Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (25 page)

I bought a copy of
Alcools
, cubist poetry, and
Calligrammes
, a selection of poetry and stories by the soldier and poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Adrienne pointed to a chair near the entrance, and said the author sat there many times. Naturally, my brother teased me about my attraction to the bookstore owner, and about my literary ambition to learn how to read poetry in French.

Calligrammes
was published at the end of the war, a cubist irony of literature. The poetic words were visual scenes, the natural motion of images, direct in translation, and more memorable than the tiresome lessons of time, tense, and grammar. I tried to translate the first few descriptive lines of “A La Santé” from
Alcools.

Avant d'entrer dans ma cellule
Ahead of entering my cell
Il a fallu me mettre nu
It was necessary for me to be naked
Et quelle voix sinistre ulule
And the shouts of sinister voices
Guillaume qu'es-tu devenu

Guillaume what have you become

Café du Départ was close to the Galerie Crémieux, but we had no sense of direction at the time. We walked down the sunny side of Boulevard Saint-Germain to Rue Dante and then to the art gallery at 4 Rue de la Bûcherie, a block from the River Seine and the Cathédrale Notre-Dame.

Nathan Crémieux, the owner of the gallery, was away for lunch so we waited in the tiny park across the street. Native ledger art, red and blue horses, bold feathers, painted pottery, curious objects from various native cultures, and from several pueblos in the American Southwest, were displayed in the gallery windows.

Harry Greene told us that Rue de la Bûcherie was one of the oldest streets in Paris. A perfect location for a gallery devoted to native creative and ceremonial arts. There were stately antique dealers on the street, several conventional and modernist galleries, and restaurants nearby.

Nathan Crémieux saw us in the park as he returned from lunch. He opened the door, turned on the threshold, smiled, waved, and invited us into the gallery. His fedora and natty tailored clothes reminded me of William Hole in the Day and our dressy cousin Ignatius Vizenor.

The walls of the gallery were covered with native ledger art and other paintings, and rows of wooden cabinets contained pueblo pottery, clay figures, mantas, kilts, sashes, and blankets. We learned later that he refused to negotiate the trade of kachinas, or medicine swathes and bundles, a decision we obviously respected.

Nathan was moved by the memories of our friend Odysseus who had worked for many years with his father and uncle as a trader in the Southwest. He fondly remembered many stories that his father Henri told about the traders, especially Jefferson Young and his son who were the most honorable traders with natives. He pointed to the art and objects in the gallery to show what his father and uncle had collected over more than twenty years as traders.

Aloysius studied the ledger art in the gallery and told Nathan that Odysseus had given him original paintings of blue horses by two Cheyenne artists, Bear's Heart and Squint Eyes. Nathan described himself as a modern trader of native art, a natural continuation of the just trade that his father
started with natives. The names of ledger artists were familiar, of course, and then the trader turned to open a cabinet drawer to show us similar visionary paintings by other native artists who had been political prisoners at Fort Marion, Florida. Nathan was emotional, deeply troubled by the visionary scenes, that so great and natural an artistic perception was both stimulated and contained in a military prison.

Only a few of the native artists continued to paint once they were released from prison. I told the trader that most native art was a natural vision of liberty. The trader seemed to be heartened by my comments. We assured the trader that most native stories were distinctively ironic, a necessity to evade the romance of the primitive and sentiments of victimry.

Nathan seemed very concerned that we had not eaten lunch. He awkwardly embraced me by the shoulders as we walked out of the gallery, and promised that we could examine the entire collection later. Nearby in a café he told more stories about his father and the experiences of his family as Jews in France. A distant relative had changed the family surname, but only to overcome the initial bias and political exclusion of certain names in France. Crémieux became an honorable name in politics, native trade, and as the name of an art gallery. Nathan and his father were active in religious practices and duties of the synagogue.

Aloysius told the trader about our surname and the union of fur traders and natives on the White Earth Reservation. Hudon dit Beaulieu was conveyed by the
voyageurs
in the fur trade, and many natives returned with the same family name as soldiers in the defense of France.

Nathan was familiar with the names of Jewish traders that Odysseus mentioned in his stories. Julius Meyer, for instance, was one of the most active traders in Omaha, Nebraska, and the Northern Plains, and had boldly escorted natives to the Paris
Exposition Universelle
in 1889. Nathan had actually met Julius and natives on a tour of the Eiffel Tower. He invited the travelers that afternoon to visit his new gallery. Nathan was only twenty years old at the time, and he was impressed that Julius had paid the entire cost of travel for the natives. The natives on tour and the address of the Galerie Crémieux, a street of butchery, were mentioned in stories told by Odysseus.

I was awkward, at first, and could not easily talk with Nathan about the
fur trade and our ancestors, not because of his manner or anything he actually said, but probably because of insecurity. I was overawed by his generosity, education, and experiences. My tendency was to tease the trader, but that seemed inappropriate at the time.

Nathan invited us to stay in a guest room at the back of the gallery, and later that day he escorted us to the Eiffel Tower and then to Montparnasse. The sun fluttered between streams of clouds, and lighted our faces on the stairs of the tower. The trader was a great storier, and a tentative teaser, a creative practice that he had learned from his father. Nathan was not hesitant, and his stories were rich in details but not in contradictions. The tease of the obvious, and ironic stories were natural to most natives.

Nathan introduced us to Rosalie Tobia, the feisty cook and owner of the Chez Rosalie restaurant at 3 Rue Campagne Première in Montparnasse. Mère Rosalie was Italian, a former nude model for Amedeo Modigliani, and she prepared outstanding meals in a tiny kitchen. The restaurant was narrow, smoky, and crowded with four marble tables. The daily menu was printed on a chalkboard.

Mère Rosalie bought fresh fruit and vegetables every day at the markets in Les Halles. Nathan translated the menu, and we ordered
Tranche de Melon
,
Soupe aux Legumes
,
Spaghetti
,
Aubergine à la Turque
, and
Pont l'Évêque
, a special
fromage
, or cheese. For dessert we had café and
Gateau de Semoule
, a semolina pudding. I was very hungry, the food was great, a truly family meal, and we were teased with every bite by Mère Rosalie.

The cost of the meals was very inexpensive, only two francs for
Aubergine à la Turque
, and less for the melon and cheese. Two francs was less than ten cents in dollars, and the entire cost of the dinner for three was about a dollar. The wine was separate but not expensive. Nothing was expensive at the time.

Nathan then invited us to have a drink at the Café du Dôme a few blocks from Chez Rosalie. He was truly surprised that night when the waiter recognized my brother. Nathan was amused by our stories of Harry Greene and the blue ravens my brother had painted the night before at dinner. Aloysius had left his art books of recent blue ravens at the gallery.

The Café du Dôme and La Rotonde were located on the Boulevard du Montparnasse near Boulevard Raspail, two sovereign cafés that sustained
the grace and rivalry of art and politics, and the manners of each café must have thrived on favors and waned on the slights of intense artists and authors.

Nathan ordered a carafe of wine and later insisted that we stop by Le Chemin du Montparnasse at 21 Avenue du Maine, a famous alley of raggedy ateliers of great artists, writers, composers, and sculptors, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Jean Cocteau, Amedeo Modigliani, Guillaume Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Erik Satie, and many others. I recited the first two lines of images in “
Les Fenêtres
” from
Calligrammes
by Apollinaire, and so revealed my passion for his poetry.

Du rouge au vert tout le jaune se meurt
Red with green and all the yellow dies
Quand chantent les aras dans les forêts natales

When the macaws sing in the native forests

Le Chemin du Montparnasse, the alley of ateliers, was only a few blocks from the Café du Dôme. Nathan directed us to the entrance of the narrow alley and told marvelous stories about a special dinner held two years earlier to honor Georges Braque, one of the most inspired cubist painters at the time. Nathan pointed to the atelier where the actual banquet was held. Braque had been wounded in the war and had returned from service. Blaise Cendrars, or Frédéric Louis Sauser, the poet and novelist, as Nathan related, was at the banquet for Braque. Cendrars had served with the French Foreign Legion and lost his right arm in the First World War.

Mariya Ivanovna Vassiliéva, or Marie Vassilieff, the cubist painter, and Max Jacob, the poet and painter, had arranged the dinner at Le Chemin du Montparnasse. We walked slowly into the dark alley, the ateliers were faintly lighted but no one was there at the time. Nathan had attended many artistic events, dinners, musical performances, exhibitions, literary parties, and lectures in the atelier of Marie Vassilieff. She had founded the Académie Vassilieff.

Nathan imagined the alley of ateliers that night at the dinner table to celebrate Georges Braque. He named and then pointed to each person seated at the conjured table in the alley. Marie Vassilieff was at one end of the banquet table with Henri Matisse who held a platter of roast turkey. Seated on the same side of the table in the alley were Blaise Cendrars, Pablo Picasso,
Marcelle Braque, in that order, Walther Halvorsen, Fernand Léger, and at the very end Max Jacob.

Nathan moved to the other side of the table in the alley and pointed to Erik Satie, the pianist and composer with a trimmed beard, then Juan Gris, the painter, Georges Braque, with a laurel wreath crown, Alfredo Pina, who was standing with a raised pistol, and then the seductive Béatrice
Hastings.

The trader told stories about each of the dinner guests and at the same time he moved to the theatrical positions of the artists in the banquet scenes in the alley. Pina, a sculptor, aimed his pistol at Modigliani who had not been invited to the banquet because of his drunken rages, and because of his jealousy. Marie pushed her boozy friend Modigliani down the stairs and outside into the alley. Picasso and Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, the painter, locked the door to the atelier.

Nathan assured us that no shots were fired and no artistic bonds were ever broken or lost that evening. The politics of painters was similar to native conduct on the reservation. Béatrice, a poet, and former model and lover of Modigliani, was at the banquet with her new lover Alfredo Pina. Nathan moved closer to the imagined table in the alley, paused near Pina, and mentioned the portraits that Modigliani had painted of Béatrice. The erotic elongated neck, narrow face, and distinctive eye squint in the portraits might have driven the poet into the arms of the serious, handsome sculptor Pina.

Aloysius moved closer to the trader as he described the scenes of the banquet in the alley. My brother created an outline scene of the table on a newspaper. Most of the painters and poets were about ten years older than we were at the time. I imagined the singular artists and the original portrayals, the tease and touch of the poets, and yet we hardly knew anything about the artists and the great wave of cubist paintings.

We learned later that cubism and other avant-garde styles were censured as subversive and Germanic. The police had seized cubist art at the gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and the art was sold at auction after the war. Picasso, who had been discovered by the art dealer, was so concerned as a foreign artist that he turned to ordinary portraiture to avoid any suspicion of ironic or decadent enemy art.

Everything was so new, original, immediate, enlivened at the end of the
war, and even more fantastic because of the stories the trader told that night at Le Chemin du Montparnasse.

Aloysius painted several blue raven scenes at the banquet in honor of Georges Braque. That night we pretended to be included in the marvelous occasions of artists, poets, sculptors, and novelists. The sounds and memories of the war were almost out of mind after only two days in Paris.

Marie Vassilieff walked around the corner at a convenient moment that night and concluded the last scene of the banquet in the alley. Her arrival was a miraculous coincidence, or a strategy of the story. That she walked into the actual story about the banquet was fantastic, by chance or maneuver, and persuasive either way.

Marie was short, nimble, and wore a black gaucho hat with a wide brim. She smiled, turned with a slight bow, a coy gesture in the presence of Nathan. We were introduced as native artists who had survived the war. Marie reached for my hand, and the warm caress touched my heart. I was enchanted with her manner and motion, the serene turn of her thin lips, and beautiful dreamy blue eyes.

Marie invited us into her atelier and home on the alley for wine, baguette, and cheese. I had first imagined the banquet of artists in the alley, and then pictured the actual scene at the table in her home. The last scene continued that night over wine and stories. Magnificent paintings by Marc Chagall, Modigliani, Matisse, Léger, and several drawings by Picasso covered the walls of the atelier. Marie was nude in one painting by Modigliani. I pretended not to stare at the seductive portrayal. The pose and colors of her body were magical in the faint light.