I have a Picasso

“You heard me boy, I have a Picasso.” The man's face took on a defiant and angry expression.

A stranger, I did not want to upset an old man, even if he were partly drunk. My long hair and accent had brought me some unfriendly looks from the group playing around noisily at the back of the bar.

“I believe you,” I shrugged. “Have another pastis?” This cheered him up, and he smiled, breathing garlic and alcohol fumes through jagged teeth. It's not usually my style to hang around old drunks, and I would have moved away, pretending that I was an ignorant foreigner, but I'd spent a few lonely days in Paris and needed a drinking partner.

I slipped a franc into the jukebox, and chose the only title I recognized, a good choice. The Doors,
Jim Morrison's warm voice sang out “People are strange.” This made the boys at the back laugh, I relaxed.

“Do you want to see it?” he asked.
“What?” I replied
“The Picasso, of course.” As much as I like art, I didn't understand Picasso, If it were a Van Gogh, who would hesitate –but how could a looser like that own any genuine art?

“Well,” I said, “I don't have a lot of time, I suppose that you keep it locked away safely?”

“No, I've got it here.” He said with a strange smile. I looked around the bar but found nothing. We sipped our drinks, and let the silence draw out.

“Here,” he said at last “On my back”.
–OK, I thought, he is crazy. Then he removed his shabby coat, swiveled around and pulled his shirt-tail from his pants. The mob in the corner went wild.

I saw, as he lifted up the dirty shirt, tattooed into the papery skin, the red, black and gray tones of a what, even to my ignorant eye, looked like a Picasso.
He put his coat back on and we waited for the kids in the corner calm down. He told me that Pablo Picasso had executed a version of the Woman in an Armchair on his back with a kit of tattooing needles in 1931, it had hurt. He had bet one of the surrealist crowd, I forgot who, that he could tattoo as well as he could paint. He had won.

I wondered about his model, she must have hated to be shown like that; executed was the right word.

During the evening he told me more of the story. How his thriving art gallery had been looted by the Nazis during the war. How the skin on his back had become an object of desire–for a time it was valued at several hundred thousands dollars.
He had narrowly escaped death or flailing alive by bribing an expert to declare his tattoo a fake. Picasso helped him by swearing that it was not his work.

We emptied a bottle between us, and apparently the drink had made me very generous, for when I woke in the park from the cold and damp, the hundred-dollar bill that I kept hidden for emergencies had been replaced by an IOU for the same amount.

I would never see the money.
–Serves me right, I thought, naivety and drunkenness is never a good mix.

Twenty years later I received a letter from a notarial office in Paris: As the sole heir of Jean-Charles Lescouque, I would receive the only asset of the estate, a supposed Picasso. I would have to pay the fees and the transport costs. I paid and received the package a few weeks later.

I have kept it since as reminder that nothing is as it seems, and that a work of art can be anywhere, in a museum, in someone's head, on a drunk's back, or on my mantelpiece in a funeral urn.