"This is Pablo Picasso, the artist I was telling you about."
From the moment we were introduced, Picasso forgot about the rest of the guests and spent the entire evening trying to strike up a conversation with me. He spoke of my beauty, asked me to pose for him, and said I needed to go with him to Malaga, if only to get a week away from the madness of Paris. He had one objective, and he didn't need to tell me what it was: to get me into his bed.
I was extremely embarrassed by that ugly, wide-eyed, impolite man who fancied himself the greatest of the greats. His friends were much more interesting, including an Italian man, Amedeo Modigliani, who seemed more noble, more elegant, and who at no point tried to force any conversation. Every time Pablo finished one of his interminable and incomprehensible lectures about the revolutions taking place in art, I turned to Modigliani. This seemed to infuriate Picasso.
"What do you do?" asked Amedeo.
I explained that I was devoted to the sacred dances of the tribes of Java. While he seemed to not quite understand, he politely began to talk about the importance of the eyes in dance. He was fascinated by eyes, and when he happened to go to the theater, he paid little attention to the movements of the bodies and instead concentrated on what the eyes were trying to say.
"I hope that happens in the sacred dances of Java--I know nothing about them. I know only that, in the East, they are able to keep their bodies completely still and concentrate the full force of what they want to say in the eyes."
As I did not know the answer, I merely bobbed my head, an enigmatic gesture that might mean yes or no depending on how he interpreted it. Picasso interrupted the conversation the whole time with his theories, but Amedeo, elegant and polite, knew to wait his turn and return to the subject.
"Can I give you some advice?" he asked, when the dinner was drawing to a close and everyone was preparing to go to Picasso's studio. I nodded yes.
"Know what you want and try to go beyond your own expectations. Improve your dancing, practice a lot, and set a very high goal, one that will be difficult to achieve. Because that is an artist's mission: to go beyond one's limits. An artist who desires very little and achieves it has failed in life."
The Spaniard's studio was not far away, so we all went on foot. Some things dazzled me, and others I simply detested. But isn't that the human condition? Going from one extreme to another, without stopping in the middle? To tease him, I stopped in front of one painting and asked why he insisted on complicating things.
"It took me four years to learn how to paint like a Renaissance master and my entire life to go back to drawing like a child. There's the real secret: children's drawings. What you're seeing may seem childish, but it represents what's most important in art."
His answer was brilliant, but I could no longer go back in time and change my mind about him. By then, Modigliani had already left, Madame Guimet was showing visible signs of exhaustion despite maintaining her composure, and Picasso was distracted by his girlfriend Fernande's jealousy.
I said it was getting late for all of us, and each went on his way. I never ran into Pablo or Amedeo again. I heard that Fernande decided to leave Pablo, but I was not told the exact reason. I saw her only once more, a few years later, when she was working as a clerk in an antiques shop. She did not recognize me, I pretended I did not recognize her, and she also disappeared from my life.
The years that followed weren't many, but when I think back today, they seem endless--I looked only toward the sunshine and forgot the storms. I let myself be dazzled by the beauty of the roses but paid no attention to the thorns. The lawyer who halfheartedly defended me in court was one of my many lovers. So Mr. Edouard Clunet, should things go exactly as you planned and I end up before a firing squad, you may rip out this page from the notebook and throw it away. Unfortunately, I have no one else in whom to confide. We all know I won't be killed because of this stupid allegation of espionage, but because I decided to be who I always dreamed. And the price of a dream is always high.
Strip-tease had been around--and allowed by law--since the end of last century, but it had always been considered a mere display of flesh. I transformed that grotesque spectacle into art. When they began to ban strip-tease, I was able to continue with my shows, which were still legal. They were far from the vulgarity of other women who undressed in public. Among those who attended my performances were composers like Puccini and Massenet, ambassadors like Von Klunt and Antonio Gouvea, and magnates like baron de Rothschild and Gaston Menier. As I write these words, it pains me to think that they are not doing anything to obtain my freedom. After all, isn't the wrongly accused Captain Dreyfus back from Devil's Island?
Many will say: But he was innocent! Yes, and so am I. There is zero concrete evidence against me, beyond what I myself encouraged in order to boost my own importance after I decided to stop dancing (despite being an excellent dancer). If I hadn't, I wouldn't have been represented by the most important agent of the time, Mr. Astruc, who represented the greatest celebrities of the time.
Astruc nearly arranged for me to dance with Nijinsky at La Scala. But the ballet dancer's agent--and lover--regarded me as a difficult, temperamental, and intolerable person. With a smile on his face, he insisted that I present my art all on my own, without support from the Italian press or the theater's own directors. And with that, part of my soul died. I knew I was getting older and soon would no longer have the same flexibility and lightness. And serious newspapers, which had praised me so much in the beginning, were turning against me.
And my imitators? Posters sprang up on every corner saying things like "the successor to Mata Hari." All they did was shake their bodies grotesquely and take off their clothes without artfulness or inspiration.
I cannot complain about Astruc, although at this point the last thing he likely wants is to see his name associated with mine. He appeared a few days after the series of benefit shows for wounded Russian soldiers. I sincerely doubted that all the money, raised by selling tables for princely sums, would find its way to the Pacific battlefields where the czar's men were taking a beating from the Japanese. Still, they were my first performances after the Guimet Museum, and everyone was pleased with the result. I was able to get more people interested in my work, Madame Kireyevsky filled her coffers and mine, the aristocrats felt as though they were contributing to a good cause, and everyone, absolutely everyone, had the opportunity to see a beautiful naked woman without the slightest twinge of shame.
Astruc helpe
d me find a hotel worthy of my rising fame and negotiated contracts throughout Paris. He got me a show at the Olympia, the most important concert hall of the time. The son of a Belgian rabbi, Astruc bet everything he had on total unknowns, and today they are icons, such as Caruso and Rubinstein. He took me out to see the world at just the right moment. Thanks to him, I changed the way I conducted myself, I began to earn more money than I ever before imagined, I performed in the city's major concert halls, and I could finally indulge in a luxury I appreciated more than anything else in the world: fashion.
I don't know how much I spent, because Astruc told me it was in poor taste to ask the price.
"Pick out whatever you like and have it sent to your hotel--I'll take care of the rest."
Now, as I write this, I'm beginning to wonder: Did he keep part of the money?
But I cannot think like that. I cannot keep this bitterness in my heart, because if I do get out of here--and that is what I expect to happen, because it is simply impossible to be abandoned by everyone--I will have just turned forty-one and want to have the right to be happy. I gained a lot of weight and can hardly go back to dancing, but the world has so much more than that.
I prefer to think of Astruc as the man who dared risk his entire fortune to build a theater and open with The Rite of Spring. It was by an unknown Russian composer whose name I still cannot remember, and starred that idiot Nijinsky, who imitated the masturbation scene from my first performance in Paris.
I prefer to remember Astruc as the man who once invited me to take the train and go to Normandy, because the day before we had both spoken, with nostalgia, of going too long without seeing the sea. We had been working together almost five years.
We sat there on the beach, neither of us saying much until I took a page from the newspaper in my bag and handed it to him.
"The Decadent Mata Hari: Lots of Exhibitionism but Little Talent," read the title of the article.
"It was published today," I said.