by Zoe Valdes
She was referring to Bernard’s presence.
She adjusted the round collar of her dress.
Bernard took a sip of the Campari with lemon. He was a young, good-looking man, more stubborn than passionate; he knew his greatest strength was fighting a one-on-one contest on the field of ambiguous seduction; well, after his deep love of literature, he told himself. He should reverse the order of those two if he wants to succeed as a writer, he thought.
A long silence held. Finally, she asked when James was planning to show up, she was getting hungry and she wasn’t ready to wait for him much longer.
“I figure he won’t be long. I went out book shopping, you know, and as you can imagine he set off to do what he’s fondest of: buying trinkets and baubles.”
She pulled a pocket mirror from her purse, examined herself on the sly, wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, and hurriedly put it back. A few gray hairs were beginning to show along her temples, forcing her to reject her own faded image as a woman with no way out.
Bernard took out his notepad and started jotting down phrases. Dora, impatient, ordered another vodka and orange juice. The waiter leaned over and whispered in her ear, “You are a very beautiful signora.”
Dora knew that compliments formed part of the customary ritual of gallantry among Venetian waiters.
She observed a woman sitting down at the next table over who was also retouching her makeup, using the same gestures she had a moment before; now she was looking at herself in a compact.
Finally, in the distance, the silhouette of James Lord appeared.
Bernard was still engrossed in his notebook. Dora didn’t make the slightest movement to acknowledge the presence of the newcomer.
“Here I am. I guess I’m late enough to get you angry, you’ll be ragging on me for a whole year.” James was carrying a few packages, and he tossed off the joke in an ironic tone.
Bernard looked up; the setting sun hit him right in the eyes.
“Yes, you’re late, and you do it on purpose, typical for a spoiled and callous character like yours,” she complained.
James had brought presents for his friends; they each smiled appreciatively. For him, a long, blue Murano crystal pen. For her, a graceful little velvet hat with feathers, and a pair of black gloves embroidered with small red flowers. The flowers looked like drops of clotted blood embossed on the slippery, stretchy fabric.
In her purse, Dora still carried the knife with which she had pierced her flesh on the doomed or blessed day she met Picasso. But now she preferred to keep that implement where it was, buried amid the banality of objects hastily tossed to the bottom of her sorry old excuse of a purse, a gift from her once and only love.
Shadows, arabesques
I spent the whole livelong day looking for a spot in a café where I could sit and write comfortably without anyone talking to me or bugging me with their endless noisy conversations. Venetians love to gab.
At last I found one overlooking the canal, fairly modest, with a few little tables on the sidewalk in front. From there I could watch the gondolas as they turned and passed directly in front.
In one gondola I spotted a dark, smooth-complexioned woman in a black dress with purple flowers, fitted tight around the waist, the sort of dress that had been in style after the war, with a broad skirt and belted waist. She stepped off the gondola and sat at the table next to mine. She ordered a vodka and orange juice.
To observe her more easily, I thought I’d pretend to be fixing my makeup, so I pulled out my compact and studied her closely in the little round mirror, powdering my face and touching up my lipstick over and over. She looked like no ordinary woman; there was something haughty and regal, extraordinary and arrogant about her. Perhaps it was her manner of carrying herself, the way she sat so straight, with a certain rigidity that elongated her back like a leopard’s, like the backs of the women in Ingres’s harem painting. She was waiting for someone, no doubt. Just as I was, with the air of expectation typical of a woman who is beginning to age.
I, well past thirty at the time, was waiting for the man I had chosen to go with me on this trip to Venice. My husband. Finally, he appeared with our young daughter in tow. She was pouting, thirsty, hungry, and sleepy.
“We can’t stay, look how crabby Attys is.”
“Give her to me.”
I sat her in my lap, where, leaning against my breast, she fell asleep instantly.
“Did you get to see the Balthus exhibition?”
I nodded.
“I’m worn out from all the walking I did, especially with the little one on my shoulders. I met Roberto in Caffè Florian, The place was packed.
He meant the Cuban painter Roberto García York.
“Did you manage to write anything?”
I shook my head.
“What’s up? How come you’re not talking?”
“Nothing, nothing’s up, I just don’t feel like talking.”
For quite some time our conversations had become more or less the same: short, concise. Yet I loved him, and he, though he never told me so, loved me too. This triangle was our life: him, our daughter, me. Indestructible; no one could break it.
Why did we love each other almost without having to talk? There was nothing we needed to say. Just by looking at each other we guessed the other’s thoughts.
From the start of our relationship I knew he was an artist of unique gifts, that he was capable, at any moment, of coming up with a solution to anything that confronted him, that his creative potential was uncanny.
We understood each other because of his filmmaking, a cinema of protest that sang of life and liberty. We went into exile together, and we brought with us our greatest treasure, our finest work: the little one, our daughter.
Nothing was easy in exile. He started making documentaries about painters. The act of making films brought us closer together, his work, not mine (my writing came between us); getting to know the painters, researching their work, painting their stories with a camera, made us a single being. It was a venture that became our world and sealed our love. Yet while I was always involved in his work, he was never very interested in mine. He never read what I wrote. He was afraid of reading me.
I liked it better that way. At the time I thought (and I still think now) that one day I’ll die, before he does, and then he can calmly read what I have written for the little one and for him.
The woman sitting at the table next to ours must have been in her fifties, perhaps younger; she uncrossed her legs, put her elbows on the rough wood of the table, gazed intently up and down the street, displeased. No doubt at all, she was waiting for someone who was running late. My husband focused on her.
Opposite the woman a faded man was talking, but she didn’t see him, she was waiting for another man.
“She looks like an old girlfriend of mine.”
Yes, my husband is an expert in talking to me about his former girlfriends when we’re on a trip that was supposed to be romantic, when we ought to be forgetting about all of our exes and focusing on us. But now he was insisting on pointing out the remarkable resemblance this woman had to his former girlfriend, who had evidently been an important part of his life.
He pulled the camera from his backpack and snapped a photo of the little one and me. The woman was in the background.
“She must have been a lot older than you, because that woman’s sure over the hill, I mean, practically ready for an old-age home,” I interrupted sarcastically.
“No way, not at all. Are you blind? Put on your glasses, come on.”
“Now all of a sudden I’m the old lady who’s going blind,” I thought. I refused to put on my glasses. The little one whimpered and woke with a start, asking for food.
“I’m hungry, mommy, hungry!”
We ordered a pizza. I cut a slice into little pieces and fed them to her. She chewed and swallowed noisily; the woman made an unpleasant face when the little one gurgled her water.
Finall
y, by and by, a tall, good-looking man appeared carrying bags of gifts. The woman looked inside the bags and smiled, accepting the man’s offering.
The little one finished chewing and slurping her pizza, we paid and left. We jumped into a gondola that left us off in front of our house; we were staying in a lavish apartment that we’d rented from a Parisian antiquarian, right on the Grand Canal.
We put the little one to bed in the room next to ours. I played with her for a while until she crashed.
I undressed in our room, in front of the mirror on which someone had scrawled with lipstick, in bad English, “Just I love you. I killed you.”
My husband stood behind me, his erection jutting between my thighs. I turned and offered him my lips. While he kissed me passionately, I was thinking about Dora Maar, about the passionate kisses she must have exchanged with Picasso. About how hard love is between two artists. About how easy it is for a woman to seduce a man—physically, rather than intellectually.
And about the fact that, when you finally do seduce him intellectually, it is possible that desire, once satisfied, is extinguished.
Dora through the kaleidoscope
She couldn’t understand how she had gotten it into her head to take a trip to Venice. It wasn’t about needing a change of scenery, getting to know the city she would have once loved revisiting with Picasso, nor did she really care at this point to understand what was really going on between herself and James, since she’d guessed long ago that all they had in common was Picasso’s art and genius; they didn’t even share their love for him. She loved the man and the creator, the God. James adored Picasso’s work, lusted after it; the painter himself was now secondary for him.
She walked slowly through Piazza San Marco, among the crowd. “Éluard, Éluard,” she murmured. She closed her eyes. “Dégoût.” She suddenly heard the word, or thought she heard it. “Loathing.” The word that had been found written on a piece of paper next to the corpse of René Crevel, the young gay poet who had asked Éluard to attempt a reconciliation with André Breton in order to raise Breton’s awareness and iron out differences between Surrealists and Communists, and whom Éluard ignored. And so began the pain of broken relationships, the great antagonism between them, the politically committed artists, first with art, then with everything else, once mistrust and discord had been sown and were spreading among the Communists.
The Communists were suspicious of the Surrealists, accusing them of being traitors, Trotskyites. Dora signed petitions and letters on both sides, running from one to the other to talk about how politics was destroying everything, but she never lost any of her faith in art nor, unfortunately, in the political ideology to which she clung for dear life.
Dora, the great artist and the Surrealist muse, stooped so low as to become a first-rate ideological extremist with a strong totalitarian streak. It’s true that in that strained era you didn’t have any other choice, but she could also have fallen much lower and flirted with Fascism, in addition to accepting Communism as the only path, with the naïveté typical of those who feel guilty about finding hope only in the liberating act of creation.
It saddened Dora to see the direction Georges Bataille was heading. He smoked more than ever, he ate little and poorly. Éluard refused to sign Bataille’s letter arguing that Hitler’s brutality was better than “the slobbering excitation of diplomats and politicians!” Éluard also broke with Breton, blaming him for everything that was happening around them. He avoided any reconciliation with the father of Surrealism and traveled to Barcelona to participate in an homage to Picasso. She sensed that something ugly was going to occur, and the foreboding pained her more than her suffering for what was going on every day.
Nevertheless she sought a refuge, a sort of empty loft of the imagination where she could harbor a bit of peace. This refuge consisted of her trust in her friends, and theirs in her. She couldn’t blame Éluard for becoming inseparable friends with Nusch. With Nusch and with Picasso. A time even came when Picasso couldn’t live without them, especially not without Nusch.
While Picasso was carving a monumental sculpture of his wife Marie-Thérèse Walter, Nusch and Éluard were staying with him at his place in Boisgeloup, keeping him entertained by reading poems and talking to him about painting, though talk about painting was what least interested him. They were reinventing the world through art. A world they knew they were losing, a world on the verge of catastrophe, but one they stubbornly kept trying to save minute by minute. Every brushstroke by Picasso proved it. Bull’s head. Death’s head.
Nusch and Éluard invited Dora to visit the Master in his chateau. Dora photographed the imposing front door, snapped pictures of every nook and cranny, of Rue du Chêne d’Huy, of the critic Roland Penrose overwhelmed with emotion and gesturing hysterically in front of the door to the house of the Genius of the Century.
When she crossed the threshold, she smelled the jasmine in bloom and a kind of strange summertime aroma imbuing the whole house and bathing her skin in warmth.
Pablo Picasso was waiting in the anteroom with his son Paulo, the child he’d had with the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova: his first wife, his first offspring.
Dora felt she shouldn’t be there, that the sooner she fled from that place the less risk she would be exposing herself to. Nevertheless she went ahead, drawn by the savage look in those eyes, by that sarcastic smile; spellbound, she kept taking photos, more and more pictures of the house, of everything inside it, and especially of its owner. Captivated, she followed those large black eyes, which she had already run into on an occasion that had a very special place in her memory. Seen through his eyes, she became transparent, uneasy, nervous, despondent, caught up in the rhythm of a dance she couldn’t shake; she was upset at her dependence on this space, adopting the squalid pose as willing partner and at the same time forced lover, like the pose of a wounded beast that seeks a hiding spot or that is about to be hit by a hunter’s flaming arrow or poisoned dart.
Picasso never stopped gazing at her, fascinated by her visual perception as a photographer, by her movements, like those of a trapped gazelle. She was—it had to be said—quite different from every other woman he had known. He and she had many things in common, and they shared a commitment to beauty and a dizzying creativity centering on the unusual.
Right away he longed to make her his muse. Her black hair was like the southern breeze, her body lavished him with familiar movements, instantly recognizable to his sense of smell, of touch, undulating as if in a carefully choreographed underwater dance: every time she got behind the camera she thrust her hips forward, opening her pelvis; when she stepped away from the camera, her body went back to her strict pose as a prudent, intelligent woman, even slightly pedantic and vain.
Hearing her speak his native tongue, Spanish, he could foresee her panting erotically, picturing his heavy hands on her backside, squeezing it, pinching it red. He quickly conceived how she might become a second mother to him, giving birth to him while consuming him in the sexual act.
Picasso knew and was enormously proud of the fact that she had been the literary model for Georges Bataille, one of Bataille’s “deviant lovers,” as he later sarcastically described her. However, the Dora and Bataille affair had endured and would endure forever, including in the timeless form of a literary work. No, theirs had not just mere sexual encounters. Dora had conquered the philosopher. As the Spaniard planned to conquer her. He did it, of course, he certainly did: he conquered her, subdued her, so that he could paint her, illuminate her in his paintings and extinguish her light in real life. She succeeded, it’s true, in seducing him with her ideas rather than with her thoughts. Because her profound and fervent thinking ended up exhausting him.
Picasso was always well aware that Dora’s beauty derived from her effectiveness at enticing people with her ideas first, and only then with her ability to control every attribute of her body and make it the focus of desire. Once she was on the altar, whether it was up on a pedestal w
here she would set the rules and rebuff every proposition, or on the contrary, later on, down below in the garbage where she would accept the most unimaginable abasements, Dora always was the one who held the power. Her power had to be destroyed.
Dora—he saw this right away—would not be the mother, like Marie-Thérèse, mother to Maya, Picasso’s second daughter, nor like the tyrannical Olga. Dora was, at last, the artist; but she was also the matron who remembered him from his halcyon days in the bordellos of Barcelona’s Barrio Chino. At first glance she looked like an exotic girl from the south, a mestizo beauty with a fun hint of flippancy, sweet, luscious, eloquent. Mysterious, cultured, and dangerously intuitive. Why not destroy her by weighing her down with all the obnoxiousness he was capable of?
He felt an urgent need to penetrate her world and puzzle it out. Like the time he wanted to puzzle out the soul of that simple gypsy with whom he lived shut up in a cave for a while, the one who later appeared in his paintings as a figure radiating innocence, fiery eroticism, tender wisdom.… Picasso realized that one of the characteristics he found most attractive about Dora was the idea that he could relive with her the passionate moments of his intense bucolic fling with a country kid. She was very manly. A real he-man, that woman. Her masculinity bolstered his desire.
There would be time in the future to tell Dora about his fleeting youthful homosexual affair. About how he had yearned to experience everything about sex, how he’d wanted to try everything that piqued the appetite of his desire. But for now she could wait to learn these secrets, he’d confess them to her later on. Dora was this new woman, the one before his eyes right now, and also that boy, that model, who seemed to have escaped from one of his future paintings. The two, joined as one, were perfection itself, Socrates’s androgynous being, rolling toward the light.
If Picasso was such an open-minded man, why was she now so strongly opposed to James’s homosexuality and his relationship with Bernard? To tell the truth, she didn’t mind seeing them together; what bothered her was having to share James on that trip to Venice, the only trip she would ever take with him. Her last trip. Though Bernard showered her with flattery and did everything he could to reassure her that he wouldn’t come between her and her friend, Dora couldn’t avoid feeling jealous about the traces of the love relationship the two men had shared.
