Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  “I’ve learned a few things over the last eleven years.”

  We passed some minutes eating quietly. There existed a harmony in this house that surprised me and allowed me to relax. I could hardly believe him to be the same man as the one who had been so insolent years earlier.

  “I’m glad you found a painting.”

  Strangely, he did sound sincere.

  He propped it up on the sideboard.

  “It’s by Cézanne. Pascal loved it because it’s an ochre quarry.”

  “Is that so? Then whoever put it there had a devilish sense of humor.”

  The conversation came to an abrupt halt. I set down my fork, suspicious. His face was unreadable. Against Maxime’s advice, I was tempted to ask him for permission to look in the two remaining windmills, but if he said no, that would only alert him to our clandestine intentions.

  “You should have seen yourself tramping up the hill holding it over your head like the spoils won by a conquering hero. Or, rather, heroine.”

  We finished the meal but sat rooted to our chairs, unsure of how to move the conversation to other topics.

  “Is this your favorite painting?”

  “No. There is one with a girl and a goat on a path alongside her vegetable plot. I love that one. I feel a strong personal connection to it.”

  “But this one, any one, moves you one step closer to leaving Roussillon.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it. Another would be that I have found my lost painting and can take pleasure in seeing it again, and I can give it its rightful place in the legacy of French art.”

  He seemed to consider that for a few minutes, as though the larger thought had never occurred to him. “Maybe I could think of it that way too if it didn’t mean your time here is shorter now.” He clasped his hands, leaned forward on his forearms, and looked silently at the table. Eventually, he raised his head and studied me. “Forgive me if I hope that finding them takes a long time.”

  That left us both thinking thoughts at cross-purposes. Hesitantly, I asked if he had gone to Paris.

  “Not yet. I’m waiting for your answer.”

  “Once you said you were not a patient man.”

  “You remember wrongly. I said I was patient, but only up to a point. You are teaching me patience.”

  “It’s a hard thing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. A very hard thing.”

  “You have been kind to me.”

  “No. I have been rude. Worse than rude.”

  “I am putting all that behind us.” At the risk of offending him, I added, “But my answer hasn’t changed.”

  “Yet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  J’AI DEUX AMOURS

  1948

  “WE’LL BE TRESPASSING, YOU KNOW,” MAXIME SAID TO Maurice in his courtyard, under Louise’s disapproving eye.

  Maurice’s bushy eyebrows crawled toward each other in an exaggerated scowl. With the speed of a thought, it changed to a grin. “No! We are the rectifiers of a wrong, just like the knights of Occitania. Are you prepared to fight with sword and dagger for our rightful booty?” He held up a long crowbar and a short, hooked pry bar.

  “Don’t clown around, Maurice,” Louise said. “This is serious.” She turned to Maxime. “If I didn’t love him, I would whip him into shape, but whipping would have no effect.”

  “Serious, indeed. And we will be successful.” Maxime raised a fist high with his index finger extended. “I will not go back to Paris until we find a painting.”

  “Is that a promise?” I asked.

  “ ‘The day of glory has arrived. Marchons! Marchons!’ ” he sang, saluting Maurice.

  It was surprising to see him adopting the Provençal temperament. His playfulness, exaggerated gestures, and theatricality I took to be evidence of his exultation at having sold a painting for Monsieur Laforgue, as well as the result of Maurice’s influence.

  “ ‘Aux armes, citoyens!’ ” Maurice sang, holding aloft the pry bar.

  Louise shook her head at Maurice. “Tonight you citoyen of France ought to kneel and thank heaven for giving you a wife who loves you enough to put up with your antics.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Maurice said in the heavily accented English of Maurice Chevalier. “Wonderful to be in love with you.” Then, with a little dance step, he launched into song, also in English: “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise.”

  Maxime joined in: “Birds in the trees seem to twitter Louise.”

  Maurice held his hand over his heart and sang: “Can it be true, someone like you could love me, Louise?”

  I applauded.

  “Ouf! Go on, all of you,” Louise said.

  WE SET OUT AT MIDNIGHT with a ladder, a rope, and the encouragement of having drunk a bottle of Émile’s rosé.

  “Be careful,” Louise cautioned at the doorway. “Don’t do anything dangerous.”

  “Ha! Art must always be dangerous,” Maxime said.

  I was hopeful. The week prior, Maurice and I had driven by the Moulin de l’Auro and had seen the door ajar. Now we climbed into Maurice’s bus, which was again working on gas, with the cumbersome firebox removed, and crept along by moonlight without headlights.

  The Moulin de l’Auro, our first windmill, dealt a severe blow to our clandestine operations. Tonight the door was secured with a padlock. Something was afoot. Did it mean there was a painting inside? We had to get in. There was a small window about three meters above the ground. Maurice patted his round belly. It was evident at once who should enter. I had had the foresight to wear André’s trousers.

  As much as possible, we worked without lighting our battery torches and without talking. Maurice propped the ladder against the windmill, and Maxime rigged a harness of the rope around my waist and under my arms. He went up first with the pry bar to loosen a screen. It was so rusty that it fell off with a clatter that made us wince. He came down, and then it was my turn, with him close behind me on the ladder. Held steady by Maxime, I entered the window feet first, then turned onto my stomach while Maxime and Maurice lowered me down with the rope until my feet touched solid earth.

  Aiming my torch downward, I peered into every crevice, looked beneath a pile of grain sacks, examined each one, upended barrels, and felt around the central shaft. My hands discovered levers, gears, wheels, ropes, but no painting.

  I climbed the steps to the second level, where the two massive grindstones lay horizontally, one on top of the other. The space between them would be a perfect hiding place, but how would anyone get a painting in there? It would have to be the miller, who would know which rope to hoist.

  Just under the rounded cap of the windmill near my house was where I had found Pissarro’s La Petite Fabrique, beneath neatly piled wooden blocks. Here, the blocks were scattered. They hid nothing. I went back down, my hope punctured, and was reaching for the rope, the signal to hoist me up, when my head hit something soft that moved, startling me.

  “Wait!”

  I investigated what seemed to be a suspended canvas funnel. Nothing was inside it. I moved a barrel beneath the window, climbed onto it, and gave the rope three hard yanks. Slowly, I felt myself being hoisted up.

  We had high hopes about the other windmill, Moulin de Ferre, where Monsieur Saulnier had found the study of heads, thinking that he might have overlooked other paintings. It was unlocked. Jittery because this windmill was visible from Bernard’s property, we searched quickly, not overlooking any possible place. No painting. Afraid that Bernard would appear out of nowhere, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  SPRING. APRICOT TREES BLOSSOMING with pinkish-white petals like flakes of the moon, and plum blossoms like the down of swans filled our nostrils with sweetness as Maxime and I walked to the bories. Along the roadside, wild purple irises lifted their regal heads. I felt a bashful pride that Maxime was finally seeing the Vaucluse in its glory. I only hoped a mistral would not blow through. In spring they were the most fierce. Everything seemed to have
its opposite—sweetness and harshness. Yet with the spring came asparagus and sweet peas and my delicate, pendulous haricots verts, and, along with them, hope that things would right themselves.

  Searching the bories was hard work—lifting off those flat stones that covered ovens and replacing them. From time to time, we rested on stone slabs and leaned our backs against the walls.

  “I have decided that the primitive people who lived in bories had to have had some sort of language,” I said. “To express wonder about mysteries. The phases of the moon. Bird calls. Rain. The mistral. Language was the only way they could confront the mysteries together. They must have hungered to understand them.”

  “What other hungers did they have?” he asked.

  I thought awhile. “The hunger to explain themselves. Actions can so easily be misunderstood.”

  At that, Bernard leapt into my thoughts. What was I to understand about the time when he’d pinned me down among the pomegranates until it appeared that he was appalled by his own actions, then helped me up? What was in him that had prevented him from taking advantage of me right there in the road? What had possessed him to be so gentle in washing the blood off my leg, or in taking tender care of me in the Sentier des Ocres? Yet he had grabbed my arm forcefully when he’d asked me to go to Paris with him. If he were more articulate, maybe then I could understand him. As it was, whatever made him have such contrary natures was a mystery to me.

  Maxime said, “Misunderstanding is exactly why people need words to communicate their feelings.”

  Exactly, I thought.

  “Like thank you. And I’m hurting,” he added, a mere whisper.

  “And like I’m sorry,” I said.

  At that moment I realized that even with language, we struggle to say the unsayable. “Maybe that’s why we have art,” I ventured.

  “But art alone can’t tell the whole story. We need words to explain why that woman’s tears burst out of her eyes like bullets in Picasso’s painting. It requires context in order to be understood fully.”

  That was obvious in the case of the Picasso painting, but in everyday life, sometimes it wasn’t obvious.

  “We also need words to help along our hungers,” I said, conscious of changing the drift of conversation.

  He regarded me quizzically. “For example?”

  “The hunger to be touched can be augmented by the word please. Please.”

  His hand came to rest on mine, and after a while, he murmured, “Imagine them falling asleep close together, those early people. Peacefully, in utter darkness, with a dome of stone above them.”

  “Or in front of their borie in summer, under the dome of the sky.”

  “Sprinkled with lights,” he added.

  “It must have given them a sense of the infinite,” I said.

  “And of their own smallness and vulnerability.” He moved so his body was against mine and put his arm around me. “Being vulnerable together is less frightening than being vulnerable alone.”

  IT WOULD BE WRONG to say that we found nothing that day, even though we came home without a painting.

  THE NEXT MORNING I told Maxime my idea that the hiding places might represent aspects particular to the region. I had convinced myself that there had to be a painting in a borie even though we hadn’t found one in the borie village. Maybe that was too far from Roussillon. I mentioned that in the fields nearby, miniature bories used as toolsheds and shelters by farmers had wooden doors with hinges bolted into the stone. We set out on a long amble down dirt farm roads and found that they had no padlocks. How trusting were the country folk.

  After investigating more than a dozen, Maxime said, “No more, Lisette. I can barely drag my feet.”

  “Oh, please, just one more.”

  Up the road a short distance, a path led to a small borie in the middle of a field of broad-leafed melon plants. The door had been painted the coral color of the flesh of cantaloupes, a Roussillon hue.

  “That one. Look. It’s special. I promise. It will be the last.”

  We stepped carefully between mounded rows of plants, found the door unlocked, and ducked inside. Cézanne’s panoramic landscape astonished us. It wasn’t even covered. It had been propped up in front of the handles of shovels and hoes, as if the farmer wanted to see it every time he opened the door.

  “If this farmer loves it this much, I hate to take it from him,” I said.

  “Don’t get sentimental. It’s rightfully yours, Lisette. This art-loving farmer could be the thief.”

  Maxime brought it out into the sunlight. It displayed so much of Provence—cultivated fields dotted with ochre farmhouses, a string of distant buff-colored arches of a Roman bridge, a narrow country road, tall pine trees on the left, their trunks bare, with foliage only at their tops, and the grand Montagne Sainte-Victoire in the distance, a pale lavender monolith, triangular and imposing.

  I changed my mind about André’s favorite painting. This was so beautiful, so true to the region, that it had to have been his favorite. “Look, André!” I shouted to the sky. “Your favorite.”

  Behind us we heard someone approach, startling us. I spun around to face a farmer.

  “Bonjour,” Maxime said.

  The man dipped his head in a nod, a slight gesture. “Adieu.”

  That disconcerted Maxime, since he didn’t know the custom here.

  “S’il vous plaît, monsieur, do you own this field?” I asked.

  “That I do.”

  “And this little borie?”

  “Mine too. For my tools.”

  We introduced ourselves and learned that his name was Claude and that he had painted the door to match the flesh of his cantaloupes. I liked his self-expression.

  “We apologize for trespassing,” I said. “We have been looking for a painting that we believed was hidden in the area.”

  Deep lines appeared in his tanned, leathery cheeks. “Then I conclude that you have arrived at the right place,” he said, gazing sadly at the painting.

  Maxime explained, “We found it in your toolshed.”

  “So did I one day.”

  “Do you have any idea how it got there?”

  “Strike me dead if I know. It just strolled in one night, as far as I can tell. It’s been here for a few years.”

  “Do you know who put it there?”

  “Bof! How can I know? Somebody needing to hide it, I’m guessing. Did you put it there?”

  “No, but the painting belongs to me.”

  The slow realization of parting with it seeped into his old eyes.

  “Then you must have it, madame, but be sure I’ll miss it fierce. It always made me content, seeing it there when I opened the door of a morning and the light angled in over it. It’s mighty pretty, to my mind.”

  “Yes, I agree. Thank you for protecting it.”

  He took a hoe from the shed. “Adieu,” he said and shuffled away.

  Baffled, amused, and a touch saddened, we walked home quietly in the somber, pale, end-of-day light.

  “I LOVE THIS ONE,” I said that evening, seeing it framed and hanging on the north wall. We’d had to move Chagall’s painting over in order to put the landscape exactly where Pascal had hung it near the dining table.

  “You love all of them.”

  “Not like this one. This one I tried to imagine when I was looking at the view through the outhouse window.”

  “Yes, well, don’t you see? That view is your own. You own it. You relate to it in all seasons of the year. In just that way, Cézanne owned this view.” Maxime’s voice became soft. “He must have coaxed the landscape to reveal its secrets to him, its hills and folds. It was his act of love that passed into expression.”

  “Listening to Pascal, I came to think that Cézanne was some sort of mystic.”

  “Perhaps you could say that. He didn’t just see nature. He contemplated the idea of nature. To him, Montagne Sainte-Victoire represented the pristine natural purity of the earth. Seeing only the tip of t
his mountain, like an iceberg, like you see here, he imagined its geological root. It was for him a descent into time before human culture, beneath centuries of superficial civilization.”

  I couldn’t grasp all that Maxime was saying, but I surely did understand the slope of Claude’s shoulders and the angle of his downcast head as he had walked away with his hoe.

  “All of what you just said is in this painting?”

  “In all of his paintings of the mountain, to one degree or another. This one has to be an early painting of the valley and mountain, but the more he worked on this subject, the more abstract his work became—less of a depiction and more of a pattern of geometric shapes done in broader brushstrokes.”

  “So is this early one inferior?”

  “Not at all. It’s just early. But his later paintings show that the geometric shapes of his landscapes opened the way for Picasso and others to use flat, hard-edged forms to depict a figure.”

  “Like our stick drawings on the courtyard wall!”

  “If you like.” He smiled at the notion.

  “Then these paintings really are a trail of the history of art, like Marc Chagall said.”

  “Once you find the Picasso, if it truly is a Picasso, they are.”

  “But Chagall doesn’t fit in.”

  “Yes, he does. At the end. The visible reality expressed through the handling of light and color of Impressionism—Pissarro—moved into the solid geometric shapes of Postimpressionism—Cézanne—to the modernism of distortion and Cubism—Picasso—and finally to the postmodernism of the expression of the invisible personal reality of dreams. That’s Chagall. You have an important historic collection here, one that should never be dismantled.”

  My thoughts flew to Pascal. Had he understood that?

  “Besides the Picasso, there are still two paintings missing. Pissarro’s red roofs and the first one Pascal acquired, of the girl and her goat on the ochre path in Louveciennes. I have lived that painting, Max. Remembering it kept me going during the Occupation years.”

  “They’ll turn up.”

  “So you say now. I don’t know where else to look.”