The Weeping Woman

by Zoe Valdes

  When one lover becomes petty and insolent, that’s the worst thing that can happen to sex between two artists, two perfectionists. Most of the time I felt nothing special toward him, and he got pleasure only by hurting me.

  The first symptom I noticed was when I started dropping things, my hands couldn’t even hold a glass. I was always shaking inside, or else my body would tense up until it went into spasms.

  And had I really gone crazy that day when Jacques Lacan and Picasso decided to commit me to the Sainte-Anne Hospital and subject me to those electroshocks? Lacan was the one who prescribed the treatment and signed the admittance order, it’s true, but Picasso didn’t do anything to stop him. And Paul Éluard was there too, backing them both up. I’m aware that Lacan thinks I had two choices, the confession box or the straitjacket. But that only proves that he doesn’t know anything about me, that he doesn’t know me. There was a time when I gave in to men’s savage desires, to their aspirations regarding me, though they never took me into account. “Never again,” I promised myself.

  My room, much like a jail cell, was painted black and had no windows. The darkness swallowed up every bit of space. Or was it the other way around, all white? Was it dark or too bright? How many days was I locked up, how many years? My forehead and temples are sunk in that black hole of memory, sucked in by blinding light.

  I stopped talking, eating, dreaming. I stopped loving. And living.

  They insisted I switch my name. It was something we all had to do in our circle of Surrealists, friends for so many years. Our mutual trust was a comfort, but… I wasn’t me anymore. Nor were they them. Picasso forced us to play at switching our identities, and sexes. We obeyed him because he was the Great Genius, Cher et Beau, Beloved and Beautiful, the Master, God. When one of them had to turn into me, that person, using my name, couldn’t be anyone else, nobody but Picasso. Which meant going to bed with him, possessing me possessing himself.

  The men, bare-chested, took off their briefs. The women, also with their breasts to the breeze, spread their legs and started laughing. Couples swapped, intertwining in a daring, surreally erotic swarm. Picasso tried to get me not to join. He was saving me for himself. Yet he could go to bed with all the other women, and they with all the men. They all made love with and penetrated each other. I photographed the moans of pleasure, the pointed breasts, the open lips, the magnificent pubes, the penises dripping sperm, and the mouths waiting for the heavenly manna of pleasure to wash over them.

  I was supposed to be content with watching, just with observing. “Observe, observe, Dora!” the Great Genius murmured. I only had the right to observe those bodies in the sunlight, or sometimes streaked by stars. I was supposed to photograph and obey, as Picasso had trained me, while he enjoyed them all, women and men alike. If it had been a bullring, for the first time in history the bull would have worn out the picadors, the bull handlers, the audience, and even the matador, and left them all for dead. My lover didn’t feel the slightest bit of tenderness or compassion, only cruelty and greed. He seemed insatiable, forgetting that I was observing every detail through the camera lens. He overlooked my presence there, watching him make love with our friends. Or maybe not, maybe he did it on purpose, to drive me even crazier. No, he wasn’t forgetting at all; more like, my being there was what turned him into that ravenous beast, devouring pubes, stuffing holes, sucking nipples, clitorises, and anuses, and also letting the others do the same to him. More like, he was running riot in a whirlwind of reminiscences that excluded me because I’d never been part of them, kaleidoscopic memories of his old sexual life with Fernande, with Eva, with Olga, with Marie-Thérèse, with so many others.

  Man Ray took part, only as a spectator, in the evasive and malevolent sport of photography, by my side, hardly even brushing up against me. Now, when it was his turn to carry the name “Roland Ray,” he was supposed to grab Ady Fideline, the ballerina from Martinique, and make love with her nonstop, like a teenager rutting shamelessly for the first time. He handed me his camera and I was supposed to serve as the official recorder of his pleasure, so I unabashedly photographed his panting face. After a while he was spewing foam from his mouth, slobbering, and his eyes were pumped up, yellow as egg yolks.

  Yes, I really felt I was going crazy during those sessions, I suffered too much from Picasso’s loveless indifference, his passion for others, but it got even worse when I was subjected to his detachment, the disdain of his lust, when he started making excuses for excluding me from his filthy sexual appetite.

  Nusch came up to me and tried to take away my camera so I could join in with them and add my appetites to the orgy, but Picasso interposed himself between us. And I, sincerely and regretfully, had by then lost my drive. Nusch liked it when Picasso cornered her, it was a kind of trick to get away from her consumptive husband, diligent Paul Éluard, who now would often dribble spit and breathe noisily as he decoupled from the others.

  Picasso set Nusch next to Valentine Penrose, on the floor, kissing each in turn, but then it was Alice Paalen who got in between them and isolated Valentine, taking over her milky, languid, body. Valentine was a breathtakingly sensual and desirable woman.…

  The men, like genuine children, started a pillow fight. Tired of all the futile madness, I made as if to join them, though only so they’d start caressing each other again, but Picasso made a gesture like he was going to slap me, and that stopped me cold. A newcomer filmed it all. At last Man Ray put down his camera and, annoyed, asked Picasso why he treated me like I was his daughter and not like what I was, his woman.

  “She has no right to appear in these films, much less to sleep with anyone. She isn’t my daughter, but it comes to the same thing, she’s my lover, and I’m tired of explaining it. She’s only permitted to watch.”

  My eyes, watery, jumped from body to body, lusting to join in the freedom that linked them. But this jubilant dance was off limits to me.

  I clenched my jaw, furious, wanting to scream and show how angry I felt, but at the same time I was afraid to lose Picasso. He would have tossed me out if he’d so much as suspected I was being eaten away by jealousy and was dying to unleash my senses. And this greed was impervious to everything but jealousy; that’s just how it was. It was unutterably horrible; it gnawed at my insides and froze my soul. I was about to burst with anger, to tell him off, let him know it had been weeks since we made love and when we did it, he didn’t worry about whether I felt the least bit satisfied.

  “You don’t have to feel anything, I’m the one who should.” Those were his very words, the one time I complained about his lack of interest in whether I got any pleasure.

  “But Picasso, I’m a woman,” I tried to explain.

  “No, you aren’t a woman. You’re a Queen with a capital Q, and queens don’t need the nonsense of pleasure, or anything at all. You, just keep me satisfied and stay the way you are, unscathed, persevering, on your throne as Queen. You should behave like Paul Éluard—he lets me do it with Nusch and he also acts the fool when Man Ray enjoys her.… You’re a Queen, you’re my Queen, and that’s that, case closed. Shush!”

  I didn’t know what to say, I felt I could sense a very different, very egotistical love in his voice, a frustration, as if I really were his Queen and my station were high above the rest, up in a sort of observatory, from which I might contemplate the alien bedazzlements of Eros, hear the moans of naked bodies clamoring for mine, and with absolute dispassion withdraw from them and surrender to onanism in my celestial realm.

  I should have exploded a thousand times from rage. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have gone crazy. But I didn’t. Picasso demanded that I remain impassive, that I show nobility of spirit, and that if I felt jealousy wrenching my guts (he never referred to the heart, he considered it vulgar), then I should start photographing, filming, offering up my voraciousness in a more solemn, artistic, magnificent, detached, and everlasting way, as when a Queen on her throne draws a line with her scepter to mark the boundary between her
self and her subjects.

  The warmth of those bodies ceased to captivate me, I photographed them feeling utterly aloof; besides, I found it doubly uncomfortable because I had to keep my clothes on. Not that I wanted to undress, either. My body was too stout, it annoyed me, and it put Picasso at a disadvantage; he’d already called it to my attention: “You’re fat, and I do not by any means want them to see you like this.” While those skinny men showed off their equally malnourished wives, following the fashion of the moment, he and I both had flamboyantly robust physiques. Women were fascinated by Picasso’s body, but he knew I was beginning to sour among the men who’d abandoned the plump woman fashion of the Twenties and were coming under the sway of the addictive vision of sickly, frail women with underfed, childlike airs who were now in demand among some Surrealists. A new style imposed by the food shortages and scarcity of clothing brought about by the Great War. Picasso preferred for my body to remain hidden under a cloak of mystery. In that way, his friends could only imagine me masked behind an enigmatic exuberance touching on the unknown, as in a painting of Gala by Salvador Dalí.

  I could undress and join the others only when we got together as couples, specifically only when we were with Nusch and Éluard.

  Éluard sensed the awkwardness of my situation; he perceived that I was bitter, could feel my distress, but couldn’t do much for me. He couldn’t stand up to his friend, Picasso, so he confined himself to writing me a poem, appropriate and puerile, that wouldn’t rock the friendship he kept up with the painter. Nusch pressed it into my hands one afternoon, a slip of rice paper, rolled up and scented with drops of Guerlain cologne. I kept it in an old secretary desk for years, later it traveled with me at the bottom of my purse until, from fear that the envelope and slip of paper would disintegrate, I added it to a folder of old documents and returned it to the desk:

  Figure of strength, scalding, savage,

  black hair where gold flows southward.

  Intractable unbounded.

  Useless.

  Such health erects a prison.

  In Mougins, in the early years of my life with Picasso, I posed constantly for them on the beach.

  Paul Éluard suggested I should let my hair grow and comb it with the ends out. I looked a little like Gala, which I hated, but I paid attention and let it grow. Then Picasso, ecstatic, started painting me like crazy. I had to put up with long hours in front of his easel, and when something didn’t turn out the way he wanted, he’d insult me.

  “You aren’t a beautiful woman. Though you think you are, there’s nothing beautiful about you. The proof is that I can’t paint you right when you look normal. If you’re weeping I can, because when you do that you look funny, and that amuses me, cheers me up, and my hand becomes free. But you’re not a woman who tends to inspire anyone to reproduce beauty, because I can’t get anything worthy of the sublime out of you. Nothing about you is sublime, just unusual; as a woman, your features look odd. Besides, there’s no harmony! You pad out the whole canvas. And that frightful, puffed-up hair!”

  Éluard kept writing, quietly, suborned by his own silence and embarrassed by the complaints his friend was aiming at me.

  That’s why all the portraits Picasso did of me at that time show me weeping. I was the weeping woman in his paintings, but I rarely wept in real life. My melancholy wasn’t an actual fact, and reality didn’t matter much him. He would reveal my face in oils on a canvas and proudly exclaim to his visitors, “Look at how she weeps for me!”

  I had nothing extraordinary about me, but I really was filled with fury. Unusually furious, that I was. I sense I was going to turn hateful or go crazy. Furious, angry, pained, tormented; my lips were dry from vomiting so often and biting them in anger. But Picasso was unable to decode my anger, much as I wanted him to so I could at last forgive him. Picasso couldn’t understand why I was frowning when he played at being the photographer, snapping a photo of Jacqueline Lamba next to me and comparing the two of us. I knew she was going to come out better than me, because I didn’t feel beautiful, but he was sure to point it out to me.

  “Aren’t you embarrassed? You’re not like her, you’re nothing to look at.”

  I no longer knew who I was, I’d lost all perspective about myself. I appealed to the mirror, and the surface reflected a squat, dark figure full of unintelligible meanings, of codes and ciphers I could scarcely crack, much less mull over. Because of him, his insistence on the invisible nature of the body, I became a cryptic woman. Good energy no longer flowed from my body. I didn’t give enduring, positive vibrations. Everything that came from me merely trickled out and soon evaporated, leaving no trace of my essence. He wanted to blast my yearnings, crush my aspirations. I accepted it because I longed for it. I allowed it more as a whim than out of love. I’d fallen in love with Picasso on a whim, as a Surrealist experiment: I yearned to find the man, the god, who could make me a goddess.

  And he did it.

  With all the difficulties it entailed, I was his goddess. He used me until he imagined there was nothing left of me that he could exploit and subdue, until he had finished hundreds of portraits and had decreed that, with all those paintings, I was less a person than a figure belonging to him and so, from then on, I should be very highly valued.

  PART III

  AN EXTRACT FROM ALL THESE SILENCES

  Bernard sheltering in my secret. Spring 2011

  The friend whom Bernard and I had in common let me know this morning that the poor fellow was bedbound now, spending most of his time on the computer he kept propped on his legs, surfing for porn. Bernard had asked our friend if he had any news about me and whether I was still planning to write about the trip to Venice he and James took with Dora Maar.

  “You should call him,” Ramón Leandro observed.

  “I don’t dare,” I murmured into the phone.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t dare, it was that so much time had passed, and perhaps the product wasn’t going to be what he’d expected of me, I clarified. Besides, he was finally acting his age, that is, you could really tell that he’d gotten old. He wouldn’t be happy at all for me to come around visiting him after he had changed so much, much less for me to bother him with a novel that didn’t reflect the true story of what happened, because that’s what it was going to be, a novel, not a mere chronicle.

  “I’ll wait a bit longer,” I assured him, “but we don’t have much time left, either.” Dora had been right: we writers are a bunch of boastful traitors.

  The doorbell rang; I shuffled into the foyer. It was the mail. From the bundle of letters I fished out an invitation from the Maison de l’Amérique Latine. It was about a book presentation for Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s latest, a biography of St. Teresa of Ávila.

  For years I’d been living with Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s biography of Dora Maar, imagining its Argentine author, dreaming of meeting her, and here a chance to do so falls into my lap. I looked for the date on the announcement; scheduled for June 20. I couldn’t possibly go, as I would be in Arras then. Maybe I could send her a letter via the Maison. A letter? What an idea! To tell her what? Simple enough: that I was writing about Dora Maar, that I was concentrating on the five, or rather eight, days she spent in Venice, about which no one could ever discover anything, and about which Alicia Dujovne Ortiz herself must still be wondering, given that after this trip Dora Maar decided to shut herself off from the world for good. And that she, and the questions she raised about that brief sojourn, and Dora Maar’s behavior from that time until her death, her seclusion after the trip, were what had inspired me to recreate those five day (or eight, counting the journey back) that she spent with James and Bernard under the spell of Venice’s charms.

  I realized I had never seen Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s face in the press, hadn’t even bothered looking her up on the Internet. I went to do so. I turned on my computer. Typing rapidly, I searched through the photos in Google—it’s so easy to look up people’s records today. There she was. Her face spoke to
me somehow, it was possible we’d met; yes, I must have run into her at some event. But no, it’s some other feeling. I got the impression I’d been with her on some very special occasion, that I’d been her friend and that, in some far distant spot, we had arranged to hold a conversation about our heroine. I paced back and forth, scribbled some notes, and finally forgot all about it.

  A bit later I started cooking, I put dinner in the oven and sat in front of the television to watch the news. I suddenly sat up in my chair. Now I knew where we’d seen each other! I ran to my office and rummaged through our box of old photos.

  She was the woman who’d been sitting at the table in that Venetian café, right next to ours, anxiously waiting for someone, fixing her makeup, attentive to the slightest flaw she could find in her compact mirror.

  She also appeared in a photo Ricardo had taken of me with the little one asleep on my lap. The Argentine writer, whose face had been a mystery up to now, was there in the background of the snapshot. She gazed out at the sea mist pooling over the darkening waters of the Grand Canal. She looked very attractive that evening, decked out in a blue dress with tiny yellow flowers.

  Life is full of coincidences, and literature makes the most of them and turns them into random accidents and amusing incidents. In the end, it tosses them into the fertile pool of memory. It is only by fishing them out and polishing them until they shine that they can be turned into something of unique significance, spun from words.

  Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Falling into Zugzwang. Venice, 2008

  I discovered, on my own one day, this little church clad in pearl-

  escent marble, a jewel box blown up to astonishing proportions. I was taking a stroll, and the half-opened church door, together with the simplicity of the portico, powerfully caught my eye.

  Entranced by the charm of the place, I crossed the threshold and found no one inside there but me. Not a single visitor.