Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

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      In 1897 their works and days had scarcely changed since Hesiod’s time: the acceleration of history (in which Picasso was to play his outstanding part) had not touched the Terra Alta. On the contrary, with the chronic agricultural depression it had slowed down since the spurt of the seventeenth century, which had seen the rebuilding of Horta’s church and the square. Theirs was still essentially subsistence-farming; a bad year, a drought, could bring death from starvation, and they knew it. There was little cash in Horta’s economy and that little was guarded with extraordinary pains—heavy iron bars to the windows, deep peasant suspicion—an odd contrast with their overflowing hospitality. They practiced the ancient virtues of thrift and hard work; their ordinary diet was sparing, their feasts enormous, with measureless wine; they were intensely pious and correspondingly blasphemous, the commonest oath being “My shit in the face of God.”

      This may seem an unlikely background for a Llotja student, but Manuel Pallarès had early shown a gift for drawing, and although his father was of course the absolute ruler of the family, his patriarchal authority acknowledged by one and all, he was no more capable than another man of withstanding his wife’s steady, unremitting pressure. He would have preferred to keep Manuel on the land, but he had three other sons, and in any case the gross materialism of the petty bourgeois is no part of the Catalan peasant’s tradition. With tolerably good grace he resigned himself to parting with a capital farm-hand and with a considerable sum of money; and in time Manuel reached the Llotja, by way of Tortosa and a private art-school.

      Manuel Pallarès had a typical Catalan head, round, male, far from beautiful, a good deal of space between his nose and his mouth, with shrewd good sense shining from it. He fitted into his place the moment he came home, helping with the innumerable chores of a farm—no airs or graces at all. There was little about the land he did not understand, from building a stack to gelding lambs; and since he was a passionate hunter he also knew a great deal about the mountains and the game that lived in them.

      “Everything I know I learnt in Pallarès’ village,” said Picasso in later years: and “everything” included not only the use of the curry-comb and the scythe; an intimate acquaintance with the making of wine and oil; the harvesting of hay, corn, grapes, and olives; the shearing of sheep; the killing of a pig; and the milking of a cow; but also the ability to speak Catalan with total fluency as well as a deep understanding of essentials that no townsman can ever know directly.

      But he and his friend were also there to paint, and to do this they retired to a cave, miles and miles away in the mountains, in an uninhabited, deeply-wooded region called the Ports del Maestrat, almost in Aragón. The cave was inadequate, uncomfortable, and shallow as well as being inaccessible, but they had the curious idea of painting two large compositions there. Picasso’s father sent the canvas, the village carpenter made the stretchers, and they set off with a mule, provisions, a dog, a small boy, and Pallarès’ younger brother, Salvador. They went as far as the mule could go, made a fire, and camped for the night in the open air. The next day, carrying their easels and color-boxes, Picasso and Pallarès climbed up through the forest and eventually found their cave. Here they stayed for weeks and weeks, painting, drawing, walking about, bathing in the nearby stream, collecting firewood and sometimes fossils. They slept on a deep bed of scented grass and leaves, and just outside the cave they kept a great fire burning until late at night: every few days Salvador brought them food—bread, wine, rice, beans, potatoes, stockfish, salt pork, oil—and among other things Picasso learned to cook. He had a knife that served to split kindling, peel potatoes, slice the fat bacon, and feed him at table: he kept it forever, and Josep Palau i Fabre, the Catalan poet to whom this account is due, he having had it from the mouth of Pallarès himself, saw it at Notre-Dame-de-Vie some sixty or seventy years later.

      As the days grew shorter and the summer waned, thunder gathered in the mountains, and one night rain, driving right into the shallow cave, soaked them and all their belongings. A few days later a prodigious wind blew all night: at dawn they hurried to the place where they had been working, and they found that their pictures had been hurled far and wide, the stretchers broken. (Picasso had been busy with an Idyll and Pallarès with a Woodcutter.) They detached the canvases, lit the fire with the stretchers, and decided that this was enough. Salvador brought the mule, they loaded their battered pictures on to it, and returned to Horta.

      In the village they found men back from Cuba, in a dismal state. The war with the United States was over; the island was nominally independent; Spain had suffered a most humiliating defeat. Yet this could have little effect upon a community that had never felt itself bound to Madrid by anything but taxes and conscription; the village welcomed the returning soldiers and then turned straight to its immediate, necessary tasks. Harvest would wait for no man, nor would the gathering of the grapes. The gutters ran purple with the washing of the lees, the presses creaked, and for weeks the lanes smelled of fermenting wine. Then came Saint Martin’s day, and Horta echoed with the shrieks of dying swine: their blood did not run down the streets, however; it was carefully preserved for that local treat—the butifarra, a bloated, black-mottled sausage. And as the olives ripened, turning color as the winter advanced, they had to be beaten down or picked, and the great millstone began to turn, grinding out their oil.

      Picasso helped wherever he could, but even saddling a mule or wielding a pitchfork has a knack to it: when the great dunghill in the central court was to be cleared away and taken to the fields he set to with the best will in the world, but presently his fork had to be taken away from him for his own protection, and he was put to carrying the dung in baskets and loading them into the paniers of the ass. He was well liked in the family and in the village, and when he went to the mill the people there would give him their particular delicacy, a great round of dark country bread, toasted, set to swim in the virgin oil, fished out when it began to sink, rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with salt, and eaten on the spot.

      At other times, apart from making a great many drawings, he worked at a painting called “Aragonese Customs.” It has not survived, but if a caricature in Blanco y Negro is to be believed, it was strictly representational—a woodcutter with an ax: a woman kneeling in the background. And he had the opportunity of painting what might have been an outstanding example of Spanish realism. The winter storms are furious in those parts, and during one of them an old woman and her grand-daughter were struck by lightning. In such cases an autopsy had to be carried out: the medical man invited Picasso and Pallarès, imagining that it would please them. His colleague should have come from Gandesa to help, but as it was raining he did not do so, and the doctor asked the sereno to proceed without him. All this took place in a dark night in a hut by the graveyard. The sereno took the saw kept for the purpose, lifted the child from her coffin, placed her on a table, and sawed her head in two down the middle to satisfy the doctor as to the cause of death. He was smoking at the time, and as he worked, his hands and his cigar became deeply spattered. Then came the old woman’s turn, but Picasso declined to stay for the second operation. Indeed, he did not even make a drawing of the first; yet might not this vertical division have had some effect upon his own treatment of the human head in later days?

      Life in Horta during the autumn and winter of 1898 was not all work, however: far from it. Picasso and Pallarès often went for walks—one took them to Gandesa, twenty miles for trousers to replace those worn out in their cave—and they often went to the village café. But these mild joys were nothing in comparison to the traditional feasts. Apart from All Hallows, with its chestnuts and new wine, and Christmas, there was St. Anthony’s day in January, a most important festival at which horses, mules, asses, and sometimes oxen, beautifully groomed, adorned with plaits and ribbons, their hooves blacked and polished, are blessed outside the church, and at which the popular religious ballads called goigs are handed about, together with those prints, the remote ancestors of the strip-cartoon, which are called auques in Catalan and aleluyas in Spanish and which, in a series of charming woodcuts on a single sheet, show the chief events of a saint’s life. Very often, in Catalan feasts, the people are unable to wait for the day itself; and here too the main celebrations СКАЧАТЬ