Madame Picasso

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.

“These are the damned artists who should be called the Wild Beasts, not the Fauvists. There’s not a thing artistically sacred to any of them. Just look at all of the nonsensical shapes,” Louis grumbled.

“One of them is actually making something of a name for himself at it, although apparently now he’s too much better than everyone else to exhibit his work here. Some Spaniard called Picasso. Wretched Spaniards.”

He rubbed his chin as he looked up at a huge canvas of gray and beige cubes. “I’d like to meet him, though. Maybe some of that dumb Spanish luck of his would rub off on me. At least I know I can paint better than a donkey’s tail!”

She’d heard the name Picasso, of course. Everyone who was anyone in Paris was talking about him, saying he was a true renegade. She had read recently that he had become known for leaving the style of Matisse, and for embracing this new linear style Louis despised. Eva knew nothing about art, but she knew that these paintings fascinated her.

When Louis was distracted and began speaking to a couple he seemed to know, Eva wandered alone back into the first room and to a corner adorned by a large canvas depicting a nude, recumbent woman. She leaned nearer. Henri Matisse, Blue Nude. There was no disguising how erotic it was. Beside it, a few feet away, The Joy of Living, also signed by Matisse. On that canvas there were naked people lounging everywhere painted in vibrant tones of yellow, red, pink and blue. One couple was even depicted... Oh, dear! Eva tried her best not to gasp.

It was at that moment that she saw him.

He gazed up at the vast canvas on the wall before him. He was a rough-looking sort. Like a hoodlum, she thought, a true shabby bohemian. He looked dangerous in his sensuality, not neat and proper like Louis. He wore a casual black corduroy jacket, black turtleneck sweater, wrinkled beige trousers, a slouchy blue cap and scuffed shoes. His thick fingers were stained with paint. He was tightly built and stocky, like a prizefighter.

And then she remembered.

It was the man from the Moulin Rouge last night. There was no mistaking those eyes; they were black as midnight and looked as though they could burn right through the painting. There was a brooding sensuality about him and she felt her body stir. He was looking at the same Matisse canvas, full of lounging nudes. To her horror, he turned sharply and caught her staring at him.

Eva’s heart vaulted into her throat, and suddenly she felt foolish. Then, as if they were the only two people in the room, his lips turned up just slightly in a casual smile and he nodded in acknowledgment of her.

Time lengthened as the energy between them flared. Her imagination betrayed her and as they assessed one another, Eva thought she could almost feel his hands running down the length of her back, drawing her against him. As she watched his gaze travel downward, she knew his thoughts were mirroring hers. His eyes were angling from her neck down along her torso with the skilled appreciation of a lover. Thankfully, no one in the crowded room seemed to notice how they had captivated one another, and Louis was still back in the room with the Cubist works.

Eva bravely returned his smile. She felt so brazen! She knew well enough that she was not a grand beauty—not like the dancers at the Moulin Rouge—but this stranger looked at her with desire.

“Curious art,” he casually remarked of the piece they both were observing. He spoke with an accent so thick that at first she wasn’t certain what he had said.

“I don’t understand it.”

“Do you suppose the artist does?”

“Well, Monsieur Matisse painted it, so he must.”

“What do you imagine he is trying to convey?” he asked.

“Chaos. Daring. Certainly a wild heart,” she said thoughtfully. “His mind must be a frenzy.”

“Along with his love life,” he replied, gazing back up at the piece.

She was as intrigued as she was embarrassed as he clamped his own chin with thumb and forefinger and she, too, looked back at the canvas with a restrained smile.

“What if it is his soul that has control of him when he paints, and not his mind at all?”

She couldn’t quite imagine what he meant and considered for a moment how to reply. “I just don’t see why he wouldn’t paint pictures like everyone else. Even like Toulouse-Lautrec did, or Monsieur Cézanne. They were innovative, and yet they were masters.”

“Not when they were alive, that’s for certain.

“Perhaps Monsieur Matisse craves the freedom to be defiant about how he sees the world.”

“How do you mean?”

“Perhaps he wishes to paint objects as he thinks or feels them, not as everyone else sees them.”

Suddenly she understood what he was saying. It was the very reason why she had run away from Vincennes, because she wanted the freedom to see the world differently than her parents did. Because she wanted to feel. She wanted to be like Apollinaire’s Gypsy.

“It is a terrible thing to be swallowed up by the world and be forced to see it as others do,” Eva finally said as their eyes met again. “Not to do what one feels.”

“I could not agree more—señorita. For many of us, conformity is impossible.”

“Picasso! ¡Aquí!” someone called, extinguishing their moment, and a young dark-haired man approached them. “You have been discovered here and there’s a photographer on his way to you!”

Eva felt a warm rush as they quickly left the room. He was Pablo Picasso? She had just flirted with a famous artist.

Needing a breath of fresh air, she made her way outside and leaned against a white stone pillar. Their little game of seduction had overwhelmed her. As much as she always said she was not an innocent, Eva was naive and out of her league with this man.

She stood still, trying to catch her breath as her mind swam with the potent mix of excitement and uncertainty. Eva had never felt so alive as she did at that moment. It really had been the most extraordinary couple of days and she did not dare to imagine what might lay ahead.

Chapter 4

That mysterious, spirited young woman from the museum had captured Picasso’s imagination and he could not get her out of his mind. Since the Salon des Indépendants two days ago, he had become obsessed with her. He had not thought to ask her name, but her face and small frame were as deeply etched into his mind now as if he had already had her in his bed. Or painted her.

He had stood there staring at her, and as she looked back at him with those guileless blue eyes and such a rosebud of a mouth, he had wanted to devour her.

But he must stop this. He was not a single man. He loved Fernande, and he was trying to remain faithful to her. And anyway, that girl was not his type. Fernande was statuesque and elegant, with her mythic beauty and luxuriant mane of flaming auburn hair. She was a woman who commanded every room she entered and possessed every man’s ardor. Voluptuous, worldly.

That little nymph was none of those things.

It made him smile to think how deliciously awkward the encounter at the exhibition had been. She was clearly not a sophisticated girl. By the look of her simple dress, she was probably from the countryside. Her eyes that flickered at him in the open light of the vast gallery were as bright and unassuming as a blue September sky. How refreshing simplicity did seem to him in the midst of the complicated world he lived in with Fernande. At the moment, he was questioning everything in his life.

Picasso stood barefoot and shirtless—as he always did when he worked. He stared blankly at the unfinished painting on his easel, the scent of wet paint and turpentine filling the air.

Fanny Tellier lay naked before him, posing on the bed beside his easel. She was a professional artist’s model and she had not moved for the better part of an hour. The painting should have been finished by now with such a compliant subject, but he could not stop thinking of the girl. He had felt sullen and unproductive for weeks, and this new distraction was not helping matters.

What a good thing that his abstract style hid the things he was really painting because today that girl was working her way into every brushstroke.

Cubism made him the master, with the power to represent people and objects as the sum total of their parts, and to place them in any order he liked. Picasso found it almost a Godlike power. He could have painted the status quo, kept on with his melancholy blue paintings, or his fascination with harlequins. That would have been far easier. He certainly knew, artistically, how to give people what they wanted. He could paint the beautiful pictures people expected like a child repeating his alphabet, and then reap the rewards. He had imitated the very best museum oils. His painting Science and Charity was right up there with the best of them, he thought smugly. And that he had painted at the age of fifteen. But realism had been such a hollow exercise since then. These days, he needed to explore, hunt, create, and he needed to matter to himself, not the critics.

The shadows lengthened on the wall as a slanting ray of first morning sunlight grew red, then mellowed to gold at dawn. It began to shimmer as it crept farther, slowly taking the space over, flooding the room. His candles flickered as they dwindled, wet wax pooling at their bases, and the glow still shone on the paint pots, brushes and rags. Ma jolie femme, he thought of the mysterious girl. How innocent she seemed, how unaware yet of the complexities of life that plagued him.

Through the windows, Picasso could see that the light over Montmartre was changing. Morning was fully breaking now. The steel-colored Paris sky was threatening rain and steadily muting the sunlight. Bathed in a shimmer of perspiration from the coal fire burning crimson beside her, Fanny finally moved her arm on the collection of pillows beneath her head. Her movement drove Picasso from the moment and frustrated him. He simply couldn’t put on canvas what he felt.

“That’s it for today.”

“Shall we get to it, then?” she asked, rising from the bed and approaching him.

Still naked and willing, she wound her long fingers seductively across Picasso’s shoulder, then down along the side of his arm. Fanny had a reputation for sleeping with her artists, and he knew that much, personally. This was not their first time. She kissed him then and he let her. For a moment, as he tasted the warmth of her mouth, he considered it. She was not all that different in form or age from the girl at the exhibition. They had similar hair and the same bright blue eyes, but his gut told him the similarities ended there. Gently, Picasso drew her hand from his arm and handed her a dressing gown.

“Not today.”

“Really, Pablo?” she declared with a note of effrontery. “That’s not like you at all.”

“You’re right, it wasn’t. But it is now.” He gently tied the silken sash at her waist.

“You’ve given up women?”

“Perhaps for a while. We shall see.” He shrugged.

“Does Fernande know that?” she asked as she moved across the cluttered studio to gather her clothes.

“I haven’t given her up, if that’s what you mean. I owe her too much for the years of poverty I forced her to endure with me. Or so she often reminds me.”

“You are staying with your mistress out of loyalty? How positively bourgeois,” she said with an amused smile as she began to dress. “Only love is a reason. Other than that, dear Pablo, you are fooling yourself.”

“I love Fernande very much. I always will.”

“Then why isn’t she the one posing for you as she used to? We’re old friends, you and I. You can tell me the truth. It would probably make you feel better if you did. You’ve worn that nasty frown the entire time I’ve been here so something is clearly troubling you. Why not get it off your chest?”