by Zoe Valdes
“James Lord.” She whispered his name thoughtfully. Now, that’s a topic. Quite an interesting topic for anyone who might try in the future to puzzle out much of what she called her “anodyne existence.”
He also wrote down everything that occurred to him, everything he experienced with her, in his interminable diary, a notebook that he purposely left on the night table, where his hostess could see it, in Ménerbes, though Dora never dared to read it, not even to open it. That diary undoubtedly shaped the writer he would become, but she was the one who provided and prepared the ingredients from which he produced the work.
Yes, he was a real writer now, Dora thought, in large measure because she had turned him into a mature man capable of being one.
“Never trust men,” she repeated, “much less writers.” They dramatize what they know, and she didn’t want anyone to write about her part from a single point of view, an idea she found execrable.
And then, inevitably, all her friends had begun to grow old, just like her, some of them even prematurely; but unlike them, she never showed herself, keeping out of sight and away from the implacable judgment of others.
Likewise, Picasso almost frivolously remade his life; falling in love with Françoise Gilot, he had children with her. More children! And then came Geneviève Laporte for a short time, and finally Jacqueline Roque. And at last, with time, the terrible news came: Pablo Picasso had died. Picasso dead! The end of all possible ends!
Dora, who like everyone else had toyed with the idea that Pablo Picasso would live forever, collapsed when she found out, but before much time had passed she came to accept it, much more readily than she would have believed possible. The apparent reason it did not tear her apart to accept his death was simply that he was always around, at her side, in her living room, lurking in the shadows, keeping her company through his paintings, his sculptures, down to the most trivial objects or nuisances she had kept of his.
This was the only time she called him by his Christian name: Pablo. But he wasn’t around to hear her pronounce, for the first and last time, the only word that might have softened his heart coming from her lips: Pablo.
Sometimes she even managed to laugh uproariously in his shadow’s presence, in the presence of Picasso’s ghost, when he merrily repeated in the stubborn litany typical of the dead, “I’m a lesbian, Dora, I’m a lesbian.”
James had long since stopped coming by; phone calls became ever more distant. The last time she had seen him was in 1980. They met after Picasso’s death, in 1974, but it was in exactly 1980 that she saw him for the last time.
She still found him very good-looking, even more so than when she had known him, though he was far too tanned for her taste and had become ceremonious and clumsily patronizing. She was already the pious and stooping little old woman she had been transformed into by resentment and God. She observed enormous bitterness in James’s eyes, quickly receding in view of the old age of the person he had once considered the most beautiful and youthful woman in the world, an eternal child and a Surrealist goddess.
On that last occasion, Dora of course asked about his friend Bernard, who she had heard was on his way to becoming a successful playwright and screenwriter. Aside from Bernard, she was interested in the few old friends who were still living. The living friends were doing well, the dead ones better, she told herself a while later, after James Lord had vanished through the front door of the house and the small pile of dry leaves that the caretaker had swept up was blowing away in a gust of wind.
She went over everything she’d written and was satisfied. The next day she would invite the stranger for tea at Ladurée on Saint-Germain-des-Prés and give her these fragments, handwritten in a scattered way, though entirely correct and faithful to her memories of an entire era that, much like herself, refused to disappear.
She read an old book for a while longer and went to bed early. Then, for the first time in quite a while, she dreamed of a simple, pleasant landscape: the sea in the background, foamy, just as it appears in her paintings, and Picasso there in front of the waves, bare chest, hairy legs, sitting on the rocks, hiding his face behind a minotaur skull. Meanwhile she focused on him, pressed the shutter, and snapped his picture.
The aged woman stepped into the courtyard, carrying her old, worn, half-empty shopping basket with difficulty. In the basket were the notebook, an umbrella, and a coin purse. She wasn’t startled when the caretaker ran after her with her thinly veined coarseness.
“Off to Mass again, ma’am?” she asked. The caretaker had the bad habit of getting between her and the door every time she wanted to go out and asking her the same question every morning, but Dora was fond of her after so many years together and looked at her more with affection than with respect.
“Yes, I am going to Mass again, as I have done every morning since you’ve known me. And on my way back I will pass by the market, but I will not be long, don’t you worry. Au revoir! Goodbye!”
Reaching the sidewalk, she scanned in every direction and got a terrible feeling of apprehension when she didn’t see the stranger. She told herself that perhaps the young woman hadn’t shown up on time because of the storm overnight. She decided to hurry so as not to miss the beginning of Mass. Then she’d come back through the market; surely her future friend would bet here by then, as always, waiting for her.
As she walked to Notre Dame, she felt a slight dizziness, then a second spell, followed by a sort of strange throbbing up around her groin, and another more intense throbbing in her brain. She stopped briefly and after a while went back to walking.
She was so happy. For the first time in so long she smiled to passersby, greeted the bouquinistes, and even came close to buying an old edition of The Graveyard by the Sea by Paul Valéry and a woolen hat offered by a woman selling on the street. But stopping to shop would slow her down, she thought, and she needed to be back early.
She was walking faster than usual, and the morning, though cold, sparkled in the bright sun; the wind had abated. She begged God to give her a little more time; over the past few years she had always asked for the same thing, as if it were her last prayer, the final line in a stern litany: “God, please grant me a little more time, a little more.”
“Jade, Jade!” A mother called out to her little girl, who was playing with the Dalmatian that a very elegant gentleman was pulling by a leash along the esplanade of Notre Dame.
“Jade.” The last word she heard.
I had been running very late, and even though I sprinted onto the metro and dashed headlong across the Pont Neuf, I didn’t arrive on time to meet Dora Maar and, at last, in a few perhaps stammering words, declare how much I admired her. I might have even heard her voice in an unforgettable and instructive conversation that would endure, like her friendship, in which she would tell me, “Art, after all, can only embellish the truth. It is not the truth in itself.”
Afterwards we would say goodbye, I would watch her walk away, and she would enter her house, promising me we would meet again.
From that same building, a short time later a beautiful and mysterious woman wrapped in a dark leather overcoat would emerge. Her profile would slowly grow smaller as she walked away along Rue de Savoie, and vanish entirely when she turned the corner onto Rue des Grands Augustins.
She would then walk, head held high, her firm steps clacking rhythmically against the sidewalk, and would carelessly drop a glove embroidered with tiny flowers. I would pick it up, intending to return it to her right then, or the next day. The glove would be dripping with blood.
Perhaps I would not have time to catch up to the elegant imaginary lady, her silhouette stretching into a lethargy of shadow, as in the photograph of Assia nude. I would be left waiting for her in vain. Because she would never return from that last appointment.
Yet I am still waiting for her today, on the vague and tremulous edge of a page.
Epilogue
On a freezing February day in 2006, I made arrangements with the phot
ographer Marcela Rossiter to go see the exhibit “Picasso–Dora Maar, 1935–1945” at the Musée Picasso. From late winter through spring of that year, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world packed the galleries of the museum in Le Marais. I returned to see it again and again.
I had never been so close to Dora and Picasso before, as they loved each other through time, their love immortalized in art. I have reconciled with Picasso, but it was not easy. How are we supposed to understand how, “when German officers came to his door, Picasso was unable to turn them away,” as we read in Alan Riding’s book And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris?
Standing there once more, looking at his work, I was completely taken by the vastness of the Great Genius. Then, after a long process, I again came to admire his skill, to love it.
I had the sense that at that moment, and for the first time, Dora Maar was also being recognized and valued rightly for her greatness as an artist and as a lover.
Paris, August 2011
Author’s Note on Sources
Part of the story told in this novel is based on facts that can be found the books cited below, and can verified in others unmentioned here that I consulted only in passing. I was also inspired by the personal testimony of several people whom I interviewed at the beginning of this project, including James Lord and Bernard Minoret. The rest is pure imagination, artifice, and invention, as should be expected in a work of fiction. This is a novel.
Avril, Nicole. Moi, Dora Maar: La passion selon Picasso. Paris: Plon, 2002.
Baldassari, Anne. Picasso: Life with Dora Maar: Love and War, 1935–1945. Paris: Flammarion, 2006.
Caws, Mary Ann. Dora Maar with and without Picasso. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
———. Les Vies de Dora Maar: Bataille, Picasso, et les surréalistes. Paris: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Dujovne Ortiz, Alicia. Dora Maar: Prisonnière du regard. Paris: Grasset, 2003.
Lachgar, Lina. Arrestation et mort de Max Jacob. Paris: Différence, 2004.
Lake, Carlton and Françoise Gilot. Life with Picasso. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Lord, James. Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.
O’Brian, Patrick. Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1976.
Ray, Man. Man Ray: Portraits: Paris-Hollywood-Paris: From the Man Ray Archives of the Centre Pompidou. Munich: Schirmer Mosel, 2011.
Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso. New York: Random House, 1991.
Riding, Alan. And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
