From a café nearby, Pablo fetches hot water and administers Germaine strong tea and spoonfuls of bone broth. He rips apart pieces of pain de mie and feeds them to her, followed by licorice drops from a yellow tin. He places his fingers behind her ears and draws her close, pressing her gently against his chest, moving his hands up and down her back as if smoothing wet clay. There’s something new in this, a tendresse he’s not experienced before, one absent erotic desire. She seems to realize the specialness, too.
On the fifth day, though, Pablo wakes on the straw mattress and finds Germaine squatting in the corner of the small room with her elbows bent around her knees. He asks, “What’s wrong?”
When she removes her arms, there are wet spots on either side of her nightgown. Pablo is fazed. He had no idea it was possible for women in these circumstances to lactate. He gets up and starts toward Germaine, feeling the impulse to comfort her. But as soon as he moves, she casts a look so stern it forces him to back away.
“You were good to me,” Germaine says in a clear, firm voice. She stands up and walks to within a few feet of him. “I forgot what that was, to be cared for. But it’s time to leave.”
“Why would I go? I don’t want to,” Pablo protests, shaking his head. “Tell me how to help you.”
“If I desired company all the time like this, I would have lived my life differently. Done things differently. Been different.”
Pablo pats down the pockets of the pants he slept in and determines he possesses all he came with—keys, a penknife, a small roll of bills. He buttons a shirt over his chest and opens the doorway that he’d found Germaine standing in only weeks ago, knowing he won’t see her here again. They stare at one another, and he begins to softly repeat the line he’s heard her say over and over since they first met—“A woman may . . .”
Germaine kisses her finger and covers his lips with it, then finishes her own vow: “choose to be a doormat or a goddess.”
Outside, in the morning light, Pablo is certain this had been some sort of love.
When Pablo travels to Vollard’s the next day, the man he wants to see is nowhere to be found. Manyac has instructed him to retrieve any unsold works, but how, Pablo thinks, could the owner just leave the gallery unattended? Might some ruffian not come by and help himself to stacks of Renoirs?
There’s a pungency tracking through the air, however, as if the paintings of Tahitian villages that Vollard keeps displayed in the rear have sweated jungle spice. Pablo has the sensation he’s been picked up by the collar and flung off to a wild, undiscovered land. Something brushes by his legs and curls around his ankle like a python. When he looks down, the mangy orange tail of a tabby cat is roped around him, and he reflexively jerks his knee. The animal darts away. From the corner of his eye, Pablo sees it slip through the narrow opening of an egress he’d not noticed before. He follows the kitty down a twisting staircase to a cellar. The passageway is thick with the smell of kaffir leaf and turmeric. A pair of ugly, gape-mouthed Polynesian statues carved from teakwood guard either side of a patina-covered doorframe at the bottom of the steps. Beyond these tutelary deities is a clandestine room with a long mahogany table lined with Trafalgar chairs and a dozen settings. A mantelpiece supports a cast bronze statue of a lithe nude, her hair covered in a caul.
Hanging on the opposite wall is a painting, the only one down here. It’s hard to tell if the object in the canvas’s foreground is a giant cypress or a towering black flame. Pablo gathers nearer. There is so much movement within the picture frame, he finds he cannot stare at any single point for long. In the distance behind the dark spire in the center, though, there’s a valley with little houses nestled around a high-steepled church, not unlike scenes Pablo witnessed from the train window as he rode with Carles through the Pyrenees. The buildings, limned in black, are the same vivid blues as the painting’s sky—Prussian, ultramarine, cobalt. Lanterns in their windows create little boxy panes of bright yellow. Above the horizon, amid spinning eddies of foreboding cloud, shine bright, magnificent stars. Pablo examines them from only a couple of inches away and can tell they were made from quick, curving flicks of the artist’s wrist using thick impasto. There is an urgency in these manic brushstrokes that Pablo admires, the whirling together of rapid streaks of pure bold color squeezed straight from the tube. The blues are intense, the mood rueful, throbbing, eternal.
“Don’t punch a hole through the thing, would you? It’s not mine,” squawks Vollard, suddenly at the entranceway behind Pablo. “Just a little something borrowed from a collector friend.”
“I have never seen anything like it,” Pablo, still mesmerized, says at last.
“I expect not,” Vollard replies. “If you can paint the same, though, perhaps you’ll become rich before this man’s estate does. A Dutchman, dead now, a suicide, I believe. They never found a note. Brother’s wife handles all the works. There’s rather a lot. She’s quite the promoter. Publicity, publicity, tsk. Trying to milk the departed for all he’s worth after the trouble he caused them.”
“Why did you hang this here in the . . .” Pablo fumbles for the word. “What do you call this place?”
“Haven’t ever seen a dining hall buried below an art gallery before?” Vollard chortles. “Your Manyac has designated it the Cave. Another of my eccentricities, I suppose. Everyone acts as if I’m cuckoo for putting a little pepper in their pot. Indeed, you’ve found me rousing a curry for a Bavarian noble and his whole bloody county. If they’re expecting it to be bland, well . . .” Vollard pushes up his lips and offers a je-m’en-fous shrug.
“To answer about the painting, I like to look at it from time to time. You see, I find this work an intriguing proposition, a vexing philosophical question-and-answer, spread out as if by a rolling pin. I’m told it is the view in early morning hours from the window of the mental asylum where the painter was committed. Only thing is”—Vollard smiles devilishly—“he left out the bars.”
Pablo recognizes the brushwork and cramped composition, but also how both something torturous and transcendent are conveyed. He’s seen this artist before. “This is that painter you spoke of with Manyac on the first day, the deranged one with syphilis.”
“So some venereologist says. The fellow’s name was Vincent. Gave him a showing a few autumns past. One way or another, we can rest assured it was a lady who made this madman mad—quite beautifully so, I’d say. Whether she infected his head with the thought of her on some evening in Arles or if she poisoned his loins with a disease that went from bollocks to brains, I wouldn’t venture to guess.”
Pablo thought of how the doctor had insisted on calling the organisms under the microscope “she.” “Is that always the way it is,” Pablo asks, “with women, I mean?”
“You’ll find out in time. They are, after all, the spice of life—the sweet, the sour, the bitter, too. The savory, the intriguing, the acidic, the scalding hot. I could go on.” He looks at Pablo as though for the first time. “Now, what is it you came for?”
“My paintings.”
“Ah, yes. All the ones that did not sell. Hardly worth taking, you know? What was good, it’s gone. And as for the rest, might as well cover them with gesso and reuse the canvas, if I should be blunt.”
“You don’t like them?”
“Does that surprise you? No one else did, either.”
Pablo can’t find a way to disagree.
“Tell you what. I’ll take them off your hands, save you the expense of coach fare home, and purchase the whole lot for seventy-five francs, shall we say? You can’t easily stuff them back in your shiny portfolio now that we’ve put them onto stretchers, can you?”
“No. I want them.”
“Go on, then. I haven’t more time to waste. There’s every blasted German in Paris to feed.”
Pablo loads the paintings into a car and rides to the apartment on the Boulevard. He uses the last of his money to pay urchins on the corner to help him up the six flights. When he sets them down inside, howe
ver, he’s shocked to find on the table his allowance from Manyac for the next month, plus an extra hundred francs that his patron has given him due to the show’s success. Pablo hastily snaps up his fancy top hat and runs downstairs to fetch the first horse driver he sees to carry him to the Folies Bergère, the Ninth Arrondissement dance hall he’s never been able to afford. Pablo takes a box seat there alongside the financiers. He spends his money as fast as a reckless gambler, downing vin blanc cassis and watching the burlesque dancers shed their clothes like rolling snakes, the audience stomping and howling for more.
Is it true, Pablo asks himself, that women are what make men mad? Lead them to reach for a noose or gun? He drinks and watches, pondering the question and the performer’s miraculous thighs, meaty and thick. Perhaps he, too, will lose his mind. The thought fills him with ironic cheer, then it leaves and comes back again, all in little more than a moment’s time. His mood undulates this way, bobbing up and down. But what, Pablo asks himself, makes women mad? It must be men. Yes, women prey on men. Men prey on women. But something else is devouring us all, which is impossible to escape. That painter whose tortured night scene seethes now in a basement below Vollard’s, he must have known this—we’re not just prisoners of temptation, but also Providence.
Pablo stumbles back to the apartment at midnight after Bastille Day festivities, all of Paris having become a raucous tricolor. For the past week, he’s tried everything to rinse away the ill temper he’s felt in body and mind, to escape the acute melancholy growing ever since Madrid: booze, showgirls, cinema reels, and those restaurants that people in Spain rave so much about upon returning from France, as if godly ambrosia had been discharged directly onto their plates.
Manyac is thankfully not home. Pablo leans back on the settee and stares up blankly, reflecting on how his aim had once been to conquer Barcelona. He’d done that. Then, he’d meant to win over Paris. Now that, somehow, appears plausible. Not even two decades old, he’s opened here at a top gallery. Yet he is powerless to dispel this gloom.
In the empty white of the ceiling above, Pablo envisions how Carles’s eyes would wrinkle at the corners when he’d laugh at a wry joke, the creases reaching almost to his hairline. That, the temple, is the place where he shot himself, Pablo thinks, imagining a hole one can run a finger through. He pictures that same head trapped in a wooden box. What would Carles have said about the paintings Pablo displayed at Vollard’s? Might Carles again have branded him—as he had back at the Málaga hotel—a sellout? The same rotten thing Pablo figured Casas for? And that which Don José contrived for Pablo to become?
Pablo beetles across the room to an untouched canvas leftover from the flurry of work he did before the show. He opens his paint box and selects the lead white and bone black and squeezes them onto the palette, not knowing what to make or where to start. He swirls them together on the board into a glaucous murk and covers the entire surface of the painting. Then, he reaches for more of the tubes—the Prussian, the cobalt, and the ultramarine—and idly begins to layer on color.
IV
Pablo scrapes the rough skin between lip and chin till it turns pink and raw. He is standing naked in an ironstone basin at the break of dawn, the bathroom around him redolent of laurel water and candlewick. The handheld vanity keeps fogging up. The razor is freshly stropped. He flinches when he nicks himself just below the ear. The drop of blood hits the pool at his feet, echoing against the wall tiles like the sound of a porpoise click. The bright scarlet spreads in the liquid, contaminating it.
Pablo’s freckles on his palms have faded, but he still recognizes the outlines, shoals beneath the surface. He has felt weaker by the day. Maybe the physician’s treatment is failing, he thinks as he sets down the mirror and reaches between his legs. He rolls his privates around with thumb and forefinger until finding where the ulcer appeared. There’s hardly a trace. The snake has receded, off into its burrow again. Slithering inside him. What will Dr. Jullien say when Pablo sees him later today? What will be his prognosis? Pablo cups his testes in one hand, straining to remember if the folded flesh always was dotted with evenly distributed bumps. He recalls how Vollard had suggested it would be better to scissor off the root of one’s troubles and sneezes. The razor clanks against the floor. Pablo gawks at his reflection in the blade. The herringbone pattern of the tiles around it vibrates in a continuum of tiny rolling waves.
A trail of wetness follows Pablo as he exits in a towel. It’s still almost black in the hallway, with only a faint blush of purple from the window. The cheeping of sparrows announces morning coming. Pablo bends at the knee beside the pile of canvases sloped up against the parlor wall. Behind it is the crevice where he stashes his valuables. A shadow moves against the plaster nearby and startles Pablo. He turns and finds Manyac stretched out on the settee behind him, a crystal tumbler in one hand. In the other is a narrow, unlit cigarette. Pablo didn’t hear him come home, figuring he’d been swept away in Bastille Day reveling.
“Something different, eh?” Manyac says, aiming the tip of his boot at Pablo’s still-drying canvas leaned up at the front of the pile—a young man’s profile, painted in quick, hard strokes of pure black, white, and blues. The hair is wild, face slack, eyes dreamily closed. A dark patch is opening at the temple as he falls. The painting’s motion and rhythm resemble the dancing flame and ethereal whorls of the work Pablo discovered in the gallery’s cellar.
“I see you’ve been up all night,” Manyac says, pointing to a stack of pastels on moldmade paper resting on a side table by the settee’s arm. They both turn to one of the pages that must have floated onto the floor while Pablo was bathing. The subject in this picture is the same, wrapped in a shroud, lying in repose, his bloodless body rendered again in frigid shades of blue. “Must be that poet friend of yours—the maniac who shot up the restaurant at the end of the block, eh? Don’t think there will be a market for it, frankly,” Manyac says, adding he won’t object so long as the rest of production keeps coming along. He places the cigarette in his mouth and tells Pablo he has a contact, an American, who may be interested in his works. “The ones that are more fungible, or, shall we say, more lively? Who knows, another show may be in the offing.”
“I don’t want a show,” Pablo says in a flat tone.
“Don’t want what?” Manyac coughs with startled incredulity. He strikes a match to light the cigarette.
“My work in the gallery, it’s shit,” Pablo says, still in a crouch, staring at his bare feet, tightening the towel around his waist.
“Oh, stop,” Manyac says, swatting at the smoke in the air. “Don’t be so critical of yourself. Though your modesty is becoming. We sold half. Next time, we’ll do more, much more.” Manyac tells him they can command higher prices, too. “Picasso won’t be a newcomer any longer. He’ll be on his way to being established, desired.”
“I don’t want those things, either.”
“All right. We can ride the primitif thing awhile longer. The man-child crawled to Paris from the Iberian wilds, making fantastic scenes of cancan dancers and winking whores. They’re very fine, you know,” Manyac says, an orange ember tracing an arc in the purple light and arriving a few inches from his lips. “Why, even Lautrec would be jealous.”
Manyac exhales a smoke ring. “But it won’t last,” he says. “Someone younger, more intriguing, from someplace more exotic than Barcelona, will come along and paint prettier petticoats than even you. Hard to imagine, right?”
“I guess.”
“Come now, why so glum?” Manyac says, rising and placing his palm over Pablo’s brow, like a priest anointing the baptized. There’s a buzzing in the air. The smell of Manyac’s arm is resiny, like the perfume of a tree wound. Those manicured fingers that created such delicate cursive letters rake their way through Pablo’s hair.
“I should leave.”
“Nonsense. Where will you go?”
“The doctor.”
“Aren’t you feeling well?”
“No
. I don’t think so. I’m not well at all.”
“Any way to make it better?” Manyac asks, running the soft pad of his thumb across Pablo’s frozen-in-place lips and inserting the tip of his salty fingernail just inside.
Pablo braces for a fight when he tugs away. But Manyac lets him. He rushes to dress behind the Chinese screen and makes a beeline for the door.
“Hurry back,” Manyac says. “After you’ve cured your melancholia. You’ve scads of work to do. I need something besides dreariness. You know, painting that actually increases the value of the canvas?”
At the physician’s office, the secretary is stone-faced, betraying no inkling of what they’d done together. “Pay and be seated,” is all she says.
Pablo takes his place on the cherrywood bench, grumbling to himself about how Dr. Jullien’s treatments are adding up. Nothing remains from the extra money Manyac gave him from the opening. Hardly anything is left from his monthly allowance. What a word, Pablo thinks—allowance. How did it come to pass that his health is dependent upon the physician who forsook Germaine, and he’s beholden to a satyr for his daily bread? This is a captivity worse than living under Don José.
If only Pablo could deal directly with the gallery owners—no mediator taking a cut, or more than his cut—then he could be independent. He might even be able to paint subjects with depth, meaning. He could stuff the pocketbook while giving succor to his worm-hollowed soul. If, that is, his body doesn’t give way first.
When it’s his turn, Pablo perches on the examination table and readies himself for a dire new verdict, one as bad as he feels inside.
“Am I dying?”
The Blue Period Page 24