Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is

by Michael Langan

  Marius nodded, but he was teary, and put his hand on the side of J-P’s. The gesture felt awkward, troubled. He was still caught up rehearsing Paul, J-P thought. Wasn’t quite himself.

  They stepped out from behind the column and Marius called out, loud as he could, “I fucking love this guy!” A ragged cheer went up from the crew, no doubt glad that whatever pep talk they’d been giving each other had worked and they could just get on with it.

  J-P caught sight of the extra again, the one who reminded him of his dad. Now that he knew it wasn’t him, J-P’s sharp anxiety had been replaced by blunt guilt, not just for how he was acting now towards his dad, but all that had brought him to this. He knew he had to put it right, somehow.

  There weren’t answers to the questions of painting and his film had no great climactic resolution as a result. The final scene was just Cézanne walking through the fields at Aix-en-Provençe at the end, his satchel and canvas on his back. Cézanne had shown him it was possible to make something beautiful out of your difficulties, to work hard at beauty until it sings out at you and makes you cry for reasons you don’t understand.

  The true backstory, the one underneath everything else, underneath his high-blown talk of making a work of art that replicated Cézanne’s technique of multiple perspectives, underneath experimenting with repeated scenes from different viewpoints, creating a sense of a whole from variations on visual themes, was the simple story of a man trying to make sense of what it means to be a human being, alive in the world, which was his story, Paul’s story, his dad’s story.

  He waited for the noise to die down, for everyone to settle. Marius was dabbing at his eyes, dancing on his toes. He seemed manic but that only energised J-P too.

  “Okay,” J-P shouted. “We’re ready to go!”

  The AD was about to step forward with her clapperboard when they all heard the ambulances wailing — two of them — going towards the Walker. The extras, the crew, were all straining to look and Security had to move some barriers to let them pass. The local news reporter and her camera guy dashed away in search of whatever was happening.

  J-P hoped that, whoever the ambulances were for, they’d be alright. It required courage, to live. Real effort was needed to exist alongside all the doubt and self-belief and misery, happiness and anger and joy together. He needed just a small part of each; to make his film, to be with Marius, to see him and his dad together.

  Life had not been very fair to his dad. He had not been very fair to his dad, who was the ghost in his life and not his mum, who was still very present. The truth was that there was anger there, which J-P had buried. He was angry that his mum had died and his dad lived. But he couldn’t have ever spoken that anger — it was a terrible thing to admit, even to himself — so he didn’t talk to his dad about anything.

  He’d ask Maria to call him, as soon as she got back, send a car and get him down on set so he could watch his son working. They can all go for food, afterwards.

  He’d love his dad to meet Marius, and Maria. She’ll be so pleased when he tells her.

  Paul, Aix-en-Provençe — 1890

  If he were to count the number of times he has painted this mountain he could go mad, though he never tires of looking at it, never tires of painting it, because, each time, the questions of painting present themselves anew. The questions of colour, the questions of tone and light and shape and form, how to make real the sensations it generates in him.

  Mont Saint-Victoire continues to reveal itself, endlessly, but always the work, this mountain, is a new beginning and his own life is caught within it. Still he feels he is seeing its details, complexities, and facets for the first time. He jabs and presses colour into canvas, building, modifying, transforming, making the landscape anew, facing anew the challenges of his life. It is different to him each time because, each time, he is different.

  He steps aside from the easel to scrutinise his latest effort, acutely. This mountain is somewhat flat still, a grey, broken triangle (once he has added dark green, white, purple, it will take on depth, assume its truer form), and its surroundings fragmented into a patchwork of green, orange and white (the sky needs more blue to compliment the orange) are placed alongside each other as firmly and instinctively as he is able, today.

  Painting demands that you express what you see, not what you think you see. He must have the strength to believe in this, and to act upon it; to be it. “This is its truer form,” he says. Such statements, the commandments of painting, are easy when directed at a mountain, or an apple, his wife, but more difficult when applied to himself.

  He believes intensely, absolutely, in his particular genius, which lies in the ability to express nature, not merely copy it. To express the sensations nature produces upon him everything must be stripped away — the mountain, the trees, the hills, the houses, the sky, even himself — open to receive and convey and express, bypassing conscious reason while using everything he has ever thought, or said, or done, or felt, all at once; stroke by stroke. Many times he fails, while certain in the knowledge only he is capable of occasional success.

  How long has he struggled with the purest questions of painting? Too long, and the time has passed so quickly. Is he really different every time he looks at the mountain? Is he so separate from the man he was? “No,” he says, as he mixes some purple, certain and uncertain of what he believes, “I am the same as I’ve ever been.” He nods to the mountain. “As are you.” And yet, it does look different today.

  Today, other thoughts, other works, are encroaching on his endeavours. A new apple painting has imposed itself on his consciousness, involving a pot of primroses, the plant uplifting, containing so many possibilities in its leaves spread wide. Its fragile, delicately assertive flowers refuse to relinquish their grip, even in the face of the mountain, the depths of this landscape.

  Today, he can only see the mountain peak as a point of crumpled, stiff white linen piled on a table, the gîtes and farmhouses are his apples, nestled in the folds of a cloth as the buildings are nestled in the folds of the valley, the sky a wall papered in bright blue. The sketched apples, the primroses, call him back to his studio and, try as he might, he cannot resist their pull.

  He has always striven to follow his instincts and to dedicate himself obsessively to his painting, because only then can he possibly achieve what lies at his core. He will never compromise that essential truth of himself by creating false drawing now, when his mind is elsewhere.

  He will pack up his paints and easel, return to the studio, not allow his frustration at not being able to express the mountain crush him, as it sometimes does, and address those apples instead.

  Small parcels of oilcloth are spread out on the ground, and each pocket of living colour, appears now a character in his own life story. His darling son, little Paul, is the vivid cerulean of the sky (he will use this blue against his apples, he decides), Hortense the deep green — often troubling, occasionally soothing — of the trees and woods. His father — black, of course. His mother…? She is the vibrant orange of the ploughed fields and the rooftops. He himself will be the brilliant white that sometimes brings all things together, sometimes creates the spaces between.

  Even here, in this open air with all its possibilities of light and colour, even when attempting to express the various sensation of mountain, sky, or trees, (the same heavily-scented pine trees they sheltered under as boys and which give shade next to the very same deep green bodies of water that shimmer invitingly in the late summer afternoons) it is possible to feel trapped inside himself.

  “I must paint it out.”

  Crows lift from the field, beat their heavy black wings over his head, as if prompted by him, and an angry buzz, of trapped bees somewhere, fills his ears. The crows are real, the bees are not. They are the sensations he used to paint when he was younger, before he finally settled in his beloved Aix.

  He gathers up the parcels of colour into a pile. Émile comes to haunt him, then, in the deep purple he
has made to add crucial depth, and substance, and shadow. Try as he might, his present estrangement (there is no other word for it) from the mountain today, has caused fragments of his friend to persist in a piercing sensation, like a knife being plunged in his belly.

  How could someone who loved him so well get him so wrong? How well can he himself be the judge of that? Does he even care to know himself — what is that compared to his art? Such questions are harder, even, than the questions of painting.

  Happiness is not a state that has been much ascribed to him, though some of his paintings are so happy he hears them singing as he brings them into being. He has never admitted this to anyone, has achieved a deep contentment in his struggle, in the idea of struggle and doubt, brought on by the acceptance that it is the best state for him to work, if not to live.

  Painting Hortense had been different, though the portraits had a habit of breaking apart, or the impetus for them dissolved. They made each other anxious — she because he demanded her full attention, though he was hardly aware of this much of the time, or when his frustration erupted into fury because he could only see her as a complex relation of shapes and colours (her oval face still pleasing), and certainly no longer as the woman he had known when they began their courtship.

  By killing off, at the end of his book, his failed and despairing version of him, Émile had joined in with the bullies they’d always fought against. First as boys when they would have died for each other, it seemed, and then as young men at the Salon and the École, and against his father’s attempts to control and stifle through all of that. He still aches with the injury of that betrayal. Held up to ridicule, exposed like an apple’s insides that brown and wizen in air.

  What unnerves and agitates him now, what will drive him back to his studio today, is the unhappy but sincere sensation that there was truth in Émile’s written portrait of him. Perhaps their friendship could have survived, but it was not he who struck the mortal blow.

  The mountain, as he straightens up and looks at it, calms him. He straps the canvas to his back, folds up his easel and tucks it under his arm, and makes off down the path towards home. His life has come full circle; there are local boys who follow him through the countryside even now, laughing and throwing things, as has happened always. But, now, he faces these trials alone.

  How much harder it is to retain your ideals in the face of scorn, mockery and abject failure. Even the impetus one gains from that as a young man soon fades. The fight is exhausting when it is relentless.

  Is his life’s work to go unrecognised? Did Émile truly believe it was Paul’s destiny to be the painter who creates revolution in others but whose genius is unappreciated? He could resign himself to this fate, as others who have changed the way the world sees itself must resign themselves.

  He may not shatter the Louvre, as he and Émile had once dreamed, but he can keep his vow to astonish Paris with an apple. Even if he paints a hundred failures it will all be worth it for that one moment. He cares nothing now for acceptance, for posterity — he doesn’t care about the past or the future, only the present, what he is thinking about now — the apples, the primroses, the tablecloth, the landscape, the mountain, the houses, the sky, Hortense, little Paul, Émile, his mother and father, himself, all mixed together.

  He stops on the path and turns to regard the mountain once more before he loses sight of it. It is through his painting that he begins — still only begins — to understand who he is, and that is as constant and never-ending a struggle as solving the problem of painting.

  He most belongs in the eternal present, addressing the questions of painting, of life, moment by moment, as they arise.

  Jeffrey, Hong Kong — 2013

  Yo Yo shuffles from one side of the screen to the other. She does not have the painting with her, as they had arranged. Jeffrey can only assume that she has either failed him, or betrayed him. He’ll make her wait.

  He had sprung into action as soon as his father’s plan revealed itself to him. All the signs had been there and he had only to open himself up to see. He’d monitored the painting machine recreating Still Life with Apples and Jug including on those days when its mechanical arms dangled idly, the unfinished canvas waiting, biding its time. Jeffrey figured the machine was programmed to mimic the estimated timeframe of Cézanne’s original production, and in four weeks it was done.

  Walter had clung on for almost three months, until yesterday. His determination to deprive Jeffrey of the only thing he cared to inherit surely his main motive for living. How foolish Jeffrey had been to think his father might change as he approached the end. Walter Yeung was toying with him, with his mother’s memory, with the whole fucking world. Well, Jeffrey wouldn’t let him win.

  But he knew he couldn’t do this alone. He’d considered involving the doctor in his scheme, but this prospect concerned him; either the doctor would have informed Walter, and so ruined everything, or he would have agreed to Jeffrey’s plan, accepted his bribe, and thereby destroy Jeffrey’s image of him. He’s not sure which would have been worse.

  Gordon Li, having already proven himself open to corruption, was not the person Jeffrey could entrust to handle his mother’s beloved painting. That had left him with one remaining option. When he’d summoned Yo Yo she came immediately.

  She’d claimed curiosity as her main motivation, and he had laughed openly at her. “Nothing to do with money then?”

  “I don’t need your money,” she’d flashed back at him. “I am Walter Yeung’s personal assistant, remember?”

  She’d spun on her heels to go and Jeffrey heard himself bark at her, “Yo Yo, stay!” in the voice of his father and, disgusted at himself, adopted a gentler tone. “He’s not going to be here forever, Yo Yo. Please,” he said, “if you help me, I will make sure that your own family will be well taken care of. I know you have a sick father of your own, three younger sisters to support, and elderly grandparents. You are well paid, but not that well. Let me help them, if not you.”

  Yo Yo had turned back to Jeffrey, and waited for him to speak.

  Eventually, he did, pacing the room. “All this time, even as he’s dying, he’s trying to take my mother’s memory away from me. To keep her for himself by — by bribing her with the gift he knows she would most appreciate.”

  Jeffrey became increasingly frantic.

  “He must be stopped. It would be a terrible violation of my mother’s love and of her love — her love for the painting.” He’d slumped down on his bed, then, struggling to breathe.

  Yo Yo had poured a glass of water and, as she handed it to him, he caught the dizzying scent of flowers drifting from her hair. He had to make her understand. “To allow my father to lock away the painting, to let it rot alongside him in his grave — that would be a form of murder. I won’t be his accomplice. Please, Yo Yo.”

  He gestured towards the chair at his desk and she perched on its edge, settling herself.

  “What do you propose?” she asked, tentatively.

  He had her. “We have to rescue it. You will be an essential part of the plan, Yo Yo. I — I need you. Gordon Li is in my pay.” He waited for her look of surprise to dissipate. “He has agreed to engineer a power outage that will shut down our security systems and keep them out of operation for half an hour. He doesn’t know the reason for my request and I would prefer to keep it that way. We will — you will — have that short amount of time before the system reboots. The real painting must be swapped for its replica, or else be lost.”

  Yo Yo remained silent, regarding him impassively.

  Jeffrey jumped up, spilling his water across the floor. “Surely you can see, Yo Yo — you have to help me. You have to. Please…”

  “I do understand, and I will help you, Master Yeung. However, you must understand that I undertake this task not out of disloyalty to your father, nor out of respect for your mother — I am sorry, but I do not care about her memory, and I do not care about you. As for my own family, I have all the
money we will ever need. Walter has promised me that himself. I will do this for the painting, and the painting alone. It’s too beautiful to come to such an end.”

  Jeffrey had been stunned by this speech. He had watched her so often, and didn’t know her mind, her voice, at all before then. He only hoped he could direct her long enough for her to do what he needed. “I am grateful,” he said, “thank you.”

  Their plan was simple. Just the day before — his father’s final day — he had sent his coded message to Gordon Li and, within seconds, the screens had gone blank. Everything was in darkness.

  Powerless, and not knowing what else to do with himself, Jeffrey had played out the scheme in his mind’s eye. He’d picked up his joystick and used it to direct Yo Yo stealthily through the entrance of Walter’s suite, along the corridor, into his sitting room as the clock ticked down the thirty minutes allotted to her. Would she make a noise? Give herself away? No. Jeffrey had pressed the red button on his joystick and, in his imagination, she’d made the switch easily. After that, the cameras and the screens had all blinked back to life as suddenly as they’d gone dark. There was the painting on the wall, seemingly undisturbed, though there was no way of yet knowing whether Yo Yo had succeeded.

  Then, Jeffrey had turned his attention to his father’s bedroom only to freeze at the sight of the doctor unfolding the white cotton square he’d taken from his suit jacket pocket, and covering Walter’s face with it. He had missed the moment of his father’s death and he didn’t know what that even meant to him.

  The doctor and Walter’s lawyer had performed their subsequent duties diligently and swiftly. Walter’s money and power had ensured there would be no need for an autopsy. The doctor wheeled in the coffin on its gurney, and Jeffrey watched as he carefully, respectfully, lifted the body into it. Even shrouded by the sheet Jeffrey could see how emaciated Walter had become, the doctor exerting himself no more than he would by picking up his briefcase. He’d dismissed the lawyer before pushing the open coffin into the sitting room. Then, Jeffrey watched as the doctor had taken Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples and Jug from the wall and laid it face down on top of Walter’s body, before closing the coffin lid.