This story is told by Mr. Edwin Denby in his article on Valdes for the Artists’ Gallery exhibition: “When he was a young man he lived with an uncle. One day when that uncle was at work, Valdes took down the towel rack that hung next to the wash-basin and put up instead a painting of the rack with the towel on it. When the uncle came back at five, he went to the basin, bent over and washed his face hard; and still bent over he reached up for the towel. But he couldn’t get hold. With the water streaming into his eyes, he squinted up at it, saw it and clawed at it, but the towel wouldn’t come off the wall. ‘Me laugh plenty, plenty,’ Valdes said.…”
This classical ideal of verisimilitude did not always succeed so well, fortunately. Gregorio was not a great painter at all, and although he certainly belongs to the class of painters we call “primitive”, sometimes he was not even a good “primitive”. His pictures are of uneven quality. They are almost all copies of photographs or of reproductions of other pictures. Usually when he copied from such reproductions he succeeded in nothing more than the worst sort of “calendar” painting, and again when he copied, particularly from a photograph, and particularly from a photograph of something he knew and liked, such as palm trees, he managed to make just the right changes in perspective and coloring to give it a peculiar and captivating freshness, flatness, and remoteness. But Gregorio himself did not see any difference between what we think of as his good pictures and his poor pictures, and his painting a good one or a bad one seems to have been entirely a matter of luck.
There are some people whom we envy not because they are rich or handsome or successful, although they may be any or all of these, but because everything they are and do seems to be all of a piece, so that even if they wanted to they could not be or do otherwise. A particular feature of their characters may stand out as more praiseworthy in itself than others — that is almost beside the point. Ancient heroes often have to do penance for and expiate crimes they have committed all unwittingly, and in the same way it seems that some people receive certain “gifts” merely by remaining unwittingly in an undemocratic state of grace. It is a supposition that leaves painting like Gregorio’s a partial mystery. But surely anything that is impossible for others to achieve by effort, that is dangerous to imitate, and yet, like natural virtue, must be both admired and imitated, always remains mysterious.
Anyway, who could fail to enjoy and admire those secretive palm trees in their pink skies, the Traveller’s Palm, like “the fan-filamented antenna of a certain gigantic moth…” or the picture of the church in Cuba copied from a liquor advertisement and labelled with so literal a translation from the Spanish, “Church of St. Mary’ Rosario 300 Years Constructed in Cuba.”
1939
Mercedes Hospital
One day in the summer of 1940 the following notice appears in the Key West Citizen:
JOSÉ CHACÓN DIED TODAY
José Chacón, 84, died three o’clock this afternoon in the Mercedes Hospital. Funeral services will be held 5:30 p.m. tomorrow from the chapel of the Pritchard Funeral Home, Rev. G. Perez of the Latin Methodist Church officiating.
The deceased leaves but one survivor, a nephew, José Chacón.
Directly underneath appears this poem:
FRIEND?
How often have you called
Someone a friend
And thought he would be
Everything it meant?
While you were on top of the world,
With money in your hands,
They flocked around everywhere,
Even at your command.
Now that you are old and gray,
Your friends look the other way
When you meet them on the street;
Never a “Hello” when you meet.
You go home to your little room
And sit silent in the gloom,
Thinking of the once bright day,
But now you are old and all alone.
But one comes to you every day
As on your bed you must lay.
He stops and takes you by the hand,
And the look on his face, you understand.
That smile on his face tells a lot
As he sits by your bed and watches the clock
Ticking the hours softly by.
With a tear in his eye, he says goodbye.
That was a Friend to the End.
I find this brief account of the death of an old man in what is really just the poorhouse, the Casa del Pobre, very touching. And of course the poem is touching too, but it naturally does not occur to me to connect them. Then I remember I am acquainted with a man named José Chacón who must be the nephew, but who certainly could never have written anything like it. He is a fat, talkative Cuban who runs a little open-air café, La Estrella. There are always several men sitting around the place, drinking coffee and playing dominoes, but the real money is made in the back room, where poker games and bolito drawings are held. José lives over the shop with his wife and several children; he is quite rich. Why he has let his uncle die in the Mercedes Hospital, I can’t imagine.
I meet him on the street a few days later. José always speaks as though he were furiously angry, but it is just a rather common mannerism. I ask him what his uncle has died of, and he bursts out, as though the old man had been his bitterest enemy, that he died of drink, drink, drink. He demonstrates: he reels, emptying a bottle down his throat, and clutching at monsters in the air. He tells me a long story of how his uncle once hit a man with a bottle and had been taken to jail. I ask him why his uncle hasn’t lived with him, and he says he couldn’t live with anybody. He was a cigar maker for forty years; then he retired and pursued his real career of drinking. I ask if his uncle was a large or powerful man. “Yes, big and strong!” And again José expresses his opinion that it is drink that killed him.
* * *
It is a very hot day. The sky is thick bright blue, the same color as the painted lower halves of the windows of the Mercedes Hospital, as seen from the inside, where I am waiting for Miss Mamie Harris to appear. Miss Mamie has the local reputation of a saint. She is a nurse who has lived and worked at the Mercedes Hospital ever since it was opened. The parlor is hot and dark, as I examine the photographs of the hospital’s founder.
The Mercedes Hospital was given to the town of Key West thirty years ago by Mr. Perro, the richest of the local cigar-factory owners. (Mr. Perro’s favorite amusement was chess, and the high parapet of his former factory was adorned at intervals with knights cut from gray stones, as well as horse heads resting on little crenellated towers looking to all points of the compass. The inside covers of his cigar boxes had the same knights surrounded by gilt sunrays.) An enlarged photograph of Mr. Perro, yellow and indistinct, hangs in the parlor of the hospital, together with the original of his cigar-box decoration, done in watercolors.
On the walls there are also two or three mottoes, cross-stitched in wool on perforated cardboard; a crucifix; and a large lithograph, extremely yellow, of the life of the patriot Martí, with the major incidents of his life arranged in an oval; at the top, Martí in a toga is ascending into heaven. Besides the wall decorations, there are a few chairs, a Poor Box nailed to the wall for donations, and an old rolltop desk stuffed with forgotten papers. Mr. Perro left the hospital all these things, plus one hundred and thirty dollars a month forever and ever, and the name of his wife, Mercedes.