by Zoe Valdes
His biographers have been very careful not to bear it in mind.
Few are unaware that Pablo Picasso had to be begged and kept people waiting when time came to help his fellow Spaniards in the struggle against fascism, which is not to say that he had anything to do with fascism himself. He, like many others, kept quiet, or rather circumspect, for a long time. Until the day three German police entered his studio and insulted him, calling him “a degenerate, a Communist, and a Jew.” It would be unjust, therefore, to not mention that it was Dora Maar who managed to convince him that he had to do something through his art. Another fact too often whitewashed in those daunting historical tomes that shower Picasso with praise and flattery while reducing Dora to the role of the unhinged lover.
I can imagine Dora, in her big-shouldered leather coat and those clunky shoes with the hollow wooden heels, begging Picasso to make some small gesture, even a simple statement of solidarity. Finally he did so, and that’s what counts. But Max Jacob wasn’t saved, and Picasso could have done it, with his enormous influence. He waited around and did nothing. His waiting made all the difference.
However, the Great Genius didn’t waste much time on great events that would have made him more famous than he already was, being too caught up instead in his orgies and in his engravings, which so obsessed him. In any case, there will always be a good pretext to excuse him; after all, it’s Pablo Picasso. And in the end, nothing better to erase memories of dark doings than sex and the pristine impact of art. Art and the death’s head that Picasso idolized.
I’m tossing and turning, can’t get to sleep. Paul Éluard, a traitor. Paul Éluard, the author of the poem “Liberty.” The poem that for years—through all the long years of my exile—I’ve been reciting to everyone who needs to understand what liberty is: life and desire. Art and life.
This is history, too: disillusionment the hard way, censored rage.
What else must Picasso’s secretary, Jaume Sabartés, have seen? He must have seen much more than this; what else? I ask this relentlessly. But he had to keep quiet; he chose to keep quiet. The poet, the secretary, had to remain loyal to the Great Genius, the man-monument, the historic artist. I capitalize “Genius,” and rightly so, I think, for of course that’s what he was; but doubt creeps in when I write “man,” a word encompassing the simple grandeur of human beings who are honest and fight for truth.
Dora, however, didn’t begin to doubt Picasso’s “manhood” until the day he stopped gazing attentively at her body, and she noticed he was starting to forget the delicious curves and hollows of her nakedness. Picasso stopped noticing her, stopped desiring her, while becoming enraptured with her mind. Or perhaps that was all she had left, her irksome and insufferable intellect.
Meanwhile, her body grew more and more rigid. Like a cracked terracotta statue. She walked beside him, and he turned away from her, or she sensed that he was turning away from her. It wasn’t like the man had suddenly stopped being masculine and virile. No, the man had ceased to desire her and to desire himself. The man wasn’t interested in the war either, or in the suffering of others unless it was art; he dreamed of peace and painted it daily. The man stopped being a man and became the great, historical artist, the Great Genius, the renowned property of the public. “My party is my painting,” he smugly proclaimed.
His kisses weren’t the same, he began to possess her even more brusquely, savagely. The little man became a minotaur, snorting, puffing, on top of her body. He scratched at her armpits until blood flowed in thin rivulets. He scratched at her breasts. With his nails he scrawled on Bristol board, “Dora Maar’s blood.” And the stain bled into the paper. He gleefully painted with her blood.
Dora tried to force herself to cry, but she couldn’t. Dora squeezed out her tears, but they refused to run down her cheeks. Dora acted out a grimace of pain, but her shame undercut her efforts. Then Picasso shook her violently by her black-and-blue shoulders: “Weep, Dora, weep, Dora!”
The woman, at that instant, recalled her father’s words, “Observe, observe, Dora!” in the distant observatory of her childhood, off in Buenos Aires.
Her splendid body, eggless as the body of Lautrémont’s female shark, had ceased to inspire the Master; but her tears, her suffering, fired his excitement and roused him to paroxysms. She sighed, relieved. This wasn’t the end. No, not yet. As long as she shed tears, he would not abandon her.
She could understand that her real power consisted in the fact that, up until this moment, of all his women, she had been the most often painted, the most often portrayed. But, instantly erased by her own evanescent, treacherously silent tears. “Stolent.” Silent, stolen tears.
James and me. Paris, 2010
I hadn’t seen James Lord for quite some time. I hadn’t called Bernard again either. The novel was on hold, time was passing; time flies, their lives fly, my life flies.
I was afraid I might not see them again, and I foresaw precisely that happening: my never seeing them again. Then the phone rang. I spoke for a while with the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s widow, Miriam Gómez, who lives in London. I hung up thinking about a thousand things at once. I took a bath, got out a black dress and put it on, and left for the Ars Atelier gallery on Rue Quincampoix.
That night there was a private preview there of an exhibition by the Cuban Surrealist Jorge Camacho, who was paying homage to another Surrealist painter, the Chilean Roberto Matta. The exhibition was called “Le Grand Transparent.” It was magnificent. Camacho’s fine-grained drawings did honor to the title, exemplifying a grand transparency of line, a clarity of time in the alchemy of verses and words drawn from the depths of dreams.
When the gallery closed, a group of us decided to go eat at a Lebanese restaurant recommended by my friend Tania, who collects art.
Halfway through dinner, I learned that James Lord had died. I couldn’t believe it. Impossible. Another Cuban painter, Ramón Leandro, passed the news along to me, and he assured me it was true. I didn’t want to accept it. It couldn’t be.
I went home and sat down to write, and to really think about them. About James, about Bernard, about Dora.… Until I was seized by nervous, hysterical, absurd sobbing. I decided to take a shower and let out all my tears under the hot water.
I wept, heartbroken, conjuring up Dora, James, and Bernard; thinking about the trip to Venice that she had so desired and that Bernard and James had made a present of to her to make her wish come true.
I barely slept, dawn caught me sitting on the sofa, my legs drawn up against my stomach, staring blankly at the dawn-red ceiling. I waited until a reasonable hour, then phoned James’s house. No one answered. I didn’t dare call Bernard. To this day I haven’t tried again.
James Lord had died. “He’s dead,” I recited dully, achingly.
I began to reread his book, Picasso and Dora, at first in French, then I downloaded it in Spanish.
I read and read the French text nonstop, my face wet with tears. Now that James is gone, there’s a new dimension to his writing, it has acquired the weightiness of a last word spoken by someone who will never speak again, the treasured echo of a voice I’ll never hear again, though he never spoke much and was a rather quiet sort, or maybe I should say “reserved,” not quite the same thing as “quiet.” He’s dead, and we won’t be able to meet anymore at his apartment, and I won’t be able to hear his asides on Dora, Picasso, Surrealism, and Cubism, or let him watch me tenderheartedly, or listen to his cloying, coy praise for the color of my eyes.
I won’t have James to ask about Dora anymore, won’t be able to find out whether that trip was the total nightmare he made it out to be in his book or whether, as Bernard declared in our first meeting, “Nothing at all happened, she just felt more comfortable around me than around James. She and I just became reacquainted, and we got on fabulously, and we shared stories and jokes. We had fun the whole time, while James got left behind. But that’s not strange, she wanted to give him a good thump on the head, teach him a
lesson, and I was a good means for her to do that. Dora was pretty malicious, not that it was easy to spot that side of her. Really, we laughed a lot. She came back to Paris with us in the same car. She got carsick. The car broke down a few times, and while James was doing everything he could to fix it, with no luck, we’d get down from the vehicle and split our sides laughing, reminiscing about people we hung out with, like Picasso and Marie-Laure de Noailles. Dora had the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard, as I’ve told you before, and of all the Surrealist women I knew, she was the most intelligent.”
I never asked Bernard what he thought about Picasso as a friend, as an ordinary man without the protective cover of being the great artist. He wasn’t forthcoming with details, either, but he always insisted that Dora was a difficult woman. Too cerebral, excessively intelligent. Her intelligence had displaced her libido. Too coldly rational, too aware of her body’s terrifying temperature. An extremely dangerous temperature for a man who sweated from hot spells in the middle of winter. Dora harassed him with her breath, but he needed her harassment, just as he needed to have kids scampering around him, the imaginary kids who played in the courtyard of his house on Grands Augustins, who wandered about all day long in his head. Three wars and Dora had aged him. Unforgivable.
“Why didn’t she have children with Picasso?” I wonder. “After she broke off with Picasso, why didn’t she establish a stable relationship with James Lord?” And I answer my own questions. “Her child was Picasso, because he was her everything, her double, he was her womb, her sexuality, her birth; he was her desire, her pleasure, and her acute suffering. He was her only child, and he was the death of her.”
“My children, good or bad, have their own lives and never deceive or bring shame on their father. And you have a lot under your control, my love,” Picasso reminded her in the home of his friend and collector Douglas Cooper.
At which she angrily shot back, “Yes, a whole orphanage.”
She could be tough with him, but she refused to be friends with anyone who expressed doubts about Picasso and wasn’t up to her standards.
James loved Picasso as much as she did, though not with the same level of devotion. James loved her in that she was an extension of Picasso’s genius. She had sensed this from the first day she met James in Picasso’s studio and, later, when the cigarette lighter incident took place.
Dora never entirely liked James, but she loved him, because she knew he loved Picasso through her. And there couldn’t be any relationship between her and any other person that didn’t go through Picasso.
Today I confirmed it on the Internet: James Lord is dead. He will never read this book. It took me so long, so affreusement long to finish it. Affreusement was a favorite word of that man who enlisted as an American soldier during World War II without a second’s hesitation, solely because he wanted to meet Pablo Picasso so desperately, so vehemently. Affreusement. “Horriblemente” in Spanish; in English, “frightfully.” I prefer the French. My language is abandoning me, and I begin to find myself possessed by the language in which I sought refuge, in this city that had given me a second life.
When I asked him if he had loved Picasso, he replied, with the submissiveness of a frustrated artist and lover, that he had loved him affreusement.
“I was his sleeping soldier.” A metaphor to sweeten the deception of pretending to sleep so that Picasso would gaze on him.
“And did you love Dora?”
“I loved Dora more than anyone in the world.” His eyes teared up. “With Picasso I was audacious and in awe. With Dora, I was just thankful and surprised.”
In his book Picasso and Dora, Lord did not leave out the story of the kiss Picasso gave him, a rare thing to see between two men in the United States but fairly common in Europe. James felt that this kiss signified much than a show or a declaration of friendship.
“Was Picasso your lover?”
“Not at all. I was Picasso’s lover. Platonic, of course, and perhaps just a bit more, as can only happen within the mirages produced by art.”
“And Dora? Did you isolate her from the rest of the world, or was it Picasso who monopolized her and swallowed her up?”
“I didn’t isolate Dora, and Picasso didn’t monopolize her. Dora was a broken woman; I suspect she’d always been so. When I met her, she hadn’t yet withdrawn completely from society. She did that bit by bit, gradually. Her definitive break took place long after we returned from our trip to Venice. We talked every day by telephone, we met almost daily; of course we talked about painting and Picasso, which became our mutual obsessions, but especially hers. The separation broke her, she couldn’t console herself, she harbored too much bitterness and resentment. Dora wanted to be a famous painter, since Picasso was the one who steered her from photography toward painting. She was sure she would be recognized, sooner or later, as an accomplished artist, but she never was. Maybe some day! Some of her paintings weren’t bad at all, though I preferred her drawings and watercolors. Curiously, she never wanted to show me any of her photos.”
“Notice that you just said ‘I preferred’—why does a woman, a woman artist, always have to be judged, evaluated, and pigeonholed by the men who supposedly love her? Did you love her as an artist? How could you love her as a woman, then? Aren’t you gay?”
James Lord rubbed his hands slowly, deliberately, his eyes fixed straight ahead on the wall, avoiding my gaze.
“In a certain sense I loved her as a man loves a woman. It was a great, loving friendship she and I had. I loved her without feeling a desire to possess her physically because, to be frank, I have never felt attracted to women. Dora knew that, but she may have also felt it would be different with her. I am a gay man who loved Dora Maar, if that’s how you want to look at it. There was one moment when I did feel physical desire for her: on the island of Porquerolles, on the beach. She was emerging from the sea, like a water goddess; she looked great in the sea, and she knew it. But my sexual and intellectual infatuation soon passed. I have loved a few women because I wanted to be like them.”
This time I was the one rubbing my hands against my coat. I’d gotten cold and felt nervous. I persisted, “I read in an interview you did some time back that you had erotic dreams about Picasso.”
“Yes, I did, I still do, I still caress Picasso in my dreams, and he penetrates me, like a bull.… The bull, for me, is Picasso’s desire.” He stopped, blushing. “Which, honestly, is what the famous painting of the bull possessing Dora Maar conjures up. I didn’t just love Picasso, I was obsessed with him. Even when I was awake I dreamed these erotic images, and I can still imagine his hand squeezing my penis.… Sorry, forgive me. I once saw him in his underpants, in his studio, he didn’t make the slightest advance toward me, but if he had I would have responded more than blissfully, euphorically, would have surrendered completely.”
James Lord forced a melancholy smile.
Now, in the deep of night, cloaked in this shadowy silence, I recall the hazy light floating in the air that afternoon, and his hands still rubbing each other, his long legs crossed, his shiny English loafers, the slight tremor in his right foot. Straight torso leaning back into the impeccably white sofa, full head of handsome white hair, misty eyes, and a reflection of Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry in those eyes. Père Ubu, the Surrealist animal in Dora Maar’s photo, bearing the whole weight of hyperreality.
“Did you know that Picasso loved to say, ‘I’m a lesbian’?”
“Of course I knew, I often heard him say it!”
It was one of his pithy expressions. We both burst out laughing.
“He also used the line, ‘Painting is just my way of keeping a diary,’” I added.
A hush fell. Dense.
NOTES FROM MY RED VELVET JOURNAL:
Dora. Venice, 1958 / Bernard. Paris, 2008 / Me. Paris and Venice, 2008
Dora
I leave the hotel and decide I’m going to take a gondola ride. While the gondolier shimmers through the water with his large oar,
and long before he turns a corner intoning, “Oweeeeee!” in his young, virile voice, I sense for the first time in years that I’m recovering the placidity of pleasure, I feel pleasure again settling in my body, I rediscover my legs and remember how the writer, filmmaker, and artist Jean Cocteau, dressed as a character from one of his works, affecting nobility with princely gestures and flittering a fistful of courtesies, decked out like a mysterious duke, prodigious in praises, used to compliment my legs. Also the actor Jean-Louis Barrault, inevitably half-undressed, approached me to bestow the most unexpected flattery and even sassy, fiery comments in praise of my sensuality, adding that my gaze seemed to have been carved by the day’s sea mist.
“You have a lovely mouth,” Barrault whispered, and I trembled within, though I showed myself strong as a castle wall on the outside, muscles all tensed, as if I were a marble statue, my neck a column of Murano glass, my face angled back, my expression evasive and aquiline.
“Yes, quite a beautiful mouth, lost in thought, reflective,” Jean Cocteau agreed, while finishing a detailed sketch of my face on paper and in spoken words.
I sense that the old woman inside me is claiming more and more space, and yet I was always old, the younger I was the older I felt, or guessed myself to be.
I know that I didn’t appeal to either of them, Cocteau or Barrault; I’ve never appealed to men with the blazing desire they demand. Picasso loved me for my intelligence, but he didn’t approve of my body. He made a pastime of calling me fat, saying, “Better watch out, Dora, you’ve put on weight,” then snatching the spoon right out of my hands not to let me overeat. He didn’t like skinny women, either, though; he couldn’t stand a woman whose bones jutted into his skin.
I yearned to be as beautiful as Leonor Fini, seductive and vibrant; not so much a painter, anyone would agree, as a cocotte, a Victorian courtesan, a Pigalle Quarter whore from the times of Toulouse-Lautrec, with torn stockings around her ankles, a cat nestling between her thighs, shapely, strong legs that looked carved from tourmaline. Leonor kept after me, insisting that I photograph her. She never found out I was dying to do so, but what I most wanted was not to seem unwelcome. Leonor Fini was more Argentine than any of us have been for ages, and much more Surrealist than Remedios Varo or me, more translucent, given her lucidity. A woman of anthracite, sometimes of diamond or fire; an opaline, pearlescent woman.