Picasso’s Lovers by Jeanne Mackin EPUB & PDF

Picasso’s Lovers by Jeanne Mackin EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online

• Status: Available for Free Download
• Author: Jeanne Mackin
• Language: English
• Genre: Women’s Literary Fiction
• Format: PDF / EPUB
• Size: 3.4 MB
• Price: Free

Paris
1953

Irène Lagut

Pablo Picasso, my lover, the greatest artist who ever lived, almost
didn’t.
At birth, he was a blue-and-white wax statuette of a newborn who didn’t
move, didn’t cry. “Stillborn,” the nurse whispered. His mother was almost
too exhausted from the birth to notice. But an uncle who had been pacing in
the hall with Pablo’s father had never seen a stillbirth before and was
curious. He leaned over the infant, so close that the burning tip of his cigar
touched the baby.

Pablo, white and blue, squirmed. He whimpered. His face turned angry
red. He wailed lustily. The greatest artist who has ever lived—and that’s not
just my opinion, I assure you—decided to live. Fire brought him to life. Fire
keeps him alive.

“Born of fire,” I say.
“What was that?” Pablo, many years after that miracle birth, turns away
from the washstand mirror and glares at me with those all-seeing black
eyes. We had dined together at Café de Flore and spent the night at his
studio in the Quai des Grands Augustins. We had bedded down among the
crates and canvases and statues, decades of his work crammed into the one
space he had hoped would be safe from the Germans during the occupation.
Mostly, it had been. In fact, they had come sometimes to buy from him,
though their regime had declared him a decadent. He sold them a few
paintings.

And he listened. Listened very carefully, in case he heard anything
useful for the resistance. He made jokes to those German soldiers who
marched down our avenues and sat in our cafés during the occupation, jokes
in secret French slang, which the soldiers only pretended to understand.
Those jokes insulted them, as Pablo intended.

People used to say of my lover that he lived only for art, that women and
politics did not matter to him the way his art mattered. But people change.
When Franco and Hitler destroyed that Spanish town, Guernica, Pablo
changed. You cannot look at that painting, at the screaming mothers and
murdered children and violence of it, and think, This is a man who does not
care about people and politics.

And I have seen how his face changes when he speaks of Françoise, the
woman who is leaving him.
“I think it will be a fine day,” I said. “But come back to bed, Pablo. It is
still early.” I smoothed and patted the rumpled sheet that was still damp
from our little bacchanal.

“The car will be here soon. If I’m not ready, Paulo will honk the horn
and make a scene in the street. He’s as mad as his mother.”
“Has Olga really turned insane? I always thought she had that tendency.
Though you are enough to madden any woman. Why don’t you just divorce
her?” I wonder what my life would have been had I married Pablo when we
were young. Not happy, I think. No, I made the right choice. But still . . .

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