Anne Girard - Madame Picasso

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.

Chapter 5

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 it from her without a backward glance or a thank-you.

After the music began again and the actress burst onstage to thunderous applause, Eva tucked the needle and thread into the pocket of her skirt and peered out past the heavy curtain.

He hadn’t been there during the first act but he was there now. Picasso sat at the front table, along with the same group of boisterous Spaniards. Tonight, however, she saw that Monsieur Oller, the barrel-chested owner of the Moulin Rouge, was seated prominently beside him. He wore a stiff black suit and bow tie, with a heavy gold watch chain over his chest, and he and Picasso were conversing intensely with each other, heads together. Eva was duly impressed, but she knew she shouldn’t be surprised that the two appeared to be well acquainted.

Eva scanned the tables around him looking again for a girl who might be Picasso’s companion. It occurred to her that there just may well be a Madame Picasso, and she cringed at the thought. She realized then that she knew so little about him other than that his strange new style of painting had set the French capital on its ear. He was a bohemian renegade, and he was the talk of the town. Although there were several young women in the row behind him giggling and pointing sheepishly at the handsome young man, there was no woman seated prominently nearby him. Eva shook her head and smiled in self-reproach. Someone like Picasso was so far beyond her reach, even for a fantasy.

Busy with mending, Eva returned to her work, and by the time she managed to steal another glance, Picasso and his band of friends were gone.

Near midnight, after the show was over and they had returned to their room, Sylvette brushed out her long hair and sighed. Eva lay back against the pillow wearing her mother’s bright yellow kimono, the only bit of her mother she had brought away from Vincennes. She was watching the nightly ritual and thinking about the evening.

“She will have me fired, too, won’t she?” Eva asked, speaking of Mistinguett.

The fear and the possibility had been on her mind all day.

Sylvette stopped brushing her hair and glanced at Eva through the mirror’s reflection. “Not if she feels loyalty to you.”