The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  But Don José vehemently opposed the arrogant ingratitude of the separatists, just as he mocked the impressionists whom he said rejected tradition because they weren’t up to the task of maintaining it.

  When Pablo uttered Catalanisme sentiments after coming home, it made the two of them fight so sharply, it was impossible to say if Pablo stormed out before he was banished or if it was the other way around. Pablo had become too accustomed to no yoke, no family, no Don José to mold his ideas by brute force. He wasn’t prepared to adopt again the humility of living at home, to feign being a son who only silently wished his father dead.

  With Pajaresco kept behind in Horta to tend next year’s wine buds and no other friends in the city, Pablo found refuge at the brothel where he’d gotten to know a coat check girl. The subterrestrial feel of these places was more satisfying than the sex, although Pablo couldn’t deny he desired that, too. On Pablo’s first excursion with Pajaresco, he’d been eager to lose his virginity—cast it off like wet shirtsleeves—and bask in the overwhelming contentedness he imagined awaiting on the other side of this rite. But the act disappointed him and wasn’t what he’d been dreaming of since his lust was first awakened in the waters off La Coruña. He’d kept going back to Barri Xinès’s brothels with Pajaresco, though, always hoping the next time he would find what was missing from the last.

  Now, though, Pablo couldn’t afford sex, and he was happy to hover instead around the coat check girl who called herself Rosita. Despite customers’ petitions and her revealingly high hemlines and low necklines, she rendered no services besides, for a couple pesetas, safeguarding jackets and valuables. Sometimes she even held the customers’ revolvers. Once, she told Pablo, she’d discovered in a satchel a crude device grafted onto a piece of leftover ordnance from the war. She’d prayed the man would finish his business before the bomb went off.

  Pablo would sketch Rosita late into the night. She watched as he did so, and they chatted about longing to travel, the peacock boa she fancied, and how she’d give anything to attend the theater. She was pretty, more every time Pablo looked at her, with an explosion of crinkled brown hair and an intelligent smile. He’d never talked so freely or so long with a girl who was unrelated to him before. She was sophisticated and outgoing, unusually so, he thought. Maybe they both didn’t belong here—not in this brothel, not in Spain. Pablo made sure his pictures were as beautiful as Rosita hoped to be. She told him he was not a bad flirt, even if he lacked experience, called him cute with his big eyes. And having worked the whole summer, he was no longer scrawny, either.

  This is how Pablo came to live for a while in the closet that was the overflow of a coatroom. Rosita brought him fish-maw soup in the evenings and coffee or chocolate to start the day. But he reckoned the situation wouldn’t last, one way or another. He not only had no money but also was running out of paint.

  Guilt nibbled at Pablo when he was forced to peddle the pictures of Rosita on La Rambla, displaying the girl in ways that would have shocked her parents, who thought she was a concierge at an inn. But it was with those pesetas stuffed into his pocket that Pablo stumbled into Els Quatre Gats, a place Rosita said he ought to visit, him being an artist and all. She did warn that he wouldn’t find any women to paint there. Kindred spirits, possibly.

  Pablo had heard of this tavern before. It had been carving out a niche new to Barcelona and unique on all the Peninsula—bohemian chic, laced with political, philosophical, and stylistic ideals both homegrown and imported. Founded by Catalans who’d lived in Paris a decade earlier and drunk at Le Chat Noir, Els Gats had become Barcelona’s indispensable watering hole for artists and intellectuals. It established a whole manner of talking, dressing, and carrying on. The modernista or decadente mode synonymous with this particular bar was becoming easy to spot on the streets now. Trappings included sharp-tailored clothes that plucked and chose flares from yesteryear, mismatching in the same outfit some exotic item from the Orient, maybe, or a pair of pointy French shoes.

  Among the tavern’s regulars was a not-too-subtle sympathy for anarchism. There was ardor for everything subversive, really, anything to fit this end of an age.

  Wagner? All right.

  De Sade? Definitely.

  Verne? Has a way of making even illiterates give a good think.

  Verlaine and Rimbaud? Divine!

  Were there real anarchists at Els Gats? Like the one who’d stabbed the long-locked Empress Elisabeth of Austria through her corset with a machinist’s file straight into the right chamber of her heart just that year? These new Goths who would sack not Rome but all the Industrial Age? Who’d made every theatergoer in Europe wonder if a bomb were not ticking beneath the seat? Perhaps. Or maybe only poseurs came to Els Gats. You never knew. It was part of the mystique.

  Down a narrow lane Pablo found the ornate art nouveau town house where Els Gats resided on the first floor. Curving consoles and lushly decorative metalwork balconies emerged from the building’s sides. A pointed archway leading into the tavern was festooned with a tangle of vine. He paced fitfully up and down the sidewalk for a few minutes before gathering the nerve to step through the grate door.

  The air inside smelled of grease fires and was woven with rills of tobacco smoke. Bright ceramics from the south decorated the walls interspersed with portraits of self-possessed, raffish men, their expressions droll and side-glancing. Pablo nabbed a seat at an empty table near the high oak bar in the rear.

  As Pablo’s eyes roved the room, he noticed that some of the faces surrounding him matched those on the wall. In the center of the tavern, a dozen consorts had perched around a refectory table, their fists filled with wines, brandies, and carajillos—the latest rage, made from coffee and Cuban rum. These were the Barcelonan artists his father always disparaged and silently envied—beloved by critics and lauded in the magazines. Pablo began sketching the scene while listening to their rapid-fire banter about philosophy, poets, and assassins. They never stayed on any topic for long and savaged one another with as many barbs per measure as they could manage, almost like they were trying to notch points in a game.

  Someone with cable-wire spectacles and the bloodless face of an Eastern mystic had been busy claiming God’s own son was an anarchist and bellowed, “In Zeno’s Republic, which historical Jesus would have read—”

  “Right, so what?” interrupted a round-faced good-timer with a fixed grin. “We know the guy had an itch for whores and wine.”

  “Hush, Nonell, or you’ll bring the wrath of God down upon our tapas,” said a man picking at a plate of grilled octopus. Gold cuff links the shape of elephants gleamed at his wrists, and Pablo sensed he was more important than the rest. So, too, did Pablo see something familiar in him. Was it the nose, lengthy and fine? Or perhaps that haughtiness in his voice, like the screech of a door hinge. Whatever it might be, Pablo swore he knew this man.

  “God’s dead. Haven’t you heard?” cried the one called Nonell.

  “Hegel wrote that first, you know, long before Nietzsche,” replied the Eastern mystic.

  “What’s he say killed Him?” asked a little man with deep-set eyes.

  Nonell shouted back, “Probably came to Els Gats and had the shrimp!”

  “Drown out the disease, why don’t you?” barked the weather-beaten bartender dangling a long clay pipe from thick, puffed lips. “The more expensive the wine, the better it disinfects.”

  “That’s right,” Nonell said. “Touch of cholera hearties the constitution.”

  But then, at once, everyone remembered aloud the soldiers coming home from Cuba with ruined guts and agreed it was nothing to laugh at.

  The man in cuff links changed the subject to tout how he’d just got back from France and was painting up a storm.

  “Is everyone off to Paris?” said a curly-haired beanpole with crooked teeth and a look of introspection. “You’d think we were laying groundwork for an invasion.”

  “Say, there’s an idea—secede from Spain and join the Frenc
h!” Nonell said, thumping his empty goblet against the wood. “The food’s all right, and how ’bout those fancy broads on the postcards? Ma belle!”

  “Painters can live like royalty in Paris,” said that important-sounding man who couldn’t quite be placed and whose sleeves sported tiny pachyderms with real-ivory tusks. “In Barcelona, your pictures are sold for less than sin.”

  “A painter king? Oh, I likes it. How about you, Casas?” Nonell posed roguishly. “You already act like the big grandee of this tavern—hear ye, King of the Gats!”

  The lot of them pounded the table and howled as Casas leaned back in satisfaction, exhaling a wheezy guffaw.

  And Pablo finally remembered exactly who this character was.

  Shortly after Pablo’s family moved to Barcelona, Don José had staged a First Communion scene with Lola as model to shop around his boy-genius’s technical prowess. He entered the painting into a show at the city’s Palace of Fine Arts, and the family made a pilgrimage there. But Pablo was mortified when he overheard a gaggle of older artists mocking his work. One of them called it “very cute” and let out that repugnant guffaw Pablo would never forget. Casas was older now, with gray flecking his beard, but he still had that laugh.

  Those men, Pablo learned then, composed Barcelona’s so-called avant-garde, a phrase Don José said as if crinkling it up to throw in the trash. Their work was raw and gutty, their images painted in a simple style Pablo had never before seen. Such a far cry it was from anything in the Prado or what his teachers and father offered. And the artists were not dressed like academics or corpses. They were wing-collared playboys, dashing adventurers. The people mulling in the exposition hall that day were raving about works made by these real, live artists, who were now sitting in a circle at the table before him. He looked up to the very idea that painters like this could exist, while hating them for having dismissed him.

  “And there is the Louvre. Don’t forget about that,” the mystic pointed out, returning to the inventory of Paris’s attractions. “Pity we must go all the way to France for a museum, though. Why is it that Barcelona hasn’t a single one?”

  “What, hang the walls with paintings from the likes of you hacks?” a tipsy voice called out from somewhere outside the circle. Pablo turned and saw a young man sitting alone on the other side of the room. He was scribbling in a notebook.

  The table booed.

  “Do tell, young Carles,” said Casas, “how a wit like yours might keep the gaslights burning by writing poetry and not selling it anywhere?”

  The fellow, tall and spruce like a teenage Chopin, stood up, and said in English verse:

  And Wit, was his vain, frivolous pretence,

  Of pleasing others, at his own expense.

  For Wits are treated just like common Whores,

  First they’re enjoy’d, and then kickt out of Doores.

  The man named Carles doffed his hat and returned to his notebook as if he’d never bothered looking up.

  “Poets do, after all, specialize in gibberish,” Casas dismissed him to the crowd.

  “And what’s a blowhard specialize in?” Carles fired back, nonchalant. Furious laughter erupted until Casas scowled, his easy demeanor vanishing.

  Pablo couldn’t believe it. This upstart hardly looked a year older than him. Yet he’d challenged the elephant bull? And no doubt won!

  After some grumbling, the banter resumed, and Pablo took his pocketful of coins to the bartender and ordered leg of roast chicken and a cup of coffee, which tasted like laundry water. When he returned to his chair, the wisecrack who’d hollered across the room was standing over Pablo’s open sketchbook, staring at the picture Pablo had made of him battling Casas.

  “Say, that ain’t half bad,” he said and offered his hand. “Carles Casagemas. I stopped adding ‘extraordinaire.’ It’s too much, don’t you think? What’s you, an art student or something?”

  “Art school dropout, actually.”

  “La Llotja?”

  “For a while. Then the Royal Academy.”

  “Oooh, Madrid. Fancy stuff. Why’d you quit?”

  “I told my family I was sick. That much is true. I was—scarlet fever. But I couldn’t take all the nonsense, either. How many times can you hear instructors who paint like cows swear you’re doing something the wrong way when you’re doing it right?”

  “Tell me about it. Cows. That’s probably being kind.”

  “It was an education, just not the one it was meant to be. And you, why are you stranded by yourself instead of sitting with the bunch?”

  “What, them? Oh, they were going on about nihilism one day, and I stopped caring.”

  Pablo feigned understanding.

  “Anyway, those guys are idiots. I mean, I must love ’em—I keep coming here, right? But they’re fucking idiots.”

  “They dress nice.”

  “Yeah, I guess. In fairness, a few are all right. Like Pere, the glum fellow behind the bar. You met him yet?” Carles fired a wink to the pipe-smoking man wearing a Brittany sweater before turning back toward Pablo and noticing his drab dish of meat smeared with gravy. “Know the first thing you did wrong?” Carles asked.

  Pablo looked at him blankly.

  “Don’t ever order the food here. It’s rubbish.” He pointed to the plate. “I bet you think that’s chicken?”

  “That’s what the menu led me to believe.”

  “Well, I tell you, I was kicking around at the wharf one day, when all the sudden, I spotted Pere in a rowboat casting about, tossing bread crusts into the water, waiting to catch the seagulls with a net!”

  Pablo felt the corners of his lips plunge as he nearly gagged.

  “I know! If you’re desperate, you might survive the omelet. But I wouldn’t risk it. What’s that you’re drinking? Coffee? You from some kind of religious order?”

  “It’s cheap.”

  “Now this is the sort of injustice I can’t stand,” said Carles. “I’ve had seven—no, eight?—beers and a liter of cava already. And you’ve had but one cup of that piss Els Gats calls coffee.”

  “It tastes like soap.”

  “Hey, that’s a good sign. Pere never used to wash the dishes before. Isn’t that right, ol’ man?” Carles tapped his beer glass with a fingernail, and Pere noticed him and smirked. The bartender hauled over two great big steins overflowing with Estrella Damm to Pablo’s table. “One for my Cervantes; one for the little Goya he found,” he said. Carles sat down across from Pablo.

  While chatting, Carles mentioned something in passing about his father being a diplomat. Pablo had deduced he came from a well-to-do family, given his dress and erudition. As an aspiring poet, it seemed he was the black sheep. From Pere’s comment, though, Pablo figured Carles must be pretty talented at least. He sure talked smart—and fast, wasting no time filling Pablo in about Els Gats.

  “See that jackass over there?” Carles said, aiming a finger at Casas. “Thinks he’s hot shit. Is, I suppose. All depends on who you ask.”

  “Yes, we’ve had a run-in before,” Pablo replied. “Doubt he remembers.”

  “What? Owe you money? I heard he owes half the city money. Pere was born broke, and running this bar is making him poorer. But Casas squanders more than most will ever know.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Every critic in the city licks Casas’s balls. Had an exhibition at some gallery in Paris almost ten years ago. When he came back to Barcelona, they anointed him God.”

  “I think he’s an ass.”

  “Good. You’re learning quick. Now, that tall guy, with the curly hair and mangled chompers? That’s Pichot. He’s all right. Smart as fuck. Went to Paris but somehow managed to not come back arrogant. Damn good painter, too. Same with Nonell, the one who’ll still be grinning at his own funeral. Scratch that. Nonell is sort of an asshole, on second thought. Paints miserable stuff, too. Not miserable paintings. I mean paintings of miserable things—sick, dying, degenerates, cretins. While I’m feeling g
enerous, don’t get me wrong about Casas. He can paint. But if you ask me, it’s nothing special. All he’s famous for is style. Style is everything with him—no substance at all.”

  Pablo studied each face carefully.

  “And if you can’t decide if Manolo is a crackpot or a hustler, either way you’ll be right,” Carles kept on, describing the small man with sunken eyes. “I already told you about Pere. Real heart and soul of the joint. Been all over the world. Paris, yeah, but also Mexico, Chicago, maybe even the Far East.” His voice bubbled with admiration. “Oh yeah, the scary guy with specs is Miquel Utrillo. Once a week he puts on performances—hosts them. Maniac piano music, Chinese puppet shows, weird choreography, poetry readings, shadow plays, that kind of arty thing. Some’s good. Rest is boring as shit. I come and watch, though. What else have I got to do, right?”

  Carles and Pablo—mostly Carles—went on and on that night till last call. After two weeks of being gone, Pablo walked back to his parents’ apartment in the small, silent hours, tiptoeing inside. Somehow, he no longer needed to flee his stifling home life in search of a precious breath of air; he’d found one. In the morning, his mother’s intercession permitted him to remain and helped patch up things between Pablo and Don José.

  As Carles predicted, Els Gats became Pablo’s regular escape. He would sit at the bar, sketching, observing the two distinct types of patrons sharing the space.

  First, there were the older, established artists and intellectuals—the known names who swirled snifters and smoked cigars and pipes, their snuffboxes laid before them on the big table like blazoned heraldry. They used the coarse language of the wage slaves from the political theory books they read, but Pablo never saw dirt on their shoes. Always high-shine. Glistening.

  Then there were the misfits—the young fellows who found spots in twos or threes on the room’s margins. Most were in their teens, like Pablo. No one knew their names. These ones drank beer, not brandy, and smoked cigarettes—occasionally gold-tipped, in gross imitation of Oscar Wilde. They talked foreign writers, class struggle, and art, but just as much recounted exploits with girls, defacement of property, petty crime, and other hijinks. A few were real guttersnipes.