The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  After word got out about the portraits cluttering the studio, Carles cracked one night that Pablo ought to stage the most scandalous show Barcelona had ever seen. Then, they decided that maybe this was a brilliant idea. One February morning, everyone woke at dawn and met in front of the tavern. Pere let them in, and they set to work using carpet tacks to hang Pablo’s portraits in every corner of Els Gats.

  The pictures had soul, Pere proclaimed. Even Utrillo, master of the puppets, couldn’t argue. Carles knew acquaintances who were cub reporters at the newspapers, and he managed to have them write a few lines about Pablo’s debut. Some viewers didn’t realize these works were not rendered by Casas until noticing that the subjects weren’t high muckety-mucks but just the tavern’s surly squirts. Others even quietly compared Pablo’s unframed images favorably to those in the Sala Parés.

  Don José came when he read the papers. As soon as Pablo saw him walk in, he felt uneasy, certain his old man would scoff at these pictures so unlike anything that would ever elicit his father’s praise. But instead, Don José stroked his beard without comment and ordered beer for Pablo’s friends. He then spent hours regaling them with stories about his son, the prodigy painter. It was a triumph Pablo couldn’t have imagined a year ago, before Carles.

  Slowly, the gang’s activities began moving away from Els Gats to the studio covered in the grandeur of Pablo’s trompe l’oeil. The place belonged to all of them now. It was a refuge where the new generation could meet to drink spirits, cava, and coffee. They smoked cigarettes for whole afternoons there, and—when they could find it—bits of Moroccan hashish that looked like rat droppings and made them feel they’d entered the gilt frame of a Delacroix, a world of intoxicating cadmium yellow and feverish reds, of turbans, tigers, ecstatics, and odalisques.

  III

  It was during a rare occasion when Pablo returned to his parents’ apartment for dinner that the letter arrived.

  Carles had dutifully accompanied him, although Pablo knew his mother was wary of anyone who didn’t wolf down her food. Doña María had spoken badly of Carles once before when he declined a lumpy, heme-colored stew—quartered sheep’s liver in curdled blood. As Don José fetched wine from the cupboard and Doña María headed downstairs to receive the postman, Carles hurriedly spooned much of his lukewarm, mayonnaise-based potato soup—a Malagueña specialty—into Pablo’s bowl.

  “You’re getting mail here again?” Doña María asked Pablo, handing him the red envelope she’d brought up. “Does that mean we might see you more than once in a blue moon?”

  “I’ll always come for your cooking, Mama. Can Carles have more soup?”

  Carles kicked him under the table.

  “Well, are you going to open it?” she asked. “You have a sweetheart, don’t you? Maybe she wants to give me grandchildren? Go ahead. Read me her name.”

  Doña María ladled the creamy broth, thick as hide glue, into Carles’s bowl. In the middle, a slice of hard-boiled egg, which Carles despised even more than mayonnaise, floated like a lily pad.

  “No, no, Mama. This looks official.”

  Don José sat down and uncorked the fat bottle of deep-red wine resting at his feet.

  “What if it’s the draft?” Carles reminded him.

  “No. Don’t open it,” Doña María said sharply. “My son isn’t going to be a soldier. I’ve seen what happens.” She crossed herself. “I can’t think of it.”

  “Nonsense, Mother,” said Don José, whom he addressed this way whenever he wanted to speak definitively as Father, arbiter of disputes. “If Pablo is called up, we’ll buy him out of service.”

  “With what money? Your salary for six months won’t cover the cost,” she said.

  “Why, we’d send him home to Málaga. My brother, Salvador, would help in our time of need. It’s not a question.”

  “Uncle Salvador? Again? He is a kind Christian, but we are always ‘in our time of need,’ like a dog forever in heat.”

  “That’s enough! We have company,” Don José said, bringing the goblet to his lips and taking a sip. “Point is, Pablo has a promising career as a painter. Doesn’t make sense getting his fingers blown off.”

  “Well, at least the war is over,” said Carles, although Pablo could still be shipped off to Morocco for service.

  “That’s right,” said Don José. “Your old man, he has a position with the Americans, no?”

  “At the consulate, sir.”

  “Something lofty, eh?”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about the draft,” interrupted Pablo, who hoped to not discuss politics or status. He pointed to the return address on the envelope: Paris.

  “My word,” said Don José. “Open it up. Go on.”

  Pablo used a butter knife to slice open the envelope. The stationery was heavy, with lustrous marbling; the type was a delicate sloping font. It was written in French. “I’m an art school dropout,” he said, passing the letter to Carles. “You handle foreign correspondences.”

  “I’ll read it while you draw a picture of me.”

  “If you would be so kind, Don Carles,” said Don José. “We’re anxious.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  So Carles began. “‘Merci, M. Ruiz y Picasso pour votre soumission L’Onction des Malades.’” He paused. “Did you submit that oil painting you’d been working on to somewhere, the one of the priest?” he asked Pablo. “Last Rite, was it?”

  “Last Moments.”

  “Yes. We submitted it together,” Don José said.

  “We did?” asked Pablo.

  “You were very busy,” Don José said. “Hardly around. I couldn’t find you.”

  Carles continued. “‘Vous êtes accepté comme l’un des représentants de l’illustre nation d’Espagne lors de l’Exposition Universelle . . .’ Pablo, your painting, it’s going to be in the fucking World’s Fair!”

  Pablo kicked Carles under the table for cursing in front of his mother.

  Doña María screeched, “The World’s Fucking Fair?”

  “No, darling. The fucking World’s Fair!” Don José corrected her. Before the last word left his lips, he and Doña María had both leapt from their seats and thrown their arms around one another, Pablo sandwiched between them. He was confused, but smiling.

  Even before everyone got drunk on the strong Monastrell wine at the dinner table that night, it was decided Carles must travel with Pablo to Paris. Don José explained that his boy didn’t even speak French. It also couldn’t hurt, he confided after Carles left, for someone with diplomatic connections to accompany Pablo in a strange land.

  The next morning, Don José set about to raise funds for his star pupil’s journey. When he couldn’t sell his paintings of pigeons to any art gallery, he tried an aviary society, then pawnshops. It would have dispirited him earlier in his career. But now his glory would be guaranteed, not through him but by his progeny. He even stopped visiting the brothels, instead depositing the savings into an ankle sock for Pablo to do with as he wished.

  The proud Spaniard loathed France and would have preferred Pablo go to Florence or Rome. But he couldn’t argue that the World’s Fair saluting the arrival of the year 1900 wasn’t the biggest event around, perhaps ever. That his son should have a painting hanging in Paris representing the nation of his birth? It was an honor—and an even greater opportunity.

  When Pablo asked if the family could afford for him to stay abroad awhile longer so he might improve his odds of making inroads into Paris’s famed art scene, Don José piled all his works into a carriage, save his only portraits of Conchita, and sold the canvases for a few pesetas each to the art school for the students to reuse. He began reaching into his dovecote when a pigeon came of age and strangling it before cleaning and dressing the breasts for the butcher. Doña María collected and rinsed the birds’ plumage in sodium borate to sell to the women who made feather beds.

  Pablo also contributed to the kitty with the money that Els Gats paid him that spring to
redesign the menu after calls became deafening for Pere to employ a fresh cook and ingredients. A contact at the health board had tipped the tavern owner off that there might be an inspection soon, which aggrieved recipients of his salt cod stew whispered should be more like a raid. Pere and Utrillo also helped Pablo find other graphic work to earn cash. Carles proved equally adept at this, and their studio became a miniature poster-making factory.

  “If you’re going to get that good with a brush, you’d better teach me to stop speaking like an idiot,” Pablo teased his friend.

  “Poetry is mastering speaking like an idiot,” Carles replied.

  “And painting is mastering what, then?”

  “Paint.”

  By Pablo’s next visit to his parents’ for supper, another letter had arrived. When Doña María went to retrieve it from her bureau, he was seized with fear.

  What if there had been a mistake, a mix-up? What if he were not the recipient of an honor from the nation of France but rather one of the countless victims of its famously inept bureaucracy?

  But the envelope his mother placed on the table was not red and princely. It was simple, tattered, and addressed in a familiar unsteady scrawl. He tore through the top and was pleased as ever to hear from his art school chum, Pajaresco. He’d gotten a substantial commission to paint a chapel’s interior, he wrote. It would let him be free of his family’s farm in Horta soon, and there was a gal in Barri Xinès tearing herself apart to see him.

  Pablo replied immediately with the Paris news, imploring Pajaresco to join him and Carles. This other friend was from a different upbringing, he told Pajaresco, but they must’ve met somewhere before and would no doubt get along, considering now all three could be called budding artists on the move.

  A slight unease hit Pablo after sending the letter. He should have asked Carles before inviting Pajaresco.

  Later that night, Pablo found Carles in the studio, working shirtless, experimenting with oils. The overall structure of the canvas was reasonably composed, but Pablo saw the shading was not what it should be.

  “Remember, fat to lean, and take care when you’re laying the color, or you’ll get eaten up,” Pablo said. Another wave of regret washed over him; he’d sounded just like his father.

  “Fat to what, and what?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I want to know.”

  “It means mind your medium and watch the cobalt or pure emerald greens. You have to wait to lighten a deep color. Otherwise, the dark will continuously swallow the light.”

  “You painters are a poetic sort, at least when you’re talking about paint.”

  “Never mind that, Carles. I gotta tell you something, something important,” Pablo said, divulging how he’d entreated Pajaresco to come along on their trip.

  “And, so what?”

  “So I didn’t know if you wanted it to be you and me. You know! Just the two of us—and a thousand Paris belles or whatever you call them.”

  “I’m confident there will be plenty to go around.”

  “What if it isn’t always the way it is now?” Pablo explained he wanted to make sure they got to have their adventure, together.

  Carles reassured him the addition of one more companion would not interfere in their conquest of France. “After all, how many musketeers were there?”

  “No clue. I just make pictures,” Pablo said, looking again at the easel with Carles’s canvas. “Fat over lean, blah, blah, blah. There’s no right way. Everyone should paint like a child.”

  “It’s getting hard to know whether I’m being complimented or insulted.”

  “A compliment.”

  “Suppose if I judge everything you say that way, then I’ll never be cross.”

  “No, Carles. Don’t ever be mad at me. I couldn’t take it.”

  “OK, but two things.”

  “What?”

  “First—and you’ve got to know this if we’re to go to Paris—there were three musketeers in the book by France’s most acclaimed writer, Alexandre Dumas, fittingly titled The Three Musketeers.”

  “Got it. On to two.”

  “Three. Didn’t we just go over this?”

  “No.” Pablo grimaced. “What was the second thing you wanted to tell me?”

  “Before we may go to Paris—”

  “All right, all right. I’ll read the book already.”

  “Don’t. It’s duller than it sounds. But it’s not that. What I’m trying to tell you is I haven’t mentioned our trip to my parents yet.”

  Pablo was confused. “Why?”

  “My mother, she’s not well,” Carles revealed. “And Father is away, traveling on matters of which he cannot speak.”

  “She bad off?”

  “Don’t know. Doctors talk a language even poets find baffling.”

  Pablo told Carles not to worry. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I

  Paris, October 1900

  What’s that you say?” Carles asked, leaping over the divide separating train and platform as the light bounced off his shoe in midair. Once beneath the sweeping glass ceiling of the Gare d’Orsay, awe froze him.

  Pablo, in front of Carles, hadn’t meant for anyone to hear the three little words he’d uttered reflexively. He replied that this merely had been thinking aloud and set down his heavy-pile carpetbag, portable easel, and a small brown case containing sable brushes and pigments he didn’t want to repurchase here—viridian, vermillion, antimony yellow, cobalt.

  As the Parisian commuters at the station looked askance at him and his friend, Pablo realized that the two of them must be a sight to behold—one tall, lean, and pallid, like a Kajar scribe idealized on a lacquer pen box; the other short and sturdy, with a sunbaked complexion and barn-owl eyes—each decked out in their matching custom-made garb. When he inched up his hat’s brim, the shimmering from above warmed and anointed his face. Pablo couldn’t help repeating once more—this time loud enough for all to hear—“I am king.”

  Before leaving Barcelona, Pablo and Carles had gone to a tailor who smoked foul-smelling cigars and wore cravats. Pablo knew him through Don José and agreed to do a portrait of his family picnicking in exchange for his cutting identical suits for Pablo and Carles’s journey—double-breasted corduroy jackets with tight wales of glossy black that would sling low past the knee and flare at the top so the collars could be flipped up to cover their necks when it got cold.

  They’d boarded the train dressed in these inventions. After so many fittings, the material was like their own skin. Beneath, they wore starched shirts, oversize floppy bow ties, and pointy patent leather shoes that reflected ceiling and sky. Once inside the passenger coach in the Barcelona station, Pablo and Carles had arranged their belongings on the wooden benches to allow the two of them to sit across and at an angle from one another, better to stretch their legs. Carles extracted from his bag a red bandana with a paisley pattern, carefully folding it into a three-inch-wide strip and tying it around his eyes.

  “What are you doing?” Pablo had asked.

  “When I arrive, I want to be like a newborn infant squeezed from the womb. There will be up till now, then my life after I’ve seen Paris.”

  As the train had exited Barcelona’s Estació de França, Pablo gazed upward through the mud-flecked window at the great continents of cloud drifting through the blue. The steam engine huffed and pulled them to the foothills of the Pyrenees, where cedars grew from the ground like daggers. He narrated the landscape to Carles as they progressed to fields of autumn wheat dotted by houses with red tile roofs and steepled white churches that looked from a distance no bigger than upturned thumbtacks. He lit Carles’s cigarettes and split loaves of bread longwise, then tore off pieces to put into their mouths.

  When night had fallen and there was nothing to see outside, Pablo cried, “Now you—paint me a picture!”

  “Picture of what?”

  “Of Paris! In words!”

>   Carles imagined aloud the museum halls, the gardens, the electric lanterns, and cancan girls with legs in lacy tights and garters of red riding round them. He told him how splendid were the women’s dainty fingers, made for jewelry just as much as jewelry was made for them. They handed back and forth bottles of musky red wine with floating bits of cork and dreamed.

  “You think it will look like it does in the posters, the Muchas? Lautrecs?” Pablo had asked.

  “It can’t.”

  “Liar! You do! You do think!”

  “Well, why not?”

  Pablo bought candied peanuts, and they lobbed them into one another’s mouths. Carles, still blindfolded, nearly choked. His ability to aim a peanut toward the sound of Pablo’s voice, however, was surprising.

  As the train emerged from a tunnel, Carles asked, “How many women, would you say, have you gone to bed with?”

  “How can I know? Not enough, tell you that. What I would like is to love them all, to recall the scent under every skirt.”

  The truth was that, outside the brothels, neither had known many women or girls intimately.

  “You’re going to have to pick up the pace,” Carles said. “You’re nineteen already, and there must be millions, no, billions, to go.”

  “If not, my curiosity will not let me be.”

  “And what about the tall ones, Pablo? What will you do when you get to them? Stand on a chair?”

  “I am a great artist. Haven’t you heard? They’ll be up for anything. Perhaps you have seen something of me in the newspapers?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Well, you should read more instead of drinking so much. I am quite famous in Barcelona, you know. Soon Paris, too.”

  That was also a stretch. But before they left, Pablo had enticed the lads at the newspaper who’d written about his portraits show at Els Gats to sneak a line into their publications announcing this latest development, that two of Barcelona’s “most promising young artists” were departing to conquer France.