Life with Picasso

  “I told you to make it exactly like the other one,” he said. “Up in the right-hand corner there’s something that’s not quite exact.” I was convinced we had done our work to perfection. If it wasn’t exact, it was probably because the stretcher wasn’t perfectly rectangular, I told him. Pablo smirked. “That’s a real Françoise answer, all right. You make a mistake in your draftsmanship and then try to lay it onto the stretcher. That’s ridiculous. Well, measure it, anyway.”

  We did. The opposite sides were not quite parallel. It was an inch and a quarter short in the upper-right-hand corner. Pablo ran to the telephone and called Castelucho in Montparnasse, who furnished most of his canvases, and roared at them. The next morning we took the canvas off the stretcher, measured it, straightened the stretcher and then replaced the canvas, having picked up the inch and a quarter in the process.

  From time to time Pablo gave me the job of painting a copy like that; painting it up to a certain point, that is. It was generally, as in the case of La Cuisine, because he had followed one course of action to its logical conclusion and after the picture was completed he was haunted by the thought of what it might have been if, at the fork in the road, so to speak, he had branched off onto the other path. To avoid having to do over again everything he had done to reach that point, he would have me do an exact copy of it. Sometimes I would make a tracing, lightly, first in pencil, then with the brush, of the lines of force in the first painting, with color indications, to give him a jumping-off point from which to launch into the variant. That gave him a chance to get to the main point quickly and work over it longer.

  That winter I did three or four other jobs like that one. Most of them were portraits of me, in a linear manner, ending in a round ball shape with green hair. For Pablo my collaboration was a practical demonstration of the truth of one of his favorite aphorisms: “If I telegraph one of my canvases to New York,” he said, “any house-painter should be able to do it properly. A painting is a sign—just like the sign that indicates a one-way street.”

  THE MONTHS LEADING UP TO the birth of our second child were, in many ways, a lot less burdensome for me than those that preceded Claude’s. While I was carrying Claude, the idea of having a child was a great worry to me and I was painfully wrought up. But this time I had quite accepted the idea of having another child, and the obstetrician I had acquired only a week before Claude was born, I had now throughout my pregnancy. Then, too, during the first pregnancy I knew almost no one in Pablo’s entourage well, but in the interim I had made my own corner in his world and things seemed much less black as a result.

  Physically, though, I had begun to feel weaker. Pablo and I always went to bed very late and since I was working hard at my painting all that winter and getting up early in the morning with Claude, I was very tired. When I slept, I didn’t rest well. Claude was nearly two years old and wouldn’t stay in his carriage. Sometimes I would walk him in a pair of reins but that wasn’t ideal, either, so as a rule when I went out into the Rue des Grands-Augustins I used to carry him in my arms, and that may not have been a very good idea. About two months before the second baby was expected, the doctor told me he was concerned about my condition. When I went to see him a month later, he examined me and told me to come back again in three days. That time he looked me over and told me to go home, get my things together, and leave for the clinic at once. Since it was the day of the opening of the Peace Congress at the Salle Pleyel—April 19, 1949—and Pablo, as one of the prize exhibits, was quite taken up with that, I objected, a little feebly, and asked the doctor if it was really necessary. He assured me it was. “I’m going to give you injections to get this over with,” he said. I told him it wasn’t very convenient and that Pablo had a lot to do. “I don’t care about that,” he said. “That’s the way it’s going to be, so let’s not waste time talking about it.”

  I went home and told Pablo what the doctor had said. I asked him if Marcel could drive me to the clinic. He looked annoyed.

  “I need Marcel today,” he said. “You know I have to go to the Peace Congress. Besides I’ve got to pick up Paul Robeson.” I told him I realized it was inconvenient for him but it was inconvenient for me, too.

  “Well,” he said, “if you need a car, you’ll have to find another solution. Why don’t you call an ambulance?”

  Marcel, who was sitting over against the wall reading his newspaper, looked up. “We could drive her around to the clinic on the way to the Congress, couldn’t we?” he asked Pablo. They discussed it with the thoroughness due a major tactical decision. Finally Pablo shrugged. “You drive me there first,” he said, “and then come back for her. I don’t want to be late.” Three days before that, he had been having labor pains for me; now, apparently, he had transferred his anxiety to the Congress.

  When I reached the clinic it was nearly five o’clock. The doctor was waiting because I had been expected at two. Toward eight that evening, the baby—a girl—was born. Pablo had been calling from time to time from the Salle Pleyel to inquire about my progress. He had lost his anxiety over the Congress and shifted into the role of nervous father-to-be. His famous dove was plastered all over Paris on posters advertising the opening of the Peace Congress and when he heard he had a daughter he decided she should be named Paloma. He rushed to the clinic for a quick look at his new dove. He found her “lovely,” “beautiful,” “marvelous” and all the other words excited fathers fall back on. He was most apologetic for his “preoccupation” earlier in the day.

  The next morning I heard people arguing outside in the corridor. I had a feeling they must be journalists trying to force their way in. I called the office. The supervisor arrived just as they were about to break into my room. They had reached my corridor after giving false names and pretending they were there as visitors. Just outside my room they were headed off by a nurse, whom they tried to bribe to let them take a picture of Paloma. The nurse told me they offered her a hundred thousand francs to bring Paloma out. When she refused, they were ready to burst in and take what photographs they could. At that point the supervisor arrived and ordered them away.

  FOR MONTHS BEFORE PALOMA WAS BORN I had been after Pablo to buy a new suit, but for him it was as difficult to buy something new as it was to throw away something old. For three months he had been alternating between two old suits that were worn to the point of exhaustion. The day Paloma was born, he was wearing the older of the two. The cloth was so thin that in getting into the car to have Marcel drive him to the clinic he tore it wide open at the knee. The Belvedere Clinic is a rather snobbish place and when Pablo arrived that evening, I noticed he was holding his trench coat in front of him at an awkward angle. When he set it down I saw that his kneecap was fully exposed. I suggested this would be a good time to get a new suit.

  “Oh, that takes time,” he said. “It has to be custom-tailored.” I told him that even a ready-to-wear would be better than the one he had on. Finally he capitulated and ordered a suit from his tailor, which he received about a month later. But during the week I stayed at the clinic, he showed up every day in the same old suit. He had to wear his old trench coat over it, even though we were in the midst of an early heat wave.

  Pablo had no problem in buying shirts or shoes, but buying a suit caused him a great deal of trouble. He was fairly broad in the chest and shoulders and had the proportions in that area of a much larger man, but since he was very small otherwise, he couldn’t buy a suit off the rack that fit him. With a ready-made suit, you could stuff two men his size into the trousers that went with a coat that would fit Pablo, and if he got a suit with trousers that fit him, he was all arms and neck, bursting out of the coat. And he dreaded going through two or three fittings at a tailor’s: it was just too much of an ordeal.

  “It turns my life upside down,” he explained to me. “I can’t paint when I know I have to go for a fitting.” I always wondered why, since he could go to the dentist’s and lots of other places hardly more amusing. When I began to go to t
he tailor’s with him, I understood. Every time he had to go through a fitting, the tailor would say something like, “You understand, Monsieur, it’s a very complicated affair to dress you. You have a long, sturdy upper torso, but you’re really a very small man.” Every time Pablo heard that, it made him squirm. So whenever I managed to get him into a tailor shop and he gritted his teeth for the fittings, he always ordered three or four suits from that fitting so he wouldn’t have to return for a long time. When he got them home, he shut them up in a closet along with his old, worn-out moth-eaten suits so that as a rule the new ones, too, were moth-eaten before he ever got around to putting them on. But since I wasn’t allowed to throw away the old ones, the ones he had never even put on were condemned in advance and the whole process had to be started over again six months later.

  When I went to live with Pablo, I had neither clothes nor money to buy any with, and for all kinds of reasons I didn’t want to ask Pablo for money. While I was carrying Claude, I was reduced to borrowing an old pair of gray flannel trousers that Pablo had long since stopped wearing. For years afterward he kept throwing that up in my face, and he stored it away as one of the most wicked things I had ever done. He moaned about it often and each time with greater pain: “All you had to do was go out and buy something of your own, instead of which you took the only pair of pants that really fit me and now I’ll never be able to wear them because you’ve stretched them all out of shape.” I hadn’t stretched them a bit, really, because even when I went into the clinic, they were still too loose for me. I must admit, though, there wasn’t much wear left in them then, because they were practically worn out when I first put them on.

  Finally the old clothes lying around everywhere began to get on my nerves. After Paloma was born, there was no room to store anything. In Paris, aside from the ateliers, we had only two rooms. I decided to throw away some of the old suits. I knew that since Pablo refused to discard anything he had ever owned, if I tried it in Paris it wouldn’t work. I had once thrown out a suit in the rubbish, and Inès, the chambermaid, had picked it out and brought it to Pablo, saying very innocently, “Look what Madame has thrown away. A mistake, no?” Pablo was furious with me for weeks afterward. So I packed up all the old clothes and took them along the next time we went to Vallauris. But the first time I threw out something down there, the gardener found it, took it home, and one day showed up for work in it. It was almost like having a body one had neatly disposed of float up to the surface of the water. I told him Pablo wouldn’t like to see him wearing that old suit; he had strange feelings about that sort of thing. It was crime enough for me to have thrown it away. For someone else to be wearing it—that, Pablo would never abide.

  “But it’s still good, Madame,” he protested.

  It just wouldn’t do, I told him. To pacify him I gave him a bundle of my old sweaters since he was about my size. One afternoon, he was quietly working in the garden wearing a particularly outlandish-looking sweater I had given him. Back to and from a distance one might have thought it was I. Pablo, coming up the steps, saw him and then, almost simultaneously, saw me come out of the house. He began to curse.

  “Damn you! I hope you realize that one day you’ll begin to look like him and that you’ll be all bent over just the way he is. That will teach you to give your clothes away to anyone who happens to pop into your head.”

  The next time it happened, we almost broke up over it. I had unwittingly given the gardener an old imitation-suede jacket of Pablo’s, mixed in with the bundle of my sweaters. When Pablo came back from his atelier and saw the gardener wearing his old jacket, he flew into a rage.

  “That’s too much,” he shouted. “This time I’m the one who’ll be transformed into that ugly old man.” (The gardener was twenty years younger than Pablo.) “It’s dreadful. It’s monstrous. You’d do that to me, would you? Well, if that’s your intention, I’m leaving immediately.” We had quite a struggle before he calmed down. Finally I was reduced to burning Pablo’s worn-out, moth-eaten old clothes. I felt almost like Landru or Monsieur Verdoux burning the corpses of his successive wives. I had to poke around in the ashes afterward to pick up any odd buttons that might have survived and given me away.

  One time at Vallauris we won a goat in a lottery. They had told us it was a nanny goat but it turned out to be a billy goat. He manifested his presence in several different ways, all equally undesirable. First of all he smelled bad. He wandered around through all the rooms in the house, because Pablo—who often seemed more concerned over his animal family than over his human one—had told me, “If I have a little goat I want her to be able to run around everywhere. I love her like one of my children.” If he felt very disagreeable he would say, “I love her more than you.” Once he went so far as to say, “I love only my little she-goat because she alone is always adorable.” The plain fact was, this adorable little she-goat was a horrible he-goat that stank as only an old he-goat can and he waddled around all over the house and did all kinds of dirty things whenever and wherever he felt like it. Furthermore, he took a dislike to Claude, who was about three at the time, and would charge him from behind and with his horns, like a pint-sized bull, send him sprawling. At the end of two months I had had enough. One day some gypsies came to the house. They asked me if I didn’t want them to forage around in the garden and see whether there were any snakes or harmful animals to get rid of. I told them I had a harmful goat to get rid of—would they take it along? They were delighted. They led him away and from that moment on I felt a sense of peace such as I hadn’t known for months.

  At noon when Pablo came home from the pottery, the first thing he said was, “Where is my little white she-goat that I love so much?”

  I said, “I’ve given your little white she-goat that you love so much to a band of gypsies that passed by.”

  “You’re the lowest form of human existence,” he screamed. “I’ve never seen a woman like you.” He turned to Marcel and said, “Can you imagine a woman like that? Have you ever seen anyone in your life so completely unnatural? Imagine! Giving away the treasure of my heart to some filthy gypsies! I’m sure they’ve carried my luck away with them.” He was crushed.

  Thanks to Pablo I became acquainted with a field of knowledge of which I had been completely ignorant except for a slight brush I had had with it during a stay in England. There, friends had taught me that when you spill salt on the table you have to pick some up in your right hand and throw it over your left shoulder; otherwise you have bad luck. Beginning on the day I went to live with Pablo, I got my indoctrination in how to live—with superstition. If I threw his hat on the bed, as I often did, it wasn’t just that his hat was not in its place; it meant that someone in that house was going to die before the year was over. One day during the course of a little joke we were carrying on, a kind of playlet, I opened an umbrella in the house. What a crisis that precipitated! We had to go around the room, the third finger of each hand crossed over the index finger, waving our arms and shouting, “¡Lagarto! ¡Lagarto!” to chase the bad luck away quickly before it could reach one of us. I was never allowed to put the bread on the table in any other way than with the rounded part on top; otherwise something disastrous would descend on us.

  In addition to these typically Spanish superstitions, Pablo had adopted all the Russian ones—and heaven knows how many of those there are—from Olga. Every time we left on a trip, however short it might be, we had to carry out the Russian custom of having all members of the family sit down in the room from which we were going to leave, without speaking a word for at least two minutes. After that we were allowed to start out on our trip, with complete assurance that nothing bad would befall us. We did that in the most serious fashion and if one of the children laughed or spoke before the time was up, we had to begin all over again; otherwise Pablo would refuse to leave. He used to laugh, saying, “Oh, I just do it for the fun of it. I know it doesn’t amount to anything, mais enfin . . .”

  In the same way, Pablo w
as an atheist—in principle. From time to time I would receive a letter from my mother or my grandmother in which I was told that they were praying for me. Pablo always said, “But they ought to pray for me, too. It’s not nice to leave me out.” I asked him why he should care whether they prayed for him or not, since he wasn’t a believer. He said, “Oh, but I do care. I want them to pray for me. People like that believe in something and their prayers certainly do something for them. So there’s no reason why they shouldn’t give me the benefit, too.”

  There is a primitive belief that one person can assume power over another through the possession of his fingernail or hair trimmings; hence they should never be allowed to fall into the hands of someone else. But if they were burned to remove them from an enemy’s reach, the person himself might die. The true believers often carried the trimmings in little bags until they found a place secret enough to dispose of them with complete assurance. Pablo always had a great distaste for having his hair cut. He would go for months needing a haircut but unable to bring himself to walk into a barbershop. If anyone mentioned the subject, it was high drama. I’m sure that mixed in with his other fears on this subject was the old notion of hair as a symbol of male vigor, as in the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah. The beard presented no difficulties because he shaved himself every day and the problem of disposal was automatically taken care of. But the hairs of his head were another matter. And the longer they grew, the more anguished he became at the thought of having to face up to the dilemma. Generally, in the end, he would let me cut them or sometimes, in privacy, cut them himself, with most unsightly results. One day in Vallauris he made the acquaintance of a Spanish barber named Arias. For some reason he felt Arias was a man who could be trusted. From then on, Arias used to come to La Galloise whenever a haircut could be postponed no longer. I never knew what happened to the hair, and don’t to this day. It just disappeared. Arias, being Spanish, became, at least momentarily, Pablo’s alter ego and Pablo lost his fear completely. Over the years since then, with Pablo’s moves to La Californie in Cannes, and to Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, Arias has continued, one of the lone survivors of the passage of time, to go to the house at Pablo’s call and cut his hair.