by Zoe Valdes
“I owe this novel to you. I admire you so much! You won’t remember this, but a long time ago you told me about the Diaries of Anaïs Nin. You even loaned me a copy!”
I didn’t remember, but it was true that I’d read those books tons of times and had recommended them right and left, and I’ve also written and published about them.
I wasn’t aware that Yendi was now a writer; she used to be an actress, mediocre at best, and had produced a documentary, equally mediocre, about some woman painter she had imitated without success, and she’d shown me a thin book of her poetry, worthless, though I was forced to write a review of it out of politeness since she insisted so vehemently. And now she was telling me she was writing novels, with one on the way and another in the planning stage. I had my doubts, knowing how manipulative she could be and how serial exaggerators like her are so often motivated by envy.
I’d heard all about her back in Havana. Several people, including one of her former boyfriends, had warned me of her neuroses and her constant fits of exaggeration. Nevertheless, I sucked it up and pretended to pay attention to everything she said, even though I was nearly bored to death and couldn’t hide the fact.
After enduring an endless stream of nonsense, I announced that I had to go, that some coworkers were expecting me to deal with an issue at work that was hanging over me.
“Wait, you haven’t told me if you’re still writing.” She grasped at my coat with her little claws, like a shipwrecked sailor grasping at a plank, in a phony gesture that reeked of desperation.
“I’m still at it, same as always, until my brains dry up.” I got up and paid, but she also got up, even though half her beer remained and she hadn’t finished her croque-monsieur.
“I’ll go with you,” she said, acting as if I were the one who wanted her company.
I was starting to get nervous. “You can walk with me for just a few blocks. My meeting is for employees only: you can’t be there.”
“Don’t worry, I have to meet somebody, too. A very famous person, a Cuban musician who lives here, everybody knows him. He’s giving a concert at the Olympia, a huge deal! I’ll only be in France a couple of days, then I’m off to Barcelona to meet an old lover, the painter—”
“I don’t want to know his name. Your husband is a friend of ours. I don’t want you to tell me your stories about lovers, or about anything.” I was blunt; she started to sob.
“Did you know my mother died? She was crazy, totally nuts. Renán doesn’t understand me, he’s so into himself, such a control freak, he doesn’t even give me any money.… Fabio is different.” She finally got out the name of the painter I hadn’t wanted to hear. “He’s kind, gentle, generous.… I feel so alone, things in Cuba aren’t going well for me at all, it’s so messed up. Luckily, I have the Colombian author who supports me—”
“We’re all alone,” I crudely interrupted, thinking of James Lord. “My mother also passed away, and exile hasn’t been easy; it’s been a long, hard struggle. People who stayed in Cuba complain, but those of us who left also have it hard, and nobody understands us or cares about us. More and more people keep leaving, but fewer and fewer understand us. Everyone’s leaving, everyone’s leaving.… But those who’ve been coming over lately aren’t like earlier exiles, they arrive ready to fight tooth and nail, with a mindset formed under the dictatorship. Everyone’s leaving, everyone’s leaving,” I repeated naïvely.
Without my realizing it, we had ended up in front of Victor Hugo’s house in the Place des Vosges. I invited her to see the museum, and though she didn’t seem very enthusiastic, she agreed, not wanting to look like an idiot.
“Everyone’s leaving,” I went on in a kind of litany. “Everyone’s leaving.”
She looked at me suddenly with a glint in her eye, which gleamed slyly, or lethally, or bent on malice, like the eye of a rat. But she didn’t say a word, and turned back to gaze at what was straight ahead.
“What a tiny bed!” she remarked as she looked at Victor Hugo’s bed.
“In those days people were smaller.”
“I could fit in that bed—I’m just a little thing, a slip of a girl!”
I nodded. It didn’t escape me that she had said nothing about my mother’s passing away in exile. It made no difference to her; she didn’t even show a little sympathy.
We walked back through the museum, seeing it in reverse, and left the building. It was very cold and gray and starting to snow.
“Did you know I’m a French citizen now?” she said with a start.
“No. You turned French in Cuba? How did you swing that? I mean, did they give you French nationalization papers while you were living in Havana?”
“Of course, thanks to Renán. His mother is French, and I’m married to him, so, well, they gave it to me. The guy who’s the French ambassador is one of ours, and he pulled some strings for me.” She winked.
“What do you mean, ‘He’s one of ours’?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing, nothing, just that he loves everything about us, he’s nuts about all things Cuban,” she squawked.
That was the last straw. My family—my husband, my daughter, and I—had spent years waiting for a residence permit; then we applied for naturalization and even in spite of the huge number of fees we paid, the government agencies turned us down. I had to wait for my Spanish citizenship papers before they’d give me French residency. Once I was a European citizen, I could choose the nationality of the country where I wished to reside and then, only after all that time, did we reapply for French nationalization. It took five years before they gave it to us.
“You’re lucky. Few people get in so quickly.” I took a breath, trying to keep calm.
“I knew how things were done, that’s all. Right? It’s a matter of pulling strings. I’ve known which strings to pull,” she announced, shamelessly.
I nodded, having no doubts that, for sure, she had left no string unpulled.
She fished a fancy cell phone out of her overcoat pocket and dialed the famous musician who—according to her—had a concert booked at the Olympia. They agreed to meet at a trendy club. Just as soon as she finished her call we said goodbye, and that was it, or so I hope. I’ve never seen her again, and I don’t think I ever will see her again for the rest of my life; obviously, in the future I’ll avoid any possible encounter with that repulsive creature. Encounters like this cut a few years off your lifespan.
Yet now I mentally had to dip into that encounter, and it’s loathsome that every time I think about James Lord I’ll have to remember her, because this all took place in less than twenty-four hours. That is, I met him, and that same night—the wee hours of the overnight, that is—Yendi called. The next day I couldn’t avoid encountering her, and when I finally managed to get rid of that repulsive individual I felt terrible, because I realized that meeting her had dulled my impressions of James Lord. Somehow, that woman showed up and threw everything off. She filled my day with gloom. People like her cast a pall over the brightest places they pass through. And now I remember that Yendi had also been there during that attempted demonstration in Cuba, the one I had participated in with Lefty Sotera, Lena, and Apple Pie. Though when the shitstorm started, she went over to the oppressors’ side.
That evening, still upset, I wondered if I had told her too much, and convinced myself that I hadn’t, since I’d done my best to talk as little as possible. In the end things hadn’t gone as I’d hoped, I later discovered, because when someone comes to steal from you, they’ll take anything you leave in reach, no matter how insignificant. In this case it was a simple phrase I’d said without thinking, a heartbroken comment I made that she turned into the title of a fairly insipid and unoriginal novel, Everyone’s Leaving. “Everyone’s leaving” was also a line in a song I wrote for Mónica Molina, which became the theme song for the film La Bostella by Édouard Baer.
Hours later, I wanted to go back to thinking about my meeting with James Lord; I tried my hardest to focus on how he looke
d, but instead of my memories of him, all I kept seeing was Yendi, and her greedy mug, and the falsity she constantly flaunts, which brings out the worst of her defects: envy, seasoned with a dash of the evil eye. I might add that she has the stupidest smile I’ve ever seen. A rodent angel, with mousy little teeth, flapping her bat wings in every direction. A dark, insensitive, destructive creature.
Dora. 1939 and 1958
The three of them had entered a palazzo facing the Grand Canal. It was a fabulous place: red velvet curtains draped heavily down the huge picture windows, golden pompom ropes gathering them to either side, and sunlight peered in to frolic with its refractions in the fancy Murano glasswork. Not only were the decorations, lamps, and dishes made from this fine, delicate, marvelous blown glass, but some of the furniture—armoires, chests of drawers—were made with exquisitely beveled mirrors in a stunning, baroque style. Extraordinary.
The light refracted everywhere, creating even more magnificent spaces, making the rooms look twice their size. Dora stood transfixed before this opulence, but soon her good taste led her to see that there was nothing elegant about it, that it was all a sort of conjurer’s bric-a-brac trick, a gilded cage concocted to fool the weak of spirit. Still, it was attention-grabbing. That was the perfect term for it: attention-grabbing. Though she did like the ceiling lamps, the Chinese silk tapestries, and the ancient drawings on the fragile, delicate cloth lamp shades.
Bernard attempted to make himself comfortable on a chaise longue upholstered in fuchsia, but he was so tall his body looked ridiculous on it, like a tiger balancing on a ping-pong ball. The upholstery on the rest of the furniture ranged from leopard skin to shades of violet, purple, gold, black, and red.
“Our friend’s apartment is all so eclectic. In Paris, however, he lives much more modestly.”
“Paris is Paris. Venice is different, Venice is lush exuberance. From what I’ve seen, here you almost have to display a style that connotes wealth.” Dora knew she wasn’t making a valid point; she just wanted to respond to Bernard. “How did you and James come to know this Venetian gentleman?”
“He’s an art dealer and an antiquarian we met years ago at one of Marie-Laure de Noailles’s get-togethers. Odd you’ve never crossed paths with him.”
“Maybe I’ve seen him before and simply didn’t notice him.” Dora was looking out at the Grand Canal, sitting on the window ledge; the pearly mist rising from the water belonged in a supernatural Flemish landscape painting. “Here comes James,” she announced, and her face lit up. She felt more at ease with her friend there.
She watched James approach the palazzo and draw the key from his pants pocket. He was returning from the market loaded down with Italian cheeses, wines, and prosciutto. Dora went to open the orange-tinted glass door of the foyer for him. He hurried through to the kitchen and put the groceries away.
“Why don’t we stay here instead of going back to the hotel?” Bernard asked from his outlandish, uncomfortable settee.
“The owner has some friends coming in this evening, and they’re staying here!” James shouted from the kitchen. “We can share the place with them, but not for very long.”
Dora wanted to help out. She prepared a tray of cheese and prosciutto; they opened the bottle of Chianti and toasted to friendship and to art. Bernard switched to a more comfortable seat and turned down the wine; he preferred champagne, his Dom Pérignon, to which he was vexatiously addicted in spite of the cost.
“Cold-bloodedly and obscenely expensive,” he stressed, self-conscious about his problematic addiction.
James thumbed through an art catalogue while Dora, once more seated on the window ledge, gazed out at canal’s the magnificent width and the slowly undulating water in it.
“This reminds me of the day I arrived in Buenos Aires with my parents. My mother was holding my hand so tightly, her nails were digging into my palm. Louise Julie Voisin, my poor mother, was terrified. She knew that in Argentina any French woman was assumed to be the worst. ‘French woman’ was synonymous with ‘prostitute.’ At a very young age I felt, or was made to feel, like a whore.”
Bernard looked at Dora. All the light of the setting sun enveloped her, and she too looked like a crystal glass, a vestal trapped between mirrors reflecting multiple spaces, her image repeated in each of them. A shattered crystal, as in the first painting Picasso gave her, his first disjointed portrait of her, painted on April 1, 1939.
Her head was depicted as a garden made up of miniscule blues and lilac patches. Picasso titled it Tête de femme (Head of a Woman). The lower part of the image is in profile, with the chin, mouth, and nose sharp-edged; the rest of the face is like a separate patch of forest in which part of the nose protrudes and disappears behind the trompe l’oeil, creating an illusion of shimmering depth; the forehead and cheeks appear to be exaggerated by the light of a miner’s lantern. The startled eyes peer into the unfathomable abyss of the implausible. Back then, Dora had seemed very sweet and submissive, while now her features had hardened, so that even with her image shattered into a mirage of a thousand quicksilvered pieces, she emanated a harmony that purified and cleansed the air around them.
Bernard kept watching her with intense, disturbing curiosity. He enjoyed talking with this austere woman, and he had just discovered a fascination with Dora in himself that prompted him to sporadic fits of tenderness. He searched deep down for an explanation: why was he so attracted to her? Because being around this woman, who had been not merely Picasso’s muse but his sexual and intellectual partner, gave him a very special sense of peace, immersed him in a state of sublime art reverie, as if looking at her, talking to her, was the same as standing before a painting by the master, leaving him enchanted and subdued by its kaleidoscopic splendor. A living work of art, inevitably spoiled, marred by the disturbing essence of our unavoidably vulgar human nature.
“What are you thinking about, Dora?” Bernard teased. “I know you’re not going to tell me, because you never think about anything.”
“Memories, I only remember useless things.”
The grayish, rainy day seemed ready to flow into the river, down the giant storm drain formed by the gaping hole of the horizon. Mist cloaked the fantasy world. It was much cooler than forecast, and the coming winter seemed likely to be much harsher than had been expected. She was running to Picasso’s studio with a baguette under her arm. Suddenly, a woman stepped in front of her and stopped her short.
“Miss, were you aware that this painter sells paintings to just anyone? And not only his own paintings, he also sells whatever other artists have given him for safekeeping. He’s sold off paintings by Wifredo Lam, drawings by Max Jacob—poor Max Jacob, after Max put him up in his house! Did you know what he said when he found out that his supposedly best friend, Max Jacob, was in a Nazi camp? He said Max would save himself, he’d fly the coop, because ‘Max is an angel.’ That stuck-up Spaniard has got to be an imbecile!”
She watched the woman and listened, distressed. A fine drizzle blurred her vision. The woman who had bumped into her, seeming to jump out from nowhere, had a swollen, toad-like face, and though you could tell she had once been beautiful, she might be about seventy now. Bulging yellow eyes flittering in their sockets; smile full of nicotine-stained teeth; chubby, restless hands. She was monstrously fat, dressed in a tight, bottle-green tailored suit, the front of her blouse stained with garbanzo purée. Dora was in a rush. “I’m sorry, madam, I can’t stay, the bread is getting wet.”
She was sure the woman was wrong, that Picasso had never sold any of Wifredo Lam’s works. Lam was too wary to leave his paintings in unsafe hands, especially if he’d signed them, since he never signed a painting until he had already sold it to a future owner who wouldn’t double-cross him, someone with plenty money whom he could keep track of as a collector.
Dora felt her bladder was about to burst, she got chills, she was dying to get home and use the bathroom. Picasso must be hungry, as he always was. Hungry as an ox.
&nb
sp; Her shoes were full of water, the soles were worn through, but her lover didn’t want her to buy new ones. Why, what did she need them for? She started shivering, couldn’t stop her lips from trembling or her teeth from chattering. But just thinking about the man she loved more than anyone in the world and how he was waiting for her at home, she hummed softly. He hadn’t wanted her to wear her best coat either, the chinchilla. With that fancy fur on, she looked too formal, beautiful, and elegant. Ugly shoes, ugly shoes, she had to wear ugly shoes! Forget about expensive coats, no luxuries!
She climbed the steps two at a time, running upstairs with difficulty, squeezing her thighs together not to piss herself; she opened the door out of breath. Jaume Sabartés was peeking out from behind a screen; she couldn’t see him but could make out his hunched silhouette.
She opened the second door and entered the painter’s studio. A very young soldier was snoozing on the cushions; he looked healthy and very handsome; she had enough time to notice he was half-naked and very provocative in his careless pose, as if offering himself up from the beyond, shameless in his dreams. Picasso was painting, a cigarette butt clenched in his teeth.
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody, an American soldier,” he answered dryly, curtly.
Dora looked at the cushions; the man was gone.
“He disappeared.” Dora dried her temples with a paint-splattered rag. She was dripping wet.
“Yes, I know, that’s what always happens. He appears, he disappears, sometimes I think he isn’t real and that I’ve made him up, that he’s a hallucination, a mere figment of my imagination.”
Dora was convinced it was true, that the young soldier existed only in Picasso’s imaginary world, and now in hers, for she blindly believed everything the Master asserted, especially when he was huffing and puffing feverishly before a canvas.