Stealing Picasso (25 page)

‘When she was released she became a recluse. I lived with her in an apartment on the Rue de Savoie in Paris. My mother was beautiful, but her features were always covered in pain. To me, in hindsight, it seems as if she had posed for that painting so long that her face had become irretrievably cast in the horror she had feigned. I lived with the
Weeping Woman
.

‘We owned many Picassos of every type: sculptures, pots, paintings and drawings. Our apartment was an Aladdin's cave where virtually every piece of bric-à-brac was worth a fortune. If I dropped a plate the world was poorer.

‘My mother was obsessed with him still. Their love was the great masterpiece of her life and this collection of his art represented that love and kept its memory sacrosanct. Thus she could not bear to part with even the smallest doodle. We lived in poverty, surrounded by riches. I do not know what we lived on. I think friends gave her money. Perhaps Picasso gave her money. If so, he did not give much.

‘Many, many times I crept towards our front door with a sketch or a scrap of canvas to sell, imagining the dresses and jewels and shoes I could buy myself. But I could never bring myself to go through with my robbery. It would have killed
her to see me come home with shiny red shoes and know what I had done to get them.

‘As Picasso was the God my mother worshipped, so Laszlo was the demon that had ruined her life. Our lives.

She had him followed by detectives, who reported to her. That is how she knew so much about him. She was planning some sort of revenge on him, and I took on her hatred of this unknown man of whom she spoke with such disgust. If he had not stolen that painting and concocted such an outrageous lie in order to sell it to Braque, then my mother would still be living with her lover. And I would be living with my father, the great Picasso. Our broken, insular existence could be traced to Laszlo Berg.

‘She had a bust of Picasso. She would hold it up before her face and smooth his marble eyebrows with her thumbs. She talked to this bust as if it were the man himself. I had witnessed her do this from when I was an infant, so these conversations seemed entirely natural to me.

‘I heard my mother forgive him face to face many times for exiling her, the smell of the pastis on her breath wafting under his marble nose. She knew he had a greater calling than to be a lover to her. That he had to be Picasso to the world. She would tell his compliant marble likeness how I was progressing at school: in art I had an eye for perspective and a gift for colour, in ballet I moved nimbly yet with gravity, like a matador – obviously my Spanish blood.

‘I began to talk to him myself. Each of us in our turn held up this marble bust and courted Picasso like two jealous rivals. The love of this beloved man had become paramount in our little apartment and we vied for it endlessly. Many of the conversations between my mother and me went via the intermediary of this bust.

‘After conversing with it she would remind me of my privileged position as his daughter. I was not an ordinary girl, I was the daughter of the greatest artist ever to live, and as such I must attend to my lessons and always excel. Each day she would say this, as if willing it to be true. And it did make me feel proud, being this great man's daughter.

‘Often, when I was feeling mischievous I would begin planning a visit to him. Talking to the bust I would describe for my listening mother his delight at seeing me, his daughter, absent from him for so long. Sometimes I appeared at a ball among beautiful people bedecked with jewels and medals, and he swooned with happiness to finally meet me, and doctors and counts rushed to his aid.

‘But my mother would hush me and take up the bust and tell Picasso to stop talking such nonsense – little Mireille could not possibly visit him. The scandal it would bring … Then my mother would make me swear my father was our secret.

‘She always protected him from me, from my advances into his life, from any claims I might have made as his daughter. I do not know why. Perhaps she suspected the truth. Or perhaps she was frightened he would accept me into his life; take me in, leaving her alone in her exile.'

Mireille paused, looking down. ‘She died a horrible death in a hospital bed with tubes up her nose. I buried the bust of Picasso with her – I would not need it any more. I was going to make my play to stand alongside Paloma at last as the daughter of the great Spaniard.

‘I announced myself scandalously in
Le Figaro
. The front-page photographs show my face. Even I saw we looked very different but, undaunted, I had my DNA run through the laboratories and law courts of Paris. I was taking my father to my bosom before the eyes of the world, standing up at last to have
my story known and my rank as his daughter acknowledged. It had been a grave weight keeping this secret all these years, and it meant everything to me now to have my exalted place in the world known. I had not done much with my life. For much of it I had lived in a cloistered ménage-à-trois with my mother and the marble head of her lover. Dominated and enslaved by the task of being Picasso's secret daughter, I had many lovers, but no one lover. How could a man compete with Picasso – this other, secret man in my life? So I had no husband. No children.

‘Weeks later, as I left the Palais de Justice, my case crushed by the scientific evidence, the photographers who were fanned out beneath me swam in my tears. For them it was a circus, but for me a funeral. A dear parent had been killed – put to death legally and, most horrible of all, justly. Not only killed, but also expunged from my history, my lifelong love of him a lie.

‘Through my childhood I had kept a bottle of eucalyptus oil I was going to massage into his hands to ease his well-documented rheumatism. Through my teens I kept a valise packed with my most precious possessions so that on the day he rode into my dull life I would be ready to flee with him to happiness. Now it turned out that this Picasso I knew to be my father was a cruel joke. My heart was breaking with a loss I had not reckoned on and could not conceive.

‘Can you imagine how I felt? And how did my mother get this so wrong? She would never have cheated on him, there was no one else. She had no secret lovers or I would have heard her confess them to him. I heard her confess all her sins to his likeness, one after the other, over and over. Morsels of negligence such as forgetting to light a candle on his birthday. There is little more sense in telling lies to a marble bust than to yourself. So, no, she did not tell lies. She believed I was Picasso's child.

‘But if Picasso is not my father, then who? Who? There was only the one known fornication. A liaison that happened at Picasso's behest, and brought forth the ecstasy he captured in charcoal and turned into the
Weeping Woman
. It can only be Laszlo Berg. Picasso's squire, the would-be poet who stole Picasso's painting and ruined his life with Dora Maar, my mother.

‘
Weeping Woman
is, then,
Ecstatic Woman
. The moment of my conception lives on as a painting. A denunciation of war. A fact I have tried to be privately happy about.'

By the time Mireille has finished telling her story, the sun on the horizon is dousing the red and green beacons that define the shipping channel across Port Phillip Bay. While she has been talking Harry has been watching container ships strung with lights sliding between these beacons to and from Webb Dock. Now that she has stopped, the many unlikely facets of her story contend in his mind. He looks at her, hoping to make sense of this tale by the light of her eyes. ‘That's … I don't know. I did this for the money. And for art. I thought this was art, this theft. I thought you did, too. But all along you had this ugly, hidden motive. You're not even who you say you are.'

‘I am who I say I am, Harry. But it is maybe true I am a damaged person and my motivations are dark, unworthy.' She nods distractedly, as if considering this.

‘You're Dora Maar's daughter?' She doesn't answer the question. She has told him already. ‘And this was …? Revenge? Was this just about … getting back at the guy?' he asks.

‘I had planned to sell him the real painting. I only needed the forgery to convince you and Turton we were going to sell a forgery and give the real one back, to convince you this thing could work, that we could all get away free. But I was going to switch them. I was going to have you go to the Savage Club with the real
Woman
. Then I would call the police and Laszlo would be arrested and ruined. My mother, and I, would be avenged. The painting Laszlo stole from Picasso to ruin her life, and mine, I had now stolen to ruin his life. He would be taken from his high place and humiliated, as she was. He would be jailed, a thief and an outcast. Of course, you would be arrested, too. And Turton. But that was no matter to me. Until I fell in love with you.'

Mireille leans towards Harry and reaches out a hand to him. He looks at it blankly and she takes it back and lays it on her thigh. ‘When I rolled up the forged woman instead of the real one and gave her to you to take to Laszlo, I realised I was in love with you.' She smooths her palms along her thighs. ‘I was sacrificing my revenge to keep you free. And you could have walked away free, with your million, if Laszlo had not found out who you were, and that Turton was involved.'

Mireille unfolds her legs and points her stockinged feet towards the window with her calves clenching. Harry knows no other woman who wears stockings. ‘My mother's existence was left colourless after Picasso. Laszlo cost her everything. The theft of this painting gave him a new life and ruined hers. And mine.' She lowers her feet to the floor and says softly, ‘I could have lived happily as Picasso's daughter.'

Harry reaches over and places a hand behind her neck and pulls her forwards and kisses her, then angrily pushes her backwards to the floor. She complies, watching him, accepting his need of this mastery.

He tears her shirt open and, hearing a button tick against the window, realises he should stop. But he keeps going, wanting to strip her bare, to know who she is.

He rides through the clamour of their orgasms, the drumfire heartbeats, sawing breaths, whispered abuse and falling tears. And loping out into a dumb contentment, he thinks he sees, momentarily, the
Weeping Woman
in the contorted features of her climax. The daughter of the mother, the horror in the ecstasy. And he thinks then, collapsing onto her, his anger momentarily exorcised, her story might be true.

Then she is gone. ‘M? Mireille? Mireille?' He calls only three times before he knows. He gets up from the paint-spattered sisal matting floor where he has slept. On the kitchen bench she has left a note. Beside it is a small canvas, rolled and tied with red string.

He unties the string and rolls the canvas out on the bench top. It is a painting of a girl with a doll in her lap. Looking at the signature on the painting he laughs, shakes his head and closes his eyes. He pours himself a glass of vodka. He looks again
at the painting. Perhaps it is a mother with a girl in her lap. Mauve and blue and yellow. It is a Picasso. Signed by the man and dated 1935. ‘No more forgery. No more stealing.' So this is real. Mireille is the
Weeping Woman
's daughter.

He hangs the Picasso in his studio. He calls it a Picasso, though he doesn't have its veracity checked. He doesn't want to know. The truth of Mireille's story rests on it and he couldn't bear for it to be proven a forgery. He couldn't bear for her to be proven other than what she has claimed. He sometimes thinks she would have known this – she may have counted on it. She may have given him a forgery, knowing its discovery would be protected by his love for her. It is an exquisite thing. A Picasso.

In 1986 Picasso's
Weeping Woman
was stolen from the National Gallery of Victoria by a group calling itself the Australian Cultural Terrorists. The first two letters attributed to the Australian Cultural Terrorists in this novel were written by them (him? Her?) and published in
The Age
newspaper. The second two letters were written by me.

Weeping Woman
was found in locker 227 at Spencer Street railway station. The identity of the Australian Cultural Terrorists remains unknown, but we almost certainly have them surrounded.