by Lewis Desoto
I’d felt a surge of pride when I realized that Piero had drawn me from memory, for I certainly had never posed for him. I’d had no particular desire for my son to follow in my footsteps, the life of an artist was uncertain at best, but nevertheless, his skill and interest had pleased me.
And what of this boy, I wondered. Did he have a talent? And did it matter? Although if I could teach him something, a means of expression, it might help him later. Maybe I could help him find a voice. If words would always fail him, perhaps pictures would not.
Père Caron had discovered the portrait sketch of Lorca, which I’d pinned up again. “This is very good,” he said.
“Thank you. She was here the other day and I did that. I’m sorry but I haven’t had a chance to take that jar of honey over to her yet.”
He was stroking his chin in a thoughtful manner while he studied the picture. “You are friends with her, non?”
I didn’t answer and moved over to where Tobias was painting. The boy looked up at me expectantly.
“Not bad,” I told him. “Your picture looks just like the flowers.” In truth, the boy had made an admirable little painting that not only resembled the bouquet of marguerites, but also had a quality that was more than just childish enthusiasm. Of course he knows nature, I told myself. These flowers are an everyday part of his world.
“You like these paints, don’t you? I can show you how to paint all sorts of things. You could even help me with the painting I’m going to do for the chapel.” I pointed to the canvas tacked to the wall. “We’ll work on it together.”
He nodded vigorously, as if the matter was settled, and went back to his painting.
“Any more ideas on what the new picture will be?” the priest asked.
I ran my hand across the unpainted cotton and shook my head. “I’ll have to give it some more thought.”
He said, “I don’t know what your true feelings are for Madame Daubigny.” He paused and it took a moment for me to realize his meaning. “But with Tobias it is different because he is my responsibility.”
I looked over at Tobias. “I want to help him.”
“Leo, you might think I am meddling, but you ought to be clear in your mind what your relationship is to these two individuals. I don’t mean this”—he tapped the drawing of Lorca—“but to the real people. Let me meddle a little further and say accept her, and the boy, for who they are. Do not let yourself substitute them for what you have lost.”
I knew what he was telling me. Don’t hurt them. You are not the only one who can be disappointed.
I folded my arms and nodded. When I turned round to look at Tobias he was no longer there. “He’s gone,” I said, not bothering to hide my disappointment.
“But look, he took the paints with him. That’s a good sign.” Pushing back the sleeve of his jacket, Père Caron tapped his watch. “And I must go too. Time and tide wait for no man.”
“Will he come back?” I asked, more to myself than to the priest.
At that very moment the chapel door opened and Tobias reappeared. He walked straight over to me and held up his painting. On the bottom edge, in lettering very similar to that on Piero’s paintbox, was the name TOBIAS. He placed the painting in my hand and stepped back with a solemn little nod, and then he left the chapel again.
“There is your answer,” Père Caron said.
CHAPTER 20
I WAS STARING INTO AN EYE; DARK, LIQUID, LONG-LASHED and shining.
I crouched forward, closer, seeing a patch of light blue reflected on the surface of the eye, and in the blue a fleck of corn yellow. As I moved back, the reflection changed and I realized that the blue was the sky and the yellow was the mirrored image of the yellow kerchief I wore round my neck.
I stretched out my hand and the donkey, who seemed to be just as curious about me, tossed its head, blinking those wonderful large brown feminine eyes. The thought occurred to me that I had been seeing what the donkey itself saw—me. If I painted that reflection I would be making not only a picture of the donkey and its eye, I would in essence also be making a self-portrait. The notion struck me as a revelation about the whole enterprise of painting. A truth about the nature of seeing.
But how to paint such a truth?
I remembered the donkey painted by Caravaggio, in that wonderful unfinished Adoration of the Shepherds, where it is not the infant Christ, but the mild and kind and long-suffering face of the donkey in the background that carries the true meaning of the picture.
Yesterday, after Tobias and Père Caron had left the chapel, I’d set to work immediately on the big sheet of canvas tacked to the wall, wanting to capture a moment of inspiration I’d experienced as Tobias paused in the doorway, suspended between light and shadow. Using just a stick of charcoal, and not worrying too much about accuracy, I’d roughed in a sketch of a boy, his body turned away in the act of leaving, but his face still looking at me. The details of the face would come later—the smile—that would be easy enough, but sometimes a movement is so particular, conveying some essential quality, but also so fleeting, that it can be lost if not recorded right then.
This morning I’d come back. The image still pleased me, but it wasn’t enough. I had no idea what else to include. Taking up the stick of charcoal, I roughed in the outlines of a building—the chapel—spending a half-hour getting the proportions right, adjusting a line, correcting an angle, erasing with a rag and starting over. Then, without even being conscious of what I was doing, I sketched in the shape of a woman. In the end I had two figures and a building, but only emptiness around them. It would have been easy enough to fill the canvas with all sorts of things—I could make up landscapes and buildings and people on the spot—but I realized that I wanted this picture to be special. I needed it to be the truest thing I’d ever done.
The unpainted expanse of canvas was like a white mist, hiding a tableau, or had the events not taken place yet? Once again Lorca’s words came back to me, of the sensation on the island that something was about to happen. An air of suspension.
I dropped the cloth and charcoal on the table, grabbed my paintbox and went out.
By now I was familiar with most of the routes criss-crossing the island, some more than others, and I headed northwest along a lesser known path, Circuit du Phare, in the direction of the lighthouse, Phare du Monde. Maybe a fresh landscape would inspire me. I was determined to make a painting. Not a portrait, or a still life of flowers, but a landscape, like I used to do.
The fields were mostly uncultivated, although some of them were fenced or boxed in with that particular dense hedgerow, bocage, that I knew from the area around Montmartin. In one of the fields I passed a herd of white cows, perhaps belonging to Ester Chauvin. They were like sculptures, as if made of clay, the warm light falling on their flanks in the same way that it fell on the bleached oyster shells that sat on my windowsill in La Minerve. They all stopped their grazing and raised their heads to observe me, turning in unison as I passed, as if a man in a field were a strange sight indeed.
Before doing that portrait of Lorca I would have said I was incapable of summoning the resources to undertake a task like making a new painting for the chapel, but now, for the first time since that day in Cyprus, I felt that I was seeing the landscape as an artist, with the eyes of the painter I had once been.
I wanted to know the island. To be an artist is to know as well as to look, to know the names of the birds, the trees, the phases of the moon, the shells on the beach, even the clouds and why the sky is blue in the morning and red at dusk, so that one can paint with faith and hope and worship. I wanted that worship again.
And then I had come upon the little grey donkey standing alone in a pasture surrounded by a low stone wall. He seemed so alone and forlorn that I stopped. I clicked my tongue and said hello and the donkey’s beautiful long ears swivelled towards me and he immediately ambled over, pushing his head over the wall to snuffle at my sleeve. When I stroked my palm down the long nose I was surp
rised at the coarseness of the animal’s fur, having expected it to be soft, like a child’s toy.
The grass in the pasture had been cropped low to the ground, but on the other side of the wall it was long and green and thick, out of the donkey’s reach, so I crouched down and pulled a handful free, then extended it towards the questing muzzle. The black lips were soft on my palm as the animal took the grass from me. I reached over and stroked the hide again, the rough hide, listening to the satisfying crunch of the animal’s teeth on the fresh grass, aware of its warmth under my palm, the beat of its life.
A wave of affection came over me for this mild and gentle creature. I was struck by the fact that it existed at all, and that out of all the moments in time, I and it should be here together. I’d often felt the same way when I looked at Piero. That from nothing could come such a miracle was astounding. How beautiful the world could be, how strange and wonderful.
What was the name of the man in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the one whose head is transformed into that of a donkey? Bottom. That was it. Poor fellow, wandering lost and bewildered in the woods, but a princess had loved him. And then there was Puck. The magical sprite. I remembered him flying over the stage. It had been one of those few times when some of us Guild boys were taken on an excursion into the city. I must have been about nine years old. The play was at the Orpheum Theatre on Granville Street. The afternoon had been rainy, dark, with the pink and green neon signs and car headlights making it all seem magical. And even though the wires suspending Puck as he flew back and forth were clearly visible, it was still thrilling—a boy who could fly and make magic.
Why had I never taken Piero to see that play? It must have been on countless times in Paris.
The donkey wandered off a few metres, nibbling at the grass, and I perched on the wall, opening my paintbox and setting my sketchbook in the lid. Using a palette knife I mixed yellow ochre with touches of iron oxide black and crimson until I had a suitable mid-grey. Additions of white in varying degrees gave me a range of cool and warm tones that were similar to the various aspects of light and shade that made up the colour of the donkey, a grey violet like the hue of wet beach sand, almost monochrome but full of subtleties.
I moistened a flat-bristle brush in turpentine and touched it to a mound of colour. My hand, holding the loaded brush, hovered with anticipation, but also anxiety, almost with dread. Then I applied the brush to the paper, rapidly smudging greys to define the shapes. No detail, no indication of what the shapes were or would be as I pushed the brush, dragged it, twisted the bristles hard against the paper, creating a language of marks to describe what I saw, what I felt.
Once the schematic block-in was done I laid in some washes, thin umber to define the earth, a hint of blue for the sky, then I switched to a smaller softer sable brush for the details, the patches of white on the ears, the dark almost brown stripe down the back. For the grass in the foreground I used pale yellow, which became a muted green with touches of black.
I worked in a kind of trance, quickly, without conscious thought, to forestall doubt, to let my emotions make the picture, putting into it all my fear and longing and uncertainty. When the shapes became a form, and when the forms became an object, and when the object suggested life, the donkey itself, I sat back. But one more thing. Switching to my smallest sable, its tip not much thicker than one of the donkey’s eyelashes, I touched a tiny dab of pure cadmium yellow on the eye. Too small to mean anything to a viewer, but I would know what it was. A kind of self-portrait in a fleck of colour.
There it was. Just a little painting of a donkey, nothing really, but the sight of it almost broke my heart. And at the same time I felt such joy.
I wanted to share this feeling; I wanted to show the picture to one person in particular.
CHAPTER 21
THE ROUTE TO THE HEADLAND KNOWN AS LE COLOMBIER was familiar to me by now and I was soon walking along the chemin des Sirènes in a green silence broken only by the softest rustling of the drizzle in the leaves overhead. As I caught sight of the cottage roof I remembered her parting words. Not a warning exactly but definitely a caution. My steps faltered. A sense of foolishness came over me and I felt just like a schoolboy bringing his handiwork home to be praised. I wished I’d brought the jar of honey from Père Caron instead. At least that would be a legitimate reason for appearing at her door.
When the cottage came into view, a slow curl of white smoke hanging above the chimney, I veered off to the left instead of going to the front door, following a little sandy track that I remembered from a previous walk. Here, a patch of wild barley grew and I unfolded my pocketknife, then kneeled to cut a bundle of stalks until I had enough for a loose bouquet, the feathery ears thick with plump seeds. Low to the ground in the barley were small poppies, crimson and black. I knew that they were prone to wilt within the day when picked, but nevertheless I gathered a handful to insert among the stalks of barley.
The bouquet was cool and moist in my hand. At the cottage gate, with its sign LA MAISON DU PARADIS, just as I lifted the latch, a burst of music poured out from one of the open windows—a cascade of notes ascending and descending in a torrent of sound, whirling, frenzied, passionate, wild.
And just as suddenly as it had burst forth, the music stopped. Silence. The soft patter of raindrops. My own breathing. I willed the music to come again, wanting that rapid cluster of notes to fill the air. I knew this was not Tobias, but Lorca. This was real music.
The clarinet started up again in a different cadence, embellished with quick lilting flourishes. Now there was something hauntingly familiar in what I heard, harking back over the years, and I recognized that fast dissonance, the high trills held longer than breath seemed possible. Hollis. In her studio that first time, when she’d put on some strange music and awakened a fire in me. “Do you dig Stravinsky?” she had asked. I remembered the painting on the sleeve of the LP. A phoenix rising from the ashes—the Firebird. She’d played it often, and I’d listened with her, reading the words on the back of the record sleeve, so often that they had fixed themselves in my memory like a poem learned by heart.
In that land where a princess sits under lock and key,
Pining behind massive walls.
There gardens surround a palace all of glass;
There Firebirds sing by night.…
For some reason, a mental slip of the tongue, I had misread the first word of the second line as Painting. Perhaps that was why I still remembered the little poem.
Even as these memories were running through my head, the music changed. Slow now, pulsing, permeated with melancholy. I heard it and understood it—that striving for completeness, for union, for wholeness. It was music made not for the listener but for the creator, articulating something deep inside the soul.
When the music ended, it did so not with a conclusion but a trickling away, a weariness, almost defeat. As if there were nothing more to say.
Gradually I became aware of other sounds that had been there all the time but seemed to have paused for the music. The soft hiss of the waves on the beach below the cottage, the faint bleating of sheep, the caw of a crow. A gutter was trickling somewhere beside the house, and the smoky scent of burning logs hung in the air.
I felt as if I’d been under a spell. There was only the memory of the music. Ephemeral. Not like a painting or a book, objects that could be touched, but like water, slipping out of your grasp as you tried to hold it. I walked softly up the path, stopping just short of the door when I glimpsed Lorca through the window. She was sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace, hunched forward, the clarinet across her knees glowing in the light of the flickering flames. The fingers of her right hand were rubbing back and forth across her lips. The mournful desolation of the music was still on her face.
I knocked. Her expression was troubled when she opened the door, but it changed into something hopeful when she recognized me, and then noticed the bouquet in my hands.
“Leo.” She took the
flowers and as I leaned forward to kiss her she turned her head so that the kiss landed on her cheek. “Is it raining?” she said. “You look chilled. Come and sit by the fire.” Taking my hand she drew me into the warmth of the house. She was wearing a black blouse with pearl buttons and a dark suede skirt. Her feet were bare.
I placed my paintbox and sketchbook on the couch as I sat down and extended my hands towards the warming flames. On the side table stood a carafe, her Lucky Strikes and a glass with an inch of red wine in the bottom. When she had arranged the bouquet in a vase and set it on the windowsill, she brought a fresh glass, filled it for me, topped up her own and sat down at the other end of the couch.
“Have you been out painting?”
“One small thing.”
“Can I see?”
I handed her the sketchbook. A gust of damp air from the open window swept across the room, blowing her hair across her face and fluttering the pages of the sketchbook. She flattened her hand over the painting.
“What a noble little creature,” she said. “Pure of heart.” She smiled sadly. “It’s very good.”
“Other than that portrait sketch of you, this is the first time I have really painted since, since Cyprus.” I found that I could say the word without the usual upsurge of pain in my heart. “You inspired it.”
“Really? Am I to be your muse, then?”
“I’ve been avoiding you,” I said. “Or trying to.”
She took her Lucky Strikes and went to the open window, shaking a cigarette loose from the pack and lighting it. I wandered over to the middle of the room by the big oak table. Some books lay scattered next to sheets of music manuscript paper. I don’t read music, but at the top of the sheet were the handwritten words Contra Mortem et Tempus. I spoke them aloud.
