by Zoe Valdes
Dora got up and walked around the garden. None other than Bernard joined her. He walked with her in silence, as curious and talkative as he always was; he seemed distressed. The afternoon turned gray, and an agreeable breeze kicked up off the water. Dora’s eyes also turned leaden.
“Where’ve you left James?”
“He’s off taking notes about a Juan Gris painting,” Bernard lied. In fact, James had stayed behind chatting with some young high-society Venetian women he’d just met, whom he’d already invited to come to Paris, an exchange Bernard had witnessed and found absolutely ridiculous.
“Oh, Juan Gris. Picasso couldn’t stand him, did everything he could to destroy him.” Dora observed with rapt attention some birds winging across the sky. “Like a bird of prey. Yes, he could be an eagle, a vulture, could sink his talons, peck away till blood flowed.… He treated Braque badly, called him Madame Braque, constantly made fun of him, still boasts that ‘Braque was the woman who loved me most.’ And Braque got back at him by saying that ‘Picasso used to be a great artist, but now he’s just a genius.’ Deep down they adored each other.”
Bernard burst out laughing. “Why do you always talk about him, about them all, as if it happened in some distant past?”
Dora looked at Bernard, surprised. “Perhaps because I’ve already moved on to the future.”
Another heartfelt laugh from Bernard startled the little birds in a nearby grove into flight.
“Do you know when Picasso met Max Jacob? The year was 1901, it was his first exhibition in Ambroise Vollard’s gallery. Picasso always thought of himself as a poet, and it was Jacob who introduced him to French poetry. The next year, in spite of the poverty that poets are supposed to put up with on their own, Picasso moved into the maid’s room at his apartment on Rue Voltaire. Max Jacob even gave him his own bed. Picasso painted by night and slept by day. Max did the opposite. He stayed there for two years. Until Max acquired the Montmartre atelier at 13 Rue Ravignan for that bunch of painters who went around like beggars. André Salmon and Max Jacob were the ones who named it Le Bateau-Lavoir.”
“Max truly loved him. Loved Picasso,” Bernard remarked.
“Of course he did, he moved into a fleabag flat at number 7 Rue Ravignan, in the back of a courtyard, just to be near Picasso. Max lived an incredibly miserable life there, and that was also where the face of God appeared to him, on one of the walls of that flat. Years later, in 1915, the Jewish poet converted to Roman Catholicism and asked Picasso to be his godfather at his baptism. After Max Jacob’s death, a few of his friends and I arranged a religious service for him at the church of Saint-Roch. Picasso stayed outside, didn’t want to come in. He’s never wanted to have any contact with death.”
“What’s Guernica, then?”
“Everything, except death.”
“War?” Bernard asked, perplexed.
“War, life. But never death.”
Suddenly, Dora thought she heard Picasso’s laughter, that whinnying horse laugh he would let loose in the most unexpected places. There was a time when the artist drank a lot of wine and Anís del Mono; he also smoked hashish around the clock and split his sides laughing at any fool thing, in thunderous guffaws, until his bull neck swelled up and his heartburn made him weep, but in acute pain, and his breath smelled like vomit.
One time he vomited blood, picked up a paintbrush, and without skipping a beat started painting on canvas, using his own blood and the chunks puked up from his stomach to draw a face of Christ that melded with the image of Max Jacob.
“Did you know that Max saw Christ’s face in a stain on the wall? Or are you tired of listening to me?”
“I’d heard something,” Bernard mumbled.
“It happened on June 7, 1909, right when he decided to convert from Judaism to Catholicism. Picasso immediately agreed to be the godfather. Communists always end up clinging to God, and Picasso couldn’t do otherwise.”
Bernard made a show of being interested to hear more of the story she told so resolutely; he walked close by her side, entranced by her voice. Dora was carrying a silk handkerchief in one hand, and when she gestured it fluttered between her face and Bernard’s shoulder.
“I also began to love God, just like Max, and I began to have faith through astrology. Yes, I’ve followed the same path Max Jacob took. There’s nothing closer to one of Picasso’s paintings than an astrological chart; faith, belief, science, poetry.…”
Bernard saw James in the distance, next to a tree, talking with some fairly good-looking guy. The young man handed him a scrap of paper on which he’d written something.
“What does it feel like to be known forever as Picasso’s mistress?” Bernard asked, mouth quivering, staring all the while at the spot where his friend was exchanging all too friendly glances with this young stranger.
“As I’ve said before, I wasn’t Picasso’s maîtresse; he was my maître.” Her wordplay was wonderful: in French, maîtresse means both “mistress” or “lover” and “dominant woman,” while maître means “teacher” or “dominant man.” Domador de fiera furiosa en una feria. Terrible tiger tamer under the big top. Now she was the one who laughed at the Spanish tongue-twister that had just popped into her head.
Bernard’s tall, ungainly figure came to a halt. He lowered his gaze and fixed his eyes on hers. He realized he was looking at the most enigmatic of faces: a maritime face. The face of a middle-aged woman who’d been through rough seas, a face where the only trace left by those passing storms were the tracks of tears cried in solitude, tiny rivulets sprung from eyes whose lashes always seemed moist, shining. A woman alone, immaculate, painted and erased by the same artist who had created her like a major work of art.
“Was there no way to escape him?” Bernard asked.
Dora became aware that something was bothering Bernard. Finally, she saw what it was: James was going off with a very attractive, vigorous stranger.
“No, Bernard, no one escapes Picasso, ever. No one can resist him. No one dares attack him, either. His legend, his ‘black magic,’ will always protect him.” She took him by the arm, as if pulling him aside to let him in on a secret. “Don’t torture yourself, take some friendly advice, it’s never worth torturing yourself.”
She slipped the handkerchief around her neck and took hold of Bernard’s arm.
From the distance, James noticed the pair of them; he said goodbye to the young man and walked toward his friends.
It started to drizzle; they rushed through narrow streets, the windstorm made a mess of her hair, and the blasts of rain lashed their bodies. In less than ten minutes it became a torrential downpour. They ran for shelter into the church of San Gregorio.
Bernard straggled a bit behind while James and Dora explored inside the sanctuary; he pulled out a small notebook and wrote:
Dora Maar is a great, underappreciated woman. No man has been able to love her as she deserves. James may know more about her than she does herself, because he’s an expert appraiser of high-value artworks, and Dora is one, but he won’t be able to stay with her to the end, either. He isn’t prepared for such an undertaking. She’s alone, and alone she’ll remain. Picasso has turned her into an incurable recluse. I wouldn’t be surprised if she turns out badly in the end, a madwoman or a saint, locked up in a madhouse or a nunnery. That is, if the nuns dared to take her in. Perhaps she won’t ever be.… No, she isn’t the sort to take her own life.
It began to drizzle, thunder boomed off rooftops and domes, and the wind whistled as it slipped through the fissures of the stained-glass windows.
Dora knelt before the altar; she seemed to be praying.
Nothing, no one. Venice, 1958
I’d like to think that what poisoned us was politics, the bad company that comes with politics and relying on ideology; the idée fixe of becoming “ideologues.” Maybe, too, we were very immature, victims of our desire to be seen in public as, not so much lovers, rather as accomplices, despite all the complications of Picasso’s lif
e, and later on, much later on, to yearn for the possibility of fleeing in terror.
Picasso couldn’t take any sort of criticism. I was always criticizing him, and that put him in a very bad mood. Other than the High Priestess, the writer Gertrude Stein, no one was allowed to criticize him. She, the mamma of every artist and writer in vogue during that “crazy time,” was the best situated to put each of them in his proper place: she would send this one down the drain or place that one on a well-deserved pedestal, depending on how each one rated. She handled Ernest Hemingway with ease, however she deemed fit, and she joked and made sweet talk with Picasso or told him off based on her frame of mind. I can say, without fear being mistaken, that Stein was utterly unpredictable. She could allow herself the luxury of sneering at his genius—the genius of the Great Genius!—and of calling him a bad poet in front of everyone, of humiliating him from A to Z when Picasso took to writing. More than to writing; he took to cobbling verses that sprang from his pain and his disappointment in love, especially after he was free from the extreme duress that Olga Khokhlova, his first wife and the mother of Paulo, his first-born son, put him through and had time to write.
“You haven’t suffered enough,” Gertrude Stein asserted, “or the verses you’ve written aren’t good enough for us to believe you’ve really suffered from love. You can’t paint like Picasso and write like any old Pablo,” the incomparable high priestess of the whip-like Word told him point blank. “The Russian ballerina isn’t worthy of your inspiration, or you aren’t worthy of the suffering she’s caused you, or else not even she has made you suffer enough to chasten you as a husband and glorify you as a poet.”
Gertrude Stein didn’t beat around the bush.
Indeed, Olga gave Picasso nothing, not even a grief worthy of his majestic art, nor did her body inspire a single brush stroke worth his trouble; as a model, she was plenty conventional, as he often commented in annoyance.
As conventional as a classical ballerina can be who doesn’t believe in her abilities and whose only aspiration as an artist is not to break the mold. What Picasso asked of us as women was to give up being conventional, to push ourselves and go beyond our limits, to leave off being women and to become paintings, immortal works of art, Surrealist girls. We had to dance barefoot for him on sharp rocks, while savagely wounding our feet. We made his hangman’s job easy.
“Olga is a nobody. She set about turning into a nobody; little by little she faded away. I’m terrified of people like her, of the nobodies who could invade the planet, nobody it, undermine it,” he murmured, passed out in my arms, one afternoon in the Luxembourg Garden when he was of a mind to reveal gloomy aspects of his relationships with women to me. The only one he didn’t talk about was Marie-Thérèse Walter, the Vestal Mother.
Logging a windstorm in his logbook
The rain suddenly stopped. Bernard left off writing in his notebook and, feeling overwhelmed, set out to look for James. Both of them ended up waiting for me at the entrance to the church under the lintel of its solid, ancient doorway. I would have stayed there forever if I could; it had been years since I experienced the peace I felt there.
We set off walking together again. I was beginning to get a taste for walking by Bernard’s side, in between the two of them. A salty mist rose from the waterfront; the mix of rainwater and canal water emitted a bogus odor, like bruised blueberries, and my senses dissolved into the damp blur of dusk.
Later, James and Bernard opted to go back to the hotel with the excuse that they needed to plan their time. In fact, I suspected they were dying to be alone, to kiss ravenously, to make love and lavish each other with affection. I’d seen it in their eyes, in the looks they gave each other, looks that left me out.
But let’s imagine it were true, that they really needed to plan their time and log their hours in a logbook, in the small blue datebook Bernard carried with him: what sense does that make?
It’s not my style. I’ve long had all the time in the world at my disposal, I don’t succumb easily to the boredom of daily life, I’m not interested in cramming my life into neat compartments or pigeonholing my existence on graph paper with the sole aim of propelling myself into an absurd headlong cosmic rush to the end.
In any case, if there’s anything that truly slips through our fingers, it’s life, the time we spend living, which is why we should at least pretend that our obsession for planning and organizing torments us as little as is possible. No matter how much we insist on filling our lives with content, we’ll find ourselves equally emptied of content in that last dreadful or liberating moment of death.
I walked the waterfront, the waves in the Venetian canal bringing to mind that stroll along the beach in the south of France my first time there with Picasso.
We had talked in Spanish, he with an irrepressible Andalusian accent that he cranked up whenever he wanted, and I making do with my grouchy Argentine accent. Sometimes I’d throw in a few Castilian pronunciations, which would get on Picasso’s nerves because he’d think I was making fun of him.
In the course of that stroll I became vaguely aware of the existence of Marie-Thérèse and little Maya, a tedious and disagreeable child, too mature for her age, who became more spiritual over the years. We all knew about Olga and his first child. I say I became “vaguely aware” because, instead of telling me straight and laying his cards on the table, he hemmed and hawed. Besides, to be honest, the less I knew about his entanglements the better. I wanted to stay out of the whole mess.
I didn’t want to know anything about either of them, much less get into anyone else’s business, even less untangle the tightly woven love tales of this man who loved prancing about, acting like a sultan, so proud of his harem of passionate and well-loved females. My attention was entirely focused on him, his brilliance, his art, and his way of expressing his love, so unromantic yet profoundly idyllic and passionate beside the course exterior that characterized him. I was his sultana, the noble overseer of his harem. At least that’s what he led me to believe for a while.
There were few times when I was as conscious of what I was looking for as on that beach stroll in the south of France, as aware as I was then of what I had found in Picasso’s persona: this man shredded my idea of what it meant to submit blindly, totally, exclusively to another person; he changed me in every sense, made me into someone else. I threw myself obediently at his feet. And I imagined that this was the notion that everyone else, the people I admired and tried to emulate, all the Surrealists (myself included), had of grand artistic love.
Though I wanted Picasso to mold me when it came to love, in the field of ideas I valued my independence too highly.
After a few months of living together off and on, politics came between us, as was then the fashion in the Surrealist camp. I was one of the women who started him on it, I admit; perhaps I let myself get carried away by my desire to be accepted as a serious, intelligent woman, firm in my convictions and thoughtful. What I didn’t know was that Picasso loathed politics and, deep down, women who thought for themselves. It was my own fault, I repeat, I was the one who dragged him onto the battlefield of ideologies. Before I entered his life, he had only flirted foppishly with the Communists, but he flatly rejected all commitments to any ideology.
Others before me have said that he refused to sign any document that would get him mixed up in political decisions. Sometimes he would be filled with rage against politically committed demands to paint this or that absurdity in favor of “the cause.” “The cause, what cause?” he would mutter angrily, brush clenched between his teeth. His cause was art, his battle was painting, he grumbled. Make up his mind about politics? It was beyond him.
I can’t help laughing when I recall that image of Picasso imitating Hitler, mocking him, with a black paintbrush for a mustache. It happened at the beach during our first vacation, at the very time the Spanish Civil War was breaking out. We weren’t the only ones who relied on humor to deal with the uncertainty that was crowding in on us, the
horror we could hardly imagine we’d soon be living through. A few months later we learned of the assassination of a poet and playwright whose name back then already meant so much to Picasso and to me: Federico García Lorca.
We began to fear the worst: nothingness. Treacherous, blank nothingness. We feared that an army of nameless soldiers, nobodies, nobodies, nobodies, would spread throughout the world, marching violently through a society that would be conquered by boredom, arrogance, terror: the Empire of Nothingness. Dying of disquiet in a world lulled into quiescence.
But Picasso could split himself in half like no one else, and he publically affirmed, “Communism represents an ideal that I believe in. I think Communism aspires to achieve that ideal.”
However, whatever he expressed in words or painting, it carried little weight with the fanatical ideologues. They commissioned a portrait of Stalin from him, and he painted it, inspired by a youthful image from back when the Soviet leader was nobody, or virtually no one. They kicked up a huge fuss. The Soviet embassy deemed the portrait unacceptable. Armageddon came down on him: the Communist ultraconservatives trained their spotlight on him. Picasso just kept his mouth shut, the coward. Deep down, he was nothing but a coward. The only coward who’s ever had so much written about him.
How did we survive all that in occupied Paris? Like most people: by devoting ourselves discretely to art, hiding out like rats, sheltering under the power of the Great Genius, who everyone tried to court, absolutely everyone, including the enemy, though in their own way. It’s true. The enemy respected Picasso. Even today nobody can explain it. Just as we still can’t explain why the enemy respected so many artists and intellectuals. Maybe because they needed to enjoy themselves, and they could only find their fun in the fashionable circles of Paris.
Bernard’s brown notebook
