Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [62]
I arose and walked until I emerged onto Las Ramblas, where there were crowds around various men who were covered in body paint and pretending to be statues. They moved suddenly, scaring the children, when you gave them coins. I continued down Las Ramblas and onto the pier. There was a small outdoor bar on the little stretch of beach and I sat under the red plastic awning and ordered patatas bravas and a beer. I drank the beer quickly and ordered another. A funicular descended from the hills to a point near the beach. There were many teenagers in bathing suits although the water must have been cold. A small wave of sexual desire broke over me. When I finished the second beer I walked back to Las Ramblas, drifted for a while, then flagged down a cab and went to the Picasso Museum. Teresa had mentioned wanting to show it to me; maybe she would be there.
I stood, I made myself stand, in front of the early portrait of his mother. It yielded nothing. The woman, in profile, is half-asleep; her head is leaning slightly forward and her eyes are closed. Pastel on paper. 1896. He was what, fifteen? A freak of nature. I could convince myself I saw space curling around the figure or areas where space flattened suddenly, but I did not see this. Maybe I did see, however, the self-assurance of a painter who assumed his juvenilia would one day be scoured for the seeds of genius, embarrassing phrase. If the work felt uncanny, it was because it was mortgaged; it was borrowing from future accomplishment as much as pointing to it. It had started to rain a little; I could hear it falling on the skylight.
I wondered how my project would have differed if I’d come to Barcelona instead of Madrid. I thought of this in order to avoid thinking about Teresa, wherever she was. That I was contingent, interchangeable, I took as a given. Slightly more impetuous brushstrokes in the self-portrait, also 1896. A shameless celebration of his own lips. The left eye, however, blackened by shadow, looked like it was blackened by a fist. I tried to imagine myself at fifteen. I remembered my brother teaching me to drive in the parking lot of the V.A.
Only the juvenilia interested me. I walked indifferently through the rose rooms and blue rooms and nodded to the guards; I brought them greetings from the museum guards of Madrid. If Teresa were there, I would have asked her: what painting would you most like to stand in front of hour after hour, day after day? It wasn’t the same question as what is your favorite painting. Or what period would you most like to dwell in and protect. Would you prefer to have to see, month after month, the figurative or the abstract? I remembered learning to drive and bonfires at Lake Clinton and what they called “experimenting” with alcohol and drugs. A tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle or supposition. Now I was an experimental writer.
My mom, whenever we went to a museum, told me that painting seemed to have developed in reverse; that if an alien were to arrive at a museum, the alien would think the abstract canvases came first, hundreds if not thousands of years before the Renaissance. Unless the alien happened to look like a yellow triangle abutting a plane of blue. I always dismissed this theory in my mother’s presence, but if Teresa were with me, I would have offered it as my own. You could say it about Picasso’s particular development and it would sound intelligent, right or wrong. In the gallery devoted to Picasso’s relation to African art, there were two young kids, six or seven. I didn’t see the rest of the family. One walked up quickly to a large canvas and pawed it, clearly on a dare. Both kids ran out of the gallery, presumably back to their parents. There was no guard around. I approached the canvas the child had touched, a miniature precursor of, or study for, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I double-checked