Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

They piled their easels, canvases, color-boxes, and baggage on to the mule and walked, first up the fertile valley of the Ebro, with its orange-groves still in flower and its rice-paddies, then they struck southward across the mountains for its tributary, the Canaleta. Sometimes one or another would perch himself on the baggage and ride for a while, but most of the time they walked, rising continually into a new air and a new vegetation—arbutus, rosemary, lentiscus, rock-rose, thyme—the highland country with vast stretches of bare mountain, forests of Aleppo pine, and wastes: only a few primitive villages in the fertile parts and an occasional isolated dwelling, a saw-mill where there was* running water, a charcoal-burner’s or a lonely shepherd’s hut. The road dwindled as they went, and in fifteen miles or so it was no more than a mule-track. In a deep and sunless gorge, haunted by vultures, it wound about on either side of the rapid stream, crossing it by fords in the less dangerous places; but by the time they reached the end they had traveled close on twenty miles, and there were only two hours to go—only three or four more great mountains to cross and they would be home.

      For one who had never been outside a town and who had never walked five and twenty miles in his life, even with the help of a mule, this was a striking introduction to a new world—a world in which it was natural to step out briskly in the falling dusk, because of wolves.

      A new world for Picasso: an ancient world for its inhabitants. The Pallarès and their neighbors had lived in this remote village since the night of time, living off the land as people had always lived, long before ships plied from Barcelona. The ancient ways, language, skills, and values came naturally to them: Manuel Pallarès himself could carry a two-hundredweight sack on his shoulders, plough a field, saddle a mule, or milk a cow without having to think about it. His father owned land in the plain surrounding the village, and an olive-mill, renowned for the purity of its oil; and the family, together with their animals, lived in a big, rambling house built round a courtyard. It made a corner with the lane now called Calle Pintor Ruiz Picasso and the village square, a finely-conceived, dignified little plaza with the church on one side and deep, massively-pillared arcades, on the top of Horta’s hill, the only flat place in it.

      In these parts the peasants do not live out among their fields, but warned by Moorish raids, brigands, civil wars, and insurrections, they huddle together in little more or less fortified towns or villages. Horta is happy in its site, an abrupt, easily-defended mound, and the houses are tight-packed from top to bottom, a fascinating mass of lines, angles, and volumes; it is also happy in its local stone, and the church is a handsome building, ancient, but done up in the seventeenth century, at about the same time as Pallarès’ house; while the smaller houses, which often bridge the lanes, are substantial, made to last for generation after generation: and they are mostly washed with blue.

      In the evening the steep narrow streets (often rising in steps and always carefully ridged for hooves) are crowded with animals coming home: mules, asses, cows, goats, sheep, and a great many busy dogs. They live in byres and stables on the ground floor, among the domestic hens and rabbits, filling the town with a pleasant farmyard smell and warming their owners on the floor above; and early in the morning, woken by countless household cocks, they go out into the plain, a great saucer rimmed with mountains. It looks flat from a distance but in fact it undulates, and the less fertile higher ground is covered with almond-trees and olives; there are figs and vineyards too, but this is near the limit for grapes. All round the rim dry-stone terraces carry more olive-groves as high as they will go: an enormous investment over the centuries, not of money but of time and labor (they being unmarketable in that economy), for a minute return. The lower part of the plain is taken up with arable and pasture, in strips; but there is not a great deal of fertile land, and the people of Horta have to work very hard indeed to wring a living from it. This is not the misery of central and southern Spain, where absentee landlords own huge estates and where the landless peasants are hired by the day in a buyer’s market, but it is a harsh life, and the possibility of disaster is always present. Apart from all the natural calamities of farming—cattle diseases, swine-fever, chicken-pest—the crops can often fail: moisture does not lie on limestone ground, and Horta is no great way from those parts of Aragón where wine is exchanged for water, in times of drought.

      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