To the Land of the Living (24 page)

Stale and old, old and stale, old, old, old, old.

“
Me cago en Dios
!” he said out loud.

“What is that?” she said. Her voice was deep, mysterious, exotic. “What are those words?”

“Spanish,” he said. “When I curse, I curse in Spanish, always.” He spoke now in English. Practically everyone spoke English here, even he, who in his other life had hated that language with a strange passionate hatred. But it was either that or speak ancient Latin, which he found an even worse notion. He marveled at the idea that he was actually speaking English. You made many concessions in this place. Among his friends he spoke French, still, and among his oldest friends Spanish, or sometimes Catalan. With strangers, English. But to curse, Spanish, always Spanish.

“You are angry?” she said. “With me?”

“Not with you, no. With myself. With these brushes. With the Devil. How hellish the Afterworld is!”

“You are very funny,” she said.

“Droll, yes, that is what I am. Droll.” He put his finger to his lips. “Let me work. I think I see the way.”

And for a moment or two he actually did. Bending low over the canvas, he gave himself up fully to the work. Frowning, chewing his cigarette, scratching his head, painting quickly, confidently. The wondrous goddess-woman rose up from the canvas at him. Her eyes gleamed with strange ancient wisdom. But he was helpless. The painting turned, it turned again, always moving away from him: it showed bones and teeth where he wanted robes and flesh, and when he fought with it it took a neoclassical turn, with gaudy late-period slashes of color also and a hint of cubism again trying to break through down in the lower left. An impossible hodgepodge it was, all his old styles at once. The painting had no life at all. An art student could have painted it, if he had had enough to drink. Maybe what he needed was a new studio. Or a holiday somewhere. But this had been going on, he reflected, since he
had first come here, since the day of – he hesitated, not even wanting to think the filthy words –

– the day of his death –

“All right,” he said. “Enough for tonight. You can relax. What is your name?”

“Ninsun.”

“Ah. A lovely name. A lovely woman, lovely name. You are Babylonian?”

“Sumerian,” she said.

He nodded. There was a difference, though he had forgotten what it was. He would ask someone tomorrow to explain it to him. Babylonian, Sumerian, Assyrian – all those Mesopotamian peoples, impossible for him to tell apart. This whole city was full of Mesopotamians of various kinds, and yet in the five years he had lived here he had not managed to learn much about them. Five years? Or was it fifty? Or five weeks? Somehow you never could tell. Well, no matter. No matter at all. Perhaps this was the moment to suggest that she slip out of that lovely robe.

There was a knock at the door, a familiar triple knock, repeated: the signal of Sabartes. This would not be the moment, then, to suggest anything of that sort to this priestess, this goddess, this Sumerian witch.

Well, there would be other moments.

He grunted permission for Sabartes to enter.

The door creaked open. Sabartes stood there blinking: his friend of many years, his confidante, his more-or-less secretary, his bulwark against annoyance and intrusion – now, maddeningly, himself an intruder. These days he had the appearance of a young man, with plump healthy cheeks and vast quantities of wild black hair, the Sabartes of the giddy old Barcelona days, 1902 or so, when they had first met. But for the eyes, the chin, the long thin nose, it would be impossible to recognize him, so familiar had the Sabartes of later years become. One of the minor perversities of the Afterworld was that people seemed to come back at any age at all. It was not easy to get accustomed to. The man who called himself Ruiz looked perhaps sixty, Sabartes no more than twenty, yet they had known each other for nearly seventy years in life and some years more – ten? Twenty? A thousand? – in this life after life.

Sabartes took everything in at a glance: the woman, the
easel, the scowl on his friend’s face. Diffidently he said, “Pablo, do I interrupt?”

“Only another worthless painting.”

“Ah, Picasso, you are too hard on yourself!”

He looked up, glaring fiercely. “
Ruiz
. You must always remember to call me Ruiz. Never Picasso.”

Sabartes smiled. “Ruiz. Ruiz. Picasso, no. Ruiz. Ah, I will never get used to that!” He turned and looked with admiration and only faintly disguised envy at the silent, stately Sumerian woman. Then he stole a quick glance at the canvas on the easel, and a sequence of complex, delicate emotions flitted across his face, which after the many decades of their friendship the man who called himself Ruiz was able to decipher as easily as though each were inscribed in stone: admiration mixed with envy once again, for the craftsmanship, and awe and subservience, for the genius, and then something darker, which Sabartes tried in vain to suppress, a look of sadness, of pity, of almost condescending sorrow not unmingled with perverse glee, because the painting was a failure. In all the years they had known each other in life, Ruiz who was Picasso had never once seen that expression on Sabartes’ face; but here in the Afterworld it came flashing out almost automatically whenever Sabartes looked at one of his old friend’s new works. If this kept up, Picasso thought, he would have to deprive Sabartes of the right to enter the studio. It was intolerable to be patronized like this, especially by
him
.

“Well?” Picasso demanded. “
Am
I too hard on myself?”

“The painting is full of wonderful things, Pablo.” “Yes. Wonderful things which I put behind me a million years ago. And here they come again. The brush twists in my hand, Sabartes! I paint
this
and it comes out
that.”
He scowled and spat. “
A la chingada
! But why should we be surprised? This place is a kind of Hell, no? And Hell is not supposed to be easy.”

“No one knows if this is Hell, Pablo,” said Sabartes mildly. “We know only that it is the Afterworld.”

“Words!” Picasso snorted. “Call it whatever you choose. To me it feels like Hell, and the Devil rules here! Once I had only the dealers to wrestle with, and the critics, and now it is the Devil. But I beat them, eh? And I will beat him too.”

“You will, indeed,” said Sabartes. “What is the name of your new model?”

“Ishtar,” said Picasso casually. “No. No, that’s not right.” He had forgotten it. He glanced at the woman. “
Come se llama, amiga
?”

“I do not understand.”

English, he reminded himself. We speak English here.

“Your name,” he said. “Tell me your name again,
guapa
.”

“Ninsun, who was the Sky-father An’s priestess.”

“A priestess, Sabartes,” Picasso said triumphantly. “You see? I knew that at once. We met in the marketplace, and I said, Come let me paint you and you will live forever. She said to me, I already live forever, but I will let you paint me anyway. What a woman, eh, Sabartes? Ninsun the priestess.” He turned to her again. “Where are you from, Ninsun?”

“Uruk,” she said.

“Uruk, yes, of course. We’re all from Uruk now. But before this place. In the old life. Eh?
Comprende?
”

“The Uruk that I meant was the old one, in Sumer the Land. The one that was on Earth, when we were all alive. I was the wife of Lugalbanda the king then. My son also was –”

“You see?” Picasso crowed. “A priestess and a queen!”

“And a goddess,” Ninsun said. “Or so I thought. When I was old, my son the king told me he would send me to live among the gods. There was a temple in my honor in Uruk, beside the river. But instead when I awoke I was in this place called the Afterworld, which does not at all seem to be the home of the gods – and I have been here so long, so many years, everything still so strange –”

“You are a goddess also,” Picasso assured her. “A goddess, a priestess, a queen.”

“May I see the painting you have made of me?”

“Later,” he said, covering it and turning it aside. To Sabartes he said, “What news is there?”

“Good news. We have found the matador.”

“
Es verdad
?”

“Absolutely,” said Sabartes, grinning broadly. “We have the very man.”

“
Esplendido
!” Instantly Picasso felt an electric surge of pleasure that utterly wiped out the hours of miserable struggle over the painting. “Who is he?”

“Joaquin Blasco y Velez,” said Sabartes. “Formerly of Barcelona.”

Picasso stared. He had never heard of him.

“Not Belmonte? Joselito? Manolete? You couldn’t find Domingo Ortega?”

“None of them, Pablo. The Afterworld is very large.”

“Who is this Blasco y Velez?”

“An extremely great matador, so I am told. He lived in the time of Charles IV. This was before we were born,” Sabartes added.

“
Gracias
. I would not have known that, Sabartes. And your matador, he knows what he is doing?”

“So they say.”

“Who is
they
?”

“Sportsmen of the city. A Greek, one Polykrates, who says he saw the bull-dancing at Knossos, and a Portuguese, Duarte Lopes, and an Englishman named –”

“A Greek, a Portuguese, an
Ingles
,” Picasso said gloomily. “What does a Portuguese know of bullfighting? What does an
Ingles
know of anything? And this Greek, he knows bull-dancing, but the
corrida,
what is that to him? This troubles me, Sabartes.”

“Shall I wait, and see if anyone can find Manolete?”

“As you have just observed, Sabartes, the Afterworld is a very large place.”

“Indeed.”

“And you have been organizing this bullfight for a very long time.”

“Indeed I have, Pablo.”

“Then let us try your Blasco y Velez,” Picasso said.

He closed his eyes and saw once again the bull-ring, blazing with color, noise, vitality. The banderilleros darting back and forth, the picadors deftly wielding their pikes, the matador standing quietly by himself under the searing sun. And the bull, the bull, the bull, black and snorting, blood streaming along his high back, horns looming like twin spears! How he had missed all that since coming to the Afterworld! Sabartes had found an old Roman stadium in the desert outside Uruk that could be converted into a
plaza de toros,
he had lined up three or four bulls – they were demon-bulls, not quite the real thing, peculiar green-and-purple creatures with double rows
of spines along their backs and ears like an elephant’s, but
por dios
they had horns in the right place, anyway – and he had found some Spaniards and Mexicans in the city who had at least a glancing familiarity with the art of the
corrida
, and could deal with the various supporting roles. But there were no matadors to be had. There were plenty of swaggering warriors in the city, Assyrians and Byzantines and Romans and Mongols and Turks, who were willing to jump into the ring and hack away at whatever beast was sent their way. But if Picasso simply wanted to see butchers at work, he could go to the slaughterhouse. Bullfighting was a spectacle, a ritual, an act of grace. It was a dance. It was art, and the matador was the artist. Without a true matador it was nothing. What could some crude gladiator know about the Hour of Truth, the holding of the sword, the uses of the cape, movements, the passes, the technique of the kill? Better to wait and do the thing properly. But the months had passed, or more than months, for who could reckon time in a sane way in this crazyhouse? The bulls were growing fat and sleepy on the ranch where they were housed. Picasso found it maddening that no qualified performer could be found, when everyone who had ever lived was somewhere in the Afterworld. You could find El Greco, here, you could find Julius Caesar, you could find Agamemnon, Beethoven, Toulouse-Lautrec, Alexander the Great, Velasquez, Goya, Michelangelo, Picasso. You could even find Jaime Sabartes. But where were all the great matadors? Not in Uruk, so it seemed, or in any of the adjacent territories. Maybe they had some special corner of the Afterworld all to themselves, where all those who had ever carried the
muleta
and the
estoque
had gathered for a
corrida
that went on day and night, night and day, world without end.

Well, at last someone who claimed to understand the art had turned up in Uruk. So be it. A
corrida
with just one matador would make for a short afternoon, but it was better than no
corrida
at all, and perhaps the word would spread and Belmonte or Manolete would come to town in time to make a decent show of it. The man who called himself Ruiz could wait no longer. He had been absent from
la fiesta brava
much too long. Perhaps a good bullfight was the magic he needed to make the paintings begin to come out right again.

“Yes,” he said to Sabartes. “Let us try your Blasco y Velez. Next week, eh? Next Sunday? Is that too soon?”

“Next Sunday, yes, Pablo. If there is a Sunday next week.”

“Good. Well done, Sabartes. And now –”

Sabartes knew when he was being dismissed. He smiled, he made a cavalier’s pleasant bow to Ninsun, he flicked a swift but meaningful glance toward the covered canvas on the easel, and he slipped out the door.

“Shall I take the pose again?” the Sumerian woman asked.

“Perhaps a little later,” said Picasso.

The city was just as Gilgamesh had seen it in his vision, that time in Brasil when Calandola had opened the way for him and given him the Knowing. It was a shimmering place of white cubical buildings that sprawled for a vast distance across a dark plain rimmed by towering hills. A high wall of sun-dried brick, embellished by glazed reliefs of dragons and gods in brilliant colors, surrounded it. Looking down into Uruk from the brick-paved road that wound downward through the mountains, Gilgamesh could see straight to the heart of the city, where all manner of structures in the familiar Sumerian style were clustered: temples, palaces, ceremonial platforms.

It was for him as though the endless years of his life in the Afterworld had fallen away in a moment, and he had come home to Sumer the Land, that dear place of his birth where he had learned the ways of gods and men, and had risen through adversity to kingship, and had come to understand the secret things, the truths of life and death.