“Deux absinthe,” Carles called out, reaching two fingers above the crowd. A man built like a bulldog elbowed him from behind.
“Why, after you with the push,” Carles said through his teeth.
“There’s no queue here,” the thickset fellow growled back. “Where you from, anyhow? Your French sounds like a lizard chewing.”
“We come from Barcelona, on a civilizing mission,” Carles said, placing the tip of his umbrella on the raw wood floor.
“A Spaniard, civilized? What a riot, lads. Didn’t anyone ever tell you Africa starts with the Pyrenees?”
“I see we’re in enlightened company, here in this supposed capital of culture,” said Carles. “Nothing so welcoming as a big-mouthed bigot.”
“Caught an invitation to come, did you?” the bullyboy said, four companions massing around him as he bumped Carles with his chest. “Or you just showed up, like maggots at a delicatessen on a hot day?”
Carles snatched an empty beer bottle from the bar and swung it at the Frenchman before the goons seized him and Pablo from behind. The original assailant squeezed Carles by the neck, and the crowd erupted at the promise of violence as the brute’s meaty fist began to pound the wordsmith.
“Jean! Stop! They’re with me!”
All froze.
There was murmuring, and then Germaine parted the throngs like an approaching dignitary. She wore a dark long-sleeved jacket and fitted bodice with a lacy jabot. Everyone appeared to recognize her. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said sharply. “How will the circus receive any press if you pummel the magazine correspondents who’ve traveled to write about it?”
The man’s grip was still coiled around Carles’s neck. He looked down, nonplussed. “Correspondents? Ah, c’mon, these ain’t nothing but Spanish bullshit rakers!”
“When bullshit is printed, it’s called publicity, and it’s damn hard to come by—got it?” Germaine said fearlessly. “Now let go.”
“And what’ll you spare me if I don’t make tartare out of his face?”
“For one, another run-in with the constable—and just maybe I put in a good word with the foreman at the new church to get you on the masonry team for the next tier. He’s a friend, you know. The wages, they’re better than you got now, for sure.”
Soon as the men released their grasp, Germaine spirited Pablo and Carles to the front door and began shouting once outside. “You have no business,” she scolded. “Don’t you know this is the Maquis?” Germaine uttered the word like the name of an awful disease, adding that the area was famous for lawlessness, thanks to the gangs that called themselves apaches and roved the dusty lots, terrorizing inhabitants. “It’s not for painters and poets with their heads in the sky,” she said, walking quickly down the road in front of the tavern.
“You stopped the fight in the first round,” countered Carles, following her, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “For that ugly lout’s sake, we thank you kindly.”
“Lord, Jean sure pegged you right. You are a bullshit raker,” she said, stopping at the entranceway of what appeared to be a nightclub at the top of the hill. Like the Moulin Rouge, there was a windmill attached to the building—but one that was old, quaint, and without flashing lights—rising above an outdoor orchestra stage. The doorman in a top hat recognized Germaine and waved them inside.
“And who says it was for his sake—or yours?” she added. “If you’re murdered, how do I get the other half of my money? My sake. Always for my sake, else I wouldn’t have bothered.”
“That how it is?” Carles asked.
“A woman may choose to be a doormat or a goddess,” she pronounced, leaving no doubt where she came down.
In the courtyard below the enormous windsails, the bandleader strummed along to a Gypsy tune, horns sounding at his back, moonlight making the sweat on his bald head glisten. The lilting music brightened everyone. Carles locked eyes with Germaine and, blood dripping down his cheek, motioned toward the open-air dance floor.
There was something so comical about it, her laugh turned to a nod. “But if you try any funny business, I’ll give you worse than a black eye. Bleed on my silk? You’re dead.”
“Go on,” Pablo encouraged them. “I’ll find beer.” As Carles and Germaine were swallowed up by the crowd, Pablo observed the way men’s eyes followed her. He wound his way to the bar and ordered by pointing absentmindedly at the first bottle on display.
There was a loud rapping against the counter. “So Paris has claimed another,” said a reedy voice by Pablo’s side.
It took Pablo a moment before he could place Manolo, one more mislaid regular from Els Gats, whom Carles had pointed out long ago. He wore gold rings on his hairy fingers and a cropped burgundy blazer. Ever since dodging conscription, he’d drifted around. Manolo always had been an enigma to Pablo, a cool customer and perpetual schemer who gave the impression he was just about to vanish before a bomb went off. He was good company, though, the kind you wanted to stick around longer, right up till the bang.
Pablo asked Manolo, “You tell me. Is this city I’ve heard so much about all it’s cracked up to be?”
“Sure, long as you don’t crack up first.” Manolo grinned with a mouth full of precious metal. “You’ve already found the venerable Moulin de la Galette, I see. This old place has what other spots can never reproduce: atmosphere. How long you in Paris?”
“Depends when they get ’round to giving us the boot.”
“Should be all right, provided you don’t have no wild anarchist uprising planned. That’s what everyone suspects of Catalans, that we’re here to assassinate a minister.”
“An unfortunate reputation, for sure, but sounds more your brief than mine. What brings you to Paris anyway?”
“Same as everyone else. Cancan girls and a place to paint.”
“You paint, Manolo?”
“Not these days. But I could. I am the concert violin in its case at night,” he said. “Someday, God’ll play my strings again. Till then, I only let beautiful French women manhandle me.”
“How you make a living here anyway?” Pablo asked as he paid the bartender.
“Kidding me? I make a killing, not a living. I run a lottery.”
“How’s that?”
“You know, the tickets with the numbers?”
“I got what a lottery is,” Pablo said. “But how does a guy operate one?”
“Every week, I print the tickets on fancy card stock—has to look nice, right? Then I charge one franc apiece.”
“Where did you find the money for the jackpot?”
“There’s no jackpot. Not in my lottery.”
“What do you say to the people who bought the tickets, then?”
“I just tell them, ‘You didn’t win.’ I say, ‘I’m not the loser—you’re the fucking loser. Now, you want a ticket for next week, or what?’ In Paris, you gotta be tough,” Manolo said, slugging back a rhum de Martinique. “You sell any pictures yet? You do real nice work, Pablo.”
“Nah. We just picked up our models.”
“What, Germaine? And let me guess, Odette and Antoinette? From Nonell, right?”
“Yes to all, except I never heard of Antoinette.”
“One of Germaine’s sisters, cute as a bonbon—and young, too,” he winked. “You’ll meet her. Germaine has lots of ‘sisters.’ That’s what she calls them.”
“I guess her father had a lot of daughters. She does seem to know plenty folks.”
“Yeah, they all like Germaine. She takes care of people, so they’re there when she needs ’em. Get what I mean?”
“Sure.”
“For scratch, though, you can pawn off loads of paintings to tourists. Tidy lil’ racket is what it is. Newspaper says there’s fifty million here for the expo, from far as New Guinea. Paint any Spanish thing—a bullring, a flamenco—they’ll eat it up.”
“I did come for the Exposition, actually. I got an oil hanging.”
“You, too? I just bumped into R
amon Casas. What am I, the only Spaniard without a painting in the Spanish Pavilion?” Manolo told Pablo he and some other Els Gats faithful were planning to pay a visit tomorrow. “Come along. Why not? Maybe make some connections. You know Manyac, right?”
“Who’s that?”
“You don’t know? He’s an art dealer. Got good connections with all the galleries. From Barcelona but lives here a long time already. Manyac’s a hustler, like me. I’ll introduce you.”
As Manolo spoke, Pablo couldn’t help his eyes from drifting to Germaine and Carles spinning on the dance floor, her backside swaying like a metronome. Carles dipped her as the song ended, and Pablo fantasized about the pompadour-chignon she wore coming loose, all that hair tumbling down like a black flood.
The two returned arm in arm, smiling like children. Ever since that night at the cemetery after Els Gats, Pablo had harbored an abiding sympathy for Carles. Suddenly, though, he didn’t feel too bad for him.
“Manolo, you know Carles?”
“Yeah, I heard about the cop in Barcelona you almost killed,” Manolo said. “Jesus,” he added when the light caught Carles’s cheekbone, “you did come to Paris to start a revolution, didn’t you?”
“No, no,” Carles said, gesturing to his swollen face. “This was just some loudmouth.”
“That’s right,” Germaine interjected. “Your friends up and decided to take a leisurely walk around the Maquis!”
“Then you seen the shanties where the anarchists run their newspapers out of,” Manolo said, recounting how some were the real old holdouts from the Paris Commune, the uprising that briefly toppled the government a few decades earlier. “Remember what happened after that? Was a fucking massacre.”
Pablo had never heard of it but Carles nodded.
“Anyway, I hope that ball-burner looks worse than you. Don’t take shit from nobody, not here. Besides, I’m one of you guys, a Marxist—redistribute the wealth, I say.” Manolo grinned, and then his face abruptly tightened. “Speaking of which, I gotta run. I see another happy customer who may have recently become aware that the watch I sold him—as I said, frankly—once belonged to a duke. Trouble is, the duke wasn’t done with it just yet. So long, chicos!”
They spotted Odette nursing a wine flute at the end of the bar, and she joined them. Pablo was taking a sip of beer when Germaine sidled up and asked, “You want to come for a twirl, champ?”
“Not until you catch up.”
She gave him a wry smile. “Do I look like the kind of girl who takes no for an answer?”
Pablo gazed intensely at Germaine and then everything around her, freezing the dance hall scene in his mind, capturing the men in high-crowned hats and ladies in aigrettes and how the flickering yellow from the chain of hanging lanterns skipped across the room. He worked out the means by which the pleated silk tucked beneath Germaine’s broad black choker was draped over her chest, thrust forward by an S-shaped corset and placed just so. He fixed how her lacy white gloves grew daintily like night jasmine from her snug black jacket. Most of all, he recorded exactly the way Germaine’s face shone in the gaslight and the marvel of how her smile appeared to emit a luster all its own.
Germaine shook her head playfully at Pablo, who was holding his thumbs and pointer fingers together at right angles in front of his vision to form an imaginary picture frame. “You don’t quit, do you?”
“How about we make another deal?” Pablo proffered.
“Try me.”
“You two ditch modeling and come to the Exposition tomorrow night instead? If yes, we waltz.”
Germaine looked straight at him and shrugged. “So let’s waltz.”
The four of them—Pablo, Odette, Carles, and Germaine—took turn after turn gliding around the parquet under the aging windmill and the midnight stars, just as in a Parisian dream.
III
I don’t understand why the girls didn’t come home last night,” said Carles, attempting to knot his bow tie in the speckled mirror on the studio wall.
Pablo twisted the spigot of the faucet in the bathroom to rinse the turpentine from his brushes. A thin, cloudy yellow cascade poured from the spout into the basin. “Maybe they prefer clean water and sanitation.”
“I don’t believe I’ve seen your Odette drink anything other than Champagne.”
“Right, and cherubs appear whenever Germaine grows thirsty,” Pablo said, grinning.
“They never let her be thirsty,” Carles replied.
“You’re really falling for her, aren’t you?”
“Plummeting,” said Carles, shifting around to see what his fingers were doing in the mirror, while also reviewing the results of yesterday evening’s barroom brawl. Fortunately it appeared that his face wasn’t too bent out of shape after the beating he took.
“Easy, there,” Pablo cautioned. “We don’t know how these French girls are. You may be biting off quite a lot.”
“I’m a big boy. I can manage my own baguette.”
“As you like. I have my plate full with Odette—I can’t bloody understand a word she says. My interpretation is ‘make passionate love until we can’t take it anymore.’ That what you hear?”
“This is the trouble with me and Germaine,” Carles said, ignoring the question and undoing the crooked bowknot to begin again. “One minute, we’re on this deep level. And the next, she thinks I’m an idiot. You suppose it’s because of the poetry bit? Some just can’t see it. My own family, to start with. Should I have introduced myself as something else? Mother would have me tell everyone I’m to be ambassador or a legislator. But if I say that, it sounds so phony. I already feel I’m pretending.”
“She doesn’t strike me as someone who gives a lot of weight to titles. Seems more a libertine.”
“I know, but that worries me, too. I’m beginning to suspect she’s having relations with half the men in Montmartre. All the circus performers at least.” Carles sighed heavily. “Oh, maybe I have bitten off too much?”
“Chew slowly and swallow,” Pablo reassured Carles as he began working the canvas on his easel in front of him. “And don’t think I didn’t notice how you cut a swanky pose on the dance floor last night, either. I guarantee you Germaine did. I had no idea you could move like that.”
“Get dragged to enough diplomats’ balls and you will, too. It’s silly—whoever dubbed this ‘culture’? It’s everything I’m against.” Carles looked over at Pablo. “And what about you?”
“I just try not to step on anyone’s feet.”
“No, Pablo. I mean, do you feel sparks with Odette? Romantic kindling?”
“A romp, at minimum,” Pablo replied, playing it cool. “Like I said, I don’t know what other language we have in common! Listen, you and I just arrived in Paris. Let’s keep our eyes open. And here’s some advice about Germaine—you got to relax. You’re too stiff. You said it yourself: it’s as if you’re playing a part in some play. Something has gotten into you. But it’s not you. All the ‘madam, this’ and ‘madam, that.’”
“Think so? Relax?”
“Yeah, she’ll go for you, man—if you let her see who that is.”
Carles made the corners of the bow tie he’d finally managed to complete crisp with his fingertips and excused himself. “Off to pick up a newspaper and cologne. I smell like a sailor. Need anything?”
“Yeah, ultramarine.”
“What’s that?”
“Only the loveliest pigment in existence. Think of the prettiest part of a peacock’s tail.”
“Where the hell am I going to find it?”
“Doubt you will. Beauty is meant to escape us.”
“Indeed,” Carles said, walking off. He paused at the studio’s threshold and turned back around. He was quiet for a moment. “Tell me something. What do you feel when you paint?”
Pablo couldn’t help but detect a note of envy in Carles’s voice. “Didn’t you declare once that painting is nothing more than dust and grease slopped on a rag?”
“
Am I wrong? Doesn’t mean it can’t evoke powerful feelings, though. In the viewer or painter. You always appear so immersed in the picture you’re making, yet serene.”
In contrast, Pablo had seen the pained expressions on Carles’s face as he scribbled in his notebook—a tortured poet wrestling his demons stanza by stanza. So often, Carles seemed to lose the match. When speaking, he always knew how to make his words dance on command. In writing poetry or prose, he did so now and then.
As for his own work, Pablo had not considered the question before. He was sure his brush never got the best of him, though, and supposed that’s what Carles must see. But the feeling of painting? It came so naturally that Carles might well have asked him, “What does it feel like to be awake?” As opposed to what, asleep? All Pablo could offer Carles was a shrug.
Rambling up Rue Saint-Vincent, Carles stumbled upon a svelte, mole-eyed man in a porkpie hat daubing a canvas with the scene before him, as viewed—in the impressionist style—through foggy glass. From hacks to virtuosos, it was easy to see why any painter would travel to the quaint, stuck-in-time enclosure of Montmartre, its stubby chimneys smudging the sky irregularly just above the world’s grandest city. There was life in every dead-end street. And Carles understood why Germaine chose Montmartre, too.
Now, Carles thought, as his eyes followed the pointed toe caps of his boots leading up the igneous cobblestones, how to resolve this impasse? She was not at all like those Spanish girls who yield when pressed and have no pushback, no firmness. He thought of how close they’d been on that first day when she posed for him, how he could almost feel the heat emanating from her and wanted to bundle himself in it. Why hadn’t he allowed himself to reach for the body calling out to him? Did he fear he wouldn’t stop? Or was he afraid he might not be able to get it started at all, as had happened in the past?
The origin of this unenviable condition was difficult to pinpoint. Its root, though, no doubt was tangled up with his ennui. Hard to say what comes first and in what order, right? Events conspire to induce sadness, then melancholy becomes its own disease. So we medicate ourselves. And then, poof! The flesh is sapped—another unhappy development, thus repeating the cycle. The world sags, the body sags, the world sags even more.
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