The Bashful Courtesan

Table of Contents

-1- | Paris 1956

-2- | Vienna 1914

-3- | Paris 1944

-4- | Vienna 1914

-5- | Paris 1944

-6 - | Vienna 1914

-7 - | Paris 1944

—8— | Vienna 1914

—9— | Paris 1944

—10— | Vienna 1914

—11— | Paris 1944

-epilogue- | Paris 1956

-1-

Paris 1956

I’ve always lived my life somewhat vicariously through my art, which I suppose is a polite way of saying that the circumstances in my life usually left me starving three days out of four; the major reason being that I frightened people— frighten them I mean, as in the present tense—because I still do. I’m short, misshapen, and ugly; needless to say, I wasn’t a beautiful child. I’m a dwarf, in case you don’t know me through my art. I once saw a poster outside a cinema where they were showing the Lon Chaney movie Notre Dame; that poster could’ve been me. As I said, not many people know me if they don’t know me for my art. When people think of an artist they usually picture a man standing in front of an easel and nothing more—except if he paints a self portrait, which I would never do unless it was a crowd scene at a freak show. I was never as popular as Monet, or Matisse, but some have said you can see the similarities in our work. If it’s the same colour dynamic, or an insincerity in my portraits, tell me now I say. Anyway, I live in Paris now— we live in Paris. I left Russia when I was thirteen years old, and swore I’d never go back; that’s one promise to myself I’ve managed to keep. Paris was always my goal—my end-game I think the expression is. Before moving to France however, I lived in Vienna for a number of years before the Great War—and by ‘I’ , I mean ‘ we’, of course. You’ll learn more about the I and we of my life soon enough, but first I have to tell you a few things about myself, so you’ll understand how I came to be where I am today.

As I said, I’d been living most of my life by happenstance. I was selling water-colour sketches to the patrons and servers in the taverns and music halls of Vienna—portraits in time I used to call them—as well as selling them to passersby on street corners where I sometimes sat under the cover of a nearby eaves painting street scenes lit up by dull city lights, or a melancholy mood. Needless to say, it was a hand to mouth existence that took years for me to establish anything even close to resembling a following; which makes me the cliché starving young artist for lack of a better expression. Whatever fame I may have at this time in my life, I owe more to luck than anything else; believe me, I’ve never been one to believe in fate. As a matter of fact, I’ve never been one to believe in much of anything. However, I do believe that success and fame have little to do with ones’ artistic talents; I’ve known many men with talent who’ve fallen by the wayside. One would almost think that luck and fate conspired against them; one could just as easily say that they were fated to fail—if one were searching for a certain irony in life. Fate’s more a matter of hindsight I think; luck’s nothing more than being in the right place, at the right time.

Some would say it’s luck that’s brought me to where I am today. That may be true, but does that mean my success is due to something I did; that my leaving Vienna and coming to Paris after the Great War set off a strange series of events? I doubt if the one has anything to do with the other. You can think that way if you want, but not me; Paris is Paris after all, and has always been my intended destination as I said earlier, even at a young age. And yes, Paris is where I was discovered, or mentored if you will, by that lost generation of writers and artists—survivors really—whose only need was to escape the memory of war by over-indulging in alcohol and cocaine. I don’t blame them for their pastimes. Would our lives have been any easier had there been no war? I suppose the answer to that question is obvious. But we’d been taught from an early age—my generation that is—that Truth was Beauty and Beauty Truth, and that the object of life was to seek it out as though it were the Holy Grail. All poetry, art, even religion, preached this tenet as though it were gospel; it was a promise we’d made to ourselves—but art and culture always suffer through times of peace, don’t they? It’s during the low periods—and war can only be thought of as a low period in Man’s existence—that any advancements in the science of industrial arts overwhelm all other discoveries made during times of peace. It’s out of necessity that art and culture come to a halt as all of society’s thoughts lean toward victory and war. Everything pales in comparison when you take into consideration that by the turn of the new century we had such innovations as the telephone, the wireless telegraph, and even the cinema. But then, there was also the bicycle, the automobile, and the motorcycle; when you throw in the aeroplane for good measure you can see how all these inventions could be misused in one way or another as instruments of the Great War. It was never a question of what the future held for Mankind, but rather, how Mankind would shape its future. I’m not saying that art and culture came to a complete standstill, they didn’t. But any hopes a man may have had for attaining world-wide fame left him with little more hope than being hailed as a local celebrity, and nothing more—unless that man had a message as powerful as Picasso and his Guernica a generation later. I suppose it’s possible that at some future time there’ll be a system whereby ideas may be conveyed as easily as words on a wireless, but until that time, one need only look at the evolution of the aeroplane from a simple flying machine into a weapon of mass destruction to see how far we can advance as a society, as well as a race.

The idea of a war to end all wars was a dream thought up by idealists; Man is not meant to live in peace.

I say all of this with the benefit of hindsight, of course, but that’s neither here nor there, is it? It’s only through the passage of time that we can understand what we’ve gained, as much as we might lament over all that we’ve lost—and if anything, we’re a generation that laments its past. In fact, there have always been men out there—some even right now, I suppose—walking the streets with vacant, broken hearts; men who, though they fought valiantly for that holy trinity of God, King and Country, feel that they’ve been bitterly betrayed, and remain resentful as they look for someone to blame. They think of themselves as the final remnants who fought for the sacred cause of Justice and Freedom in the world. There were a multitude of such men during the Great War who gave the greatest sacrifice that a man can give, life itself. But those same men—those who survived—after the war, they became Brown-shirted thugs rife with thoughts of revolution and anarchy, reasoning that the lives they once led had not only been forgotten, but that they’d been forsaken as well; the ultimate betrayal in their eyes. And why’s that, you ask? Well, why does any society forsake those it once regaled as heroes? Is there even an answer to such a question? That’s how those embittered veterans—to all intents and purposes—evolved into preachers of the politics of hate. If the war taught us anything, it wasn’t that we’d killed the baser instincts of cruelty, blood-lust, and primitive savagery, no, if it taught us anything at all, it’s that our humanity has been broken. We’d lost that part of ourselves, so much so, that we truly were a lost generation. All it takes for history to repeat itself now is the failure of the world’s markets, and the collapse of the world’s banks. In America, crops were failing and people were flocking to the cities in search of hope. Is it any wonder those proselytizers of hate—those false prophets of doom—were determined to find someone they could blame; or, in failing that, find a scapegoat for some other invented cause? Is that what the future holds for us now? It’s always been in times such as those when men we’d never deign to lead us willingly, step up from the mire so that they might lead us into the darkness. Russia is a fine example of that with its nascent revolution giving birth to Stalin; and just as France of old gave the world Napoleon, so the Great War gave us Hitler. I’d seen what he and his followers could do on newsreels at the cinema around the corner—add to that Mussolini’s rise in Italy, Franco’s victories in Spain, and Communism rearing its ugly head in both America and Britain—and you can see why people are willing to listen. And cheer. Hitler preached fear and hate, and as much as he called for retribution against the crimes of the past generation—against the Jews, Catholics, and even the Blacks in America—I’ve often asked myself how it was possible for anyone to believe in him, and yet, they did. The people readily endorsed his new political party, and just as eagerly donned his brown- shirted uniform as though there was a new purpose to their life. People are quick to follow anyone willing to lead the way, eager to preach violence and rail on about taking what they feel was once theirs, and all the while dismissing the treaties of the past as they exclaim a new world order that is nothing more than an excrescence and a blight on the horizon of the future.

And why is it that, you say? With the Civil War being fought in Spain and proving to be more than a trial run for the modern war plans of the German High Command, it looked for a time as if it would spill over the borders and seep into France. Refugees cried to be let across the borders but were prevented; atrocities were inflicted on the populace; France became rife with strife as a result. There were no jobs to be had; poverty, and the immigration of homeless refugees, was just as much a problem in Paris as it was anywhere else. Jews were fleeing the continent like rats off a sinking ship, using French ports as a jumping off point; shipping treasures to relatives in Holland, or England; storing them in bank vaults. Hitler and his fervent followers—fresh from conquests both political and military—were clearly laughing at the world as they pointed out the failings of their fellow man. Nobody wanted the Jews, he said, and to prove himself right, he let them board ships with the hope of finding themselves a better life in America, or Canada—but even those havens of refuge were closed.

When we originally left Vienna in 1921, Stanza told me that if I seriously planned to walk with a blind woman across Europe in the hopes of seeking out a better life in Paris, she insisted I call her by her real name, Constanza Leismuller. She said her reasons were selfish, but the main one was that she no longer felt like the woman she’d pretended to be for all those years; the name she’d used in Vienna had never been her real name. She said that if we were going to start our lives anew, she wanted to cut off all ties with her former self and use her full name—the name her mother had given her—and I agreed. I told her that I’d change my name as well, that now, whenever I signed my paintings, I’d use the name Pumilio.

I’m telling you all of this for my own reasons, of course—the primary reason being that I blame myself for not leaving France when we had the chance. We should’ve left years before. Instead of leaving with the last crowds in 1937—those leaving after having attended the Berlin Olympics—I chose to stay, thinking now that Hitler had his moment in the sun, things would settle down. The writing was on the wall as they say, but I simply refused to look at it. Stanza could see what was coming, but for some reason, refused to say anything; she’d left it up to me to tell her when we were leaving with the other displaced refugees to make our way to the outlying provinces where there’d be fewer German soldiers and more provisions. But I never made the decision. When the Germans did invade, we were still in the city; I was more concerned with helping document and pack up the treasures of the Louvre than I was in leaving Paris.

There was no constant barrage of questions asking me when we were planning to leave; it seemed as if she’d accepted what was coming and understood that I’d waited too long. I didn’t have the power to change it. Her blindness had always prevented me from doing what was right, choosing instead to do what was right at the moment, which it turned out was never right for either one of us. And now that the world had plunged itself into yet another war—a Second World War they were calling it—as if by numbering it, it allows us time for growth, we lived our lives accordingly. The Germans entered Paris on 14 June, 1940; by 16 June, the Prime Minister resigned, and on 17 June, the new acting head of State, Marshall Petain, called for an immediate cease-fire.

How did I let this happen, you ask? How did I allow us to become victims yet again? I’ve asked myself that same question many times over the years. It may be as simple as the fact that I’ve always been a victim; unknown to me, my life has never been mine to live. Ours was a generation distinguished by its coinciding with the opening of the twentieth century—an age of promise, wealth and luxury when one considers the great technological advances that were made, but an age that was bifurcated by the Great War—a truly world war of untold magnitude. Those of us who survived—those of us who lived through the horrors of the battlefield, and those of us who starved in the cities—divided our lives into separate categories: before, during, and after, and those of us who grew up and matured in an age of such loss never reconciled ourselves to the fact that we let our fathers’ generation dictate how we were to live our lives.

So, how did all of this happen to me? It all began with a knock at my door—my life as I know it now. And while I can’t say how everything I say from here on in is the truth, or how everything I say we did is exactly how it happened, or how it came about, there’s little I choose to leave out. This isn’t as much an autobiography as it is a search for one’s self; whether that search results in self- loathing is not the question to be asked here, nor the answer I seek. Nothing in life makes any sense if you leave out the details, no matter how small; there’s always someone that will show up out of