Mr. Gwyn

by Alessandro Baricco

  They talked softly and had the air of boys who are stealing something.

  Tom held the sheets of paper in his hand and glanced at them. Maybe he read the first lines. He had raised his head off the pillow, with the appearance of making a tremendous effort. But in his eyes there was something alert that no one had ever seen, in that hospital. He let his head fall back on the pillow and extended the pages to Jasper Gwyn.

  “Okay. Read.”

  “Me?”

  “Do I have to call the nurse?”

  Jasper Gwyn had imagined something different. Like Tom reading it while he went home, finally, to take a shower. He was always a little late to admit the bare reality of things.

  He took the pages. He hated reading things he had written out loud—reading them to others. It had always seemed to him a shameless act. But he began to do it, trying to do it well—with the necessary slowness and care. Many sentences seemed to him imprecise, but he forced himself to read everything just as he had written it. Every so often Tom chuckled. Once he made a gesture to stop him. Then he let him understand that he could continue. Jasper Gwyn read the last page even more slowly, and to tell the truth it seemed to him perfect.

  At the end, he arranged the pages, folded them in two, and placed them on the bed.

  The machines continued to emit inscrutable messages, with a vaguely military obtuseness.

  “Come here,” said Tom.

  Jasper Gwyn bent over him. Now they were really close. Tom pulled an arm out from under the covers and rested one hand on his friend’s head. On the nape. Then he hugged him—he leaned his friend’s head against his shoulder and held it there. He moved his fingers slightly, as if to be sure of something.

  “I knew,” he said.

  He pressed his fingers lightly on his friend’s neck.

  Jasper Gwyn left when Tom fell asleep. One hand was lying on the portrait, and to Jasper Gwyn it looked like the hand of a child.

  51

  Rebecca was in the office when the news arrived that Tom hadn’t made it. She got up and without even taking her things went out to the street. She walked quickly, as she never did, sure of what street to take and oblivious of everything around her. She arrived at Jasper Gwyn’s house and rang the bell. Her desire for that door to open was so persistent that the door, finally, opened. Rebecca said nothing but threw herself into Jasper Gwyn’s arms, the only place in the world where, she had decided, it would be right to cry and not stop for hours.

  As often happens, it took a while to remember that, when someone dies, it’s incumbent on others to live for him, too—there’s nothing else appropriate.

  52

  So the fourth portrait Jasper Gwyn did was of the only friend he had, a few hours before he died.

  Then it was hard to start again, for many predictable reasons, but also because of the unexpected sensation that making those portraits had also been a way of challenging a person who wasn’t there anymore, and through whom, probably, he had been persuaded to challenge that whole world of books he wanted to escape. Now he had no one to convince except himself, and the privacy in which he had always imagined his career as a copyist had become a sort of secret battle, almost without witnesses. He began to get somewhat accustomed to the idea that it was so, and to regain the clarity of a necessary desire. He had to go back to remember the purity of what he was looking for, and the cleanness he wished for, in the heart of his own talent. He did it calmly, letting the joy he knew re-emerge by itself—the desire. Then, gradually, he went back to work.

  The fifth portrait was the one he had to do of the boy who painted, and he didn’t like it at all because he had to start again from the beginning—a thing objectively doomed to failure. The sixth he did for a forty-two-year-old actor with a very strange body, like a bird’s, and a memorable face, as if carved out of wood. The seventh was two very rich young people who had just married and insisted on posing together. The eighth he did for a doctor who for six months a year sailed on merchant ships, all around the world. The ninth was a woman who wanted to forget everything, except herself and four poems of Verlaine—in French. The tenth was a tailor who had dressed the Queen, without being especially proud of it. The eleventh was a girl—and that was the mistake.

  Rebecca, who in choosing the candidates tried to protect Jasper Gwyn from unsuitable subjects, had in fact never met her. But there was a reason: the father had come to her, and he was not just anyone but Mr. Trawley, the retired antiques dealer, the first man in the world who had agreed to spend money to have a portrait made by Jasper Gwyn. The girl was his youngest daughter, her name was Audrey. With the courtesy and civility that Rebecca recalled appreciating when she met him, Mr. Trawley had explained that his daughter was a difficult girl and he was convinced that a singular experience like the one he had had in Jasper Gwyn’s studio would perhaps help her find a truce—he said it exactly like that—where she could regain some serenity. He added that whatever Jasper Gwyn wrote in her portrait would provide for his daughter a path clearer than any reflection in the mirror and more persuasive than any lesson.

  Rebecca discussed it with Jasper Gwyn and together they decided that he could do it. The girl was nineteen. She came into the studio on a Monday in May. Sixteen months had passed since he had done her father.

  53

  Her nakedness was like a challenge—her young body a weapon. She talked often, and although Jasper Gwyn showed no sign of answering and was repeatedly driven to explain to her that silence was indispensable to the success of the portrait, every day she started talking again. She wasn’t recounting anything, she wasn’t trying to describe something: she chanted a perpetual hatred, and an indiscriminate cruelty. She was magnificent, not at all childish, and powerfully animal. For days she insulted, in a ferocious yet graceful way, her parents. Then she digressed briefly on school and her friends, but it was clear that she did it hastily, imprecisely, because she was aiming at something else. Jasper Gwyn had given up silencing her, and had grown used to considering her voice a detail of her body, only more intimate than others and in some way more dangerous—a claw. He didn’t pay attention to what she said, but that caustic singsong became so vivid and seductive that it made David Barber’s sound cloud seem vaguely useless, if not actually irritating. On the twelfth day the girl reached the point she had been aiming at, that is, him. She began to attack him, verbally, flare-ups alternating with silences in which she merely stared at him with unbearable intensity. Jasper Gwyn became incapable of working, and as his thoughts spun vainly he reached the point of understanding that there was something tremendously perverse and seductive in that aggression. He wasn’t sure he could defend himself against it. He withstood it for two days, and on the third he didn’t show up at the studio. Nor did he for the four days that followed. He returned on the fifth day, almost sure he wouldn’t find her, and strangely disturbed by the idea of not being wrong. But she was there. She was silent the whole time. Jasper Gwyn felt, for the first time, that she had a dangerous beauty. He began working again, but with a troubling confusion in his head.

  That evening, at home, he got a phone call from Rebecca. Something unpleasant had happened. In an afternoon tabloid, there had appeared, without specific proof but in the usual vulgar tone, a curious story about a writer who made portraits, in a studio behind Marylebone High Street. It left out his name, but it mentioned the cost of the portraits (slightly inflated), and there were many details about the studio. There was a malicious paragraph about the nudity of the models and another that described incense, soft lighting, and new age music. According to the tabloid, having a portrait done in that manner had become, in a certain high London society, the fashion of the moment.

  Jasper Gwyn had always feared something like this. But over time he and Rebecca had understood that the way of working in that studio led people to become extremely jealous of their own portraits and instinctively inclined not to damage the beauty of the experience with something that invaded the private spher
e of their memory. They talked about it a little, but of all the people who had been in the studio, they couldn’t think of one who would have taken the trouble to contact a tabloid and cause that mess. It was inevitable, finally, to think of the girl. Jasper Gwyn hadn’t said anything about what was happening with her in the studio, but Rebecca by now could read every little detail and it hadn’t escaped her that something wasn’t working as usual. She tried to ask questions and Jasper Gwyn confined himself to remarking that the girl had a very special talent for spite. He wouldn’t add anything else. They decided that Rebecca would monitor how the rumor circulated in the media and that for the moment the only thing to do was go back to work.

  Jasper Gwyn returned to the studio the next day with the vague impression of being a lion tamer entering a cage. He found the girl sitting on the floor, in the corner where he usually squatted. She was writing something on the cream-colored pages of his notebook.

  54

  Nothing much came of that story in the other papers, and Rebecca looked for Jasper Gwyn to reassure him, but she couldn’t find him. He showed up after a few days, and had little to say, only that everything was fine. Rebecca knew him well enough not to insist. She stopped looking for him. She cut out the articles, just a few, from papers that had picked up the story. She said to herself that all in all it had gone well. She worked in a tiny office that Jasper Gwyn had found for her, a pleasant cubby, not far from his house. She met with three candidates (all three had read the tabloid) but none of them truly convinced her. A week passed, she waited for what always happened when the inscrutable will of the Catherine de Médicis decided that the time was up. In a few days Jasper Gwyn would deliver to her a copy of the portrait. She would then summon the client, who would come to get it, settle the bill, and give back the key to the studio. It was all habitual and repetitive, and she liked that. Only this time Jasper Gwyn was late in showing up, and instead one morning Mr. Trawley appeared. He had to say that, according to his daughter the Catherine de Médicis had gone out, and had done so in a rather elegant fashion, but the truth was that when that happened Jasper Gwyn had not been to the studio for nine days. His daughter hadn’t failed to go there every afternoon, but she hadn’t seen him. Now Mr. Trawley wondered if he should do something particular or just wait. He wasn’t worried, but he had preferred to come in person to determine whether everything had gone well.

  “Are you sure that Mr. Gwyn didn’t show up for nine days?” Rebecca asked.

  “My daughter says so.”

  Rebecca stared at him in a questioning manner.

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “But in this case I’m inclined to believe her.”

  Rebecca said that she would check and would be in touch as soon as possible. She was uneasy, but she didn’t let him see it.

  Before leaving, Mr. Trawley managed to ask if by any chance Rebecca had an idea of how it had gone in the studio. What he wanted to ask in reality was if his daughter had behaved decently.

  “I don’t know,” said Rebecca. “Mr. Gwyn doesn’t talk much about what happens there, it’s not his style.”

  “I understand.”

  “What I guessed is that your daughter isn’t an easy subject, so to speak.”

  “No, she isn’t,” said Mr. Trawley.

  He paused.

  “At times she can be extremely unpleasant, or excessively attractive,” he added.

  Rebecca thought that she would like to be a girl of whom something like that could be said.

  “I’ll let you know, Mr. Trawley. I’m sure that everything will be all right.”

  Mr. Trawley said he didn’t doubt it.

  The next day a long article about the portraits appeared in the Guardian. It was more detailed that the one in the tabloid and went so far as to mention the name of Jasper Gwyn. There was also a second small article about him, with an account of his career.

  Rebecca hurried to look for Jasper Gwyn. She didn’t find him at home, nor was a tour of the neighborhood Laundromats of any use. He seemed to have disappeared.

  55

  Nothing happened for five days. Then Rebecca received from Jasper Gwyn a thick envelope containing the portrait of the girl, wrapped with the usual meticulous care, and a note of a few lines. He said that it would be impossible for him to be in touch for a while. He counted on the fact that in the meantime Rebecca would look after everything. He would have to delay the next portrait: he wasn’t sure he could return to work for a couple of months. He thanked her and signed off with a big hug. He made no reference to the article in the Guardian.

  For the entire day Rebecca had to politely refuse the many telephone calls that, from all over, arrived from people wanting to know more about the story of Jasper Gwyn. She didn’t like being left alone at such a delicate moment, but on the other hand she knew Jasper Gwyn well enough to recognize a behavior that it would be useless to try to correct. She did what she had to do, as well as she could, and before evening she telephoned Mr. Trawley to tell him that the portrait was ready. Then she unplugged the phone, took the girl’s portrait, and opened it. It was a thing that she never did. She had made it a rule to hand over the portraits without even glancing at them. It would have been the right moment to read them, she had always thought. But that evening everything was different. There was in the air something that resembled the breaking of a spell, and suspending the usual actions seemed to her reasonable, maybe even right. So she opened the portrait of the girl and began to read it.

  It was four pages. She stopped at the first, then put the pages back in order and closed the folder.

  56

  The girl arrived in the morning, by herself. She sat down facing Rebecca. She had long blond hair, straight and fine, that hung down on the sides of her face. Only at times, with a movement of her head, did she fully reveal her features, which were angular but dominated by two enchanting dark eyes. She was thin, and she displayed her own body with no signs of nervousness: she seemed to have chosen a kind of refined stillness as a rule of her being. She wore a jacket open over a purple T-shirt through which her small, shapely breasts could be imagined. Rebecca noticed her hands, which were pale and covered by tiny wounds.

  “Your portrait,” she said, handing her the folder.

  The girl left it on the table.

  “Are you Rebecca?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Jasper Gwyn talks about you a lot.”

  “It’s hard for me to believe that. Mr. Gwyn isn’t the type to talk much about something.”

  “Yes, but about you he does.”

  Rebecca made a vague gesture and smiled.

  “Well,” she said.

  Then she handed the girl a piece of paper to sign. To settle the bill she had made an arrangement with the father.

  The girl signed without reading it. She gave back the pen. She gestured toward the portrait.

  “Did you read it?”

  “No,” Rebecca lied. “I never do.”

  “How stupid.”

  “What?”

  “I would.”

  “You know, I’m old enough to decide myself what’s best to do and what isn’t.”

  “Yes, you’re grown-up. You’re old.”

  “It’s possible. Now I have a lot to do, if you don’t mind.”

  “Jasper Gwyn says that you’re a very unhappy woman.”

  Then Rebecca looked at her for the first time unwarily. She saw that she had an odious way of being charming.

  “Even Mr. Gwyn is wrong every so often,” she said.

  The girl made the movement with her head that revealed her face for a moment.

  “Are you in love with him?”

  Rebecca looked at her and didn’t answer.

  “No, that wasn’t the question I wanted to ask,” the girl corrected herself. “Have you made love with him?”

  Rebecca thought of getting up and showing the girl to the door. It was obviously the only thing to do. But she also felt that if there was a way of
penetrating the strange things that were happening, right in front of her she had the only possible path, however odious.

  “No,” she said. “I haven’t made love with him.”

  “I have,” said the girl. “Are you interested in knowing how he does it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Violently. But then all of a sudden tenderly. He likes to touch himself. He never speaks. He never closes his eyes. He’s very handsome when he comes.”

  She said it without taking her gaze from Rebecca’s eyes.

  “Do you want to read the portrait with me?” she asked.

  Rebecca shook her head no.

  “I don’t think I want to know anything else about you, girl.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “There, perfect.”

  For a moment the girl seemed distracted by something she had seen on the table. Then she looked up again at Rebecca.

  “We did it for two days, almost without sleeping,” she said. “There in the studio. Then he left and never returned. A coward.”

  “If you don’t have any other venom to spit out, our conversation is over.”

  “Yes, only one more thing.”

  “Hurry up.”

  “Would you do me a favor?”

  Rebecca looked at her, dismayed. The girl again made that movement that revealed her face for a moment.

  “When you see him tell him I’m sorry about that thing in the newspapers, I didn’t think it would be such a mess.”

  “If you wanted to hurt him you’ve succeeded.”

  “No, I didn’t want that. It was something else.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know… I wanted to touch him, but I don’t think you can understand.”

  Rebecca thought with irritation that she understood very well. She also thought of the sentence that condemns those—they are many—who aren’t capable of touching without hurting, and instinctively her eyes sought those hands and the little wounds. She felt the shadow of a distant compassion and understood immediately what had subdued Jasper Gwyn, in the studio, with that girl.