Max prescribes that after returning home the man should place a cascade of orchids on his wife’s bed and wait. When she sees him there, he must kiss her, “and not like a concupiscent ogre, molesting her lips,” Max exhorts. “Rather, bring one arm behind the small of her back and lean in, gently placing your mouth onto the corner of her neck. She will say, ‘What are you doing?’ You will reply, ‘Only what is in my heart, ma jolie. I cherish you, your every atom, and if you will allow me, I want to love you now as I promised on our wedding day.’”
“Can this cure whatever it is you see?” the man pleads.
“Without love, nothing is possible, and with it, everything. Once you let love into your life, you’ll have no need again to consider your palms.”
“I’ll do it. I will! I must!” Reinvigorated, he thanks Max profusely and strews a fistful of coins and bills across the table.
Pablo, unable to believe the mounds of francs, accidentally lets out a gasp.
“What was that?” He turns, spotting Pablo’s big eyes through the cracked-open door. “What has he heard? That I’m a profligate, a frequenter of the bordels? Think of my good name!”
“Nonsense,” says quick-witted Max. “This is my assistant. He knows the rules: absolute confidentiality, at all costs. Your secrets are safe. Besides, you’re a changed man now.”
“That is the truth,” he agrees.
Max calls to Pablo, questioning whether the required items have been procured. “The untainted deck of Tarot de Marseille? Quicksilver and brimstone for my alchemical experimentations? Spool of crimson string specified in the Kabbalah?”
Yes, Pablo signals three times.
“Most excellent,” Max says, adding he’s intuited that a breakthrough is nearing and he’ll have to send Pablo out again later for tincture of henbane and a bottle of eau-de-vie to calm his head. In the meantime, Max beseeches his customer to forgive him, but he has a pressing obligation to purify via telepathic means the spirit of a very pretty young woman who’s in great distress since her fiancé left her. “Practically beside herself. She’s bed-ridden, can’t even bother to be dressed.”
“That sounds dreadful,” the man says. “Shall I pay her a visit? Bring one of your potions and see she takes it? Keep her company until she is strong enough to put on her clothes again?”
“Quite all right,” Max replies, the peacock feather looming over his head like a third eye. “I have complete psychic ability to ordain her convalescence from right here. Besides, don’t you have other matters to attend?”
“What? Oh! At once! My wife, she is waiting for me!”
“For far too long, I should think.” Max cautions him that in his case he cannot intercede from afar. “Only you can cultivate love in your hearts. Do her your duty.”
“Indeed, thank you, Monsieur Max! I’ll sing your highest praises to Monsieur Poiret.”
That would be very fine, Max tells him. “Paul, he’s such a doll. Or the doll-dresser, as it were. Godspeed!”
The repentant philanderer tips his hat to Pablo as he rushes off.
“That was remarkable, Max!” Pablo says, stepping inside the apartment in the visitor’s wake. “How did you manage? Quite a lot of money, isn’t it? All for palmistry?”
“I ought to have a handsomer commission from that rascal’s wife, I reckon. But it’s for the good, one supposes. Lovely to see you! I had no notion you were back in Paris.”
Pablo apologizes for not writing. “It all happened so fast. I just had to get out of Barcelona. My soul was sinking, and my head wasn’t right,” he says, studying the red Indian wallpaper of Max’s apartment, its woodblock design a many-layered parade of ridden elephants, wedding umbrellas, and palanquins.
“You sound like one of my patrons. Need we cook up some occult medicament to brighten your disposition?”
“Will it work?”
Max removes his turban and roots around inside an oak buffet standing next to the table. “Let’s just fix what you really require—a good, stiff drink.” He pours Cognac and absinthe into a pair of snifters, halves a curlicue of mandarin peel with his teeth, plunks one end in either glass, and pronounces, “Tchin-tchin!”
Pablo takes a mouthful and almost heaves it onto the battered Persian carpet. “Some kick,” he tells Max, setting the drink down to cough.
“Used to be Lautrec’s favorite libation—un tremblement de terre,” Max reflects. “I was heartbroken to hear of his passing. Pound-for-pound, I can’t think of a greater artist. How come they talk about boxers that way and not painters?” Max says, peering down at Pablo’s own thinned frame. “Why, you’re not very tall and lean as a sand cat. And the finest painter who’s come through in years, I’d say. How’s it, then? ‘Pablo Picasso: The New Greatest Pound-for-Pound Artist Alive!’”
“Yet somehow I could hardly recoup the cost of my canvases on Rue Laffitte just now,” Pablo confesses.
“What’d you want with that place?” Max scoffs. “Those gallery owners wouldn’t know art if it kissed them on the balls.”
“The only way they’d recognize it,” Pablo muses.
“Why in God’s name are you so skinny? Food in Spain must be worse than I fear or else they’re all out of it. I’ll admit it was meager here as well, for a while. Weeks passed when all I’d eaten was the fruit at the bottom of a cocktail.”
Max’s career in art criticism had come to an unceremonious end when he wrote that the late, great painter Meissonier—renowned for his abilities to transpose the exact details of equine musculature—had known his horses in the stable intimately. His finances got so bad, he took to working as a window dresser in a department store. “I figured at least I’d get discounted,” he was wont to say.
Instead, however, a top designer for the House of Worth, Paul Poiret, came by shopping for ideas one afternoon when he noticed Max behind the glass, practicing reading palms on the mannequins during his lunch hour. The couturier introduced himself and asked if he might send Max clients with a penchant for the occult, have their fortunes told.
Max’s new gig as a psychic doesn’t surprise Pablo. That sort of crazy thing is always happening to him. He’s met just about everyone famous in Paris and has better stories than even their publicists. And he’s an absolute riot once you get him going with impressions. Jane Avril to Sada Yacco, Max can reproduce the high kicks and affectations of everyone on the Paris stage. He even wears a dress and makeup better than most.
Max insists on giving Pablo at least enough cash to buy paints. He also refers him to an acquaintance, a sculptor named Auguste who may be of some help at the galleries.
“Thank you, Maxie. I’m going to crawl out of this mess.”
“You’ve got the right attitude, mon prince. Don’t hesitate to call on me, anytime,” Max tells Pablo. “We’ll see you crowned yet.”
Auguste, it turns out, doesn’t have a gallery contact, but he does possess something as valuable—a cheap bed to rent. Not only has sleeping on the cold floor become intolerable, Josep is openly speaking of charging Pablo for the pleasure.
Pablo moves into the attic suite that Max’s sculptor friend keeps in the jaundice-colored Hôtel du Maroc over in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The once-elegant town house now has more fleas than a greyhound track and sells rooms by the hour. Auguste’s accommodation is an absolute sty, but it’s cheaper than staying on with Josep. Suddenly money is everything.
Weeks pass by like the scenery outside a slow-moving railcar. Pablo continues painting blue portraits of the poor and lonesome in the corner of Auguste’s bedroom but sells nothing. The gallery owners have caught on that each day he is bringing them the same canvases, reused. Pablo contends not only with rejection but also their ever-deepening mockery. What cash Max gave him is long gone. Lunch and dinner is yesterday’s baguette. Breakfast is a loaf from the day before soaked in water. Pablo’s direst conundrum is how short he’s become on paint, and the colorists won’t offer credit to foreigners. Soon, he’ll have no way to make
new work. And what other commodity does he have to improve his circumstance? Pablo is not so different than his subjects now—grossly thin, fearing disease because he hasn’t money for medicine, clinging to a thread.
Even if Pablo did have fresh supplies, production at the Hôtel du Maroc has proven difficult. While he is grateful for a place to stay, Auguste’s bigger-than-life sculptures and endless array of poached carving wood clutter the hatbox room they share. And the sculptor himself is as towering as the Colossus of Rhodes. He’s so whopping large, Pablo conjectures, there is simply too much to wash without wasting all day, thus he simplifies by only scrubbing the necessities, and only once in a while, long ago having become immune to his own odor, which resembles spoiled potato soup. Any apartment Auguste enters feels immediately constricted. One this small is a breathless squeeze.
With nowhere else to paint, Pablo takes to sneaking to a disused slurry pit below a corridor on the first floor that leads to the hotel’s back garden, which is covered with frazzled vines. Each night, Pablo climbs through a trapdoor and descends a bowed ladder to set up his easel, laboring by candlelight under a ceiling just high enough to stand. It’s chilly down here. Rot and cat piss linger in the air. There’s barely more room than upstairs with Auguste, but at least it’s private. The smell is also preferable.
On a particularly blustery autumn eve, Pablo works up a portrait of a grizzled man selling mistletoe with his emaciated boy underfoot. He remembers how last December the marchands de gui arrived with fresh sprigs of the plant after it had sucked the life from poplar trees all season. Every annum, these roving men string up their leafy, parasitic stems onto poles and vend them without irony to passersby to hang in the home for New Year’s. Vollard rejected that anyone would buy scenes of suffering, and Pablo wishes now he’d ticked off all the ways people relish tokens of others’ misery. A better question, Pablo thinks, is whether the portraits he’s painted over the past year have captured people’s humanity or chronicled the inhumanity in everyone? Or perhaps, like in some Eastern saw, these two are really one.
Long after midnight, when Pablo can’t keep his eyes open, he ascends the shaky ladder and unlatches the overhead door that opens to the building’s rear.
Blocking the path to the stairway leading up to the hotel’s first floor of rooms is a pair of rough, bleary-eyed men. One is tall and gangling, with a long and wrinkled face. The other has a broad brisket, short limbs, and a ripe, red complexion. Standing beside them is a woman with a mountain of plaited silver hair.
“The hell is this? A furry rabbit up from its burrow?” the thin man says to the red one—in Spanish, to Pablo’s surprise.
The men’s clothes appear thrown-on, their profiles slick with sweat and grease. The woman’s powdered curls are a wig for sure, Pablo sees, just like those getups worn at the Model Market so painters can snag somebody to pose for their period piece of Marie Antoinette. Besides this, she has on little more than ill-fitting undergarments. Pablo looks closer. Beneath layers of opaque foundation and round stamps of rouge on her cheeks, Pablo detects wax-filled pockmarks and traces of stubble. He is sure that in the morning she will return to dressing as a man.
“You heard him,” says the stocky red fellow, his breath reeking of wine, his teeth dark with its stain. “Who’s you?”
Pablo recoils. “I stay here,” he says.
“In that hole?”
“In the hotel.”
“What room?”
“What’s it matter?”
“We’ll escort you.”
“Not necessary.”
“What you got there?” The slender, wrinkly one says, pointing to the canvas and French easel in Pablo’s hand.
“It’s a portable get-out-of-my-way contraption,” Pablo replies.
“Funny. Never seen a Spaniard paint in Paris before. They all come to either fuck or get fucked.”
The stout man jumps in. “No, wait a minute, eh. Here we are in France, maybe we ought to have a little art and culture with our jollies, no? Now I’d quite like to borrow this little bunny’s kit and paint his nice, fluffy tail. Got the room for another quarter hour, after all.” He motions to Marie Antoinette and asks, “How much we rent this one for?”
“Five francs.”
“All right, what’d you say about that? How’s five francs for a rabbit portrait, Mr. Rabbit?”
Pablo is frozen.
“Just take a few minutes to paint you,” says the thin man. “We work fast, real fast.”
“Ten francs,” the stout one says, before flashing a burgundy-stained grin. “Or scamp back down to your bunker, and we’ll ferret you out.”
Pablo’s eyes are wide and crazed as they search for an escape. Or what will he do if there is none? His thighs are shaking like noodle pudding, which is probably why when Auguste lumbers by and sees the four of them together, he turns and speaks up before heading to the stairway, despite his philosophy to live and let live. In one hand, the sculptor holds a rusted bow saw, and in the other, a tremendous bough of gnarled linden he hacked away under the cover of night.
“You all right?” asks the giant.
“That a tree you got there?” Pablo manages.
“Yup, for now,” Auguste says. “I figure I’m going to carve it, though.”
“Can I give you a hand?”
“Could get the door, I suppose.”
No sooner, Pablo has hotfooted past his tormentors. He bolts over to Auguste, slips beneath the huge man’s arm—rank putrescence hanging down like an invisible curtain—and races upstairs.
The next morning, Pablo departs the hotel before even the owner’s nippy dog is awake. He wends his way through the Left Bank toward the pensione where Josep still resides. Pablo can’t stop trembling, though. No, he couldn’t possibly spend even one more night at the Hôtel du Maroc, he thinks—not after what nearly happened to him. Perhaps Josep might let him cadge a little more time on the floor, he hopes. If he could just pull himself together there, maybe he could get back on his feet.
Finding the man who accompanied him on the train to Paris not at home, though, Pablo lets himself inside with a spare key he hung on to and waits. After an hour, Pablo decides it wouldn’t hurt anything if he uses the bathtub. He soaks in the warm water and dries with one of the pensione’s towels, which seemed stiff and of inferior quality when the two travelers arrived a month ago, but now after so much time without a clean bathroom or linens (Pablo had even resorted to wrapping himself in canvas), the threadbare terry cloth feels plush and divine.
There is a fresh boule on the table. Pablo’s starving and can’t help but pinch off a sample of its wholesomeness. He finishes the entire loaf without pausing. Guilt seizes him, and he stuffs the fallen crumbs into his pockets so there will be no trace of evidence when Josep comes home. He can go to the boulangerie to get another, he thinks, before remembering he has no money. Pablo notices beside a crumb that escaped him a scattering of loose change; it must have fallen from the trousers folded onto a hanger just above. Pablo tucks it into his pocket, too. What to do with it, though? Buy Josep a new loaf of bread or one for himself? Does that doughy son of a bitch really need it more than he does? And what about paint? What will Pablo do in Paris when he runs out of paint? He doesn’t want to even think about it. His mouth has turned dry. He reaches for his ears and rushes outside in a panic.
Pablo once believed he knew what deprivation was—but not like this. This is what Germaine warned him of, this is what it means to be “really down, really out.” Now, he has nothing, and he fears there is no bottom. Who knows what he’s capable of?
Hours later, Pablo’s blistered feet are searing. With each step, he’s accepted more of the awful truth. If Auguste had not come home, Pablo would have been the one wearing the wig. He’d have ended up taking the Spaniards’ ten francs, or even if it were only five. How many times in Pablo’s life had he said the word whore with disdain? Never did he treat the women at the brothels badly, but he’d looked down upo
n them.
But how is he any better? What, besides, had he just resolved to do with the canvas of the mistletoe seller? Cover it all over in white to work up the loveliest of scenes, people laughing in the prettiest hues, that’s what. If Pablo could find just one measly buyer, then he could eat for a few days.
But what would Carles have said to him?
What would he call him now?
A sellout, that’s what Pablo is. And a whore.
Pablo arrives at Max’s door a whimpering puddle of tears.
“Come in,” says Max. “I’ve just read the fortune of the maître-fromager at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne, and he’s paid me all in Brie. You must have some. And wine!”
Max is the kindest soul Pablo’s ever met, he thinks. When he offers to take him into his home as long as needed, Pablo cannot refuse.
They have one narrow bed between them but arrange a schedule whereby Max works at the department store during the day while Pablo sleeps, and Max gets a few hours of shut-eye at night when he’s not watching the canvases fill up and reading poetry amid cannabis and ether fumes.
Of course, Pablo hoped to put to rest the sniggers in Paris about his relationship with Manyac and any lingering question about his manhood by letting a sortable little swallow perch on his arm at all times here, the type of gal who alights on up-and-coming artists. Sharing accommodations with Max, a man as masculine as a scallop shell made of soft butter, will do little to further that end.
But being with Max is so comfortable. It reminds Pablo of his time with Carles. Maybe there is something in a poet’s blood. When Max reads aloud in the night, the words dance like fireflies. When Pablo is overcome by distress, there is someone there to commiserate, someone who feels also how this world is not made for artists. A painter, a poet, or a troubadour—they are as ill-suited for this earth as a wooden Indian in a wildfire, Pablo thinks, remembering Horta and that mysterious boy who’d materialized without a flock but had a master’s brush hand and then wandered away just as easily. Pablo wonders what it would be like to be a painter left in the bush, how it would be different and the same as being so broke in Paris.
The Blue Period Page 29