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Dora and the Minotaur: My life with Picasso Slavenka Drakulić; translation by Christina Pribichevich-Zoric Foreword The famous French surrealist photographer and painter Dora Maar, born Henriette Theodora Markovitch, died in Paris in 1997 at the age of ninety. Among the many French papers, documents and notebooks found in her Rue de Savoie apartment was a black notebook in Croatian, the language of her father Joseph Markovitch (Josip Marković, b. Sisak 1874 – d. Paris 1973). Though fluent in Croatian, she seldom spoke it, except with her father, whereas French, the language of her mother Louise Julie Voisin (b. Cognac 1877 – d. Paris 1942) she used daily. The Croatian notes may well have had a special meaning for her because she had an emotional connection with the language, which, in her case, was embodied in her father, not her mother. Known as a photographer, Dora Maar won fame is as the muse of Pablo Picasso (b. Málaga 1881 – d. Mougins 1973). Unsurprisingly, her journal revolves around Picasso, the relationship between two creative people, one of whom is extremely dominant, their break-up, its traumatic impact on Dora, and the aftermath of their intense affair. Although the entries in her black notebook are untitled, it seems apposite to call it after one of Picasso’s most famous works, Dora and the Minotaur, the 1936 drawing that perhaps best symbolizes the nature of their relationship. Judging by some of the quoted references, most of the undated entries – partly inspired by her conversations with the psychoanalyst Dr. Jacques Lacan, marked with the letter A (for analysis) - were written between 1958 and 1959. They are penned in purple ink, in neat handwriting. This was the 2
period when Dora Maar withdrew from public life, living a lonely existence for the next four decades until her death. Her writing looks like material for a future autobiography, which either she subsequently abandoned or simply was never found. The notebook – and it may be the famous “Ménerbes notebook” mentioned by James Taylor, Alicia Dujovne Ortiz and others in their books about Dora – was sold at auction in 1999 under the title The Last Reminiscences of Dora Maar. Following the death of the anonymous buyer, it wound up in the native country of Dora’s father. The notebook is now in the possession of someone in Rijeka who not only knows Dora’s work but also knew Dora herself. The new owner contacted the editor below, on condition that neither his name nor the name of the previous owner be made public. Even though this is a fragmentary and indeed incomplete text, it offers valuable insight into the creative personalities of both Dora Maar and Picasso and as such deserves to be published. Here it is, with the copyeditor’s corrections and editor’s comments. S.D.
Rummaging through my papers for an issue of a magazine recently, I came across an old notebook. I thought it was empty but on the first page I saw a note dated June 1945: I was in such a good mood when I left Jacques’ yesterday! I feel better already. For days after the electric shocks and the hospital my legs hurt, I walked stiffly, as if on crutches. In fact my whole body hurt. I dragged myself down the hallway 3
overlooking the courtyard, but I didn’t know if I was still in the hospital or in my apartment. The green of the bushes in the courtyard merged with the white and grey of the surrounding walls, as if a membrane had been drawn over my eyes. It felt like swimming in muddy water. My brain was slow to recover. Jacques got me out of Sainte Anne where they almost killed me. They strap you down to a bed, shove a wad of cloth into your mouth and then release the electric current through your body. I don’t really know how many times I underwent what the hospital calls “treatment”. I never asked. It’s a fad, Jacques said the first time we met after I came out of the hospital, a stupid fad. Medicine is no different from hats or shoes. But this fad is the reason why my body is still broken! Forget about the electric shocks, you’ll recover, why you’re not even forty yet. You’ll come here and we’ll talk. Nothing more. You don’t need any kind of therapy or drugs, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of anymore. I don’t want to talk about the hospital, I barely got out of there alive. You don’t have to talk about the hospital; you decide what we talk about. Well, I guess about why I wound up in the hospital in the first place and why I’m here with you now for therapy. Supposedly I had a nervous breakdown. Picasso got scared about my state of mind and called you for help. I don’t think he was really 6 - worried, only somebody who doesn’t know him can think that. I think he dumped me in a lunatic asylum because he just wanted to get rid of me… So tell me, what would somebody who knows him think?
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I gave a dismissive wave of my hand. The afternoon sun lit up the bookshelves, his huge walnut desk, his jug ears and thin ghostly figure clad in a navy blue jacket. His office smelled of books and cigars.
On my way home I stopped off at the stationary store and bought myself a hardcover black lined notebook. I hated these notebooks when I was at school because I had very neat handwriting and it never went over the lines. But I felt that I needed them now, that with my muddled mind I’d find it hard to write in a straight line. I also bought a bottle of purple ink. I can try to put some things down on paper, I thought, slipping the notebook into my bag. After all, I don’t have to show it to anybody, not even to Jacques. I’ve even decided to write in Croatian, it will protect it from prying eyes, although the only person I know here who knows the language is my father. I’m sure that writing will help me pull myself together. I’ve got to try something on my own and not just leave everything to Jacques. Because I know him from before, not through Picasso, but through Jacques’ wife Sylvia; we became friends while she was still married to Georges Bataille. And I find knowing them is somehow inhibiting in this new doctor-patient relationship. That’s why I think that if I can remember some things from my past and write them down, maybe I will understand better why I had a nervous breakdown and wound up in the hospital. I just have to focus, as if I’m preparing to stand behind the camera again, focus and look into - myself. I think I can do that now, with the help of Jacques and this notebook. It’s the same process in my profession: when I take photographs or paint, I choose the subject, I control
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reality, I shape it. I decide, and I’ll do the same thing here. You decide, isn’t that what he told me? His words made me feel better, because he urged and encouraged me to talk instead of keeping me drugged and strapped to a bed. I can still see that horrible machine with all those wires, I can still feel those cold electrodes on my temples and the waxy taste of the wad in my mouth. But when have I ever taken a decision, except when photographing, which I haven’t done in years? Was it all those years ago when I decided to study photography, and then everything that followed was the result of other people’s decisions? I can - 7 barely remember wanting to take pictures or that feeling of control I had, of freedom, of confidence in my decisions, in myself. Where did it all go, and why? How could I have let myself finish up in the hospital? That’s what I want to write about. *** And that is all there was in the notebook! I was somehow struck by those forgotten words, written more than a decade ago, and especially by the sentence: I can do it. It sounded as if I was trying to convince myself. But it obviously didn’t work. The blank pages that followed bothered me. Why had I stopped writing? What had I been afraid of? What had inhibited me? I could see the face of my psychiatrist, the display window of the stationary store, my reflection in it. I remembered that brief but clear surge of hope after my first visit. When I stepped out of his house I looked up at the cloudless blue sky. I remembered the title of Georges Bataille’s book Blue of Noon, not so much because of the story and what he supposedly wrote about me, but because of the title. Was this the blue he had had in mind? 6
The wind ran its fingers through my hair, I took a deep breath and, like a sailboat, abandoned myself to its whims. I drifted for a while, enjoying the bright easiness of it. Having spent weeks in a more or less comatose state, drifting between light and dark, as if tossed into a dark well, doomed to await my end there, for the first time I did not feel lost that day, I did not feel utterly abandoned. I reread that first sentence: “I was in such a good mood when I left Jacques’ yesterday.” Only a few pages later, the cheerful tone and optimism gives way to silence and blank pages. Nobody had told me nor had I yet read about the after-effects of electric shocks: that the unpleasant, painful “therapy” would be followed by euphoria. So my feelings had been due to a chemical reaction in my brain! That initial enthralment with Jacques, and later the dark thoughts and constant fatigue which had stopped me from picking up my pen. Was the electric shock treatment responsible for my inability to concentrate as well? Or for my occasional memory loss? Jacques told me that a patient can sometimes suffer memory loss but that it usually comes back. I’m afraid that at the time too little was known about the after-effects and I was simply a guinea pig for this newest fad… How much did the psychotherapy help me? Was it too brief for me to really get better? My hands – the same hands that Picasso painted so often, with their still smooth skin and long polished nails – are holding the notebook now. It is big, its corners slightly frayed as if I had toted it around with me everywhere, thumbed it, constantly changing my mind about what to do with it. What 7
really surprised me was how thick it was. Had I honestly thought I would fill up all those pages? The few words I did write all those years ago are a pathetic testimony to how helpless I felt. But I will write now what I did not have the strength or ability to write then. Because Jacques - who in the meantime has become the famous Dr. Lacan and isn’t my doctor anymore, just an old acquaintance - was wrong about one thing. Only now, I think, am I actually able to make decisions, now, long after I finished, or to be more precise, discontinued my therapy with him. Yes, it took me longer than I thought after that first talk of ours. And it is really only now, after all these years, that I remember some of the subjects and questions we discussed. Only now that the doors are slowly opening for me to perhaps finally examine my life from a different angle, from an emotional and historical distance. I am going to try to record these emerging memories in this same notebook. I’ve even got that purple ink still lying around somewhere. *** Tell me, what do you see when you close your eyes? Jacques asked me that first day. A curtain. I see a white curtain billowing in the breeze, I said, and then stopped. I could feel my throat tighten, tears welling up. The curtain is hanging over the glass door of my room in Buenos Aires, the door separates my room from my parents’. I’ve been seeing it in my mind these last few days – the glass door, the room, my childhood. I just have to close my eyes and I’m back there again. I’m four, maybe five years old. I’m 8
in bed, gazing at the almost transparent white curtain on the door, the only obstacle between me and my parents. It’s morning and through the curtain I can make out my parents’ bed and hear my father’s muffled, menacing voice. I know that tone, he uses it only with maman, and only since we moved here. Later maman says, your daddy had another attack. She calls it l’attaque. As if Marko, that’s what Julie calls him, is a lunatic and not just a choleric man whose day is ruined by the sight of his wife’s scowling face first thing in the morning. I can feel it, I can sense it in his voice, he wants to yell at the snivelling woman lying in bed next to him, but he can’t because of me. And so when his voice goe it sounds like a hiss, as if he’s turned into a big loud snake that is strangling, squeezing her throat, leaving just enough air in her lungs for her to weep quietly. Of course, I wasn’t supposed to hear their fights. But my room was right next to theirs. Dividing the two was a sliding glass door with a thin piece of cloth over it that only just covered the glass, but did not block out the sound. My father spoke to Julie in her language, French, which we spoke at home. But I also understood his language, Croatian; it sounded loving, warm, special to my young ears. I loved its gentle tones. Mila moja Dorice, my sweet little Dora, my father would say leaning down to kiss me on the cheek. But his kiss was always wet somehow and I couldn’t help shuddering from the touch of his lips. There were other things I wasn’t supposed to hear from their room either. The sound of increasingly heavy breathing would wake me up in the middle of the night. My mother’s voice would rise to a sob. I remember, little as I 9
was, that I thought she would burst into tears any moment and I wanted to climb out of bed and open the glass door. I’d get up in the dark and search for my slippers which had wound up under my bed somewhere. I can still hear the creak of the wooden floor as I groped around for my slippers. Why was I even looking for them? After all, the parquet was smooth and I wasn’t cold. Just as I stood up, having decided to walk over to the door in my bare feet, silence fell and I quietly slipped back into bed. My parents had probably heard me and gone still. But one time I did open the door because I was worried. I saw my father on top of my mother. His silhouette against the light of the window looked menacing, dark, it seemed to loom over her. Was he going to strangle her? She let out a faint sound, something between a moan and a sigh. Daddy, I whispered, is maman ok? My father sat up in bed. Everything’s fine, my little Dora, go back to bed. Maman just had a bad dream, but she’s all right now. I believed him, what else could I do. Maman would sometimes make frightening sounds – a catch in her breath, groans, muffled cries. But my father’s words would calm me down. He was probably surprised that I was even awake. My parents never thought that I might be watching over them as they watched over me, that I could not but hear them, that I knew much more about them than they might like – why, I was still only a child after all. They didn’t think that a growing child could start to understand their coded language, which they used, I realize only now, to express their passion, hostility or indifference.
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I wonder why they gave me that room? As their only child was I really so delicate a little plant that I had to be kept in a glasshouse and protected day and night? But my parents obviously thought there was a big advantage to having a glass door. True, at night they could hear my even breathing and fall peacefully asleep themselves. In the morning it was usually my father who pulled back the edge of the curtain and peeked in to see if I was awake. If I opened my eyes, his face would light up, he’d step into my room and shower my damp head of dark curls with kisses. If I pretended to be asleep, especially when he had l’attaque, he would just stroke my head. He never left the house without first coming into my room to see “Daddy’s little girl”, as he called me. They must have decided on that room out of trepidation and it was probably one of the rare decisions they took together. Mamanwas already thirty when she had me, she’d lost all hope of ever having a child and she’d tell anyone who cared to listen how in the hospital the midwife had criticized her for leaving it so late. Even my father, who was thirty-three at the time, wasn’t considered young anymore. Their marriage didn’t stand a chance without a child; at least my arrival imposed a certain structure on them, gave them responsibilities that kept them together, as I soon learned. When I was born my father switched all of his affection from my mother to me and Julie was accorded the status of my guardian while he was at work. Julie, how’s the little one, were the first thing he’d say as he walked in the door in the evening.
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After he had an attack, maman would keep to her bed, glad that I wasn’t bothering her. She was mad at my father not just because he’d turned on her in that threatening voice so early in the morning – at least if you shouted like a real man! she would snap spitefully – but also because she had had to move from Paris to Buenos Aires. To that horrible city, among savages, she would say. She found everything in the city disgusting – the streets, the dust, the men who gawked hungrily at the women, the market where the peasants displayed their ware on the ground, the ladies in last century’s dresses… The only reason Julie had agreed to leave Paris was his job and the promise that it would make them rich. People go to Argentina to get rich, he said. Yes, he could be charming and persuasive when he wanted to be, she had to give him that. But as time passed and there was no sign of the promised wealth, her vexation grew, and so did her reproachful complaints. I had to listen to it all through the glass wall, along with her heaving sighs and sobs. But their double bed did not creak much at night anymore. God, everything is so crude here, so primitive, maman would say to Madame DuPont, with whom she had become friendly only because she was French too. My mother thought it was very posh to be French in Buenos Aires in those days, but she soon discovered that that was not the case. Our maid Juana, whom maman called Jeanne, explained to her that lots of impoverished French women here went into prostitution, which was why prostitutes were called francesa. ***
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Glass does not just protect. I remember the feeling of being exposed to staring eyes. The feeling of being in a display window or aquarium. I would feel my father’s eyes on me long after he had left for work. I knew that if I didn’t get up, maman would peer in to make sure I was still alive, still breathing. She worried about me until the day she died. She behaved as if I was incapable of taking care of myself, both then and later when I was already grown up and living in Paris. Poor Julie, maybe she was right after all! Her constant worrying was annoying because it restricted me; she seemed to look at me in a different way than my father. Hers was a weary look, without the warm anticipation of seeing me wake up, without a smile or kiss when she left, as if she were leaving forever. I learned that maman had better things to do than devote herself to me early in the morning. I knew that she would spend the next hour locked up in the bathroom with cold compresses on her eyes to reduce the signs of crying, during which time I would be left to my own devices, free of her control. Why are memories of that room from my childhood coming back to me now? I know, I see it sometimes when I feel like a child again. When I want to run away, go back to the past. When I feel unprotected. There is no one and nothing to stand between reality and me. And I have laid down my camera forever. My hands are empty now. I didn’t like my room, but it was my only refuge. As I got older, however, I felt increasingly exposed. In the end, I would dress only in the bathroom. I remember feeling both protected and exposed, I remember that glass cage that I couldn’t leave, that gave me nowhere to hide from peering eyes. It 13
made me uncomfortable even as a child and many years later I recognized that feeling as being due to some sort of parental abuse: the unease of being exposed to unwanted looks, something that later made me retreat more and more behind the lens of my beloved camera. For a long time, my camera served as a shield against other people. I would retreat and hide behind it – yet, it was also a means of communication, except that I set the rules. The camera was my own piece of personal magic, taming everything that stood before it. I had to find a way to protect myself against this feeling of exposure. And I did it through play: I am seven or eight years old, I remember, and I like to play with light. The glass door is open; shafts of sunlight reach my bed. I remember liking being on my own, without any supervision. I open and shut my eyes; the translucent red behind my closed eyelids is replaced by the dazzling brilliance of the sun’s rays. I put my hand up to the window. The strong light penetrates my skin and I see dark strokes – my bones? I wonder – and a thin web of veins. My hand looks completely different, like a transparent little creature, a jellyfish maybe like the one I once saw in an aquarium. In any event, it is like a completely alien thing that has nothing to do with me. I put this thing into the dark of the sheet, and to my astonishment, the “magic” now over, it’s my plain old hand again. I am fascinated by the metamorphosis of parts of my own body. The play of light and shade can transform one thing into another. I am a magician, I tell maman later, I turn the known into the unknown, here look! I don’t know the word artist yet. Maman tells me not to be silly, she doesn’t 14
see anything even when I show her how easily I can turn my hand into a jellyfish using only strong sunlight. But she says that a hand is certainly not a thing, as if I didn’t know that. I realize that she doesn’t understand the magic of light or my love of playing pretend. It doesn’t upset me, though, because I have something that’s mine and mine alone, my own secret. When I was a little girl in Buenos Aires, I told Jacques, I liked going for a walk in the park with maman. Sometimes she would take me to the playground to play with the other little girls. They spoke Spanish, the language of maids, sailors, porters and cattle herders. I remember her saying that it was a useful but filthy language, filthy like the people around us. Maman and I joined my father in Buenos Aires when I was three. Even then, as a little girl, I felt torn between my parents, between the French and Croatian and now this new language, Spanish, that my father already spoke quite fluently but we didn’t know a word of. Torn between my mother’s perfumed clothes and Juana’s wide skirts with its hoard of hundreds of unfamiliar smells. As if I myself was made up of old and new, clean and dirty parts. I’ve always felt like that. Even now? Jacques asked. Yes. I’m a mixture of Theodora, Dora, Dorica, Dorita, Adora, Dorissima. My answer seemed to intrigue him, he jotted down something in his notebook but asked me no more questions.
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