Picasso, Juan-les-Pins, Spring 1936

PABLO PICASSO WISHED HE HADN’T bothered to read today’s mail. It disrupted his newfound peace of mind, which was as delicate as a young green shoot in spring. At first, when he arrived in Juan-les-Pins, the forecast was not auspicious; the weather had gone damp and chilly, making him wonder if he’d made a mistake in retreating here out of season. For awhile he’d simply slept a dozen hours each day—and that itself was a miracle, after so many sleepless nights in Paris.

Then, when he finally ran out of the provisions he’d travelled with, he put on an old coat and hat and slipped into town, roaming the small neighborhoods, enjoying the whole cloak-and-dagger drama of sneaking out of Paris and escaping here incognito. He gravitated to the lively, friendly Café Paradis, run by locals who seemed to know how to mind their own business. He’d ordered a good peasant stew of wild boar sausages and lentils, which warmed his blood and nourished his body and soul in a profound way, reminding him of his boyhood days in Spain. The rough red wine and the warm café seemed to wrap itself protectively around his shoulders like a blanket from his doting Italian mother.

“This is just what I need,” Picasso told himself. “A month of it and I’ll be strong as a Miura bull!”

But he also understood that his newly regained strength could so easily dissipate while tussling with those small decisions and tasks that he found so life-sapping, like the daily questions of, what to eat? What time? And where? Having to settle these Lilliputian things for himself simply exhausted him.

So when the proprietor of the Café Paradis asked if he could be of more service, Picasso impulsively made an arrangement with Monsieur Belange to have his lunches brought up to him at the villa. This would hopefully become an anchor in his daily routine, ensuring that Pablo would not waste his energy with endless domestic indecision—therefore leaving him to his privacy and his work.

Just making that decision had helped, because today he’d awakened earlier than usual, feeling alert and hopeful again. And, he noted, today was Thursday—always a fortuitous day for arrivals and departures, for casting out old demons and beginning new ventures.

But there in his mailbox he spied a newly delivered pouch from Paris. Letters were being forwarded—selectively—by his old friend and assistant, Sabartés, who awaited instructions on how to reply to them, so that no one would discover where Picasso had disappeared to.

At first, he threw the package on the desk in the back room. But that wouldn’t work. It was sitting there just like a spider, Picasso thought. The only way to kill its fearful power was to confront it.

With a defiant flourish, he opened the parcel, bypassing the envelopes from friends, art dealers and magazine editors and galleries, all the while dreading that he’d find one particular stationery—the one from a lawyer’s office, which had become so wretchedly familiar that it made his gut freeze the instant he spotted it.

“The devil!” he exclaimed. He tore it open and scanned it rapidly with growing disgust. What pit bulls his estranged Russian wife had hired! Well, he shouldn’t be surprised. To marry an aristocrat was one thing. To marry a ballerina, quite another. But to marry a woman who was both! You couldn’t breed a more highly strung bitch if you tried.

Yet he still respected the delicate, volatile, dark-haired Olga. He had thoroughly enjoyed being her husband, dressing up like a dandy in fine clothes with “a true lady” on his arm, whose social connections opened the doors of the best parlors in Europe for him.

“In Spain, a man can keep a wife on one side of town and a mistress on the other for years, and they’d only find out about each other at the man’s funeral, when he is beyond caring,” Pablo grumbled.

Not so in Paris. Discretion lasted only so long. Once his young blonde mistress became pregnant, mutual “friends” couldn’t resist letting Olga know all about Marie-Thérèse. Now his wife was devoting all her time, energy and fury to winning this legal battle. How could an artist compete with that?

But divorce was out of the question because the marriage agreement he’d signed, subject to French law, required an equal division of property. And property, apparently, included art. Olga’s expensive, fancy lawyers were poised to split his collection in half, like the woman in the Bible who would cut a baby in two rather than let someone else have it. They’d even gotten the judge to put a padlock on Picasso’s studio in Paris.

“Imagine locking a man out of his own workplace!” he brooded, still incensed.

Olga already had possession of their son, Paulo. That should be enough for any woman. As it was, Picasso could seldom bear to sell a painting when it was done; the whole process of separation from his creations depressed him for days. What did the money-men know of that kind of pain?

No, divorce must be avoided. A legal separation was the only answer. So the bargaining had begun, and the endless torture of waiting, waiting, waiting for a settlement. On and on it went, month after ghastly month, for over a year now; and for the first time in his life, Picasso stopped painting. He was not dead in those months, but he was not really alive—more like a man tied under a swinging blade that was slowly swooshing closer and closer to him until it would finally slice him to death.

In the end, he’d simply had to get out of Paris. Today’s letter from his own lawyer was at least hopeful; negotiations were now under way which might finally persuade Olga simply to separate. In return, she’d get the country house outside Paris—and there would be other financial concessions because she’d make sure that he paid a hefty price for his freedom—but the paintings, which were all that mattered, wouldn’t so drastically fall under the axe, after all.

Whatever the outcome, here on the Côte d’Azur where the sun shone brightly now, a man could surely regain his vitality. As nature was casting off winter for spring, Pablo was transiting from his conventional, respectable family to the illicit new one presented to him by his angelic muse, Marie-Thérèse. He felt a certain masculine pride in their little daughter Maya, who’d been born just last year.

The ever-submissive Marie-Thérèse never complained, bless her, but now she hadn’t any real hope of becoming Madame Picasso, for Olga would still be Picasso’s legal wife until God and death parted them. And while Pablo enjoyed playing the doting new papa during his Sunday visits with his little second family, he could already feel the stirrings of boredom that domesticity invariably evoked.

“Women are either goddesses or doormats,” he concluded after each conquest.

—

FORTUNATELY, AFTER A morning of settling in with his new supplies, he’d found today’s fine lunch from the Café Paradis awaiting him; and when he sat down to eat it, once again the food worked its magic to soothe him and make him forget all those letters. Afterwards, wanting to keep his body fit for the task ahead, he’d gone for a walk in the fields behind the house—they belonged to a gentleman farmer who grew roses and carnations—and here, in the remarkable light of the Midi, Picasso’s pace became brisk and purposeful. He returned to the villa feeling ready to do what had been impossible only a week ago—to mix his paints and create anew. So it looked as if he’d made the right choice with the Café Paradis, whose cuisine was far more agreeable and soul-nourishing than the boring, restrictive diet suggested by his fussy Parisian doctor to cure his anxious stomach during this time of turmoil.

As soon as the young girl from the café left his studio, Picasso’s gaze rested on the seashell she’d been holding. “What a character that Ondine is. One might believe she really is a water nymph,” he mused, recalling a fairy tale that a German dealer once told him about ondines—they were magical sprites who, if they married a mortal man, would lose their immortality but gain a soul.

He glanced out the window just in time to catch a glimpse of Ondine as she was gliding away on her bicycle, with long hair fluttering like the waves of the sea itself and her skirts flowing in a circle around her, like a ship with sails flying. He watched until she reached the crest of the hill, where, for a moment, she seemed to hang there in the sky just before vanishing from sight.

“She’s more like a kite on the wind,” Picasso observed, moving his hand in the air in a preliminary sketch of a kite. He stepped closer to his easel. “But, she has a bit too much defiance in those eyes,” he thought with a shade of disapproval.

The truth was, modern girls made him uneasy. They no longer knew how to respect and serve men as women did when he had been a boy surrounded by a doting mother, grandmother, godmother, aunts and sisters who unquestioningly accepted their God-given inferior position to men they treated as kings. All those breasts and bellies and arms and laps! That outpouring of adoration. Nothing could match nor replace it.

And so Pablo grew up believing that women of all ages were meant to sacrifice their lives to men, just as the mythic maidens were sacrificed to the Minotaur. It began with his little sister—and even now, Concepción’s name still had the power to pierce his heart like the crown of thorns that wrapped itself around Christ’s heart in the holy cards of his youth. For, at only seven years old Concepción had contracted diphtheria, suffering in doomed agony, fading slowly, becoming almost translucent like a ghost, right before his horrified eyes. Day after day she’d lain in bed, pale and hopeless, prompting the thirteen-year-old Picasso to kneel trembling by her side and utter a prayer that he regretted from the moment it left his lips.

“Dear God, save my sister and I will never pick up a brush to paint again!”

What devil had inspired such a terrible sacrifice? For even then, the boy Picasso’s talent was indisputable. As a child he’d begun drawing even before he could speak. Everyone knew that he was destined for greatness—why, his father had quit painting and handed over his own box of paints and brushes to Pablo, in a gesture that carried as much burden of guilt as it did a vote of confidence.

Would God really expect the boy genius to give up such a gift if his sister survived, just to make good on his rash bargain? In a panic, Pablo had tried to ignore another voice that whispered demonically in his ear, “Ask God to keep your artistic destiny alive, and take your saintly sister’s life as a sacrifice…”

For days Picasso agonized as only a young boy could, imagining that it was his will, and not God’s, which must make this decision. He would never wish his sister dead—yet he could not help praying to be released from his promise to stop painting if she survived.

Concepción died soon after.

And that was how Pablo came to believe that no one could create without destroying something dear. Birth begat death, and in Spain the ghosts of the dead never completely went away. You learned to live with them instead of resisting them, and you avoided sentimentality, or else the servants of Death would think you were ready for him much earlier than you had to be.

Now, with civil war galloping toward Spain as inexorably as a charging bull, there was no point in going along with the trend throughout Europe of pretending that there would never be another world-wide war. Life and death were like the ebb and flow of the tide. In Barcelona, people understood this. On Sundays a young man’s day began in church, but it might finish up with an afternoon visit to a brothel, where love was a mere transaction, and life a mocking challenge to outwit all rivals and enemies.

Create while you can, before the forces of death catch up with you…

Pablo Picasso picked up his brush.