The Musical Brain: And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

raising his index finger (which was bigger than
the rest of him), and above all, by the queen, composed of so many intersecting
planes she seemed to have been extracted from a pack of cards folded a hundred times
over, refuting the proven truth that nine is the maximum number of times a piece of
paper can be folded in half.
    The fable had some intriguing features, which gave Picasso’s decision to turn it into
an image further layers of significance. First, the fact that the protagonist was
lame and didn’t know it. It’s possible to be unaware of many things about oneself
(for example, to take the case at hand, the fact that one is a genius), but it’s
hard to imagine how this could extend to an obvious physical defect like lameness.
Perhaps the explanation lay in the protagonist’s regal condition, her status as the
One and Only, which prevented her from judging herself by normal physical
standards.
    The One and Only, as there had been only one
Picasso. There was something autobiographical about the painting and about the idea
of basing it on a childish joke that he must have heard from his parents or his
schoolmates, and even about the implicit use of his mother tongue, without which the
joke wasn’t funny and made no sense. The picture dated from a time when Picasso had
been in France for thirty years and had completely adapted to the language and the
culture; it was curious, to say the least, that he had resorted to Spanish to
provide the key to a work that was otherwise incomprehensible. Perhaps the Spanish
Civil War had renewed a patriotic streak in him, and this painting was a kind of
secret homage to his homeland, torn apart by the conflict. Perhaps, and this need
not exclude the previous hypothesis, the root of the work was a childhood memory,
which had lived on as a debt to be repaid when his art had acquired a sufficient
degree of power and freedom. By the thirties, after all, Picasso had been recognized
as the pre-eminent painter of asymmetrical women: complicating the reading of an
image by introducing a linguistic detour was just another means of distortion, and
in order to underline the importance that he attached to this procedure, he had
chosen to apply it to a queen.
    There was a third hypothesis, on a different level from the first two, which took the
painting’s supernatural origins into account. Up until then, no one had known that
it existed; its enigma, its secret had remained intact until it materialized before
me, a Spanish speaker, an Argentine writer devoted to Duchamp and Roussel.
    In any case, it was a unique piece, singular even among the works of an artist for
whom singularity was the rule; it could hardly fail to fetch a record price. Before
embarking on one of my habitual fantasies about future prosperity, I took a little
more time to enjoy contemplating the masterwork. I smiled. This crooked little
queen, who had to be put together again from a whirl of tangled limbs, was touching,
with her biscuit-like face (once you found it), her golden chocolate-wrapper crown,
and her puppet’s hands. She was the center of a centerless space. Her entourage, a
veritable court of painterly miracles, was waiting for her choice; the evanescence
of the flowers was a reminder of time, which for her was not a duration but an
instant of understanding, a final realization, after a lifetime of illusion.
    A crueler version of the joke can be imagined: the queen has always known that she’s
lame (how could she not know?), but good manners have prevented her subjects from
broaching a topic that she prefers to avoid. One day her ministers dare one another
to say it to her face. This may be more realistic, but it’s not what the painting
represented. No one would make that queen the butt of a joke; no one would mock her.
The courtiers all loved her, and wanted her to know it. Beneath the surface message
(“choose”), the hidden message (“is lame”) was meant for her: she would hear it and
then, in a flash