The Restoration Artist

by Lewis Desoto

  “I’ve seen the famous one in the Louvre, The Rites of Spring. He died young, I understand. He didn’t leave many paintings behind.” I moved back to get a better view. “How did this one come to be here?”

  “Asmodeus was exiled from France by Louis Napoleon in 1858 for so-called ‘seditious activities’ and was on his way to Spain by sea. A storm brought the ship here to La Mouche. He stayed for three months, painting. Some say he fell in love with the island landscape, others that it was a woman he loved here. Whatever the truth, the painting remains.”

  “It’s very compelling. Could it actually be an original Asmodeus?”

  “A scholar was here before the war to examine the painting and he made no conclusion, although he was inclined to doubt the authenticity of the signature. I like to think it is genuine.”

  “And the subject?”

  “The expert said it should be titled ‘Love and the Pilgrim.’ Something about the figures being similar to another painting on that subject.”

  “It’s a pity about the bloom,” I said, pointing to where the varnish had discoloured. “And that bit on the man’s face where the pigment has flaked off from the gesso. The sea air, I suppose. The church isn’t heated, is it? That would explain the damage. Humidity must have got in with the varnish. And maybe there wasn’t enough binder in that section around the face. The artist probably never imagined this painting hanging in an unheated building so close to the ocean.”

  “Of course, you know about these things, you’re a painter yourself.” He pointed to the paintbox under my arm.

  “Not really. Not any more.”

  “Oh. Aren’t you here to paint?”

  “I’m not … feeling inspired at the moment.”

  The priest was silent as he rolled himself a cigarette. “How are you today?” he asked when he’d flared a match to the tobacco and inhaled.

  “Much better, thank you. I’m afraid I haven’t been able to find my shoes.”

  “No problem. Keep those.” He studied me while he drew on his cigarette. “When we first met, you asked some questions about a boy.”

  “I was confused,” I answered quickly. “Forget about my questions.”

  He seemed to be about to ask more, then he gave a small shrug and said, “And the damage, is it irreversible?”

  I looked at him sharply.

  “To the painting.”

  “No, probably not. But the decay will continue. It really ought to be restored.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “Me?”

  “You apparently know what the problem is, and the solution.”

  I smiled and shook my head. “You need a professional restorer.”

  “I don’t think the bishop will agree to that. This is a very poor parish.”

  I tilted my head and squinted at the painting.

  “You could try,” the priest said.

  Something in his tone brought back a memory.

  Brother Adams, at the Guild. I used to draw cartoons as a kid, usually obscene ones, which was a way to be popular with the other boys. One day I was called in to Brother Adams’s office. On his desk lay one of my drawings, this one of Brother Adams himself. I’d drawn him as a baboon, exaggerating his brush-cut and large ears. Adams watched me as I looked at the drawing. He picked up a thin bamboo cane from the sill and tapped it in his palm. Brother Rod. I was well acquainted with Brother Rod, having felt his painful bite on my backside many times. I resigned myself to getting a beating. But Adams surprised me.

  He told me to pick up the sketch. Underneath was a book. Understanding Drawing by Geoffrey Smedley. Adams told me that he was going to take a chance on me, that he was going to put his faith and his hope in me. The talent for drawing was a powerful force, he said, a gift that should not be squandered in amusing buffoons. That book became a bible to me. I still had it. But I no longer deserved Brother Adams’s faith and hope.

  It was true what I’d said about not being inspired. How could I be? I hadn’t lifted a brush since that day in Cyprus. The door to my studio in Paris had remained shut for a long time. I looked up at the painting on the chapel wall and shook my head. “No.”

  “Do you have somewhere else to be, other things to do at the moment?” the priest asked.

  I shrugged. He was right, but that didn’t mean I wanted to paint.

  “It would mean a lot to the people here, to have that painting restored, to have something beautiful in the church. Who knows, it might even bring in a few tourists if word got around that we had an original Asmodeus.”

  The way he looked at me, with a meaning behind his words, made me realize that he was trying to offer me something.

  “I don’t have the materials for any restoration.”

  “They can be ordered and sent over from the mainland.”

  “It could be expensive.”

  “Then I will take up a collection from the congregation. They are poor but they would give if it was for the painting.”

  “You have a solution to my every objection, Père. I’ll think about it. I don’t promise anything.”

  “Thank you.” He patted me on the arm. “If you’re going to be spending any time over here I should warn you about the tides. As you see, our chapelle is not actually part of the island. At low tide, as it is now, you can come and go as freely as you like across the sand. But at high tide the chapel is cut off. You can cross by boat, or even swim, although the current is very strong and I would not advise it.”

  “There are worse things than being stuck here, I suppose,” I said. “One could at least work in peace.”

  “I will make sure to give you an almanac listing the tides and help you obtain whatever materials you need.”

  I nodded, but it wasn’t the painting I was considering. I was thinking again of the boy.

  CHAPTER 8

  BALANCED ON A SCAFFOLD ASSEMBLED FROM A LONG board supported between two tables, I was within easy reach of the painting on the chapel wall. Next to me, an empty Mère Poulard cookie tin held a quarter boule of white bread, a Thermos of tap water, a bar of soap, and a handful of clean white rags. These had all been provided by Victor at the Hôtel des Îles. My paintbox, or rather Piero’s, containing brushes, a handful of colours and a small jar of turpentine, was arranged beside the tin.

  I had no intention of agreeing to the restoration, but something had drawn me back here. A couple of days had passed since I wandered in on the Mass and despite my explorations of the island, I had not seen the boy again. If he existed. Perhaps he had been part of my delirium that day.

  I had spent a couple of hours examining Asmodeus’s “Love and the Pilgrim,” even lifting it off the wall and carrying it out into the sunlight. While the painting could never be restored to its original state, or certainly not by me, I could see it would not be difficult to at least clean off some of the grime and do a bit of retouching. This wouldn’t bring back the former brilliance of the colours, but it would make the features of the scene more visible.

  Back inside, I rubbed my hand lightly across the face of the painting, as if it were a misted window that I could wipe clear and peer through. The feel of the small ridges and bumps of dried paint under my fingertips, the sensation of touch, unexpectedly transported me back to the past, to another painting, where I had once done the same thing.

  When I was a boy at the Guild, we were sometimes taken on visits into the city. I never really liked being outside the walls of the Guild. If people looked at us in our blazers and grey flannel trousers and asked what school we came from and we had to say the Guild Home for Boys, I always felt ashamed at the way they looked at us. As if there were something wrong with us.

  One day I was part of a small group that Brother Adams took to the Vancouver Art Gallery. And there I saw a picture that changed everything.

  It was a painting of a riverbank, with some trees on the left and a man in a rowboat just off shore. A woman stood under the trees. The painting was all silvery blue and
hazy grey tones, misty and mysterious like an autumn evening, with just a thin sliver of pink light showing on the horizon. Everything was very still. I felt a strange longing, like homesickness, for a place like this one. It was like that feeling that comes in the evening in October, when the lights go on in windows and there is the sound of voices in the dusk and the scent of burning leaves in the air and you’re standing somewhere all alone, there but not there, like one of the shadows. And you’re strangely happy.

  I reached out a hand and touched the painting.

  And I was there, under the slender pale birch trees on the shore. The slight coolness from the river mist caressed my skin and I could smell the damp earthy forest scents. Who was the woman standing under the trees? I wondered. Was the man in the boat leaving or arriving? Everything was so real. At the same time, it was just a picture. I could see the brush marks, the smears and ridges of paint, and in the right hand corner the name of the painter scrawled in an untidy hand, Corot.

  A realization hit me. Someone had made this. Someone took a brush and dipped it in paint and touched it to the canvas, making these marks and shapes and colours. And he made the world in the picture appear. It was a kind of magic. A hand had made this. A hand like any other, even mine. I looked down at my own fingers, almost expecting to see a trace of paint on my knuckle.

  Afterwards, I used to dream about that place at night as I lay in the darkened dormitory, listening to the snufflings and whimpers and snores of the other boys. That place existed, and I wanted to find a way there. Could I learn the magic? I wondered. I was determined to become a painter. Even though I didn’t know exactly how a painter lived, or how to do it, I knew one thing. I wanted to be someone who creates his own worlds.

  THE SOUND OF CURLEWS on the sand outside the chapel brought me back to the present, to this island, this shore. I set to work.

  Breaking off a piece of the soft interior of the loaf, I rolled it into a little ball and rubbed at a section of the painting near the bottom right hand corner. The bread came away black with grime. I discarded the soiled part and repeated the process until the square inch of canvas I was working on showed up as lighter and brighter than the surrounding area.

  Next I tipped water into the cup of the Thermos and wet a corner of linen rag, which I lathered on the bar of soap. Carefully I rubbed at the painting, cleaning away years of accumulated ocean salt and soot from candles and lamps. What had been an area of blackish green now gradually became visible as a light olive foliage with a yellowish tint.

  This task demanded absolute concentration—the last thing I wanted was to ruin the picture—but at the same time it stilled my thoughts. How long had it been since I was able to forget, unless my mind was numbed by alcohol?

  The biscuit tin was propped open, the inner lid reflecting the daylight from the open door behind me, and I shifted it slightly so that the glare wouldn’t be in my eyes. I leaned closer to the painting, carefully working away the grime. The next step in the process was to dip a soft sable brush into the turpentine. With light, feathery motions, I stroked the painting, wiping the brush frequently on a rag. I wanted to soften and dislodge the yellowed varnish and reveal the true colour of the pigments underneath.

  The danger in any restoration was always the possibility of disturbing the original paint layer itself and removing it along with the dirt. Such an error would be irrevocable. Without any real knowledge of restoration, I was relying instead on my own understanding of the science of painting.

  I worked on, feeling a sense of kinship with Asmodeus, the original painter, as my brush followed his dabs and strokes. The smell of oil paint and the piney turpentine, pungent and familiar, prompted a faint stirring of the old excitement that painting used to bring. It was like rediscovering the taste of a long unavailable fruit. I wasn’t exactly painting, but at the same time I was creating an image, or at least revealing one.

  The tide was out and the chapel was silent—I was astonished at how silent. My movements—of the brush tapping against the glass jar of turpentine, the creak of the board I was sitting on, or the rattle of something in my paintbox when I reached for it—sounded amplified. From outside came the high piping sounds of the curlews I’d seen on the sand earlier.

  Just as I was rubbing cautiously at what was slowly becoming a patch of bright green, I became aware that the birds had fallen silent. In the reflected image of the room behind me, visible in the lid of the biscuit tin, a stealthy flicker of movement caught my attention as a shape darkened the doorway. A different kind of picture showed on the bright metal, like a mirror, but clouded as if seen through a mist. Framed in the light was a human figure. A boy.

  My heart started racing, but I pretended to carry on working, dabbing at the painting, reaching for the bread and rolling a pellet, all the while watching the reflected image and trying to contain my excitement. More than anything, I wanted to turn around. But I was afraid—not that the figure might disappear, but of what I might see.

  At last, slowly, I turned my head and looked back over my shoulder. I saw only a silhouette because of the bright sunshine around the child. Then, as my eyes adjusted, another pair of eyes met mine, round and serious and unblinking.

  “Hello?” I whispered.

  At the sound of my voice, the boy flinched and sprang backwards through the doorway like a shadow and was gone. The door banged shut, and the interior of the chapel was plunged into darkness.

  By the time I had climbed down from the scaffold and hurried outside there was nobody in sight. I was about to re-enter the chapel, when, on the steps just in front of the doors I saw an extraordinary thing—two things, rather—my shoes, the ones I’d lost on the cliff. I picked them up.

  Here was proof of the boy in the mist. He had been there. He’d seen me. Strange, though, that he had not gone for help when I fell. Maybe he’d been frightened and had run away. But at some point he obviously went back and climbed down to the ledge and retrieved my shoes. It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone young and agile. But whatever his reasons, I now knew that he was as real as the shoes in my hand.

  I unlaced the boots the priest had lent me and slipped my feet into my own shoes. They had been wiped clean, I saw. I stood up and turned once more to scan the landscape. Was a pair of eyes watching me from the trees?

  Lifting a hand, I waved a thank-you.

  CHAPTER 9

  “WELL?”

  “It can be done.”

  “And you will do it?” Père Caron asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t think I have the skills. Not for a proper restoration.”

  “But you said it could be cleaned. You showed me.”

  “That much, yes.”

  “You obviously have the skills for that.”

  “It’s a long job. And I don’t know if I’m staying.”

  “No?” He studied me for a minute. “Do you have somewhere else to be?”

  It was the second time he’d asked me that, and I had the impression he knew the answer already. I shrugged again.

  We were sitting in the last light of the day at a table in the garden of the hotel with a bottle of Ricard pastis between us, our glasses filled with the pale milky yellow liquid. The air carried the licorice aroma of the anise liqueur. On the grass next to the wrought-iron legs of my chair sat the brown paper bag I had brought down from my room.

  Earlier, the priest had come by the chapel and I’d shown him the area I’d cleaned on the painting. “Remarkable,” he’d said. “I would never have thought it was so bright underneath. All these years I’ve thought of it as a dark painting. And it’s gotten darker gradually, without me even noticing. Life can be like that, n’est-ce pas?” He’d then invited me to join him for dinner later in the garden of the hotel.

  The door to the kitchen swung open and Linda appeared with a tray. She set down a plate containing small black olives and slices of dried sausage. “Since you are drinking pastis I thought you should have it the way they do in the south, w
here I come from, with salty olives and dried sausage. This one is flavoured with thyme.”

  “Why don’t you and Victor come and join us?” I said. “There aren’t any other guests for you to look after, are there?”

  “No. But we’re cooking. Père Caron ordered the specialty of the house tonight. We’ll sit down and eat with you later.”

  The priest smiled and rubbed his hands together. “L’agneau pré-salé. You’ve tasted it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Linda said, “Pré-salé lamb is fed on the salt marshes, where the grasses are often covered by the high tides. The marshes are on the other side of the island, near the lighthouse. You might have noticed them?”

  I shook my head.

  “You are in for a treat, young man,” the priest said. “There is nothing better than our own island lamb.”

  As Linda left, her foot knocked over the paper bag next to my chair. “Sorry.” She bent to set it upright before continuing to the kitchen.

  I picked up the bag and handed it to Père Caron. “These are the boots you lent me. Thank you.”

  He leaned over and looked at my legs.

  “I found my own shoes,” I said.

  “You found them?”

  “Yes, on the cliff. I don’t know how I could have missed them before.”

  There was a disbelieving expression on his face, and I was on the verge of telling him about the boy, but I decided not to.

  He lit one of his Caporal cigarettes and dropped the extinguished match on the lawn, lifting his face to the last rays of the sun. Just beyond him a honeysuckle bush was lush with blooms on the verge of opening, the closed flowers like thin red flames in the fading light.

  Without looking at me, he said, “I think you should tell me why you are here, Leo.”

  “I told you, to look at the landscape. To paint it.”

  “Yet you said to me that you are not really a painter. ‘Not any more’ were your words.”

  “I’m not a desperado, Père, if that’s what you’re thinking. The police aren’t after me. Nobody is, for that matter.”