The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  “So will I,” Pablo replies.

  “And me. But the relevant diagnostic question is where in its natural arc is the organism—beginning or end?”

  “How much more can I take?”

  “A fair bit,” Cinto supposes. “Call it a doctor’s hunch.”

  “An intern’s, you mean.”

  Cinto slaps Pablo on the back, playfully. “Still a doctor—and thanks for the reminder!”

  “Do me one favor?”

  “What, you didn’t come just to make certain I had pastry today?”

  A row of granite slabs draped with white linens fills the basement morgue. Icy air encircles Pablo and Cinto.

  “Preference?”

  “Not moving,” Pablo replies, unlatching his easel. Pablo has asked Cinto to sneak him inside so that he can finally face death. He remains haunted by not having looked straight at the autopsy of the girl and grandmother who were struck by lightning in Horta when he stayed there with Pajaresco or at the fetus that Germaine had carried.

  Cinto raises the corner of the shroud that covers a patient who came in the previous day.

  Pablo asks, “How’d she go?”

  “Complications of a gynecological surgery,” Cinto says.

  “A hysterectomy?”

  “What, are you taking up medicine in your spare hours?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve spent far too much time lately in doctors’ company. They’re starting to make me sick.”

  “No offense taken,” says Cinto.

  “Present company excluded,” Pablo adds.

  “The woman came in with her husband, experiencing pain,” Cinto recounts. “But the problem was too big. This was her end.”

  Pablo peers on squeamishly before applying dabs of lampblack to his canvas, limning the face of his subject in dark, thin strokes. He questions his friend while filling in the outlines. “Don’t you think people should be attacking the causes? Not the symptoms?”

  “Doctors do,” Cinto says, sitting down on a stool, watching Pablo work. “We’re always examining, testing. Discern the disease, then prescribe treatment.”

  “The disease is not the cause,” Pablo says.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Search harder. Look for the roots,” Pablo tells him. “You said it—everything has an end. People are always dying. Disappearing.”

  “So you want me to cure death? Tell me how.”

  “Are you really asking the painter?”

  “Listen, what you’re describing is entropy. I get your point, though. Let me ask you,” Cinto says, rising to hold out the nickel-plated end of his stethoscope to Pablo’s chest. “Why did you see so much of Paris doctors?”

  Pablo recounts for Cinto his trips to Dr. Jullien, detailing the injections he received and the pills he’s been taking.

  “That’s a substantial dose of mercury,” Cinto says. “I can write you a script for something else to relieve the symptoms without so many side effects. It might even improve your state overall.”

  “Figured I deserved to be queasy,” Pablo says.

  “I’ve never seen you like this,” Cinto says. He taps Pablo’s head with the tip of his finger. “What’s going on up there?”

  Pablo has been working on this synthesis for weeks while painting so many people on the edge. He finally decides to lay it out. “All around, everyone’s ill, miserable, dying. And we all know someday, not far away, that’s going to be us. But we go on about our days like fools, ignoring the basic truth.”

  “Yeah, so you said. And what should we do?”

  “Fight back.”

  “Fight? Against who?”

  “God.”

  “Huh?” says Cinto.

  “Hear me out,” Pablo pleads. He’d worried that explaining this to even a close friend would be too hard—how the memories and events since Carles’s suicide have changed him. “You were in Barcelona for the general strike, yes? What I’m saying is, it’s time for a real revolt. Not against the monarchy, the elites. Against the true source of suffering. No more prayer, candles, veneration. None of that shit. Starve the rotten geezer, the one who made this infinite disaster and expects thanks. Assault Him.”

  “In other words, no more taking death lying down?” Cinto says, amused.

  “Serious, man!”

  Cinto hushes Pablo, delivering a reminder that yelling is sure to get them caught trespassing in the morgue.

  “Don’t you see what I mean?”

  “I’d say you’ve been perseverating nonstop about death for far too long. Also, you may want to avoid inhaling the embalming fluid down here too deeply. Tell me, do you find yourself picturing your own death a lot?”

  “All the time,” Pablo says, finishing layering the painting with a wash of thinned Prussian and cobalt.

  “Well, knock it off,” Cinto tells Pablo. “When you die, you won’t be around to see. Nothing to worry about,” he says. “But I’m concerned about you right now, while you’re still very much alive.”

  “I have to get out of Barcelona, don’t I?”

  “Go the hell back to Paris already. This place is no good for your head.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I

  Paris, October 1902

  Spose we could top ’n’ tail, but it really don’t feel right, you know?” says Josep, bouncing onto the room’s only bed. This leaves Pablo the dusty floor.

  Angel’s chubby sidekick has accompanied Pablo to Paris, and after less than an hour, Pablo is already sick of the sour-mouthed man. With barely enough cash for a few meals, though, Pablo needed any way possible to defray the trip’s costs. He’d scraped together train fare by doing illustrations for El Liberal while still in Barcelona, but that left almost nothing to put a roof over his head once here. So when the two of them arrived together and Josep offered to spring for a pensione—but insisted it be on the Left Bank, where he claimed “all the real artists” live—Pablo could hardly decline.

  As for not wanting to share a bed, Pablo knows just what Josep’s getting at. He wonders what stories he’s heard.

  Indeed, the prospect of facing Manyac had helped keep Pablo away from Paris. Never again would he be somebody’s indentured servant or bauble. He can’t wait for that whole ordeal to fade from memory—his own and everyone else’s. It was in fact the news that Manyac had decamped France altogether, along with Pablo’s one-year contract ending, that freed him to return.

  Once settled in at the pensione, Pablo leaves to head over the river. Packed inside the portfolio with him is his finest recent artwork portraying the destitution of so many lives in Barcelona and the hopelessness of the Saint-Lazare. During his stint back home, he’d seen clearly that the human conflict is no smaller than a war against fate, natural order, God—whatever word you use for that which has chucked us onto earth only so that we may molder. Standing now midway across a bridge leading over the Seine, Pablo stares down at the slow-moving water beneath him and strategizes how to win over the Paris gallery owners. They alone possess the clout to make his works reach audiences far and wide. They also can grant him the financial means to restock his supplies—ammunition for the long campaign, as it were. Only in this way might Pablo create art endowed with meaning instead of canvases that merely tickle the eye, as he seeks the power to reshape the cosmos.

  A bell chimes as Pablo enters a gallery at the end of Rue Laffitte. The shop is neater and more elegant than Vollard’s. Every picture is mounted behind conservation glass in florid frames that are thoughtfully arranged.

  A man with a slicked-back widow’s peak and well-ironed morning suit approaches Pablo, asking if he is looking for someone.

  “You,” Pablo replies, assuming the cutthroat confidence he’d seen Manyac wear.

  The glittering chain of a skeleton pocket watch twirls in the gallery owner’s fingers. It and the wax in his goatee and the rolled gold of his glasses gleam all at once. “Whatever for?”

  “You run this joint, right?”

  �
�How might I assist you?”

  “Au contraire,” Pablo says. “Today, you’re a very lucky man. For I am a distinguished painter from Barcelona who’s displayed at top galleries both at home and right here in Paris. Accompanying me is a handful of works, which would be ideally suited for your discerning clientele.”

  “A Spaniard, eh?” The owner asks, “Have any bullfights? Ladies in mantillas? Flamencos, that sort of thing?”

  “No,” Pablo says, “only paintings far more original and vastly more moving. They possess what we call in my country duende—the raw, essential feeling residing at the depths of every man, woman, and child’s soul. This is what I offer, in oils and pastels. Like to see?”

  The man appraises Pablo up and down, then centers on the watch face on his chain. “Try me after lunch.”

  “Excuse me, but this will be more satisfying than even your croque monsieur,” Pablo says, revealing from his portfolio a blue work showing a gaunt woman staring back from a prison cell.

  “What on earth? I’ve lost my appetite.”

  “I painted her at the Saint-Lazare,” Pablo says, trying to contain his irritation.

  “Goodness, have you washed your hands? I don’t want my customers to become infected.”

  “Another may be more to your liking,” Pablo volunteers, reaching inside the leather case again.

  “You say you’ve exhibited in Paris? I can’t fathom where.”

  “At Vollard’s, just up the block.”

  “You mean our Ambroise Vollard? That old coot must’ve lost his feathers. Why don’t you go sell your pictures to him, then? Perhaps he has some depressed clients desiring the portrait of a wan harlot whose last john hanged himself.”

  Pablo is appalled by the man’s callousness. He blurts out angrily, “Is art not always about sadness?”

  The man’s squeal spirals into wicked laughter. “Art is always about business, my unworldly little shaveling, and that can bring great, great joy,” he says. Tears of mirth must have formed, because the gallery owner removes his glasses to wipe his eyes with a silk pocket square. “Tell you what,” he says, a few notes appearing as if by sleight of hand, “here’s twenty-five francs.”

  “My painting could sell for four times that,” Pablo responds.

  “Not for the shriveled trollop.” The man lowers his eyebrows and draws back his neck. “For everything. I don’t need to look at them, either. I couldn’t bear it, in fact.”

  “You must be mad.”

  “Or not mad enough.”

  “I’d rather find a gallery with a spoonful of respect for art,” Pablo says as he fastens his portfolio.

  “Just a teaspoon,” the man replies, the money having disappeared. “Wouldn’t want anyone to choke.”

  The bell above the door clangs on Pablo’s way out, and he remembers how Paris can be so unkind.

  He soldiers on to the gallery next door. It’s shabbier, more of an auctioneer’s warehouse offering paintings alongside other artifacts. Interest in Pablo’s work, though, is no more forthcoming.

  It’s the same all along the block.

  After a dozen rejections and twice the cigarettes—smoked with the nerves of a corrida bull pacing in the corral—Pablo sucks it up and visits Vollard’s.

  The frowzy man has his eye glued to a jeweler’s loupe when Pablo comes in. He’s arched over a browned, vellum-bound manuscript atop his fruitwood desk, some acquisition for the gallery’s antiquarian offerings, Pablo guesses.

  “A sixteenth-century ship’s travel log,” Vollard says without looking up, preempting the question he must have felt looming after hearing footsteps. “The ending might be abrupt—the crew was eaten by cannibals in the Solomons. Some may find it tempting, nonetheless.” Vollard finally drops the eyepiece into his lapel pocket, observes Pablo, and drily says, “Well, well, what fortune brings you by?”

  “This is indeed a lucky day,” Pablo replies, trying to muster the bravado he displayed earlier.

  “Merely a matter of speech,” Vollard responds. “Wouldn’t do to say, ‘Curses, why has this bothersome monkey disturbed me at such an inopportune moment,’ would it?”

  “Let me rephrase: it’s your lucky day!”

  “Appears that things already are spoiling.”

  Pablo hastily unzips his portfolio, and Vollard pages through the canvases, making faint groaning noises. “Let me ask you, how can a cheery little fellow paint with so much oppressive dreariness? And why all in blue? Have they no other paints in Spain?”

  “These scenes represent what life is really like,” Pablo proclaims.

  “Miserable, you mean?”

  “Often, no?”

  “Don’t have to rub it in my face, do you?” Vollard rebuffs him. “What do you imagine would be the market for something like this—who’s the buyer?”

  “Have you any clients with stirrings of a human soul?”

  “You’ve seen them, right?”

  As for blue, Pablo pointed out to the man that the painting downstairs he so admires is the same color.

  “I’ve got rid of it. Returned to its owner. Had to. I couldn’t sleep. Found it disturbing, like some sort of voodoo,” says Vollard. “Besides, it wasn’t all blue. Used a good bit of yellow, too.”

  “Bloody yellow! That’s all you need?”

  Vollard recollects that he showed a Spaniard once who’d painted in all yellow. “Or was it saffron? Manyac brought him also. Did scenes of cretins on some hilltop village in the Pyrenees. Your country sounds like a truly terrible place. Whatever is wrong with Spaniards? Don’t ever let me go there, will you? Or have I been? That’s right, I have. I caught listeria.”

  Pablo asks, his agitation flaring, “What is it you want me to do to my paintings?”

  “Don’t do anything for me, please, but depart,” Vollard replies. “I’m dying to find out if at the conclusion of the ship’s log we learn the taste of human flesh.”

  “You’re a scoundrel!”

  “Say something that offends me, why don’t you?”

  “You’re an imbecile.”

  “Only to receive you again. Off now. Return to your country, as your Manyac already has.”

  Pablo hauls his portfolio back to the morning’s first gallery, finding the owner returned from lunch, sandwich crumbs dotting his goatee.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Take what?”

  “The twenty-five francs.”

  “Fifteen,” the owner says flatly, the folded cash already out.

  “What! It was twenty-five just a few hours ago.”

  “Should have nabbed it then. I’ve been to the café and the bordel since. Neither’s provisions were free. Had more for my money with the croque monsieur, but that’s another matter.”

  As Pablo treks back to the pensione where Josep is letting him bunk—his load much lighter—he wonders if Manyac has poisoned the well at every gallery in the city just to spite him.

  Disillusioned he may never show work again, Pablo decides to consult Max Jacob, an art critic he first encountered at Vollard’s exposition months ago. The urbane but eccentric Breton magically appeared at his gallery opening in a long jacket with braided edges, blowing smooches at Pablo’s paintings and trumpeting, “Quel génie!” Manyac naturally begged Max for a calling card and even invited him on another occasion back to the studio for un apéro and rillettes. But Manyac soured on his guest after Max spent all night smoking the sweet-smelling kif he’d brought along, lavishing his hosts till dawn with impressions of Sarah Bernhardt.

  Pablo kept in touch after returning to Barcelona, however. He appreciated Max as a learned writer who prized the Symbolists, as Carles did. He was also tickled by the doodles that found their way onto the backs of Max’s postcards. And Pablo very much enjoyed Max’s poems—whimsical like nursery tales, lyrical as a chansonnier, sardonic like epigrams, suggestive as an exposed leg, more mystical than the Catholic Church.

  Now, back in Paris and needing help reentering the art scene,
Pablo searches Boulevard Voltaire for Max’s address, eventually locating it above a flower shop. He climbs a flight of stairs and finds the door to flat number 5 slightly ajar. Pablo spies through the crack a hefty gent in an overcoat of fine Bowmont wool seated with his hands palms-up on a table. Max is sitting across from him, studying them intently. Around Max’s neck hangs a bronze hamsa amulet studded with garnet and turquoise. On his head is a giant plumed turban woven with cloth of gold, like a swami from the Raj might wear.

  “It’s not good. Not at all, I’m afraid,” says Max.

  “What? What can you make out?” the eager man anxiously replies in a cigar-smoker’s growl.

  “Right there. Your love line. See it?”

  “Yes, yes, go on.”

  “Fate has not been kind.”

  “Fortuna, you mean?”

  “You know her?”

  “Well, you said . . . what is it, for God’s sake? Have mercy, would you!”

  “Let me ask, Ever been in love before?”

  “Of course I have,” he says, digging into the ticket pocket of his coat and then hunting around in his trousers in a panic before finding his wedding ring still on his finger. “I’m a married man,” he exclaims, holding up proof.

  “Makes no difference. Think hard.”

  “She’s beautiful, a dream, my wife is. Caring. Given me three fine children. And I received a liberal dowry from her parents, in the tannery trade, you know?”

  “What do you feel for her?”

  The man goes silent. He pours his head into the very hands that exposed his vacant heart with their cruel pink lines. “Nothing!” he cries. “I’m a wretch. I’ve been to the brothel more than I’ve been at her side, not cared for her as I should. And the children, they’re pests! How I have little to live for.”

  “Precisely as I feared,” Max says, even toned. “Your love line is hopelessly formed. Does love mean anything to you, anything at all?”

  “Surely. I want love, I do! Don’t say it’s hopeless,” he blubbers. “I want to be wonderful to my wife, give everything she desires! What, pray tell, can be done?”