Madame Picasso

She almost asked Sylvette if she knew his name, but then suddenly the orchestra music flared for the second half of the show, and she heard Madame Léautaud shouting for her. Fanciful thoughts would have to wait since there was work to do, and Eva was determined to make a success of this job.

Chapter 2

He stood barefoot and shirtless before the easel wearing only beige, paint-splashed trousers rolled up over his ankles and holding a paintbrush in one hand. Morning light streamed into the soaring artist’s studio in the ramshackle Bateau-Lavoir. There was an easel planted in front of a window that overlooked a sloping vineyard where sheep grazed. Beyond it lay a sweeping vista dotted with the slate-gray rooftops and chimneys of the city.

In the humble space, the cold tile floors were littered with rags and jars of paint and brushes. The plaster walls were papered with art. Here, Pablo Picasso was free to be much more than a painter. Here he was like a great Spanish matador, the wet canvas like a bull to be finessed into submission.

The act of painting was all about seduction and submission.

Finally now when the private thoughts were put aside, the canvas yielded at last. Once he knew he had won control, Picasso was humbled before his opponent. It opened to him like a lover, took hold of him—possessed him as a sensual woman would. The comparisons always mixed freely in his mind. The work after the surrender, once his challenger, became his most exotic mistress.

Paint stained his fingers, his trousers, the inky dark coils of chest hair, his hands and his feet. There was a streak of crimson slashed across his cheek, and another across a swath of his long black hair.

It was quiet in his studio at this early hour and there was a hazy stillness around him. Picasso savored moments like these. He gazed at the wet canvas, the cubes and lines speaking to him like poetry. And yet the quiet brought thoughts of other things, too.

Fernande had drunk too much again last night after their quarrel, so he had gone off to the Moulin Rouge, taking solace in the predictable company of his Spanish friends. Feeling increasingly celebrated here in Paris eased a little of his disquiet. But he knew that when the night was over, Fernande would be at home in their new apartment, and last night he was still too angry to return to her. So he had come to his studio.

He loved Fernande. He did not doubt that. She’d had a difficult life before him, married to an abusive husband from whom she had escaped, and who she was still too afraid, even now, to divorce, and Picasso always had an overwhelming need to protect her because of it. They had been together through the hungry years, living the life of an unknown and struggling artist in Paris, which had strengthened their bond in spite of their ongoing inability to marry.

Yet lately he had begun to question whether that was enough; and his ambivalence about their relationship was extending to other things in his life. In the increasingly looming shadow of his thirtieth birthday, he felt deeply that something was missing. Perhaps it was only that he felt this concerned him.

Picasso picked up a smaller paintbrush and plunged it into a pot of yellow paint. Beyond the smudged windows, the sun was shining. He focused for a moment on the grazing sheep that made the little corner of Montmartre seem like countryside. He thought suddenly of Barcelona, where his mother remained, worrying about him every day.

Thoughts of family, and the simplicity of childhood wound themselves like thread in his mind. He thought of his little sister Conchita, with her wide blue eyes and precious innocence. Even after all these years, Picasso missed her so dearly, but forcefully he pressed the memory away and urged himself to think of something else. He could not change what had happened. All it ever did was bring him pain laced heavily with guilt.

The sound of someone knocking sent the memories skittering into the back of his mind. The door opened and two young men staggered inside. They were his good friends Guillaume Apollinare and Max Jacob. They were laughing, their arms draped fraternally around each other, and they carried the strong scent of alcohol.

“So much for Pablo’s promises,” Apollinaire slurred, and his flamboyant gesture filled the room. “You said you would meet us at Au Lapin Agile last night right after the Moulin Rouge show.”

“I say a lot of things, amigos,” he grumbled, and returned to his painting. But as annoyed as he was by the interruption, he was relieved that it was his friends who had come and not Fernande.

Picasso loved these two misfit poets as if they were his own brothers. They stimulated his interest in ideas, in poetry, in thought—and that encouraged him always with his art. They talked together, drank, argued wildly and had built a deep trust that Picasso greatly valued now that he was beginning to find the first hint of real fame. He was not always certain any longer who he could depend upon to like him for himself. But Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire were beyond reproach.

Max, the smaller of the two men, was the trim, well-read and exceedingly witty son of a Quimper tailor. He had been Picasso’s first friend in Paris. That winter, ten years ago, Picasso was so destitute that he had been reduced to burning his own paintings as firewood just to keep warm. Max had given him a place to sleep, the two of them taking turns in a single bed in eight-hour shifts. Max slept at night while Picasso worked, and Picasso slept during the day. Max had little but he always shared with Picasso what he had.

It was generally assumed that Max led Apollinaire in their flights of fancy, but that was no longer true. Max’s addictions to opium and ether set him at a disadvantage to the charming and clever Guillaume Apollinaire, who now ruled their social engagements.

“Where’s your whiskey?” Max slurred.

“Haven’t got any,” Picasso grunted in reply.

“Fernande drank it all?” Apollinaire asked.

“As a matter of fact, she did.”

“Oh, bollocks, that’s a lie. She rarely comes slumming up here anymore now that you’ve gotten her that elegant place on the boulevard de Clichy, and we know it,” Max countered.

“Well, she came yesterday. We fought, so she drank the whiskey because I had no wine,” Picasso replied in French, but with a voice thickly laced with the melody of his Andalusian roots. Everyone always told him that his French was a dreadful mess of improper verbs and tenses and he knew it, but so early in the morning like this, he didn’t care.

“Ah,” Apollinaire said blandly, dabbing a single long finger at the canvas to check for wet paint. He did not always believe Picasso’s stories. “That does explain a multitude of things.”

“Well, whatever she’s done, you will forgive her. You always do,” Max said.

Pablo felt the squeeze of anxiety make a hard knot in his chest. It was all starting to feel like an inescapable cycle. Best just to work and not to think. Of her, of the futility, of the wild restlessness that was invading his heart more strongly every day. He must bury it just as he did his thoughts of his sister, and how she’d died.

Max looked around the studio, taking stock of the new canvases. Then he paused at the two rough-hewn Iberian stone heads sitting just behind the little drapery that hid his single bed. “You still have these?”

“Why wouldn’t I have them? They were a gift,” Picasso snapped of the antiquarian busts he used in the studies for several pieces of his work.

“A peculiar gift, I always thought. They always looked to me like something from a museum,” Max dryly observed. He ran a finger over the throat of one bust and touched the head of the other. “Where on earth does one find something like these? Legally, that is,” he asked.

Apollinaire replied. “How would I know? I got them from my secretary who was trying to bribe me to introduce him around Paris. Apparently, he thought they would impress me. I gave two of them to Pablo. Simple as that. It has never been my habit to question where gifts come from.”

“Or where the women come from,” Max quipped with a smirk and a clever flourish. “And yet, they do come to our dear Picasso—and both rather generously.”

“Are the two of you quite finished?” Picasso growled as a stubborn black lock of hair fell into his eyes.

“What, pray tell, is this meant to be?” Apollinaire asked, changing the subject. He was looking at the wet canvas on Picasso’s easel.

Picasso rolled his eyes. “Why must art always be something?” he snapped.

“That circle there reminds me of a cello,” Max said playfully. He was rubbing his neatly bearded chin between his thumb and forefinger as he and Apollinaire looked at the painting and then exchanged a glance.

“It reminds me more aptly of a lady’s derrière,” Apollinaire offered with a devilish little smirk.

“Not that you have actually ever seen one, Apo, my good man,” Max quipped, using the endearing nickname they all had adopted for him.

“Well, you most certainly haven’t.”

“Do you not feel things when you look at the painting, or do you only see with your eyes?” Picasso asked, annoyed that they had disturbed him at this sacred hour, and irritated that now they were poking fun at his work. “Dios mío, sometimes I feel as if I am surrounded by a gang of idiots!”

“What I feel is confused.” Apollinaire chuckled, pretending to further inspect the canvas. “Pablo, your mind is a mystery.”

“I feel thirsty just talking about it. Shall we all go find a drink?” Max asked.

“It’s not even noon,” Picasso snapped.

“Morning is always a fine time for a beer. It will set your day to rights,” Apollinaire answered as he loomed over the two of them like a lovable, slump-shouldered giant.

“You two go ahead. I’m going to work a while longer, then I am going to take a nap.” Picasso nodded toward the little iron-frame bed in the corner of the studio. It was covered with a fringed apple-green quilt embroidered with red roses that has mother had sent from Spain. He pressed his hair back from his eyes.

“Sleep here?” Max asked with a note of surprise, since Picasso was well beyond his hungry years in Montmartre. There was no reason for him to spend more time up here in this frigid tumbledown place than was absolutely necessary. “Will that not make things worse at home with La Belle Fernande?”

“Fernande and I will be fine. We always are,” Picasso assured his friends as he picked up a paintbrush and turned away from them. “Go on ahead. I will see you both Saturday evening at Gertrude’s, as usual,” he assured them as he began to stir a pot of paint.

He looked forward to Gertrude Stein’s Saturday evening salon. He craved the young minds there, and his intellectual arguments with Gertrude herself, who was always up for a debate. She challenged him. She made him think, and she questioned every single societal rule there was to question. That woman was a force of nature! If only he was attracted to her physically.

“Now let me get back to work.”

“Aren’t you forgetting? You promised to go to Apo’s reading at the Salon des Indépendants tomorrow,” Max reminded Picasso in a whisper as they arrived at the door.

“I haven’t fogotten,” Picasso said.

But he had forgotten entirely.

* * *

For a moment, with her eyes still closed, and the fog of sleep just beginning to leave her, Fernande had a vision of her husband, the man who had beaten her. She opened her eyes in a panic, but all she saw was a little toffee-colored capuchin monkey dressed in a smart red jacket with a necktie sewn to the lapel. The creature was peering at her with beady black eyes as Pablo stood behind him, smiling.

“The monkey from the café?” Fernande asked, trying to make sense of the little thing perched on her chest, busily cleaning himself. The moment seemed absurd, especially with the fringes of such an awful dream still playing at the edges of her mind.

“I bought him on the way home from the studio this morning. Granted, he is unique but he is better here with us and our little menagerie than how he was being treated.”

Fernande glanced around at their shaggy dog, Frika, a huge shepherd mix, Bijou the Siamese and a white mouse they kept in a wooden cage near the window. Yes, it was becoming a menagerie indeed.

She sat up and the bedcovers fell away from her bare chest. Her long auburn hair tumbled down over her shoulders highlighting her green eyes. The animal leaped from her lap and up onto the dresser, then onto the floor, in skittish bursts of movement. “But a monkey, Pablo?”

He sank onto the edge of the bed beside her. “He was being abused and neglected. You know me, I could not resist rescuing him. I didn’t have enough money with me so I made a sketch for the organ grinder. He seemed quite happy to make the trade.”

The apartment was now flooded with bright morning sunlight and Fernande looked around at all the rescue animals Picasso had always insisted on taking in. “Besides, it is an investment,” he continued. “I can use him in some of my new studies. Monkeys have been symbolic in art back to the Middle Ages, so he might actually prove useful.”

“When he is not soiling our floors or our furniture.”

Fernande sighed as she watched the little creature leave a puddle on the carpet, then scramble across a bureau. Picasso pulled a piece of a croissant from his jacket pocket to give to it. Bijou and Frika lay together on the rug, watching the encounter with bland acceptance.

Fernande sighed and finally got out of bed to dress. She loved Pablo’s tender nature most of all. Perhaps one day, if she loved him enough, God would bless them with a real child. She knew he wanted a family most of all, just like the one he had as a boy in Barcelona.

As she drew on her chemise and buttoned her blouse over it, she saw his eyes narrow. Peeking out from behind her pillow, he had found the pencil sketch she had posed for yesterday while he was in Montmartre. She knew how Picasso felt about her modeling for other artists but she had done it, anyway. The days were long here in this lovely apartment, and he was not the only one who deserved fame. His success kept getting the better of her.

“What is this?”

“You know what it is.”

She knew he immediately recognized the style. “You posed for van Dongen?”

“Pablo, be reasonable. You are gone for hours at a time most days, and Kees is one of our friends from the old days. We know his wife and little daughter, for God’s sake.”

“He’s still a man and you posed for him with your clothes off.” He stalked across the room toward her as she buttoned up her long black skirt. Picasso took her wrists and pulled her forcefully against his chest, stopping her. There was desperation in the movement. “Have I not given you everything you have ever asked for? This apartment, elegant clothes, a wardrobe full of hats, gloves and shoes, and an entrée into any restaurant in Paris you like so that you don’t have to do that demeaning work any longer?”

“It’s not work to me, it’s freedom.”

A silence fell between them, and Fernande turned her lower lip out in a little mock pout and her green eyes grew wide. “Does this mean we are fighting again today, too?” she asked.

“It’s a disagreement. Only that.”

“We quarrel too much, I fear.”

He pressed a kiss onto her cheek and released her wrists. His hands snaked around her then and moved down to the small of her back, drawing her close against him. He was so good at seduction, Fernande thought, and she tried not to think again of the blinding number of women on whom he had honed his skills. She was good at manipulation, but they both knew he was better.

He tipped her chin up with his thumb so that she could not look away from his eyes. “Yet, we always reconcile, which is the enjoyable part,” he said.

It was difficult to feel angry about how forceful Picasso could be when her desire for him had already claimed her. She wanted to be right back in that big warm bed with him, even if there was an element of predictability to their relationship now. After all, they loved each other, and at the end of the day that was enough for her. It had always been enough for him, too.

“I want you to tell van Dongen you can’t pose for the painting.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“It is not a question of trust.”

Fernande could hear the sudden edge in his voice, and she wondered how much he knew of what she did during the long hours when he was up in Montmartre working. “Of course it is.”

“I will not say I am sorry for trying to protect you all of these years, after what your husband did to you. You deserved much better than that.”

She thought of saying that she did not deserve to be so high on the pedestal upon which he had placed her five years ago. But she could not bring herself to because some part of her still craved his adoration. Instead, she pressed a hand to his chest, knowing the curves of him so well, knowing what would make his body respond. It surprised her when he gently brushed her hand aside and turned to look at the little monkey, who had perched on top of the dog’s large, shaggy back. Watching Picasso, Fernande’s heart felt heavy all of a sudden. She was not certain why.

“Let’s go across the street to L’Ermitage for lunch. Just the two of us, hmm?” she asked, trying to sound kittenish. She felt a strange new barrier between them and she did not like it.

“All right. But don’t give me a hard time when I want to bring the leftovers back for Frika.”

“Sometimes I think you love that dog more than you love me.”

“Dios mío, Fernande, I am still here, aren’t I?”

Chapter 3

“I can’t do it! I won’t!”

She heard her own voice first, when she remembered what had happened the last time before she left home, and the memory of the scene was quickly vivid again in her mind.

Eva’s parents did not react to her protest. Her mother stood silently at the stove stirring the iron pot full of beet soup. Her father sat across from her at the small kitchen table, his elbows heavy on the table and his meaty hand clenched around a half-full mug of wine. He was always so irritable when he drank that sour-smelling cheap wine but no one dared to tell him.

“Kochany Tata,” Eva pressed, hoping that the tender term of endearment would soften him. Yet she knew there was a note of something more harsh in her voice that she could not contain. It was something he would hear because he knew her so well.

The scent of pork, ginger and sour wine was bitingly strong with the tension.

“And what is wrong with Monsieur Fix?” her father asked. He was hunched over and looking up from his glass with glazed, heavy-lidded eyes, as though life itself had gotten as burdensome for him as it had for her mother. He was not yet forty. “You’re too good for the man, are you?”

“I don’t love him, Tata.”

“Opf, love!” he grumbled, batting a hand in the air. “It has all been settled with his family. A girl like you should have a husband, a house full of children and a secure life here near your parents.”

She cringed as though he had pronounced a death sentence on her. A girl like you. What he meant was a plain sprite of a girl, still unmarried at the age of twenty-three, still untested by men, relationships and the world. How she should respond so as not to ignite his anger, Eva did not know because she was not desperate for marriage. The only desperation she felt was to make something of her life. Her mother continued stirring the soup.

“I won’t marry him, even if he is the only man in the world who ever wants me.”

“You will.”

“You don’t understand me, Papa! That life would kill me, I know it would!”

“He is the first serious offer you’ve had. By God, you will marry him.”

“I’m a grown woman! You ask too much.”

“You will always be my child, Eva Céleste Gouel—you do as you are told, and there is nothing more to understand,” her mother declared, finally breaking her silence as she tossed down the wooden spoon and it clattered onto the tile floor.

“No! I tell you, I won’t!”

Suddenly her father slapped her and the force of the blow to her cheek turned her head. She felt the sting of surprise, since her father had never in her life struck her before. Her parents loved her. They had always loved her. As she turned slowly back to face her father, she tasted the trickle of blood from a crack in her lip. “You are our daughter, you owe us for that, and by God in His heaven, you will be Monsieur Fix’s wife, if it kills you!”

Finally her mother spoke. There were tears shining in her eyes. “Eva, please. He is stable enough not to abandon you if you fall ill again. That pneumonia last winter nearly took you. You have always had a weak constitution, your lungs especially. Something bad will happen to you if you go off where we cannot protect you. Something awful, I know it!”

“Eva? Are you listening to me?”

The memory still had the power to claim her. It slipped like a phantom back into the corner of her mind as she gradually heard Sylvette’s voice again. The room they shared was dark so Sylvette could not see the tears in her eyes. The sound of crickets flooded the room through the open window as she realized Sylvette had been telling her a story she had not heard.

“Were you thinking again about what happened with your parents?” Sylvette carefully asked.

“It’s just a vivid memory that comes to me at nighttime, that’s all. I’m fine.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“That won’t help.” She felt the tears fall and then dry on her cheeks. She did not bother to wipe them away. There was a quiet stillness between them after that for a time.

The small room they shared was lit by a moonbeam. Both girls lay on their backs looking up at the ceiling, and Eva could hear Sylvette’s rhythmic breathing. It was soothing, she thought, and the assurance of it calmed her. She looked across the little wooden dresser with porcelain knobs that separated their two beds. A moment later, Sylvette tried to lighten the mood between them.

“Did you see Mistinguett’s face when you said that you were going to mend her drawers?” Sylvette asked, beginning to chuckle. The sound reminded Eva of the tinkle of bells.

Eva felt herself smile and then they both laughed.

“She hates me.” Eva groaned.

“She hates all women who are a threat to her.”

“I’m not at all beautiful, or talented like her, so I should be no threat.”

“But you do have a certain quality. People can feel it. And men look at you differently than they do a woman like her. You are sweet and innocent. They want to protect you.”

“I’m not so innocent. Certainly not all that sweet.”

Sylvette giggled. “Oh, believe me, yes, you are!”

Images of how she had left home crept back into her mind. Her defiance with her family haunted her. A week after the argument with her parents, Eva had summoned the courage to buy a Métro ticket to Paris, and she did not even tell her parents she was going. She was too terrified that they would change her mind.

Her parents were not terrible people. She knew her mother had struggled to find a way out of the poverty she had known in Warsaw, and she dreamed of marrying and having a child in the peaceful suburbs of France. But Eva did not share the same dream. Eva had dried her tears as she’d stepped onto the Métro car in her only pair of button shoes. She knew how badly she was hurting her parents, but she had craved excitement. And the powerful hope for something more than she could find at home.

“Sylvette?”

“Hmm?”

“What happened to the seamstress before me?”

“Mistinguett didn’t like her,” Sylvette answered after another small silence.

“She is so awfully intimidating.”

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but it might make you feel better. Mistinguett’s real name is Jeanne, but no one dares to call her that.”

“Why not?”

“Because her own mother was a seamstress. I think she wants to distance herself from her past, as you do. Throwing her weight around helps her do that. It is her one weakness, I think, that those days still can wound her and she flares up in defense.”

“Sylvette?”

“Hmm?”

“Thank you for helping me get the job,” Eva said, feeding the next little silence.

“It was nothing. I only told you about the opening. You got the job all on your own,” Sylvette replied with a yawn. “Besides, you will be able to repay me one day. I feel certain of it.”

* * *

The next afternoon, Eva and Louis made their way together along the busy quai d’Orsay beneath a wonderfully warming spring sun. Everyone in Paris seemed to be out enjoying the lovely weather—parasols open, wide-brimmed hats, their plumes fluttering in the breeze. The sidewalks were ornamented by shabby little bookstalls filled with ragged leather-bound treasures. Brightly painted boats bobbed on the shimmering Seine beyond.

This was her favorite part of the city, and today, with the sunlight playing through the Tour Eiffel and the Parisian rooftops on the horizon, it all looked positively magical.

Ah, how she loved the vibrance of this city!

Next, they cut through the shaded luxury of the Luxembourg Gardens, with its broad sun-dappled walkways, manicured lawns, Grecian urns and magnificent fountains luring them beneath its lush bower of trees. Young bourgeois couples strolled hand in hand casually with them past the Medici Fountain, the ladies twirling their parasols, the men in high cravats and bowler hats or crisp boaters, and fashionable walking sticks. Other couples sat on green park benches scattered along the walkways, some of them feeding the pigeons.

As they walked, they spoke of the latest news. Everyone was talking about what the newspapers called the World’s Largest Ocean Liner, being nearly completed across the channel in Ireland. They were going to call it the Titanic, excitedly heralding it unsinkable.

Now that seemed a sure way to tempt fate, Louis said. The prospect of going all the way from England to America on her maiden voyage seemed absolutely terrifying. Yet, was life not really all about doing the things that frightened one the most?

The greater the risk, the greater the reward. Ironically, it was her father who had always said that. “Would you take a voyage if you had the fare?”

“Not in a million years.” Louis laughed. “I despise the ocean. It’s too big and black and unknown!”

“It’s the unknown in life that’s the best part,” Eva countered with a broad smile.

She was happy finally to merge then with the large crowd moving past the Grand Palais on the broad avenue Nicholas II, and up the dignified staircase into the great white stone Petit Palais, where the exhibition was being held. She could put her concern about Louis’s intentions aside for a while and allow herself to be excited about the artwork everyone was talking about. She tipped up her chin proudly as he handed the two tickets to the man at the entrance.

The building itself was magnificent, and inside there were massive murals covering the walls along with a soaring stained-glass rotunda. There were different rooms all dedicated to various styles of art, and Eva and Louis made their way steadily through the crowd into one of them. Eva noticed that the men and women were holding their gloved hands to their mouths. She quickly realized why and giggled with embarrassment. She had wandered into a room celebrating the work of Henri Matisse.

Eva’s senses were bombarded by bold color, crude styles and raw designs she could not have imagined. She had no idea what she was meant to think or feel about any of it, but some of it was shocking since his work lacked all convention. Several people openly laughed and pointed at a portrait called Woman with a Hat. Eva thought the work was a torrent of confusion with boldly colored brushstrokes slapped onto the canvas as if by a bricklayer’s trowel. It seemed wild and forbidden.

She was fascinated by the naked women in the other paintings around it—the bodies, the great sensual gobs of oil paint on canvas. Eva needed to catch her breath.

“This is the sort of thing artists are doing?” she asked, feeling her body stir as she gazed up at bare breasts, legs and torsos seemingly on every other canvas.

“This was the style a few years ago. They do this and much more that they would not dare to display here. Much of it far more blatantly erotic even than all of these nudes.” Louis sniffed reprovingly.

“You’ve seen worse?” she asked.

“Of course. But now that drivel they call Cubism is the new thing, leaving all this flesh to a retrospective collection in favor of something even more wild. Come, you’ll want to see it. It’s in the next room.” He took her hand and led her through the crowd. He was so stodgy, and his description was the perfect example of that. She hated his moist hand almost as much as how predictable he always was. But even that could not dampen the thrill of this moment. Being here, amid this elite crowd at such a glamorous exhibition, was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her, and her heart was soaring.

“Last year a Parisian donkey made a painting with its tail and they showed it at the exhibition here. That trash sold for four hundred francs, and an artist like me can barely make a decent sale,” Louis droned, doing his best to assert his knowledge and dampen the thrill she felt.

As they made their way to the next room, Eva wasn’t certain what she had expected to see but the new sensory barrage stunned her even more. The vast room, with its colored play of light and all of the people, suddenly made the space seem extremely warm. There were so many huge canvases covered with lines and angles. All of them seemed like sharp pallid cubes with human beings trapped inside trying to escape. Eva felt a shiver at the evocative paintings as she wondered what some of the artists might have been trying to say. There were too many people milling around her to pause long enough to hazard even a guess, but each one was oddly stirring to her.