Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  My saints, most of them, eventually left here, too. Mansfield decamped to the thin air of Switzerland where, for a while, she thought she could breathe better, then she moved on to her Russian guru and the feverish mystic hopes of her last consumptive months. Fitzgerald went, too—of course not back to St. Paul as I will soon do. “I never did quite adjust myself to those damn Minnesota winters,” he wrote from Baltimore to an old St. Paul friend in 1934. “It was always freezing my cheeks, being a rotten skater . . . though many events there will always fill me with a tremendous nostalgia.” But it was the grudging nostalgia of one still loyal to his early escape, and not only because of the weather. New York, the Riviera, the whole sliver of the East Coast from Baltimore to New York—these were his chosen places, the places of his success, not his formation.

  Jerome Hill, the St. Paul boy from the other end of Summit Avenue, did stay in the French paradise, though he lived as the rich do, in seasonal homes—a New York apartment in winter, Cassis in summer, skiing and traveling here, there. Only Matisse remained entirely loyal to the bliss of this place, the love-at-first-sight joy he experienced when, a working boy from the north, he found not only himself but his subject in the light of the south and intuited it would be his glory.

  In 1918, early in the odalisque years, he was staying at the Hôtel de la Mediterranée in Nice. Looking back years later he still delighted in it, his memory full of exclamation—“an old-fashioned hotel, of course! And how lovely the ceilings in the Italian way! What tiled floors! . . .I stayed there four years for the pleasure of painting nudes and figures in an old rococo sitting room. Do you remember the light that came through the shutters? It came from underneath, as if from the footlights. Everything was false, absurd, splendid, delicious.”

  As if he required distance from sincerity and earnestness—the wearying northern virtues—in order to get it. Get the light, get the color. Accuracy and even truth could only be found in a stagecraft that was “false,” “absurd.” Beauty—yes, but nothing pretty. He sought the core elements of the splendid, not because they were lovely but because they bespoke the longing at the core of a creature alive in a created world. He was, even in this, trying to “convey all his emotion,” as he had said as a young man trying to understand the brilliance of Rembrandt’s biblical scenes. The authority of Rembrandt’s paintings arose not from accuracy but from the shot arrow of perception piercing the living world. That was art, to be able to convey this transaction on the ground of its happening—that is, to express “all his emotion.” To see in order to attest to what is. To keep taking notes for “the celestial process” as Henry James called the work of making art.

  A moment ago, as I was writing this, still trying, I suppose, to express all my emotion, a beautiful girl, jaunty and at the height of her self-certainty as a woman, drove by M. Brun’s with breathtaking assurance on a little conveyance, a sort of cart with an open driving seat, the kind of vehicle you might see on a golf course. The men sweeping the pavement before their shops paused, an unsighed sigh in their pause. She wore old jeans, poured down her endless legs. They hung by a breath from her hips, and a bright orange T-shirt winked at her midriff, exposing a band of golden skin—her flat stomach and the beginning of her slim hips. She was ferrying crates of oranges mounded up behind her on the toy cart to the fish restaurants around the port. I almost laughed out loud—a girl in orange, even a tincture of orange on her flawless, flaunted flesh, delivering oranges that are just coming in now from Italy. Or maybe they come from Algeria, straight across the water.

  Sitting here, a person without any employment except to look, I have an uncanny sense that things here in this light, the world itself and all its haphazard parts, have a way of coming together to form something—sun, the lick of the morning air off the sea, shopkeepers leaning on big brooms, gulls sweeping the sky, the ruined medieval château on the crown of the bluff across the harbor almost effaced in the light, insubstantial but enduring like the past as it recedes and enriches itself in the mind.

  This leisure offers up for the just-looking person café after café around this old port (even if it is a borrowed slowness, the leisure of travel and a few months’ free time), old men walking, slightly bent, batons of bread under their arms like benign weapons. All of it arranges itself. Or the light arranges it.

  Of course I’ve just described (and become) a stereotype—the ardent American tourist taking in what accords with her prearrival dream, a scene arranged for her consumption by willing tourism offices and shopkeepers (the coffee at M. Brun is for the tourists, Mme Lecat, a native Cassisdian, says with disdain. Don’t spend your money there. In this alone I must disobey her). But what is the difference between a stereotype and this penetrating desire in the face of splendor, of what was long imagined in the cold north and came true in this glittering south?

  THERE IS ONE MORE pilgrimage to make. From Marseille to Vence, the little town not far from Nice where Matisse lived from 1943 to 1946 in a villa called Le Rêve, “The Dream.” On the insistence of his doctor who advised against the sea air of Nice, Matisse had been living above Nice in Cimiez at the Hotel Regina since 1938, exiled from his beloved view and the watery light of the Mediterranean. Still, he thought of the period that began in 1941 (and lasted until his death in 1954) as his “second life.” He’d undergone a harrowing operation for duodenal cancer in 1941, followed by pulmonary embolisms and then flu. It was a miracle—he believed and everyone around him believed—that he was alive at all.

  After an air raid on Cimiez, he moved for the rest of the war to Vence, where his long convalescence continued. Before he moved to Vence, while still an invalid in Cimiez, he met the woman who was to be his last great model, who, in her own second life became the unlikely muse who led him back to his beginnings for the last great work of his long life.

  Just as Lydia Delectorskaya had first come into his household as a companion for Mme Matisse, and only some months later became Matisse’s model after his “grim and penetrating stare” fastened on her, so this time the muse arrived as a nurse. Only the patient now was Matisse, and the woman was a young nursing student. Her name was Monique Bourgeois. Her father had just died of his war wounds. She was recovering from a tubercular lung herself, was broke, unable to return yet to nursing school, and desperate for a job. A nursing service in Nice sent her to Cimiez to the famous Matisse (she had never heard of him), telling her that it was a temporary post—and she should not tell him she had only completed one year of nursing school. Matisse, she was told, was “looking for a young and pretty night nurse.”

  At twenty-one, Monique Bourgeois felt she qualified as young, but pretty? She had serious misgivings. But she needed the job.

  “That was September 26, 1942,” she writes in her memoir. “I rang the bell. A tall, blond young woman, with very pale skin, opened the door.” This was Delectorskaya, by now the keeper of the house and the health of Matisse. Not simply a muse, but a kind of beloved disciple, an acolyte, wifely and secretarial. “He’s a very important man,” she told Monique, “you have to take the best possible care of him.”

  Into this invalid setting devoted not simply to the care of a very ill old man but even more essentially to sustaining his work as an artist, Monique Bourgeois came to change dressings and to see Matisse through the insomniac hours past midnight. She was the night nurse.

  Sometime later he showed her some of his paintings and asked her opinion. “Monsieur,” she said, “forgive me for saying this. I like the colors, but the shapes are just awful.”

  This of course delighted the Master. The hiccup of honesty, the charm of it after long years of fawning reverence. They became friends—as maybe is bound to happen to two people alone in the dead of night—between the warm milk, the therapeutic massage, the change of dressings. She read aloud to him but fell asleep, an exhausted child, and he told her to get some rest, turning into something of a night nurse himself. When he asked about her studies and she told him there was no money for
her to resume them, he arranged for a scholarship. She told him he was a grandfather to her. He seems to have taken this to heart.

  The regular night nurse returned, and Monique went to Vence to be with her family. Sometime later she received a telephone call from Cimiez. Matisse wanted her to pose for him. It was a job—and they had formed an attachment, a fondness and trust. She couldn’t turn him down.

  From these sessions Matisse painted a series of four stunning portraits of a woman in different gowns with plunging necklines, her regal head massed with a cascade of black curls. A beauty after all. One of them is titled L’Idole, the same title he had chosen for the portrait of his wife in 1906.

  And then, after knowing Matisse a year and a half, working for him, posing for him, seeing him through the dark night, becoming part of his household, taken under the wing of this grandfather so soon after the loss of her own father, bound to him with the bonds of fondness and teasing honesty and the charmed and harmless flirtation that can arise between an old man and a young girl for whom the rules are clear and kept, Monique Bourgeois entered the Dominican convent at Monteils and became, to her patron’s initial dismay, Sister Jacques-Marie. Like Matisse, she, too, had a calling.

  WE HAVE COME from Marseille, a three-hour drive on the A-8 through Provence, to see the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, the work Matisse did for Sister Jacques-Marie rather than of her as the portraits are. My old friend Michael, an American writer settled in Marseille, where he and his French wife live with their son, Noah, has agreed to drive me. He’s always meant to visit the chapel, too. Jokes about the nice Jewish boy from Jersey who would make the perfect altar boy. More jokes about the Minnesota convent-school girl still going back to the nuns for more. We love to regale each other with our stock selves, the Old World stories of our old religions that put their mark on us early, the very selves we have tried to live and write ourselves out of, away from. And back to, back into. We argue over who has the more labyrinthine patterns of guilt—Jews or Catholics. We trade jokes—he tells the Catholic jokes, I tell the Jewish ones. The flowering landscape skims along outside the little car.

  We think we’re hilarious, topping each other with self-derision, betraying the odd affection the children of religion have for the faith that bedevils them, cracking the whip of humor. Isabelle, Michael’s wife, laughs at us when we do this. She can’t believe how serious Americans are about religion. She is beautiful and gentle, and doesn’t take a razor to her “background,” her “heritage,” as her husband and I do to ours. Maybe that’s because, living in Marseille, up the hill from that bronze plaque embedded in the Vieux Port, she has seen the civilizations come and go, radiating one set of gods after another, and somewhere in her prudent native-memory, she can’t rise to the old bait.

  But I can, I do. Still looking for love—that is, the sublime—in all the wrong places. As if the sea weren’t enough, the bowl of coffee at M. Brun, the lavender fields, the cheese man at the market who took my hand. As if my love and life at home, waiting for me on Laurel Avenue in old St. Paul, were not enough. I have never succeeded in giving over wholly to the things of the earth, always reaching up. Up—the first word, I read in a biography, that Scott Fitzgerald said as a baby—reflecting that terrible urge to transcend that perhaps only death, that certain cheat, can finally satisfy.

  But maybe this chapel will, after all, be “the place,” the thing sought, the grail or the treasure—whatever it is that is supposed to be at the end of the rainbow of pilgrimage. Anyway, for now, I’m putting my faith—or at least my curiosity—in this great final effort by the master of the odalisque, the chapel whose making was prompted by the wish of a nun who had once been a fresh young girl, mourning her dead soldier father, a girl Matisse set before one of his mysterious screens and painted into a beautiful, commanding woman in a plunging neckline, her dark hair a glory.

  WE’RE THE FIRST to enter the chapel when the volunteer (or nun? It’s hard to tell who’s a nun anymore) opens the gate for the afternoon hours. The chapel is white and unremarkable from the outside, modern and minimal. The brilliant blue roof is arresting, as is the thin, almost aerial cross with its surprising addition of Islamic-like crescents, glinting in the sun. There is a sly hint of a mosque to the place.

  We wander through the small space, taking in the whole wall of stained glass leaves. The guidebook I buy at the museum shop explains that the design was taken from a passage from the Revelation of St. John referring to the tree of life “whose leaves were for the healing of the nations.” A postwar peace chapel. The idea of the tree of life, I read, represents the Golden Age—not the one the ancients dreamed of, looking backward to a lost past, gazing at their goldfish in a bowl, the watery totems of that old dream. Rather, in the Christian way, abstract and wishful, it is the Golden Age to come, the Second Coming, the Return and Rapture. The colors are yellow, blue, green. And past the raised altar (chosen by Matisse because it looked like a cottage loaf of bread), another wall of stained glass, great desert leaves in yellow on a field of blue and green.

  All the other walls are covered with white tiles, painted with the freehand strokes of the old man: The great wallhigh Virgin holding her simple shape of a child is surrounded by flower-clouds, comical billows of good spirit.

  The wall at the back, behind the small seating area, holds the Stations of the Cross, also black against the white tiles, but the hand here is not serene and playful, but pained, scratching its way to Golgotha.

  Then, modestly placed in the corner at the back, as if not wishing to draw attention to itself is what I have come for: a small Moroccan door. I know immediately it is a confessional, the little room where you’re supposed to tell the truth. Not simply your sins, I’ve always thought, but your truth. The rattle of wrongs, the bad moves, wrong turns, bum raps, false steps. The door is decorated with a wooden screen of intricate faux-Arabic script painted a glistening whipped-cream white, a faint mauve in the scrim behind the carving promising a different dimension beyond the closed surface. Open the door, open your heart. How I wanted to put my hand on it, and go there, Tell All.

  Is that what was behind the screen that fascinated me all those years ago in Chicago—a confessional like the little box confessionals at St. Luke’s? Standing stock-still in front of the woman gazing at the aquarium, the screen behind her (I remember it held a promise of aquamarine as this carved door promises lavender) beckoned me, seeming to promise something. I thought it was the whole exotic world “out there” or possibly “over there.” The secret world of Real Life that I sensed I had not yet cracked with my English-major earnestness, my literary dreams, and my Midwestern flyover soul. But here it is again, like a second chance. And it proves to be a door—and not to somewhere else, but to something else. A door to a tiny room where you tell your truth and are forgiven.

  I tell Michael I’m disappointed that the sign says there is Mass for the public only on Sundays. That’s several days away when I’ll be long gone. He scurries off with his perfect French and his easy charm and his journalist’s assumptions, and returns smiling: we have been invited to attend Mass the following morning at 9:00 AM. Simply ring the bell at the convent next door, and enter through the garden. Oh, and by the way, Sister Jacques-Marie is here. She will be happy to sign your book—for I am clutching two copies of her memoir, one in French, one in English.

  “She’s alive?” I say incredulously.

  “Very,” the woman (nun? volunteer?) behind the counter says, smiling at my gaucherie.

  SISTER JACQUES-MARIE, I decide, must be the tall, thin older woman (how old? Eighty? That would be about right) I am seated next to the next morning in the chapel. She has a brisk way about her and shows me where the service starts in the prayer book without looking at me, just taking my book and opening it. There aren’t many nuns in this convent, it appears. Perhaps a dozen, and only one, very old, rather dumpy, wearing the habit. The others are dressed sensibly, their hair cut short, their bodies lithe and trim. Quick smi
les, easy, graceful manners.

  Michael has never been to a Mass before, but the younger nun who was organizing things spoke to him the day before and knew his French was good. She comes up now as we sit in a choir pew with the small congregation of a dozen nuns and asks him to do the first reading. A Jewish altar boy after all.

  During Mass the light plays against the white tiles, slowly changing in what seems a profoundly subtle light show, the brilliant colors of the stained glass paying out the frailest pearl tones against the shimmering white. I stare—can’t help staring—at the wall where the Virgin stands amidst her flower-clouds on the softly glowing tiles. I watch the light move. I almost forget I’m sitting next to Sister Jacques-Marie. I should be “observing” her, taking notes.

  But in fact, it is the bent elderly nun, the dumpy one in full habit, wearing the Dominican white, her short veil revealing a small band of gray hair, who proves to be Sister Jacques-Marie. She needs help when she walks from the chapel to the convent. The younger nun points her out, and we rush from the chapel to intercept her.

  Yes, she would be happy to sit and talk, she has some time. She asks me to take her arm. Or rather, she commandeers my arm. I feel her weight on me as she leads us to the convent. I would like to walk slowly in this convent garden with her for a long while. A bower of bliss, roses everywhere. But she takes us to a shadowy parlor with a large oval table where she sits down heavily, gripping the edge of the table. Clearly she is in pain, but her face is long used to smiling, a habit of wit has impressed itself in the corners of her small dark eyes, deep in her oval face, a face of only a few strokes, I thought. A Matisse face even now.

  She signs my copy of her book: For Patricia, in memory of your stay at the Chapel of the Rosary. I hope that this book is “truth.” The little shrug of the quotation marks implying a wry acknowledgment that truth, of all things, can’t be counted on, even with the best intentions of the writer.