The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  Pablo and Odette had been treating one another as conveniences. Each was growing bored. And at this point, his relationship with Germaine was more frozen than the Seine. He feared the thaw more than the ice. But the merciless weather forced both Pablo and Carles to suspend their excursions. Even Pajaresco came back, announcing that while in the middle of an afternoon delight at a Moroccan-themed bordello, the owner had ordered the women to drop the last of their seven veils so he could hurry back to Saint-Denis to bring the livestock in.

  And so, once again, everyone was bunched together under one roof.

  The drinking—to warm and to numb—started one mid-December morning when they awoke and every window was piled up with white, the only light coming inside grainy and muted, almost unsuitable for painting. The world beyond the rattling glass was howling wind and metal shovels scraping the sidewalk as men futilely tried to clear the way for emergencies. The studio’s occupants lacked provisions other than booze, though. All the boulangeries and patisseries and boucheries and crémeries—and, to Carles’s dismay, drogueries—had drawn their shutters the night before. There was only a thin, sour stock that Germaine had brewed from the turnip, carrot, and leek Pajaresco managed to procure after braving the elements all the way to Pigalle, paying exorbitantly for root vegetables so mealy they weren’t fit for rodents.

  The pipes froze at five-thirty in the evening. Afterward, water had to be obtained from the powder accumulating on the ledge outside. Flushing the toilet meant using freezing hands to fill a saucepot with snow and then waiting for it to melt by the fireplace.

  By the next night, everyone was as depressed as prisoners. Pablo and Odette nuzzled for warmth, as did Pajaresco and Antoinette, the brandy like fresh accelerant thrown onto their desires. No one dared shed any clothes, though, lest they catch a chill that turned to bronchitis. They loved each other through their fly fronts and by girding their knickers, while Germaine and Carles once again shared a passionless bed.

  The six sat at dinner, spoons going up and down to their mouths like the wooden figurines of an elaborate cuckoo clock. They’d been cooped up for days. Carles and his bowl were deadlocked in a staring contest when Antoinette asked, “Won’t you eat anything? You look ill.”

  Odette mimed from across the table as if she were downing the contents of a vial.

  “Taking medicine?” Antoinette asked. “Do you need a doctor?”

  “Bah, he is a licensed surgeon of the soul,” Pablo said, “his pen a scalpel.” Pablo remembered with some sadness how he’d once believed this.

  “A surgeon?”

  “Un poète,” Odette practically spat.

  “Tell her the regimen of Champagne you prescribe yourself for loneliness,” Carles said to Odette with sudden alertness. “‘Et de ton cœur endormi,’” he recited, staring at the cold window across the room. “‘Chasse à jamais tout dessein.’”

  Hearing this doleful proclamation, Antoinette asked, “Whose lines are these?”

  “Penned by Verlaine,” Carles replied. “To a woman he loved deeply, Mathilde. Before he fell for another poet, Arthur—does that shock you?”

  “She’s brought up in Montmartre,” Germaine said, cleaning the stewpot’s edges at the sink with her fingertips. “You couldn’t shock her with electricity.”

  But something in the poem did appear to frighten Antoinette. “Yearning,” she said, nervously, “should not be chased away from the heart. Love, if true, is never in vain.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t taught her your cynicism,” Carles chastised Germaine.

  “She’ll learn on her own, from men,” Germaine said.

  Carles looked into Antoinette’s eyes. “What if I told you I was in love, madly in love, filled every moment with the boldest desire,” he said, his voice faltering before picking up again. “I pray sometimes to God, who may be cooling in his grave, but I ask that my longing be embraced. Do you hear me?” Carles said, turning to shout at Germaine. “A love not in vain!”

  Pablo placed his hand on Carles’s shoulder, but he brushed it away. “This, old friend, is not a good idea,” Pablo said, shaking his head. Everyone was too drunk, he knew, the air they’d been stirring in too thick.

  Laughing uncontrollably, Odette snorted when the Champagne bubbles hopped up her nose.

  “But Germaine is . . . ,” Antoinette started hesitantly. “She’s married.”

  Odette added in French that on top of that, she’d heard Germaine was having an affair with a circus performer, one of the lion trainers. “N’est-ce pas, mon chou?”

  Carles pounded his fists on the table.

  Antoinette translated for Pajaresco. “Bet she tamed him,” he whispered.

  Pablo was stunned by this news. So many screws inside him felt suddenly loose.

  Odette explained that Germaine likes a certain sort of man. “Un bête!”

  “What’s that?” Pajaresco asked Antoinette.

  “A beast,” she said softly.

  “Is there any other kind?” Carles managed.

  “Some’s more beastly than others,” Pajaresco cracked, adding a little whistle. “You know, men who’ve got more balls to haul?”

  Carles jumped from the chair and tackled Pajaresco out of his, toppling both of them onto the floor. Antoinette screamed. Odette’s glass shattered. Pablo grabbed at Carles to pull him away. Germaine dropped the pot she was scrubbing to help. But Pajaresco was already out from under Carles, landing his knuckles square into Carles’s nose. The sounds of bone mashing cartilage were terrible. Carles reached for the broken stem of Odette’s Champagne glass and gripped it in his hand like an ice pick. Pajaresco scrambled and armed himself with a fireplace poker, taunting Carles to advance.

  Above the clamor came a banging. “Ouvrez la porte!”

  The two men stood across from one another, breathing deeply, their eyes bursting to fight.

  “Inspecteur de Police!”

  Carles snatched his coat and scarf from the back of the chair and dashed to the water closet.

  Germaine patted down her hair and climbed downstairs to open the red door. Standing outside, snowflakes clinging to his grenadier mustache and falling from his stiffly peaked cap and oilskin watch coat, was a uniformed detective.

  “May I enter?” he said, already ascending the steps. The inspector barged into the studio and pivoted his head around, noting the glass on the floor, the fallen chair, the general disarray.

  “So sorry for the disturbance, Officer,” Germaine said, trailing behind. “There was a mouse.”

  Pajaresco, the fire poker in his hand, smiled awkwardly.

  “That is not why I am here,” he said. “Who lives at this residence? All you? Under one roof?”

  “My friends, they are painters,” she said, reaching to turn over the canvases stacked against the wall.

  Pablo prayed she’d not flip over the one he’d painted of Germaine on their night together, but she luckily chose instead a still life—a white jug full of blooming jasmine.

  “Which of you is Carles Casagemas?”

  They looked at each other, and Germaine shrugged. “Who?”

  “Your friends,” the rigid man motioned to Pablo and Pajaresco with a sharp outstretched finger. “They speak?”

  “Not in French.”

  “What’s their mother tongue?”

  “Catalan.”

  “That name, Casagemas, is of the same origin.”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “I can. It is. Unfortunately, the region has become poisoned. Outlaws have killed scores. From Barcelona springs a particularly vile and violent strain of this terroristic scourge called anarchism. A most serious threat to our safety in Paris, to the Republic.” The inspector said he found so many Catalans living in this apartment—in what can only be called desperate conditions—troubling.

  Germaine asked for his pardon. Since the snow, her housekeeping had not been what it should. “Forgive me, sir, but these men are not terrorists, not anarchists.
”

  “What of this Casagemas? What sort of man is he?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Does anyone?”

  No, they shook their heads, after Germaine translated.

  “Should you uncover who he is,” she said, “you’ll tell us, please.”

  The inspector eyed them suspiciously. “Monsieur Casagemas has been writing articles for the incendiary leaflets that proliferate among the shanties on the Maquis,” he said. “We’ve foiled a dastardly plot. Can you be certain the men present are not involved?”

  “They are painters, not fighters, sir.”

  “Better brushes than bombs, though best is they stay in their own country. There’s plenty artists in Paris, too many in Montmartre. And you, madam, what is it that you do?”

  “I and my sisters, we’re seamstresses.”

  “You know these men how? Something intimate?”

  “No. We have modeled to make a bit of extra money, keep us fed, warm.”

  “In other words, seamstresses, plus a trifle more?” he said. “I bet you cut a bloomy figure. Your sisters, too. In my day a painter—Detaille, Meissonier—drew up glorious scenes of French triumphs. The models were war heroes, not women doing laundry and God only knows to scrape by.” The inspector looked Germaine up and down and picked the rest apart with his eye. “This young one looks more a shepherd than a painter,” he said, frowning at Pablo.

  “He has his flock,” she said.

  The inspector wandered through the studio, moving around the blankets on the chaise with his baton and examining the kitchen for signs of stronger stuff than Germaine’s broth. He opened the water closet door, and they held their breath. He turned the faucet handle carefully. A yellow trickle streamed down into the slime-covered basin, which appeared to disgust him so much that he left the room.

  “All right, then. I have reports of comings and goings at odd hours from this residence. It can be said that my suspicions have been piqued by its unclean state and unkempt occupants—questionable women and Catalans, no less. Do not be surprised if I pay another visit. In the meantime, report any sign of a Carles Casagemas at once. He is wanted in connection with a grave investigation.”

  “Sure we can’t offer you tea?”

  “I would not drink from that sink, madam,” the detective said, shutting the door behind him.

  As the clacking of the nails in the man’s bootheels against the stairs grew faint, Pablo rushed to the water closet. It was empty. There was a slight draft on his bare wrists, and Pablo noticed from the narrowly cracked window a trail of fabric running to a knot tied around the foot of the tub.

  Pablo yanked open the sliding frame. There was Carles, three feet below the sill, dangling. His teeth chattered as he held on for dear life. The blood from his nose was hard, his hands nearly frozen. Pablo hoisted him inside, and they threw snow into a pot and heated it by the fire. Carles groaned when he dipped his fingers to defrost.

  “Writing for the anarchist rags in the Maquis?” Germaine fumed. “What were you thinking? Do you want to be locked away?”

  “Wasn’t writing. Translating. French to Catalan, Catalan to French.” Carles shivered.

  “You and your messed-up little friends,” Pajaresco said, “is trying to louse up the whole world, ain’t you?”

  Pablo pulled Pajaresco away and sat him down.

  “Words with meaning, verse or prose, cannot help being revolutionary,” Carles said. “They must reach every man, woman, and child.”

  So this was how Carles had tried to distract himself from craving opiates and Germaine, Pablo thought. He’d had enough. This misadventure must end—for all their sakes. “Tomorrow we take the overnight to Barcelona,” Pablo announced, “after I attend to something important in the morning. Be packed before I return, Carles.”

  “L’argent,” Odette cried.

  “Don’t worry,” said Pablo. “You’ll get your money.”

  Germaine was biting her lip, watching Pablo, her eyes, usually so inviting, telling him nothing.

  Antoinette held Pajaresco like a squirrel hugging a tree, but he pushed her away and put his arm around Pablo. “Look, if you need cash, I can cut back on my, er, pastimes? Paris girls is a helluva lot more expensive than Barcelona.”

  “Hold on to it,” Pablo said. “Stay here, at least till another train. It won’t look good to have three Catalans boarding at the same time.” Someone, he reasoned, might suspect they were plotting to do God-knows-what and alert the gendarmes.

  Pablo wanted Germaine to tell him he didn’t have to go. But neither of them would admit to one another what they felt, he knew, and there was no time left to wait around. Carles walked silently to the window, squinting as though he were trying to see beyond the frost.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 8

  I

  Madrid, March 1901

  The first bullfight of the season in Madrid, held the first Sunday weather allows, marks the conquest over winter as definitively as the pink-and-white almond blossoms arriving overnight in the Parque del Buen Retiro.

  Pablo sits midway between the front row and the rim of the soup-bowl-shaped stadium, where the tickets are cheap and the sun shines all day. The section would be a brutality in mid-July, but it’s welcome warmth for Pablo now, as the high-plateau air is still cool and flinty. He wishes for a scarf and Manzanilla tea.

  The illustrations Pablo churned out for the debut of Arte Joven—the magazine he has been working on—are finally done as of last night, the proofs sent to the printer in time. Whether or not the irreverent writings and images will spark creative fire in this artistically stifled capital, Pablo cannot say. But it is a worthy endeavor, even if the bushy brows of the conservators at the Prado are not moved. Since arriving in Madrid from Málaga almost two months ago, he has spent many nights hunched over a shaky table of unfinished pinewood in the garret on Calle Zurbano—rented with money from Manyac, the Paris art dealer who granted Pablo a monthly stipend in exchange for rights to his paintings for the next year, which was the only deal he could clinch in the nick of time to pay off Germaine and Odette. But the India ink and pastels for drawing and shading the magazine’s pictures have cost more than every Madrid meal he’s eaten. There also have been many trips to the plaza to try to recover his mind, sort it all out. Nine days have passed since Cinto came rushing up to him there with the grim revelation of what happened in Montmartre.

  By attending this bullfight, a staple of his childhood, Pablo hopes he will find reprieve from the ensuing shock and confusion. He remembers how, when he was a boy, his father used to take him to the novilladas and hoist him up on his neck like a Barbary monkey climbed atop a palm tree to watch the young, chiseled toreros in sparkling, brocaded suits as they learned to master the mighty animals racing at their hearts with deadly horns. He recalls how Don José taught him to heckle when their capework was clumsy or vain. But when the matadors were brave and graceful, when the animals charged, and they whipped the muletas away as horns passed inches from chest and cheek, together father and son would erupt, their eyes welling with victory and joy.

  “It is no different than for a painter,” Don José would say. “All the time the canvas is trying to murder you. Your brush is all you have to defend yourself against a beast.”

  Indeed, those bullfights made mortality real for Pablo at an early age. Pablo would beg to meet the bullfighters after the last toro was killed. Once, as Pablo was perched on a matador’s knee, he noticed the rip in the man’s gold-stitched jacket. The wound was patched, but blood oozed from the sides of the bandages like vermillion from a tube.

  “It’s nothing,” the man said, “incidental.” He pulled down his shirt collar and showed the boy a horrific crater just beneath his clavicle, where, the previous fighting season, an oversized Miura bull plunged his horn in like a harpoon. “That right there, that bull almost did me in. My life flashed before my eyes.”

  When the man said it, Pablo imagined flipping th
rough a stack of old canvases, surveying the painted scenes. But how many pictures could you see before the blood drained, until everything went dark?

  The wind at the stadium in Madrid picks up, jostling Pablo back from the memory. It feels too early for the first bullfight, the air still too frigid. He buttons his overcoat and flips up the collar. If there’s one thing Pablo hates, it’s the cold.

  Carles must be so cold, he thinks. Dreadfully cold. Did his life flash before his eyes? Pablo wonders. If so, what did the canvases he saw hold? In how many of them was Pablo?

  When Cinto brought word of Carles’s death, it was not exactly pain or sadness that Pablo felt at first; rather, it was a knowingness. Strange, isn’t it? He’d spent more time with and grown closer to Carles than anyone. He pondered whether the injury of what transpired in Málaga—where they’d fled after France, the police inspector, and all that had gone wrong there—severed what bound them together. But in the days that have followed Cinto’s dark news, Pablo has been assaulted by a rush of memories, a band of escaped genies. Some are from the distant past. Other recent ones from his voyage down south are so vivid, they have a way of overwhelming everything else, even the present.

  While Carles had knocked himself out before the train even pulled out of Paris, Pablo recalls, he stayed awake for the whole ride, watching the scenery unravel in reverse, a roll of canvas painted with hills and fields and towns and little churches’ eager spires rising beneath the scythe-shaped moon and yellow stars. He was thankful his fidgety friend had his medicine to dose himself with. Pablo even envied Carles’s anodyne, wishing it could quell his own hatred that burnt over so many opportunities missed.

  They stopped in Barcelona long enough only to eat Christmas dinners with their families and scrounge a little cash. Word was there’d also been raids against anarchists and sympathizers here. They grew restless again, wary this was no place to linger.

  Worse, the letter so feared by Pablo’s mother had finally arrived—he was being called up for military service. He’d again have to think of something quick, as Manyac’s monthly payments wouldn’t let him buy his way out of enlistment in time.