Madame Picasso. Anne Girard
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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?”
“All right, the truth is I’m not sure anymore that I am meant to be with her forever.”
“What has changed since the last time we spoke?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know for certain. We fight too often, and she seems never to have enough of my money to make her happy.” He raked his hands through his hair. “I’ll be thirty years old soon, and sometimes I feel like she and I want different things out of our lives. So much has changed since we met.”
She tipped her head and thought for a moment. A hint of a smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “You surprise me. You’re a deeper, more serious man than I thought. It’s a lot different than all that puffed-up bravado. I like it.”
After Fanny had dressed and put on her coat and hat, she returned to where Picasso was cleaning his paintbrushes. She was slipping on her black gloves as she approached him.
“Look, Pablo, maybe it’s none of my business, but the gossip in Paris is that she’s not all that loyal to you.”
He smiled and pressed a kiss onto her cheek, gently refusing the bait because, in a strange way, he cared about her. “I appreciate your trying to help, but our relationship is complex. We have both been unfaithful through the years,” he replied as he drew several francs from a ceramic jug on his working table where a clay pot of clean paintbrushes was sitting.
“Not that it’s altogether unappealing, mind you, but you’re also a complicated man, Pablo Picasso,” she said with a wan smile.
“Unfortunately, my dear, you don’t know the half of it,” he replied as he saw her to the door, eager to have her out of his studio.
After she had had gone, Picasso gazed over at the half-finished canvas, much of the paint still wet. He needed solitude—the isolation to make this piece into what it was inside his mind. There was a heaviness within him, and he stood there for a long while, basking in the silence that had been returned to him.
There had been too many voices in his head. Too much of the past.
His heart was not bound up enough by the work on his easel, and he needed it to be. But he was stuck. For Picasso to complete it, he knew he needed inspiration. What he needed was a muse.
Saturday evening at the Moulin Rouge, Eva was busier with mending than she had been the first night. She waited with needle and thread just offstage, behind the edge of the heavy red velvet curtain, with her fingers trembling. She so very much needed to get this right.
“Be quicker about it than you were last night!” Mistinguett growled, thrusting a torn stocking at Eva as a wardrobe assistant approached them bearing a long-handled hairbrush to smooth the star’s hair back into a tight mahogany wave. “What are you staring at, you imbecile? Sew!” she barked when Eva did not move quickly enough.
Shaken from the moment, Eva realized that she had been transfixed by the glamorous star. She hadn’t noticed how openly she was staring until she caught a glimpse of Sylvette standing behind her, wearing a stricken expression. Quickly, Eva cast her own gaze downward and set back to work. It was easy enough to fix the tear, and Eva quickly offered the stocking back up to Mistinguett, who snatched