The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (3 page)

JANUARY 22, 2011

Picasso

IT ALL BEGAN WHEN
the genie came out of the Magic
Milk bottle and asked me what I would prefer: to have a Picasso or to be Picasso. He
could grant me either wish but, he warned me, only one of the two. I had to think
about it for quite a while; or rather, I made myself think about it. Folklore and
literature are so full of stories about greedy fools who are punished for their
haste, that it makes you think those offers are all too good to be true. There are
no records or reliable precedents on which to base a decision, because this sort of
thing happens only in stories or jokes, so no one has ever really thought about it
seriously; and in the stories there’s always a trick, otherwise it would be no fun
and there would be no story. At some point, we’ve all secretly imagined this
happening. I had it all worked out, but only for the classic “three wishes”
scenario. The choice the genie had given me was so unexpected, and one of the
options was so definitive, that I had to weigh them up, at least.

It was a strange choice but not inappropriate; in fact, it was particularly apt. I
was leaving the Picasso Museum, in a state of rapture and boundless admiration, and
at that moment I could not have been offered anything, or any two things, that would
have tempted me more. I hadn’t actually left the museum yet. I was in the garden,
sitting at one of the outdoor tables, having gone to the café and bought a little
bottle of the Magic Milk that I’d seen tourists drinking everywhere. It was (it is)
a perfect autumn afternoon: gentle light, mild air, and still a while to go before
dusk. I took my notebook and pen from my pocket to make some notes, but in the end I
didn’t write anything.

I tried to put my ideas in order. I silently repeated the genie’s words: to have a
Picasso or to be Picasso. Who wouldn’t want to have a Picasso? Who would turn down a
gift like that? But on the other hand, who wouldn’t want to have been Picasso? Was
there a more enviable fate in modern history? Not even the privileges of supreme
worldly power are comparable to what he had, because they can be removed by
political events or wars, while the power of Picasso, transcending that of any
president or king, was invulnerable. Anyone else in my place would have preferred
the second option, which included the first, not only because Picasso could paint
all the Picassos he liked, but also because it’s well known that he kept a lot of
his own paintings, including some of the best (the museum I’d just visited had been
set up with his personal collection), and in his later years he even bought back
works that he’d sold as a young man.

This inclusion did not of course exhaust the advantages of being transformed into
Picasso, not by a long shot: the “being” went far beyond the “having,” taking in all
the protean joys of creation, stretching away to an unimaginable horizon. “Being
Picasso,” in the wake of the real-life Picasso and whatever he was really like,
meant being a Super-Picasso, a Picasso raised to the power of magic or miracle. But
I knew my geniuses (
je m’y connaissais en fait de génies
), and I could tell
or guess that it wasn’t quite so simple. There were good reasons to hesitate, and
even to recoil in horror. In order to become someone else, one has to cease being
oneself, and no one willingly consents to that surrender. Not that I considered
myself to be more important than Picasso, or healthier, or better equipped to face
life. He was fairly unstable—I knew that from the biographies—but not as
unstable as me, so by becoming him I would improve the state of my mental health to
some degree. Still, thanks to a lifetime’s patient efforts, I had made peace with my
neuroses, fears, anxieties, and other handicaps, or at least reached a point where I
could keep them under control, and there was no guarantee that this partial cure
would work with Picasso’s problems. That was more or less my reasoning, although I
didn’t put it into words; it was just a series of hunches.

Fundamentally, this was an extreme case of the problem of identification, which is
raised not only by the master of Málaga, but by every artist one admires or
venerates or studies. The problem goes beyond Picasso, and yet remains within him
too. Identification is one of those things that can’t be generalized. There is no
identification in general, as a concept, only identification with this or that
figure in particular. And if the figure is Picasso, as in this case, there can be no
other. The concept turns itself inside out, as if we were to say (although it’s a
clumsy way to put it) that it’s not about “identifying with Picasso” but about
“Picassifying identification.”

Few individuals have inspired so much writing; everyone who came into contact with
Picasso left a testimony, an anecdote, or a character sketch. One is almost bound to
find a common trait. For example, I’ve read that he had a problem with action. He
would see a piece of paper lying on the floor of his studio, and it would bother
him, but he wouldn’t pick it up, and the piece of paper could lie there for months.
Exactly the same thing happens to me. It’s like a tiny, incomprehensible taboo, a
paralysis of the will, which keeps me from doing what I want to do, indefinitely.
Picasso overcompensated for this with his frenetic production of art, as if by
painting picture after picture he could make the piece of paper pick itself up.

Whatever the reason, there was no doubting the continuity of his production, through
all his metamorphoses. Picasso was only Picasso insofar as he was a painter, so if I
were Picasso, I could paint all the Picassos I liked, and sell them and get rich,
and maybe (since the rich can do anything these days) stop being Picasso if I felt
trapped in a life I wasn’t enjoying. That’s why I said that the gift of “being”
included that of “having.”

Picasso once said: “I’d like to live in peace like a poor man, only with lots of
money.” Setting aside the deluded belief that the poor have no problems, there’s
something odd about the remark: he was rich already when he made it, very rich. But
not as rich as he would be now, thirty years after his death, with the rise in the
price of his paintings. Everyone knows that painters have to die, and therefore stop
producing, for their work to become really valuable. So there is an economic gulf
between “being Picasso” and “having a Picasso,” as there is between life and death.
The remark about living in peace, leaving aside its facile ingenuity, could be
applied to the situation in which the genie had placed me; it was a message from
beyond the grave, sent in the knowledge that my dearest wish was for a truly
peaceful life, without problems.

Given the current prices, and the relative modesty of my aspirations, a single
painting would be enough to make me rich and allow me to live in peace, writing my
novels, relaxing, and reading . . . My mind was made up. I wanted a Picasso.

No sooner had the thought formed in my mind
than the painting appeared on the table, without anyone noticing; by then, the
people who had been occupying the neighboring tables had got up and walked away, and
the others had their backs to me, as did the waitresses at the café. I held my
breath, thinking: It’s mine.

It was splendid: a medium-size oil painting from the thirties. For a long time I
gazed at it intently. At first glance it was a chaos of dislocated figures, a
superposition of lines and wild but fundamentally harmonious colors. Then I became
aware of the beautiful asymmetries that leaped out at the viewer, then hid, then
reappeared elsewhere, then concealed themselves again. The impasto and the brushwork
(it had been painted
alla prima
) were a masterful demonstration of the
assurance that can only be achieved by un-self-conscious virtuosity.

But the painting’s formal qualities were merely an invitation to explore its
narrative content, which began to reveal itself little by little, like the meaning
of hieroglyphics. First there was a flower, a crimson rose, emerging from the
multiple Cubist planes of its petals; facing it, like a mirror image, was a jasmine
in virginal whites, painted in Renaissance style, except for the right-angled
spirals of its tendrils. In a collision of figure and ground, typical of Picasso,
the space between was filled with little snail-men and goat-men, wearing plumed
hats, doublets and breeches, or armor, or a fool’s cap and bells; there were nude
figures too, dwarf-like and bearded. Over this court scene presided a figure who
must have been the queen, to judge by her crown: a monstrous broken-down queen, like
a damaged toy. Rarely had the distortion of the female body, one of Picasso’s
trademarks, been taken to such an extreme. Legs and arms stuck out of her any old
how, her navel and her nose were chasing each other across her back, the windmill of
her torso was inlaid with the multicolored satins of her dress, and one foot,
encased in a big high-heeled shoe, shot up skyward . . .

Suddenly the plot revealed itself to me. I was looking at an illustration of a
traditional Spanish fable, or rather a joke, and a joke of the most primitive and
puerile variety; it must have come back to Picasso from his early childhood. The
joke is about a lame queen, who’s unaware of her handicap, and whose subjects don’t
dare tell her about it. The Minister of the Interior finally comes up with a
strategy for tactfully letting her know. He organizes a floral competition, in which
all the kingdom’s gardeners compete with their finest specimens. A jury of experts
narrows the field down to two finalists: a rose and a jasmine. The final decision,
the choice of the winning flower, is up to the queen. In a grand ceremony, with the
whole court in attendance, the Minister places the two flowers before the throne,
and, addressing his sovereign in a clear, loud voice, says: “
Su Majestad,
escoja
,” which means “Your Majesty, choose,” but also, if the last word is
broken up, “Your majesty is lame.”

The tale’s humorous tone was translated visually by the multicolored tangle of gaping
courtiers, by the stocky minister raising his index finger (which was bigger than
the rest of him), and above all, by the queen, composed of so many intersecting
planes she seemed to have been extracted from a pack of cards folded a hundred times
over, refuting the proven truth that nine is the maximum number of times a piece of
paper can be folded in half.

The fable had some intriguing features, which gave Picasso’s decision to turn it into
an image further layers of significance. First, the fact that the protagonist was
lame and didn’t know it. It’s possible to be unaware of many things about oneself
(for example, to take the case at hand, the fact that one is a genius), but it’s
hard to imagine how this could extend to an obvious physical defect like lameness.
Perhaps the explanation lay in the protagonist’s regal condition, her status as the
One and Only, which prevented her from judging herself by normal physical
standards.

The One and Only, as there had been only one
Picasso. There was something autobiographical about the painting and about the idea
of basing it on a childish joke that he must have heard from his parents or his
schoolmates, and even about the implicit use of his mother tongue, without which the
joke wasn’t funny and made no sense. The picture dated from a time when Picasso had
been in France for thirty years and had completely adapted to the language and the
culture; it was curious, to say the least, that he had resorted to Spanish to
provide the key to a work that was otherwise incomprehensible. Perhaps the Spanish
Civil War had renewed a patriotic streak in him, and this painting was a kind of
secret homage to his homeland, torn apart by the conflict. Perhaps, and this need
not exclude the previous hypothesis, the root of the work was a childhood memory,
which had lived on as a debt to be repaid when his art had acquired a sufficient
degree of power and freedom. By the thirties, after all, Picasso had been recognized
as the pre-eminent painter of asymmetrical women: complicating the reading of an
image by introducing a linguistic detour was just another means of distortion, and
in order to underline the importance that he attached to this procedure, he had
chosen to apply it to a queen.

There was a third hypothesis, on a different level from the first two, which took the
painting’s supernatural origins into account. Up until then, no one had known that
it existed; its enigma, its secret had remained intact until it materialized before
me, a Spanish speaker, an Argentine writer devoted to Duchamp and Roussel.

In any case, it was a unique piece, singular even among the works of an artist for
whom singularity was the rule; it could hardly fail to fetch a record price. Before
embarking on one of my habitual fantasies about future prosperity, I took a little
more time to enjoy contemplating the masterwork. I smiled. This crooked little
queen, who had to be put together again from a whirl of tangled limbs, was touching,
with her biscuit-like face (once you found it), her golden chocolate-wrapper crown,
and her puppet’s hands. She was the center of a centerless space. Her entourage, a
veritable court of painterly miracles, was waiting for her choice; the evanescence
of the flowers was a reminder of time, which for her was not a duration but an
instant of understanding, a final realization, after a lifetime of illusion.

A crueler version of the joke can be imagined: the queen has always known that she’s
lame (how could she not know?), but good manners have prevented her subjects from
broaching a topic that she prefers to avoid. One day her ministers dare one another
to say it to her face. This may be more realistic, but it’s not what the painting
represented. No one would make that queen the butt of a joke; no one would mock her.
The courtiers all loved her, and wanted her to know it. Beneath the surface message
(“choose”), the hidden message (“is lame”) was meant for her: she would hear it and
then, in a flash of insight, understand why the world rocked when she walked, why
the hems of her dresses were cut on the diagonal, and why the lord chamberlain
rushed to give her his arm each time she had to descend a staircase. They had
resorted to the language of flowers, that eternal vehicle for messages of love. She
had to choose the most beautiful flower in the kingdom, just as I had been obliged
to choose between the two gifts offered by the genie . . .