Belonging as he did to an earlier generation, Bilbao wanted love to be given to him freely as a reward for a life of hard work he had accommodated himself to in order to please his father, who had died thirty-five years ago. So after Cregar and Macedonie, my mother, left him in Paris, Bilbao walked the streets. Accosted from time to time by a woman needing (or wanting) money, he recoiled. He didn't intend to pay any more for love than he had already paid. Bilbao was having difficulty imagining Parisian streetwalkers in such a way as to make them real. For if she becomes real, a woman acquires a consciousness which must be reckoned with, and which only a skilled artist can paint.
Having had to fabricate myself, I may be fabricating Bilbao trying to imagine beautiful women. "Fabricate" means "make." Ex nihilo nihil fabricat. Bilbao was fabricating nothing. He had gone from being an artist to being an art teacher to being a man "with the soul of an artist" but none of the artist's activity. A longing for women inhabited him, a longing for young women, a hope of returning to the metaphorical maples of his childhood, of erotic innocence and egocentric desire. In the end he hired a model, used Cregar's studio in Paris, and painted his best picture. It now hangs in the Athenaeum, a museum I've visited many times in Hartford.
In Paris Bilbao painted the vulnerable-looking young woman amid symbolic oranges from the trees of Valencia where he spent his childhood. Osier, birch, maple, orange--the terms in which Bilbao spoke of the young woman and I speak of Bilbao--are all trees. The earth tones of the painting are like Gauguin's colors, and like Cregar's colors in the painting of my mother, Femme nue de Balque (Balkan Nude). But the central figure in Bilbao's painting, the woman, is actually off to one side, and as white as the Maja Desnuda of Goya, the Olympia of Manet, or the women in Le bain Turc by Ingres.
Looking at Bilbao's painting, one cannot say with certainty whether the subject's hair has been cut short or gathered behind to stream down the shapely topos of her back. A round mirror to the left (her right) balances the composition by teasing us with reflections of furniture and fruit, but the subject's back is just out of reach of the mirror's inflexible eye--like a bird's eye, which can't move in its socket but must move with the bird's head--as the woman herself was out of reach of the painter on the other side of the illusory wall that was the canvas, the painter just glimpsed in the mirror as part of the composition, like the king and queen in Las Meninas being painted by Diego Velasquez with his wig modestly askew. But the perspective is as tricky as in Manet's The Bar at the Folies Bergere, in which what appears in the mirror can't have been across the bar--assuming it's a normal mirror, which of course we cannot assume. Ingres was eighty when he painted Le bain Turc, a flat circle full of round, voluptuous nudes.
The disheveled cot in the background of Bilbao's painting is clearly a bed for one. Though pale, the model stands firm, with her arms down and her legs together, neither posing nor posturing. Bilbao had tears trickling down his cheeks when he first saw her naked body, he was so happy. I know I too would have wept with joy. Her small painted breasts are womanly but vulnerable. She has nursed no children. Her wondrous hips are strong, her whole lower body providing a center of gravity connecting her to earth. I want to go home. Women's hips are everyone's home.
In her extraordinary monkey-like left hand she holds an orange with a dry green leaf, but she's neither offering it to Bilbao nor about to peel and consume the fruit herself. Her slender-fingered hand reminds us of the best in our most distant ancestors. Bilbao's handling of the paint hints at the white membranes and translucent segments inside the nubby skin. Orange is such an extraordinary color. In the last sentence but one, "handling" is a metaphor; Bilbao's fingers never touched the paint intentionally.
The model has a small chin, not unlike the one on the sculpture by Rodin called "Thought" (Pensée), a woman's head with the chin and neck not quite liberated from the block of stone. Camille Claudel, who posed for the head, was temporarily Rodin's mistress, and for a much longer time a skillful sculptor herself, though her talent stood in relation to Rodin's much as Bilbao's to Cregar's. Love has to do with touching, with warmth. Painters rarely touch their subjects. Rodin frequently touched his. Bilbao wanted to stroke the curve of his model's smooth cheek where the bone stood clear and strong beneath the skin, just as the curve of her hip revealed a strong pelvis.
Bilbao's painting is distinguished by the subject's spectacles. But there is no book, or paper or magazine for her to read in the space the picture opens. She is not reading, but she can see Bilbao with glassy clarity, even if we can't. Bilbao, whose vision even with spectacles was not as sharp as it used to be, wanted to preserve his own innocence as much as his model's. He really wanted to preserve something he may only have imagined to exist, an innocence that makes a woman as tender and sweet but not as acid as an orange, and as fascinating as a book in a language one does not understand but which one longs to read.
Decorating a recent month of my calendar a brown-haired dreamy young woman wears tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses and a white peignoir through which her enormous pink nipples are visible. I like her smile, which, coupled with the specs like Aphrodite coupling with Zeus, suggest wit and intelligence. Whether the woman who posed for the picture was witty and intelligent is left almost entirely to my imagination. But the calendar is not a work of art with the skill of Bilbao's painting. Not until recently have naked women wearing glasses appeared on calendars. They're still rare in paint.
Before the Beginning
Bilbao hired his model after she approached him on the street one cold evening flecked with snow. There was no longer a Marche des Modeles, women walking around the fountain at the Place Pigalle to announce that they were available to pose, some of them dressed in the costumes of their homelands and some even carrying babies. Of course there were men too, looking for a job posing as a legionnaire or a saint. Sometimes my whole life threatens to fold into itself and disappear. Would I feel this way if my mother had wanted me to be born?
"Let me make you young again," the prospective model cried out to Bilbao. It was a bold but tactless ploy. Bilbao was tempted to collect a glob of white spit on his pink tongue and flick it between his blue lips at her. But his old mouth was dry. He sensed they were the only two people in the darkness, or he would have walked on. For just an instant he had nothing to fear. He drew closer to her, away from the street light.
"Your name," he said.
"Marie," she said. She pronounced her name Ma wee, with the emphasis on the first syllable and the "w" caught on the way out of her throat so it turned r-ish. "Ma wee" is "little mother."
"I want you to pose for me," Bilbao said.
"Ça va," she said. "Whatever you want."
"Name your price."
"How long will you want me to pose?" she said. An old man may come quickly, but he may take a long time to reach the pass where he can come.
"Hours," Bilbao said, "days."
"Ah," she said. "By the hour, then."
"Twenty-five francs," Bilbao said.
She was astonished at his generous offer. The going rate was half that amount for a four-hour session. He was astonished that he might get what he wanted at so small a price. To think one could get a woman to stand naked in front of one for hours simply by giving her small amounts of money!
"Come with me," Bilbao said.
At Cregar's atelier Marie realized Bilbao was serious about her posing. While he lit the fire and began to ready his palette, Marie walked around the room. Posing was going to be more tedious and colder work than what she had originally imagined. She would have been happier under warm covers with grandfatherly Bilbao.
"I must ask you to disrobe," Bilbao said, hiding his trembling with a firm voice.
"What's this?" Marie said, coming on a sheaf of papers she may have thought were a gossipy diary. She took her spectacles out of a hard snapshut case in her soft black reticule, looped their bows over her delicate ears and tried to read the handwriting. Without her glasses she saw the world as a chaotic impressionist painting.
"Why in all the world," Bilbao said, distressed at her instincts. "Filth," he said, and snatched the sheaf out of her hands, "paper I use for wiping my brushes." Has anyone written a history of the humblest paper? Momentarily careless of consequences, Bilbao tossed the smutty diary Cregar had given him in the woodstove.
After Cregar's mother died, he spent less and less time in Toledo, so that by the time of the Spanish Civil War he was there in spirit only. But in 1919 when Bilbao was about to paint Marie, Señora Cregar was still alive, though she had never visited her son's work place in Paris. Facts can't disappear, but objects can.
A Rudimentary Snore
I stopped a day's writing on the questionable generalization in the last sentence of the last paragraph. Last night Aphrodite came to me in a dream. She appeared in the guise of a naked shapely grandmother. That I would imagine her as a beautiful old woman is the inverse of Bilbao's seeing her in the pretty body of a girl. Our imaginations were both limited to seeing her in women.
The old woman in my dream had soft white skin, a little wrinkly, but her figure was excellent. She was posturing naked on the lawn (sur l'herbe) near the driveway beside the house I used to live in on Albany Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut. A spruce tree, blue and white, from my memory of that yard, loomed behind her. Cregar was not in the tree. A few flakes of snow drifted in the air. The woman lay down in the blanket of snow.
I tried to take her photograph. A black and white photograph might mute the dyed blond of her hair. A car came down the road to turn into the driveway next door, but I was determined to snap a picture of the woman. Proud and excited to have access to her wonderful nakedness, I wanted the man in the car, my neighbor, to see her, and me. But I didn't want him to have access to her as I did.
The woman lay on her belly in the snow. She smiled and said nothing. I could feel the cool snow and her warm flesh. Her back and bottom were soft and inviting, a warmer white than the snow. But she was distant. The black and white hair between her legs seemed much more important than right or wrong. I wanted to photograph her before she disappeared. Then she was on the veranda of the Albany Avenue house, posing naked with small wrinkled breasts with big nipples and a red bow in her hair. When I awoke with a stiffness I haven't had so intensely in months, I couldn't get back to sleep.
So I understand Bilbao's disturbed longing for Marie. The woman in whom Aphrodite appeared in my dream must have been Cregar's mother, who was not actually my grandmother and whose picture I have never even seen. What I saw was neither my grandmother, nor someone else's grandmother, nor Aphrodite, but a fabrication in whom they both lived. Or both did not live. Cregar's mother died in Toledo in 1925, and Aphrodite is only as alive as any other god or goddess, as alive as emotion.
A Long Snoreless Sleep in the Audience
Cregar's mother passed away without agony in Toledo in June 1925 on a warmish afternoon. June was not the most hellishly hot of the three summer months, and as the Señora grew older and her joints ached in the cold she preferred hell to winter anyway.
She had just drunk a glass of water and opened her bible. As an exercise in spiritual discipline, she had made up her mind to re-read the bible from the beginning. She thought of it as re-reading, but she didn't enjoy reading as much as she enjoyed remembering, and what she remembered was enough detail from the chapters and verses she had actually read to convince her she had ingested the whole bible many times, though not necessarily from Genesis to Revelation. Once one accepts that one is re-reading, whether it is the first or the fiftieth re-reading doesn't matter much.
So this June Thursday, about an hour after her dry mid-day meal of an orange and three crackers, she drank her water, settled herself in a wing chair whose back was almost as stiff and straight as her own, and opened her bible to Genesis. "In the beginning," she read (En el principio), and that sent her mind wandering. Many fairy tales begin with an emphatic assertion that the story is beginning. "I'm near the end," she thought in a flash of realism about her own life. If it took her a month (she underestimated wildly) to re-read the bible, a little each day, she would have an entelechy for the remainder of her life. "Entelechy" means "a force urging [her] toward fulfillment," in which case the precise metaphorical meaning of fulfillment, of finishing her ultimate reading of the bible, would be left vague.
She looked at the end of the book. Revelation. The last word was "amen," a word without a definition, but which used to mean "certainly," a clearing of the throat to end the conversation. You bet. Okay. You said a mouthful. Really. The penultimate word, the last word of substance rather than form in her bible was "you" plural (vosostros). The word before that was "all" (todos). The last three words of the Nuevo Testamento represent a trinity: the Father ("all"), the Son ("you") and the Holy Ghost ("amen").
A newspaper lay folded on the table beside her empty water glass. In the entire newspaper there was not a single sentence about her son. If there had been even a single word about Señora Cregar herself, she would have died on the spot. As it happened, she did die on the spot, but not because of anything she read in the Prensa.
The Señora's thin legs were crossed at the ankles. In 1920, torn between modesty and a desire to keep up with the young, she had bought her first ankle-exposing dress. The straps across the insteps of her black shoes of Spanish leather terminated in one black button at the outside of each foot. If the buttons had been on the inside they might have caught together as her feet passed each other. Her feet were not swollen but slender and shapely. They were not, however, visible. "Ah, well," she said. "In the beginning, God."
She had memories of Mexico, her birthplace, that were as intense and inconclusive as her recollections of the bible. She couldn't remember her beginning any more accurately than you or I could. When she was eleven years old a physician had told her parents she had "a murmurous heart." She did remember that, because at first there had been some confusion about whether the doctor had said "murmurous" (murmuroso) or "bloody" (sanguinario) with reference to the blood (sangre) her young organ pumped, and which her father took to mean "murderous" (muertoroso).
"In the beginning God created heaven," and before Señora Cregar could get to "earth" (la tierra), a fluttery tightness gripped her at the sternum. She opened her eyes, then closed them. Unless the world is even more mysterious than I think it is, she was not daydreaming of me posing naked in snow or sunshine.
The Señora was not the cosy, milk and cookies granny I have sometimes wished for. (Only on a very cold day in January would one wish to sleep with one's naked grandmother.) Heaven may bring one to a form congenial with one's ideal of oneself. If that is true, Señora Cregar didn't need to die to go to heaven, for she already had an unwobbling sense of herself as a woman of no particular age (but about thirty) in full vigor and possession of her faculties, which for most of her life were exercised in gossip and prayer. Bilbao could have married her, if she'd been in any way interested in marrying again.
(Because I can't spend the time on a long digression to describe M. Cregar, Sr.'s death, suffice it to say that he died before Señora Cregar, of a cerebral hemorrhage. He died without extreme unction, because between the moment when he took his first sip of morning coffee, went white and said, "I have a ghastly headache," and the O that completed the BING on his card, there wasn't time to summon a priest.)
You Can't Imagine What's Taking So Long
In my dream I couldn't catch the grandmother, even on film. She never said a word to me. I couldn't know her. Like a picture, she just smiled. The terrible thing is that if she had spoken I might no longer have wanted her. I didn't want to capture her, I just wanted her, my body longing for hers, or making my mind long--if the mind is not itself part of the body. Taking her photograph was safer than reaching for her. In my dream I knew I was dreaming, but if I could fix her image on film, when I brought the camera to the waking world, I could get the film developed. And voila! There would be the proof of the reality of my dream. The result would also, unfortunately, be a pornographic picture the drugstore would refuse to develop and print for me. I'm afraid most men wouldn't consider a photograph of a naked old woman exciting, unless perhaps they knew it was a snapshot from a dream. A snapshot of anything captured from a dream would be exciting. On the other hand, all the photos of naked women I have seen are snapshots of a dream. And a woman in a dream can either feel immortal herself or make the man dreaming her feel immortal.
How sweet life and death would be if I could snuggle with my dream woman in a pile of warm bed clothes on Cregar's atelier floor with a good fire in the stove and snow drifting slowly through the clear January air outside. To hell with my grandmother!
I know Cregar longed for Macedonie in the same way, because his mother didn't give him what he needed when he needed it either. A note found among my mother's papers is the only correspondence I know of from Cregar to Macedonie.
"Macedonie, I beg you to take me back. I am nothing, nothing, without you. I'm an old pest, I know, I deserve your scorn, but I love you, I will always love you. Forgive me. I need you. Please." He wrote in Spanish signing himself, El insecto nocivo, adding his logo sketch of a scarab, but without his initials on the wings, this time a fat cockroach instead of the Egyptian symbol for life. El insecto nocivo, the noxious insect--this was no way for a great painter to talk, so different from his banter with Bilbao. Without her eyeglasses Marie couldn't see very well, but Bilbao wanted her to see him. If he was to recognize reality, reality ought to recognize him too. Estoy tambien nada.
When Cregar wrote to Macedonie he was older than he had been when he brought Macedonie and Bilbao to Paris. In 1919 he played the role of a man in full vigor and possession of his powers (like his mother), a man lucky enough to have an intractable mistress barely of marriageable age. But when he was alone with Macedonie sometimes he felt old and helpless. He changed his shirts frequently and chewed cloves to sweeten his breath. And eventually he became old, though not as old (and perhaps not as wise) as Bilbao when he painted Marie. Bilbao had the sense to paint her, not to fall in love with her.
Nonetheless Bilbao came so far toward grasping something about Marie and about himself that--in spite of the intrinsic interest Cregar's portrait of my mother has for me--Bilbao's painting is superior to, though physically smaller than, Cregar's. Maybe portrait painting is always a secondary art. Bilbao's painting of Marie is not just a portrait. The Cregar is full of openness and mystery; the Bilbao, of candlelit desire and deep, deep emotion. I smile at the Cregar and feel a desire to kick up my heels. I'm not just smiling at my mother. The Bilbao, on the other hand, arouses nothing so glib as tears. Rather it reaches down my throat and begs me for love and understanding. And I didn't even know Marie. Bilbao called his painting, "El Muerto de Mama."
You Cover Another Yawn
In Homer and Virgil, Aphrodite enters the bodies of many women, including now and then a wrinkled grandmother. Since Aphrodite seems to have embodied herself in Marie, in the grandmother in my dream, and in the Playmate for November, I should tell you about Aphrodite's life.
Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, was born on Cyprus out of sea foam (Hesiod, Theogony 188-206), perhaps because left to themselves women eventually smell like the ocean. Eventually Aphrodite fell in love with a handsome mortal, Anchises, a Trojan shepherd on Mount Ida. She gave birth to Aeneas by Anchises, and to Eros (Cupid), but I'm skeptical that she ever nursed either one of them at her perfect breasts. Although Cupid never grew up--which implies that erotic desire is immature--in the ancient Greek version of the story Eros was not a perpetual baby but a man with wings and roses, who preceded Aphrodite and then consented to be born through her. My own relationship with my mother was similar.
I'm fond of Aphrodite because she favored the Trojans, the losers. Her son Aeneas was a man, a leader on the Trojan side. When Diomedes, a mortal, wounds Aphrodite in The Iliad, Zeus reminds her to stick to love. After the Trojan War, Aeneas left the ruins of Troy (the burning towers of Ilium) and went voyaging with his father and son. When he was shipwrecked in North Africa, Dido, Queen of Carthage fell in love with him, and--according to The Aeneid--killed herself when he left. Eventually Aeneas went to Italy and became a forefather of the Romans and Virgil wrote The Aeneid about his adventures, mentioning Venus frequently.
According to the Oxbow Dictionary of the Classical World, Dido, daughter of King Belus of Phoenician Tyre, was called Elissa at Tyre and came to be known as Dido ("the Wanderer") at Carthage. Her husband Acherbas (or Sychaeus to Virgil) was killed by her brother Pygmalion, who by that time had supplanted Belus as King of Tyre. Dido escaped to Libya with some followers and there founded Carthage. (Dido's brother Pygmalion was not the Pygmalion who carved a statue of a woman out of ivory, called it Galatea, and fell in love with it, which enabled Aphrodite to bring the statue to life so he could couple with it.)
Fact and fabrication always mingle in myth. Though Dido may have been an imaginary queen, Phoenicians indeed founded Carthage of the Tunisian coast and brought with them Aphrodite (perhaps called Astarte). In a version of the Dido story older than Virgil's, Timaeus says Dido built her pyre as an offering for her marriage to the king of Libya and then jumped in the flames to avoid that marriage. As Virgil tells it, Dido climbs on the pyre when Aeneas, whom she loves to distraction, leaves her as an act of piety to divine command. The earlier writer Varro, however, says it was not Dido but her sister Anna who committed suicide over the loss of Aeneas.
Since Aphrodite is Aeneas' mother, it seems more likely that she looked out for her son's mistress. For, though Aeneas left Carthage out of piety, he still cared for Dido. Perhaps Aphrodite let the wandering Dido wander deeper into Africa to give birth to another child of Aeneas. Why shouldn't Dido be among my great-grandmother's ancestors?
