Madame Picasso, page 36
But one day, what he had done to vent the rage was too much. A hideous painting of a woman with her breasts nailed onto her chest taunted him from the easel. A monstrosity. He gazed at his creation in horror, as if someone else had painted such a vile image. This wasn’t Eva, not the woman of his heart, yet he had painted her cruelly, anyway. Overcome with grief, Picasso surrendered his face to his hands. Then he put a blank canvas on his easel to begin again.
The wounded child hidden inside of him bid him to leave Eva. That would ease this unrelenting pain of seeing her weaken a little more each day, and he so powerless to help her. His feelings about illness and death had always been so complicated. Even he did not understand them, but if he did not work them out soon, he would lose Eva as he had lost Conchita—helplessly and with painful regret.
When finally he could no longer eat or sleep, or even work, Picasso returned to the Abbey de Sion. A heavy rain beat a rhythm against the grand stained-glass windows. He took a seat in the last pew, his shoulders hunched and his hands forming a steeple beneath his chin. He looked up at the huge crucifix suspended in the hollow nave. Jesus in torment... He had never felt more helpless in his life.
“Can I help, monsieur?”
Picasso turned with a start to see the same young dark-haired altar boy who had let him into the church that first time. He had not heard anyone approach, yet the boy was sitting beside him. He was wearing the same vestments and holding an ivory rosary. The boy was gazing at him with wide dark eyes and Picasso felt his angry veneer crumble. He could not find his voice at first. Desperate for composure, Picasso cleared his throat, ran a hand across his face and straightened his back. It was then that he realized he had been plaintively weeping. The boy must have heard him.
“Only God could help me now, but He and I are not on the best of terms.”
“I felt like that myself once. After my sister died, my parents thought I could be helped by being nearer to the Lord, so they forced me to be an altar boy.”
Picasso leaned back against the hard wood of the pew. “They forced you?”
“They were trying to help me reconcile things.”
“And did you?”
“Being nearer to the Lord is always best.”
Picasso gazed at the boy more intensely then. He looked older now. He certainly sounded older. For a moment, he thought he might be dreaming in this great, shadowy sanctuary. The intimacy was too sudden, as was the coincidence of their loss.
“You must reconcile the things you cannot change, monsieur, past and present, to find true peace for your future.”
“I haven’t a clue how to do that.”
“Perhaps that is the journey our Lord has set you on. No matter how far away we think we are, the past is always there, until we resolve it.”
Somehow he meant Conchita, Picasso thought, even though this boy would have had no way of knowing about her. He squeezed his eyes shut against the thought and exhaled several deep breaths. How could he ever resolve her death when he was being forced to lose the only other person he had ever dared to completely love? There was no answer to that. It was impossible.
Picasso stood, preparing to tell the boy that he had no idea what he was talking about. But the boy was gone. Picasso glanced around the church but he had completely disappeared. Or had he been a figment of his desperate mind? I don’t know what You want from me, Picasso thought. He knew that coming here was a mistake. There was no peace for him here. Not in a church. Certainly not with God.
Chapter 34
There was no end to the war as the months went on, and there seemed no place to hide Eva from any of the darkness war brought, or to find her a place to simply die in peace. Dr. Rousseau gave them little hope of a hospital bed in Paris. Wounded soldiers were everywhere, the hotels, schools, private homes. Try the sanatorium in Auteuil, Rousseau advised. For enough money, they may find a space for Madame Picasso there. And so he did.
Every day through the cool autumn Picasso juggled love and duty with art and anger. He would paint throughout the night and the morning, alone in the apartment Eva had chosen and decorated. There were haunting memories of her everywhere there. Then, in the afternoon, he would set out for Auteuil to visit her.
Every single day he descended the subway steps alone and entered the stifling station at Montparnasse to make the journey. In crowded subway cars, the women glared at him; the children pointed. They did not care that he was a rich or important artist, or that the woman he loved lay dying. Picasso always looked away, out the window of the subway car into the blackness of the tunnel. He felt the rhythmic rock and sway as the heavy car clacked endlessly over the tracks. Then always he was jarred by the grinding squeal of the brakes as they arrived at station after station. And every moment of every trip he made to Auteuil and back, Picasso thought of the bright-eyed girl at the exhibition—the one who owned a yellow kimono. And he knew that she had changed his life, and broken his heart, in a way that could never be healed.
Late one afternoon, when he felt Eva stroking his hair, Picasso realized that he had fallen asleep in the chair at her bedside, his head leaning on the edge of the bed. “Are you all right? Do you need anything?” he asked her, quickly shaking off sleep to attend to her.
Her face was so sallow, gray and pale now. The sweet blush of youth had already been eaten up by the cancer that was consuming her.
“Everything I have ever needed is right here beside me. But I must speak to you about something.”
“Is this another lecture about my odd work habits?” he tried to joke, because now it was simply too painful to be serious.
“Pablo, please.”
He poured her a glass of water and held it to her lips. She struggled to take a small sip.
“I want you to take a lover.”
He bristled and put the glass down. Dios, he had not seen that coming. He sat up stiffly, pushing back against the shock that rushed at him. She brushed a hand tenderly along the line of his jaw in response, as if she could almost hear what he was thinking.
“I won’t hear this. You’re getting better. You will be home with me soon.”
“No, chéri, I am not going to get better.”
“Stop.”
“But you are young and strong, and so vital. You have a long life ahead of you.”
“Eva, Dios. Stop it.” He wanted to flee. To be anywhere but here with her forcing him to face the truth yet again about her mortality.
He raked his hair back and pressed both hands against his own temples. Suddenly he felt as if he was going to cry. It was a foreign sensation and it caught him by surprise. He did not want to cry. He could not lose control like that now. Eva needed him to be strong.
“How I hate this.”
“I need for you to be happy.”
“I was happy. So happy. With you...”
“Please, my darling, say you will be happy again.”
Eva began to weep softly then as the rain came down more heavily outside the hospital windows. Something, at last, broke inside of Picasso.
“Don’t leave me, Eva. Please, don’t leave me.”
“Oh, my heart. Would that I could give you what you ask. But you have such brilliance ahead of you. No matter who is by your side, you are going to become a legend. I always knew that.”
“But I want that to be you! You were there when it mattered most, and you believed in me unfailingly. You made so many things possible.”
She stroked the back of his hand. “I am grateful for everything we’ve shared, but even so, I cannot go on with you. When I am gone, don’t let people know how I died. I’m so embarrassed.”
“Why would you be embarrassed?”
“Vanity, I suppose. A woman’s breasts are part of what makes her a woman.” She tried to laugh but only a weak sound came.
“Stop.”
“Pablo, I mean it. That is the last thing I will ask of you. Think me foolish if you will, but you knew all along that I didn’t want people’s pity. Please, speak with Dr. Rousseau. After I am gone, see that he destroys my records. Promise me.”
“Eva...”
“Please, Pablo.” She stroked his hair again.
“Dios, why couldn’t He have spared you?”
“Oh, chéri, I fear that was never God’s intention. But I am grateful that you have overcome your fears about illness and death—enough to be here all this time for me. That, I think, was the plan all along.”
He looked up at Eva and saw it so clearly then that he could not imagine why he had not seen it before. The boy. The church. It was himself. He felt a cold shiver of realization. Eva had been the inspiration for his healing with God. It was she who had led him to find himself. Picasso had risen to the challenge God had placed before him without even realizing it. In spite of his fears, in the face of her lengthy illness, and now her impending death, he had not abandoned her. Her steadfast love had helped him to become a noble man, and to be there for her in a way he had not been able to be for Conchita.
“I am so sorry...” he cried, unable to stop the flood of tears. He hunched over the bed and surrendered himself to the warmth of Eva’s weak embrace. He pressed his head to her chest and heard the sound of her faint heartbeat and her shallow breathing. “I’m so very sorry.”
“Please don’t be, mon amour. You have given me the happiest days of my life.”
Picasso shook his head, his body racked with sobs. “I should have insisted we marry. Even when you refused me, I should have overcome your objection. You have been a wife to me in every meaning of the word.”
“I never refused you. The timing was just never right.” She tried to smile but the weak result was only a soft turn of her lips as she reached up and dried his tears with the back of her hand. “Besides, you know our souls were always joined, and forever will be. We didn’t need a piece of paper for that to be so. I feel as if I have been your wife all this time.”
“I never finished that painting of us. I planned to finish it when you were well again. I wanted to give it to you as a wedding gift. It was meant to hang in our drawing room for our children to have one day.”
“An unfinished painting of us seems so fitting now.”
“Dios, don’t say that. You are killing me, and I am dying with you.”
“Ah, you will not die for a very long time. The best gift you could ever give me now is to take what we have built together and embrace the magnificent future that is about to come to you. If I have one regret, it is that I won’t be here to share that with you. I know it will be amazing.”
Picasso hardly heard her last few words. As she spoke them, he slid onto the bed beside her, nestled as tightly against her as he could, buried his face at the turn of her neck and wept for what he knew would be the last few fleeting days ahead that they would ever share together on this earth.
Chapter 35
For four years, Fernande had wanted Eva to die. Yet, now that it was actually about to happen, she did not know what to feel. So many things had come full circle for the two of them. This was the fifth day she had come out here and stood in the little courtyard outside the front door of the sanatorium in Auteuil, unable to go inside to speak with her. As she gazed up at the row of windows, memories of her own years with Picasso—and then of her years without him—crisscrossed through her mind. Sorrow filled her but there was a bit of cold comfort to her, in that moment, knowing that with Eva’s death, Picasso might finally suffer as she had. Although she had heard through Juan Gris, since they still knew many of the same people, that Picasso had quietly taken a mistress now at the last. She knew him well enough to know that he would have done that for his own emotional survival, not because he didn’t still worship Eva.
Fernande was not sure what she had hoped to find by coming here. She had heard from Apollinaire, who wrote from his hospital bed after being wounded like Braque, what lengths Picasso had gone to for her rival, since the start of the war. She never would have imagined him capable of such devotion to a woman. It was not a part of himself that he had revealed to her. Fernande cringed, remembering how she had once made Eva her confidante.
Fernande was lost in her thoughts of the past when a man approached her.
He insisted on leading her beneath the eaves of the sanatorium because it had begun to rain and he could see she had not noticed. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he asked.
His eyes were familiar but she could not recall where she knew him. He looked very old and tired as he stood beside her in a weathered military uniform, his arm in a sling.
“I am Louis Marcoussis. You gave me that name yourself once.” They embraced then like long-lost friends, and she glanced down at the sling. “I was wounded so they sent me home. When I heard about Eva, I had to come here.”
“He is with her,” Fernande said. “I saw him go inside about an hour ago.”
A flash of pain lit his blue eyes more brightly, and it struck her then how Pablo Picasso had changed them all. She could see that he had always been in love with Eva, but he had never really had a chance with her heart once destiny struck. Fernande felt the same about Picasso, and she realized going forward that she would never be able to compete with a ghost.
What had become of them all? She wondered if any of them had ever actually been so young and carefree, so wild with abandon, as she remembered. Each of them had been intent on defying convention, in their own unique way. To be bold, wild and romantic was everything. Ah, but then that was the dreamworld of Paris. Such a long-lost dream now.
As she stood there with him, the rain began to fall harder, and Fernande wanted to tell Louis the truth of what she was really here to say to Eva. But even after everything, Fernande could not hate her. Picasso had become a better man because of Eva’s love, and as much as she was loath to admit it, she knew that Eva had been better for him.
“He will leave soon to return to his studio in Montparnasse. It is the same every afternoon,” she said. “I’ve tried for days to find the courage to go inside once he leaves. But seeing her again might just do me in.”
“I came here because I thought I wanted to see Picasso feel the same pain that I did,” Louis said. “But I’ve seen too much death to take satisfaction. What I need now is to ask Eva for her forgiveness.”
“I don’t know what to say to her,” Fernande added as they began to walk toward the door.
“Me, either,” Louis replied. “But I suppose it will come to us. Who shall we tell the nurses we are?” he asked her as they began to walk toward the door.
“We will tell them we are her friends from the old days,” Fernande said simply, which, once upon a time, had been true.
* * *
As Eva lay wrapped beneath blankets, in the wonderfully soft yellow silk kimono Picasso had brought for her, she thought how much, in wintertime, bare tree branches resembled skeletons. She had gazed for so many endless hours out the window at the gnarled, twisted shapes and pitied the people out there in the cold this time of year. It would be Christmas soon. She knew she would not see spring. It was fitting how her most recent favorite Apollinaire poem, “The Farewell,” kept moving in and out of her mind.
I have picked this sprig of heather. Autumn has ended, you do remember. Never on earth shall we meet again. Scent of time, sprig of heather Remember always, I wait for you forever.
The worst of the pain was gone, but in its place was a numbness from the medication that she could not escape.
A few days after Eva entered the sanatorium, Picasso invited her parents to visit. Eva was angry at first because she hadn’t wanted them to suffer by seeing her like this. But when she saw them she remembered every good thing about her childhood, and how much she had missed them. They spent hours together lovingly recounting the past, and forgiving one another for all that had happened between them. Picasso had done for her what she had done for him with Apollinaire.
Her mother sat on Picasso’s chair beside the bed, her father stood beside it. “I’m sorry that we tried so hard to get you to marry Monsieur Fix, and later your friend Louis,” her mother said as she held Eva’s hand.
“There was only one man who was ever right for me,” Eva weakly replied.
“Your Pablo has been good to us, too. He brought us here and he has assured your father he will take care of everything.”
“Then you can believe him.”
“Oh, Eva, why didn’t you take better care of your health?” Her mother began to cry. “I pleaded with you to get more rest and—”
“Hush, Marie-Louise,” Eva’s father urged as he pressed a gentle hand onto his wife’s shoulder. “That won’t help things now.”
“I’m sorry the way I left home,” Eva whispered. It was difficult to speak. “I know I worried you.”
“We pushed you too hard. I just can’t help thinking this is all our fault.”
“Please don’t think that. I couldn’t bear to die knowing you did.” Eva brought her mother’s hand to her lips and kissed it. “What you both gave me was such strength, and an inner core that made so many things possible. That was all from both of you. I have had the best life ever, I really have.”
Her mother said a Polish prayer with her then, the way she had when Eva was a child. Then her father kissed her forehead with great tenderness before the nurse came back and told them that Eva needed to rest.
After they had gone, she knew there was nothing left unsaid between them, and she felt ready to give herself over to sleep with only the happiest thoughts in her mind.
