Portrait of a Girl

by Binkert, Dörthe

  “And,” he went on, “after all, times have changed. Women aren’t goods that you acquire only if none of the edges have been chipped or damaged. Women are at last starting to decide for themselves what they want to be—and how they want to live. I like that. I also like your Aunt Betsy. She seems to jump right over a lot of hurdles. And she’s right. You may well take a page from her book.”

  My God, Mathilde thought.

  “So you like Aunt Betsy too?”

  He nodded. “That’s what I’ve been saying. I like Betsy a lot. She’s an intelligent, beautiful, unconventional woman who . . .”

  Mathilde put a hand over his mouth. “Enough. Please take me home to my sickbed, to Dr. Bernhard, to the nurses.” She looked at him dubiously. So this was Edward? And this was life?

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  “Till the end of my days,” he said.

  The End of the Season

  Sometimes, going around a turn, the coffin on the old horse-drawn cart would slide back and forth a bit. It was made of lightweight pine and only sloppily secured to the cart.

  They were bringing Luca home.

  Aldo was silent. How different he had imagined Luca’s homecoming. How proud he had been of his son. Benedetta, instead of an expression of mourning, just wore her perpetually unfriendly look. What did she care about the suffering of others? What good was it to know she’d been right all along? Luca had been torn apart by exploding dynamite when they were blasting a tunnel. Now there would be another gravestone in the cemetery with the name Biancotti, as if there weren’t enough already.

  Signor Robustelli didn’t dirty his fingers. He sat behind his desk and admired the daring stretches of train tracks from afar. She wasn’t pleased that he came to the funeral, but Andrina had insisted. She cared for him. And Benedetta didn’t like that either. She didn’t want a man like that in her family. It just wasn’t right. He didn’t fit. And if Andrina went on like this, she soon wouldn’t fit in to the family either.

  Benedetta’s legs were tired, and she was having trouble breathing. Nika had noticed, and she’d climbed up to Grevasalvas to tell Gian and to bring him home. Benedetta needed him now more than ever.

  They were all afraid that Gian, upset by what had happened, would have an attack and scare everyone to death. But the worst did not happen. Gian was quite calm. He held on to his mother and supported her even as, standing in front of the open grave, she staggered momentarily, as if wanting to throw herself down into the hole on top of the light pine coffin gleaming up from below. He held her tight and whispered calming words as if he were talking to his cows.

  Aldo stood by himself, trying to catch Andrina’s eyes. But she was with Robustelli and didn’t leave his side.

  Even if Luca had had bad luck, she, Andrina, was going to look forward to the future, just as her brother had. She enjoyed the way Achille put a protective arm around her, and she knew he was her future. She couldn’t rely on her family, who had only managed to make it from Stampa to Maloja, and not a step beyond.

  Nika was standing to one side. Luca had found his resting place. She pulled her woolen shawl tightly about her, pressing her hand to her chest. She imagined him lying there in his black suit. Not able to hear or see anything anymore, not even the dull sound of the clods of soil raining down on his coffin now.

  The Segantini family had of course come to the funeral too. Bice looked as if she were suffering, but maybe she was only cold. The wind of Maloja blew over them all, whirling past them along with their thoughts of the dead boy. Segantini saw the wind driving the reddish-blonde strands of hair into Nika’s face. Whenever a cloud covered the sun, the fiery note in her hair was extinguished, and only her sad face remained. He had been troubled when she’d told him she would not miss him. If she had admitted the opposite, he wouldn’t have had to keep thinking of her. And he would have preferred that.

  “Be careful,” Adrian was going to say, “they can bite.” But by then Mathilde had already stuck her finger into the cage. She screamed. Startled, the squirrel hopped back and forth at the end of its chain, its red, bushy tail beating wildly against the bars. The tears that welled up in Mathilde’s eyes were not only in response to the shock and pain of the small, deep wound, but also in pity for the caged animal. It was an unfortunate present Adrian had brought her. She didn’t know how she should thank him for it, and anyway, she had some unpleasant news for him.

  “You can chain it outside the window,” Adrian had said as he greeted her and handed her the cage.

  “But I wouldn’t chain up an animal that wants to run around free in the forest,” she had said with passion, and without thinking twice about it, had stuck one of her fingers in between the bars.

  “I thought an animal might pass the time a little for you,” he said apologetically while she was trying to stop the bleeding. She said nothing, and a long silence ensued between them that he didn’t understand.

  Finally she said, “Adrian, I am not going to marry you.” She could see from his face that he hadn’t grasped the meaning of her words. “I don’t know how to explain it to you . . . My life has changed since I’ve been up here. I’m not the same Mathilde you knew and fell in love with.”

  “But you don’t look sick.”

  “I am not talking about external things,” she said. “Many things have changed inside me. What I think, how I feel, what I want . . .” It was no use. He simply didn’t understand. He was here, just as he always was, no different from a year ago, and he was only waiting to take her home, to marry her, no matter how his parents felt about it. Wasn’t that enough? What else could she possibly want?

  “I don’t understand you,” Adrian said. She was glad at least that he didn’t bombard her with questions.

  “No one can understand it,” she said. “I myself don’t understand.”

  “But it’s probably just a mood.” He tried again, “Emotions . . .”

  “Yes. It is only emotions, feelings. And I am going to listen to my feelings.”

  “But it isn’t all that simple, Mathilde. You can’t simply break off an engagement with three sentences. Think of all the plans we’ve made, your parents, the future that we were planning for,” Adrian said, completely at a loss.

  “Oh yes, it is that simple, no matter how much we talk.”

  It was futile to try to change her mind right now. But he’d come back, and he’d ask Mathilde’s father to accompany him.

  Segantini was restlessly walking back and forth. He was searching for one of his paintings. Where was the oil painting that he’d hastily dashed off one or two years ago, the forerunner to Love at the Springs of Life? The painting wasn’t large, barely half a meter by half a meter (eighteen inches x eighteen inches), and he had never exhibited it. It depicted a nude female, a rare subject for him.

  At last he found the picture; it was with his children’s things. Ah, he remembered now—in a fit of dissatisfaction, he had let them play with it, and the boys had used it as a target for their air gun. It was lying in the garden, where it had been carelessly thrown. It had been damaged in several places by the feathered arrowheads of the projectiles.

  Segantini picked it up, gently wiped it off, and gazed at it.

  The main colors were blue and green with some beautiful turquoise notes, as if he had already been thinking of Nika’s eyes. In the background, an idealized landscape rather than a faithful representation of nature—mountains and a gleaming blue lake. And closer to the viewer, two tree trunks close together, with leafy crowns growing out of the picture. In the foreground lay a gentle hill. Round and soft and split into two lush rounded halves by a bubbling spring that flowed from deep within the hill. The flowing waters shimmered white against the dark cavity of the pool the spring had created and tumbled downward into a dark-green lake surrounded by grass. Beside the spring, on a light-blue cloth, is a beautiful nude, relaxed and givin
g herself up to the light of the summer day. One of her arms is pushed under her head as if to better expose it to the sun. Her eyes are closed, her legs crossed—and yet, Segantini thought, it would be easy to spread her legs. But why—the spring, the beginning of the world was already shamelessly open, much enlarged, it was pretty much an innocuous natural depiction of the female sex, what this reclining nude concealed between her legs.

  And just then, Segantini felt a tormenting, painful longing that he didn’t want to give a name to. He turned the picture over again, face down on the earth, where it had lain. It was a futile, an idle longing.

  “That isn’t me,” Nika said when she looked at the painting Segantini had taken her to see. “Only the hair is right, otherwise, nothing.”

  Segantini smiled. “But then, you didn’t pose for me. The painting is an allegory in which I wanted to express an idea. It isn’t a portrait of you.”

  “So what did you need me for?” Nika’s feelings were hurt.

  “You were the inspiration for the picture. When I was driving past in the coach and saw you at the lake, I suddenly saw the composition for a painting before me—you, standing over the water, gazing at your reflection.”

  Nika silently gazed at the canvas. It wasn’t finished yet; that she could see. Segantini would still be adding many little brush strokes. But that would hardly change the painting as a whole.

  Segantini had chosen a broad format. The action took place in the middle of the picture. It was a picture without sky. That bothered Nika. There was no way to avoid looking at what was happening in the picture, no escape for one’s eyes. The upper edge of the picture simply cropped out the green tops of the trees, which stood where the meadow ended. The large waves of grass that took up almost all the upper half of the picture lay in bright daylight. Totally unlike the hidden place in the forest where Segantini had taken her.

  In the foreground, Nika saw the glacial pool, but even the pool wasn’t like the one they had visited. The boulder she had clambered over, and which had bordered the deep pool on one side, was flattened in the picture, a nearly horizontal line in the middle of the picture. And there she stood, naked in the landscape, bathed in relentless light, and at the mercy of all eyes.

  “The boulder looks like a bridge,” Nika said.

  There was the alpine rose near the water, which Nika remembered. But then she noticed a white cloth tossed over the boulder, as if to represent her clothes.

  “What is the white cloth?” she asked.

  “White is the color of innocence,” Segantini replied.

  “It looks like a dress that’s been taken off,” Nika said.

  “So there is something that’s right,” he said. “Back then, at the glacial pool, you undressed.”

  Nika, feeling uneasy, looked at the girl in the picture. She was supporting herself with her left hand on the boulder. With the right, she was holding her abundant hair out of her face—reddish blonde like hers—and looking down at the water. True, Nika was also tall and slender, but this girl was much younger than she was.

  “But this is a young girl in the picture,” she said, with disappointment in her voice, “not a woman!”

  “She stands at the threshold of becoming a woman,” Segantini replied. “Soon she’ll cross the bridge.”

  “Is that why she is looking at herself? To see who she is?”

  Nika looked carefully at the water, which reflected the girl. On its surface, the color of the water was a deep blue. Where the boulder cast a shadow, it was a swampy brown. And then Nika noticed something that the girl had apparently not seen yet. There was a monster lying in the water, a water snake with a dragon’s head, brown and ugly, its teeth bared. “She doesn’t see what’s lurking down there!” Nika cried, taken aback.

  “Because she’s totally absorbed with her own reflection and isn’t aware of anything but her own face. Vanity is a source of evil.”

  Nika felt hurt. So when he thought of her, he thought of vanity and a monster emerging from a deep pit of water.

  “And why is it a girl standing there and not a man?”

  “Women, it seems, are vain. And besides, it was you who gave me the idea for the picture.”

  Nika looked at him angrily.

  “There are also men,” he said to soothe her, “who look at their own reflection. You don’t know the myth of Narcissus. Narcissus was a young man.”

  Nika felt a chill. So he had carried this terrible picture within himself ever since he had first seen her.

  Yet, on the other hand, how enchantingly beautiful was the place that Segantini had brought her to. The quiet forest, the path overgrown with moss and tree roots, and the dark, bottomless pool with white clouds reflected in its blackness. What a wonderful smell in the forest, the mysterious interplay of light and shadow, wood cracking under their feet followed by a deep stillness that returned again when they paused. How the buds of the alpine roses had glowed, and she had felt as if she and Segantini were diving together into a profound, unfathomable dream. But no. He was looking at this girl in the picture from a cool distance; the colors were cold and did not radiate even the smallest spark of love.

  “I don’t like the painting,” Nika said.

  “I’m quite proud of it,” Segantini said. “I consider it my best so far. I think I shall call it Vanitas. It’s a Latin word; it means ‘Vanity.’ One could give it other titles too, such as The Spring of Evil or Venus before Her Mirror.”

  He looked at the picture. “I like La Vanità best. That name also refers to the futility of all our striving. In the end, there is always Death. Death is always there, always more powerful than we are.”

  He saw her horrified look and laughed. “Don’t be afraid for me. A fortune-teller prophesied I would reach the biblical age of ninety-nine. I’m a superstitious person. So I believe it.”

  “I still don’t like the picture,” Nika said. “You look into a mirror because you want to know who you are. Is that a bad thing?”

  “Too much looking is damaging,” he said. “Then you stop seeing others.”

  “Maybe,” Nika said. “But no one ever showed me who I am. Why I’m here. I look in the mirror to find out.”

  “It’s also vanity to believe that you can know yourself,” Segantini said.

  “But what if you can’t see yourself, can’t recognize who you are?” Nika said.

  “The only salvation is love,” he said. “Selfless love for another—a love like a mother’s love.”

  Nika shook her head. “Not all mothers love their children. My mother didn’t love me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I have been looking for my mother because I want to know why she abandoned me. Maybe I’ll understand her better then.”

  “You have to learn to love without understanding. As long as we don’t know about death, we won’t know anything final about life either. You will never find out everything. It’s better for you to believe that she loved you.”

  Nika looked down at the ground.

  “No, I’ll never give up my search. And besides,” she added angrily, “that dragon that you painted there, that doesn’t exist. What took me by surprise at the pool was only a strange insect on the water’s surface.”

  Nika looked around the attic room. A bed, a table, a chair, a bureau with a water pitcher and bowl on it. There was space in the bureau for her things. My God, she thought, I have a room. A room. With a window through which the sunlight can come in.

  She sat down carefully on the bed as if it might collapse with any violent movement. A bed! A pillow! A sheet, cool, fine, smooth. Nika got up again. Walked around. The wooden floorboards creaked under her feet. She sat down again, startled by the noise she was making. She felt she had to be quiet as a mouse so that the dream wouldn’t burst like a soap bubble.

  Half a year had gone by since she ha
d run away from Mulegns. And nothing was the same as before. She took the locket from the table and concealed it with her few things in the bureau.

  When Signor Robustelli had called her to his office and let her know that he had a room for her, she had stared at him as if he were an apparition. If you’re treated badly for a long time, you can’t believe it when you’re suddenly treated well. You have to get used to it gradually.

  Nika sat there on her bed, not moving, her knees pressed together, hands in her lap, letting the sun shine on her. She thought about Signor Robustelli who had looked at her, surprised. He must have noticed that she was staring at him as if she’d seen a ghost. Without being aware of it, she had begun to rely on him, to trust him, to ask him for help. But you can see people a thousand times and still not see them. He was just Signor Robustelli. Up to that point, she had only wondered and thought about Segantini. But at that moment when he’d explained about the room, she’d suddenly seen who this man really was, Achille Robustelli. He was younger than Segantini, more slender. He seemed more elegant, more agile. He took up less space than Segantini, and was probably less full of himself as well. Robustelli had dark, slightly wavy hair that was not as conspicuous as Segantini’s magnificent curls. At the temples Nika could see the first silvery gray, a contrast to the young smooth face. He didn’t have a beard like Segantini, didn’t conceal his lips, which were smiling at that moment as if to say: Well? And so? Did you lose your tongue again?

  Then she came back from her reverie, smiled, looked at him as if to say, Aha, look at that, there you are.

  Well, at last, his look said.

  “Nika,” Signor Robustelli said, “I need you inside the hotel. You have to help serve. I know you liked working in the garden. But we have to get ready for the Venetian Ball even while the normal hotel service continues. We need every available hand to help now. Go to the Chef de Service, report in, and have them give you the appropriate clothes. And,” he said after looking at her hands, “scrub your hands first. And your fingernails.”