The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  “There is no mountain I cannot climb, no woman with flames inside who won’t burn to mount me,” Pablo boasted.

  “Your confidence is certainly soaring. Some ladies still, I hear, appreciate a bit of modesty.”

  “Nonsense. Modesty is for the modest.”

  After two days on the train together, bantering and sleeping with their legs propped up, the bells finally chimed, signaling their stop. Carles untied his blindfold right as a grandiose beaux arts station appeared. With a 370-room luxury hotel attached, the Gare d’Orsay was thoroughly modern and marvelously magnificent. It was as if they had ridden not a locomotive but a time machine to the future—a beautiful, electric, and lyrical future. The stationmaster in his red waistcoat and silk top hat came into view. Rows of eager porters waited behind him. As soon as the doors opened, a newspaper seller appeared on the platform with a wicker basket, waving rolled-up broadsheets and shouting headlines in French as the passengers alighted. Children ran up to their papas. Reunited lovers pressed into each other’s chests and cooed. And Carles followed Pablo, who stepped off the train and proclaimed himself sovereign in the same instant.

  So it was that the newborn and the new king found Paris at last.

  For months, Carles and Pablo had planned their voyage to France—what they would wear, how they’d walk, what to order in cafés. But they wholly failed to set a course for once they’d disembarked from the train.

  After stumbling around by the station, Pablo suggested that to avoid getting lost they follow the Seine. But it didn’t take long for inland adventure to call, and they began scouring the Left Bank for the Latin Quarter, the only arrondissement they knew, thanks to La Bohème. Puccini’s free spirits had drunk, loved, made art, and—in Mimi’s case—died somewhere around here, albeit sixty years earlier in a fictional work.

  If Gare d’Orsay had transported Pablo and Carles to the future, they now managed to wander far into the past. To their great surprise, much of Paris resembled a feudal grubland. How could these tumbledown buildings and overgrown lots belong to the city of Eiffel, of Ader? How should this decay coexist beside dazzling iron-and-glass gates leading to the brand-new Métro whirring underground, beckoning like damselfly-winged portals to other dimensions?

  On a squalid block of short houses that smelled of livestock and a gurgling street drain, they came across a stump of a gray-haired woman. She wore a dress of homespun cotton, and a white flannel serviette covered her forehead like she’d wandered from a Courbet painting. She was haranguing a cabbage-seller who’d overcharged her.

  Having already delved deep into a flask of rotgut, Pablo and Carles interrupted the woman’s tirade to ask if by chance she knew of someone renting a studio. It was midmorning, and they’d been beating the streets and dragging around their luggage for more than two hours.

  Why, yes, she so happened to own one right there that had belonged to her late husband.

  They took a cursory gander inside these most rudimentary accommodations, gave her a deposit on the spot, and left their bags. Figuring the woman too old to be crafty, Pablo and Carles didn’t think twice about the price.

  Unburdened now, they sped through the city, sightseeing like ravenous pillagers, rambling like wild men, erupting with adolescent giddiness. They strutted up Avenue Denfert-Rochereau and ogled the Fontaine de l’Observatoire, pretended to be buckaroos on the ponies spinning around the carousel in the Jardin du Luxembourg, pocketed bonbons and pâtes de fruit by the smeary handful from the chocolatiers in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, traipsed back across the river over the Pont Neuf and explored the Île de la Cité until happening upon an immense cathedral with twin towers and buttresses flying everywhere.

  “Dare me to spit on Notre-Dame?” Carles asked.

  “Hawk on that brawny Frenchman guarding it with a carbine, why don’t you?” Pablo countered.

  “If he strikes me, what will you do? Will you forsake me? What about his rifle, if he shoots?”

  “I shall write a poem to commemorate your untimely death.”

  “A poem? Why not paint the scene instead? I’m the wordsmith,” Carles replied.

  “Have you gone buggy? A painting?” Pablo said in mock disbelief. “Do you know how much blood there will be? It’ll use all my vermillion.”

  When they grew tired, they found a bench on the Quai de Montebello to view the parade of young women strolling by and wondered how different were these ones than those back home. The same species as their Spanish counterparts, they decided, but evolved to suit an entirely different landscape. Here, women’s faces were hung like lanterns instead of hidden. Each one walked as if every obstacle in her path would move out of the way.

  “Belle! Belle! Je veux baiser!” Pablo waved to a lady whose heels clicked against the paving stones, garbling all the French he knew. She swiped the back of her hand across the bottom of her chin in a gesture Pablo could only presume indicated affection.

  Carles wasn’t wholly surprised at the severe limits of Pablo’s language ability. After all, the southerner still spoke Catalan with a thick, halting accent despite five years of residing, on and off, in Barcelona. Luckily, Carles had studied French. His parents spoke it fluently. The vocabulary came easily to him. It was only his tongue’s Catalonian lisp that now and again caused him to sound like a reptile reading Molière.

  “You can’t go around propositioning French women like that,” Carles chided Pablo. “This land is civilized. You must have decorum. Or at least act like you do.”

  “Did you see the way she looked at me? That sign she made with her hand? I think she’s keen.”

  “This is nothing like in your Barcelona brothels. French women demand respect, even the most hard-up grisette.”

  “What’s that?” Pablo asked, guilelessly.

  “Have you ever studied a book in your life? Gri-sette. A woman of low social standing, though quite conceivably high intellect, who may, time to time, commit herself to a unique arrangement with a benefactor. It’s endemic to this land, though perhaps oriental in origin. Altogether a bit hard to explain. Something like a seamstress, I suppose.”

  “A seamstress? They sew buttons, don’t they?”

  “Not these. Not mostly, anyway. It can be a front.”

  “Front of what?” Pablo shook his head.

  “Really, Pablo!” Carles said, tipsy, riled, and admittedly amused.

  When it began to drizzle, they beat a retreat toward the old woman and then hustled through a doorway beneath a burgundy awning after the rain picked up, hoping to find beer, bread, and stew. The restaurant was loud and busy, and they sat down on palm-bottomed bentwood chairs at a little marble table, studying the hand-scrawled menu.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” a husky tenor coated in Cavendish and phlegm called out. The room was so dark that Pablo and Carles felt the broad hands of Nonell—the artist and regular at Els Gats—on their shoulders before they saw his face. “Really, are there any Spaniards left in Spain?”

  “We’ll all be gone soon. We expect America to invade any day,” remarked Carles, before remembering he was a diplomat’s son and someone might take him seriously. “Not really—that’s a joke. For now, anyway. Good to see you, man!”

  “To hell with America,” thundered Nonell, having obviously downed a pint or thirteen. “Name a painter it has produced. Not one in over a hundred years who improved the canvas after he stretched it. I tell you, I don’t think America is long for this world. No goddamned country will sustain itself without art, and none . . .” He broke midsentence to get a good look at Pablo and Carles, appearing surprised again to find them here. “And no man can last long without beer. Let me welcome you to Paris, gents,” he said, whistling for the garçon.

  Nonell hiccupped before adopting the tone of a museum docent. “Know what they call a place like this in French?” But before they could respond, he answered himself. “A bistro.”

  “We’re Spaniards, not dullards,” Carles said.

  “Bet you
don’t know why, do you, wise guy?”

  He thought about it. “No.”

  “The Cossacks,” Nonell said. “They barked ‘Bistro! Bistro!’ to the city’s poor restaurant cooks after sacking the place with the tsar, which is the same way they hurried their horses. Now, it’s what everyone calls one of these joints to wet your throat and find quick grub before riding off.”

  “What’d they say at the cathouse?” Pablo asked.

  “How I’ve missed you so,” said Nonell, planting his wet palm on Pablo’s head, messing its black mop of hair. “Look at you. I remember when you could hardly see over the counter; we thought you might be a mute. You’d sit in Els Gats with your fucking sketchbook, drawing all day. I hear you’ve got a painting in the Exposition?”

  Pablo dipped his head slightly.

  “Proud of you, little brother,” he said, slapping Pablo on the back heartily. “Listen, where you jokers staying?”

  “Just rented a place nearby.”

  “What? On the Left Bank? Why? How much you paying?”

  “Six hundred francs.”

  Nonell held a finger to his temple and looked bewildered. “Are you off your onion? That’s a small fucking fortune!” Across the river, he told them, they could nab a grand studio for next to nothing, have money left over for canvases, paints, and a bit of mischief, too. “Over by Boulevard de Clichy, where all the action is,” Nonell said, adding that Montmartre—just beyond Paris proper—is a charming area, high on the hill with a laid-back, country feel. All the artists were moving in. “They got no tax on wine up there!”

  “How’s it called, again?” Pablo asked.

  “What are you, an Iberian painter or a shepherd boy?”

  “It’s the hat,” Carles said.

  “Is that what you did in Andalusia?” Nonell pressed. “Sheep?”

  “We had a certain fondness for the livestock,” Pablo admitted. “But it prepared me greatly for when I had to make love with your mother. Always from the backside, she wanted—always! And I never let those outrageous chompers near my privates. Oh, I was too afraid!”

  The booze had turned Carles devilish. “Nobody would mistake a blade of grass for a meal, Pablito,” he said.

  “You guys are idiots all right,” said Nonell. “Don’t stay here. It’s a waste pile. Worst in all of Paris. Montmartre is the place—farmland but with cabarets. Renoir lived there. Painted the windmills. Hell, it’s where Le Chat Noir was, before that went to pieces.”

  “Gone?” Carles asked.

  “Long time already,” Nonell shook his head. “See, you’re no fucking dummy! Heard of Lautrec? Steinlen? Degas? Well, Montmartre, Montmartre, Montmartre. I’m telling you, it’s where youse decadentes want to be. Yeah, too bad about the black kitty, it is. Kaput.”

  “You must think us far more fashionable than we intend,” Carles inserted casually.

  “They’re already building the most beautiful church in France there, taller than fucking God,” Nonell continued, slamming the bar top. “Pablo! Carles! Look, you’ve made me take the Lord’s name in vain, for Christ’s sake. If my mother knew, she’d whip me.”

  “Can she whip me, too?” laughed Carles.

  “Watch your mouth, you funny bastard.”

  “Which way is Montmartre?” Pablo relented. “And how are we going to find a studio there?”

  “That I can help with,” Nonell hiccupped.

  Tight in the bladder and light in the head, Pablo and Carles gave Nonell several hundred francs to rent his Montmartre studio—unseen but already palatially appointed in their imaginations—and set out to collect a refund from the old woman. After they’d managed to wrangle back half what they’d paid, she chased them out with a cleaver, yelling, “Swindlers!” The two cried with laughter and fled in the direction they believed north, the wind of mischief steering them and filling their sails.

  Traveling up Avenue d’Antin, turning his head this and that way to take in every fresh scene, Pablo realized how very small Barcelona was by comparison. And dark. Paris, on the other hand, felt like a vast, radiant bouquet—a hub near the center of existence. Here, Haussmann’s broad boulevards lined with town houses the colors of butterfat and chalk were somehow brilliant even in the overcast sky. Pablo further recalled how Andalusia was full of light, but there the rays become oppressive. All throughout Spain, which is to say all throughout his life, bright light had always been countered by a corresponding inescapable darkness. The land where he was born must have been predetermined to be a chiaroscuro country—one of demons, umber, cannibals, firing squads. And, perpetually on the horizon, was Judgment itself. “If Degas were a Spaniard,” Don José would say, “his ballerinas would be clutching daggers.” However, in this ancient city of the Gauls that Pablo’d finally found, the gods made each atom emanate its own Parisian glow.

  “Sacré-Cœur,” muttered a shabby street sweeper who spotted Pablo and Carles staring up a steep hillside at the gleaming white church covered in scaffolding, which stood at Montmartre’s highest point. The two weighed-down pilgrims clambered up the slope’s thousand steps with their bags slung over their shoulders as if they were traversing a mountain en route to some holy relic. Upon reaching the top, they were winded and dripping cool sweat, racked with aches and pains and blisters, and well drunk. They followed the road as it eased downward for a bit and came to a beige, brick, four-story building on Rue Gabrielle flaunting a red door.

  There it was: number 49.

  Not planning to return to the studio before leaving Paris, Nonell had given them a ring of keys. The lock easily turned. A giant mirror hung in a hallway just past the vestibule, beside mailboxes labeled with French names: “M. Papin,” “Mme. Cocteau,” “M. Leclercq.” Pablo and Carles both halted in the yellow from a skylight above to stare at their reflections in the looking glass.

  “It’s us,” said Carles, “in Paris.”

  “Honest folks pray for heaven. All painters want is a Paris studio,” Pablo replied.

  They bolted up the stairs to the third floor, reenergized, like kittens chasing moths. Pablo jammed another old-fashioned ward key into the brass hole. It rattled around three twists before giving up its fight. But the door stuck in the frame. Together, they threw their weight against the heavy oak and exploded into the apartment. And then came a scream.

  Inside the ramshackle studio, strewn wall-to-wall with half-finished canvases, Bordeaux bottles, a hodgepodge of furniture, and a chaos of painting paraphernalia, was a woman with tawny tresses who rushed to gather the blanket from a daybed in order to cover her bare body. “Police!” she shrieked.

  “Aleluya!” Pablo cried.

  The woman pelted the intruders with pillows and beat them with bolsters that split at the seams. A flurry of feathers floated through the air, the room becoming a startled snow globe.

  Another door swung open, and a second woman stepped out from the water closet, framed by the molding like a maja in the Prado. Her hair was blue-black and pulled into a pincushion bun. The straps of her hourglass corset loosely clung to her chiseled shoulders. Her eyes had such fire, her body was so statuesque, it frightened Pablo. Perhaps her next most conspicuous characteristic was an absolutely perfect French nose, slightly upturned at the tip. “Nonell!” he kept saying, over and over while being assailed by a headrest, even as he couldn’t tear away his gaze.

  “You know him?” the black-haired woman asked—to Pablo and Carles’s surprise, in a throaty Catalan.

  “Yes, yes,” they pleaded.

  “Wait till I see that bloody chinch!” She dug into a beaded handbag sitting on an easel’s ledge and withdrew a narrow boning knife, its silver point gleaming through the falling feathers. “Let him suck on this!”

  “Madam, allow us to explain,” said Carles, summoning whatever diplomatic grace he’d inherited. “We are artists. It would be a crime against the law and good taste to kill us.”

  “Artists?” she roared. “You mean con artists, like your friend Nonell!”<
br />
  “If you please lower your weapon,” he beseeched the woman as she filleted the air, “I will give you the distinct honor of meeting my illustrious companion, the magnificent painter, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispín Crispiniano Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso!”

  The syllables lisped gallantly from Carles’s mouth, and Pablo bowed like a caped bullfighter, peering out from under his brow, shocked as anything that Carles could actually recollect his full-winded Andalusian name.

  “This up-and-comer’s prizewinning and tear-wrenching masterpiece,” Carles said, “which he’s christened Last Moments, hangs at this very moment in the Spanish Hall at the World’s Fair, the Exposition Universelle. We have traveled from our Catalan homeland to Paris to collect the laurels he so rightfully won.” Cheekily, Carles added, “We can even arrange for you and your fair companionette an intimate visit, should you wish.”

  “I don’t give a shit about you, this mother raper, or any of your Catalan countrymen. You can all choke on a fucking olive pit. And make sure, while you’re at it, my good-for-dirt father is buried there besides. Now, I’m going to ask nicely, before I paint the walls with your bile. Where is Nonell? He’s supposed to finish playing with his pictures today and pay us what he owes.”

  “Seamstresses,” Pablo whispered to Carles.

  “Models! Professional models for professional artists,” she countered, punctuating each syllable with the knife. “We don’t stand around naked catching a cold for free, comprens?” Her eyes, black and fierce as a bear’s, looked Carles up and down. “And who the fuck are you, anyway?”

  “I, my lady, am the poet Carles Casagemas,” he said. “Betrothed to an austere life of vermouth, verse, and revolution, I’m a scribe wittier than Lucan, an enfant terrible more terrible than Rimbaud.”

  “I have no doubt you are terrible. How did you get the key to this studio?”

  “We have rented it from Nonell, who said he shall be returning to Barcelona, posthaste.”