The Weeping Woman

by Zoe Valdes

  “As a painter,” James immediately replied, still visibly annoyed, “and as a photographer, Dora is one of the great Surrealist artists. Don’t call her ‘poor Dora,’ that’s what he calls her when he’s trying to make fun of her.”

  “James, have I said or done something to upset you?”

  Another doleful silence.

  Bernard closed the shutters. He settled in next to his friend in bed. They held hands. Bernard loved this friendship, though their amorous relationship had long since ended. Like this, fingers intertwined, he knew his friendship with James would last throughout his life and that he’d always like him, despite his bad temper.

  “You are such a grouch!”

  “And you never stop asking questions that don’t concern me. The thing is, you seem to have fallen in love with Dora.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Bah.” James turned over and pretended to fall asleep.

  From the street rose the buzz of diners at a nearby restaurant, the clattering of dinnerware and the typical commotion of Venetian waiters.

  “Do you think she expects something extraordinary from me?” James suddenly asked.

  “She expects everything from you. However, she’s resigned to waiting and living in this muddled uncertainty.”

  “Did you know, for a while, in the past, she and Balthus saw a lot of each other? They are still close friends, of course. We’ll really make her happy if we do take her to visit him on the way back to Paris, as we promised.”

  “Now you’re jealous of Balthus.”

  “No, really, not any more, though I used to be, of course I used to be.… Another great artist in her life, imagine, Balthus, Picasso.… Picasso actually was jealous, still is jealous, of Balthus, even though he knows Balthus is only attracted to teenage girls.”

  The blue twilight grew dimmer until the room was left in darkness. Bernard lit another cigarette. The glowing tip moved through the shade toward his mouth. The small burning circle then traced the other male form, silhouetted against the cloud of smoke.

  “James, what is Dora to you?”

  “A goddess!” he exclaimed without stopping to think, but he immediately reflected, falteringly: “A child.”

  The Queen of Tibet. Paris, 2010

  Secluded at a table in Café Sully on Rue Saint-Antoine, I write in my small notebook and then transcribe it to the laptop. I enjoy transferring my notes to the keyboard, because I’m one of those who still feel that writing by hand in a notebook links us to the great writers of past times. Writing in pencil now belongs to an ancient language, and translating it by keystrokes still represents, for me, a more complex and modern language, less suggestive, and not at all mysterious. I see the text better when it is written on paper. I am still not used to reading on screens, or to correcting my writing directly on the computer.

  While I write, I’m thinking about Dora—for years I’ve been thinking about her, dreaming of her, talking with her—and while I think about her, I’m watching people go in and out of the café from the corner of my eye. At this exact moment I see a haughty, elegant woman with black hair and pearly white skin. She sits at the table next to mine, smiles at the waiter and then at me, then turns back to the waiter and orders a vodka with orange juice, no ice. She isn’t very tall, but she looks it. She is wearing lots of Tibetan bracelets on her forearm; she’s covered in jewels, as if she were the Queen of Tibet. That’s the first image that comes to my mind.

  “The Queen of Tibet,” I repeat to myself in a litany. That is what Dora Maar started to call herself when she realized, without wanting to admit it, that she was going to lose Picasso. Besides, to make matters worse, she lost her mind. This woman looks like Dora Maar, and she also has something in common with Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, but she’s neither of them, though she manages to be a combination of them both. Now the woman I’m calling “the Stranger” opens a book of Surrealist photography, quite a coincidence. It is a beautiful picture book, and it sold very well when it was published. She thumbs through it, gently, and carefully studies each photograph under a small illuminated magnifying glass that she pulls from a side pocket of her full skirt.

  The Queen of Tibet had been found one afternoon naked in the hallway, another time she stripped in front of some neighbors in the entrance hall to the apartment on Rue de Savoie where she lived with her cat Moumoune, a present Picasso had given her after her little dog was stolen.

  Later, she walked barefoot down the street and even told the police that her bicycle had also been stolen when, in fact, she had abandoned it by the Seine. The Queen of Tibet began speaking in verse, in what seemed to be incoherent moralizing maxims, tossing out unintelligible messages, tinkling and absurd phrases: “Trees are like balloons about to fly away,” she muttered. “Everything is simple, and I admire the utter doom of objects,” she stressed in one grim declaration.

  Her glassy eyes closed sorrowfully, her lids falling slowly in a strange, deathlike movement that hinted at a psychological rather than physical weariness. Her mouth drooped, her lips had lost their color and even the vibrant pout they used to sport.

  She was only thirty-eight years old. Electroshock could only be given to those forty and over, Lacan stipulated.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the Great Genius told the psychoanalyst on the way to the psychiatric hospital. “It is absolutely essential for her to forget. To forget me!”

  The Queen of Tibet forgot so much, she even forgot her real name. Now she was going by “the Queen of Tibet” and could recollect, in bits and pieces, that she had once loved someone very important. She could tell this from the precious protuberance she had on her forehead, invisible to other people’s eyes, except for the bald, pot-bellied man with the square head and the bulging eyes with large, dark pupils that looked like a pair of dried blood clots, whom she couldn’t get out of her most caustic nightmares. He was the only one who noticed the huge horn on her forehead, and he had painted it just so, like a unicorn’s horn.

  Like an erect penis, to James’s eyes.

  The Queen of Tibet sensed that James loved her because, thanks to her, he could satisfy his suppressed homosexual passion for Picasso. James also felt attracted to her deified presence because of Picasso’s art. No matter where she went, she wasn’t going there as herself but as the living art of the Great Genius of the Century, with a tag dangling from her marked with a price still considered cheap. At that moment, she was drastically undervalued in comparison with what she’d be worth later on.

  “I am the Queen of Tibet, and you owe me respect and deference. All your belongings and your money shall be mine,” she decreed, obliging the young man of thirty-one to kneel in obeisance before the woman of forty-six.

  The young man watched her through eyes filled with tears.

  The old, ugly dwarf with the crazed eyes had once dominated her. Now it was her turn to subjugate the tall, trim young man with fleshy lips and fine skin, with abundant locks of hair falling over his eyebrows and a prophet’s or alchemist’s dreamy smile. She also started telling unpleasant stories about herself, describing herself as an avaricious queen whose greatest treasure was the drop of blood belonging to Picasso that she had dripped onto a piece of paper.

  She stopped eating, at most nibbling at something when she was by herself. She rarely went out, meeting with a few friends at a restaurant. If they asked if she’d eaten, if she were getting enough to eat, she would assure them she was, but then her friends would discover it wasn’t true, because as soon as they weren’t looking she would borrow a fork from the person next to her and start grazing off the others’ plates. This earned her the nickname Picassette, a play on pique-assiette (sponger, plate-picker) and a comically feminized form of “Picasso.”

  Her friend Leonor Fini tried to cheer her up, taking her in her arms, lulling her like a baby against her bosom. Dora’s head, resting on the artist’s shoulder, would sink into her breast, just as a bone two dogs are playing with will sink into a fluffy cush
ion. She seemed like a bewildered child, detached from everything, and Leonor was pretending she could take her dead mother’s place. Perhaps she was the only one who noticed that Dora was not really cured when she left the sanatorium.

  On the other hand, she never wept. Ever. She reasserted herself to her friends with impeccable, admirably incisive body language, with diabolically clever gestures that offered proof of her superb intellect.

  The Queen of Tibet had been diagnosed with delirium tremens, persecution mania, schizophrenia, and extreme paranoia. A nice cocktail of pills, electroshock, and isolation would do the rest. She couldn’t remember the exact moment when they freed her, that is, when they discharged her and put her back in the original setting where she had consummated and been consumed by her illness. But there she was, once more, for a very long time, longer than expected.

  Sitting on the stoop by the entrance, under the lintel of the door to her room in Venice, in the year 1958, Dora could take a deep breath and recall the entrancing aroma of ether. They were using bits of cotton to dry her temples so they could apply the electric shocks to either side of her head. She was angrily biting down on a piece of rubber, her body was contracting into a knot, from her trunk to every muscle in her face. The bright and deadly ray was coursing through her limbs, her waist was twisting, arching, her bones rattling, as if they had split a porcelain doll in half with a single stroke. It was horrible to watch. Dreadful and debilitating to experience.

  The roll of cotton kept her from biting her tongue or breaking her jaw. But sometimes it didn’t do any good and blood flowed copiously from her mouth. This treatment could supposedly be applied only to patients over forty, she heard the nurses around her emphasize. No one saw fit to check her age. Except Lacan, who again recalled, “She’s only thirty-eight.”

  And the Great Genius of the twentieth century uttered the sentence that finished off Dora’s sexual and spiritual life, finished off her emotional life, finished off life itself: “Je m’en fous, I don’t care! I’m telling you again, she has to forget. Besides, no one else is going to care about her. She’s no use to me, she’s no good for me. She won’t be any use to anyone else, or be any good for anything.”

  However, the Queen of Tibet would reappear much later, apparently cured. I say “apparently” because she wasn’t completely well, but she didn’t know that yet. In her nightmares a fist would pound on her throat, the back of her neck, or between her eyes, or would suddenly knock her down and smash all the tiny bones in her tailbone.

  In the past, at Chez Francis, she’d had to accept that things were really over with the love of her life when he introduced her to the young woman who was replacing her, Françoise Gilot.

  It happened in a seemingly simple way: she recited like an automaton to her young rival that everything between her and Picasso was over, just as her trainer’s tactics forced her to do. She feigned savvy by ordering the most expensive dishes and gulped down her pain with fine champagne, caviar, and foie gras. She was no longer the captive wild beast. And she was following a brilliant script.

  When the comedy was over, she went off on her own, but first she had to put up with the contemptuous mockery from her Maître, her master, her tiger trainer: “At your age you won’t need anyone to walk you,” he hurled at her with a snideness she recognized from a not very distant past.

  She responded no less sarcastically, “At your age, you need to lean on youth, like a cane, to get yourself anywhere.”

  She pocketed the ashtray Picasso had slipped to her after pilfering it from Chez Francis. She squeezed it angrily, her hand thrust between the silk and wool of her overcoat.

  The Queen of Tibet walked awkwardly, as if she would collapse at any moment, while recalling the words of Paul Éluard, one of her few friends: “He’s sold too many paintings to the Germans to be trusted as a member of the Communist party.” And what the hell good did being a Communist do? she wondered, furiously chewing her lips. It didn’t even help you be a man.

  I wrote all this and more in the Café Sully, so engrossed in and focused on my writing that I hadn’t noticed the woman at the table next to mine had quietly left.

  “When did that lady leave?” I asked the waiter. “I hadn’t even noticed she was gone.”

  “About an hour ago, my dear petite dame, about an hour ago.”

  How long had I been writing in the café? Several hours, many hours, I didn’t want to calculate it. I was starting to feel bad and didn’t know why. I paid the check and decided to go home. It was already dark.

  The Café Sully never closes.

  Reciprocal offerings between deities. Venice, 1958

  God had surely given her this trip as a gift. Now they were nearing its end and she didn’t want to spoil it; she had to behave nicely and be good, promise herself to be well-mannered and kind toward James and Bernard. But to be honest, she preferred to be just as she always tried to seem: tough, strict, demanding. Though she was falling apart inside. She’d had a few drinks in her room and felt happy and tipsy. God had also given her three horrific gifts: Picasso, a chair on which he used to paint her, and a church kneeling bench. God sent her those two last gifts through the painter. She got them after they were already living apart, and she was sure that he had sent her both the heavy torture chair and the church kneeler to remind her that she was and would continue to be his lifelong victim, and he her tormentor, and that all she had left to her now was devotion to God. God had formed her exactly as she was now, at fifty years of age: honey on the inside, superior hard rock on the outside.

  In exchange for these hideous presents, Dora sent Picasso a rusty, broken, worm-eaten shovel, which James was kind enough to convey to him. Picasso died of laughter when he got it and assured James that no one but that woman, that madwoman, could understand his messages and respond in kind.

  God never stopped putting her to the test, but during her youth she couldn’t hear him, because what fascinated her was the wonderful sonata of art, its fervent melody, its transcendent meaning, and like all young people she’d been egotistical, greedy for everything earthly that the age demands.

  First, God made her Georges Bataille’s lover, turned her into his perverted, cultish sadomasochistic muse; after Bataille came others, almost all of them important Surrealist artists; finally, her greatest and hardest test: Pablo Picasso. The Great Genius of twentieth-century Cubism. And, not satisfied with her work, God cast her from the heights, forcing her to fall headlong and smash herself to bits in the harshest, most remote chasm. Would James be her savior, the one to catch her at the last second, just like in the movies?

  She had to recover her strength, lift herself up, climb the unmentionable paths of shame and bitterness, reach the summit once more, if there was still time for her, curl up in a bend of the road, wait and get used to it, accept the idea, realize that the only alternative she had left was to surrender completely to Him, to the one, true, authentic Lord of her solitude. God, then, is nothing but abandonment, estrangement, isolation.

  In a short time they’d be leaving Venice, they’d take the car and make the trip back to Paris by highway. James promised her they’d visit Balthus. After a few hours, or days, it would all be over, the trip would come to an end. The trip of her life and the journey of life.

  In the secret of myself

  living you make me live my own secret.

  This room where I lived in madness, fear, discomfort

  is the simple birth of a summer’s day.

  Exile is endless but it is summer,

  silence under full sun.

  An enclave of peace where the soul dreams only happy things.

  A child on the highway home.

  The verses sprang to mind suddenly, strangely, vaguely. Yet even though she visualized them clearly and sharply, she couldn’t remember when she wrote them, or in what context. Nor did that matter to her any more; all that mattered was the essence of the verses: chaste, humble, free from the strident malice that arises from
the ridiculous, aggressive egotism of mediocre poets.

  Nothing worthwhile happened on this trip, but at least she had restored peaceful relations with James. It had been one more jaunt with him, though longer and farther than their earlier ventures; another stroll by his side through the vast society of solitude that the world had become. Both of the men accompanying her had tried to be nice, and she was deeply and sincerely grateful. Nevertheless, she was expecting much more from her young friend, a more delicate devotion. Though she suspected there wouldn’t be any more to him than an interest in having her friendship, just as he aspired to own the artworks Picasso had painted for her. Perhaps she was being unfair, she supposed without getting too upset, but she had to find an excuse for getting away, and she’d already given so much that she now only wanted them to give her the courtesy of letting her be unfair at the last moment, the moment of bidding farewell.

  Her friendship with James Lord was slowly being reduced to this, strictly to trading information about Picasso’s work, and she knew that the others, his friends, never stopped gossiping about it. She didn’t deny James loved her—of course he loved her, in his own way, a way that involved few social obligations. She couldn’t even fall back on the powerful treasure of having shared intimate moments of physical love. She hadn’t permitted it, and he didn’t have the right disposition. It could have succeeded, that night when he lay down by her side, in her bed, at Ménerbes, under the stifling and sustaining light of a candle. She took his hand and placed it on her breast, his hand clutched hers, but she withdrew it, and when he asked her if there was something she desired that he should do, she told him no. Told him everything was better this way.

  They packed their bags that same afternoon. They left the Hotel Europa, seemingly having fun, between the fake acid barbs Dora hurled at the couple and their over-the-top retorts, which also papered over their real frame of mind, which was quite low.

  They got into the vehicle. The rain was coming down hard. In the car, James and Dora argued over nothing, over nonsense that she preferred to forget or that she had simply erased from her memory. Bernard mediated unsuccessfully, trying each time to tilt the situation in Dora’s favor, and incidentally in his own, with the same skill he used when he had to get out and repair the car on several occasions, under the heavy downpour but fortunately with greater success. James also tried to fix the car several times but was unable; he didn’t know the first thing about mechanics or any of that nonsense.