by Zoe Valdes
She could also tell her about the conversation between Lord and Picasso, when the two of them were alone, in which Lord finally made the best, the most beautiful statement any man had ever made about her: “I’ve never known anyone like her.”
“Neither have I.” At last there was something they agreed about, James sighed, but Picasso couldn’t restrain himself: “I’ve never known anyone so—how can I describe her?—so handy. Dora was whatever you insisted she be, a dog, a mouse, a bird, an idea, a storm, a formula. That’s a huge advantage when you’ve fallen in love, don’t you think?”
And that was undoubtedly the ugliest thing anyone had ever said about her. Inevitably, Picasso had no scruples about putting her down. No, she wouldn’t repeat this anecdote that Lord had hesitatingly, downheartedly shared with her. It might be interpreted some other way, she might again become an object of humiliation to so many ignorant people.
She must, yes, she had to meet this young woman as soon as possible. Tomorrow, she’d agree to talk with her tomorrow, and if the young woman wouldn’t approach her—because from what Dora could see, she was still very shy—she’d find a pretext to start a conversation. “She’ll probably find Picasso’s comic side interesting,” she sneered. “Like the time he painted the bathroom of the house in Ménerbes, and then joked about it, saying he’d only wanted to give it a touch of Pompeii, and this way the great Dora Maar, meaning me, could enjoy the chance to sit down and defecate on his work, take a shit on him once and for all, on his goddamned genius, on his shocking solemnity, on his putrid art.” Ugh! The damned Spaniard’s broad, blustering sense of humor was enough to make her sick. How had she put up with him for so long? How could she have deviated so far from her fundamental impulses and made her heart beat only for him?
Much later that night, she pulled out an ordinary school notebook and began writing down some of the stories she’d tell the stranger after they finally met and became friends. She didn’t want to forget a single one of the unbelievable adventures that formed her life. Nothing should be left out, not the smallest detail, she told herself, repenting of her desire to sideline Picasso. However, she didn’t have the slightest idea how to put order into the tidal wave of thoughts and their unexpected evocations that surged rebelliously, crashing chaotically in her mind.
She’d tell the young woman how she once explained the one true meaning of Picasso’s art to James, and she’d do it in the same way, referring to the meaning of a simple tree, its obvious interpretation: a tree isn’t much until it has been observed by a genius and his vision. No tree is important if Picasso hasn’t seen it, hasn’t painted it. “Take a good look at it, James, observe it,” she had told him. “For you, it’s a plain, ordinary plant, with that meek trunk and those shrubby branches hanging from it, just something growing on the side of the road, completely commonplace, spectacularly trite. If Cher et Beau painted the tree, the story would be totally different, James. He’d turn that tree into a matchless object, a treasure, a jewel, an unquestionable object of worship. To a person of faith, it’s already a miracle in itself, since it’s a tree. It’s pedestrian, rustic, but it represents all that is beautiful on earth and in the world, because it comes from the earth, it’s alive, visible, tangible, an explicit message from every living being on this planet. It represents you and me and all the universe, the whole conceivable and inconceivable world. Picasso will always go deeper, because he can catch more than the obvious message; he’ll reveal the majestic mystery of the tree’s roots to us, beginning deep down with the soul of the tree, because he’ll give the tree a soul, invent one for it if it doesn’t have one already.”
James readily understood, because even though he wasn’t exactly a genius, far from it, he was a very sensitive person, open to mysteries, and he wrote down everything she told him in his diary. That was how James got ahead of her and wrote everything she wished to weep before she wrote it herself, before she even finished weeping over it.
She wasn’t sure whether the woman who would soon become her listener, and a very special one, would be able to understand how hurt she was when James moved far away and fell out of contact for some time. Kept his distance, relatively speaking, from her distressing self (she knew that was how he talked about her with others), first in a comfortable flat on the Avenue Georges Mandel, later on Rue de Lille. At the time, he was feeling more Parisian than the Parisians. After a while they met again. No, it isn’t easy to understand how you can love someone so much that you prefer to keep them out of reach, even if the grief of being apart ties our feelings and our bodies in knots, in a physical and heartrending sense.
During one conversation, James grew so sad that his eyes teared up and he almost started to cry. This happened when Dora said of Lacan, rather admiringly, “He’s the high arbiter of lost causes. I’m one of them.”
Sending her into one of those desperate, irreversible downward spirals until she was saved at the very end, almost miraculously, in extremis.
“Dora, can I say something to you? I want you to know that nobody has meant as much to me as you have.”
She smiled and ran her hand over his head with deliberate and painstaking sweetness.
James loved her, no doubt of it; he gave her so many presents—and she gave him so few in return. Rather, none at all, until she decided to offer him the tiny original etching used to print her face on the Dunhill matchboxes, made by Picasso.
When he got home, he was so happy that he ran to greet Bernard. He admitted to his friend that he thought the right thing to do was to ask Dora to marry him.
“Are you crazy? Think about it. Dora isn’t just Dora, she is Picasso, too. Do you want to marry Picasso?”
Why did James insist on being honest with her, as if she were his mother? And why did Bernard slight her so cruelly? Yes, it was true, she and James would never be free of Picasso. James and Bernard were right. No, they could never go anywhere without the phantom presence of Cher et Beau.
“You know something, James? Being Picasso wasn’t enough for him, he also wanted people to love him for being himself,” she whispered once.
Now it was James asking her if she was crazy for denying some bit of nonsense that she couldn’t even recall. She could only visualize the moment this happened and hear the cruel question on his lips, “Are you crazy?”
She abruptly turned to face him, gritted her teeth, dropped the lilting nightingale pitch of her voice to snarl an uncharacteristic, unexpected growl, like that of a wounded wolf. How dare he? How, how dare he?
“Don’t you ever, ever, even think of telling me I’m crazy, hear me? Never!”
No, this fragment of her at her wit’s end, of the delirium into which her life descended, would not be to the point; her interlocutor would doubtless overwhelm her with too many questions, most of them awkward, and then she really would have to go back over the chapter of her illness and figure out how to cover it and in what order: the madness, the psychiatric hospital, the electroshocks, the unbearable string of events she went through, up to the irredeemable ending.
No, better not distress or confuse the young woman, because if she did, she might run off, whereas her mission was to keep the woman here as much time as she could. The little time she had left.
The light at sunrise gilded the furniture and lent a coppery glow to the worn leather and polished wood of the old sofa. She crossed the drawing room to the bathroom, relieved herself of a long stream, and got the impression that her urine smelled of antibiotics gone bad, which wasn’t normal at all, not a bit. She couldn’t allow herself the luxury of falling ill, especially not in the kidneys.
By then Picasso had died, most of the major characters from her era had passed away, from a natural death or from suicide. She, however, was still there, resisting, growing older, slowly wasting away. Just like James, he must also be getting old, and even though they were growing old apart, Dora always received a bouquet of orchids, roses, lilies, and gladioli. A courtesy she no longer returned,
not even with a scribbled postcard as a show of thanks; she had even lost the spirit one gets from having good manners.
She thought intensely about the young woman, whom she was quite sure she would see again that morning, and felt very nervous, more nervous than ever, because she hadn’t concocted a speech, hadn’t even thought up some solid, interesting phrase to open a conversation with her. Of course it would be easier if the other woman approached her first, but what if she never made up her mind?
In fact, this is how it happened. After getting dressed, always in black from head to toe, she went outside and there was the young woman, leaning against the house across the street, smoking. Dora was glad to see she smoked. She was wearing leather shorts, a black velvet jacket, red socks, and black leather boots to the middle of her calves. Dora walked slowly and observed that, as usual, the woman didn’t fall behind or lose track. Then Dora turned around sharply and began to walk in the young woman’s direction, but when they crossed paths, neither one dared say anything but good morning, accompanying the greeting with a slight smile.
Dora took time to walk all the way around the block and then along the Seine so she could enter Notre Dame by the main door.
Tomorrow, without fail, she told herself, she would surprise the stranger with some phrase, the most powerful she could come up with. She wouldn’t expect more than that, she couldn’t expect more. She mused nervously.
She heard Mass, entertained herself strolling along the waterfront, and went home to eat something and to paint. Though she was quite elderly and her whole body ached as she neared her final rest, she could still sit before an easel and imagine and create, in short, slow brush strokes, the landscapes that she could no longer stretch, as she had in the distant past, to cover the endless expanse of gigantic canvases. She consoled herself with the thought that at least she had enough strength and spirit to paint. Taking shelter in color and getting caught up in the enigma of the unusual journey of the line toward nothingness were the best imaginary ointments for her rheumatic bones. She worked for two hours. She had a light lunch, washed the dishes, and sat down to write in her lined Clairfontaine notebook.
For her there was nothing like the sea. She came to identify so deeply with the bluey vastness that when she swam underwater, deep beneath the azure surface and far from shore, she felt she could stay there for the rest of her life, dying slowly, little by little, without putting up any resistance to death. Her body undulated like a dolphin, like a manatee, like some ancient sea deity. The ocean revived her, projected her into another dimension, and gave her a sense of security such as she had never experienced with her feet on dry land. The sea swell enwrapped her in a supernatural halo that made her feel herself, in the foaming crest of a surge, a fluid woman, composed and assembled piece by piece from drops of water. She had the sense that Picasso would be watching, bewitched by this image of the dolphin woman, the salty goddess with the body of a bird. Picasso ran to find something to sketch her with, returning in exultation, and from this image of her, liquid and intensely blue, he dreamed up and elaborated the drawing of the beautiful bird woman, radiantly indigo, an owl with firm breasts, a winged face, like a sphinx, standing an elegant vigil on a rocky promontory. She knew that when Picasso said she could be anything, “whatever you insisted she be,” as he told Lord, he had said it in the name of creativity, of painting, scorning the effect of human insensitivity his words might have on someone who heard them out of context without paying attention to the artistic obsession that overcame him, nor to everything he appropriated for himself with the brilliance of his gaze.
That vision of Dora rising from the waves had a different meaning for James, however. The only time he saw her emerge from the ocean, he was petrified by the sexual desire her image aroused in him. A sudden and imperious urge to possess her carnally overcame him, as she could tell from a slight physical excitation visible in his swimming trunks, which sadly lasted only a short while.
There was a period when she preferred to inspire men with physical desire rather than aesthetic ardor. That period lasted an immoderately long time and disturbed her deeply.
She paused. At length she continued writing for the stranger, her hand held straight above the paper, but she had to stop once more when, suddenly, another strange and very specific image came between her memories and the young woman who was to receive this rosary of written anecdotes.
It was set in a not too distant future: she saw the woman with a man and another girl, apparently even younger, rather short in stature and with the most maleficent guinea-pig eyes she had ever seen. Sitting in a café, they were talking about Anaïs Nin; then they moved to what looked like a plaza, after which she found them without much difficulty as they walked through a museum. They rushed out of there and jumped into a car. The second woman intentionally forgot her gloves on the back seat, feigning absentmindedness; they were nightmarish black lambskin gloves with red backstitching.
“Don’t touch them, don’t touch them!” Dora felt an impulse to warn the stranger not to pick up the gloves dropped by the ungrateful, malicious woman whose company, she deeply intuited, would bring her no good luck.
Exhausted by this vision, she decided to lie back in the rocking chair, holding a cup of rosehip tea in one hand. What secrets did she still have that at this date might interest a woman of today? What could she reveal that the woman might care about? She racked her brains. “That’s it, I know! The trip to Venice!”
The eight days with James and Bernard. Those days were almost too much, so definitive that they had made her long to move “far from the madding crowd.” But the trip to Venice had also been unquestionably wonderful.
Though afterwards there was dead quiet, a wall of silence. She hoped, she waited for a phone call.… No special, tactful attention came her way, and yet she always imagined that James would always be à portée de main for anything she might need. Despite the way her friends brushed her off afterwards, the Venice trip would be a good topic of conversation and wouldn’t be too great a commitment on her part, since the young woman wouldn’t have to wait for the next chapter or to keep up a friendship based on an intimidating and submissive relationship with Picasso’s work, or with her own.
Waiting, waiting inordinately, for what? She’d waited so long already! Picasso and James had both left her on the doorstep one fine day, no explanations, no dedication, no special manners. What happened with James after the Venice trip had occurred in the same way, long before, with Picasso. He had also left her at the door of the house on Rue de Savoie as if he were setting out a worn old piece of furniture for the trash collectors to pick up, and bid her a warm farewell, perhaps too warm. She knew right then it was all over. And she didn’t discover the real reason until some time later: a younger woman. It must have taken her more than two weeks to verify it. The disillusionment of having the rumor confirmed added to the sense of estrangement. She missed him tremendously, because they had been seeing each other almost daily for ten years, and it was hard for her to get used to how it had ended so suddenly, without a word, without so much as a relevant gesture, other than his telling her he was going to leave there, not walk up with her, since she could walk on her own.
What she would never forgive Picasso for was the fact that he hadn’t had the courage to tell her, as a gentleman would, that everything was over between them. Even worse, she supposed that to keep from having to talk it through with her, he had hoped that his silence would push her to suicide, that she’d have died for him, without a complaint, that she’d have ceased to exist, tormented and silenced, so he would be able to live more comfortably with the other woman who by then had definitively taken her place.
His indifference was extremely stinging. Criminal. And so she became ill. So ill that one day when Paul Éluard came to visit, he came in and found her on the stairs, in her nightgown, weeping desperately. The poet picked her up and called the doctors. He let Picasso know right away. That incoherent, unbearable scene would run
through her head like a litany for the rest of her life.
From that day forth, she swore, she would never again make a spectacle of herself; but it was too late, the illness had attacked her, with no solution. The contagious and irreversible madness of women who wail streams of baleful invocations, occupying the minds of men who expect from women only moans that reaffirm their tragic manliness, had taken root in her battered body.
Still hopeless, she managed to more or less heal, and once she was completely over the breakup she swore again that she’d never run the risk of depending on somebody else, that she’d depend exclusively on herself. No, she would never live with a man again. To this oath she added a promise that she would sweep aside any amorous intentions that might plunge her life into another anesthetic state of desolation, no matter how healthy and attractive it might look at the beginning. As Marlene Dietrich might say, life is a circus. “Believe me, everything’s just a circus,” and every one of her misadventures in love represented one of its terrible performances.
But then James reappeared, with his aroused youthfulness, and sat on that bench under the fig tree in Ménerbes, and, sitting there, she had no choice but to paint him. She had no other option but to dream again. She couldn’t help it; he seemed eternal, brimming with vigor. Besides, he knew to treat her tenderly, pampering her and never tiring of telling her that he wanted nothing but to be with her always, by her side. Trop mignon, n’est-ce pas?
After that they became great friends, almost lovers; the only thing missing was the sex, because even though he made serious and truthful declarations to her in bed, they never touched, just a few light pats, more tender than puritanical. Dora had grown resentful, distrustful, and more headstrong than before her illness, and she brandished her new character as her only weapon of resistance against idleness; but for all that, she accepted having a man’s friendly and concrete presence again.