94
PARTISAN REVIEW
showed through the fruit. Apparently he had felt that since the wall was
back of the fruit he should paint it there, before he could go on and paint
the fruit in front of it.
The next day we discovered in the Sunday
New York Times
that he
had a group of .fifteen paintings on exhibition at the Artist's Gallery in
New York. We cut out the notice and took it to his house, but he was so
sick he could only lie in bed holding out his thin arms and saying "Excuse,
excuse". We were relieved, however, when the family told us that he had
at last consented to have another doctor come to see him.
On the evening of the ninth of May we were extremely shockeq when
a Cuban friend we met on the street told us that "Gregorio died at five
o'clock". We drove to the house right away. Several people were standing
on the verandah in the dark, talking in low voices. One young man came
up and said to us, "The old man die at five o'clock". He did not mean to
be disrespectful but his English was poor and he said "old man" instead
of "father".
The funeral took place the next afternoon. Only relatives and close
friends attend the service of a Cuban funeral and only men go to the ceme·
tery, so there were a great many cars drawn up in front of the house filled
with the waiting men. Very quickly the coffin was carried out, covered with
the pale, loose Rock Roses that the Valdes grow for sale in their back
yard. Afterwards were were invited in, "to see the children".
Gregorio was so small and had such a detached manner that it was
always surprising to think of him as a patriarch. He had five daughters
and two sons: Jennie, Gregorio, Florencio, Anna Louisa, Carmela, Adela
and Estella. Two of the daughters are married and he had three grand·
children, two boys and a girl.
I had been afraid that when I brought him the clipping from the
Times
he had been too sick .to understand it, but the youngest daughter
told me that he had looked at it a great deal and had kept telling them all
that he was "going to get the first prize for painting in New York".
She told me several other anecdotes about her father,-how when the
battleships came into Key West harbor during the war he had made a large
scale model of one of them, exact in every detail, and had used it as an
ice-cream cart, to peddle Cuban ices through the streets. It attracted the
attention of a tourist from the north and he bought it, "for eighty dollars".
She said that when the carnivals came to town he would sit up all night by
the light of an oil lamp, making little pin-wheels to sell. He used to spend
many nights at his studio, too, when he wanted to finish a sign or a pic·
ture, getting a little sleep on the cot there.
He had learned to paint when he and his wife were "sweethearts", she
said, from an old man they call a name that sounds like "Musi",-no one
knows how to spell it or remembers his real name. This old man lived in
a house belonging to the Vaides, but he was too poor to pay rent and so he
gave Gregorio painting lessons instead.
Gregorio had worked in the cigar factories, been a sign painter, an
