vitality. As nature was casting off winter for spring, Pablo was transiting from his conventional, respectable family to the illicit new one presented to him by his angelic muse, Marie-Thérèse. He felt a certain masculine pride in their little daughter Maya, who’d been born just last year.
The ever-submissive Marie-Thérèse never complained, bless her, but now she hadn’t any real hope of becoming Madame Picasso, for Olga would still be Picasso’s legal wife until God and death parted them. And while Pablo enjoyed playing the doting new papa during his Sunday visits with his little second family, he could already feel the stirrings of boredom that domesticity invariably evoked.
“Women are either goddesses or doormats,” he concluded after each conquest.
—
F ORTUNATELY, AFTER A morning of settling in with his new supplies, he’d found today’s fine lunch from the Café Paradis awaiting him; and when he sat down to eat it, once again the food worked its magic to soothe him and make him forget all those letters. Afterwards, wanting to keep his body fit for the task ahead, he’d gone for a walk in the fields behind the house—they belonged to a gentleman farmer who grew roses and carnations—and here, in the remarkable light of the Midi, Picasso’s pace became brisk and purposeful. He returned to the villa feeling ready to do what had been impossible only a week ago—to mix his paints and create anew. So it looked as if he’d made the right choice with the Café Paradis, whose cuisine was far more agreeable and soul-nourishing than the boring, restrictive diet suggested by his fussy Parisian doctor to cure his anxious stomach during this time of turmoil.
As soon as the young girl from the café left his studio, Picasso’s gaze rested on the seashell she’d been holding. “What a character that Ondine is. One might believe she really is a water nymph,” he mused, recalling a fairy tale that a German dealer once told him about ondines—they were magical sprites who, if they married a mortal man, would lose their immortality but gain a soul.
He glanced out the window just in time to catch a glimpse of Ondine as she was gliding away on her bicycle, with long hair fluttering like the waves of the sea itself and her skirts flowing in a circle around her, like a ship with sails flying. He watched until she reached the crest of the hill, where, for a moment, she seemed to hang there in the sky just before vanishing from sight.
“She’s more like a kite on the wind,” Picasso observed, moving his hand in the air in a preliminary sketch of a kite. He stepped closer to his easel. “But, she has a bit too much defiance in those eyes,” he thought with a shade of disapproval.
The truth was, modern girls made him uneasy. They no longer knew how to respect and serve men as women did when he had been a boy surrounded by a doting mother, grandmother, godmother, aunts and sisters who unquestioningly accepted their God-given inferior position to men they treated as kings. All those breasts and bellies and arms and laps! That outpouring of adoration. Nothing could match nor replace it.
And so Pablo grew up believing that women of all ages were meant to sacrifice their lives to men, just as the mythic maidens were sacrificed to the Minotaur. It began with his little sister—and even now, Concepción’s name still had the power to pierce his heart like the crown of thorns that wrapped itself around Christ’s heart in the holy cards of his youth. For, at only seven years old Concepción had contracted diphtheria, suffering in doomed agony, fading slowly, becoming almost translucent like a ghost, right before his horrified eyes. Day after day she’d lain in bed, pale and hopeless, prompting the thirteen-year-old Picasso to kneel trembling by her side and utter a prayer that he regretted from the moment it left his lips.
“Dear God, save my sister and I will never pick up a brush to paint again!”
What devil
The ever-submissive Marie-Thérèse never complained, bless her, but now she hadn’t any real hope of becoming Madame Picasso, for Olga would still be Picasso’s legal wife until God and death parted them. And while Pablo enjoyed playing the doting new papa during his Sunday visits with his little second family, he could already feel the stirrings of boredom that domesticity invariably evoked.
“Women are either goddesses or doormats,” he concluded after each conquest.
—
F ORTUNATELY, AFTER A morning of settling in with his new supplies, he’d found today’s fine lunch from the Café Paradis awaiting him; and when he sat down to eat it, once again the food worked its magic to soothe him and make him forget all those letters. Afterwards, wanting to keep his body fit for the task ahead, he’d gone for a walk in the fields behind the house—they belonged to a gentleman farmer who grew roses and carnations—and here, in the remarkable light of the Midi, Picasso’s pace became brisk and purposeful. He returned to the villa feeling ready to do what had been impossible only a week ago—to mix his paints and create anew. So it looked as if he’d made the right choice with the Café Paradis, whose cuisine was far more agreeable and soul-nourishing than the boring, restrictive diet suggested by his fussy Parisian doctor to cure his anxious stomach during this time of turmoil.
As soon as the young girl from the café left his studio, Picasso’s gaze rested on the seashell she’d been holding. “What a character that Ondine is. One might believe she really is a water nymph,” he mused, recalling a fairy tale that a German dealer once told him about ondines—they were magical sprites who, if they married a mortal man, would lose their immortality but gain a soul.
He glanced out the window just in time to catch a glimpse of Ondine as she was gliding away on her bicycle, with long hair fluttering like the waves of the sea itself and her skirts flowing in a circle around her, like a ship with sails flying. He watched until she reached the crest of the hill, where, for a moment, she seemed to hang there in the sky just before vanishing from sight.
“She’s more like a kite on the wind,” Picasso observed, moving his hand in the air in a preliminary sketch of a kite. He stepped closer to his easel. “But, she has a bit too much defiance in those eyes,” he thought with a shade of disapproval.
The truth was, modern girls made him uneasy. They no longer knew how to respect and serve men as women did when he had been a boy surrounded by a doting mother, grandmother, godmother, aunts and sisters who unquestioningly accepted their God-given inferior position to men they treated as kings. All those breasts and bellies and arms and laps! That outpouring of adoration. Nothing could match nor replace it.
And so Pablo grew up believing that women of all ages were meant to sacrifice their lives to men, just as the mythic maidens were sacrificed to the Minotaur. It began with his little sister—and even now, Concepción’s name still had the power to pierce his heart like the crown of thorns that wrapped itself around Christ’s heart in the holy cards of his youth. For, at only seven years old Concepción had contracted diphtheria, suffering in doomed agony, fading slowly, becoming almost translucent like a ghost, right before his horrified eyes. Day after day she’d lain in bed, pale and hopeless, prompting the thirteen-year-old Picasso to kneel trembling by her side and utter a prayer that he regretted from the moment it left his lips.
“Dear God, save my sister and I will never pick up a brush to paint again!”
What devil
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