the minotaur
by Lorette C. Luzajic
after Science and Charity, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1897
The painter’s clients and acquaintances might be surprised, and especially his lovers, how tender he had been as a child. The earliest photographs reveal a small boy with an impish spirit already showing in his eyes. There is confidence and determination, too. Some children are born already knowing who they are, and what they want, and he was one of them. He knew by the time he could talk that he would be a greater painter than even his father.
But there is a softness there, too, and it makes him almost pretty. You can see it even more in the face of his younger sister, who is the spitting image of him in feminine form. But the boy’s innocence was irreversibly shattered on that precarious ledge between child and adult. Going to mass was the tradition for every Spanish family on Sundays. At thirteen, his father took him afterwards to another kind of church, where he was initiated into the pleasures of the flesh by women twice his age. That same season, the young man watched his beloved little sister suffer the agonies of Christ, coughing for months as she grew thinner. Doctors came and went from her little room, but they could not save her. The boy was inconsolable when they took her tiny body away forever.
That was twenty years ago, but he relives his helplessness and fury all over again with Eva. The first woman that he truly loved refused to marry him. She understood him too well, perhaps, and knew that his art would be his only wife. He loves Eva even more, and though she loves him, too, she, too, refused the vows she knew he could not keep. Like a cruel replay of the past, she coughed through their happiest years together. Not diphtheria, but cancer of the throat. Her bloody handkerchiefs littered his room alongside his turpentine rags and hundreds of canvases.
The painter shares his pain with his good friend Gertrude in a letter. Life has been hell, he writes, in and out of hospitals. And then, after: “My poor Eva is dead. This has been a great sorrow. She was so good to me.”
In his loneliness there, in those brief moments between Eva and his next conquest, he thinks about the secret pact he had made so long ago with the authorities in the heavens. If only his beautiful sister would live, he would lay down his brushes for her and give up his glory. There was nothing he loved more than painting. Creativity was his divine gift. It moved inside of him like thunder, like a raging river. But he would give it all up if the Lord would renew her to life.
His sacrifice was inadequate, or perhaps it fell on deaf ears. Bargaining for mercy with his very soul had been futile. Now, as then, he understands. There is no benevolent force, no personal love, no mercy, in the mystery of fate. It is every man for himself. All right then. He would be the omnipotent one, the creator and destroyer. I, King, he had once signed a painting. In that moment, he had vowed to become the greatest artist who ever lived. Picasso, as epic and brutal as God.
Photo of Lorette C. Luzajic
BIO: Lorette C. Luzajic lifelong passion for art history fuels her writing and visual art practice. Her ekphrastic flash fiction and prose poems have been published in hundreds of journals and two dozen anthologies, including two appearances in the Best Small Fictions anthologies and in Best Microfiction. She teaches ekphrastic writing, and is the founder of The Ekphrastic Review and The Ekphrastic Academy. Her most recent ekphrastic flash collection, Disgust, from Cyberwit Books, focuses on themes of chronic illness and pain, after her own experience surviving a rare, mysterious pain disorder and breast cancer. She is also an award-winning visual artist with collectors in forty countries.