Cooking for Picasso (14 page)

“It was a very mysterious time for Picasso,” Aunt Matilda continued, scanning the pages. “Nobody really knows what happened to him that spring—some say he was just hanging out with Marie-Thérèse and their baby. But whatever he was doing down there, suddenly, he begins painting again. And within a year, he'd create his greatest masterpiece about the Spanish Civil War—
Guernica
.”

She spun the book around so I could see a photograph of Picasso in his Paris atelier during this period. “Not exactly Cary Grant,” Aunt Matilda commented. “Short, with a nose like a fighter. And those scary eyes. But he had charisma, you know?”

“How old is he in that photo, do you suppose?” I asked.

“He was born in October of 1881,” Aunt Matilda replied. I did some fast mental arithmetic.

“He'd have been fifty-four years old in 1936,” I observed.

“And why, pray tell, is that period so important to you?” Aunt Matilda asked, pouring more tea for us both. Her gestures were casual, but her eyes were alert and birdlike.

I wasn't sure I was ready to answer that question, since Mom evidently had chosen not to tell Aunt Matilda about Grandma Ondine and Picasso. So I mumbled, “Well, I studied art before I went into theatre and makeup. I love the 1930s.”

“You know,” Aunt Matilda said, “it's the strangest thing. But just after Christmas, your mother came by here to have tea with me. And guess what? She asked me the same questions you asked—about Picasso. When I asked her why, she said, ‘It's just something I wanted to know—for Céline.' ”

For a moment we sat there so quietly that I could hear Aunt Matilda's old-fashioned wristwatch ticking on her arm. It dawned on me that Mom had wanted an art expert with her on this trip.

“Are you still planning to go?” I asked. She rose again, went to a kitchen drawer, and brought a matching packet for her tickets and itinerary, laying it on the table before me.

“Sure,” she said cheerfully. “It's paid up. I go to Europe every spring. Gotta see all the art and hear all the music before I get too old to walk around. Not to mention the casinos. They sure beat the lottery and the church bingo around here.” I remembered that Aunt Matilda always enjoyed playing cards with us kids whenever she came to visit. She had, I recalled, the soul of a gambler.

I reached into my purse and pulled out Mom's matching packet for the trip. “I stole it,” I confessed. “I didn't want Danny and Deirdre to get their hands on it.”

There was another brief silence. “It would take a little doing, I suppose,” Aunt Matilda observed with a gleam of mischief in her eyes. “But I bet we could re-arrange it so you could take your mother's place. You can look around the Riviera. See what you see.”

I found myself winking away tears in my eyes. “I think I'd like to do that,” I said.

Because even before Aunt Matilda suggested it, the same idea had been quietly building up inside me. My mother must have summoned a lot of courage to even think of going on a trip without Dad. Perhaps all she'd wanted was to immerse herself back in the culture she'd left behind. Maybe. But on the other hand, it seemed to me that her mission must have had a bit more to it than that.

What if she was going back to visit Grandmother Ondine's world in order to take one last look around the café—just in case the painting that Picasso gave Grandma still lurked somewhere in a hiding place that nobody had discovered yet? It was a wild long shot, of course. But
if
Mom had planned to do this, then maybe she knew something that made her believe there was a distinct possibility she'd find it.

So now I pictured myself flying to France in her place to recover my grandmother's lost painting. I could even imagine auctioning it off for the enormous sums of money a Picasso can claim, enabling me to rush back home with wads of cash to wave under my lawyer's nose.
Now let's go into court and kick ass,
I'd say. And I'd get my mother out of that damned nursing home in Nevada.

It was a crazy dream, but I didn't care. These days, the things that people called sane were, I thought, often dumber than what I had in mind. “Yes,” I said, more definitely now. “I'd like to go.”

“Well,” Aunt Matilda said briskly, “then you'd better start calling me Tilda. There are going to be some single gentlemen my age in this class, and I don't want you running about there calling me Auntie. You got that?”

“Got it,” I said. We actually shook hands on the deal.

And within a week, the two of us set out to explore Grandmother Ondine's world.

T
HE SUN WAS GROWING HOT
and strong, its golden gaze making the earth's breast soft and pliable. Ondine, wearing lighter clothes now, and with her legs becoming stronger from her daily cycling, felt like an Amazon as she practically flew up the hill to cook, and pose, for Picasso.

She'd gotten her mother's permission to leave the café earlier in the morning, ostensibly to give her plenty of time to prep and cook in Picasso's kitchen. Ondine had become quite efficient and thus managed to arrive at his house early enough so they could work for hours before she served his lunch.

She noticed right away that he treated her completely differently, now that she was his model and the focal point of his work, which was clearly sacred to him. Whereas earlier he'd hardly noticed her arrival, now as she pedaled into his driveway she found Picasso waiting for her like an impatient lover, standing there in the doorway, smoking and staring out for the first glimpse he could catch of her.

On good days he would give her a broad smile and a courteous nod; at other times he would turn wordlessly inside and go upstairs to his studio as if he were engulfed in a brooding dark cloud that felt dangerous. She found herself anxiously searching for a clue as to which mood he was in.

“Bonjour, Patron,”
Ondine said breathlessly today as he held the door open for her so that she could carry her supplies and stow them in his kitchen. He was bare-chested, wearing only black pants, and sandals with thick leather straps. He was amused by her conspiratorial attitude.

“Sneaked off early again, eh?” he commented, throwing down his cigarette on the stone steps and stubbing it out with his foot. She quickly made a pot of a Provençal herbal tea that he liked, and he carried his first cup upstairs. Pretending to be motivated by courtly chivalry, he always made her go up the steps first, but Ondine suspected that he enjoyed watching her from behind.

Sometimes while he drank his tea he liked to tell her stories about his youth—how, when he was a sixteen-year-old art student in Madrid, he'd nearly died of fever, but recovered and grew stronger by hiking into the mountains and forests of Spain with a friend, making rice and beans at campfires, sleeping in caves or shepherds' huts, or just lying on the earth's bed of scented grass and herbs. At nineteen, he was already struggling to survive in Paris, cooking his own omelettes whenever he could buy eggs, and wedging his paintings in the cracks of the walls to stave off winter's drafts. But he was always jubilantly inspired by everything he saw on Paris's streets—from exhibits of ancient African art to the windmills of Montmartre; and the masons who sang as they sawed great sharp-angled blocks of white stone that rose up like a real-life Cubist landscape. Here, among poets and prostitutes and other budding artists, Picasso made his name and found lifelong friends like Matisse.

Ondine listened, enthralled by the vivid images he conjured. Sometimes he queried her about her own life, and she felt there wasn't much to tell; but his smile and warmth were irresistible as he prodded her to sing the songs of her youth and tell him all that she knew about life in Juan-les-Pins.

However, once he was ready to work, he became focused and serious. While he prepared his paints—mixing his colors on sheets of newspaper instead of a palette—Ondine went behind a screen he'd erected for her. She changed into the same blue checked dress, which she brought with her in a bag because she didn't want her mother to see her wearing her best dress over and over. Then she took off her shoes and stockings and, even though he did not keep telling her to remove her
culottes,
she did it anyway, feeling a thrill of rebellion against all the piety she'd been raised on.

Quickly she sat down on that same thin tasseled pillow on the floor, jammed into that same corner of the room, exactly as before with the props of comb and wristwatch; and, with her dress unbuttoned, her limbs all twisted, her bare feet posed just so, she pretended to gaze at herself in the mirror.

Picasso stared at her for a long time, like a pearl-diver on a cliff about to make the leap, until something seemed to get resolved in his mind and, abruptly, he disappeared behind his easel. Sometimes when he moved around, Ondine could see the muscles rippling in his sturdy arms and broad chest; and the room filled up with the masculine, and not unappealing, scent of his sweat.

Today he was so engrossed that they worked straight through his usual lunch hour. Ondine did not dare ask if she should get up and cook. Hour after hour went by, yet he kept her there immobilized, all twisted up on that hard wooden floor until her neck and back ached so much they felt as if they were burning. Even when her stomach growled loudly, he diabolically kept on painting.

Surely he hears my poor belly crying out for mercy,
Ondine thought, peering at him beseechingly. He glanced up and then put on the expression of a simpleton, pretending not to notice, but she thought she saw a look in his eyes that revealed a peculiar enjoyment of her torture.

“Stop moving your arms,” he reprimanded.

She'd felt the urgent need to scratch and had tried to do so before he noticed, but he caught her even before her fingers reached the spot.
All right, I won't move,
she told herself, feeling the full demand of the itch and the torturous pleasure of ignoring it. Which was stronger, the itch, or her? She tested herself, waiting to see if by sheer force of will she could sacrifice her own physical needs for the sake of his art, and master her own desperate urges in order to please his.

He seemed unaware of her struggle, yet, just when it began to be too much, he rewarded her with his most beautiful of smiles, saying, “You know that everything you and I do together in this room is of profound importance. Every word we speak, every gesture, every
thought,
do you understand?”

So what was a small itch when posing for a masterpiece?

Finally, when she was feeling completely light-headed, Picasso put down his brush.
“Tiens!”
he exclaimed, seizing her wrist to look at his watch. “Is that the time? Let's go see what you brought me for lunch,” he suggested. “Don't bother to change your clothes. We might work some more after we eat.”

She followed him downstairs into the kitchen, glad that today she'd instinctively packed food which required little preparation—a country pâté, some
cornichon
pickles, a beef-and-orange
daube
she'd made last night so it would “profit”, a salad dressed in vinaigrette, and a cherry tarte. She always politely set the table for one, not taking a plate for herself until he formally asked her to join him, which he usually did.

But now, to her surprise, he unpacked the meal himself. “Today
I'm
going to feed
you,
my little odalisque,” he announced, seeming suddenly playful. He would not permit her to handle the food; he insisted that she sit there with her mouth hanging open—like one of the pet birds that he told her he kept in his Paris studio—while he dangled each bit of bread or food above her lips and made her go for it, one morsel at a time. A few times at the very last minute he yanked it away, laughing uproariously.

“You have the lips of a movie siren,” he commented. He dipped a finger into the cherry pie, and then she felt his fingertips first on her lower lip as he colored it red, then the upper as he traced the cupid's bow. She tried to ignore the strange surge of arousal this evoked in her.

“You'd better lick it off before I do,” Picasso commanded. “Slowly! Make it last.”

Ondine obliged with her tongue, watching him watching her. He sighed deeply.

“What a pretty bird you are! Maybe one day I'll build a golden cage to keep you in, so that no other man can feast his eyes on you,” he said, surely teasing, although he looked queerly serious when he said such strange jokey things. “I'll make you sing to me every day, but if your song doesn't please me, then I won't feed you. You'll grow so faint with hunger that you'll eat anything I give you, even the scraps no dog would touch, otherwise you'll starve.”

“Just as well, I probably should go on a diet,” Ondine retorted teasingly.

“No, no! Don't you dare. Girls today are too thin, they look like boys,” he said scornfully. “They hardly inspire me to paint them!”

He waved his hand as if swatting away a fly. She noticed that his forearm was stained with paint. He said, “I'm very careful when I choose someone to model for me!”

Picasso's expression was sober and benevolent now, as if confiding to her his greatest secret. He was watching her closely with those inky dark eyes of his, to test her somehow, yet all he said was, “Well, let's go back to work for a while longer, all right?”

As if it were her choice; as if she, like a goddess, could decide whether his genius would be indulged today. When they ascended the stairs Ondine felt elated.

For, although she wasn't even permitted to move a muscle once she sat down in her little corner and resumed her pose, she still felt freer than her parents counting their money, and the chatterboxes in the village marketplace, and the proud Wise Men playing cards, day after day; and the girls in such a rush to get married, and the old people who never once in their life broke a rule.

Soon Ondine felt she was drifting lightly through the passing minutes like a cloud floating up into the foothills of the Alps, over the snow-capped mountains and beyond, to London and New York and all the wider world.

“Finished,” Picasso said unexpectedly.

Ondine received this remark as a physical jolt. “Already?” she asked, rudely awakened from her dreams. She felt a surprising sense of panic, which was surely absurd.

“Yes, we're done with this one,” he said decisively. “Oh, I'll work on it a little more myself. I may even do another variation of this. But you don't have to pose for it anymore.”

She felt so utterly disappointed that she did not know what to say, and could only come up with, “I really do like working with you.”

He answered her neutrally, as if he had chosen to stop listening to her heart fluttering painfully like a bird beating its wings against its cage. “I'm thinking of doing a completely new series,” he replied thoughtfully, more as if he were talking to himself. “But I have a nude study in mind next.”

Ondine had automatically risen to go behind the screen to change her clothes. Now she heard the hopeful tone in his voice. “What do you think?” he asked casually.

Oh, so that's what he's after,
she realized. Aloud she replied, “Perhaps,” imitating his careful neutrality. She was enjoying getting undressed in the same room, yet just beyond his all-seeing gaze.

“In fact, I have already seen you naked in my mind,” Picasso called out. “A real man can ravish a woman with his eyes, without ever removing a stitch of her clothing. So why the fuss?”

His attitude had become so matter-of-fact that Ondine felt foolish for imagining that he was trying to seduce her. Still, she wondered guiltily,
What would Maman say?
Suppose her parents found out what she'd been up to all along here with Picasso? Perhaps she could deflect their anger if she was paid well for her modelling.

It was the first time she'd thought about wages. How much did models charge? And would he pay more for a nude? Picasso's paintings had made him a rich man, she reasoned. So his models must earn a lot, like opera singers and actresses with all their jewels and furs!

Dressed now in the skirt and blouse she'd worn cycling over here, Ondine decided it was time to ask him about her earnings. Soberly she stepped out from behind the screen and asked, “How much wages will you pay me for—
that kind
of modelling?”

Picasso was fussing with his brushes. Now he looked up sharply.

“Who put that in your mind?” he asked. “Did your mama or papa tell you to ask me that?”