by Zoe Valdes
Besides, it’s not that she was enthralled by James Lord himself; her genuine feeling of love for him arose from an aesthetic visual image: the image of him in the enormous, sculpture-crammed room where the Great Genius worked, surrounded by all sorts of stuff, true masterpieces along with vulgar bric-a-brac, in the midst of which the soldier looked like an ephebe from ancient Greece, yet another object to be preserved and adored.
Dust reigned in that room, so eclectic it tired your eyes to look at it all, where you could hardly make out the stained and threadbare old red crepe sofa, or Kazbek, the dopey dog, lolling in the spot where the sofa sagged most deeply.
That afternoon when she first discovered the lad, he was half-naked in the suffocating heat, and the smell of the cushions mingled with the smell of James’s sweat (and the sweat of previous guests), while he slept, or pretended to sleep, stretched out on the garish couch, making him scandalously seductive. His face shined as if bathed in a patina of marble, looking keen and serene, as if time’s glacial passing had turned him into a Taino stone artifact polished by calm and silence. Picasso was painting nearby. He approached the sleeper when he saw Dora enter. With an aristocratic gesture of his hand he indicated she should take care not to disturb him. He chuckled. “Be careful, Dora, don’t wake him. This little American soldier is my war trophy, you know.”
The Master skipped off playfully, pleased with himself. After a while he came back, still smiling, muttering flirtatious remarks at his guest. Dora still stared in amazement at that pile of fresh, tasty, delectable flesh, assembled as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle. Picasso began showing off to the other visitors who were now arriving what he called the “Sleeping Liberation Warrior,” as if he were one more object in his personal collection.
“Look, look! Isn’t he stunning? Isn’t he absolutely glowing with health?” he whispered.
Picasso’s admirers had no choice but to utter compliments to each other, faking an admiration for the living work of art outstretched before them, whom the Cubist genius would have titled Sleeping Soldier. To all appearances, the sleeping lad’s utter surrender had transformed the artist into a passive spectator, chosen by the object of his observation, flattered and satisfied in the deepest part of his ego, since everything indicated that the lad had made an exclusive and everlasting gift of his sleep to Picasso alone.
This image, these memories, these events, had captivated Dora more than the actual person behind them. From that day forth, Dora appreciated James Lord for his boldness and his brilliant ability to turn his own self into a Picasso.
Years later, when the painter had abandoned her and Lord had begun to woo her, she realized that Picasso had unknowingly led her to a man who would go to any lengths to help her heal from her irreparable loss. Actually healing was another story.
As she wandered over the rusty, cobblestoned streets of Venice, a putrid odor arose from the lagoon, shattering her rose-colored image of palazzos with their prominently displayed coats-of-arms of old families of the Novecento, some waning, some prospering. Most had already disappeared by then, with their burning desire to amass more riches and titles, or else had grown perfectly accustomed to sneering bitterly at the end of their frippery and frills and the triumph of the bourgeoisocracy.
On one of her walks she realized—as if receiving a memo from the past—that the first time her body had been aroused about James was when Picasso told her he had kissed the good-looking soldier. She had not witnessed it herself, but she had indeed been there at the moment when the lad awoke from his long sham sleep and rose from the sofa to go to the living room, constantly trailed by the frightening shadow of the sickly, skeletal, skeevy Afghan hound that responded lethargically to the stupid name of Kazbek.
The guests paid no attention to the dog, much less to James. The lad announced in a drowsy voice that he was about to leave. Dora returned to the other room, followed by the entourage of visitors. It was then that Picasso, taking advantage of his being alone with James, took him in his arms, brought his lips close, and planted them on young man’s blushing cheeks. The American was overwhelmed by the kisses of his idol, and he let Picasso do it, ecstatic, immobilized by excitement and desire.
He was unable to respond, however, because he didn’t know whether he should return the kiss, and at the same time he was overcome by an inner thrill that, although enjoyable, was too unsettling and too exquisite for his taste. He had desired this kiss and he accepted it happily, but innocently, rather like a child. James later told Dora that this show of exaggerated affection had been totally unexpected and unprecedented for him, and it had stopped him in his tracks, given that nothing of the sort ever happened in his own country between two men, and even though it had, of course, aroused him from head to toe, like a teenaged boy fingered and caressed for the first time, the worst shock had been discovering that it gave him an erection.
Much later, once again recalling the event with Dora, she had told him, “In France, a kiss like that doesn’t mean anything sexual; it’s usually the same as shaking hands. Of course, who knows what Picasso intended by embracing you and kissing you so passionately. You never can tell with him. Can I share something with you? He used to love pulling my hair just to hear me scream—that’s what he’d say—and he did it so savagely I almost passed out, and when I screamed he couldn’t hide the endless delight and pleasure my pain gave him.”
She could now smile as she listened to James relate how Picasso talked about her when she wasn’t around, though she could imagine the sarcastic sorts of comments he threw at her, meaning to take her down a peg, making fun of her to his heart’s content. Sure, he’d say, she was a first-rate photographer, but then he’d add that she had never picked up a brush before she met him. Of course, he’d say, she was a brilliant photographer and yes, certainly, as soon as they met Dora began taking hundreds of photos of him, and she wouldn’t have been happy if someone like James took the place she’d always held as his portrait photographer.
While she stood apart from the pair, aiming her camera to take her famous photograph of them, the vain Picasso shared these bits of gossip with his newly-arrived guest, whom he would later consider an upstart.
“Take your time, Dora. This will be a one-of-a-kind portrait. I will never pose with such an attractive American soldier again,” he jabbered, laughing his head off.
Click. Dora captured a superb shot of the two. Two such different men, who would nevertheless play such complementary roles in her future.
She dragged her feet along the dense evening streets of Venice, feeling the decadent humidity of the cobblestones, wondering if she would ever return to this city with James and Bernard, or perhaps just James. And if Picasso ever asked her to make this trip again, would she accept? No. Never. They’d never do it. It was too late to bring Picasso back into her life, and she couldn’t allow herself to be seduced again by someone she now knew she should handle very carefully. A woman’s life is a perfect litany, like a Bach fugue, basically unvarying, then building in a crescendo to nowhere, until at some point it all collapses and nothing is ever the same again. Nothing in this infinite song of life, not a single melody, ever repeats, not even one faltering note.
She was spontaneously overcome by a fit of nervous laughter. James had once told her how he sometimes passed himself off as Picasso’s son, and how he used this trick to mess with more than one stuffy, old-fashioned gallery owner, the sort who loathed the Spaniard for his “incompetent” paintings, his unbearable moodiness, and his uncontainable verbal diarrhea.
“It got worse when he decided to join the Communist Party. Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard were the ones who got him all fired up and talked him into agreeing to become a Bolshevik.”
“He’s just a Commie, yes, sirree! That father of yours is really something!” blurted out one of those old schoolmarm dealers who found Picasso’s work horrendous and who never completely believed l’américain Monsieur Lord when he claimed to be the Great Genius’s son. “Aragon ca
n be very persuasive, because he not only dresses the part, so elegant, but he’s also attractive; he has a free hand with gifts and an ingratiating tongue for flattery. At least, that’s what the women who hang around him say,” said the “schlock handicraft saleswoman,” as Picasso called her type of dealer.
James never could stand Aragon, who was too devious and twisted, a real reptile, truly a snake, doing whatever it took to charm and humor those beguiled by his sibylline circumlocutions. Paul Éluard was a different story. James liked him from the start, since he always treated James with tactful kindness. James was a nobody, but Éluard talked to him one-on-one and gave him his full attention. He seemed so nice, and besides, James never knew how he managed it but he could always entrap him in an intricate conversation, full of the big-boned words that Éluard loved to employ: “pistil,” “limbo,” “nonchalance,” “demon,” “rhinoceros,” “pitch-black.”
Dora felt a viscous liquid sloshing against her feet; a reddish trickle started to fill the cracks of the pavement and cover the soles of her shoes. The overcast sky offered a crushing view of the city, as if it were about to fall with all its leaden weight flat upon her. She felt as if the walls were closing in on her, as if the streets were narrowing until she would be squashed between the buildings. She felt trapped, scarcely able to breathe.
James had once told her that “every adventure is about going to a particular place, arriving at a destination, whether physical or spiritual, normally at some distance from where you started, which in any case is irretrievably lost in time. There’s also the possibility of a quest, if only a quest to find yourself.” Why could she always remember what James Lord had told her and hardly ever what Picasso said? Was it just that whatever words Picasso said to her weren’t particularly memorable or eternal? She could vividly remember every sensation from every moment she’d spent with Picasso, but the things he had expressed in words had been few and scarcely interesting. So far from wise that she hadn’t added any to the album of famous quotes she jealously treasured in the most hidden recesses of her mind.
The walls that had closed in on her now withdrew again, until she suddenly found herself in the middle of a vast space, with that same black cloud still looming overhead, and she did nothing but prance about stomping in puddles as viscous as coagulated blood.
Two phantasmagoric figures appeared before her, like silhouettes drawn in pencil, embossed in graffiti dust, specters subordinated by their long-limbed movements. One of them was the painter, the other the young soldier. Picasso lay on a pile of big cushions, motioning for the lad (also drawn as if in an animated cartoon) to cross the threshold. James lay down next to Picasso, who pulled him close and kissed him on the lips, then backed off in surprise, staring into James’s eyes, and let out a sonorous guffaw.
“You are a miracle, a miracle!” he exclaimed, excited.
The vision was gone in a flash, and Dora found herself once more squeezed between the old palazzos and the foul stench of the lagoon. After that fever dream, another Picasso appeared, fuming in repressed fury.
The war with Picasso had long since ended, but as he himself had once told Lord, hostilities would persist forever. Any time they met, even if only in phantom form, it would trigger uncontrollable rage in them both, but especially in her, choking her, smothering her, making her sick. She didn’t want that, didn’t want to get sick, and didn’t want to spend the rest of her life remembering him with hatred.
Down below, mist spread in the opaque light of dusk, and a fine drizzle fell; up above, on the bridge, she gazed through her tiny opera glasses as if watching Assia, her former model, diving into water streaked with too much concentrated sunlight. Everything seemed framed like one of her early photos of Paris in the rain, or in the sun, a low-angle shot, the sort she took with Kefer in the early thirties. The water of the lagoon churned bottle-green, turbulent, stinking. She could photograph water like no one else, and no one could create liquid images better than she, finding the choppy waves in a model’s hair or in a body whose pores could be made to look, through the magic of the lens, like cresting foam or like the craters of some newly discovered hydraulic planet under study.
She knew she would spend her final years alienated and entrapped by a heap of memories, foremost among them those from her trip to Venice, where she made one of her last attempts to revive the water woman, the enthusiastic woman who stirred within her, always struggling to outsmart the clay woman who wept heartbroken, striving to reclaim her artistic self and eager to forget her lover. Maybe her memory was playing tricks on her, mixing up her success as a Surrealist photographer with that trip to Venice; maybe, too, Picasso’s phantom apparition came to her with the intention of dashing to bits the last hopeful dreams that were bringing her past back to life. So in order to make up for the turbulent invasions of her inner peace by these smooth, placid memories, she ran from home, from her solitude, with a stifling desire to seek the banal, furtive, iconically unnatural refuge of a church.
Sitting on a pew beneath the vault of Notre Dame, she was able to calm her spirit and redirect it toward a single figure: God. But when she resurfaced, out on the street again, the past seized her throbbing inner mind and then, as if hypnotized, she retraced the steps her old spirit had traveled.
In the middle of the crowded street, she imagined she saw James coming toward her with a bunch of russet orchids specked with emerald green, and she guided him to the staircase landing, after first happily accepting his embrace.
Thanks to the calling card that the florist had carefully pinned to the bouquet, she noticed that it had been bought on Rue Royale, at the Lachaume flower shop, a pricey location; she held onto that information, and then she appreciated the gift more for its cost than for its beauty. Her idea of beauty, especially when it came to art, tended to be less practical than the idea of beauty found in everyday life; if it was expensive it was good, better than beautiful, an idea that had caused not a few misunderstandings: people took her to be more selfish and egotistic than sensitive to expressions of generosity or poetic brilliance. She loved poetry, but she was a practical woman and hated people who used poetry as a means to other ends. She detested the tiresome use of lyrical wordplay for passing as the intellectual of the moment or the pearl found in the pigsty.
Picasso was very prone to this very type of false lyricism. She had learned it from him and also rejected it on account of him. Though it’s true that Cher et Beau—the nickname she and James had given him, “Beloved and Beautiful”—could be counted on to pull one of them out of thin air at the drop of a hat, as a clever reply to something more about politics than art. No one was ever able to trip him up in a conversation that dropped art in favor of politics; Picasso always came out ahead. Asked a million times why he had joined the Communist Party, he always answered it was because everyone had to demonstrate their commitment to a cause back then, and not just any cause, so he too felt obliged to belong to something and had gladly joined, and so had put himself in the role of a loyal individual, since he valued loyal commitment, a thing that many people had undoubtedly found beneficial. Why wouldn’t he find it profitable, too?
“Since one party is as good as another,” he said, amused, “I joined the party of my friends, who are Communists. In the end, I only did it out of friendship.”
Well, of course, doing it out of friendship gave him the apolitical status he needed in order to claim he was far above ideology. Dora also understood that this evasive behavior was what best suited a genius, that it was the equivalent of responding with a truthful performance in art. Frankly, it was better to be evasive than to surrender eagerly and fanatically to politics, because for artists, politics led to nothing but hate, bitterness, and slavery.
All the hours that she and James spent together in Ménerbes, they devoted most of their time to puzzling out the painter’s social and political persona.
Nevertheless, she now drove off the fervent visions and stances that cast doubt on Picasso, always
deferring to the attractive opinions that James brilliantly inserted in his languid and intelligent conversations as well as to the fabulous, fascinating stories he told on returning from America, from Egypt, or from some other captivating journey.
In New York, James had met Thomas Mann, and their meeting spurred a series of beautiful, joyous, lucid letters. “The gift of feeling astonishment is one I have spent my whole life endeavoring to cultivate,” Mann wrote in one letter. And indeed, that was the only thing Dora still had in her after she lost her capacity for love: astonishment at all the great artists who had, in one way or another, destroyed her life. She detested them as lovers, but as artists she admired and venerated them to the end of her days. The greatest of them was Pablo Picasso.
This ability to separate her feelings from artistic judgments hadn’t come to her overnight. Living with James had helped her view things clearly and analytically without getting defensive.
James was a cultured, refined man who never proved to be the great writer he claimed to be, and because of this, his inability to demonstrate greatness, he never became a full-fledged poet or painter either, much as he was set on it and dreamed of succeeding. That was why, no matter what he did, even when he annoyed her, she indulged him as a loyal friend, her most devoted and most loyal. If she had maintained her friendship with him for this long, without sex or any other sort of commitment in the middle, it was because James hadn’t been egotistical enough to reach the artistic heights to which he aspired and was dying to attain.
His egotism revolved around needs and ambitions that were all too earthly; for example, when he first set foot in Dora’s home he stopped to count how many Picasso paintings he saw in the living room; eight all told. And just knowing that he was in Dora Maar’s living room, surrounded by eight Picassos, more than satisfied him: it was bliss. He was on top of the world. His artistic egotism could be sated through osmosis, through the adventures of someone else who had taken over his dreams. And when the illusion of someone else’s adventures monopolizes your own dreams, you’ve lost a major part of your struggle for talent.
