“Without paying us? That chinch!”
“I beg your pardon, madam. But we have come as Nonell’s emissaries, extending the promised sum—your most worthy fee, that is—for agreeing to arrive each day as our models and muses.” He fumbled for a moment, as his ad-libbing had raced too far ahead. “Seven hundred francs, I believe. Yes?”
“You wretched twit! It’s twice that! And what do you mean, ‘arrive?’ We have every right to live here! This roof, it is ours, rightfully ours, just as much as yours. That’s the stinking deal—four hours per day of modeling, no more, no less, and paid room and board, if you can call this squalor a place for ladies to reside. It’s what we agreed on. Nonell, was he drunk?” She paused, then added, “And why are you dressed like goatherds who won a carnival raffle?”
Pablo and Carles brushed the feathers off their corduroy pants and jackets indignantly.
“Your fine name, what is it?” said Carles, tipping his hat.
“My name is Bugger Off. We model for Nonell, not his petite bourgeoisie Spanish friends who’re more broke than even him. You Spaniards come to Paris and think models fall from trees like rotting fruit.”
Pablo was spellbound. Never mind even the flesh—beneath it this formidable woman was all nerve, and spine, and spleen!
“Madam, we’ll pay your fair price for such very fair models. Have no fear,” Carles said. “As a token of goodwill and recompense for this unfortunate incident, we shall in fact make the sum one thousand five hundred. And we should be enchanted for you to share our humble studio while we work, tight quarters though they may be. We’ll do all we can to make you comfortable. We only hope you don’t mind if in the process we make you famous, too.”
“Fame? What do I want with that? You mother rapers give us two thousand francs or else talk to the eels at the bottom of the Seine,” she said, waving the blade again.
From his trouser pocket, Carles exhumed an envelope. “Half now,” he said, handing her the bills, “half when we’re done.”
She counted it, twice.
Once more Carles asked her name.
“Germaine Gargallo,” she replied, aiming the aspirant double L with her lips like a poisoned blow dart. “That’s right, half Spanish. Mother is French. Daughter is done with every one of these lousy countries.” She motioned with her chin to the woman wrapped in a quilt. “Call her Odette,” Germaine said of her partner. “But if you don’t speak French, she’ll have no idea what the hell you’re saying.”
Pablo could see Odette was perhaps a decade older, a flower in full bloom. Her hair ranged from zesty yellow to sunset floss. Her cheeks were plump and fresh.
Germaine announced abruptly they had business to attend to and could suffer here no longer. Odette fastened the back of the boning of Germaine’s corset and threw a worsted gray sweater coat over her shoulders. Odette donned a long fur with nothing underneath and high boots. “We’ll return in the morning,” said Germaine. “Be ready with your little paintbrushes.”
The door slammed.
Pablo turned to Carles. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“The daughter of the Eye of Ra,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“Sekhmet, the Egyptian deity before whom all men tremble. Evil itself is known to jitter. My heart, oh, my heart, it aches!” said Carles, clutching his chest, smiling in delight.
“Heart? Ha! My knob is swollen like the Eiffel Tower, old man. I almost told her, stab me or love me, but please put me out of this misery.”
“Careful. What if she’d gone for the groin?”
A devastating injury to have in Paris, they both agreed, shedding their jackets and swigging from the flask, exhausted after such a long journey.
In his poetic talk of ancient immortals, though, Pablo could hear Carles claiming Germaine to pursue. This left Odette, who spoke no common language with him. At least she was an impressive vision in her own right, although he still felt drawn to the one who’d brandished the knife. But how could he deny Carles anything? And, who knows? Maybe Odette would even teach Pablo a little French along the way.
Pablo and Carles awoke on the floor after dark, stirring slowly amid feathers and debris. Pablo found a candle and lit it to finally take proper inventory of their surroundings. The walls were the color of whipped eggs. A confusion of threadbare rugs lay over the scuffed parquet floor. There was a row of narrow casement windows that should let in decent light before noon. Canvases and ashtrays and empty bottles and painting supplies were scattered everywhere. Pablo placed the candle on a round tea table draped with faded pink brocade and spotted a clock on the mantel above the fireplace. They had no watch and no sense of time, though, and couldn’t be sure it was really after nine until at least another minute passed.
Then, silently, each began gathering himself in a rush. They threw water onto their cheeks from the thin stream of yellowish liquid running from the washroom’s faucet. They polished their teeth with powder, gargled brandy, used their jacket sleeves to wipe their lips, and ran out the door, lest they have to spend eternity knowing they’d slept through their very first evening in Paris.
Answering to grumbling stomachs, they ducked into an inn right off Rue Gabrielle. The dark wooden beams inside seemed to struggle to hold up the sagging ceiling. But they were grateful to have someplace so close at hand and ate soupe à l’oignon, tasting of pungent earth, and gulped goblets of acidic but tasty vin de pays. A buxom waitress brought a leg each of duck confit—so tender you could have fed it to a toothless baby—with sliced potatoes swimming merrily in golden fat.
When their bellies bulged, Carles paid the bill and asked the woman who’d served them where to find nightlife in these parts.
“It is for you two? Go down the hill, to the boulevard,” she said.
Carles asked if she knew where to buy tobacco. The shops were closed, she told him, before rolling a cigarette herself, shaping it with wine-stained fingers, then running the tip of her tongue across the paper to seal it before smoothing and licking both ends again. She placed the cigarette between Pablo’s open lips.
“Thank you,” Carles said, slapping Pablo on the back to break his fixed stare.
“It’s nothing,” she replied.
“My companion won’t soon forget your generosity.”
Outside, Carles found a fancy umbrella leaned against the inn’s wall and tucked it underneath his arm. They stood there, passing the cigarette back and forth, contemplating again this mysterious creature, the French woman, imagining hints of Merlot on the wet paper. How different were these than the demure ladies of respectable Spain still emerging from their mantillas! Here, women seemed to have no inhibitions, sometimes barely even clothes. He wondered aloud, “Have we wasted the first two decades of our lives?”
“In Paris, I would have never learned to paint,” Pablo said.
“Can we even go back to Barcelona?”
“There’s some nice ladies in Barri Xinès who may get lonely if we don’t.”
“Write them,” Carles said. “Say, ‘Come to Paris. Lonely feels less lonesome here.’”
As they smoked, Pablo began to recollect every woman he’d known or seen, starting with his own mother and aunts, who nurtured him like precious saffron—to the bathing hut at the beach in La Coruña, the coatroom in the cathouse in Barcelona, and beyond. But had he ever witnessed a glory greater than Germaine? Unexpected guilt tainted his mood. He was ashamed for envying Carles. But he couldn’t deny the attraction he felt for the woman with glossy black hair—art embodied. For a brief moment, Pablo was inclined to tell his best friend this. Perhaps he’d understand. After all, given how close they’d become, their interest in the same girl should come as no surprise. Hell, they even were wearing identical outfits. But the notion of letting anything come between them made him think better of it. “Come on, Carles,” he said. “The night, it’s young.”
It had started to mist. Carles opened the filched umbrella, clutching the tigerwood hand
le and holding it upright as can be. The two of them walked closely beneath the silk canopy, an odd pair because their heights were so different. Carles rested his elbow on the shoulder of his companion, and Pablo replied by wrapping his arm around Carles’s waist. They strode off, looking just like an elderly husband and wife might.
II
Into the early hours, Carles stayed up, chronicling their escapades to the gang back in Barcelona.
He penned letters telling of how the dazzling had stretched far down the Boulevard de Clichy, with every option for inebriation, from sleek cabarets to ginned-up gin joints and rum bars with ridiculous names: “the Nothingness, the Sky, the Inferno, the End of the World, Les 4 Z’Arts.” Outside the bars, streetwalkers hiked up their ruffled organdy underskirts to reveal even more thigh than the cancan girls did on stage. “But all these spots are tinselly and ill-suited to relaxation—someplace down-to-earth like Els Gats could make Pere a fortune here,” wrote Carles. Popular also was a drink the color of distilled pond scum, he explained. Upon adding cold water, it turned cloudy and phosphorescent like a dusty milk jar holding a glowworm. The French and the many foreigners—Russians, Bavarians, Moravians, English, Corsicans, Basques, some Catalans—drank it with unchecked glee. Tonic wine, ales, punches, and fizzy quinine cocktails were equally en vogue and overpriced.
He described how a towering six-story windmill beamed at the foot of the hill, its blades studded with electric bulbs and flashing letters below announcing this revue as the Moulin Rouge. The noontime effulgence corrupted the sky all around, casting the whole area in garish purple light. “The structure is grafted on top of a music hall, like a corsage orchid might be made to grow unnaturally from a weed—perfect disharmony,” he mused, signing off his last missive just as the sun rose and a rag-and-bone man was coming up the street with a donkey cart that was clacking and rattling against the stones.
Carles left to locate a tabac, a mailbox, a gift.
The models arrived early while Carles was still out. Though Odette understood no Spanish and Pablo no French, all he had to say was that lovely Italian word, contrapposto, and she knew exactly what to do, shifting her weight and assuming the most dramatic angles of the pose with no more effort than a bird perching on a branch. She held it without moving, as if her flesh were soapstone.
People who are not painters or models never understand how hard a job this is. Grown men panted from the strain. Pablo’s best models had been his sisters. Lola possessed an unusual knack for stillness. Conchita never could remain in one place, but her flickering eyes lit up every drawing he’d made.
Countless times before, Odette had posed. Many painters’ works even resembled what she saw in the mirror: her long neck and high forehead, a healthy frame with broad hips that earned compliments at every café in Montmartre, that garden-of-smithia hair. But no one had been able to adequately capture the thing about her she herself most admired—how she could say more with her eyebrows than all the books in the Bibliothèque Nationale. She was proud of those prominent crescents and used them to great effect in daily life. So when she pardoned herself to wet her mouth with Champagne and saw this was the first thing Pablo’d added to the canvas—these bold, bent streaks speaking volumes—she already felt a masterpiece.
Carles returned to the studio and found Germaine seated at the breakfast table, a mare’s tail of smoke rising above a folded copy of Le Sourire that she held in front of her face. When she lowered the magazine, he fought to keep his nerves.
“So now you’re going to make a poem?” she said, snuffing out her cigarette.
“A picture,” Carles replied. He’d never even seen a professional poser before but wasn’t about to cop to this fact.
“Where do you want me, and what shall I wear?”
He saw that across the room Pablo was painting a practically nude Odette and hesitated.
“You pay me to model, I model,” Germaine reassured him, adding she knew people in Montmartre who could furnish them with any costume he liked to rent. “Marie Antoinette. Water nymph. Nun. Joan of Arc. Salome. Say the word.”
“What about a Spanish goat tender? I could lend you my corduroys.” He regretted at once the smidge of hostility in his voice, but it was the only way to cover up his fawning.
“Oof.” Germaine sighed and then clicked her tongue. “You’re not going to hold that against me, are you? You settled up. Now let’s get on with it.”
Carles silently extended a small package to her. “Mind putting this on?”
Germaine received the parcel he’d picked up on his morning jaunt, undid the knot, and delicately unwrapped the pink tissue. It was a broad plastron necklace of silver, turquoise, and malachite that might as well have been taken from a pharaoh’s tomb.
“Cleopatra? You aim to paint a hieroglyph?”
“I thought you might think it was pretty.”
“A gift?”
“If you please,” Carles said, seeing that she couldn’t hide her admiration for the heirloom he’d found in an antique shop by the apothecary. He was sure he’d won the upper hand.
“How should I wear it?” Germaine asked, fastening the necklace’s clasp behind her nape and undoing the zipper of her dress with the same hand so that when she stood up from the chair, she was in nothing but jewelry, corset, and a pair of black walking boots with snow-white foxing. “Like this?”
“Most painters want us deadly quiet,” Germaine said to Carles after a few hours posing on the other side of his easel. “Like they have some great wheel turning in their head that might go off in the wrong direction. Certain you want to keep talking?”
“The wheel will be just fine,” he assured her.
“Good,” she said. “Now, then, please answer for me why is it so many young creative types believe they have to come to Paris to give themselves a jolt?”
“You came, didn’t you?”
“Ah, ah—I came to Montmartre from Paris. You’ll see the difference after a while.”
“All right,” Carles pressed her. “How’d you wind up in Montmartre?”
“Simple—it was a lark. I ran away to the circus. My life had become worse than a cage. And I’d always wanted to do the trapeze, soar through the air like I was born with wings. A misplaced step ended that. Came within an inch of dying is what I did. But when I landed, it was in Montmartre. Now it’s home,” she said, confidently. “I do whatever I want here, be however I choose, love whomever I desire, become what I wish.”
“Do you miss it?” Carles asked.
“The trapeze? Don’t want that now. I’m very content to watch the show and get to know the performers, perhaps.”
“Oh? Any old clown?”
“If a man can juggle a dozen bocce without ever dropping one, what else can he do?” Germaine countered.
“That what you want, a lot of balls?”
“Doesn’t hurt.”
“What else?”
“Wise. I want him to have figured out what it is he really wants, what’s worth wanting, that is, and then know how to get it.” She peeked up at the clock. It was nearly noon. “That’s enough for today, no?” Germaine stood and pulled her dress up over her undergarments. She removed the necklace. “I’ll leave this here. Maybe we pick up tomorrow.”
“I thought you would stay the night? Didn’t you say you lived under this roof?”
“No. I said we have the right to be here—we come and go as we please. Right now, I’d rather sleep beneath the stars. Don’t worry. I have a key. You’ll forgive us, but we’ve another appointment.” Germaine’s tone sharpened. “For you, for today, I’m a Cleopatra. She kills herself, right? What is it, snakes? Tonight, who knows? Maybe another artist will want to paint a picture where the sitter gets to live. C’mon, Odette. You through?”
Germaine walked past the canvas that Carles had been intently looking at when not ogling at her; it was completely empty.
“Hmm. I see I won’t be Cleopatra after all.”
“How do
you know that’s not you walking among the clouds? Next time you pose, I shall write a poem.”
“Blank verse, I expect.”
The door shut behind them, and Carles came over to Pablo and examined his canvas. It displayed Odette standing before a wall of twisted vine—the eyebrows more arresting than the Mona Lisa’s.
“She fancies me,” Pablo said.
“Who?”
“Odette, of course.”
“Right. I can’t make heads or tails of that Germaine,” said Carles. “It’s like my brain has been set to boiling. My heart? Up in smoke.”
At night, Pablo and Carles set out in search of a simple, homey place to swill lager, somewhere rather like Els Gats. Pablo led them in the opposite direction from the too-loud, too-bright boulevard, and Montmartre became—as Nonell promised—increasingly pastoral. Patches of vegetables grew next to townhomes. There were henhouses and horse stables. Lots were planted with Pinot Noir and Gamay. Cobblestones deteriorated into barely paved roads. And yet when Pablo squinted, he could still see the Eiffel Tower’s outline in the pink smog.
At the plateau’s edge—the end of Montmartre—they found a very different milieu, first detectable by its stench. Here, hundreds of jerry-built tarpaper-and-scrap-wood shanties rose above brushland. The ground was spread with pot shards, broken furniture, soiled paper, and refuse. All around, rabbits darted, rats scrambled.
Pablo and Carles forayed further and noticed that a band of ragtag teenagers shouting and idly kicking a cart wheel back and forth hushed to conspiratorial whispers when they passed. Pablo felt his back tense. They’d wandered beyond where was wise, he realized. In the distance, he spotted a tavern’s porch light, and they hurried to take cover.
Inside, it was hot and packed tighter than a steam tram at rush hour. Lanterns hung low from the ceiling. Faces hovered cosmically, floating and bobbing amid a smoky haze. The wait was three Frenchmen deep, each one chuffing at the barman. Pablo inched up on the balls of his feet to be seen. He couldn’t tell who exactly this place was for. Every walk of humanity, it seemed—dockhands and roughs to bourgeois misters with pomaded hair, all looking to get drunk and grab a girl.
The Blue Period Page 10