Carles didn’t fit into either camp. He was friendly—and equally unfriendly—with both. In age, he straddled the sets, being just on the cusp of twenty. And he was a mercurial sort. Most often he’d enter the tavern and find a table to sit at alone, writing verse in his leather-bound journal, drinking alcohol in quantities hardly tolerated by those twice his weight. It was a public performance of solitude, Pablo thought. By the end of Carles’s evenings, though, he’d always become a different man, gregarious and hurling clever insults, mostly at Casas’s band.
Pablo’s contempt for Casas quickly grew. Carles had gotten him right—a stylist, not an artist. His works were attractive, but nothing an average student at La Llotja, if coached, couldn’t produce. Yet he had the ego of an Olympian, engorged by so much flattering press and the sycophants who picked up his tab. While Pablo did feel affinity for the modernistas—so different than the starchy classicists his father revered—he also could see how he’d inherited no small dose of Don José’s taste and temperament, skeptical as he was that these new aesthetics gave no-talent imposters like Casas too much leeway.
Each time Pablo returned to Els Gats, he looked forward to conversing with Carles, but instead the poet acted like a stranger to him, as if that first night had never happened. Was this Carles when he’s merely drunk, as opposed to very drunk? Had he simply decided Pablo was a bore? Or, somehow, was Carles testing out Pablo’s fitness as a comrade? He felt out of place and alone at Els Gats, as he had at every school ever attended. And yet, for once, Pablo wanted to belong. He sat there by himself one evening after another, wearing the floppy hat Pajaresco gave him in Horta, drinking the awful coffee or sometimes a beer, wondering how he might make Carles notice him again.
One Friday night, Pablo arrived at Els Gats to find a makeshift stage set up at the back of the tavern. All the windows were blacked out, and a sheet of pale cambric veiled the rear wall. The tables were arranged in rows with scores of visitors huddled in the chairs. Pablo grabbed the last open seat in front and settled in.
The gaslights dimmed. The room turned black. A lantern illuminated the cloth, and it glowed hazy yellow, like a dust-laden sunset. The crouched puppeteers were nearly invisible as they manipulated sugar-paper cutouts mounted to doll rods. The shapes traveled across the scrim, dark horsemen undulating as a phonograph played Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. At first, the effect was mesmerizing, helped along by the strong anise-flavored spirit Pere was handing out. Pablo imagined that it was almost like being at one of the shadow-puppet plays at Paris’s famed Le Chat Noir.
But, after a time, the spectacle tired. There was no narrative. The loud music prevented anyone from talking. Yet it seemed rude to leave. Pablo tightened his jaw to contain a yawn. His thoughts wandered. He remembered how in Málaga, he’d entertained Conchita by bringing embroidery scissors to a newspaper’s edge. Even then, his work had more artistry than this show, more life and imagination than these arrogant clowns and what they called avant-garde.
Pablo’s muscles felt loose, the drink working like ether.
From his coat pocket, Pablo removed a tobacco pouch he’d begun carrying. He was determined to become a diehard smoker. Pablo rolled a squat cigarette and struck a match. But since he wasn’t used to punishing his lungs, he coughed. It got worse, drier and drier, louder and louder. He doubled over and grasped the table.
The audience shushed him.
When Pablo unclenched his eyes, his still-lit cigarette had nearly rolled onto the paper menu. He snatched it away. Christ, he’d almost started a blaze—what a way to make an impression, burning the place down. Pablo drained his glass, willing his embarrassment to fade.
Pere handed Pablo another. After a deep drink of it, he reasoned, why the hell not? He studied the shapes of the puppets galloping across the backdrop, and got to work, furtively and furiously.
Just as in the Liceu, with the music’s crescendo came a surprise. In the upper corner of the screen, a terrifying creature appeared before the audience, gliding above the horses with a heraldic eagle’s sinister-facing sharp bill peering above spread wings—and the gigantic bust of a nightclub dancer.
Murmurs erupted across the room as the audience awakened, and then the crowd grew noisier. Amid an aura of light emanating from the front row was Pablo, holding a menu—perfectly formed into this bird-woman’s shape that he’d projected—in front of an ashtray filled with a burning box of matches.
There was applause.
“Venga!” yelled someone in the back, bringing his palm down hard on the tabletop. It was Carles, in a high, starched collar.
Pablo made the Valkyrie swoop at the horsemen, burying the riders’ heads in its shadowy bosom. Laughter broke out, and his eyes met Carles’s. He flashed a smile at Pablo and clacked a fork against the table, sounding like the clattering of castanets. “Así se baila!”
A pair of teenagers who’d been brooding at the room’s edge stomped out the rhythm. Carles shouted and trilled like a flamenco caller swept up in song and enticed the winged woman to shimmy and shake on the screen. Through Pablo surged a joy he’d not felt since he was a boy in Málaga when his mother, aunts, Lola, and Conchita swooned over his ingenious creations.
One of the hangers-on from Casas’s clique, drunk since afternoon, leapt onto a table to dance. The pounding, laughing, whelping, and banging of glasses drowned out poor Wagner.
“Disgraceful,” Pablo saw Casas mouth.
The impromptu dancer and Carles joined Pablo in front to take a bow. The cheering was only overcome when a decrepit man roared at the top of his asthmatic lungs the banned Catalanisme anthem, and the motley crowd belted it out, defying the streets to silence them.
Young and old rapped Pablo on the shoulders. “Where did you get the idea?” They asked. “Bravissimo!”
Pablo overheard Casas ordering Pere to call the cops. The bartender reminded him the tavern was teeming with anarchists and rascals. They’d lock up half his customers, he said. “Why, Carles was nearly arrested last year when he blindsided a police officer abusing a youth with a blackjack during a street protest—gave ’im a solid hook,” Pere recounted. “Besides, I thought those little shits were pretty funny.”
Pablo didn’t see Carles again at Els Gats for days, until one evening he spotted a skinny figure leaning against the plaster wall outside the archway, a cigarette blooming in his hand. The young man started off and tilted his head for Pablo to follow.
Forty-five minutes later, they were padding together up the beach, still having not exchanged a word. The air smelled of kelp and then burnt rubber. The sun was setting, a fog rolling in as if a blanket were being laid over the churning sea. In the distance, Pablo noticed bituminous streaks of cloud slicing up the magenta sky. As they walked north, he could see these trails came from smokestacks. Carles routed them away from the water, and they climbed a knoll strewn with discarded mussel shells. Past a cluster of date palms stood a row of depressing apartment buildings belonging to the working poor who resided in this industrial zone and filled the factories during the day. Carles turned northward again, and Pablo was surprised to be confronted by a pair of obelisks flanking tall iron gates. Beyond them was a cemetery.
“If you see dogs, don’t run,” Carles said, throwing his coat over the sharp points and then shinnying to the top just as night was falling. Pablo followed behind him, jumping down into the fog creeping beyond the fence.
They navigated the labyrinthine graveyard by matchlight. Instead of plots, the dead rested in chambers along honeycomb-like aisles two dozen feet high. Families erected marble statues nearby rather than use hedge markers. The very wealthiest residents had private mausoleums done up like pharaohs’ lairs. In front of one of these, Carles stopped.
“Who’s here?” Pablo asked.
“I had a sister,” Carles said. The smell of wet leaves and decaying duff hovered at their noses.
This news conjured in Pablo’s brain the image of Conchita, a perfect lithograph. He wanted to t
ell Carles he knew how it felt, to recount everything. And he had questions, so many questions. To start, did Catalans practice the same custom of dressing the sick in blue? But he couldn’t bring himself to confess his guilt or probe Carles, so he simply said, “I’m sorry.”
“No. I’m the one who should be apologetic,” Carles lamented, pausing as if he also had more to say. “A fever took her, when she was younger than I am today,” he explained. “She was a new wife, new mother. I was a boy. I don’t even remember what my own sister looked like. Her face is a blur, except sometimes I can see a pair of heart-shaped lips. Or maybe I’ve imagined that, too.”
Was Carles also consumed by remorse for his sister’s death? Pablo felt so drawn to him now, as if brought together by fate.
“Why did you take me here?”
“I didn’t want to be alone.”
“But how come you came?”
“To ask forgiveness,” Carles said.
“For what?”
“I’ve dishonored her, I’m afraid. But how am I to be blamed when love cannot be bridled? And mercy what I endure,” Carles replied, adding a series of stanzas in French.
Pablo did not speak the language, and his friend was becoming too cryptic. He sighed in frustration.
“A poem by the late Charles Baudelaire,” Carles revealed.
“About what?”
“A guy who walks into a bar.”
“You must be joking.”
“The contrary,” said Carles, his face newly pained.
Pablo was torn between wanting to know more and desiring to return to that interlude of levity a moment ago when he thought Carles was kidding. “What’s it like, this bar?”
“Fabulous in every way. All the people are dressed lavishly. Choice cigars, sublime liqueurs, roulette where you always win.”
Pablo tried to lighten the mood again. “Better chow than Els Gats?”
“Best.”
“Where’s this?”
“Paris,” Carles said.
“Figures,” Pablo said. “How’d he find such a place, then?”
“Devil brought him, of course. The two of them drink awhile, make chitchat, and gamble. Before long, Scratch wins the man’s soul.”
“There’s no suspense in that.”
“Well, turns out Satan’s an all right fellow. Not an asshole, you know? He’s at peace, see, because he doesn’t have to work anymore. Each aspect of progress—science, philosophy, rhetoric, art—he’s insinuated himself in them. Modernity does his mischief now. In fact, he’s feeling so generous that even though he’s bagged another soul, the devil decides to give the bastard whatever he wants—fame, fortune, women. Plus, he’ll throw in one more thing, the grandest gift of ’em all.”
“What’s that?”
“He says he can rid the man of ennui.”
Pablo furrowed his brow. He’d only heard the word before uttered in contempt by Don José.
“You know, that touch of sadness that never leaves you, won’t let you be free? Makes you always feel a little bit like . . .” Carles went silent again. He brought a match to the cigarette in his mouth. “So the devil says to Charlie he’d be willing to give him the possibility—think of that, just the possibility!” Carles’s wild yell echoed among the graves. “It’s the chance to end once and for all this bizarre affliction, the source of misery.”
Pablo looked at his new friend and felt in his diaphragm like he’d swallowed a bumblebee. “That’s what’s got you, isn’t it?”
The match was extinguished with a sudden breath in the dark air; Pablo knew it was because Carles didn’t want him to see his eyes. “Every goddamned moment, long as I can remember,” he said. “I keep hoping there’s someone who can make it disappear. But every time I think I’ve found her, she turns me away. My poetry, that’s my only balm.”
Pablo desired to unravel Carles, wanted to know what tormented him. Was there anything he could do to relieve his suffering, this ennui? And then, Pablo thought, might Carles understand his own burden? Was their sadness and guilt the same?
They left the graveyard and trekked back to Pablo’s street. He started to say that there was a bottle of Jerez in his father’s cabinet that they could drink from. But before the words came out, Carles had vanished.
By autumn, Don José was busily plotting Pablo’s next painting, a production of grand scale, maturity, and poignancy, something to electrify every last critic and judge—a masterpiece to deliver his son bona fide prestige. It should be an oil in somber tones of a priest administering the final Eucharist to a dying woman, on the largest canvas Pablo’d ever painted. Everyone would see it was only suitable for a museum or a very wealthy patron’s wall. He’d already arranged for Angel Soto, the teenage son of a family friend, to model as the novice priest. He’d even fed a beggar to pose as the old woman and finagled for Pablo to gain use of the storeroom in a garment factory to accommodate the oversized canvas.
Pablo hated everything about this idea. But so long as he lived under Don José’s roof, he was forced to relent.
For many weeks during that fall, Pablo labored over the damn thing, with his father regularly checking in. Just as he was pulling on his smock one morning, the doorbell rang at his parents’ apartment. It was Carles, the brim of a tweed cap pulled jauntily over one eye. He had the come-out-and-play expression of a six-year-old. Pablo had barely seen Carles in a month. He’d missed him. This was the perfect excuse to escape for the afternoon.
The two shuffled outside onto the bustling street. It was an unseasonably warm day, and traces of rosemary roamed the air. They smiled as they walked and talked and flung spent cigarettes into the wind. Carles jabbed a rolled-up art magazine into Pablo’s stomach and filled him in on the latest from Els Gats, which Pablo hadn’t been to since he’d started the dreaded painting. Casas’s one-man exposition at the Sala Parés, Barcelona’s most coveted gallery, had gone swimmingly and gotten rave reviews, apparently. “Even the fucking bishop came,” Carles said. The tavern was changing, he asserted. “Bunch of fakes. No clue about anything. I tell you, I don’t even know if I’ll go back.”
They reached a dilapidated, soot-stained building on Carrer de la Riera de Sant Joan, in between the noisy market and cathedral. “There’s something I want to show you,” Carles said, opening the gate and leading Pablo up an uneven stairway. At the last landing, he kicked open a flimsy door and light flooded into the new studio he’d found.
“In Andalusia, this is big enough to sleep a family of six,” Pablo said, “plus pigeons.”
“Want to share it with me?”
“I have a little spot, Carles. Above the corset-makers.”
“Sure you do. But that’s for totally different work, paintings for your father. Don’t get me wrong. I like tradition. I’m very traditional, really. But here, you can paint in the new styles—Lautrec, Mucha, all that’s the rage in Paris. You’ll be brilliant at it! And Don José won’t be breathing down your neck, telling you it’s all degenerate, wishy-washy stuff.”
Their voices bounced around the high-ceilinged loft’s bare walls. There was no furniture save for a rickety table, a few folding chairs, and a davenport made of satinwood. A single unframed, finished canvas was leaned in the corner, bearing the image of a very young woman in a boatneck black evening gown, her extended gloves shielding china-cup arms. Her eyes were closed, as if she were daydreaming. On the table, Pablo found a charcoal-and-pastel study for the picture.
“Carles, you didn’t tell me you paint. You’re a poet. And an artist, too?”
“Your words, not mine. I daub for fun. You know, when verse and getting varnished are too much bother.”
“It’s good,” Pablo told him. “You ever displayed anywhere before?”
“Yes, right here. You sound like you’d buy it. Tell ya what, how about I rent it to you? Come view it every day while you work, and when you’re done, pay me back with something you make. Whatever you want. I don’t care. I know it’ll be phenomenal,�
�� Carles said. “Just keep me company.”
Pablo’s friend couldn’t possibly know what this offer meant—to not have to go home to his parents’ or to that unventilated storeroom. He must find some other way to compensate him.
“You want to see something else?” Carles asked.
“Have you got another studio hiding?”
“No, but it’s a thing of real beauty,” Carles said. He lifted the davenport’s hinged top and carefully removed a box of solid Gabon ebony with opal inlay and purple velvet lining. Inside was a pistol, just small enough to fit into a vest pocket, with an ivory grip and finely engraved silver barrels.
“Belonged to a Swedish esquire,” Carles said, explaining his father got it as a gift when assigned to the diplomatic legation in Stockholm. “He doesn’t even know it’s gone.”
Pablo couldn’t deny how pretty the object was or how much it reminded him of the stories set in the Old West that he’d read. In them, boastful cardsharps and ladies’ men always kept a spare derringer tucked away. And yet he was apprehensive, knowing how bloody were these tales.
“Careful, friend,” Pablo warned. “A gun’s like a penis. You never know what somebody might do with one, especially when they’re drunk or in love.”
II
Pablo was finishing the last touches on a braid of garland when he heard the studio’s door handle turn behind him.
“What in Christ’s name have you done?” Carles said as he stepped inside.
While Pablo’s friend had been gone for the holidays in Sitges, where Carles’s mother’s family was from, he’d transformed every inch of the loft into a palace scene befitting a sultan: walls painted over with marble columns and scrolls, floors bearing flattened furniture laden with tropical fruits, a medieval harp glistering in the corner where it was superimposed, exotic flowers blooming everywhere, and gold ducats piled into two-dimensional heaps. He even stocked mock bookshelves with Cervantes to Shikibu, de Castro to Thoreau.
The Blue Period Page 6
