by Zoe Valdes
She went back to the middle of the room, unpacked, hung her clothes in the wardrobe, undid the bed, lay down on the mattress, and looked at the ceiling for a long time; after a while, she closed her eyes.
Opening, closing the eyelids, the present, the past. With an imperceptible movement of her lids she could shift from now to memories, and this was her life, this was what it all came down to: rambling and remembering. The routes her rambles took her on grew shorter and shorter in contrast to the inexhaustible trajectory of her memory. Now it was all just walking on an imaginary high wire; down below her were the arched windows of Rue d’Astorg, twisted, glinting like liquid, as in her Surrealist photos.
She lay there half napping, dreaming that a little girl with blond curls stood laughing beside her, but at the same time she began to hear a wail coming from the front door. She slipped lightly down a hallway toward the door. It was open, and a shadow was slipping through, toward the staircase. She was walking around naked, her thighs as white as milk, her breasts swaying, her hair loose. She closed the door heavily. She went back to bed; the little girl was gone. She opened a bottle of pills and swallowed a fistful; her mouth went dry.
“Dora, Dora…”
Someone knocking on the door.
“Coming.” A cramp clenched her toes. She sat up in bed with difficulty.
At last, she dashed to the bathroom, decorated in flamingo-pink tiles and flagstones, and vomited. She washed up. On the mirror some previous guest had written in lipstick, in English: “Just I love you. I killed you.”
So it was, that was life, just love another person, sing the other’s praises, and then murder that person. She had been wrong, had confused love with eroticism in the period when she’d met Georges Bataille and become his lover, and he’d initiated her as a lover who fell headlong into passion; then it was time for the next type of love, artistic love, her love of Surrealism; then came true love, the great love, her love of Pablo Picasso, and to top it off, her love of Communism. After all these excesses, what else could she expect but disillusion.
Love was nothing but mere love, without its trappings, and at the end, death. Life should be no more than that, loving others without expecting anything on their part. Not even expecting them to love you. Her life now was loving God.
She left her room refreshed, her hands scented with a flowery cream and her neck with a subtle cologne. James and Bernard were waiting for her in the lobby. They wore sporty clothes, light colors, both looked radiant. They were young, and therein lay the secret of their peculiar glow.
Dora, on the other hand, was already on a one-way journey, was beginning to age just when she was feeling her youngest. She regretted having worn the dress with the tiny flowers against navy blue and the round collar, thinking it made her look too provincial. She smiled and continued skipping down the stairs; they let her take the lead.
She came out onto the narrow street, and a fresh breeze from the canal caressed her face. She sensed that her friends, behind her, were gazing at her with a certain amount of pity.
“Dora, where do you want us to go?”
“Wherever you two want, or wherever our old homesick feet lead us.”
“Let’s roam around. If you don’t get lost in Venice, you can’t really know the city,” Bernard remarked.
“Let’s get lost, then,” Dora murmured.
“Later on we can have dinner at that small restaurant on the canal, the one where they make the delicious shrimp with the red Venetian sauce,” James suggested.
The other two agreed.
Without a word, they walked about the narrow streets, which were strangely empty for that time of year.
“I’d like to try out Caffè Florian.”
“You see, Bernard,” James protested, “we’ll never be able to surprise her. We had planned to take you there tomorrow for breakfast, Dora, but we thought it better to give you the biggest surprise possible by taking you there blindfolded.”
Dora gave him an amused yet domineering look. “Never dare put a blindfold on me. Never, ever.” Throughout their years of friendship, sometimes she spoke to him casually, and sometimes, as now, her tone with him was emphatically formal. “I shall never be a woman whose gaze is hidden, never allow my gaze to be blindfolded.”
Bernard lagged behind, James waited for him, Dora continued ahead of them.
“I know, Bernard, I also get frightened by the hasty answers she bursts out with lately, but I think it’s her age, she’s getting old,” whispered James, who loved making her out to be a bit older than she was.
Dora paced quickly along the narrow street. Suddenly, she stopped in front of a shop window, which the owner had filled with a display of all sorts of telescopes, ancient, modern, various sizes. Her father’s face took hold of her memories and transformed them into startling visions.
My father, Joseph Markovitch, was born in Siskak, Croatia. He was a certified architect in Vienna and Zagreb. He arrived in France in 1896 and four years later was named commissioner of the Austro-Hungarian pavilion at the Universal Exposition in Paris. There he met my mother, Louise Julie Voisin, a small country girl born in Cognac on February 28, 1877. Henriette Theodora Markovitch was born on November 22, 1907, on Rue d’Assas.
That’s what she had jotted down when she tried writing her memoirs. She later dropped the project, finding it presumptuous and a waste of time. The same year she was born, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
When she was three, the little girl traveled with her parents to Buenos Aires; she only remembered the unnerving sensation of the Earth rolling beneath her feet and of being thrust back into a womb, an iron womb this time. Her father made his fortune building monuments. “Who doesn’t remember,” she wondered, “that remarkable seven-story edifice on the corner of Alem and Cangallo?” Her father would climb, with her in his arms, up to the observatory in the gilded oval cupola and let her gaze at the sky with the strange optical devices he had installed at the pinnacle.
“Dora, observe the stars, Dora, observe, how beautiful.” Her father had started shortening her name to Dora.
Then the telescope would aim low and, seen through the lens, the smallest details in the harbor would look enormous: the ships coming and going as they left for Europe or returned, the yellowish waves tinged with florescent orange in the Río de la Plata.
To the age of thirteen, she lived in Argentina with her parents; then they returned to Paris. During those thirteen years she did what all young girls do: study, play, get to know life through the experiences of the adults closest to her, make up stories, dream of what she would be when she grew up, who she would fall in love with, what fate had in store for her. The adults closest to her were her parents. As an only daughter, she was pampered by Joseph and Julie, who did their best to clothe her properly, teach her good manners, and give her a good education. They could afford it, they had the economic resources, and they also worked very hard to offer her a full, untroubled life.
Every evening at dusk she would climb up to the observatory, with or without her father. She had become an expert with the optical instruments, focusing them, turning from one to the next to measure distances, using them to observe the stars. She had given each star its own name; she wished now that she could recall them all, but she couldn’t. She could only hear the distant voice of her father, Joseph. “Dora, don’t close your eyes to the immensity of the universe, observe, observe, Dora.” He repeated this so often that she ended up thinking the observatory was actually called an “observadora.”
A man behind the window—the owner of the Venetian shop—motioned for her to come inside. She finally awoke from her reverie. James and Bernard were walking slowly, quite a ways beyond. She realized she was annoying them with her delay and ought to catch up.
She passed by a hat shop. Her mother also made fancy hats in Buenos Aires, but instead these hats brought back memories of Picasso. The hats and the fluttering birds pinned to the ornaments Dora wore in her unkem
pt hair, or sometimes in her well-combed hair, depending on the circumstances, while tears stained the fronts of her blouses, in the paintings in which he immortalized her.
Her friends waited for her impatiently. “So tell us, Dora. Do you like Venice, or not?”
She nodded.
“We knew you’d love this city,” James added.
She said nothing to encourage him. James waited for her to respond, and when she didn’t he reproached her. “I get it, I get it, you knew it all before I ever found out.”
“I didn’t say anything, I kept quiet, because I didn’t want to disappoint you by saying something prissy or foolish,” she said as she smoothed her raven black hair, in which a few gray hairs were just beginning to show up on either side of the part.
They continued on their rambling course, stopping every now and then on a small bridge to watch the gondolas, some carrying pairs of lovers, others crammed with families with children.
Dora stopped in front of a vendor of shoes for gondoliers made from felt, velvet, and stitched leather, in every color, radiant colors. She looked through them, handled them, kept on walking. Bernard approached her, smiling. “Would you like a gondolier’s shoe like one of those? What size do you wear?”
“No, Bernard, I don’t need any.”
She never needed anything, but, like all women, presents delighted her; she adored surprises. If she’d said yes to Bernard, if she had admitted that she’d liked the shoes, it wouldn’t have counted as a present when he gave them to her, just an empty gesture occasioned by a whim, not a true gift.
“I only wanted to see how they were made, how they were sewn,” she answered, nonplussed.
“But Dora, please, I want to give you a pair as a gift,” Bernard insisted.
“No, no, Bernard, I already said no. Thank you, but don’t insist.”
She was annoyed by the obvious efforts Bernard was making to regale her in order to create a more comfortable, trusting space for himself between her and James. At least, that was how she interpreted the young man’s persistent attempts to bring his friendliness to her attention.
Her head, her mind, open and free, soared once more.
There was a time when things might have played out differently. There was a time when perhaps she was better-natured; no doubt she was sweet, generous, caring, even funny. But she was aware that she had become embittered years ago; she often noticed that her rudeness repelled others. She couldn’t afford the luxury of recalling in detail how she used to be, so it would take effort for her to compare her past and present behavior.
Not long ago, when Picasso was still the center of her life, she wasted no time in self-reflection; she had even forgotten that the way others treated her depended on how the painter treated her, had even blotted out what her relationships with friends—some of them short-lived and superficial—had been like, all the ins and outs and intrigues of friendship. Before, she only saw things through Picasso’s eyes, was totally devoted to him, to his talent, to his demands. And Picasso, due to his extreme possessiveness, succeeded in isolating her from everyone, demanding that she work only and exclusively with him, hand in hand, face to face, joined at the hip.
Even when she was with other people, she felt psychically bound to him, though she was not physically by his side. Even when she was listening to other people, even when the subject at hand had nothing to do with either of them, her only point of reference was him, no one and nothing else. And no concern enticed her away or distracted her from her focus, her central core: Picasso.
When he started getting aggressive, he was hotheaded though not verbally abusive, bad-tempered to the point of losing self-control; she also began changing, pouring into him like wet clay poured into a mold, and acquiring her lover’s personality traits. Then he changed again, in turn, and at times took on Dora’s style. She couldn’t understand how he had managed to steal her personality and take over all her attributes, her good, kind, just qualities. She, on the other hand, had inherited the worst in his character, his tediousness, his bad moods, and a fleeting sense of sweetness and insincerity.
“What are you thinking about?” Bernard interrupted.
“Oh, nothing. The Grand Canal is beautiful at nightfall.” She lowered her eyes.
They were facing the Grand Canal, also surprisingly empty, which still seemed strange on such a beautiful spring day.
“Dora will never admit she’s thinking about anything,” James joked. “But she always looks like she’s got something on her mind and that she’ll suddenly barrage us with questions.”
“Why are there so few people? I see hardly any tourists. I thought Venice would be overrun with them.” Dora looked back at the canal, directly away from James.
In perfect Italian, Bernard asked a gondolier what was going on, and he told them, “Today is Workers’ Day, May 1, e questo.…” The young man’s lengthy explanation went on until his gondola disappeared around a corner.
“Grazie mille! A rivederci!” Bernard called out.
“I’m exhausted. Let’s grab a seat in a café.” Dora’s face was pale, beads of sweat dotting her forehead and upper lip.
They ended up, inevitably enough, in the sumptuous Caffè Florian. They stayed there a long time. Fascinated, Dora took in every nook and cranny of the legendary place, which she described as being “straight out of a novel” and which reminded her of Balthus’s paintings, though she couldn’t say why. She had two hot chocolates with cream and a dessert that looked a tower of meringue. They remained there, engrossed in the ambience of the café, until it started to fill up with foreign visitors like them, though some were repeat visitors, as well as also true regulars, the real locals. Then they began to feel removed, out of place, out of touch with the history and rituals of the city, so they decided to go for another walk. After wandering for a while, they took a table at a charming little café next door to the hotel.
Settled in a corner in the small café, they watched other newcomers. Dora sat with her back against the wall, next to the front window, where she could study the few passersby, her face bathed in sunlight. They ordered café crème. Bernard and James started planning an itinerary to go museum hopping and satisfy Dora’s urgent desire to get to know the works of Bellini, Titian, Carpaccio, Tintoretto, the mosaics of Piazza San Marco and Torcello. Dora leaned her head against the back of the chair, closed her eyes, and fell into passing trance.
Through a fog, she made out the image of her mother. Dora was lying down, asleep in her bed, in Paris, and her mother planted herself in the doorway. Standing at the threshold, her face was hard, and she was naked. She must have been sixty, but there were no wrinkles on her body, her pubis was shaved. Dora went to ask her something, but she lost the thread of her dream, shifted in her café seat. Yet she fell asleep again. The second time, she dreamed that her mother and grandmother had died and that she had removed them from the grave. In the casket, they both looked putrid, their flesh greenish, covered in sores, and yet they half-raised their eyelids. They whispered to her, calling for Dorita, their poor little Dora, “Come here, my little girl.” “Good girl,” her grandmother murmured.
“Sorry, I must have dozed off, I’m so tired.” Dora rubbed her eyelids with a white handkerchief she pulled from her pocketbook. A veritable relic of a purse, completely out of fashion, a gift from Picasso.
“Don’t worry, it was only five minutes,” James commented.
“It seemed like hours, centuries.” She looked at her watch, with its delicate silver hands. “Whenever you want, we can take off again.”
“If you’re ready, let’s go now, right?” Bernard folded his newspaper, and he and James got up to leave.
Dora took a sip of water and hung her purse on her shoulder. No avoiding it, she’d have to see Venice now. Until a few days ago she only had to imagine it, now she had to face it with all her senses awake to the adventure of confronting Venice head on.
James. Paris, 2006
I picked up the
receiver and dialed the number, feeling nervous. I don’t like to disappoint anyone who’s set aside time to see me, I’m punctual to a fault, but I had no choice, I couldn’t help it, I could arrive late or not go at all.
“Bonjour, Bernard,” I stuttered. “I can’t go with you to visit James Lord today.”
He greeted me politely, but he was annoyed by my unexpected announcement.
“Well, that’s quite a disappointment.” He dropped the friendly tone, no doubt because I’d put him in a foul mood. “You arranged to meet James Lord with me. He’s a difficult and busy man; besides, tomorrow he’s going skiing and the day after he’s leaving for the United States. You won’t get a chance to see him for months, if then. It won’t be easy to get another chance to meet him.”
“Bernard, I apologize, my daughter has a fever.”
He thought I was making it up. When I saw how offended he was, I changed my mind.
“Don’t worry, I’ll catch a taxi right now and be at your place in twenty minutes.”
“Fine, I’ll expect you, but I’m warning you that we’ll be half an hour late as it is. James won’t appreciate your being late; he’s quite the stickler for time.”
I left my daughter with our au pair, an Italian nanny. She still had a fever, but it was going down.
It wasn’t easy to find a taxi driver who would agree to take me as far as the Bastille Market, closed due to a protest march. I called Bernard just as he was leaving his apartment. He descended the stairs uneasily while I waited for him in the cab; when he left the building, I got out of the cab to greet him with the usual kiss on each cheek, then invited him to ride with me.