The Weeping Woman

by Zoe Valdes

  Nor could she bear imagining them making love, and yet she couldn’t help constantly envisioning their naked bodies entwined in the act of love.

  That’s why she was out so early now, walking around the plaza over and over again, making its oval circuit, trying to push away the image of the young pair, each sucking the other’s sex, an image that frequently disturbed her dreams.

  Then her mind turned again to the suicide of René Crevel, the young gay poet everyone made fun of, the one who’d been marginalized by most for being homosexual, for being “wimpy,” as his most envious rivals put it. And, she told herself, that fascinating and creative era had gone to ruin when they gave in to the Nazis, and again when they ended the savagery and blotted out the horror of Fascism but then, instead of wanting to be free, latched onto the Communist terror. When they traded one brute for another. Did they have any other choice? Yes, the choice of freedom, but once they’d won it, like most young people, they didn’t know what to do with it.

  Or they did, but they swapped it for debauchery, for an unbridled sexuality that only got them riled with each other and amused the enemy once again. They did not know how to juggle freedom and desire. They couldn’t turn sex into poetry. They sullied everything with politics and polemics.

  Picasso had probably been more daring than she, because he was able to take sex in a different and more savage way, in a much more vigorous, childish, emotional, abiding way, mingling it with his pleasure at his own courage in toning down his manliness, in sodomizing her, and in becoming a totally sexual being.

  Picasso, moreover, awakened amazingly possessive impulses in everyone who met him. We can be so deeply affected by somebody else’s courage and talent that we’ll instantly succumb to our desperate, agonizing desire to possess him, to appropriate his whole being.

  Such was the case of Pere Mañach. Dora was amused by the gripping old stories of ardent pursuits that were attributed to this gay gallery owner. He had offered Picasso lots of money for his work, but in consequence he wouldn’t let him alone for a minute. It got so bad Picasso had to pretend he was going to bed with his friend Manuel Hugué and let Mañach catch him there, a thrilling sight for Mañach but rather unexpected for Manuel, in order to get him off his back.

  “Dora, hey!” James Lord was waving to her from the door of Saint Mark’s Basilica.

  She smiled, happy she could witness the spectacle of the young James Lord calling to her from the atrium of the church. He was so close; she wanted to run to him, hug him, tell him everything she had remembered during this long early morning walk. But she held back. No, she shouldn’t break the spell woven by the respect she had so painstakingly established between herself and the eternally aspiring writer and artist, whom she had first met while he slept at Picasso’s feet as the artist put the finishing touches on one of his finest works: a contemplation of bold and fleeting youth.

  Dora was only too aware that James would write about her one day, and she didn’t want to mar her image of exquisite and austere good looks, which allowed her to put Surrealism behind her and remake herself as the existential shadow behind the faces in those Man Ray photographs, which no longer had anything to do with her. Because you could say that those faces had been shot precisely so that Picasso would discover her, love her, and paint her. And now none of those stories existed; the multiple versions of her face invented by Man Ray had evaporated. Nothing existed, except in the intimacy of memory. Thinking it over, not even in the sinister promiscuity of recollections. Nothing existed but the paintings in which Picasso had immortalized her.

  James was waving tactfully, a tender smile on his lips, just as he had in that little shop in the Parisian neighborhood they shared, the day he met her for the second time in his life.

  The shop was barely lit. She turned around with a package she had just bought and tried out a tedious cliché, “So we meet again.”

  And he replied with the even more trite, “What a surprise.”

  The absurdity of the cliché did sound less rough and inexpressive than their spontaneous indifference, which spoke volumes.

  Impression of the inner life of Dora, 1958. The Bridge of Sighs

  But to stop remembering I’d have to kill myself.

  Around eleven at night, after dinner, I told James and Bernard I was going for a walk. They wanted to come with me, but I begged them, reluctantly, to let me be alone for a while; besides, I wanted them to get some time together, too, take a walk by themselves, exchange a few words in keeping with their intimate friendship, and enjoy a city they would undoubtedly return to someday, though they would never forget a single detail about Venice from that trip, precisely because they had taken it with me.

  I walked toward the Bridge of Sighs, quite near where we were staying. The water flowed dark and oily from the miasma that filled the lagoon. “I’ll never share a kiss with the one I love under this bridge, nor make a wish, as the legend suggests,” I told myself sadly.

  A while later I decided it would be best if I threw myself into the canal and ended it once and for all, but then I thought about my two young friends. It was a selfish decision; they didn’t deserve to suffer such an act of melodramatic foolishness. Even the act of dying calls for elegance and, above all, good manners and self-restraint. But could I really want to end my life?

  “What would those two do with my body if they found it intact?” I wondered, and almost burst out laughing.

  Then they sure wouldn’t ever forget our grisly sojourn in Venice.

  I was condemned to the doleful reverberation of memories, to continue living under their constant drip, drip, drip, coming more and more often, more stridently, more gut-wrenchingly. Most of my acquaintances expected I would commit suicide after Picasso left. Even Picasso suspected I would. I didn’t, and I never will. For the simple, ironic purpose of proving them wrong and not giving the painter the satisfaction. They’d all think I was a miserable wretch if I did. But he’s the height of misery, not me. Because he never loved anyone. He didn’t know how to love.

  When he left me, he transferred the quantum of cruelty he used to invest in crushing me to his work, which was already cruel enough in itself.

  All of a sudden, a shadow caught my eye. The dark form glided, or so it seemed to me, from the entrance to an alley, along the edge of the canal, and up to the stone balustrade where I was standing. It spread its arms, which transformed into two immense white wings. It was an angel, or a sprite, I thought. When it stepped into the light, I realized it was a man wearing a tuxedo with a pair of immense blue wings fixed to the back and a mask covered with white sequins.

  “Who are you? What do you want with me?” I asked, pointedly.

  “I’m going as Marlene Dietrich. It’s Carnival, didn’t you know?”

  “Well, you don’t look much like Marlene Dietrich. And you’re lying, it isn’t Carnival,” I added, teasingly.

  “Of course I do, I look just like her, at least the tux. It’s the same one she wore in the film The Moroccans. I had to take off so much weight to fit into it. But no matter, doesn’t make any difference. All that matters is keeping up appearances.…” The man ran away from me along the waterfront, and in the distance I saw him duck through the door of a palazzo flecked with flamingo-pink paint.

  I can’t conjure up the image of an angel without thinking back to Max Jacob and the heyday of Le Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, at 13 Rue Ravignan, where so many artists lived and painted, where poor Fernande Olivier became Picasso’s model and his lover. Yet nowadays most of the people who go on pilgrimages to that narrow, eloquent space think of it as nothing but Picasso’s shrine and studio.

  It’s true that Picasso lived and worked there, but he did so as one among many artists who were joining forces, all with the common objective of creating and changing the direction of art. It was there, though, that Picasso also took off on a seemingly frivolous tack in his painting: his Rose Period. For a man as rough and coarse as Picasso seemed to be, the Rose Pe
riod was when a brashly feminine world burst into his art. Perhaps it came from the woman who showed up and turned him into a severe Iberian male, Fernande Olivier, who truly initiated him in the role of the untamable macho, mounting women like a bull, snorting and foaming, in extended amorous group attacks, in orgies, where her beauty stood out among the vulgar attractions of the other young women.

  Max Jacob was an angel, a duende, a sprite; Picasso was right to call him that, suddenly so poetic that the words sounded suspiciously evasive on his lips. Max loved the Spaniard and the Spaniard loved Max, without any doubt, but in the long term Picasso could be faithful only in his relationships with form and color, perhaps more clear-cut than his friendships in the muddied waters of love, which blinded him. Max Jacob brought him to Le Bateau-Lavoir when he could no longer keep him in his garret.

  Picasso was afraid of that angel’s love. Picasso was simply afraid of the sprite and didn’t even take the future consequences of his fear into account. For even if Max Jacob was an angel, which he metaphorically was, he was above all a mortal creature, however immortal he was as a poet, the greatest poet, Lorca’s duende, the very spirit of art. And there was no reason for Max to have been sent into that horror, into that threshold of hell at Drancy, final stop: Auschwitz, when he could have been rescued if his old friend had been quick and decisive instead of solemn and metaphorical; Drancy, a place from which he couldn’t fly, where he died tortured and ailing, his wings incinerated.

  One evening we spoke about Max Jacob. Picasso rarely did so with me, he avoided mentioning the unhappiness and suffering that Max represented in his life, a subject on which I think he was more forthcoming with the underhanded Sabartés. And on this occasion he avoided talking about the moment when the German police took Max away, preferring to glorify the old times when he and Max met Guillaume Apollinaire and they eked out an abject living, smoking opium and misspending their youth, which was their greatest treasure then.

  Jaime Sabartés was a fairly subdued man, as I’ve said before and want to emphasize. Sabartés only came to life when he was flattering the Master and when the Master deigned to give him his infrequent thanks. His faithful Sabartés.

  What did I learn from how others reacted to the acclaimed Master? Picasso was also a great master for me, even though artistically I was a Surrealist from the start; I learned from him the true mystery of painting: that it is music, that it is literature. I learned, and I truly appreciate all the people who scorned me, because they inspired me to aim higher and higher. Though on the other hand, when they continually abused me they thought they were honoring Picasso. One of them was Sabartés.

  I quit photography because the Great Genius wanted it that way, because Picasso hinted imperiously that I should, as if he were giving an order: my way or nothing, my way or the abyss. And so he suggested the idea to me because, according to him, he wanted to make me a great artist. Photography or painting. Photography or Picasso. Personally, I don’t know but that I was already a great artist. Yes, perhaps I was, most likely I was. At least, others thought so, the others thought I had been great before I got together with him. And one of those who thought so was Max Jacob. However, what I really wanted to achieve was exactly and precisely along the lines of what Picasso also wanted me to achieve, what he dreamed of for me.

  He almost surely left me because I didn’t meet his expectations. I didn’t produce the creative impression, the atmosphere of perseverance from being near him, that he expected of me.

  My world fell apart the first time I wept in front of Picasso over something less than poetic; that was when I ceased to be the lover, the mother, the companion, and was reduced to the weeping woman. “Reduced” is just a way of putting it; actually he exalted me by imagining me as invariably tearful, endlessly weepy.

  From then on, my presence always suggested a chain of events to him related to weeping, nothing about me interested him but my tears and my blood, not even my naked body. He soon began to lose interest altogether in my body, stopped nibbling greedily on my sharp breasts as he loved to do when we first met, turned away from the jet-black mound of my pelvis, except when my menstrual blood flowed.

  Picasso yearned to see me cry again and again, again and again, endlessly; tears and blood, my cheeks and the bull writhing in the sand, death throes and blood clots. Picasso spat words like daggers, like darts, trying to hurt me, only to paint me unharmed, recreating the shock of the event on canvas. My tears became diamonds, and I gladly gave them afterwards to all the women he courted. My tears soon sold at higher prices than the most sought-after jewels in the famous salons of Paris and in art circles all over the world.

  People are always ready to pay for prurience. Everything that humanity has ever sold, disguised as art, has been sheer, sick prurience. This is why I ran away from all that greed, which I neither wish nor am able to call “art.” This is the real reason for my isolation, my abstinence, my bitterness, my one-way journey to worshiping the god of the unmentionable, a genuine god. After Picasso, only God. And me? No, I no longer exist.

  Long-awaited conversations, and a dream about the painter Jorge Camacho

  About a year and a half ago I visited the painters Jorge and Margarita Camacho. I told them I was writing about Dora Maar and Picasso. We shared a lot of laughs over anecdotes that Jorge recounted about Picasso and Wifredo Lam. I was convinced Picasso had fallen in love with the half-Chinese, half-black Cuban painter, devilishly brilliant as an artist and complicated as a human being. Camacho roared with laughter, but he was doubtful. I think it was one of the best conversations I ever had with Camacho, the Surrealist painter, one of the first Surrealists and one of the last. “Surrealism still goes on, though, it will never end,” Margarita reminded me. Camacho knew that the alchemy of art derives from laughter, and he knew how to laugh, being a fine alchemist throughout his life, and now in death as well.

  Several months after that mirth-filled visit, Camacho fell ill. I visited him two or three more times. Then he got so sick he couldn’t even bear to let friends visit. He didn’t want us to see the state he was in. Margarita took care of him to the end, and she respected his wish to let no one see him in his weakened condition.

  Camacho died. The death of a friend in this mournful exile adds still more terror to the delirium tremens that has seized hold of me.

  I took three pills and fell asleep. When what I really wanted was to fall dead, but I lacked the courage.

  Dora Maar, naked, handed me a bar of soap.

  My mother, naked, held out an apricot for me in her chapped and trembling hand.

  Jorge Camacho, hiding behind some trees at Los Pajares, peered out, smiled, walked away toward a salt dune, far off, blurry.

  I woke up two days later, needing to drink water, lots of water. My throat was parched and my eyes were glued shut from a conjunctivitis I had contracted in my sleep.

  I went to the kitchen; on the way there I bumped into the ghost of the writer Emilia Bernal, muttering one of her poems. For an instant my fingers caught hers, she squeezed my hand tight.

  We looked into each other’s eyes, smiling in amazement.

  Early the next morning I phoned Miriam Gómez in London, who told me she was still working on the Complete Works of her husband, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and that she’d just read the Romanian translation of his novel The Fickle Nymph.

  “You know Romanian?” I asked her.

  “No, but it’s very easy to read.” A typically brilliant riposte from Miriam Gómez.

  I hung up with Miriam and then got a call from Juan Abreu, phoning me from Barcelona to ask me to send him my photo, saying he wanted to do my portrait. “I’m too old and ugly for that,” I told him. But he insisted.

  I had a terrible case of insomnia. I didn’t feel like doing anything. I went back to the books about Dora Maar.

  For years I’ve watched American movies late at night. “It’s better than paying for a shrink,” Miriam Gómez assured me. No doubt about it. Old Japan
ese films, too.

  At midday, invariably, I was taken by the idea that I ought to kill myself, but five minutes later I’d be filled with a squeamish love for life. “Besides, only frothing mad writers kill themselves,” I would tell myself, losing heart. Or brave writers. Am I a coward?

  I picked up yet another book about Communism and totalitarian states, and forget it, the same old stuff. That sharp pain, piercing my whole head, refusing to withdraw its talons from my brain, sinking into my nerves.

  Mamá appeared again; she was angry, visibly upset, because I hadn’t visited her grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery, because I hadn’t brought her flowers on that special day, her birthday. “You didn’t even bring me a tangerine,” she complained; much less did I bathe her with rum the way she likes to be bathed, that is, I didn’t sprinkle rum across the marble tombstone I had placed over her grave. Pink marble that cost about as much as a condo in Miami. But Mami always wanted a high-class tombstone. I would have preferred the condo, like anyone else, but that wasn’t what God had in store for me. God, or whoever.

  That’s how things go with my dead mother. And my life with Dora Maar. Nocturnal, rough, eventful.

  My life with friends and with spirits.

  Yesterday I had lunch with Laure de Graumont, at her house, only steps from 29 Rue d’Astorg.

  You know what 29 Rue d’Astorg is now? Offices. At night, shadows and ghosts. Vaulted rooms, filled with bundles of soulless reports and wandering forlorn spirits.

  I took three more pills, it’s become a habit, taking pills on the sly, it’s the only way I can get through the day and sleep through the night. I chew them up and spit them out. I don’t swallow them, just the saliva juice and that chalky residue that sticks like sediment to the roof of your mouth.