The Weeping Woman

by Zoe Valdes

  “Even her photos, her drawings, her paintings aren’t considered part of the essential Surrealist canon, which is a real injustice,” Janine said as she handed a glass of orange juice to the painter.

  “No, no, come off it. Dora Maar is very well known.”

  “As Picasso’s lover,” Roberto interjected. Janine’s hand trembled slightly when she heard the painter’s qualification. “Only those in the know are aware of her enormous legacy, not in quantity but in quality. But her fame really is based on Man Ray’s famous photographs of her, and the portraits by Picasso, which by the way started commanding very good prices—and very quickly. Destiny is an amazing thing. And to think that she made sure his work would be taken such good care of. God knows where all those tremendous Dora Maars that Picasso painted have ended up. To be totally honest, she wasn’t a great painter, but she was the greatest Surrealist photographer. And that really would be worth showing the world.”

  A bit away from us, by the window, my little girl started humming a children’s song while scribbling on the floor with some paper and colored pencils Roberto had given her. My husband, Ricardo, was paying attention to our conversation. Janine, always on her toes, was looking out only for the painter’s demands and needs. She had been his model; now she was merely his partner. And though she took care of him, she also imposed a lot of her own tastes on him, which for the most part he disliked and found tiresome. She didn’t take part in the conversation even though we’d been speaking French so she wouldn’t feel left out, since she didn’t speak a word of Spanish despite having lived with our friend for forty years.

  “I’ve always been surprised by the power of domination that male artists exert over women, and how the women accept it in the most abject state of submission. Even when they try to set their own rules as homemakers, it’s a false assertiveness, yet another act of astonishing deference and obedience. Wouldn’t it be easier for them to refuse to give in, and to dump them?” I said to Ricardo after breakfast was done, while we were walking up around Hotel Danieli.

  “What’s most terrific isn’t being the ‘Great Genius,’ as they called Picasso. What’s extraordinarily sublime is loving the Great Genius, apart from understanding him, and having the naïve certainty that the meaning of life revolves around him,” Ricardo pontificated.

  “You say that because you’re a man.”

  “No, that has nothing to do with it. Not because I’m a man.” He paused half a beat. “Because I’m a genius.”

  We burst out laughing. Our girl started asking us why we were laughing like crazy.

  “Mamá, what are you laughing about with Papá so crazy?” The question, structured just as she said it, was filled with the sublime, special, nearly Surrealist grace that only children have.

  We strolled along the narrow streets adjoining the Grand Canal. Ricardo stayed playing with the little one in Piazza San Marco, and I looked for a quiet place where I could write in my notebook. I picked one of the many cozy cafes that lie just beyond the square.

  I would write by hand, then type it all up on the computer. I ordered a Campari with lemon and started writing. The waiter came over with the tray and the iced Campari sweating up the glass, I looked up, and then I noticed a woman who strongly resembled Dora, wearing the same navy blue dress with tiny flowers and high, rounded collar that Dora has on in some photos. I took a sip and pretended to be admiring the scenery. I kept my eyes on her, following her through my Campari glass.

  I couldn’t imagine Dora just waiting, not with her restless attitude. Much less imagine her at the mercy of those who always took advantage of her, something she would notice with her keen intelligence: the man she loved would have to choose between his wife and his little girl, and his much younger lover. Dora remained right at the center, inconvenient, bothersome to others, especially to the one who was trying to juggle the tumultuous lives of all those love-struck women, as if he were some mere circus performer.

  Guernica in the face of catastrophe

  JOURNALIST: You really love the word “love,” Pablo Picasso.…

  PABLO PICASSO: I even told a girl who interviewed me for some newspaper the other day, “You know, for me there’s only love.”

  J: You love people a lot?

  PP: I really do. If I didn’t have people, I’d rather be a door knob, or a flower pot, anything.…

  J: Do you also love television? Not so much…

  PP: Oh, I do have one, I do. I started watching it one day because they were showing Princess Margaret’s wedding. Somebody loaned me a TV and I watched the princess’s procession, and I kept on going after that.

  J: You know what would be great? Just leave you alone in front of the cameras, totally free, you’d be able to do great stuff for the viewers, you’d make up all sorts of things.…

  PP: Yes, most likely. Sometimes I find wonderful things on television, lovely things, things I love, things I find interesting, but other times it’s just appalling. I can say that, can’t I? Because it’s just the two of us here alone. Oh, no, that’s not true, everybody can hear me!

  J: If you had to choose which period, which painting, which canvas would live on after you, which would you choose?

  PP: I don’t know, that’s a hard question. Everything was done with the intentions we had in the moment, in the period, in the state we were all in, myself included. It’s so hard to say. When it was Guernica’s moment, I made Guernica. That was a terrible catastrophe, and the beginning of so many other catastrophes we’ve suffered through, wasn’t it? But that’s how it is. It’s personal. At bottom, these are memoirs one writes for oneself.…

  ON SCREEN: “I paint the way others write their biographies. My canvases, finished or not, are pages from my diary.”

  —Excerpt from Picasso’s only interview on French television; transcript from the archives of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA).

  Marie-Thérèse showed up unexpectedly. The secretary, Jaume Sabartés, was rubbing his hands in amusement, watching; he eyed the situation from behind the door with the air of a bullfighter about to win the ears and the tail in a single fight. He sided completely with Maya’s mother, whom he considered the “Good One.” The other woman was the “Bad One,” the enemy, the upstart. The other woman was Dora Maar.

  “I have a daughter with this man. It’s my right to be here with him. You may go. You’re nothing but the other woman.” The Vestal Mother lay down the law.

  “I have a lot more reasons to stay than you do.” Dora was haughty and gruff. “I don’t have any children with him, and I don’t see any difference between having them and not having them.”

  She could have said she did have one, that the monumental painting looming before her eyes was the offspring of them both. But she thought it inappropriate.

  Picasso was unfazed, anyone would say unaffected, by the scene of jealousy playing out before his eyes, but he turned his back and kept on painting as if it had nothing to do with him.

  Neither of them had seen the other before, they hadn’t even crossed paths accidentally. Both women thought the same thing, that the rival was more beautiful than her. But Dora had the advantage of having loitered many times around the house in Tremblay where Picasso had installed his wife and daughter, knowing that the painter was inside that building, surrounded by his family. Those were nights when she wasn’t ashamed to weep pathetically in front of a taxi driver, under lashing rain or falling snow, unable to focus through the windows on the faces smiling at the man she loved more than anyone in the world.

  “Which of us should leave?” Marie-Thérèse put Picasso between a rock and a Guernica.

  “It’s a difficult situation. I like each of you for different reasons. Marie-Thérèse, because she’s sweet and kind, and she does everything I ask. Dora, because she’s intelligent. I have no interest in making a decision. I’d rather leave things as they are. You two work it out.” Picasso continued slinging paint on the canvas, smiling quietly, smugly, unable to look at
either of them, pretending neither of them deserved his precious time or the selfless attention he devoted only to his painting.

  Dora felt completely drained, as if her body were nothing but a formless mass of jelly, and her veins were opening of their own accord and her blood burbling out and puddling at her feet.

  Marie-Thérèse struck the first blow, a punch to the jaw, then Dora grabbed her by the blond hair, so meticulously coiffed in Belle Époque curls. They both rolled across the floor, slapping and punching.

  Picasso was dealing out brushstrokes right and left, faking indifference toward what was going on behind him, though inside he was seething in a Machiavellian frenzy. Sabartés noticed he was more elated than ever.

  His women were on the floor, fighting, scratching, yanking out hair by the roots, pinching and biting each other’s breasts, kicking their backsides! Wasn’t it magnificent? It would have been better if they’d ended up in bed making love to him, he thought, more and more triumphant as he watched his wife and his lover getting beaten up for the cause, for him, the trophy, the talisman, the lustful object of their wrath. But he’d have to be satisfied with a brawl instead of romance.

  Neither of them would ever again resemble the models that the Great Genius had immortalized in his paintings, so low had they sunk. Dora had lost all her elegance, he had sucked her dry of the last ounce of mystery, and nothing remained of the intelligence that had captivated her Master in those Man Ray photos and had enslaved him to her blinding beauty.

  From the corner of his eye Picasso watched her screaming obscenities, her mouth gaping wide, her eyes red and bulging, her hair disheveled, her dress torn. This image satisfied him more than the first photographs Man Ray took, because at last he was discovering the broken woman, her tattered soul, her mouth twisted into a grimace and eyes frozen in weeping, rage inflaming her swollen flesh. This grand spectacle finished her off as an enigma. Wounded, Dora ceased to be the intelligent woman and became the tormented lover. Everything he’d loved about her, her masculine side, lost its power in this torrent of tears and moans. The gravitas vanished from her face, replaced by a melancholy frown. What emerged was the soiled, rotten, diluted, insipid woman of water.

  “I liked her as much as if she’d been a man,” Picasso put it on one occasion, “and, well, that day when she and Marie-Thérèse decided to fight over me, she looked like such a woman to me, I stopped loving her.”

  Once her masculine armor of wisdom (claimed as the exclusive property of men) was shattered, the fragility of the wounded, dying lover appeared. The hysterical tears were followed by mockery. Picasso reveled, he delighted, in ripping her to ribbons.

  “I stopped loving her when she appeared to me as a regular woman, fighting with another woman, over me.… And the thing is, I’d seen that so many times.… It offered me nothing new. For the first time, Dora didn’t surprise me,” the Great Genius lamented.

  I set my glass on the table. The woman who looked like Dora turned her gaze on me and held it there until I lowered my eyes to stare at my notebook. When I looked up again, she was gone. The sun was setting golden over Venice.

  It seems the sunsets in this city are inevitably golden. I was sure some artist would be smearing a canvas, trying to capture the sobriety and elegance of the setting sun in ochre, pearl, and rose.

  “Every adventure has to do with.…”—with leaving someplace, with running away. Where had I read that phrase? In James Lord’s book?

  Every adventure means losing ourselves to a new place, a place we’ve never thought about before, a place we’ve never even noticed in our dreams.

  The austere aloofness of James. Venice, 1958

  I should be nicer to her. At least I could try pretending better. After all, we treated her to this trip, we’re the ones who invited her. At first, Bernard didn’t seem as excited about it as me, but now it turns out he’s gone crazy about Dora, and he never stops pointing out that I shouldn’t be so prickly.

  Picasso never loved her, and he treated her worse than a cow. Everyone knows that neither he nor anyone, anyone at all, loved her, certainly not him. I can’t be sure that no other man loved her, not even the ones I didn’t know who were trying to woo her with the idea of getting me away from her. None of them would have given her the love she gave Picasso. Not even Georges Bataille. Maybe Yves Tanguy did. So why should I love her, then? She’s nothing but a woman. Or worse, she’s too much more than a woman. Terrifying.

  But I contradict myself, I can’t help it, I love her because I could latch onto Picasso only through her, and I can’t find a good explanation for that. Maybe I have to give the same explanation the painter came up with for himself: I love her because she’s a real man. Her soul is male, entirely male, though wrapped in a woman’s body, fragile and somewhat coarse only in appearance. I love her because she’s as much of a man as Picasso. She’s like him. She is him.

  There’s no doubt. She’s an angel sculpted from mud with her wings sawed off. Or a sprite. Like Max Jacob.

  Picasso painted her weeping so many times because he thought that after cutting off her wings she’d be left wracked with pain for the rest of her life. But she resisted. Does anybody know why? I do. Because she’s a warrior. Invincible. She’ll never be defeated.

  And as far as I can remember, I’ve only seen her sniffle a couple of times, and almost never weep.… I should try to recall.… No, never. I’ve never seen her weeping.

  She bites her lip when she feels scorned, humiliated, but she doesn’t weep. Her eyelids fall heavily, as if she’ll never open them again, but she doesn’t weep.

  She isn’t a weeping woman. She’s a broken woman. Shattered, yes, undone. At the point of evanescence, as if she were going to vanish, suddenly about to fade away, shatter into a thousand shards. A woman dry as glass.

  When I watch her ordering a plate of garlic shrimp in a restaurant, I’m tempted to wrap my arms around her and kiss her on the cheeks. I can’t help feeling tender or compassionate, the life she lives grieves me. Compassion is what I feel, that’s the word. Her life goes on with nothing to look forward to but one day after another with nothing gained. Or maybe there is something. Perhaps she still longs for, still dreams of, the return of her tormentor, or of anyone who might take his place.

  When we eat dinner, she avoids looking me in the eyes, and she always addresses her remarks to Bernard; she watches him with a smile, self-effacingly. Bernard raises his glass in a dainty toast, first to her, then to me, but I’ve noticed he too avoids looking at me. He locks his eyes on hers, savors every sip, and doesn’t look away for a second. I calmly drink my red wine, or pretend I care about nothing, especially not the scoldings I get for how I savor my wine, which Bernard finds vulgar. It bothers Bernard when I toast with wine, a habit he considers low class, too American. He and Dora prefer Italian champagne. More power to them! I exclaim, not without some irony, and light up cigarette number who knows which. Yes, I also smoke like a chimney.

  Last night I ordered several glasses of Chianti, let my drinking get out of hand. I’ll never get used to drinking like a Cossack, it just took a few cups for my head to get as puffed up as a hot-air balloon and me to go around saying awful things. I got very sarcastic and wheedling and demanded that Dora explain to me how she made love with Picasso. How did he do it? How did he penetrate her? Vaginally or anally? Or both?

  I can imagine it so easily, I whispered into her ear. He penetrated you with a good deal of physical cruelty. He was a delightful sadist, a brute, a genuine bastard. I can’t deny it was those same qualities that made him so powerfully fascinating to me.

  Last night I behaved badly, very badly, I was a fool, I admit, especially with her, but also with Bernard, who couldn’t understand why I insisted on showing my worst side. I don’t understand what was going through my head either. I was very drunk, and that’s why I can’t accept that I did it on purpose. I’ve been worn out for days, it’s true, tired of it all, and it’s because I can sense we’ve alread
y experienced everything important we were going to experience. We’re already almost dead.

  I’m here so we won’t die, won’t rot all alone, and that’s why I’ve invited her to take this trip to Venice. I mean for her to get to know the city, to enjoy herself as much as possible before she goes back to Paris, before she shuts herself up again, this time forever, with Picasso’s paintings, with her idol’s things, with her God’s stuff, and suffers, in the end, unavoidably, the torments of remorse. I don’t know what to do with Dora, I don’t know.…

  Maybe if I buy her some presents, I could make her a little happier, or if I ask her to the theater. She’s so aggressively intense to be around. How could I get rid of her? I don’t want to!

  No, Dora will never be happy again, for one simple reason: she never was. She was never able to be. It never mattered to her.

  For the last two nights I’ve been plagued with these damned erotic dreams about Picasso. I tell her about it over breakfast, she rolls her eyes and replies, majestically, even delightfully, “I dreamed about him each and every night for over ten years. There were moments when I was terrified to go to bed. There were nights when I would have rather died than go to sleep.”

  Why should I want to be cheerful? Venice, 1958

  James was vulgar last night. Maybe I provoked him and didn’t realize what I’d done. I can understand him, I haven’t been friendly to him these last few days.

  Why will I always have to find excuses for men?

  No, this time I won’t. James acted like a real ass, he was insufferable, and I’m not going to forgive him so easily. It’s not worth thinking about for one more second. Once more, his attitude sowed doubt in me about what kind of sexual relationship I really had with Picasso.

  At the beginning of our relationship, despite the sour taste of his kisses, Picasso made me feel like a real woman. Some time later, he fell into his harsh, beastly routine.