Pablo asked, “Who are the old masters?”
“The ones who gave us eyes.”
“God gave us eyes.”
“They’re like little gods. His helpers, you might say. Before the Italians, we could barely see.”
Pablo pointed to a high shelf where stood a lone phial of blue that shone even in the dim lamplight. “What’s that?” Pablo asked.
“Only the most beautiful pigment ever found,” Don José said, uncorking the bottle with great care and tapping out the cool, deep-blue powder onto the table. “Ul-tra-ma-rine,” Don José said, one syllable at a time. “From beyond the sea! The land of Babur and the shahs!”
Pablo told his father it looked like the gown Mother Mary wore in the picture in Aunt Pepa’s room.
“Yes, that’s right, Pablito! Mary always wears blue.”
“How come?”
“It’s the color of heaven.”
“I thought blue is sad.”
“Blue is many things,” the man said to his son. “I’ll tell you, when a little boy is very sick, his mama and papa pray to the Virgin and promise to dress him in this color. They ask her help because Mary knows what it is to lose a child.”
Don José sprinkled the blue dust onto Pablo’s palm and poured three drops of linseed into it. His father touched a thumb against his son’s hand and made little circles, pressing into the young flesh and massaging oil into the particles. “Go ahead, Pablo. It’s paint, like in the tubes.”
Pablo rolled the pigment and the medium together with his fingertips until they melded to become a slick liquid brilliant as the air above the ocean at dawn.
The man pried open the clamp of a tall jar, and the pong of mothballs filled the air. He removed a paintbrush and told Pablo the bristles were made from Siberian sable, “an animal more ferocious and fine than any of the little girls in your classroom, Pablito.” He tickled the boy’s nose with the tip, which was soft as silk.
Don José dipped the brush into the pool of blue in Pablo’s hand and slathered a streak of heaven onto the canvas that had been waiting blankly at his easel.
So it was that Pablo came to appreciate paint and learned to love color almost as much as he loved lines. For his sixth birthday, he received a set of hog-hair brushes. He cherished them like he did his beloved lápiz.
Over the following years, Don José taught Pablo all his secrets, just as he himself had learned them: how bleaching linseed oil in the Málaga sun each July produces the best paint for the whole year, how to size canvas with glue made from boiling rabbit skin, how to scrape palettes with a dull blade and mix the chips with solvent and marble dust. The only imprimatura worth the effort is lead white, he would say—creamy and long, smooth and sweet—blended with homemade bone black, two-to-one.
Young Pablo took these lessons and admonitions as sacrosanct because they were spoken by Papa, the great artist. He hung on every word, swelling with pride from such attention and encouragement. At Don José’s side, Pablo learned to imitate the immortals so that one day he might join them.
CHAPTER 3
I
La Coruña, November 1891
Outside his home, Don José had earned a somewhat different reputation. Locals called him “the Englishman” because of his attachment to imported attire. Without ever having traveled far beyond their poor province, Pablo’s father perpetually strode its dusty streets with a top hat and cane, as if he’d just been hobnobbing with the queen. He showed up at barrooms, bullfights, the theater, and a humble music conservatory, offering opinions on art and aesthetics that recalled certain sherries: strong, cloying, and best taken in short doses. So, while famous, he wasn’t a celebrity—no cause for celebration, anyway. Rather, to nearly everyone in this small hard-luck city, Don José was that notorious fop on continuous parade and also the finest painter of pigeons around.
Of course, the man could render other subjects. Different birds, for example. Rarely, he did a human that had some appeal. His museum colleagues would note how he endowed even these men and women with certain avian features—darting eyes, a puffed breast, heads prone to wobbling.
The pictures would always be done in Don José’s best—that is, sufficient—imitation of the courtly style of portraiture that had dominated Spanish art for centuries and showed no signs of abating at the academy, where Goya, dead for more than sixty years, was still controversial. That fad called impressionism, which had ruffled Paris two decades ago, was gaining ground in Spain more slowly than Protestantism. Don José held it to be a worse sacrilege.
But somehow, when Don José painted pigeons without affectation but only pure admiration, they appeared ready to flutter off the canvas. He was like a violinist who has perfected a single sonata that he plays ad nauseam. The origins of this obsession were unknown to even Don José, as if owing from some Vedic past life.
As far back as anyone could remember, though, Don José maintained a dovecote on the roof, and pigeons flew freely in the Ruiz Picasso house. Aunt Pepa tolerated them in honor of Saint Francis so long as they did not alight on her statues. No creature should shit on the head of Christ.
Don José, who was not very religious and preferred a brothel bed to a church pew, waxed mystical only when he spoke of paint, the old masters, and pigeons. With an olive branch in its beak, the gall-less pigeon is a sign of life, he would tell Pablo. It can also be an omen of misfortune to come.
Cover its eyes, and the pigeon will flap to the sun till falling like Daedalus. They carry messages from star-crossed lovers, fly between detached battalions, navigate peril without fear.
If the bird perches on your table, there will be sickness in the home.
A pigeon can mean hope or signal death—it takes a diviner or a painter to know which, Don José observed.
No soothsaying was needed, however, to see that Don José’s own station in life was tenuous. Even Pablo sensed it, noticing the tense conversations between his parents over his puny salary and considerable expenses. After school, Pablo would come home and hear his mother turning away tailors, tobacconists, or the owner of the late-night tasca, each inquiring about unpaid bills. In the evenings, his family ate gazpacho and fried whitebait, jamón and oxtail now tastes of the past.
Worse, the rest of Málaga’s fortunes were sinking, too. Everyone spoke of troubles. Winemakers gave up more of their vineyards to aphids each year. The cotton, iron, and sugar trades had soured. Cholera took its toll. Money to maintain the museum where Don José worked was scarce. When his curator’s salary was revoked, he managed to stay on by restoring paintings damaged in the earthquake for a modest fee. There was such a backlog that the family scraped by, even if keeping up appearances became tight. While Doña María descended from a lesser-caste family, Don José—though cash poor—boasted of distant noble blood and was dedicated to impressing the public with refinement befitting a baron-grandee.
Until a new cost arrived.
They christened the unexpected child Concepción, to be affectionately called Conchita. She was long and fair, like her father, and born with ringlets that Pablo delighted in gently stretching so they bounced back like springs. There was no denying she was the prettiest of the three children. But having already established himself as the household’s irreplaceable talent, Pablo was confident Conchita posed no threat and instantly adored her. He devised a game where he’d bring embroidery scissors to a newspaper’s edge and fervently slice toward the middle, twisting and wending the blades across the page as the paper took the form of a kitten, a bullock, or anything he imagined, all to be unfurled for Conchita’s applause.
But Don José was struggling to keep the growing family afloat.
When the museum closed a few years after Conchita’s birth, Don José had no choice but to beg the family patriarch, his well-connected brother, Salvador, to help him secure another job. Pablo’s father languished, growing deeper in debt. When the only position to be found was at an art school in La Coruña, a seaside redoubt in the distant pr
ovince of Galicia and as far as one can travel in Spain before drowning in the freezing northern Atlantic, Uncle Salvador put in a good word. Don José grudgingly accepted.
So, as his tenth birthday approached, Pablo watched him bid goodbye to his friends, family, and Andalusian home. He caught the man crying while packing up the glass jars of colored pigments in his studio. At first, Pablo’s impulse was to rush over and gather himself around his father’s waist. But in the next instant, he felt anger swallow his empathy the way a fierce, opaque Indian red will overcome a translucent green on a canvas. For his father, he saw in that moment, had failed them.
Pablo boarded a cargo ship with his parents, sisters, and a flight of pigeons stuffed into a crate. He’d never been at sea before. They steamed away from all they knew, straight into a gale. Each day felt like riding out a nonstop earthquake. The sickness lodged itself just below Pablo’s sternum. It slept and woke on its own schedule. When it roused, he was left sweating, gagging, and panting in horror.
After more than a week of rocking to and fro, they pleaded to disembark at the port of Vigo and began the journey’s final leg overland. Just as Pablo had known instantly he hated school—even now he could be undone by simple arithmetic—Don José detested La Coruña as soon as they’d pulled up in a crammed carriage under a dismal drizzle.
The family had few acquaintances in this new place. Don José was informed at the art school that his methods and style were passé. His colleagues there treated him as an outcast. Beyond their apartment window stood a great, foreboding lighthouse, where storm clouds always appeared to gather. Don José spent whole afternoons staring at it through the dripping panes.
In cold and wet La Coruña, Pablo saw the man he looked up to become something other than the towering artist he’d believed in. Pablo watched as children pointed and giggled at his caped outfits and harsh dialect from the south. He overheard people on the street dismissing him as a featherbrain who tried to pass himself off as a leading artist and aristocrat. In Málaga, Don José may not have been revered, but he wasn’t jeered at. Here, in this northern exile, Pablo’s father was reduced to a backwater buffoon.
Pablo, meanwhile, found a kind of freedom in La Coruña. Don José’s energy for instructing him had diminished, and Doña María was busy chasing his little sisters. Nor were aunts around to mind his every move. For the first time, Pablo roamed with the street kids, shot cork guns, corralled calves into mock bullrings, and traded Buffalo Bill comics. He learned that the charisma he’d cultivated and used to great effect inside his home worked just as well outside of it.
Come summer, though, Pablo retreated to the Playa de Riazor to bask in the fleeting Galician sun before it disappeared for another year. The solitude of these excursions pleased him. The beach’s shoreline was strewn with short and squat wooden cabanas painted in pastels and mounted on wagon wheels. Beachgoers would pay to enter these contraptions, and their owners would whip up draft horses to pull the rickety shacks into the sea. Now deposited on a sandbar far from the public’s gaze, the occupants luxuriated privately in the briny water, which was said to smooth bathers’ skin.
Pablo would settle on an outcrop of rocks, the huts coming in and out of the ocean marking the passage of a day. He’d make drawings of gulls fighting the breeze, cormorants diving to pluck an eel, fishermen in oilskins hauling rafts of octopus. Or sometimes, while staring into the distance, Pablo would become lost in his thoughts as he watched waves seek land, noticing how their excitement increases as they approach shore—the way children run, laughing, into parents’ arms. That age seemed remote to Pablo now. No longer could he speed toward his mother and father as Lola and Conchita did, bright-eyed, baring teeth and love.
One blinding white afternoon, Pablo left his perch for the chilly, thigh-deep surf. As he was wading along, holding his totable sketchbook in the air above him, he felt something slick and almost wetter than water move against his knee. He looked down and found nothing.
But a few feet away, just beneath the waves, he saw a group of them—narrow, silver-blue fish, motionless and sparkling in the sun.
Pablo rushed forward and plunked his hand in, but the school dispersed. They reassembled, and he charged again, missing once more. He became obsessed with catching just one. Each time, they edged deeper, now almost to where the rolling waves might swell over his head. He’d never learned to swim. When he leapt and finally felt a tailfin wriggle in his fist, a shiver ran down his spine, right before the fish splashed away.
But as Pablo stood up, he sensed an absence of weight. Then he remembered how, when he pounced, he’d heard a small plunk. He turned around, and there it was, open at the hinge—his sketchbook was being carried away by the current. A gift from his father, it contained every drawing Pablo had made in the months since he’d arrived in La Coruña, starting from when Pablo could barely render two-point perspective convincingly and spanning to now, when he could draw a tall ship, each mast and sail perfectly foreshortened. He longed to show Don José how he’d advanced—and the thought of losing his artwork terrified him.
The buckram binding floated for a moment on the surface amid rafts of foam, but then the pages absorbed the water, and the book began going under, swaying side to side as it sank to the seafloor.
Pablo scurried over and tried to pick up the book with his toes, but he couldn’t touch the murky bottom. He scrunched his face and dived, pulling himself lower with cupped hands. The water stung his eyes and tasted like oyster broth. The object slid away from him, and he came up for air. He was a little closer to shore and could almost stand. He looked toward shallower water, where the cabanas had dragged bathers into the sea, the waves coming right up to the stairs. Pablo spotted the book wedged underneath one of the hut’s wheels, making it easy prey.
With a deep inhale, Pablo took another plunge. When he emerged with the waterlogged sketchbook in hand, his bangs curtained his brow and dripped saltwater onto his lips. His eyes were tearing up, but he swelled with the pride of a victorious matador.
Pablo’s sight cleared slowly. When it returned, a strange, transfixing creature was just a few feet away. His spine shivered again. There before him was a mass of tangled orange burning like fire. Galicians, who carry the blood of the Celts, are among the few peoples in Spain who have inherited this hair color. In fact, the wet, curly growth reminded Pablo of his father’s beard after he would wash away the pipe tobacco scent from his chin. This, however, was much more compelling and forbidden even to see. But he was frozen in awe.
Finally, Pablo’s stare ascended to meet a young woman’s gray-green eyes set in salt-edged, freckled cheeks. She wore a light chemise on top, and her arms prickled in the breeze. In her hands were the wet candy-striped bloomers she was washing the sand from when she’d indiscreetly opened the cabana door and squatted on the steps, sure no one was around. Her small nose twitched, and Pablo could feel her surveying his tan frame, his wide black eyes, the dripping book.
Pablo was ashamed at how excitement had stretched the sheer fabric of his shorts. But he detected on her face the flash of a smile right before she scampered up the plank stairs, the cabana door shutting behind her. He felt pregnant with new desire, euphoric, scared, and more awake than ever. Somehow, he was also sad, as though he knew he were close to the end of a dream.
In fall, Pablo attended the art school where Don José taught, though not often his father’s courses. He had difficulty concentrating or pretending to, having learned all these lessons before. Pablo’s paintings of the plaster casts of limbs his teachers brought in were done in half the time and were always finer than the rest. In Málaga or La Coruña or anywhere, Pablo decided, nothing was more boring than a classroom. He entertained himself by ignoring instruction and sketching whatever was in his mind. A bloody bullfight. The locusts he imagined Aunt Pepa eating, like John the Baptist in the wilderness. Or the girl who sat in the front of class, Angeles. Countless pages he filled with her reclining on blankets of cloud, surrounded by
lyre-plucking cherubs. In Angeles, Pablo finally found something at school that captivated him.
The other students—who regarded the laconic son of the too-tall, red-bearded Englishman with eerie reverence—snickered when they caught Pablo trying to figure out how to draw the intricate braid of her hairdo with a Conté crayon. And Angeles became aware she’d hooked an admirer.
When it wasn’t raining or foggy (in La Coruña, it was almost always one or the other), the instructors let the students work en plein air.
The class strolled outside to the tip of a peninsula to render the rocky shoreline and the Tower of Hercules, a giant rectangular lighthouse that had been built by Romans atop a ridge. As Pablo was setting up one day, he spotted a familiar figure in a yellow dress slip past the teacher to the stairway leading to the tower’s lantern. With the instructor distracted by another student, Pablo quickly followed, spiraling to the top, where he opened a heavy door. A dole of doves circled beyond the catwalk’s railing, flapping in the boundless gray. Angeles stood in the middle of the platform, the wind whipping the lemony pleats of her skirt against the outline of her slight frame.
“If you’re going to draw me,” she said, her voice almost yelling to be heard above the forceful air, “you should get the eyes right.” They were, of course, what had attracted Pablo to Angeles initially, their intense light and heat. He had studied them for weeks now, hoping he might capture that supernal spark.
“What happened to your eyes?” she said. “They’re funny.”
All his life, Pablo’s aunts said so many complimentary things about his big dark eyes that consumed half his face. “Guapísimo!” they’d cried. Never had these been mocked.
The Blue Period Page 2