by Zoe Valdes
Neglect was everywhere, the vault was under restoration; filtering through a stained glass window, the sun described a cone of light on a bench in the center of the nave and bounced playfully across the lintel. A thick layer of ash-white dust covered the benches, statues, and altars. I walked around the nave. Might Dora have visited this little church? I pulled out the binder of notes Bernard had photocopied for me, searched for any mention of the church in them. Yes, indeed, they’d all been here together.
I imagined how the three of them had walked in and how, after casing it, stopping in front of every niche, they’d decided to sit down, separately or all together on the same bench, to enjoy a moment of spiritual contemplation as they gazed on every detail in the architecture and the religious objects that adorned the place.
In all likelihood Dora had prayed here. She’d become mawkishly Catholic, though she hadn’t yet reached the extreme religious befuddlement that later made her objectionable. Nevertheless, even back then, she like Max Jacob had set off on the path toward holiness by way of astrology, mainly because she was living such a lonely life after leaving the man she most yearned for, the very one who had brought about the deep, disturbing split between her soul and her body.
She had found it almost impossible to admit that she couldn’t even give children to the man she loved, because of her sterility. It was even worse to know for certain that she’d never have what Marie-Thérèse Walter did: a son or daughter as proof of her love with the artist—though not even this fact consoled the bosomy blonde for the loss of her absent husband’s love, not when he’d always promised to marry her but never did. Marie-Thérèse killed herself four years after Picasso’s death. Dora comprehended her desperation, understood the terrible deep chasm that was left after giving up life with Picasso, after his total disappearance. Because she had also edged dangerously close to that cliff.
Jacqueline Roque, his last wife, also couldn’t resist and refused to keep on living after the Great Genius’s death. She was a strange accident in Picasso’s life. And such an accident could only end one way: causing a bigger accident.
Dora had loved life so much—and he had killed that love.
Picasso never asked Dora if she wanted to have children, but she also didn’t try to, or push him to live a domesticated life as if she expected to. And then, in the end, she learned she’d never be able. Even so, she harbored the hope he might ask her, might beg her, “I want you to give me babies.” If she’d been able to conceive, maybe she would have given him some, though it would only have been to hold onto him a bit longer, since Dora, so cerebral, wasn’t the sort of woman to bear or raise children. To top it all, she doubted that if she’d had them Picasso would have given them the time they needed. What would her children with Picasso have been like? She often wondered. “Children to destroy” was the conclusion Dora had always come to in the past.
On various occasions she smiled sarcastically to herself and silently made sardonic fun of the clearly loveless situations she’d had to put up with. Such as the time, for example, when the Great Genius was telling his friends that his lover Dora obeyed him quicker than his dog Kazbek, an Afghan hound so lazy it barely stirred when Picasso gave it a command. While the dog ignored him doggedly, Dora, to the contrary, ran to his side at the slightest hint of being needed, obeyed him better than his pet, and this filled Picasso with immeasurable joy. “She’s just a little girl, like a puppy, a little pet. Throw her a bone, and she’ll go running to find it and bring it back to you,” he boasted without batting an eye, perversely amazed.
When they made love and he was on top of her, he’d make fun of her expressions, angrily pinch the skin of her neck, of her breasts, leaving excruciating bruises on her. The more he satisfied his libido, and the closer he came to the glory of orgasm, the more bitter he became, and then, rather than giving free rein to his lust—which wouldn’t have meant involving himself lovingly, either—he violated her. He was more in love with violence as an artistic convention than with love itself, as art.
It irritated him when she made all those idiotic faces—according to the sarcastic remarks he threw at her in the middle of the sexual act—though he also deplored the way her body was always so rigid, staring straight at him, cold as ice.
Was he capable of ejaculating and emptying himself into her like that, studying her in that way, denigrating her with such cruelty at that most crucial moment in the act of love? It was hard to imagine it possible. He delayed, and delayed, and the longer he delayed, the crueler his thrusting on top of her became. She would dry up and bleed, her heart would turn to a ball of iron.
For Dora, those few days in Venice helped her to understand precisely when she ceased to be an artist, instinctively open to exploring art and passion; she realized that from the moment her special, secret affair with that man began, when she herself had tried to become an idol, her life had been reduced to a series of reeling states of drunkenness. She felt drunk on him, on her passion for him, on his work, and distanced from her own work, fed up with everything having to do with herself. Drunk and cornered. So it was only through him, through his pathetic games, that she learned the meaning of lovelessness, experienced the risk that her willing subjugation could perpetuate the horror, the fear, of letting go of herself, of her life. Her absolute, continual, cruel dependence on that man, with no say of her own about anything.
She knew she couldn’t fall ill, couldn’t let herself fall ill—not for her own sake, but for his. She anticipated and observed any sign of weakening health in him so that she could care for him with all the devotion he deserved, or all that she thought at first he deserved. But whenever he got sick, he wanted to have nothing to do with her, turning most of all to his secretary, the irreplaceable and grouchy Sabartés. At these moments of weakness, no woman must be at his side, no lover should ever witness his feverish decline. Least of all her, as uneven as she was. He never explained to her what he had meant when he called her “uneven.”
James had once pointed out that Picasso would often talk with Kazbek, the Afghan hound, then continue the conversation with his secretary, and finally, when he noticed James was also present, have him join in. But when Dora arrived and tried to give her opinion, Picasso would listen intently, only to declare the subject closed, despotically, abruptly, and without taking into account what his lover had said. For Picasso, Kazbek’s attention mattered much more than Dora’s. He couldn’t care less about her opinion, or at least that’s the impression he tried to give his audience at what the artist thought of as his “manly” and “virile” displays of self-assertion.
Perhaps on these benches in the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, she and James, with Bernard as witness, could sadly or joyfully recall a few fragments of a past full of unbearable twists and turns, or to the contrary, full of pleasant moments, such as when they joined forces to confront the fury of the Great Genius, of Cher et Beau, whose word almost always resonated like sacred oratory.
I took another turn around the church and after a bit hurried back to the hotel. It was raining buckets. My leather sneakers were soaked, and a strange melancholy had taken hold of my spirit. My greatest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to interpret the enigma of the passion Dora felt for Picasso, or divine the revelation she had sensed or accepted on this last trip in her life, giving her an iron will to withdraw from the world and to leave her house only to go to the Notre Dame cathedral. After attending Mass, she would return home and shut herself away again, surrounded by the Picasso paintings hanging haphazardly, somewhat carelessly, in no particular order, and with no desire to emphasize their extraordinary value, just as he had left them, on the dreary walls of her dusty apartment, like living personalities that sometimes drew close to cheer her up and, other times, repulsed her fiercely and inscrutably.
In chess there’s a position called zugzwang, like being forced to hurt yourself. Being put in zugzwang means a player is obliged to move even though moving means losing a piece. If the p
layer didn’t have to move, the situation wouldn’t be so dire. It always takes place at the endgame; it’s a position that seals the truth, which is that losing is inevitable. I didn’t exactly learn all this from playing chess, I got it from reading Guillermo Cabrera Infante. His writing revealed for me the true meaning of obeying when you don’t willingly accept your submission and long for it. If you obey, you’re forced to lose after one move. When you accept submission as a tactic in the game, you force the other player to be obedient, to play without options, and to lose. Dora traded her liberal state of submission for blind obedience.
Mild and gentle. 1958
James asked if there was anywhere else they wanted to go, since they only had a little time left. They’d have to leave Venice soon and, due to the short stay they’d planned, they hadn’t been able to see everything. He would have liked to go back to Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo, but Dora and Bernard objected. With so many other museums and works of art to see, the smart thing would be to go roaming through the byways, discovering new places, entering them randomly, Bernard rather impatiently noted.
They left the hotel and set off together at first, but before long Dora straggled behind, glued to the window of an eye-catching though cramped shop, studying the masks on display. The shopkeeper came out and talked them up, got her inside the shop, and she agreed to try on some of those gems. Excited, she also threw a red velvet cape over her shoulders. Amused and all smiles, she talked with him for several minutes, telling him about her passion for theatrical trappings.
“Ah, the signora loves the costumes!” crooned the Venetian.
“No, sir, theatrical trappings; quite different,” she now insisted, very serious.
She took one last look around the crowded shop, filled with gilded, brocaded, embossed masks and costumes, laces, cloth so soft you wanted to touch it, caress it, lamps of fine Murano glass, Murano glass jewels as well. “This is all so different from the things I’m surrounded by every day,” she thought.
“At last we got her mind off things. I think this trip has really changed her, I find her sweeter now.” Bernard was trying to get James’s hopes up regarding his friend’s personality problems. They had gotten quite a bit ahead of her and she couldn’t hear them talk about the worries that turned all their conversations to the complexities of her character.
“It’s temporary, it’s a passing change,” James murmured.
She left the shopkeeper and quickened her pace to catch up with the young men.
“I’d like to go off by myself, wander around out there, without you two.” Dora stared at them, expecting a reproach.
“Of course, Dora, but be careful, don’t get lost. In any case, here, take this map of the city.” James handed her the folded map.
“Are you sure you want to go it alone, Dora?” Bernard asked, more cautiously.
She nodded. With a childish wave goodbye, she took off resolutely down the street, then turned into a lane that led right. Her friends lost sight of her.
She gently ran the tips of her fingers over the damp wall. Suddenly, a strange sensation ran through her, very pleasant, something she’d never experienced before, as if the raw skin of her fingertips was dripping blood and she was slowly sinking into a luminous, mild, and gentle state that warmed her spine. “Blood purifies everything, everything,” Picasso was telling her.
“Give me your hot blood, girl.” And she was laughing out loud, cutting herself with the knife and letting the red liquid drip over the paper. The brush did the rest.
The steamy, bumpy cobblestone street was eerily vacant. She picked up her pace; in the distance she saw the elongated figure of a man. Was it a man or his shadow? When she was very close, she noticed the strong resemblance between this tall, thin mulatto stranger and the painter Wifredo Lam.
The whispers growing more intense. Venice, 1958
She decided to go back to Piazza San Marco, walking so fast she could barely keep track of where she was, and, dizzy, she almost lost her balance. She had to lean against a chipped wall, tilt her head back, breathe deeply, regain her body’s bearings.
She opened the map, clumsily spreading it with both her hands, and stared at the layout of the streets, then lifted her eyes and looked for the street sign on the wall. She’d gotten lost, just as she had yearned to do, to get lost in the city, on her own. Alone and enigmatic. But she’d lost her head at the same time; suddenly she’d forgotten who she was. She’d lost track of her thoughts and her memories when she brushed past the figure of the man who reminded her of Wifredo Lam. She was afraid of going back to the point of no return in her unhinged mind. She was afraid of relapsing, losing her memory, going crazy.
Sitting on the doorstep of some house, she drew her knees up toward her belly, and put her head down, resting it on her knees.
The first time Lam went to the studio of Rue des Grands Augustins, he was coming from Spain to deliver a letter to Picasso from his old friend Manuel Hugué, the fellow who’d shared youth and poverty with Picasso and Mañach at Le Bateau-Lavoir. Picasso liked this young mulatto with thick hair and Asian looks, smiling, shapely, a body like a rustic dancer with no training in dance, wild and brimming with questions.
“Some of my ancestors emigrated to Cuba and set down roots there,” Picasso said after getting the letter and the firsthand news from his friend Hugué.
“To Cuba? Your ancestors?” Lam spoke familiarly with Picasso no sooner than they met, with a friendliness that conveyed brother-
hood.
Lam’s gangling figure took over the room, and he started describing the island landscape, the trees, the monte, as he called the Cuban countryside, the birds, the color of the sky, the resplendent blue of the sea. His host studied those long, thin arms, the elegant lines of his legs, the bony face and bulging lips, the eyes with their perfect Asian line, the hair like jungle undergrowth, the countryside furrows in his smooth, chocolate-colored face. Everything about this man evoked tenderness, familiarity, and greatness.
“He is a prince,” he told himself, “an indomitable prince.”
From the moment he saw Lam’s paintings, Picasso knew that, while Lam humbly recognized that he was Picasso’s disciple, he could learn a lot himself from the Cuban and African forms created by this young artist, who was only thirty-seven but already a master, a tremendous artist. Picasso did not hesitate to sponsor Lam’s exhibition at the Pierre Loeb gallery in Paris.
“We have the same blood; you’re like a cousin. Why not sponsor you and your work?” Picasso insisted.
Lam smiled with satisfaction and gave the Spaniard an effusive hug. Just then, Dora walked in and, surprised by the hug and their enthusiasm, asked what they were celebrating.
“We’re celebrating Wifredo Lam’s exhibition in Paris!” Picasso sounded more effusive than usual.
“My brother, my brother!” Lam sang as he danced around the room smelling of resin, oil paint, ink, and turpentine.
The three spoke their language, Spanish, with different accents. The Cuban’s speech, of course, flowed most smoothly. Dora tried to harden her z’s and soften her y’s so her Argentine accent wouldn’t stick out too much for the Spaniard and the Cuban. Picasso opened a bottle of Anís del Mono, the only drink he had to offer, and they toasted with small, thrifty sips.
“Why don’t we go to the restaurant on Rue Bonaparte?” Picasso invited, the other two accepted in high spirits.
They flew more than ran to the restaurant; they were starving, especially Lam. Halfway there, Picasso straggled a bit behind, enraptured with observing the two of them: the talented young man, and the woman who so perilously loved him and whom he was already beginning to push away noxiously. Then he felt the fear that always seized his spirit when forebodings crowded his mind and hampered his ability to think and analyze. He wondered fearfully what would happen if over time the two of them became his rivals, his worst enemies.… Dora looked back at him; she was shocked to see his blurry, flabby, suddenly aged face. She gue
ssed that something deep had shattered him, old nagging worries. Lam, noticing nothing different, took him by the hand and made him prance about, cheek to cheek, tromping in the glassy puddles on the fogbound street. Just at that moment Picasso reacted, letting loose one of his great horse laughs.
At the restaurant, Lam wolfed down his dinner, seemingly eating with an ancient appetite; he couldn’t help it. Dora barely tried her food, while Picasso guffawed, “Look at that, this kid might start eating the table leg next! There’s nothing crueler than hunger; I’ve felt it, I know what I’m talking about. That being said, nobody will contradict me: you can paint better hungry than with a belly full of grub.” And the Great Genius went back to laughing thunderously.
Lam wiped the corners of his mouth with the white napkin and drank copious amounts of red wine. Dora asked him, in an oddly prim way, what Cuba was like.
“Surrealist, Cuba is Surrealist!” Lam exclaimed.
“That can’t be, no country can be.…” she sighed.
“Yes, it is, any absurd situation contains a hefty dose of Surrealism,” he asserted.
Picasso asked where they should go after dinner. Dora shrugged; Lam lit a cigarette.
“I know, we can go dancing. That’s it, let’s go dancing!”
They ended the night in a small cabaret on Rue Vavin, where they met two young women who had each, on her own, been invited to that Spanish soirée: the painter Remedios Varo, accompanied at the time by the very drunk Óscar Domínguez, and once again the ethnologist Lydia Cabrera, there with an extremely reserved and elegant young woman, dressed in a sheer toga dyed bone- or ivory-white.
Lam and Lydia hugged, recognizing each other in their shared love for the faraway island. Picasso watched them, jealous of not having an island, the island he had heard so much talk about.
As she walked through the winding streets of Venice, her eyes climbed up the façades.