in his friend. What is more, Manolo was extremely witty and gay; even his victims—that is to say almost his entire acquaintance—bore him no ill-will; and Picasso had more fun with him as a companion than ever he had had with the melancholy Sabartés, who had now gone off to the New World in search of a fortune. It was a true companionship: each respected the other (and, by the way, neither of them drank; they both retained their lucidity at all times). Maurice Raynal knew both intimately, and when he was telling Brassaï about Manolo he said, “I was very, very fond of that man, and Picasso was devoted to him … Manolo was the elder by ten years and for him the young Ruiz was always ‘Little Pablo.’ And Picasso took more notice of him than of anyone else … he was perhaps the only person from whom Picasso would take criticism, teasing, contradiction.”
A fellow-tenant in the Bateau-Lavoir, a big, sleepy, beautiful young Frenchwoman named Fernande Olivier or Bellevallée, the detached wife of an insane sculptor, used to watch Picasso laughing with Manolo, talking all day long with his Spanish friends under the trees of the little square. Sometimes he also showed the local children how to draw chickens, hares, and what the cautious André Level terms “ruminants” in the dust. She wondered when he found time to work, and presently she found that it was in the quiet of the night, lit by an oil-lamp or sometimes by a candle.
At this point Picasso was twenty-two and Fernande about the same (some say older, some say younger): and although she did notice his small feet and hands she did not see anything particularly attractive about him at first—rien de très séduisant. She was not alone in this: a friend of Gertrude Stein’s described him as a “good-looking bootblack.” Nor could she place him socially; his days of purple and fine linen were over (there was no Soler in Paris and in any case Picasso’s dandyism had only been for the fun, a kind of dressing-up) and now he usually wore a boilersuit or the French workingman’s blue cotton jacket, with the red Catalan sash, the faixa, under it. But like everybody else Fernande was struck by his extraordinary eyes—huge, dark, and piercing, generally kind, always compelling; and by the immense vitality that flowed from him. She did not think him particularly young at the time; but she does observe that he stayed the same fairly mature twenty-two for all the twelve years they lived together. For that matter, photographs taken when he was well past fifty still show an absurdly boyish face, with the same black forelock drooping over his forehead; and even in 1952, when I first met him and when by the calendar he was over seventy, there was nothing at all of the old man about him: he was trim, compact, well made, his round head burned brown in the sun—age was irrelevant.
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