This was the place Pablo’s family arrived in the years before the war—that great moody metropolis of the Mediterranean that attracts as it repulses, charms as it forebodes, caresses as it cuts.
At fourteen, Pablo once again found himself plunked into someplace strange. This time, he couldn’t even understand what the damn people were saying. As stimulating as Barcelona was, he was eager to make his displeasure known and acted indifferent about this move, a smug convict transferring jails.
Don José, born middle-class and sunk now to just scraping by, was hard on Pablo so his son wouldn’t go bust as he had. Besides relentlessly pressuring the boy to perfect technique, he also decided they must pursue a new tack. To win favor and increase the value of his output, Don José concluded a painter must carefully select his subjects. No one before him in all of Europe accomplished what he had with the pigeon. But Don José admitted it had brought him no money and no good. So he pushed Pablo to sow his reputation and land profitable commissions through large religious compositions. After all, anyone in Spain knows churches have more gold and silver than banks.
Soon after arriving in Barcelona, this plan was validated when Don José charmed a convent of Vincentian nuns into letting Pablo paint a mural behind their altar. Don José entered Pablo’s work into every show, talking up the prodigy he’d sired as though he were a prize horse.
All the while, Pablo bit his tongue and tried to remain obedient, always remembering that awful night in La Coruña, of which neither father nor son spoke. But relations between them were perpetually on the verge of erupting again. Many evenings, Pablo escaped their apartment via the roof and drifted through the Barri Gòtic’s shadow-drenched labyrinth like a tadpole floating through reed grass, meandering in and out of crocodile jaws.
During the daylight, however, Pablo attended La Llotja. He was among the class’s youngest, but he painted more skillfully than his professors and gained instant notoriety. Arrogant and aloof, when he couldn’t follow what the teachers were telling him in Catalan, Pablo simply cocked those endless eyes and wagged a hollow grin, his brush continuing to twirl and caper, dapple and fandango. This certainly aroused his classmates’ curiosity, but such a demeanor deterred introductions, even invited scorn. He was careful not to show how their teasing bothered him. Luckily, he often didn’t comprehend the words anyway.
A few months after starting classes, Pablo was sitting on the school’s front steps when another student walked up to him. Flaxen-haired and well-built, he looked several years older. Pablo recognized him as a decent painter, although only of country scenes. Pablo didn’t see why people confined their art like this, forever repeating themselves.
“Back home, people call me Pajaresco,” said the young man, holding out a thick, blistered hand to Pablo. “You can call me that, too.”
It turned out he was from up in the mountains in a remote farming settlement nestled not far from the river, a place called La Horta de Ebro. Pajaresco reminded Pablo of the American cowboys he’d read of in pulp paperbacks—few words, a square jaw stippled with auburn, and a cigarette between his teeth. It was obvious enough to Pablo this farmhand didn’t belong in the stodgy school where Barcelona’s best families sent their sons to be painters. Pablo liked him for that.
And as he himself was from a dusty province at the bottom of Spain—hardly different to Barcelonès than the outlaw Texas of his comic books—Pablo might even borrow something of the older boy’s desperado swagger.
“All them other kids, they’re too squirmy and dumb to paint nothing good. The teachers won’t let them near the ledge,” Pajaresco said to Pablo. “But it’s like you was hatched full-grown, a painter right outta the shell.”
Soon, the two of them could be found strutting in big, bowlegged strides down La Rambla, the leafy promenade running from Plaça de Catalunya to the seaport. Burnt caramel and the calls of newspaper vendors reciting bloody headlines wafted through the air. The pavement was lined with flower-sellers and stacked cedarwood cages filled with canaries, parakeets, finches, and a macaque monkey clenching the bars. Pajaresco showed Pablo how to whistle “all aboard” to shopgirls. He treated Pablo to strong tobacco and booze at the seedy joints of Barri Xinès with the cash he’d saved from odd jobs.
From Pablo, Pajaresco learned to fix the perspective in his bucolic paintings. And when Doña María saw that the boy was living away from his family, she invited him to Sunday suppers for home-cooked meals.
“Don’t try too hard fitting in here,” Pajaresco comforted Pablo after dinner one day. “These city people might kick a dog if they thought nobody was looking. They call themselves Catalan, but the true Catalunya is up there.” He pointed through the windowpane to the escarpment beyond the rooftops. He promised someday he’d show Pablo real living, back home in Horta.
Hardly after Pajaresco had spoken, his parents fetched him to come work the land and avoid the military draft. Anybody could see that war with America was approaching.
Around the same time, Don José heard from his fellow teachers there was nothing left for his son to learn at La Llotja. Just before Pablo turned sixteen, Don José borrowed money from Uncle Salvador and shipped him away.
Pablo became withdrawn in Madrid, the sprawling capital where his father enrolled him in the country’s finest art institute. He didn’t write his parents, made few friends, and grew disinterested in anything but his artwork. He also noticed how easily incensed he could become, just like Don José. The mindless jabbering of his classmates and instructors drove him mad. But he seldom spoke up himself because he didn’t want to engage with anyone. He couldn’t determine who he was anymore. As a child, he’d been the entertainer. Then he was the talent. Now, at the San Fernando Royal Academy, all the students and teachers were technically adept, but no one’s work stood out. Yet they each harbored an opinion about how Pablo should paint, the same way his father had. They seemed determined that art be concerned with mechanical sophistication and completely without novelty, human emotion, or depth. Here, Pablo felt without contour or form, like he might have picked the wrong vocation—or, rather, that it had been unjustly chosen for him.
After eight months, Pablo’s tongue became coarse and swollen like a starfish arm. He was diagnosed with scarlet fever. Doña María was terrified. Despite Lola barely being a teenager, the family sent her to nurse Pablo and bring home its prodigal son.
CHAPTER 5
La Horta de Ebro, June 1898
Pajaresco got to make good on his promise much sooner than either one of the young men anticipated.
Pablo arrived in Horta in a battered donkey-led wagon after his mother deemed Barcelona no place for someone in his condition. Instead, she arranged for him to recuperate amid the fresh highlands air. He relished learning from his friend the farm’s routine. Pablo and Pajaresco fed the soil around the family’s olive trees with bonemeal, cleaned pomace from the press, plowed fields, chopped firewood, and held hot barbs to each other’s skin to remove ticks.
And they painted.
They’d wander off with their canvases, brushes, tubes of color, and easels tied in burlap bundles, eating fig cakes, drinking handfuls of cool water from streams and purple liquid from a smelly goat-bladder wineskin, finding ridges that in the sunset became ribbons of gold. After exhausting every subject close by, one morning they packed their bags onto a dun-colored mule and marched into the mountains, where the landscape was still wild. Brown finches skimmed through the trees, and Pajaresco moved in great strides, a gundog panting beside him in the heat of the sun. When the animals tired, they tied them up by a river, left food, and carried on.
Pablo, still convalescing, could barely keep pace himself as they bouldered up hillsides, leaping from one rock face to another. On a steep incline, a sapling he’d grabbed on to broke in half, sending him sliding toward the canyon far below, his arms and legs kicking up dust.
Pajaresco scrambled down the scarp, catching Pablo’s wrist just as he was going over the ledge. “You
saved my life,” Pablo exclaimed with heavy breath as his friend’s powerful arm hoisted him up.
“So we live to paint another Virgin,” Pajaresco replied.
The two climbed higher and made a camp in a limestone cave. A spring nearby nursed the river. They washed their clothes and let a narrow waterfall drench their heads and roll off their backs. Pablo was warmed by Pajaresco’s friendship, but the fear he’d felt while tumbling—the sensation the earth was opening up to an infinite void beneath him—lingered.
Pablo and Pajaresco did not put on clothes even after their skin had dried in the sun, going instead like Pacific tribesmen. They maimed a hare with buckshot from a Holland & Holland and killed it, skewering the animal longwise on a beech branch. The meat was unrelenting and spare, but it was free and it was theirs, and they were free and they were alive. When the sun went down, they guzzled wine, and Pablo laid the ends of sticks in the fire until their tips glowed. The night’s blackness became an edgeless canvas on which to render that most pagan rite, the Spanish bullring. In the air, he drew the thick-muscled outlines of bulls, horsemen, and toreros with the orange embers and watched them disappear.
When Pablo awoke the next morning, there was someone standing before him, a shadow encircled in early light. Pablo looked around and saw Pajaresco had taken the shotgun hunting. But he was not frightened. The figure was lean faced, with a sharp-edged nose and hair like gall ink. His skin was the color of baked terra-cotta, with a white patina of ash at the elbows. He must have been about Pablo’s age, perhaps slightly younger—or was he older? The boy talked with a strange accent—not Catalan, not Aragonese, not Basque—and said he was with his flock, passing through. But Pablo saw no one with him, creature or man. His calves were round, like pomegranates, and his stomach bare, a vest covering his ribs. Slung over his neck was a jute sack. A mandolin poked out.
Pablo walked with the boy through the tall sedge past a growth of blue borage by a hornet’s nest. They followed the river, carrying Pablo’s brushes and rolled-up canvases.
“Further up, you can catch sturgeon,” the boy said. “Long and black, with little whiskers, mothers full of eggs.” Had Pablo seen the boar, he asked. The falcons? The lynx?
“There’s no lynx here,” Pablo said.
“She’s hiding,” the boy said. “Townspeople try to kill her, but she’s too smart. Hear her, if you know what you’re listening for.”
Pablo asked the boy if you could really make paint from the river, and he told him it was true. Alongside them, the water grew wider, then narrow again.
The boy called out the names of trees and plants as they walked, telling Pablo the properties of each. Tea of valerian for catarrh. Climbing bindweed berries for cancer. Gentian to regain strength after a sickness. “Syrup from cooked mulberry seeds together with honey makes you feel desire,” he said.
“Aunt Pepa uses a special thyme.”
“For desire?”
“For her appetite.”
“No,” he said. “For mating.”
The boy announced there was no paint in the river here, though, so they sat down on a rock cluster that shimmered with quartz and took out their easels and bundles of brushes and tubes. On the horizon was the faint movement of a distant storm. Pablo watched the traveler’s graceful handwork and saw how effortlessly the poppy bulbs against a cerulean sky came to life on his canvas. The boy swore no one had taught him even to hold a brush. It reminded Pablo of his father’s stories of the boys from the barren scrubland: too poor to have a proper matador’s suit, but they could plant a sword between the bravest bull’s shoulder blades as if their hands were guided by angels.
When they returned to the cave, Pajaresco was waiting. He’d tracked a boar nine miles but made a dangerous error after getting the bastard in range. “You can’t graze a boar,” he said.
The three hunted quail—killing, plucking, gutting, and stuffing a half dozen of them with chanterelles. The boy removed from his sack sausages wrapped in rough paper and cooked them with thistles and wild leeks. They huddled in the night like ferrets to keep warm.
In the small of the morning, before even Pajaresco rose, the boy led Pablo along the stream in the other direction, its pebbly shores colonized by foxtails and nightshade. Fish gathered in eddies and leapt out and in. The two foragers batted away black flies. Their footsteps sunk into the moist earth. A twig snapped. The boy grabbed Pablo’s collar.
“Is it the lynx?” Pablo asked. “I forgot the gun.”
“No,” the boy replied, swiveling his gaze through the air, searching. “We’re all right here.” He pointed at their feet.
Pablo saw the muck they had been walking through was soft and ruddy, with bright yellow running through it like gold veins. It was the ochre deposits Don José had told Pablo of long ago, when he was tiny.
“Paint!” Pablo screamed.
“Nature,” the boy said, “hides herself.” He fetched a handful of the moist clay and held it out. Pablo dipped his forefinger into the outstretched palm, and rust-smell filtered through the air, mixing with sticky rockrose.
Without knowing why, Pablo dragged the yellow tip of his finger up the boy’s forearm, leaving a wet ochre stripe. The boy’s grip closed around Pablo’s wrist, and their eyes met. He pulled Pablo slowly, hand-over-hand, and Pablo let himself be hauled closer. Their feet and ankles sank into the wet ground as they began to explore one another. Nearby, the cool water kept running away.
That night, after the faint orange turned to silver cinders, the boy woke Pablo once more to say his people were leaving. “Give me your hand,” he whispered. With the tip of his knife, the boy cut a curve from thumb to little finger on their palms. They pressed the oozing surfaces together, smearing the blood between them like warm paint.
“Brothers,” they said. Then Pablo watched him go, listening as his departing footfalls grew softer until there was no trace.
When the sun rose, Pablo spread out the iron-rich clay as instructed, cut it into pieces with his knife, and ground it with the bottom of a tin cup. He stirred the fine powder with linseed oil and painted the hillsides. The picture was better than what he had done in Madrid, or Barcelona, or anywhere before. Pablo thought he might never leave here.
Then the rain came. Pajaresco had intended for them to depart that day, but they were forced to shelter beneath the limestone slab, watching the water drape down. There was no dry wood and no place to build a fire. They tried burning their easels. They shivered through the night.
After two days in which they ate or drank nothing besides handfuls of flour mixed with rainwater, Pajaresco said they must go. He feared the cave would flood while they slept. They fretted how the river already must have overrun the easiest paths to the farm.
On the journey back to Horta, Pablo began to feel his fever return. When they arrived at the tree where they’d tied up the dun-colored mule, they found it weak and dripping wet but still alive. The dog had chewed through the rope long ago.
Near nightfall, just as it stopped raining on Horta’s outskirts, a carriage full of men wearing threadbare pantsuits and crumpled hats of straw and banana leaf crossed their path. Their arms and legs were wraith-thin, their eyes pale-yellow harvest moons. One rested his chin weakly on the guard of a saber, and Pablo recognized the returning soldiers. He knew then that Spain would lose to America.
For the rest of the summer in Horta, and then after it became cold again, Pablo dreamed of the stranger and the hidden place where he had taken him. In his sleep, the colors of the landscape kept changing, tones coming and going, even the boy shifted. But the pigment would always be buried there in the mud.
CHAPTER 6
I
Barcelona, March 1899
With a stroke of ink from the queen regent’s pen, the war—the one Yanks called a “splendid little war”—was over, just as Spain was being invaded by its own defeated recruits.
Platoons of riflemen waded to Barcelona’s shores from the maimed boats that carri
ed them. Gaunt and gnarled, they languished from fever, dysentery, typhoid, and the mal air of tropic ports. Their wounds had slow-dried into stucco. The health board feared the whole population would be infected as more soldiers hobbled along La Rambla on peg legs, begging for alms, loose tobacco, and rum. But no one could stop this lost regiment from cursing the Crown it had defended, insulting the cowards who’d bought draft exemptions, or beating cheating wives.
The bawdy houses in the Barri Xinès were packed. Madams scribbled numbers on strips of paper, handing them out to the lines like delicatessen tickets. Riots nearly broke out when the women barred the doors.
The mothers who’d prayed to a panoply of saints for their sons to return now swore off the faith. In bars and at bullfights, over the dinner table, and kneeling in church pews, the city boiled with hate for the country claiming it. Barcelona, always grumbling, was now fully apoplectic. Why ever should it be forced to belong to this deflated nation?
Just beyond living memory, Spain presided over a conquest greater than Rome’s or the caliph’s. It sprawled, bronze and fit as a satyr, across the globe. But the empire on which the sun never sets was gone now. Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines—the territories providing the last of its foreign cash—vanished overnight. All became shiny new baubles belonging to America. Having spent the New World’s riches like roulette winnings, Spain’s coffers were empty. The military had been crippled, and the nation’s standing was in tatters. Barcelona and the Catalans wanted out.
This was the melee Pablo returned to after nine months in Horta. There, Pablo resided among old men spewing stories of when they had taken up arms with militias against Spanish royal troops during the First Carlist War. Pablo had formed his own opinions now, grown bolder.
The Blue Period Page 4
