92
PARTISAN REVIEW
Valdes, Sign Painter
on it. Inside there were three rooms with holes in
the floors and weeds growing up through the holes. Gregorio had covered
two sections of the walls with postcards and pictures from the newspapers.
One section was animals: baby animals in zoos and wild animals in Africa.
The other section was mostly reproductions of Madonnas and other relig·
ious subjects from the rotogravures. In one room there was a small plas·
ter Virgin with some half-melted yellow wax roses in a tumbler in front
of her. He also had ·an old cot there, and a row of plants in tin cans. One
of these was Sweet Basil which I was invited to smell every time I came
to call.
Gregorio was very small, thin and sickly, with a childish face and
th;ed brown eyes,-in fact he looked a little like the
Self Portrait
of El
Greco. He spoke very little English but was so polite that if I took some·
one with me who spoke Spanish he would almost ignore the Spanish and
always answer in English, anyway, which made explanations and even
compliments very difficult. He had been born in Key West, but his wife
was from Cuba, and Spanish was the household language, as it is in most
Key West Cuban families.
I commissioned him to paint a large picture of the house I was living
in. When I came to take him to see it he was dressed in new clothes: a
new straw hat, a new striped shirt, buttoned up but without a necktie, his
old trousers, but a pair of new black and white Cuban shoes, elaborately
Gothic in design, ·and with such pointed toes that they must have been very
uncomfortable. I gave him an enlarged photograph of the house to paint
from and also asked to have more flowers put in, a monkey that lived next
door, a parrot, and a certain type of palmtree, called the Traveller's Palm.
There is only one of these in Key West, so Gregorio went and made a
careful drawing of it to go by. He showed me the drawing later, with the
measurements and colors written in along the side, and apologized because
the tree really had seven branches on one side and six on the other, but in
the painting he had given both sides seven to make it more symmetrical.
He put in flowers in profusion, and the parrot, on the perch on the veran·
dah, and painted the monkey, larger than life-size, climbing the trunk of
the palm tree.
When he delivered this picture there was no one at home, so he left
it on the verandah leaning against the wall. As I came home that evening
I saw it there from a long way off down the street,-a fair sized copy of
the house, in green and white, leaning against its green and white proto–
type. In the gray twilight they seemed to blur together and I had the
feeling that if I came closer I would be able to see another miniature copy
of the house leaning on the porch of the painted house, and so on,-like
the Old Dutch Cleanser advertisements. A few days later when I had hung
the picture I asked Gregorio to a vernissage party, and in spite of language
difficulties we all had a very nice time. We drank sherry, and from time to
time Gregorio would announce, "more wine".
He had never seemed very well, but this winter when I returned to
