A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry

Fernande Olivier: Woman Sleeping, 1904

307 The Muse Talks Back Fernande Olivier: Woman Sleeping,1904 Diane K. Martin I detest Sundays. I tell you, they smell bad. If that Sunday I lay in bed with a book, I’m sure I didn’t read it but thought only of that first night with Pablo—how the wind took the trees in Place Ravignon, how the rain soaked my blouse to the skin. At Bateau-Lavoir, Pablo blocked the way in. I’d seen him around of course, that Andalusian the artists and poets all followed. (One night,they marched drunk shouting: Up with Verlaine! Down with Laforgue! Or was it the other way round? No matter.) Well, there he stood in the doorway, in his arms the smallest wet kitten. Voici Minou, he said, laughing, she is as wet as you. Then he made me see (vraiment) his new etching. You know the one I mean—two blue people, blue wine, the piece of blue bread? He scratched it in zinc with a hatpin found on the floor of a brothel. Pablo, Pablo, his face so old, his black eyes coal hardened to diamond. His hands, delicate as a girl’s, held me, removed my wet hat, then my shoes, my stockings, slowly, and my lace... On that muggy Sunday I lay in bed with my book, remembering this—the air so close, it didn’t seem possible I could stir by my own volition, more like the Fates pushed me—to leave Laurent for good. I packed my things into Pablo’s trunk, got him to drag it across the hall to his place. Mon Dieu, it stank! It seems his pal, Appollinaire, had the bright idea to clean the floor with paraffin. Then they used bleach to rid the place of paraffin; then eau de cologne —that made it smell even worse. 308 A Face to Meet the Faces But there I stayed seven years, as much a part of his studio as the mattress propped on tin cans, the iron stove, the yellow bowl. We lived for Beauty and Experience— we smoked the lovely opium with les autres, staring into the flame of dreams. We had nothing to do with those petits bourgeois farts who lived in the classy parts of town. Weekends we might buy Pablo a shirt for a couple centimes at the open-air market. In winter, tea left in a cup would be ice by morning. Summer found Pablo painting shirtless in the heat, red scarf around his waist. Some days we ate only macaroni or dined in cafés on credit, running up bills so high they let us in so they had some hope of payment. Once we were so hungry we cooked and ate a sausage Minou dragged in. But sometimes a dealer came and left quite enough for wine, and Pablo would buy me lavender perfume in cut glass bouteilles. Oui, certainment, he loved me, or the idea of me, or the idea of love. You can see: he watches as I sleep. Day after day, I lay behind a curtain while he painted and held court. He said he would starve for me. (But what I had to do to get him to wash!) He enshrined my hat as if it were a holy relic. He forbade me model for the other painters, or even shop or clean. So I slept and read, got used to being la femme decoratif, as Gertrude called me. With me in his life he left behind brothels and blue canvasses. Rose hues bloomed, saltimbanques began their strolls. Still and always 309 The Muse Talks Back he was a man who gnawed his own bones, who only ever thought about his painting. That was all he ever wanted to do, though doing it did not make him happy. And there was no asking him, Pablo, what is the matter? As for me, I get bored. If I’d been a man, I could have lived by my skills. I hated being locked in (like the white mouse he kept in a drawer), while one girl or another at the Lapin Agile sat laughing in his lap. And so, I never meant to leave but did and then could not find my way back. ...