Life with Picasso

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER I went to live with Pablo, Dora Maar had an exhibition at Pierre Loeb’s gallery. It was made up in part of the same kind of still life that she had shown a year earlier at Jeanne Bucher’s. There were, also, a few views of Paris quays, done from the Pont-Neuf looking toward the Châtelet. In her handling of the Seine, there was a translucent quality that suggested great depth, a depth that wasn’t there, but which she had achieved through the deftness of her touch. Both her conception and her technique were interesting and whatever influence of Picasso’s work she still showed seemed to be fading away, perhaps as a result of her break with Picasso.

  After that period, she began to have conversations about painting with Balthus. Once after Pablo had called on her and looked at the work she was doing, he told me he saw in it the results of those contacts with Balthus. That disturbed him.

  “One can’t work toward a tendency that lies ahead and then do an about-face toward something that is another world entirely,” he said. “That kind of painting may not be outgrown for Balthus but it certainly is for someone who has been working against the tradition that Balthus is working. Balthus began with Courbet and never got very much beyond him. For Dora Maar it’s an anachronism.”

  Pablo had said that we were going to the Midi that summer. I assumed he meant the Côte d’Azur. But one day he came back to the atelier and said, “We’re leaving on vacation and we’re going first to Ménerbes, to Dora Maar’s house.” That seemed a strange thing to be doing. For me it couldn’t be very pleasant and for her, I thought, extremely unpleasant. I told him so. He said, with that side of him that was both eminently practical and quite incredible, “But I’m the one who gave that house to Dora Maar. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t use it.” I said I thought she would be very happy to let him take it—for himself—but perhaps not if I went with him. He said, “Of course she will. Besides I insisted on her lending us the house. And now that I have it, I’m going to insist on your going there with me.” That gave me a bit of a jolt, but I didn’t react strongly at the moment. After all, I had left everything behind me to please him, so one more concession didn’t seem important.

  Ménerbes is in the Vaucluse, near Gordes, situated, like a fortified village, on high ground overlooking the farmland of the rich Cavaillon valley. The countryside is very pretty but the house was right in the village.

  It was a large house, and since it was built on a sloping rock, on the street side it had four stories but in the rear, because of the pitch of the rock, there was only one. The fourth floor in front became the ground floor in the rear. The ground floor in front was a dark, high-studded hall, which served chiefly as a shower room, since it was the only floor that had running water. The next floor above had large rooms decorated in the Empire Style. The house had belonged to one of Napoleon’s generals, who had settled there after Napoleon’s final defeat.

  Mornings we did little else but relax. At noon we went to a bistro in the heart of the village. Most of the customers were the stone-cutters who worked the quarries nearby. We heard lots of talk about scorpions. Almost every noon one of the laborers would tell about someone who had just been bitten by one that morning. The first time I heard that, I paid no attention, but after a few times more I must have begun to look worried, because Pablo tried to cheer me up by telling me that the year before Marie Cuttoli had been bitten by one. “As you see, she didn’t die. Of course, she was pretty sick for a while,” he said. Half the village was situated on the sunny side of a huge rock gable, facing south, but Dora Maar’s house was on what the natives referred to as the “Cold Coast,” facing north. Since the house was intended only for summer occupancy, that location had a certain advantage: it was never hot inside. The scorpions, I soon discovered, liked shade, too. First I noticed one or two in the garden; after that, a few more on the outside wall of the house. There was a monumental staircase inside and there, too, I ran across a number of scorpions no less monumental. After that I found one in our bedroom. During the day all was well but as night fell, the scorpions came out in droves. So we had to turn everything inside out and look very carefully before dressing.

  From the house we could see the village of Gordes, situated on the hill facing us across the valley. Every evening we heard the sound of bugles being played in all the little farms that dotted the valley, as discordant a chorus as anyone could wish for. The sunsets are magnificent in that part of the country and I found it a little disconcerting to be enjoying one, and all the peace and calm that went with it, and then suddenly have it shattered by bugle blasts from all over the valley. That went on every night from sundown until well after ten o’clock. Pablo, on the other hand, was thrilled. One of his chief delights, I had learned, was blowing the bugle. In the studio in the Rue des Grands-Augustins he kept an old French Army bugle, from which hung a red, white, and blue cord. He never let a day pass without picking it up and letting out a few good blasts, as loud as he dared. He was a little frustrated because in Paris there were laws governing noises like that, and during the Occupation, particularly, it would have gone hard with him if he had blown it too loud. But right after the Liberation, in the general excitement, he grew very courageous and worked up to the point of blowing as many as thirty notes a day. I think it was one of his greatest satisfactions. If ever there was a day when for one reason or another, he missed blowing his thirty notes, he was miserable. So for him, now in Ménerbes and temporarily deprived of his daily quota, it was balm in Gilead—at first. But as time went on, it only made him unhappy. He wanted his bugle and it was back in Paris.

  On the Fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, we reaped the fruit of all those rehearsals: a torchlight tattoo with all the buglers of Ménerbes and the surrounding valley taking part; big burly specimens, high in color and in spirits, brandishing their torches and blowing with all their might at their horns, each one more off-key than the next. It lasted nearly three hours. I couldn’t drag Pablo away. I never saw him more excited than he was as he watched those rugged blacksmith types, most of them stripped to the waist, blowing his beloved bugle and waving their torches. This was real he-man’s country and the women were practically excluded. That meant—and this must be unique for a Bastille Day—there was no dancing. That was made to order for Pablo. Not only did he hate dancing, but he considered it the most shameful of all possible pastimes. For a man as uninhibited as he was, he had a curious puritanical streak in him when it came to dancing. To sleep with a woman, any woman, any number of women, was perfectly all right. But to dance with one was the last word in decadence. Obviously, in Ménerbes nobody was decadent and so nobody danced. They only indulged in purely masculine entertainment: making all the noise it was humanly possible to make.

  The next morning, still excited by the spectacle, Pablo painted a large gouache showing the men parading in the night with a red, white, and blue flag, brandishing their torches and their bugles.

  Every night we took a walk around the village. On one of our first walks after dark we ran into something Pablo found fascinating and which held his interest as long as we stayed in Ménerbes. There were many large owls in that region and as soon as it grew dark they would come out in search of unwary rabbits to carry off in their claws. Since most of the local people were well aware of this, they kept their rabbits safely shut up at night. But there were always a number of emaciated cats at large. If you said anything about their leanness to any of the natives they would tell you the cats got that way because they ate only grasshoppers and lizards, and the lizards, being still alive after the cats swallowed them, moved around so much inside that it made the cats grow thin. But the fact was, nobody fed them. So the cats went prowling at night in search of lizards and the owls prowled to pick off the cats.

  After dinner at the Café de l’Union we would walk to the other café, where the men went to drink. After sitting there for a while over our coffee, we had a half-mile walk to get home. And on that road, almost invariably, we would see two or three fights
between owls and cats. The stars were very bright and the air clear, so although the night was dark there was almost a transparency to the darkness. Then, too, every fifty yards or so there was a street lamp. Suddenly one of the owls would swoop out of the dark. The tops of his wings were a grayish beige but his front was golden white and he would make for a cat skulking along the roadside ahead of us. Sometimes he would manage to pick the cat up in his claws and carry it off to eat somewhere else. But if the cat was a big one, the battle would last a fairly long time. Pablo would stand there, fascinated, as long as the fight lasted. He made at least five or six drawings of those fights.

  Not far from Ménerbes was another rocky promontory we could reach by a foot path. There was no village; just a few cabins where shepherds sometimes stayed in the summertime. That was the only time I ever saw Pablo interested in nature. The fact that he was sure of meeting no one made him feel free to explore. One day, returning from one of those walks, he picked up a piece of the rib of a cow, about four inches long and worn smooth by exposure to the weather. He held it up to me. “That’s Adam’s rib,” he said. “I’m going to draw an Eve on there for you.” He incised it with his small pocket-knife and when he had finished, Eve had a mythological appearance, with two small horns. She was seated like a sphinx and had the same kind of cloven hooves for feet that he often made in that kind of drawing.

  Meanwhile, the scorpions kept coming closer. One evening as I leaned back against the wall, Pablo called out, “Look behind you.” I turned and saw three of them scuttling around my head. “That’s the kind of crown I like to see on you. They’re my sign of the zodiac,” he said.

  The idea of staying any longer in Ménerbes became each day more unpleasant. I was hoping something would give Pablo the desire to leave without my having to demand it because then he would have been able to triumph over me by saying, “Ah, you’re sensitive to the categories of pleasure and pain,” and so there was a kind of philosophical competition between us and I had no alternative but to try to be the perfect stoic. I kept up my courage for nearly three weeks. By then it began to look as if Pablo intended to spend the whole summer there, and I started to have serious second thoughts about the wisdom of having come to Ménerbes in the first place; in fact, I wasn’t at all certain that I wanted to go through with my new mode of life anywhere. And not just because of the scorpions. There was another element in the situation that I found far more disturbing than that.

  When Pablo broke with Dora Maar, I assumed there were no other real entanglements in his life. I knew, of course, that he had been married to a Russian ballet dancer, Olga Khoklova and had a son by her, a boy about my own age named Paul, whom everyone called Paulo. But Pablo and Olga had been separated since 1935. I had met her once, briefly, when I was walking with Pablo on the Left Bank and she had seemed quite detached from him, emotionally. I knew also that he had had a mistress named Marie-Thérèse Walter, and had a daughter, Maya, by her. I knew that Pablo went to see her and their daughter occasionally but I had no reason to look beyond that fact. However, as soon as I moved into the Rue des Grands-Augustins, I noticed that every Thursday and Sunday Pablo dropped out of sight for the day. After a few weeks I began to sense there was a pattern to his disappearances. When I asked him, he explained that he had always been in the habit of spending those days with Maya and her mother, since those were the two days Maya was out of school. Almost as soon as we got to Ménerbes Pablo began receiving daily letters from Marie-Thérèse, which he made it a point to read to me every morning in detail and with comments—invariably highly approving ones. She always wrote in the most affectionate vein, and addressed him with great tenderness. She gave him an account of each day, right down to its most personal detail, and there was much discussion of finances. There was always news of Maya, their daughter, and sometimes snapshots of them both.

  Pablo would read me some of the more ardent passages, sigh with satisfaction, and say, “Somehow I don’t see you writing me a letter like that.” I told him I didn’t, either.

  “It’s because you don’t love me enough,” he said. “That woman really loves me.” I told him we all had different ways of feeling and of expressing our feelings.

  “You’re too immature to understand things like that,” he told me loftily. “You’re not a fully developed woman, you know. You’re just a girl.” He read me another passage to show me just how much of a woman Marie-Thérèse was. Very nice, I said, and bit my lips to prevent myself from showing my anger.

  By the time I began living with Pablo in the atelier of the Rue des Grands-Augustins, I had come to consider that place hallowed ground. Everything had seemed right and natural as long as we were there. Our relationship was reduced to its simplest form, and the frame-work in which it existed was impressive enough to favor its evolution. But to be abruptly transferred to what was essentially a hostile environment, both physically and psychologically, was too much. Between Dora’s house and Marie-Thérèse’s letters, I felt very uncomfortable. I decided to get down off that hill and follow the road to the sea. Casting about for a goal to set my sights on, I remembered that a friend of mine, a painter, had written to me from Tunisia saying that I could have a job there as a drawing teacher any time I wanted it.

  One day when Pablo had gone out for a drive, I decided I couldn’t go on living with him in such circumstances any longer. I had no money but I walked out to the main road leading south to hitchhike to Marseilles. There I had friends from whom I could borrow money to go to North Africa. There was very little traffic along the road that day and I hadn’t been there long before Marcel and Pablo drove up. The car stopped beside me and Pablo got out, breathing fire. He asked me what I was doing there. I told him.

  “You must be out of your mind,” he said. “Why do you want to leave me?” I told him I didn’t feel at ease in that house. Beyond that, I said, I could see already that life with him would never be a natural, spontaneous relationship: it was far too complex.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked me, planted squarely in front of me, his hands on his hips. Marcel peered over his shoulder, making no attempt to disguise his interest in all this. I told Pablo I didn’t want to be there any more. I said I had gone through the very painful process of breaking all the bonds that had bound me to another way of life and I didn’t like feeling even more strait-jacketed in my new one. I said it was difficult enough to adapt myself to a completely new environment without being tied to a rigidly inflexible way of life that was shaped and bounded by his past.

  Pablo looked incredulous. “After what you’ve given up in order to come live with me, don’t tell me you’re going to throw everything over just for that! If you finally came, after all your doubts and hesitations, I suppose it was because you decided you loved me. It ought to have been clear to you long before now that I love you, too. We may have a few difficulties in making the adjustment, but now that we’ve come together it’s up to us to build something together. Let’s not toss away our chance so lightly.”

  This was such an unexpected reversal of the way Pablo had been talking ever since we reached Ménerbes that I must have begun to look less sure of myself. Pablo grabbed me by the arm and pushed me into the car. Marcel started the motor and turned back toward Ménerbes. With one hand Pablo kept tight hold on my right arm. With his other arm around my shoulders he drew me close to him. After a moment he turned toward me, relaxed his grip, and kissed me. He didn’t speak right away, but when he began he spoke more softly.

  “You mustn’t listen to your head for things like that,” he said. “You’ll talk yourself out of the deepest things in life. What you need is a child. That will bring you back to nature and put you in tune with the rest of the world.”

  I told him nothing was more simple than to have a child at my age; it was only a matter of choice. But I didn’t feel that having one would add anything that was especially relevant to the experience I was right now coming to grips with. Children were useful in a negative rather
than a positive sense, I said, in that when one becomes mature and there are none, the lack makes itself felt, because by that time one must get out of oneself, and being occupied with the problems of others helps to ease one’s own anguish. But children, I told him, were only one solution among several. After all, there were other forms of creation. The fact that I had undertaken to become a painter and, on top of that, to live with him and help bear the burden of his solitude showed that I was trying to make something creative out of my life, and to get out of myself. Each one of those steps had forced itself on me, and I felt I had no choice; but the idea of having a child was something that up to now had never crossed my mind, and it seemed to me entirely irrelevant. It was just as though he had told me that I ought to learn how to sole shoes. I would have said yes, I was sure it was a very practical thing to know but not at all urgent just at the moment. And that was the way I felt about having a child, I tried to explain.

  Pablo sighed. “Words, words, words,” he said. “You are developed only on the intellectual level. Everywhere else you’re retarded. You won’t know what it means to be a woman until you have a child.”

  I didn’t feel altogether sanguine about that, considering the effects to date of my radical attempts to stand on my own feet like a grown woman, and I told him so. He brushed me aside. “I’ve seen it work before and I assure you that you’ll be completely transformed. Please don’t deny it until you’ve at least tried.”

  I couldn’t feel, all at once, the same kind of buoyant enthusiasm that Pablo was displaying but before he dropped the subject, I had decided to take his advice, and to stop listening to my head. Since Pablo, I was convinced, had been talking with his heart, I could at least listen with mine. I put Marie-Thérèse and all the other negative elements out of my mind and I took the rest of Pablo’s advice: I tried.