Part 2

Picasso, My Grandfather
by Marina Picasso

(Page 2 of 2)

Inside the titan's den-Ali Baba's treasure cave-clutter reigns supreme. There are piles of paintings on paint-spattered easels, sculptures lying everywhere, crates overflowing with African masks, cardboard packing boxes, old newspapers, stretchers for unpainted canvases, tin cans, ceramic tiles, armchair feet bristling with upholsterer's tacks, musical instruments, bicycle handlebars, profiles cut out of sheet metal and, on the wall, posters for bullfights, bundles of drawings, portraits of Jacqueline, heads of bulls.

Amid this shambles, where we are made to wait once again, we feel unwanted. My father helps himself to a glass of whiskey and empties it in one gulp-no doubt to give himself composure and courage. Pablito sits down in a chair and pretends to play with a lead soldier that he's taken out of his pocket.

"Don't make noise and don't touch anything!" yells Jacqueline, who has slipped into the room. "The Sun will be coming downstairs any minute."

Esmeralda, my grandfather's goat, follows her. Esmeralda can do anything she wants-gambol through the house, test her horns against the furniture, leave her droppings on Picasso's drawings and canvases piled up in a jumble on the floor. Esmeralda is at home. We're intruders.

We hear a flurry of laughter and shouts. My grandfather makes his dramatic entrance, thundering and heroic.

I say "grandfather," but we're not allowed to call him that. It's forbidden. We're supposed to call him Pablo, like everyone else. Instead of abolishing frontiers, this "Pablo" confines us to anonymity; it creates a boundary between the inaccessible demigod and us.

"Hello, Pablo," my father says as he approaches him. "Did you sleep well?" He's supposed to call him Pablo as well.

Pablito and I run to him and throw our arms around him. We're children. We need a grandfather.

He pats us on the head, the way one strokes the neck of a horse.

"So, Marina, what's new? Are you a good girl? And you, Pablito, how are you doing at school?"

Empty questions that don't need answers. A way of taming us whenever it suits him.

He takes us to the room where he paints-whatever room he has chosen as his studio for the day, the week or the month, before inaugurating another, as he moves wherever the house takes him, or his inspiration, or whim. Here nothing is forbidden. We're allowed to touch the brushes, draw on his notebooks, and smear paint on our faces. It amuses him.

"I'll make you a surprise," he says, laughing.

He rips a sheet of paper out of his notebook, folds it over several times incredibly fast and, magically, his powerful hands produce a little dog, a flower or a paper chicken.

"Do you like it?" he asks in his husky voice.

Pablito says nothing while I stammer, "It's . . . beautiful!"

We would like to take it home, but we're not allowed. It is the work of Picasso. These figurines made of paper, cardboard or bits of matches, all these illusions he created like a conjurer were part of an ambition that I now find monstrous-to make us understand subconsciously that he was all-powerful and we were nothing. All he had to do was scratch a sheet of paper with his nail, cut up a piece of cardboard with scissors, spread a splotch of paint on a fold. Out came violent, pagan images that crushed us.

But I'm also convinced that Picasso felt lonely and wanted to recapture childhood. Not ours, but his own, over there in Málaga, in southern Spain, where with a single pencil stroke, he bewitched his young cousins Maria and Concha by creating imaginary creatures out of the void. That was the audience that amused him as material-like Pablito and me, raw, as-yet-undamaged material that he could manipulate according to his mood. He behaved like this toward his son Paulo from the start with his paintings of Paulo on his donkey, Paulo holding a lamb, Paulo with a slice of bread, Paulo dressed as a torero, Paulo dressed as a harlequin. This was before he turned him into the inadequate father of my earliest childhood.

My father, although always present when we visit La Californie, doesn't dare interrupt the special moments that we're spending with our grandfather. He paces furtively from the studio to the kitchen with a worried, feverish look in his eye. He pours himself another glass of whiskey or returns from the kitchen with a glass of wine. He is drinking too much. In a short while he'll have to confront my grandfather and ask him for money for us and my mother, money that Picasso owes him-the words pain me-for "services rendered." He is Picasso's chauffeur, paid by the week, his factotum with no life of his own, a marionette whose strings Picasso enjoys tangling, his whipping boy.

"Say, Paulo, your children are no fun. They should loosen up."

We'd better not break the spell; we'd better make sure everything goes well. For my father, and my mother who'll be asking me if everything went well, we must play along and please Picasso.

He grabs a hat lying on a chair, snatches a cape off a coat peg and drapes it over his shoulders, and jumps up and down like a disjointed puppet. Extravagant and extreme, he yells and claps his hands.

"Come on," his eyes flash. "Copy me! Play and cheer up."

We clap our hands to punctuate his clowning. My father joins in, goading his father, a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, his eyes watering from the smoke.

"¡Anda, Pablo! ¡Anda, anda!"

An ovation shouted in Spanish, the language of the Picassos, the only link between the omnipotent father and the belittled son.

Galvanized, my grandfather picks up a wooden spoon and a dish towel from the table: his sword and muleta. With a bright, barbarous look in his eye, he performs a series of passes for us: manoletinas, chicuelinas, verónicas and mariposas, to the rhythm of my father's repeated "Olé!" and mine.

Pablito is silent and looks away. His face is deathly pale. Like me, he would like to belong to a normal family with a responsible father, a lenient mother, a loving grandfather. Pablito and I were not destined for such things.

How do you create an identity or acquire serenity when your grandfather takes up all the available space? And your father kowtows? And your mother will bombard you with questions after the "visit of the century" to which, of course, "no one had been kind enough to invite her"?

The east wind has chased away the clouds and a timid sun sheds a holy light into the room. My father has still not dared broach the subject of money with my grandfather. Why annoy him? He's in such a good mood.

Copyright © October 2001, Riverhead books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Marina Picasso is the granddaughter of Pablo Picasso. She lives in the house she inherited from her grandfather.