“You haven’t read these, Pablo, have you? You couldn’t have known!”
“Good guesses.”
“I’d say, my friend. I’d say.”
The only thing Pablo hadn’t painted over was the davenport, which looked expensive.
“How in hell did you do this? I said you could repay me with a painting—not painting the whole damn studio! It’s so marvelous!”
“I wanted to give us all we deserve,” Pablo said, nodding toward the tantalizing harem posing on a far wall with fistfuls of grapes.
“Say, I think I’ve seen that redhead somewhere,” Carles said coyly.
“Then tonight, we’ll look for her,” Pablo proclaimed, letting his palette and brush fall by his feet, “or her sister anyway—in Barri Xinès.”
But he saw his words had wiped Carles’s face blank. “I can’t, Pablo. Please don’t ask me to go, not tonight. I’ve suffered a long train ride. I really won’t be any good.”
“Nonsense,” Pablo said, as he marched Carles down the stairs. “We’ve got something very important to discuss.”
Later, in the brothel’s salon, Pablo discovered that Carles truly had been sapped, though. The girls paraded by in lace undergarments, advertising their especialidades de amor. But Carles was in a daze. Pablo left him on a ragged velveteen sofa with a luscious blonde. When he returned, Carles was asleep, the woman gone.
“Wake up.” Pablo shook Carles. “How much have you had to drink?”
“Not enough,” he said drowsily, his eyes still closed. “Glass of Burgundy. A mild digestif.”
“Carles, there’s a poster contest for the new year—the new century, that is. I read about it in the magazine you gave me. Don’t you even want to hear?” Pablo slapped his cheeks to rouse him, and Carles’s eyes opened for a moment, but his pupils looked like the heads of nails.
“Take me home, Pablo.”
“Are you sure you’re OK?”
“Yes. Please, I can’t stand it here. These places depress me.”
Pablo threw Carles’s arm around his shoulder and helped him do a scissors step back to the loft. Soon as they were inside, Carles folded onto the floor. Pablo lay down beside him, draping an unstretched canvas over them for warmth.
In the middle of the night, Pablo turned onto his stomach and roused in discomfort. He felt around beneath him and removed an object, smooth and cold. By the rays of the moon coming through the skylight, he could see in his hand a small amber bottle. It must have fallen from Carles’s pocket. Pablo unscrewed the stopper. It smelled of strong vapors and cinnamon. He placed it on the davenport so neither of them would roll over again and break it.
In the morning, Pablo awoke to an empty studio. Carles was nowhere to be found.
He filled his hands with water from the sink and washed himself, pressing each nostril shut with a knuckle as he blew through the other. He glanced over at the davenport: the amber bottle had disappeared with Carles. Pablo curled up the canvas and pulled on his shoes, thinking to himself that poetry was hardly Carles’s only balm.
By the time Pablo arrived, past noon, Els Gats was already abuzz. A boyish, pretty-lipped young man he’d seen before accosted him.
“What mischief have you planned for us?”
“Oh, the shadow puppets. That was nothing. Too much anís that night.”
“Nothing?” said the kid with spectacles. “Only the highlight of my life, next to getting accepted into medical school, which I’m not proud of. Just that I dread the other option my father gave me—accounting. No, it actually tops that. You know, we’ve all been talking about you. Not only because you saved us from certain death by boredom. I heard what you did with Carles’s studio. Transformed that dumpy loft into an oriental idyll, like water into wine.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Pablo said. He looked past the young man and around the tavern but didn’t see Carles.
“How did you learn to paint like that?”
“Well, when I was small, my mother told me to draw a blind rooster searching for the start of day. The rest is history, I guess.”
“I have no clue what you’re saying. But call me Cinto. Did you know that is how they make goldfinches sing better, poke out their eyes? It’s physiological. When the brain is no longer burdened with sight, it reallots itself for other tasks.”
“You’re a medical student?”
“Third year. I give myself a fifty percent chance of survival.”
Pablo said he’d attended too many drawing classes where instructors claim to be anatomy experts. “Names for everything. Lateral, medial . . .”
“Proximal and distal! That’s pretty good. Don’t forget the posterior.”
“That’s the one thing I did pay attention to,” Pablo assured him.
“It’s amazing, female anatomy,” Cinto said. “Almost like a woman has an invisible brush, using it to paint a canvas inside her, bringing it to life. You and I will never do that.”
“Placenta the greatest palette?”
“You could say.”
Pablo, worrying where Carles might have gone and being distracted, hastened to change the conversation to the poster competition.
“I figured that’s why you might have come,” Cinto said. “Where’s your entry?”
“Haven’t done one yet. Do you know who’s the judge?”
“Come on, Pablo. You can’t guess?”
“Why am I even surprised,” Pablo groaned, realizing at once there was no way he could win.
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” said Cinto.
“Yeah, and someone should poke out Casas’s other eye,” Pablo said. “What made him so goddamned precious anyway?”
“His chest is full of confidence because everyone in Paris knows his name. If you matter in Paris, you matter everywhere.”
Paris was all the young men at Els Gats talked about now, like it was the Promised Land. Puccini’s La Bohème had swept across Europe, leaving behind a wake of romantics. Carles had taken Pablo to see it at the Liceu. The girls in the audience swooned for Rodolfo. The poet’s struggle for transcendence captivated Carles, too. Pablo’s only observation was that Marcello, the opera’s painter, had bungled the canvas on stage. “Hideous,” he’d said. “Better to quit and paint gutters.”
But Pablo was as fascinated by Paris as the rest, and Cinto’s diagnosis confirmed what he’d already concluded—Paris was the only place to become the artist he wanted to be.
“Listen, I’ve got a date with an anatomy diagram,” Cinto said, excusing himself but inviting Pablo to his parents’ apartment anytime. “They’re usually away. And bring Carles with you.”
Pablo took a seat at the bar after Cinto left. Pere was smoking his clay pipe and polishing stemware, which, even when he was done, looked like it had been washed with wheel grease.
“Seen you sketching here. Makes me think of someone I knew once,” Pere said gruffly, without looking from the tulip-shaped copita in his hand.
The man had never spoken to Pablo before, and he didn’t know how to respond.
“Have you heard of Lautrec?” Pere asked, looking up.
“Of course,” Pablo replied.
“A funny little man. Hear his ways are catching up with him. Cupid’s plague,” Pere said in his low voice. “Should you ever make it to Paris, though, you must eat at Lautrec’s house. I know what they say about my cooking. It’s poppycock, I tell you. But Henri is not like me. Pours his soul into the pot. Always, with everything. That’s his way. Barely five feet. Bones brittle as marzipan. Looks like his bottom half was driven over by a horse carriage. But I’ve seen him wrestle a brute to within an inch of his life. Paints, prints, draws, and assembles glass every conceivable hour.”
Pere told of how Lautrec was a terrible drunk, “but in such a wonderful way. Reminds me of Carles in that.” He glanced away before returning his gaze to Pablo. “Together, you two have got something—talent, soul. Most people, this is what they lack, even if
they’ve found fame. Now it’s a matter of desire. I don’t mean longing for success. Everyone wants that. I’m talking about climbing down and surveying the depths of what it is to be mortal. That’s the ticket to the divine.” As the weathered man said this, he extended his yellowed thumb and forefinger in front of Pablo’s eye and rocked them back and forth as if tuning a dial, a gesture that asked Pablo if he understood.
From reproductions in magazines, Pablo had noticed the skill of Lautrec’s brushwork, which was superior in his estimation to Renoir and Monet. And he saw the expression and tenderness the painter gave to the prostitutes and every other inhabitant of the Paris demimonde—how he breathed into them life.
Pere stretched to place the glass he had been polishing onto a high shelf but then turned around, as if he weren’t quite done with the moment. “Do you really want to know something?” he asked.
Pablo nodded.
“Then you will.”
When Pablo returned to the studio, he found on the floor a pearly-papered invitation to the Three Kings Ball later that night. Carles must have left it for him, not understanding Pablo’s family was much humbler than that of a diplomat—the only formal wear he owned was from his Catholic confirmation years ago. Pablo ran to his parents’ and dredged up a box stuffed with costumes Don José had procured over the years for painting different scenes, mostly religious. It might have been a long shot, but when the guard at the chancery that night saw the friar’s frock, he waved the holy man inside. Pablo blessed him.
This was the grandest feria in the most opulent ballroom Pablo had ever laid eyes on, with furniture encrusted with geometric patterns of iridescent abalone shell, brilliant chandeliers, and edgeless art nouveau motifs wreathing easily through the baroque. Revelers mingled in the corridors and dipped crispy neules into cava, their teeth gleaming beneath masks.
From the courtyard, where a commedia dell’arte troupe was doing acrobatics and pantomiming, he spotted Carles up in a balcony, all alone, his hands covering his face. Pablo quickly pushed upstairs.
“She’s gone,” his friend stammered when Pablo got to him. “Announced to be married.”
The bleary poet reached into his vest pocket and retrieved the amber bottle, pouring a few drops onto his tongue.
Never had Pablo witnessed anyone so shattered since his father in La Coruña the morning after Conchita died. “Where are your parents?” he asked.
“What do I want them for? I should have sailed to Havana,” Carles bayed, dribbling on about how he was in the naval academy before his family withdrew him when war against America appeared on the horizon. “But you can’t get shot at by the nation your father serves, right? A diplomatic incident is what that’s called. Now she’s to wed some wretched military officer instead of her uncle, the vagabond.”
“You’re related?” Pablo said, seeing the pupils of Carles’s eyes were nailheads again.
“Yes, you fool. You viewed her mother’s grave—my sister’s—remember? It’s sickening—how my deranged desire has smeared the memory of her! So you know now what everyone else can plainly see. That there’s always been something amiss about me, a piece out of place,” Carles moaned. “I’m a moon ejected from its orbit, wandering the solar system. Who can blame me for trying to cling to someone so precious who was also so near?”
Pablo began, “You’re a magnificent poet, and any number of women would . . .” But Carles was already slumped against the balustrade, his face blue veined, his chest barely moving. “Carles, what the fuck have you done?”
Pablo hoisted Carles over his shoulders and raced three blocks away to the only place he could think of for help. When Cinto responded to the pounding on the door to his parents’ apartment, Pablo handed him the amber bottle. The medical student rushed Carles to the sofa and returned with a jar of charcoal powder, water, and two sugar cubes. He mixed them into a black, swirling cloud.
“Hold his nose,” Cinto told Pablo before pouring the concoction down Carles’s throat. He coughed the fluid up, and they dosed him with more.
“You’re drowning me,” Carles warbled.
Pablo thought it ironic how much his friend was fighting back; a moment ago, he’d seemed intent on dying.
Finally, his breathing returned to normal. Carles remained in a stupor, though. They walked him around the drawing room in circles for hours.
“What’s that stuff in the amber vial?” Pablo asked.
“Laudanum. We give it for everything from consumption to menstrual colic,” Cinto explained. “People find out they enjoy it, though. In small quantities, it’s no worse than a few cordials. But Carles ingested enough to tranquilize a moose.”
Cinto kept Carles stashed away there, since his parents were out of town, as Pablo sat watch. Carles roused the following afternoon, and Pablo gave him water. The day after that, he asked for something to read, and Pablo retrieved from the studio the book he’d seen him working his way through, a red leather one thick as a slice of layer cake—Anna Karenina. He also grabbed oil painting paper and supplies. Pablo was mixing his colors beside where Carles lay on the sofa with the book in his hands when he finally asked, “What’s it about?”
“Passion, I suppose,” said Carles, looking up from the heavy volume. “And death. Or jealousy. The peasants, too. Also, religion. And even art.”
“Well, which is it?”
“All of them. It’s a long work.”
“Oh yeah? And what’s Anna got to say about art?”
“She’s quite fond of it, for sure—as is her lover. Although, the author seems to take a rather skeptical view.”
“How can an artist not like art?”
“Interesting. You mean to say because Tolstoy is someone who makes art, he should have affinity for his own lot, right? But don’t you see a sort of parallel in how so many humans—responsible, after all, for begetting each successive generation—seem to act as if they hate humanity itself?” Carles let his reply linger for a moment before gluing his eyes again to the page. Pablo was still silently mulling the question when, a while later, Carles added, “What a shame—she’s just died.”
“Anna?”
“Yes. Suicide.”
“At the end?”
“Not quite.”
“How can that be? It’s her story.”
“Actually, this is many people’s story, or rather one story told from multiple perspectives, seen through different eyes, as it were. That’s one of a novel’s main pleasures—briefly you get to inhabit the vantage of the divine.”
“You mean each and every view at once? Well, that’s certainly something you can’t do in painting,” Pablo said with finality, adding detail to the picture he was working on of three dancers flittering by a french window.
“How can you say?” asked Carles. “Ever tried unfixing the perspective in your work, making impressions seen from a variety of points? Who knows? It might end up being more realistic in the end—or more egalitarian, anyway.”
“An image painted from all different angles? Impossible.”
“Think about it. In a novel, the author doesn’t even have to abide by laws of time. Might someone so free up painting someday as to compose pictures where the present, past, and premonitions are all shown at once? Just the way we experience real life? Or, maybe you’re right—it is a bit far-fetched.”
“Guess we’ll never know,” Pablo said, having difficulty following Carles’s fanciful flight. “You look better at least. All done vomiting guts and glory?”
Carles laughed a little. “Yes, and you know what? I believe I’ve fallen out of love with my dear niece, besides a typical filial affection. I even offer benedictions to the bride and groom.”
“Good of you,” Pablo said cautiously. “Perhaps I ought to try reading one of these big, fat books. Seems to work wonders.”
“I’d rather you kept painting.”
In the days after, not only did Carles cease pining for his niece, his habit with the amber bottle made a retreat,
too. Pablo and Carles, meanwhile, became closer than ever. There were few absences between them now. People joked they were two churros stuck together. Evenings, one painted and the other wrote by the light of a hurricane lamp fueled with kerosene pilfered from the chancery. And they talked and talked. They even started to sound the same. And yet, together at the studio, in the crisp of the night, they each felt more fully, distinctly themselves.
They found novel ways to entertain one another, too.
Since Barcelona’s critics fawned in particular over Casas’s likenesses of the city’s moneyed elites, done in bold black lines on top of soft watercolor, Pablo decided to poke fun by making similar portraits with inexpensive Conté crayons and a wash of diluted palette scrapings. Except Pablo drew the scrappy young people who came to Els Gats: aspiring artists and artistes, poets and playboys, ragamuffins and radicals, bookworms and bandits, drifters and decadente dandies. The works soon filled up the loft, more than a hundred of them piled on easels and stacked on the floor.
“The studio looks like the lair of a spree murderer,” Carles said.
In fact, though, when Pablo wasn’t jesting, he did feel a twinge of patricidal guilt. For the past year, he’d been signing his work only with his mother’s Italianesque name, Picasso, dropping his father’s Ruiz, which sounded too common, like the hiss of one of the neighborhood dogs. Each time, he did so with contempt for Don José. Then he would stare afterward at the signature, seized by guilt, anxiety, and nostalgia. He’d not been home now for a month. Mostly, he did not miss it, but sometimes, he felt abrupt urges to eat supper at his mother’s table, which was laden with the sultry flavors of Andalucía, the orange eddies of fat stirring with ñora peppers, blood sausage, saffron, and laurel. To look at his father once more, no matter how he sometimes hated the man.
The Blue Period Page 7
