Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  I crossed the street. A mistake. Opposite the Lutetia was the Santé prison. I’d photographed it late one night when the shadows were especially dark. Now its fortress walls looked threatening even in broad daylight.

  On the corner a grizzled old fellow was selling black market ladies’ silk stockings stretched out on a filthy white towel. I had to take a picture of that chorus line of ghost legs against the frayed terry cloth curtain. But first I had to pay off the guy and promise that his face wouldn’t appear in the photo. As I set up the shot, I asked why he didn’t just cross the street and sell inside the hotel, to the Germans.

  Two Maltese toughs controlled the territory. They would beat him senseless.

  Both of us were nervous. We sensed a hundred pairs of eyes—the eyes of spies and secret operatives—watching us from the windows.

  I should have thought a million times before picking up my camera. Was that what people mean when they talked about being willing to die for your art? Taking pictures of anything carried a serious risk. Any German could knock your camera out of your hands if he’d had too much to drink or just didn’t like your face. I’d gotten good at ducking into doorways. Several friends had had their cameras smashed.

  I didn’t care. I wanted that shot. I wanted to buy a pair of stockings for Suzanne and another for the baroness. Small tokens of my gratitude. How patient and kind those women were!

  Someone grabbed me from behind. Two helmeted German soldiers tossed me between them like a rag doll. Eventually they got bored with the game and demanded to see my papers. Was I by any chance a Hungarian spy?

  I said, No, I was an artist. On my way to visit Picasso.

  One of them pulled a gun on me and said if I moved he would shoot me.

  He said, “Admit you’re a Hungarian spy.”

  I said, “All right. You’ve got me. I’m not really an artist. I’m an amateur on my way to a private studio where I plan to take . . . certain pictures.”

  The older soldier asked what did I mean by certain pictures?

  I said, “Artistic pictures of naked French women.” The older guy looked at the younger one, who, after a brief hesitation, asked if this studio was nearby. The older one explained that this was precisely the sort of filth that needed to be mopped up. I said I had the address, which I would be happy to give them. I had in mind a real place, which made the conversation easier. But the address I gave them was that of the government office that monitored resident aliens in Paris.

  The older German returned my camera. He said, “Go on, get out. We don’t want to see your ugly mug again. And you’d better keep away from that whorehouse you mentioned.” I promised yes on both counts, and they let me go.

  It took another twenty minutes to walk to Picasso’s. I had time to calm down. But my shoulders hurt where the soldiers had grabbed me, and I was still breathing hard when I climbed Picasso’s famously steep, dark staircase. I promised myself to quit smoking. Such was my state of mind as I pulled myself up to my full height and knocked on Picasso’s door.

  Picasso appeared, grinning up at me with that white, startled-clown face. I felt my knees bend on their own, to equalize our heights. The last thing the world needs is another description of what a shrimp Picasso was. So let me say that I was short. But Picasso was shorter.

  As I looked into those blazing anthracite eyes, I thought of my old friend Lionel Maine, who had gone back to the States. Lionel, my lost brother. I tried to remember what he’d said about Picasso’s eyes, something about a magic dog in a fairy tale.

  Picasso wore a gray jacket, gray pants, gray cotton shirt. Another thing one heard was that he dressed to match the dust that collected in his studio, the dust he called his alarm system because it alerted him when anything was touched. His suit was costlier than it looked. I’d been around enough to know that, though my own fashion taste ran to baggy overcoats with pockets I measured by how many glass plates they held.

  Picasso slapped me on the back. I winced. I considered telling him about the incident with the stockings and the German soldiers, because it was a good story, and because it might impress Picasso, who had shown such bravery in painting Guernica and letting it be shown. Picasso and I were resisters. We worked on a small scale, on our own. Soldiers armed with art. I decided against it. I was afraid that Picasso would figure out how scared I’d been.

  During the months after the invasion, when I’d stayed with the baroness in the south, Picasso was at the beach in Royan. But he’d run out of canvas. He decided he would rather die than not paint. He’d keep working and hope for the best.

  Ever since the day I’m describing, I’ve had a recurring dream of wandering through a portal into a glittering, cobwebbed chamber filled with treasure, a magical curio shop. I wake from these dreams in bliss, knowing that the god of sleep has carried me back to that studio, dismantled decades ago, which now lives only in memory—and in the photographs that I and others took.

  How could such a place vanish? Why can’t I go back, even once? I dream of walking through a door, and there they are, waiting for me, like guests at a surprise party: the brothel girls, the gangsters, the thieves. Where have they disappeared to? I might think I had imagined it all if I didn’t have my photos to remind me that Picasso’s Paris studio existed—and that I, Gabor Tsenyi, was there.

  I thought I’d photographed the range and variety of the nests that artists build in which to hatch their ideas. Giacometti with his Etruscan tomb; Kokoschka’s grand white parlor empty but for one painting, a huge mirror, and his life-size Alma Mahler doll; Brancusi cooking succulent lunches on his roaring forge; Monsieur Matisse with his giant birdcage and the naked models who were always in attendance, and who made his studio my personal favorite.

  But I had never been confronted with so much to look at, such a profusion of things crammed into the labyrinths connecting grand salons, pyramids of empty cigarette packs piled against gilded mirrors; corners arranged like shamanic altars to an animal god who demanded moth-eaten taxidermy, skeletons, and seashells. Canvases were stacked everywhere, on easels, against the wall. Painted faces peeked at me from behind the crude votive idols dressed in artists’ smocks, holding brushes and palettes.

  I could write this whole preface about how the light shone down from the mullioned windows, onto the tables piled with papers and books, the heaps of metal scraps, the plaster cast of the artist’s hand. It didn’t require a palm reader to trace the lines of his greatness. The African figurines, the pitch-covered goddess bristling with nails, the Cycladic nude emitting the sharp, salt-and-vinegar smell of something brined on the ocean floor.

  I had often participated in that ritual of the studio visit, with its special chemistry of the professional and the friendly, the casual and the official, its ballet of how the visitor moves through space, where he stops, what he passes, says and doesn’t say. It was a test of one’s tact, judgment, aesthetic, not to mention one’s ability to come up with a perceptive or witty remark. It was even trickier when so many of the paintings were portraits of Picasso’s mistress Dora Maar, her face sliced apart and reassembled, weeping, wracked with psychic pain. What could I say? Are these Dora? You’ve made her look so . . . what?

  At last I came upon an earlier, happier portrait of a woman holding an artichoke. I suppose I must have chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Picasso.

  “That artichoke,” I said. “The most Cubist of vegetables.”

  “My point, exactly!” Picasso said. “From now on, everyone who eats an artichoke will be dining on a Picasso!”

  From the corner of my eye I saw something that I was never able to capture on film. My photo of it exists. But now that every grade-school art-class student knows that a bicycle seat can be made to look like a bull’s head, I can no longer describe what it was like to discover, for the first time, that an artist could see a mythical toro where the bicyclist puts his ass.

  Picasso said, “It’s a miracle that it doesn’t take off and t
rot back to the pasture.”

  I laughed to convey my admiration for his imagination, his creativity. Did it matter that I knew he’d said the same thing countless times before?

  He showed me into a room whose walls were covered with tribal masks. He said he’d bought these “diplomats of the sacred” from an artist who’d gone mad. Like his idol Gauguin, the poor fellow had gone to live with a primitive tribe. But unlike Gauguin, he’d discovered that his new friends and family were hunting heads while he lived among them.

  Was Picasso unaware that this anecdote was in my friend Lionel’s Make Yourself New? Had he not read this banned masterpiece that, serialized in Demain and other avant-garde magazines, had achieved an underground reputation? I wished Lionel were in Paris, so I could meet him for a drink and report that Picasso was still telling the same story. Though maybe it was fortunate. Lionel’s vanity could be easily wounded when he realized that someone—especially someone like Picasso—had never read his work.

  What followed was one of those instances for which the master was famous, when it seemed that those blazing-coal eyes read your mind like the Spanish Gypsies from whom, before people found out the truth, Picasso claimed to be descended.

  He said, “Let me show you a drawing that was inspired by that American, your writer friend. What was his name? Leon something. Typical American. Naive. Like little children. He was explaining how enlightened and civilized the French are. So I made him this picture”— Picasso led me across his studio until we were standing in front of a framed drawing of a guillotine.

  I could hear Lionel ranting about how much he’d wanted the drawing and how Picasso had grinned as he grabbed it. Back in New Jersey, Lionel was probably still wishing he had it, a regret that might haunt him until the day he died.

  Picasso gave me a sly smile. He knew that I knew the story.

  I said I thought that Lionel Maine was a major talent who would one day be appreciated as the original he was. Picasso looked bored. He said he was sure I was right, but mostly he remembered doing the drawing and my friend thinking he deserved to get it as a gift. Who did he think he was?

  I said we’d better get started. I imagined he’d want to be there when I photographed his studio. I warned him not to be alarmed by the small explosions produced by the old-fashioned magnesium flashes I still used for lighting. I assured him there was no danger that this could start a fire.

  Picasso held up his hand. He grinned at me. Then he rocked back on his heels and laughed.

  “A terrorist!” Picasso said. “I’ve always wanted to meet one!”

  From the (Unpublished) Memoirs of Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi

  To be destroyed on the occasion of its author’s death

  IT TOOK THE Germans a while to realize how docile their victims would be. Occasionally one saw struggles, but most people did what they were told. They gathered their possessions, walked to the waiting car or truck. They wanted to live. Who could blame them?

  But at first the Germans didn’t know that, so they’d send gangs of thugs. Hearing the commotion, Gabor and I would go to the window and look down at the street swarming with woolly gray-green grubs. Potato bugs, we called them.

  After I joined the Resistance, I was always sure they’d come for me. I leaned against Gabor, but I couldn’t explain why I kept shivering even after I saw which house the police went into. I let Gabor think that my fear was for others. It was safer for him. Often I thought of his photo of me, lying dead on the sidewalk. Would he ever be able to look at that image again if I was shot and fell on the pavement beneath his window?

  One rainy night, Gabor and I watched an arrest. At the center of the wriggling potato bugs were a woman and her two teenage sons. The boys were taller than their mother. They locked their arms around her until the soldiers pried them apart.

  Gabor and I couldn’t speak. We went back to bed. We killed a bottle of bootleg brandy. We said we loved each other and passed out.

  Nor did we talk about the mother and her sons the next afternoon, when Gabor got back from Picasso’s studio and I returned from the language school, where a German woman told me in broken French that her navy officer husband was going up to the Normandy coast, where they were expecting some action. I told her that the word for ship was the street argot term for urine. After dinner I would need to fake some illness and go to Ricardo’s clinic at the hospital. Our comrades in the north needed to know about the action in Le Havre.

  After the war, no one believed that I could have done what I did without Gabor knowing. But it was true. I couldn’t put him at risk. He was a foreigner, under suspicion. Every day he wasn’t deported was our lucky day.

  Each time he left home with his camera represented a decision to choose art over safety. He took pictures of bombed-out houses, of a calico cat living in the rubble of its former apartment. He caught a trio of pretty French girls eyeing a German soldier with such undisguised sexual contempt, that image alone could have gotten him shot. People told him secrets they wanted recorded on film. A priest brought him to see lovely white marble statues of saints, blackened by the coal cellar where they were hidden. I was terrified for weeks after a humorous Resistant posted a broadside on which Gabor’s photo of three men in lipstick, mascara, and ermine coats at the Chameleon Club was juxtaposed with a snapshot of Hermann Göring, dressed and made up the same way.

  Twice he was required to get new papers. Once he received an official request for a notarized letter stating that Tsenyi wasn’t a Jewish name. It made him so angry he wanted to go down to the Gestapo headquarters and say that Tsenyi was a Jewish name. Was it hypocritical that I talked him out of the kind of courage I was called upon to show every day, carrying forged documents in my bicycle basket and fake passports on the Métro?

  Gabor’s love gave me the resolve and strength to help smuggle stranded British soldiers, Resistants, and Jews across the border, to distribute newspapers, to get medical care for the wounded and the Aryan identity cards that people needed in order to work. Meanwhile I was charming my language students into telling me where troops and supplies were being moved.

  I knew that Gabor would make a terrible Resistant. He claimed that being Hungarian gave him a talent for keeping secrets. But there was always a chance that he might go to Picasso’s studio and have a few glasses of wine, and from pure sociability and genuine fellow feeling, mixed perhaps with the desire to impress the Spanish genius, he would describe the dangerous missions our group was carrying out. Not even Picasso could be trusted with the knowledge that a German officer, practicing his French during a playful language lesson, had given us the information we needed to blow up a munitions train en route to Bordeaux.

  I said, “Why make trouble for yourself? Not only are you not Jewish, but Tsenyi isn’t even your real name.”

  Gabor saw the logic in that, though logic wasn’t the point. It gave him an excuse not to do something that might cost him dearly and would accomplish nothing. He suffered from being cut off without news from his parents. Every so often he wrote them. He told me his letters came back. After his death, I found evidence that these letters were never mailed.

  Close as we were, we never discussed the most important things. We never mentioned my contraband radio or the BBC broadcasts. Though it was technically illegal, everyone listened to the nightly half-hour program in French. It wasn’t the sort of offense for which you’d get sent to prison, except perhaps in a small town where a cop had a grudge against you or nothing better to do.

  For part of every broadcast, the announcer read personal messages. Hello, Mama, I am in a prison camp, but I am safe. Don’t worry. Darling, I pray every night for your return from the Front.

  Many of these were coded communiqués from de Gaulle’s agents in London. I had to listen carefully. Once, for example, I found out that a British aviator had landed in a tree in the woods outside Paris and had to be rescued at once.

  Gabor claimed the messages were better than Surrealist poetry. Mama, the fox h
as gotten into the figs. Dear Cousins, the sunflower wants its coffee. The moon has eaten all the Camembert. The cannibal king is on a diet.

  He would repeat them several times. Was he helping me remember them? After the war, he said, Yes, he was. I had been raised to be truthful, but during those years our lives depended on lying. Sometimes I wondered if we would ever get used to telling the truth again.

  After the war, Gabor’s photo of the Allied troops rumbling into Paris and being welcomed by the exultant crowds became one of the most famous images of that joyous event. Many people knew the story of how Gabor was shot at as he took the picture. A sharp-eyed GI saw the flash and thought he was a sniper.

  In the minds of many, this near disaster has become an act of heroism, just as Gabor’s documenting the Liberation has been viewed as evidence of his helping to make it happen. Gabor insisted that he had known everything. He used to ask how much I knew about what he was doing.

  I know that he never hesitated to do anything I needed. When I asked if he would mind taking the pictures of friends who had lost their food ration cards, he said he would be glad to. They could come to his studio any time, free of charge. And when I suggested that a steady stream of desperate clients might draw the wrong sort of attention, he said he would take their photos wherever I wanted.

  In the same way he’d staged scenarios early in his career, we devised little scenes for him to document. What German, however suspicious, would question a guy photographing two lovely young women in kerchiefs and summer skirts in the Luxembourg Gardens? And who, including Gabor, would suspect that the faces he took for ration cards were being used for forged passports and the Aryan certificates necessary to get a job?