The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  But what can he say? He’s already filled a thousand pages.

  “Woman of my life,” maybe? Not convincing.

  “I am a fool for you,” perhaps? Too foolish.

  “Marry me already!” A touch, what’s the word, direct?

  “I forgive you for what you’ve done.” He isn’t exactly in the position.

  Germaine cranes her neck as Carles’s car passes the bench where she is sitting with Pajaresco. Carles sees she’s seen him.

  Wearing the cutaway suit of olive-green velvet that he’s carefully selected, Carles alights clutching a leather attaché and a fancy tin of pink marzipan. Be like a leopard, he tells himself. A thrill runs through his being when he notices Germaine’s pupils increase into fantastic black gems growing just for him.

  “I told you I’d return,” Carles says.

  “So you did—and you have,” Germaine replies.

  “You look more ravishing than when I left.”

  “It’s been a long ride. C’mon, we’d better find you someplace to stretch out.”

  This is Carles’s chance, and he wastes no time. “How I want to be alone with you. In the woods, where are the birds and the wind and the oaks, they hear only our whispers to one another. Or on the waves, in a little white boat, the billowing sail carrying us further out to sea, as we chase the horizon.”

  “We’ll go get coffee,” she says, biting her lip.

  “Each day I’ve been away has been like living not at all, as if I’ve vanished from myself.”

  She adds, “And a croissant.”

  “Live with me,” he says. “Be my wife. Be my love.”

  “Where? Look, Carles, you can’t. You just can’t have me like that.”

  “There’s nothing in this world I need besides you—not poetry, not prose, not painting. You are the greatest line ever written or drawn.”

  “But, you see, I don’t love you. Do you understand? I get a say, too, you know?”

  “Not yet, you don’t love me. But you don’t know me the way I know you.”

  “You’re right. I don’t know you. But you do not know me, either. You just know what you think you see. I’m not some lyric in your mind. We’re like pieces of two different puzzles. They don’t fit. They never will.”

  Carles bows his head, and the starched white collar creeps up on his neck. His bangs fall onto his brow.

  “You’re a good writer,” Germaine says. “A fine painter. And here you are in Paris again. You’ll find it’s a place where things happen far more wonderful than even me.”

  The three walk to Montmartre in silence. But, as they approach the butte, Carles begins to tell a joke about a friar, a mule, and a magistrate. They all laugh a little before stopping at the door to the apartment. Pajaresco says Carles can stay while he gets sorted out.

  Germaine seems surprised when Carles doesn’t even try to invite her inside. “How about a pastis on the boulevard?” she asks.

  Pajaresco responds with a don’t-look-at-me shrug.

  “I won’t be long here,” Carles says.

  “Nonsense. Why? You don’t have to go anywhere else,” Germaine says. “You’ve just arrived.”

  “Paris, this isn’t the place.”

  “Everything is here—or in Montmartre, at least.”

  “Not for me, not now.”

  “Give it some thought, would you? See a show. Have a waltz. A drink. Have some fun. Don’t do anything rash.”

  “Thanks. I will. I mean I won’t. You know what I mean,” Carles says, even pulling off a smile. “Do one thing for me, though. I’m tired. I don’t want this to be our goodbye. I want to celebrate, a toast to each of us finding something new.”

  “I’d raise a glass to that. Where? When?”

  “Soon. I’ll write you.”

  There’s a pause in Germaine’s breath.

  “No. I mean I’ll write to let you know where to meet after I’ve got rest. And then I won’t bother addressing you with any more silly letters. That’s over now. I promise.”

  “Oh, you haven’t bothered me, Carles. It’s charming, actually. Just your way. You’re a poet. You have so much in you to say. And it’s lovely. It is. I’m just not the one to say it to.”

  That night, Carles stays awake at a draft table in the apartment’s corner. He doesn’t write poetry in his notebook or a love letter on the stationery he’s bought. Rather, they are screeds. When he is done, just before light, his wooden legs rise from the chair, and he walks gingerly to a window overlooking the Boulevard de Clichy. Outside, above the white Haussmann buildings and plane trees, is a half-sleeping purple sky encroached by that daily menace. Carles wishes the violet were sweet and everlasting, but soon it is overcome by the steady warping of the spectrum to azure—another crushing day. The dawn chorus of blackbirds begins to sound and so does the chirruping of a thousand house sparrows flying from gutters and streetlamps. There is no escape.

  When Pajaresco wakes, Carles is gone. He’s absent from the apartment the next morning, too. A courier with a message sent by pneumatic dispatch turns up. Carles has written to say he’s departing Paris and requests Pajaresco’s attendance at a farewell in the evening at L’Hippodrome, a bistro a few doors down.

  Pajaresco couldn’t be more relieved. Three people in an apartment barely bigger than a birdcage is too tight, especially when one is Carles. Under the wrap of that tortured poet façade, there were those high-caste manners Pajaresco detested. And something about Carles always made him uneasy.

  At 7:00 p.m., Pajaresco arrives in the cramped corner restaurant to find Carles, Germaine, and Odette, plus a couple other Catalan acquaintances, sitting at a zinc-topped table. Apparently, everyone received invitations via la poste pneumatique. Carles orders a feast that would make all the starving artists and fashionably slim bohemians in Montmartre writhe with envy. Buttered bread and radishes. Frisée and lardons topped with a gently poached egg that resembles a sea creature escaped over the side of aquarium glass. Glistening pork shoulder with stewed chestnuts. Seared rumsteak. Crème caramel. Orange peels in black chocolate shrouds. With every new dish, there is more wine; Carles makes sure of it.

  Little tulips of brandy and hot Chartreuses follow dessert. They all reach over the table to clink glasses, Germaine to Carles’s right, Odette to his left, Pajaresco directly across from him, flanked on either side by the other Catalans. Carles stands to make a toast. Pajaresco, who can’t understand polite French—a language that always sounds to him like a flamingo trying to pass a billiard ball—has no idea what he is saying.

  Carles is wearing the same crisp, notch-collared cutaway sack coat of shimmering green velvet that he stepped off the train in.

  Everyone’s tipsy at this point. The girls snicker when his voice rises loud as a stage actor, as if he’s speechifying to an imaginary balcony in the cozy restaurant.

  Pajaresco spots Germaine noticing something poking out of Carles’s pocket, and she playfully reaches toward him. The letter falls onto the table beside the glazed china bearing the last chocolate-coated orangette that no one has been bold enough to claim. She leans forward to inspect to whom the missive is addressed, and the smile on her face goes crooked—before it is wiped away by instant sobriety. Pajaresco cranes his neck to look closer and finds that the name on the envelope is that of the prefect of police. Odd, Pajaresco thinks, as he bastes a spoonful of custard in the well of sweet, vitreous caramel gathered at the edge of his plate. Suddenly, Germaine bolts under the table, disturbing the setting and knocking over at least two wineglasses before scrambling up behind Pajaresco, who is about to shovel the custard into his mouth just as Carles turns and politely says to Germaine, now crouched behind the back of Pajaresco’s chair, “Voilà pour toi.”

  The glint of the barrel rising in Carles’s hand seems to move across the disheveled table as slowly as if it were traveling through gelatin—such a pretty little pistol, Pajaresco thinks, admiring the engraving fine as lace, the ivory grip. He can feel his brain c
hurning as it calculates the trajectory of the arc of Carles’s arm, and the balls of his feet push from under bent knees, catapulting him forward and upward, with Pajaresco’s outstretched fingertips reaching Carles’s wrist just as the gun explodes in a room-shattering bang.

  He feels the hand clenching his chair from behind go limp. The body it belongs to falls to the floor in the very same instant the custard that was flung into the air from his spoon splatters back onto the plate. Carles looks down at Germaine, licks his lips, and reaims the gun. He says, calmly, “Et voilà pour moi.”

  By the second blast, the restaurant has all but emptied of patrons. Odette is frozen. Pajaresco has dived on top of Germaine, his body covering her like a pile of clothes. The two other Catalans at the table are yelling as they try to plug the hole in Carles’s temple from which blood is gushing out. It’s futile, and they cup their hands beneath, as if they could capture every drop to later funnel it back inside him.

  A frantic waiter approaches with a policeman, and they drag Carles to the pharmacy across the street to find help, his limbs like a marionette’s, the tablecloth wrapped around him soaked crimson.

  At this place in Pajaresco’s retelling, Pablo can’t contain himself any longer and interrupts the tale that has filled his imagination. “Was there nothing you could do?” Pablo asks, more pointedly than he’d meant to.

  “I did do,” Pajaresco says in a ruffled voice. “I jumped on top of the woman in case he fired at her again. Ain’t that enough? I was half blind from the gun that went off not two inches from my face, couldn’t hear nothing in neither ear. I still got ringing, and my eye isn’t right yet.”

  “What happened to Germaine?”

  “She was more than all right,” yells Pajaresco. “Carles didn’t but graze her. Looked like an orange caterpillar climbed along the back of her neck. She comes up, and what’s she do? Kisses and hugs me after using me for a shield,” Pajaresco tells him. “I reckon if your boy Carles had one more bullet he woulda liked to send it my way. Never did see eye to eye. I thought he was a little pompous, frankly.”

  “Let’s not speak ill of the dead,” Pablo reminds him.

  “Look, I didn’t mean nothin’. I just been through a bunch, is all.”

  “Was there anything else? Another letter?”

  “Yeah, one to the king of Spain, one for the pope.”

  Pablo had hung on to the prospect that there may be more than only Carles’s anarchist ranting to authorities, that there might be something addressed to him, even if it were a single paragraph of verse.

  “If there was one more bullet,” Pablo tells Pajaresco, “it should have been for me. This, it’s all my fault.”

  “Yours? What’d you ever do to him? You was his friend. I’m the one almost broke his skinny nose at the studio. But I’d say it was that Germaine’s doing, if anyone’s.”

  Pablo thinks back to the way Málaga ended, and then to Paris, and he asks himself how could he have succumbed and slept with Germaine, been so reckless? Yes, long ago he had warned Carles about the pistol, but that hardly made him less culpable. Again, temptation had led to disloyalty.

  “I was not a good friend,” Pablo says.

  “Hell you wasn’t,” Pajaresco huffs. “Always done right, far as I know. Nobody’s perfect. Can’t be. Wouldn’t want to be. Life’s like paintings. Perfect don’t catch your eye. It’s that smudged-up canvas that’s all kinds of wrong that does.”

  Finally, Pablo feels the waited-for sting, the hurt of understanding how he’d ruined his own best friend.

  “But you, you were a brave man, Pajaresco,” he says, “More than she, or I, deserve.”

  They each throw back their rum. It is a while before either speaks.

  “Excitement over these past months has got me about worn out,” Pajaresco says eventually. “Time to head home to Horta and clean up. Fill the purse.”

  “Why don’t you come back to Paris instead?”

  “Nope. That’s one place I won’t be revisiting. Them lionesses play too rough. I’ll stick here in Spain and find me some pretty kitties that don’t do nothing but purr when you pet ’em.”

  “I hear you.”

  Pajaresco lets his gaze drag along the tabletop awhile before picking up his head and asking Pablo if he might want to snatch one by the tail right now at the cathouse down the street, “for old times, you know?”

  “You never change,” Pablo says.

  “Sure I do.” Pajaresco nods. “I’m blinder and deafer now.”

  After another two rums, Pablo gives in. The friends leave the hideaway and creep through an alley to a red lantern resting on a window ledge on Carrer d’Avinyó. It’s early still when Pablo and Pajaresco arrive. The bagnio is quiet. The crone who greets them is wrapped in a cloak of night-colored gabardine. There’s something about her movements that gives the impression she may have been a fine figure long ago, before her left eye was ghastly marred.

  She leads them to a countertop, where gherkins that look like digits snipped from a mummy’s hand, drab olives, and a sweating rind of manchego sit beneath bell jars like laboratory specimens. She motions to the tapas, but they wave her off, patting their bellies to indicate they’d already had supper, couldn’t possibly handle another a bite.

  The procuress shrugs and continues to a stage curtain of crushed orange velour. “Maybe you’d like a little dessert,” she says in a creaky groan. “Nice and juicy. Nice and fresh. Just for you.”

  Pajaresco inches back the fabric.

  Two figures behind it immediately halt whatever they were doing, hiding any expression and striking poses that seem part mannequin and part mantis. The one with her hair pulled into a Psyche knot has both arms folded behind her neck. She heaves forward her bare chest. The other mimics this, though she clings to a sheet with one free hand, draping it above her powerful thigh. Each of their eyes intently move and adjust like the aperture of a camera lens capturing its subject.

  Nearby on the stone floor is a bowl of fruit—musky grapes, a yellow apple, and a half-eaten melon that another woman squatting beside it just put down, her chin dripping with the sticky remainders. She lifts her gaze, seems to be sizing up the potential customers as much as they are judging her. She is intriguing, almost in a runic way, Pablo determines. But the manner in which her shape is underlit by the oil lamp on the ground is briefly terrifying.

  And what, he wonders, do these viewers think of him—how does Pablo Picasso measure up? Is he the man he’d hoped to be or just a coward? An artist or an amateur? Deliverer or treacherer?

  A fourth woman draws back another set of drapes partitioning the room and emerges to see what the madam wrangled from the street. She appears perplexed by Pajaresco and Pablo, dashed perhaps with a streak of pity. The quandary also distorts her face.

  Every painter in the Louvre or Prado has painted prostitutes, Pablo thinks. But what’s before them here is not some dreamy, idealized scene. It is far more strange, possibly sinister, and altogether intimidating—like something fearsome bubbled up from the dark center of the universe, a place where past and future are interchangeable, and everything and everyone is far while also near. But for what purpose are they here now—to woo him away?

  Pajaresco chooses the woman with the juice-stained chin, which relieves Pablo because he found her chiefly disquieting, like she saw something beneath his skin he’d meant to keep hidden. His heart is pounding, he realizes, understanding the extent of how deeply he’s been disturbed. To be done with it, he nods toward the one who has just entered. She has the most laconic air about her, and he can’t bear to maintain a conversation with anyone right now.

  The last time Pablo went to a brothel was the night he learned of Carles’s death from Cinto. He’d marched to Madrid’s red-light district, thinking of how Carles had once read from a history book detailing ancient peoples’ practice of ritually purifying their souls at Aphrodite’s temples. But the experience was far from erotic or purgative: he paid a fee he could ill
afford to lie beside a woman twice his age and fall asleep on her breast, nothing more, as she held his head beneath the flea-infested blanket on the yellowed sheets of the bloody mattress in a dirty room. In fact, Pablo had made love to no one since Paris.

  Now, this dreary evening back in Barcelona is turning to be much the same. He lies in his undergarments beside the odd, ruminative naked woman, thinking to himself of how in his youth the unmoored bathing hut in the sandy shallow had swayed in the tide after the Galician beachgoer ran up the steps. He and the prostitute cradle each other without exchanging words. Pablo’s thoughts continue to wander, and he contemplates the particular way Germaine had smelled. It was mostly the perfume she wore—jasmine, he supposed—but also hay. He remembers the other smells of his night spent with her: that of the smoke from a burning fire, the sweat, the lust, and the embers combing through the air. Does greed have a smell, the way anger does? Carles had a scent, too, Pablo recalls. No matter how infrequently he bathed or how much brandy and God only knows what else he’d drunk, Carles always smelled like a clean, cold river. That’s how Carles was the night Pablo found his friend unconscious on the sofa at the Barri Xinès brothel that he hated. Or when he’d nearly fallen over the railing at the Three Kings Ball. That’s how Pablo knew Carles would be all right even when he already looked gone, that it would be all right. Because Carles had not smelled like he was going to die, not the way Conchita had. There was no faint emanation of decay.

  Pablo himself is in need of reviving now. In the past weeks, his body has grown weary all over. At first, he figured it was scarlet fever again. Hope sowed that his planned return to Paris in a matter of days would restore him.

  There is another disturbing development Pablo has noticed, though, part of the reason he’s reluctant to remove his undershorts now. He recently discovered a chancre on the tip of the bulbous part of his penis, like a ladybug perched on a tree gall. It has not bled or oozed. But the notion that its putrefaction is growing and might soon envelop him entirely infects his thoughts every still moment. Pablo knows of the diseases sailors get, of the French curse, Paris’s revenge. It makes them mad. And, far worse for a painter, it makes them blind. He worries this is what it could be. He is not special, Pablo thinks. He is as doomed as the horse or bull in the ring was. Or Carles.