The Weeping Woman

by Zoe Valdes

  It was still possible to travel without being overwhelmed by so many trifles; journeys were relaxed, and a trip to a faraway place (back then, everything was far away) had not yet become the horror it is today: a sort of hustling to and fro with no meaning beyond sticking your nose into other people’s business.

  Nowadays you can’t appreciate what you see out of the corner of your eye fully or deeply enough, because you’re watching everything idly, through the lens of the superfluous. To top it off, you’ve got Japanese tourists behind you, with their flashing cameras, their feet getting in your way, all hunched over; American tourists to one side, in their Bermuda shorts, showing off the scraggly hair on their legs; over there, Spaniards shouting themselves hoarse, wrapped up in their disparate ways of expressing their self-imposed, commercialized nationalisms; and farther back, Saudi fat cats handing out bribes left and right—actually, it’s never right—using the oil-bought gold that they cart about in sequined moneybags or in safes in the form of designer handbags. Don’t put it past them to tip the hotel receptionist a couple of gold ingots as if they were loose change to get the best seats in the restaurant and the most attractive Russian whores, even in the middle of Ramadan, or precisely because it’s the middle of Ramadan. Everything has devolved into a genuine, absolute human error turned scientific horror. When people still dropped Latin phrases as a stroke of distinction and culture, it was called, as in antiquity, the horror vacui.

  Traveling to Venice in the era when Dora, Bernard, and James made their trip was still a matter of confronting the unexplored and mysterious world with an imperiously adventurous spirit, and you might even brandish a romantic notion of getting far away, a fervor for consuming miles. Why even travel to Egypt today, if we get calluses just from visiting the pyramids by Internet, not on our feet, but on our eyes and on the finger pressing the mouse button?

  James Lord was right when he admitted he was terrified by the idea that the coming years, with their obsession over a future of marked egalitarianism and ideological comfort, of greed and Puritanism hiding behind a false show of pleasure and lewdness, and of the deranged and pretentious possession of vain and pointless wealth, would destroy their present day, when people still valued the desire to listen to those who could express themselves well and when the presence of others mattered; the need to know other people, and theirs to be known in turn, was surrounded by a halo of deep wisdom that always went along with a pleasant bit of eccentricity. Culture was still far from being mere spectacle. And music was really music, melody, not deafening noise.

  True enough, money still served to manipulate people’s destinies, and many of them were flush with cash before, during, and after the war, and it has always been the solution for every sort of scarcity, especially the scarcity of morals. Why wouldn’t they claim that clinging to a belief that money mucks up everything is stunningly immoral and cretinous? With the disappearance of cash and the appearance of banks, the mediocre provincial illusion spread that everybody could be rich, brilliant, and, the height of stupidity, powerful. How cynical!

  All-embracing stupidity. Totalitarianism became a sentiment, an overwhelmingly idiotic sentiment. You can fight against an idea, the Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante used to say, but not against a sentiment that is deep-seated, inbred, and immature, and therefore the perfect glue for holding an ideology together.

  She wanted to push all these distressing thoughts aside. She made a scornful flick of her hand, and in so doing noticed the ease of that gesture. Her hand was no longer heavy, wrinkled, arthritic, and covered with the thick, swollen dark spots that old age had provided her. Her hand had become unexpectedly bright, smooth, and youthful, sporting nails painted red; it seemed to be jutting out in the most unusual way from a sea snail emerging from a gleaming shell, against a backdrop of perfectly spaced clouds, as in that Surrealist photo she had manipulated through photomontage, way back in the thirties.

  Peals of thunder shook her and broke her daydream, and she had to run over to the big windows at the entrance to the hotel, which crashed thunderously every time the wind shoved them violently open and slammed them closed. The storm had risen up without warning, one of those unforeseeable events orchestrated by the master instrument, nature. Everyone was asleep; everyone but her and a tabby cat prowling around a roof across the street.

  PART IV

  THE FINAL WORD AND FINAL PRAYER

  Time as handle

  She wrote, possessed by her text, eagerly to rid herself of all she knew, to erase it from her mind by writing it down, returning to the point of departure, once and again, as in a leaden litany; thoughts compiled in her diaries led her through shrinking, labyrinthine tunnels, down narrow byways elegantly edged by the bitterness of memory. She revised it yet again, went over it and over it, to be certain there were no mistakes, that she hadn’t left out any detail, conceiving each repetition as a string of bewitching and melodious events in which figures from her photos mingled with landscapes she had photographed or painted and anecdotes she relived. She corrected, rewrote, crossed out, interwove and meticulously stitched together what she had written, as if it were a medieval tapestry. As if an invisible stranger’s hand had taken hold of hers and set it moving with unwonted verve, forcing her to spill everything she had hitherto tried to keep hidden. She obeyed, and this act of obedience, of renunciation, flooded her with feelings of desire and pleasure more satisfying than any she had ever felt.

  She went back over the passage about the meeting at the restaurant: years earlier, that night in La Méditerranée, she was smiling and her voice lilted like a singer’s. James watched her, intrigued: no, this wasn’t the impenetrable, morbidly melancholy Dora he was used to dealing with. At that moment she appeared a stranger, a mysterious and unrecognizable companion, perfectly dreamy, reinvented. Her eyes had a new sheen to them, and she sucked on her cigarette holder, slowly inhaling the smoke, moving with such expressive and sensual body language that he blushed in embarrassment. Cigarette ash rolled down her silk blouse, collecting in a small pile that rose and fell with the movement of her breasts. Dora looked delicious, delectable. James would never forget how she looked at that moment, and pressing his lips to her shoulder dabbed with an exotic Oriental perfume, he even told her that if he wanted to describe the universe, he could find no better definition tonight than her.

  Douglas Cooper was the first to break the enchantment when he asked how much some Picasso canvases cost. Dora answered him, a slight shift in her features denoting nervous tension. “Oh, I’d rather be talking about movies or the weather, but here we go, I have to get back to talking about Picasso and the prices of paintings. I get it, that’s what people expect of me, nobody knows it better than I do, but—prices! How boring can we get? You give me so much grief. Please, have pity on me!”

  “This is the century of Picasso, the evidence is inescapable, and you’re part of it, part of its fabulous fatalism, a key character in the drama. It isn’t just that Picasso is the most important personality of the century, bigger than Einstein or Freud; it’s also that his works are getting more expensive every week.” Douglas Cooper paused as if to underline his conviction regarding this point, his hand fluttering in the air, an arrogant frown on his face. “That’s right, I wouldn’t doubt it for a second. This is the century of Picasso.”

  “Poor century!” she exclaimed, and a corrosive, bitter taste burned her throat.

  Her distraught face wrinkled into a grimace of confusion, and she was no longer the charming woman who had been flirting with a man much younger than herself only minutes before.

  “Still, Douglas, you’ve had your doubts, I mean, you had to think about it before you came out with such a big statement,” James said, trying to save the situation and recover the woman who had made him compare the gleam in her eyes to the twinkling of the stars, just as unbearably twee as that, sincere as the comparison was on his part.

  “Dora, let’s set the inessentials aside. Can you tell me the
prices?” Douglas Cooper insisted, pretending to ignore Lord’s opinion.

  “No, leave me alone, I beg of you, for pity’s sake, I have nothing to do with those prices, I’m sorry, I’m not up to talking about Picasso sales.”

  “But, you’ve sold… you’ve sold…” he persevered, pouring salt into the wound.

  “I’ve sold a piece or two that were less important to me, as you well know, because I sold them to you, dear Douglas, but I’ll never sell another one, much less speculate on my ‘memories of lost love.’”

  That was what Dora called the paintings that represented the passion and the deep, ill-fated love, which—according to what she declared when she showed off in front of her friends—had been mutual, until the interest and enthusiasm waned.

  The paintings rattled against the walls, or at least that’s what she seemed to see through the darkness. She was an old woman now, and she took all these revelations as warnings or proofs that she was already passing into some sort of antechamber before the journey to the beyond. As in her 1935 photograph, Forbidden Games, where the smallest detail pointed to a beyond, to a never-never land, both possessed and possessing. She couldn’t even remember why she had titled the photograph like that, given that it only showed a young boy sitting under a table and watching a couple in full erotic play: the man in the dark business suit, to all appearances a real gentleman, bent over double to play horsey, and the half-naked dancer riding him. The woman’s breasts were exposed, and her attitude was not very lascivious or even provocative; rather, she looked businesslike and contagiously, sinfully bored.

  She could see the subjects of the photograph now, as if she had plunged into the frame and could move around to look at it from different angles; the paintings on the walls had been replaced by Picassos, and the mirror wasn’t completely black anymore but reflected James’s face. A viscous, honey-tinted liquid flowed from worn striped silk wallpaper, the same sticky glop that had soaked her shoes and ankles a little while ago, and the red of it looked the color of slippery purplish clots jammed into a laboratory test tube.

  She studied this space, framed in a hexagonal format that she had invented in a photomontage, yet inspired by a standard bourgeois Parisian apartment from the turn of the century, and she felt satisfied when she observed her own anachronism, her figure an unneeded addition to the overflowing, eclectic jumble.

  Trying to climb into the spaces that her imagination had created allowed her to recycle her apathy. This new game made her feel less alone and less useless, she had managed to make her artworks accompany her, to enter into them, melt into their phantasmagoria, though to do so she paradoxically had to distance herself even more from the real world and listen more closely to the burbling litany of time that played inside her head. The uneasy rhythmic cadence that accompanies and imprisons an old woman.

  Yes, she should resist, remain immaculate, reject the tainted human tide swarming sullenly around those weak and execrable spirits out there. She would keep her resistance intact, would look more and more like the portraits where Picasso painted her as confined, as shamed by her tears, bitter, covered with stigmata. Her solitude itself would merely be a product of the Great Genius’s creativity. Yes, because Picasso had only been able to be generous toward her when he kept her isolated and offered her a mélange of solitudes. Majestic solitudes, crushed into a shapeless lump of imperishable traces, turning her from a woman into a sort of savage goddess, as James described her, covered all over in scars and tattoos. Nobody would come anymore to seek out the real Dora but rather the goddess created by Picasso, the image established in museums around the world, framed in precious woods. All her beauty, as seen and revisited by the eyes of the Great Genius, all her magnificence, as translated by Picasso and offered up to the onlookers who flocked from every corner of the planet to worship her, entranced by the moist, absent gleam in her eyes: sheer hieroglyphics. They are more interested in how much it costs than in the sheer artistic value emerging from the creation and the painting.

  The woman who would become most visible was now, however, the most deeply hidden. The one who in the future would be surrounded by the largest crowds of viewers stopping to gaze at her various portraits, was for now the loneliest one, sitting and fanning herself in the large armchair of the drawing room, or pushing herself forward and back in the rocking chair, a repetitive motion of mundane inertia.

  Picasso painted nothing but his fury and, though she didn’t want his wrath to pass on to posterity, she had been unable to stop it. Their show was all sacrifices and lies, because his fury never actually lasted long, the sting of a bumblebee. He did get those fits, indeed, but they quickly passed, because he wasn’t spiteful and he readily forgot—perhaps too quickly and too readily. Yet he had labored to immortalize those dreadful attacks of anger. And from then on, for everybody else only what Picasso had seen and painted would count, not what she had been or done, really, much less what she had felt.

  But it would be different for James. Perhaps he knew much more about her, since he had probed her deepest secrets in his eagerness to become a writer. He was searching her inner life for the words he lacked, and she knew that with the passage of time she had become an inexhaustible wellspring of waiting words, of unwritten phrases, and that she could have written down everything she had wished to weep. James would do it, she had no doubt. And others would do it, too. Even if she steadfastly opposed it in her last testament. Posterity would pass her by, and she wouldn’t be able to decide on it or add anything, she wouldn’t be in any condition to do so, because she’d be dead, like the poor, mediocre human she was; though on the other hand, she knew, she’d be immortal, eternalized, in the portraits of Dora Maar signed by Pablo Picasso. Likewise, and no matter what other people wrote, even if James Lord did his best to do her justice, nothing would change the vision Picasso had of her through his works.

  Her hands would be tied, like when they stole her dog; he came in and, without saying a word, reached down the neck of his shirt and pulled out that cat, that skittish little devil. He brought it home precisely because he knew she loathed cats. And right then, to torture her, he gave her Moumoune, and she could never get rid of the annoying animal, for which she came over time to feel a sort of morbid affection, or compassionate disgust.

  Nor could she ever get rid of the view that others had of her, through Picasso, through James, and through those to whom her past, her life, had something more or less relevant to say.

  Despite all these fears and hesitations, she was convinced that James would not betray her. She knew. She was sure of it. He couldn’t. Picasso, on the other hand, already had, first by painting her, then by abandoning her. By erasing her from his most important work, or trying to: Guernica. Not completely, though. The evidence of her presence had gone over the Master’s brilliant head. The work would still exist, with her impassive face and her voice caught in her throat.

  James wouldn’t betray her in the future. James would write exactly what had happened between them, and intuitively sensing this gave her comfort.

  They began seeing each other, one on one, when she was already forty-six and he was thirty-one. Another litany of numbers she wouldn’t dare give up: the day she met Picasso, her age, his age, the day she met James, his age, her age, and so on; figures she jotted down here and there, amassing them in address books and in her beleaguered brain. Despite it all, she recited once more, James was the genuine article, even when his elegance sometimes failed him and his American coarseness betrayed him.

  “How much do you figure the Picassos are worth, the ones in my house?” Dora asked with satisfaction, once when she felt like boasting about her Picasso possessions.

  “Half a million dollars, maybe more,” he reckoned.

  “Quite a bit more.” Her arms waved in agitation and the haughty frown on her face deepened. She shook her cigarette holder, scattering ashes everywhere. “You know why they’re worth so much? I’ll tell you, confidentially: they’re worth a fortun
e because they’re mine, they belong to me, and the longer I hold onto them, the more value they accrue. Most likely if they were hanging on the walls of some gallery they’d go for the laughable sum of half a million, but being on the walls of Picasso’s lover adds a hefty surcharge. On Dora Maar’s walls, they have another sum tacked on by a story of love lived and love betrayed. As if they’d been saved from a fire.… Picasso showed me all sorts of tricks, I learned things from him nobody had been able to teach me, and he always said that money isn’t important, not at all, but you should consider it absolutely vital or it will destroy you.”

  “I wish I owned one of those paintings,” James muttered. She pretended not to hear him.

  Her parents hadn’t taught her anything relating to money, so in the first years of her adult life as an artist, though she was still practically a teenager, she was completely unable to manage her money, spending, misspending, overspending the little she made. She had to admit, she told herself, the person who got her started saving and administering her money carefully, who even turned her into a penny-pincher, was Picasso. On top of that, and this wasn’t positive at all, he had passed on the vice of gossip to her. It’s a known fact that when two people get to understand each other deeply and begin to identify as a couple, the virtues and defects of one will reproduce and multiply in the other. For the best and for the worst.

  However, Picasso loved his parents and respected them. She loved her father more than her mother. Her relationship with her mother had always been tense; there were moments when she wished her mother would die, and she even dreamed about killing her. Her mother meddled too much in her affairs, and with her constant squabbling over nothing she made a mess of everything. Picasso didn’t pick up this defect from Dora and start hating his mother, nor did she pick up his mother-worship or soften toward her own.