Madame

by Antoni Libera

  It occurred to me that I had yet to work out a plan of campaign for when she did arrive, and in particular to decide when best to make my move. Exhaustive consideration of the pros and cons led me to conclude that it would be wisest to bump into her later rather than sooner: not at the very start, and not even during the exhibition, but afterwards, when she had seen everything there was to see and was thinking of leaving. Her attention would by then no longer be concentrated exclusively or even mainly on the drawings; she would have had her fill and would be ready to return to the world around her, which earlier she would surely have ignored or even treated as a hindrance, an irritating distraction in her contemplation of the works of art before her. And it would give me a better pretext for striking up a conversation: what more natural beginning than a casual question about how she had liked the exhibition? Even the briefest of replies would serve as a basis for continuing and developing the exchange. Lastly, there would be a real chance of leaving the gallery in her company – together!

  Given these premises, the conclusion was clear: most of the time I’d have to follow her movements while remaining unobserved myself, to watch without being seen, to control the situation so as to pick the most propitious moment for the attack.

  An exciting task. But it required her presence – and of this there was still no sign.

  The vestibule, meanwhile, was becoming more and more crowded. People were literally squeezed against one another, arms pinned to their sides, waiting impatiently. My eye roamed slowly over the faces of the assembled guests, trying to omit no one. Alas, none of them was identical with Madame.

  At last the thing began. There was a glare of camera lights and a rasp from the microphones, the cameramen took up their positions behind their tripods and three men, attired in suits that were clearly their Sunday best, descended the stairs to the wide landing and halted in front of the microphones.

  The first to speak (or, rather, to read, from a slip of paper he took from his pocket) turned out to be a representative of the Ministry of Culture.

  After the first few sentences I stopped listening, for he was droning on in the best wooden officialese, and resumed my surveillance. Presently, however, my attention was drawn back to him: I heard the words ‘Guernica’ and ‘fascism’, then ‘Franco’ and ‘Spanish civil war’. That was when I discovered that Picasso ‘stands – as he has always stood – firmly with the forces of progress, and his membership of the Communist Party is eloquent and indisputable proof of this. For twenty years now,’ thundered the representative of the Ministry of Culture, ‘he has marched in its front ranks, and the Party is proud of him. Just as it is proud of Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, France’s greatest living writers.’

  Having thus concluded his speech, the Ministry man recited (this time from memory) the conventional formula about being honoured and delighted, etc., and handed over the floor to the director of the cultural section of the French Embassy, M. François Janvier.

  Instinctively my hand went up to the card pinned on my breast. Bending it up and sideways, I peered at the signature scrawled over the name on the stamp. Yes, that was it.

  So the person standing before me was the Green-Eyed One’s boss – the man who had read my essay and who, reading it, had been ‘unable to contain himself’.

  I hastily unpinned the card and slid it, together with the safety-pin, into my pocket.

  M. Janvier was a good-looking man of forty-odd with raven-black hair and a tanned face, looking as if he had just come back from the Côte d’Azur. He was clad in an impeccably tailored cream-coloured suit, a pale-blue button-down shirt and a dark-blue tie with diagonal scarlet stripes. Over the shirt he wore a thin olive-green sweater, and on his feet well-made shoes of nut-coloured suede.

  He spoke without notes, fluently and with confidence, gesticulating lightly. The gist of his speech was more or less as follows:

  Modern civilisation, despite its constant appeals to the idea of progress, reason and freedom, despite its claims to be guided by high ideals and its alleged desire to liberate man and raise him up, in fact enslaves, fetters and confuses him. Despite extraordinary advances in technology, science and education, despite a higher standard of living, man is not happy in these new conditions. He is alienated, he is frustrated. He feels inferior, constrained and artificial. He feels deeply false.

  Picasso, the genius ever in advance of his time, perceives this more clearly than anyone else. And he appeals to us to abandon this path.

  For what? you may ask. And he answers as Rousseau did two hundred years ago: for Nature!

  ‘Your promises are false!’ he says to modern civilisation. ‘Instead of a better life you have brought genocide, instead of greater freedom we have constraint and shame. I no longer believe your claims! I cannot trust you!’

  The master turns away from modern civilisation towards what is real and true, innocent and unsullied, towards our root and our source: le corps. Le corps humain. Here is man’s true paradise; here, only here, can man be himself, truly himself. This is where his happiness, his true happiness, lies. L’amour. L’amour physique.

  ‘Yes, mesdames et messieurs,’ said the director, winding up, ‘Pablo Picasso’s message in these masterpieces from his latest period makes me think of Shakespeare’s Antony and his seditious reply to the news that an envoy has come from Rome. Let me quote it to you. This is what he says:

  Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch

  Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.

  Kingdoms are clay. Our dungy earth alike

  Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life

  Is to do thus: when such a mutual pair –

  at this point the director paused suddenly and peered upwards, as if looking for someone, or perhaps merely trying to remember the next lines; but this turned out to be only for effect, for, momentarily casting off his role, he went on to explain that upon these words Antony draws Cleopatra to him and they embrace (he used the word ‘étreinte’). Then he finished:

  – when such a mutual pair

  And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind,

  On pain of punishment, the world to weet

  We stand up peerless.

  The director’s words were greeted with enthusiasm. There was much clapping, accompanied by cries of ‘Bravo!’ (with the rolled r and the last syllable accented), as if he were some great operatic tenor. He, for his part, acknowledged this reception like a professional actor, bowed, and then once again peered upwards, somewhere in the direction of the first floor, as if it were the balcony of a theatre and part of his audience were seated there.

  The end of the opening ceremony was brief and purely formal. A representative of the Zacheta Gallery and the CBAE, a weedy, frightened-looking individual in a grey suit from the Polish Fashion collection, came forward to thank ‘all those wonderful people who have made this exhibition possible’, especially Messrs Daniel Henri Kahnweiler and Maurice Jardot of the Louise Leiris Gallery in Paris, who had so graciously decided to lend this collection without a fee and had even taken care of the insurance, which would have had to be paid in foreign currency.

  ‘Polish artists and art lovers will be eternally grateful for their extraordinary generosity.’ As he uttered these words the wretched man bent his scraggy body almost double in a painfully servile bow towards the director, who acknowledged the homage with a hand-on-heart gesture and a modest inclination of his head.

  The Ministry man, meanwhile, immobile as a rock, observed this ‘Polish tribute’ with an expression of ill-concealed distaste.

  ‘This exhibition of Picasso’s drawings,’ squeaked the weedy man in a voice trembling with emotion, ‘is hereby declared open!’

  The crowd in the vestibule surged upstairs. I remained where I was as it rolled by, scanning the faces of the guests. I followed only when the last of them had passed.

  On the landing, as I turned to the second flight, I glanced instinctively up to the white balustrade that went the
length of the first-floor passage, and observed that it did actually form a sort of gallery. There might well have been people (members of the diplomatic corps? A-list guests?) up there during the opening ceremony; most likely it was indeed at them that the director had been gazing when he had recited the Shakespeare, and again at the end of his speech.

  I finally made it upstairs, entered the first room – and froze, thunderstruck by the sight that met my eyes. No, it wasn’t Madame. It was the pictures on the walls – the drawings.

  It wasn’t as if I’d had no idea of what to expect. I was familiar with Picasso’s work from his various periods, including the post-war ones, and I hadn’t forgotten the Green-Eyed One’s remark about how it would be ‘très scandalisant’ for the bourgeoisie, or the director’s public allusion, in his speech, to the cult du corps humain and de l’amour physique. So I was prepared for the sight of things that were daring and provocative, perhaps titillating, possibly even obscene. And yet, faced with the graphic – in both senses – expression of that cult, immortalised in these drawings, I was stunned. I felt embarrassed and ill at ease, as if I were the one being exposed, as if I were being stripped naked and ridiculed.

  The walls were covered with naked bodies. Wherever the eye alighted, it met representations of the naked human form, in varying sizes, more often female than male, and always grotesque, monstrous and hideously deformed. Most shocking was not the nakedness itself or even the deformity, but the way the primary sexual characteristics – the reproductive organs, in other words – were brought into relief. Crotches and genitalia were prominent in the foreground, the centre of gravity of each drawing, as it were. And although they were roughly, almost symbolically sketched, barely suggested by the dots, dashes, circles and occasional black splotches of which they were composed, in their deliberate crudeness they were tremendously, powerfully expressive. At times they made one think of the kind of thing children might draw in their early ‘genital’ phase – the iconography by which they express their first anatomical discoveries, particularly the fascinating and mysterious anatomical differences between little boys and little girls; at others they reminded one insistently of the art of primitive peoples, in which sex also tended to play a considerable role.

  Of course, Picasso’s drawings were less naïve than either of these. They exuded a pointed, almost vicious irony. The brushstrokes and ink lines seemed to echo with the sound of his laughter – at once ribald and sardonic.

  What was the Master laughing at?

  Put simply, he was laughing at man’s unconvincing and silly pretence of maturity; at the deathly seriousness with which he took himself, at his risible pride in being the creator of Culture, his feeling of superiority to the flora and fauna and his mistaken conviction that he had surpassed them.

  So, the paintings drawled at me in a mocking voice, you think you know everything, do you? You think you’ve become gods? Or at least, with the kingdom you’ve built on earth, with its morality and spirituality and pious ceremonies, far outdistanced your four-legged relatives? Well, let me show you something, let me remind you of what you really are. You are still, irredeemably, ineluctably, subjects of Nature: slaves to blind instincts and animal drives, biological forces over which you have no control. Whatever you may quaintly imagine, your only purpose on this earth, and that goes for each and every one of you, is to reproduce, to procreate, to propagate the species. That’s it, there’s nothing else. All the rest is meaningless – a pretence, an illusion. Whistling in the wind.

  Look at him, Homo sapiens, puffing himself up! Look at his airs and graces and his posturing! And yet below the waist he’s still a savage – wild, incalculable, ridiculous. All those fissures and protuberances, those holes and concavities where the act of procreation takes place – how ludicrous they are, how absurd, when you look at them like this!

  I forged my way through the crowd, trying to avoid the front rows of spectators and barely pausing before the drawings. I gave each of them a lightning glance, trying to take in as much as I could, and then moved on, affecting indifference. I was tense and wary, and tried hard to be inconspicuous. I would have preferred to disappear altogether. At some point I realised I was paying more attention to the spectators than to the exhibits, and no longer because I was looking for Madame but for an entirely different reason.

  The people around me were mostly embodiments of maturity, in terms of both age and social status. They were an élite in every respect: professional, financial, artistic, physical. Their bodies were sleek and well fed, confident and well cared for; their clothes were expensive; the experience of life etched on their faces was rich and varied. One glance was enough to see that their schooling in the realm of emotion and sex had been extensive and thorough. They had learnt their lessons well, mastered the material, passed their share of exams in the subject; their knowledge of human passion was solid and well tested.

  I had been assuming, not altogether consciously, that if I observed them well, especially when they were absorbed by the nudes, some of their knowledge would be passed on to me; that the expression on their faces, caught, as it were, in flagrante, in the act of perception, would disclose their secrets, allow me to glimpse the traces of some other act, committed by them in the murky and distant past and now remembered.

  A deluded hope, of course, but exciting nonetheless. And it grew in a tangle of unanswered questions: what do they feel when they look at these drawings? Or rather, what goes on inside them? What echoes, what shadowy memories return, prompted by the shapes before them, what feelings, what sensations come flooding back? And what form do they take? Do they return as a memory of some past experience? As a shiver of fascination, a sudden stirring of desire – or revulsion?

  These questions became more urgent when I passed into a room with a cycle of drawings entitled L’étreinte, the word the director of the Service had used in referring to Antony and Cleopatra’s embrace; the Zacheta Gallery had translated it as Embracing.

  The drawings depicted couples in coitu in various positions and from a variety of perspectives. In most of them a hairy man resembling a satyr was thrusting, in a half-lying, half-kneeling posture, into the body of a woman; she, legs bent and drawn well up, urged him on, either gripping his buttocks, beneath which a huge, pendulous bulb of testicles swelled, or propped up on her arms, back arched, straining to meet him and pushing out her spreading, liquid breasts. In some of the drawings this coupling was presented from several perspectives at once, including impossible ones. Picasso seemed to be taking apart his subject – the actus copulationis – into its primary elements and then reconstituting it as an abstract sort of synthesis. This, the drawings seemed to be saying, is how man mates; this is what it looks like. Here are the various angles, viewpoints and cross-sections that make up the complete picture.

  This room was the most crowded of all; you had to push your way through a crush of bodies to get from one picture to another. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to look at the drawings or the people. My thoughts raced wildly. I felt feverish.

  The questions gathered and spilled over one another. What did all this mean? Why were these people so mesmerised by these drawings, why did they stare at them so greedily? And why the heavy atmosphere in the room? After all, this was simply Nature as Picasso depicted it – ordinary, basic nature, perfectly familiar to them all. Then why the excitement? Why the flushed cheeks and nervous glances? Why didn’t they respond like this when they looked at other manifestations of Nature in art, such as motherhood, beauty, suffering or even death?

  But perhaps this was the wrong question to ask; perhaps it should be turned around and directed at the creators, not the spectators, of art: why did the artists, portrayers of Nature, omit this subject when they painted everything else? Why did they not portray conception and birth? I couldn’t think of a single example of a classical painting that showed either of these two crucial acts. Why should they be taboo? They were human, after all. Why did no one ever mention the
m? Why were they never depicted – or, if they were, labelled pornography? The Greek porne meant ‘debauchery’; was the sexual act, then, debauched?

  I struggled with the chaos of these questions, giddy with speculation, unable to impose order on my thoughts. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. What was I asking? What did I want to know? Why this confusion in my brain? Why was I worked up to such a pitch of nervous excitement – I, the rationalist, the champion of Reason?

  Finally I began to understand the causes of my disquiet. They were connected with Madame – in several ways. For one thing, the exhibition, which was supposed to have been a useful springboard for striking up a conversation with her (circumstances permitting), had turned out to be more of an obstacle: talking to her here would be problematic. What would I say? How did you like it? What did you think of it? How true to life do you think it is? It would feel awkward, somehow. Embarrassing. She might think I was mocking her. On the other hand, if I said nothing and began to talk of something different without even mentioning the drawings, that would seem odd, too. After all, the drawings were the main reason we were there.

  But this, however inconvenient, wasn’t the main thing that was troubling me; it was quite possible that I might not see Madame here at all. The true source of my consternation lay deeper – in the realisation, awakened in me by Picasso, that my whole world of feelings, desires and dreams was a pretence, the result of profound self-delusion. And the effects of my disillusionment were devastating.

  I was a sensible, clear-thinking kind of person; indeed, I sometimes suspected myself of excessive rationalism. And yet until this moment I had thought of my feelings for Madame as a spiritual passion, separate and distinct and belonging only to the soul. I had genuinely believed this. I had trusted my feelings and acted accordingly, seeking fulfilment in the sphere of language, of words. And now Picasso, the pagan, the follower of Dionysus, had brought me down to earth with a thud. I could hear his gleeful sniggering, his obscene chortles of delighted mockery. It was a rude and painful awakening, like a bucketful of cold water sloshed over my head.