Bluebeard (40 page)

“So that is probably the only point at which Picasso paid the least bit of attention to one of the most popular American artists in history,” I speculated.

“Probably,” she said.

Old Soldier’s Anecdote Number Two: “I was captured when the war had only a few more months to go,” I said. “I was patched up in a hospital and then sent to a camp south of Dresden, where they were practically out of food. Everything in what was left of Germany had been eaten up. So we were all getting skinnier and skinnier except for the man we’d elected to divide what food there was into equal shares.

“There was never a time when he had the food to himself. We saw it delivered, and then he divided it up with all of us watching. Still, he somehow remained sleek and contended-looking while the rest of us became skeletons.

“He was feasting absentmindedly on crumbs and dribblings that fell on the tabletop and clung to his knife and ladle.”

This same innocent phenomenon, by the way, explains the great prosperity of many of my neighbors up and down the beach here. They are in charge of such wealth as remains in this generally bankrupt country, since they are so
trustworthy.
A little bit of it is bound to
try to find its way to their mouths from their busy fingers and implements.

Old Soldier’s Anecdote Number Three: “One evening in May,” I said, “we were marched out of our camp and into the countryside. We were halted at about three in the morning, and told to sleep under the stars as best we could.

“When we awoke at sunrise, the guards were gone, and we found that we were on the rim of a valley near the ruins of an ancient stone watchtower. Below us, in that innocent farmland, were thousands upon thousands of people like us, who had been brought there by their guards, had been
dumped.
These weren’t only prisoners of war. They were people who had been marched out of concentration camps and factories where they had been slaves, and out of regular prisons for criminals, and out of lunatic asylums. The idea was to turn us loose as far as possible from the cities, where we might raise hell.

“And there were civilians there, too, who had run and run from the Russian front or the American and British front. The fronts had actually met to the north and south of us.

“And there were hundreds in German uniforms, with their weapons still in working order, but docile now, waiting for whomever they were expected to surrender to.”

“The Peaceable Kingdom,” said Marilee.

I changed the subject from war to peace. I told Marilee that I had returned to the arts after a long hiatus, and had, to my own astonishment, become a creator of serious paintings which would make Dan Gregory turn over in his hero’s grave in Egypt, paintings such as the world had never seen before.

She protested in mock horror. “Oh, please—not the arts again,” she said. “They’re a swamp I’ll never get out of as long as I live.”

But she listened thoughtfully when I told her about our little gang in New York City, whose paintings were nothing alike except for one thing: they were about nothing but themselves.

When I was all talked out, she sighed, and she shook her head. “It was the last conceivable thing a painter could do to a canvas, so you
did
it,” she said. “Leave it to Americans to write, ‘The End.’”

“I hope that’s not what we’re doing,” I said.

“I hope very much that it
is
what you’re doing,” she said. “After all that men have done to the women and children and every other defenseless thing on this planet, it is time that not just every painting, but every piece of music, every statue, every play, every poem and book a man creates, should say only this: ‘We are much too horrible for this nice place. We give up. We quit. The end!’”

She said that our unexpected reunion was a stroke of luck for her, since she thought I might have brought the solution to an interior decorating problem which had been nagging at her for years, namely: what sort of pictures, if any, should she put on the inane blanks between the columns of her rotunda? “I want to leave some sort of mark on this place while I have it,” she said, “and the rotunda seems the place to do it.

“I considered hiring women and children to paint murals of the death camps and the bombing of Hiroshima and the planting of land mines, and maybe the burning of witches and the feeding of Christians to wild animals in olden times,” she said. “But I think that sort of thing, on some level, just eggs men on to be even more destructive and cruel, makes them think: ‘Ha! We are as powerful as gods! There has never been anything to stop us from doing even the most frightful things, if even the most frightful things are what we
choose
to do.’

“So your idea is a much better one, Rabo. Let men come into my rotunda, and wherever they look at eye level let them receive no encouragement. Let the walls cry out: ‘The end! The end!’”

Thus began the second great collection of American Abstract Expressionist art—the first being my own, the storage bills for which were making paupers of me and my wife and children. Nobody else wanted those pictures at any price!

Marilee ordered ten of them sight unseen—to be selected by me and at one thousand dollars each!

“You’re joking!” I said.

“The Countess Portomaggiore never jokes,” she said. “And I’m as noble and rich as anybody who ever lived here, so you do what I say.”

So I did.

She asked if our gang had come up with a name for ourselves, and we hadn’t. It was critics who would finally name us. She said that we should call ourselves the “Genesis Gang,” since we were going right back to the beginning, when subject matter had yet to be created.

I found that a good idea, and would try to sell it to the others when I got home. But it never caught on somehow.

Marilee and I talked for hours, until it was dark outside. She said at last, “I think you had better go now.”

“Sounds like what you said to me on Saint Patrick’s Day fourteen years ago,” I said.

“I hope you won’t be so quick to forget me this time,” she said.

“I never did that,” I said.

“You forgot to
worry
about me,” she said.

“I give you my word of honor, Contessa,” I said, standing. “I can never do that again.”

That was the last time we met. We exchanged several letters, though. I have dug one of hers from the archives here. It is dated three years after our reunion, June 7, 1953, and says that we have failed to paint pictures of nothing after all, that she easily identifies chaos in every canvas. This is a pleasant joke, of course. “Tell that to the rest of the Genesis Gang,” she says.

I answered that letter with a cable, of which I have a copy. “NOT EVEN CHAOS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THERE,” it reads. “WE’LL COME OVER AND PAINT IT OUT. ARE OUR FACES RED. SAINT PATRICK.”