History tells us something of what happened. The shooting took place at L'Hippodrome restaurant at approximately nine in the evening of Sunday 17th February 1901. There is no dispute as to who fired, but recollections of the event are contradictory and the records of the Paris police are incomplete. The official version omits the names of two of the diners as well as most of what especially fascinates us about the case.
At the time, the events of that night were chaotic and senseless. After more than a century, we have a knowledge of history that gives us objectivity. Those who saw the shooting felt only a baffling immediacy. It is we who are able to supply meaning.
A modern perspective is based on the achievements of the most important person in the story, though he was not there to watch what happened. He was far away in another country. And yet without him the shooting would have been just another gesture: histrionic, foolish, fatal, and forgotten. It was an age of destructive gestures.
Afterwards, he had to imagine the scene from details supplied by those who had attended that farewell dinner. But he did not ask the waiter what had happened, and the waiter saw it all. The waiter took the order, served the drinks, and was ordered to clean up afterwards. We need not give his name because his name is lost to history. Yet everyone knows the name of the man who was not there.
The waiter had no reason to expect anything dramatic. Although it was only his second week at tables after months of washing dishes, it is reasonable to assume that he had already developed an ear for accents. It must have been evident that the five men in the group were Spanish. He might have recognised Catalan inflections. Waiters quickly become sensitive to the trappings of origin and class, so he may even have registered that one of the men wore a suit of green velvet that was much more ostentatious than the cheaper clothing of the others. The women were all French, and these he would have categorised immediately, though he may not have thought of them as models.
The waiter's concentration was fixed on a job he was still learning, but nevertheless he was aware that emotions ran high around that table. The forced conversation, self-conscious laughter and staged embraces were evidently part of a farewell celebration for the lean and excitable young Catalan in the green velvet suit. When this man stood up to make a speech the waiter did not expect it to be in French, but he anticipated that it would be indistinguishable from other sentimental goodbyes he had heard. As he spoke, the Catalan rested one hand on the back of his empty chair. It was the very same posture that the waiter had been asked to take while posing for a studio photograph the previous week.
Later, the waiter decided that there had been something disturbing about the Catalan's intensity. The truth was that he noticed nothing unusual until the man pulled a number of letters from his pocket with a theatrical flourish. Then, bizarrely, the woman in the next seat dropped to the floor and scrambled away as if she were crawling through an invisible tunnel. The Catalan hurled his papers across the table and reached into his other pocket.
This time he pulled out a pistol.
At this moment everything assumed a puzzling, dreamlike quality. The waiter was unable to name the sensation until some months later, when he visited a cinema and saw a fantasy film by Méliès, now lost. Watching the film he understood that what he had experienced bore an affinity to slow motion.
The woman reached the far side of her table and hid behind the chair of a man wearing a suit of scuffed black corduroy. All the time, the Catalan tracked her with the pistol barrel quivering in his hand. The waiter took several uneven steps backward until he collided with another table. He felt behind him until he was able to grasp its edge. It had a smooth solidity that was somehow reassuring.
Now, in an action that the waiter judged foolhardy, but that he would later describe as brave, the man in black corduroy reached out for the gun and knocked the barrel to one side. At exactly the same time, the Catalan shouted "Voilà pour toi!" and pulled the trigger.
There was a flash that hurt the eyes and a noise that dulled the ears. If there was a scream, the explosion deadened it. The man in black corduroy held his hands up to his face and the woman shrank to the floor behind him. Customers stumbled from their tables and ran in panic from the restaurant, knocking over chairs as they fled. Cutlery and plates clattered on the floor. Someone began yelling as if from a distant room.
The Catalan's eyes were as impenetrable as shining glass. He turned the pistol and pressed it against his right temple. The waiter could see the skin yield beneath the pressure. "Et voilà pour moi!" the man exclaimed. And he pulled the trigger again.
Momentarily lit by the flash, his face contorted brutally as the bullet entered his skull, and then the muscles relaxed and he toppled forward over the empty chair. Blood pumped fiercely from his wound. The air stank of burning.
In the shocked aftermath, the waiter found himself abstractedly puzzling over the mechanisms of killing. The only deaths he had ever seen had been the butchery of helpless animals. This death was different. As in Grand Guignol, it was stylised, didactic, fabricated. The Catalan's body had even fallen over the chair like a discarded dummy. Only the blood seemed real.
Curiously, the waiter felt even less involved in what happened afterwards.
Like a creature in a dumb show, the woman picked herself up from the floor and embraced the man in black corduroy. He indicated his wrist and then his eye, as if he had only suffered minor damage. She was unharmed. Two of their fellow diners hurried out quickly as if to avoid contamination. Any customers who had remained sat in a profound silence or wept convulsively. The dying Catalan lay unmoving in his slightly absurd posture across the chair back. Blood had spurted across his green velvet suit and the scattered letters and was fading into the tablecloth.
Uniformed police entered the restaurant and people began to talk again, volubly and noisily. One of the police examined the body and declared the Catalan still alive, so his motionless body was picked up and carried quickly out of the building. Some others from his table followed in a ragged, trembling procession.
The restaurant was full of diners who could no longer eat, with half-finished meals on the tables and cutlery littering the floor. The waiter thought vaguely about all the ruined food that would have to be thrown into bins. He looked around for guidance from his more experienced colleagues. No one knew what to do. The manager, who had been sheltering behind a door, appeared and took agitated, blustering control. The customers could not be kept waiting, he insisted, although it was evident that no one wished to eat. And the blood and the mess should be cleared up immediately. Immediately.
Later that evening the waiter woke his parents to tell them what had happened. He reported it all with the startled relish appropriate to a crime of passion, but he needed the next day's newspapers to fill out more detail.
The gunman was taken to Dajou's pharmacy for first aid, but the case had been hopeless. He was moved to the Hôpital Bichot where, two and a half hours after pulling the trigger, he died. The newspaper gave his name as Carles Casagemas, and his profession as painter. The woman he had intended to murder was a Parisian housewife, Germaine Gargallo, whose husband had not been present. The man who had shielded her was also a painter, Manuel Pallarés. Another Catalan, the sculptor Manuel, or Manolo, Hugué, was recorded as being present, as was Germaine's sister, Antoinette Fornerod. All these people were said to be friends. The report did not mention two other Spaniards, the collector Alexandre Riera and the critic Pujulà I Vallès, who had fled to avoid association with the suicide. Naturally, neither did it mention the man who was not there.
The waiter was content with the press report. He believed the motive of the shooting was clear enough. Casagemas must have been the jealous lover, Germaine the woman who had betrayed him, perhaps with the man Pallarés. That, the waiter decided, was as much as he would ever find out - as much, perhaps, as he wanted to find out.
The waiter did not know it, for the killing had made him feel thrillingly alive, but by the time he read the newspaper he himself had already begun to fade from history.
Like others named in this account, Casagemas has been absorbed into history not because of his own qualities, but because of the achievements of the man who was not there.
Picasso was in Madrid when he heard the news. His reactions have not been recorded, but we may conjecture that he was engulfed by contradictory emotions of shock, anguish, guilt and release. Casagemas, once his closest friend, had become increasingly self-dramatising and unstable, and yet less than a year ago he, Picasso and Pallarés had been so united in ambition that they felt themselves to be blood brothers. When they had quit Barcelona for Paris in the previous autumn, all three had arrived in the city wearing identical black corduroy suits.
At 49 rue Gabrielle, Montmartre, these young men shared ambition, penury and a scarcely furnished hovel. It was here, in one squalid room with little comfort and less privacy, that Casagemas slept with Germaine, Pallarés slept with Antoinette and Picasso slept with a third woman, Louise Lenoir, known as Odette. So close were they, and so narrow was the space they shared, that Pallarés wrote out a half-joking, half-solemn list that showed the times that they would eat and paint and fuck, and fixed it to the wall.
For Casagemas this had been an existence that was almost religious in its agony. Unlike his friends he was unused to the ways of the street and the brothel. He was cosseted, sickly and addicted to morphine. By nature he was probably homosexual, though unable to acknowledge it. With Germaine he was undoubtedly impotent. With such burdens, how could he not be in thrall to the transforming ideals of romance?
The others scoffed at his intensity, for the rue Gabrielle was a place where higher feelings were reserved exclusively for art. Casagemas rapidly angered the sexually uninhibited Germaine. His protestations and declarations verged on hysteria, and his obsession with suicide was both absurd and frightening. She was not alone in wishing her hopeless, infuriating lover back in Spain. Picasso recognised that his best friend had plunged into an erotic delirium from which he was unable to surface. A return to his rich and loving family seemed to be the only means by which Casagemas could be forced into self-realisation and recovery. So it was that, still wearing their black corduroy suits, the two young Catalans took the train back to Barcelona in the middle of December 1900, just as an age was ending.
But Casagemas was now so wedded to the histrionic that he could not simply leave. He vowed to return and marry the already-married woman he had, without her agreement, begun to call his fiancée. Predictably, Germaine wished that this embarrassing failure would never come back. Besides, she was already intrigued by Manolo Hugué. But just in case, and perhaps sensing a disaster of some kind, she was astute enough to return temporarily to the husband she had so recently deserted for the bohemian life.
Two months later Casagemas did indeed return, resplendent in a new green velvet suit, and this time he carried a pistol in his pocket. He did not stay at the rue Gabrielle, but at the apartment his old friend Pallarés had recently moved into on the Boulevard de Clichy. It was here, in conversation with Pallarés, that Casagemas finally began to understand the truth of his rejection and the extinction of his hope. Everyone should meet the next day at L'Hippodrome, he suggested. It would be a farewell party.
Casagemas was never to know that Germaine would take Manolo as a lover, or that within a few short months, he too would be replaced. For in May of that year Picasso would come back to Paris, more than ever determined to succeed; determined, too, to make sense and art from a suicide he had not witnessed.
So, in the room where Casagemas had spent his last night, a short distance away from the place where he had turned the pistol on himself, Picasso lay in the arms of his dead friend's mistress. And it was in this apartment, from July onwards, that he began to execute a series of paintings in which that troubling, volatile friend would reach an apotheosis.
Picasso had depicted Casagemas before, but usually in sketches, and from the left. Now he began to paint him in oils, and the side of the face that fascinated him was the side into which the bullet entered.
There are two versions of the Head of the Dead Casagemas. One shows the corpse stretched out on a bed, its decaying flesh a vivid green, a bright candle burning alongside the head. In recognition of the cause of the suicide, the wick and flame are a visual pun on an aroused vagina. In the other image Casagemas appears to be standing, but his eyes remain closed so that he looks like a slain man unable to rest. In both paintings the scorched entry wound is clearly visible on the right temple.
There are further works - two versions of Casagemas in his Coffin and, later and less successfully, The Burial of Casagemas and The Mourners. The latter paintings are crowded allegories showing figures gathered around the corpse in its shroud. Art historians lay particular emphasis on their palette, because these canvases mark the start of the blue period. This is the beginning of Picasso's domination of 20th-century art.
Within two years of the suicide, the waiter from L'Hippodrome had met the woman he would eventually marry. At the same time, Picasso was at work on La Vie. As if in an unexplained ritual, a near-naked Casagemas is embraced by a wholly nude Germaine while ethereal blue light saturates both their bodies and the landscape. In the same year Picasso sketched his dead friend again, fully naked this time, as frail and vulnerable as a virgin sacrifice, his hands shielding his genitals as in a Renaissance depiction of a body brought down from a cross.
Picasso never fully exorcised Casagemas, nor did he wish to. The act of suicide was much too fertile to be erased. It is probable that he also realised that, in a clear place beneath the turmoil of his imagination, Casagemas would have known that only his extraordinarily gifted friend would be able to fashion art and universality from such a death.
And did Picasso give Casagemas immortality? Of course not; only a god could grant that. What he did instead was to articulate an eternal remembrance. Picasso had the arrogance of genius. He knew that as long as there is art, then his work, and the death of one man, would be inseparable from its history.
Seventy years after he finished La Vie, Picasso died in the south of France. He was ninety-one years old. No other artist had been so famous, so prolific, so admired, so recognisable and so rich. The value of his estate was so huge it became a matter of guesswork; already his possessions, letters, photographs were being reverentially preserved. After his death, prices for his art continued to outstrip those of any other 20th-century painter. At an auction in May 2004, a winning bid of $93 million secured a canvas painted just two years later than La Vie.
Neither the waiter nor his family was to know this. They had long been wiped off the face of the earth.
In his life the waiter did not see a single painting by Picasso. He would not have appreciated it if he had. For him, art was trivial. Almost anything else that went on in the world was more important.
What fascinated the waiter was history. Even as a dishwasher he had been aware that history could organise and clarify the confusions of both the past and the present. The waiter was eager for guidance. When he was waiting at tables he saved a little money each week until he was finally able to buy a three-volume set of illustrated books that detailed France's glorious heritage. He read them closely, not missing a single word, and then he read them again.
In the coming years, he would often refer to the books. They were vital to his growing belief in destiny. Now the waiter clearly understood that he lived in a country that was the envy of the world. It had a character and vitality that was superior to any other, and what drove the nation forward were the needs and tastes of ordinary men and women. Art was irrelevant to their lives. What mattered was the everyday. His wife and son, the wages he took home, the rent he paid for their apartment, even an abstract idea like the good of the country, all were charged with an energy that lay outside the ambition of the squalid dreamers and their camp followers to whom he served food. Those people were too ignorant to share the common currency of patriotism, too obsessed with each other to be able to march bravely into the future. Art was ephemeral and histrionic. In fact, art was just like the life of the madman who had killed himself close to where the waiter had once stood, pressed up against one of the tables he had been serving, in the restaurant where he still worked.
As the years passed, the waiter grew certain that the suicide had been forgotten. Perhaps those who had actually witnessed it would remember, but for those who had merely read about it in the newspaper the name Casagemas would mean nothing. The waiter also reasoned that the dead man's life must have been miserable, hopeless and utterly unlike his own, which he assumed would be long, uneventful and characterised by honour and respect. The waiter respected what God had given him. He had never contemplated taking his own life. Like thousands of his countrymen, he was, however, willing to risk its sacrifice.
Fifteen years after the death of Casagemas, the waiter found himself in military uniform. Near to his country's ruptured border he became part of a prolonged, massive, bloody and tactically pointless battle, which he did not survive. After a short while he did not expect to. No one's life was guaranteed. Time itself seemed to collapse or expand in a way which only had an analogue in fantasy films like those by Méliès that he had seen in his youth. The shattered trees, the shelled ground, the smashed fortifications made up a landscape on which murderously imbecilic struggles were fought. All around were varieties of death for which Casagemas's orchestrated suicide could never have prepared him. Eviscerated bodies of men and horses littered the ground. The air reeked of mud, decay, shit and smoke. Explosions hurled earth, timber, brick, helmets and human limbs into the air. Everything was taken apart, time after time, and there was nothing fixed that a man could hold on to.
Partly deafened, filthy with lice and foot rot, the waiter hunched in a muddy shell hole and comforted himself by thinking of better times. Sometimes he conjured imaginary scenes of an arcadia that would follow the war. Sometimes he remembered simple domestic pleasures, recollections of an everyday happiness about which the mysterious suicide must only have been able to dream.
Like thousands of others, he took a photograph from his tunic, held it like a sacrament in his hands, and stared at the faces of his wife and son. The waiter feared what would happen to them if he were killed, but his imagination was unable to foretell their actual fate. All he could imagine was that at the moment he was looking at their faces, perhaps they were studying a photograph of him. He could not know that soon a photograph was all that would exist.
After months of squalor and terror the end came rapidly when a shell burst just a few metres away. As the shrapnel entered the waiter's brain and he fell forward in his own silence and darkness, he felt a curious sense of justification. It lapped at the edge of his fading consciousness like an ocean on black sand. In that last moment he was astonished to find himself picturing not his family, but the long-ago suicide of an unknown painter. The waiter knew it was the last time that event would ever be recalled, but that his own sacrifice would always be remembered. And then his consciousness collapsed in on itself.
The waiter's family was erased from history in the influenza pandemic that followed the war. They died within hours of each other, and they shared a grave that was identified only by a number.
The waiter's body sank within ooze and gravel, the soil packing tightly over it. His flesh decayed, the buried helmet rusted, the family photograph faded and then shredded into pulp. The waiter was lost forever beneath earth, and then grass, and then saplings.
He had no marker. There was no known date of death. He did not even have an identity. He was lost within the guesswork of battle deaths as his family was lost among the guesswork of disease mortality.
The landlord made sure that the contents of the apartment were sold to pay off unpaid debts from the waiter's family. However, since he often tried to impress his mistress with the breadth of his interests, he gave her the three books the waiter had saved for. Meanwhile, the apartment was cleared. Beds and furniture went without history to their next owners. Documents and letters were burned. The personalities of the waiter, his wife, his child, vanished. A generalised remembrance of the multitudes of the dead moved on through the lives of people they had never met and whose names they had never known.
Some weeks later, as she was getting ready to desert the landlord without telling him, his mistress leafed through the three books on history. She was not interested in what they had to say, but intended to sell them. A photograph fell from between the pages of one. It showed an ordinary-looking man posing awkwardly in his best suit, his face stiffened self-consciously and his eyes glassy with nervousness. His hand was resting on the back of a chair.
The landlord's mistress thought that the books could be of some small value, but a stranger's portrait was worth nothing. And if she were leaving, she would have to leave soon, and never look back. Her love for the landlord was already in the past.
She tore the photograph in half and threw the pieces in a bin with the remains of a meal she had been too nervous to finish.
