‘Braque looked at Laszlo. “Why would Picasso let you, his squire, make love to his woman?”
‘“He is obsessed with her. He paints her endlessly. He wanted to paint her in orgasm. Le petit mort. But he couldn’t sketch her and make love to her at the same time, so he had me make love to her while he sketched. It was an honour. She is a fabulous beauty, a renowned woman.” Laszlo’s eyes softened and his smile amplified with reminiscence as he stared at Picasso’s painting of her. He had hoped they would have to make love many times before Picasso caught her essence – the power of her climax. But he was Picasso. He caught it all that first time – her little death.’
‘What is this story?’ Harry asks this quietly so as not to insult Mireille with his doubt.
‘It is a story told to me many times by my mother. I suppose she invented some details so she can see it all more clearly. Then these inventions become memory. But they are not important. The detail is there because she lived the story as she told it, she was inside it, seeing it all around her. The way she told it is how I will tell it, because I know it that way and I do not know it any other.’ Mireille gets them both a whisky.
‘So I was up to where Laszlo was boasting to Braque of making love to Dora Maar while Picasso sketched them. Braque wasn’t sure whether to believe this. “No. It is surely part of his Guernica series,” his lip curled in scepticism. “Picasso’s indictment of fascism.”
‘Laszlo tells Braque that Picasso is scared of what they might say about his painting. Would they call him sick? A pornographer? A pimp? Even the great Picasso runs in fear of the beau monde. Ecstatic Woman has sat in his studio for months. Now that the Luftwaffe has bombed Guernica, he sees his chance: he adds a handkerchief, he renames her Weeping Woman, and he says she is a native of Guernica weeping at the tragedy that has befallen her city. “You want to buy her?” he asked Braque. “Ecstatic Woman?”
‘Braque asked Laszlo, what made him think he would buy a stolen painting, and Laszlo shrugged. “If I had an enemy I would covet evidence of his cuckolding.”
‘Braque and Picasso had fallen out by this time, a well-known enmity, each claiming to be the inventor of cubism. So Braque certainly would have enjoyed this proof, painted by the man himself. Perhaps he would have held private showings, laughed at the great Spaniard, spread word of his beloved Dora’s ecstasy at the hands of another.
‘Braque was poised with a handful of notes when Picasso entered the Palais de Noctambules searching for Laszlo, searching for the Weeping Woman. Laszlo snatched the francs from Braque’s fist and pushed the canvas at him.
‘“Ah, Don Pablo,” Laszlo called to him across the room. “Welcome. You know Monsieur Braque.” He indicated Braque with his hand. “You will be pleased, then, to hear he admires your recent work. Especially, he is fond of this painting in which the artist bravely immortalises his own cuckolding and captures the moment of conception of his lover’s child at the hands of his squire. Monsieur Braque admires it so much he has bought it and intends to amuse his friends with it.”
‘“Bastardo,” Picasso called.
‘Now comes the great fisticuffs between Picasso and Braque, of which those of us in the art world have all heard. The reasons given for it vary: it was a battle in the war over the origins of cubism; it was a fight over an unpaid debt; it was a battle for Dora Maar herself.
‘But, no. Picasso, who now regretted painting Dora’s ecstasy, was desperate to stop Braque having and showing this painting, and spreading the tale of its origin. He had thought it would be a monument to woman’s ecstasy, not to his own cuckolding. Nor could a man with limitless vanity bear to live with the rumour that the baby growing in his lover’s womb was not his. His ego would not allow such a role for him.
‘He wanted the painting back so he could announce her to the world as Weeping Woman, not Ecstatic Woman. To paint her in orgasm had been an idea he had given in to under the influence of opium and it was not worthy of his great artistic soul. He regretted it terribly.
‘He attacked Braque, who dropped the painting, which was snatched up by Laszlo. The giants of cubism got down on the tiled floor like two anciens putains in a turf war and bit and pulled hair and cursed, Braque calling Picasso a cuckold, Picasso calling Braque a thief, while their sycophants glared at each other.
‘The two artists wrestled and swore, and by the time they had worn themselves to exhaustion, Laszlo had made off with the Weeping Woman once more. So now she was stolen from both Picasso and Braque and both owned her and wanted her back and both wanted Laszlo buried in the Paris sewers.
‘After this famous fight, word of Picasso’s cuckolding was out and the only way for him to save face was to pretend he did not love Dora, that she was just another floozy he kept for sex and canapés – a model he kept on hand. He dismissed her to make the rumour of his cuckolding null and void. He sent her away to save his own reputation. So what if he had shared one of his strumpets with his squire? That was not news.
‘Dora Maar was my mother. She forgave Picasso. She understood – he had his duty to the world. He was a slave to Picasso as much as she was – he had to protect Picasso the myth. He had to throw my mother away as if she were a four-franc-a-day model. But it was not true. She was the burning light of his soul, and he was hers. They were in love.
‘His plan worked. The story of his cuckolding, now that it was with a woman he had dismissed, was worthless and it died. The rumour of a painting called Ecstatic Woman died.’
‘Laszlo sold the Weeping Woman to an English smuggler who owned a ferry line and made himself a heroic figure in the war by evacuating his countrymen at Dunkirk. He paid Laszlo for the painting with an old wooden ferry and an unknown amount of money and Laszlo went down the coast to Marseilles, where he bribed his way into the position of customs officer, and I have told you about his happy war and his people smuggling.
‘His life as a smuggler of people was set up and paid for with the stolen painting. And it was ended by another stolen painting, when he was found with a Modigliani in his possession. It had been stolen from the Louvre by a fleeing Nazi whom Laszlo was shipping out of France. The Nazi paid for his passage to South America with this bauble. But by the time Laszlo sold it, some years later, it was on a list of French treasures stolen by the Nazis and he was arrested. The last man he smuggled out of France was himself.
‘My mother, after Picasso exiled her, went mad. This is well known. They found her naked in a doorway and she spent some years in a psychiatric hospital, receiving shock treatment. This is where I was born. My earliest memories are of living in the crèche in that hospital – a dormitory and garden for the offspring of mad mothers. It was a beautiful garden. I was taken to see her once a day, as a princess might be taken to visit the queen. I remember wondering why I was dressed and washed and had my hair brushed to see this lady. And wondering why the nurses thought us so special to one another, when she never seemed very delighted to see me and I had scarcely any feeling for her at all. The nurses sat me on her lap, and I remember it was difficult to balance there, with her not touching me, almost in a position of recoil.
‘When she was released she became a recluse. I lived with her in an apartment on the Rue de Savoie in Paris. My mother was beautiful, but her features were always covered in pain. To me, in hindsight, it seems as if she had posed for that painting so long that her face had become irretrievably cast in the horror she had feigned. I lived with the Weeping Woman.
‘We owned many Picassos of every type: sculptures, pots, paintings and drawings. Our apartment was an Aladdin’s cave where virtually every piece of bric-à-brac was worth a fortune. If I dropped a plate the world was poorer.
‘My mother was obsessed with him still. Their love was the great masterpiece of her life and this collection of his art represented that love and kept its memory sacrosanct. Thus she could not bear to part with even the smallest doodle. We lived in poverty, surrounded by riches. I do not know what we lived on. I think friends
gave her money. Perhaps Picasso gave her money. If so, he did not give much.
‘Many, many times I crept towards our front door with a sketch or a scrap of canvas to sell, imagining the dresses and jewels and shoes I could buy myself. But I could never bring myself to go through with my robbery. It would have killed her to see me come home with shiny red shoes and know what I had done to get them.
‘As Picasso was the God my mother worshipped, so Laszlo was the demon that had ruined her life. Our lives.
She had him followed by detectives, who reported to her. That is how she knew so much about him. She was planning some sort of revenge on him, and I took on her hatred of this unknown man of whom she spoke with such disgust. If he had not stolen that painting and concocted such an outrageous lie in order to sell it to Braque, then my mother would still be living with her lover. And I would be living with my father, the great Picasso. Our broken, insular existence could be traced to Laszlo Berg.
‘She had a bust of Picasso. She would hold it up before her face and smooth his marble eyebrows with her thumbs. She talked to this bust as if it were the man himself. I had witnessed her do this from when I was an infant, so these conversations seemed entirely natural to me.
‘I heard my mother forgive him face to face many times for exiling her, the smell of the pastis on her breath wafting under his marble nose. She knew he had a greater calling than to be a lover to her. That he had to be Picasso to the world. She would tell his compliant marble likeness how I was progressing at school: in art I had an eye for perspective and a gift for colour, in ballet I moved nimbly yet with gravity, like a matador – obviously my Spanish blood.
‘I began to talk to him myself. Each of us in our turn held up this marble bust and courted Picasso like two jealous rivals. The love of this beloved man had become paramount in our little apartment and we vied for it endlessly. Many of the conversations between my mother and me went via the intermediary of this bust.
‘After conversing with it she would remind me of my privileged position as his daughter. I was not an ordinary girl, I was the daughter of the greatest artist ever to live, and as such I must attend to my lessons and always excel. Each day she would say this, as if willing it to be true. And it did make me feel proud, being this great man’s daughter.
‘Often, when I was feeling mischievous I would begin planning a visit to him. Talking to the bust I would describe for my listening mother his delight at seeing me, his daughter, absent from him for so long. Sometimes I appeared at a ball among beautiful people bedecked with jewels and medals, and he swooned with happiness to finally meet me, and doctors and counts rushed to his aid.
‘But my mother would hush me and take up the bust and tell Picasso to stop talking such nonsense – little Mireille could not possibly visit him. The scandal it would bring … Then my mother would make me swear my father was our secret.
‘She always protected him from me, from my advances into his life, from any claims I might have made as his daughter. I do not know why. Perhaps she suspected the truth. Or perhaps she was frightened he would accept me into his life; take me in, leaving her alone in her exile.’
Mireille paused, looking down. ‘She died a horrible death in a hospital bed with tubes up her nose. I buried the bust of Picasso with her – I would not need it any more. I was going to make my play to stand alongside Paloma at last as the daughter of the great Spaniard.
‘I announced myself scandalously in Le Figaro. The front-page photographs show my face. Even I saw we looked very different but, undaunted, I had my DNA run through the laboratories and law courts of Paris. I was taking my father to my bosom before the eyes of the world, standing up at last to have my story known and my rank as his daughter acknowledged. It had been a grave weight keeping this secret all these years, and it meant everything to me now to have my exalted place in the world known. I had not done much with my life. For much of it I had lived in a cloistered ménage-à-trois with my mother and the marble head of her lover. Dominated and enslaved by the task of being Picasso’s secret daughter, I had many lovers, but no one lover. How could a man compete with Picasso – this other, secret man in my life? So I had no husband. No children.
‘Weeks later, as I left the Palais de Justice, my case crushed by the scientific evidence, the photographers who were fanned out beneath me swam in my tears. For them it was a circus, but for me a funeral. A dear parent had been killed – put to death legally and, most horrible of all, justly. Not only killed, but also expunged from my history, my lifelong love of him a lie.
‘Through my childhood I had kept a bottle of eucalyptus oil I was going to massage into his hands to ease his well-documented rheumatism. Through my teens I kept a valise packed with my most precious possessions so that on the day he rode into my dull life I would be ready to flee with him to happiness. Now it turned out that this Picasso I knew to be my father was a cruel joke. My heart was breaking with a loss I had not reckoned on and could not conceive.
‘Can you imagine how I felt? And how did my mother get this so wrong? She would never have cheated on him, there was no one else. She had no secret lovers or I would have heard her confess them to him. I heard her confess all her sins to his likeness, one after the other, over and over. Morsels of negligence such as forgetting to light a candle on his birthday. There is little more sense in telling lies to a marble bust than to yourself. So, no, she did not tell lies. She believed I was Picasso’s child.
‘But if Picasso is not my father, then who? Who? There was only the one known fornication. A liaison that happened at Picasso’s behest, and brought forth the ecstasy he captured in charcoal and turned into the Weeping Woman. It can only be Laszlo Berg. Picasso’s squire, the would-be poet who stole Picasso’s painting and ruined his life with Dora Maar, my mother.
‘Weeping Woman is, then, Ecstatic Woman. The moment of my conception lives on as a painting. A denunciation of war. A fact I have tried to be privately happy about.’
By the time Mireille has finished telling her story, the sun on the horizon is dousing the red and green beacons that define the shipping channel across Port Phillip Bay. While she has been talking Harry has been watching container ships strung with lights sliding between these beacons to and from Webb Dock. Now that she has stopped, the many unlikely facets of her story contend in his mind. He looks at her, hoping to make sense of this tale by the light of her eyes. ‘That’s … I don’t know. I did this for the money. And for art. I thought this was art, this theft. I thought you did, too. But all along you had this ugly, hidden motive. You’re not even who you say you are.’
‘I am who I say I am, Harry. But it is maybe true I am a damaged person and my motivations are dark, unworthy.’ She nods distractedly, as if considering this.
‘You’re Dora Maar’s daughter?’ She doesn’t answer the question. She has told him already. ‘And this was …? Revenge? Was this just about … getting back at the guy?’ he asks.
‘I had planned to sell him the real painting. I only needed the forgery to convince you and Turton we were going to sell a forgery and give the real one back, to convince you this thing could work, that we could all get away free. But I was going to switch them. I was going to have you go to the Savage Club with the real Woman. Then I would call the police and Laszlo would be arrested and ruined. My mother, and I, would be avenged. The painting Laszlo stole from Picasso to ruin her life, and mine, I had now stolen to ruin his life. He would be taken from his high place and humiliated, as she was. He would be jailed, a thief and an outcast. Of course, you would be arrested, too. And Turton. But that was no matter to me. Until I fell in love with you.’
Mireille leans towards Harry and reaches out a hand to him. He looks at it blankly and she takes it back and lays it on her thigh. ‘When I rolled up the forged woman instead of the real one and gave her to you to take to Laszlo, I realised I was in love with you.’ She smooths her palms along her thighs. ‘I was sacrificing my revenge to keep you free. And you could hav
e walked away free, with your million, if Laszlo had not found out who you were, and that Turton was involved.’
Mireille unfolds her legs and points her stockinged feet towards the window with her calves clenching. Harry knows no other woman who wears stockings. ‘My mother’s existence was left colourless after Picasso. Laszlo cost her everything. The theft of this painting gave him a new life and ruined hers. And mine.’ She lowers her feet to the floor and says softly, ‘I could have lived happily as Picasso’s daughter.’
Harry reaches over and places a hand behind her neck and pulls her forwards and kisses her, then angrily pushes her backwards to the floor. She complies, watching him, accepting his need of this mastery.
He tears her shirt open and, hearing a button tick against the window, realises he should stop. But he keeps going, wanting to strip her bare, to know who she is.
He rides through the clamour of their orgasms, the drumfire heartbeats, sawing breaths, whispered abuse and falling tears. And loping out into a dumb contentment, he thinks he sees, momentarily, the Weeping Woman in the contorted features of her climax. The daughter of the mother, the horror in the ecstasy. And he thinks then, collapsing onto her, his anger momentarily exorcised, her story might be true.
Then she is gone. ‘M? Mireille? Mireille?’ He calls only three times before he knows. He gets up from the paint-spattered sisal matting floor where he has slept. On the kitchen bench she has left a note. Beside it is a small canvas, rolled and tied with red string.
Harry,
No more forgery. No more stealing. Paint. Art is freedom for you.
My love was love.
Mireille xxx
He unties the string and rolls the canvas out on the bench top. It is a painting of a girl with a doll in her lap. Looking at the signature on the painting he laughs, shakes his head and closes his eyes. He pours himself a glass of vodka. He looks again at the painting. Perhaps it is a mother with a girl in her lap. Mauve and blue and yellow. It is a Picasso. Signed by the man and dated 1935. ‘No more forgery. No more stealing.’ So this is real. Mireille is the Weeping Woman’s daughter.
Stealing Picasso Page 20
