Nearly two years later, when I told Pablo I felt I had to leave him, he brought up that incident and said, “That was when you decided to leave.” That was far from true, because it was at that moment that I had decided to stay.
I think I loved Pablo as much as anyone can love someone else, but the thing he reproached me with later, and proof of which he saw in this incident, was that I never trusted him. He may have been right, but it would have been hard for me to feel otherwise, since I came onstage with an unavoidably clear vision of three other actresses who had tried to play the same role, all of whom had fallen into the prompter’s box. Each of them had started out quite happy in the thought that she was unique. I didn’t have that initial advantage because I knew, in general, what had gone on with Bluebeard’s earlier wives and what I didn’t know, he soon told me. It was almost impossible for me to be so confident of my own superiority to all the others that I could afford to laugh at the handwriting on the wall. After all, their fate didn’t depend exclusively on themselves; it depended in large measure on Pablo. And mine did, too. They had all had different kinds of failures, for very different reasons. Olga, for example, went down to defeat because she demanded too much. One might assume on that basis that if she hadn’t demanded too much and things that were basically stupid, she wouldn’t have failed. And yet Marie-Thérèse Walter demanded nothing, she was very sweet, and she failed too. Then came Dora Maar, who was anything but stupid, an artist who understood him to a far greater degree than the others. But she, too, failed, although, like the others, she certainly believed in him. So it was hard for me to believe in him completely. He had left each of them, although each of them was so wrapped up in her own situation that she thought she was the only woman who had ever really counted for him, and that her life and his were inextricably intertwined. I saw it as a historical pattern: it had never worked before; certainly it was doomed this time, too. He himself had warned me that any love could last for only a predetermined period. Every day I felt that ours had one day less to go.
If Pablo was right in saying at times that I was cold, I suppose it was because I was chilled by the growing realization that whatever might come in the guise of good was only the shadow of something bad which was to follow; that whatever was pleasing would have to be paid for by its opposite immediately after. There was no means, ever, of coming really close to him for long. If for a brief moment he was gentle and tender with me, the next day he would be hard and cruel. He sometimes referred to that as “the high cost of living.”
After Paloma was born, in the moments when I wanted to promote a real fusion between us he withdrew abruptly. When I, as a result, withdrew into my own solitude, that seemed to rekindle his interest. He began to reach out to me again, unwilling to see me serene so close to him yet without him. The heart of the problem, I soon came to understand, was that with Pablo there must always be a victor and a vanquished. I could not be satisfied with being the victor, nor, I think, could anyone who is emotionally mature. There was nothing gained by being vanquished, either, because with Pablo, the moment you were vanquished he lost all interest. Since I loved him, I couldn’t afford to be vanquished. What does one do in a dilemma like that? The more I thought about it, the less clear the answer seemed.
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1951 I was obliged to return to Paris several times because my grandmother was gravely ill and also because I had to settle the new apartments in the Rue Gay-Lussac so that Pablo and I and the children could move in and avoid having them requisitioned. My grandmother had a series of strokes after her first one, and the last one left her paralyzed on one side. She was barely able to move and could hardly talk at all, but she was still lucid. I sensed she wanted to tell me something but she wasn’t able to get it out. She grasped my hand and sank her nails into it. I could feel her desire to speak. Finally she was able to break through the barrier and she said, “Let me bathe myself in your eyes.” That was the last thing she said to me.
I returned to the Midi on the first of August. A few days later Pablo and I were at the pottery. Since our house wasn’t in the center of Vallauris but up in the hills above the town, any telegrams that came for us were delivered to the post office. In France as elsewhere, southerners are never in a hurry and they often let such things gather dust for a while. When it began to be evident that my grandmother couldn’t rally again, my mother had begun sending me telegrams to prepare me for the final news. Two or three of her wires had been received at the post office but since we had no telephone at the house, they were lying around undelivered. Finally, learning that we were at the pottery, the postal clerk called up there. When the telephone rang, I was standing beside it. Without thinking I picked it up and said, “Hello.” The clerk was expecting Madame Ramié to answer so he simply announced, “Françoise’s grandmother is dead.” I hadn’t received any of my mother’s preparatory wires and when that sentence hit me, it knocked all the breath out of me, like a punch in the pit of the stomach. I returned to Paris at once knowing my mother would need me, since she worshiped her mother.
When I reached Paris, my mother told me that my father would be at the funeral, and that I had better be prepared to meet him. I hadn’t seen him since I went to live with my grandmother in October 1943 because he had made it plain that he didn’t wish to see me again. He hadn’t seen my grandmother since then, either. Meeting him now was difficult, but I knew I must make the effort because it was a breach that, one day or another, had to be healed. And with his disposition it was certain that he would not take the first step.
We met in the clinic in Neuilly where my grandmother had died. My father shook hands with me rather coldly. I held his hand long enough to let him overcome his fear of appearing “soft,” and finally he said, “After the ceremony is over, I’d like to have you come to the house.” Then he added, “I’m not doing this for you, but for your mother.”
After lunch he said to me, in a clear-cut businesslike fashion, “I haven’t forgiven your grandmother for having supported you in this enterprise of yours, but I see no point in arguing about that now. I’ve decided to overlook it, so consider yourself at home here once again. I’ll be happy to see you whenever you care to come, you and the children. We won’t discuss it again.” From that day until the day he died he was polite, and on occasion helpful, but no more. We were able to discuss literature, or anything he thought he had to teach me about money matters so that I would be able to look after my mother and the children properly if one day it fell to me to take over his role in the family, but there was nothing of father and daughter in our talks.
WHEN I WAS FIRST GOING TO SEE Pablo afternoons at the Rue des Grands-Augustins in the spring of 1944, he used to tease me about a girl that Paul Eluard had sent to him, who was beginning to write poetry. “You’re not the only girl who comes to see me,” he told me. “There are others.” I didn’t rise to the bait, so he went on, “For example, there’s a girl who studies philosophy and writes poetry. She’s very intelligent. What’s more, she’s very thoughtful. Very often when she comes to see me in the morning, she brings me cheese—Cantal cheese.” I told him that if she was as nice as all that, he ought to invite me some morning when he knew she was coming, so that I could look her over and see if she measured up to his praise. He did, and when she arrived I saw a big bosomy girl, whose physical attributes bore a definite relation to the production of cheese. After that, any time Pablo referred to her, I would say, “Oh, yes, the Cantal cheese.” Like most people who enjoy ridiculing others, Pablo never enjoyed being exposed to ridicule himself and he soon stopped talking about her.
The years passed and I had quite forgotten about the Cantal cheese when something arose to remind me of her in a very disagreeable way. Early in 1951, after a relatively quiet period, Pablo began making trips to Paris alone, leaving the children and me in Vallauris. I felt that something was going on, but it wasn’t clear just what or with whom. In May, Paul Eluard and Dominique arrived at St.-Tropez. Pablo went over, wit
hout me, to spend two weeks with them. I sensed that he wasn’t alone and that Paul wasn’t the real reason for his trip.
One day soon after that, Madame Ramié confided to me that some journalists had told her Pablo was carrying on in St.-Tropez with another woman. She said they had even told her he was planning to go off to Tunisia with the girl, and she thought I ought to know about it before I read it in the papers or heard it from “an outsider.” I thanked her but told her I’d have preferred to know nothing about it from anyone. Even though I had suspected something of the sort, it wasn’t very pleasant to have it confirmed, and in that fashion. There are times when one can take that sort of thing in one’s stride; other times, when it’s rather hard to stand up to it. At that moment it was very hard indeed. When Madame Ramié finished filling me in on Pablo’s “new adventure,” as she called it, I remember feeling just as though I had fallen from the sixth floor and had picked myself up and tried to walk away. There was more than one painful element in the situation. For one thing, I was very fond of Paul Eluard and I liked his new wife, Dominique. And although I didn’t know exactly to what extent, it seemed evident that they were somehow involved and were helping make the difficult situation between Pablo and me become more so. All by itself, the matter of Pablo’s becoming interested in someone else was hard enough to take; to know that people whom I had come to consider my closest friends were leading him into this “new adventure” was far harder.
I had no idea who the woman might be; I knew only that Pablo was very distracted and that his mind and his heart were elsewhere. When I thought over Madame Ramié’s story afterward, I wondered for a moment if the woman might not be Dominique Eluard. Since I knew Paul very well and understood that masochistic nature of his which had led him, years before, to give tacit consent to an affair between his previous wife, Nusch, and Pablo, I thought the pattern might be repeating itself. In a certain sense, if it was Dominique, it seemed easier to accept.
When Pablo returned, I asked him if he wanted to tell me about the change in his feelings toward me. I said we had always been very frank with each other and I felt we should continue on that basis. Deciding, doubtless, that too much talk on the subject would complicate things for him or that I would react like a child, he said, “You must be crazy. Nothing at all is going on.” He sounded so convincing, I believed him, preferring to think that perhaps the journalists had been badly informed. A few weeks later we spent the weekend with Paul and Dominique at St.-Tropez. They were very nice to me, thoughtful in the way one sometimes is with someone who is ill and needs special consideration. But as I studied them all and their relations with one another, I knew it couldn’t be Dominique.
It was soon after our return from St.-Tropez that my grandmother died and I went to Paris for the funeral. Almost as soon as I got back, Pablo left for a bullfight in Arles. While he was gone, I went to the pottery one day. Madame Ramié, looking very conspiratorial, got me off into a corner.
“My dear, I know who it is,” she said. “Of course, it’s all over now; you can take comfort from that.” If it was all over, I asked her, why did she need to bring it up again? She said she thought she should tell me for my own good. Finally, she got the name out. It was none other than the Cantal cheese. I was flabbergasted. At first I laughed, and then I felt rather sad that Pablo could have been willing to cause so much pain for so little in exchange. He had a proverb he was fond of quoting which translates to the effect that one look at a she-monkey’s face tells you how much milk she’s good for. One look at the Cantal’s face had convinced me there was neither much fun nor profound feeling behind it. But that was my judgment, not his. Apparently I was a bad judge.
When Pablo returned from the bullfight, I told him that if he wanted to start a new life with someone else, I would make no objection to that, but I didn’t want to share our life with that someone. What I was principally interested in, I said, was having him tell me the truth. And if he did, I would try to accept it cheerfully.
What I got was the usual wild rage. “I haven’t any idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “Everything is exactly the way it always has been. There’s no use talking about things that don’t exist. Instead of probing continually to find out whether I have interests elsewhere, you should be more concerned to learn whether—if such a thing were true—it might be your fault. Whenever a couple runs into a storm, it’s the fault of both of them. Nothing has happened, but if anything had, it would be because you allowed it to, fully as much as I did—at least passively.”
Two or three times more I tried to raise the question. His answer was always in the same vein. And I soon began to see that having denied everything flatly, he was making an effort to have his attitude toward me correspond to what he had said. However, since he was unwilling to talk about it, it kept bothering me, because even if his little fling was finished, the fact that he couldn’t any longer be frank and open with me hurt. But I said nothing more to him about the incident. My behavior toward him remained the same in that summer of 1951, but inwardly I began to move away from him. My grandmother’s death had given me a heightened sense of individual solitude, of each one of us walking toward his own death, with no one able to help us or to hold us back.
Over the next year everyone had the impression that we had never been so happy. Our life together was very calm, within and without. Sometimes when one does things without passion but with a sense of order, the results are the better for it. I had never before been so efficient in my work, Pablo told me. Our relations were constantly amiable. There was no real exchange, but each of us exerted himself more for the other than he had in years. There was no longer a real dialogue; each of us carried on a monologue in the direction of the other.
Toward the end of October 1952 Pablo went up to Paris. I asked him to take me with him. I told him that if he wanted us to remain together, he should take me with him when he went away for extended periods, because as soon as I was alone, I began to think the kind of dark thoughts that would lead me away from him. He shook his head. “Paris in winter is no place for you and the children,” he said. “There isn’t proper heat, for one thing. You’re better off here. Besides, the sort of thing people can talk about like that, they never wind up by doing.”
I told him I thought he must know me well enough to realize that I was not the kind of person who threatened to do something but never did it. If I told him even once that I felt that from now on we should be together all the time, that we should find a way of life that was adapted to us both and not just to him alone, it was because I would do something about it. But he left for Paris by himself. Three weeks later he telephoned to tell me that Paul Eluard had died. I was so broken up I was unable to go to Paris for the funeral. I asked him to get in touch with a friend of mine named Matsie Hadjilazaros, a Greek poet who was also a friend of his nephew Javier’s, and ask her to come stay with me. I felt I needed to talk things out with someone. She was older than I and I had enough confidence in her objectivity to feel that she could help me make the right decision. She came at once. I told her that I couldn’t see my way clear to staying with Pablo any longer, but his insistence that it was my duty to remain, that he needed me in his work, troubled me.
“No one is indispensable to anyone else,” Matsie said. “You imagine that you’re necessary to him or that he will be very unhappy if you leave him, but I’m sure that if you do, within three months he will have fitted another face into your role and you’ll see that no one is suffering because of your absence. You must feel free to do whatever seems best for you. Being somebody’s nurse is no way to live unless you’re unable to do anything else. You have something to say on your own and you ought to be thinking, first and foremost, about that.”
When Pablo returned, I told him I was convinced there was no longer any deep meaning in our union and I saw no reason for staying. He asked me if there was anyone else in my life. I told him no.
“Then you must stay,” he said. “If there
were someone else, you’d at least have an excuse, but if there isn’t, you stay. I need you.” That autumn and winter we were preparing for the big exhibitions of his work in Milan and Rome, and there was a lot to be done. So I put out of my mind everything Matsie had said and I stayed. Until then I had dreaded Pablo’s absences. Now I welcomed them. I worked as hard as ever, but the less I saw of him, the easier I found it.
It was obvious that Pablo realized how I felt and he was darting up and down the countryside like the headless horseman. He never traveled so much in his life as he did that winter. Every time he returned to Vallauris he asked me if I had changed my mind. My answer was always no. In the spring, he went from one bullfight to another, the intervals between sprinkled liberally with amorous intrigues. Each time he returned from one of these expeditions like a tired dog dragging his tail behind him, he would ask triumphantly if I still wanted to leave him. Always childish, he imagined that through jealousy I would do an about-face to keep him at all costs. But the effect was just the opposite.
For the first time I started taking into account the factor of Pablo’s age. Until then, it had never seemed important. But when he began gamboling about so wildly, I suddenly came face to face with the fact that he was now over seventy years old. For the first time I saw him as an old man, and it seemed extraordinary to me that he should be the one to carry on in that fashion. I was the young one, lacking experience and the stability it brings, whereas he had had more than enough time to find his equilibrium. If, in spite of his years, he had no greater capacity for self-government than an inexperienced boy my own age, I might as well grow up with a boy rather than with an old man whose education, by now, should have been completed, but was actually far from it. That was the crack that let in the light. One day, after he had inventoried for an hour or two in his usual fashion all the things that were going so badly in his life, I was surprised to hear myself, instead of beginning the usual ritual of winding him up and starting him off in the other direction, say, “Yes, you’re right. It’s going very badly. It will probably be worse tomorrow.” I went on, like Cassandra from her rampart, to say that things were dreadful, that there was no way out, but that the worst was yet to come, and that things would grow so black that one day he would look back on these days as happy ones. He was outraged. He went into a fit of anger and threatened to commit suicide. I told him I didn’t believe he would, but that if it would make him happier, I wouldn’t attempt to stop him.
Life with Picasso Page 39