Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

detached the canvases, lit the fire with the stretchers, and decided that this was enough. Salvador brought the mule, they loaded their battered pictures on to it, and returned to Horta.

      In the village they found men back from Cuba, in a dismal state. The war with the United States was over; the island was nominally independent; Spain had suffered a most humiliating defeat. Yet this could have little effect upon a community that had never felt itself bound to Madrid by anything but taxes and conscription; the village welcomed the returning soldiers and then turned straight to its immediate, necessary tasks. Harvest would wait for no man, nor would the gathering of the grapes. The gutters ran purple with the washing of the lees, the presses creaked, and for weeks the lanes smelled of fermenting wine. Then came Saint Martin’s day, and Horta echoed with the shrieks of dying swine: their blood did not run down the streets, however; it was carefully preserved for that local treat—the butifarra, a bloated, black-mottled sausage. And as the olives ripened, turning color as the winter advanced, they had to be beaten down or picked, and the great millstone began to turn, grinding out their oil.

      Picasso helped wherever he could, but even saddling a mule or wielding a pitchfork has a knack to it: when the great dunghill in the central court was to be cleared away and taken to the fields he set to with the best will in the world, but presently his fork had to be taken away from him for his own protection, and he was put to carrying the dung in baskets and loading them into the paniers of the ass. He was well liked in the family and in the village, and when he went to the mill the people there would give him their particular delicacy, a great round of dark country bread, toasted, set to swim in the virgin oil, fished out when it began to sink, rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with salt, and eaten on the spot.

      At other times, apart from making a great many drawings, he worked at a painting called “Aragonese Customs.” It has not survived, but if a caricature in Blanco y Negro is to be believed, it was strictly representational—a woodcutter with an ax: a woman kneeling in the background. And he had the opportunity of painting what might have been an outstanding example of Spanish realism. The winter storms are furious in those parts, and during one of them an old woman and her grand-daughter were struck by lightning. In such cases an autopsy had to be carried out: the medical man invited Picasso and Pallarès, imagining that it would please them. His colleague should have come from Gandesa to help, but as it was raining he did not do so, and the doctor asked the sereno to proceed without him. All this took place in a dark night in a hut by the graveyard. The sereno took the saw kept for the purpose, lifted the child from her coffin, placed her on a table, and sawed her head in two down the middle to satisfy the doctor as to the cause of death. He was smoking at the time, and as he worked, his hands and his cigar became deeply spattered. Then came the old woman’s turn, but Picasso declined to stay for the second operation. Indeed, he did not even make a drawing of the first; yet might not this vertical division have had some effect upon his own treatment of the human head in later days?

      Life in Horta during the autumn and winter of 1898 was not all work, however: far from it. Picasso and Pallarès often went for walks—one took them to Gandesa, twenty miles for trousers to replace those worn out in their cave—and they often went to the village café. But these mild joys were nothing in comparison to the traditional feasts. Apart from All Hallows, with its chestnuts and new wine, and Christmas, there was St. Anthony’s day in January, a most important festival at which horses, mules, asses, and sometimes oxen, beautifully groomed, adorned with plaits and ribbons, their hooves blacked and polished, are blessed outside the church, and at which the popular religious ballads called goigs are handed about, together with those prints, the remote ancestors of the strip-cartoon, which are called auques in Catalan and aleluyas in Spanish and which, in a series of charming woodcuts on a single sheet, show the chief events of a saint’s life. Very often, in Catalan feasts, the people are unable to wait for the day itself; and here too the main celebrations took place on St. Anthony’s eve. They took the form of a kind of free-running play, with plenty of room for improvisation, in which the saint appeared, was tempted by as many demons and fair women as Horta and the surrounding hamlets could provide, and did resist. Picasso did not: at least he did not resist the prodigious quantity of wine drunk on these occasions, and was found fast asleep on the staircase of Pallarès’ house.

      This vitally important period of his life, in which he acquired new values and a far wider understanding of the world, the best part of a year spent in completely new surroundings, produced no obvious, radical change in his drawing or his painting; and the volume of his work was understandably less—for one thing, he lacked materials.

      The drawing is even more assured, and there are some truly wonderful sheep and goats, studied essentially for their life and movement. The touch is more determined, and in some of the drawings he paid more attention to texture than before: in his intricate shading he used some methods new to him, but his general approach was still the same, in spite of a greater interest in light and darkness and the use of a heavier outline for the figure. And still there is this preoccupation with his name: a peasant in wooden shoes, sitting on the ground in front of a broken pipkin, is surrounded by P. Picazzo Picasso Picaz P. Ruiz Picasso Picasso Picas.

      In the paintings that have survived, much the same applies. Apart from the rural nature of the subjects, most of them might have been painted a year or so earlier; and there is one of a cart-shed which, with its strong light and deep brown shadow, harks back farther still.

      Upon the whole the drawings are more obviously brilliant than the pictures. There is a timeless quality about very good drawing which is lacking in the fin-de-siècle colors he was sometimes using then; yet among the paintings there were some landscapes in which hindsight can see the seed of that Cubism which was to flower in Horta itself some ten years later and others which give the lie to the statement that Picasso took nothing from nature itself but saw the world only through other men’s pictures, a statement made by those who had never seen this then invisible part of his work, and one upon which a great deal of theory has been founded.

      However, of these pictures it was certainly “Aragonese Customs” that pleased Don José most. Before it vanished it won another honorable mention in Madrid, another piece of facetious criticism, and in Málaga another gold medal.

      He finished this picture in February, 1899, waited for the paint to dry, rolled the canvas up, made his farewells, and returned to Barcelona. There could be no more convincing evidence of his amiability among those he esteemed than the fact that in spite of his having stayed with the Pallarès three quarters of a year, he was urgently pressed to come back again.

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      HORTA de Ebro had given Picasso a complete break, time and peace for reconsideration of everything that was important to him; it restored his health and strength to such a degree that he resisted the privation of the coming years; and even more important for the immediate future it provided him with the language of the country he lived in. He did know a little Catalan before going there, but he had not been obliged to use it: at Horta he swam in the language—not a word of Castillan around him for close on a year—and it had sunk in deeply. He now spoke it without effort, using the language, says Sabartés “exactly, and with no literary turns or affected phrases.” Sabartés should have known, since he and Picasso went on speaking it together for the next sixty-nine years: but on the other hand, for Sabartés Picasso could do no wrong; and Cirici-Pellicer, a more objective witness, says that Picasso “usually employed a mixture of the two languages [Castilian and Catalan], which made his manner of expressing himself eminently picturesque.” Certainly he wrote it incorrectly. He was no good at languages: in 1911, after years and years of Paris, a monoglot French mistress, and the perpetual company of French friends he could still begin a letter “iyer de toute la journé je ne ai pas eu de letre de toi”; and to the end of his life he never lost his very heavy Spanish accent nor his highly individual approach to the French language.

      Picasso had a brilliant and original mind, but it did not do its important work in words; it was not primarily a verbal mind. It traveled into regions where words are either non-existent or irrelevant; he worked out no consistent verbal theory whatsoever, and his dicta on art can be made