“Ha, naturally,” Pablo would say. “You all want to martyrize me. You want me to go to the bullfights. Well, you’re not going to martyrize me. Not any longer. We’re not going.”
“No, we don’t want to martyrize you,” Paulo would answer. “We don’t care whether you go or not. But if you do want to go, we must order the tickets today. Anyway, we can order them today and if you want, cancel them afterward if we don’t go. But how many should I order? Will we have friends with us or not?”
Pablo would throw up his arms, and scatter his mail all over the floor. “Ah, yes, now I have to take friends.”
“No, Papa,” Paulo would say, “I don’t mean that you have to take friends, but if we don’t order any tickets for friends and then afterwards we take some, there won’t be any seats for them.” This went on all morning long. Finally, after the tickets had been decided upon, with a carefully counted number of spares for selected friends, and the order telephoned to Castel, the first person Pablo ran into walking along the street—his barber, Arias, or even one of the workers at the pottery, someone of no interest to him at all—he would invite to go with us. When he got back to the house and thought over what he had done he was furious with us for “letting” him hand out the invitation.
The next day would be just as turbulent. We would telephone to Nîmes and change the order, taking two or three additional tickets as a precaution, and then go on stoically, head lowered, shoulders squared, ready for anything, because from that day on Pablo was in a dreadful humor, harping relentlessly on the old theme that we were the ones who were obliging him to go to the bullfight. Of course, if we had ever dared not to order the seats, he would have been in a worse humor and claimed that we were trying to prevent him from going. All during the time that remained we would telephone twice a day to Nîmes: once to cancel the tickets, once to reorder them, or to add more tickets to the order or take away some. During this period, Pablo’s work was all topsy-turvy, because this put him, just as it put us, in a terrible state.
The morning of the corrida, Pablo wouldn’t get up. That was an ordeal that Paulo and I had to face up to regularly. We would enter the bedroom and give him, once more, all the good reasons why he ought to participate in what was, for him, really a fiesta. We would plead with him not to take the line of least resistance. We told him it was, after all, an incomparable spectacle, very important for his work, and that we all loved it. Paulo did like it but I went along mostly to please Pablo. Aesthetically it is very impressive but it always gave me a frightful anguish, and I didn’t have to go very often to have had enough. Furthermore, I was often carsick en route in those days, because my health had been less steady ever since Paloma was born. One could hardly say I had a passion for bullfights, and that I dragged Pablo to see them.
Finally, slowly, in order to please us, Pablo would get up and we would leave, way behind schedule. After that, Marcel had to drive like mad because it’s about a hundred and fifty miles to Nîmes, and only a little less to Arles, and we had to get there early enough for Pablo to inspect the bulls in the toril before lunch, greet the nervous matadors in their rooms, and very important, discuss with the mayoral de la ganadería, the breeder, the traits of each bull.
The mayoral always accompanies the bulls. He stands at the barrera directly behind the matadors so that he can see everything that happens during the corrida and thus know to what extent his bulls live up to his expectations. They call a bull “tame” (manso) when he refuses to fight and, instead of charging the cape, paws the earth and then backs up. They used to send in dogs to tear at him, but now they simply withdraw him from the fight. That is considered a great blow for the breeder. But when the bull has fought “sublimely,” in the terminology of the aficionado, he is given full honors in the arena in defeat—in death. For the breeder, that is an indication that he has brought together the right stock in the right way to produce the best combination of fighting qualities.
So between inspecting the bulls, greeting the matadors, and talking shop with the mayoral, Pablo had a busy morning before him. These are all characteristically Spanish rites without which a bullfight is not a bullfight, and we had to get there well before noon; otherwise the whole day was spoiled for him. So we always tried to leave early, but since we never could, we had to rush and get there just under the wire. And then there was another rite. We had to sit down to a huge lunch of paella with all the friends who would come to Castel’s house—the writers Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille, Pablo’s nephews Javier and Fin Vilato, and a dozen more. By that time Pablo was radiant. We were at the bullfight and everything was fine.
One day we went to a bullfight in Arles, not only to see the usual three matadors kill their six bulls but also to see Conchita Cintrón, a Chilean girl about eighteen or twenty years old, who was a rejoneadora, fight two bulls from horseback. When the matador is on horseback, there are no picas or banderillas. All those first phases of the corrida are replaced by the maneuvers that the matador makes from his horse. When the bull tries to charge the horse, the matador pulls away from him and plants in his back wooden lances about five feet long with an eight-inch steel tip. These lances are called rejones. If he is skillful enough, he kills the bull. If not, at the end of ten or fifteen minutes, he gets down off his horse, takes a sword and a red muleta and goes in for the kill in the usual manner. That was the way it happened with Conchita Cintrón that day: she got down off her horse and killed the bulls with her sword and she did it well. She was about my size, and had brown hair, and green eyes. We had met her before the corrida because, as usual, we had gone to speak to the matadors. After the corrida, some of us were sitting around in a little café—Pablo and I, Javier, Castel, and the mayoral who had brought the eight bulls from Spain to Arles. The mayoral was wearing the costume of his function—narrow trousers, boots, a kind of leather apron, a short Andalusian jacket, and the Andalusian hat. Since he spoke only Spanish we were all speaking Spanish with him. I was wearing the hip-length Polish coat Pablo had brought back for me from his trip to the Peace Congress in Wroclaw. A group of people came over to me and asked me for my autograph. I thought that strange. I pointed to Pablo and said, “He’s the one who signs the autographs.’ They said, “No, no. It’s you we want.” Pablo said, “Don’t argue. If they want your autograph, sign.” So I signed, all around. Everyone seemed happy and they left. Almost immediately another group came in and we went through the same routine. This time even Pablo was astonished. I asked the people why they wanted my autograph. One of the men, looking very wise, said, “Whether you want to admit it or not, and even if you sign with another name, we know you’re Conchita Cintrón.” Pablo was delighted that I could be mistaken for a bullfighter and told the story to everybody.
That day the painter Domínguez and Marie-Laure de Noailles came to the corrida. For Pablo the bullfight was just as sacred—perhaps more so—as mass for a Catholic. We were seated in the first row in the shade, as usual, so that we had the best possible view and we were observing, as always, the religious silence that Pablo imposed on us. When he saw Domínguez and Marie-Laure come in and take their seats just behind us, he began to curse. Domínguez was weaving tipsily and they were laden down with bottles of wine, sausages, and a huge loaf of bread. Pablo remained friendly on the surface but inside he was seething. He muttered to me, “You know I don’t like any distractions at a corrida. It looked like a decent program for a change, and now they’re going to spoil everything, those two back there. It’s disgusting. And I can’t say anything. What a life I lead! Everybody spoils everything for me. No pleasure without the taste of ashes.”
And in fact that afternoon Domínguez outdid himself and everyone else in shouting, cheering, hissing, at the most inappropriate moments. When the time came for the matador to receive his tribute from the crowd, Domínguez, amid the olés, threw down the loaf of bread and then a sausage and finally the wine bottles, now more or less empty. But he did it with such brio that Pablo couldn’t stay an
gry, despite the sacrilege.
Domínguez suffered from acromegaly, which made his skull swell and press against his brain and turned him half-mad and led him, eventually, to suicide. He had an enormous nightmare head right out of Goya. Marie-Laure, her hair parted in the middle with long bangs and falling in waves on each side, looked a bit like Queen Marie-Louise. She was wearing a very Goyaesque black lace dress with layers of ruffles and Spanish pompons. Since she had put on a bit of weight that summer, there was a space between the bodice and the skirt where you could see a generous patch of Marie-Laure. That cheered up Pablo somewhat, and he decided that, in spite of his earlier pessimism, their presence had actually added zest to the afternoon’s other pleasures.
PABLO’S SON PAULO caused him a good deal of anguish on occasion, but I always felt he had more genuine affection for his father than many of those whose actions were more carefully calculated to please. My first view of Paulo came by way of a large photograph of him that hung in the long room where Sabartés worked at the Rue des Grands-Augustins. He had a straightforward, direct look that I liked and that shed a different light on him than the scrapes he sometimes got into and the angry reactions they aroused in Pablo. Whenever I asked Pablo about him, he was thoroughly out of patience with him: he said he was lazy, had no ambition, couldn’t hold a decent job, and he made various other reproaches bourgeois parents often make about their slow-starting, twentyish sons. Then he would launch into a bitter diatribe against Olga, Paulo’s mother, to show me that Paulo couldn’t possibly amount to anything with a background like that.
Soon after I went to live with Pablo in June 1946, Paulo, who had been living in Switzerland, came to Paris and dropped into the atelier one day. He was over six feet tall, had red hair, looked no more Spanish than I, and had a likeable, easy manner that corresponded to the impression I had received from the photograph. Pablo introduced us and told him I had come to live there. Paulo seemed pleased, talked in a friendly fashion for a while, then closeted himself with Pablo for some private matter and took off as quickly as he had arrived, back to Switzerland on his motorcycle.
A few weeks later, just as we were leaving Ménerbes to go visit Marie Cuttoli, Paulo and motorcycle arrived again. He decided to accompany us to Cap d’Antibes. All the way down he served as a combination escort and entertainer. There was almost no traffic a good part of the way and whenever the road was visibly free for several miles ahead, he would weave back and forth in an exhibition of fancy riding, sometimes far ahead, sometimes just behind us. It seemed to me to be intended not just as a proof of his skill in handling his motorcycle, but his way of trying to demonstrate an exuberant affection for his father and his goodwill toward me. Pablo didn’t take it in that light, however, and by the time we reached Cap d’Antibes, he was thoroughly exasperated with his daredevil son.
Paulo was often in Golfe-Juan and once Pablo and I began spending much of our time in the Midi he was frequently with us. He did give his father a good bit of concern in the process of growing up—and sometimes it seemed like a very long process indeed—but in any of his dealings with Pablo it was always very clear that it was never self-interest that motivated him but a genuine and spontaneous affection.
Paulo’s spontaneity was evident in other ways, too. One evening after making the rounds of the bars of Juan-les-Pins, Paulo and a friend brought back to the Hotel du Golfe, otherwise known as Chez Marcel, a couple of girls of the kind one meets in the late bars. In French we call this kind of girl “light,” and these two were so light that about two in the morning, having exhausted all the other possibilities, Paulo and his friend decided it would be easy to throw them out the window. At any rate, they managed to scare them half to death. The girls shouted and screamed so much—and the hotel was just across from the police station—that it ended with the intervention of the local police commissioner, a fellow named Isnard.
Isnard was fond of Pablo, and we used to see him often. He had got into the habit of dropping by, periodically, just as Pablo was getting up in the morning, to tell him what had happened the night before. Even when Paulo had not been misbehaving, we were treated to frequent briefings about everything that went on along the Riviera. He would tell us the whole story about such things as the theft of the Begum’s jewels, who had taken them, and whether or not they would be given back. We knew, often before the newspapers did, the latest sordid stories that had crossed the police blotter. Isnard loved to spin out all the gossip. As for Pablo, it wasn’t just that he liked gossip; he adored it. If we wanted to see him in a good mood all day long, all we had to do was to get Commissioner Isnard up to the house in the morning to tell him about the latest burglaries along the coast. Obviously, though, it was not quite so funny the days when he came to tell us of Paulo’s carryings-on. That would put Pablo in a bad mood for the whole day.
That morning Isnard came in with a long face and said mournfully, “I don’t like to have to bring it up, but do you know what happened last night? That son of yours, how he carried on! Talk about disturbing the peace! I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a good thing he’s your son and that we can take that into consideration. Otherwise—well, all I can say is, you’ve got to put a stop to it somehow. It’s just out of the question that this kind of thing should go on. Imagine, trying to throw women out of the window!” By now Pablo was sitting up straight in his bed looking very glum, and Isnard, sensing that he had his audience, launched into his story. Being a true son of Marseilles, he loved to embroider the facts. By the time he had finished, Pablo looked like a thundercloud. “You go get Paulo and bring him in here,” he said to me.
I went out to look for Paulo. He hadn’t arrived yet, but when he showed up at eleven o’clock I saw that he was pretty badly hung over. I told him about Isnard.
“I’m not going in there alone,” Paulo said. “You walk in front of me.” Since Paulo was six feet one, I couldn’t hide him entirely, even though he was crouching down behind me. Pablo began to bellow, “You worthless creature. You carried on again last night just like the lowest form of animal existence.” He grabbed his shoes from the floor and threw them at us, then the books from his night table, and anything else he could lay his hands on. One of the books bounced off my head. I protested that I had nothing to do with this.
“Never mind trying to pass the buck,” Pablo said. “He’s my son. You’re my wife. So he’s yours, too. It amounts to that, anyway. Besides, you’re the one who’s here. I can’t go out looking for his mother. You’ve got to stand up and take your share of the responsibility.” Paulo and I burst out laughing at this brand of logic but that only made Pablo angrier. He looked around for something else to throw but he had run out of ammunition so he began to shout again.
“Good God, I don’t understand how you can carry on like that. It’s unbelievable. Trying to throw a woman out of the window. It’s absolutely mad. I never heard of such a thing.” With an angelic look on his face, Paulo said, “But Papa, you amaze me. I would have thought you had more imagination. You, of all people, ought to understand that sort of thing very well. Haven’t you read the Marquis de Sade?
At that Pablo exploded. “You’re the son of a White Russian, all right. I’ve got the most disgusting son in the world. You’re nothing but a bourgeois anarchist. And besides, you spend too much money. The only thing you do is pile up debts. What good are you?”
“I’m sure Aly Khan spends more of his father’s money than I do of yours,” Paulo said piously.
Pablo pounded his pillow. “You’re disgraceful. Now you’re comparing me to the Aga Khan. What a lack of respect! You have the crust to talk about me in the same breath with that repulsive old Buddha.” I couldn’t stop laughing and I was chased out of the room for impertinence. For the rest of the day Pablo didn’t speak to us. He didn’t even get out of bed.
Soon after that, tired of hearing his father say he couldn’t do anything, Paulo told him there was one thing, at least, that he could do—ride a motorcycle. He en
tered a motorcycle race that started from Monte Carlo and wound over the curves of the Grande Corniche and the Moyenne Corniche and he came in second in competition with professional racers. Pablo was very impressed, but he was so afraid Paulo would kill himself if he kept it up that he never again reproached him for not being able to do anything.
I think Paulo would have done lots of things if his mother hadn’t held him back. He lacked neither intelligence nor a sense of humor. One morning. Baron Philippe de Rothschild arrived at La Galloise. Since he knew that Pablo had already done L’Homme au Mouton, the statue of the man holding a sheep in his arms that now stands in the market square at Vallauris, he wanted Pablo to make a sheep for him as an emblem for his Mouton Rothschild wine, to be cast in bronze and placed at the entrance to his château and vineyards near Bordeaux.
“What I want,” Philippe de Rothschild specified, “is a sheep holding a bunch of grapes in his mouth.”
“Oh, I see,” said Pablo. “That’s a very natural desire on your part. But you think that just because I’ve made a goat and a sheep, I’m going into that business? If you asked me to do Bacchus holding a bunch of grapes in his mouth, I’d say, ‘Go see Michelangelo. He’s your man.’ But a sheep with a mouthful of grapes—you must be out of your mind. I never heard of such a thing. I wouldn’t consider it. And I don’t know anybody who would.”
Feeling a bit at a loss, no doubt, and looking for something to ease away the awkward moment, Philippe de Rothschild turned toward me and said, “Oh, Madame, it’s marvelous how youthful you look.” I asked him why. He said, “Well, I had heard that you had been paralyzed.” I realized he thought I was Olga, who was then in a hospital in Cannes, partially paralyzed. Not content with one faux pas, he said, “It’s unbelievable that you should have a son so big,” and he pointed at Paulo. Paulo burst out laughing. Then he said to Philippe de Rothschild, “You know, I was born a bit prematurely. Quite a bit. As a matter of fact”—pointing to me—“I was born before she was.” Then Rothschild realized he’d made the most beautiful gaffe of his life. Paulo rolled up his trouser legs as far as his knees, crouched down near the floor and began to run around the room, waving his arms and shouting, “Ma-ma, Ma-ma.” Claude, who was then about three years old, was so delighted with this that he began to follow him around crying “Mama,” too, and Philippe de Rothschild was obliged to leave, but without a sheep.
Life with Picasso Page 28