Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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begin the arabesque anywhere and to come back to the starting-place, finishing the whole in one sinuous stroke, never taking one’s finger from the ground. The sand has gone, but there is still plenty of dusty earth under the municipal plants, and the children of Málaga still play this game; and they still cry Ojalá, which may be rendered O may Allah will it.
It is certain that some of the very earliest Picassos were drawn in the dirt of the Plaza de la Merced; and as he had no inhibitions about the living form it is probable that they were not sterile abstractions. He very soon acquired a mastery of this technique, and it stayed with him. As a very old man in years he would still start a drawing anywhere at all, just as he had done when he was a little boy, amazing his cousins Concha and María by beginning a dog or a cock at any point they chose to name—the claws, the tail—or by cutting the forms out of paper with his aunt’s embroidery scissors on the same terms. Curiously enough this calligraphy never overflowed into his writing: except for some early labored inscriptions he always wrote like a cat.
Behind the respectable houses lining the east side of the Plaza de la Merced began the slums of the Mundo Nuevo and the Coracha, the gap between the hill of the Alcazaba and that of the higher Gibralfaro; a place full of ruins, with swarms of Gypsies and desperately poor Spaniards living among them. In those days the slums continued round the Gibralfaro; under the Alcazaba they still remain, a most desolate spectacle even in the sun—ruin, filth, makeshift hovels, excrement. The district was called Chupa y Tira (which Penrose happily renders “Suck and Chuck”), from its inhabitants’ way of eating nothing but shellfish soup, shellfish being free and abundant in the more polluted parts of the harbor, and of chucking the shells out of the window once they were sucked clean. This whole area provided the needier housewives of Málaga with an inexhaustible supply of servants, rough no doubt and illiterate certainly, but undemanding. Perhaps the great point of servants is not that they move dust, which does no great harm where it is, but that they bring children of the bourgeoisie into contact with earthy good sense, with real life, its virtues, values, and miseries comparatively undisguised. Picasso may have learned more from Carmen Mendoza, the powerful, strong-voiced, mustachioed woman who took him to school than he did sitting there at his desk (he was an exceptionally dull scholar); and his unrivaled capacity for making a slum of any house in which he lived, however elegant, may perhaps have been based upon his early experience of the Gypsies of the Alcazaba, many of whose values he shared. And it was certainly from them that he derived his taste for the only music that ever really touched him, the cante hondo. Its strange, un-European cadences, its passionate outcry above the sound of a guitar, could be heard—can still be heard—from those miserable booths huddled together out of odd planks and surrounded by filth. Canta la rana, y no tiene pelo ni lana, say the Spaniards: the frog sings, though she has neither fur nor wool.
Picasso had a prodigious memory, both for forms and for events. He could remember learning to walk with the help of a biscuit-tin, and he could remember his sister’s birth when he was three. The circumstances of his sister’s birth were striking enough, to be sure. Don José was gossiping with friends in the back room of an apothecary’s shop one evening in December, 1884, when the bottles shot from their shelves with a crash. Earthquakes are common enough in those fiery regions for no one to sit pondering when they begin. Everyone darted into the open, and Don José ran home, up the stairs, seized his heavily-pregnant wife, his cloak, his son, and ran down into the square. Pablo was wrapped in the folds of the cloak, but his face peered out, and he saw that his mother had a kerchief over her head, a sight hitherto unknown, and deeply memorable. They hurried along the Calle de la Victoria (it commemorates the Christians’ perhaps illusory victory over the Moors), right along to the far end, skirting the Gibralfaro, to Muñoz Degrain’s little one-storied house, built solidly into the rock. Degrain was visiting Rome at the time, but they settled in, and here Picasso’s sister María de los Dolores—Lola—was born. (This earthquake killed over a thousand, devastating the whole region, and the cholera epidemic of the following year killed at least another hundred thousand more.)
But even with this astonishing power of recall he could not remember when he began to draw. He had in fact been drawing even before he could talk, and his first recorded words (recorded by his mother) were “piz, piz”—all that he could manage of lápiz, a pencil. He drew in season and out, particularly at school. His parents sent him first to the parochial school and then, when he was declared a “delicate child” after some illness that was supposed to have affected his kidneys, to a private establishment dedicated to St. Raphael: at neither did he learn anything in the scholastic line, neither reading nor writing nor arithmetic. Somehow the rudiments of these arts seeped into him quite early, but they did not do so in the classroom: to the end of his life he was not at home with the alphabet, and although in later years he was as keen as a hawk where the calculation of merchants’ commissions was concerned, his spelling remained highly personal. The one thing he did learn at school was that other people were willing to admit that he was an exceptional being, not subject to the common law.
Even in a very easy-going establishment a child who sat, not minding his book but drawing bulls or the live pigeon he had brought in his bosom, and who got up without leave to gape out the window, would have been sharply rebuked at the least and more probably flogged; but not Picasso. He would often arrive late when his father rather than Carmen brought him (the school was on the way to the museum) and he would sit there staring at the clock, waiting anxiously for the moment when he would be released, sometimes nursing the walking-stick, pigeon, or paintbrush that he had wrung from Don José as a hostage for his return. It does not appear that he was a wicked, turbulent, or dissipated pupil, but rather that he belonged on another plane: the master and even more surprisingly the other boys accepted this and they neither complained nor imitated his example when he stood up and walked out of the room altogether, looking for the headmaster’s wife, to whom he was much attached. “I used to follow her about like a puppy,” he said.
Counting came hard: so did telling the time. Once when he was gazing from the classroom window he saw his uncle Antonio, Aunt Eloisa’s husband, who had a post in the town hall over the way. Pablo called out, begging his uncle to come and fetch him away—he was always very much afraid that they would forget him—and in reply to the question “When are you let out?” he replied “At one,” supposing that since one was the first of the numbers it would also be the nearest hour.
Don José does not seem to have troubled much about his son’s lack of progress in the subjects taught at school, but he did teach Pablo a great deal about drawing and later about painting. He was the heir of the tradition of Spanish realism, but of a tradition sadly diminished and watered-down over the generations by academic doctrine, and most of what he taught was of course purely academic, a photographic realism, very slightly touched with fantasy; but he did have some ideas of his own. For example, he would cut his pigeons out in paper and move them about on the canvas in search of a satisfactory composition: he also handled cardboard and glue with great dexterity. In other hands and in another atmosphere these ideas might have borne earlier fruit. However, he provided his son with a solid, firmly-disciplined basis, and never can a man have had an apter, more eager pupil.
This may well have been the time of their happiest relationship. The father knew a great deal about the craftsmanship of his calling; at that age the son can hardly have distinguished between technique and the purpose of technique; and Don José, less glum in those years, less battered by life, was vested with the nimbus of the omniscient initiator. Long, long after, Picasso recalled one particular picture of pigeons. He remembered it as an enormous canvas. “Imagine a cage with hundreds of doves in it,” he said to Sabartés. “Thousands of doves. Thousands. Millions. They were perched in rows, as though they were in a dovecote, a prodigious great dovecote. The picture was in the museum at Málaga: I have never seen it since.” Sabartés found it: the physically present birds amounted to nine: the canvas was quite small.
Picasso never threw anything away if he could possibly avoid doing so, and some of the drawings and paintings of those days in Málaga have survived, together with many more from the following years at La Coruña and hundreds from his adolescence in Barcelona. Of these Málaga pictures, that which is usually called the earliest and which is dated 1890/91 is a little painting of a picador: it is oil upon wood (the smooth cedar tops of cigar-boxes were useful to