Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (18 page)

I
FEEL NUMB.
At the time, mild shock, a moment of resentment, the annoyance felt by any male who has been given his marching orders, and then enormous relief and a strange feeling I can only assume to be gratitude or something akin to gratitude. I realize there is something monstrous about this feeling; in fact, if I start to think, it is as if women should have been born only for such gestures, to be exemplary and spare men certain disagreeable actions, certain tiresome and dubious, not to say downright obscene, tasks. Women are expected to sweep the floor, wipe their children’s noses, wash clothes and dishes, scrape away with an affectionate thumb any shit stuck to the seat of their menfolk’s underpants. This would appear to have been the situation ever since the world began. Therefore it is no less just (or essential, which is another form of justice) that women should look after the thermometers, barometers and altimeters which measure affections and passions and, once having checked and appraised them, should draw up reports about the combustible waste and energy produced for the male to approve and sign, because no more is expected or asked of men. It is monstrous, I repeat, to have felt gratitude, because this gratitude is once again relief, conclusive proof of the constant selfishness of man, of his inherent cowardice, not to mention his insolence when he starts to boast, at least to himself, and lie to himself in so doing, that all his earlier actions and words had been intended, on reflection, to force the other person (the woman) to take the final decision. In this way, the man can go on being romantically melancholic or histrionically outraged (whichever he finds more convenient) and declare himself the victim of female incomprehension, or, getting back to the point, imply, like someone not fully in control of what they are saying, that Adelina did what I expected her to do, for this is where I had guided her without her being aware of the doors I was opening and closing for her, of being pressured, of the gentle pressure I was exerting as I amiably pushed her toward an inevitable breach.

I must confess that I never noticed before just how well Adelina writes. She uses few words and short sentences, of which I am incapable or only rarely capable of using as she does. Her letter is worth keeping. I wonder how she wrote it? At one stretch, on a sudden impulse, or did she have to write it out several times, play around with words until she hit the right note, not too dry or too maudlin, neither disdainful nor tearful? I would love to know. I ask myself how this letter would have sounded if written by me, and I can imagine how long-winded it would have been, with interminable phrases, trying to explain the inexplicable or, worse still, giving vent to recriminations and insults, knowing full well, even as I write, that a deep anguish (but futile and damaging) could be breathed over the written words, however cruel or even malicious they might be.

Earlier on I wrote that it is not yet time for the desert. I reread those words but cannot understand why I ever wrote them. Nor can I understand why I wrote that it is no longer time for the desert. Let us examine this more carefully. People speak of having premonitions. However, to believe in premonitions is far too easy, especially since it makes us seem interesting. An external force, but not alien to some, must be hovering out there, probably not in the common space inhabited by everyone, but in another space (which we can only enter by displacing ourselves, that nonterrestrial measurement which I call a hundredth of a second, a simultaneous dislocation in time, a second, and in space, a centimeter), and from there, by impenetrable methods of transmission and reception, we are forewarned as to what we shall say, think and (or) do much later, or what others will say or do to us. The only thing we are not told is what they will think, just as we were not told in time, if we were ever told, about what they thought.

Could it now be time for the desert? And why the desert? Because Adelina, too, has walked out of my life, as that familiar and silly saying goes, which presumes someone can be inside another’s life? And what is the desert, after all? The one Lawrence of Arabia contemplated all night long as in the film? As films go, the scene certainly makes an impact and is skillfully done, but on reflection, not very original. To reenact the famous Gospel scene at Gethsemane might be effective, I concede, but shows little imagination. It was written: “And he came out and went, as he was wont, to the Mount of Olives; and his disciples also followed him./And when he was at the place, he said unto them: Pray that you enter not into temptation./And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and knelt down and prayed,/Saying: Father, if You be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done./And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him./And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground./And when he rose up from prayer and was come to his disciples, he found them sleeping for sorrow./And said unto them: Why are you asleep? Rise and pray lest you enter into temptation” (Luke 22:39–46). Transposed and without the disciples (who were twelve in the episode quoted), this is the scene with Lawrence, eyes turned in anguish toward the desert all night long. By night, not by day, because the sun would not permit this dramatic moment, or would make it dramatic in a different way, with Lawrence dying of sunstroke, thus jeopardizing British policy in the Arab world and obliging the British to wait for some other Lawrence less given to contemplation. The same is true of Jesus. If Jesus had died on the Mount of Olives from that hemorrhage which turned out to be benign and not fatal, would there have been any Christianity? And without Christianity history would have been altogether different, the history of men and their deeds; so many people would not have been immured in cells, so many people would have met a different death, not in the holy wars nor at the stake with which the Inquisition tried to justify its own relapsed, heretical and schismatic nature. As for this attempt at autobiography in the form of a traveler’s tale divided into chapters, I am convinced it, too, would be different. For example, what would Giotto have painted in the Chapel of Scrovegni? Arcadian orgies of a mythology which persisted into the Middle Ages, if not to the present day? Or would he simply have been a house painter who was there not to paint the chapel but simply to whitewash the walls in the Scrovegni household?

Desert—to desert. The dictionary defines the first of these as “noun: desolate, uninhabited, uncultivated, solitary place. Abandoned, unfrequented. A place where no one wishes to go.
jur.
The willful abandonment of a loyal or moral obligation.
n.
desolate or barren tract: a waste: a solitude.” And the dictionary says of the latter: “
v.t.
to leave: to forsake.
v.i.
to run away: to quit a service, as the army, without permission.”

I ask myself how writers and poets have the nerve to write hundreds or thousands of pages, millions upon millions if you put them all together, when a simple dictionary definition or two would suffice, if carefully pondered, to fill these hundreds or thousands or millions upon millions of pages. Today I am of the opinion that writers have shown far too much haste: they micrometrically complicate sentiments without probing the various meanings of words beforehand. Take these two straightforward examples of mine, which resulted from a conjectural premonition which led me from desert to desert after having passed via T. E. Lawrence (Thomas Edward, 1883–1935), born in Tremadoc, a British Secret Service agent in Arabia and Asia Minor during the 1914–1918 war,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
(1928); and via Christ, which means the Messiah or the Lord’s anointed, a name given to Jesus, who, according to the venerable manuscripts which are capable of revealing everything apart from their ignorance, was born in Belém (situated between Pedrouços and Junqueira) on the twenty-fifth of December in the year 4004 of the universe (4963 according to
The Art of Verifying Dates
), in the year 753 of Rome, in the thirty-first year of Augustus’s reign. This authoritative source claims that the year of Jesus’ birth was almost certainly established by Dionysius Exiguus. But according to other calculations no less worthy of trust and respect, the date of the aforesaid birth (without sin, pain, carnal copulation or tearing of the hymen) has to be referred back to the twenty-fifth of December of the year 745 of Rome, six years before the common era. Therefore Jesus would have lived for thirty-nine years instead of thirty-three. Fortunate man.

Here I am then, abandoned and in the desert. Seeing things as I do now, Adelina was merely that last shadowy form which, not so long ago, although already remote, could still be seen on the steep slope of a shifting dune, a blurred double shadow or the double blade of open scissors cutting into themselves, becoming ever smaller and then a mere sign on the crest of the sand where the wind blows minute chippings (loose substance, powdery and vitrescent, produced by the crumbling of siliceous, granitic or argillous rocks) and suddenly, in the time it takes to open and read a letter, she has disappeared onto the other side. Are we the desert or are we deserted? Abandoned, forsaken, lost, or are we responsible for this wilderness and solitude? As someone who has never been a soldier and therefore never had the opportunity of absenting himself without leave, I must confess that I have always been fascinated by ranks, that plural entity; I have always dreamed of having my own force and at the same time all the military force of the Tetrarchs multiplied, a thousand times four, four thousand times one, and my intelligence multiplied as well, and sensibility and sweat and labor, yes, labor, four thousand times one. However, if every regiment has its ranks, all those ranks do not make a regiment. And since the desert can have inhabitants and still be a desert, inhabitants are not enough for the desert to be no longer desert. With all my festive friends here in the flat, or out there while I think of them as my friends, no desert of mine (or I the desert) has been populated. I became conscious of this when I began writing. In the end I put all my effort into recovering the desert, (trying) to understand afterward what might have remained, what did remain, what might come to remain. Solitude certainly, but perhaps not sterility. Uninhabited, I concede, but not uninhabitable. Dry but with water inside, the terrible water of tears, perhaps that fresh feeling pouring over one’s hands. H2O. Primordial water and whatever is suspended therein.

T
HE PORTRAIT OF THE COUPLE
who are about to marry off their daughter will not be painted here in the studio where so many people, from A. to S., have already been. Where I had Olga the secretary on the divan. And Adelina. Only a deep love of the picturesque (however mistaken) or sheer necessity would induce anyone to climb those four awkward flights of stairs. People with a daughter of marrying age need not be old but this couple is, either because the bride-to-be was a late child or because respectability has aged them prematurely. So off I went then, to that grand, solemn and silent house in Lapa, and there I painted the portrait. I began by positioning the husband and wife in the actual space their bodies continue to occupy, and then in the unstable space of the canvas. During the second session I told the husband he could go while I painted his wife. The perfect lady. Polite but distant, icy behind the thin veneer of courtesy, or because of this very same veneer, which, like the one I use in my profession, is glossy, smooth and cold. On the third day I was introduced to the daughter, on the fourth (day) to their future son-in-law. She crossed her legs ostentatiously, he came to examine the effect. It is obvious that neither of them (from my point of view, since I neither marry nor unmarry them) attaches any real importance to the portrait, which is simply a foible of the middle-aged or a convention being played out in a house in Lapa, a district where there can be few people left who indulge similar whims. The mother remains quite still, unbending, scarcely says a word however much I try to get her to relax; she looks as if she were in a state of shock. The daughter approached the scent of my frontier while the clouds of smoke from her fiancé’s cigarette and her father’s cigar passed over it. “I used to smoke Havanas, but now . . .” The head of the household broke off, offering me a Dutch cigar probably made with the finest tobacco from Cuba. Meanwhile I go on painting.