by Lewis Desoto
“One never knows what a painting can accomplish. And what will be the subject?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it will be an island landscape, with figures. Like the original. Pilgrims and lovers?”
“Maybe.”
We walked for a few moments in silence, and then I said, “I wanted to talk to you about Tobias. Do you think he would take to some music lessons?” I told him about hearing Tobias trying to play the clarinet.
“Have you put the idea to Madame Daubigny?”
“Sort of. She didn’t discount it entirely.”
“I know you want to help him in some way, Leo, but I honestly don’t think Tobias has much talent in that direction. I have tried to get him interested in the piano more than once.” He shook his head. “But I have a better idea. Why don’t you be the one to give Tobias lessons? In drawing.”
“Really? Do you think he would be interested?”
“He likes to draw. He is a bit of a wild boy, but when he is drawing he becomes very serene. The activity seems to give him pleasure. His whole face changes.”
“Of course I’d be more than happy to help him.” I was thinking of how important drawing had been for me when I was Tobias’s age, how it had allowed me to forget my loneliness.
Père Caron said, “I’ll put it to him so that he understands. The answer will be his alone, though. Now, I must give you a jar of honey to take home.” He took me through to a pantry where two of the shelves contained rows of neatly arranged jars.
“My treasure trove. Each of these is from my bees—collected, strained and bottled by my own hand. As a painter, you will appreciate the varieties of colour.” There were transparent golds, silky ambers, dark malty-looking syrups. He ran his fingers over the jars, “Now, let’s see. Ah, here. I think you will like this one.” He unscrewed the cap, lifted out a seal of white wax and reached for a teaspoon in the drawer. Dipping it into the honey he offered the spoon to me. “Taste it.”
The flavour was immediate and powerful. I ran the honey back and forth over my tongue and swallowed. “Something grassy, summery?”
“Wild thyme. Last summer. It was growing everywhere.” He handed me the jar. “And you must take one for Madame Daubigny as well. This one.” He reached for a second jar. “It’s not a grand cru, but not ordinary either. Perfectly suitable for a gift.”
He could just as easily have given it to her himself, I thought. Was he trying to steer us together? I shot a sharp look him, and received a curious smile in return. I felt myself colour slightly.
As I left, the two jars of honey in my pocket, the priest called, “And, Leo, let the boy come to you, if he wants to. Who knows, perhaps miracles are possible, even if they are only small ones.”
CHAPTER 18
I WANTED TO SEE LORCA AGAIN BUT I DID NOT GO TO her. In fact, I avoided that side of the island completely, only travelling between my cottage in LeBec and the chapel, and sticking to the route des Matelots, or walking along the eastern shore if the tides made it possible.
Of course, it would have been easy enough to just stroll over to La Maison du Paradis and knock on the door. There was that jar of honey from Père Caron, which I’d promised him I’d give to her. A suitable excuse. Not that any excuse or reason was necessary. We were practically neighbours, after all, and what could be more natural than a neighbourly hello on the way to the shop.
But then I would think again of the almost cold way she had spoken when she left the chapel. I remembered also that black eye on the day I first saw her, and the band of lighter skin on her finger where a ring had recently been removed, and her seeming reluctance to say anything about herself.
There were other reasons why I did not go to her. For so long I had lived with a heart of ice and now I feared a thaw. I had another motivation for staying close to the chapel, one that had nothing to do with Lorca, or even my work there. I was waiting for Tobias. It was clear to me now that until I met him normally, in a way that would let me see him as an ordinary boy, my lingering illusions, or confusions, between him and Piero, would continue. I wanted to know him for himself.
The restoration of the painting progressed slowly and methodically. For hours I lost myself in the careful removal of grime and yellowed varnish from the surface of the canvas. The two figures were now fully visible and I was working my way outwards, as if the light emanated from them, pushing the shadows back.
When my hands or my eyes became tired I would sit back on one of the pews and look up to the blank wall where the painting had hung. In my mind I painted scenes there, but only in my mind, for still I had no ideas or inspiration.
Lorca had said something when she was encouraging me to paint a scene of the island, that the landscape had the hush before a storm, that it gave her a sense of something about to happen, something strange and beautiful. So I waited. Not for a storm but for the beauty.
In the meantime I drew. Once, my sketchbooks had always been in use, had always been in my pocket when I left the apartment, a pencil in my hand. The book and the pencil had been instruments of joy. And then the covers had shut, and remained shut, until the other day when I drew Lorca’s portrait.
I sat now with the book on my lap, doodling, drawing faces, some invented, some familiar, like Linda and Victor at the hotel, or Simon, testing my visual memory. Flipping over to a fresh page I started to draw Père Caron with his bushy moustache and the ever-present floppy beret. It was a face that could have lent itself to caricature, but I resisted, because it was a kind face that I did not want to insult.
A memory came to me, of the time at the Guild when I’d made that drawing of Brother Adams and instead of punishing me he’d given me a book on how to draw. Thinking of Brother Adams always evoked a complex mixture of emotions: loss, guilt, gratitude never expressed. It was through his generosity and faith in me that I had been able to leave Vancouver and continue my studies in New York, and it was through his grace that I had gone to Paris.
The last time I saw him was after I had left the Guild, although I was still living in Vancouver, in the studio that had been passed on to me by Hollis when she left for San Francisco. Adams had told me that he’d put my name in for a scholarship and I’d been awarded a grant to further my studies at the Art Students League of New York. I was immensely grateful to him, but after moving I didn’t stay in touch as much as I should have, only sending the occasional postcard. Grateful as I was to Adams, the Guild was a place I wanted to forget. Being an outcast and an outsider, the shame of it, was no longer a part of my picture of myself. I never mentioned the Guild to new acquaintances; instead I used a story about being raised by grandparents after my parents were killed in a car crash. In New York no one really cared about your past, anyway.
When news came of Brother Adams’s death, I had changed studios a number of times and the announcement took three weeks to be forwarded to me. There was also a letter from the headmaster of the Guild explaining that Brother Adams had remembered me in his will. The amount was quite a bit. He’d requested that I use the money to go to Paris—he’d been there once himself as a young man, and he always said it was the only place in the world for a painter to be. Of course, I was told, I also had the right to do whatever I wanted with the money.
That evening, as I sat at the window of my studio on Coenties Slip, down at the tip of Manhattan, watching the daylight fade and the lights of the cars moving along the Brooklyn Bridge, my heart broke and I wept. I’d never lost anyone before. Even when Hollis announced that she was leaving I’d gotten over it soon enough. Not having known my parents, I’d always felt that I had nobody to lose. Now I knew that was not true. There had been times over the years when Brother Adams had been kind to me and I’d fantasized that he was my father, concocting stories in my mind about secrets and hidden identities. I had known him all my life. I wept now because I had never felt more of an orphan.
Adams used to have a little painting of mine, one I’d given to him during my first
year of art school. A little landscape done in Stanley Park. It was always in the same place on the wall of his office when I visited. He’d said to me once about the painting, “Who needs a view when you can see a world as beautiful as this?” Maybe that was one of the reasons why I’d become a landscape painter. For the joy it gave.
That night I’d had a dream.
I found myself standing alone on a desolate and wild shore. I’d been shipwrecked. In the far distance I glimpsed the faint shape of an island. I knew that I had to find a way to get to that island. The only things I had with me were my paintings. It occurred to me that I might be able to use the wooden stretcher bars and frames to construct some kind of raft. I could then use the actual painted canvas to rig up a sail. Somehow I managed to do this. As I built my craft, the sea became rough and a thick mist began to envelop everything. I was afraid to venture out, that my raft would fall apart, that I would lose my paintings, and even my life. But then I heard what sounded like Brother Adams’s voice in the mist, repeating his favourite bit of advice. Faith and hope, my boy. Faith and hope.
I managed to get the raft through the surf and then I twisted the sail into the wind and in a few moments I had surged out beyond the breakers. Soon the wind fell, and there was nothing around me, no shore in sight, not a breeze or a current, and I kept thinking I should have stayed on the land because at least there had been water and fruit and a chance at rescue.
Gradually sunlight began to show through the mist, and I could feel a slight breeze picking up. My raft began to move again. And then I saw other rafts. They were strange-looking things, of odd shapes and unusual colours. One of them swept by me, all deep earth tones and soft golds like an aged oriental carpet. A man who looked like Rembrandt sat at the tiller. Another raft skimmed by, black and white and all jagged shapes and angles. A stocky bald man in a striped T-shirt waved. Picasso. Other boats joined the fleet. There was van Gogh in a raft with sails of bright corn yellow and intense blue. Matisse steered past in a blaze of red. I looked up at my own sails as they filled with wind and they were glowing, all silvery light and soft dove greys and milky whites, as beautiful as anything I’d ever seen.
THE NEXT MORNING I HAD BOOKED MY PASSAGE on a real ship, the SS Volendam, bound for Le Havre, with a connecting train to Paris.
CHAPTER 19
I ENTERED THE CHAPEL CRADLING AN OVERFLOWING bouquet of wildflowers in my arms and let them slide onto the table, where they spilled out in a spray of yellow and orange. In the little vestry where Père Caron kept the objects necessary for Mass, and where I stored my painting equipment during services, I found a wide-mouthed pewter vase on a shelf. I filled it halfway from one of the water bottles I kept behind the door.
With my pocketknife I snipped the ends of the stalks from the flowers before arranging the bouquet. I placed the vase in the sunlight flooding in through the window. The bright yellow of the petals, glowing so intensely in the floating array of flowers, made me feel almost dizzy, intoxicated, as if the colour were some honeyed wine that I had been drinking. The flowers were marguerites jaunes. Brown-eyed Susans. Claudine had taught me the name during our first summer in Montmartin when I used to bring her bouquets of wildflowers after my painting excursions.
In most ways, she had been a practical and down-to-earth person, but she also had a romantic side to her. Once, I had been sitting in the garden of her mother’s house, sketching a blue flower that grew near the wall. “Aquilegia vulgaris,” Claudine had said, coming up behind me. “Commonly known as the columbine. From the Latin for ‘dove.’ See here, this little spur at the top is a bit like a dove’s neck.” She touched the blossom delicately with the tip of her pink fingernail. “And the petals fold out like wings. When Mary, mother of Jesus, was pregnant, she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who somehow knew that the child was going to be the promised Messiah. Elizabeth is the one who says, ‘Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.’ I love the sound of that phrase. So beautiful. When these parts here, the spurs or dove’s neck, wilt and fall to the ground, they resemble shoes. So in medieval times the story grew that wherever Mary’s foot touched the ground during that visit, columbines sprang up.”
Then Claudine reached forward and plucked the flower from its stem, and with the side of her thumbnail sliced the blossom open. “Pistil, stigma, stamen, style, ovary,” she said, reciting the names of the parts. “It’s kind of a secret, isn’t it, these hidden chambers inside a flower? When I see the harmony and the logic inside a flower I think of our own hearts and maybe that the reason they beat is not just an accident of nature.”
I remembered touching her upper lip, where a little dusting of yellow pollen had somehow lodged. “Powdered sunlight,” she said as I rubbed it between my fingertips.
Would I ever paint a bouquet with the same sense of joy that I once had? I turned away now from the flowers to the big piece of canvas that was tacked up on the east wall. I had obtained it through Simon Grente, who’d fetched it from a sail-maker on the mainland. The canvas was of a rougher quality than I would usually select, but it would do for the new painting I intended to make. When I had a subject.
A couple of small boards, painted white, sat on the table. I had asked Simon Grente for any scraps that might be lying around, and he had cut them to size. They were for Tobias—when he came, if he came.
As if in answer to my hopes, three notes from a whistle sounded in the quiet of the morning. Looking out, I saw Père Caron and Tobias making their way across the causeway. The priest waved. Tobias blew the whistle again.
Père Caron entered first, taking off his floppy beret and shaking my hand. “Bonjour. Tobias has come to see how one goes about making a painting.”
The boy hovered behind the priest, giving me a shy look. He leaned forward to sniff the flowers, then studied the paintbox with its gleaming brass fittings. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a check pattern of green and white and a pair of khaki pants, both of which looked freshly laundered. In fact, he was altogether cleaner than I had seen him before. When he stepped past me, his curls gave off a scent of shampoo.
He ran his fingers across the paintbox, tracing the letters engraved there, a smile on his face, that familiar enigmatic smile.
“That box used to belong to another little boy,” I said. “His name was Piero.” A sudden impulse came over me, to give the box to Tobias. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t part with it; it was all I had left of my son.
“I have something for you,” I said, opening the paintbox and bringing out a small cardboard carton. Inside were four tubes of paint. On each one was the name of the manufacturer, Liquitex. They were labelled with the names of the pigments: titanium white, cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue.
They were something new called “acrylic,” a paint that could be mixed with water instead of linseed oil and turpentine. They had come from André Jocelyn, the store where I had bought my materials for years. Piero often came with me and they made much of him there, calling him le petit maître, always taking his questions seriously and treating him with professional dignity.
The last time I’d been to the shop was in the months after Claudine and Piero died, when I’d taken to roaming the streets of Paris, obsessively revisiting the places where we used to go. I’d been standing outside the store window, remembering happier times, when André came out to greet me. He asked after the boy and I lied, saying he was fine and I’d bring him for a visit soon. The box of paints had been a gift for le petit. Never used.
“The paints are for you,” I said now to Tobias.
He reached for them, hesitated with a glance at Père Caron, who nodded, then gathered them up.
“They’re very easy to use—all you have to do is mix them with water. I’ll show you.”
I poured some water into a jam jar before uncapping the tubes and squeezing a bit of each colour onto the palette. I handed him a brush and pointed to one of the whitewashed panels.
&nb
sp; “What shall we paint?”
Tobias pointed at the bouquet.
“The flowers? Good idea.” I dipped a brush into the yellow paint and made an outline of the petals. Adding a little red and a touch of black to make a dark brown, I dabbed it in the centre of the flower. “You give it a try.”
Tobias drew a flower shape, quite accurately I noticed, then filled in the petals with yellow as I had done. He rinsed the brush and squeezed the excess water from the bristles with thumb and forefinger, mimicking me, and then mixed the brown for the dark centres of the flowers.
“Very good. And if you want to lighten the colours, just mix in a little white.”
The tip of his tongue showed between his lips as he concentrated. I smiled. Piero had done exactly the same thing when he bent over his drawing.
Watching the sure way Tobias applied himself, I said to Père Caron, “It’s not the first time he’s painted?”
“No. As I mentioned, he loves to draw, and sometimes he uses some tubes of gouache I have at home.”
We stood silently for a time, watching Tobias work. My eyes moved up from the boy’s painting to the pale scar that encircled his neck. He was still too young to know fully the extent of his tragedy. Yet he seemed content, and today his expression even showed a hint of pleasure. Children are like that, I thought, they can forget. But the suffering will come later.
“He has some talent, n’est-ce pas?” the priest commented. “An artist in the making.”
“Le petit maître,” I murmured. The little master.
Piero had shown early promise. He might even have gone on to develop into an artist. He was often in a corner of the studio when I worked, silently painting his own little pictures, sometimes humming tunelessly. His presence had been comforting to me, a sign that all was right with the world.
Once, when Piero was at school, I had looked through his sketchbook and amongst the drawings of dinosaurs and rocket ships I was surprised to come upon a rendering of my own face. It had some basic errors in proportion, but the likeness was uncanny; the angle of my nose, the particular shape of my upper lip, the intensity of my gaze.
