The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  In any case, Pablo’s advice was sound. At this point, it’s best to relax. Nicer for the circulatory system so all the blood isn’t dammed up in the head, with none left for any other organ.

  It was also true what Pablo pointed out: ever since meeting Germaine, Carles had been playing a part. Couldn’t he be loose? Be himself? In fairness, their introduction had been one holy hell of a mix-up. Time to unwind already. Devil may care. She’d adore that. Act like the French. Just her thing.

  At the same time, Carles was peeved Pablo had been so didactic. What did he know of love? Had Pablo ever slept with a woman he hadn’t paid for?

  Bother, Carles reproached himself. He shouldn’t think this way about his friend.

  But there was also something about Pablo’s paintings that Carles found at once miraculous and a bit like trickery, albeit feats performed by a talented magician. After all, could anything done with such ease be of value?

  Whereas, while Carles led a materially privileged life, few knew suffering the way he did. His poems were proof. He poured himself into his writing to unearth universal truths, not to manufacture some trifle to acquire money. His anguish and what it revealed did not belong to commerce.

  Carles retrieved from his coat pocket the amber vial and dripped a few drops onto his tongue. He’d tried to stay away from the drug since that awful night of the ball, but it was still the only antidote when depression bore down like this. He walked on, and a few blocks later, the world was already more bendy, he more fit to be plied.

  He reached a parfumerie and found in the back an enticing eau de cologne, fragrant of violet and musk, ambergris and wet cedarwood. He bought it, despite the outrageous price, and dabbed his collarbone. In a cloud of pleasantness, he retreated to a cozy boîte with a shingled mansard roof on a hidden side street, like a capsule holding the lost charm of the Second Empire. Into a tumbler of rum, he stirred a few drops more from the vial with his long finger, which he licked. His thoughts slowed like a river after the rains calm. He sauntered back toward the studio, loose as a barn door swinging in the wind.

  What? Jealous of Pablo? Ha! Never.

  Each pair held hands while cutting down the hillside of the Montmartre Cemetery to meet the Els Gats crew. Speckled brown lime and purple ash leaves crinkled beneath their feet. It was in front of Stendhal’s grave that Pablo, Odette, Carles, and Germaine found—standing in a circle, hands dug into their pockets or else cradling pipes—Casas, Utrillo, Pichot, Manolo, and some others from back home.

  “Your tastefulness has improved considerably in Paris,” said Casas to Carles as he sized up Germaine.

  “I’ve always had taste, Ramon. It’s my fortune to have found better company here.”

  “Careful.” Casas nudged Germaine in the rib. “The only thing worse than a painter husband is a poet—they write beautiful vows but don’t ever keep ’em.”

  “If all I cared about was loyalty,” she answered, “I’d put a briard with bangs over the eyes on a leash and saw off its bollocks.”

  Casas twirled an invisible lasso in the air and lifted his voice to corral them into joining the hubbubing droves filling the Rue Caulaincourt viaduct, all marching to celebrate the new millennium at the mightiest exposition ever known. The crowd was made of both aristocrats and plebes who’d flocked here from around the world, many in their native garb so that Austrian knights in revers and cape sleeves walked shoulder to shoulder with Australian bushrangers in curled slouch hats.

  During the journey, Manolo introduced Pablo to Manyac, the big-fish art dealer whom he’d spoken about at the nightclub.

  “I hear we’re going to see one of your paintings,” said the man who wore a gambler’s mustache and the finest grosgrain top hat Pablo had ever seen. It was angled slightly to the side, almost hiding that one of his pupils seemed more dilated than the other.

  “If you like, I’ll sell it to you,” Pablo said bluntly.

  “It’s a religious subject?”

  “A woman receiving last rites.”

  “Won’t do, I’m afraid. The French have decided to be quite the godless lot. Pious art only reminds them of centuries of persecuting Protestants—and before that, the Moors. They’re even having second thoughts now about harassing Jews. No, they will not buy that painting. It would hurt too much. Have you anything else?”

  “How do you like Lautrec? Steinlen?”

  “Which one are you?”

  “Better than both. That style is easy. Except I do it with El Greco’s passion and Goya’s madness,” Pablo boasted, hearing how his confident pitch echoed the way Don José touted him when he was a boy.

  “I don’t doubt it. Manolo said you were good. Long as your work has got a little carnality—provocative, magnetic, right up to the edge of obscene. But pretty. That, I can sell. You know, it’s not impossible we could work out an arrangement. Put you on a contract?”

  “What if I’ve already been offered one?”

  “You? By whom?”

  “Heaven. Hell. Maybe it’s a bidding war.”

  “You’re not actually religious, are you?”

  “See my painting and you’ll believe I’m divinely touched. That doesn’t make me a believer—just a recipient, right?”

  “Your bravado and blasphemy are both admirable,” Manyac said.

  Carles leaned over and whispered in Pablo’s ear, “I do believe this eerie man is trying to part you from your soul.”

  Pablo cupped his hand around his mouth to reply, “He may be dangling quite a lot of money.”

  “That’s usually how it goes, no?”

  “Considering I’ve only got one, I ought to get a good price.”

  Manyac turned to Odette, whose arm was hooked in Pablo’s. “And who is your companion?”

  “One of the finest models in Paris,” Pablo said, adding that she didn’t speak Catalan.

  “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble fondling your way along,” the art dealer mused. “It’s rather too bad, though. You look so young and pure, maize still in the husk. Shame such an experienced creature should de-kernel you.”

  Pablo’s eyes narrowed. Odette might have been slightly more mature, but she wasn’t old. And he wasn’t so innocent.

  The Palais du Trocadéro, an enormous concert hall with tiered arcades, stood opposite the Eiffel Tower like an outpost of Byzantium facing off against modernity. The Exposition’s pavilions filled the surrounding expanses of great lawn on either side of the river. Each building adjacent to the Palais was devoted to the peculiarities and progress of France’s colonies and vassal states—the Transvaal to the Tonkin protectorate—and was done up in the architecture of that land.

  As the group stepped onto the grounds, a rickshaw carting a pair of gasping English pensioners whizzed by. A two-man team in coolie hats raced them around, the gentlefolk holding tightly to the bamboo sides, saying plummily, “Oh me, oh my.”

  “Exploitation, right this way!” said Carles in a carnival-barker voice.

  First the visitors found a monumental Cambodian wat guarded by seven-headed serpents and limestone lions wearing furrowed pompadours. The Dutch East Indies pavilion exactly replicated Candi Sari, a Javanese shrine from the ninth century, with soaring stone blocks carved with beatified bodhisattvas. Indonesians danced the serimpi to gamelan music and soothing bamboo flutes out front. Nearby, tourists bumbled through faux Cairo backstreets and makeshift bazaars. Over yonder, the subjects of a Dahomian king brought offerings in a staging of supposed life back home, both sexes in loincloths, which caused a sensation among the crowd, no one caring that these people were obviously freezing and would have given anything for a wool coat. In the Madagascar pavilion, schoolchildren and grown-ups alike were made to demonstrate the process of becoming civilized as they sat yawning in a classroom while a Norman headmaster, declared expert in such matters, discoursed unintelligibly about reading, writing, arithmetic, and how to wear shoes.

  “Somebody ought to do that for the Spanish,” whispered Pablo
.

  “Yes, the French are quite refined, at least before ten p.m.,” Carles responded with an irritated rasp.

  They crossed the Pont d’léna and headed toward the sounding of “God Save the Tsar!”—the Imperial Russian anthem. A table next to a Trans-Siberian railcar vended curious souvenirs of painted wooden dolls that hid one inside another, the smallest no bigger than a beetle and grinning with a tuft of yellow hair. Carles bought a set for Germaine, remarking, “It’s like all of us, so many personalities vying underneath one façade.”

  He was sweating, Pablo noticed, and looked ghostly pale. “You all right?” he asked.

  Carles didn’t respond, and Pablo felt a pang of worry. He’d hoped Paris would distract his friend from this habit but feared now as Carles unbuttoned his shirt collar that nothing could keep him from that amber bottle.

  Wending along the Quai des Nations, they stopped at a Mexican installation and drank a boozy slosh of fermented pineapple, toasting Bacchus with grappa in the Italian one before sipping cool plum wine atop a Japanese pagoda. The United States made its presence known with a theater showcasing Loie Fuller, a dancer who writhed and contorted with billowing white sails covering her body, imitating Salome before Herod. There was nothing to imbibe here save for the intoxicating movement of the wild woman.

  Finally arriving at the Spanish Pavilion, which resembled a hastily constructed Gothic cathedral, each of their party was at least tipsy. On the steps, a gilet-wearing guitar player strummed incessantly, and flamencas in ruffled red skirts clacked their castanets and tip-tapped their heels. Other women in mantillas aired themselves with giant folding fans. The scene was meant to celebrate Pablo’s homeland, but it felt like a mockery instead. He was visited by new empathy for the Dahomian king.

  Inside the pavilion’s first chamber hung Casas’s painting, a long impressionist portrait. The subject—staring off into the distance through pince-nez glasses—was a famous music composer, Manyac quietly informed Pablo, who occasionally still haunted Montmartre, someone named Erik Satie. As Pablo dissected the work, he briefly thought he caught Germaine fixed upon him from across the room like a gazehound. Or was she looking so intently, so meaningfully, at the gilt-frame painting a few feet in front?

  Further from the door, and a bit higher on the wall, Pablo discovered his own Last Moments. He was immediately swept away by a deluge of satisfaction. Then, as an arm curled around his shoulder, he felt himself ripped back to the place where he stood.

  It was Casas.

  They’d never shared even a sliver of intimacy between them, far as Pablo knew. It was strange to be this close, the dried fumes of Casas’s cigar right beneath his nose.

  “That, my boy, is how it’s done. Painting’s hard as breaking rocks—worse for the joints and back. You’ll see when you’re my age. Only thing to make this interminable fiasco worthwhile is to have your canvas mounted on the most hallowed wall where everyone damn well knows it.” Casas paused. “And the money,” he added, firing off a wink and that disgusting guffaw. “You’d be surprised how rich you can become with flax oil and a snip of hog’s hair.”

  Casas’s father had made a fortune in Cuba before he was born. He didn’t need to burnish his wealth. Pablo was vexed to hear this man, whom every critic in Barcelona worshipped, speak only of the lucre of his profession. How could he be so callous at a moment such as this, one that Pablo wanted to cherish?

  “Don’t forget about the women,” said Germaine, interrupting them from a few feet away. Pablo pivoted to face her and saw she was staring up at his creation. “Be honest. Don’t you paint because beautiful women love to love great artists, feel their touch?”

  She made no effort now to conceal the way she was eyeing Pablo. There was something especially attractive about the wisps of hair that protruded from Germaine’s coif, softening her hard edge. Was it possible they might be intentional, too? Even her disarming features were ruthless, it seemed.

  Pablo surveyed the room for Odette but couldn’t find her. Instead, his eyes landed on Carles, who was wobbling around a one-to-twelve replica of the Alhambra. He looked like he might fall face-first into the miniature fountain, which was replete with a running trickle. Pablo thought about how one can drown in any amount of water.

  As Germaine walked away toward a culinary display concerning the history of chorizo, Pablo began to follow her, almost as though her movement was commanding him. All of Pablo’s life had been spent mastering his body, learning to control the eyes in his head, the fingers in front of him. What is a brush or palette knife but an extension of the hand, which itself is connected by a main avenue to the heart? The ability of body was what he offered the world. Pablo found Germaine’s perfect mastery of hers—gained from modeling or who knows what—irresistible. He felt compelled to hold her, greet where that dark hair met the back of her neck with his lips.

  Casas suddenly whispered in Pablo’s ear. “I do believe she was making a pass at me.”

  At him! How could a painter be so blind?

  “If that Carles hadn’t already stuck his little flag in, I might take her behind that Javanese stupa for some fun.”

  Pablo shuddered to think of it.

  “Let the lad have a chance, though. You know?” Casas continued, more magnanimously. “You also. My generation of prize horses has to make room for the colts sooner or later. I do hope you’re taking care of that Frenchie with the high, round haunches. Had a bit too much Champagne today, but that can’t be helped, can it?”

  “Ramon,” Pablo said, “we all could use more Champagne.” He’d never directly addressed him, let alone by his first name.

  Pablo retrieved Carles and exited the hall. The rest of the Barcelonans followed.

  The blaze of five thousand incandescent bulbs pulled Pablo and company toward the Palais de L’Electrique. In the area surrounding it, every aspect of French art, culture, commerce, and science had a shrine. Inside the Exhibition de Viticulture, they downed the sweat of the finest Chablis grapes and tried sirop de citron stirred with Cognac. They sampled herbal liqueurs while nibbling pheasant flavored with juniper berries and delicately fried cromesquis drizzled with Villeroy sauce elsewhere at the Palais de l’Agriculture et des Aliments. A lecturer discoursing on the cultivation of drupes offered them paper cones overfilled with crushed ice and sweet crème de pêche, which they spooned into each other’s mouths.

  Hanging from the ceiling in a humongous display devoted to innovation were newfangled motorized flying machines that one day might sail through the sky in ways God had not intended for linen and steel. Humanity’s biggest telescope was erected here, too, with which one could see the surface of the moon as clearly as if gazing at the banks of the Seine. A moving boardwalk paraded people along while they stood still. Powered automobiles were scattered throughout, promising to make carriages and coachmen obsolete.

  “What will we do with the horses?” Pablo wondered aloud.

  “Cut the reins and let them run wild,” said Germaine.

  “Cello bows,” Carles hiccupped. “Glue.”

  By the time they were ready to leave, the bunch had drunk so much they were cakewalking arm in arm up the avenues like the minstrels outside the American pavilion. One or two peeled off here and there, into this tavern or that inn, this friend’s apartment, or that bordello.

  Eventually, only the two models, the poet, and the painter remained. Pablo offered to walk the women to wherever they had been sleeping. Odette protested she wouldn’t take a step further than the studio tonight. Her feet had blown up like brioche in her high-buttoned boots.

  Carles could barely stand.

  When the four passed the full mirror in the vestibule, Pablo noticed Germaine eyeing him again. They sloshed upstairs and into the studio, where he lit a candle. Odette placed a bottle of sparkling wine to chill on the window ledge before plopping onto the chaise longue. She pried off her boots, sighed luxuriously, and announced that she was going to draw a bath.

  Pablo ru
shed to heat water on the stove. Once hot, he proffered the kettle through the cracked door, barely avoiding a spill. There wasn’t an inch of Odette he hadn’t already seen. It was ridiculous. She said something in French and giggled before waving him inside. He entered, inhaling orange blossom and shading his eyes with his hand before leaving her soaking in the fragrant pool.

  Germaine, meanwhile, stood over Carles, who was crumpled on the daybed. “He’s going to be sick,” she said.

  “Nah,” said Pablo. “He’s like a horse. It must have been something that didn’t agree. The plum wine—so sweet, you forget you’re drinking.”

  “Or was it his habit?” she said. Pablo looked away, avoiding her. “You can see it in his eyes. They’re all over Montmartre, people on the tincture. He’s by no means the worst off. But he’ll move to morphine soon.”

  When Pablo had first discovered that amber bottle jabbing his side in the middle of the night in Barcelona, he’d done nothing because he didn’t know what precisely his hand held. Whatever this narcotic potion was, it seemed a fittingly romantic peccadillo for a poet. But after what happened at the Three Kings Ball, when Carles looked nearly gone, Pablo knew he ought to intervene. For a while, though, Carles seemed to be improving, the habit curtailed after he drifted out of love with his niece and he and Pablo began to spend more time together.

  But now, Pablo asked himself, why had he not stopped Carles at the Exposition?

  “He’s not going anywhere but to bed,” Pablo said.

  “You’re trying to protect him. Good of you, but you’ll do him only harm,” she said.

  “Everybody has something to kill them, if they live long enough,” Pablo said. But maybe he’d wanted Carles to become incapacitated tonight.