Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

I think of my father…. As far as I am concerned the man is Don José, and that will be so as long as I live…. He had a beard…. I see all the men I draw with his features, more or less.” Don José was a good teacher, with a considerable share of technical knowledge; and later, when he found that he could teach him no more he ceremonially handed his brushes over to the boy and never painted again. Could any castrating son ask more? He did all he could to further Pablo’s career; he stretched his canvases; he gave him an independent studio at the age of fifteen; he parted with all his money except for the loose change in his pocket to enable the nineteen-year-old to go to Paris; yet when he died in 1913 his son did not come to his funeral although Picasso was then at Céret, only about a hundred miles away, and although he was not then particularly short of money. Picasso did not bury his father; and late in his life, when he was eighty-seven indeed, he executed a series of etchings in which Don José appears, sometimes as a watcher of bawdy scenes, sometimes as a participant.

      But these complications did not exist—or at least did not exist on the surface—in those early days in Málaga. Don José was the Man: tall, bearded, ageless, dignified, bony, with pale eyes and a grizzling sandy beard (his friends called him el Inglés), quite unlike his busy, plump, entirely human, black-haired wife, and so far removed from his son in every conceivable way that no one could possibly have guessed the relationship. He was the only man in a household full of women; and although it would be wrong and indeed absurd to say that every Spaniard regards women, apart from the sacred mother, as a race to be exploited either as sex-objects or as domestic animals, the notion is common enough in the Mediterranean world, both Moslem and Christian: a century ago it was commoner still, and in Spain it increased the farther south one went. Neither José Ruiz nor his son was likely to be wholly unaffected by it; and this was the atmosphere in which Pablo spent his early years, the only boy of his generation, cosseted by a host of subservient aunts and female cousins, many of whom accepted the doctrine of their inferiority, thus communicating the deepest and most lasting conviction to the young Picasso. His mother, however, stood quite apart: the relationship between them was uncomplicated love on either side, with some mixture of adoration on hers; and it is perhaps worth while recalling Freud’s words on Goethe, with whom Picasso has often been compared: “Sons who succeed in life have been the favorite children of good mothers.”

      These early years were cheerful enough for a child who knew little or nothing about the struggle for existence and to whom the overcrowded, somewhat squalid flat was as natural as the brilliant and almost perpetual sunshine in the square. His father’s increasing gloom was no more than the normal attribute of the Man, and in any case Pablo did not see much of Don José, who went off regularly to teach and to work at the museum in a room “just like any other, with nothing special about it,” as Picasso told Sabartés, “perhaps a little dirtier than the one he had at home; but at least he had peace when he was there.” Besides, the final gloom, the total withdrawal, of Don José did not take place until he left Málaga: at this time he still visited his friends, particularly the admired Antonio Muñoz Degrain, and he still went to see every single bull-fight, taking Pablo with him as soon as the child was no longer a nuisance.

      This man about whom the household revolved, the only source of power, money, and prestige, the women’s raison d’être, had as his symbol a paintbrush. Although he did not work at home, it was Don José’s custom to bring his brushes back to be cleaned; and from his earliest age Pablo regarded them with an awful respect, soon to be mingled with ambition. At no time did he ever have the least doubt of the paramount importance of painting.

      José Ruiz could not very well work in his flat: it was full of women (to say nothing of the tame pigeons, Don José’s models, and every year the paschal lamb, a pet for a week or so and then the Easter dinner); and two of these women, the penniless aunts Eladia and Heliodora, spent their days making braid for the caps and uniforms of railway employees. What contribution their sweated labor made to the common purse history does not relate; it cannot have been very much, but even a few reales would have been useful in that secret, hidden bourgeois poverty. Only a woman of great good sense, accustomed to frugality, to managing with very little, and to wasting nothing, could have run such an economy: happily for her family Doña María, in addition to a great many more amiable qualities, possessed all these. Nothing was thrown away: the flat may not have been particularly clean, but appearances were kept up: and one of Picasso’s earliest memories was that of his grandmother telling him to say nothing to anyone, ever.

      Many children have been told to avoid waste without hoarding great piles and heaps of their possessions, trunks, cardboard boxes, crates overflowing and filling house after house, leaving no room to live, nothing ever thrown away: many have been told to be discreet without growing secretive, if not hermetic, in later life: but these precepts sank deep into Picasso’s unfolding mind. As for the secrecy, which Françoise Gilot speaks of as so marked a characteristic in both Picasso and Sabartés, it is not altogether fanciful to invoke the Holy Office: with short breaks from the thirteenth century right up until 1834 Spain had suffered under the Inquisition, hundreds of years during which Spaniards learned to keep a close watch over their tongues. A relapsed Jew and a Quaker were publicly tortured as late as 1826, and in the Carlist wars (vividly present in his parents’ memory) the supporters of absolute monarchy hoped to bring the inquisitors back with their king. Then again, in some crypto-Jewish families (and there were a great many in Spain) the habit of secrecy was passed on even longer than the faith: by this I do not mean to imply that either the Ruizes or the Picassos had Jewish ancestors, though it is by no means impossible, but only to suggest one more reason for the country’s traditional discretion, since the tradition necessarily affected Picasso.

      The household was poor, but with a poverty that did not exclude the presence of some agreeable things, such as a set of Chippendale chairs that had presumably reached Spain by way of Gibraltar and that eventually came down to Picasso, and some pleasant Italian pieces of furniture; and Aunt Josefa, at least, owned a gold watch and chain. Nor, in the Spain of that time, did poverty mean the absence of servants, any more than it did in Micawber’s England: there is, indeed, something a little Micawberish about Don José, if Micawber can be conceived without gaiety and without a bowl of punch. Don José too was a hopeless man of business; he too hoped for something to turn up; he too had a wife who never deserted him, although a flat in which the cooking had to be done over charcoal in little raised holes, the water and slops to be carried up and down some fifty stairs, and oil lamps to be cleaned, filled, and lighted every day must have been a trial to her constancy, servants or no servants.

      The flat is still there, and since 1962 (the year of a great Velasquez commemoration) the house has borne a plaque recording Picasso’s birth; it is now numbered fifteen, and it makes the corner, being the most westward of the range of buildings erected by Señor Campos, two matching terraces that fill the whole northern side of the square. They were not built at the happiest period of Spanish architecture, and they do not compare well with the two or three remaining eighteenth-century houses on the west side, but they have a restrained, somewhat heavy dignity and they are at least conceived as a whole: the balconied façades are uniform and the proportions make sober good sense. Each number has its own door that opens on to a hall paved with white marble. Modest double flights of marble stairs lead up to the first floor, where they give way to tiles, growing shabbier as they wind up round the wells in the middle of the building; but all the way up, on each landing, there are fine doors, each with a bright brass judas. Lifts have been installed in some of the houses, spoiling the staircases; electricity-meters by the dozen line the halls; and no doubt the water-supply and drainage have been improved; but otherwise there has been little change, and the pigeons still fly up to the balconies in greedy, amorous flocks.

      Little change in the square itself, either. Many of the plane-trees under which young Pablo and his sisters played are still there; so are the massive stone benches, calculated to resist the successive generations of children who have haunted the gardens since they were first laid out; so are the little plump lions on pillars that guard the side entrances, though their tails have suffered since Picasso’s day. Ninety years ago the paths were sanded: now they are covered with asphalt. The sand made it more convenient for the children to play one of their immemorial games, the tracing of arabesques, those calligraphic patterns with which the Moors (to whom images were forbidden) decorated anything they