Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  I wanted to know the names of the colours — titanium white, ivory black, yellow ochre, ultramarine, cobalt blue, Venetian red, alizarin crimson, viridian green, terre verte, light cadmium red. There was poetry in the colours, their ability to change and alter when nudged with a little of another. And how to organize them on the palette, remembering the order; the dark colours looked similar to me, in dark mass, but a little white dabbed on the edge of the mass revealed blue or dark green.

  J. explained the process of taking a good sketch to the canvas, using a grid, using charcoal or a pencil to keep the elements of a design intact. “Don’t worry about buttons or eyes at this stage,” he said, studying my body, mixing the colour for my nipples.

  Touch up the hair with verdaccio; then with this brush shape up this hair with white. Then take a wash of light ocher; and with a blunt bristle brush work back over this hair as if you were doing flesh. Then with the same brush shape up the accents with some dark ocher. Then with a sharper little minever brush and light ocher and lime white shape up the reliefs of the hair.

  — Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook

  In that particular context, I suppose I was a muse. It took me years to recognize this. A young woman is often the last to recognize her own attractions. I grew up in a family that didn’t praise. We weren’t unusual. My mother’s background was Presbyterian. If I looked in the mirror for too long, or expressed too much interest in my appearance, she would tell me I was vain. And yet — oh paradox! — my mother wanted me to have curly hair like Shirley Temple (a perfect child, with her blond curls, dimples, and a sweet nature). Mine was disappointingly thick, brown, and straight. Never mind, that’s why the home permanent was invented. I remember afternoons spent crying in a haze of ammonia as my mother wrapped sections of my hair with paper and rolled them onto small curling rods before drenching my scalp with Tonette. I’d weep as my mother wrapped and my father would say, “That’s the price of beauty,” and I cried even harder: “I don’t want to be beautiful. It’s Mum who wants me to be!”

  The perms never worked. I never looked like Shirley Temple. I’d have needed short hair to begin with, and someone who knew that one had to begin high on the scalp with the curling rods instead of rolling them from the bottoms of the strands. So I’d have smooth hair from the crown and then uncontrollable frizz for the last four inches.

  The perms coincided with Easter, and there was a new dress and hat for the Easter church service. I was mortified at the way the frizz hung below the brim of the straw hat. It took weeks, even months, for the perm to settle down, and it was always a grave disappointment to my mother, and to me — for I wanted her to be happy with how I looked. Yet each year, the resurrection of the Lord prompted the ritual of the perm.

  In my early teen years, I’d been very aware I wasn’t the kind of girl boys my own age were drawn to. I was a little taller than average — 5'6" — and not thin. I was dark-haired, dark-eyed. One of my best friends was very fair, with blue eyes, delicately pretty. When we went to parties together, she was swarmed by admirers. Beside her I felt gawky and plain. Once I waited in the car while a boy walked her along the waterfront, kissing her in the moonlight while I tried not to watch.

  But later, when I was seventeen, I began to attract another kind of attention. There was a man who did deliveries for the pharmacy where I worked on weekends. He’d look at me in a deeply admiring way, seriously, and I felt like he was taking my clothes off in his imagination. He had an old Rolls-Royce, I remember, and often suggested that he drive me home after work. As I lived about three blocks away, I’d refuse him, politely, the way I’d been taught to treat those older than me. He was older than my father, after all, and I was not comfortable with his interest.

  One of the pharmacists used to follow me into the lunch room and try to rub against me. He had a crewcut and pop-bottle glasses, terrible breath, and a wife who always wanted a substantial discount when she bought makeup from the cosmetician. I could not imagine kissing him — or for that matter, lying with the delivery man in soft grass somewhere hidden from the road — for surely that was his intention.

  But that became the way of it. Older men, as old as my father, or more ancient (my father at that time was about forty-seven), began to show me the attentions boys my own age couldn’t, or wouldn’t. They weren’t all shifty-eyed, in back rooms of a pharmacy, or leering from the magazine aisle while I rang up a customer’s order. Some were courtly; they noticed my appearance (hair styles noted and approved of, a dark green dress praised by the father of a young man I dated, my graduation dress of ivory silk commented on by my high-school teachers). They talked to me as though to an intelligent person whose ideas were worthy of being taken seriously.

  My father, in contrast, argued with me about everything and looked down his nose at my emerging political beliefs — though I must confess I expressed them aggressively. Coming home from my first opportunity to vote, I said airily, “Well, I guess my vote cancelled yours,” having made my mark beside the name of the Communist candidate. Although I knew almost nothing about communism, apart from a brief introduction in my modern world history course at school, I knew that my father hated the idea of anyone other than the Progressive Conservatives as our governing party. He hated Trudeau. Communists, socialists: anyone who mentioned the poor or human rights or the seal hunt was a bleeding heart. He hated anyone who he believed had behaved cowardly or otherwise badly in the Second World War. This included people whose origins were in countries like Japan or Germany or Italy, even if their families had arrived a generation or two earlier. Like ours had.

  My father had no interest in art or poetry or any of the things I was discovering could teach me to live as I needed to. When I made plans to travel abroad, he said, “What’s wrong with here?” “Here” was my parent’s small house, where we crowded around an Arborite table and ate from Melmac plates. My mother made wholesome food but did not go to any effort to serve it nicely, apart from at Christmas; she was too busy with the daily work of a household of six. In my parents’ home, listening to music was thought of as “affected,” and the notion of a lovely table set with pretty dishes and flowers was “putting on the dog.”

  The winter I shared a beautiful heritage house with a friend — it was her family’s summer home, built in the early part of the twentieth century on its own little cove north of the city — I began to see that houses and meals could be gracious and not simply utilitarian. That house had a shelf of cookbooks that I read like novels; Elizabeth David’s Summer Cooking is one I particularly remember. From that book, I made a salad Niçoise, delighting in the arrangement of steamed beans and golden-yolked eggs, glistening olives, small creamy potatoes. It was a world away from iceberg lettuce and Thousand Island dressing. When I thought of my own modest background, I felt a kind of shame in the contrast, as though I was betraying my roots in wanting to surround myself with beauty.

  I was living in that charmed house (I dream of it still) when I met a visiting poet from Venice who took me for long, drunken dinners and recited poems in my honour (though I realized later that the poems had been composed for earlier loves; it was convenient to have them memorized when he fed me delicacies, washed down with glasses of red wine) and who proposed marriage during our fourth meal together. Though flattered, I was beginning to realize that he wasn’t entirely the man I had been waiting for, and ended the relationship.

  Some nights, I stood on the stone terrace while the sea lapped just below me, wondering if I would ever see Venice in my life now that I’d stopped taking the poet’s phone calls. He’d call late at night, manic and tearful, almost incoherent with drink, lapsing into Italian as he sang my praises or lamented my indifference. Anyway, it wasn’t indifference but fear that made me replace the telephone receiver while he carried on at the other end. I was afraid I had gotten in over my head, and the only way I knew to save myself was to hide.

  Only weeks later, he was courting another young woman who did marry hi
m and go with him to Europe, giving birth to several children, living (as I understand it) in poverty while he wrote poetry and translated obscure texts (he was a polymath, among his other gifts).

  There were others. The list embarrasses me now, as I see its pattern so clearly. Yet there was something compelling about older men treating me as though I’d been gilded with a kind of divinity. Which I see now was simply youth.

  With a very soft, rather blunt, bristle brush take some of this flesh color, squeezing the brush with your fingers; and shape up all the reliefs of this face. Then take the little dish of the intermediate flesh color, and proceed to pick out all the half tones of the face, and of the hands and feet, and of the body when you are doing a nude.

  — Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook

  This is hard to talk about. When J. painted my body, I felt a strange thrill — the brush stroking paint across my abdomen, and concentrating on my nipples, the dark vee of my pubis. I never made love with him but in this way, he made love to me. I was beautiful under the bristles and sables, flats and rounds. Beautiful against the flowered cloth, the imperfections of my skin eased away by his touch. Outside, forsythia bloomed against the window, so it must have been March. Afterwards, there were glasses of wine and a plate of cheese with a few grapes. It was like talking in bed, after love, although of course at this point we were again fully clothed. Or I was, for he had never taken off as much as a shirt.

  I thought about J. (now deceased) and his seductive work on a recent trip to Venice. (How gratifying it would have been to the young woman I was to know she would see Venice one day, and not in the company of a man who wept under the influence of red wine and who groped for her body in tears, but rather with her beloved husband.) One of the first places we visited was Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, where I stepped into a sacristy to meet Paolo Veneziano’s Madonna. She sits serenely within her altarpiece as she has for almost seven hundred years, holding her son on her lap, wearing a cloak as blue as Giotto’s skies, gorgeous with fleur-de-lis. Though a doge and his consort are being presented to her at one side of the painting, she gazes away to the saints at her right, not at them, though she is also aware of us looking. Her knees beneath her draperies look very strong. Cennini says:

  There are some masters who . . . take a little lime white, thinned with water; and very systematically pick out the prominences and reliefs of the countenance; then they put a little pink on the lips, and some “little apples” on the cheeks. Next they go over it with a little wash of thin flesh color; and it is all painted, except for touching in the reliefs afterward with a little white. It is a good system.1

  I don’t know if this was Paolo Veneziano’s particular method, but he did something beautiful with his Madonna’s cheeks. And her eyes are ravishing.

  Then take a little black in another little dish, and with the same brush mark out the outline of the eyes over the pupils of the eyes.2

  I had a single eye pencil in my toiletries bag at the Albergo Casa Peron on Salizzada San Pantalon and try as I might, I couldn’t outline my own eyes in that intriguing way.

  I saw those women everywhere, their eyes out of Cennini. Paolo Veneziano’s Coronation of the Virgin at the Galleria dell’Accademia, his Madonna and Child Enthroned and another gem by Giambono, also a coronation. Bellini’s later Madonna of the Little Trees, her downcast eyes not made up as dramatically as the Byzantine fashion, but still wonderful, more human. By the early Renaissance, the Madonnas were actual women rather than the primarily stylized images of devotion modelled on the glorious golden ikons coming to Italy from Constantinople and Greece.

  In that fall of 2009, Venice was still full of those women, dark-haired and dark-eyed, their skin glowing. I’d see a woman standing on a bridge over one of the canals, talking into a cellphone, her shoulders wrapped in a shawl of rich carmine or China red, balancing on one high heel, turning the toe of the other sleek boot this way, then that, her free hand brushing her hair back from her face. And I, full of Titians and Tintorettos from a day of entering churches and hardly believing that the next might contain more beauties than the last, would recognize her profile, her animated hands.

  We went by train to Padua for a day and walked from the station to the Scrovegni Chapel. The process for admission was complicated. We bought our tickets at the civic museum and walked over to the chapel; it was brick, very plain and unadorned. We hadn’t understood that small groups, no more than twenty at a time, were assigned a specific time for admission, based on reservations; but because the group waiting to go in had fewer than twenty, we were allowed to wait with them. We had to sit in an antechamber for half an hour while dehumidifiers hummed and did their work, quietly absorbing the fall moisture from our clothing. We were shown a film on the history of the chapel. Then we were ushered into the chapel through a series of doors designed to keep damp air at bay. We had twenty minutes to look at the astonishing painting cycle begun (arguably) in 1303 and completed by the consecration date of March 25, 1305.

  It was like entering a novel, episodic in form, providing scenes from the lives of Joachim and Anne, then their daughter, Mary, her husband, Joseph, and her son, Jesus. It was necessary to find our way through the narrative quickly, the clock ticking those twenty minutes away. Like entering a novel: beginnings, plot development, rising action, a denouement, a death, then resurrection. The panels were so richly animated. Everything was in them — serenity (Anne in her bedroom receiving news of her impending maternity from an angel climbing in through a high window, its wings barely clearing the lintel, while outside her handmaiden spins yarn) in contrast to an earlier panel of Anne’s husband Joachim meeting shepherds after being driven from the Temple of Jerusalem for his unworthiness (i.e., he hasn’t been blessed with fatherhood). In his panel, a small dog leaps at his feet, and the sheep mill about while the shepherds look puzzled at his arrival. Later, we read the flight into Egypt, Mary and her infant on a remarkably placid donkey, her cloak having lost most of its azurite pigment from the centuries of damp.

  (“If you wish to make a mantle for Our Lady with azurite,” advises Cennini,

  . . . begin by laying in the mantle or drapery in fresco with sinoper and black, the two parts sinoper, and the third black. But first scratch in the plan of the folds with some little pointed iron, or with a needle. Then, in secco, take some azurite, well washed either with lye or with clear water, and worked over a little bit on the grinding slab. Then, if the blue is good and deep in color, put into it a little size, tempered neither too strong nor too weak . . . Likewise put an egg yolk into the blue; and if the blue is pale, the yolk should come from one of these country eggs, for they are quite red. Mix it up well.)3

  Mary’s cloak may be flaking from the damp but her eyes are beautifully long, and outlined in black. Her husband looks back in awe and concern. And perhaps the most dramatic scene of all, in the garden of Gethsemane: even from our distant place on the floor, centuries later, I could see the furrows of Judas’s brow as he kissed Jesus in that moment of betrayal, Peter slicing an ear from a soldier, raised lances, a horn blasting, torches flaring in the night. And everywhere, those dark Byzantine eyes.

  J. made me a little book, hard-bound in black leather. I was going away, in part running scared from his attentions, in part to see if I might make a life for myself, alone, in order to test my writing gifts — I thought they needed to develop in isolation, or that I needed to develop in isolation, and for a time it worked. He hoped I might try to paint, because he was convinced I could do anything. (The little scribbles I produced in his company, using his charcoal and fine papers, were praised far beyond their worth.)

  The book set out to teach me basic painterly skills, beginning with materials, preparing the support, taking an image from sketch to painting, demonstrating with arrows and crosshatching how to keep a composition dynamic, mixing colours on a handy plate or piece of glass. His first intention (I believe this) was to offer me quick lessons in the skills I’d need to pa
int. But it quickly filled with drawings of me — my face, my body (in poses I’d never have agreed to), my clothing peeled away like bark. I turn its pages now, a woman in her fifties, and understand something about obsession. Maybe even love.

  Out the window of my study, an arbutus tree stands in a bed of periwinkle. Warblers dart among its blossoms in spring, eager for the tiny insects that are drawn to their honeyed scent; band-tailed pigeons visit in late summer for its berries. It’s like a patient beautiful woman, arms open to the sky. And looking at the tree, I’m reminded of how age too can be peeled away like bark to show the smooth new layer, waiting to receive its first experience of sun and rain, the light feet of birds, a young snake curled at the base, listening with its tongue.

  In Venice, we looked at hundreds of paintings over two weeks. I noticed colour like never before. Was it November’s grey skies and the dark water of the canals that made things so vivid by contrast? The ancient buildings with their peeling paint more beautiful for the wear? No matter. I would enter a church or a scuola and the reds would ravish my eyes. The dense warmth of the yellows heated the chilly interiors like embers. And skin glowed like the flesh of the young, as though lit from an inner source.

  I loved the carmines (from cochineal insects), the Venetian red (derived from red iron oxides), ultramarines, azurites, Egyptian blues, purples from indigo and madder, malachite and verdigris (from acetate of copper) greens, lemony orpiment and Naples yellows, burnt Siennas and umbers, the heavy white of lead and the lighter chalks and gypsums, and the carbon blacks (from burned bones, soot from lamps, charred remains of vines). There was a shop we passed often in the Dorsoduro where powdered pigments filled a tray in the window, the colours crying out to be purchased and mixed.