Papa, Pablo and Me (Pierre)

Chapter 1 – The Dealer

The greed was sweating out of the dealer's skin. He had licked his lips at least once as he took the piece of paper from me and surveyed it. While he may have thought he was playing it cool, the moisture above his top lip glistening in the Manhattan sunlight betrayed him.

"Tell me exactly, Mr Aubert, how it is you have possession of this…this remarkable piece of paper."

I readjusted in the deep black leather of my chair, pulling out a cigarette from my case as I did. I'd show the dealer nonchalant; the expression and the attitude were, after all, French.

"Do you mind?" I asked, holding up one of my smokes.

"No, please, of course!" he said, reaching over with an already lit Zippo.

The chrome desk calendar said April 8th, 1975. It was fourteen years since Papa died, two years to the day since Pablo.

"Pablo," I chuckled, "did an incredible impersonation of Gertrude. It was pitch-perfect." Mimicking Pablo mimicking Gertrude, I repeated her mantra, "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose". And so, I began my story about how I became the owner of that incredible piece of paper torn from a little black book.

Chapter 2 – La Rotonde

At night, Paris looks it best when it rains. The mixture of illumination – celestial, gas and electric – would reflect in the wet pavement mirrors, and halos of light would hang in the misty air. Even the lit cigarettes of café patrons and passing pedestrians seemed to dance like fireflies.

Café de La Rotonde was a bright light most nights in Paris. Still, on a Saturday night, when Gertrude held a gathering at 27 Rue de Fleurus, it would become a supernova. Or perhaps it was more of a red giant when I think about its sign and the colour of its velvet chairs.

On this particular Saturday, November 12th 1927, the Rotonde itself was full of shining lights. I was 17. I had just become un serveur, or as an uncouth American might shout - a garcon, when two men walked into the café deep in an argument.

Chapter 3 – The Ballad of Trotsky

"Leon is a thinker," boomed the tall hirsute American as he entered. "Revolutions need thinkers like him, but governments need politicians, Stalin is…"

"Conniving?" retorted the smaller Spanish man.

"Strong, Pablo! He's strong, and one day Europe might need a Soviet Union with strength."

"More than it does a strong America?"

"It might need both. It has before. It will again."

It was at that moment that the American caught my attention and spoke his first words to me.

"Tell me, young man, what do you think about Leon Trotsky?"

I can laugh now, but at the time, I didn't know who he was, and I didn't know what he was talking about. As we say in France, I was etre con comme un bala, as dumb as a broom.

"I am sorry, I don't know that drink. Can I get you something different instead?"

Both men burst into hysterics. The American guffawed, and the Spaniard sniggered like a teenage boy.

"You see, there are thinkers, and there are politicians. This young man is clearly a politician in the making. What's your name?"

"Pierre, Pierre Aubert," I replied.

That was the moment I first caught a glimpse of it, the little black book. The American pulled it out of his jacket pocket and scrawled my name down.

"Pierre, this is Pablo, and I am Ernest, but most people call me Papa," he said, shaking my hand.

Chapter 4 – The Conversations

I've never cared much for politics. It always seemed to me the privilege of people who already had a lot and who couldn't actually do much. But that's how it began, with me not knowing my communist leaders.

Over the weekends that followed, Pablo and Papa led me into their world, and I duly followed as impressionable as I was. Papa always said the best way to find out if you could trust somebody was to trust them first, and that's precisely what I did. Wherever their minds wanted to take me, I would try to follow. I poured them drinks, and they filled my soul with ideas I still can't comprehend.

I remember they would bicker incessantly over the greater creative force in the world, painting or writing. Both of them debating which artform took more of the man.

"There is nothing to writing," Papa would say, "all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"Every child is an artist," Pablo would proclaim in response, "The problem is how to remain an artist once they grow up."

Of course, they agreed on somethings. They thought F. Scott Fitzgerald vein and James Joyce, a rambling bore, and they both adored Gertrude. I met her several times. She was an incredible woman with incredible wit. I don't think I have met anybody before or since who could tell a story quite like her.

"We are always the same age inside," she said to me once. She was right. I am an older man now, but inside, when I think of her, Pablo, or Papa – I am still 17. We all have an age where we truly discover the world and what it means to live in it, and that was mine.

*****

"Mr Aubert!" the dealer interrupted me. "This piece of paper, how did it happen?" He was agitated. His greed was getting the better of him. I had to admit, I was intentionally rambling; if he wanted what was in his hand, he would earn it by listening.

"Let me listen to me and not to them," I said with a smile.

"What?"

"Sorry, just something else Ms Stein used to say. Ah, yes, the piece of paper. I was just coming to that."

Chapter 5 – The year that changed everything

I continued. How well do you know your history? 1927 sounds pretty unremarkable, doesn't it? Between the wars, a seemingly forgettable number, yet it was, in fact, the year when everything changed. It's a pivot, in my opinion, about which the entire 20th century turned, and human history changed forever.

Several important things happened that year; I have already mentioned one – Stalin ousting Trotsky and taking control of the Soviet Union on the day I met Pablo and Papa. But he wasn't the only man who began turning the cogs of history that year. A certain Adolf Hitler started speaking again in public after a two-year ban - he wouldn't stop. And in China, a man called Mao Zedong helped formed the Chinese Workers and Peasants' Army; better know to you and me as the red army. In one year, the political landscape of the world and its future had been changed.

In the same year, two technological and cultural leaps were also made. We started to fly, and the movies began to talk. Of course, there had been planes before Lindbergh completed his first solo non-stop transatlantic flight, and Pan Am started its first pan American flights from Key West to Havana, but after, well after, the world suddenly didn't seem so big. And when Al Johnson told the world, "you ain't heard nothing yet," I don't think he could have ever imagined how talking pictures would change everything.

History passes most people by. We get caught up in the news and the gossip of the day. But the daily news rarely becomes history. And history itself isn't always recorded in the front pages. But Pablo and Papa weren't most people; they sensed the change in the air like animals, the weather, and they talked non-stop about what was happening.

On the Saturday that I came into possession of that piece of paper, they discussed how the future might look; it was mid-December.

"Art is a lie that makes you realise the truth. And the truth that man will now be able to create on film will change everything. Pictures and sound together creating realities not yet imagined. It defies belief," said Pablo as I poured them both another drink.

"It terrifies me!" Papa retorted.

"Why? Think of the ideas and dreams that will spread to people everywhere,"

"Exactly! Not everyone dreams, Pablo. Some people have only nightmares. Not everyone deserves a stage, but now those who have the money and the power will tell everyone how to think. Pierre, what do you think about talking movies?"

"It could be nice to hear the voice of Renée Adorée," I replied.

As per usual, my response amused them both immensely.

"See! Pierre here just wants to hear the pretty ladies speak. Men like poor Pierre are destined to a future falling in love with every screen siren they see just because they've looked him in the eye on camera and said – I love you."

"Hearing just one woman say I love you is all that most men want in life," Pablo said, sipping his wine.

"And they're fools for it," Papa laughed.

The nights always went on like this, with debate into the early hours of the morning. It fascinated me seeing both their minds at work. At the time, I don't think I realised what bright light I was being allowed to bask in, but I still recognised I was witnessing something special. I idolised them. They let me worship at their altar of creativity, and I was grateful for it. At times, I think they were even thankful for my input. They both believed in the little guy, the underdog, and I was their little guy. That night, just before Christmas, they left me something, my own little black book. And what you have there in your hand is all that remains of it.

Chapter 6 – The offer

The dealer stared down at the notebook page in his hand. A smile spread across his face.

"So this is a..."

“A signed sketch of me in the Café de La Rotonde by Pablo Picasso…”

"And a…"

"A handwritten note signed by Ernest Hemmingway. Yes, yes, it is." I knew it off by heart. "True nobility is being superior to your former self and not another man," I said with a smile. It had been the one simple rule I had tried to live my whole life by.

"Quite remarkable," he said. "An unknown Picasso sketch from his Parisian days with written wisdom from none other than Ernest Hemmingway. Or as those who knew him, Papa. Name your price Mr Aubert."

Chapter 7 – The snap

With a smile, I stepped out on to the Manhattan street. I looked down at the cheque in my hand - $20,000. The dealer had nearly choked when I made my offer. It was certainly worth more. But I didn't need more. At that moment in time, $20,000 was all I needed to ensure that the woman who'd said I love you to me would have the wedding she deserved.

Anyway, $20,000 for one little story wasn't too bad; I wondered what the dealer would have paid for a little black book full of stories. As I did, I took out a notebook from my pocket and flicked through the pages: past the sketches by Henri, Georges and Juan; past the poems of Gertrude, Max and Ezra; and past the prose of James and Francis to the final, and my favourite page, of my little black book - the one Pablo and Papa had given me.

I folded the cheque and placed it neatly inside the last page next to the sketch Pablo had done of Papa, him and me. I read the words he had written under his drawing:

"Everything you can imagine is real."

I closed the book and, with a satisfying snap, I pulled its rubber band to secure it and the cheque inside. Papa was right; no friend was as loyal as a book.