The Best Australian Stories 2015

by Amanda Lohrey

  6 Commission

  1937 As part of a commission to create a mural-sized painting for the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques, Juan Larrea acquires an appropriately sized studio for Picasso’s exclusive use: the giant top-floor attic of 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, where Balzac had written his ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’. Its floor is paved with small red tile hexagons, many of which have been broken in clusters beneath the weight of three centuries worth of ponderous furniture. There is a view (opening up the pair of twelve-paned windows) across geometrical hills of rooftops, chimney stacks; ridges of terraces skittled with chimney pots. Marie-Thérèse remains in Vollard’s Tremblay-sur-Mauldre house. During the week Pso sleeps at his new studio, still within the range (it comes to him, a tinnitus) of Olga’s screams. Meanwhile, a street away in rue Savoie, Dora waits to be summoned.

  7 Painful

  1937 In his paintings Marie-Thérèse grows fatter, uglier. One night he enters the bedroom to see her seated (half-turned back from the dressing table at his footfall), her face that of a victim of some monstrous stroke, her nose and forehead become one swollen, drooping, doughy, appendage. Over the following days the dismemberment begins – eyes, fingers, nipples, float on a white background. Now every part of her is obliterated. He draws close to his audience: ‘It must be painful for a girl to see in a painting that she is on the way out.’ Meanwhile, with little more than a month to go before the exposition, Pso still has no subject for the Spanish Pavilion’s empty forty metres.

  8 Guernika (1937)

  Out from the fields beyond Guernika, barely audible above the relentless bomb-bursts, the fire-roar and the collapse of masonry, comes the sound of mechanical ratatat and the hideous silent chorus of high-pitched bleating. The German aeroplanes are machine-gunning flocks of sheep.

  9 The Effect of Fear

  1937 Late May, with Guernica still a cartoon laid out in black and grey, Pso holds a luncheon at the Grands-Augustins studio. The table is set up, centred on the French doors. Seated before him are Giacometti, Ernst, Breton, Roland Penrose and Henry Moore. Late in the afternoon, over the plate of cheeses, Pso begins a monologue.

  ‘The woman running from the little cabin on the right,’ and he leans back in his chair, ‘with one hand held in front of her. Let me tell you,’ he says, rising, ‘there is something missing there.’

  He leaves the room, coming back with a roll of toilet paper which he sticks on the woman’s hand.

  ‘There,’ he says, addressing the table, ‘that leaves no doubt about the commonest effect of fear.’ He laughs. And everyone laughs with him.

  10 Balls

  1937 There is a Dora Maar photograph of Pso from the mid-summer days spent at Mougins. The artist is seated, legs apart. One can see his balls shifting quietly in the Mediterranean air, as might buoys in the slightest of swells. Clocking against each other. Barely held in check by his swimming costume.

  11 A Game of Cards

  1937 Pso fans open his hand: a king of hearts and four queens. He smiles. But the pleasure is short-lived. At their first sight of him, the Queens begin to weep. Now they sob. Soon it will be clearly heard by those around the table in the smoke-filled room. Now, their miniscule tears fall to the tabletop. He yells at his cards to be quiet. You are ruining everything, he bellows. But already it is too late – Hey, Pablo, comes the voice of one of the players. You wouldn’t have the Weeping Queens again, would you? Over time it becomes a stock phrase with which to taunt him: Picasso’s got the Queens today.

  12 nocturne: night Fishing in antibes

  1939 Back from Amboise Vollard’s funeral, Pso finds a new guest at his Antibes studio – Jacqueline Lamba, wife of Breton, and Dora’s friend since Art School. The two women spend days together on the beach. Here they are, this August night, promenading, nearly at the quay’s edge. Dora with a double-headed ice-cream in her right hand, a bicycle wheeled by her left. There is a grace to them. The grace and serenity of a slow dance (somewhere a blues trumpet is playing, its melody broken, breathless, as though its improviser lay flat upon his back – le jazz horizontal). The air is filled with flying insects. Above, a sky blotched with crushed yellowed starlight. Stars of the myopic. Stars as they might appear through the eyes of a weeping woman. Below the stone quay-side, men lean out from a small fishing boat spearing fish attracted by the yellowed acetylene light-flare which deceives them into thinking it a sudden summer’s day. When real morning comes, gun emplacements are being set up along the beach.

  13 Nude Dressing her Hair

  1940 At last he is able to express it. Here, he has captured her, the essence of her. Here, as he enters to find Dora naked before the mirror dressing her hair. He paints her that very evening from this memory – snouted, loose-fleshed, splay-footed, massively arsed and thighed. As dog-faced as the skeletal Kasbek, his malnourished Afghan hound. Barely held within the room in which she squats. Her body disgusts him. The thick hair. The darkening moustache. The seepages. The monthly mess with its ammoniac after-stench. He can no longer take the air of her into his body. Cannot bear its stinking passage through his nose, the aftertaste of it in his mouth. But what can be done? There is nothing else to do. He beats her repeatedly, often leaving her unconscious on the floor.

  14 Goldfish

  1943 in Paris, witnesses a particularly bitter winter. Brassaï’s goldfish freezes to death in its tank. The studio of Grands-Augustins ices over. The war plays havoc with his artists’ supplies. He turns to making figures from cut or torn paper. Using the tip of his cigarette to burn out the features of the face. Pso is in love again. A young Art student, younger by forty years, has come to his attention. She reminds him of Rimbaud and he finds the comparison pleasing, a frisson, captured by her fine androgyny, this Françoise Gilot.

  15 Clippings

  1946 Meanwhile, Dora crumbles beneath the ghostweight of Marie-Thérèse. She sits in a darkened room, staring at the naked insides of her fingers, the webbing. The flesh is scarred. Hatched with fine lines. It is how her whole body feels. As though a blade had passed over her every extremity, too close, too close. A thousand cuts. Fear love, she sings, fear love. Like some modern Ophelia. Close the window. Open the window. Let the mirror be empty.

  Pso has Dora committed. Gives his consent to a program of electric shocks. On ‘medical grounds’ Doctor Lacan encourages her to convert to Catholicism. Pso moves about his audience, noting how he had never been in love with Dora Maar. ‘I liked her as though she were a man. I used to say: “You don’t attract me, you never have.” Well, you can imagine the tears and hysterical scenes that followed!’

  As for Marie-Thérèse, she will retain all his letters and, in tiny packages of tissue paper, his finger-nail clippings. It will take her another forty years before she hangs herself.

  16 The Last of Dora Maar

  1947 She packs two suitcases – one filled largely with grey clothes; the other, various painting materials. She takes a taxi to Gare de Lyon and a train to Avignon, where she is met and driven to a ruined house in the village of Ménerbes. So it is she moves between the Parisian winters and the summers of the Luberon. It is the life of a recluse, her body slowly curving down upon itself like a figure from her photomontages. In 1994 she falls. Dora is bedridden. The shutters of rue Savoie now remain permanently closed. She has a saucepan on which she beats two spoons to call Rosa. She constructs a series of strings with which she can pull necessary objects closer. She will only read books written in, or translated into, English. Three years later she dies alone in her apartment, beneath a large boxwood crucifix and surrounded by the stations of the cross. She has outlived Picasso by twenty-four years. I am blind, she writes. Made from a clutch of earth. But your gaze never leaves me. And your angel keeps me. The soul that still yesterday wept is quiet. Blood shakes its wings and alights from between the fingers of a glove. This day, she whispers, was a sapphire. Here it is.

  17 Broomstick

  1947 Françoise Gilot bear
s him a child. As usual, it makes him feel young again. He overflows with energy. And then he feels the need to free himself.

  ‘Look at you,’ he derides. ‘With all your ribs sticking out to be counted. Any other woman would improve after the birth of a baby, but not you. You look like a broom. Do you think brooms appeal to anybody? They don’t to me.’

  You will recall how, during the war, Pso would fashion human figures from torn paper, burning in their features with a cigarette end. Here, now, with war a distancing memory, he returns to this technique. This time we encounter the little man with the dead eyes holding a cigarette to Françoise’s cheek. It pits the skin, puckering the flesh around it, a miniscule volcano smouldering on his so-called lover’s face.

  18 Thinking of Herself

  1952 A Spring exhibition of Gilot’s paintings is opened at Kahnweiler’s. One which garners too much praise – a circumstance intolerable to le maître. Pso visits the major dealers. Her contract with Kahnweiler is terminated. Everywhere she turns, dealers tell her they cannot show any of her paintings – to do so would be to risk Picasso’s displeasure.

  Unlike her predecessors, however, she does not consider him a god. By the end of the year Françoise is confiding: ‘I despise him. I can’t forgive him for turning the person I loved into one I despise. He’s become a dirty old man. It is all so grotesque and so ridiculous that I can’t even be jealous.’

  She informs Picasso that she is going to marry the painter Luc Simon. ‘It’s monstrous,’ he exclaims at the announcement, turning to the audience. ‘She thinks only of herself! I’d rather see a woman die, any day, than see her happy with someone else.’

  19 A New Afghan

  1953 He is seated on a couch. He wears a t-shirt, loose shorts and square-toed sandals. His hands are clasped about his left knee. His legs have lolled apart, sufficient to provide a view (one dare only look for a second) of his famous sack and the monstrous balls that plot within. How he aches to show them to every woman, this bull’s endowment. He shows them to his new Afghan, Kabul.

  ‘But I do not have a woman,’ he repeats over and over to the long snouted, doe-eyed, creature which seems to embody his misery.

  ‘I am wounded without a woman.’

  20 Jacqueline

  1955 Then suddenly, his wounds are healed. At the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris where he fashions his ceramics, he reacquaints himself with Jacqueline Roque, a young woman forty-five years his junior. Under her influence he begins a series of canvases and lithographs – variations on the theme of Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers. The harem women all based on versions of Jacqueline. One February day, three days away from completing the series, he is taken by a sudden silence. The air clears a moment. As if wiped clean. A coup de torchon. What is it, this ceasing? It comes to him – a near-constant screaming has fallen away. It is no surprise that late in the afternoon he receives news of Olga’s death.

  21 Clothes

  1957 He’s kept them all, for years, these stick-figure’s clothes, Françoise’s dresses. Clothes belonging to a broomstick. Has kept them in a cupboard under lock and key. How he had come to hate them. And the body they had fitted so perfectly. But now he discerns a use for them – as he had often thought he might – that is, their utter inappropriateness for his new mistress.

  ‘You don’t need money for clothes,’ he says. ‘You need to choose something from the wardrobe.’ And he leads her upstairs. Jacqueline can’t fit into them. He goes through the mockery of making it possible. Lettings out. Constructing longer hooks. All of which serves to underline her own body’s failings. The fabric tears.

  22 Cobblestones

  1962 It is said, in his years with Jacqueline, Pso produced more works of art than with any other woman. In 1962, for instance, he paints her portrait 72 times; in 1963 he paints her portrait 160 times. But he grows old. He has already swapped his gaping shorts for long flannels, loosely cut. Two years later he undergoes surgery on his prostate. The long held belief that should he cease to work he would die, presses down increasingly upon him. I paint, he says, just as I breathe. He loses height at an alarming rate. Exhausted, terrified, barely over five feet tall, he works. In Spring of 1968 he begins a suite of what will be 347 etchings – brothel scenes, copulations, observed by various voyeurs, a dwarf, a clown, a jester, a king. A little Andalusian boy. How he has come to loathe his wife! What possessed him to marry her! He portrays her as The Pissing Woman – the hot yellow water hissing through her flaps, splashing back from the gutter against her thighs. For her part, Jacqueline is familiar with Pso’s own timid performances above the porcelain. The draining-off. The pitiful after-shake. The too-too dark colour of his offering.

  Nearby, streets are barricaded with overturned cars. Students are pulling up ancient cobbles for ammunition.

  23 Signing

  1973 Pso clutches a swathe of lithographs to his woolly (pizzle-yellow) chest. ‘I can’t die now,’ he trembles. (Has he wet himself?) ‘Now I must sign my works.’ He picks up a coloured pencil. Separates the first of the prints, smooths it out. Scrawls in the corner: Picasso. Adds: Greater than Matisse. ‘What day are we?’ he calls to Jacqueline. ‘Le 7 Avril.’ ‘And the year?’ ‘1973.’ ‘Of course it is,’ comes his reply. He adds the date. Draws forth another print: Picasso. Greater than Manet, 7.iv. MCMLXXIII. Takes another: Greater than Velázquez, 7.iv. MCMLXXIII …

  24 Smoke

  1973 Next day his heart specialist, Pierre Bernal, arrives; two hours before the artist’s death. Never a tall man, recent years have shrunk Pso to a near homuncular state. A brown wrinkled manikin drowsy in his cot. From the bed he tries to affect a joking manner. But his breath often fails him, and most of what he says cannot be understood. Only after the specialist has gone, does the engrossing begin. The skin, too sparse for the unexpected bloat within, tears apart at what looks to be points of old stitching, as though the grand-maître were a monstrous doll from one of Hoffman’s tales. Jacqueline waits at the bedside, drifting in and out of momentary sleeps. She is, though, wide awake when death occurs. Don Salvador’s cigar smoke is finally expelled through Picasso’s nostrils, drifting upwards, back into the still-breathing world. Jacqueline does not leave the bedside. Even when the corpse begins to rot. All of this, with over thirteen years to wait before she shoots herself.

  Southerly

  2 or 3 Things I Know About You

  Claire Corbett

  I’m standing in your study, stunned to find it unlocked. Bad teen girl stalker. How could I have got so lucky? Your home so isolated on this hill overlooking the water. I’m almost your neighbour and we never lock our doors either. It’s like the country, though ninety minutes from town. But you’re a world-famous film director and this weekender, with one of the most beautiful views on earth, stands empty during the week. This is years ago, before CCTV: no sensor lights flood the garden breathing in the dark.

  Breathless

  I am standing in your study that you told Cahiers du Cinéma you built yourself. Gum trees writhe in the night, pale sickle of beach gleams, lighthouse beam winks slower than the racing motor of my heart, which revs higher than your red sportscar. What if someone sees the light I’ve switched on? Is there a dog? The night is quiet except for the clatter of possums on Colorbond.

  Detective

  I am standing in your study where I have no business being. Intruding. Looking for your real self. If I’m caught what will they do? The shame. To be exposed as every man’s terror: the crazy girl who loves too much. I’ve read every article, seen every film. I could be your daughter but am hopelessly obsessed, more than any character you’ve created. You haunt my dreams. I search your study. Everything here will bring me closer to you. Finally I will get under that skin, that skein you’ve woven of art and the marketing of your public self. Your movies, your interviews, the reviews and critiques. I will know you better than any collaborator, fan or scholar.

  Goodbye to Language

  I am opening the drawers of your
desk. Picking up your keepsakes. A leather wayang kulit puppet, an ancient tin of corned beef from the North Queensland Meat Export Company, an antique paperweight, glass enclosing purple pansies. In the bottom drawer lies treasure beyond anything I could have imagined. Twenty, thirty handwritten diaries!

  Contempt

  I’m eighteen, have read all the Diaries of Anaïs Nin. Diary-keeping is for dreamy, self-absorbed women. Notoriously, you scorn your scriptwriters: what are you, the famous film director who thinks only in images, the action-hero among artists, doing contemplating your navel in all these notebooks?

  A Woman is a Woman

  What do I do now? Sit and read your diaries, exposed by the light streaming from your window? I know I am doing wrong but I am excused by love.

  In Praise of Love

  I cannot stay here. I pull the diaries from the drawer, heap them on the desktop. They are not large; they can be smuggled to my house nearby. No-one will ever know. Safer than reading them here and I cannot ignore this windfall. I have to know. I worship you. I am justified.