Through word-of-mouth, Pablo learns that Angel, the dedicated bon vivant and sometimes-artist he last shared a studio with, has taken over the old spot on Carrer de la Riera de Sant Joan that Carles once leased. Angel occasionally uses the space for an evening rendezvous and rarely lifts a brush there. Pablo asks to move in.
The trompe l’oeil images that Pablo painted floor to ceiling three years ago—a Turkish castle’s furnishings, the seraglio of courtesans—no longer glisten seductively. Now, the women’s eyes burn with awareness, accusation. One even has Germaine’s stare.
The davenport where Carles stored the pistol is still here, too. If this were not enough of a memento mori, leaned against a wall is that huge canvas, Last Moments, the picture that brought Pablo and Carles to Paris and to Germaine in the first place. The paint is cracking in places, stained and faded.
When Pablo stands still, he can almost hear Carles’s voice, see him traipsing about the room in sorrowful robes, his head oozing. Pablo borrows money for supplies and works almost nonstop in order to distract himself, rendering the peasants whom Barcelona has been less kind to than Babylon was to Judeans.
After two in the morning, when Pablo is sleeping on the floor one night, he hears a click, and the doorknob turns.
Spilling through is Angel, his good looks debased by a fervid, animal intensity as he flicks his tongue into the mouth of a redhead in black stockings he’d picked up. He appears too drunk to care whether Pablo is home, and possibly too gone to notice. Pablo rustles the covers loudly so the woman won’t trample him with her spiky heels.
Angel directs her to a wooden prayer bench that he’d mischievously pilfered from a church. The woman arches over the sloping shelf made for a lectionary book, extends her neck, and presents herself. Pablo can’t bear to watch and pulls the blanket over his head. But it does nothing to muffle the desperate, grisly sounds. The entire studio seems to be hurtling toward apocalypse.
Then, the noises abruptly cease. There is only asthmatic breathing and a thin pant. Pablo peeks through the weave of the linen and sees Angel fall off his lover and onto the floor, a glacier sheet calving to sea. From the trousers riding around his ankles like shackles, the man retrieves a cigarette.
He calls out to Pablo, “Want one?”
After bearing the horror of having to listen to him copulate, Pablo convinces Angel, who’s deferential to superior artists, that he must announce his debauchery so Pablo can make sure to be absent. But the episode lingers with him. Sex, after all, is the very source of human life. And yet something about it seems so calamitous. How can each person be the outcome of such an act? When Pablo is in the throes of passion, does he appear evil?
While vacating the loft, Pablo often escapes to the quay and watches the boats, just as he did as a boy in Málaga. Except in that fishing town, the same vessels that leave come back at day’s end. In Barcelona, a shipping hub, they go and may never again be seen. Pablo feels that, for as long as he can recall, he’s been drifting. Taunted, tempted, and now he is wracked. Pablo sometimes collapses in exhaustion into his blue dream, where he is visited by the faces of the people he’s lost. In his sketches, he begins to add to the composition the frames and easels and studio in the background of the drawing, showing both his subjects and the labors of the artist, rendering scenes from his own life within the paintings on the page—pictures within pictures.
Pablo’s other redoubt is the old, high-ceilinged café across from the opera, where the slouchy waiters line up against the wall, wearing bow ties and black jackets, like a row of vultures. Pablo is sitting there one day, staring through the window as they surreptitiously shovel into their mouths platefuls of greasy fried eggs. A towheaded girl walks by outside in her middle-school uniform. She’s about how old Conchita would be, had she lived. Pablo wonders if this is what she’d look like now. Beside the blonde girl is her dark-haired classmate. Pablo shrinks down Germaine to this tender stage and puzzles over what she might’ve been like back then. How, he contemplates, did she become who she is today?
Pablo returns to the same colorist each week. The old man pauses at the cash register one afternoon, and the smell of sea and vinegar from a plate of boquerones he’d no doubt eaten for lunch swims in the air.
“You know, we have other colors,” says the man, who wears a faded red barretina, like Catalans of yore. “I could show you some, if you like.”
Pablo tells him that’s all right.
The paint shop owner asks if Pablo’s eyes are OK.
“My eyes?” Pablo says, anxious he is succumbing to his father’s disease.
“Can you see what you’re painting? It’s nothing but blue.”
Pablo tries to think of some way to ease the fellow’s concerns without going into a long explanation. “The sky, it’s in every picture.”
“But it is not always blue. Gray. White. Black. Orange. Even pink.”
“Do you make pictures?”
“No.”
“Ever thought about it?”
“If I paint, who will run my shop? That’s for a different kind,” he says. “I hope to always have plenty customers, though. And not just for my business. If there are no painters, I fear for this world.”
At the beginning of May, a few months after returning to Barcelona, Pablo finds the lingering pungency of strong cigars in the studio. He concludes Angel must have been there with a coterie of paios, doing the devil knows what, their deeds hanging around the loft now like specters.
As usual, Pablo toils into the evening, continuing to draw scenes of a painter’s work. Outside are distant flashes of lightning without thunder, as if a menacing rain is coming. As he sketches, Pablo keeps returning to what the colorist said about a world without artists. Also echoing is a conversation he had with Germaine long ago, from when they were riding inside the carriage after the procedure, headed back to the cubby where she lived.
“Why’d you tell that doctor the father is dead?” Germaine asked.
“How can you be sure it wasn’t Carles?” Pablo replied.
“It couldn’t have been,” she said, looking at Pablo strangely. “You already know why.”
“What about your husband?”
“Haven’t let him lay a finger on me since I was seventeen.”
“And the circus performer, or lion tamer, or whatever?”
Germaine’s lips peaked ever so slightly into a simper. “Don’t think it was hers, either.”
She was right—Pablo never really doubted he was the father. He only thought of it as Carles’s sometimes because everything between them was so knotted. As they rumbled along in the victoria, Germaine, still weary, reclined on the cushiony lazyback. Pablo felt the deep desire to kiss her, to land his lips where Carles’s had been. Guilt and remorse for the deaths of his friend, his sister, and this brief life that never held a breath of air in its lungs had become one. And they were all tangled up with labyrinthine affections for Germaine.
“I couldn’t help that I didn’t love Carles,” she’d said after a pause during the carriage ride. “Or what he felt for me. I wanted to. I did. What can I say? What could I have done?”
Thunder sounds, but in the blackness of the window, there is still no rain. Pablo turns to look at Last Moments. In the face of the painting’s old woman receiving final Eucharist, he believes there are prescient hints of an elderly version of Germaine. Superstition overtakes him, and he determines to cover the painting up in many coats of white. Pablo rises and adds layer on top of layer onto the canvas, as if repeating ritual ablutions.
The room has filled with spirit of turpentine and some other urgent vapor. Pablo’s head feels like a heated porcelain pot. His body itches from the top of his scalp to the inside of his legs, from the rims of his nostrils to the bend of his neck. Underneath his fingernails, his skin crawls. He feels the vibrating just before the boil. There’s a current of cool night coming through the window, but he is dripping with sweat.
Something begins to command Pab
lo’s hands. He furiously adds to the sketches he’s been working on, black dust floating off the pages, torn sheaves of paper littering the floor. With each stick of charcoal, the idea that’s emerging shifts, changes form, evolves, decides what to be.
Then, it’s as if the tube squeezes itself onto the palette and the brush dips into a Prussian blue lake on its own volition before finding another of cerulean, and Pablo begins filling the white. Before he knows it, he is spotting and smearing, daubing and smoothing, muddying and blackening, limning and highlighting, jabbing and licking, shaping and scraping, working, reworking, pouring, turning, buttering, borrowing, reordering the cosmos—painting.
Pablo’s mind races as he works. Evil is entropy. Entropy is evil. The ancients knew this, as did the masters. It is all around us and also a snake buried within, stirring in the gut. It is everyone’s sickness. There is no option of avoidance—to resist every temptation or with an ultimate sacrifice. This is the nature of life. The lone way to fight entropy, to regain control, Pablo understands, is to create. That is what the colorist meant, why he fears a world without artists. To become one, then, is to join with the divine. Pablo has cursed God many times, but in this moment, he doesn’t feel a rival but an equal, charged with the same responsibility to keep the universe from being overrun.
As the canvas fills, Pablo empties. He gives his last drops to that lost creature who has inhabited his dreams. When Pablo steps back, he sees his work is complete and that it is good.
Emerging onto the street, Pablo is vital again, the blue sky resplendent in the light of the yellow sun. The trees are budding, growing. He walks by Els Gats, even though it has recently closed, with Pere off on some wild trip somewhere. A mongrel with no collar sniffs around the door, and Pablo squats down. The dog comes to lick his wrists, to nuzzle its scraggly ears between Pablo’s knees.
For the first time in weeks, Pablo returns home to his parents’ apartment, finding his sister Lola back from school. She greets him with a love peck on the chin. Together, the two relish their mother’s food, a cold white soup of garlic and almonds marbled with olive oil that suspends a halved green grape like an embedded eye of jade. Pablo spoons greedily, lavishing Doña María with praise and murmurs of satisfaction.
When Pablo hauls the new painting up to show his father, the old man palpates the canvas and its hardened brushstrokes as if he is reading braille. He searches the air with his unsteady palm. Don José finds Pablo’s arm, and his long face spreads into a fond, toothless grin. They’ve not touched in years. Pablo lays his hand on his father’s, their fingers overlapping. Don José offers to prepare a canvas for him, and Pablo agrees, believing that after a lifetime of practice, his father can do it no matter what. This is how he wants to remember the man—his first teacher, the one who provided him with means. For Pablo knows that when he leaves Barcelona next, this time it will be for good.
Just as he and Carles did long ago, Pablo begins inviting their band to consort at the studio. They all drink and chat like old times, whispering to one another admiration for the huge and hypnotic painting hung there, repeating what they’ve always known—that Pablo was among them but not of them.
The world on the canvas is that of a dream. A splotchy blue-walled chamber is illuminated obliquely. In the background, there are two more paintings—pictures within the main picture, chapters to the story, just as Pablo had been practicing sketching, folding in multiple meanings, collapsing time, as if teaching himself how to construct origami hieroglyphs. In one, frightened lovers cling together, powerless to stop calamity. In the other, a weary woman mourns her loss alone, touched by the chaos of death both outside and from within.
When Cinto first sees this work by his friend, he comments on how these two embedded pictures bring viewers into Pablo’s process of creation and let them feel the power and uncertainty of the transpiring act.
On the left-hand side of the main image that fills the large canvas, a couple occupies the space near an arched entranceway, cast in the cool, crepuscular light. The young man stands forthright in nothing but a loincloth, his face astute but resigned. It is Carles. Naked, resting her head on his shoulder, is Germaine. In her eye is the same reasoned knowingness. Carles’s arms are at his side, but his wrist is bent upward, the forefinger extended, pointing across the way to the right half of the canvas where another figure has entered the scene—a stolid, thin-lipped matron, barefoot with broad toes that have crossed many beaches and deserts. She is clad in a tunic that is the deepest of blues. This woman is cradling at her chest a new baby. It is swaddled in the folds of her gown, protected there from all suffering, sleeping in peace.
What the observers who view this painting will not realize until many years later is that in the first sketches that Pablo made amid the growing thunder, the man holding Germaine was not Carles. It had been himself. But when it came time, Pablo altered the scene, as one grafts a flower.
No one who sees this painting in the studio will leave without speaking of it everywhere. They will conjecture and tell tales of what it means and allegories they claim to know. Cinto, though, will tell them they are wrong. This is something different, something they cannot understand, though they already feel.
Finally, one of Pablo’s friends will ask him, nervously, “What’s it called?”
Long ago, he stopped naming pictures. For this, however, the title came to Pablo while he painted.
“Life,” he says.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 14
I
Paris, April 1904
Pablo stopped in the Place Ravignan—a tree-lined square near the top of the butte—to fix his hair. He’d promised his mother he would do this, even in Paris.
After pocketing his comb in the smart suit Doña María sent him in and petting the head of the mongrel dog he’d secreted aboard the train from Barcelona, Pablo rapped his knuckles against the double doors of the single-story building front just east of the plaza. Its walls were buttercream stucco. White volets hung off the window frames.
When no one responded, he let himself in. A prehistoric smell permeated the darkness beyond the threshold, a mix of dampness, flora, and dust.
On the outside, the structure appeared to only have one floor. But inside, a staircase led downward, and twisting passageways branched off to more stairs and sudden drops into dark abysses.
Pablo and the dog proceeded gingerly, and the floorboards shifted and creaked beneath them, wobbling as if they might give way. It took quite some time to find the designated studio. How, Pablo wondered, could he become lost in such a small building? He was soon slick with sweat and out of breath from lugging around his carpetbag and easel. Just as he set down his belongings, he heard a pick sliding across the tight coil of guitar strings.
From behind a partial wall emerged a lean, copper-colored man, his hair twisted into a bun. He spoke Spanish. His name was Fabián, and apparently he was left behind by Pablo’s sculptor friend, Paco, who’d written to tell Pablo his Montmartre studio would be free soon, as he was preparing to brave the no-man’s-land of the Maquis if that meant being able to construct his own kiln. Pablo was ready for a fresh start and had replied to say he’d be there in a week.
Fabián asked Pablo if it were all right to stay on a few days longer, adding that he could sleep on the floor. Pablo looked around and thought it a strange offer because the large room came with no bed for either of them. But he nodded.
The man said little and turned out to be good company. The chords and notes of his guitar-playing filled the air and became the score of Pablo’s afternoons.
There was a miraculous total of thirty studios in the building. Invisible from the plaza, the back side descended a steep cliff of four flights. There were peculiar carve-outs and vacant shafts one could plummet through if not careful. Each inhabitant made some specialized form of nectar in his or her chamber. There were painters and poets, writers and sculptors, models and musicians from all sorts of nations and background
s—Polish, Russian and Jewish, Catalans and Basques, French, Germans and Dutch, a Berber, and a Japanese.
A handful of older tenants dated back from before Renoir ushered artists and bohemians into Montmartre to reside amid the peasants who already had inhabited it for decades. A vegetable-seller rented a studio below Pablo. He dried carrots on a roof dormer. During winters, when nothing grew in the soil, he collected mussels from the Seine and sold them from buckets kept inside his room.
All the people living there became intimately acquainted, as there was only one bathroom—nothing more than a hole in the ground guarded by a homemade door and latch that rattled when the wind blew. There was also just one water pump, and many times, it was faster to go and fill a pot from the fountain in the plaza.
The building once had been a piano factory, and it had other lives as well, each constructed on top of the other like a French metropolis erected over a Capetian capital, layered above a medieval city, founded on Roman ruins, and so on, down to time immemorial. The architecture and furnishings, therefore, were as organized as archaic scrolls. The walls were perpetually mildewed. It was drafty in some corridors and stifling elsewhere. As summer grew hotter, the only way to breathe was to escape outdoors.
These accommodations were not always easy living, but the camaraderie of misfits made up for the convenience they lacked.
Pablo roomed with the dog who’d found him outside Els Gats, a cat he adopted from an alley near Notre-Dame, and a family of white mice who were longtime occupants of the studio. He cared for the mice like stranded refugees, keeping his favorite in a desk drawer, feeding it crumbs. He spent many afternoons in the chestnut-tree-filled Place Ravignan that the front of the building faced, relaxing with a pipe and passing around wine bottles with Fabián—who moved into another studio and whom Pablo taught to paint—and Manolo, who had escaped his sentence in the Spanish cavalry by riding to the border and selling his horse and rifle to a Gascon for train fare to Paris. Max also began trekking all the way from the Left Bank to join them, until he decided it would be easier to take an apartment only a few doors down. And Paco came around, too, perpetually merry, bringing bread and sardines, along with stories of his friend Gauguin’s early days.
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