He was stunned. “You, who were so sweet and gentle, what have you become? You’ve lost the magic mountain,” he said. “You used to be a kind of somnambulist, walking on the edge of the roof without realizing it, living in a dream or a spell.”
I had been, but I wasn’t any longer. I had waked up and I was disenchanted. From that moment on I saw him threatened by every wind and all kinds of distractions—the same things that threaten everybody else. One of the qualities I had admired most about him was his intense power of self-concentration to unite and direct his creative energies. He attached no importance to the façade of living. Any roof would have suited him, so long as he could work under it. He spent no time on “entertainment”: we almost never went to the theater or the movies. Even our friends were kept within well-defined limits. His great strength had always been that in proportion to his expenditure for his creative work, he wasted little of himself on the assorted routines of day-to-day living. That was one of his guiding principles.
He had told me once, “Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my painting, and everything is sacrificed to it—you and everyone else, myself included.”
Until now I had seen him, through his inner life, as a unique phenomenon. But now that I saw him spending his energies in the most frivolous and irresponsible ways, I saw him, for the first time, from outside. I realized that passing his seventieth birthday had made him feel a whole decade older and that the strength he ordinarily kept concentrated within him for his creative work, he was suddenly eager to spend in “living.” And so all the standards he had set up and so carefully observed until now were completely thrown aside. His constant dread of death had moved into a critical phase and, as one of its effects, had apparently provoked a taste for “life” in a form which he had abandoned years earlier. He was anxious to appear youthful, whatever the cost, and he kept asking me if I wasn’t afraid of death. He often said, “I’d give anything to be twenty years younger.”
“What luck you have to be your age,” he said. Before, he had told me, “If I live with someone young, that helps me to stay young.” But now he complained that “seeing someone young around all the time is a constant reproach for being no longer young oneself.” The idea that he was now past seventy was something he hurled against me as though I were responsible for it. I used to feel that the only way I could atone for it was by making an effort to become, suddenly, seventy years old myself.
I used to get up very early mornings. At night he would keep at me hammer and tongs with discussions and recriminations, often until three in the morning. Sometimes I would pass out from exhaustion. When he saw that I was very weak and even at my age didn’t have the same kind of robust good health he had, that would cheer him up somewhat.
“You’re not so well off, after all,” he told me. “You won’t last as long as I will.” He couldn’t seem to bear the idea that anyone who had been part of his life should survive him. I recalled how he had told me at the beginning, “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around now to complicate my existence. Maybe that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.”
WHILE PABLO WAS IN PARIS, about two weeks before Eluard’s death, he met one of the few men he had always admired: Charlie Chaplin.
I had long realized that all his life Pablo had identified, in a symbolic way, his role—even his fate—with that of certain other solitary performers: the anonymous acrobats and tumblers whom he etched so poignantly in the Saltimbanques series; the matadors whose struggles he made his own and whose drama, whose technique even, seemed to carry over into almost every phase of his life and work.
The clown, too, with his ill-fitting costume, was for him one of the tragic and heroic figures. Almost every morning as Pablo lathered his face for shaving, he would trace with a finger in the billowing cream the enormous caricatured lips, the suggestion of a question mark over the eyebrows, and the path of tears oozing out of each eye—the stigmata of the professional clown. His makeup complete, he would begin to gesticulate and grimace with an intensity that made it clear that this was not only a game he enjoyed but, at the same time, something more. Claude was always a good audience and soon I, too, would burst out laughing.
Pablo had told me that he had been an avid Chaplin fan during the silent-film days but that when the talkies came along he had lost interest in all movies. When Monsieur Verdoux was announced, he could hardly contain his impatience, curious to see how Chaplin would manage with a role outside his traditional one, because for Pablo, Chaplin’s art lay essentially in the physical stylization of his “little man” role. After seeing Monsieur Verdoux Pablo felt a little disappointed with the film, but he cherished those scenes where Chaplin relied exclusively on mime to produce his effects. The scenes, for example, in which Chaplin so deftly flipped through the pages of the telephone directory and counted money were responsible, I’m sure, for the way in which Pablo, over and over again, counted, or miscounted, the banknotes in his old, red-leather trunk. In those scenes the direct force of the image seemed to him to duplicate the kind of shock that comes when you look at a painting. “It’s the same thing, to the extent that you work on the senses to convey your meaning,” he said. “Mime is the exact equivalent of the gesture in painting by which you transmit directly a state of mind—no description, no analysis, no words.”
More than once he had expressed a desire to meet Chaplin. He never failed to add, very seriously, “He’s a man who, like me, has suffered a great deal at the hands of women.”
At the end of October 1952, Chaplin came from London to Paris for the French première of his film Limelight. Several days later, with Aragon and a few other friends, Pablo had dinner with him, and Chaplin visited his studios in the Rue des Grands-Augustins. Chaplin didn’t speak French, nor Pablo English.
“The interpreters were doing their best but the thing was dragging badly,” Pablo told me. “Then I had the idea of getting Chaplin alone and seeing if maybe all by ourselves we couldn’t establish some kind of communication. I took him upstairs to my painting studio and showed him the pictures I had been working on recently. When I finished, I gave him a bow and a flourish to let him know it was his turn. He understood at once. He went into the bathroom and gave me the most wonderful pantomime of a man washing and shaving, with every one of those little involuntary reflexes like blowing the soapsuds out of his nose and digging them out of his ears. When he had finished that routine, he picked up two toothbrushes and performed that marvelous dance with the rolls, from the New Year’s Eve dinner sequence in The Gold Rush. It was just like the old days.”
Limelight, though, was another matter. The tragic—or at least melodramatic—aspects of the story troubled Pablo deeply. There were three separate levels to the effect the film had on him. One of them was simply and expectably a general protest against sentimentality in any form.
“I don’t like that maudlin, sentimentalizing side of him,” he said. “That’s for shopgirls. When he starts reaching for the heart-strings, maybe he impresses Chagall but it doesn’t go down with me. It’s just bad literature.”
The second layer of meaning the film had for him he explained in terms of the physical changes time had wrought in Chaplin and how these had modified the whole nature of his art.
“The real tragedy,” he said, “lies in the fact that Chaplin can no longer assume the physical appearance of the clown because he’s no longer slender, no longer young, and no longer has the face and expression of his ‘little man’ but that of a man who’s grown old. His body isn’t really him any more. Time has conquered him and turned him into another person. And now he’s a lost soul—just another actor in search of his individuality, and he won’t be able to make anybody laugh.”
But beyond that—and far more disturbing to him—was the parallel he must hav
e drawn, even if unconsciously, between our own precarious personal situation and the story of the film: the aging clown who not only brings the young dancer out of her paralysis so that she can dance once more and discover herself as an artist but is ready to sacrifice himself and turn her over to a younger man and thus allow her to embark on her life as a woman.
“That kind of altruism is ridiculous,” he told me scornfully. “Just hand-me-down, threadbare romanticism. That’s not my way of doing things, I’ll tell you that. To claim that when you love somebody, you can accept the idea of seeing her go off with some young fellow is very unconvincing. I’d rather see a woman die, any day, than see her happy with someone else. I prefer to be honest and sincere and admit that I want to hold onto the person I love and not for anything in the world let her go. I’m not interested in these so-called Christian acts of nobility.”
DURING THE SPRING OF 1953 Pablo was intrigued by two silhouettes he used to see in an old pottery across from his studio in the Rue du Fournas. They belonged to a girl named Sylvette David and her fiancé, a young Englishman who designed and assembled very unusual chairs, with an iron framework filled out by rope and felt. The chairs were so impractical for sitting in that Pablo was delighted with them. Sylvette’s fiancé made one up and brought it to us one evening as a gift. At the end of the arms were two round balls on which to rest one’s hands. On the network of rope one could put a pillow and make the chair a little less uncomfortable. It was such an abstraction of the idea of a chair that it reminded Pablo of certain paintings he had done during the 1930s in which Dora Maar is shown sitting in a chair made up of a skeleton framework much like this one, ending in two balls. This resemblance pleased him, and since it was obvious that Sylvette and her fiancé were doing barely enough business to get by, he ordered two more chairs like the one they had given him and a third one somewhat smaller. As a result La Galloise was bulging with chairs that were amusing to look at but took up a disproportionate amount of room in view of the fact that no one could sit in them with any pleasure.
After this Pablo decided that Sylvette, with her blond pony tail and long bangs, had very pictorial features and he began to make portraits of her. Undoubtedly he wanted to make portraits of her, but I know, also, he hoped I might think twice about leaving if I realized there was someone else so close at hand who could step into at least one pair of my shoes. But I encouraged him to go on and make more portraits of her, for I found her as charming as he did, and I made it a point never to be around while she was posing for him. The first few portraits he did with enthusiasm, and then he began to drag his heels like a schoolboy doing homework on his vacation. The pleasure was shrinking. One day he reproached me: “You don’t seem at all unhappy about it. You should refuse to admit another face into my painting. If you knew how Marie-Thérèse suffered when I began making portraits of Dora Maar and how unhappy Dora was when I went back to painting Marie-Thérèse. But you—you’re a monster of indifference.”
I told him it wasn’t a question of that. For one thing, I had never had the ambition of being “the face” in his painting. Beyond that, the portraits I admired most were some of his Cubist portraits, along with some of Dora Maar, which seemed to me much more profound and inspired than anything he had done of me. I tried to explain to him that it was his work that held me, not the image of myself that I saw in it. What I did see in it, I told him, was him, not me.
One day while Pablo was working on one of his portraits of Sylvette David, Totote, the widow of his old friend the sculptor Manolo, and her adopted daughter, who lived near Barcelona, came to call on us, driven over by friends of Totote’s who lived at Perpignan—the Count and Countess de Lazerme. Madame de Lazerme was tall and well built, with black eyes and hair and classic features. Except that she was taller, she resembled strongly my school friend Geneviève. She looked about thirty-five and was a very charming queen bee. She invited Pablo and me to visit her and her husband in Perpignan. They had a large house there, she told us, and she said she thought Pablo would be interested in seeing the library. Since Pablo was going to all the bullfights that were held at Nîmes, and Nîmes was right on the way to Perpignan, it was very easy for him to accept Madame de Lazerme’s invitation. Once he had found his way there, he discovered that it was pleasant to spend the intervals between bullfights in this vast house with its intriguing library. I had now come to feel that my leaving him was only a question of time, and I thought it pointless to accompany him on these junkets. He confided to me that he was “paying court” to Madame de Lazerme. He was flattered to feel he was attractive to such a handsome young woman. He made several trips in her direction and then began to travel farther afield. In the center of France he was smitten by another married woman, a pregnant one this time, whose husband was only too delighted to be cuckolded by such a great and famous man. Pablo gave him a drawing now and again, inscribed from “his friend Picasso,” and he became the most willing of accomplices. One day the entire family landed in Vallauris so that, in the seclusion and comfort of his own studio, Pablo could paint the wife’s portrait. Life had become a permanent circus.
On his return from one of these expeditions, Pablo looked at me with his air of enfant terrible, and said. “Well, aren’t you going to say anything? No protest to make? Don’t you have any desire to hold me back so I don’t do things like that?” I said it was too bad, but I didn’t. Not any more.
The situation became even more difficult. I had never known Pablo to talk about his private business with anyone. Everything was a secret to him and when I first went to live with him, whenever I referred, in front of others, to anything concerning our activities, I was in for a raking-over. Now, suddenly, he began sharing his private life with everyone. His reactions and attitudes were so changed, I felt I was dealing with a total stranger. We had discussed the idea of separation but hadn’t settled on anything. And yet everyone who came to call was greeted with, “You know Françoise is leaving me.” I knew I had to leave him because I had finally come to realize that I didn’t have the strength to go on; on the other hand, I had a terrible sense of desperation at not being able to go on. I loved him and I felt that for the children’s sake it would certainly be better if we stayed together. My hope, originally, was to make it a gradual and partial separation, helped, perhaps, by some intermediate step, toward a less painful final solution. At one moment I even thought that if I could regain my equilibrium through rest, I could make some adjustment that would enable me to stay. I asked Pablo to let me go to the mountains for three months. He refused. And since he talked about our separation with everyone and it was now the chief nourishment of all the gossips, it became inevitable.
He wrote countless letters to Sabartés, in a very hermetic Spanish: “I am not what I was. I am not loved,” and so on, and then left them around for me to read. But that was nothing; Sabartés was as discreet as the tomb. Pablo broke the news to Kahnweiler and Madame Leiris, Dominique Eluard, Madame Ramié—everyone we met in Vallauris or in Paris. He was getting advice on all sides. People were rushing to me, telling me I mustn’t leave him, then rushing back to him saying I wouldn’t leave; it was only a maneuver on my part to obtain more freedom; all he had to do was remain firm and I would come around. By now Pablo’s nerves were pretty frayed. He didn’t know what to say to me, since nothing he did seemed to produce the desired effect. And he kept on piling up psychological errors, one on top of another.
“No woman leaves a man like me,” he said. I told him maybe that was the way it looked to him, but I was one woman who would, and was about to. A man as famous and as rich as he? He couldn’t believe it, he said. I could only laugh at his complete misunderstanding of a woman with whom he had lived for so many years.
A year or so earlier Pablo had asked me whether there was anyone else in my life. That had started me thinking about all the friends I had once had. It made me want to go back and pick up their traces, find out what the painters and writers of my own generation had been se
arching for, and where their efforts had led them. As I did so, I saw that even though they weren’t widely known, most of them, they had sent off arrows into the future, and the efforts they were making gave real meaning to their lives. All that seemed much closer to me than the routine of someone who had arrived at the summit of life without me and for whom I existed as a physical form and a useful object but not a genuine necessity. So I began to tell Pablo that if I was leaving him, it was in order to live with my own generation and the problems of my time.
Now it was Pablo’s turn to laugh at me. “You imagine people will be interested in you?” he said. “They won’t ever, really, just for yourself. Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life has touched mine so intimately. And you’ll be left with only the taste of ashes in your mouth. For you, reality is finished; it ends right here. If you attempt to take a step outside my reality—which has become yours, inasmuch as I found you when you were young and unformed and I burned everything around you—you’re headed straight for the desert. And if you go, that’s exactly what I wish for you.”
I told him I had no doubt that the majority of people who now bent over backward to please me acted that way for reasons that were neither pure nor sincere. But if I was destined to live in the desert, as he predicted, I wanted to make the effort to do just that, and to see if I could survive, if for no other reason than to find out what I was. For ten years now I had lived in his shadow, trying wholeheartedly most of the time to relieve the pain of his solitude. But since I now realized that he lived in a self-enclosed world and that his solitude was therefore total, I wanted to explore my own solitude.
Life with Picasso Page 40