Mr. Gwyn

by Alessandro Baricco

  When the last light bulb went out, she was staring at it, hypnotized. In the darkness Jasper Gwyn heard her laughing, nervously. Thank you, Miss Croner, you were perfect, he said. She got dressed, she had just a light dress, that day, and a small purse. She took out a brush and smoothed her hair, which she knew was nice and she wore long. Then, in the afternoon light that filtered faintly through the shutters, she went up to Jasper Gwyn and said it had been an incomprehensible experience. She was so close that Jasper Gwyn could have done what for days he had longed to do, but just out of curiosity—touch those highlights on her skin. He was convincing himself that he shouldn’t when she kissed him on the lips, rapidly, and went off.

  Miss Croner got her portrait in exchange for fifteen thousand pounds and a declaration in which she pledged the most absolute discretion, on the pain of heavy pecuniary sanctions. When she received the portrait she kept it on the table for a few days. To read it, she waited for a morning when, waking up, she felt like a queen. There were some, from time to time. The next day she telephoned Rebecca and did so repeatedly in the following days, until she was convinced that it really wasn’t possible to see Jasper Gwyn again and discuss it with him. No, even just an aperitif, like two old friends, was out of the question. Then she took a sheet of her writing paper (rice paper, amber-colored) and wrote a few lines straight off. The last said, “I envy you your talent, master, your rigor, those beautiful hands, and your secretary, who is truly charming. Yours, Elizabeth Croner.”

  47

  The third portrait Jasper Gwyn did was for a woman who was about to be fifty and had asked her husband for a gift that could amaze her. She hadn’t seen the advertisement, she hadn’t dealt with Rebecca, she hadn’t chosen to do what she was doing. When she arrived, the first day, she appeared skeptical, and didn’t want to undress completely. She kept her slip on, of purple silk. As a young woman she had been a stewardess, because she needed to support herself and to put as many miles as possible between herself and her family. She had met her husband on the London–Dublin route. He was sitting in seat 19D and was then eleven years older than she was. Now, as often happens, they were the same age. Starting on the third day she took off her slip, and a few days later Jasper Gwyn became, without knowing it, the sixth man who had seen her completely naked. One afternoon Jasper Gwyn had all the shutters open when she arrived, and she had a moment of hesitation. But then she seemed to get used to it, and in time she came to like lingering at the windows, without covering herself, touching the glass with her breasts, which were white and beautiful. One day a boy crossed the courtyard to get a bicycle: she smiled at him. A few days later Jasper Gwyn closed the shutters again, and in some way, from that moment, she surrendered to the portrait—a different face, and another body. When the time came to talk she spoke in a girl’s voice, and asked Jasper Gwyn to sit beside her. Every question seemed to catch her unprepared, but every answer was unusually acute. They talked about storms, about revenge, and about expectations. She said, at one point, that she would have liked a world without numbers, and a life without repetitions.

  When the last light bulb went out, she was walking, slowly, singing in an undertone. In the darkness Jasper Gwyn watched her continue slowly, grazing the walls. He waited until she was near him and said, Thank you, Mrs. Harper, it was all perfect. She stopped and in her girlish voice asked if she could make a request. Try, Jasper Gwyn answered. I would like you to help me get dressed, she said. With tenderness, she added. Jasper Gwyn did it. It’s the first time someone has done this for me, she said.

  Mrs. Harper got her portrait in exchange for eighteen thousand pounds and a declaration in which she pledged the most absolute discretion, on the pain of heavy pecuniary sanctions. Her husband gave it to her on the evening of her birthday, the table set for just the two of them, by candlelight. He had wrapped the folder in gold paper and a blue ribbon. She opened the present and, sitting at the table, without saying anything, read straight through the four pages that Jasper Gwyn had written for her. When she finished, she looked up at her husband and for a moment thought that nothing could keep them from dying together, after living together forever. The next day Rebecca received an e-mail in which Mr. and Mrs. Harper thanked her for the splendid opportunity and begged her to tell Mr. Gwyn that they would jealously guard the portrait, and would never show it to anyone, because it had become the most precious thing it had been granted them to possess. Sincerely, Ann and Godfried Harper.

  48

  The fourth portrait Jasper Gwyn did was of a thirty-two-year-old man who, after studying economics with excellent grades, had gotten stuck five exams from a degree, and now was a painter, with some success. His parents—members of the London upper-middle class—had not welcomed this. Until some years earlier he had been a good swimmer, and now he had a body without definition, as if reflected in a spoon. He moved slowly and yet without confidence, so you had the impression that he lived in a place stuffed with very fragile objects that only he could perceive. Even the light in his paintings—industrial landscapes—seemed to be something that only he was aware of. He had been thinking for some time of trying portraits, especially of children, and when he was close to understanding what truly interested him he had chanced to come across Jasper Gwyn’s advertisement. It had seemed to him a sign. In fact what he expected was a meeting where it would be possible, at length and in the tranquility of a studio, to talk about the meaning of making a portrait of a living person, so in the first days he was dismayed by the silence that Jasper Gwyn, firmly, claimed from him and preserved in himself. He had just begun to get used to it, and to appreciate the strain, to the point of considering that it might be a rule to adopt, when something happened that to him seemed normal but in fact wasn’t. It was perhaps an hour before eight, and someone knocked at the door. He saw that Jasper Gwyn gave no sign that he was aware of it. But outside the knocking began again, and continued with annoying insistence. So Jasper Gwyn got up—he was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, in a corner that seemed to be his den—and with an expression of infinite disbelief on his face went to the door and opened it.

  There was that twenty-year-old kid, and he was holding a cell phone in his hand.

  “It’s for you,” he said.

  Jasper Gwyn was bare-chested, wearing his usual mechanic’s pants. He couldn’t belive it. He took the phone.

  “Tom, are you mad?”

  But Tom’s voice wasn’t there on the other end. He heard only a person weeping, very faintly.

  “Hello!”

  Still that weeping.

  “Tom, what the fuck kind of joke is it, will you stop it?”

  Then from that faint weeping the voice of Lottie emerged to tell him that Tom was ill. He was in the hospital.

  “In the hospital?”

  Lottie said that he wasn’t well at all, then she began to weep, and finally she said could he please hurry there right away, she was asking him, please. Then she said the name of the hospital and the address, because she was a practical woman, she had always been.

  “Wait,” said Jasper Gwyn.

  He went back into the studio to get his pad.

  “Could you repeat it?” he asked.

  Lottie repeated the name and address, and Jasper Gwyn wrote them on one of those cream-colored sheets. While he watched the blue ink fix on the paper the horror of a hospital name and the sterile prose of an address, he reminded himself that every spell is unspeakably fragile, and life is very swift to plunder.

  He told the young man that he had to stop. Suddenly he saw him infinitely naked—and in a grotesquely useless way.

  49

  Since human nature is surprisingly petty, in the taxi Jasper Gwyn thought mainly of how many people he would have to see at the hospital—colleagues, editors, journalists, quite a few extremely tiresome encounters were to be expected. He imagined the moment when they would ask what he was doing. Horrible, he thought. But when he reached the ward, only Lottie came to meet him, i
n the deserted corridor.

  “He doesn’t want anyone, he doesn’t want to be seen like this,” she said. “He asked only for you, a thousand times, luckily you’ve come, he’s just asking for you.”

  Jasper Gwyn didn’t answer, because he was looking at her, disconcerted. She was wearing spike heels and a breathtakingly short skirt.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s Tom who asked me to. He says it keeps him in a good mood.”

  Jasper Gwyn nodded. Her décolletage was also of the type that keeps one in a good mood.

  “He gets mad if I cry,” Lottie added. “Do you mind staying here for a while? I’m dying to go somewhere and have a good cry.”

  In the room, Tom Bruce Shepperd was lying amid tubes and machines, as if shrunk, under sheets and blankets of a nonexistent color—hospital color. Jasper Gwyn sat down in a chair beside the bed. Tom opened his eyes. Disgusting, he said, but softly. His lips were dry and there was no light in his gaze. But then he turned a little and recognized Jasper Gwyn, and then it was different.

  Softly, and slowly, they began to talk. Tom had to recount what had happened to him. His heart, somewhere. A complicated business. They’ll try an operation in two days, he said. But try isn’t much as a verb, he pointed out.

  “You’ll come out of it,” said Jasper Gwyn. “Like the other time, you’ll come out of it flying.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean maybe?”

  “I think I’d prefer to change the subject.”

  “Okay.”

  “See if you can say something that doesn’t depress me.”

  “That outfit of Lottie’s was something.”

  “A pig as usual.”

  “I? You’re the pig, you’re the one who wants her to dress like that.”

  Tom smiled—for the first time. Then he closed his eyes again. It was evident that speaking tired him. Jasper Gwyn ran a hand through his hair, and for a moment they stayed like that, simply together.

  But then, without opening his eyes, Tom said to Jasper Gwyn that he had wanted him to come for a particular reason, even though he’d give anything in the world not to be seen by him in that nauseating state. He caught his breath, and then he said it was about that business of the portraits.

  “I don’t want to go without knowing what the fuck you’ve invented,” he said.

  Jasper Gwyn shifted his chair a little closer to Tom’s head.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said.

  “Just a manner of speaking.”

  “Try repeating it and I’ll sell my whole backlist to Andrew Wylie.”

  “He wouldn’t take you.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “Okay, but now listen to me.”

  Every so often he stopped to catch his breath. Or a thread he’d lost, damn.

  “I’ve thought about it, that business of the portraits… well, I don’t want to listen to a lot of nonsense. I had a better idea.”

  He took Jasper Gwyn’s hand.

  “Do it.”

  “What?”

  “Make me a portrait, and I’ll understand.”

  “A portrait of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  “Here. You have two days. Don’t try to con me with all that nonsense that you need a month, and the studio, and the music…”

  He gripped Jasper Gwyn’s hand hard. It was an irrational force, no one could have said where it came from.

  “Just do it. If you know how to do it, you can do it even here.”

  Jasper Gwyn thought of a lot of objections, all sensible. He understood with absolute lucidity that it was a grotesque situation, and regretted not having explained everything at the right moment, which was a long time ago, and certainly not now, in this hospital room.

  “It’s not possible, Tom.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not a magic trick. It’s like crossing a desert, or climbing a mountain. You can’t do it in a living room just because a child you love asks you to. Let’s do this: they operate, everything will go wonderfully, and when you get home I’ll explain everything, I swear.”

  Tom let go his grip and for a moment he was silent. His breathing was a little labored now.

  “It’s not just that,” he said finally.

  Jasper Gwyn had to lean over slightly in order to hear him.

  “It’s important to me to understand what the hell you’re up to, but it’s not just that.”

  He clasped Jasper Gwyn’s hand tightly again.

  “Once you told me that making someone’s portrait is a way of bringing him home. That’s right?”

  “Yes, something like that.”

  “A way of bringing him back home.”

  “Yes.”

  Tom cleared his throat. He wanted what he was about to say to be understood clearly.

  “Take me home, Jasper.”

  He cleared his throat again.

  “I don’t have much time and I need to go home,” he said.

  Jasper Gwyn looked up because he didn’t want to look into Tom’s eyes.

  There were all those machines, and the color of the walls, and the timbre of the hospital everywhere. He thought it was all ridiculous.

  “It will be awful,” he said.

  Tom Bruce Shepperd relaxed his grip and closed his eyes.

  “Anyway, of course you don’t think I’m going to pay you,” he said.

  50

  So for two days and two nights, Jasper Gwyn stayed in the hospital, almost without sleeping, because he had to make a portrait of the only friend who remained to him in life. He settled himself in a corner, on a chair, and he saw doctors and nurses passing by without seeing them. He lived on coffee and sandwiches, every so often he stretched his legs in the corridor. Lottie came and didn’t dare to say anything.

  In his bed, Tom seemed to become smaller every day, and the silence in which he was surviving was like a mysterious disappearance. Every so often he turned toward the corner where he expected to see Jasper Gwyn and he always seemed relieved to find that it wasn’t empty. When they took him away to do some test or other, Jasper Gwyn stared at the unmade bed and in that mess of sheets he seemed to see a form of nudity so extreme that it no longer needed a body.

  He worked by weaving together memories and what he could now see in Tom that he had never seen. Not for a moment did it cease to be a difficult and painful activity. Nothing was like the studio, in the embrace of David Barber’s music, and every rule he had established there was impossible. He didn’t have his pieces of paper, he missed the Catherine de Médicis, and it was hard to think amid all those objects that he hadn’t chosen. The time was insufficient, the moments of solitude rare. Noteworthy was the possibility of failure.

  Yet the evening before the operation, around eleven, Jasper Gwyn asked if there was a computer, in the ward, where he could write something. He ended up in an administrative office, where they gave him a desk and the password for the employee’s PC. It wasn’t a normal procedure and they kept emphasizing it. On the desk were two framed photographs and a sad collection of windup mice. Jasper Gwyn adjusted the chair, which was annoyingly high. He saw with disgust that the keyboard was dirty, and intolerably so on the most frequently used keys. He would have thought the opposite should happen. He got up, turned off the overhead light, and returned to the mice. He turned on the desk lamp. He began to write.

  Five hours later he got up and tried to figure out where the hell the printer was, which, he heard very clearly, was spitting out his portrait. It’s odd where people put the printer in offices where there’s only one printer for everyone. He had to turn on the overhead light to find it, and he discovered that he had nine pages, printed in a font he didn’t especially like, paginated with margins of an offensive banality. Everything was wrong, but also everything was as it should be—a hasty precision, in which the luxury of details was removed. He didn’t re-read, he merely numbered the pages. He had printed two c
opies: he folded one in four, put it in his pocket, and with the other in his hand he went to Tom’s room.

  It must have been four in the morning, he didn’t even check. In the room there was only a single, fairly warm light, at the head of the bed. Tom was sleeping with his head turned to one side. The machines connected to him every so often communicated something and did it by emitting small, hateful sounds. Jasper Gwyn brought a chair to the bed. It made no sense, but he placed a hand on Tom’s shoulder and began to shake him. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would please a passing nurse, he realized. He brought his mouth to Tom’s ear and uttered his name a few times. Tom opened his eyes.

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” he said. “I was only waiting. What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Late.”

  “Did you do it?”

  Jasper Gwyn held the nine sheets in his hand. He placed them on the bed.

  “It came out a little long,” he said. “When you’re in a hurry it always comes out a little long, you know.”