by Peter Selgin
No such luck. “Attendez!” he cries, splashing after me.
We swim out past the barrier reef, me doing my Aussie crawl, smashing through elephant waves. In his competitive fervor the instigator of Guernica and The Pipes of Pan swims into my kicking foot; my heel collides with his face. When I look back, he’s treading water, holding his nose. Part of me thinks, “Serves him right.” Another part is horrified, beside myself.
“You okay?” I say, treading.
He doesn’t hear. Or does he? He starts back to shore, doing a sidestroke while holding his nose, a thin ribbon of blood trailing him, reminding me for some reason of my father, who fell for me. As I wobble out of the surf, he’s toweling himself, his back a giant scallop.
“Pablo? Mr. Ruiz?”
With the towel flung over his shoulder he walks up the path to our dreary digs. I shout, “It’s your own fault! You swam too close to me!” The cottage door slams. It’s painted the same blue as the lagoon, the same blue as the Topolino. I see a brush mixing that color, the bristles picking dabs of lead white, cerulean, and cobalt off the palette. When the mental camera pulls back, the hand belongs not to Picasso but to my father.
I pace in front of the blue door, a swimmer afraid to dive. What else can I do? No prolific master of twentieth-century art has ever been sore at me before.
I knock. The door opens. Picasso wears a white terry-cloth robe. With a nod he motions me into the cool, rattan-shaded space. On the desk: papers spread out under scattered crayons. He’s been sketching. On the topmost sheet figures float in a sea of childish waves, blood arrows wheeling like gulls around them. He has mapped our collision, charted its course, latitude, longitude, vector. Annotations filigree the margins, state’s evidence: the geometry of disaster. A heavy X marks the point of impact. I recognize my foot. Where it strikes Picasso’s Minotaur head the sketch is animated with a series of pulsing slashes. For the rest of me Picasso has drawn not man but whale: precisely, he has drawn Monstro, the grinning leviathan that swallowed Pinocchio and his toy-maker father, Gepetto. He’s signed the goddamn thing.
“What’s all this about?” I say, picking it up.
He seizes and crumples the sketch into a ball, then lies back in his bed with a wad of tissue pressed to his nose. The ceiling fan squeaks.
The road narrows; the lines of perspective converge. Peripheries are nullified as the geometry of death reasserts itself. We plunge into a funnel. I’ve grown suspicious of our destination, wondering if we’ll ever get where we’re going, supposedly.
“Don’t you have to be dead to be a saint?” I ask.
“It helps,” says Picasso. “But unless one has the goods, one may drop dead forever and it will get one nowhere.”
“It would be a shame to drive all this way for nothing,” I say.
“You are a skeptic. And anyway can you not simply enjoy the ride? Why does a journey need a purpose anyway?” says Picasso. “For the same reason a picture needs a subject: merely as an excuse for the paint, to have something to hang shapes, colors, and textures on.”
“Are you sure you didn’t make her up?”
“Who?”
“Sister Whatsherface, the saint.”
“The saint, the saint!” Picasso throws his hands in the air. “Is that all you can think about? Such a hopelessly narrow mind for such a broad body! With that sort of mentality how do you expect to get anywhere?”
“She doesn’t exist, does she?”
“You will never be an artist, that’s for sure!”
“It’s all a bunch of bullshit, isn’t it?”
“You will be one of the countless poor sods who dream of painting but end up only making pictures of things.”
“Does it occur to you, Mr. Picasso, that I don’t want to be a painter?”
Picasso says nothing. He sits with arms folded, bottom lip pugnaciously pursed, steaming like an espresso pot. We ride in silence for a mile or two. Then he blurts:
“You want a purpose? Fine! Pick one! Whatever strikes your fancy. Say you want to go mushroom hunting, or mountain climbing, or spelunking with those big, fat, flat feet. Maybe you and I will track down Bigfoot or the Abominable Snowman — the South American one! Don’t like my suggestions? Come up with your own. Whatever you pick, I will happily accept. And if you can’t come up with a purpose, come up with a texture, or a color. Call it a brown journey, or a blue one. Whatever you say, Maestro, Picasso will back you 100 percent!”
We reach the Andes, which shed their cool color and their charm as we transgress them. The Topolino struggles. Now I know why Picasso calls it the goat. Wishful thinking! A goat would chew up these hills! But our little mouse quakes in fear. Halfway up a near-vertical grade, with a gouge of smoke the engine dies. Soon we’re side by side, backs to the bumper, pushing.
“Fucking Fiat,” I say, forgetting myself.
“It was just so with me and Monsieur Braque,” says Picasso. “Two mountaineers roped together, scaling the heights!”
“I told you it was underpowered, but no, you had to have it. You and your goddamn artistic choices!” It must be the altitude; I can barely breathe.
“That said, were it not for your being more than a little pasado de peso …”
“Fuck you, you Spanish ape! If you think I’m too fat, then why didn’t you pick some pretty little girl to chauffeur you around? Why me? I’ll tell you why: because you need someone you can dominate, someone who’ll put up with all your Spanish bullcrap, that’s why! Well, I’m not taking it anymore. All my life people have pushed me around, making me kiss their fucking feet! Well, I’m goddamn sick of it!”
It’s official: I have broken boundaries, infringed, encroached, gone over the line. I have lost my place because I never knew it. Picasso burns me with his Mussolini stare; for a moment I think he might even spit on me, strike me with his draftsman’s fist. But then a Disney twinkle lights those Andalusian eyes, and there’s that tight little mischievous grin, the same grin that swallows his face when he does something naughty with a brush or pen. All this time we’ve been pushing the car uphill. Were I to let go now, it would roll backward, flattening the greatest of all living painters.
We reach the crest. Breathless, Picasso bows to me.
“Very well, Maestro.” He snatches the chauffeur cap off my head and puts it on his. “What is your wish?”
That’s when I see the brown car pulled over to the curve. A man in dress slacks and undershirt works a jack under a rear tire. She’s in the backseat. I must act now or forever know my place. This is for you, Father, this breaching of the rules while bowing to them. For once art will serve us.
I sketch out the rough plan; Picasso, with his brain like a brush full of paint, fills in the details. By what we are about to do my boss is so greatly amused he smothers his titters with his hand. Our collaboration has about it all the wit, charm, and spontaneous simplicity of the best animations. Now I see why I love cartoons: they give us the world minus gravity and suffering, a world of primary hues, unambiguous outlines, unbridled possibilities, without weight, subtext, or sophistication. For all his worldly fame I realize now that Picasso is really a cartoonist at heart, a child with his Crayola box, as naive as he is diabolical, prepared to do his bidding for me, his Walt Disney/Antichrist.
“Ready?” I say.
“Rescatar la Virgen de los Andes!” he says, with steely enthusiasm.
Sticking to the plan, I ask the man if he can use some assistance. He seems suspicious and relieved as he hands me the tire iron, wiping his hands on his shirt and saying, as I bend to the task, “I’ve always marveled at the curious conceit that keeps men floating down freeways on bladders of air.” For appearance’ sake I give a few turns to a lug before braining him — not quite hard enough to send his gray matter showering down the mountainside, but no love tap, either. He falls into Picasso’s arms. As the girl looks on with indolent curiosity, we stuff our scoundrel into the Topolino’s passenger seat, but not before relieving Mr. Humber
t of his wallet, passport, and other forms of identification. Before sending the blue goat to its final pasture, we grab our luggage — including two dozen tightly rolled canvases — from its trunk. With a series of grunts and our damsel still watching (her sleepy eyes only slightly aroused), we heave the Topolino over the side. When on the sixteenth roll it bursts into flames, Picasso clasps his hands and notes with glee how the colors match perfectly those of the sunset that has meanwhile spread itself, like a knife loaded with Skippy, across the horizon.
You would think our rescued nymph would show some gratitude to her saviors. You’d be wrong. She chomps her chewing gum, her frown as fixed as the stars that begin to appear just then in the sky. We drive through the night with no words from her. In our cut-rate motel room the next morning we force her to sit for us next to a bowl of bananas: the least she can do, the gumpopping twit. Picasso titles his portrait Still Life with Virgin. Though I daresay mine is the better likeness, our subject is equally untaken with both our efforts. “They don’t look a thing like me!” she squawks.
“Don’t worry,” Picasso and I chime. “They will.”
Touched with an artist’s brute fearlessness, I guide our considerably more powerful vehicle to Bogotá, where we drop Dolores off with the proper authorities, who assure us that they know just what to do with her.
From there all roads lead to glory, or close enough. We are a brush loaded with pigment, sweeping across a primed, gessoed landscape, the world our blank canvas. All boundaries have been erased, all outlines eradicated. Wherever we go we spill color; we spew, splatter, and scumble it, improvising subject and form as we please — improvising but also obscuring, demolishing them. Is there a Virgin of the Andes? Who cares. If we put her on paper, there she is. If not, not.
From here on, what we say — or paint — goes.
Plaza des Armas, Cuzco, Peru. The fountain sprays as high as the budding trees. We arrived in time for the annual art fair, with Pablo in sunglasses and sombrero, me in a green-visored boating cap. We’ve nabbed an excellent spot, in the shade of the triumphal arch. Thus we intend to raise gasoline money for our journey back north.
So far, the painter of Three Musicians, The Weeping Woman, and a thousand etchings of bulls hasn’t sold one of what he calls his “Topolino Landscapes.” I, on the other hand, former shoe salesman and child of a failed, insomniac cartoonist, have sold twelve.
Picasso’s pissed.
“Beginner’s luck,” he says.
SAWDUST
MR. BULFAMANTE SMELLED like oil of wintergreen. I swear he greased back his gray curls with the stuff. He had a chunky head and cauliflower ears and carried a ball-peen hammer everywhere, as if it were the key to unlock his days. That hammer: a dainty object of brass, so small it disappeared inside his fist. He’d been a boxer in the French navy, he said, and carried his shoulders scrunched high, as if warding off imaginary blows to his ears.
On weekends starting the summer before my junior year of high school and continuing through winter break, I worked for Mr. Bulfamante sanding floors: worst job in the world. Most of the floors we sanded were in new houses, their Sheetrocked walls unpainted, no electricity, no water. We drank and washed our hands from a two-gallon water keg Mr. Bulfamante kept in the back of the van, next to the drums of varnish and sealer.
Mr. Bulfamante liked me to call him Sugar, as in Sugar Ray Leonard or Sugar Ray Robinson, one of those sweetly named boxers. At dawn he would pick me up in his white Ford Econoline van. The van was covered with varnish: dripping down door panels and across windows, staining upholstery, stamping blurry brown thumbprints on the hood, streaking like comets across the windshield. The radio dials were all yellow and sticky. Seeing me standing at the end of the driveway holding my lunch bag, Sugar would flash a gap-toothed smile, nod his big, square head, and mouth the words, Ya bum! through the windshield, which had a big crack in it. Sugar called everyone a bum.
Before he’d let me into his van, Sugar would make sure that I’d brought my thermos full of bouillon. Sugar insisted on hot bouillon as the only suitable beverage for floor sanders and boxers, summer and winter. Not lemonade or iced tea or coffee or hot chocolate. Bouillon. And not chicken bouillon, either. Beef. Chicken was for fruitcakes. Also the bouillon couldn’t be made from those little cubes, none of that Herb-Ox or Knorr Swiss crap. It had to be real. Homemade. From oxtail or beef brisket bone. Sugar taught me how to make it. He was a widower.
“You make bouillon?” Sugar would ask. He had a thick accent. I couldn’t tell if it was French or Italian. Maybe both.
I’d tap the red thermos sticking out from under my arm.
“Good. Bouillon good for you.”
I’d sit on the passenger seat, which, like everything else, was sticky with varnish. Over the defroster’s useless whir the radio sputtered classical music: Bolero. Schubert’s Eighth. The Firebird Suite. The same music Mr. Quick, my freshman English teacher, had taught me to appreciate on his portable Sony tape recorder.
Sugar would hand me a Kleenex to wipe the fog off the windshield. Then we’d rumble through the morning gloom, the sky still as dark as the roofs of the houses, headlights peering down murky streets, the defroster exhaling lukewarm air, strains of Schubert seeping through static, barrels of varnish and sealer bumping and splashing in the gloom behind us.
I never knew where we were going. It might be an old farmhouse with wide-planked floors thick with paint that would take dozens of sandings to remove, the burnt-paint smell horrible in my nostrils. Or it might be a brand-new house with fresh-laid floors still smelling of oak, caked blobs of plaster forming little bird-guano-like archipelagos all over it. We’d rumble for twenty minutes or so down increasingly narrow roads, Mr. Bulfamante’s calloused hands loose on the steering wheel, the sun just burning pink through silhouettes of houses and trees, the van bouncing like a donkey cart. I’d keep my eyes fixed on the windshield crack, watching to see if it grew when we bounced, afraid to speak lest I say the wrong thing and increase Mr. Bulfamante’s suspicion that I was a fruitcake.
Sugar suspected I was a fruitcake because of my friendship with Mr. Quick, which began during my freshman year. Sugar had learned about it from my mother. My father was dead. Mr. Quick was skinny and short, with a black mustache, the ends of which he would twist upward, and a rapid, mincing walk to match his name. A lot of kids called him “Mr. Queer,” but then they called everyone queer who didn’t play sports. I thought he was interesting, like no one else I’d met. I liked it when he read us poems about Grecian urns and assigned stories about the knights of the Round Table.
Jack Quick lived alone in what used to be the caretaker’s cottage at Bennington Pond. He wore Frye boots with side buckles and bell-bottoms. He’d been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and had an English accent, but not really. He didn’t drive a car or eat meat or wear ties. His cottage had no electricity. He liked to read and write and play chess by oil-lamp light. He didn’t have a family as far as I or anyone knew. His cottage was filled with books on every wall. He didn’t drink but liked to sip a certain kind of Chinese tea with a melodic name and a smoky taste and smell. He’d been teaching for less than a year when I started high school.
I began to visit him at his house in early October of freshman year. When the water was warm enough, he and I would swim together in the lake, sometimes with no clothes on, since there were no houses nearby and no one could see us. It shocked me how muscular he was, standing there on a large rock, the sun bouncing off his skin. I never thought you could fit so many muscles in a body so skinny.
At the center of the small lake was an island with a miniature stone lighthouse. I’d swim out there with Jack — I called him Jack — though he always swam faster than I did, his short, skinny legs kicking up sun-speckled plumes of water. Then we’d lie flat on a rock below the lighthouse, looking up through a net of tree branches that seemed to sway and leap out over the water. Sometimes we’d talk. Jack never talked about people or things, only ideas, with every
other sentence ending with a question mark. He liked to think, think, think. I said to him once, “Jack, can’t you ever stop thinking?”
“Frankly,” he said, “no.”
Or we’d just lie there silently, eyes closed, the sun warm on our faces, the wind crawling coolly over us, feeling nothing but good. “Doesn’t the sun feel great?” I said to him one day.
“As thermonuclear devices go,” Jack replied, “it has its charms.”
When it got too cold to swim, we’d play chess in his cottage with the stove roaring and mugs of that strong tea that smelled like Wesley Conklin’s house after it burned down. Jack would checkmate me, and I’d say, “You bastard!” or, “You slimeball!” or even, “You fucker!” and he’d smile that sneaky, know-it-all smile of his under his black mustache.
Sometimes he’d get me so worked up I’d lunge at him, and we’d wrestle. And though he was no bigger than me, he’d pin me in two seconds flat to the cottage floor, which was wide planked and painted a greenish blue color like the sea. While pinning me he’d grin, and I’d pretend to be mad and call him all kinds of names, though I wouldn’t be able to stop smiling.
The van turned up a freshly paved road, bordered by abortedlooking mounds of snow-covered dirt, to a new housing development, some of the houses still without clapboards, sided in tar paper, their yards snowy moonscapes of raw earth littered with shingles and scrap lumber. Sugar stopped the van and checked a house number against the one written on a varnish-stained scrap of paper. He nodded his greasily groomed head, pulled into the driveway, turned the engine off, and yanked the hand brake, hard.
“Ready, ya bum?” he said, punching me in the shoulder.
We went inside and scouted the premises. Using his ball-peen hammer, Sugar tapped the floorboards, tap, tap, tap, like a doctor palpating a patient’s chest. With the hammer’s flat end he chipped away at stubborn plaster deposits, then ran his thick palm across the floor feeling for nail heads and gaps between boards, all the time nodding his wintergreened head, making grunting sounds — the same sounds for approval and disapproval. Then, like someone who’d just sampled a glass of wine, he drew a deep breath, stuck out his lower lip, nodded, and said, “Okay. We work.”
