skin, her gently closed, pressed lips; her nostrils flared as they did when she first entered the basement where Georges Bataille, the philosopher and writer of magnificent erotic novels, received her and invited her to sit on the edge of his bed, surrounded by porn magazines. The way she sat on the edge of the mattress in this first encounter with Bataille inspired him to create the character of Xénie, immortalized in his erotic novel Blue of Noon.
She liked the smell of the narrow street, which let off an unsettling odor of dank walls, honeysuckles and irises, burnt jasmine. She opened her eyes wide. She would have loved to paint that mossy crevice. “No, no, forget it,” she told herself. Probably, if no later vision obscured and surpassed the scene before her now, when she got back to Paris she would put a new canvas on the easel and paint that cleft with its fine, shiny green covering. She gloried in the idea of returning to her artistic work. “Art.” Such a stiff word, so harsh. Her desire to take photographs or paint quickly evaporated.
“Art, after all, can only embellish the truth. It is not the truth in itself.”
She half-closed the wooden blinds of the windows, letting a shimmering cone of light play onto the carpet. She longed for the darkness of her apartment, she missed the sound of Parisian silence. Here in the city of canals, she heard the muffled roar of the sea in slow motion, sounding as if the water would rise high as her throat and drown her. She pronounced the forbidden name once more: “Picasso.” Her voice still had its birdlike lilt, as Bernard and James confirmed. Her voice was still lovely, like Xénie’s.
“C et B.” That’s what James and Dora called Picasso. Cher et Beau, “our Beloved and Beautiful,” was always jealous of Georges Bataille, her first love, the lover who initiated her.
She never called Bataille by his first name nor Picasso either. Never “Pablo,” always “Picasso.” “Men who have made their surnames famous no longer need a first name,” she once said in a flash of wit.
James and Bernard welcomed her to Venice. James was cloyingly sweet, Bernard seductively charming. All this unsought attention was beginning to repulse her; being mixed up in dramas that had nothing to do with her was terribly boring. But at the same time, she didn’t want to be without company, alone, no, it wasn’t time for that, not yet.
Fourteen years and fourteen days earlier she had been admitted to the Sainte-Anne Hospital, escorted (not exactly accompanied) by Paul Éluard, Picasso, and Jacques Lacan, the eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Lacan signed Dora in under a fake name that still brings a small ironic smile to her face: Lucienne Tecta, “Covered Light.” Or in Spanish, Luz Escondida. Did he mean that she could use that name? She, who up to that moment had been permanently overexposed as Picasso’s lover, in the eyes of everyone, of every camera?
Fourteen years and fourteen days and a torrent of electroshocks administered by Lacan himself later, Dora Maar still sensed that last vestige of desire, or of jealousy. She had not changed all that much since then, since Lucienne Tecta, the woman who had been committed by the only man she loved and two of her best friends to the Sainte-Anne Psychiatric Hospital. She distrusted Lacan at first, until he slowly began to win her over. Not so Éluard. In Paul she saw a brother. Then, Picasso.… Pablo Picasso was bigger than God. How could she not give him all her faith? She gave him her life. And he’d used her life to do the only thing he knew how: he bled her and painted her with her own blood. She offered up her mind to him. The weeping woman. Weeping, weeping, weeping.… In a litany. The word “weeping” echoed against the fretwork Moorish ceiling embossed in red and gold.
After that experience, she thought she’d renounced desire. But not completely, for just now a slight reminiscence of pleasure had pulsed through her and given her goose bumps from head to toe.
She studied the objects around her: commonplace, public furnishings, pretentious copies of antiquities. She took the pictures down from the wall and hid them under the bed. A painting by Picasso would look very nice there—the canvas in which she—she rubbed her eyes aggressively, feeling drowsy—in which she was depicted as an animal forged of steel, as if her fingers moved rhythmically like sharpened scissor blades, slicing her blouse. The portrait in which she was weeping, weeping, weeping incessantly. In every painting she is weeping, wailing for all eternity.
“I do not love you, I feel no attraction to you.” She relived those words in the painter’s mouth, lips taut and dry, the words the surly S
paniard pronounced with his eyes glued to a canvas. Gleeful to humiliate her.
She had not been able to erase those words, uttered with such bored brutality, from her mind. Had he said it wearily? Or the opposite, with feverish intensity, like everything that came from Picasso? No matter; so much time had passed. Or perhaps not even enough time. Not too much, not sufficient. “Perhaps I haven’t gotten over it as much as I had thought,” she wavered, anguished.
She remembered one of the most painful scenes in her life. Picasso was sitting in Le Catalan, the restaurant on Rue Saint-André des Arts, with the Hungarian-born photographer Brassaï and Gilberte Brassaï, with the poet Paul Éluard, and with Éluard’s lover, Nusch, such a delicate woman she seemed she might shatter into a thousand pieces, shimmering with beauty, with fragile yet indelible loveliness, like that of a trapeze artist whose every death-defying move on the high wire leaves a lasting impression.
She counted more people, nine altogether, and she spotted the seat they had saved for her. Picasso was smiling, recounting unusually wicked stories, talking very loud, chewing on a chunk of baguette, ordering a chateaubriand steak. He was the center; no one thought of him as anything less than a god. He was the most important thing in this world and in every possible world.
She had recognized him from a distance. She entered the restaurant slowly. She would have liked to smile, to be friendly with the others, in short, to act naturally, but she couldn’t swing it. She knew she looked too serious, that she was about to cry, she knew Picasso wouldn’t appreciate the tense look on her face, her tedious appearance, bordering on insufferable.
Time snaps back to the present, as in a Surrealist story.
But now she’s in the past, the past in which she went by the name of Lucienne Tecta, in which she was locked in a dark room, bound in restraints, her teeth clinched. Her brain bursting with light and frothy spittle. The man she once loved jamming his thumb into her pituitary. She felt so tired then, she stopped eating, lost weight. Her backside was riddled with needle marks from the injections, her arms scratched and covered in bruises. They had to trim her nails to the quick to keep her from mangling her arms in her fits of self-
revulsion. Then she started tearing out clumps of her hair, chewing it up and swallowing it down. She vomited hair balls, like a cat.
And if she’d had a key, a shard of glass, a sharp point of any cutting object, she would have plunged it into her neck, into her jugular vein.
But back to the table at Le Catalan. She sensed that something had broken, irreparably. She was already sick of guessing how good a time he had of it when she was wasn’t around, she couldn’t stand seeing him so friendly around others, much less put up with his acting gruff and regretful around her. Picasso was a different person, enraptured with his flirtatiousness, when she wasn’t there: he was likeable, almost gentle. Finally, Dora reached the table, sat down, after discreetly saying hello; he—God—looked at her for a second and kept on talking, gesturing wildly, angrily demanding his chateaubriand. Out of the blue, he poked her forearm with the tip of his knife, as if to tell her, “Hey you, pay attention!”
She still doesn’t know why, but all of a sudden Dora came out with the whole thing about how she couldn’t stand him anymore, wouldn’t stay with him one minute longer, she was leaving, she never wanted to see him again. She stomped out in a fury. She suspected he might follow her, but not far, a couple of yards at most, the bare minimum. She was wrong: he ran after her, much farther than she had imagined. He grabbed her by the shoulders, laying his minotaur hooves on her.
It surprised him that those green eyes, Dora’s eyes that changed like the weather, were now dry and furious, that she stared directly at him with a dignity, a sharpness, that he found discomfiting, that she was struggling feebly to free herself from the rough hands pinning down her arms, that she was fighting back, though without making a fuss about it, in cold and calculating way.
“Weep, Dora, weep!” He shook her violently.
A single tear shined like a diamond in the corner of her eye.
He studied the track of that tear, as if it were a trickle of paint running down the canvas of one of his paintings: astonishing, amazing! An erection bulged under the fly of his pants, dribbling from the tip. He ejaculated at the same time that the teardrop fell from her chin to the breast of her blouse.
At last she managed to escape his powerful porcupine quills. He caught her again, she began to wail, more and more quietly, suffocating in her own moans.
She remembered nothing more. Actually, she did not want to remember one more iota of that pitiful sequence of absurdities that filled her with such shame.
Picasso cried for help, as if she were the one who had dug in her nails, not the other way around.
Sure enough, Lacan and Éluard showed up to help their friend Picasso. Not to help her, no. She was an obstacle to clear out of the way, for the time being, so that the Great Genius would feel free. Free from her! At least, that was the idea that Dora formed about what they doing to her, how they were forcing her to suffer. How could she have been so naïve? How could she have gotten depressed to the point of seeming crazy, even to the point of actually making herself ill?
In that moment The Weeping Woman was born, an inexhaustible theme in Picasso’s work. Dora Maar, the artist, the beloved partner, the lover, had only just succumbed.
Outside it was raining, as it so often does in Venice, with a sublime impertinence that only seems believable in novels. All the water falling at once, soaking even your bones, and the puddles turning to muddled mirrors, splattered and worn.
In a window up above the street, a woman of water closed the shutters.
With the same gesture, years ago she had closed the shutters of a hospital room. The darkness had healed her, she who had been radiant, a creature who loved light and sought it out, who relished lying under the sun in gardens to photograph the clouds, was now coming back from darkness to life, slowly, regaining her sanity, through the emanations of shadows.
Nothing around her, under this rainstorm, jibed with the imaginary shadows that had once kept her so penned in but that now extended a hand to her in truce.
Dora closed the window, but the playful cones of light still peeked in through the blinds. Then she lowered the wooden slats with her fingertips, quietly.
“I’d become too high-strung,” she whispered. Her hands trembled slightly.
She studied the bare walls in the semi-darkness.
She worried about the Picasso paintings she had left hanging on the walls of her house in Paris; she felt a desperate urge to return, to sit down again on the shiny leather of her ratty armchair, facing them, impatient to gaze at them and take care of them, if only by staring blankly into them, losing herself in each masterful brushstroke.
She would descend the staircase silently, without a suitcase, leaving behind everything she had brought with her and escaping unencumbered by those heavy, useless objects, making do with just her purse, catching the water taxi and making her way back to Paris. Good God, how could she have left those paintings alone with no one to look after them? She had been through hard times but had always refused to sell Picasso’s important works, not a single one of his masterly paintings. She had, however, sold some of his drawings at prices that today would seem ludicrous, and later she might even sell the famous painting Bodegón, then still hanging in her living room. Yes, perhaps she would decide to sell it sometime, but it would have to be to a friend or acquaintance, someone she really trusted.
On the other hand, one day she would die and there’d be no one to take care of the works that Picasso had dedicated to her. It was her entire fortune. Nothing, she had nothing else, only her Picassos, and that was enough! What a burden! Why did she suffer economic hardship yet resist selling off any of her valuable paintings by him? A friend asked her one day, in the vulgar way typical of those who think friendship allows them to use any tone of voice they want, why she didn’t solve her problems by s
elling her ex-lover’s paintings. From that moment, Dora never wanted to see that fellow again, ever. Nobody could be her friend who didn’t understand that she cherished her life itself less than she did those lavish canvases: her paintings, the paintings Picasso had dedicated to her.
Alone, she became increasingly isolated, meeting fewer people; when it came down to it, this solitude was all her fault, her responsibility. People, seemingly so busy, began to forget her, or didn’t forget her, but life always outstrips memory. Dora then held demented conversations with their portraits, the ones of her old friends that Picasso had painted, and in a ritornello or perhaps an eternal soliloquy, she would also converse with the portraits he had done of her.
Hesitating, she dropped her small suitcase, placed the shopping basket she used as a purse in the middle of the floor, opened the door, and stood a few moments with her hand on the doorknob, her mind a blank.
She came back in. She would only be away for five days, she asked for only five days, eight or nine at most, plus the return trip; she thought maybe they could stay at Balthus’s castle on the way back. Perhaps eight or nine days, tops. No one in Paris would notice her sudden getaway, except for the building caretaker, always sticking her nose in what was none of her business. It would do her good to get away, as long as it was for art’s sake, for the memory of art, for art’s impact on that city created by the icons of water: Venice.
She still loved James and felt curious about Bernard, longed to get to know him better. Five or eight days of conversation with them would be healthy for her, would transform her memories of her vacation with James in Ménerbes, at the house Picasso had given her; these new experiences would displace the old ones. She would take the trip to Venice as an escape, a getaway, a sort of evasion therapy. Would James still feel the same about her? Could it be true that he was still interested in marrying her? She was getting carried away here. James Lord had never proposed to her; yes, he had hinted at it, but that was quite another thing, a hint was very different from an proposal made on the fly, ephemerally inserted in the middle of some banal conversation. In any case, she would never consent to marry anyone. She had given herself to him, to Him alone, like so, capitalized, to Picasso, to God. Her God.
