by Zoe Valdes
This kept up until her mother died in the most ridiculous way imaginable: in the middle of an argument with Dora, and she couldn’t even remember what it was about. That night they were having a real row over the phone. Dora was gesticulating, pacing back and forth as far as the cord would reach. After a moment, she heard a rattling breath, followed by a heavy, devastating silence on the other line. She thought her mother had hung up, but she was surprised to hear the absolute vacuum of the sound of silence in the infinite depths of the phone line.
The Nazi occupation was then in full swing, and the curfew made it impossible to go check up right away. She wasn’t able to leave her house until the following day, when she ran desperately to her mother’s house and found her there, dead, sprawled across the phone, the receiver still in her hand. She knelt beside her body and looked at her for the longest time. She didn’t want to forget any detail from that instant. “Photographer’s habit,” she told herself.
After a while Picasso joined her and, without skipping a beat, he set about displaying the corpse to everybody who came, as if it were a circus, evidently proud to be the son-in-law of the woman who had “sung ‘The Peanut Vendor’” (a Cuban expression that Wifredo Lam had taught him, referring to someone who had passed away). She had died getting worked up in an argument over the phone with her daughter, who was his lover!
That defining incident could never have happened the other way around, because he would never have allowed anyone to show off his dead mother like a worm-eaten doll broken by helplessness and separation.
Dora sometimes dreamed of her mother, who appeared to her sleeping, or dead, with her hair lying in an untidy mess on a pillow placed on top of a brick, her arms at her sides, her mouth gaping open, her body covered with a grayish-white bedsheet. She was lying on the ground under a vault of arches and columns, much like the arcades in the Place des Vosges, a wave of white foam surging into what seemed to be her home. It was simply an evocation of another photograph of Dora’s from 1935, when she was in her full Surrealist glory.
Her dreams often transformed into a jumble of random nightmares.
In one of them, repeated endlessly, her mother, standing erect, was showing her the gilded Dunhill cigarette lighter, embossed with a small face that looked like Dora’s, that Picasso had made for her. She threatened to throw it into the sea or into a stony chasm, then she carried out the threat after letting out a dreadful cackle. Dora would wake up feverish from this nightmare, soaked in sweat, her head burning. She would take a cold bath and gulp down a glass of chilled white wine. Surrounded by Picasso’s paintings, she’d spend the early hours of the morning staring at one spot on a canvas. After a while, she would get up, wander around the apartment, searching fruitlessly in every nook and cranny for the lost lighter with trembling hands: in the bottoms of drawers, in the pockets of dresses, in the wardrobe—without finding it.
She’d go back to bed. In the bit of sleep she could still grab, nightmares would befuddle her again: her hand fluttering about while holding her porcelain doll, as in the photo where you can see the shimmering ocean and, in the distance, the Statue of Liberty. In the foreground, her fingers, nails painted, clutching the bisque plaything, holding it perpendicular to the woman who symbolizes the triumph of life and the free world.
In her dream, however, what she clutches is a Roman glass bottle with a fairly common shape but a rare color: a purple patina with shades of peacock blue and Pompeiian green. The bottle was a present from James; it had slipped from her fingers and broken the same day he gave it to her. In the nightmare, it shatters over and over again, in slow motion. Then, to get back at her, James steals the bird he had wanted so badly, a bird Picasso had fashioned from wire, wood, and plaster especially for her. Dora had felt so sorry for breaking James’s gift that she had offered it to him, but she later took it back, in one of her unbearable fits. James kept drooling over that beloved treasure, but she knew how to torture him and prevented him from having it to the end.
Now she is the one being tortured, because she can’t stop dreaming about that bird, dreaming that James is pinching it from her and she can’t run after him because she keeps falling, always falling. Tormented, she then looks for a phone number, the number for the police, but only manages to recite her own phone number in a deafening litany: ODE 18–55, ODE 18–55, ODE 18–55.…
She roams all over the house, grabs her overcoat and runs out, distressed, to Chez Georges, the restaurant on Rue Mazarin where she has arranged to meet Marie-Laure de Noailles and her lover, Óscar Domínguez, the painter. The lover, drunk as always, sets about making unpleasantly nasty jokes, making fun of Dora and her relationship with Picasso, then attacking Lord. Isn’t Lord a faggot? Why does she hang out with that fag American? The spectacle gets louder and louder and more and more dismal. She can’t stand it. She flees the restaurant without saying goodbye to her friend. Furious, powerless, doubly annoyed because her patroness didn’t even bother to stop her lover from talking such nonsense.
Then she runs into James Lord in the middle of a street very much like the one she had photographed years ago: to the left, a glimpse of a set of stairs; by it, a passageway with windows in rounded arches, lots of light, carved stone columns; a boy in shorts, shirtless, carrying another naked-chested boy on his shoulders. The lad is bent over double, like a stevedore carting a heavy sack on the docks. In the background, a plump, half-naked woman in a Roman helmet and carrying a spear, comically trying to stand guard. And Lord reemerges in the middle of all this. What is Lord doing here?
“Dora, I need to talk to you. I can’t bear this ridiculous situation. It’s killing me. Look, I’m giving you back Picasso’s bird.” He hands her the tiny sculpture, she clumsily catches it. “I don’t know if I’d be willing to be your lover. Don’t you see that I can’t compete with him? He holds all the winning cards; for all the bad things he’s done to you and the way he’s tortured you, he’ll always win. And I’ll lose, I’ll lose.”
“You can do it, James, you can,” she whispers, smoothing his cheek with the palm of her hand, holding it there for a moment, taking his temperature. “You’re very important for me.”
“I can also satisfy a woman sexually, I know, and I’d really love to do it with you, but…”
“But? Are you afraid of the marks Picasso has left on me? You’ll never be able to erase those marks, as I warned you then and I’m telling you again now. This isn’t about you leaving your own mark on top of his; you just have to accept that you’ll leave a very small mark compared with Picasso, but it will be there, and it will endure.”
James steps back from her, crushed, hurt by her words. Then Bernard appears in the background and jealously calls out to his friend. “Don’t do it, James, don’t you dare, don’t be ambiguous. Don’t make a fool of her. She’ll never forgive you. Don’t join up with a fallen goddess, because when it’s your turn she’ll destroy you.”
She woke up from the dream exhausted, her body burning with fever. It was barely dawn. Sitting up in bed, pale, sad, she smiled bitterly. Though her friend was younger than she was, he had never paid much attention to the difference in their age; that wasn’t the issue. But she sensed that there was more standing between them than the “existential, intellectual, and moral inequality” that he referred to, because she had so much more experience and wisdom; and besides, he had never been frank with her, not the way she had been with him. He had other love toys; he had Bernard, and he could let off steam by going to bed with any of his lovers, until it reached the point where Dora had nothing but his ambiguous presence on the increasingly rare and more formal occasions when he showed up. So, she couldn’t stand being dependent for one more minute on the crumbs men left her, the scraps from this man. Picasso had brought them together; Picasso drove them apart.
Turning to the mirror, she inspected her wrinkled face. She had stopped wearing makeup as she once did. When she was young, she used to put it on first thing in the morning, but no more; it
wasn’t worth the trouble, her face was no longer the guiding light, the radiant glow that illuminated and inspired Picasso, James, her other friends. Now she could go out and calmly watch people, study the youth, whereas nobody saw her, few even noticed she existed. She was one more old woman among all the grumpy, angry, abandoned old people wandering lonely around the city.
That was why she was surprised to find that young woman—a foreigner, yes, as far as she could tell, by her accent, her appearances, the way she walked, she was a foreigner—waiting for her every morning on Rue de Savoie, a few steps from her house, then following her to Notre Dame, and for nearly two hours walking a certain distance behind her, though she never dared to say anything to her. Yes, she found the girl’s timidity amusing, because it indicated a kind of monastic withdrawal. She told herself she really ought to say hello to the girl, without being too friendly or giving her too much access, because she had struck her as a nice person from the first. The girl was posing for a photographer, shivering with cold but still standing there, smiling, shy and stoic, barely resisting the photographer’s lens, silenced by duty. That persistent girl reminded her of Nusch, and of Leonor Fini, and of herself.
She realized that the girl was actually more attractive when she handed her a bouquet of carnations, reminding her of the time she gathered those white flowers in Ménerbes, with James.
She and James had filled the car with dozens of bouquets of those white flowers, spending that whole morning and afternoon in the middle of the field, surrounded everywhere by pure white petals, carried away, overwhelmed, by the scent still floating in the air after a passing drizzle.
Picasso was a Scorpio, she a Capricorn. Her astrological chart resembled a diamond crushed and viewed edge-on, cut wafer-thin. She was a fiery Capricorn, a goat enveloped in flames.
She kept this drawing from her astral chart under her pillow, and it often appeared to her in dreams like the atlas of her destiny, floating in three dimensions above her head, alternating with Picasso’s portraits of her.
So it was with her now: tossing and turning in bed, she was looking at the picture. Suddenly, she heard knuckles rapping at the door. She half-opened her eyes, and the knocking stopped. No sooner had she returned to a brief, shallow sleep than the knocking on the front door started up again. “Who’s out there?” she sleepily asked.
“Maman, c’est moi,” but she had no children. It was, to all evidence, the voice of a young women whispering behind the door: “Maman, c’est moi,” the voice drooped hoarsely.
She got up with difficulty—her kidneys were giving her trouble, she found it hard to raise her swollen legs. She made an effort, put on her slippers, and went to the front door. Nobody there. She went back to bed. She stood facing the bed for a while, looking at a portrait that Picasso had made of her in which she appeared nude, young, and plump, her legs spread and her sex entangled with what looked to be some species of perfidious two-headed insect.
At length she lay down and, squeezing her eyes shut, she clung once more to sleep. It was easier, more comfortable, to live in her fantasy and dream world. When she was awake, she was plunged into that whole ordinary real and repetitive world which, like a worn, blunt needle, was tattooing on her temples the little time she had left and, on top of that, stressing that she would die very soon. She could put up with it better asleep because in that other dimension, her life grew; sleeping, she encompassed the vast, limitless eternity provided by the impalpable dream unreality.
She saw herself sitting, years ago, on that square chunk of cement, shaped like a column, in the middle of the beach, forest and shimmering shoreline in the background. She had crossed her legs and was holding the toe of one foot with one of her hands, as if to comfort it after some imperceptible sting. She was gazing out into infinity, which at that moment might seem to be, from her perspective, Picasso’s profile. He, on the contrary, sat comfortably by her side, one leg tucked under him, eyes staring straight ahead. Both seemed carefree, she more loving and attentive than he. He was still acting like a free man, she was already becoming his slave, guided by a pact of obedience. But there was no fear, no pity, no forgetfulness, no rage between them yet. Though, she remembered, the Spanish Civil War had already broken out and he seemed a bit saddened, without being terribly distressed, but he still tried to avoid looking slightly lost and to hide his worries.
“Roland Penrose, Roland Penrose,” Dora mumbled in the middle of her semi-insomnia. Penrose had taken that photograph of them, and she struggled not to lose that frozen image of the first symptoms of cruel everyday apathy; in any case, bad memories are the last to vanish; they are the ones that endure.
In the hours before dawn, she felt thirsty, her throat was dry, she stretched out her hand to grab the water glass; as she drank it, she noticed that the furniture had grown hooves and a kind of mold, and that huge masses of long, thick hair were emerging from the drawers, like horse tails and manes. Dear God, dear Virgin Mary! She pressed her hands together to pray, but she couldn’t recite any prayer correctly, none came to her lips.
The bedroom filled with galloping horses.
In a murmur she heard the word jade.
The warm water from some beach flooded across the old parquet floor and, a posteriori, the landscape of Porquerolles poured into the living room. “Posterior,” “a posteriori,” words that Picasso used.
In the distance, James was killing time by catching tiny fish in the hollow of his hands and throwing them back. Catherine Dudley prattled next to her, “They tell me you’re badmouthing Picasso. You shouldn’t do that, it won’t do you any good, people are already making fun of you behind your back. After all, you owe everything to him, you owe him everything.”
“Come on, Catherine, could you try being a little less idiotic? That is so stupid! Please, don’t get me mad. I don’t owe him anything at all. Actually, it’s the other way around. He used me, savagely. He used me for his art, I was his raw material. He used me ruthlessly and tossed me aside when I wasn’t any more use to him. Don’t forget the motley and misshapen portraits he did of me. The ones he says are me.”
“The ones you hold onto like they’re all the gold from Peru,” Catherine said sarcastically.
“And what would you have me do? They’re mine, I’m me, it’s my business. Of course I hold onto them like gold dust. He abused me, sapped my intelligence. I don’t hold a grudge against him—don’t you think that’s enough? Besides, I don’t have them all; he kept most of them for himself.”
“They’re going to exhibit more of his things, have you heard? They’ve put together an incredible selection in Russia. Nobody in Paris has seen these paintings. It’s going to be wild, people are going to go crazy about them. The only problem is that they’re putting the exhibit up at the Maison de la Pensée Française, that Communist dive.”
Catherine fiddled with a dry branch, making rings of sea foam on the sandy beach.
“As far as I’m concerned—well! I don’t care about any of that, couldn’t care less, to tell you the truth. I’ve seen my fill of Picassos, they sicken me. I’ve seen enough Picassos for this life and a hundred thousand more.”
“I don’t believe for one second that you don’t care.”
Dora left a long pause before replying.
“You see that young man there? Lord? Maybe I like him, and perhaps he loves me. Isn’t that good enough for a woman my age? Well, of course I care about Picasso, and his paintings, but I have to pretend I don’t, make a show of not giving a damn. It’s so unbearably boring when everybody’s in love with Picasso, even James. Especially James.” She pointed him out with an elegant movement of her chin. “He loves Picasso more than me. That’s the problem that keeps us apart, but on the other hand, it’s the advantage that brings us together. Tomorrow he’ll take off as cool as can be to brownnose him and leave me here alone.”
James had walked over and heard the last phrase, at which he defended himself. “Of course I’ll go visit him, but I’ll b
e bringing him a present from you.”
“Yes, that humiliating thing, the perverted piece of junk.” Dora let out a guffaw that ended in a deep sigh. “A rusty shovel, in response to a torture chair he sent me. It’s a sinister code only we understand.”
Dora got out of bed. She didn’t want the dream to keep going, like a sorrowful encumbrance of dangerous old obsessions, not very advisable for one’s mental health.
Sitting in the rocking chair, she thought she should find someone who would force her out of this rut.
Could it be the woman who persisted in following her? Could she be the answer that would get her to break momentarily from her solitude? Maybe paying attention to her now and then, sitting down to talk with her in a café, making friends with this young woman would do her more good than not. But what could she tell this woman? What did they have in common? She wasn’t sure if the woman even knew who she really was.
But there couldn’t be any doubt. The woman wasn’t following her because she was any woman; she intentionally wanted to get close to her. She must know who Dora Maar was, the great Surrealist photographer, the painter and lover of… Or could she only be interested in her because she’d been Pablo Picasso’s lover, like all the rest? In that case, what could she do to attract her more to herself and keep her from growing bored with her stories about her past adventures, while she erased Picasso from her life?
Yes, absolutely, she’d do it, and she wouldn’t leave out the Great Genius. She’d start with that phrase he once blurted out to her contemptuously, the sort of verbal jab he readily shared with everybody: “The uglier my paintings get, the crazier people get about buying them.” Because the worse he painted, the more accessible they became to common people, the bourgeois crowd. He was right about that: the worse artists paint, the greater and more incomprehensible the blind fury in which they paint, the more people snatch up their paintings.