The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  CHAPTER 10

  I

  Paris, May 1901

  There is no response to Pablo’s knocking on the door to Manyac’s sixth-floor apartment on the Boulevard de Clichy. He gives a gentle push, and it creaks open before swinging shut again, as if trying to eject him.

  Inside, four stern-faced men are seated at a round table on the far side of the room, a plaid deck of cards distributed among them, the players locked in dead-eyed stares.

  Pablo recognizes Manyac’s waxed mustache beneath the shadow of a gray felt homburg. He is wearing a checked wool waistcoat with his necktie loosed. His back is to the wall. Pablo waves to him.

  The art dealer had been so ebullient in his recent letter that Pablo is shocked when he doesn’t move a muscle or offer a greeting. Pablo failed to announce his trip, but isn’t this a pleasant surprise? Or is Manyac irked at him? The man has always been hard to decipher. And he has a way of making Pablo anxious, especially in light of their budding financial relationship. Pablo has long accepted creativity as a natural gift, but he is doubting his own business acuity. The gushing tone of Manyac’s correspondences has led Pablo to become increasingly suspicious that the one hundred and fifty francs he gets per month is a swindle. Maybe he’s worth twice that—why not? Or, then, might he be worth only half? Nothing at all? So hard to know.

  If Manyac was not happy to see Pablo, though, he should appreciate at least that in Pablo’s hand is a portfolio stuffed with all his best recent work, owed to Manyac under their contract. He’d become so excited to get it to him, he even skipped his own show with Casas in Barcelona and boarded the next train heading north. Shouldn’t Manyac be overjoyed at both? He’s a difficult one, all right. An uneasiness has planted itself right above Pablo’s navel and is starting to grow.

  Pablo looks around the twin rooms without partition. The watermarked plaster is covered with risqué chromolithographs advertising cabaret performers, the froth of their white petticoats blooming around pink legs kicked high. Chéret, Mucha, Grasset, Lautrec—all surreptitiously peeled from the sides of Paris shops and kiosks and public urinals.

  Finally, Manyac darts his eyes and tilts his head to the side to beckon Pablo. He looks a bit older than Pablo remembers, maybe in his thirties. Pablo traverses the room, and Manyac whispers something. Pablo kneels close to Manyac’s lips to hear. The other card players sigh. One slams down a notebook he was using to keep score, sending stacks of poker chips clattering all over the table.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, my dear. Delightful to see you,” Manyac says, barely moving his thin lips and granting no readable expression. “I happen to be engaged in a rather fraught game of high-stakes silent manille. If I speak much more, I fear my good-natured opponents might become, shall we say, cross.”

  “Sounds no good.”

  “For now, it is not, Pablito. For now.”

  Back in Barcelona, Pablo had witnessed this intense card game at the gambling dens in Barri Xinès. It is similar to botifarra, but with a deck of only thirty-two cards. No one is allowed to talk or signal in any way to his partner across the table. Even in that unsavory and violent district, however, Pablo hadn’t seen the rules regarded so gravely. It dawns on Pablo he’d made a particularly grievous faux pas by passing the other players’ revealed hands and then crouching to chat conspiratorially with Manyac. He is embarrassed and a little afraid for them both.

  Manyac tells Pablo to put his things down and come back tonight. He’ll be a prized guest. “Now, and I beg your pardon, but you’d better scarper. The gentleman to my left was a soldier of fortune in Tonkin and is said to have killed a man by lashing his torso above a fast-growing bamboo. Imagine that for a moment, would you?”

  Pablo hisses at the thought of what this mercenary might do to a card cheat.

  “Precisely,” Manyac says.

  Leaving his portfolio and carpetbag, Pablo sets out for coffee. He is exhausted after the train ride from Barcelona and fears he might doze off standing up. He’d made scant preparations for this sojourn in Paris, as his last living quarters in the city materialized so precipitously, and fatefully. Only now is Pablo considering what it will be to spend a night in the very Paris apartment that Carles occupied before his suicide. But he doesn’t have any other options. He wouldn’t dream of staying with Germaine, not after what she did: tempting and deceiving everyone, toying with them, and then putting Pajaresco in the cross fire.

  From him, Pablo had also heard that two days after Carles shot himself, Odette decided she was through with Paris and hopped a train to Belgium, mentioning something about an uncle who fashions brass instruments there. Too bad, Pablo thinks, imagining a waft of pleasing citrus following her to Brussels. But then, maybe it’s fitting that Pablo is here, near the scene of the crime. Even in death, Carles’s life is intertwined with his.

  Despite how much Pablo needs a dose of caffeine, and all that’s brewing in his mind and weighing on his heart, he does feel exhilarated to be back in La Capitale du Monde. He’s even committed to improving his French and trying to think in the language. After a short walk, Pablo finds an outdoor café and sits beneath a green canopy, watching the women on the street, both the done-up ones and those who artfully wear their disarray. Somehow nothing in Paris ever seems out of place, even the hodgepodge. It’s all so much livelier than anything in Spain. The arc lights, omnibuses driven by dapper coachmen, metros whirring underground, and a sweet odor of singed track grease from the electric trams. The engrossing silhouettes of grandes dames with so much plumage their hats look ready for flight. The flashy boulevardiers prowling like urban tigers. Those rouged ladies working the sidewalks outside the cabarets. He’s been gone too long.

  Yet when Pablo stirs the bitter espresso with his eyes closed, listening to the warble of pigeons above the street noise, the sound makes him think of his father, and his recollections veer away from France and back to the ride his family took across the country from La Coruña to Barcelona when he was a boy.

  On the way, Don José made them briefly disembark in Madrid. Doña María and Lola went to the Puerta del Sol to haggle with stall-sellers over folding fans. His father and he headed to the Prado.

  They marveled at Velázquez’s portraits, analyzed Goya’s lunatics, licked their chops at his La Maja Desnuda. And they shared a laugh for the first time in ages over Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a bird-daemon on the third panel of the triptych gobbles a man headfirst while shitting a flock of magpies. Don José called this an accurate illustration of his own personal hell.

  When his father left to use the latrine, Pablo drifted to a gallery where El Greco’s saints were on display all in a line, a murdered row. Pablo admired the figura serpentinata coiled in each scene. But he also noticed something special while observing these martyrs’ hands. In their long, slender fingers, bent in ways that seemed to defy joint and bone, he saw the shape of pigeon toes. Pablo still remembers the way he puzzled over this surprise. How many birds must Spain’s adopted painter have composed before he knew their secrets? In spite of all appearances, Pablo ponders again now, could it somehow be true—had Don José stumbled onto a channel to mastering human form by contemplating pigeons so long and hard? Was he not a washed-up dauber, as everyone said, but instead an unsung master?

  But then Pablo remembers what happened as he stood staring at El Greco’s famous imagining of San Sebastián—the faithful’s elongated golden abdomen bound to a tree trunk and pierced by a hail of arrows, his soft gaze tilted almost Magdalene-like to eternity, as if he loved the Christ more than anyone knew.

  Pablo had been transfixed—caught wondering if the hands clasped behind this martyr’s back were not those of a dove—when Don José reappeared, startling him with a backslap, sneering, “I wouldn’t leave my son alone with that gamy ol’ Greek for too long.”

  While exiting the museum, they passed by Goya’s chalk sketch from the Peninsular War of a lynch mob chastising an invading Frenchman. The
soldier was lashed to the ground, naked below the waist, squirming while the guerillas buggered him with a crescent-cutter. Upon spotting the crude picture, Don José cawed, “Bet he didn’t mind it as much as they thunk!”

  At the time, Pablo forced himself to raise a smile.

  When Pablo finally returns to the apartment at night after wandering Paris all day, the card players are gone, and Manyac has dozed off. He plops onto the settee in the corner and falls fast asleep.

  “I call it the second-best cigarette of the day,” says Manyac, standing above Pablo in the morning, smoking—his voice silky and firm, like taffeta.

  Pablo rubs his eyes and sees a silver case extended in an open palm near his head. “Go on,” says the art dealer.

  “I won’t say no,” Pablo replies, removing one of the tightly rolled cigarettes and letting Manyac light it.

  “You realize I’m going to bring you today to meet someone who will change your life?” Manyac says, taking a deep drag before settling on the scroll arm of a sofa across the room. “He’s very special in Paris, Vollard is. One day I suppose you’ll owe me a share of gratitude. Not for inventing you, of course. But for, let us say, announcing you to the world.”

  Pablo is silent as he inhales smoke both from his cigarette and the haze expanding in the air.

  Manyac asks Pablo his age and then whether he understands what it means for a nineteen-year-old to exhibit at a gallery here.

  “I have a show up with Casas right now at the Sala Parés.”

  “Barcelona is for hacks,” Manyac croaks. “This is fucking Paris. You do know the difference, don’t you?”

  Pablo is quick to nod.

  Manyac tells Pablo to get dressed and sort his portfolio. “Put anything too studied in the back. Vollard hates that sort of dreck. He wants feeling. Wants pretty,” Manyac says. “He wants something he can sell.”

  The plan is they’ll double Pablo’s stockpile before the show. Manyac can furnish him with whatever he needs: models, booze, opium. Pablo is learning his host can be even moodier than Carles, although Manyac’s swings are of a different kind, seesawing from charming to tyrannical in the same breath. “I’ll be out strolling for the next hour. Be ready when I get back,” he says.

  Pablo fills a pitcher and pours it over his head above the basin to wash his face. He scrubs his eyes before a mirror and pulls back his hair. It’s the first time he’s had a good look at himself for a while. He’s gotten thin. And he will have to do something with the wispy mustache above his lip—shave it clean or make it neat. Pablo uses his undershirt to dry himself. He stands by the window and stares outside, looking across the boulevard lined with plane trees, thinking of how Carles might have peered from this same spot on his final day.

  As Pablo is scouring the card table and every other flat surface for a stray cigarette, he notices a pile of canvases leaned against the wall. They are his, ones he painted in Paris months ago before everything turned upside down. Pajaresco must have brought them here for safekeeping.

  He riffles through them, each facing inward except one, which is unfinished. The face is unmistakable to anyone who knew her, though.

  It all comes back, like a riptide.

  During those heady days on Rue Gabrielle when Carles was dissolving just as Paris revealed its wonders, Pablo painted each night, all night. Only then could he count on no interruptions. The crisp of the nocturnal air enlivened him. He would strip to his undershorts and set up an easel in the front room with the fireplace or lay the canvas against the wall there and crouch, becoming entranced in his work, allowing his brain to process all he had seen during the day, working it onto the canvases, breaking only to fetch a cigarette or when the ache in his back and thighs summoned him. Then he’d fold his arms tightly and rock his head side to side, viewing the work from different angles, before squatting again to resume his thoughts with the brush.

  Pablo was immersed in this routine late one evening when he realized Germaine was standing in the doorway, having watched him for who knows how long. He sucked in a breath of smoke and said she shouldn’t sneak up. “I thought no one was home.”

  “Women like surprises—flowers, earrings, a fragrance. Men don’t like to be caught off guard,” Germaine replied. “Even when it’s something they wanted.”

  “Men don’t know what they want.”

  “Most men,” she said.

  They fell silent for a moment, then Germaine spoke aloud what both must have been thinking. “Sure, that’s what he tells himself. Oh, and he says it to me, all the time, ‘I adore you. I worship you.’ Says it’s my fault for looking at him, letting him see me.”

  Pablo asked what she was doing awake so late.

  “I’ve got an ungodly hangover.”

  “From the other night? Shouldn’t you have cured it already?”

  “Thought I did. Must have been in remission,” Germaine said. Looking down at the scene of Spanish dancers Pablo was working on, she asked, “How come you never ask me to pose?”

  Pablo said he could paint her into this canvas right now. “Just like that, carry you to Barcelona faster than the express.”

  “As you like. I’ve Spanish blood in me.”

  “Who is really Spanish, anyway?”

  “Gypsies and Moors,” Germaine said knowingly.

  “I’ve a little Gypsy blood in me,” Pablo countered, thinking back to Horta.

  “Why am I not surprised? There’s something different about you,” Germaine replied, nibbling on her bottom lip.

  “Let’s get a fresh one,” Pablo said and retrieved a blank canvas. He directed Germaine to perch on the armchair and turn her chin ever so slightly. “I want to see your eyes.”

  She rolled them sarcastically instead. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve struck this exact pose? No variation. No novelty. I thought you’d be a bit more, you know, inventive—might imagine something exciting.”

  Pablo couldn’t help imagining plenty.

  “Ever been on a Friday morning to Place Pigalle, where all the models are gathered ’round the fountain?” Germaine asked. “They even call it the Model Market—like we’re ripe produce! Painters saunter up there to pick and choose, as if sorting aubergines and cabbageheads. But careful if you go,” she warned. “The models might be a little snappish, cruel even. You’ll find all types, though—Moses, Jupiter, Venus, Napoléon, Marie Antoinette. And every one of the commedia dell’arte gang. Probably more than a handful of Virgins. Think of it: you’re Jesus’s mother all day, a naughty lil’ minx at night! What a life, right?”

  Pablo asked, “Still have the necklace Carles gave you?”

  “I do, and I rather like it. Don’t you?”

  “And how do you like Carles? He’s mad about you, you know?”

  “I’d rather not say right now.”

  “How Egyptian—like the Sphinx!”

  “A kitten who knew her craft,” she said.

  “Have you ever seen the Egyptian galleries in the Louvre?” Pablo asked, to which Germaine nodded. “The Chaldean ones, too,” he went on. “The gods and the paintings on the walls, I find them fascinating. They remind me of people I know sometimes.”

  “And the goddesses?”

  “Yes,” Pablo said. “Funeral goddess. Vulture goddess. Goddess of scorpions.”

  “And of magic, and of love. Et cetera, et cetera. Not everyone is wicked, you know?”

  “And the cat-headed goddess? What is it? Motherhood—and war?”

  “Fertility,” Germaine reckoned.

  “But also war?”

  Germaine borrowed Pablo’s cigarette for a puff.

  “And why should the models at the market be cruel to me?”

  “Maybe not to your face,” she told him. “But why not? They spend a dozen hours bent into some mad pretzel pose to please the painter. What, and then have these louses chinch your pay, when it’s only a few sous to begin with? Haven’t models got the right to be cross? The worst is they try to seduce you once
you’ve got your clothes off, like you’re some little idiot.”

  “So we’re the wretched ones, then?” Pablo asked.

  “You’re sweet. But you, you’re still young. Just wait,” Germaine said. She reached for an open wine bottle on the sill of a warped window that never quite closed and held it upside down above a glass. Nothing came out, and she landed the bottle back in its place with a thump. “It’s nippy in here. Have anything else to warm a lady before I freeze?”

  Pablo poured his stash of brandy into two teacups and threw one of the hefty cedar logs he’d bought that afternoon into the fire. It started to crackle. “When you went to the Louvre and saw the Egyptian, what struck you?”

  “The men and the women and even the animals, they all have such nice, calm faces, no matter if they’re killing or dying. Don’t even open their mouths.”

  “Maybe they know something we don’t,” he replied, handing her a teacup. “The art in these galleries is called primitive. But it’s not, I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “On those walls, artists with no names did something quite special. It’s because they didn’t paint to please. It’s not just for people to look at. It was more, sacred. A ritual. A struggle for survival.”

  Germaine looked intrigued.

  Pablo explained it was as if back then, the painters were ordering the cosmos. “Life, death, creation, destruction, all of it. Just with pigments dashed on stone walls.”

  “Now that’s some poetry,” she said, clinking her cup against his. Germaine took a sip and set down the porcelain. Her eyes lit up then, and she said excitedly, “C’mon! What’ll it be? Order the cosmos, or at least the scene in this room! A little creation? A little destruction? Hint of both? Tell me, what shall I become tonight?” She leans closer to him. “How do I pose? I can do my face. I’ve got on only cold cream and rouge.”