Ensconced in the protection of a new patron, Pablo sets to work, starting with a pastel of a pair of brightly colored, pretty ladies. He walks it up to Pigalle in search of Madame Weill, an elfin Frenchwoman who wears baggy trousers and men’s frock coats and governs a diminutive gallery there. She is a friend of Manyac’s, but she had been kind to Pablo during his first trip to Paris. She has an art dealer’s eyes and wit but can’t suppress her good nature, no matter how hard she tries.
Madame Weill isn’t in, though. Pablo leaves a makeshift calling card on her doorstep, along with—as a token of friendship—the pastel. If she likes it, there will be plenty more, he writes.
While Pablo does not care for the work, he is enough satisfied to have made it in the service of a gallery owner with taste and a pleasant demeanor. While he waits for her reply, he returns to painting the blue-hued scenes of the downtrodden—his truer and higher calling. One day, he keeps telling himself, the world will value them, too.
The palette of the city’s promenades lined with liberty trees is changed over from bright yellow to orange and crackling red. Roast chestnuts scent the cool air. A week after moving in with Max, Pablo has felt a whiff of the Paris magic again.
One evening, he receives a note from Madame Weill and reads it over dinner. On the strength of Pablo’s work, she’s agreed to have an opening at her gallery, splitting the proceeds down the middle. Pablo is so overjoyed, he frolics with Max around the table as if the tin of beef standing on it were a maypole.
But the show lacks sufficient advertising and is not the success Pablo hoped for. When it closes just before Christmas without a single painting sold, Pablo falls into despair. What good is talent without a smarmy salesman like Manyac to prop you up? Madame Weill might have discriminating taste, but in the art world, banditry outduels nobility every time.
Max also hits a wall. The department store dismisses him for insubordination and fondling the mannequins. Max blames the incident on the ether flask he routinely sniffs for inspiration, an excuse that fails to win his manager’s clemency. Max’s lucrative trade in telling fortunes also dries up after he forewarns an uppity lady dispatched by Poiret that she is guaranteed a premature demise. The clothier refuses to send anyone else, claiming shoppers preoccupied with death seldom order custom clothing that takes up to a year to construct. “But I saw it plainly in the cards,” Max protests. “And what about funeral attire?”
Being gay and Jewish in the aftermath of the back-to-back scandals of Alfred Dreyfus and Oscar Wilde, Max would have difficulty finding work no matter what, without adding his untimely honesty and cultivated eccentricity. He probably could have had a successful theater career, Pablo thinks, but instead Max pursues jobs below his intellect and talent. Pablo encourages his friend in his highly inventive poetry, although Max has difficulty focusing on it for long. Occasionally, he falls into depression, from which he tries to bounce back by clowning and serving up jokes at his own expense.
Standing at his easel one day, as they both seem to be descending into a worse melancholy, Pablo asks his companion to recite something as he paints. The apartment soon fills with Max’s stentorian tenor declaiming Mallarmé’s “L’Azur,” the Symbolist verses about a poet who longs to create something beautiful but can never escape the taunting of the majestic blueness forever hectoring him from above.
How could one hue be so ideal and also so cruel, Pablo asks himself, pondering once again the color that has occupied him for the better part of a year. Pablo can still hear Carles revealing in the graveyard how an empty feeling was always chasing him, never letting him be. This must be what he meant, Pablo understands.
“You and me,” Max says, appearing to see Pablo smarting, “we’ve felt the trials of our craft, the bleakness. Yet we are called to transcend. Every time I just can’t bear it, though, I look away and see you constantly laboring, painting glorious blue canvases. You’re doing it, my dear. Your art, someday it’s going to mean more to people than you know. Don’t hate me for being jealous.”
Pablo stares into the streaks of Prussian against a misty background on the canvas before him. “I never drew or painted like a child,” he confesses. “Some artists, they can do only one thing. Landscapes. Portraits. Birds. Before grown, I could paint everything, any style, easy as giving milk. My father was the painter, but I moved ahead of him. Soon, there was no master. I had no peer.”
“Heavens,” Max whispers.
“But now, painting only makes me lonely. Yet I can’t stop. So it feels not like strength but a curse. I try to breathe onto canvas the reality beyond what most people care to view—sickness, want, mortality. But this has made me as blue as the pigment, sad as the pictures.”
Max’s head is floating in a cloud of cigarette smoke on the other side of the room. Pablo can just make out his mouth, serious and narrow as he asks, “Why haven’t we ever read your palm?”
“It’s covered in paint.”
“As it should be,” Max says. From a hip flask he pours ether onto a handkerchief and tosses it to Pablo across the room for him to clean his hands. They move to the bed and sit together, legs folded into pretzels, knees barely touching. Pablo uncurls his fists atop a paisley cushion with frilly trim. Max reaches for his pince-nez and slides them up and down on his face like he is focusing a microscope. He traces the tell-all creases of Pablo’s hands with his fingertips.
“The Mount of Mercury, it’s prominent,” Max says. “Means you’re intelligent, obvious artistic aptitude. The line of the head, it forks and disappears. That signals to me you’re prone to caprices, flights of fancy, and yet are dominated by preconceived illusions.”
Pablo asks anxiously about his health, and Max peers over his lenses.
“The hepatic line is divided, a sign wellness will be indifferent, seriously failing as you reach the end of days. As for the luck line, I see a brilliant beginning, then a stumble. But there’s a change of fortune to come, perhaps at thirty. Always give or take a few years. It’s not an exact science.”
“Oh really?”
“Shhh. Quiet! Do you see this?” Max says, pointing to the base of Pablo’s left palm. “Then as we go higher, all the other lines arise from that crevice, like the spark of a firework shooting up and exploding in the sky. Only in very special predestined persons does one witness this kind of a living star. It will turn the sky its own color, leave its own image.”
“And my love life?”
“This side of the heart, simply magnificent. Lust, sensuality. It’s abundant. You’re absolutely showered with it.”
Pablo smirks.
“On the other side of the heart line, I see disappointments, brutal ones. It frightens me,” Max says, knitting his brow. “Your greatest feud, Pablo, it’s not what you think. You’re convinced you’re battling a higher power, but the real fight is against yourself. Besides, an artist should not have such hate for a fellow creator. It isn’t right. Do you remember what I told the man who came to have his palms read on the day you arrived? Nothing can be won without love. With it, you’ll have everything.”
After months of handwritten reconnaissances de dettes, Max loses his lease with the landlord. He and Pablo pack their belongings into a steamer trunk and load it onto the borrowed cart of a rag-and-bone man. They move into a much shabbier attic nearby, which is even colder, as if the walls are stitched together with thread.
Max tries his hardest to banish the glumness of the frozen garret with song and an array of analgesics and stimulants he’s stashed away like a wartime supply of essential medicines: troches of Turkish opium, Vin Mariani coca wine, and a curious confection—gooey and sweet—of mortared coriander seed, fig, cinnamon, honey, and a scarab-sized glob of buttery hashish, which he claims once sustained and illuminated saints wandering the Sahel. Pablo and Max rarely have proper food. One night, Max brings home a scavenged sausage, but it is so rotten, it explodes upon hitting the pan.
Christmastime is always harrowing for Pablo, ever since Co
nchita. Around the holiday, a lull falls over the apartment. Pablo and Max awkwardly bump into one another, stuck inside their attic; anyone on the frozen streets far below the windows risks damaging their lungs.
Pablo eats Max’s mystical fudge to be happy for a time, before euphoria lifts and forlornness returns with new urgency. He scolds Max when he performs the cancan.
“That’s all right, mon prince,” Max says. “Alas, even Helen could not cure her son’s grief with pharmakia. How I know you don’t mean it. But please don’t forget to laugh with me.”
Only dim light penetrates through a vicious snowstorm outside. The stove glows meekly. Max and Pablo are burning the only kindling left—sketches and notebooks of poems. Max lights a cigarette from the flame and unlatches the casement windows overlooking an arctic landscape. A noisy gust flings the panes open and blows in air so cold that the paint on Pablo’s palette stiffens and becomes unworkable.
Shivering, Pablo scrounges the linings of his coat pockets to cobble together a mix of tobacco and wool lint to roll a wire-thin cigarette. One after another, wooden matches flare and extinguish in the fierceness. Pablo walks to stand in the bracing stream of spindrift pouring in. Max extends his cigarette to him. The two ends meet. He and Pablo puff together in the wild wind behind cupped hands, staring outside, beyond the window frame.
There is the sound of a snow shovel. They squint, searching for the narrow pavement five stories below. But there is no way to see. All is a whiteness, without up or down, depth or distance, a blank canvas with no delineation, no color, no gradient. Pablo senses the void calling Max just as it is summoning him—the ultimate victory that chaos may have over artists.
Pablo recalls when he was young in Horta and sliding down the cliff to what he believed would be his end in the ravine. If I die and never create again, he thought as he fell, then the very thing I traded Conchita’s existence for will have been lost in vain. He also has another life to account for now; he left Carles wallowing on the floor in Málaga because his friend’s despairing had become too much an impediment. Pablo pictures the emptied bodies of him and Max spread out in the white below, a pair of red cutouts on a silk screen.
This is his last chance to save anyone, Pablo understands. He clamps down the window in a whoosh, cutting off the cold current like the head of a serpent, and pronounces, “We must not think that thought.”
Max appears taken aback. But then his eyes turn winsome. He smiles that crooked Max smile. “I knew you wouldn’t let us go, mon prince.” The poet closes a blanket around himself, walks back to the stove, and places an inkwell on top to thaw.
II
The air is warm around Germaine when she opens her eyes. The bed and covers are soft. Outside the window, fine-grained snow speeds by, and she hears the faint calls of a brave Montmartre street vendor selling candles on the corner for twenty-five centimes.
Germaine flops her forearm beside her, expecting to touch the long, firm frame of Ramon Pichot, the Spanish artist who she’s been seeing, but he’s not there. She recalls a metallic buzz in the dream she was just roused from. In waking life, she thinks, the doorbell must have sounded. Maybe he went downstairs to answer it. The second-floor bedroom around her still feels full of “Moni”—her pet name for Pichot—crowded as it is with wall-to-wall bookshelves, his countless volumes watching over her from their perch like curious forest creatures surrounding a visitor to the meadow. Could one man possibly read all these? It’s just like him to live in a library, she thinks.
Germaine stares up at the medallions in the pressed-tin ceiling and remembers how Moni surprised her after they made love last night, saying he’d earned enough between Barcelona and the latest sales of his paintings in Paris to buy this old boardinghouse.
“It could be ours,” he said.
“Is that what you want?” she asked.
“Only if you’ll have it with me.”
Germaine was silent for a long time, thinking of how funny it is to be with a man she actually believes knows what he desires. And the biggest surprise of all? It’s what she wants, too. Yesterday the new year came, and now for the first time in memory, she isn’t turned off by the notion of sharing her life with someone—or at least up to a point. Moni is so unlike every other artist she’s known. She swore away cupboard love long ago, but this is different. Moni’s bookishness does remind her a tad of Carles, minus the strife. And his paintings sometimes share a strange Spanish quality with Pablo’s. But Moni is almost a decade older than Pablo or Carles before he died, and her Moni is so much more a grown-up. She doesn’t feel trapped with him. She feels freer.
Still, though, it would have been foolhardy to not even negotiate. So when Pichot made his proposal in bed last night, she eventually turned to him and countered, in her most professional tone, “All right, monsieur, you buy this building, but I dress up every inch in sumptuous rose and transform it into where all Montmartre comes for an aperitif and a bit of play.”
“Is that all?” he said. “Done.”
A gust of wind rising all the way from the foyer and the sound of a shutting door interrupts Germaine’s memory. She hears footsteps tromp upstairs. Pichot enters the bedroom, covered with white flakes. He pulls off his sweater, removes his boots, and shakes dry his curly beard. In the corner of the room, he sets down a black leather portfolio slick with melting snow.
“Was there a visitor?” Germaine asks sweetly, noticing the concern on Pichot’s contemplative face.
“Yes, an old friend of sorts from the tavern in Barcelona, another painter.”
“Left you with quite a lot of work, did he?” she asks, pointing to the familiar portfolio. “Why didn’t you invite him upstairs for a Cognac to warm up?”
“I did. He wouldn’t have it. Refused to even come inside. Said he must hurry off. He wanted to sell me all his paintings for a ticket home to Spain. Muttered something about still being at war but having to beat a retreat. Lord knows what he was talking about. There’s no fighting here or back home.”
“And you bought this from him?”
“No, no,” Pichot replies. “I gave him the train money and told him I’d simply keep the work safe until he’s back in Paris before long. He seemed to think he might not be returning, though. He looked as if he hasn’t eaten, washed, or seen the light of day in weeks. It’s a shame. Superbly talented, he is.”
“True,” she affirms.
“Right, right, of course. You know Pablo through Carles,” Pichot says before glancing away and clicking the cheek behind his crooked teeth with a look of regret. “Sorry, love.”
“Yes, I do, a bit,” Germaine replies. She remembers how she once told Pablo that he’d never known hard times. “You say he appeared thin? Pale?”
“Like a wraith.”
Nobody flies before falling, she thinks. “Tell me, did he have with him a small brown case and a box, or was he planning to pawn those off, too?”
“His supplies, you mean? That’s all the luggage he had, actually. I’m rather worried about him.”
“You needn’t—not so long as he’s still painting.”
CHAPTER 13
Barcelona, January 1903
Late at night, Pablo slips into the bedroom in his parents’ apartment on Carrer de la Mercè that his mother keeps perfectly intact in case her son should ever materialize.
In the morning, Pablo opens his eyes and for a moment can’t figure out where he is. The crucifix on the wall and framed pictures of animals he’d drawn as a child remind him. He leans over the bedside and peers down to the spot he peeled off his clothes before falling asleep. But there is nothing.
In the corner, gleaming like the coats of two Labrador puppies, are Pablo’s shoes. They hadn’t been shined in ages. He climbs from bed and reaches for the doorknob, then realizes he can’t enter his family’s living room stark naked. Also, the floor is freezing. Could he not escape the cold even here on the Mediterranean? He sinks barefoot into his now-glossy brogues and tears the be
dsheets away to wrap himself.
Doña María is at the breakfast table, reading newspaper headlines to Don José, who can no longer make out the type even with a thick magnifying glass.
“Pablito!” his mother cries, jumping from her chair, rushing him for kisses.
But he sees his garments draped across the balcony and runs toward them instead. Leaned up against the railing is the broom Doña María used to beat the layers of dirt that had collected, dried, and colonized Pablo’s unwashed trousers and jacket.
“Mama! What have you done?”
“I clean. I clean.” She shakes her head, mystified.
Pablo kneels on the balcony, gripping his hair, squeezing the corduroy to his bare chest like it were a drowned child, crying, “The dust! My Paris dust!”
The street people below crane their heads upward to watch, signing the cross in memory of whoever was this lost Dust.
Pablo weeps for his treasured particles—microscopic talismans from a faraway city that was supposed to make painters into great artists but has been so merciless to him—until his mother is also in tears. He retreats to bed, unravels himself and lies naked, cursing himself, cursing God.
When Pablo wakes again, he smells a current of savory stew. He at once wants to sit for a meal and yet thinks he couldn’t bear it. He loves his doting mother but doesn’t know how to speak to her anymore, and his father is all but sightless, stuck in the doldrums, nearing his end. It tortures Pablo to see Don José like this. Pablo regrets telling Doña María he must rush out again before dinner. But he leaves to find someplace to paint other than here. On the train back to Barcelona, he admitted his latest Paris campaign was a failure. He hopes there’s still a battle here that he can win to turn the tide of the war that has ravaged him.
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