Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (6 page)

I picked up the drawings again, examined them with indifference, laid them aside. This was a face that would cause me no problems: as regular and commonplace as any well-designed advertisement. A mouth which would look good with a pipe, eyes one could show half closed against the sea breeze, hair for the same wind to tousle or for feminine fingers with long, lacquered nails to stroke with knowing and calculating sensuality. Looking through the window, I saw the white evening sky and felt I was all alone. Holding a gin and tonic, iced and aromatic, in one hand, I leaned back on the well-worn studio divan and sipped at my leisure. I had left the kitchen light on but made no attempt to get up and switch it off. Had I closed the fridge door? The clock chimed (I never use a wristwatch when I am working) and I thought Adelina might already be at home. I got up from the divan, went into the bedroom, where I keep the telephone, and when she answered I immediately invited her to dinner and suggested we could go to the cinema afterward. She accepted without a moment’s hesitation. She never refuses.

At this time, I had only known Adelina a little over six months. That is to say, I had known her for at least two years but had only been going to bed with her (to have sex, of course) for little more than six months. We had started this affair in the usual way: some friends who had called for a chat after dinner brought Adelina with them, a long-standing friend, the hours passed, eventually everyone left except Adelina, her idea or my silent insistence, and once we were alone we discovered we had been interested in each other for a while, and things being what they are, she stayed and slept what was left of the night after we had made love. She lives with her widowed mother, who does not ask too many questions if Adelina returns home in the early hours, but to stay out all night looks bad. And Adelina tells me she tries not to upset the old girl. I pray in silence that her dear old mother will not change her mind, but to keep the fire burning I periodically throw a tantrum. Poor Adelina, torn between a false lover and a mother who has relinquished all her authority except for this nightly vigil. So far, this triangular situation has worked to perfection.

Anxious to speak about S., since the objective of this inquiry is to find out what has been lost between the first and the second portrait, or what was already lost forever (what had been forever lost in me), I must probe the meaning of this complacency which brings me to discuss Adelina when it has nothing to do with Adelina. But perhaps there is no point in drawing up an inventory of someone’s strengths and weaknesses in order to fight them, or to record statistics without first examining our own strengths and weaknesses. Any such examination will make it impossible for us to ignore those which weigh on us like lead pellets revolving inside a cylinder moved by some other force, within whose movement those same lead pellets are activated without affecting the cylinder or the effective force. Poor Adelina, as I jokingly think of her, is much less “poor” than I have suggested. She comes into my bed, consents and demands that I enter her (this ingenious transposition results in total obscenity, because entering her literally means that I have reduced myself to minute proportions in order to be able to press [or should I say regress] inside her or, on the contrary, that this same interior has become as big as a cathedral, the Basilica of St. Peter, the Church of Notre Dame, the greenish gold grotto of Aracena through which I pass [penetrate] in my natural size, splashing about amid humors and secretions, resting on swollen mucous membranes, and ever advancing toward the secret of the universe, toward the laboratory of the ovaries, the stentorian cry of [mute] Fallopian tubes, inhaling the earth’s primordial odors stored there in all female sexual organs, no longer obscene because sex is not obscene, as I have come to know). And because I am entering her and she is, however involuntarily, a part of this life in which she and I participate and where we are both on the same ledge, on the same narrow ridge of Chartres, I can neither say “Poor Adelina” nor forget her. Inside her I am forever spilling millions of spermatozoa already condemned to death, trapped in a viscous fluid which pours from me as I lie there panting, and even though I do not love her nor she love me, neither of us escapes the fleeting moment when our weary and sated bodies rest, mine nearly always on top of hers, hers sometimes on top of mine, and as we lie, the one on top of the other, our united bodies support each other. At the end of the sexual act (also known as making love) the body underneath weighs on the one on top, and anyone who has failed to discover this possesses neither body nor sex nor self-awareness. The force of gravity is therefore exercised twice, not in order to annul itself but to ensure complete prostration. For the levitation of bodies is impossible when the male organ is still deeply anchored inside a woman’s body, spilling or having spilled the white secretion from the testicles and is washing itself between the red or rosy inflamed walls at the same time as the remote sadness of copulation enshrouds the mind in veils and pulverizes those abandoned limbs one by one.

Adelina and I both know that one day we shall terminate this relationship; only our inertia keeps it going. Needless to say, I am not the first man in her life; she has had various men, some of whom I know and who speak to her as friends, for they never loved her nor did she love them, just as I shall speak to her as a friend when we come to experience the brief sorrow of parting. And perhaps she will call at my house when some other Adelina is there who will spend the night with me when all the others have gone, perhaps she will leave with another man and spend the night with him, and far away from each other we shall make gestures we both know on other bodies, our past forgotten and so absorbed or distracted by this new encounter that there is no common memory, and even if there were, it would be pure thought, something from another existence or even relating to someone else. That is why I am so convinced of this simple truth of mine: the I at this moment is fundamentally different from what it was a moment ago, sometimes the opposite, but certainly always different. So I am convinced the past is dead (it would not be enough simply to say it is over). The women I have had so far are dead, and the more I loved them, the more dead they are. Yet I loved none of them sufficiently for part of me to die with them.

Relationships such as this one are remarkably serene. They work as long as the need to be mutually faithful does not become a burden, and they have already terminated once this tacit agreement has been infringed. Nothing is lost or complicated so long as the game is honest; only bourgeois couples betray each other, only marriage certificates become the cages of frenzied madmen, a wild jungle inhabited by mindless dinosaurs. If Adelina leaves me or I should ask her to go, or we both suddenly look at each other with indifference, one hour of time will settle quietly on another hour of time, and the world will prepare itself for rebirth. And if we should separate here in my flat, I shall be listening for her footsteps descending the echoing staircase, increasingly less distinct, increasingly farther away, and perhaps one of my women neighbors who knows her and thinks our affair is permanent will greet her: “Good evening, see you tomorrow,” and I alone will know, and Adelina, too, that there will be no tomorrow. As for the evening, if we look closely we can see that it is as pleasant as any other. Both of us also aware that we shall say in our turn, “Good evening, see you tomorrow,” when we meet again, with scarcely any sexual attraction unless suddenly aroused by an incautious glance, some fortuitous contact, or a little too much alcohol which has gone to the head. By then everything will be dead, with no resentment on our part. There is no other difference.

Adelina is eighteen years younger than me. She has a good body, an exquisite belly inside and out, a wonderful fornicating machine, and she has the kind of intelligence I admire. She’s not very bright, my friends remark, but then she is no fool either. She manages or owns a boutique (I have never really found out which) and earns a good living. She does not live at my expense, I am glad to say. She seems to be satisfied with our arrangement, somewhat independent and detached, but always willing to go out with me, and I suspect she would not be averse to a closer relationship. I use my work as an excuse, and she has the decency to consider it a profession like any other, for she knows enough about the arts to make the distinction. Thanks to her good taste and common sense and to the esteem in which she obviously holds me, we can discuss painting without referring to my work, as naturally as we might discuss astronautics without my being Laika or her being von Braun or vice versa. Yet I find this silence somewhat annoying: nothing I do matters to her, neither my pictures, which she does not like, nor my money, which she does not need. To be frank, the only place where we can honestly meet is in bed: there I am not a painter nor she the owner of a boutique; as for intelligence, that of the sexual organs suffices and they know what they are doing.

I
T WAS NOT
until fifteen days later that S. explained why he wanted this portrait, so much at variance with his nature and outlook as a man of his time. I never ask my clients in this blunt manner why they decided to have their portrait painted. Were I to do so, I should give the impression of having little esteem for the work which provides me with a living. I must proceed (as I have always done) as if a portrait in oils were the confirmation of a life, its culmination and moment of triumph, and therefore accept the inevitable fact that success is the prerogative of the chosen few. To ask would be to question the right of these chosen souls to have their portrait painted, when this privilege is clearly theirs by right and because of the large sum of money they are paying and the sumptuous surroundings in which they display the finished work, which they alone appreciate according to how they value themselves. I have often thought about the care with which spotlights are installed to enhance these portraits, like tiny suns created exclusively to illuminate a single planet from a certain angle: a diffused light contemplating the entire surface, a soft, crepuscular glow which obscures nothing yet highlights nothing, and there is that preferred light which encircles faces and illumines them in search of an imaginary spirit or a real one covered with impenetrable layers of paint. Confronted by pictures lit up in this way, one is obliged to stop. We are as bereft of ideas as the painting is of meaning, everything sharing in the same complicity, in the same connivance, in the same hypocrisy. On these occasions I am truly ashamed of my profession: to live a lie, to exploit it as if it were truth and justify it with the indisputable name of art, can sometimes become intolerable. The one who least deserves to be despised is the person having a portrait painted, who can be forgiven, after all, for being so ingenuous. I am speaking about the portrait I am painting, about the portraits I see which could have been signed by me; I am not referring, for example, to the portrait of Federico da Montefeltro painted by Piero della Francesca, which can be seen in Florence. At this very moment I can get up from my chair, search among my books and once more gaze at that profile of a middle-aged man who knows he is ugly but is unperturbed, his nose shaped like an easel, and in the background an imponderable landscape which I know to be the real Tuscany. And having looked (or not wishing to look now), my fingers grow numb with that severe chill known as despondency, remorse and defeat, and where an infinite and nameless expanse of ice still remains. I transfer this reflection to the names of the model and the painter and begin savoring them, separating them between my teeth into tiny morsels, translating them into my native Portuguese in order to know them better or lose them forevermore: Frederico de Montefeltro, almost unchanged, and Pedro da Francisca or dos Franciscos, the son of a shoemaker, poor devil, whose mother might have been called Francesca, and who as an old, blind man allowed himself to be led around by a boy named Marco di Longaro, who appears to have been born just for this, because all he left behind were the lanterns he went on to make in order to earn his living. And I, who will leave no lanterns behind and have never learned to guide myself, ask what purpose eyes serve.

When S. told me, smiling, that his portrait was being painted at the request of the board of directors and to please his mother, I froze as I stood there at my easel with one arm poised in midair, my eye fixed on the tip of my brush, where the paint slowly trickled, liquid viscera abruptly cut off at the root but still throbbing, like a lizard’s tail or the surviving half of a blindworm. I hated S. for making me feel so unhappy, so positively useless, so very much the painter without any painting, and the brushstroke which I finally applied to the canvas was, in fact, the first brushstroke of the second canvas. We have all dreamed at some time or other of saving someone from drowning, and after having used my arms as best I could, I found myself holding a plastic doll with a derisive smile on its face and a mechanism inside which produced the sound of laughter. It was only later that I learned the story of the portrait of S.’s father; the sheer absurdity of it all would have dissuaded him from saying anything. Nor is it true, as I said earlier, that I remained charitably mixing the colors on my palette as I listened; that came later, and not charitably, or simply with the unconscious charity of someone aware of seeking revenge by some means or other. As a painter, only the techniques of painting were within my grasp, and that was how the second portrait came about. Perhaps my silence may have offended S. and turned against him a weapon which was not being handled by me. His patronizing disdain soon turned to a hostility he made no attempt to conceal. This was clearly why the sessions became less frequent. The first portrait made little progress, as if awaiting the second one painted in different colors, with different gestures and no respect, because determined by wrath, because money could not paralyze it. Even at that point I believed the craft of painting would be enough to achieve the modest victory of coming to terms with myself.