The Pritchett Century (76 page)

Click, went the camera.

Pearson sat back and put down his pen and dropped his arm to his side.

“Will you do that again,” said Zut. “The way you just dropped your arm,” Zut said.

Pearson did it.

“No,” said Zut. “We’ve missed it.”

Pearson was hurt, and apologised to Mrs Zut, the dumb goddess. Not for worlds would he upset her husband. She simply gazed at Zut.

Zut himself straightened up. The room tipped back to its normal state. Pearson noticed the long lines down the sides of Zut’s mouth, wondered why the jacket did not rumple his grey hair. Cropped, of course. How old was he? Where had he flown from? Hovering vulture. Unfortunate Satan walking up and down the world looking for souls.

Satan on his treadmill. I bet your father was in, say, the clock trade, was it?—and when you were a boy you took his watch to pieces looking for Time. Why don’t you
talk?
You’re not like that man who came here last year and told me that he waited until he felt there was a magnetic flow uniting himself and me. A technological flirt. Nor are you like that other happy fellow with the waving fair hair who said he unselfed himself, forgot money, wife, children, all, for a few seconds to become me!

Zut slid a new plate into the camera and glanced up at the ceiling. It was smudged by the faint shadows of the beams behind it. A prison or cage effect. Why was he looking at the ceiling? Did he want it to be removed?

Pearson said, “Painted only five years ago. And look at it! More expense.”

Zut dismissed this.

“Look towards the window,” said Zut.

“Which one?” said Pearson.

“On the right,” said Zut. “Yes. Yes.” Another blow on that poor woman’s arm.

“Lamp—higher. Still higher.”

Click, click from the toad in the lens.

“Again,” said Zut.

Click. Click. Another click.

“Ah!” said Zut, as if about to faint.

He’s found something at last, Pearson thought. But, Zut, I bet you don’t know where my mind was. No, I was not looking at the tree-tops. I was looking at a particular branch. On a still day like this, there is always one leaf skipping about at the end of a branch on its own while the rest of the tree is still. It has been doing that for years. Why? An
et cetera
, a distinguished leaf. Could be me. What am I but a leaf?

One more half-hearted click from the camera, and then Zut stood tall. He had achieved boredom.

“I’ve got all I want,” he muttered sharply to his wife.

All? said Pearson, appealing. There are tons of me left. I know I have a face like a cup of soup with handles sticking out—you know?—after it has been given a couple of stirs with a wooden spoon. A speciality
in a way. What wouldn’t I give for bone structure, a nose with bone in it!

Zut gave a last dismissive look around the room.

“That’s it,” he said to his wife.

She started to dismantle the tripod. Zut walked to the photograph of the Albert Memorial on the chest near the door, done by another photographer, and studied it. There was an enormous elephant’s head in the foreground. Zut pointed. “Only one eye,” he said censoriously.

“The other’s in shadow,” said Pearson.

“Elephants have two eyes,” said Zut. And then, “Is there a …”

“Of course, of course, the door on the left.”

Pearson was putting the muscles of his face back in place. He was alone with Mrs Zut, who was packing up the debris of the hour.

“I have always admired your husband’s work,” he said politely.

“Thank you,” she said from the floor, buckling the bags.

“Remarkable pictures of men—and, of course, women. I think I saw one of you, didn’t I, in his last collection?”

“No,” she said from the floor, looking proud. “I don’t allow him to take my picture.”

“Oh surely—”

“No,” she said, the whole of herself standing up, full-faced, solid and human.

“His first wife, yes. Not me,” she said resolutely, killing the other in the ordinary course of life.

Then Zut came back, and in procession they all began thanking their way downstairs to the door.

At the exhibition Pearson sneaked in to see himself, stayed ten minutes to look at his portrait, and came out screaming, thinking of Mrs Zut.

An artist, he said. Herod! he was shouting. When the head of John the Baptist was handed to you on that platter, the eyes of that beautiful severed head were peacefully closed. But what do I see at the bottom of your picture. A high haunted room whose books topple. Not a room indeed, but a dank cistern or aquarium of stale water. No sparkling anemone there but the bald head of a melancholy frog, its
feet clinging to a log, floating in literature. O Fame, cried Pearson, O Maupassant, O
Tales of Hoffmann
, O Edgar Allan Poe, O Grub Street.

Pearson rushed out and rejoined the human race on that bus going north and sat silently addressing the passengers, the women particularly, who all looked like Mrs Zut. The sight of them changed his mind. He was used, he said, to his face gallivanting with other ladies and gentlemen, in newspapers, books, and occasionally on the walls of galleries like that one down the street. Back down the street, he said, a man called Zut, a photographer, an artist, not one of your click-click men, had exhibited his picture, but by a mysterious accident of art had portrayed his soul instead of mine. What faces, Pearson said, that poor fellow must see just before he drops off to sleep at night beside the wise woman who won’t let him take a picture of her, fearing perhaps the Evil Eye. A man in the image trade, like myself. Pearson called back as he got off the bus. Not a Zurbarán, more a Hieronymus Bosch perhaps. No one noticed Pearson getting off.

(1989)

What Turgenev needed in order to outgrow the dilettante self was not only a change of mind but, above all, a deepening of his power to feel. He had not yet known the force of passion.

In November of 1843 Pauline Viardot-Garcia, the Spanish singer, came from Paris to Petersburg to sing the part of Rosina in
Il Barbiere di Seviglia
at the magnificent opera house which had been remodelled and which could hold an audience of three thousand people. Italian opera had not been heard there for a generation and the season aroused wild enthusiasm. It was a triumph for the young singer and for her middle-aged husband who was her impresario. She had succeeded in London but had been edged out of the Paris opera by the established prima donnas.

The event was not one that a poet and young man of fashion could miss but Turgenev was in a bad way for money because his mother now refused to pay off his heavy debts and kept him to a very small allowance. She had been amused by
Parasha
as a personal present but she was not going to do anything for a common scribbler who dragged the family name into the papers. He could earn very little by his occasional
writing, but he somehow got a cheap seat at the opera and saw on the stage a slight young married woman of twenty-two, three years younger than himself, with no figure and almost ugly to look at. She had black hair, a wide mouth, a heavy underlip that seemed continuous with her chin and a very long neck. The effect was of sullenness in a strong, gypsyish way, the hooded eyes were large and black, the pupils lifting in one of those asserting Spanish stares of mockery and pride; yet the stare would break into sudden vivacity, warmth and enticing smiles. And then the voice!

Musset, who had known Pauline Garcia and had been in love with her when she was seventeen, said the voice had “the velvetness of the peach and youth,” and had written a poem in which the first verse runs:

But the last verse contains the lines:

The extravagant words of Heine about her voice are well-known:

Musset was more precise. Recalling the resemblance of her voice to the voice of her famous sister, La Malibran, he said there was “the same timbre, clear, resonant, audacious; that Spanish
coup de gosier
” which has something, at the same time, so harsh and so sweet in it that it reminded him of the taste of wild fruit.

Heine’s grotesque images magnify the reality. Pauline Viardot was an exotic: her inheritance came from the Triana. The strictly dedicated young artist, who had been brought up in cultivated circles in Paris, had race in her. She had the fine carriage of Spanish women; she sparkled in repose. Many other writers speak of something noble in her plain masculine face; in her portraits which are, of course, idealised, there is something else: authority. Such a strange figure must instantly have brought back to Turgenev the half-barbarous spell of his plain mother. Love at first sight, Jane Austen said, was a sign of giddiness: Turgenev certainly had the reputation of giddiness in Petersburg. But with him, love at first sight seems to have been a recognition of an earlier image printed in the heart.

If the voice of Pauline Viardot was part primitive and a gift of nature, it was exquisitely schooled beyond the rough spontaneity of popular Andalusian singing. An exacting musical culture had produced it: Pauline was born into a family who had been musicians for three generations. Her father, Manuel del Popolo Garcia, had been born in Seville in 1775; her grandfather had been a gypsy and as a child had been one of the harsh, shrill choristers of Seville cathedral and had become very quickly a professional singer and composer. Manuel Garcia’s wife is said to have been an actress with all the hard-headedness of the theatre in her. There had been nothing for a poor ambitious man like Manuel in Spain and, being enormously energetic, subject to strong impulses, and having the gifts of a showman, he had moved the family in a business-like way to Paris. There he soon made a reputation as a tenor and pushed on to Italy, where he sought out
Rossini who wrote for him the part of Almaviva in
Il Barbiere di Seviglia:
the opera in which Turgenev first heard Pauline was almost the Garcia family’s property. Her father and her famous sister, La Malibran, had made their names in it.

In considering the character of Pauline one has to look more closely at the influence of this elder sister’s life and fame. She was much older than Pauline, who was a child when her sister was already celebrated in Europe and America. In her scholarly life of Pauline Viardot and her indispensable account of her relationship with Turgenev,
The Price of Genius
, published in 1964, to which all writers on Turgenev owe a debt, April Fitzlyon tells us that La Malibran became the incarnation, the goddess of the Romantic movement. Every poet worshipped her. Beautiful and of great independence of spirit she had caused an upheaval in the Garcia family by quarrelling with her father and marrying Malibran, an American banker, when they were in New York. Manuel had been unrelenting and even cruel in the training he had given his daughter and she had married Malibran to get away from him. She was not cast down by the failure of her marriage—her husband went bankrupt at once and became unimportant in her life—she eventually divorced him and after many love affairs married a gifted Belgian violinist. The extraordinary girl was not only a singer but a talented painter and a daring horsewoman.

One early adventure of the Garcia family—of which Pauline and all of them were proud—occurred when Manuel, having done well in New York, dragged his family to Mexico, where again they made a small fortune and decided to go back to France. On the rough and dangerous journey from Mexico City to Vera Cruz they were attacked by brigands who soon disposed of the frightened escort of soldiers and robbed the party of everything. Although Pauline was frightened—she was only seven—she used to say in old age “all this was terribly beautiful, I liked it.” And apparently, the excited and cheerful Garcias laughed all the way to Vera Cruz afterwards.