The Weeping Woman

by Zoe Valdes

  On April 5, 1942, Max described half-jokingly to Jean Cocteau the time a member of the Gestapo had visited him, and how he’d interrogated him in his room. “He was a round-shouldered man (an Edmond Jaloux type), accompanied by a soldier:

  ‘Police!’”

  Jacob answered the door, pretending to be delighted, pronouncing the word emphatically, “Enchanté!” And, inviting him to move closer to the warmth of the fireplace, he commented on how cold it had been that year.

  “What sort of things do you write?”

  “What a pity I don’t have my books here.… Though I do have a booklet with a few of my verses. May I give it to you? Would like me to sign it? Please tell me your name, thank you! How shall I sign it? ‘In friendship’? Why not! I’ll write, ‘To commemorate.…’”

  And on the part of the Gestapo, the interrogation continued on its dry, impetuous path.

  In a letter dated July 18, Max Jacob wrote to another friend, Conrad Moricand:

  The Paris security detachment ordered Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire to personally see to it that I was wearing the yellow star. Two daring gendarmes arrived and were able to confirm that I had been corrected.

  Dora’s martyrdom, her torment, was her friend’s unstoppable descent into the inferno. Without a doubt, this was the most painful of her regrets.

  “Why did you quit photography, Dora? Was it to take up painting?” Bernard asked.

  It was not a question she really wanted to deal with; she preferred to avoid it, to send him off on another tangent. “Dear Bernard, I started out with painting. My father was an architect, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps by using my artistic talents. I can’t explain why, maybe it was just a childish whim, that’s probably what it was for me. The fact is, I went to the School for the Arts because I wanted to learn how to draw. I studied at André Lhote’s famous studio, the one everybody enrolled in, especially the Argentines, who are always up on the latest trends in art.”

  Dora’s mind began to fly, unstoppably.

  “Montparnasse supplanted Montmartre in the hearts of painters. Going to Rue d’Odessa, the tiny street where Lhote had his atelier, opened up a huge range of possibilities for me. Not that Lhote was easy to get along with; he had a shortcoming that we all accepted because it was outweighed by his immense wisdom: he was extremely demanding of his students, intolerably severe and acrimonious, and with him you either learned or you died of shame. His was the best atelier in Paris. So I devoted myself to painting, and I learned from him how to mix colors, to make sensible palettes, to structure a composition in spatial terms. He introduced me to the intricacies of perspective, so that later I could break it, smash it to pieces, crush it.”

  “I’ve never been clear whether Lhote was an artist,” James interrupted.

  “Lhote never managed to become the great artist he believed himself to be, but for me he was a great expert. He was uniquely unflappable, tenacious, and sharp. One of my most cherished prizes came from his classes: my friendship with Henri Cartier-Bresson, who gave me a taste for photography. Though that was a later chapter, as you know. I’ve always admitted that I owe the whole beginning of my career to Lhote, his Treatise on Landscape Painting, his studio, and his views about Cubism. Nevertheless, his methods weren’t suited to someone like me who depends too much on passion.” She scrutinized James with a sidelong gaze, a gesture Bernard did not fail to notice.

  James sat back and listened to Dora unperturbed, or feigning deep calm, absorbed by her words, even though he knew this story by heart.

  “I was more interested in angles and geometry; that was Cartier-

  Bresson’s fault. I say ‘fault’ because he instilled me with the shortcoming of looking at things from several points of view at once, a shortcoming I thank him for teaching me, because he infected me with the divine virus of focusing on what is hidden and of breaking things down into triangles. I learned abstraction through a photogenic appreciation of reality. Though I have to admit that Lhote also loved the ‘aerial perspective,’ as he called it, the fluid rhythms of rhomboids, and the dense power of line. These are all concepts that he pioneered, and they are all still in use. There was one phrase of his, however, that has resonated with me, that has been reinforced in so many ways, like glittering splinters of a broken mirror reflected in liquid: the one where he explored the tremendous value of negative space. Your head, for example, is a negative space.”

  “So why don’t you paint me?” Bernard was enraptured by Dora’s knowledge. “Though you’ve painted me before, but I’d love you to paint the physical changes that have been taking place in me over the years.”

  “I’ll paint you again, Bernard, you have a very interesting head and a flawless nose. Everything I like about faces is in yours. I’ll do it again, count on it.”

  James cleared his throat, somewhat dubious about the words of praise Dora directed at his friend.

  “Don’t act jealous, James, I’ve painted you many times; but besides, Picasso painted you. You don’t need anyone else to immortalize you. I painted you sitting on the bench, our bench, under the fig tree in Ménerbes; that was an unforgettable, unrepeatable afternoon.”

  The word “unrepeatable” sounded like slapping a permanent seal on a top secret document. Blushing, James went to put a record on the old phonograph. Fréhel’s voice invaded the room.

  “Actually, I have to admit it was Marcel Zahar, the art critic, who urged me to enter the École de Photographie de la Ville de Paris,” Dora went on. “Cartier-Bresson has never wanted to express his thoughts, or even talk at all, about our friendship. I don’t know why he doesn’t mention us; perhaps he’s afraid Picasso will start to ignore him. Well, I was also coming from far away; it’s only logical and natural that the so-called “one-minute” photographers who swarmed all over Buenos Aires made a huge impression on my memories. For me, finding the man hiding behind that wooden box on a tripod, with a black cloth over his head, summed up the whole mystery of staring contemplatively at the famous imaginary ‘birdie’ that the stranger always asked me to watch. Was the birdie inside the box, or on top of the one-minute photographer’s head, or in some inaccessible spot where I couldn’t quite see its always-invoked, never-seen profile? Cartier-Bresson must never have understood where I was coming from, or coming back from.…”

  “And your other teachers?” He searched her limpid eyes.

  “You didn’t let me finish, Bernard. I was going to say that even though I had a great teacher, which I’ve never tried to hide, I rarely mention him; he is one of my secret treasures: Emmanuel Sougez. It was unquestionably Sougez who gave me individual lessons in photography and convinced me that photography was my art. He introduced me to Pierre Kefer. Or was it Louis Chavance? Just mentioning that guy’s name annoys me; he’s always thought he ‘discovered’ me. Typically rude playwright. Anyway, I met Pierre Kefer—he was quite a character. I set up my first studio with him at his house in Neuilly.”

  “I suppose he could help you out.”

  “Of course. Pierre was rich, from a prominent family, a society man, and he lived in a lovely mansion. He went all out to get me to go in with him, and he succeeded. He eradicated all the arrogance and bad temper I had back then. But I don’t know, perhaps I owe the impetus, the élan vital, to the journal L’Art vivant. In their October 1934 issue, Jacques Guenne described my early work with a wealth of detail, and he did such a stunning job that I wrapped myself in his elegant praise like a warm, protective blanket of affection and recognition. Later, I began to see things more clearly and I did a lot of fashion photography.”

  “See, Bernard? With Dora nothing is ever the last word.”

  “It’s true, James. The only last word in my life was Picasso.”

  Fréhel’s voice on the phonograph sounded more nasal than ever.

  James now realized why Picasso always said she was like a man: not only because her crude reactions intimidated him, but also because he couldn’t put his finger on what she meant by
her lapidary phrases. A phrase Picasso constantly repeated. “For me, Dora is a man.” When he was asked to create a statue of Guillaume Apollinaire, he gave them an old image of Dora that he’d cast in bronze. Dora was a man for him, perhaps because of the lack of definition that had always characterized her, or because of her absolutely unyielding frankness in the face of any situation; and no matter how unstable she might appear to be, she inevitably came straight at you, like a well-aimed punch to the gut, always with a nettlesome remark that left you speechless. Her remark burned, sent flying like a flaming arrow without a lot of thought.

  “I’ve lived in many places and with the best people I could find.… I was also the assistant of the Polish photographer, Harry Ossip Meerson.”

  Bernard was bowled over. “No. Really? The famous American photographer?”

  “He became a naturalized American later, but he was always Polish,” Dora explained.

  “He’s taken lots of photos of Marlene Dietrich,” Bernard noted.

  “She was his ticket to success. Her face was like a landscape. That’s how Josef von Sternberg described it, the Austrian-American film director who made films such as The Blue Angel and Morocco. The architect of Marlene’s stardom.”

  James drew the curtains closed. A bloodstained cloud reddened every color in the room.

  Suddenly, Dora’s eyes began flittering restlessly in their sockets, as if trying to leap in time to unlikely recesses of her memory. To those shards of memory left behind in the cells of the psychiatric hospital, where she beat her head with hands bruised black and blue, where she gnawed with her teeth and aching gums at doors made of stone.

  Bernard and James. Me. Paris, 2009

  His hands trembled at times—especially his right hand—from early Parkinson’s, very slightly, scarcely noticeable. I looked up and met his fluttering eyes the color of honey, or rather of gold. He kept silent a long time, and I didn’t dare upset the invisible barrier that stood between us. Bernard’s eyelid was also trembling persistently.

  Bernard had been expecting me for too long. I had disappeared for the meantime to write another novel, but though he suspected otherwise, I hadn’t given up on the idea of using literature to understand why Dora Maar had felt forced to withdraw from all her friends, choosing never to see them again, after that trip to Venice.

  I don’t know if I’ll be able to clarify anything, I’m not convinced literature is up to the task. Perhaps I’ll only manage to make an even more tangled mess of the facts and cast an even darker shadow over the evidence.

  Bernard was sitting in front of me in the Café de Flore, half-shutting his eyelids, like a tabby cat. I wouldn’t have known how to answer if he’d asked me why I had disappeared for so long. More than three years had passed since I had even phoned him.

  An unfathomable silence washed between his eyes and mine.

  He didn’t ask at all about my seclusion. He had aged a little, nothing very visible. However, you could barely tell his age from his trembling fingers; his skin had lost none of its youthful freshness.

  Finally, he spoke. “What about her attracted you? Or rather, how did you find out she existed? Did you hear about her in Havana or in Paris?” He extracted a moist towelette from its envelope and cleaned his hands, finger by finger. He waited for me to reply while he examined the edges of his nails minutely; he was a fanatic for scrupulous cleanliness.

  The grisaille, that dull, enervating monotony of gray, was settling on the streets of Paris; suddenly a ray of sunlight broke through the clouds. At that moment I began my story.

  “It was in Havana, in the early nineties, when I got my hands on a book of photography that I had been aching to have for a long time. I hadn’t been able to acquire it by honest means, so I traded a few pounds of powdered milk to get it from a friend who had stolen it from the library of a Dutch diplomat. One of the perks of totalitarian life: swapping stuff. I had already read about Dora Maar but I hadn’t seen any of her photographs.”

  The shadow of one of my friends, Lena, fell in skewed proportions across the wall. Sunlight, tinged by the ivory or bone-white curtains, flooded the terrace in an orangey glow. Lena looked magnificent; her smiling blue eyes filled the room with cheer. She was naked.

  I was leafing through the book of photographs that a friend had sent me from Paris. And I opened it precisely to the page where Assia, Dora’s beautiful model, was posing for that photo in which her body flows softly across the wall, shockingly beautiful, gigantic, her nipple like the prow of a boat.

  “We’re going to be late,” Lena prodded me while she got dressed. “Apple Pie won’t forgive us.”

  “Have you seen Dora Maar’s photographs?” I asked Lena, excited.

  “Never heard of her.” Lena put on a slip under her skirt.

  “I’m not surprised, it isn’t your fault. In this country we live in the most shameful ignorance.”

  “You haven’t told me who she is.” She lit a cigarette, took a puff, set it back in the ashtray, wiped the sweat from her brow with a graceful linen handkerchief. “What a shitstorm! I don’t think it’s a great idea for us to go out walking on the Malecón on a blazing hot day like this. Or having to wrap ourselves in the flag. And to top it off, we’ll be there with who the fuck knows.… We gotta be crazy! The last thing we’ll know out there is who’s who.”

  “What do you mean, ‘who’s who’?” I was still engrossed by the images in the book.

  Lena shrugged and picked the cigarette back up from the ashtray, took a deep drag, pointed at the book. “So tell me already, who’s this Dora you’re so fascinated about?”

  “A Surrealist photographer, a painter too. Picasso’s lover.”

  “Picasso? What a stud! Picasso’s lover, you say?” Lena kept asking, as if she were deaf.

  “Yes, and Georges Bataille’s. Picasso painted his fill of her, and his filth of her, too.”

  “I don’t get it, I prefer the kind of filth you get your fill of the other way, lying down.” Lena stubbed out the cigarette, went to the kitchen, grabbed a tangerine and began to peel it. I don’t think she was very interested in the topic of Dora Maar and Picasso, though she pretended otherwise.

  “It’s a good thing you had one tangerine left, because I’m about-to-faint starving. Speaking of photography and these people you find so fascinating—Picasso, Dora—are you bringing the camera?”

  I nodded. We finished getting our stuff together and went outside. The atmosphere was tense, or so it seemed to us. Lena kept sucking on the tangerine peels and spitting them onto the asphalt.

  “You nervous?” Her eyes fell on mine. Sea-blue eyes, liquid eyes, watery dreamlike eyes.

  “No,” I replied, uncertain. “I don’t want to think about what we’re going to do.”

  We walked a long stretch in silence along the Malecón, heading toward Havana Bay.

  Around Calle Salud we met up with Apple Pie. She was with Lefty Sotera, bus driver and part-time baseball player.

  “Wass’up?” Lefty greeted us, visibly nervous.

  Apple Pie kissed our cheeks, and we kissed hers. Normally, we talked in a natural way to avoid suspicion, but now we didn’t even dare whisper a few words. A while later other people joined up, and before long there were about thirty of us there. Among them I recognized Yendi, younger than us, slippery, the one who had tried to get into my house by way of her painter boyfriend. Thirty people—or more, or maybe less.

  “Plenty have showed up, anyway, and, as always, more blacks than whites,” I said to myself. Given the fear of repression that exists in that country, getting an opposition rally of thirty together was quite a feat.

  We had agreed that Lefty Sotera would be in charge of operations, but the poor guy had suddenly blown a fuse and was moving in slow motion, as if he’d gone loopy and didn’t know what to do.

  Apple Pie pulled out a thermos and started pouring shots of coffee into cardboard cone cups for everyone. She was a young woman with very rosy skin, honey-colored e
yes, a small mouth, short, and restless by nature, nervous for no reason, though at this moment we all had reason to be nervous. She adjusted her bra after she finished pouring the coffee; she was busty, and her bra seemed two sizes too small. The sun was starting to burn her delicate skin. She complained that she was thirsty, and she had been so focused on making sure there’d be coffee, she’d made a large pot before she left and had forgotten to bring water.

  “We’re all thirsty,” Lefty Sotera pointed out. “Good job of forgetting, Apple Pie. OK, everybody, listen up, on my order we’re going to unfurl our banners and march together toward the American embassy. I doubt they’ll let us get that far. Most likely they’ll intercept us on the way, but we’ll try. Ready?”

  There were murmurs of assent. The sea was calm, shimmering in its Caribbean blue. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  “Do you think the police will detain us?” an older man asked.

  “Yes, purete.” (“Purete means ‘grandfather’ in Havana slang,” I explained to Bernard.) “Of course they’ll arrest us, and let me tell you, if you want to leave you still have time to run away. More than likely they’re going to beat us up. We have to be ready to get a good stomping, to get arrested, to get taken down to Villamarista or one of those detention centers; and, by the way, we should also be ready to pretend we’re crazy and we all forgot our names.”

  “Don’t worry, I can take it,” the old man boasted. “My grandfather fought in the war for independence.”

  At Lefty Sotera’s signal we pulled out our banners and marched forward, linked arm in arm. We waved our placards in the air and shouted out, demanding freedom for political prisoners. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!