Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ at the Academy. News of this reached Málaga. Rich Don Salvador saw it as another proof of Pablo’s indiscipline, want of purpose, and defiance of established authority: he and the Málaga relations cut off their supplies. Don José, on the other hand, took Pablo’s side; he maintained his contribution and even increased it as much as he could; but his £100 a year did not allow him to do much, and the pittance dwindled to subsistence-level or below. One of Picasso’s many self-portraits, drawn considerably later, shows a thin adolescent, wan and pitifully young. Had he drawn it at the time, the face would have been more pinched by far. This cutting-off of his allowance came at a time when he was growing fast, and although he would probably never have reached his father’s six foot however much he had been fed, a reasonable diet at this point might have added those few inches that make all the difference between a small man and one of average size. As it was, he remained short; and it is a matter of common observation that in men of a determined character, combativeness is in inverse proportion to height. Perhaps it was just as well: if Picasso had been as tall as Braque, would he ever have painted the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” or “Guernica”? At all events (and this is another instance of the peculiar and unpredictable sweetness that made part of his extremely complex and often contradictory character) he bore no grudge for this or many other affronts: when Don Salvador lay dying in 1908, Picasso wrote to his cousins Concha and María most tenderly, with obviously sincere anxiety and pain. Though to be sure since 1897 Don Salvador had paid for his nephew’s exemption from military service.

      The days passed, and winter came on: it comes early in Madrid, a city of extremes, perched on a bare steppe two thousand feet up, with icy blasts from the Sierra de Guadarrama, and it can be most bitterly cold even for a native, let alone a Mediterranean sun-worshiper like Picasso. Furthermore, the air is so desperately unhealthy even in a dead calm that it will, as the local proverb says, “kill a man, although it will not blow out a candle.”

      Between bouts of painting, Picasso moved house several times, following his harassed landlords as they fled from the bailiffs, always keeping to the same kind of street—San Pedro Mártir, Jesús y María, Lavapiés— never far from the great rag-fair of the Rastro. It was in the last of his garrets that the Madrid air and the effects of privation caught up with him. He fell ill with a violent fever, his throat was excoriated, his flayed tongue assumed the appearance of a strawberry, he came out in vermilion spots all over, the spots rapidly coalesced, and he presented the classic aspect of a patient suffering from scarlet fever.

      The illness could be mortal then, but Picasso was tough. After some weeks of bed, losing his old skin and growing a new one, he was able to creep out for the verbena of San Antonio de la Florida, on June 12. These verbenas take place on the eve of the saint’s day, and although no doubt they were pious in their origin, for centuries they have been little more than fairs, with a great deal of singing, dancing, drinking, and fornication of a secular, if not pagan, character: Picasso was not going to miss a moment of it.

      Then he took the weary train to Barcelona, where home cooking, kindness, and his natural resilience restored his strength and spirits so quickly that a week or so later when Pallarès invited him to convalesce in the country air, at Horta, he accepted at once.

      Horta, where Pallarès was born and where his parents lived, was a village of some two or three thousand people; or perhaps one should say a very small town, since it possessed a mayor, a doctor, and a sereno, a watchman who called the hours and the weather throughout the night and who represented the law: he also buried the dead. It stands on a steep small hill in the middle of a plain surrounded by mountains, and it lies in the high limestone country known as the Terra Alta, on the far limits of Cataluñia, within sight of Aragón: it was then called plain Horta, or Horta de Ebro (though it is miles from the river), and now it is Horta de Sant Joan, a mayor of some sixty years ago having had a particular devotion to that saint.

      Even now it is at the back of beyond: in 1898 it was more so. They took the train to Tortosa, where Pallarès’ brother was waiting for them with a mule. They piled their easels, canvases, color-boxes, and baggage on to the mule and walked, first up the fertile valley of the Ebro, with its orange-groves still in flower and its rice-paddies, then they struck southward across the mountains for its tributary, the Canaleta. Sometimes one or another would perch himself on the baggage and ride for a while, but most of the time they walked, rising continually into a new air and a new vegetation—arbutus, rosemary, lentiscus, rock-rose, thyme—the highland country with vast stretches of bare mountain, forests of Aleppo pine, and wastes: only a few primitive villages in the fertile parts and an occasional isolated dwelling, a saw-mill where there was* running water, a charcoal-burner’s or a lonely shepherd’s hut. The road dwindled as they went, and in fifteen miles or so it was no more than a mule-track. In a deep and sunless gorge, haunted by vultures, it wound about on either side of the rapid stream, crossing it by fords in the less dangerous places; but by the time they reached the end they had traveled close on twenty miles, and there were only two hours to go—only three or four more great mountains to cross and they would be home.

      For one who had never been outside a town and who had never walked five and twenty miles in his life, even with the help of a mule, this was a striking introduction to a new world—a world in which it was natural to step out briskly in the falling dusk, because of wolves.

      A new world for Picasso: an ancient world for its inhabitants. The Pallarès and their neighbors had lived in this remote village since the night of time, living off the land as people had always lived, long before ships plied from Barcelona. The ancient ways, language, skills, and values came naturally to them: Manuel Pallarès himself could carry a two-hundredweight sack on his shoulders, plough a field, saddle a mule, or milk a cow without having to think about it. His father owned land in the plain surrounding the village, and an olive-mill, renowned for the purity of its oil; and the family, together with their animals, lived in a big, rambling house built round a courtyard. It made a corner with the lane now called Calle Pintor Ruiz Picasso and the village square, a finely-conceived, dignified little plaza with the church on one side and deep, massively-pillared arcades, on the top of Horta’s hill, the only flat place in it.

      In these parts the peasants do not live out among their fields, but warned by Moorish raids, brigands, civil wars, and insurrections, they huddle together in little more or less fortified towns or villages. Horta is happy in its site, an abrupt, easily-defended mound, and the houses are tight-packed from top to bottom, a fascinating mass of lines, angles, and volumes; it is also happy in its local stone, and the church is a handsome building, ancient, but done up in the seventeenth century, at about the same time as Pallarès’ house; while the smaller houses, which often bridge the lanes, are substantial, made to last for generation after generation: and they are mostly washed with blue.

      In the evening the steep narrow streets (often rising in steps and always carefully ridged for hooves) are crowded with animals coming home: mules, asses, cows, goats, sheep, and a great many busy dogs. They live in byres and stables on the ground floor, among the domestic hens and rabbits, filling the town with a pleasant farmyard smell and warming their owners on the floor above; and early in the morning, woken by countless household cocks, they go out into the plain, a great saucer rimmed with mountains. It looks flat from a distance but in fact it undulates, and the less fertile higher ground is covered with almond-trees and olives; there are figs and vineyards too, but this is near the limit for grapes. All round the rim dry-stone terraces carry more olive-groves as high as they will go: an enormous investment over the centuries, not of money but of time and labor (they being unmarketable in that economy), for a minute return. The lower part of the plain is taken up with arable and pasture, in strips; but there is not a great deal of fertile land, and the people of Horta have to work very hard indeed to wring a living from it. This is not the misery of central and southern Spain, where absentee landlords own huge estates and where the landless peasants are hired by the day in a buyer’s market, but it is a harsh life, and the possibility of disaster is always present. Apart from all the natural calamities of farming—cattle diseases, swine-fever, chicken-pest—the crops can often fail: moisture does not СКАЧАТЬ