The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  On the other side of the street, there is a cavalry regiment.

  Amid the waving and shouting, Pablo sees some of the strikers fling stale bread at the soldiers. A bucket of slop is aimed. Soon the air is filled with detritus and stones.

  There’s a crack-crack-crack.

  Then, screams.

  Who’s been hit? It’s a cacophony of frantic cries.

  The crowd eventually determines that the flashing muzzles fired only into the sky. But Pablo has a sinking feeling. In the commotion, he flips over the barricade and darts to his building. He desperately fumbles for his keys for a panic-stricken moment before hurriedly turning the lock, pushing inside, and slamming the door behind him.

  After a long, twisting climb up the grungy staircase, Pablo watches the scene below from the rooftop and sees a shadowy figure sprint by in a balaclava and strike a horse in the jaw with a club. The animal stumbles like a dazed boxer. Its rider nearly falls off before regaining control of his steed and charging through the crowd in a flurry of hoofs. Troops of every variety arrive until half the street looks like a mosaic of combatant uniforms, hats, and armbands.

  But the opposition is also swelling.

  Pablo spots a pair of guardsmen, easy to distinguish in their tricornios of polished black leather, the brim’s back upturned—giving the appearance that bone-eaters have perched atop their heads, waiting for carrion. They are scanning rooftops, looking for snipers. He shelters inside the studio and prepares a canvas. He can get some painting done in between viewing through the window slats.

  The sun is soon low again, the situation outside taut as piano strings. Provisions in the studio total one box of Ceylon tea, a half-eaten canister of hardtack biscuits, two casks of Monastrell wine, and one large bottle of cheap brandy. After two days, he’ll be famished, Pablo concludes, but he might be drunk for five.

  When Pablo hears footsteps coming upstairs, his skin crawls. The knob and spring bolt turn.

  As the door opens, Pablo is standing in his britches, smeared with oil paint and clutching a palette knife as though it were a broadsword.

  “You look ready to defend the Peninsula against the infidels,” laughs Angel. He’s brought an accomplice with him, a chubby rounder named Josep who claims to be an artist of some sort. They’re both swinging gin flasks between their fingers.

  “Would you believe even the whores are on strike?” Angel says.

  “I didn’t think it would go that far,” Pablo admits, genuinely shocked at the disruption to the city’s order.

  “What do these gals want, a nine-hour workday?” Angel muses, plopping onto the threadbare sofa, narrowly avoiding a protruding spring. “Like they don’t enjoy every lovin’ minute!”

  Pablo finds this company and its commentary boorish, unsalvageable, and out of place with everything going on around them. He thinks of the women he met at the brothel when he stayed there for a couple weeks in the coatroom during his teens—some had turned to prostitution after the textile factory they worked at closed down or a boss needlessly fired them. And then of those at the Saint-Lazare. Pablo wishes his visitors would disappear before remembering the studio belongs to Angel, even if his frequent carousing means he’s hardly here.

  By evening, warfare has rung out below. Authorities and rioters exchange ambushes—baton and bayonet versus broom handle and brick. When union toughs arrive baring jackknives and cleavers, however, the city’s forces switch from crowd-controlling knee knockers to full-lead bullets. There are dead and wounded on both sides.

  All night, Pablo hears rifles fire in response to potshots. He tries to focus on the canvas, ignoring not only the chaos outside but also Angel and his friend, who deal cards and page through a raunchy magazine, comparing the bodies of the women inside both to conquests and planned endeavors, telling stories from the illustrious battlefield of amor they’ve created in their heads.

  Early the next morning, when Pablo looks through the shutters, the streets are covered in spent cartridges, glass, horseshit, and blood. Intermittent gunfire and the scampering of heels have replaced the songbirds. Smoke, dust, and the aromas of cordite and burning tar hover between ground and rooftop. He hears in the distance pans banging—the sound that preceded yesterday’s carnage. As the clattering becomes louder, Pablo braces for violence. This cycle lasts until Thursday morning, when Pablo perceives on the ground outside the window something new—little dots growing in the gory mess like pointillism. There’s a giant noise in the air. At first, Pablo thinks they’ve brought out the cannons. But a terrific deluge from the sky opens, and he understands it was a thunderclap.

  At week’s end, Pablo braves the elements and finds a newspaper at the corner tabac. The front page shows the dreaded general who’d viciously put down uprisings in Spain more than a decade ago before his talents were called into service against Cuban guerillas. Now, with martial law declared in Barcelona, he has been redeployed here. Anyone suspected of inciting violence has been rounded up and sent to the dungeons of Montjuïc so they can be persuaded to identify coconspirators. In the newspaper, the military commander gives credit to himself for saving the nation.

  Pablo will go on firmly believing, however, that these hostilities that left more than a hundred dead and many more wounded were finally brought under control not with gun barrels but by the rain. It’s one thing to be shot at. That happens so fast, the consequences are so unimaginable, human brains can’t fully comprehend it, he decides. But all animals instinctively avoid a storm.

  When the water subsides and debris has been washed from the streets, Pablo joins many familiar faces at Els Gats. They’ve come to regroup and trade tales of what they witnessed or argue about who’s to blame. Several men wear dressings or scars. Ongoing food shortages mean few items on Pere’s menu are available, no doubt a blessing in disguise.

  The beefy owner of a butcher shop is throwing back Italian grappa like it’s sweetened milk—saying he’s never been so afraid as when he visited the slaughterhouse today and was greeted by a half-starved mob.

  “They’d blood in their eyes. Cried, ‘Give us meat, or we’ll take it,’” the butcher recounts. “But it wasn’t seven in the morning yet. There’s no pork—just sheep, chickens, pigs, all waiting to be slit.” The man says he started stocking his store as a lad. Slaughterhouses are like a second home. “But I’s scared, for animals and the drudges working the carving line. When crowds get a frenzy, there’s no telling.”

  A youngster yelps from behind: “The multitudes have a right to demand rations.”

  “Piss off already,” the butcher shouts at the high-pitched boy.

  Another waspish regular chimes in that during the uprising, he saw somebody nearly torch city hall. “I couldn’t wait for them to roast up every last crooked barrister.”

  The room grows tense.

  Pere, who’s been quietly smoking a pipe by the cash register, turns and asks the butcher, “Where’s the steaks on a fellow anyway?” It elicits grins, and he passes around his best brandy. “Starve if we must; we needn’t be sober, too.”

  Anything but that, they all agree, downing their glasses. The mood improves.

  Pablo doesn’t know how many total hours he’s spent at Els Gats, but not since the night of the shadow puppets has he seen Pere give away a drink for free. Like those around him, Pablo’s been shaken by these past days. It feels good to be back at this tavern. Pablo is even oddly glad when he spots his old nemesis Casas stride in. Until he realizes the painter is scalding mad.

  “Fear my brush!” Casas shrieks. For the past three hours, he’s been railing to the men, calling the ruling classes in Barcelona curs.

  There is hardly anyone whom Pablo figured less likely to defend the workers and poor than Casas. How could a painter who’d made a career out of kissing up to every benefactor who might grant him prestige—and who’d given Pablo the most venal advice imaginable about art back at the World’s Fair—be the one calling out the establishment? All Casas’s work that P
ablo has ever known has appeared aimed at making a rich livelihood—dashed-off portraits of patrons’ wives and mistresses in whatever style brings the most money and favor. And now the man is snarling at the very hand that feeds him?

  “It’s same as the time of Goya,” Casas proclaims. “If no one engraves images in the public mind, how will they be remembered, addressed?”

  Apparently, Casas was once a very different sort. After the painter’s own bohemian stint in Paris, Barcelona’s powers-that-be branded him a bête noire for depicting the executions of prisoners and other tableaus designed to ruffle bourgeoisie sensibilities, he tells the people in the room. When he worked up a devastating scene showing the precise moment before the most infamous bomb blast the city had known, he was cast out of every gallery. Each viewer who saw the painting glared at the crisp details of the schoolgirls’ white dresses and veils as they left the Basilica de Santa Maria del Mar, thinking only of how the procession would soon be enveloped in red. Only later did Casas climb his way back into gallery owner graces with soft portraits of high society.

  But now Casas promises to return to his rebellious roots. Just as the great Goya swore off courtly commissions to immortalize how a firing squad sliced apart rows of peasants, this week’s events have inspired Casas to shine light on the government’s atrocities—consequence be damned. “In my studio at this moment is the canvas I’ve done up of a guardsman charging down innocent bystanders,” Casas says, slamming his brandy onto the table. “If they hang me from a rope in the plaza, one of you can take a photograph!”

  That line to a bar full of painters is classic Casas condescension and bombast, Pablo thinks. But under the circumstances, he forgives this slight. In fact, quite unexpectedly, Pablo swells with regard for the man he’s long despised. He wonders whether Carles knew of Casas’s revolutionary past. Before Paris, what Carles aspired to do in life was write poetry and prose to strike against inequality. Was he aware, then, that Casas had once done the same in paint? Just as perplexing, how could Pablo have not known this about Casas before? Or maybe he ignored it somehow, the same way he’d stop paying attention whenever Carles was spouting off about politics.

  What’s different today is that Pablo has seen injustice firsthand—not only on Barcelona’s brutal streets but also in how the uncared-for women at the Saint-Lazare are led to lives of want, illness, scorn, and agony. If Casas feels the call to act, shouldn’t he? Or, as Germaine once implored Dr. Jullien, does Pablo have no obligation?

  While seated at Els Gats across from the table he once shared with Carles, Pablo pledges to forgo making pictures formulated to merely please buyers’ eyes, as Carles accused him of on that awful final night in Málaga. Pablo will not sell out. He will exert his brush and a lifetime of perfecting technique to portray suffering that goes unnoticed and use his talent to assault decorum, awaken the public’s empathy, stir its soul.

  Pablo will seek what Carles sought, before he became consumed by desire.

  Hair and beard grown long, Pablo renders every misery, painting with the zeal of an itinerant preacher who wills himself to the mountaintop so his voice might echo below.

  He paints blind alms seekers.

  He paints alcoholics.

  He paints singing prisoners.

  He paints street sellers and their scrounging children.

  He paints broken, heaped-upon housewives.

  He paints wizened Jews in tattered trousers.

  He paints old shoremen with sacks weighing their shoulders.

  He paints wandering, babbling lunatics.

  He paints rheumatic troubadours.

  He paints the decrepit.

  He paints sickly prostitutes.

  He paints desperate mothers.

  He paints young women crouched in pain.

  Each wretch and sinner, the sediment of humanity, Pablo paints in only lonely blue. He endows these canvases with emotion and resonance that artists for centuries reserved only for saints and wealthy patrons.

  Pablo combs the city streets, seeking his subjects. They are easy to find, even if they’re hard to look at. But he tells himself he must not be frightened by the leper or be stunned by the naked, shriveled breast or the faces rotted by disease. He will walk among them and display their plight, making it impossible to ignore.

  II

  After months of illustrating people whose demise is near, Pablo wakes one morning on the studio floor, gathers himself over a cigarette, and determines the only logical next step.

  Wearing his white machinist coveralls, carrying a small canvas and his paint kit, Pablo sets out for the Hospital de la Santa Creu, which is undergoing a renovation to transform the grounds into a sprawling, brightly colored modern monstrosity. At its heart, however, remain formidable Gothic cloisters with high pointed-arch ceilings dating back five hundred years.

  Pablo has come here to see Cinto, who is busy with the frenzy of his intern year. In addition to bringing a stash of painting supplies, he also roves the halls with a small gift tucked under his arm. Passing by an examining room, Pablo spots his bespectacled friend hovering over an amputee and the man’s almost widowed wife, straining to sound authoritative as he admonishes, “Better to remove the limb than perish the patient.”

  A great, awkward smile grows on Cinto’s face when Pablo approaches the door, and he abruptly excuses himself.

  The two escape to a citrus grove in the hospital courtyard, sharing a pipe, reminiscing over old times, and chatting about Paris life. Cinto confesses he’s jealous Pablo spent so many months there. Despite the tragedy of Carles, Cinto idealizes the fabled place as at once sinful and divine.

  “True,” Pablo confirms. “But my soul is Spanish, always.” He asks Cinto if he’s seen his drawings in the newspaper, El Liberal.

  “Are you kidding? I’ve been filling my scrapbook. You’re quite the star.”

  “I couldn’t care less about that,” Pablo replies.

  “So what do you want, then?”

  Pablo hesitates. Should he tell Cinto the radical idea that’s been steeping in his mind? How not only artists but practically everybody today has gotten it so wrong, not seen the scale of the problem? No, it’ll sound too insane. “Change,” he says instead.

  “Change what?”

  “Everything, up and down—that’s the matter.”

  “Is this why you’ve been painting all those blue canvases of the dispossessed? I don’t know if that’s going to get the attention of the king, to tell you the truth. But it’s noble.”

  “No, no. Think bigger. See, this is what kills me. People think too small in Spain.” Pablo doesn’t want to sound so angry. “Sorry, Cinto,” he says.

  But Cinto seems unperturbed. “Well, look on the bright side—there’s hardly any place with a greater supply of downtrodden. What exactly are you after? You want to do what, change the world?”

  “How about the universe? Now do you get it?”

  “Are you OK, Pablo?”

  “Take Paris, for instance,” he replies hastily. “There’s plenty of pain, gobs of it, just like here. People suffer everywhere. That’s the issue. What I’m talking about is the whole canvas, not just one corner. Like I said, everything—the misery of being alive but understanding it’s not for long, that you’re sick and getting sicker, and soon all you’ll be is forgotten.”

  “This is about Carles, isn’t it?”

  Pablo is silent for a while, still reticent about divulging all that he’s deciphered. He says, finally, “I’m just tired of being a pawn.”

  Cinto looks deeply into Pablo’s eyes, studying them. Then he glances down nervously at the neatly bundled white box under Pablo’s arm. Cautious, he says, “What’s that?”

  “Tortell,” Pablo replies. “I brought it for you.”

  “Because you come to a hospital, you bring sweets? I’m not one of the invalids, you know.”

  “How come we always bring dessert after people are ill?” says Pablo, raising a smile, trying to cheer
up the conversation. “Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Didn’t they teach you that?”

  “Pastry prophylaxis! I love it! And you, Pablo. You make me laugh,” Cinto says, motioning them to a stone bench beneath an orange tree where they scoop fingerfuls of the chewy confection into their mouths. Pablo brightens briefly, until sinking at the thought of the tortell he’d once carried to Carles’s mother. The frail, unwell woman had sat between two classical urns in her extravagantly appointed stateroom. Her lips were sealed, the face above them unmoved. Pablo had to summon every crumb of charm in his being before she agreed to let Carles go with him to Paris. After the suicide, Pablo’d heard she nearly died upon receiving the news. Carles had been reluctant to inform his parents of the trip because of her weak heart. And Pablo broke it—after assuring Carles and his mother he’d take care of everything.

  Cinto studies him again. “This is about Carles,” he says. “Look, there’s a question you need to ask yourself and answer honestly. Would Carles not have burnt out sooner or later, no matter what you did? And, by the same token, your suffering is not going to last forever. That’s what we see in physiology. A genesis and a lysis.”

  Pablo kisses the sugar off his fingers and squints. “A what?”

  “It means dissipation. Disintegration.”

  “You mean, like, we’re all going to die?”

  “Well, yes. But there’s another side. And I want you to think about it. The principle dictates that a patient with a terminal disease will eventually expire, but it also says temporary symptoms affecting him might disappear because the microbes causing them die off. Everything has a beginning and an end. Whatever pain and guilt you feel, it will abate with time.”