in their own tongue, and in 1891 it was still more general. Figures for the turn of the century show 1,800,000 Gallegan-speakers out of a total population of just under two million.
The contrast between Málaga and La Coruña was very great indeed, but it could have been equaled in other parts of Spain, a country separated by its geography and its history into such markedly distinct regions that some of the early rulers took the title of emperor of the Spains, dwelling upon the plural. Navarra, Aragón, Castilla, León, and Catalonia were once sovereign states, so were Asturias, Estremadura, Jaén, Córdoba, Sevilla, and several others; and Galicia was one of them, a geographic, economic, and linguistic entity far closer in habits and culture to Portugal than to León or Castilla, and inhabited by a race with the reputation of being hardy, honest, industrious, stupid, and unpolished: indeed, the word Gallego had a certain currency in the rest of Spain as a term of reproach, meaning boor. Traditionally, in such cities as Madrid, it was the Galician who brought the water, coal, and wood, carrying it up innumerable flights of stairs.
This damp former kingdom, then, retained its individuality (and its diet) over the centuries, and the uprooted child Picasso was confronted not only with a strange language but also with strange forms and faces that to an Andalou scarcely seemed Spanish at all. The Moors did reach Galicia; but although they came from bitterly inhospitable regions, most being Berbers, they withdrew after no more than five years, unable to bear the climate. It is true that they were also encouraged to withdraw by the plague and the army of King Alphonso of Asturias, but the great point is that they went away without having bred there. No trace of the Moor remains in blood, customs, or architecture: these are the descendants of the native Iberians, the Suevi and the Visigoths, with perhaps the slightest touch of Roman.
Faced with this different civilization, the Ruizes retired into their second-floor flat in the Calle Payo Gómez and watched the rain beating against the windows. They discussed the weather interminably—there was a great deal of it to discuss—and Don José at least felt the cold reach to his heart. His wife had a new home to set up, three children to look after, and the strangeness of Galician shopping to cope with—the makings of a gazpacho were hardly to be found, far less a bottle of generous wine. This left her little time for introspection, and in any case hers was a much happier temperament. For Pablo and his sisters too the initial horror faded; there was, after all, a new town to be seen, a town built on a peninsula with a harbor on one side, a beach on the other, and cliffs at the far end. It was not much of a town compared with Málaga—about a third of the size—and its solitary delight, apart from the port and the bull-ring, was a Roman tower on the howling eminence at the end of the peninsula, an erection called the Torre de Hercules by the inhabitants and the caramel tower by Don José. With its later additions it soared up four hundred feet, still serving as a lighthouse; and when the great Atlantic rollers drove in to break with a measured thunder at the foot of the cliff and sent their spray up to the tower it had a splendor of its own.
The port was busy enough, but even when it was visible it was not to be compared with Málaga. The exports were hogs, horse-beans and roots (mostly for Cuba, then still a Spanish possession), and the imports mainly coal, arriving in dirty tramp-steamers from England and South Wales. The bull-ring was closed when they arrived, but even when it opened it was a disappointment. There is little comprehension of the corrida outside Andalucía, little grasp of those fine points that distinguish it from mere bull-baiting (or at the worst a vile butchery) and so raise it to the level of a savage, dangerous, poetic sacrifice. When the bullfighters are aware that the congregation does not know what the mystery is about, they will only perform, not officiate; and after a while, the season having come round at last, Don José was so disgusted that he gave up attending.
Picasso drew the tower, as he drew everything else in La Coruña. The early drawings are still childish, or rather boyish, many of them being illustrations to jokes about the weather; others, particularly those in the margins and blank pages of his schoolbooks, show the kind of battle that most schoolboys draw—Romans, savages, people with spears, swordsmen slashing away at one another. There are also some capital bulls. The school-books which Picasso preserved are in the museum at Barcelona: they resemble almost all school-books in being dog-eared, battered, and tedious, but they are of a considerably higher standard than might have been expected. One, which has selections from the classics and which Picasso adorned with a pen-and-ink Moor’s head and some pigeons far livelier than his father’s, has quite advanced Latin verse and passages from Cicero. How much Pablo made of it is another matter, but at least he had got into the school and he did well enough not to be sent away; furthermore at this time he wrote, or was compelled to write, a far more elegant, legible hand than he had ever used before or was ever to use again. The school in question was the Instituto da. Guarda, and Picasso was admitted to the primer curso, the first year of the secondary cycle: the next year, in 1892, he also matriculated at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, where his father was teaching, while at the same time he carried on with his studies at the Instituto.
At no time of his life was Picasso a willing writer of letters. In La Coruña he invented a way of communicating with his relatives in Málaga that called for little effort in the literary way: this was a small news-sheet “published every Sunday,” called sometimes Asul y Blanco and sometimes La Coruña, in which he drew local people, dogs, pigeons (one of his small advertisements reads “Pedigree pigeons purchased: apply second floor, 14 Calle Payo Gómez”), the “caramel tower” on a tray, and wrote short dispatches such as “The wind has started, and it will go on blowing until there is no La Coruña left,” or “The rain has begun already. It will not stop before summer,” or “At the time of going to press this publication had received no telegrams of any kind.” Then there were more jokes, some illustrated and most of this general nature: During an arithmetic examination: Master, “If you are given five melons and you eat four, what have you left?” Pupil, “One.” Master, “Are you sure that is all?” Pupil, “And a belly-ache.” Most of the people are struggling with the wind or the rain or both (La Coruña’s main industry seems to have been the manufacture and repair of umbrellas); and to show Málaga the extreme wild remoteness of these parts there is a drawing of the Galician bagpipes.
These too are still entirely boyish productions, with little hint of what was so soon to appear; and it is worth pointing out that the spelling entonses, for example, or asul, rather than the orthodox entonces and azul, shows that Picasso had retained his Andalusian way of speaking (the Castilian pronounces z and soft c as th, whereas the southerner makes no attempt at any such thing—nor do many South Americans, Andalusian in origin). These mistakes, together with others that have nothing to do with phonetics, also show that Picasso remained impervious to printed shape: which is strange, when one considers his astonishingly accurate recall of other forms, even then. And what is more curious still is his mirror-version of the final question-mark: this might have been influenced by the Spanish convention of starting a question with another question-mark, upside-down, but later he sometimes inverted the esses of his signature, and when he took to etching and engraving he could not or would not grasp that the printing of the plate necessarily reversed the legend. It is as though there were some confusion in the mental process that separates right from left.
These childish things were soon to be left behind, however, and although the facetious illustrative sketch reappeared at intervals, the young Picasso suddenly moved on to an extraordinary degree of maturity, to serious and as it were total painting. He might perhaps have done so a little earlier if his father had set about his education as a painter more seriously; but the separation from his friends, his native climate, his whole way of life, coming on top of his other reasons for unhappiness, quite crushed Don José’s spirit: he hardly ever went out, but stood at the window, watching the rain. When he did leave the house, it was to go to the art-school, just over the way, or to Mass: the then unchanging Mass was one of the few remaining links with his former life—that and the pigeons, which he still kept, and which he still painted from time to time, although with little enthusiasm, and that little diminishing fast. This is the Don José that his son painted, a man so deeply sad that it is painful to look at some of the portraits. Yet at this time he
