Pablo Picasso
Blue Period
Daniel Marcus
Charcoal was good. Pablo liked the simplicity of it, the challenge of coaxing subtlety from the purest of elements. You begin with nothing. White paper. Black lump of coal. And like God shaping the Earth from light and void, you create a world.
Sometimes.
He had been working since early afternoon. A woman in the market giving an apple to her half-wit son. Something about the two of them, the set of her shoulders toward the boy, the way the light touched his hair, suggesting that some measure of divinity lay in him and that she was the one saddled with infirmity. But Pablo wasn’t getting it. The thing emerging from the rough paper was a cartoon, a grotesque joke.
The shadows in the studio lengthened until the sun fell behind the buildings across the rue Gabrielle. Pablo took no notice, working until it was almost too dark to see. Finally, when the charcoal smudges began to flow of their own accord into the unmarked whiteness of the paper, he stepped back and stretched his cramped shoulders.
He lit a lamp and the studio filled with warm yellow light. The large room looked like it had been visited by a whirlwind with an artistic fetish. Canvases in various stages of completion were scattered about; rough sketches littered the floor. To the left of the wide bay windows, to catch the light of afternoon, a raised platform for the models. Heavy-breasted cows, most of them, but what could you do? Pablo loved Paris, but the women were pigs.
On a table near the door, a loaf of bread, three days old and hard as stone, a bottle of rough burgundy, a bowl of apples. And leaning against the south wall of the studio, about twenty finished canvases, Pablo’s portfolio. They were set apart from the clutter as if a protective wall had been erected around them. His ticket to greatness. Nineteen years old and already he was breaking new ground, surpassing the work of the established masters. After all, he had been chosen to represent his native Spain at the Paris Exhibition! The canvases he saw in the Montmartre galleries would be better suited to wrap liver. Monet should have been smothered as a child. Smothered in flowers. Who cared a dog’s teat about flowers? Even the best of the new ones, Denis, say, or Vuillard, couldn’t paint their way out of a burlap sack. Dragonflies! Lilies! Swirling hair! It was crap, all of it.
“The Spanish upstart,” they were calling him. Dismissing him as if he were an insect. “Deft but morbid,” one review said. “Uneven,” said another. He would show those symbolist cretins what a real artist could do. He turned back to the sketch of the woman and the idiot boy.
But not tonight, he thought. This is shit.
Pablo tore the page from the easel and ripped it in half, then in half again. He let the pieces fall to the floor and walked across the room to the table. He uncorked the burgundy and raised it to his lips, taking a long draught. It was rough but good, leaving a warm glow in his gullet. The French peasants were all right for something. He raised the bottle to his lips again when suddenly, a bright green flash lit the sky outside his window. It was gone in an instant, but it was so intense that the afterimage of the silhouetted buildings across the street stayed pulsing in his vision.
What the hell was that? He ran to the window and looked out. A few souls on the street, looking up. He scanned the horizon. There, beyond the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, a greenish glow pushing into the twilight, just beginning to recede.
Even as his eyes began to adjust, another green flash lit the sky. This time, Pablo could see its trail, like a shooting star but brighter, lancing downward to the west. It was accompanied by a roaring sound, something like thunder but with an edge to it, as if the sky were made of cloth and somebody was ripping it in two. There was a moment of preternatural quiet, the world itself holding its breath, then a flickering orange glow began to lick at the bottom of the sky. The Bois de Boulogne? It was hard to tell. Pablo was still new to Paris and didn’t quite have his bearings yet. In fact, he hardly ever left Montmartre.
His countryman Casagemas had said he’d be at Le Ciel on the boulevard Clichy, fondling women, no doubt, and getting drunk. Pablo felt a sudden need for his companionship. He grabbed his jacket and cap and began to head out the door.
Then, as if he’d forgotten something but wasn’t quite sure what, he stopped, turned, and looked around the room. His eyes lingered on the stack of canvases leaning against the wall. His mind filled with an unfocused dread, almost crushing him under its sudden weight. With an effort of will, he pushed it aside. Everything was all right. Shooting stars. Big deal. God taking potshots at the lame and unrepentant. Pablo knew that God had other plans for him.
The streets were buzzing with energy. People clustered in front of shops, talking, gesturing up at the sky. As Pablo passed one such group in front of a patisserie on the rue Saint-Vincent, he overheard someone say, “Men from Mars, I’m telling you! They’ve landed!”
Pablo approached the group. “Excuse me, my French still isn’t very good. Did you say ‘men from Mars’?”
“Yes!” The speaker grabbed Pablo by the lapels. He was drunk; his breath would have knocked over a horse. “A cylinder landed at Royaumont this morning and vile things crawled out. Gargoyles! The monastery is in ruins!”
Pablo pried the man loose and backed away. One of his companions laughed. “The monastery is seven hundred years old. It’s already in ruins.”
“Laugh all you want,” the drunk said. “We aren’t the only creatures in the cosmos God has graced with intelligence. They’re here to test us, and we’d better be ready!”
Another of the man’s companions winked at Pablo and pantomimed drinking from a bottle. Pablo walked away. Their voices faded behind him, drifting up into the warm night air.
Men from Mars! Pablo had read in Le Figaro about the recent volcanic activity on Mars, jets of gas shooting out from the planet’s surface, visible from Earth with even a modest telescope. Forty million miles away. Pablo shook his head. What did numbers like that mean? And now men. No, monsters! Gargoyles sent by the God of War! He laughed. Casagemas was really going to get a kick out of this. He quickened his pace.
He cut through the Montmartre Cemetery on his way to the boulevard Clichy, and quiet surrounded him like a velvet glove. Gnarled oak trees cast a protective canopy, muffling the street sounds. Neat rows of headstones, pale in the moonlight, followed the gentle, hilly contours like cultivated crops. The sky above the trees to the south was bleeding orange at the bottom.
Inside Le Ciel, the smoky air was charged with reassuring chaos. An acrobat tumbled across the stage, flanked on one side by a dwarf in formal evening attire and on the other by a grinning pinhead in a flowered nightshirt. A mustached pianist played a lively accompaniment. Near the bar, two men shouted at each other at the top of their lungs. It was business as usual at Le Ciel, Martians or not.
He scanned the tables for Casagemas. There, near the front, his friend’s broad back and shaggy black hair. He was leaning over to whisper something into his companion’s ear. She threw back her head and laughed. Pablo stared. This one was beautiful. Not painted like a whore, but flush with the bloom and innocence of youth. Casagemas was moving up in the world!
Pablo pushed through the maze of tables and wedged a chair between the two of them.
“Ho, Carles!” he said. “What have you been keeping from me?” Up close, the woman was even more lovely than he’d thought. Curly brown tresses framed a heart-shaped face. Cool blue-green eyes, like the ocean under a tropical sun. “Casagemas and I are the best of friends,” he said to her. “We share everything, you know.”
She blushed and smiled, but Pablo saw first a flicker of anger pass across her face. Passion, too! Good!
“Hey, Pablo, behave yourself,” Casagemas said. He turned to his companion. “He doesn’t know how to act around a real woman. Just the whores. Germaine, this is Pablo Ruiz Picasso, the greatest painter in Paris, only nobody knows it but him. Nineteen years old and already he is a legend in his own mind.”
“Yes, well, one day Carles will shock us all and sell one of his own paintings,” Pablo said. He took Germaine’s hand and brought it to his lips. “I am not only charmed,” he said, in Spanish, “but stricken with envy that this pig will be taking you home tonight and not I.”
Her eyes flashed again with anger, and she blushed a deeper red. She started to say something, glared at Casagemas, pushed back her chair, and stalked away.
Casagemas glared at Pablo. “Her father is Spanish, you fool. She speaks it like a native. You’ve really done it this time.”
He got up and hurried after Germaine. Pablo grinned and watched him weave through the crowd, narrowly missing a collision with a waiter carrying a tray laden with bottles and glasses.
He picked up his friend’s glass, still half full of ruby burgundy, took a healthy sip, and turned his attention to the stage. The dwarf was balanced on the acrobat’s shoulders, juggling a wicked-looking knife, an empty wine bottle, and a flaming torch. The pinhead looked on, his mouth hanging open. In the light from the stage lamps, his lips were shiny with drool.
After a few moments, Casagemas and Germaine returned to the table.
“Germaine has consented to stay if you will apologize to her, Pablo,” Casagemas said.
She was glaring down at Pablo so hard that he had to look away to keep from smiling.
“I’m sorry,” he said. That you’re with Casagemas, he added to himself. “We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. Please stay.”
She smiled, a little stiffly, to be sure, and sat. Casagemas did likewise. Pablo motioned a waiter over and ordered a bottle of wine and a plate of bread and hard cheese.
“So,” he said when they were settled. “What do you think about the men from Mars?”
Casagemas laughed. “It’s the Germans. Von Bulow’s ambition has finally gotten the better of his common sense. We’ll crush them like insects.”
“The Germans!” Germaine said. “We’re at war, then?”
“No, I’m kidding.” Casagemas held up a hand. “But it seems more likely an explanation than men from outer space.”
“Well, something is going on,” Pablo said. “There were two explosions—at least two—and I think the Bois de Boulogne is burning.”
“Burning!” Germaine said. “Maybe we should try to find out what’s happening.”
“Maybe we should have some more wine,” Casagemas said.
Pablo thought for a moment, then grabbed the bottle and stood up. “Maybe we should do both. It’s better to know what’s going on than to be left in the dark.”
He wrapped the bread and cheese in a napkin and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. Germaine and Casagemas looked up at him from the table.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Pablo asked. “Let’s go!”
They looked at each other. Casagemas shrugged and reluctantly pushed back his chair. He offered his hand to Germaine.
“I have a bad feeling about this, Pablo. If there was something wrong, the authorities would notify us. This is another one of your crazy expeditions.”
Back in Barcelona, Pablo had persuaded Casagemas to come with him to the recent scene of an anarchist bombing. An outdoor cafe, reduced to rubble in the middle of the afternoon. Two hours later, it was still a charnel house, debris everywhere, a row of bodies in the street covered with bloody tablecloths. Due to their scruffy looks, Pablo and Casagemas were arrested at the scene and detained for several hours. Eventually, they were released, but not before some very rough questioning. It was all fuel for Pablo’s artistic drive; he filled a whole notebook with sketches. Casagemas had nightmares for weeks. Disembodied hands, flesh cracked and burned, reached for him in the dark while faceless inquisitors hurled nonsense questions at him.
“Don’t worry, Carles,” Pablo said. “Germaine and I will protect you.”
Germaine smiled uneasily.
Pablo took a last look across the room at the stage. The pinhead was looking directly at him. His eyes, which Pablo had first thought glazed with idiocy, burned, full of suffering and grace, into his own. Pablo turned away.
Traffic was heavy on the boulevard Clichy; horses, carriages, the occasional motorcar, wove through the thickening crowd of pedestrians. A tradesman, still in work clothes, had his wife and two beribboned girls in tow. A trio of drunken soldiers passed a bottle back and forth, laughing. The overall mood was almost that of a holiday. It was as if they were saying, “This is Paris, after all, the center of the civilized world! What could possibly happen?”
Pablo thought back to Barcelona again, to Death himself laying waste upon the languid peace of an afternoon. Anything could happen. Anything. God is a cruel prankster and these Parisians are fools.
When he could get a glimpse of the sky to the west, Pablo saw that it was still tinged with flickering red at the bottom, but the crowd was moving in the opposite direction, toward the center of the city.
He stopped a young man in a blue watch cap. “What’s going on?”
“Something crashed in the Seine, near the Île de la Cité! The river is boiling!”
Germaine and Casagemas clung tightly together to avoid being separated in the thickening crowd. She reached out her hand to Pablo and he took it. It was warm, soft, and strong.
Pablo heard several different stories, each of them more fantastic than the last. Notre-Dame had been leveled. A great crater had been plowed into the Jardin du Luxembourg and grotesque things were crawling out. Another variation of the Royaumont story, only this time the Martians, after destroying the monastery, began striding across the land in great cowled vehicles hundreds of feet high, setting fire to everything in their path.
The crowd had a life of its own now, sweeping them down the rue de Rivoli. When they reached the Pont d’Arcole, Pablo shouted to his companions, “Let’s stay on the bridge and let the crowd pass. We can see everything from here.”
They pushed their way to the side of the bridge, buffeted by passing bodies. When they reached the railing they held on. Soon, the mob thinned.
Something was going on in the river. Just beyond the tip of the Île de la Cité, a circular patch of water ten meters across pulsed a luminous green, the glow intensifying to eye-searing brightness and fading to cool chartreuse within a period of roughly thirty seconds. As the glow intensified, the water in the affected region bubbled furiously. Wraiths of steam floated above the river.
“This must be where one of the shooting stars landed,” Pablo said.
A pair of barges bristling with grappling equipment floated on either side of the glowing area. Men clustered on the decks.
There was something wrong with the outline of Notre-Dame Cathedral. As his eyes adjusted, Pablo saw that one of the towers was gone, sheared off near the top leaving a jagged silhouette. The shooting star must have grazed the old cathedral in its descent.
A black tentacle broke the roiling surface of the water. Its motions were flexible, but it was clearly a mechanical contrivance, composed of a series of articulated segments. Tentative at first, it waved this way and that, as if sniffing the air, extending itself all the while above the river like a metallic beanstalk.
It stopped its weaving motion, leaned toward one of the barges, and struck with reptilian speed. The tentacle wrapped itself around the barge and, in an instant, dragged it down into the turbulent, glowing water.
Bits of debris floated to the surface. A few men struggled briefly, but they were being boiled alive like crabs in a pot. Soon their motions ceased.
Another tentacle, or perhaps it was the same one, broke through the water’s surface. This time there was no hesitation; it went directly for the other barge, pulling it under in the blink of an eye.
All was quiet. The luminous patch faded to a dull, pulsing glow. A few scraps of wood bobbed in the water.
Pablo looked at Casagemas. His friend’s face was pale. Germaine clung tightly to his arm.
“What was that?” she asked.
Casagemas shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Germans, eh?” Pablo asked. He was badly shaken, but he didn’t want his friend or Germaine to know just how badly. “Germans from outer space!”
He realized that he still held the wine bottle by its neck. He lifted it to his lips, took a long pull, and offered the bottle to Germaine.
She shook her head, and Casagemas shot him an annoyed look. “Don’t be flip, Pablo. People are dead. What sort of horror is this?”
Pablo shrugged. “Maybe it’s true. Men from Mars bearing the judgment of a cruel, stupid God.” He took another pull of wine and winked at Germaine. “Or maybe they come to Paris for the women.”
Germaine looked away.
Suddenly, the water began bubbling furiously again, and a rounded shape broke through the roiling surface. It continued to rise; sheets of water cascaded off its surface. As it cleared the water Pablo saw that it was supported by three jointed legs. Curled tentacles dangled from its flat bottom. One such tentacle was wrapped around a box, affixed to one end of which was a shape like the funnel of a Victrola.
At its full height, the thing towered above the river, balanced on spidery tripod legs. The cowled head was level with the turrets of Notre-Dame. It looked this way and that in a manner that was almost human.
Surely this thing is not one of the Martians, Pablo thought. It must be some sort of vehicle, with the creatures themselves inside.
Whatever it was, intelligence and malice guided its motions. It stepped out of the river onto the quay, raised the funneled box, and pointed it at Notre-Dame Cathedral.
A deep thrumming sound seemed to emanate from the device. Suddenly, a ghostly green beam, almost too faint to see, leapt from the box, and the face of the great cathedral exploded. Stone shattered, stained glass glowed and ran like wax. The remains of the south tower began to collapse, as if in slow motion.
It took Pablo a moment to realize that what he was seeing was the effect of great heat, but when the Martian swept the beam across the roofs of the surrounding buildings, there was no doubt. As soon as the beam touched them, they burst into flames as if ignited by a torch.
The crowd, so anxious a little while ago to get close to the spectacle, began flowing back across the Pont d’Arcole. It was a brainless mob; Pablo saw at least one person trampled under its relentless, panicked flight.
“Hold tightly to the railing!” he shouted to his companions.
As they were buffeted in the sea of bodies, trying to keep from being swept downstream, a ragged line of soldiers appeared on the quay from the nearby préfecture de police. They raised their rifles at the great machine towering above them.
Pablo could see muzzle flashes, like tiny fireflies in the night. Their effect upon the leviathan was little more than that. It swept the beam across the pitiful rank of soldiers, and one by one as it touched them they burst into flame.
The machine swept the beam across the river, leaving a violent wake of hissing steam, and as it touched buildings on the Rive Gauche, they exploded into fiery blossoms. The beam cut a swath across the mob on the Pont d’Arcole, not twenty feet away from Pablo and his companions. Pablo felt the heat on his face; it was like standing too close to a furnace.
Each person the heat-ray touched instantly became a wick encased in a billowing column of fire. One man was looking in Pablo’s direction as the beam touched him. Time slowed to a halt; every detail imprinted itself on Pablo’s vision. The dark hollows of his eyes in the flickering inferno, his skin peeling, blackening, cracking, his mouth open to scream, consumed by the fire before he could utter a sound.
Pablo ducked down, seeking the meager protection of the stone fence. Casagemas and Germaine stood clutching each other, frozen with fear.
“Get down, you idiots!” Pablo grabbed Germaine by the hem of her coat, pulling her down. She pulled Casagemas down with her to the stone walkway.
They huddled together, leaving as little exposed as possible to the panic of the mob and the return of the heat-ray. Countless feet kicked their hunched backs in passing flight. They huddled closer.
A deafening screech filled the air, exultant and alien.
“Aloo! Aloo!”
Pablo looked up. Almost directly in front of him, one of the tripod legs rose out of the water. Its strangely scaled surface held a dull sheen. Impossibly far above them, the cowled head swept back and forth. Suddenly, a jet of bright green steam hissed from one of the joints, and the leg lifted out of the water. It passed over their heads, gone in an instant. The alien howl cut through the night again, fading as the thing strode west along the river toward the flickering glow in the sky.
Pablo was hyperaware of his surroundings—the smell of Germaine’s perfume, her rapid breathing. The scratchy feel of Casagemas’s overcoat on his cheek, more real than the Boschlike image of a three-legged monster towering above the river, laying swaths of destruction across the City of Light.
Soon, relative calm descended upon the bridge. The cries of those touched by the edge of the beam floated toward them. A greasy, burned smell hung in the air, singed hair mixed with meat left too long on a spit. Wisps of smoke rose from the pathetic charred hulks that had once been human beings. Scattered groups of survivors began looking dazedly around. A few began seeing to the injured.
“What are we going to do?” Casagemas asked. They had retreated to the safety of an alley on the Rive Gauche side of the Pont d’Arcole. In the distance, they could hear the hollow boom of artillery.
“My parents live in Versailles,” Germaine said. “I have to get out there.”
“I will accompany you, of course,” Casagemas said. Germaine touched his arm gratefully. He looked at Pablo.
Pablo thought of the stack of canvases in his studio. His portfolio, the sum total of his work to date. It would be easy to dismount them and roll them up. He could no more abandon them than he could leave an arm or a leg behind.
Pablo nodded toward the orange glow in the western sky.
“That’s probably Versailles,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s anything left.”
Germaine began to weep.
“Pablo, you are such an asshole sometimes,” Casagemas said.
Pablo shrugged. “Do what you must. I have to go back to the studio and get my paintings. It would be a disaster if they were destroyed.”
“A disaster!” Casagemas said. “What do you think is happening here? Your paintings mean nothing, Pablo. We have to survive, help if we can. Our chances are better if we stick together.”
Pablo stiffened. “You are a woman, Carles. Go then. Run. Survival is nothing without art. Otherwise, we are no better than dogs pissing in the street.”
Casagemas glared at Pablo and pulled Germaine closer. Without a word, he turned and walked out of the alley, his arm around her shoulders.
Pablo watched them turn the corner and disappear. His soul was filled with blackness. A part of him wanted to chase after them, to throw in his lot with them, flee the city and find a safe haven somewhere far away. But Casagemas was a fool. There was no safety anywhere. It was the Apocalypse. Grace had passed Man by and thrown open the Gates of Hell in her passage. The Beast was loose upon the world.
Pablo wandered the streets, trying to make his way back to the rue Gabrielle. He quickly became lost. A detachment of mounted cavalry appeared out of nowhere and all but ran him down.
The sound of distant artillery shook the warm night air. Above it floated the sharp staccato of rifle fire. If he stopped to listen, he could sometimes hear the deep thrumming of the terrible ray. Several times, the uncanny cries of the Martian machines pierced the night.
Knots of people stood on street corners, talking and gesturing. Others huddled together in alleyways, passing bottles of wine and bits of food back and forth. The stories of destruction he heard were similar to what he’d witnessed from the Pont d’Arcole. Paris was being crushed under the weight of the Martians’ onslaught.
The things weren’t unstoppable, though. An artillery battery near the Bois de Boulogne had shot one of a tripod’s legs out from under it and the thing toppled, sending a ball of flame hundreds of feet into the sky when the cowled head hit the ground. But for the most part, the resistance offered the Martians was sporadic and ineffective.
Somewhere near the rue de Rivoli, Pablo came upon a small mob smashing windows and ransacking shops. A handful of soldiers appeared on the other end of the block and began firing into the crowd. Pablo ran.
The sky was beginning to segue through lightening shades of gray. He emerged from a labyrinthine tangle of streets onto the Quai d’Orsay. A bloody, swollen sun hung low in the sky over the Seine, peering through a haze of smoke.
Across the river, the spire of the Eiffel Tower scratched the bottom of the sky. Pablo loved Eiffel’s creation. The juxtaposition of fluid curvature and implacable Cartesian logic epitomized for him Mankind’s emergence into the new century.
A pair of tripods approached the tower from either side. They were dwarfed by the structure, their heads rising only to the second tier. They moved in and backed away, giving the appearance of nothing so much as a pair of dogs investigating a particularly troublesome artifact.
A bundle of tentacles descended from the belly of one of the machines and wrapped itself around the tower’s leg. Its fellow likewise approached the adjacent leg. The machines pulled and strained at the structure, clearly trying to bring it down, but without success.
Then, the nearest machine stepped back and lifted one of the funneled boxes high in the air. Its companion stepped back and pointed its own device at the tower. In the daylight, Pablo couldn’t see the heat-rays, but their effect was immediately apparent. Currents tore at the air above the tower. Soon the entire structure was glowing cherry red. The Martians swept their beams up and down its length, and the bottom arches began to sag. Suddenly, it folded over upon itself and collapsed onto the Champ-de-Mars.
Champ-de-Mars! Pablo began to laugh. Champ-de-Mars! He looked around for Casagemas to share the joke with, but there was nobody. Pablo shook his head, remembering. Casagemas was gone. Fatigue descended upon him like a dark, heavy cloak. Gone, his friend and countryman. Gone, his beloved tower. All gone.
The machines stood above it for a moment, like hunters gloating over a kill, then they strode off to the west, crossing the Seine and disappearing into morning haze made thick by the smoke of many fires.
Witnessing the tower’s ruin tore at Pablo’s heart, but it had a sobering effect as well. He resolved to get back to his studio. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that Montmartre was vaguely north, so he walked with the rising sun at his right, trying to avoid the major thoroughfares.
The streets were strangely quiet. He could hear the distant sound of fighting, but it hadn’t yet spread to this part of the city. He guessed that people had either left the city or were cowering in their apartments. He was grateful that he’d had the foresight to stuff some bread and cheese in his pocket back at Le Ciel, and he gnawed at them as he walked.
He turned a corner onto the boulevard de Magenta, and everything clicked into place. The dome of Sacré-Coeur rose above the rooftops. Almost home.
His studio was just as he left it. Morning light cast stripes of light and shadow across the floor. His paintings leaned in a stack against the far wall, but his eyes were drawn to an unfinished canvas propped up in a corner, a commission from the Church of St. Geneviève. It was a standard Crucifixion scene. So far, he’d just sketched in the cross and the outline of a man upon it.
Pablo stared at it for what seemed like a long time. Then, moving as if he were in a trance, he dragged his easel into the light and placed the stretched canvas on it.
He used oil, thick, viscous gobs of it. At first, he applied it with a knife, but before long he was using his hands, his fingers, the end of a smock, anything that would serve the image emerging onto the canvas.
Shadows crawled across the floor. The sound of artillery grew closer for a time, then began to recede. Smoke drifted in through the open window.
Pablo stepped back, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a stained sleeve. He was done.
There, the vacant idiot eyes and glistening lips. Slack-jawed, full of grace and pain. Behind Him, Judgment rose above the smooth, tawny hills of Calvary on spindly tripod legs.