The Weeping Woman

by Zoe Valdes

  The façades dissolved, behind them a monte thick with trees appeared, and she could hear the beating of drums and melodious Yoruba chants. Then the dense trees closed in around her, tightening, the underbrush grew in every direction. Brash, she ran barefooted, trying out the novel sensation of entering the scrubland on her own. She felt it was like being baptized. The vegetation ended up running into a colorful jungle where reeds wrapped around the broad trunks of ceiba trees. She heard warm murmurings, soporific as the buzzing of bees, and in the end, the lyrical song of a bird she’d never seen before.

  Dora had walked nonstop along the vast, labyrinthine cobblestone lane until she reached a dead-end street, or rather, a street whose only outlet was the sea, and she faced a steamy curtain of mist rising off the water of the Grand Canal.

  The sun was setting. Never before—except during her illness—had she managed to get so unfathomably far from reality, only to live consciously in the foggy, unreal space of worlds she had invented in a state of lethargy she was unable to control.

  The man who looked like Wifredo Lam, the one she’d crossed paths with in the lane, was now right behind her, was going to touch her on the shoulder. She turned around. “I don’t think either of us knows where to go. I suggest we keep each other company,” she pronounced.

  “Señora, I have no choice but follow you, you’ve chosen me as your shadow,” the painter’s double stammered.

  Dora smiled timidly. This was why only isolation, or what others thought of as solitude, awaited her when she returned to Paris. A solitude overpopulated by phantoms. With them around, Dora would have enough to maintain her balance on the edge between anxious endlessness and indifference to eternity, that hackneyed concept.

  She’d held out on that edge, though just barely, hanging on by an imaginary cable, kept aloft by the wind, during her internment at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, not knowing exactly for how long, under a different name, abandoned and forgotten.

  The only thing she could recall, could view through a sort of nebula, was the rope high up above, herself hanging, and the wind gently rocking her, helping her to stand. She also saw broad corridors that narrowed into the interminable distance, doors opening and closing, and the faces of dead people, of the living dead, who recognized another dying person in her, just one more among them all.

  Her bruised face glimmered with large drops of sweat. She could tell from the sharp pains in her cheeks. Her teeth had gotten loose and her knees trembled all the time. Her body was like a map, marked by bruises and pricked by the needles that tore her skin, for she would impetuously wriggle from the arms of the attendant and run off, intending to pass straight through the walls, and then would crash her body into them.

  However, every single night she was there she dreamed of sunny gardens, a field awash in golden oranges, a horse that answered to the name of Jade, a man dressed in white, an Andalusian woman singing at a flamenco show. But the next morning, she would be awakened by the smell of urine mixed with bleach.

  An episode of disorder. Venice, 1958

  I don’t like to daydream; I find it fairly disagreeable, unpleasant, and absurd, quite harmful to my mental health. It isn’t just that it fills me with dread, it’s that I lose control of myself. That precisely is what happened to me a short while ago. I was walking, and I started recalling the day I met Wifredo Lam, one of the greatest artists I’ve known and admired. For me there is only Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, and Wifredo Lam. If I could recognize myself in any of the artists of my time, I swear I’d love to have created the powerful works of Lam. He possesses the lordly gravitas of his ancestors, he’s poetic in his forms and exquisite and powerful in his content; he’s historical with his content, moreover, deeply anthropological and prophetic. And he’s unlike anyone else, because he’s telling the story of a world that still hasn’t been thoroughly explored and doing it through the desires of a seer. He was able to shake off the influences of Picasso and a Surrealism that was past its prime. Lam had no parallels; he was a natural expert. Only two people equaled his greatness in the world of letters: Lydia Cabrera and Henri Michaux. I would have gladly traded places with either of them. Picasso would have admired and loved me much more if I had turned out like one of them. If Picasso was considered the genius of the twentieth century, then Lydia, Lam, and Michaux should be described as “the sprites of the twenty-first century.” Though my male double—as I believe I’ve already made clear—is Max Jacob. Max Jacob, in my judgment, was the greatest of them all. Neither an angel nor a sprite. A man, a poet.

  Unsettled by these thoughts, I head for Piazza San Marco; the city looks deserted, this oppressive drizzle keeps falling. From time to time I cross paths with strangers passing by with umbrellas of every color, all rushing as if they were late to some appointment, anxiously bustling, noticing no one else, for all the time we have available is this tiny crumb dangling over our heads like the edge of a sword. I should hurry along, too, since James and Bernard are waiting for me and have no idea where I am.

  At last, my ramble leads me into this enormous space, I’ve forgotten the name of this famous piazza. The cobblestones gleam like a crocodile’s skin. My feet are soaked, I could wring out my sneakers.

  I enter Caffè Florian to look for them, I check every room inside, my friends aren’t here. Yes, I remember now, this is Piazza San Marco. My favorite waiter has the same name: Marcos. My memory scatters among ragged crags and peaks, I partially recover it, as when we stop to pick a flower and its petals and its fragrance take us back to places where we’ve never really been. I leave Caffè Florian and nose around in various places: cafés, boutiques, inns, but my friends are nowhere to be found. I return, then, to the hotel. Their room key is not at the front desk. The young man at the front desk doesn’t know what’s going on with them, or else he doesn’t want to tell me.

  “They’re still not back,” the manager calls out from his little office. I get my key and go up to my room.

  I undress and take a warm bath.

  Sitting on the edge of my bed, I realize just how alone I am. I have no one. This trip is not mine. It’s their trip. They’ve brought me, and I’m superfluous, I’m in the way. From now on I’ll always be superfluous everywhere. Because I’m old and I’m alone, and I have more and more gaps all the time in my memory. I’m a woman abandoned by Picasso to a bitter and uncertain fate, that’s why I still have some value. Though James and Bernard might tell me it’s not true and try to convince me that I mean much more to them, it’s only because I’m still his lover in the Great Genius’s best paintings, immortalized as pauvre Dora, “poor Dora!” as he loved to call me, to humiliate me, just so, in front of friends and enemies alike. I know it’s all over. Period. No, now I’m nobody, I’m alone, I’m not his woman anymore, I no longer play any part of Picasso’s life. And I am no longer of any interest to those whose one great value is named “Pablo Picasso.”

  My eyes itch and burn, I try to weep but can’t. My tear ducts are dry and gaunt, dusty, cracked. I’m starting to become indecipherable even to myself. Nobody loves me, I love nobody. So much the better. Complete freedom. I can die without hurting them. I bet I could die and everyone would go on their merry way without me, utterly impassive. Isn’t that what I’ve aimed for all my life, for neutrality, for indifference, without the idiotic drama of having to make a confession of it to myself? To disappear without a splash, that’s what I’ve aimed for with my restless, youthful, old-fashioned body.

  These last few days have helped me better understand what I’ve suffered through. My double exile with my parents, my unbearably austere origins, and my calling to a creative life, apprehended on the way toward a cultural blending, a forced and unfinished blending. The oddity of my Surrealist and erotic art world has in the end battered and abused my true, sincere desires because of the inconsolable grief into which I was sinking. My meeting Pablo Picasso, the man I was waiting for to make me what I am today: disorder. And not so far away, I find myself now on a path
at last to the unknown, to God, who is unknowability: nothingness, pure and opaline. Is God knowledge? That’s what some people think, convinced they’ll be able to appropriate divinity for themselves and spoil it. In the same vulgar, inappropriate way they’ve taken over humanity.

  A dream. I see myself in a navy blue dress and matching shoes. A pair of hands is unbuttoning my shirtdress, but I can hardly make out his masculine face, bathed in light. He throws me on the mattress, I’m naked, his hands run over my body. His fingers enter my vulva, I enjoy being masturbated, slow, deep, delicious. The man kisses my lips, his mouth tastes of plums, and I guess that his eyes are green.… Then, just at that moment, I’m awakened by a comical melody. But the man was real, and I let him escape, though his fake-phantom shadow still weighs upon my body, once more throbbing.

  I lie on the bed for a bit, then go to the chair where I’ve left my purse, stick my hand in and search the inner pocket where I keep a sort of amulet: my first gift from James, an Egyptian ring, found at Deir el-Bahari according to the man who sold it to him, a fellow named Molattam, quite curiously shaped, ceramic inlaid with a wonderful turquoise gem. The ring shouldn’t be worn, the antiquarian warned him, it’s extremely delicate. It is simply a sort of spiritual talisman, a gem meant to nurture the spirit of whoever conserves it and observes it in the midst of her dreamworld. I always keep this piece with me. Even after someone shook my hand so roughly they practically reduced it to dust, I’m afraid of losing it. I keep its broken fragments in this bag. This ring may be the cause of our whole misunderstanding. Perhaps I was giving it more significance than it really had. Most likely I accepted the ring with false hopes, and all this was all just a pitiful muddle I brought upon myself, and it was really given to me as a vain and fleeting fancy. Maybe everything in my life, including my relationship with Picasso, has been nothing but a series of misapprehensions, of terrible misinterpretations by my dreamy, mercurial mind.

  I was his intelligent, brilliant freak whom he was pleased to cite doggedly: “Dora said this, Dora said that.” It was only at such moments that I was of use to him, only then that I ceased to be the beast and turned into as his adorable Dora. Before long he was back to painting me with those gigantic, monstrous feet, representing me in drawings and paintings as a shapeless beast, absurd, dreadful, and so saccharine I even looked stupid. Tediously melancholy eyes that fall like two gashes to either side of my face. Lips painted in red that spills over the corners of my mouth, twisted into a pleading grimace. A smile that inspires pity because there are worms in the gap between my lips and ants mangling my tongue.

  “Get out, go off to the countryside, by yourself!” he’d tell me in the middle of the war, and I’d have to leave with my problematic name, a name so dangerous that if I’d fallen into Nazis’ hands I could have disappeared, been deported, been killed. Even so, I had to leave, alone, by train. “Go by yourself,” he’d insist, bored.

  But I loved him, and I still do, yes, perhaps I still love him, I’ll always love him. And there was nothing I could do but leave in a daze, desolated, rush to the station, catch the train with my heart in my throat, and lightly accept the chance that an ID check could ruin my life, that I was putting myself at the risk of winding up in a concentration camp. But he didn’t see it, didn’t want to see it. Nor did he hesitate an instant before sending Marie-Thérèse and his daughter to an apartment quite far from his on Rue des Grands Augustins and setting them up there, on Boulevard Henri IV. What difference was it supposed to make to him, the Great Genius, if the mother of his child had to take the metro or come on foot to see him in the middle of the occupation, to beg him for the bare minimum they needed to survive, implore him for the little he’d allotted them, the little time, the scant resources! He didn’t care if I had to wait anxiously for him to visit me during the rest of the week, which he’d reduced to two days, and then he’d drop on me without warning! The other days were for her, the Vestal Mother, who had received his permission to visit the studio of the man she still considered her husband, the little girl’s father.

  I can still hear my paltry reply, dwarfed by the devastating presence of the mother of his daughter Maya: “But I’m the one you love!” And that unexpected response—or was it really so unexpected for him to silence me the way he did? “Dora Maar, you know that Marie-Thérèse Walter is the only woman I love.” And the answer from the only woman he loved: “You heard him. Get out of here!” Repeated like a litany, hammering my temples: “Get out of here!”

  Venice is a city where writing paper, blown glass pens, and fine crystal are sold everywhere. These luxurious products—elegant, tinted, embossed paper, and blown glass in all the colors of the rainbow—lift me up and cheer my soul. Standing in front of another shop window, I can be enchanted, captivated for minutes at a time, by all these fascinating kinds of paper and Murano glass ornaments.

  On the morning of February 14, 1938, I got the most wonderful letter in my life; my name was written out twenty-one times on it, in Picasso’s handwriting and blue ink. How could he not love me? Next, he dedicated a Surrealist story to me in which my name also appeared in a calligraphic form made to resemble a house: ADORA, all capital letters. He also covered one corner of a wall in my room with insects drawn in pencil, spiders. He entertained himself there, drawing little bugs, for hours, days, months. Did that mean that he didn’t love me?

  Picasso left me just as he washed his hands of Max Jacob; or perhaps he never belonged to either Max or me, and we never belonged to him, the way a beloved trophy would.

  “He loved you, Dora, he loved you,” James once assured me, “but he didn’t know how to show it. He loved you so much, the only way he admitted it was by hurting you.”

  James liked to recall the famous retort Picasso made to a German who’d asked him if he was the one who made Guernica. His response was lashing, no beating around the bush: “No, you were the ones who made it.” Nor could Picasso detach himself from the horrors he had committed. Max and I are two examples of the victims no one cares about. What does it matter? What difference do our lives make compared to the life of the Great Genius? None.

  “All that time, I had the following image of my life on earth, one that often recurred to me: I’m alone on the edge of the earth. Above my head, a night sky. Below, also the sky. And eternity cascading before me like a black waterfall.”

  I have the vague recollection of having written this reflection somewhere, but it must surely be about Max Jacob. Not about me.

  Or about me, from when I was one of the living dead, in that filthy hospital where they shattered half my brain.

  Discussion between overthrown idols. Venice, 1958

  “Who did she leave her cat Moumoune with, in the end?” Bernard asked James.

  James shrugged, then urged Bernard to ask her about Moumoune himself if he cared so much about the cat mess. James could be too brusque. Ask her what it was like the day she went off the deep end, too, he said, and caused such a ruckus that Picasso, together with Lacan, had her committed to the psychiatric hospital, above all with the approval of their friend Paul Éluard. Bernard shot back that he was in a better position to ask her about that heartbreaking passage in the bleakest part of her personal life.

  Madness is something people don’t want to deal with, not even from afar. She was mad or she wasn’t mad, but something happened, something strange, or they made it look like she was mad, or they drove her mad. And they took her there, like it or not. At the Sainte-Anne Hospital they subjected her to countless electroshock sessions followed by a fairly extreme treatment.

  “Was it Picasso who drove her mad? That’s what we could make of it at the time, but no one dares to confirm it,” Bernard insisted.

  “No, he took her out of her own artistic world and inserted her into the exclusive world of Pablo Picasso, he made her a slave to his work and his love. It was Lacan who broke her with the electroshocks. I’m not the one saying it. Others said it first. It’s clear that the lovelessn
ess of their breakup weakened her and that the extreme treatments they gave Dora for a disease she didn’t have shattered her psyche.” James lit a cigarette.

  “Is she still mad or was she cured?” Bernard slipped a light cotton sweater over his shoulders.

  “I think that Dora the artist was never mad. On the other hand, Dora, Picasso’s lover, was mad, very much so, even lingering at death’s doorstep because of all her repressed delirium at first, then vomiting out everything her guts conjured up in her. She only had moments of lucidity when she went back to being the artist. That’s why they admitted her under the name Lucienne Tecta and turned her into a phantom, erasing any hint of their culpability. Lacan made her one of his case studies. She brought together everything that interested him: her bisexuality, homosexuality, guilt, punishment, paranoia, self-flagellation, arrogance, meanness, awkwardness as a lover; but above all, the mystery of her being a great artist with an astounding mind, a mind of stifled thoughts.

  “Poor Dora! Lucienne Tecta…” Bernard’s voice sent a trail of echoes across the balcony facing the canal. Leaning out, he could see two cats romping with each other on the roof across the street. “Such innocence!”

  Yes, such innocence. And such indecency. James lay back in bed to write in his diary. His friend was enjoying the view Venice offered him from the balcony, the narrow street and the people walking down it who had nothing to do with the history they were experiencing, perhaps without realizing its true importance, possibly taking it all too lightly. A beautiful story of their friendship with Dora Maar, the former lover of Pablo Picasso. The sublime photographer, the misunderstood, unfinished painter.

  “Do you like her paintings?”

  James kept writing in his notebook and chose not to answer.

  “I do, a lot. Though, of course, I prefer Leonor Fini,” Bernard said, trying to provoke.