GREGORIO VALDES
93
Key West he seemed much more delicate than before. After Christmas I
found him at work in his studio only once. He had several commissions
for pictures and was very happy. He had changed the little palette that
said
Sign Painter·
for a much larger one saying
Artist Painter.
But the
next time I went to see him he was at the house at Duval Street and one of
his daughters told me he was "seek" and in bed. Gregorio came out as she
said it, however, pulling on his trousers and apologizing for not having
any new pictures to show, hut he looked very ill.
His house was a real Cuban house, very hare, very clean, with a
bicycle standing in the narrow front hall. The living room had a doorway
draped with green chenille Christmas fringe, and six straight chairs around
1
little table in the middle hearing a hunch of artificial flowers. The
bareness of a Cuban house, and the apparent remoteness of every object
in
it from every other object, gives one the same sensation as the bareness
and remoteness of Gregorio's best pictures. The only decorations I remem·
ber seeing in the house were the crochet· and embroidery-work being done
by one of the daughters, which was always on the table in the living room,
and a few photographs,-of Gregorio when he had played the trombone
in
a hand as a young man, a wedding party, etc., and a marriage certifi·
cate,
hanging on the walls. Also in the hall there was a wonderful clock.
The case was a plaster statue, painted bronze, of President Roosevelt
manipulating a ship's wheel. On the face there was a picture of a bar·
keeper shaking cocktails, and the little tin shaker actually shook up and
down with the ticking of the clock. I think this must have been won at one
of the Bingo tents that are opened at Key West every winter.
Gregorio grew steadily worse during the spring. His own doctor hap·
pened
to he in Cuba and he refused to have any other come to see him.
His
daughters said that when they begged him to have a doctor he told
them that if one came he would "throw him away".
A friend and I went to see him about the first of May. It was the first
time he had failed to get up to see us and we realized that he was danger·
ously sick. The family took us to a little room next to the kitchen, about
six
feet wide, where he lay on a low cot-bed. The room was only large
enough to hold the bed, a wardrobe, a little stand and a slop-jar, and the
rented house was in such a had state of .repair that light came up through
the
big holes in the floor. Gregorio, terribly emaciated, lay in bed wearing
1
blue shirt; his head was on a flat pillow, and just above him a little holy
picture was tacked to the wall. He looked like one of those Mexican retahlo
paintings of miraculous cures, only in his case we were afraid no miracu·
lous cure was possible.
That day we bought one of the few pictures he had on hand,-a still
life of Key West fruits such as a cocoanut, a mango, sapodillos, a water·
melon, and a sugar apple, all stiffiy arranged against a blue background.
In
this picture the paint had cracked slightly, and examining it I discov·
ered
one eccentricity of Gregorio's painting. The blue background extended
all
the way to the table top and where the paint had cracked the blue
