Cooking for Picasso by Camille Aubray Read Free Book Online Page B

again. And, he noted, today was Thursday—always a fortuitous day for arrivals and departures, for casting out old demons and beginning new ventures.
    But there in his mailbox he spied a newly delivered pouch from Paris. Letters were being forwarded—selectively—by his old friend and assistant, Sabartés, who awaited instructions on how to reply to them, so that no one would discover where Picasso had disappeared to.
    At first, he threw the package on the desk in the back room. But that wouldn’t work. It was sitting there just like a spider, Picasso thought. The only way to kill its fearful power was to confront it.
    With a defiant flourish, he opened the parcel, bypassing the envelopes from friends, art dealers and magazine editors and galleries, all the while dreading that he’d find one particular stationery—the one from a lawyer’s office, which had become so wretchedly familiar that it made his gut freeze the instant he spotted it.
    “The devil!” he exclaimed. He tore it open and scanned it rapidly with growing disgust. What pit bulls his estranged Russian wife had hired! Well, he shouldn’t be surprised. To marry an aristocrat was one thing. To marry a ballerina, quite another. But to marry a woman who was both! You couldn’t breed a more highly strung bitch if you tried.
    Yet he still respected the delicate, volatile, dark-haired Olga. He had thoroughly enjoyed being her husband, dressing up like a dandy in fine clothes with “a true lady” on his arm, whose social connections opened the doors of the best parlors in Europe for him.
    “In Spain, a man can keep a wife on one side of town and a mistress on the other for years, and they’d only find out about each other at the man’s funeral, when he is beyond caring,” Pablo grumbled.
    Not so in Paris. Discretion lasted only so long. Once his young blonde mistress became pregnant, mutual “friends” couldn’t resist letting Olga know all about Marie-Thérèse. Now his wife was devoting all her time, energy and fury to winning this legal battle. How could an artist compete with that?
    But divorce was out of the question because the marriage agreement he’d signed, subject to French law, required an equal division of property. And property, apparently, included art. Olga’s expensive, fancy lawyers were poised to split his collection in half, like the woman in the Bible who would cut a baby in two rather than let someone else have it. They’d even gotten the judge to put a padlock on Picasso’s studio in Paris.
    “Imagine locking a man out of his own workplace!” he brooded, still incensed.
    Olga already had possession of their son, Paulo. That should be enough for any woman. As it was, Picasso could seldom bear to sell a painting when it was done; the whole process of separation from his creations depressed him for days. What did the money-men know of that kind of pain?
    No, divorce must be avoided. A legal separation was the only answer. So the bargaining had begun, and the endless torture of waiting, waiting, waiting for a settlement. On and on it went, month after ghastly month, for over a year now; and for the first time in his life, Picasso stopped painting. He was not dead in those months, but he was not really alive—more like a man tied under a swinging blade that was slowly swooshing closer and closer to him until it would finally slice him to death.
    In the end, he’d simply had to get out of Paris. Today’s letter from his own lawyer was at least hopeful; negotiations were now under way which might finally persuade Olga simply to separate. In return, she’d get the country house outside Paris—and there would be other financial concessions because she’d make sure that he paid a hefty price for his freedom—but the paintings, which were all that mattered, wouldn’t so drastically fall under the axe, after all.
    Whatever the outcome, here on the Côte d’Azur where the sun shone brightly now, a man could surely regain his