Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (7 page)

After all, how important is the story of the portrait of S.’s father? Let the portrait painter who has never copied from a photograph cast the first stone, and I shall not be stoned, because no one will ever remember my having been involved in anything like that. What is the difference between a silent photograph and a vacant face that leers and grimaces in pursuit of some impossible and sublime expression? The painter Henrique Medina was wise enough to earn his money without being obliged to speak to his foreign clients. And what would this one say to him if he were to speak? What does S. say to me as I paint his portrait? What ties exist beyond our common fear and mutual dishonesty? At least Olga the secretary, so reserved in the great boardroom, so secretive as she guided me along corridors, spoke as much as I allowed her, so nervous and absurdly flustered, so bourgeois after all, and almost endearing in her sudden desire to be esteemed by the middle-aged painter who was listening to her message, somewhat distracted but converting that same distraction into the invisible cloak of rapt attention. S. could not keep his appointment and she had called to tell me since my telephone was out of order, something of which I myself was as yet not aware. I invited Olga the secretary to enter, as she stood there trying to recover her breath after climbing four flights of stairs in the absence of any lift. I noticed that she had come prepared to linger, curious to probe a world of which she knew nothing and undoubtedly adorned in her imagination with all those picturesque details one finds in certain second-rate films. I also noticed (but not on this particular day) that S. had spoken about me in formal terms, not out of any respect (I assume) but because to have treated me disrespectfully would have shown a lack of self-respect, once he had resigned himself to sitting quite still while I examined him like a surgeon, fabricating a double without flesh or blood but with a threatening illusion of reality. Olga the secretary arrived exuding confidence, as she thought, but inquisitive and flustered and therefore at risk. Well, perhaps not; after all, she was not falling into the hands of a sadistic assassin, so there was no danger and there might, in fact, be much to gain. As there turned out to be for both of us and on two occasions.

I asked her if she would like a drink and she accepted a whisky. She wanted to know if she could be of any assistance and I said no thank you, mine was a bachelor establishment, rarely tidy or clean, and my domestic skills did not go beyond removing ice from the fridge. She found that amusing, although it was not my intention. Now I really was distracted, without knowing how to make conversation. As we drank, I reminded her of the offhand manner in which she had received me at
SPQR.
She could not remember, she could not remember at all, she assured me. Perhaps she had been worried about something at work, letters waiting to be typed, behind with her filing. That was obviously the explanation, I agreed. Then it was her turn to ask if she could see her employer’s portrait. From where she was sitting one could only see the back of the canvas. I held her by the elbow as she got to her feet and squeezed it a little more tightly than was necessary. She did not react and allowed herself to be led in this manner. We both looked at the portrait, with me right behind her as she stood there quivering with excitement and curiosity. She found a remarkable likeness and asked how much longer it would take to finish the portrait. “That depends,” I told her. “If your boss goes on missing appointments, it could take some time.” Ever the loyal secretary, she embarked on some garbled explanation about S. being so busy, not to mention his golf and the factory, his bridge and the new factory under construction. I sat her in the chair reserved for my clients and I perched on a high stool. I could see quite clearly that she was ready for a sudden affair and sensed it in her every movement, as if the unfinished portrait of S. were inciting some kind of incestuous passion. Or perhaps she, too, had some wrong to redress in order to be able to live in peace. Human behavior resides in a world of hypotheses. If, in Eça de Queirós’s novel, Padre Amaro dressed Amelia in the Virgin’s mantle, why should Olga the secretary not make love to me before the portrait of her employer (patron, father, sugar daddy), who had started an affair with her and then lost interest?

I never cease to be amazed at the freedom women enjoy. We men regard them as inferior beings, we are amused by their little foibles, we sneer when they get things wrong, yet every one of them is capable of surprising us, laying before us vast territories of freedom, as if in the depths of their servitude, with an obedience which gives the impression of being in pursuit of itself, they were putting up the defenses of a harsh independence without restraints. Confronted by these defenses, we men, who think we know everything about this lesser being we have been taming or thought we had tamed, find ourselves disarmed, powerless and terrified; the lapdog which was so endearingly wriggling on its back and showing its tummy suddenly jumps to its feet, its limbs trembling with rage, its eyes full of mistrust, irony and indifference. When Romantic poets compared (or still compare) woman to a sphinx, how right they were, bless them. Woman is a sphinx who had to exist because man appropriated science, knowledge and power. But such is the fatuousness of men that women were content to put up the defenses of their final refusal in silence, so that man, resting in the shade as if stretched out under the penumbra of submissive eyelids, could say with conviction, “There is nothing beyond this wall.”

A grim miscalculation from which we are still trying to recover. Olga the secretary made love to me, but not out of obedience to the male or because used to submission, much less because she found me attractive. She accepted me because she chose to and had prepared herself for any eventuality. And if it is true that the half-hour which elapsed between her arrival and the moment when she crossed her arms and pulled her blouse over her head was taken up with the same old gestures and foreplay of weary seduction, this was due to that little ritual couples must observe rather than upset the sequence. This also explains our interest in the ups and downs in the life of the prostitute with whom we have just entered a rented room. She might even be offended or we might feel we had offended her if we were not to ply her with questions.

Within the half-hour Olga the secretary finished drinking the first whisky and started on a second. Within the half-hour I made a rapid sketch of her, but a good likeness, and in order to show it to her and examine it together, I sat beside her on the divan. Sitting slightly further back, I was able to lean over her shoulder and brush my face against her hair. Familiar ruses giving the appearance of being distracted and at the same time denying it, whereby the equivocation becomes extreme in this tacit game in which both sides play with their own and each other’s cards while pretending to be mere spectators. It was at some point within this half-hour that she asked me if she could keep the sketch and I began insisting that I wanted her to have it. Then, next minute, I was pulling her toward me by the shoulders and turning her toward me, began putting my lips to hers. And believe me, if she drew her face away it was only so that everything should not be confined to that moment, which already had its surfeit of pleasure given and accepted, and might therefore be considered incomplete although essential for any pleasure to follow. I am playing with words as if I were using colors and still mixing them on my palette. I am playing with these events while searching for words, however tentative, to describe them. But I must confess that no drawing or painting of mine could ever convey what I have just ventured to express in writing. The mouth of Olga the secretary put itself within reach of mine as the black cloud from the center of my body, which is my sex and much more than simply sex, became charged with the rapid currents of a nameless fluid which draws my blood to secret caverns. I then knew that this was precisely what Olga the secretary had planned the moment S. asked her to call in person to cancel his appointment, or shortly afterward, and that all I had to do was to assist in this purification, first and foremost the involuntary agent of her revenge, already its agent before Olga the secretary even reached my flat and my sex was quiescent, hers unmistakably quivering with desire. We kissed like two adults who know all about kissing. We kissed, knowing how to get our lips into a comfortable position, how to prepare that first meeting of tongues, how to control our breathing. And we both knew exactly when I should lean over her and she should bend over me until we found ourselves half lying on the sofa, in possession of this new intimacy of bodies pressed up against each other as our mouths went on provoking from afar our sexual organs, which were already stimulated. The most difficult moment of all is when mouths separate: the least word can be excessive. Knowing this, I reached out to hold her breasts, and appearing to avoid me, she crossed her arms and pulled her blouse right over her head. Half dressed, we had no difficulty in making love. Driven by thoughts I could sense, she soon caught up and overtook me, allowing me to witness her orgasm in the motionless center of my black cloud until it was my turn to lose self-control and enter the maelstrom. As first acts go, it had been excellent. No words were spoken, and I was frightened because I was dependent on her for any serenity afterward or that common and ill-disguised vexation which can so easily ensue in these situations. I could see from the position we were in that I must be pressing on her leg, and I asked her if it was painful. “A little,” she replied, and these were the first words exchanged, and the movement that followed was facilitated by the same physical discomfort as we began getting dressed and I calmly helped her into her blouse, an old married couple for whom there are no more surprises. But when I caught her looking at S.’s portrait, when I saw that mocking smile, I asked her abruptly if she had been S.’s mistress. I was taken aback by my own question, but she was certainly expecting me to ask her sooner or later, for she simply turned and replied, “Of course,” starting to speak while still gazing at the painted face of S. and finishing as she looked at me, or perhaps not looking at me, not looking at this face already lined with wrinkles, at this vague blotch that often passes for a face, not looking at me at all, but at some endless desert stretching behind or inside me. And this secretary Olga, whose importance consists of being a secretary and having an exceptionally generous orgasm, allowed a breach to open in her defenses for one brief moment so that I might experience once again my former vertigo when confronted with what I choose to call the fundamental freedom of woman. By mutual consent, she was taking her revenge on me.

Within minutes, she resumed her subordinate role. Smiling flirtatiously, she came up to me, put her arms around my neck and pressed cool lips to mine. We were playing a different game and clearly with marked cards, but this was our only possibility of appearing natural. This was why we could ask each other in jest, “How did this happen?” and I could ask, as was expected of me, “When can we get together again?” to which she naturally replied, “Who knows, I really can’t say, this was utter madness.” We made playful gestures with our hands, trying not to appear distracted, and kissed each other deliberately but without too much insistence. In both of us the tide was ebbing like life taking its farewell. She gave me another kiss as we said goodbye on the landing, a kiss which gathered up what little passion remained. She did not cast so much as another glance at S.’s portrait.

I slowly closed the door, returned to the studio, feeling physically tired, mentally distracted, torn between the modest triumph of easy conquest and the irony of having to confess to myself that I had made no conquest whatsoever. Of the two of us, she alone had got what she wanted, she alone had been free. As for me, I had passively played an active role (a contradictory and redundant statement) in a farce, the silent servant who delivers the letter whereby the plot unfolds. I shook my Saint Antony by the hand (the position of the right arm allows for this) and stroked his friar’s tonsure. No one can dissuade me from believing that the pitchers this saint shattered were a subtle disguise for the hymens he penetrated. But Saint Antony was so conciliatory toward the world, so friendly toward women, that the pitchers were miraculously restored, but not those virginities, and just as well. Repeating these witticisms of a somewhat unimaginative heretic, I went off to run a bath. Waiting for the bath to fill, I stood there watching the hot water gushing from the tap and listening to the hissing of the heater in the kitchen next door. Perhaps I was feeling a little lonely. Night was starting to fall. When I finally turned off the tap, all I could hear at first was total silence, but as I began undressing I could hear the (discreet) sound of singing coming from my neighbor’s radio. I could barely make out the words in French, let alone identify the voice, which might have been that of Leo Ferré or Serge Reggiani. Both middle-aged, one step away from what they do not want, one step away from that last remaining phase which they fear might be all too short: the time it takes to get into a warm bath and lie there, as the building settles down for the night, as the body cools down and the water with it, only the dripping tap persisting as one waits to see if someone will notice before the water overflows and floods the flat below. On an impulse which I made no attempt to restrain, I pulled out the plug. The water quickly disappeared right down to the final gurgle coming from that antiquated plumbing. Then, saved from death, I turned on the shower and washed myself. Quickly. And within minutes, half dried and wrapped in a dressing gown, I looked through one of the studio windows at the night sky and the lights on the river. Darkness everywhere. “What’s happening?” I asked myself.