“Surely, lad. How soon, that is what my profession endeavors to tell,” Dr. Jullien says, pouring a dilution into a sturdy glass syringe. He then screws a three-inch needle onto the tip. “In your case, the prognosis is at least fair. No discernible signs of deterioration. No new symptoms. All that is required are routine treatments and the absence of further complications,” the doctor says as Pablo rolls up his shirtsleeve. “You’re still young. What, you’re some kind of a writer, are you not?”
“A painter.”
“Knew it was something on the fringes.”
Dr. Jullien remarks that Pablo is lucky to find himself in Paris, of all places. He may even meet a fine young lady here, not the impure kind he’s so far been acquainted with. “A few more doses, and it’s entirely possible to approach the hymeneal altar with health regained—preserve hers, too. Thanks be to science!”
Pablo winces as the doctor plunges the needle into his arm, filling it with fire. The doctor slowly compresses the hypodermic, and Pablo tries to busy his mind with anything but the pain. He hunts around the room before pointing to a brass apparatus resembling a bilge pump connected to two tubes of black India rubber and howling, “What’s that?”
“So glad you asked. For this may be the instrument to revolutionize medicine. In each man and woman, we have a volume of five liters of blood, you see? Lose two, easy enough to do, and you’re done for. But”—to Pablo’s horror, the doctor stalls in depressing the syringe and wags his finger in the air—“what if I could give my blood to keep you alive? Of course, you could not give me your blood because it’s got the syphilis. Or you might try, I suppose, but I’d not want it. Soon, though, there will be better diagnostics for that,” he says, mercifully pulling out the needle and placing a gauze pad over the seeping red. “Imagine, to be able to transfuse the very vitality of life? You can see the ready application in the operating room. Even a top-notch surgeon’s sure to lose lots of blood.”
Pablo breathes heavily, trying to calm himself as Dr. Jullien goes on about how at the office his bread-and-butter surgeries are mostly limited to nips, scrapes, and lithotomies.
“But in my position at the Saint-Lazare, that’s another story. I am the only Frenchman who performs more than one thousand procedures on genitourinary organs each year,” he says. “I’ll be applying to patent a brilliant metrotome I’ve rigged up for amputating the cervix during a hysterectomy.”
Pablo has no idea what the doctor is talking about. He scrunches up his face in confusion while continuing to grit his teeth.
“Cut the womb, it means. Complete removal. Rut it all out after it’s become corrupted. By venereal disease, quite often. Sarcoma sometimes. For my prison patients, women who can ill afford children, this has the added benefit of being highly effective birth control.”
The pain starts to subside, and Pablo asks, “They’re locked up?”
The doctor acts as if he can’t believe Pablo has never heard of Prison Saint-Lazare. “Why, Marquis de Sade was incarcerated there during the revolution,” he says. “All women and girls now, though. Confined for lunacy, degeneracy, indecency, or, often, mere indigence and crimes of need. More of a sanatorium than a jail.”
Pablo detects a strain of unexpected compassion in the doctor’s voice as he recounts that their offspring, female and male, can also be found there until they’re old enough to become state wards. “The majority of inmates are stricken with something venereal,” Dr. Jullien says, adding this may—or may not—be the cause of their state of mind. “Chicken or the egg again, right?”
Pablo thinks of how disheveled and twisted his own thoughts have become ever since Madrid, how his memories run amok. He asks, “They have syphilis, the same disease as me?”
“Some do. Some do,” Dr. Jullien says. “I’ve sympathy for many of the women—victims, really—they’ve often done nothing to bring upon themselves these redoubtable maladies. Rather it’s the libertinism of their husbands or erstwhile fiancés. So many a coward wrecks a girl before marriage, then doesn’t have courage even to go through with the rite. How she suffers—the sores, aches, blindness, madness. Not to mention stigma for the condition itself. Don’t get me wrong; plenty of floozies in there, too.”
An idea awakens in Pablo as he imagines these women hidden away in prison—or infirmary or whatever it is—and how in them he might find subjects more worthy of attention than what he’s been pecking about for on Paris’s streets. He looks up and says, “Can I view them?”
“For what?”
“To paint.”
“They’re ne’er-do-wells, harlots, and loonies, not a bowl of fruit. Why should you paint them?”
“Make the world see they exist.”
Dr. Jullien looks excited by this idea. He points out he’s been doing the same for years, frankly, in his written volumes, which have been published even in Spanish. “But the beauty of a picture is it needs no translation,” he says. “Then, the symptoms of this ignoble era might be recorded in the very visages of its distempered lives, could be made readable by the gouges and pro-truuu-sions of their disfiiigured flesh!”
The physician pauses, considering.
“Let’s arrange it,” he concludes, shoving the needle into Pablo’s other arm.
A stocky guard with shaggy gray hair stands at the gate of the Saint-Lazare holstering an ancient flintlock pistol. He ejects a stream of saliva that lands beside Pablo’s feet. The man pats Pablo down, then scours his easel and box of painting supplies for anything that could be made to slice, saw, garrote, or puncture. He confiscates a palette knife but lets him keep his brushes, after snapping them to be two inches long, incapable of seriously damaging an internal organ.
The guard leads Pablo through the partitioned courtyard bordered by tall walls darkened by centuries of dirt and carbon. “That there,” he says, pointing to a round island of soil with a few huddled orange azaleas amid the paving stones, “was the guillotine.” His face is so rough, utterances of any sort are a surprise, yet he seems proud to know this gobbet of prison lore. Or is he remembering the contraption with fondness, Pablo wonders, having once been the executioner? The Saint-Lazare’s main building has four floors of barred windows plus a row of dormers eyeing out from the slate roof. Its most notable feature seen from a distance, however, is an adjoining dome-covered chapel rising over the rural landscape.
Inside at the admitting desk, which is surrounded by iron mesh, Pablo meets Mother Superior. Framed by a dark veil, her pale, grave face and double chin are almost inseparable from the high-necked white guimpe beneath them. Pablo hands her the note of reference that Dr. Louis Jullien, the prison’s esteemed medical laureate, gave him.
“Why should I allow you to disturb these women?”
“Art’s good for the soul,” Pablo replies.
“So is solitude. Silent contemplation. Prayer,” she says. “Wherever did you learn to speak such atrocious French?”
“No words in my paintings,” Pablo assures her.
Mother Superior looks long and hard at him. She consents for Pablo to paint the inmates but only in public. “Make no effort to be alone with them. Don’t speak more than the minimum. They’ve nothing to hear from you, and you nothing from them. Understand?”
“Yes, Your Holiness,” Pablo replies with his most beatific smile, before begging one more question. “How do I know which women have syphilis?”
“They’re marked by white bonnets, easy to spot.”
“Those aren’t nuns?”
“Hardly.”
The head of the congregation and her second-in-command chaperone Pablo down the hall to a large chamber with high ceilings and muted sunlight bending through leaded glass pocked with tiny bubbles.
Row upon row of women crowd around long wooden tables—sewing, darning, doing needlework, and making lace. The room is a whir of turning treadles, scissor snips, and whispers.
In the corner, Pablo locates a group of condemned women by their telltale white bonnets. He s
trides over, easel under his arm, supplies in one hand, the other planted beneath his chin. The prisoners, unaccustomed to strange young men meandering the premises, look both curious and cautious as he circles.
Pablo clears his throat and begins unfastening his easel, pulling out each leg, tightening the wing nuts to keep the hinges in place, positioning the picture stand—all with the speed of dripping treacle. Quite aware he has an audience, once everything is in place, he theatrically hastens his movements, mixing paints on the palette with a flourish, fluttering the brushes, and snapping his wrist with each stroke like a flamenco, displaying the showmanship he perfected before his mother, sisters, and aunts.
The convicts at the Saint-Lazare appear spellbound. Except, that is, for the seated woman closest him, who instead busily ties little knots of white thread to make a tatted trim. Like Pablo, her fingers are fast and deft, her eyes black beneath wide-set eyebrows. She couldn’t be more than thirty. Her face is slender, cream-white, and unstirred. A squat companion speaks softly into her ear. The woman shakes her head, gives a dismissive French shrug, and carries on.
After an hour of painting, Pablo hears a handbell chime outside. Scores of women rise and head toward the exit to take exercise, walking together in a line along the courtyard’s perimeter.
Pablo continues to work amid the clamor. The woman he’d been depicting, the same who’d ignored him, is the only one remaining seated.
“Why me?” she says, without turning.
“The light chose for me. Without it, I can’t work,” Pablo says pointing upward with his brush to the latticed window casting a diamond pattern on her face. “Blame the sun, if you must.”
“I see I’m not the only fatalist. Who are you?”
“They must have told you a painter was coming,” he lies.
“I stopped listening a long time ago, but so I see. What did you come to paint?”
“In Spain, artists can’t help specializing in heartbreak or loving madness.”
“That’s what everyone says. I’m going mad.”
“Today?” he jokes, looking to the wristwatch fastened above his hand holding the palette.
She coils the extra length of thread that’s still on the needle back onto the spool, appearing to be mulling him over. “It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t want to be painted,” she says, “would it?”
“You could please recommend someone else, maybe?”
“Another zany, you mean?” When the woman looks up, the hatched light catches her pupils, and they shimmer like polished onyx. She points to the girl sitting outside, clutching her ears, rocking, and pivoting her head like a crazed dove. “Could always try her.”
“Don’t think she’d stay still,” Pablo says, before adding, “and, if I may, you’re nice to paint.”
The woman shows no sign of registering the compliment as she nimbly pries apart the knot at the end of the needle with her incisors. “Did you know that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with bigger eyes than yours,” she says. “Perhaps somebody ought to paint you instead?”
“If your brushwork is anything like your lace-making, I’d be delighted. Paris is full of so-so artists, you know. I’ve hardly met one who can hold a candle to me. But you appear to have skill, technique.”
“Aren’t you cheeky, Bugeyes.”
There’s something about the delicate movements of wrist and neck, Pablo thinks, that gives the woman the air of a deposed royal under lock and key, a tsarina, or a Medici. Awaiting the hangman, yes, but still bold and genteel. He is reminded of Germaine. A moment ago, his showy painting demonstration gave him a rush of confidence, but with this memory, it quickly departs. He begins to pack up his easel and notices she has seen the canvas, a reflection of herself—solemn, stately, stoic, beautiful, and washed in blue. Pablo thinks he’s won her over with it.
“If you come again, I’ll have nothing to do with it,” she says, however, returning to disinterest. “Paint a dead cat.”
Early the next day, Pablo wakes and heads back toward Prison Saint-Lazare, stalking from Montmartre to Boulevard de Magenta and passing the bridal shops near the Place de la République, all the way to where civilization ends and men with reeking wheelbarrows unload their haul of horse droppings onto giant mounds. Pablo has noticed these collectors trailing carriages—rake in hand—in the city’s center. Way out here, he finds the depository granting them five francs per load. Grape and wheat farmers purchase this fertilizer, after it is cut with night soil, for their fields. Five francs is about the same as a model’s wages for a day, or, Pablo calculates, apparently what Vollard thinks one of his unsold paintings is worth.
This is the route that Pablo follows to the institution each morning for weeks. Soon, he gets to know the signs of the affliction he shares with many of the inmates. Most of the women are in much more advanced stages of the disease or have worse cases of it. Should he consider himself lucky or doomed? For example, the palm freckles that may appear after inoculation sometimes render the flesh like toad skin. Had he suffered the same, it might not have let him paint. Further along, there are the soft, sunken noses or the jaundice that makes the whites of eyes look like buttermilk. Vision usually begins to deteriorate at this point. Necrotic sores dot and swell and curl the brows of the patients. Then it’s uncontrollable contortions, incoherent rambling, hallucinations—and eventually, death.
After a while, the woman whom Pablo painted on the first day quietly consents for him to set up an easel at her side and capture her mood as she works. It’s odd, but he’s never learned her name. By the time he realizes, he is already calling her in his head “the Bronzino”—after her likeness to the portraits by the late Italian mannerist whose subjects always appear to be lancing the viewer with their eyes. Perhaps, he thinks, it is this resemblance that has led him to adopt that era’s style of flat backgrounds, warped proportion, allusive meaning, and inscrutable faces. Sometimes while painting her, he feels they are cantering toward one another on horses in a jousting match. Each speaks little, establishing a pattern where words are not, as Pablo promised the Mother Superior, required.
When the Bronzino does address Pablo, however, she calls him Bugeyes. It is an unexpected intimacy. She is chief among a handful of women he paints at the Saint-Lazare. After their breakfasts, she sits for her portrait while spinning webs of lace as complicated as basilica ceilings.
In the afternoons, Pablo heads outdoors. Never particularly enamored by the impressionists—a disinclination planted by Don José, he hates to admit—Pablo doesn’t seek to capture the complexities and fleetingness of sunlight, despite what he told the Bronzino about his dependence on it, which is true. Rather, his excursions to the flagstones in the courtyard allow Pablo to pretend he is focusing on the canvas before him while instead furtively viewing the shaded portico where the children play. Pablo takes care to avoid watching the wet nurses work, although he notices how their faces appear rigid and unyielding, like the bars on the infirmary windows. It is the children who fascinate him. Ranging from three months to four years, they are allowed to see their mothers one hour each day, in the evenings, depending on good behavior. There is something infinitely sad to Pablo about the notion of being born into a prison. It both irks and tugs him.
With few exceptions, the incarcerated women whose young also reside here are the best behaved. Other punishments—reduction in rations, ice-cold hoses, forfeiture of exercise, cross-irons around the ankles—are all ineffectual deterrents compared to the threat of refusing to let a woman see her child for even a day.
When Pablo asks Mother Superior whether he might be allowed to paint the children, she doesn’t say no. He reads this as acknowledgment that, after a month, he’s become a Saint-Lazare fixture, and the women and nuns, on some level, accept him. He isn’t allowed onto the portico during nursing and is barred from the newborns’ crèche but otherwise comes and goes as he pleases.
One late-summer morning, Pablo, in an unusual outburst, recounts to the Bronzi
no how he watched the kids romp outside the previous day. “They drew black squares on the pavement with a charcoal nub and pitched a bead of glass inside,” he describes excitedly. “I couldn’t believe it—here they are, all running, chasing, having more fun than me back in Montmartre!”
“Not all,” she says.
Pablo did not realize there were others.
After this, he learns from slyly questioning the children that there is another enclave of the prison he’s not visited. Stowed away here are les petits monstres. The children tell tales of these cloistered creatures: the incisors rough and irregular like broken almonds; yellow skin covered in spots; rent, lipless faces with craggy noses; bowed, brittle legs and shins.
All Pablo can think of is the fetus Germaine carried, the one he didn’t have courage to view. His invented visions of these children begin to haunt him. He and Germaine hadn’t any good option, if there were a heartbeat, he tells himself. This is what the child would have suffered. The images float alongside Conchita and Carles in the gauzy blue eternity of his nights.
Pablo is preparing a canvas when the Bronzino glances over at the portrait he painted of her the previous day. She is staring at the long, wispish fingers and abnormally stretched neck of the figure against a smooth background. “It’s as if you’re trying to extend me,” she says.
“I’m experimenting. The style is from ages ago,” Pablo responds. “Back when painters from Florence to Spain were reaching to achieve perfection in any pose. They were continuously refining, challenging themselves, like scientists searching for truths that no one had succeeded in discovering. But they had no more equipment than paints, brushes, and their eyes.”
“It appears a bit bizarre, don’t you think? Does my body really look so tortured?” she asks, setting down her bobbin.
“That was never my intent.”
“And all your works since you’ve come to the Saint-Lazare, they’re blue.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Are you asking if I wish for you to paint in a different color?”
The Blue Period Page 25
