by Zoe Valdes
She heated some turnip soup, fried some chicken breasts, daubed the bread with oil. “Come and eat, it’s cold and you’ve been working a long time.”
“But who asked you for food? I don’t want to eat. It isn’t time for me to eat! Stop interrupting me, get out of my way!” He slapped his brushes and snorted, his face throbbing with anger.
Dora’s reply was to look distressed.
“Oh, so now it’s weeping time. The weeping woman! And here come the tears again. When I tell you to.… You’re going to drive me crazy, you’re pushing me to the edge with your tears! You and your tango tears.…”
He got dressed, bundled up, and went outside, slamming the door behind him.
Dora wavered in momentary shame but then ran after her lover. He was walking too fast and disappeared among the pedestrians. A bit later she caught sight of him entering a nearby café. She held back, straggling on purpose, then walked past the establishment and spied him through the steamed-up window. That was a period when everyone spied on everybody.
Inside, the Master was having a roaring good time with some buddies, regulars of the café, while the owner served him a pot-au-feu, a boiling soup featuring a huge bone whose marrow flavored the oregano-scented broth, a few vegetables, bread, and that’s it. The painter devoured the dish with a ferocious appetite.
When he got back he was in a better mood, and the soldier was still there, seemingly asleep. The Great Genius, moved to pity, lauded the soldier’s beauty. “A dream, a genuine dream!”
In her distress, Dora had bitten her lips bloody.
After a bit, tired of waiting for the painter to notice that she was there, she got up from the armchair, violently grabbed her coat, and fled headlong, running in terror down the stairs. She never wanted to hear his name again, ever. She was still young, why not find someone else? Why not fall in love with some other man? Why not drop the artist and go off with someone who’d love and admire her the way she really deserved, as the genius that she also was? Because she loved the Great Genius and wasn’t able to love anyone else, couldn’t leave him, was ready to sacrifice everything for him, including herself. She wanted to throw herself in the Seine, kill herself, die tragically, she longed to disappear; yes, that’s what she’d do, she’d disappear, she’d punish Picasso. But maybe he wouldn’t see her suicide as a punishment but as liberation. She blew her nose into a sketch she had doodled on a napkin and wept disconsolately.
She continued walking along the bank of the Seine; the booksellers watched her progress with some foreboding, jittery. It’s true that she was stumbling like a madwoman at a suffocating and unstoppable pace, acting terrified and looking depressingly like an angry woman, an abandoned woman, a wounded beast. Madness produces dread in others.
How could she free herself from the trauma of Picasso? Did he love her as much as she loved him, she ceaselessly wondered? No, he didn’t love her: the Great Genius couldn’t love anyone but himself. Then she changed her tune: she could put up with him, she kept telling herself, yes, yes, she could endure his egotism to any degree. With no complaints, and then she’d be the perfect lover, the guardian angel, the servant who only appeared when he called, at the precise moments when the Master had a concrete need of her presence. No, Dora couldn’t behave like a servant to the man she loved. That wasn’t love, no, not at all, not her concept of love. How could a woman as intelligent as she was behave in such an unbearably submissive way?
“Picasso is such a bastard,” she thought, and immediately regretted the thought, begging for forgiveness in an anguished prayer while kneeling before a statue of the Virgin in a corner niche on the wall bordering the Seine. Why before the Virgin? She was a committed atheist, an unbeliever. Well, because the Virgin was different, somehow, the Virgin was a woman, she’d understand what Dora was going through better than anyone else could. Then she burst out laughing, her hand bleeding from being dragged, scraped, against the river wall. Was she going crazy? Not at all, not at all; quite the contrary, excessive sanity was her worst defect. It was merely that she was suffering, feeling very high-strung, too high-strung and sad, she was shivering with cold. She saw the clotted blood on her hand, she licked the wound, and her saliva allayed the sting.
She entered a café, pulled up a chair, ordered a hot chocolate, and drank it in small sips. The liquid warmed her stomach, and she feel better, fortified. She watched the people walking by through the frosted window; a couple kissing under a street lamp with nerve-racking passion, utterly absorbed in their desire, deeply immersed in pleasure. Did he love her as much as she obviously loved him, judging by the expression of surrender in her lips? Men always love less. It depends on the woman. There are all sorts of women! Women savage at love, women clumsy at submitting! Women so sharp, so sneaky, that they always figure out how to get the men to love them so they’ll profit from their loving!
“I’d love to go on a trip,” Dora murmured.
The waiter, who hadn’t quite heard, asked if she had ordered something.
“No, sorry, just talking to myself, please don’t think I’m crazy.… I’m not crazy or sick.
The waiter went on to the next table and took care of some Swedes sitting there. They were two couples, and the city had made a good impression on them. Dora listened absently as they showered praise on Paris in perfect French. They raved about this first trip of theirs to a gentleman who had just happened in, talking at first from table to table, until the man got up and joined them at their table to assure himself that everything was going well for them and that his new Swedish friends were having a grand time. Dora noticed that the old man emphasized the word “Swedish” so the owner would realize they were foreigners.
“Tout baigne, mes amis les suédois?” The old man’s face grew blurry through Dora’s tears.
Dora asked the waiter for the check, paid, and went back out.
The street was empty; it was starting to snow. From far away, another woman was walking toward her, on the other side of the street. She was very pretty, young, sassy, thin, just the type to catch the Spaniard’s eye. Had she gone to visit Picasso? Could she be one of Picasso’s lovers, coming back from making love with him? No, no, he wasn’t cheating on her yet, Dora comforted herself, not yet.
Yes, it was a young woman, not exactly pretty, but by her shape she was the type of woman the artist might find attractive. Blond, sublime green eyes, shock of straight and slightly flaxen hair, a soft complexion. She wasn’t vulgar, and she knew how to walk—that is, she walked with a sway in her hips, as if she were dancing, undulating with the rhythmic disdain of a languid mermaid (that was the sort of cultured catcall men gave women in the tropics, the Great Genius had told her). Walking forward, it became evident that there was something scatterbrained about her sashay, with a dash of concealed, understated passion. “Face of a phony,” Dora thought; however, the other woman clacked her heels against the sidewalk with firm steps. Dora crossed to the sidewalk where the woman was walking.
They barely touched as they passed. The woman had given Dora a sidelong glance; Dora felt she had smiled at her impudently, even cynically. She backtracked and tugged on the woman’s arm. “You’re coming from Picasso’s studio, right? Tell me, you meddling nobody.”
“Hey, what’s with you, are you crazy? Let go of me, leave me alone!” She fended off the artist’s claws as best she could.
“Picasso, the name Picasso means something to you, right? Have you slept with him? What a bitch!” Dora’s eyes were bloodshot, she couldn’t control her jealousy, all her rage came foaming out at the corners of her mouth.
“Who, what? Please, let go of me. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Dora—dissociated from herself, disconnected from her true being, possessed by complexes and rancor yet merely the lover of the painter, who was already married to that plump blonde Marie-Thérèse Walter and who, on top of it all, was the father of a young girl and a good-for-nothing son whom the blonde insisted on treating as h
er own—went on stamping her feet and hurling insults.… Exhausted, weeping, at last she let go of the woman; but doubt was a thorn in her side, for deep down she was sure that the girl was shamelessly lying to her.
“She must have gone to see Picasso, she must have slept with him, he must have begged her to let him paint her.…” And he’d done his part in all of it, especially painting her, except that the face on the painting would never be that of this baby-faced whore, but hers, her own face, the face of the weeping woman. Weeping, weeping, weeping, echoing ceaselessly, unbearably, in an endless and vulgar litany. Her temples pounded in throbbing, shooting pain.
The other woman went away cursing Dora, turning around to look from time to time. She was carrying a notebook under her arm; it fell to the ground and she scurried to pick it up, then tucked it safely inside her large, time-worn leather purse.
Did this episode, which recently ran through her mind while she contemplated the chalk-white landscape of the Grand Canal, really happen like that, or was her memory beginning to play tricks on her? Were these constantly crumbling fragments of memories, or this series of memory lapses, a product of what she herself had seen of life, or were they just her attempts to string together stories others had told her after she was committed to the Sainte-Anne Hospital?
Bernard again asked her to share her thoughts.
She refused, giving him the slippery and scarcely believable answer, “I swear, I’m not thinking about anything.”
Now she only wanted to recall the moment she first met Kiki de Montparnasse at La Rotonde. Kiki was singing for American soldiers and passing the hat. Dora thought she was a great artist, though others scorned her. Kiki had modeled for Foujita, Modigliani, Derain, Soutine, and also for Picasso.
Kiki de Montparnasse was undeniably a beautiful woman, but heavyset, though very happily so. In fact, at that time, being fat was fashionable. She just wanted to caress those chubby cheeks and stare captivated at her lines, to pet her like you’d pet a stray puppy, not a wanton woman; she wasn’t voluptuous, no, not by any means. Her body was like an overstuffed cushion, inviting you to sink on in. Her hairstyle was laughable, even ridiculous, with straight hair and short bangs that came out limp from the shower, and her eyes were unusually small and totally impish.
Dora admired Kiki from the first photograph she saw of her, the one shot by Man Ray, Le Violon d’Ingres, where you can appreciate Kiki’s narrow waist, her fabulous backside, her wide hips, her exuberant ass. A terrific ass, a voluminous monstrosity, ready-made for the camera.
Dora saw herself in that photograph; if she didn’t watch her diet, before long her own rump would look like the model’s. So she wanted to meet Kiki, she looked her up and found her. They met in the summer of 1924 at a bar in Montparnasse. Afterwards, following the trail of that beautifully photographed backside and its owner, Dora luckily met the photographer, Man Ray. He was not pleasant at all the first time she approached him, in fact quite the contrary: rude and evasive. Until she told him her full name and he wanted to identify himself as a Jew, just like her. If her name was originally Markovitch, his was Radnitzky. Dora insisted that her last name was not Jewish in origin at all; her continual need to clarify this led to innumerable misunderstandings later on.
Man Ray listened, rather dully, to Dora’s tales of her life as an emerging (and in his opinion, unskilled) artist, so he paid little attention to her career as a Surrealist photographer, at least not at that moment; he was more attentive to her form and her oval face, leading him to be immediately captivated by her impatient (his words) and devastating beauty.
Bernard came over and placed his hand affectionately on her back; she didn’t pull back, and yet he perceived a gentle rejection, telling him that his gesture was unwelcome.
James had just prepared a wonderful breakfast for them with loving care. He invited them to the table. Dora had a ravenous appetite and had no qualms admitting it, with a cheerful smile, she always had an appetite that she ought to conceal, and besides, she gained weight too easily; she smiled again, this time with a touch of shame. The lukewarm sun climbed with agonizing slowness through a hazy sky.
She gained weight too fast, her hips, already round enough, were starting to look terrible, misshapen, grotesque, and this made her feel handicapped, unattractive. She knew she no longer enjoyed the youthfulness of Kiki de Montparnasse.
Now so much time has passed that today she’s practically an old woman, so she can eat whatever she feels like, can stuff herself with food, sweets, anything she wants. She ought to be more worried about diabetes than outward beauty. But precisely now, when she no longer has to please anyone, she’s lost her sense of taste, her discriminating palate. Before, everything she tasted was delightful, deliciously succulent. Even back during the trip to Venice, every mouthful tasted bitter and insipid, and nevertheless she needed to eat, to chew, to fill her belly, feel some warmth in her guts. Her guts would grow lukewarm, but just then her feet would get stiff with cold. She didn’t know why, for many years, her feet tended to get cold and upset her digestion.
James squatted in front of her and massaged her feet with his large, robust hands. Using his fist, he pressed the soles of her foot, from heels to toes. Her heels hurt her terribly, as if needles were constantly piercing them. “It’s the weight,” she told herself, “too much weight.”
And to think, she’d been a slender child, although, true enough, she had a very heavy, serious character; but as for weight, she was light as a feather, ethereal, had no appetite. Yet there was never a smile, never a toothy grin on her lips, and no one could swear to ever seeing her jump for joy. That’s not to say she was a depressive teenager, certainly not. She remembered herself instead as always stern but happy, though her hard, tough features alarmed people. Her chin hinted at this aspect of her personality: the deep-rooted toughness of the uprooted. Nevertheless, she pretended she was managing to float among the others, with the lightness her Argentine childhood imparted to her, very much despite her abundant, shiny, jet-black hair, her clear, sharp eyes, and her robust arms and legs.
As a teenager she was so light she could dance the tango, pretty much behind her mother’s back; she would dance cheek-to-cheek with a shadow, her back like a tigress’s, her legs coiled around the abyss.
Naturally, she danced the “respectable tango,” as the decent families called it back then, but in the end it was still a tango. “The sisters’ tango,” they also called it, and the most feverish and sensual moves took place in that sisterhood. The more refined a tango seemed, the more obscene; the obscenity was unleashed in the dancers’ fevered imaginations. I’m speaking of ballroom tango, not the slum tango of the outer districts.
Dora danced and danced, swept away by the rhythm of her ripening desire, turning, circling, losing herself in a whirlpool of kisses though they were nothing but dreams, shimmying and swaying so sweetly and smoothly she couldn’t stop even when her mother insisted, flying off and away through an open window.
“Every good story is written through an open window,” she thought with eyes closed, “every honest story.” Then she remembered the iron-barred window at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, in the Psychiatric Unit, and her desires to transform into a ringed-neck dove, and how she succeeded in doing so, in her own mind, when it was unhinged.
And with that same lightness, at the threshold of adolescence she reached Paris. As soon as she set foot on the sidewalks of Saint-Germaine-des-Prés she lost this misty gift, even as she began, on the other hand, to melt herself down and pour herself into a mold, or to rid herself of all the worries inherited from an imploding family. Then her body became transparent, fugitive, stunning in its flight. Her body became a sort of perpetual wanderer.
She walked all over Paris with the voices purring to her inside her head, a genuine chorus, a whole crowd addressing her from within her head, familiarly. She used to leave the Lycée Molière and get lost, wandering with her friends for hours all up and down Avenue Foch. She loved go
ing her own way, roaming around with no set goal, getting lost in Paris like anybody else, mercurial and ordinary; and thanks to this very ordinariness, which adolescence gave her and old age would take away, she could feel supremely natural and free.
Like every intelligent girl, Dora aspired to learn more and more, to know everything. What she desired and treasured most of all was knowledge.
She started going to get-togethers, what they called “surprise parties,” and there she met Louis Chavance, another great artist in a city full of artists, famous playwright, film editor, actor; she considered him her first lover, with whom she frequented the Café de Flore and whom she ambiguously accompanied everywhere. There she also met the writer Georges Bataille, another great and unforgettable lover, and in this period Picasso stepped up, unsurprisingly, or better said, not shockingly. Because Dora intuitively knew that he was the one she had always been unconsciously waiting for.
At that time Dora wore a pageboy haircut, and so her profile lost even more of her former imbalance. Her excess of spirit began to weigh down her arms, her legs, her cheeks. Dora wanted to be on her own and she moved to a place she would immortalize in her photographs: 29 Rue d’Astorg, with her mother.
It was probably then, after she moved, that she began to lose interest in superficialities; only the most profound things astonished her, and she adopted an unprejudiced attitude; pumping others for information, she got rid of consistency and seriousness, though she became noticeably more mysterious, because she never revealed any secrets. However, others suspected that she was storing up the flame of desire—the double flame that Octavio Paz wrote about, the flame of desire and the flame of love—and that only a demonic force could capture her and set her afire forevermore. Her yearning for knowledge turned into a ceaseless pursuit of desire and love. In the meantime, an artist was born.
Max Jacob saw her as an Etruscan lady and heaped flattery on her. Max was certainly an angel, but he couldn’t escape the Nazi camp; his singed wings weren’t up to it. He died there, like everyone else, like his dearest sister, of pneumonia and typhus, crushed by life. Dora could never forgive herself, though none of it was her fault. Maybe they could have done something, but they didn’t.… This has always been her most painful memory, her torment.