Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  Soon after that, Pablo and Marcel returned to Paris because Pablo was having trouble holding onto his apartments in the Rue La Boétie, from which the owner was trying to evict him. The car was at Pablo’s disposal all day long and when he had no more use for it Marcel was supposed to put it into a garage for the night. Everybody knew he often used it in the evening to drive his wife and daughter, just as though it were his own, but nothing had ever been said about that. One evening he drove his family out into the country, about sixty miles from Paris, and smashed into a tree. No one was very badly injured but the car was a complete wreck. The next morning Marcel came to tell Pablo what had happened. Pablo was quite philosophical about it at first. But later, as he thought it over, all the complaints he had had against Marcel over the past twenty-five years surged up before him and he fired him. Poor Marcel was aghast.

  “You mean that in spite of everything I have been to you, you’d fire me for that?” he said. “If you’re that heartless, I warn you the day will come when you won’t have anybody left. Not even Françoise, because even she will walk out on you.”

  Pablo was unmoved. He bought a Hotchkiss and suggested I take Marcel’s place as chauffeur. I took several lessons but didn’t like driving. I suggested that Paulo take over since he was such a good driver. With Paulo at the wheel, the Hotchkiss served for ordinary driving and for trips to Paris. A little later, Pablo’s treasure, his old Hispano-Suiza, was rehabilitated and brought to Vallauris. He kept it in the garage and used it only for bullfights. It had room for eight or nine people and resembled the cars the more idolized matadors used for their gala entrances.

  THE WRECK OF THE Oldsmobile wasn’t the only, or even the principal disaster that summer. Pablo’s two apartments in the Rue La Boétie had been unoccupied for years. Because of the acute housing shortage since the war, they could have been requisitioned at any time, but in the case of people like Pablo the enforcement agencies took a lenient attitude based on the idea of the “importance to the nation” of such people. As long as Pablo had friends like André Dubois at the Prefecture, nothing was ever done. But when André Baylot, an archenemy of the Communists, became Prefect of Police, he decided to annoy Pablo by exercising his legitimate right in the case of Pablo’s unoccupied apartments. Because of their size, they offered the possibility of housing at least half a dozen people, upstairs and down. If Pablo had owned the apartments, it might have been possible to put someone in there to “cover the law,” but since he was only a tenant he could do little about it. And since the apartments were filled with all kinds of precious objects, he could not, on the other hand, let the housing authorities put just anyone in.

  When Pablo received his eviction notice he was outraged, but he expected that, either through André Dubois or Madame Cuttoli, he would be able to straighten things out. They tried all possibilities, but the administration was more expert in such matters than any of Pablo’s influential friends, so in August 1951, after a year of litigation, Pablo had to give in. He turned the moving job over to Sabartés, who had to examine and classify every object, however important or humble, and pack each one of them in its proper case. At the end, he had filled seventy wooden packing cases.

  After Pablo was evicted, he was obliged to store all his worldly goods here, there, and everywhere. The studios in the Rue des Grands-Augustins were very large but not large enough for all of Pablo’s needs. And there was far from being enough room to accommodate the cases from the Rue La Boétie. So we bought two small apartments in the Rue Gay-Lussac, one above the other, and decided to store as much as we could in them. Of the rest, everything that could be fitted into the ateliers in the Rue des Grands-Augustins was sent there; what remained was put into a warehouse. But as soon as we returned to Vallauris, we had eviction notices served on us for nonoccupancy of the new apartments—further proof, if one needed it, that the whole maneuver was political.

  I had been feeling tired and not very energetic for a long time, but I left at once for Paris, hung curtains in the new apartments and brought in a minimum of furniture so that we could move in and forestall another eviction. We stayed there all through that winter, making our way around the packing cases as best we could. In the Midi we had gotten out of the habit of the damp Paris winters, and Pablo and the children came down with heavy chest colds. Pablo was barely able to drag around. The children’s colds turned into pneumonia and they topped that off with the measles. Since Pablo wouldn’t have anyone else around him, I nursed everybody and at the end was so weakened that I began to have fainting spells. Pablo had to put on mustard plasters every three hours, but he refused to take them if I didn’t keep him company. I didn’t have any chest complications—I was simply exhausted—but I had to go along with him, and apply just as many mustard plasters to my own chest as to his.

  All this put Pablo in a very black mood and he couldn’t work at all. I kept on working, whether I felt like it or not, because of my forthcoming exhibition at Kahnweiler’s. Pablo just sat there day after day watching me work but not lifting a pencil or a brush himself. This went on for weeks and weeks and weeks.

  PART VII

  AT THE TIME I WENT to live with Pablo, I had felt that he was a person to whom I could, and should, devote myself entirely, but from whom I should expect to receive nothing beyond what he had given the world by means of his art. I consented to make my life with him on those terms. At that time I was strong because I was alone. During the next five or six years I had given my life over to him completely, I had had the children, and as a result of all that I was perhaps less capable of satisfying myself with such a Spartan attitude. I felt the need of more human warmth. And I thought that we had been working toward the point where such a thing was possible. Until some time after Paloma was born I continued to hope for that, and then gradually came to realize that human warmth was something I would never get from Pablo; that I would get nothing more than what I had been willing to settle for at the beginning: whatever joy I might receive from devoting myself to him and his work. It took me a long time to work up to this realization, because I couldn’t throw off all at once the hopes I had for something more, since I had come to love him much more than I had loved him at the outset.

  But now that the children were regulating our lives to a great extent, it began to be clear that Pablo was chafing under so much domesticity. I could almost hear him thinking, “Well, I suppose now she figures she’s won the game. She’s taken over, with her two children, and I’m just one of the family. It’s total stabilization.” And if ever a human being was not cut out for total stabilization, that was Pablo. What he himself had wanted so badly and at first had brought him such great pleasure began to rub him the wrong way. He seemed, at times, to look on the children as weapons I had forged to be used against him and he began to withdraw from me.

  It began rather subtly. From the time I went to live with him in May 1946 until his trip to Poland with Eluard and Marcel, Pablo and I had never been apart a single day. After his return from Poland he began taking short trips to Paris without me. Another time he set off for a bullfight in Nîmes without me on the pretext that I wasn’t well enough to stand the trip and the excitement. Whenever I went with him to Nîmes, we were generally back by midnight. This time, when he hadn’t returned by three in the morning I began to fear that perhaps Marcel had drunk more than he should and had smashed up the car. I dragged a mattress out onto the balcony and stayed there, sleepless, until I saw the car pull up in front of the garage just before dawn.

  When Pablo came up the stairs, he flew into a rage, accused me of spying on him and said he was free to come in whenever he wanted to—all this without my having said a word to him. The Ramiés had been in the car with him and since I had waved to them before Marcel drove them away, Pablo also accused me of embarrassing him in front of his friends. How, I asked him.

  “Instead of being asleep in bed where you belong, you’re out here waiting for me. It’s obvious to anybody that you’re trying
to take my freedom away from me,” he said.

  In the weeks that followed, I saw that both spiritually and physically he was erecting a wall between us. At first I couldn’t believe it possible that he should want to stay apart from me at the very moment I was making the greatest effort to come close to him. But I wasn’t sufficiently extroverted to be able to ask for explanations for a thing like that, and my pride would not allow me to force myself on him in the ways that any woman can when she feels a man’s interest is flagging. His attitude did not extend to the children: he was obviously very fond of them, as he always had been of all small children, but when he saw them in their relation to me, and me, as their mother, in my relation to him, his attitude hardened. He had me handle his affairs with Kahnweiler and others more and more, but our own relationship became increasingly impersonal. Before, it had been profound and satisfying. Now we had become working associates.

  I realized, as I thought it over, that Pablo had never been able to stand the company of a woman for any sustained period. I had known from the start that what principally appealed to him in me was the intellectual side and my forthright, almost tomboy, way of acting—my very lack, in a sense, of what is called “femininity.” And yet he had insisted that I have the children because I wasn’t enough of a woman. Now that I had them, and presumably was more of a woman and a wife and a mother, it began to be clear that he didn’t care a bit for it. He had directed this metamorphosis in my nature, and now that he had achieved it, he wanted no part of it. Up until then, I had never felt any form of bitterness. No matter how difficult he had made things at times, I may have regretted or disliked what I saw but I always felt it was less important than the thing that bound us together. But now I began to feel bitter because it seemed to me there was an ironic injustice in what had taken place. And I began to do something terribly feminine and—for me—most unusual: I cried a good part of the time. One of the few lithographs, among all those that Pablo made of me, for which I actually posed (and which is perhaps the most naturalistic of all of them), is the one listed in Mourlot’s catalog as No. 195. I remember sitting there almost all of that dark November afternoon and crying steadily with only an occasional letup. Pablo found it very stimulating.

  “Your face is wonderful today,” he told me while he was drawing me. “It’s a very grave kind of face.” I told him it wasn’t at all a grave face. It was a sad face.

  Another time he was less flattering. “You were a Venus when I met you,” he said. “Now you’re a Christ—and a Romanesque Christ, at that, with all the ribs sticking out to be counted. I hope you realize you don’t interest me like that.”

  I told him I realized I had grown rather thin, but, as he knew, I hadn’t been feeling very well since Paloma was born.

  “That’s no excuse,” he said. “It’s not even a reason. You should be ashamed to let yourself go—your figure, your health—in the way that you have. Any other woman would improve after the birth of a baby, but not you. You look like a broom. Do you think brooms appeal to anybody? They don’t to me.”

  It was pretty hard to take this kind of talk, especially since I was physically very much weakened at that time, but finally I was able to get myself out of the picture. I told myself that I could best express my feelings for Pablo by devoting myself more than ever to him and to the children, and that I might still be of some use to him in his painting; also, that I had work of my own to get on with, too, and on that basis life could be quite livable, even if our relationship had apparently deteriorated to the point where the usual personal and emotional fulfillment a woman derives from a man’s love was no longer possible. But it took me two full years, from 1949 to 1951, to reach this acceptance of the situation.

  Whenever Pablo went to Paris, he always left me plenty of work to keep me busy until he came back. In February 1951, he made one of those trips. Tériade was planning to bring out a special number of his art review Verve devoted to Pablo’s ceramics and his recent painting and sculpture. Pablo had given me the job of picking out the works that were to be photographed. He told me I was not to budge until the photographer had finished his work and left, so that nothing would be broken or stolen.

  A few days after Pablo left for Paris, I received a wire from my mother, telling me that my grandmother had had a serious stroke, and that I should come at once, since the doctors didn’t expect her to live much longer. She was the person I had always felt closest to and I had, in a sense, abandoned her to go live with Pablo. I decided that having to make photographs of pottery was no sufficient reason for not going to Paris—at least for a single day—to see my grandmother before she died. I knew that if I telephoned to Pablo in Paris he would forbid me to leave, since the only thing in the world that ever really mattered to him was his work. I decided to take the night train to Paris, spend a day there and return the following night. I told Tériade’s photographer I would be absent the next day but back on the job the day after.

  After an all-night train ride, I arrived in Paris the following morning. I went directly to the hospital and saw my grandmother. She was very badly off. As it happened, she rallied and I was to see her again because she managed to hold on for a few months longer, each relapse leaving her a little worse off than the previous one. I spent the day at her bedside and around six o’clock I left the hospital. My train wasn’t due to leave for the Midi until 8:30 that evening, and the thought came to me that I had time to see Pablo and explain what I had done. But I knew so well that he would be unable to accept, or even to understand, my reason for coming to Paris that it would be better simply to return without adding all that unpleasantness to the sadness my grandmother’s condition gave me.

  At that moment I realized just what our relationship had become. When you are unhappy, the natural thing is to look for comfort from the one you love the most. I knew I would not only find no comfort there, but that I would be subjected to the stiffest kind of rebuke. I knew there would be more comfort in some anonymous spot that would not involve me in any kind of contact, so I returned to the Gare de Lyon, checked my suitcase, and went into a café close by. I had two hours before my train left and I decided to think over very carefully both my past and my future with Pablo. As I sat there, weary and burdened, it seemed to me that I was completely alone—worse off, actually, than if I were alone—except for the children. In that case why go on, I asked myself. The only answer I could find was that I had a certain usefulness for Pablo, however one-sided our relationship had become. I knew I could expect nothing further from him, and that if I did continue, it would have to be out of a sense of duty.

  It was the closing hour for business offices. People were working their way in among the crowded tables and the café filled up. I felt a kind of solace in the movement of all these human lives crossing mine and flowing around me. They seemed to brush away a part of Pablo’s hostility, which I felt even in his absence, and cover for a moment the vision of my grandmother lying helpless on her hospital bed. And as I studied them, their gestures and expressions, it came to me that, after all, most of them had burdens like mine, some far heavier, that we were all headed in the same direction with the same job to do in different forms, and that I was no more alone than they—just as much, but no more. Part of my burden dropped away. I got a very clear sense of the solitude of every human being, and of our complete interdependence, and that helped me in my determination to go on. After that I was much less unhappy than I had been in the previous two years.

  As soon as I reached Vallauris I wrote Pablo a letter telling him what I had done. Zette Leiris wrote back saying that I had behaved in a silly way that Pablo was deeply hurt and was telling everyone that if I was in Paris it was my duty to come see him, that if I hadn’t, it was because I had probably seen other people that I preferred to him, and that I cared nothing about him or his work. When he got back to Vallauris, he asked me why on earth I thought he would have scolded me if I let him know that I was in Paris and had gone to see my grandmother. I t
old him he had said so many things of that kind to me, I knew all his reactions by heart now.

  “Of course I might have said something like that,” he told me. “It’s my nature to get angry. But I’m always saying things I don’t mean. You should know that. When I shout at you and say disagreeable things, it’s to toughen you up. I’d like you to get angry, shout, and carry on, but you don’t. You go silent on me, become sarcastic, a little bitter, aloof, and cold. I’d like just once to see you spill your guts out on the table, laugh, cry—play my game.” He shook his head in disgust. “You northerners, I’ll never understand you.”

  But I couldn’t have played his game. At that period I hadn’t wholly outgrown the effects of my early indoctrination. All my life I had been warned away from public displays of emotion. Growing angry, losing control, bursting into a storm of temperament in front of someone else, even a person one loved, were as unthinkable as parading nude before a thousand strangers; for that kind of emotion I was still locked within my shell. I have often wondered if all the lobsters and knights in armor Pablo was drawing and painting at that period weren’t ironic symbols of his feelings about me in this respect.