Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is

by Michael Langan

  He looked at her now, delighted. “Oh my God, that’s great!”

  “I know, right? I can hardly believe it. I mean, I’m nobody and these paintings, well, you saw them… I’m still working out what my work is all about, but I guess he liked them and you have to start somewhere.”

  “We should totally celebrate.”

  “Y’know, you’re right, we should. I’ve been nursing a hangover all day but now I can feel it lifting.”

  He nodded to the waitress: “Can we get two glasses of Prosecco? Is that okay?” he asked her. “Prosecco?”

  Sophie nodded. “You’re only the second person I’ve told,” she said.

  “The second!” he exclaimed, mock-offended. “Who was the first?”

  “Oh — ” she couldn’t tell him it was the long suffering, long dead wife of Paul Cézanne — “Sorry, I mean you’re only the second person who knows. After Christa.”

  The drinks arrived then, Prosecco and tea all together, along with the tiramisu. They both sat back and admired the sheer beauty of the gently graded layers of dark brown bleeding into creamy white. It had come in small, cut-crystal bowls and Sophie wanted to hold on tight to hers, to prevent it shattering.

  “I hope you’re making a mental note of this,” she said, “for my poem. I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Me neither.”

  Sophie lifted the Prosecco to him. “Cheers,” she said, and he raised his glass in salute. The sweet fizz was delicious.

  She felt strangely calm, anticipating the hit of coffee and dry cocoa and mascarpone as she picked up her spoon; it really was perfect. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she said.

  “Me neither.”

  She laughed. “I’m gonna totally destroy this.”

  “Me too.”

  Paul, Paris — 1868

  He had thought to see Émile tomorrow but his friend’s note insisted he couldn’t wait another moment, not now he knew of Paul’s return. Pulling his greatcoat tight around him he shivers uneasily. It must be the damp from the river. The city is unusually, damnably, cold, though not like the Provençal cold that braces and cleanses the body from the inside out. How he misses it. He should be out walking in the forest, tasting the sharp, green air, bathing in the fresh green waters.

  “The light here is no good!” he declaims, to no one but himself. It doesn’t have the dazzling blue-white brilliance of the sky at Aix. Nor is he truly inspired here as he is by the depth and variety he perceives in the mountain and the trees, in the hills and deep valleys and the small towns tucked in the folds between.

  How quickly his excitement for Paris wanes. No patience for the daubers and their disciples, the time-wasting café-dwellers. “Shithead fools, all of them.” Passers-by look at him askance at the best of times, even more so when he curses into the air like this. He hates them all the more for it.

  Like those two women there, across the boulevard, staring and laughing at him, mimicking his upward gaze with a mocking intensity, he’s sure of it, but he doesn’t care. “Imbeciles!” strutting up and down but going nowhere, he wants nothing to do with them. Yet… he cares what they think. But why does he?

  The more he cares, the more he craves the countryside and the freedom to paint, as a caged animal craves the freedom to roam and hunt. He will stalk the hostile streets on the way to join Émile, all the while imagining he inhabits the beloved landscape of their youth.

  There is, perhaps, rain coming. This morning he’d woken into thin, early spring light but the sky was clouding over. It was usually his favourite time in the studio, but he’d felt so listless, lying there on the divan, and felt the half-finished canvas that sat on the easel summoning him.

  Realising his nightshirt had twisted round his body during the night, and was restraining him like a shroud, he had pulled himself up, torn the shirt off and kicked his way through the oily rags and dirty palettes covering the floor (he sent a paintbrush, sticking to his foot, clattering into a corner) to fling open the window and gulp for air. His exposed flesh had tightened and goose-pimpled — as it did when he and Émile plunged into the ponds after one of their long treks — and the accompanying contraction in his groin awakened the memory of the morning’s dream-vision, pulling to the surface his desire for the model who had lain the day before on the very same divan where he slept. Some of her scent must have remained there, like an infection.

  Heavy-limbed, with delicate hands and feet, her corn-gold hair and clotted cream skin had emitted an astonishingly radiant glow. Her breasts were small and rose-tipped, and her pudenda shone dark pink and violet beneath her pale, abundant, bush. He barely spoke to her beyond giving brusque instructions and, when she’d gone (after accepting her payment with a bold, straightforward look to which he did not respond), he’d paced the room, furious.

  Then, in the sleepy dawn, he’d felt her climb on top and straddle him, her delicate hands now clawing, tearing, trying to get inside his very flesh. But he won’t be distracted from his art, which is his life. He has seen it happen to so many of his friends, try as they might to prevent it. But hadn’t he, in truth, wanted her?

  A bombardment of horses’ hooves clattering on the cobbles behind pulls him from his agitated reverie to be once again surrounded by the terrible clamour of wagons and carriages and bustling people. The light of the morning has been totally subsumed now by thin grey cloud, like cheap gauze laid over the sky — “Ach!” — he can’t bear it. The wafting hot hay smell of the horses, that, at least, he loves. Surely there is a way to make this city work for him? It is the centre of the world, after all. But, oh, for the simple joy of wolfing down a fresh omelette cooked on the campfire after a long trek and invigorating bathe… He cannot recapture such pleasures here.

  Before Paul came to Paris, Émile had filled his letters with stories of who he’d met and what he’d seen — the parties, the painters, the writers, the women — and his excitement had been contagious, but it was not Paul’s excitement and never could be. He mutters, “Must we meet today?” It requires so much effort he is weary merely thinking of it.

  He trudges on. His appearance will only embarrass Émile, as will his refusal to indulge in idiotic café chitchat. He would rather confine himself to his studio and never leave it (always he must fight this impulse). He shakes his head vehemently, flicking words and thoughts from his mind “Yes!” he barks into the sky, they must meet.

  Paul must enter the café where they will all be, and the volume of chatter will dim momentarily. He must stand there, shuffling, as they take in his dishevelled country garb of smelly coat, wool trousers and boots, his unkempt hair poking out from beneath his felt hat. They will recoil from his outstretched hands streaked with paint and he will enjoy that. “Why should I wash them?” Why wash away the signs of work? “God knows how fucking hard it is!”

  A man — some popinjay — drawing alongside him in the opposite direction stops dead, abashed, and Paul squawks in his face — “Ha! Ha! Ha!” — with a flash of delight, just as he’d enjoyed deliberately grasping Manet’s hands with his filthy paws that time, all but ruining the beautiful, pale-yellow kid leather gloves he was wearing. He will be there no doubt, with all his hangers-on in attendance, but Paul won’t play the fawning game.

  Exhausted suddenly, weighted down, he stops and rubs his forehead, his eyes. He shouldn’t torture himself like this - it would be better if Manet liked him – no, he doesn’t care! “They can all eat shit!” He does care.

  He’ll see Émile, drink a brandy or two with him and endeavour not to embarrass his friend, or anyone else, and least of all himself. Even if he were to ignore his note and return now to his lodging, Émile would simply visit and Paul doesn’t want him floating around, struggling to compliment his work, pretending not to notice the squalor.

  Things have changed between them, there is no doubt. They were going to devour the whole world. They had left behind their boyhood selves, for whom everything was at stake and anything was possible. When arguments w
ere enjoyed and forgotten in a moment, and they didn’t disappoint each other. Where did all the tenderness go? Émile used to calm him; now, he is most angry at Émile.

  Paris does, occasionally, give Paul what he had hoped for; its incomparable variety of people, the capacity to absorb, reflect, magnify life’s infinite experience, engaging all the senses at once. But his devastation at the realisation that this same city was determined to spurn him at every opportunity — the Salon, the École, the other artists, the fetid models who wrinkle their noses at him — has been utterly crushing. He can’t do anything here. “Can’t paint. Can’t think.” It is the capital of the world, and he hates it.

  They had imagined, he and the other Inseparables he means, that Paris would cure him of his discontent, but it has only made things worse. All the activities his friends take pleasure in — drinking, smoking, talking, whoring — are no use to him. Instead, everything irritates and angers and Émile blames Paul, not Paris, for his profound unhappiness. The city, his family, his friends — all fail to live up to his grand ideals. And he too fails. He has uncovered here a many-layered and terrifying disquiet deep inside worse than anything the world may throw at him.

  As long as he remains here, he will never pull himself free.

  He could drop down now, in the street, depleted.

  Then, the colours of something in a shop window beside him — a hat — a hat, of all things! — arrests him. Its smooth green velvet, dark as a wine bottle, fringed with pale, primrose pink and a ribbon of clear-sky-blue sings out through the glass. “Those colours!” So alive… It is undoubtedly those colours that prevented his collapse. There are so many possibilities in the world, if he could only manage life.

  He isn’t happy here but he isn’t truly happy in Aix either, he must admit that. At least here he doesn’t have Old Father Cézanne looking over his shoulder, trying to pressgang him, as always, into the law.

  Paul has tried to do what his father wants — moving back home, following his legal studies, relegating drawing and painting to a hobby — all to please him, all because his father doesn’t understand the pull of painting that returns to the fore no matter how hard he tries to resist it.

  He loves and hates all at once; the frustration, the listlessness, the desperate energy, the feeling worthless, alongside the certain knowledge that, out of all of them, he is the best, the most original genius.

  He moves closer to the milliner’s window, flooding his field of vision with the blue-green of the hat display’s backdrop, chosen to intensify the shimmering bottle green, the blue ribbon, the soft blushing pink. He sees, then, the model’s dark pink places, rests his forehead against the glass to support and cool himself.

  Paul would rather live as a pauper here than do his father’s bidding back there. Even now, having given Paul permission once more to study in Paris, he keeps his son on a short financial leash. His insistence that Paul make money from his art, that he must enrol at the École or return home, that the Salon must accept him before he, his own father, can accept him, drives him to despair. As if any of that means anything apart from the opportunity for the old man, a petty bourgeois who understands nothing, to boast of what a great success his son is.

  “It’s impossible. Impossible. I can’t…”

  He pulls his head away from the glass, sees the dim reflection of his own lips moving, and the heat rises again in his face. He has fogged a patch of the window with his breathy mutterings and wipes them away with the sleeve of his coat.

  At the clear sight of himself he yelps a laugh. He is monstrous, it has to be said; his features massive, his long, black hair already thinning, though his anarchist’s beard is luxurious still, his beetle-brow truly terrifying if you have no sense, no idea, of what it means to struggle as he does, if you do not know the person trapped within.

  Will he tart himself up like a simpleton to please the Academy idiots? “No.”

  Rent himself out to indulge the vanity of those complacent bourgeois bastards, who want their portraits painted? “No!”

  Émile knows all that is required to make a name for yourself. They were going to take Paris by the scruff of the neck and shake it, hard — but they hadn’t understood what that meant. These days, Émile has grown more handsome, urbane even. Women like him too, flocking to him even more since the great success de scandale of Thèrése Raquin, while Paul barely has the guts to even look at a woman outside of the studio, let alone speak to one. How different they are from the sensuous maids they dreamed about as they wandered through Aix, how different is the reality from that pure and noble love they once craved.

  Émile has become the kind of man who would have an opinion about these hats in the window, a conversation about them even. There’s a rumour that he sits for Manet now, that Manet is painting his portrait.

  Émile will succeed because he’s prepared to play them at their own game. But Paul will not. “They deserve each other,” he mutters, grimly.

  No, he’s being disloyal, unworthy of his dearest friend who has helped him so much — even interceding with the Old Man on Paul’s behalf, just as when they’d fought the bullies together at school (he can hear the laughter of boys somewhere) — and Paul loves him immensely for it, the big brother he had wished for, always the first to defend him, even here in Paris.

  It is Émile, and only Émile, who has encouraged him, who has helped give him his new life in Paris, for better or worse, and only he who truly understands what it means for Paul to be Paul. “Émile, Émile, Émile…” They were, and surely still are, Inseparables.

  His focus shifts and brings to his attention a group of ragamuffin boys reflected on the pavement behind him — it was they who were laughing just now — real laughter, not his memory’s malicious recollection. How long have they been watching him? What have they witnessed, or heard him say?

  He thrusts his hands in his pockets, feels the squat, encrusted blade of the little palette knife he’d forgotten was there, pulls it out to look at it. A flake of dried, blue-black paint drops onto his boot. He grips the knife’s smooth wooden handle with his growing anger, then spins round to brandish it at the gang. “Fuck off you little shit-eaters,” he growls.

  The boys jump back as one, then “Ooooh,” jeeringly.

  Paul turns back to the window display. If he ignores them they will go away. In the glass, he sees, too late, one of them scoop a clot of half-dried dung from the roadside and throw it. Before he can dodge aside the horseshit strikes his backside with a dull thump.

  “You eat shit!” the boy catcalls and the whole gang cackles and hoots and scampers away.

  Paul flashes hot and dizzy. He feels himself tumbling, tumbling, sees stairs and feet and floor. How long, how long, he has worked to forget the traumas of childhood, and yet back there he is, in less than an instant, falling, falling.

  He places a hand against the window to prevent himself crashing through the glass. He can hardly breathe, sinks, slumps to sitting.

  In the distance the boys jostle each other, pushing and shoving, punching, kicking, laughing. It’s so easy for them — being alive — why is it not easy for him? How is life to be borne? How is it to be tolerated?

  He could take the palette knife still in his tight fist and plunge it into his own eyes, his heart, crusted paint and all. He clambers to his feet. He will go back home. He will do the only thing he can at moments like these, which is to paint.

  Breath easing, his focus rests on a woman across the street, peering quizzically at the grubby lunatic who speaks into the window of a hat shop, a grown man who is assaulted by children in the street then flops down onto the ground like the piece of shit he is.

  She looks away when he meets her gaze but does not yet walk on.

  Paul thinks she wants to examine the hat shop’s display, but is afraid to approach while he is blocking it. He can just make out the delicate, pearly shell of one ear — the same pale pink of the fringing on that hat, he sees — and a wisp of hair that has
come loose.

  He envisions himself standing behind her, placing his hands on her waist. He quivers at the imagined touch of her on his dirty palms, feels her yielding to him, leaning into his body, the line of him shaping the line of her. In life there are no outlines, he thinks, just shapes, colours, light and shadow, and shadow is a colour, as light is.

  She glances across once more and he sees her more clearly. Her face is not beautiful but is infused with intelligence, curiosity and, he thinks, kindness. Could such a woman like him?

  No one of any value would think him attractive. Even those tarts who offer themselves round to all his fellow artists have given up on him,. They consider him brutish, a barbarian. The model who silently offered herself yesterday to him must have been desperate for the extra money.

  Is he never to know the intimate touch of a woman? Never to kiss, to stroke, to fuck, to feel? He should have paid the price, and taken her.

  He will speak to this woman, instead. He will tell her he is not a vagrant, nor a madman.

  As he strides boldly across, a maelstrom of emotions and sensations flickers across her face: surprise, embarrassment, fear, revulsion, pity, amusement; he sees them all before she collects herself and makes off down the street.

  From the side, her figure, swathed in dove grey silk shot with lavender, only increases his desire — her breasts not too full, her belly slightly rounded, and her hands, her hands that flutter about as she struggles to pull on her gloves, have long, fine fingers.

  He follows, powered by the urge to explain that he is only a great, unhappy painter. Could he take hold of her? Force her hand into his? He would only sully it. The filthy mitts that amused him before distress him now. But still, these stained hands, along with the paint-encrusted knife, are proof of who he truly is. He must make her see that.

  Thrusting the blade before him, he lurches faster, is drawn into the wake of her perfume, a floral mix of primroses and lilac and it halts him. What is he doing?