I Always Loved You

by Robin Oliveira

  • • •

  Edgar Degas could find his way around Paris in the dark. He had to, because the black sun floated in his vision now all the time, plaguing his days. Lately Mary Cassatt had begun to query him about color, whether or not he had given up on subtlety, whether he had decided that saturated colors were best after all, whether he really wanted such a strong orange, such a hard turquoise, but he did not know what she was talking about and told her so, somehow forgetting that this had been his deepest fear. The colors he applied were muted, as they had always been, as he had always preferred, but she insisted that he couldn’t quite see what he was doing, that he was choosing more vibrant tones, implying that he was losing his grasp, implying that he was unaware of his choices. She let it go, but the implications bothered him, and he ignored her for months, only to woo her back with a kind word about her work. He was always saying nice things about her work, except when she indulged her worst bourgeois tendencies and painted something so commercial it was as if she were begging for money.

  It was difficult to see lines, though. This he did not doubt. They doubled and tripled under his hand so that he had to retrace them again and again. Sometimes they were not clear at all for some reason, and he had to outline his figures in black to ground them, which he had done sometimes in the past, but now found a necessity. Or the forms he was after, the precise curve of a shoulder, the long line of a neck or an extended leg, would not materialize from the canvas. No matter the medium—oil or pastel—he indulged that need, one he could not remember being such an imperative before. He could not remember lines being such trouble. The technique of his youth began to leave him. But people rarely listened when he complained of his eyes. They believed him a hypochondriac, still. And he wouldn’t tell Mary, because she would only go on about color again.

  The exhibitions ceased. After the contretemps of 1882, when Caillebotte seized the reins, there was only one other, in 1886, and he and Mary had exhibited then. They held it at the same time as the Salon, a last statement of their belief in their own significance. But the fire of it all was gone. The State had given control of the Salon to the artists, and so there was little left to rebel against. The dealers Durand-Ruel and Portier bought and sold their work now. The art world had changed, and whether or not their exhibitions had had a hand in altering it was a question he could not answer.

  He filled his evenings and Sundays with visiting the Rouarts and the Halévys and their children. He asked one of the young women to marry him, and she pretended his question was a joke. Sabine died and a woman named Zoe Cloisters came to care for him. The city of Paris argued about Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain who had been accused of being a traitor. Everyone in Paris took sides for or against the man. Degas was against him. Everyone said the opposition was de facto anti-Semitism and not about the man’s betrayal, that what the opposition disliked was the man’s Jewishness. Degas stayed opposed to every writer and artist in Paris, and lost many friendships, even his dear friend Halévy, who was a Jew himself. Even Zola supported the captain, writing an article in the newspaper against the government’s prosecution, so he lost him, too. And Mary Cassatt was beside herself with fury at him. For years, she had wavered in and out of his vision, his life. Now she forgave him nothing. Friends frequently reunited them, but Mary was sharp now. That yielding young woman had become an old woman who yielded nothing.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  After Berthe Morisot died, Julie Manet, who had begged Degas to teach her how to paint, asked him one afternoon about Mademoiselle Cassatt.

  “Oh, once we were great friends.”

  “Once?” Julie asked. “Is this what happens when you grow old? Don’t you wish to see everyone you ever knew, to say everything that should be said?”

  “No,” Degas said. “What happens is that you no longer have the energy for talk.”

  “How sad,” Julie said.

  He had to turn his head to see the whole of her, but he could make out her beautiful cheekbones and long hair, a silhouette that reminded him so much of her mother he had to look away to hide his dismay. Where was the Manet in her that had once caused him so much trouble?

  “Tell me, Monsieur Degas, did you love Mademoiselle Cassatt?” Julie asked. “Everyone wonders.”

  “Do they?”

  “Of course. People say lots of things about Maman and Uncle Édouard, too.”

  “Ignore people, Julie. I always do.”

  “Why didn’t you marry her?”

  “She didn’t want to marry me. And it would have been a marriage only of the mind. That was all I had then. A mind for art.” Which wasn’t completely true.

  “Maman was married. She had time for love.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “She did.”

  “Did Mademoiselle Cassatt love you?”

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  “But don’t you know? You would know, wouldn’t you, if she did?”

  How did he not know the answer to that question? It seemed to him suddenly that this was the essential question, the question of their lives. Why didn’t he know? Shouldn’t he know? And if he did know, would it change anything about now, about the end, when the hours were beginning to pass like bitter pills, one after the other, God playing a joke, making him suffer, draining him of light? Would his life be better if he and Mary Cassatt had ever once said I love you? Or even said it a thousand times? I didn’t say I didn’t love you. How those words had come to haunt him. Why hadn’t he said it outright? Would she have then said that she loved him? And what would have happened then? Would she have married him? Would they have enjoyed dulcet days, surprised by devotion? Back then time had seemed elastic, eternal; the choices, endless. This was the shock as the end loomed: that one paid too little attention to the moments when life was asking questions. One had to pay attention. One had to think, Why not be brave? Why not take a chance? Regret was the stepchild of unheeded desire, and now he might never know. But if he asked her, if he visited her at her apartment or begged Julie or someone to take him to see her, far away in Mesnil-wherever-it-was that she lived now, what would he learn?

  That perhaps he had been a fool.

  And what man wanted to learn that?

  “She has her life,” he said.

  “I don’t think she is happy.”

  “Isn’t she?” he asked, trying to suppress the surge of joy that ran through him.

  “Monsieur.”

  “You reproach me, but you have everything ahead. You don’t know.”

  Daily he limped to the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, but no one was there to argue with him anymore and so he limped home. He wandered the streets, hardly able to see anything, remembering his way, remembering light. The restless flaneur, walking because he could no longer paint.

  Then the worst cruelty: They forced him to move his studio. They were going to tear down his building. Haussmann’s reach was long, even though he no longer held office, but the man had influenced everything, and nothing of old Paris would remain. It was an affront, having to move. Someone said the Little Dancer was falling apart, but he couldn’t find her, because she was buried deep in his packaged things, left disorganized in his new studio because he could not see to organize them. He wanted to work. He played with wax in an effort to feel his way to something, anything, to at least feel himself at work, but he had to abandon the lumps of uncooperative wax in disgust, as he once had abandoned many things.

  He attended art auctions. He could see none of the canvases for sale, but he wanted them all. He had to have them. He bought and bought, borrowing money to pay for them from Durand-Ruel, who in turn bought more of Degas’s work, work that had sat for years in his studio. Degas took his treasures home from the auctions and did not even unwrap them.

  Zoe died. Alone, he spent his days walking. He walked and walked and walked. He did not know what he wished to find except the hours filled. He no longer even tried to work. He was old and he felt old and everything was too much. He
forgot to wash and eat. Sometimes he did not even rise from his bed.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  She didn’t lose the light until late, not until long after Degas had lost his. Not until after she broke her leg in a fall from her horse. Not until after she fell so deeply in love with Japanese prints that she would see her style irrevocably influenced, finding in the flat planes of the Oriental art something so pure and interesting that even her brushstroke altered. Not until after she had traveled Europe with Louisine and her husband, helping them to purchase a museum’s worth of paintings. Not until after she earned Degas’s scorn by designing murals for the great Chicago exposition, fulfilling a commission she was proud to have received. Not until after she traveled one last time to the States to visit America and to see her paintings exhibited in Philadelphia. Not until after her brother Aleck died. Not until after the pains in her leg struck and the doctors diagnosed diabetes. Not until after she began to inhale radium to cure it. Not until after Matisse and Picasso infuriated her by making a mockery of art. Not until after she traveled down the Nile with Gardner, his wife, Jenny, and their children, a trip to ease her loneliness.

  She may have begun to lose the light when Gardner died after returning to Paris from the boat trip, felled by some bacterial infidel of Egypt. Or it may have begun when the Germans started marching through Alsace-Lorraine and she had to flee for a time to the South of France, leaving her chateau and all her Manets and Monets and Pissarros and Degases and Japanese prints vulnerable to the marauding Germans.

  Or it may have begun when she last visited Degas, after hearing of his peripatetic wanderings through Paris, and had seen for herself the lonely, pained man he had become.

  Yes, she believed, that might have been the moment. Shock could do that to a person, couldn’t it? Who knows what the human body will do? It might even blind you when you cannot stand what you see.

  He lived now at 6 Boulevard de Clichy, where she had once had her studio, so long ago. The tree-lined boulevard had gone from backwater unsophisticate to busy avenue, but it still carried the shabby patina of Montmartre, the unpolished edges of the little village it had once been. Even so, much had changed: Automobiles weaved among carriages; the trees had grown up to block the light; and newer, taller buildings had replaced the lowly two-story houses and open lots and chicken coops from her time. Neither was 6 Boulevard de Clichy the same building where she had once toiled; it was instead a new and anonymous sandstone building butted up against a brick monolith, all of which, she knew, Degas must hate, even though artists’ studios, equipped with north-facing window walls and attached living apartments, stamped the area as uniquely, once and forever, the artists’ quarter of Paris. She had heard he had four floors. At the entrance on the third floor, at No. 3, she stopped to catch her breath. She knocked and waited a long while before the shuffling sound of slow footsteps approached the door.

  A wraith answered the door: an old man with unkempt white hair and a snowy, bushy beard. He wore an ill-fitting threadbare woven coat, baggy pants, and slippers on his unsocked feet. His skin had grown translucent, creped and spotted here and there under his eyes, which were glassed behind thick lenses smoked black. Through the opaque glass it was impossible to tell if he betrayed shock at her unheralded arrival or if perhaps he just needed a moment, as she needed one, to accommodate the mark of time. She had not written him to tell him she was coming to visit, not when he could not see to read her note. She stepped forward, took his hands in hers.

  “Is it you?” he said.

  “It is.”

  He felt his way into a cluttered parlor, a pathway it seemed he had traversed a hundred times, expertly dodging dusty tables and chairs piled with dishes crusted with dried food. Here and there stale half-eaten loaves of bread hibernated in their paper wrappers. He sank into an armchair while she lifted a pile of unread mail from the cushion of another and sat down too. Behind this room was another room. A spiraling private staircase provided navigation to the upper floors. Sunlight filtered through the stairwell, attesting to better light upstairs, where, she thought, he must have his studio.

  “Do you remember?” Mary said. “My studio used to be here, at this address?”

  “Did you hear my sad news? Zoe left me. She abandoned me.”

  “She didn’t abandon you, Edgar. She died.”

  “Well, she’s gone, either way.” He turned his head as if to look for her, though his gaze drifted.

  He was thin, his clothes hanging from his shoulders.

  “Are you eating, Edgar?”

  “The cheese vendor on Rue Lepic takes care of me. He gives me a baguette and slices me some cheese and makes my change for me.” He fingered the damask cloth of the armchair. “What color is this? I can’t remember.”

  “It’s gold.”

  “Is it?”

  “Have you even had coffee this morning?” Mary said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Have you eaten today?”

  “I can’t remember. I don’t think so.”

  No one had told her that it was this bad. They had written that he followed funeral processions, that he was dependent on walking sticks, that he could roam in circles for hours about the streets, but not that he wasn’t eating. She wondered whether anyone had checked on him recently.

  “You must see my new work,” he said.

  “You have new work?”

  Upstairs, in a high-ceilinged studio that any artist would envy, the usual disarray had mushroomed into complete disorder. Crates were heaped in a jumble, with barely any room to walk between them; boxes of wax lay open and dried out; molded figures vaguely resembling his old dancers and horses lay half-done, abandoned, or finished, the figures imperfect, barely reminiscent of his previous obsessive perfectionism; hundreds of papered-over canvases lined the walls along the floor—it was impossible to know what they were, for no identifying label marked the paper, just his address and that of an auction house; a forest of cylinders storing rolled-up drawings leaned against one another in the corners.

  On his walls hung many of the paintings he had long loved: drawings and oils by Delacroix and Ingres, a number of primitives by Gaugin and one extraordinary canvas of a vase of flowers; two early Renoirs, before he prettified everyone and made Degas furious; print after print by Pissarro of his countryside villas and gardens west of Paris; studies and oils by Édouard Manet, including one of Berthe Morisot in mourning, just before she married Eugène. And framed by all the others hung a single oil of hers from the eighties that he had adored and had to have: Girl Arranging Her Hair, hung in the exact center, surrounded by dozens of her prints—all the prints from the journal that was never published—of her mother and father reading the newspaper, Lydia at the Opéra, her mother reading to the grandchildren, her mother knitting. Her family, her old life, their old life, resident with him.

  There was no new work. He had wanted to show her this.

  “I made sure that you were here. I made certain.” He turned, unsteady on his feet, shuffling, his unseeing gaze hidden behind those black glasses. “Do you remember when we were together? I’m afraid I wasn’t very kind to you. But I don’t know what would have been,” he said, suddenly defiant. “I cannot say.”

  Even now, years and years later, he would not define what they had been to one another.

  “Where is your little dancer?” Mary said.

  “I don’t know. I’ve lost all my friends,” he said. “They leave you, don’t they, when you are old and infirm? I’ve lost everyone. Sabine. Zoe. Caillebotte, Manet, Berthe, Achille. Where do they go? And Halévy died, but we had broken with one another long before, over Dreyfus.”

  “As did we, if you’ll remember.”

  “Your forgave me, though. It’s odd, isn’t it, how none of that matters now?”

  “I think it still matters.”

  “I must be nearer death than you.”

  They went downstairs.

  “I have my car and chauffeur,” she said
. “We can go somewhere nice to get something to eat.”

  They drove to Rumpelmeyer’s, the celebrated café on the Rue de Rivoli. The doorman opened the door for them and shuttled them inside, two old people who no one recognized anymore.

  During breakfast, Degas talked about old Paris, the winding streets and the dark misery of it all; he talked of his mother, who had died when he was thirteen, and how he missed her still; of his dead sisters and their daughters and sons; of his dead brother, Achille, and his living brother, René. He often lost his way; Mary reminded him what he had been speaking about and he talked on. He picked at his eggs and salad, pushing them around on his plate, sipping his coffee, misplacing the cup on the saucer from time to time. When they had finished eating, Pierre drove them across Paris, through the Place Vendôme, past the palatial Opéra house, approaching Montmartre through the twisted triangles of streets, the new white cathedral of Sacré Coeur sailing above the butte. The Germans were in Alsace-Lorraine, but as yet had not touched Paris, though Mary wondered if they might, if food would be as short as it was in the Prussian War, if Degas would be stuck here, defenseless, having to fend for himself in an upturned world. At his studio, they ascended the stairs together, his walking stick making sharp noises as he planted it before he climbed each step. Who had chosen this ghastly building for him, Mary wondered, without either gas or elevator?