She was very fond of Claude, told him stories, made him laugh, and in general was fairly hard working. But aside from the bad air Claude was breathing and the questionable atmosphere he was soaking up along with it, I was afraid that Marcelle, weaving her way home at the end of the afternoon, would one day swerve into the path of an oncoming car and they would both be run over. From then on I kept her at home and took Claude out afternoons myself.
The move to La Galloise gave me a good excuse to get rid of her. There I engaged a couple who lived across the road, the husband as gardener, and the wife as cook and general factotum: Monsieur and Madame Michel. I found Madame Michel a great improvement over Marcelle. She applied herself to her job and did the heavy work well. I would have preferred to have someone look after Claude and nothing more but Pablo said he couldn’t stand another strange face around the house, and when I mentioned it to Madame Michel she told me that if anyone else came in, she would leave at once. I let the matter drop.
Madame Michel was a model of French thrift. I had linen sheets for Claude’s bed but she never put them on. She cut out squares from worn-out sheets and tablecloths and used those instead. When I told her to use the ones I had bought for the purpose, she told me it was a waste and quoted a local proverb to the effect that counts and barons were brought up with a minimum of fuss and feathers.
Claude had lots of playsuits and I used to change them often—two or three times a day if necessary—so that he looked clean and fresh most of the time. When I tried to have her observe the same routine, she looked at me sternly and again recited her bit about counts and barons. She kept him in a drab, institutional-looking plaid romper suit. Every time Pablo saw him he’d say, “Well, here’s the orphan.” On Sundays at least I would have liked to see him in white, but nothing doing. Counts and barons.
One day Madame Michel told me she couldn’t serve lunch that noon; she had to leave early, to “make grass” for the rabbits, which in the local phrase meant that she was going to cut some grass for them. I suggested that perhaps the rabbits could eat at another time, but she thought not. It happened so often and took such a long time I thought the Michels must keep at least two hundred rabbits. I found out later that they had only five or six.
It wasn’t long before she was unable to serve dinner either, and for far stranger reasons than making grass. It was the beginning of winter when she approached me one evening about six o’clock, with a very tragic air, to say, “Madame, I must leave now. There’s an agony in the Fournas quarter,” which, translated, was her way of saying someone was dying in the section of Vallauris near Pablo’s studio. I told her I was sorry to hear that, but why did it mean she had to leave?
“That’s the way it is, Madame,” she said. “In this part of the country nobody dies without me.”
I had no idea what she was referring to but I began to laugh because it struck me as a very strange notion, whatever she meant by it. She looked at me disapprovingly. I stopped laughing and asked her why it was nobody could die without her. After all, she wasn’t the village priest.
“Madame doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” she said. She had very little respect for either Pablo or me, and she generally talked to me as though I were her wayward daughter. I told her she was quite right; I certainly didn’t know what I was talking about, and I’d be happy if she would explain it all to me so that I would know.
“Well, Madame,” she said, “I’m a weeper; the best weeper in Vallauris.” Old legends of Corsica surged up through my memory and I realized, then, that most of the local people were of Italian origin. “You don’t just die, like a dog,” she said. “Unless you’re very poor, you bring in three weepers to help you get through.” I told her I would give her the time to go to her agonies on condition that she tell me what went on, because I wanted to know how it was done. She needed no urging.
“Well,” she said, “when we’re called in, the first thing we do is to eat a good meal. Weepers work hard and you can’t do that on an empty stomach. Then we draw up our chairs alongside the bed. The main thing is to prolong the agony so that before you leave, you’ve helped that poor soul recall everything important that happened to him all during his life. I might say, ‘Do you remember, Ernest, the day of your First Communion, how little Mimi stood behind you and pulled your hair?’ I grew up with him, you see, and I remember those things. ‘Yes, yes, I remember,’ he sobs, and all three of us weepers groan and wail with him. Then it’s the next weeper’s turn. ‘Do you remember the day you left for your military service and how you felt when you had to say good-bye to the family?’ If he says yes, then it’s the third one’s turn, but if he says no, we try it again and again and add more and more details until he does remember. Sometimes, it’s a real sad memory, like ‘Do you remember, Julie, the time you lost your little girl from the croup at the age of three?’ When Julie cries her heart out, we follow along like a chorus. If it’s a happy memory, we all laugh. And it goes on like that through the whole life of the one who’s dying.”
I said it seemed to me rather gruesome to put someone who was already suffering through an ordeal like that.
“Just the contrary,” Madame Michel said. “If he can recall everything of importance that happened to him on earth, happy or sad, he can start his new life on the other side happy and free. But it’s not as easy as you think. That’s why I’m the best weeper around here, because I generally get it all out before they go. Sometimes we have to work fast. Other times, when we can, we take a longer way around, and make things go on like that for two or three days. But the main thing is to make it all come out even. Then, when the poor soul feels the end approaching, he doesn’t answer any more; he turns his face to the wall.” Madame Michel leaned closer to me and lowered her voice. “That’s more important than extreme unction,” she whispered. “Then we eat again and go home. The rest is up to the undertaker.”
I had no choice but to let Madame Michel follow her vocation. Fortunately, in Vallauris people weren’t dropping off like flies. One evening, after a calm period, she had to leave suddenly to weep for someone who was in a very bad way, over in the Fournas quarter. Pablo had bought the atelier there only recently and it hadn’t been completely refurbished for his use. Since it had been used as a distillery for perfume essences, there were pipes that carried away the waste products into the sewer mains. In the middle of the front yard was a kind of shaft, blocked by a manhole cover, that led into this subterranean complex. When Madame Michel left the house, she told me she was going around by Pablo’s studio in order to avoid passing in front of the house of a very poor Italian family known in the quarter simply as “Les Calabrais.” Most of the Italians who had settled in Vallauris were from Piedmont, but a later wave came from a much poorer region, Calabria. The Piedmontese looked down on the Calabrese, whom they accused of eating cats and of having the evil eye. Whenever it was necessary to pass in front of the house of a Calabrese, they never failed to make the usual signs to exorcise the evil eye. But if there was a way to avoid the house, they took it.
“If I were like you people who speak pointed”—people from the North—“that wouldn’t be necessary,” she said, “but I have to take precautions.”
The next morning at breakfast time she wasn’t back. I didn’t worry because by now I had grown accustomed to agonies that went on and on. Her husband, the gardener, didn’t give it a second thought, either. After breakfast I went to the atelier, as usual, to start the fires for Pablo. I thought I heard groans coming out of the ground beneath my feet as I walked through the yard. I had been listening to too many of Madame Michel’s stories, I told myself. Inside the atelier the groans seemed louder. I went out into the yard again, looked around and noticed that the manhole cover over the branch line of the sewer wasn’t in place. I ran over to it and looked down inside. There, sitting against the wall, twelve feet below me, with no way of getting out, was Madame Michel. I ran for a ladder and when she had laboriously climbed out, stiff from th
e cold and her bruises, but with nothing broken, fortunately, she explained that after a long evening of weeping, tired and distracted, she had cut across lots in the dark and without any warning suddenly found herself in what seemed a bottomless pit. After that her zeal for agonies was noticeably diminished.
One night while she was washing the dishes, I told her that we who talked pointed didn’t like agonies a bit, that we didn’t watch things like that unless it was someone in our own family, and that overindulgence in agonies would do her no good in the end. And since I felt in a sermonizing mood, I told her also that another thing she ought to slack off on was reading her favorite magazine, Détective, a very lurid crime sheet she was addicted to. She looked at me, scandalized.
“Madame,” she said, “that’s the only thing that’s true. What you read in the other papers may have a little truth in it, but it’s mostly a pack of lies. But when somebody pulls out a gun and kills somebody else, there’s no two ways about it: it’s real.”
Détective was so real to Madame Michel that it put every other periodical in the shade. She knew, for example, that she worked for a man who was being written about constantly in all the papers and magazines. But he was never written about in Détective and she thought that very odd, she said. He couldn’t really amount to very much. And she had reservations about other things, too.
“I don’t understand why Madame and Monsieur don’t dress like a lady and a gentleman,” she said one day. I asked her how one ought to dress to win her approval. “Well,” she said, “I know you have enough money to dress like the people in Paris, but you don’t.” I explained that since we were painting most of the time, it was a lot more convenient to wear blue jeans and sweaters than fancy clothes like the people in Paris. She admitted grudgingly that she understood, but it obviously made her unhappy. She had a niece, she said, who was a second maid at the Aga Khan’s villa and there people dressed properly.
About two weeks later she came in one day looking very pleased. Someone had moved into the villa Les Mimosas, down the street, who dressed like a gentleman, she said. “I’d like to work for him,” she added. I told her I had no objection to that. She stayed on, however, but from time to time she would point him out to me as he walked along the road, and he did look like a real dandy, right out of Savile Row.
A few weeks after that, Pablo’s friend the police commissioner dropped by one morning to feed Pablo his weekly ration of gossip. He was walking on air.
“We just picked up Pierrot le Fou No. 2”—a Marseilles gangster who was Public Enemy Number One in France at the moment. “We’ve been trying to get our hands on him for months,” he said. “And you know, he’s been living up here right under your nose in that villa Les Mimosas, which he bought through a straw a few months ago to use as a hideout. Everybody took him for a rich businessman from Paris. He certainly dressed the part.”
Madame Michel took it rather hard. And since she was always rubbing my nose in one of her meridional proverbs, I decided it was time to teach her another one. “It’s not the coat that makes the man,” I reminded her. She didn’t find it at all funny.
That wasn’t the only thing that didn’t amuse her. Pablo would have preferred, at least when it was warm, to have me walking nude around the house and the garden. For one thing, being at the beach so often, wearing the usual bikini, made me very tanned, but when I took off the bikini, there were white patches in one or two places and Pablo found that unattractive. He suggested that if at home I walked around in and out of the sun without even my bikini, the damage would soon be repaired.
“Besides,” he said, “how do you expect me to put nudes in my paintings if I never see any?” I pointed out that on occasion he did. “Well, if I do, it’s lying down, and if I want to paint a nude walking or standing, that’s no help at all. Furthermore, it’s important for me to see you nude outside the house, in natural surroundings.” I realized he had a point there, but it was difficult to carry out because of Monsieur and Madame Michel. Madame Michel was prudish, and if I had dared walk about like that while she was on the premises, she would have given me a week’s notice and then covered her face with her apron and run out of the house screaming. So nothing of the sort was possible during the hours she was on the job. And for a different reason it was just as impracticable when Monsieur Michel was at work in the garden. If I ever tried to take a sunbath on the edge of the swimming pool, with a giant-sized bath towel beside me for use in emergencies, that was always the moment Monsieur Michel chose to come consult with me about what flowers he should plant, although he never planted any, and whatever he did do, he did without consulting anybody. But at those times he wasn’t able to do a thing without frequent and lengthy consultations. And although I always covered myself with the beach towel when he came, he looked disgusted and indignant as though the mere thought of our low ways was almost more than he could bear. Yet it was next to impossible to get rid of him. Sometimes he would preach me a little sermon. “Madame can’t stay here like this. What if the postman came?” If I pointed out to him that the postman had long since come and gone, he raised the possibility of an unexpected telegram. “And if the delivery boy saw Madame like that, what would they say in Vallauris?” If he was on the grounds there was no place I could go without having him search me out, so the only time I could sunbathe without drawing the fire of either one of the Michels was at noon when Madame Michel left to make grass for her rabbits, and Monsieur Michel had his midday siesta. That satisfied Pablo, too, because in spring and summer it was generally warm enough to have lunch outside. Since it wasn’t his intention that anyone else should see me in that costume, we ate on the terrace, which was sheltered from the neighbors. So in theory, and especially if the Michels weren’t around, there was no particular reason for me to be dressed. Occasionally that got me into trouble.
One afternoon I had just taken a shower and was coming out into the next room, when I heard a noise. I thought it was the children coming back from the beach. I walked through the door and found myself face to face with the matador Dominguín. I didn’t know what to do. Should I stay and greet him, like a polite hostess, or should I turn and run for cover, however undignified that might make me appear? Then it suddenly occurred to me that neither one would do. He had already seen the front; it was too late to do anything about that, but there was no reason to show him the rear also. So I solemnly backed through the door, shut it, and then, when I had dressed, returned to the room. He was still waiting. I felt almost as embarrassed with my clothes as I had without them. He apologized for not knocking at the front door but explained that he had been walking around outside the house, thinking he might run into Pablo. He had seen the open door leading onto the terrace, had walked inside, et puis voilà. I accompanied him to Pablo’s atelier in the Rue du Fournas. Later, when I told Pablo how Dominguín had walked in on me or vice versa, he laughed. “You weren’t in any danger with him,” he said. “After all, you’re not a bull.”
I THINK PABLO AND I were with Paul Eluard the day he first saw Dominique, who was to become his wife a year and a half later. We had gone to Paris for a few days just before Pablo’s first exhibition of pottery at the Maison de la Pensée Française. Madame Ramié was with us and she wanted to call at a small pottery shop in the Rue de l’Arcade. With her and with Paul, we visited the shop. The woman who waited on us that day was Dominique.
Some months after that, Paul left for Mexico to give a series of lectures and also to see several refugee Spanish writers, Machado among them, who were then living in Mexico. At a meeting of one of the literary groups he spoke to he met Dominique for the second time. She had gone there on holiday. After that they traveled around Mexico together and a month or two later returned together to France. We knew nothing of all this at the time.
In February 1951, in Vallauris, we received a note from Paul one morning telling us that he was coming to call in a few days, “with my chauffeur.” Pablo and I knew he had never driven a car because his
hands shook as a result of an illness he had had when he was about sixteen, but we knew also his very meager income didn’t allow him luxuries like a chauffeur. We thought it must be a joke. In a few days Paul called up the Ramiés to say he had arrived and to invite us to have lunch with him at Chez Marcel in Golfe-Juan. When we got there, we found him waiting for us with his chauffeur, who had driven him down from Paris. It was Dominique. We recognized her from our visit to the pottery shop in the Rue de l’Arcade, and then they told us about that second meeting in Mexico, and everything that had happened since. They went back to Paris soon after that but in June they returned to the Midi to get married and wrote asking us to come to St.-Tropez to stand up with them at the ceremony.
In June there is a fête at St.-Tropez called La Bravade. The local people go around shooting an antique rifle called a tromblon, which flares out at the muzzle like an old horn. They load them with gunpowder and make a terrible noise with them. The marriage took place right after La Bravade, at the town hall. The mayor’s nerves must have been badly frayed by the festivities. He was surly and couldn’t even bring himself to say the few friendly commonplaces generally handed out on such occasions. We all signed the book and went out and that was it. A group of us, including Roland Penrose and his wife, Lee Miller, and Monsieur and Madame Ramié, went to lunch afterward at a small inn called L’Auberge des Maures.
Life with Picasso Page 34