“Now you’re learning, kid. You wanna make it as a painter in Paris, don’t trust nobody, and use your wits.”
A warm breeze comes, and Pablo’s eyes wander to the steadily flowing Seine. Germaine, he thinks, she’s like Manolo, in a way. Born into a hardscrabble life but found ways to survive. These past months must have been miserable for her. Someone else would have disintegrated. When Pablo had reached for Germaine’s neck with his lips the other night, he’d found the scar from the bullet that grazed her, a purple silkworm crawling sideways from her collar.
And that—that was the very same throat he’d wanted to strangle? In his anger, Pablo had been blinded to the fact that Germaine was already bruised by life, love, circumstance, men’s desires—be it Carles’s or those of her husband, whoever and wherever that man is. He’d probably been the one who infected her with this hideous disease when she was a mere girl. Yet Germaine, she never played the victim. Quite the opposite. Pablo recognizes that even if he’d gone and tried to kill her, she never would’ve let him. She’d have scratched his eyes, gored him with that boning knife in her purse. Because Germaine never betrayed her own strength.
Except for in that single moment, when she was standing in her robe, sobbing into Pablo’s shoulder. There was a split second then when he felt nothing holding her up but him. It was the same instant his anger thawed.
The bronze church bells strike the hour, and Pablo awakens from his thoughts right as the steam-powered smell of brown butter and cocoa hits the air. He looks at the empty chair where Manolo was sitting and realizes he’s been gone more than ten minutes, and his hat evaporated with him. Who wears a straw boater to the loo?
Why, that son of a bitch has run off and left Pablo with the check. This will clean Pablo out for the month. And now he has to pay Dr. Jullien for that god-awful medicine. Would he need to ask Manyac for an advance—have to owe him? Pablo rubs the back of his neck, and his eyes search for the restaurant’s exit. The soufflé is advancing toward him fast on the gleaming silver tray balanced on the fingertips of the burly waiter, tilting straight at him, building from the ramekin like the snake head climbing from the charmer’s basket, escaping like the guts of the horse. Pablo’s limbs tingle. He curls his arms over his ears. Everything is madness. This hulking Frank is about to attack with the soufflé, Pablo knows. He panics. He leaps over the sidewalk railing and darts away like a grazed animal.
“Monsieur, wait!” a voice calls after him. Pablo can hear the rapid footfalls beating the pavement in his wake, faster and faster, until someone yells, “Stop, Gallego! Thief!” Pablo races along the quay, dodging hapless tourists and the booksellers who line the riverbank, knocking over their green boxes, copies of Candide spilling everywhere.
Pablo spots the Pont Neuf’s archways dapping across the river and bolts for it. He crosses the first half of the bridge to the Île de la Cité and ducks into the Sainte-Chapelle, kneeling in the huge Gothic church as inconspicuously as he can, bowing his head, shoulder to shoulder with others begging for mercy or benediction before an altar with dozens of flickering candles. He makes the sign of the cross.
Cobalt-toned light rains from every direction in the thirteenth-century nave made of long fillets of stained-glass window stretching toward a high ceiling. It once had been the reserve of the king and other palais penitents and was where France’s holiest relics from Christ’s passion were reposited, including the thorns that tormented the Lord’s weary head. Pablo had pondered this crown as a boy when he was bent down before a life-sized crucifix at Aunt Pepa’s blood-strewn shrine. He’d watched and mimicked the woman, seeing she was different than the rest of the family, her eccentricities tolerated in Don José’s household because she’d amassed eldritch powers through a steadfast devotion to God and the saints. Even Doña María didn’t dare invade her holy closet, save to chase away the copal- and rockrose-scented mice feasting on idol offerings. She hardly spoke to mortals.
Aunt Pepa had allowed Pablo to wander in, though. During the rare times when she wasn’t dived into prayer, she would tell him stories of the lives, deeds, and gruesome deaths of martyrs and teach him recitations to slake their thirst, receive their blessings, not allow evil to be sown. At her behest, he drew Paul’s inverted crucifixion, Cecilia’s beheading, Catherine stretched on her breaking wheel—all of which the old woman added to the altar, like sacred talismans.
“Be ready, child,” Aunt Pepa implored him during his growing up. “You never know when it will be your time.” Even then, Pablo understood.
Now, though, God’s kingdom and the foibles of His creations—shaped in the chapel’s one thousand windows of glass shards and lead ribbons surrounding him—are almost blinding. Pablo is awash in the unsparing light, frightened. His own end feels too near. What awaits then? He looks straight up at the vaulted blue ceiling spangled with sharp, bladelike fleurs-de-lis—a heaven where souls might ascend to be shredded.
No one’s safe, not even the good, Pablo thinks. He can’t help reciting his childhood prayers until the words blend into a continuous keen. He feels ridiculous and wishes to recall instead just one poem Carles composed.
III
A former model with whom Germaine is acquainted can concoct a powerful blend of pennyroyal tea. There’s also a sundries shop on the boulevard vending “lunar tablets” promising to return regular menses by the next moon. “I just couldn’t, though,” she’d uncharacteristically confessed to Pablo when he came again. But every day, Germaine’s body tells her that time is of the essence. If outside appearances weren’t enough, she feels within her a maelstrom.
On the Friday after his gallery opening, Germaine meets Pablo at noon near the Gare du Nord at the medical office of a Dr. Louis Jullien. The Spanish painter appears to have worn his least wrinkled clothes.
Germaine, however, woke at dawn to attire herself—putting on a serious-minded but fashionable navy blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves and training her hair to rise in an impressive tower above a tortoiseshell comb. She pinned to her bodice a sparkling ornament of assorted marcasite flowers that dances in the light as she moves. She might be broke and broken, but no one would know it. Not today.
She sits together with Pablo on a cherrywood bench in the drab waiting room. Thankfully, the little secretary with feline eyes calls them back quickly. Dr. Jullien is a tall, odd, talkative man who’s quite full of himself. He appears to recognize Pablo and seems to inquire about her carefully, as if he’s tiptoeing around something. Pablo introduces Germaine as his cousin.
“Verboten,” Dr. Jullien declares when they tell him what they’re here for. “Absolutely not. Have you read the law?”
She can feel her face ice over.
“Look at the woman, for crying out loud!” the doctor says. “Have you tried listening?” He points to her belly and proffers Pablo the stethoscope.
An impulse to tie the rubberized tubes around the man’s neck and throttle him nearly overcomes her.
“Palpate the abdomen. Go on, feel,” Dr. Jullien says. “It’ll wake if you nudge it. Nothing I can do at this point, not now.” He babbles on about how he could lose his practice, end up in prison. “Have you ever seen the medical facilities inside Le Santé? Nothing but bush doctors. They have no microscopes. Nooo, and no!”
Germaine hasn’t “read the law,” but she knows it. Every model does. The dilemma is that the quickening happened to her weeks ago. From just a simmer, her body has become a boiling pot, a mysterious hand deciding when it stirs.
And despite her best efforts of concealment, of wearing ever-thicker clothes, more layers, Germaine knows what she must look like. At first, she’d eaten hardly anything at all, hoping the problem might resolve itself, but it was no use. As her abdomen got rounder, and her skin got thinner, the movements became even more obvious. Now she’s afraid to be naked even when she’s alone. She certainly can’t model. How she will make ends meet is anyone’s guess. And beneath so much wool, someone still might see. The most frightening
thought is the possibility of her estranged husband finding out. He has a way of learning where she is, what she’s up to. Would he try to hurt her if he knew? Men can be unpredictable. Germaine often finds herself reflexively gripping the knife in her purse.
“Have you no obligation?” Germaine yells at the physician.
“It’s strange, in a way,” Dr. Jullien says, introspectively. “You are, after all, infected—by a mere single cell, certainly not one of your own. Spermatozoa are very much alive, with a tail steering them, much like flagellates—eukaryotes, bacteria, et cetera.” The doctor appears to have excited himself and asks in a burst whether he can prepare a microscope stage for them to view. When Germaine and Pablo remain silent, he shrugs disappointedly and continues.
“And now, what you have inside you, it could almost be considered a tumefaction, that is, an abnormal growth in your uterus, swelling at an exponential rate. Can you imagine, a sarcoma that goes from the size of sand to the weight of a Sunday roast in forty weeks?”
But Dr. Jullien cautions them that in this case the fetus is almost certainly malign, having been contaminated with syphilis.
The implications of the news sink in for Germaine.
“Pardon!” he turns to Pablo. “You said she is your cousin, didn’t you? But that really doesn’t mean anything? I mean, you could have easily . . .” The doctor is stepping all over himself trying to discreetly inquire who the father is. “Why, it’s you, isn’t it? What’s your name, again? Pueblo? Pedro Picado? Paolo Piccolo? Pincho—”
“The father is dead,” Pablo replies. Germaine feels a churning inside.
“That is a problem. For him, I suppose, too. Well, madam,” the doctor says as he turns to her, “it may be a blessing in disguise. If what we’re dealing with were hereditary syphilis, oh, that’s a grievous condition. The lesions. Pustules. Hydrocephalus. Deformations of teeth and bone. Sometimes, the infant has hardly a face at all.”
“You do nothing for these women?” Germaine asks, her blood pressure soaring as she becomes irate. “Is it not a crime to refuse a patient in need?”
Dr. Jullien appears flabbergasted. “My obligation is to practice medicine and advance science within the laws of France,” he says. “To honor the Hippocratic oath of ‘do no harm.’”
Behind him, Germaine notices a petite silhouette beyond the frosted window. The door swings open. It’s the cat-eyed secretary. “Your manuscript, Doctor. It’s done,” she says, waving a ream of paper bound with gleaming brass fasteners.
“Yes, yes, very well. Bring me my pipe, and you can read it to me,” Dr. Jullien says, adding with a dismissive flick of the wrist that he is through with patients for the day. “And where were you a moment ago? I was extemporizing about a most fascinating comparative study of the motility of human sperm cells and their anatomic analogues in the bacterial kingdom.”
“So sorry to have missed it, Doctor.”
“You should have got it down. Were you that busy?” he chides her. “Now please see the Spaniards to the door.”
Germaine aims a poisonous stare at the physician as the secretary leads them away. While they pass through the waiting room, she braces for the sinister glances they’re likely to encounter stepping out of the venerology office.
Behind her, she hears someone right on her heels, though. The secretary has rushed out onto the street and places a hand on Germaine’s arm. She extends a slip of russet paper pinched between forefinger and thumb.
“What’s this?” Pablo demands as he turns around. “A bill? No service has been done—it has been a disservice! We owe nothing, not one centime!”
Germaine opens the small folded square. Written on it is nothing more than a time: eight o’clock.
Germaine and Pablo find a shabby boîte located below street level to count down the hours. The cement floor is damp. The area between a pair of mouseholes is a rodent thoroughfare.
Pablo fetches two glasses the shape of blossoming dog roses, absinthe filling their bottoms. From a carafe on the table, slick with condensation and the oil of so many handlers, Germaine pours ice water. The emerald-colored liquor clouds over with an auroral glow. They clink glasses. Neither of them can come up with a better toast than “to health.” They sip in silence for a time, staring.
“Thank you,” she says, at last.
“For what?”
“You’re here.”
Pablo has been following her eyes. He’s studied how Germaine has watched the mice scamper back and forth before disappearing inside the crevices in the plaster and then popping their twitchy heads back out again later. He knows what she is thinking, he’s convinced. It’s the same thing he’s wondered—what is the invisible life of the tiny creatures behind those walls?
The secretary opens the entrance of the physician’s office before they even knock and whisks them through the antechamber and behind the door with frosted glass, double-locking it. The only illumination inside is from an oil lamp. A set of gleaming steel instruments is lined up in a row on parchment. She turns to Pablo and says, “If you faint, then I’ll have two patients.”
“He won’t,” says Germaine.
Wearing an apron and Dr. Jullien’s stethoscope, the secretary wastes no time in telling Germaine to remove her clothes. She eases Germaine onto the table and into the leg supports. She begins cleaning the skin with iodine. She pulls on gloves and probes Germaine with her fingers. She pours brandy into a beaker and drips a tincture into it with an eyedropper. She fills a pump with a mix of distilled water and fine salt. She unrolls a sheet of gauze and inverts over it a metal canister until the white cotton becomes translucent.
Pablo had not made his hesitations known about whether or not a secretary could be trusted to perform such a task. But as he watches her work—with quick, deft, silent movement—that concern subsides. It’s clear she’s absorbed all the gynecological knowledge and experience required.
Still, as she inserts the rubber tips of the stethoscope into her ear, there is a moment when something else, a lingering doubt about whether there might not be some other way, seizes Pablo. When the secretary places the device’s diaphragm on Germaine’s stomach, he feels an urge to grab it away. But the woman has already removed the instrument.
“There is no heartbeat. The fetus is dead,” the secretary says, turning to the clock. “I don’t know how long, but sepsis may be imminent. The patient is at grave risk. We haven’t got time.”
Pablo’s eyes lock with Germaine’s. Contrary to the secretary’s call for haste, it’s as if everything, everywhere freezes. He thinks, If I’m ever to do anything correctly, let it be that she cannot see this fear.
“Are you ready?” the secretary asks Germaine.
The two women exchange nods like cavalry officers preparing for an unwinnable assault, and then the secretary holds the gauze over Germaine’s mouth until her eyes bat and shutter. Her limbs go limp. The secretary gives the cotton to Pablo to administer again if Germaine wakes.
Pablo hasn’t been anyone’s assistant for years, not since a class way back at La Llotja when he was the junior member of a sculpting team. He remembers standing in awe before a slab of Calacatta marble worth its weight in silver. Despite all the bodies he’s ever seen and painted and made love to, none have looked anything like the one resting before him, legs splayed open and in stirrups. It is at once foreign and intimate, breathtaking and disquieting, hard and vulnerable.
The secretary inserts a bivalve brass speculum inside Germaine and then instills a saline solution with a steel pump. She places the round end of a lubricated glass rod inside. After a few minutes, she inserts a different one, slightly larger. She does this several times. And, just as when Pablo watched in amazement as the senior sculptor chiseled away at the slab of deep-veined stone, he is impressed with the secretary’s poise and exacting technique. But once she reaches for the serrated forceps and double crochet resting on the parchment paper, those thoughts dissolve, and so does his courage.
From here on, Pablo tries everything to make certain he sees nothing besides Germaine’s sleeping face. His mind flees to years earlier in Horta with Pajaresco, when late at night someone knocked at the farmhouse’s door. A family friend was inviting the two art students to watch an autopsy. A girl had been clinging to her grandmother when lightning struck. Pablo and Pajaresco arrived at the country doctor’s shed, and the dead girl and woman lay side by side on a rough-hewn table. The faces were bloated, hair singed and matted, lips stiff like duckbills. The fat, cigar-smoking coroner sliced open the old woman’s clothing to reveal the damask pattern of her blouse ironed into the skin and then placed a bone saw atop the child’s skull. Pablo averted his eyes as red speckled the shed’s wall. He puked his dinner onto the floorboards and could stand the autopsy no longer.
According to the clock on the table, the procedure to remove the fetus takes less than an hour, but it feels like an eternity. Pablo breathes a sigh of relief when it’s done, having managed to prevent himself from viewing what is left behind. But no sooner is this air exhaled amid the chloroform fumes than he begins to understand that whenever he ponders death from now on, he’ll be haunted by the phantom of mangled limbs and viscera that his mind will create for what he assiduously refused to face. There will be no salve for this, no way to ever go back.
Germaine is weak. She bleeds often and has developed a fever over the past days that they fear will turn for the worse. Pablo stays with her where she lives above the warehouse. He admires how she’s converted this hovel into what looks like a Moroccan majlis, with hanging lanterns and moiré silk draped from the low ceiling. But he understands now why during the winter she’d always returned to the studio on Rue Gabrielle each time it became cold, even after everything had unraveled there—this place has no heat, no stove, and no ventilation, aside from what comes up from the uninsulated floors. And Pablo gets why, if Odette lived anywhere similar, she immediately drew a warm bath upon arriving at the studio, lying in it as if she’d found heaven. Pablo became itinerant by choice. He could go to his parents’ home if needed. That is not the case for these women.
The Blue Period Page 23
