“Would you like that?”
“In life, we only act like we’re free to choose,” the Bronzino says, closing her hands around the swath of lace she’s been making. “But there are no choices. I learned that here.”
The woman’s eyes fix on her pitted fingernails. She’s begun to see the signs, she tells Pablo. Felt them, too. How her brain is more scattered. The people she is speaking to, who move inside and outside of view—they may not really be there at all.
Pablo looks down at the holes in the lace.
“Bugeyes?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t come back after today. I don’t want you to see how I am.”
A sadness fills Pablo as it sinks in that he is being banished from the only place in Paris he’s felt at home since the studio he shared this past winter—and by the first model who’s inspired him since Germaine.
When the bells ring, they part and meet again secretly upstairs, against every prison rule, in the grated cell in an attic dormer where the Bronzino stays—as opposed to the common, lice-infested sleeping quarters—a privilege afforded to her because of her unrivaled needlework. She grants him this intimacy for his final picture.
There, beside the barred window, she positions herself and loosens her bonnet. Grecian black locks emerge. She folds her arms, stoically, and Pablo imagines how she will fit into the canvas’s rectangular borders. What shall she be? What feeling should he convey? The sun is filtering through the prison window, but the first thing Pablo does is change it to the light yellow of a moon in the early evening.
“You might have taught me to paint,” she says.
Pablo remembers how he’d instructed Carles long ago. “And I could have learned to make lace.”
She replies with an anemic smile.
Hours pass, until day really has become dusk. Pablo finishes. The figure on the easel is long and elegant, cloaked in blue, and turned away from the twilight beyond the cell. Her keen gaze beneath scythe-like eyebrows sees fate clearly, what it is to be made to briefly exist.
Now there’s a record of who this woman had been while she was sane.
The window painted on the canvas has no bars.
Without Pablo’s trips to the Saint-Lazare, he finds himself with Manyac much more. His penury and even the elements conspire to keep them close. Pablo has no money and no credit at the cafés or boîtes, and autumn rains mean trudging through mud and then finding nowhere to paint outdoors.
After the exhibition at Vollard’s, Pablo expected work. But no one else has offered him a spot on their walls or bought his paintings. Pablo suspects this is due to Manyac deploying his influence to divert interest away—to make Pablo more dependent, obedient, pliant.
And Pablo’s contract with Manyac, he learns, is nearly impossible to circumvent. At last, he manages to secure a single commission to illustrate a magazine but only after resorting to using a name he hasn’t signed with in years: Ruiz. If Manyac found out, he could charge Pablo with breach. But it’s the only way for him to land enough cash to live with a shred of autonomy. Even in good weather, there are no longer World’s Fair tourists around Paris whom he can impress with bullfighting scenes.
Every day, it seems, Manyac lords over Pablo more, regulating how he dresses, who he sees, what he eats and drinks—taunting him like a lover. Until Pablo relents and becomes one.
Pablo will ask himself why he does this. He concedes it may be a product of being sent away during the past six months by both Germaine and the Bronzino. Or raw, physical need—combined with the strange magnetic force proximity exerts, plus Manyac’s relentless baiting. But most importantly, Pablo decides, this is not Manyac having his way. Rather, Fate is having its own.
For Pablo has become resigned to the idea that circumstances are not ours to control. Yes, he’s being exploited, his youth taken advantage of in more ways than one—just because he’s from Spain doesn’t mean he’s an imbecile. But the light in a room, the colors we find there, these are not ours to decide. There is no stopping the tide or holding on when it tears away. It’s just as the Bronzino said: in life, we have no choice. There is always death, that’s true. But death is a certainty, not a decision. Instead, we imagine there’s the power to choose while we’re alive, too afraid to admit soon there won’t be this consolation. Freedom is a mirage.
Pablo can’t even deny the response of his flesh when Manyac caresses him. And, to be really honest, nor is he Pablo’s first lover of this kind. There was that boy who appeared at the mouth of the cave in Horta long ago. It was different—very different—of course. He’d felt so drawn up in this stranger who’d shown him something miraculous: the paint running through the ground. And, besides, Pablo tells himself as he clenches his fists and watches the gold fringe hanging from the tufted divan sway pendulously to Manyac’s rhythm, what else is Paris for if not to expand one’s passionate repertoire?
Manyac gleams with conquest and treats Pablo well. The cantankerous taunter has subsided; he has become again the affectionate man who’d sent flattering letters to Madrid. He sings Pablo’s praises all the time.
As winter goes by, Pablo hears whispers about their relationship. But Manyac is the one in Paris whom every Spanish artist hopes to know. He promotes them, makes connections, finds avenues. Despite other faults, Manyac takes care of his own—so they all must envy his Pablito, whom he takes care of best. Pablo even cuts a little mustache, just like his keeper’s. And he is showered with gifts—stylish clothes, trips to restaurants and cabarets, and even to the Palais Garnier opera to watch Saint-Saëns stage Les Barbares. From front-row balcony seats, they witness the Goths storm Italy and a vestal virgin relinquish her vows for the mercy of the invading chieftain. Manyac and Pablo quietly hold hands during the duet between the agile mezzo-soprano and the golden-toned heldentenor, these harmonious passages floating up to them and an immense sparkling chandelier that refracts the flames of the pillaging on stage. How light dances sometimes, Pablo thinks, and elsewhere it is still and settled, pondering its next move.
There is a knock on the apartment’s front door one afternoon, more than half a year after Pablo first entered it. Reaching for a bath towel, he listens to Manyac receive a telegram from the postman. A moment passes in silence before Manyac’s crystal tumbler shatters against the hardwood floor.
“Coin, encouragement, guidance, finery, and connections—in-valu-able connections I gave you!” Manyac wails.
Pablo recalls how the art dealer once revealed that there was no creature in Paris he’d ever loved besides his Pomeranian and him.
“I even lent my home. And this you’d do to me?”
Fog had gathered on the mirror during the bath. Pablo dries himself with the terry cloth before rubbing the glass clean. In the reflection, a tiny smile rises. He knows from Manyac’s sobs that the giro transfer from his father must be complete. The money from Barcelona for train fare to come home is now available at the Société Générale on Rue de Provence. It’s true, he acknowledges: Manyac’s cunning granted him higher recognition than any unknown twenty-year-old artist in Paris should aspire to. Eventually, Pablo might feel a twinge of remorse. He’d known he was deceiving Manyac and never loved him in return. How must the man feel that a messenger should come without warning to snatch his happiness away, granting him no choice in the matter?
But that, Pablo thinks, is also Fate at work.
CHAPTER 11
I
Barcelona, January 1902
Pablo hikes from the station with his belongings slung over his shoulder. The entire train ride, he fretted about facing Don José, agonized over how his father would critique his latest works and needle him about his time in France. But when Pablo unzips his portfolio at home, the old man slouched in an armchair in the family’s salon merely nods at the paintings. He must be nearly blind now. Pablo surveys his father’s face for other signs of the venereal disease they might share. It’s not unlikely Don José would be afflicted—the goat has only p
atronized Spain’s brothels since before Louis-Napoléon.
Would Pablo be gladder if the clear deterioration above and below Don José’s brow were of the more typical variety? That is, only the familiar hand of age that leads babes to adolescence, then middle age, and so on, promising accomplishment before robbing youth with every swipe—hair, sight, tautness in cheeks, vigor in loins—until nothing more remains. What, anyway, could be left of this tired manqué who’s seen a life of sadness after losing his beloved Andalusia, his most beautiful daughter, a cherished career, the steadiness in his wrists, and the respect of his only son?
Doña María guides Pablo to the kitchen table, bemoaning that Lola is away and can’t be there with them. She sets a steaming cup before him. The clank of the porcelain echoes. It dawns on Pablo how quiet the apartment is. There are no pigeons floating around, leaving feathers and ghost-white droppings everywhere. Pablo’s mother—already preparing dinner, although it’s before noon—explains that the dovecote on the roof is empty. “Your papa couldn’t take care of them,” Doña María tells him, picking up a mortar and pestle. “I opened the cage and said a prayer.”
Pablo is astonished. Those birds are all his father might have had. They are inseparable from both Pablo’s memories of Don José and his own childhood, the family having carried the oldest pigeons here all the way from Málaga. Pablo can clearly recall features of individual animals as if they were blood relatives. He could have picked them out of a flock just by the way they moved.
A snippet of conversation returns to Pablo as he inhales the steam from the chamomile tea, an exchange at Els Gats he’d once had with Cinto, back when his friend was attending medical school.
“Tell me something,” Pablo said then to Cinto. “How about hands and feet?”
“What about them?”
“Painters always get them wrong,” Pablo remembers saying. Then they laughed at how so many society portraits leave one hand outside the picture frame and have the subjects tuck the other into a waistcoat, avoiding the trouble altogether.
Cinto pointed out, though, there was good reason painters struggle with these extremities. In a hand there are twenty-seven bones—twenty-six for a foot. With two of each, that’s half the bones in the entire body. Together, it’s also hundreds of joints and ligaments. “But the thing that makes them even more unusual,” Cinto had said, “is fingers have no muscles.”
“How can that be?” Pablo asked incredulously.
“All you do with your hands is controlled by tugging and relaxing in the wrists.”
“Like strings on marionettes?”
“Precisely.”
“Would that be true also of birds? Say, pigeons?”
Cinto had looked puzzled. “I am not studying to be a bird doctor, thank God. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Pablo replied. But, just as when he’d seen the twisting hands of El Greco’s portraits in the Prado, he wondered then what if Don José had never forced him to paint pigeon toes for countless hours? Might Pablo have failed each time he attempted to render a man or woman offering an outstretched palm, a gentle stroke of the hand, a beckoning finger? As Pablo sits at his parents’ table, this memory makes him rethink Don José yet again. If only things had been different, who might his father have become? Pablo feels a tide of regret for both of them.
Looking up from his reverie, Pablo finds Doña María staring from across the kitchen counter. “You’re too thin,” she says, shaking her head while pulverizing ingredients into a fine paste. Pablo goes on sipping tea as she prepares to fatten him. She moves to mixing finely chopped pig neck with spices before rolling giant meatballs. “And where is your Paris wife?” she asks, holding a moist finger in the air, bits of wet pork clinging to it like grout. “I want grandbabies, Pablito. Hear me? They can speak French, long as they eat Spanish.”
It’s clear as daylight Pablo can’t tell his mother or father anything of the life he’s lived during the many months that have passed since they last saw him beyond that there was a gallery opening, and it went swell. Nor can he bear to stay here. Pablo excuses himself and leaves in search of a studio to cadge, lying to his mother that he will be home in time for dinner.
At Els Gats, Pablo asks around and learns that Angel Soto—the family friend whom Don José hired long ago to model a novice priest administering the Eucharist for Last Moments—has a studio his parents rent for him. Apparently the occasional painter and full-time lothario has produced no paintings there, though. Pablo isn’t surprised. The building is located next to the notorious Eden Concert cabaret and Barri Xinès red-light district. Pablo remembers how when Angel was his model more than a year ago, he would pose as a cleric all afternoon only to repair to a brothel at night, sometimes still in his cassock. Pablo accompanied him more than once, just as he had earlier with Pajaresco. He even took to calling his fiendish companion “We’re-No-Angels” Soto.
When Pablo knocks on Angel’s door, this old acquaintance is happy to let a talent like Pablo share his atelier. “It’ll be like I’m legitimate,” Angel says. The living arrangements are modest but suitable. Angel is surprised, though, that Pablo is much less inclined these days to join him in his libidinous exploits. Pablo can’t say it to Angel, but brothels remind him too much now of the women in Prison Saint-Lazare and the consequences they endure. These days, if he paints prostitution, instead of giving the women lush, bright, décolleté attire and coaxing looks, the scenes are drowning in shadow. The women sometimes are crouched low, their arms curled around themselves. They often avert their eyes, unable to face the viewer’s cruelty.
Instead of partaking in seedy nightlife, Pablo nurtures a habit of slipping away just before sundown to walk the beach near the cemetery that Carles once brought him to, setting up his portable easel a few yards from the shoreline. He paints here amid the damp, spumy, nocturnal air, projecting from memory inhabitants of the Saint-Lazare onto the cooled sand—stealing them away from their prison, freeing them to wander barefoot in the slanting yellow moonlight against a backdrop of a collapsing cerulean sea and sky. Loosed from fate, they hold their children close to their lips. As always, both mother and child in these paintings are shrouded in Mary’s sacred blue.
As Pablo fills up these canvases by the sea, Germaine also drifts through his thoughts. He didn’t try to find her again after she sent him away, but he’s heard she’s taken up with some other artist in Montmartre. Pablo wants to be happy for her. And yet he can’t help feeling hurt and angry that she chose someone else. A million times he’s tried to distill what exactly he feels for Germaine, or she for him. Was it a great love shared—something beyond even that? Or, in the end, was the attachment all about Carles? After all, he had invested in her his desire, his poetry. Was she to Pablo a mere contact relic, revered because she touched a martyr? He doubts that, knowing Germaine emanates too much of her own magic.
But after a month back in Barcelona, Pablo’s mysticism continues to recede, the nihilism he gained in the Saint-Lazare filling its wake. Late one Sunday night, beneath the moon, he falls asleep on the beach inhaling salt mist after painting Germaine in the bonnet the women there wore, the sound of whistling air filling his head.
In late winter, a wind begins to blow across the Mediterranean from the Maghreb, and a great fog sometimes rolls over Barcelona as the warmth fans over the cool, choppy sea. Pablo awakes in a thick blue-gray haze. He can’t see his own feet. There is a deathly quiet, as if mist has swallowed all but a waxy light. No din at the ports, no gulls.
This fog, Pablo thinks, is thicker than the dreaded one of La Coruña he’d experienced as a boy, or any other. It has a different, speculative quality. Everything around him feels shapeless now, not yet drawn. He stumbles in the uneven sand and falls, remembering how after living under Manyac’s regime had become insufferable, he’d begged his parents for money to return from Paris to Barcelona.
But with his fingers inched into the cold grains, Pablo intuits there is something else that
pulled him back here. There have been brushes with success, although no guarantee more will come—just as it’s unclear whether he is heir to a master or the son of a hack. He’d needed to be closer to where art first began, felt natural, before Don José drilled into him what succeeding means or Paris tried to impose its own definition.
Pablo stands and attempts to angle inland through the haze. It’s hard to say where he is. He locates steel tracks laid into the pavement and follows them, knowing the tramvia will lead to the city center.
A clanking in the distance breaks the silence. The noise becomes louder, and Pablo jumps to the side, fearing the emanation is the bells of a streetcar about to flatten him. But the sound isn’t moving fast enough. And it’s too big, like a clattering of many objects striking metal rather than one chime. Pablo finally makes out the base of the Cristóbal Colón statue and turns up La Rambla. It’s early but shops should be open. Where are the flower vendors? The canaries and parakeets packing brass wire cages? The macaque monkey? Two figures whoosh through the cloud around Pablo, their faces streaming blood. He walks on and now hears clambering and shouting.
The fog thins, revealing a crowd. The metallic sound he heard is spoons clanging against casserole dishes. Protesters are chanting, holding pickets with caricatures of politicians and fat-cat industrialists. Pablo’s studio is on the opposite side of a barricade. He learns from others on the street that the area by his parents’ apartment on Carrer de la Mercè is also besieged. Even a church may have been set on fire. Among the aggrieved masses he finds metalworkers, factory laborers, shop-weavers, tradesmen, stevedores, housewives, cooks, waitresses, lame veterans, and farmers who’d fled to Barcelona because the land back home is dry, their crops dead. There are anarchists and nationalists, communists and Catalanists, liberals and reactionaries, progressistes and collectivistes, acolytes of Marti and freemasonry, Marx and human rationality, hayseeds and intellectuals. All stripes of the disenchanted are on one side of Spain’s first-ever general strike that began with grumbling at a metal foundry but has grown to encompass every perceived inequity leveled by the powerful against the rest of the population. Even the circus handlers are outside agitating, the howling apes beside them banging against pots with hand and foot.
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