The girl noticed Pablo’s mouth stiffen.
“Oh, not so funny? You take yourself pretty seriously, don’t you?”
Pablo wasn’t going to admit it if he did.
Angeles turned away from him and peered down over the railing toward the expanse of Costa da Morte. She asked Pablo if he would plummet from the edge of the lighthouse’s crown for her.
He replied, “Would you kiss me before I do?”
“After.”
“Are you crazy? Kiss a bloody pancake?”
“It’s the only way to know you’d really leap,” she said. “What if the kiss were for nothing, nothing at all?”
“How am I to know I’ve been kissed by a pretty girl if I’m dead?”
“Faith.”
A shrill pea whistle cut through the wind.
“You’d better take the stairs,” Angeles said, making for the door.
But then she clattered back and placed her lips on his cheek, making a little suctioning sound.
Pablo’s heart thumped in his chest as he watched her disappear down the lighthouse’s stairway like jewelry swallowed by a drain. He felt graced to receive even briefly such a gem, apprehensive of what Providence might seek in return.
It was the dreariest winter anyone could remember—wet and cold, cold and wet. Pablo was barely thirteen.
Over supper, Don José recounted to his family how he’d carried a box easel to the rooftop and painted a bird whose ankle was tethered by a cuff connected to a tiny copper chain. He’d shivered so much that the picture’s lines resembled those blurry dancers of Degas that he despised. So he packed up his brushes and surrendered, unclasping the pigeon. When she flew off, a toe was left frozen to the ledge.
Not long after, Conchita, now seven, woke with a cough that sounded like the bark of a gaffed seal. Then, a few days later, a brushstroke of red appeared in the handkerchief after Doña María wiped Conchita’s nose. The girl’s complexion grew ashen, and she drenched the bedding with sweat on Little Christmas. She was kept alone, forbidden anything save porridge, warm milk, aromatic tea, and drops of a belladonna decoction.
In the middle of the night, Pablo would visit his sister, lighting the candelabra on the sconce with a long match. In bed, she lay swaddled in a wool blanket of powder blue. Bargains had already been made between Doña María and the Mother of God. Conchita would wear this color for the next seven years, just as Don José told of long ago.
Pablo took her fingers into his own. In his other hand, he clutched the scapular dangling from his neck. He called upon an even higher power, God Himself, a backup if his parents’ accord with Mary failed.
“It is Don José’s son,” Pablo said aloud, unsure whether or not heaven hears prayers uttered only in our heads. “Papa says I’ll be the greatest painter in Spain, better even than Goya.”
Pablo paused, in case confirmation might be forthcoming.
He offered to let his Maker take it all back and vowed never again to create art. No oils, no watercolor, no charcoal, nothing, so Conchita might live. Pablo kissed her burning forehead. Later, he confirmed the pact by snapping his pencil like a pagan sacrifice.
The following morning, Pablo awoke to a hushed conversation in the parlor, the word diphtheria drifting down the hall. He’d heard of the disease before; it had ravaged dwellings nearer to the sea. The surgeon-and-tallow-chandler across the street, who somehow knew Uncle Salvador, had ordered from France a new elixir, an antiserum extracted from horse’s blood that might cure her. Pablo kneeled and made the sign of the cross, thanking the Lord for answering his call.
Upon returning to class, Pablo told the instructors his hand had been injured doing chores, leaving him neither able to paint or draw. When he admitted he was strong enough to write, they allowed him to read of the Renaissance and record notes instead.
Sitting at his school desk, gazing at a plate of Titian’s Venus, Pablo daydreamed of Angeles’s lips. He pictured her striking the same pose as in the folio, naked save the ring on her finger, sprawled over white sheets during the lighter side of twilight, a spaniel sleeping at her feet, one hand lazily clutching a spray of roses while the other rested indecently at her groin. His pencil moved across the paper, almost of its own accord. When Pablo looked down at the page, he choked on his saliva and gasped before slamming the notebook shut. He’d made a portrait of Angeles.
Could this crude sketch be considered art? Surely not. No. It wasn’t a real drawing but merely a trifle, a vulgar joke, like a comic in a smutty magazine. The All-Knowing has got to realize this.
Carefully opening the notebook’s cover just an inch, Pablo peeled back the first pages. His excitement returned. The picture really looked like the girl he’d yearned for. The reproduction of her delicate cheeks had been executed shrewdly enough. And those eyes—celestial and sultry—yes, they were flawless!
Yet Pablo knew this phenomenon was only possible because of his gift from God.
He tried to convince himself that he’d neared the line but not quite crossed it. Had not broken his vow. Not intentionally.
Pablo raced home after school, bursting through the door and running to Conchita. She was curled up, resting quietly. Pallid still but her chest was rising and lowering. He sighed with relief.
A telegram arrived announcing the serum had passed through the Pyrenees, Doña María told him. It could be in La Coruña any hour. “Your sister is going to be OK, thanks be to the Virgin.”
Forty times at the side of his bed, Pablo praised God. He dug his fingernails into his forearm, the first of many acts of penance, he told himself. He might not have crossed the line, but he knew he had done something wrong. He would devise novel offerings tomorrow. Maybe he needed to break his fingers.
Eventually, he drifted to sleep.
Awaking to an insistent banging, he found Don José hovering by the front door, barefoot and gape mouthed in the morning light. Gold-plated instruments and the serum poked out from the satchel of the physician standing near him. But before the sky had finished changing from black to indigo to purple to red to orange to blue, Conchita was long dead.
Days later, the family trudged behind a mule dragging the cart that carried Conchita’s matte coffin. As they walked, another procession passed with glistening, taffy-colored horses and carriages with shiny spokes. Pablo was envious before he was ashamed. Without a wake or even a marker, Pablo’s sister was laid into the grassless January sod.
Pablo knew the catastrophe that travels with creation had finally arrived to claim her, its way cleared by his broken vow.
But the indignity of the funeral and all of La Coruña, these were Don José’s fault alone.
II
For months, the family sagged under the weight of a leaden sky. Pablo’s father stared at incomplete canvases, his brush vibrating inches from the stretchers. He watched the window, waiting for the rain to end, the fog to burn away. It seemed to emanate from that wretched Tower of Hercules in the distance, a lighthouse not projecting a ray to lost ships but dispensing evil.
After one such spell, Don José removed a pair of shears from a kitchen drawer and wrenched open the trapdoor in the ceiling above, as if still deciding whether to slice his wrists or plummet from the rooftop. Instead, Pablo’s father returned a few moments later from the dovecote and hung a pigeon’s snipped-off feet—limp and red, like a pinch of whole saffron—from a nail on the wall in his alcoved study.
“Paint the outlines, claws, and scales. I’ll do the rest when I’m back,” Don José told Pablo before exiting the apartment.
This assignment was an exercise Pablo had occasionally undertaken, now that his father’s eyesight had begun to fade.
“That’s what separates artists from arses, the hands—and the feet, too,” Don José would say. “Draw a thousand, no, no . . . a million pigeon feet, and one day, you might render a human hand correctly—might!”
Pablo remembered how, years before in Málaga, he sometimes found his small clenched fists
enclosed inside the grasp of Don José’s long fingers. Father and son would peer together as they opened their hands, analyzing each digit, each joint.
“Look how your second finger begins to point even when you don’t command it. Try. Squeeze tight. Tighter! Now release them all at once. See there—see how it’s out of the gate before the rest? It wants to show what’s ahead. Remember this when you draw. Let the fingers move on the canvas as they wish, just as yours do.”
Back then, Pablo revered this instruction. But even before Conchita’s death, the luster of those lessons had dimmed. Don José heaped praise on Pablo but also endlessly chastised him—dressing down his uninspired works as mockeries of nature, reminding him that only imbeciles ignore shadows—all to prod his son toward painting the masterpiece that he could not manage himself.
By Pablo’s teens, though, he estimated his work equal to Don José’s and, in some cases, superior. The implications troubled Pablo. What business, then, did his father have correcting him, doling out advice? Pablo had grown tired of this apprenticeship and was bored with painting pigeons. Seeing Don José so emptied now tore down the last regards Pablo had for the man.
And the family was sinking closer to privation. Lola, Pablo’s eldest sister, turned to mending the neighbors’ clothes to augment the pittance the art school paid Don José. At night, she stayed up late darning instead of doing homework.
His father had uprooted the whole family, brought them to this awful place, because of his chosen profession—or his lack of talent within it. Either way, Don José had failed to keep his home warm with a stoked fire, his children healthy, his wife loved. Pablo wondered: Was his own artistic ability really a gift from God, or had Don José merely handed down a jinx, then? If the latter, should Pablo be made to suffer all his life pursuing what had so bedeviled his father?
Pablo was back lying in bed and paging through cowboy comic books with the room’s door parted when he heard the man fumbling up the stairway leading to the top floor. Doña María rustled in bed. The lamplight extinguished with a sigh.
Don José pushed through the apartment’s entrance and collapsed loosely onto his studio chair in the alcove where he painted. Pablo quietly watched through the open doorway as his father grabbed at his pipe and sniffed the air upon finding the clay still warm. The man turned to the brandy cask, which was filled lower than when he left, and Pablo regretted not thinking to add water to bring the level to what it was before. But Pablo’s confidence rose when Don José glanced over to the easel, where the painting was now complete—no denying the pigeon’s feet Pablo had rendered on the canvas weren’t nearly identical to the ones dangling from the wall.
“That’s that,” the man announced before sucking his teeth. “I couldn’t do a goddamn pigeon finer myself, nor could Michelangelo. ’Spose you’ve not much to learn here, anymore. Ignored by so many would-be Manets, at least pigeon painting is a discipline that will serve you many years,” Don José let loose with a groan. “Even after your masterpiece.”
Pablo continued turning the pages of his book.
“Hear me, boy?” Don José burst into a loud laugh that segued into a sputtering cough. “I might never paint again!”
Pablo got up and walked to the studio to see if he could quiet his father before Lola awoke, at least.
“Your landscapes instructor says you’re quite the prodigy,” Don José said, wiping his nose with his palm and then flipping open a newspaper on the table so he could glance down at the headlines. “You’ll pay the bills, eh, with me retired? Why, I won’t lift a brush!”
“Don’t say that,” Pablo replied. “It’s a promise we never keep.”
The graying man’s eyes narrowed. Don José almost spoke but stopped short, instead mouthing the word we. He tapped the ash out of his pipe and set it down before leaning forward in his chair. “And you should know how?”
Pablo raised a finger, but only the first syllables exited his lips before Don José’s open hand struck him below the cheekbone.
He smothered a whimper.
“Speak up, boy. I’m long in the tooth, short on eyesight, and having the damnedest time hearing you. You were about to expound on some insight you had, no?”
Don José removed tobacco from his pocket and told Pablo to compose his thoughts, returning to reading the paper unfolded across the table. “Of all the vileness Paris permits,” he said of the astonishing report that France had banned bullfights, “to think it would make illegal such a noble pastime. It’s all right. One might say, ‘The French don’t know how to kill a bull any more than they make real art.’”
Pablo shook as Don José growled, “Only a Spaniard understands the chief component to painting is pain! Not that which they call in France—what’s it? Ennui?” The man cleared the table with a forearm as he rose, shattering bottles of pigment and varnish.
“Yes, I’ll give you Delacroix,” Don José said, drunkenly. “A porpoise caught in the tuna net. The rest, they’re too busy sodomizing one another to paint anything worth hanging in a pissoir. That’s the only hurt they comprehend. But not us—we understand what it is to be knifed in the heart and live! Study that yet, did you?”
Pablo felt his eyes welling with tears. “What should I learn from you, if not to paint? Can you teach me to make a fortune? How about just enough to put a stone on Conchita’s grave?”
The blow that came next sent Pablo to the ground. The man knelt to meet him there, stabbing the air with his long finger an inch from Pablo’s nose. “Art emanates from suffering, bitterness, and hard, crystallized loathing buried in the soul. A paintbrush is a pickax! Mine your misery!”
The bite of turpentine filled the room. Don José reached for his pipe, stood, and lit it. “You’ll be sorry and so will everyone you meet, boy, but you’ll be good,” he said. “That is my gift. I’ve granted more than you know.”
CHAPTER 4
Barcelona, September 1895
After almost four years in cold, wind-lashed Galicia, Pablo longed to return south to the simple comforts of Málaga, where lizards ducked behind window shutters and the Mediterranean rays had first awakened his skin’s Moorish tones. Instead, he and the rest of the family followed Don José to Spain’s northeast, where a teaching position waited for him at an art school in Barcelona. The job at L’Escola de la Llotja—which was situated on the second floor of the city’s old stock exchange, the landmark for which it was named—turned out to offer neither prestige nor prospect. But at least it provided a means to flee. In the family’s new home, however, they found a city that was big, proud, dark, and in the worst of moods.
The Catalans, whose claim to this area as an independent region extends a thousand years, were the most unwelcoming people Doña María said she’d ever encountered. Their language sounded to the newcomers like stuffy-nosed gibberish punctuated by guttural consonants. Their culture, conspiratorial and heedful of outsiders, was as impenetrable.
The family took an apartment in the Barri Gòtic, a seamy quarter of ancient, soot-covered buildings. Dank alleys wended through it like the slithering paths of a worm-eaten gourd, narrow enough to inspire bouts of claustrophobia and perfect, Don José warned, for thieves. The balconies dangling from the walls on either side of the passageways faced so near to one another that neighbors heard every illicit lover and broken dish. Pablo was wonderstruck by how commotion and desolation came together in Barcelona the way an aroma of hazelnuts toasting or pimientos frying was always laced with fetor.
While the rest of Spain persisted in being practically medieval, Barcelona had hurtled itself into the bounty and indignities of the Industrial Revolution. Its textile factories turned out the Jacquard fabrics that adorned gentlemen’s waistcoats and draped over ladies’ shoulders across the continent. The city’s streets were bustling with migrants, mill laborers, and opportunists. The ports teemed with dockworkers and saw footloose sailors coming and going from Marseille to Manila, the Caribbean to the Barbary Coast. After Saturday night, taver
ns were dirty with sweat, swill, stink, and blood. Every type of contraband was found in Barcelona, especially in Barri Xinès, the red-light district. Vice, locals said, lacked only a trade union.
As the turn of the century approached—the whole world full of anxiety and hope for a brighter, less cruel future—Barcelona was then both a harbinger of change and a tinderbox.
The Ruiz Picasso clan quickly learned the city was haunted by ghosts left behind by a spirits-smuggler fond of anarchist literature who’d lobbed Orsini bombs—explosive-packed prickly pears of death—into the Gran Teatre del Liceu a couple years before they arrived, murdering twenty-two operagoers during the “William Tell Overture.” Not long after the family was to mark its first year in Barcelona, dozens more would be mauled by blasts at the Corpus Christi parade. Afterward, hundreds of men, women, and children were rounded up in a dragnet and locked in a castle on Montjuïc hill, side by side with prisoners from the restive colonies. They were beaten, boiled, and stung with knitting needles. Their sides were slit open before being set upon by rats. Six were executed.
Another mustachioed Italian anarchist soon arrived from Paris, locating the Spanish prime minister near the Roman baths of Santa Agueda and shooting him dead, appealing to his shrieking widow, “Pardon, madam. I respect you as a lady, but I regret that you were the wife of that man.”
Working-class angst was the radicals’ lifeblood; the intelligentsia channeled it to feed their own ire. More curiously, anarchists often shared common cause against the Madrid government with Catalan nationalists—odd bedfellows since that movement included Barcelona’s conservative upper crust. Both Catalanistes and anarquistes yearned for the region to escape the Spanish crown’s weight, each promising to emerge triumphant the way a magnificent, shiny beetle crawls out of dried-up dung.
Long ago, the city had become the most sophisticated perch on the Peninsula. As the rest of Spain withered, upright Catalans were busy seeking to rebirth their beloved capital, looking to fair-faced Paris rather than Madrid as a surrogate. Using money pouring in from textiles, the wealthy erected grand churches and theaters in the nouveau style embodying belle epoque ideals of fluid form and grace in nature. Barcelona, then, was beautiful when it was not ugly.
The Blue Period Page 3