“Your job is to remain by my side, to devote yourself to me and to the children,” he said. “Whether it makes you happy or unhappy is no concern of mine. If your presence here provides happiness and stability for others, that’s all you should ask.” I told him it was quite clear from his recent performance that I couldn’t do much about providing him with any stability, and as far as the children were concerned, I was no longer convinced that they would have less stability without him than they had with us together. He grew very angry.
“Of course,” he said. “We’re living in a disgustingly sentimental age. Everyone thinks in terms of ‘happiness’ and other concepts that don’t really exist. What we need are Roman mothers; they were the only real ones.” “Roman” was a term Pablo often used to imply people without feelings, since for him, sentiment was the equivalent of sentimentality. It was apparently pointless to try to make him see anything unrealistic in his notion that one of us should be motivated only by a sense of duty and have no feelings whatever, while the other should react only in accordance with his feelings and have no sense of duty toward anyone but himself. Pablo always saw himself as a river sweeping everything before it. That was his nature and he must obey it. He used to refer to himself as “an ascetic of the plethora.” His vision of my role was that of the unresisting saint, sitting quietly in her cave, sanctifying or at least neutralizing by an exemplary existence the worst aspects of his own way of life. At one time I had been able to accept that concept. But now the distance between us had grown too great.
In the summer of 1948, when Pablo’s nephew Javier and Matsie Hadjilazaros had come to Vallauris to visit us, they had brought a friend named Kostas with them. Like Matsie he was Greek. He had left Greece in 1946 and had studied philosophy with Karl Jaspers in Basel. He was now settled in Paris, translating the writings of Heidegger and working on a book about Heraclitus. Together with Pablo, I had seen him perhaps six or seven times. When I went to Paris in the spring of 1953 to work on sets and costumes I had been commissioned to do for a ballet of Janine Charrat, I saw him with Javier and Matsie. Like everyone else, he realized that things were going badly between Pablo and me and he asked me what I planned to do. Probably nothing, I told him. There were the children to think of and besides that, I still felt I was more useful to Pablo than to anyone else. His answer stunned me. He loved me, he said, and I must end my relation with Pablo. I could see that he meant what he said. His declaration made me realize that in spite of all Pablo had said, it would be possible for me to have a valid human relationship within my own generation. I told him I was deeply moved by what he had said but I didn’t think I loved him. He said that was of no importance, that there are times when one person can carry the burden of love for both. I told him I thought it would be impossible for me to begin another life with someone else. He said it was obvious, in any case, that my life with Pablo was finished; therefore, I should write an end to that. Whether I had confidence in a future with him or not, at least he would offer me moral support while I took that necessary step. I felt very uncertain of the rightness of the step, but over the next few months I gave it a great deal of thought. To strengthen my resolve I told myself that I loved him. And I told Pablo that now there was someone else. He discussed that with everyone, too.
The only comforting element in the situation that summer was the presence of Maya, the daughter of Pablo and Marie-Thérèse Walter. She came and stayed with us for about six weeks. She knew I was thinking of leaving and she was the only person who was helpful. While she was there we had a fairly pleasant, reasonably normal life and I began to feel it might be possible for me to stay on. Letters arrived daily from Kostas urging me not to falter. No one but Maya seemed to realize that I was in an extremely difficult situation and so exhausted as to be unable to handle it comfortably.
I had other problems, too. Ever since Paloma was born, things had not been quite right with me. Recently I had been having frequent, very heavy hemorrhages, which weakened me greatly and were a constant source of annoyance to Pablo. My doctor had told me I needed an operation. I had written to Inès asking her to come to Vallauris and look after the children while I was in the hospital. She replied that she couldn’t leave Paris at the moment. When I spoke to Pablo about it, he said there was no question of my having the operation right away.
“I’m much too busy to let you take time off now,” he said. “There’s no need for women to be sick so often, anyway.”
I decided there was only one thing to do: return to Paris with the children. I served notice on Pablo that as of September 30 I was moving with them to the apartment in the Rue Gay-Lussac and enrolling them at the Ecole Alsacienne for the fall term. The future could take care of itself. I made the train reservations. Right up to the last minute Pablo was convinced I would back down. When the taxi pulled up and I got into it with the children and our bags, he was so angry he didn’t even say good-bye. He shouted “Merde!” and went back into the house.
In Paris, when I tried to make a go of things with Kostas, it didn’t—it couldn’t—last. I wasn’t really ready. It was difficult enough to bring ten years of my life to an end in that manner without starting at once to take on something new. I was not yet free of my involvement with Pablo. Kostas couldn’t stand that. In less than three months we had broken up.
FOR A LONG TIME BEFORE I LEFT Pablo, Madame Ramié had known that things were not going very well between Pablo and me. She had been virtually force-feeding me with whatever details she had access to concerning Pablo’s outside activities and she found other ways, too, of adding to the general confusion. During the fall of 1952 she imported a young cousin of hers named Jacqueline Roque to be a salesgirl at the pottery. In general, she used to let the salesgirls go in the fall; once the tourist season was over, there was no further need for them. Jacqueline, however, came at the end of the season, with her six-year-old daughter. She spoke a little Spanish and since very little pottery was sold in winter, her chief occupation appeared to be holding conversations in Spanish with Pablo. She was just over five feet tall, with a rather cute little head, high cheekbones, and blue eyes. She had a little house between Golfe-Juan and Juan-les-Pins, which she called Le Ziquet. In the Midi, that term means “the little goat,” and Pablo often referred to her as “Madame Z.” I wasn’t with Pablo very often when he went to the pottery and he undoubtedly saw Jacqueline Roque and talked with her more often than I might have imagined at the time, had I given it any thought.
A week after I left Vallauris on September 30, Pablo came to Paris and stayed two weeks. Within a week of the time he got back to the Midi, Jacqueline Roque had taken over. “One can’t leave that poor man alone like that, at his age. I must look after him.” That was the substance of the quotations that were passed along to me at the time. Journalists literally camped on my doorstep. There was one period when I didn’t go outside for a week because there was never a moment when the stairway was not obstructed with them. Our separation was the last thing I wanted to talk about. But I was soon reading in the newspapers declarations to the effect that I had left Picasso because I didn’t care to live with “a historical monument.” I never made such a statement to the press—or to anyone else.
At Christmastime I accompanied Claude and Paloma on the train to Cannes so they could spend the holidays with their father. Madame Ramié was waiting for me at the station. I asked her if she thought it would be a good idea for me to drop in to see Pablo. She told me it was much better that I didn’t go near him, and that he had said he didn’t want to see me. So I took the train back to Paris the same evening without going to La Galloise. When the Christmas vacation was over, I went down to Cannes to pick up the children. Madame Ramié brought them to the station and I returned to Paris with them, still not having seen Pablo.
As I thought it over, I began to understand that she was doing her best to keep Pablo and me apart. From the start, she had pretended that she felt I shouldn’t leave, yet she did everything she could
to make me want to. La Galloise belonged to me and I had taken away only the clothes that the children and I needed at once. I hadn’t planned on moving out at all. In Paris one of the apartments in the Rue Gay-Lussac was mine and before I left, Pablo and I had agreed, in one of our calmer moments, that we would get together in Paris and in Vallauris from time to time. But it was quite apparent, now that I was no longer there, that his good friends on the spot had repeated to him so many times that I was a wicked and selfish woman to do such a thing to a man like him that Pablo, already in a very bad mood over my departure, was soon agreeing with them. After three months of that diet, he was saying that he never wanted to set eyes on me again, if one could believe Madame Ramié.
I decided that when I brought the children to the Midi for their Easter holidays, I would see him, and a few days before leaving Paris I wrote him to that effect. When we reached La Galloise, Jacqueline Roque was nowhere in sight, but it was apparent that she had left not long before. I went to my clothes closet to put my things away and noticed a number of changes. In my Spanish gypsy dress—the type worn during Holy Week—which Pablo had had someone bring me from Spain, all the hooks in the back had been pulled away as though it had been worn by someone heavier than I. There were other indications that my clothes had been worn in my absence. It gave me a strange feeling.
Pablo had heard that Kostas and I had broken up. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to make out with anyone except me,” he said, cheerfully. Then he grew more sober, as he added, “I’m going to talk to you now like the old philosopher talking to the young philosopher. Whatever you do from now on, your life will be lived before a mirror that will throw back at you everything you have lived through with me, because each one of us carries around with him the weight of his past experiences and that can’t be set aside. You loved me, and since you came to me fresh from nowhere and you were completely available, it was easy for you to be generous. You haven’t learned yet that little by little, as life forms us, it shapes us into a mold. That is why I have told you that you are headed for the desert, even though you think you’re moving toward understanding and communication. You made your life with me, I passed my own brand of anxiety along to you and you assimilated it. So now, even a person who might be willing to dedicate himself completely to you, since he hasn’t been tested in the same fire that you have, wouldn’t be able to save you, any more than you were able to save me.”
I told him I knew that deserts produced mirages but that they also contained oases and that under certain circumstances a cup of water was the most precious of gifts. He brushed that—and its implications—aside. He said that we should begin again to live together, but “on another basis”—as friends, so that I could help him with his work and continue our conversations on painting which, he said, had become a necessity for him. He would “fill in the rest” elsewhere and wouldn’t ask me to account for my outside activities, either. I could see that although the name had changed, it was the same old kingdom. I knew that my life with Pablo was over. If life was to become a desert or a long exile, I had to face it. I couldn’t go back to where I had been before.
But for the moment there was no animosity between us. “The reward for love is friendship,” Pablo said. We agreed that we had lived through many happy experiences together, that we had a great deal of affection and esteem for each other, and that there was no reason why that feeling couldn’t be carried on as we went our separate ways, especially since it would be a stabilizing influence on the children.
Over the next two weeks we talked a great deal about painting. One day as he showed me the work he had done since I went away, he said, “It’s terrible that you have to go away again. There’s nobody I can talk with about the things that interest me most, the way I can with you. The solitude is so much greater since you left. We may have had our troubles living together, but it seems to me it’s going to be even harder living apart.” I let that opening pass.
A few days later Pablo said to me, “Since you’re here, you ought to see Madame Ramié.” I didn’t want to argue with him about her so I went to the pottery. Madame Ramié acted much more coldly toward me than ever before.
“What are you doing here?” she asked me. “You can’t possibly imagine how much that poor man has suffered because of you. You’ll make him sick, coming back like this. It’s plain to see you haven’t got a heart. It’s shameful, what you’re doing. I hope he told you so.” I said things hadn’t taken that path at all. I told her I saw no reason why Pablo and I couldn’t talk together.
“There’s a very good reason,” she said. “You may not know it but there’s someone else in his life now.” I said he hadn’t spoken of that to me and it might be better if she let him tell me.
“I’m telling you right now,” she said, “because it’s the truth. And if you imagine you can come and go as you please, whenever you take it into your head, you’re very wrong.”
I decided, in view of that conversation, that since I had no intention of going back to live with Pablo, perhaps it would be better if I went away while our casual relations were untroubled. In that way he could arrange his life in any manner he saw fit and we could see each other whenever the occasion demanded, just like any other friends. I said nothing to him about my conversation with Madame Ramié. I think that what she told me was basically true but that he was waiting to see my reaction before taking a step in any direction. When I left Vallauris, we agreed that I would come and stay for a month with the children at the beginning of the summer, leave him the children and their nurse for the rest of the vacation and then return at the end of the summer to take them back to school in Paris. La Galloise would remain common ground because of the children.
As agreed, I returned to La Galloise with the children in July. Again I found Pablo alone, but Jacqueline Roque came nearly every day. We had lunch with her at her house several times. It was clear from everything Pablo said that he considered her presence temporarily useful but that he didn’t see it as a long-term arrangement. He and I picked up our old habit of talking while he worked and sometimes after, until two or three in the morning. Pablo, I could see, was very restless, but he was very nice toward me.
“Since we’re together,” he said, “we’ve got to take advantage of it and have some fun for a change.” That amused me, because in all the years that we were together, the question of “having fun” had never come up. With one exception, I had never known him to go to a movie-theater. And we had never set foot in a nightclub or anything of that kind. But for several weeks that July we spent whole nights in the clubs of Juan-les-Pins and other towns nearby. Pablo would hardly ever go home without seeing the dawn. And once he saw it, then he’d say, “There’s no sense going to bed now,” and the next day would start then and there. We went around the clock like that day after day. I was worn out, but Pablo was very gay and lively. There were always between twelve and twenty guests following us around, including Jacqueline Roque, some friends of hers from Bandol, and some Spaniards to whom Pablo had given the job of organizing the first bullfight in Vallauris. We went from Juan-les-Pins to Bandol and from Bandol to Nîmes, from bullfight to bullfight. In Vallauris I was living at La Galloise, and so was he, but we occupied different rooms. When we went to Bandol and stayed at a hotel, I had no intention of sleeping in the same room with him, but when I ordered a separate room for myself, he insisted I share his as I had always done when we traveled. Jacqueline Roque was indignant and said that even the idea of it was “immoral.”
I had intended to leave by the end of July but Pablo urged me to stay for the first Vallauris corrida, which was being held in his honor.
“If you want to do me one last favor,” he said, “you can open the bullfight in Vallauris. You’re going out of my life, and last year when you left I was in a pretty ugly mood. But you deserve to leave with the honors of war. For me the bull is the proudest symbol of all, and your symbol is the horse. I want our two symbols to face each other in that ritual
way.”
I agreed to go through with it. I was to enter the ring on horse-back, execute a series of intricate movements and circle the arena several times, making the horse dance. Then there would be a proclamation to read stating that the bullfight was being held under the presidency of Pablo Picasso and in his honor. But it wasn’t at all easy to find a horse that had the training to fit him for that role, nor was there enough time left before the corrida to train one very thoroughly. I finally found one in Nice that was somewhat above the average and after working him out over a period of two weeks, got him to the point where he could be counted on not to make too bad a job of it.
Madame Ramié made no secret of her disapproval. “Imagine this person, who has walked out on our great and dear Master, being given the honor of opening the first bullfight here in Vallauris—and in his honor!” That was the form in which her protest got back to me. When she said something to me about the “inappropriateness” of it all, I reminded her it was Pablo’s idea, not mine. I said I would be glad to turn the job over to someone else, but it had to be someone who wasn’t easily dismounted. Would she like to try it? Whereupon she grew all red and walked away.
Jacqueline Roque, meanwhile, had been behaving reasonably calmly. But the morning of the bullfight she drove up to La Galloise and burst into the house, tears streaming down her face. “I beg of you, don’t do that,” she said. “It’s just too ridiculous for everybody.” Pablo asked her what she was talking about.
Life with Picasso Page 41