The Restoration Artist

by Lewis Desoto

  “A quote from a painter, actually,” she said. “Ernst Josephson. In reference to his painting Näcken, of a boy sitting in a waterfall playing a violin. I saw it in Stockholm once.”

  “Like Tobias, in the forest with your clarinet. What do the words mean?”

  “‘Against Death and Time.’ Isn’t that the point of art?”

  The manuscript had a number of crossings-out and corrections. In her own hand, I assumed. “Are you composing something?”

  She nodded. “Trying to.”

  “I was outside earlier, I heard you playing. The second part sounded very tragic. Was it this music?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Why was it so sad?”

  “It’s an old piece that was never finished. From the war years.”

  I had guessed that there was a ten-year gap in our ages. When the war ended twenty years ago she would have been about twenty. “Was it hard for you, that time?”

  She drew on her cigarette and turned to blow smoke out the window. “Life is hard, Leo. You know that, better than most people.”

  “Tell me something about yourself,” I said. “Why … why did you have a black eye when I met you?”

  “Oh, Leo,” she answered softly, but said nothing more.

  I looked down at the books on the table: Les larmes viendront plus tard, with a cover picturing an African landscape, George Sand’s Un hiver à Majorque with Delacroix’s portrait of Chopin on the cover. Lying open and face down was Pensées Morales of Marcus Aurelius. I picked this one up and turned it over. A passage had been marked in red ink. I read the underlined words out loud: “‘The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.’” I put the book down. “Do you believe that is true?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She stubbed out her cigarette in a scallop shell and closed the window. Leaning back against the sill she looked at me. That same considered look from the first day in the chapel, part curiosity, part defiance, part something else entirely. A log shifted in the fireplace with a flurry of red sparks. The rain rattled against the window. Her eyes were deep and impenetrable. Minutes seemed to pass.

  Then she crossed the floor and took me by the hand. Her eyes were shining. “Come,” she said, leading me to the stairway.

  Her bedroom was shadowy in the muted light from outside. A white chest of drawers with a mirror, the glass draped with a curtain of lace. The bed was large, covered by a white quilt. Kindling and newspaper had been laid in the small fireplace. Lorca took a box of matches and lit the fire, then one of the candles in the black wrought-iron chandelier on the mantel.

  “Come,” she said again, taking my hand, pulling me to the bed.

  The rain rattled against the window. Outside the circle of light and warmth from the fireplace, the darkening room seemed to enclose us, folding us into its glow. When I kissed her it was like sinking into black water. I held my breath. And then I exhaled, drowning.

  AFTERWARDS, WE LAY APART, our faces close, gazing at each other without speaking. There were fine smile lines on the skin at the outer corners of her eyes. I was aware of the difference in our ages again. And in our lives.

  “What?” she said after a while, responding to the intensity of my stare.

  “I want to know you.”

  “Isn’t this enough?”

  “Not only like this. More.”

  “You mustn’t love me, Leo.” Her expression changed, she got up and went into the bathroom. A tap ran, the toilet flushed.

  She came out wearing a red and white kimono and sat down on the corner of the bed with her back to me, the kimono sliding down her shoulders. Like an odalisque, I thought, looking at her long back, like Ingres’s La Grande Baigneuse in the Louvre.

  As she stretched for her cigarettes on the bedside table I immediately noticed the ring on her left hand. A simple unadorned gold band. It had not been there when she went into the bathroom.

  “You found your ring.”

  “I never lost it.”

  “I noticed you weren’t wearing one before.”

  “I decided not to wear it. For a while.”

  She lit the cigarette, her back still to me, head turned away, the smoke making a lingering spiral towards the ceiling. I heard the pattering of the rain, the crackle of the flames, the thudding of my heart.

  She turned to look at me. “I am married. My husband is Armand Daubigny. He’s the conductor of the Orchestre de Paris. In which I play. He is twenty years older than me. I was his pupil. We’ve been married for fifteen years. Satisfied?”

  I was disappointed, but not really surprised. A woman of her age and beauty would not be single. “And the black eye?”

  She looked away. The rain was a continuous tapping at the window accompanied by a gurgling from the gutter outside. She sighed. “He hit me when he found out I was having an affair. With another musician. Not from the orchestra. A jazz musician. He despises jazz.” The casual way she said this, as if it were hardly of consequence, surprised me. She raised a hand to her cheek.

  “It’s gone. It’s over.”

  “The affair? Your marriage?”

  “The bruise.”

  I looked at the scars on her wrists. “Is that something you do often? Have affairs?”

  A shrug.

  “Is that what I am? An affair? Or not even that?”

  She leaned forward and flicked cigarette ash towards the fireplace.

  “Do you love your husband?” I said.

  “It’s complicated.”

  Neither of us spoke for a time.

  Then I asked, “Why did you make love to me?”

  “Because it was pure. Without questions or answers.”

  “Was this a revenge on your husband?” I knew I sounded bitter.

  “Don’t be cheap, Leo. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “We just made love. Is that cheap?”

  “Do you think you can fall in love so easily? With a stranger. You want to know about me? Well, where should I start? The day I was born? Or is it my husband who interests you?”

  “Sorry.” I stroked the warm skin of her back, already desiring her again. “Perhaps you were just being kind to a lonely man. Is my desperation that obvious?” When she didn’t answer, I said, “Or did you just need a little recreation to relieve the tedium of a rainy afternoon.” I said it to provoke her, to get a reaction.

  She spun round and glared at me. “What do you want from me, Leo? Someone to replace your dead wife?” She jerked away, pulling the kimono over her shoulders.

  For a second I was speechless. Then I was getting up, pulling my pants on, grabbing my shoes and shirt, already going down the stairs, face hot with anger, shame, humiliation.

  I heard her calling, “Leo! I didn’t mean that.”

  Too late.

  As I passed the table and grabbed my sketchbook, I noticed that the poppies in the bouquet were already wilted.

  CHAPTER 22

  I WALKED BACK ALONG THE CHEMIN DES SIRÈNES feeling used. And foolish for letting myself be used. For feeling anything. Was it all a game to her? A little fling that she’d instantly regretted?

  The leaves around me were dripping but the rain had stopped, although the sky was dark with sullen clouds. At the junction with the route des Matelots I paused. I wanted a drink. I wanted several. But I didn’t want to talk to anyone, or see anyone, which meant the hotel was out. There was an almost full bottle of Étienne’s Calvados in my cottage. That would do. Then I remembered the bottle of wine I had taken to the chapel after Lorca’s last visit. She’d wanted a drink and I hadn’t had anything to offer her, so I’d stowed away a Beaujolais with my painting gear. I headed for the chapel; it was closer than my cottage.

  A thin sheen of water covered the sand of the causeway. The tide was coming in. The sandpipers were gone. I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up the bottoms of my trousers, my feet throwing up splashes as I crossed.

  Inside, I tossed my sketchbook and paintbox ont
o the table and lit the oil lamp. It hissed into life. I sat down on one of the pews to dry my feet before crossing over to the canvas tacked on the east wall. I stood for a moment looking at it, then with the damp cloth I’d used to dry my feet, scrubbed out most of the charcoal drawing of the woman. In the bright light of the lamp my shadow fluttered across the walls. Who was I kidding, thinking I could make a painting for this place?

  I turned and looked at the little portrait of Lorca, which I’d left on the table propped against a jar. What I saw made me gasp. There was a slash of red paint right across the face and a coarse grimace had been drawn over the mouth.

  I stared, dumbfounded. The smear was like a gash, a bleeding wound. For a second I had the absurd idea that Lorca herself had done this. But it was as if my own anger had manifested itself in this crude disfigurement. As if one of my long-ago caricatures had come back to haunt me.

  A round object whipped past my head and rebounded off the wall with a thud. I jerked around. A second apple came flying across the room, narrowly missing my head.

  A figure was framed in the window—a figure with a scowling face.

  “Tobias!” I shouted.

  The face dropped out of sight as I rushed to the window. I ran back to the door and flung it open. But in the gloom I saw nothing against the dark shape of the island.

  “Tobias!”

  Then I heard a strange guttural cry and the sound of splashing, like an animal galloping across the causeway. The boy was briefly silhouetted on the ridge as he vanished into the dusk. I didn’t call out again.

  I looked at the two apples lying on the floor, the portrait with its lurid streak of red paint, and the whole thing in the harsh light from the lamp was like the scene of a crime. I couldn’t bring myself to even try to remove the paint. Why bother now?

  I noticed too that the painting of the flowers was gone, the one Tobias had signed and given to me. Had he seen me carrying flowers to Lorca’s door? Had he seen more? The shutters had been open. Is that why he had slashed paint across her portrait? To hurt her? Or me? I had not given him a thought all day. I’d wanted to paint, and I’d wanted Lorca. My promises to teach the boy had been forgotten.

  Lorca had said I shouldn’t have any illusions about her. But this whole place was an illusion, and I was the self-deluded fool in the middle of it. What did I think I could accomplish here? This wasn’t a real studio. Lorca and Tobias and Père Caron were strangers to me, and I was using them as actors in some misguided personal drama.

  I picked up my paintbrushes and hurled them across the room.

  AT A CERTAIN DISTANCE from the shore there is a place of emptiness, where neither the island nor the distant mainland is visible. One either goes forward, or turns back. I looked back from the deck of the Stella Tilda to where La Mouche had sunk over the horizon. The boat’s engine rumbled and vibrated beneath my feet and the sharp breeze blew a waft of diesel smoke across the deck.

  Simon Grente, steering from the wheelhouse, raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question, indicating that it was still possible to turn around. I shook my head and faced in the other direction. I did not look back again, not even when the mainland appeared, nor when I disembarked in Saint-Alban, nor after I had pressed a handful of franc notes on the protesting Simon and walked up the slope to the town with my bag in my hand.

  CHAPTER 23

  I STOOD IN THE HALLWAY OF THE APARTMENT ON rue du Figuier with the keys bunched in my hand. I inhaled, and all the familiar smells overcame me, a thousand memories flooding my senses so that I seemed to inhabit not only this particular point in time but all the moments that had ever taken place in these rooms.

  But was there anything left of that old life? I flicked on the light switch and shut the door. Nothing had changed here, except for the film of dust that had appeared on surfaces. Where did dust come from, I wondered, and how did it penetrate rooms when the doors and windows were shut? A pile of mail had accumulated on the floor and I pushed it aside with my foot, not bothering to even glance at the envelopes.

  This was the only real home I had known in Paris, or anywhere else, for that matter. This quartier, this street, these rooms, had been my life—the birthdays, the Christmases, the dinners, the happy times.

  As I wandered from room to room again, the strangeness of the apartment struck me. Everything appeared unfamiliar, unrecognized, like the belongings of people I had never met. I could not even bring myself to sit down in one of the armchairs.

  I wanted a drink.

  The kitchen sink was full of empty wine bottles. In the cupboards there was nothing. I’d long ago finished off the Calvados and the brandy, and even a bottle of gin, which I hated. Just behind the sauces I spied the label of a pommeau bottle. Uncorking it and lifting the neck to my mouth, I swallowed. Oh that familiar taste! In a moment I was standing in the garden of the house on rue Pierre des Touches in Montmartin, listing to the cooing of the turtledoves in the pine trees, in my hand a small fine crystal glass containing my first taste of that sweet sherry-like drink made from cider and apple brandy. It was my first visit there. We had known each other less than two months.

  Was that the day we’d cycled down to the dunes? Yes, it must have been. We had wheeled the bikes up the gravel driveway to the street. Within two minutes we were at the edges of the small village, past the houses of grey stone and slate roofs, on a flat stretch of road. Claudine rose on her seat and pedalled hard, shooting ahead. I raced to catch her. She was wearing a yellow summer dress cinched at the waist with a white belt, and a pair of espadrilles on her feet. Her dress billowed around the tops of her thighs as I caught up to her, whistling in appreciation. She laughed and made no effort to cover her legs.

  As we rounded a curve, the sea appeared, spread below like a carpet of blue light fringed by white sand, immense and wide to the distant horizon. The road twisted and curved down through the fields, crossed a narrow river and ended at the dunes. The tide was high. Not a soul was in sight on the long beach. To the right, at the mouth of the estuary, stood a green lighthouse on a point of land.

  Oystercatchers with long red beaks scurried along the shoreline, heads bobbing up and down as they dug at the wet beach. Claudine dropped her bike on the sand and ran down to the water, her hair streaming behind her like a horse’s mane. The birds took to the air in a wave of flashing black and white. She bent down and picked up something and when I approached she held her hand out to me, fingers closed over her palm.

  “For you,” she said.

  But first, I said I had something serious to tell her, and I confessed that the story about my parents dying in a car crash was a lie. I told her the truth about my upbringing.

  “Why did you lie to me, Leo?” she responded. “You say you love me. I tell you everything that is in my heart. Everything. I don’t hold anything back.”

  “It’s a lie I’ve always told. A kid once told me my mother was a prostitute. It hurt me. Maybe it was true. I’m ashamed that I had no parents. I didn’t want anybody to think that my parents gave me up, that they didn’t want me. For whatever reason.”

  “I don’t care about your parents, Leo. But if you could tell me this lie, what others? How can I believe anything now?”

  I took her hand, the one she had held out, and she opened her fingers. In the centre of her palm lay a small pink shell, worn smooth by time and the ocean into a perfect heart shape. Then she pulled her hand away and was running up into the long grasses on the dunes.

  When I crested the slope she was nowhere in sight. It took me five long minutes of searching and calling to find her. She was reclining on her back in a little hollow nestled and sheltered between two higher dunes, one arm flung back above her head, a clasped hand resting lightly across her breasts. Her eyes were shut. Her dress was bunched above her knees, showing her long thighs. I could smell the warmth of the earth.

  I lay down next to her and she opened her eyes. When I saw her expression I thought I had lost her. But then she whispered,
“I forgive you,” and she pressed the small heart-shaped shell into my hand. “You can have my heart now,” she said.

  A half-hour later, under that clear blue sky, with the sun warm on our naked bodies, I asked her to marry me.

  Replacing the cork in the bottle of pommeau I set it back on the cupboard shelf. I no longer had the desire or need to obliterate my memories with alcohol. I still had that little shell, treasured in a small velvet-lined box among Claudine’s jewellery. We can never forget, I thought, but perhaps we can learn not to regret.

  From the kitchen I walked down the long hallway to my studio at the back of the apartment. I opened the door but did not enter. Bare walls, a blank canvas on the easel, two drawings lying on the worktable. Two faces. A boy and a woman. I closed the door.

  In the living room I opened the windows onto the street. Startled by the sudden noise of the neighbourhood intruding in this place of memory, I quickly slammed the window shut.

  The coffee table in front of the couch was littered with magazines and books that I had not looked at in over a year. Sitting on top of Zola’s L’oeuvre was my paperback copy of Balzac’s short story The Unknown Masterpiece, the one illustrated with etchings by Picasso. I’d bought it my first year here because it was the story of a painter and took place in Paris. Some of it was set on rue des Grands-Augustins, in a building that Picasso had eventually rented and where he had painted Guernica. I hadn’t known then that the book was about a painter who works on the same picture for years, unable to finish it, never showing it to anybody, and after his death his friends find a canvas covered in incomprehensible scribbles. For an artist, the story was a chilling one.

  I set the book on the shelf and as I did so a sheet of folded paper slipped out from between the pages. It was an article that had been torn from a magazine, and though I knew what it said, I read the words again.

  In Leo Millar’s paintings now showing at Galerie Serge Bruneau, we have the sensation that time has ceased, or is suspended. Pastoral is the word that comes to mind. These are landscapes of eternity. We feel these are places we might know, and if not, we want to know them, we want to be there and experience that comforting light, that timeless serenity, that beauty.