Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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the rites of the Church, so he left it with at least some of them.
In 1891, in Málaga, the ten-year-old Picasso was more concerned with the ritual of the bull-ring than with any other sacrifice, and he recorded it diligently: but the days of his ordered, natural life were coming to an end. He now had a second sister, Concepción, born in 1887, and the flat was by so much the smaller; his father was growing even more withdrawn; and then, in a decision that caused great unhappiness, the municipality finally closed the museum. There had never been any margin for living in the Ruiz family, and this blow was disastrous.
In his distress Don José found a post at La Coruña: he was to teach drawing and decoration in the Escuela Provincial de Bellas Artes. La Coruña is in Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, a great way off in the north, and obviously the whole family would have to live there. All at once Don José became aware that his son was if not wholly illiterate then something very like it. Illiteracy and a total inability to add two and two would for the time being have mattered little in his native city, where friends and connections would naturally stand by the boy; but in a remote and savage province like Galicia the rules would have to be obeyed, at least by strangers, and to get into any school Pablo would have either to pass an entrance examination or present a certificate of competence. There was no possibility of his passing an examination in any subject but drawing, no possibility at all, so Don José went to see a friend who had the power of granting certificates. “Very well,” said the friend, “but in common decency the child should at least appear to be examined.”
The child appeared, and after some fruitless questions of a general nature, the child remaining mute, the examiner presented him with a sum, three plus one plus forty plus sixty-six plus thirty-eight, telling him kindly how to write it down and begging him not to be nervous. The first attempt was not wholly successful and the sum had to be written again: this time, when he showed it up, Pablo noticed that the examiner had made the addition himself on a scrap of paper, left obviously in sight. He memorized the figure, returned to his desk, wrote down the answer, drew a line beneath it with some complacency, and received his certificate.
This valuable paper was packed, together with all the family’s portable possessions, and the home in the Plaza de la Merced fell to pieces. Dr. Salvador helped his brother to a passage by boat, and at the end of that summer of 1891 Picasso first took to the sea, at the beginning of his long voyage.
*Family trees are always difficult to follow in a narrative: these are shown diagrammatically in Appendixes 1 and 2.
LA CORUÑA: a leaden sea and a weeping sky. Don José had looked forward with misgiving to this remote little town in a backward province, but he could never have imagined the cold, sodden reality: on seeing it, he withdrew into his humid lodgings, appalled. Until a southerner has had the living experience of it, he cannot possibly conceive the difference between the Mediterranean civilization, lived largely out of doors, and that of the north, where people huddle in unsociable family groups, each in its own house, to keep out of the cold and the rain.
The voyage had been arduous in the extreme, and rather than face the equinoctial gales off Finisterre and the full horror of the Bay of Biscay the family left the ship at Vigo, although this meant taking the train to Santiago de Compostela and then the diligence on to La Coruña—eight hours of a crowded, lumbering horse-drawn vehicle, something between a coach and a covered wagon, in the pouring rain with two small children and a baby: the road in a chronic state of disrepair.
Their arrival was inauspicious; they had left Málaga with the grapes ripening in the sun and the sugar-cane standing tall, perhaps the most delightful season of the year, and they reached La Coruña in time for the onset of the prodigious autumn storms. All this ironbound north and northeastern coast of Spain is exposed to the great winds that tear in over three thousand miles of Atlantic ocean, sweeping low cloud and vast sheets of rain before them; and the north-east corner is even more exposed than the rest. Galicia’s rainfall is the highest in the Peninsula, five and a half feet a year falling upon every square inch of Santiago, as opposed to London’s twenty-three and a half inches and New York’s forty-two. When it is neither blowing nor raining it is often foggy, as though the elements were hopelessly entangled; and this fog resolves itself into a cold, penetrating drizzle that streams upon the granite cliffs and the wet granite houses. There are pleasant days in the course of the year, when the sun peers through, lighting the pure sandy beaches, and when the deep fjords take on a certain charm; but then the warmth acts upon the piles of rotting kelp that the gales and furious tides (unknown in the Mediterranean) drive up to the high-water mark, and they breed swarms of noisome flies. In any case the Ruizes saw none of these fine days for the first months of their stay: autumn, winter, and spring had to pass slowly by before there was any hope of sun, as they understood the term.
These horrors impressed the young Picasso deeply, as well they might; but perhaps even more than by the incessant rain, the wind, the coal fires, the smoke-laden fog and the cold, he was shocked by the fact that in the streets the people spoke a different language. This was his first experience of being a foreigner, cut off; and for many small children the experience of hearing another language all round them, so that they are outsiders, debarred from the incessant, involuntary communication of the crowd and surrounded with secret, incomprehensible words, is deeply disturbing. The language spoken in La Coruña and the rest of Galicia is Gallego, a somewhat archaic variety of Portuguese, and although it is of course a Romance language other Spaniards do not understand it at all. The people can speak Castilian too, but among themselves it is Gallego: even now, with generations of military service and compulsory education in Castilian, a great many of them communicate in their own tongue, and in 1891 it was still more general. Figures for the turn of the century show 1,800,000 Gallegan-speakers out of a total population of just under two million.
The contrast between Málaga and La Coruña was very great indeed, but it could have been equaled in other parts of Spain, a country separated by its geography and its history into such markedly distinct regions that some of the early rulers took the title of emperor of the Spains, dwelling upon the plural. Navarra, Aragón, Castilla, León, and Catalonia were once sovereign states, so were Asturias, Estremadura, Jaén, Córdoba, Sevilla, and several others; and Galicia was one of them, a geographic, economic, and linguistic entity far closer in habits and culture to Portugal than to León or Castilla, and inhabited by a race with the reputation of being hardy, honest, industrious, stupid, and unpolished: indeed, the word Gallego had a certain currency in the rest of Spain as a term of reproach, meaning boor. Traditionally, in such cities as Madrid, it was the Galician who brought the water, coal, and wood, carrying it up innumerable flights of stairs.
This damp former kingdom, then, retained its individuality (and its diet) over the centuries, and the uprooted child Picasso was confronted not only with a strange language but also with strange forms and faces that to an Andalou scarcely seemed Spanish at all. The Moors did reach Galicia; but although they came from bitterly inhospitable regions, most being Berbers, they withdrew after no more than five years, unable to bear the climate. It is true that they were also encouraged to withdraw by the plague and the army of King Alphonso of Asturias, but the great point is that they went away without having bred there. No trace of the Moor remains in blood, customs, or architecture: these are the descendants of the native Iberians, the Suevi and the Visigoths, with perhaps the slightest touch of Roman.
Faced with this different civilization, the Ruizes retired into their second-floor flat in the Calle Payo Gómez and watched the rain beating against the windows. They discussed the weather interminably—there was a great deal of it to discuss—and Don José at least felt the cold reach to his heart. His wife had a new home to set up, three children to look after, and the strangeness of Galician shopping to cope with—the makings of a gazpacho were hardly to be found, far less a bottle of generous wine. This left her little time for introspection, and in any case hers was a much happier temperament. For Pablo and his sisters too the initial horror faded; there was, after all, a new town to be seen, a town built on a peninsula with a harbor on one side, a beach on the