Meanwhile, Carles was pining for Germaine like a cat at the window, mewling to return to a baroque love affair he’d created in his mind, fancifully referring to her as “my wife.” Pablo suggested they both carry on to Málaga, clear their heads and hearts, hang them out to dry in the pounding rays of al-Andalus. He also held out hope Carles might be weaned off laudanum there and their friendship could be repaired, forgetting how the bright light of Spain is never without corresponding shadow.
There are three matadors to fight six bulls today. With all winter to fatten up, the beasts are gargantuan. The bullfighters’ bellies bulge, too, after months of gorging on the lavish spreads set before them at every stop during the off-season, each day they are alive another cause for celebration, their exercise limited to hotel beds and boudoirs.
Still, both the matadors and bulls cut striking figures: the stiff-backed men with bejeweled capes draped over their shoulders; the monstrous mountain ranges of savage muscle, with needle-sharp horns hovering ominously above evil, burnt-brown eyes.
Even the bulls’ roan-colored hindquarters are impressive feats of nature only outdone by the scrotums swaying underneath.
As each man enters the ring, he bows before the president, seated in the best box, and the brass band’s paso doble is drowned out by the booming crowd.
When Pablo and Carles arrived in the city of Pablo’s birth, Uncle Salvador’s household was unprepared to greet these two unshaven young men, with their scraggly hair and worn clothes of strange proportion. Carles, raw-boned and pale as a phantom, claimed to be a poet and revolutionary. In the library, he retched inside the loud horn of the Berliner Gramophone, yellow bile dripping as the recording turned.
Pablo decided to shell out for a shared room at a habitación by the port.
“What are you doing in Málaga?” the squinty concierge asked.
“My family, we are from here,” Pablo replied.
“They don’t want you?”
Pablo assured the woman he and his friend would be no trouble.
“He doesn’t look healthy,” she said, nodding toward Carles.
“The water hadn’t been too kind, that’s all,” he told her.
They were heaps of trouble, though, from the moment she rented them a small apartment where they could smell the sea each time a breeze sailed through the window. Whenever Carles wasn’t passed out or writing love letters to Germaine, the neighbors complained about the Catalan madman calling out, “Per què? Per què! Per què?”
The first fights prove predictable. The clown-like banderilleros jab sashed barbs into each animal’s back to correct its movements and aggravate its temper. Mounted picadors invite the bulls to charge their horses and then lance them with spears. The matadors do the killing, hiding the sword behind the red muleta and waiting for just the right moment to drive it between the shoulder blades straight through the heart.
Sometimes at a bullfight, especially in Madrid, when both the bulls and the men battling them are superb, the fight is art, grand as opera, delicate as Japanese silk screen. Or else, as on this day at the stadium, when Pablo has come to regain control of his stampeding thoughts, during the slower moments the spectacle wears thin, and it becomes too apparent what the audience is really watching: doomed animals chasing a cloth.
Pablo tried to bait Carles’s passions away from Paris with the choicest temptresses of Málaga, but his besotted friend had no interest in the chicken ranch where the wizened madam known as La Chata presided with a cigarette perpetually planted between her crepe-paper lips. It was here that many years earlier Pablo had followed his father after church one Sunday and stood on a milk crate outside the window to see the women kissing Papa.
When Pablo took Carles to the local watering hole, where hardened campesinos drank shots of moonshine and ate fried mullet, guts and all, Carles nearly got them both clobbered, accusing the man sitting at the bar with a navaja knife poking from his work pants of not speaking Spanish correctly and being inbred. Pablo saved their necks with a few well-placed Andalusia-isms and many pleas of perdón.
All the time, Carles was either starting fights or else out cold from that poison he drank. To think Pablo had once admired—looked up to—this man, who’d been the spitting image of a youthful romantic poet right here in living, breathing, snarling flesh and perfectly creased clothes!
Carles had become a shade of himself—it was steeper than Don José’s decline. Only a last shred of loyalty was keeping them together, like the root strands anchoring a loose molar. Unable to summon compassion, Pablo felt mounting disgust.
The final bull enters the ring, and the crowd hushes. It must weigh a ton and shows less fright than the sun has of sea. Murmurs spread—the balls, they’re ripe as honeydew!
Fresh from the gate the animal charges, aiming its master horn directly at a banderillero’s vitals. The paunchy man, who should have quit the sport long ago, leaps over the railing and into the first row. Two others flap their wide dress capes—saffron on one side, magenta the other—and draw the bull, twisting themselves away just before it arrives.
When Carles lectured Uncle Salvador at his New Year’s Eve dinner table about Catalanisme and proclaimed Barcelona’s superiority above backwater Andalusia, Pablo’s patience splintered. The family patriarch had chipped in for his tuition to art schools in La Coruña, Barcelona, and Madrid. Now Pablo was coming home to beg money so he might not lose his fingers in Spain’s next disastrous war. He excused himself and Carles, returned to the hotel, and shut the door behind them, before pouring equal portions of brandy into coffee cups.
“Drink, you imbecile,” he told Carles. “Where do you get off insulting my family?”
“Nothing of the kind. I professed pride for my homeland. Each is entitled, no matter if he is right or wrong.”
“And what if you are wrong—wrong about everything? Wrong about your pride, your poetry, and wrong about Germaine?”
“My poetry? Are you my judge?” Carles’s brow twisted as if it were being wrung out. “And what’s Germaine got to do with this?”
“Your love poems are worse than tripe.”
Carles held his cheek as if he’d been struck.
But Pablo knew how a wounded animal could suddenly grow ferocious, a bull rising again in the ring.
“My verse,” Carles snapped, “is a higher creation than your tiresome pictures—those which are devised to sell, mere paeans to profit. No, I’ve not learned to whore myself as you have, friend.”
Pablo’s big eyes narrowed to knife edges. “Who do you think you’re in love with, a virgin?”
“Germaine may not be a saint, but she’s no whore,” Carles shrieked.
For the life of him, Pablo couldn’t figure out how Carles had gone from wanting to be the poet laureate of the damned to dreaming of some goose-game life with Germaine. “And do you really think that’s what she would have?” Pablo interrogated Carles. “Darn your socks, suckle your babies? You said it yourself—she’s making it with half the circus, which Odette confirmed. She has a husband, for Christ’s sake, who she didn’t bother to tell either of us about. How can you be so dense?”
Picadors trot from the corral on blindfolded draft horses, one liver-colored, the other slate-gray. Their assignment is clear: do something to attenuate the strength of this hellish creature or else the matador will surely die.
The lanky, unseeing horses parade around the ring.
The bull’s eyes lower and fix on the right side of one of them. The beast dips its neck and tears across the clay. Its head hooks after impact, ramming the horns into the horse right up to the ring’s wall. The picador astride the shocked mare thrusts his lance into the bull’s back along the spine and digs in with all his strength. The bull jerks up again and lifts the horse into the air, piercing deeper. Red grows, absorbing the horse’s gray coat.
Carles paused and drew back his neck, scrunched up his eyes, and chewed for a moment on what Pablo had said about Germaine’s husband. “Wh
y the hell should she tell you? So you can paint him?”
“She might’ve told me so I didn’t make love to another man’s wife.”
Carles looked confused. And then it dawned on him. “You made love to . . . you fucked her?”
“What’s the difference? Just one more,” Pablo cried. “Wake the hell up. Germaine doesn’t love you. She detests you. And so do I.”
Carles flew into a rage then. “If you ever go near her again, think of her face even—”
“You haven’t the will to destroy anything but yourself,” Pablo said. “Not to make anything worthwhile, either.”
“How do you know what I’m capable of? You think you’re God!”
“I know what you aren’t capable of, and so does Germaine.”
The bull rattles back and forth, tearing the horse open. Its bowels leap out like a cobra escaped from the snake charmer’s basket. The mare bares its teeth in agony while galloping away, dragging a tangle of guts behind. If horses could pray, this old nag would ask for the knackery.
The cup Carles hurled at Pablo flew past his ear and crashed against the wall, scattering porcelain and making the leashed dog outside yowl, which hid Carles’s weeping, a soft quavering song as he lay on the floor, his cheek against the tile. Pablo stepped over him and walked back to his uncle’s home to rejoin his family at the table, promising that the stranger who had disturbed them would not return.
Hidden within his cape, the matador brings his curved sword up high above the bull’s lowered neck, then drives the point down, straight through the aorta. The animal kicks and bucks before dropping to its knees. It goes limp, and the crowd roars.
II
While Uncle Salvador had given Pablo money to escape the draft and travel to Madrid, the man resisted petitions to contribute to the art magazine Pablo is working on. He accepts that no more funds will be forthcoming from Málaga.
Pablo’s partner in this publishing venture is a Catalan named Francisco Soler. His family has lent support to Arte Joven from the fortune it made selling an apparatus to cure all manner of ailments, rheumatism to nervousness. Chiefly, however, the device promises to rid the afflicted of that most worrisome hobgoblin: impotence. As with death, even men who have no reason to be anxious about its proximity live in mortal fear this numbness might strike at any hour, leaving them limp, without meaning, legacy, or joy.
The machine’s construction is simple and undeniably effective—at least no one seems to doubt that some effect is happening. It consists of a wide leather belt interlaced with copper wires connected to a motor coil that the wearer straps around his midsection. A codpiece-like diode dangles in front, which must be fitted and affixed, too. Jolts of alternating current to the groin then invigorate and revive the region in a procedure that recalls raising the Frankenstein monster, only in miniature. It’s been a smashing success in Barcelona since the Soler family got the patent two years ago. Now they are aiming for their medical miracle to likewise inspire Madrid—conveniently paralleling the aspirations of Pablo and their son to induce an appreciation for contemporary art and culture in Spain’s capital, long in a state of repose.
In the end, though, Arte Joven fails to find any other advertiser besides the Solers and is expected to fold after the fifth issue. Fortunately, Pablo has other developments to occupy him. Two letters from Paris arrive, along with a postcard and an envelope from Barcelona.
The first is from Manyac. As Pablo sits in his garret in Madrid, he pictures the elegantly attired Montmartre art dealer hovering over the embossed ecru stationery, his writing hand carefully slanting each character, curling the tails just so. Pablo has thought a good bit of him recently. The excitement of signing his first contract still lingers, even though he’s begun to believe he should be earning more than the agreed-upon monthly sum. As Pablo reads the letter, he imagines the long fingers on Manyac’s other hand plying his mustache’s corner, which is like the soft bristles of a fine-tipped kolinsky brush.
Good news, my charming Pablo. A very reputable gallery owner in Montmartre named Vollard—hung Manet, Renoir, Gauguin, among others—wants to give you a show, along with a promising Basque whom I also introduced him to, though I believe he will prefer your output. Of at least fifty works! Can you do it? Be on your way already, Pablo. Celebrations in order! Also, I have not received a parcel from you this month or last—are you painting? Have you received my payments? Write me at once, please. And then hurry to Paris!
The second letter is from Germaine. Pablo slits open the cottony envelope with a palette knife and removes the pink paper. He holds it in his hand momentarily before shredding it without reading a word. Ever since learning of Carles’s death, a creeping anger has replaced his desire for Germaine.
The next is a halftone postcard from Barcelona showing off a smoldering vedette making eyes at a hand mirror. Pablo knows before he turns it over who it is from. “How ’bout it?” is all the card says. It’s signed “Pajaresco.”
Pablo thinks of how urgently he’d like to see his friend from Horta. Cinto had brought few details about what happened to Carles—he’d found out from his brother in Barcelona, who’d gotten it from Manolo in Paris, who was never a stickler for facts. Most valuably, though, Cinto did impart that Pajaresco was also on the scene that night. Pablo desperately wants more information.
The last letter is from Pere, who is writing to let Pablo know that Casas will stage another exhibition at Barcelona’s prestigious Sala Parés. But this time, Casas had deigned to share the space with Pablo’s work. Pere has underscored three times this is Casas’s idea, not his own. The painter has insisted, he writes.
Pablo’s heart flutters, and he forgets all his troubles. Will he really don the same spotlight as the most well-known contemporary artist in Barcelona, if not all Spain, in the city’s most respected gallery? That, Pablo thinks, is the power of having been to Paris. Ignoring the one-year lease on his apartment after just a few months in Madrid, he packs his belongings to abandon a place he never learned to love or despise. Pablo writes Pere to let him know he’s on his way. He also scribbles a note to Pajaresco, accepting his tersely worded invitation.
CHAPTER 9
Barcelona, April 1901
Long ago, Pablo had memorized the paths of Barcelona’s narrow, doglegged alleys wending between churches, guild halls, and high buildings, a barely navigable tangle that Catalan counts plotted centuries earlier to ward off sackings by the Moors.
But now, he is getting hopelessly lost in the streets of his youth. Since the invasion of the news about Carles, Pablo’s head has been a mess—has itself grown into a maze. It takes him an hour to reach the dank hideaway where he agreed to meet Pajaresco so they can talk freely. His old friend is ducked in a corner and jumps up from the table. They find themselves in an awkward trap, not knowing whether to embrace, shake hands, or merely nod; be happy to see one another or still be in mourning. Pajaresco orders jars of Cuban rum to smooth things.
There is just enough small talk before Pajaresco comes out and says he has to tell Pablo what the hell happened. “It’s eating on me like vermin.”
This is music to Pablo’s ears.
As far as Pajaresco knows, after Pablo and Carles left Paris, the police did not visit the studio again. But he wished they’d hung around more. Apaches laid claim to the entire zone, and one night, Pajaresco scarcely avoided being garroted from behind by thugs.
The models all went their separate ways, with barely a goodbye. The last time Pajaresco saw Antoinette was right after she’d charmed a pastry chef into letting her train at a top kitchen in the First Arrondissement, hoping to someday earn more money baking wedding cakes than by modeling painters’ virginal brides.
Soon, Pajaresco moved into a shared living space on Boulevard de Clichy a couple blocks from the Moulin Rouge. The apartment’s lease belonged to none other than Manyac, but he was regularly gone for weeks on end and would allow Catalan artists to stay in his absence cheaply or even for free. “Dr
opped by asking for news of his Pablito now and then,” Pajaresco says. “Sometimes, Manolo was around, too. I considered myself a passing guest.”
But a postcard eventually arrived there for Pajaresco—from Carles. He wrote that he’d taken a steamer back to Barcelona after Málaga and was Paris-bound now. It specified what time to fetch him at the Gare d’Orsay. “I thought about letting him wait there, like I done. But it ain’t my style. Even if I kicked the shit outta someone, I’ll still buy him a pork chop if he’s visiting town.”
On the day of Carles’s scheduled arrival, Pajaresco said he found Germaine on the platform, holding in her fingers an identical postcard. He tipped his hat and plunked down beside her. Her other hand was buried inside a bear-fur muff. A boater crowned her head above a black shawl.
“Carles wrote you?” Pajaresco asked.
“Every day. I never forget to wind my wristwatch,” she replied dispassionately.
“Love fallen from its perch?”
Germaine flung him a razor-sharp look.
Listening in the barroom to Pajaresco recount the story, Pablo pictures Carles approaching on the train from Spain with absolute clarity. It’s as if he’s right there with him, the countryside villages passing outside the window, the autumn foliage that blanketed the hills on their first trip to Paris gone now, each little house naked.
He watches how, as the engine pulls into the station, Carles scans the platform, searching for Germaine’s shape, which he knows so well.
What is Carles thinking when he spots her silhouette, head tilted slightly back in that gypsy shawl? But Pablo knows this, too. Carles hears the whistle and the brake hiss and realizes he’ll have to disembark any moment and speak to this woman who has consumed him. Is his hair fixed? He nervously licks his palm and presses down the unwieldy bangs and grabs the corners of his collar and pulls them taut from under his coat.
The Blue Period Page 17
