The Restoration Artist

by Lewis Desoto

“To the radio? Records?”

  Another shake of the head. “Neither.”

  “What then?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  She smiled. “Come sit down a minute with me.”

  We moved to the bottom edge of the dunes, where the tide had not reached and the sand was dry. Lorca was wearing white shorts and a black and white striped St. Tropez–style jersey. She kicked her sandals off and stretched her long legs out, then bent and scraped at the worn crimson nail polish on her toenails. She dug her toes into the sand, hiding them, and took her cigarettes from the pocket of her shorts. Bending her head against the slight sea breeze she cupped the flame from her Zippo and inhaled.

  “My father was a musician,” she said. “Not a professional. He was the choirmaster at the school in our town. I remember once when we were on our summer holidays in the Pyrenees, the two of us were walking in the forest, looking at birds. He knew the names of every single species we encountered. It was phenomenal.”

  She tapped the ash from her cigarette and watched it fragment on the breeze. “We’d sat down to listen to a Dendrocopos major, what you call a woodpecker. A black and white bird with spots and a red patch on its head. Anyway, we weren’t listening to its call, but the drumming noise it made on tree trunks. My father suddenly put his hands over my eyes and said, ‘What do you hear?’ He had large hands, they practically covered my face. I can remember the smell of soap and his pipe tobacco.

  “‘I hear the woodpecker,’ I said.

  “‘Nothing else?’ he asked. ‘Listen harder.’

  “I could hear my own breathing, and I told him that.

  “‘Listen to what else is out there,’ he said. I tried to imagine the forest, any other birds, or sounds from nearby farms. I mentioned these things, but he said, ‘You are not really listening. You are thinking. Stop thinking. Just listen.’

  “His hands were on my eyes the whole time. At first I heard nothing, not even the tapping woodpecker, which had stopped. Then, as if it had just sprung up, I heard the breeze, like a distant breath in the trees, a rustling exhalation. A bird called, two quick peeps. An answer came from another direction. Then a faint drone sounded, far off, a tractor climbing the slope. I heard another drone, much closer. A bumblebee. I listed each one of these sounds for my father.

  “‘What else can you hear?’ he pressed.

  “He removed his hands but told me to keep my eyes closed. The light behind my eyes changed, became brighter, and it was as if sound flooded in with the light. Suddenly I could hear everything. A car on the main road, its tires hissing on the macadam; the flapping splash of a duck landing on the lake behind the trees; distant church bells across the valley; the sound of children’s voice from the town; the rustle and creak of my father’s leather jacket as he shifted slightly; the liquid sound of him swallowing. I seemed to hear even the beating of his heart. I thought to myself that if I listened carefully enough I would be able to hear faraway oceans breaking on beaches, and the whispering of light as it travelled from the sun to the earth. I even imagined I would hear the turning of the earth on its orbit.”

  Lorca had closed her eyes while she spoke and she opened them now and looked at me. Her eyes were shining. “I think that was the real beginning of my musical education. Just listening. For the first time. My head and my ears have filled up since then, with all the sounds of life. I don’t hear the world in the same way any more.”

  “And that’s what you’ve been doing all this time in your cottage. Listening.”

  “Trying to. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Absolutely. If I substitute the sense of sight for that of hearing, I know exactly what you mean.”

  “But it’s not the world I’m listening for. I want to hear myself. You understand, don’t you? I want there to be a perfect silence, and in that silence I want to try and hear myself. If I can. I don’t know if I have ever done that. But until I try, I don’t feel I can call myself a musician, much less a composer.”

  I nodded. I wanted to tell her of my own breakthrough, of my renewed creativity, my excitement over the picture I was painting.

  As if divining my thoughts, she said, “I talk too much about myself. How is your own work progressing?”

  “Why don’t you come and see it? Tell me what you think. I can always use a fresh opinion.”

  She got to her feet and brushed the sand from her hands. “I will. Soon. Not just yet, though. You understand?” She touched my arm.

  “Promise?” I said, though I felt an emptiness in my chest.

  “I promise. Soon.” She peered down the beach to where the small figure of the boy was hunched over something on the sand. “I don’t think I’ll talk to Tobias today. I want to get home.” She leaned forward and kissed me quickly on the mouth, then turned and walked back over the dunes, head down, not looking back.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE BOY STANDS IN THE FOREGROUND, JUST TO right of centre. Part memory, part reality, part something else entirely. He wears only a pair of faded blue shorts, his skin young and brown and smooth, his thick dark curls unruly. There is no bandage around his throat, neither is the scar visible, although a faint shadow beneath his chin hints at it. He is half turned away, looking back towards a white stone chapel.

  The apple tree that I had originally placed in the centre of the canvas had been erased, but at the boy’s feet, among the grasses and flowers, are scattered apples, green with a red blush. On the far left is a line of black yew trees. The light is diffused, but it is not that silvery misty grey light I used to paint and love so much, the Corot light. This light is rosy, the rising light of morning, the light that will not fail.

  I had begun by using sketches and memory for the figure of the boy, but then I had asked Tobias to pose, placing him near the door with the daylight on his skin. Later, I made a trip to the orchards on the east side of the presbytery and gathered up a basket of apples, which I brought back to the studio, and I had Tobias stand beside them in the same pose while I painted the fruits. I paid careful attention to the faint hints of green reflected light on the boy’s legs, on the side where the apples were scattered. I wanted naturalism, and to that end I tried to paint what my eyes saw.

  From the shore I made numerous oil sketches of the chapel at different angles, and then I rowed out in the skiff and sat at anchor, painting the chapel from the seaward side.

  I worked on every aspect of the painting, except for one blank section of unpainted canvas. An absence. Tobias, who had helped me with bits of filling in here and there, once tapped the bare section and raised his hands palms-up in a querying gesture. I shook my head. I knew what was needed. I knew what I wanted to place in that void, to fill that absence. But I could not paint it from memory, and I couldn’t paint it from sketches. I would have to wait.

  For long stretches of time I sat staring at the canvas. Sometimes I got up and crossed the floor and studied a particular section. Sometimes I reached for a brush and made an adjustment. When my eyes blurred and I couldn’t think straight any more, I scraped the dried paint from my palette and wiped it clean. I soaked my brushes in turpentine, then lathered them in soap and water and shaped the bristles and set the brushes in a jar on the windowsill.

  One day I trimmed my hair with a pair of scissors and put on a white shirt, which was clean but wrinkled because I had no iron and had dried it on the clothesline in the garden. At first I put on shorts, but then changed my mind and dressed in my khaki chinos.

  In the little garden, standing on a kitchen chair and reaching up into the branches, I picked a basket of figs, my hand seeking out those that were deepest green. The starlings had been at most of them, but there were enough hidden where the branches grew thick towards the trunk. I wanted figs that could be eaten within a few hours. Too soft and they would break at the slightest pressure, too firm and they would not yet have developed their full flavour. From La Minerve I followed the familiar route des Matelots and
turned west along the chemin des Sirènes, pausing along the way to gather a small bouquet of pale violet malva that were growing by the wayside. They were very pretty next to the green figs.

  The blue wooden shutters on the ground floor were fastened shut. The curtains were closed in the upper windows. I raised the iron knocker on the front door and let it fall. I waited a minute and knocked with my knuckles. No response.

  “Lorca? Hello! Lorca?”

  I went around to the walled garden at the back. A rap of knuckles on the garden door brought no answer. I walked down to the beach and surveyed the shoreline in both directions. Nothing but a solitary black-backed gull drifting back and forth above the sand. She wouldn’t leave without telling me. Would she?

  I set the basket down on the sill and tore a page from my sketchbook. I need your help, I wrote. With my painting. I’m in the chapel every day. Low tide is roughly between 8 and 3. Leo. I wedged the note between two figs and nudged the basket closer to the door. She would come, or she would not come.

  SHE CROSSED THE NARROWS with the rising sun behind her. Aurora, bringer of the morning. She looked like the vision that I had encountered on that far off day when I’d climbed the cliff after my fall. How long ago it seemed now. As if it had happened to a different person.

  I was standing in the doorway when she arrived, and her greeting was brief, a clasping of hands, a kiss. She wore a thin white dress that reached to her knees, the cloth almost transparent, and she was unadorned, no makeup, rings or bracelets. She stepped into the chapel and stood in front of the painting, looking at it a long while.

  “You once said to me that the island had a strange beauty.” I said. “A hush. As if something strange and beautiful were about to happen.”

  Raising a hand she touched the section I had left unpainted, echoing the inquiring gesture Tobias had made. “You’re waiting to put something here,” she said.

  I had missed the sound of her voice, that smoky, slightly hoarse way she had of speaking. “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Who, you mean.”

  She nodded slowly. “Me.”

  “Yes. I want you to step into that landscape and complete it.”

  She nodded again. “Tell me how. Tell me what to do, Leo.”

  “Just like that, like you are, but move back into the light.” I took up a stick of charcoal. “The pose I want is called ‘contrapposto,’ where the upper torso is turned off-axis from the hips. So that tension and graceful relaxation are contained in the same posture. It’s a classic stance. Artists have been using it since the time of the ancient Greeks.”

  “Like the Venus de Milo,” she said. “Should I be nude?”

  Bending to grasp the hem of her dress, she began to draw it up her thighs. I shook my head.

  “Not nude. Much as I want to see you naked again.”

  She graced me with a tiny smile. “Nothing sacrilegious, then?”

  “This is a church, after all. But I like you in that white dress. It has a sort of timeless feeling.” I tilted my head and squinted. “Put your left foot forward slightly. And turn this way a little, your upper body, as if you have just heard something. A voice calling, from a distance.”

  “Or music?”

  “Or music.”

  I worked quickly, charcoal giving way to brush, monochrome to colour, white and crimson and ochre mixing to create flesh tones. Then I reached for a tube of pure cadmium yellow. A touch of white and crimson gave it a hint of peach. Coming to stand just a foot or two away from her, I peered at her bare arms, then crouched and studied her calf, comparing the tones with the mixture on my palette.

  “Perfect,” I said. My fingers grazed the top of her foot. “Exactly right.”

  Returning to the painting I brushed in the new colour. Now came black, ultramarine blue, a smidgen of green, and I painted her hair, black as a raven’s feather.

  Gradually, I stopped looking at Lorca, all my attention on the canvas. At a certain point it is the painting that is real, not the model. When she relaxed her pose and went to sit on one of the pews, lighting a cigarette, I barely took notice.

  I don’t know how much time passed before I set down palette and brushes. Finally I stretched my arms above my head and flexed my fingers. Lorca was stubbing out a cigarette in the bleached oyster shell on the table. I looked around the chapel like a man waking from a dream.

  “Is it finished?” she asked, coming to stand next to me.

  “For now. The idea is there, the feeling. The rest I can do without you here. Thank you for posing.”

  “And now you can pour me a drink,” Lorca said, her voice lighter, forcing a change of mood. “I did see a bottle of wine here somewhere.”

  “You are correct, m’lady. Stocked especially for your pleasure, and in the hope of your return.”

  I brought out two glasses and uncorked the wine. We carried the glasses outside and settled ourselves against the warm stone of the chapel wall on the seaward side. I touched my glass to hers.

  “Thank you again. I wish I could help you with your music in some way. But musicians don’t exactly need models.”

  “Has Tobias seen the painting?”

  “Oh yes. In fact, he’s helped me so much that I’m going to have to credit him as the co-artist.”

  Lorca laughed. “Père Caron will be happy, I’m sure. It’s a wonderful addition to the church.”

  “I hope so. It’s not really a religious painting, well not overtly. But I feel it is spiritual. He told me I should take Love as my subject.”

  “What will you call it?”

  “Mmm. I haven’t thought of a title.”

  “Why not use your original title?” she suggested. “‘Love and the Pilgrim’?”

  “But then I would have to paint myself into the picture.”

  “You don’t need to. Leo. You are there already. Whatever those figures are waiting for has arrived.”

  “Do you think so?” I took her hand and ran my fingers back and forth across her wrist.

  “Things are changed,” she said. “The landscape has changed, you have changed. Tobias too has changed.”

  “And you?”

  “I … I think I’ve completed my work. Would you come and listen, Leo?”

  “But that is wonderful! Of course I want to hear it. When?”

  “Come tomorrow. But not too early. I want to practise a bit. Come in the evening. At dusk. It is a nocturne, after all.”

  THAT NIGHT I DREAMED OF HER, and in the morning I realized I couldn’t recall ever dreaming about a woman before. Not Claudine, not Hollis, not the few other women I’d known during those years before I married. Except for long ago, during the long nights at the Guild, when I used to dream about a woman who came and went, and sometimes called my name, and never quite showed me her face.

  CHAPTER 33

  IN THE TWILIGHT, IN THE BLUE HOUR, AS THE brightness of day softened towards dusk, I made my way to her house. The stacked hay bales were orange in the evening sun, with long purple shadows stretching across the fields. In the fading light the swallows darted overhead with high distant cries. In my hand I carried a bouquet, stalks of rye and red nasturtium flowers with bright green leaves.

  The air was very still and warm, the sea flat, dark and blue. Candlelight showed in the windows of the house, yellow against the western sky, a sky that was a deep velvety tone, neither ultramarine nor sapphire nor indigo, but all of them—the blue hour.

  I knocked on the door and she answered immediately, a little shy, a little serious. Her face lit up with pleasure when I gave her the flowers. She touched my lips with her fingertips and put the flowers and rye stalks in a tall white jug on the table next to a bowl of apples.

  A music stand on the table held the sheet music, the same pages I had seen earlier, handwritten, with the words Contra Mortem et Tempus at the top. Her clarinet lay next to it, golden in the candlelight. There was a book there too, De l’obscurité à la lumière. Poèmes de C.P. Cavafy. />
  Lorca pointed to a chair. I sat down facing her. Neither of us spoke. She was wearing a simple black dress that buttoned down the front and fell to her calves. Her feet were bare. She moved over to the table and took up her clarinet.

  It began with a jarring sound, high-pitched and slightly atonal, like shimmering violins, but not sweet, a sound that induced tension, like shards of glittering sunlight on water. Just as it reached an agitating constancy, a wasp now, there came three bass notes, a harbinger, then repeated higher, suggesting the arrival of something but not revealing it. I found the music disturbing, almost sinister. I shifted in my chair and directed my gaze away from Lorca, to the evening sky framed in the window, to the soft blue sea and the first white stars.

  The music crescendoed suddenly, like a crack in the sky, revealing only a vast emptiness beyond. A long silence followed. When it began again it was plaintive, regretful, full of mourning and remorse. A lament. The music frightened me. It was like a wound, a heart ripped bare. The suffering, the long, long suffering was unbearable. It wasn’t even personal, but some grief of the ages, a music that came out of smoke and ruins. I knew that sound and I wanted it to stop. I shut my eyes.

  And it did stop.

  I could hardly bring myself to look at Lorca. When I did, she was pale, breathing deeply, her face drawn. She stared past me, through me, to some distant place where the smoke still burned.

  “That’s the first part only. But I didn’t write it. Betsie did.” She spoke in a whisper.

  “Who is Betsie?” I asked, whispering too, the way one does when pronouncing the names of the dead.

  Lorca looked down at the clarinet in her hands. “This is hers.” The candlelight threw her face into gaunt shadows.

  “On a Wednesday afternoon in June 1943 the Gestapo came to the music school where I was studying and took us away to a prison camp. Myself and two other women, Brigitte Delpeche and Michelle Lyotier.”

  “To Rosshalde,” I said, remembering what Jeanette DuPlessis had told me.

  “Yes, to the concentration camp at Rosshalde. When they came for us we had just been playing some Beethoven. The adagio from his String Quartet number 15. Ironic, that, since the piece is titled Heiliger Dankgesang, which sort of translates as ‘Holy Song of Thanks.’ There are some references to it in what you just heard.”