by Zoe Valdes
When Picasso abandoned me, Leonor Fini was always there à portée de main, at my fingertips, to console me, but I didn’t want her consolation or any other woman’s. I only wanted to be around men, and I accepted them as a string of punishments.
This was how I took Georges Hugnet, the poet. He was impressed by my Surrealist photos, the ones Picasso loathed, at least that’s what he said, though deep down he didn’t really feel any disdain for them. Hugnet was moved by seeing my photos, so he published my 29, rue d’Astorg in a collection of postcards. Every inch a man, good, patient, intelligent, a faithful man. His friendship did me more good than bad, though all my friendships with men, without exception, harmed me. However, like the good creature of contradictions that I am, I find men easier to put up with as friends than women. Women I can only love, like a man.
Georges Hugnet died before his death, faded away in life, young at heart though old in years. We shut ourselves in for hours at my apartment on Rue de Savoie; his wife never understood our relationship, but she didn’t give a damn what might happen so long as he was happy, and I think she likes me because she recognizes that I did make him happy, I distracted her husband and kept the worst from happening, kept him from getting bored with life, and she owes me that debt of gratitude. I photographed him, painted him. But I never managed to capture how very beautiful and deep he was. I have never been satisfied with my photographs of men, or with my paintings of them. What good is personal satisfaction when you’ve lived with an undisputed genius? Everything I might do will look small and ugly next to his extraordinary art.
Who cares if I was Georges Hugnet’s lover? Nothing of him belonged to me, unlike every particle in Picasso’s body. Nor did any part of me infiltrate Hugnet’s soul. A young soul, virtuous and sincere to the end.
It is no secret that my whole life changed the day Picasso discovered Man Ray’s photograph of me, the one in which I wear a feathered headdress and a soft gaze. Everything changed then, the day my independence was fated to be wiped out and I was to be nullified as an artist. I don’t know how Man Ray could capture that gaze, I never gazed sweetly at anyone. Picasso should have reproached me for it. Picasso, who hated the sad women who looked at him with the eyes of slaughtered sheep. Picasso loved me through that photo. No, excuse me, Picasso loved that photo first, not me. The thing that existed for him, the object of his admiration, was the photo. And then he wanted to love the woman Man Ray had photographed. For Picasso love always was always filtered through art, through his artistic eye. Rather than a weeping woman, instead of that fanciful nothingness that is the artistic whole, for him I was a Man Ray photograph, an image of a woman with a falsely sweet gaze, sensual, wearing feathers on her head, with full lips, and the perfect hands, the tiny hands of a porcelain doll.
A primitive woman floated in that photograph, which superficially pretended to be an image of me, though it wasn’t me, it wasn’t the static, rigid woman I am now; it was still the water-woman, a torrent of watery clay. That image was the chance product of observation and contemplation: Man Ray asked for a particular pose—or rather, he suggested one, since he never imposed anything—and so I was captured forever as the object that would seduce the Great Genius.
Picasso fell in love with the Amazon, the savage woman, the gruff, stubborn woman who skittered to hide behind feathers while putting on a sugary-sweet, blurry face. My hands turned into trophies by the strength of Picasso’s prodigious imagination. Tiny hands that didn’t square with my uncouth-looking face, a face to tone down and put on display in the glass exhibit case that the god of painters needed to equip himself with a feminine ideal and quench his thirst, though it be with a single drop from the water-woman, the woman who would become his perpetual watering hole.
I always preferred the other photo Man Ray took, the gentle one that shows my face plain, without all that photographic manipulation: my pupils float in the teary lakes of my eyes, my mouth looks slightly open, loopy, my nose is as delicate, my nostrils more closed than in the earlier picture, eyebrows are thin, everything is a line in this face I used to have, wrapped between my arms draped in black cloth, my small ear barely to be seen, like a skittish little bird. Here, in this simple photo, I am a genuinely liquid, crystalline woman; here I’m already the woman Picasso stole for his paintings, all tears, all lines, all reverie, all gut feeling.
Picasso and I met in the middle of one of my most famous weeping sessions. In a film. After that photo by Man Ray, when we both aspired to find ourselves in the world we sensed in premonitions, a world conceptualized only by Surrealism. The only thing left was for us to meet in a novel or in a film.
And the latter happened: he was in the audience, watching, and I was up on screen. Not as an actress, not at all. But as the set photographer. Our chance meeting was on the set of Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange. When I photographed Sylvia weeping as she watched the train’s departure, I was forever frozen there, recast as that image. I photographed everything my doleful dreams sensed about Sylvia. I shot her weeping disconsolately. Picasso saw her weeping in the movie hall; he must have been deeply moved to see a woman weeping so copiously, without trying to hide her tears, exposing her weeping as if she were spreading her legs, naked, whimpering shamelessly, immodestly, healthily, with unwonted wildness. Sylvia crushed a handkerchief into her lips, chewed the corners of its tear-stained cloth. The handkerchief opened up like a white rose between her pearly teeth. From the other end of the movie hall, hidden in darkness, I watched the same scene, delighting in my work, and my vulva went wet as I thought of the beautiful photograph I had gotten of Sylvia Bataille.
I don’t remember if I said hello to Picasso before I settled into my seat. Later on he said that I did, that we nodded to each other from a distance, and that afterwards he made out who I was in the dark by my shape, by the impetuosity of my body, and he especially recalled tracing my silhouette in his mind. It was just as he described and painted me later: in his eyes I was silently weeping. So even when he was a stranger I was already weeping in his mind, in the deepest and most incorruptible part of his artist’s soul, wailing for the man who intuited I would love him till I died, and the man I was wailing for was none other than himself, though not even I knew who it would be at the time, and yet there he was, living and breathing just a few steps from me. And he was already sure that he would be the one I’d go crazy for. There I was, a woman in the movie hall, weeping like a Mary Magdalene, waiting on the Master, the Great Genius, who would pluck the petals from the white rose between my teeth and form me once again into a great and famous portrait though I was nothing but a woman, desired and then forgotten. Without knowing it, I yearned to have his ferocious will conquer mine, I hoped that the immensity of his talent would snuff out my own, I was overwhelmed by the power flowing from this man whom I invented and desired, who had not yet defined the vast and restless outer reaches of his shadowy power.
I won’t deny what no one can have failed to notice, that the focus of my work, the core of my life, has been the twisted image of tragedy, which hasn’t unfolded in all of its splendor because I was never brave enough, nor on the other hand meticulously methodical enough, to balance the solidity of art and the adventure of love. Two opposing forces, which together, locked in a wild struggle, destroy the spontaneity and freedom of fragile beings and so create the true tragedy, which is that hostilities persist forever.
The day I met Picasso—he could tell the story better than I could—he even told it to Françoise Gilot, who later told and wrote the story in turn to everyone, right and left. That day, I was still gullible; not exactly naïve, but too trusting. I should digress and let you know that I suffered and was terribly jealous of her. However, to be fair, I must admit she could give Picasso what he longed for, what he most missed: youth and children. More rebelliousness and personal egotism. Without her rebelliousness, without her egotism, if she hadn’t ousted him from her life as she did, Picasso would have gotten bored and turned her into
another pushover, a patsy who killed herself in the same pitiful way all the other women did. Picasso never stopped making his women jealous of his art, but with Françoise Gilot he suffered exactly what he’d made some of us go through: aloofness, indifference, disdain, humiliation. She offered him a supple, almost adolescent love that later morphed into a motherly, vestal love, greatly strengthening his love for her, because it came from a mother, the person to whom nothing can be denied. The person who gives life itself continuity, eternity by bloodline. And that’s something that only comes with children. No work of art will do it. Of all his women, Françoise proved the most skilled.
In October 1935, I was a fresh, daring, beautiful young woman. I knew it, and I knew I could use my beauty to arouse strange emotions in men, charming them with more than just my body, for my intelligence and brightness shined through even if I sheathed myself in a heavy black cloth dress, even with my shiny black hair combed straight back, even in clunky high-heels. Men would stare at me, and their stares would pass right through my clothes, undressing me. They realized they found me irresistible at first glance, and after a second look they’d start to find something deeply unsettling about me, something that wouldn’t let them forget me. I became the drug that every man needs to reaffirm his virility, but their virility numbed their souls.
I walked into the café Les Deux Magots and immediately noticed a pair of large round eyes gaping at my body. I didn’t know who was staring at me nor did I care to know. All I cared was how hard he was staring and how I reacted by bringing out my bestial side. I tried to appear all sweetness and light, even making my face friendly, I traipsed around the café as if dancing to a luscious melody, a waltz, a tango, a minuet. The large round eyes followed my every move.
I don’t know who he is, he doesn’t know who I am. Paul Éluard answers when the stranger quietly asks a question, or so I guess. Paul Éluard whispers to him that I am Dora Maar, a sturdy soul, a Surrealist soul, an indomitable woman who beat Georges Bataille at his own game and tossed him aside (when in reality he was the one who left me for Colette).
And yet I walked into the Les Deux Magots meaning to yield to the man of my life if by any chance I met him, if fate threw us together, intending to throw myself at his feet. I longed for this meeting to take place, because I had been living obdurately and exclusively for the moment when I would no longer have a doubt that this was man I’d been imagining since adolescence.
The large round eyes then climbed up and up my body, nibbled my ears. They paused at my eyes. I resisted their magnetic gaze without batting a lash. They dropped slightly down and to one side from my right ear to fix on my lips, as if the stranger were shooting thousands of tiny needles into my skin.
I wore a pair of black gloves embroidered with pink rosettes; I took the glove off of my right hand, and then the round black eyes took hold of my waist and forced me to sit.
I opened my purse, pulled out the knife with the sharpened point. I placed my left hand, still gloved, on the table and carved its outline into the wooden table with the point of the knife. The large round eyes capered about the table’s edge. Eyes closed, I tried to plunge the knife into the wood between my fingers, leaving success up to chance. I barely felt any pain, almost nothing. When I opened my eyes, the outer edge of my hand was bleeding and my tortured fingers throbbed.
The stranger’s large, odd eyes drilled into the drops of blood. The glove steeped in rich red fluid. The large round eyes now sat astride my spirit. In front of me sat the stranger, who was no stranger at all. It was none other than Pablo Picasso, demanding my blood-soaked glove. He wasn’t the sort of man, much less the sort of painter, who would needed to have an object to be able to recall it. Picasso had a memory for objects like no one else, because even before things existed he had already divined them. No object escaped his visual ability or his memory. He always kept my glove in the case where he stored his treasured fetishes. The valuable thing about my glove was the blood, obviously. I found that out later when I saw him dipping his brush in the cotton pads saturated with my menstrual flow.
Just as I later found out that the valuable thing about me wasn’t the wrapping, which is me, but my heart, that pulsing mass crudely congealed into an unexplored mound, a virgin landscape.
I thought he would ask for my hand, and he took my glove. That little, bald man with the face of a mad monkey, abnormally wide eyes, acerbic tongue, pants hiked up too high for my taste, skinny arms compared to his rather broad torso, grim, but with enormous power in his black eyes, with great manly power in the way he grabbed the glove and stuffed it into his pocket, determined to keep that object at all cost, he left without saying one word. At least, all I remember are those dark eyes, like two bright red, dripping nails from Christ’s crucifix.
Some time afterwards, that man, the owner of those bulging, excruciating eyes would be laughing with me as we embraced for the first time in bed. I was twenty-four springtimes old, and he was, on the outside, a shriveled old man of fifty-four battered winters.
Even so, I already felt I was intellectually older than he was. And he continued to be a child playing his favorite game: loving you until he tore you to bits. The child who would never give it up. The child who would torture you with his other favorite game, the one between brushes and a blank canvas.
Bernard, nearly tepid
Bernard took one of her hands in his. They were sitting at a table in front of a small café near the gallery where some of Balthus’s paintings were on exhibit.
Dora allowed him to seize her hand, barely noticing; since her solitary gondola ride, her mind had taken refuge in the past, her past with Picasso, and she couldn’t stop thinking in an irksome litany how much she would have loved to have made this trip with him.
It was in the past, precisely, that she and Picasso had traveled to Italy; he had invited her, just so, springing it suddenly on her, the way he always gave surprises: “Let’s go to Florence and see all those masterpieces.” But once in Genoa, crabby and visibly fed up, he started badmouthing Botticelli, Rafael, Michelangelo, and the rest, shouting that he wouldn’t give a penny for any of that hideous rubbish, that he wouldn’t trade the lot of them for his one Cézanne. And then they had to clear out because his fury tormented him and ruined their visit by driving her mad.
“Your hand is so small,” Bernard said.
She withdrew it. It wasn’t the first time he had noticed how small her hands were.
Bernard felt a desire to describe those fingers, the nails like delicate scales about to detach. No, Dora hadn’t been as beautiful as her friend Leonor Fini, but he had no doubts about her obvious mystique, all concentrated in her eyes, in her lips, in her hands, but above all in her voice. He would have loved to be a great writer so he could rapturously describe the tone of Dora’s voice. Clouds resounding in the throat of a sparrow; incisive and torrential, watery as air laden with fat raindrops in a downpour. Then he asked her a semi-foolish question, as if to get her to loosen up and speak candidly.
“Dora, what do you expect from James?”
Leaden silence.
It wasn’t exactly a question she could easily answer.
“Didn’t you know he and I were a couple? Of course you must know we’re just very close friends now.”
She turned away, fixing her half-closed eyes on a pigeon that was pecking at a pebble and continually cleaning its beak.
“Do you love him?”
She turned, now, to look at him straight on.
“Yes, to be honest. At one time I thought we might live together,” she murmured.
“You thought? You don’t think so anymore? Would you like him to marry you?” Bernard hesitated before asking such a daring question point-blank.
She shrugged. She was like a frightened child; he’d never seen her like this. Never before had he dared to emotionally corner the woman who so humbled him as an artist.
“I’m not sure James would want to.” Bernard wanted to hurt her, plung
e the knife into the wound.
She put a quick stop to it.
“Please, Bernard, leave it. What possible interest is this of yours? Do you want to hear my confession?”
“I’d like to write, become a great writer, I’d love it if you could be the main character in my greatest work, that’s all,” he stammered.
“Oh, please, no, I was only someone’s model, the clay that Pablo Picasso molded. Isn’t that enough? For me it is. I’m nobody now. Whatever I managed to become during my relationship with Picasso, I’m not that now, it’s all gone and forgotten, I’m worthless. Find another model you can use, I don’t know, some queen perhaps. Queen Margot might be good for a thick novel with hundreds of pages; or a king, make up a king with palaces and courtesans. Or go for Pablo Picasso himself.” She loved to savor her tormentor’s name. “Pablo Picasso.” She also enjoyed switching suddenly and speaking to her friends in a formal, distant tone. “Please, Bernard. You have no right.”
The silk ribbon around her hair came undone; the breeze tussled her untied locks. She modestly hurried to retie them into an austere bun.
“All James and I have in common is our friendship with Picasso, he must have explained that to you. We both feel an intense love for his work. We’re linked by our memories of that era; nothing more. I love James, perhaps I got my hopes up, but now I know that we could never have anything real between us. The fact that someone is here with us confirms that fact.”