She lived waiting to hear, “It’s over, Elvira I don’t need you anymore,” and her reaction, which she knew would be desperate. Have you ever seen Cimarosa’s picture? Could she continue to sit for him? What would happen to them afterwards? And why should there be an after for them?
14.
Scratch, strip, scrape. Stretch, stretch ... this area must be darker, slimmer, lighter. Here is the neck. Yes. Her neck, tapered white like that of a real swan. And the nose, the chin. The beak of a heron. Spread, expand the charcoal. Again and again. And here, give it a little more. Just like that. Good. Increase the light and shade on the eyebrows, and on the cheeks, so hollow, so delicate. Her hair now. Long, smooth, corvine. Sometimes there is a shade of cobalt blue that you can only see for a few moments. But thin and graceful. When she moves, they dance enveloping her shoulders. The shoulders. White, precious ivory. Oh, to be able to touch those shoulders, that perfumed skin! Scent of incense and lavender. A hand on the heart. Like that, yes. A gesture of love. The head slightly leaned forward, looking at something that is not there. Or if there is it is only present in her thoughts. Beautiful, beautiful... God how beautiful she is. But do you know how dangerous your sensuality is? Do you know what men think when they look at her walking on the street; is she aware of the power of her light, polite breathing?
Scratch, scratch now, stronger, get rid of the color. It won’t work, it won’t work like this. There must be less contrast between the different shades. She is not a woman of bright colors. She has a watercolor carnality. Senses and pastel. It’s life. She is alive but breathing with discretion, fearing to disturb and apologizes for being and loving. Has she loved? Who loved you? And, how? I have to be crazy. She’s just a model. Extend it now. Again. Thus, decisive lines, darken, shadows. Good. Right. It’s coming along. But no, I don’t have to. I can’t. That’s not how she is. This cannot be so. She is pure. Glamorous and sincere. Scrape. Scratch it off. Cancel it. Expand. Expand more ...
15.
A slight humidity announced the coming of summer, although it was still May. Pentecost was round the corner, and the work commissioned from Cimarosa had not yet been completed. Elvira had been tempted to ask Father Alfonso several times, but she hadn’t got much more than a grim and mysterious smile.
“But Father, I’ve been posing for him for months, and I haven’t been able to see the portrait yet, not even the frame!”
“Don’t be so cruel, Elvira dear, artists are like that, you know it as well! He can’t create on command!”
It was useless to insist. Father Alfonso had chosen Orlando, and he would have defended him until the end. There was an unconditional trust in him that would not fold because of a little lateness. But Elvira had decided now: Cimarosa had to know her face to perfection. She would no longer go to pose. Perhaps this would make him withdraw from the creative torpor where the artist seemed to have been immersed for so long. She would tell him that morning. Without a word, without preamble: from now on I won’t be coming anymore, Mr Cimarosa no more no less. But that morning, he did not seem to want to get to work. Entering the studio, he had greeted her with his back to her, just hailed her with a wave of his hand, and always waving he had invited her to go down to the basement where she posed and to sit down. He was holding a long conversation on the phone and it never seemed to end. In all likelihood it was his gallery owner. He had persuaded him to agree to exhibit in an art gallery abroad, and after much insistence and many denials on his part, he had accepted. He was now arguing about catalogs, invitations, openings.
“All the things he hates,” she smiled, listening to Orlando’s calm and peaceful voice, becoming higher sounding slightly shrill,” he will be furious at the end of this phone call. Will I be able to give him the coup de grace?” She was a little worried. The idea of imaging him hurt made her feel bad. She went down the stairs and walked into the basement. She looked around, noting with surprise that the painter had made a lot of changes among his things since the previous morning. The canvases leaned up against each other on the walls were now piled on tables improvised using folding supports and old and worm-eaten wooden boards. He will be selecting the works to be exhibited, she thought trying to locate the two paintings that she loved so much and that, since she had been visiting the painter’s studio, she would willingly have liked to see for the last time. But being unable to find the ones she was looking for, it would not be easy to do so without making any noise and, mostly without causing any damage, with the risk of overturning paint and jars of solvent. She started browsing the stacked canvases against the walls, trying not to be fascinated by the beauty of some of them. Every one of his paintings gave a different sensation to the mind and eyes, an important emotion. But his first canvases seemed to have disappeared. She heard in the distance phrases of circumstance and farewell, a sign that the long phone call with the gallery owner was almost over when a cardboard folder caught her attention. Some drawing sheets overflowed from it. She had never noticed it before; perhaps it had been buried among dozens of canvases, perhaps purposefully concealed. She heard the steps of the painter coming closer, coming down the stairs quickly, but she had to open that folder, had to look inside.
She would not be there any more tomorrow, tomorrow would be late.
“How could you? How could you plunder my soul in this way? How could you do that?” Her words were just a whisper said more to herself than to the author of those sketches who now looked at her as if abducted, even if indignantly. Then she turned, sensing his presence, and would have struck him dead with her eyes. She quickly closed the folder and could do nothing else but run away.
“Because I love you ... madly” Orlando wanted to answer, immobile at the door and still shocked at what had happened. She had discovered his secrets in an instant. Forbidden drawings and his feelings. You had asked for a last moment of creativity, isn’t that right? The question hammered in his head and the answer, obviously, did not want to know that he found himself behind the question mark that made it. But he had to give in.
Yes, that’s how it is.
A last gust of exuberance and ecstasy he had asked the Goddess of Inspiration, and had received much more than a moment, far more than a whirlwind. He had obtained a whole source of fresh vitality and had stuffed it in fully with both hands. He had drunk the sight of Elvira, had sipped her as if tasting a delicious new wine, had dreams and fantasies about her silently, discreetly, without daring to approach and touch her. He had stripped her and lay her on soft sheets and silk draperies, he had licked and caressed her soft skin, passed his fingers over her and nuzzled her scented hair with brush and color, with pencils and charcoal. He had shaped those tracts with his fingers, blurred and at the same time brushed, that body with his fingertips on the rough paper.
And now, that he had seen the face of Elvira whitening at the discovery of those forbidden sketches, he had found that light, that aura that he saw in the evening of their meeting in the church during the Mass with Father Alfonso and that had captured him, which had been impossible to portray on the canvas; now he understood what he had seen, what had obsessed him all that time, and why he had never been able to reproduce it, it was wonder.
“I love her,” he admitted with a raised voice as if hearing and repeating it confirmed a truth long kept silent. He loved her, but that statement was useless, she had already disappeared behind the door, and she could not hear him any longer.
16.
Father Alfonso, smiling as ever, with half-closed eyes, and with the usual irony that breathed from his wrinkled face “I have some surprises for you, Elvira...” and handed over a cardboard folder, one of those that usually contain drawing sheets. Above there was a hand-written dedication, carrying the signature of Orlando Cimarosa.
To Elvira, earthly inspiration for a divine mission
“This is the copy of the painting Cimarosa did for me last month, and that has already been handed over to the Vatican Secretary,” he told her, giving her a pict
ure depicting a beautiful sacred painting.
“How, last month? The painting was already in your hands? But if I just finished posing for Cimarosa yesterday!” She no longer knew whether to be astonished or furious ...
“Elvira ... you’ve been a great artistic inspiration for Cimarosa, so that his artistic production has been impressively prolific during these months...”
“But I don’t agree with how he did this! I should at least be aware of Cimarosa’s intentions!”
Now she felt offended, and she had not expected it from Father Alfonso. Perhaps any other woman would feel flattered to learn that a great artist had produced masterpieces based on the emotions she had inspired in him, but not her. The sight of those drawings, the recollection of those sensations she had felt when seeing them, still shocked her. She was not offended by the images of those portraits; she was baffled by her being so faithfully and so thoroughly interpreted. She who for years had struggled to conceal, hide, disappear behind a totally different image ... and that man, who she had learned to appreciate over time, and for whom she felt a mixture of feelings; strong, intense, unexplainable ... he had stolen all of this, with the sole purpose of producing art, without respecting her reserve. “Blessed girl ... open this folder and look at yourself...”
Opening her heart, she gasped with an unbearable and violent force: dozens of drawings, color proofs. She had been portrayed in a thousand different poses: different angles, intimate and personal situations. She felt stripped, observed within, penetrated deep into her soul. No one could have described her so deeply; no one seemed to have known her so intimately. And in that moment she again saw Orlando, the day before, immediately after the discovery of those drawings, he had stood motionless at the studio door, unable to speak, literally paralyzed and helpless.
17.
“In the Name of the Father ... of the Son ...” slowly, responding to the sacred gesture of the celebrant, Elvira completed the sign of the Cross. Father Alfonso was always there, solid and present in her life of faith. Recalling the circumstances of her encounter with Cimarosa, Elvira often wondered whether he had really disliked her as she had believed, or perhaps also, struck and swept away by the magic of that encounter, in that mystical atmosphere of a crypt, lonely had desperately tried to deny himself the possibility of a strong and powerful love ... what she knew today, anyway, was that the barriers that Orlando had placed to their destiny had been beaten down by her, as soon as she understood, as soon as she had recovered from her astonishment. Opening that folder, that she had never have expected to see her self inside, in a profusion of drawings, roughs and sketches, now mystical and inspired, now carnal and passionate.
Father Alfonso, smiling even now, had waited patiently for her to recover from the amazement, and then had explained. Orlando, feeling a mature man, before her youth, almost old, yet he had fallen in love like a child with a young and beautiful young woman, and he thought he could never hope for that love to be returned. And then he had vented his passion, his love, in those paintings. Every kiss, every caress, every embrace he wanted to give her, he had transposed them onto those sheets, and onto the canvases that he had jealously hidden, so that no one could have access to them, if not her, Elvira, the day he would be no more. Along with his first two paintings, the ones she loved so much, and that only she had understood, while at all the exhibitions that he’d shown them, they had gone unnoticed. Now those paintings, and all the drawings and canvases that Orlando Cimarosa had painted during the time she had spent posing, were hers. As a sign of gratitude for an experience that had given hope and joy to two blue and tired eyes.
“Father, but he doesn’t know ... he cannot know how much I love him!” Torn by a pain in her chest, she burst into tears, moved by the sight of those drawings; yes, now she also knew she loved him, beyond age, beyond the obstacles that land and sky lay between men. And he had to know it too, she had to tell him, she wanted to tell him.
“So, blessed daughter, what are you waiting for run and confess it to him?” Padre Alfonso’s lips formed into a gratifying smile and his eyes closed in two thin commas. “Ah, blessed youth. Do I have to do everything?”
18.
She still remembered the furious race zigzagging between the cars packed in evening traffic on a rainy autumn evening. The windshield wipers a repetitive dirge scratching the windshield and licking the drops off the glass, dimming the intermittent car lights on the verge of turning or those colored traffic lights. Orlando. Yes, for some time, she had been wondering what that wave of heat was, that arose at the thought of the surly man but with eyes full of sweetness, his hair splashed with white and light-skinned and luminous, with a slim, solid body that exuded an aura of strength and decisiveness that breathed through each of his gestures. For weeks, she wondered why she had been sleepless, unable to fall asleep unless she had visited that face and body over and over again, smiling as she went through their days in the studio, talking or simply being silent savoring the presence of each one. And her waking up in the morning pronouncing a single name: Orlando.
She had asked several times if she wasn’t crazy yet anchored in an adolescence that had already vanished. Her, precisely her, was it possible that she had fallen in love with a man so ... old? Orlando wasn’t old. Not in her eyes. Not to her heart. He was just a man of great experience and with a virgin heart, because – oh she felt it – that man had never really loved. And as he had made her proud, now, to find out she was the object of Orlando Cimarosa’s first heartbeat!
Elvira imagined infinite possibilities of love to live with that man. She didn’t care about the carnality of an embrace, nor did she care about the disruptive power of a sensuality long kept quiet. Or at least so, perhaps more simply, she believed that this was what she was telling herself, denying him every time, since on reawakening she was assailed by the awareness of so many passionate dreams, and immediately, out of modesty, forgot them.
Now, running in the middle of the traffic, she realized how silly she had been. She had never made a gesture that could have somehow let Orlando know how much she was attracted to him. And indeed, for shame or fear of being hurt again by a dangerous love, that she had almost always rejected, pushing it beyond the boundary that confines feelings to the most congenial respect. But she did not want to be respected by Orlando. Now she understood. She wanted to be loved.
From the man who had restored her stolen soul to her and who had snatched her heart.
The studio was closed. The shutters down, all dark around and inside. Had Orlando left? For many months she had never wondered where he lived, what his home address could be. It was late to ask him. Then she remembered the art exhibition that Orlando had agreed to attend. The opening was the next day. She went back over the memories of the previous days, found in a faded image, blurred by distraction, the clipboard written by the painter with his beautiful hasty calligraphy, abandoned on the table at the entrance: dates, timetables, flights and airports. She recalled that she had glanced at it quickly; to have felt her heart tighten thinking her surly painter was about to leave but had given it no more thought. There were so many days to go! And instead... the time had flown away in a rush, the hours had passed as if blown by an aggressive wind that took with it everything in its path and here it is, it had arrived, the time of departure, for the journey abroad. Orlando was leaving in two hours for Paris and then from there New York. If she hurried, who knows, maybe she would be able to arrive at the airport in time to greet him and tell him ...
She saw him now across the checkpoint at security. He was bent over and dressed up in his usual melancholy, absorbed with a strange book with a black cover and the whitest pages.
“Please, let me in for a moment...” she asked the security guard who checked the passengers.
“Do you have a boarding pass?”
“No but...”
“Then nothing doing....”
“Can you call that man over there, who’s reading that book? It is impor
tant I need to tell him ...”
“Look, why don’t you call your father on the phone and tell him what you have to say to him? I’m not here to be a messenger...”
Father? Orlando was not her father at all. He was her beloved. She wanted to hit the disgruntled woman in the face, but what would it have served?
“ORLANDOO!” she shouted.
The guard tried to stop her, but Elvira was filled with courage and a brazenness that she did not know she possessed and again she shouted. Orlando turned around looking confused. She jumped and grinned, however, warning herself to stop otherwise she would be arrested.
But Orlando had seen her. And Elvira smiled at him. He responded to that smile with an expression that was at the same time anxious and pleased.
“Can I leave for a moment?” The painter asked the airport attendant.
“I’m sorry, it’s not possible. And they are about to board, I suggest you get a move on.” They remained an eternal moment looking at each other, questioning all the things they had never said before and would have liked to have asked each other.
“I’ll be back next week. Then we can see each other and talk.” He said.
“But I need to tell you this now, before you leave: I love you.”
“It’s just an impulse, you’re driven by the enthusiasm for those works I’ve given you...” he tried to deny it, incredulous.
“Orlando Cimarosa, I’ve never said such things in my life and I’ve never used words like these pushed only by an impulse. I am a mature woman, though young. In fact, I’ve never been young in all my life. And if I tell you I love you, you have to believe me.”
Mysterious is the Heart Page 3
