The Restoration Artist (13 page)

I
WAS STARING INTO AN EYE; DARK, LIQUID, LONG-LASHED
and shining.

I crouched forward, closer, seeing a patch of light blue reflected on the surface of the eye, and in the blue a fleck of corn yellow. As I moved back, the reflection changed and I realized that the blue was the sky and the yellow was the mirrored image of the yellow kerchief I wore round my neck.

I stretched out my hand and the donkey, who seemed to be just as curious about me, tossed its head, blinking those wonderful large brown feminine eyes. The thought occurred to me that I had been seeing what the donkey itself saw—me. If I painted that reflection I would be making not only a picture of the donkey and its eye, I would in essence also be making a self-portrait. The notion struck me as a revelation about the whole enterprise of painting. A truth about the nature of seeing.

But how to paint such a truth?

I remembered the donkey painted by Caravaggio, in that wonderful unfinished
Adoration of the Shepherds
, where it is not
the infant Christ, but the mild and kind and long-suffering face of the donkey in the background that carries the true meaning of the picture.

Yesterday, after Tobias and Père Caron had left the chapel, I’d set to work immediately on the big sheet of canvas tacked to the wall, wanting to capture a moment of inspiration I’d experienced as Tobias paused in the doorway, suspended between light and shadow. Using just a stick of charcoal, and not worrying too much about accuracy, I’d roughed in a sketch of a boy, his body turned away in the act of leaving, but his face still looking at me. The details of the face would come later—the smile—that would be easy enough, but sometimes a movement is so particular, conveying some essential quality, but also so fleeting, that it can be lost if not recorded right then.

This morning I’d come back. The image still pleased me, but it wasn’t enough. I had no idea what else to include. Taking up the stick of charcoal, I roughed in the outlines of a building—the chapel—spending a half-hour getting the proportions right, adjusting a line, correcting an angle, erasing with a rag and starting over. Then, without even being conscious of what I was doing, I sketched in the shape of a woman. In the end I had two figures and a building, but only emptiness around them. It would have been easy enough to fill the canvas with all sorts of things—I could make up landscapes and buildings and people on the spot—but I realized that I wanted this picture to be special. I needed it to be the truest thing I’d ever done.

The unpainted expanse of canvas was like a white mist, hiding a tableau, or had the events not taken place yet? Once again
Lorca’s words came back to me, of the sensation on the island that something was about to happen. An air of suspension.

I dropped the cloth and charcoal on the table, grabbed my paintbox and went out.

By now I was familiar with most of the routes criss-crossing the island, some more than others, and I headed northwest along a lesser known path, Circuit du Phare, in the direction of the lighthouse, Phare du Monde. Maybe a fresh landscape would inspire me. I was determined to make a painting. Not a portrait, or a still life of flowers, but a landscape, like I used to do.

The fields were mostly uncultivated, although some of them were fenced or boxed in with that particular dense hedgerow, bocage, that I knew from the area around Montmartin. In one of the fields I passed a herd of white cows, perhaps belonging to Ester Chauvin. They were like sculptures, as if made of clay, the warm light falling on their flanks in the same way that it fell on the bleached oyster shells that sat on my windowsill in La Minerve. They all stopped their grazing and raised their heads to observe me, turning in unison as I passed, as if a man in a field were a strange sight indeed.

Before doing that portrait of Lorca I would have said I was incapable of summoning the resources to undertake a task like making a new painting for the chapel, but now, for the first time since that day in Cyprus, I felt that I was seeing the landscape as an artist, with the eyes of the painter I had once been.

I wanted to know the island. To be an artist is to know as well as to look, to know the names of the birds, the trees, the phases of the moon, the shells on the beach, even the clouds and why the sky is blue in the morning and red at dusk, so that
one can paint with faith and hope and worship. I wanted that worship again.

And then I had come upon the little grey donkey standing alone in a pasture surrounded by a low stone wall. He seemed so alone and forlorn that I stopped. I clicked my tongue and said hello and the donkey’s beautiful long ears swivelled towards me and he immediately ambled over, pushing his head over the wall to snuffle at my sleeve. When I stroked my palm down the long nose I was surprised at the coarseness of the animal’s fur, having expected it to be soft, like a child’s toy.

The grass in the pasture had been cropped low to the ground, but on the other side of the wall it was long and green and thick, out of the donkey’s reach, so I crouched down and pulled a handful free, then extended it towards the questing muzzle. The black lips were soft on my palm as the animal took the grass from me. I reached over and stroked the hide again, the rough hide, listening to the satisfying crunch of the animal’s teeth on the fresh grass, aware of its warmth under my palm, the beat of its life.

A wave of affection came over me for this mild and gentle creature. I was struck by the fact that it existed at all, and that out of all the moments in time, I and it should be here together. I’d often felt the same way when I looked at Piero. That from nothing could come such a miracle was astounding. How beautiful the world could be, how strange and wonderful.

What was the name of the man in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the one whose head is transformed into that of a donkey? Bottom. That was it. Poor fellow, wandering lost and bewildered in the woods, but a princess had loved him. And then there was Puck. The magical sprite. I remembered him
flying over the stage. It had been one of those few times when some of us Guild boys were taken on an excursion into the city. I must have been about nine years old. The play was at the Orpheum Theatre on Granville Street. The afternoon had been rainy, dark, with the pink and green neon signs and car headlights making it all seem magical. And even though the wires suspending Puck as he flew back and forth were clearly visible, it was still thrilling—a boy who could fly and make magic.

Why had I never taken Piero to see that play? It must have been on countless times in Paris.

The donkey wandered off a few metres, nibbling at the grass, and I perched on the wall, opening my paintbox and setting my sketchbook in the lid. Using a palette knife I mixed yellow ochre with touches of iron oxide black and crimson until I had a suitable mid-grey. Additions of white in varying degrees gave me a range of cool and warm tones that were similar to the various aspects of light and shade that made up the colour of the donkey, a grey violet like the hue of wet beach sand, almost monochrome but full of subtleties.

I moistened a flat-bristle brush in turpentine and touched it to a mound of colour. My hand, holding the loaded brush, hovered with anticipation, but also anxiety, almost with dread. Then I applied the brush to the paper, rapidly smudging greys to define the shapes. No detail, no indication of what the shapes were or would be as I pushed the brush, dragged it, twisted the bristles hard against the paper, creating a language of marks to describe what I saw, what I felt.

Once the schematic block-in was done I laid in some washes, thin umber to define the earth, a hint of blue for the sky, then I switched to a smaller softer sable brush for the details,
the patches of white on the ears, the dark almost brown stripe down the back. For the grass in the foreground I used pale yellow, which became a muted green with touches of black.

I worked in a kind of trance, quickly, without conscious thought, to forestall doubt, to let my emotions make the picture, putting into it all my fear and longing and uncertainty. When the shapes became a form, and when the forms became an object, and when the object suggested life, the donkey itself, I sat back. But one more thing. Switching to my smallest sable, its tip not much thicker than one of the donkey’s eyelashes, I touched a tiny dab of pure cadmium yellow on the eye. Too small to mean anything to a viewer, but I would know what it was. A kind of self-portrait in a fleck of colour.

There it was. Just a little painting of a donkey, nothing really, but the sight of it almost broke my heart. And at the same time I felt such joy.

I wanted to share this feeling; I wanted to show the picture to one person in particular.

T
HE ROUTE TO THE HEADLAND KNOWN AS
L
E
C
OLOMBIER
was familiar to me by now and I was soon walking along the chemin des Sirènes in a green silence broken only by the softest rustling of the drizzle in the leaves overhead. As I caught sight of the cottage roof I remembered her parting words. Not a warning exactly but definitely a caution. My steps faltered. A sense of foolishness came over me and I felt just like a schoolboy bringing his handiwork home to be praised. I wished I’d brought the jar of honey from Père Caron instead. At least that would be a legitimate reason for appearing at her door.

When the cottage came into view, a slow curl of white smoke hanging above the chimney, I veered off to the left instead of going to the front door, following a little sandy track that I remembered from a previous walk. Here, a patch of wild barley grew and I unfolded my pocketknife, then kneeled to cut a bundle of stalks until I had enough for a loose bouquet, the feathery ears thick with plump seeds. Low to the ground in the barley were small poppies, crimson and
black. I knew that they were prone to wilt within the day when picked, but nevertheless I gathered a handful to insert among the stalks of barley.

The bouquet was cool and moist in my hand. At the cottage gate, with its sign L
A
M
AISON DU
P
ARADIS
, just as I lifted the latch, a burst of music poured out from one of the open windows—a cascade of notes ascending and descending in a torrent of sound, whirling, frenzied, passionate, wild.

And just as suddenly as it had burst forth, the music stopped. Silence. The soft patter of raindrops. My own breathing. I willed the music to come again, wanting that rapid cluster of notes to fill the air. I knew this was not Tobias, but Lorca. This was real music.

The clarinet started up again in a different cadence, embellished with quick lilting flourishes. Now there was something hauntingly familiar in what I heard, harking back over the years, and I recognized that fast dissonance, the high trills held longer than breath seemed possible. Hollis. In her studio that first time, when she’d put on some strange music and awakened a fire in me. “Do you dig Stravinsky?” she had asked. I remembered the painting on the sleeve of the LP. A phoenix rising from the ashes—the Firebird. She’d played it often, and I’d listened with her, reading the words on the back of the record sleeve, so often that they had fixed themselves in my memory like a poem learned by heart.

For some reason, a mental slip of the tongue, I had misread the first word of the second line as Painting. Perhaps that was why I still remembered the little poem.

Even as these memories were running through my head, the music changed. Slow now, pulsing, permeated with melancholy. I heard it and understood it—that striving for completeness, for union, for wholeness. It was music made not for the listener but for the creator, articulating something deep inside the soul.

When the music ended, it did so not with a conclusion but a trickling away, a weariness, almost defeat. As if there were nothing more to say.

Gradually I became aware of other sounds that had been there all the time but seemed to have paused for the music. The soft hiss of the waves on the beach below the cottage, the faint bleating of sheep, the caw of a crow. A gutter was trickling somewhere beside the house, and the smoky scent of burning logs hung in the air.

I felt as if I’d been under a spell. There was only the memory of the music. Ephemeral. Not like a painting or a book, objects that could be touched, but like water, slipping out of your grasp as you tried to hold it. I walked softly up the path, stopping just short of the door when I glimpsed Lorca through the window. She was sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace, hunched forward, the clarinet across her knees glowing in the light of the flickering flames. The fingers of her right hand were rubbing back and forth across her lips. The mournful desolation of the music was still on her face.

I knocked. Her expression was troubled when she opened the door, but it changed into something hopeful when she recognized me, and then noticed the bouquet in my hands.

“Leo.” She took the flowers and as I leaned forward to kiss her she turned her head so that the kiss landed on her cheek. “Is it raining?” she said. “You look chilled. Come and sit by the fire.” Taking my hand she drew me into the warmth of the house. She was wearing a black blouse with pearl buttons and a dark suede skirt. Her feet were bare.

I placed my paintbox and sketchbook on the couch as I sat down and extended my hands towards the warming flames. On the side table stood a carafe, her Lucky Strikes and a glass with an inch of red wine in the bottom. When she had arranged the bouquet in a vase and set it on the windowsill, she brought a fresh glass, filled it for me, topped up her own and sat down at the other end of the couch.

“Have you been out painting?”

“One small thing.”

“Can I see?”

I handed her the sketchbook. A gust of damp air from the open window swept across the room, blowing her hair across her face and fluttering the pages of the sketchbook. She flattened her hand over the painting.

“What a noble little creature,” she said. “Pure of heart.” She smiled sadly. “It’s very good.”

“Other than that portrait sketch of you, this is the first time I have really painted since, since Cyprus.” I found that I could say the word without the usual upsurge of pain in my heart. “You inspired it.”

“Really? Am I to be your muse, then?”

“I’ve been avoiding you,” I said. “Or trying to.”

She took her Lucky Strikes and went to the open window, shaking a cigarette loose from the pack and lighting it. I
wandered over to the middle of the room by the big oak table. Some books lay scattered next to sheets of music manuscript paper. I don’t read music, but at the top of the sheet were the handwritten words
Contra Mortem et Tempus
. I spoke them aloud.

“A quote from a painter, actually,” she said. “Ernst Josephson. In reference to his painting
Näcken
, of a boy sitting in a waterfall playing a violin. I saw it in Stockholm once.”

“Like Tobias, in the forest with your clarinet. What do the words mean?”

“‘Against Death and Time.’ Isn’t that the point of art?”

The manuscript had a number of crossings-out and corrections. In her own hand, I assumed. “Are you composing something?”

She nodded. “Trying to.”

“I was outside earlier, I heard you playing. The second part sounded very tragic. Was it this music?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Why was it so sad?”

“It’s an old piece that was never finished. From the war years.”

I had guessed that there was a ten-year gap in our ages. When the war ended twenty years ago she would have been about twenty. “Was it hard for you, that time?”

She drew on her cigarette and turned to blow smoke out the window. “Life is hard, Leo. You know that, better than most people.”

“Tell me something about yourself,” I said. “Why … why did you have a black eye when I met you?”

“Oh, Leo,” she answered softly, but said nothing more.

I looked down at the books on the table:
Les larmes viendront
plus tard
, with a cover picturing an African landscape, George Sand’s
Un hiver à Majorque
with Delacroix’s portrait of Chopin on the cover. Lying open and face down was
Pensées Morales
of Marcus Aurelius. I picked this one up and turned it over. A passage had been marked in red ink. I read the underlined words out loud: “‘The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.’” I put the book down. “Do you believe that is true?”

“Don’t you?”

She stubbed out her cigarette in a scallop shell and closed the window. Leaning back against the sill she looked at me. That same considered look from the first day in the chapel, part curiosity, part defiance, part something else entirely. A log shifted in the fireplace with a flurry of red sparks. The rain rattled against the window. Her eyes were deep and impenetrable. Minutes seemed to pass.

Then she crossed the floor and took me by the hand. Her eyes were shining. “Come,” she said, leading me to the stairway.

Her bedroom was shadowy in the muted light from outside. A white chest of drawers with a mirror, the glass draped with a curtain of lace. The bed was large, covered by a white quilt. Kindling and newspaper had been laid in the small fireplace. Lorca took a box of matches and lit the fire, then one of the candles in the black wrought-iron chandelier on the mantel.

“Come,” she said again, taking my hand, pulling me to the bed.

The rain rattled against the window. Outside the circle of light and warmth from the fireplace, the darkening room seemed to enclose us, folding us into its glow. When I kissed her it was like sinking into black water. I held my breath. And then I exhaled, drowning.

A
FTERWARDS, WE LAY APART
, our faces close, gazing at each other without speaking. There were fine smile lines on the skin at the outer corners of her eyes. I was aware of the difference in our ages again. And in our lives.

“What?” she said after a while, responding to the intensity of my stare.

“I want to know you.”

“Isn’t this enough?”

“Not only like this. More.”

“You mustn’t love me, Leo.” Her expression changed, she got up and went into the bathroom. A tap ran, the toilet flushed.

She came out wearing a red and white kimono and sat down on the corner of the bed with her back to me, the kimono sliding down her shoulders. Like an odalisque, I thought, looking at her long back, like Ingres’s
La Grande Baigneuse
in the Louvre.

As she stretched for her cigarettes on the bedside table I immediately noticed the ring on her left hand. A simple unadorned gold band. It had not been there when she went into the bathroom.

“You found your ring.”

“I never lost it.”

“I noticed you weren’t wearing one before.”

“I decided not to wear it. For a while.”

She lit the cigarette, her back still to me, head turned away, the smoke making a lingering spiral towards the ceiling. I heard the pattering of the rain, the crackle of the flames, the thudding of my heart.

She turned to look at me. “I am married. My husband is Armand Daubigny. He’s the conductor of the Orchestre de Paris. In which I play. He is twenty years older than me. I was his pupil. We’ve been married for fifteen years. Satisfied?”

I was disappointed, but not really surprised. A woman of her age and beauty would not be single. “And the black eye?”

She looked away. The rain was a continuous tapping at the window accompanied by a gurgling from the gutter outside. She sighed. “He hit me when he found out I was having an affair. With another musician. Not from the orchestra. A jazz musician. He despises jazz.” The casual way she said this, as if it were hardly of consequence, surprised me. She raised a hand to her cheek.

“It’s gone. It’s over.”

“The affair? Your marriage?”

“The bruise.”

I looked at the scars on her wrists. “Is that something you do often? Have affairs?”

A shrug.

“Is that what I am? An affair? Or not even that?”

She leaned forward and flicked cigarette ash towards the fireplace.

“Do you love your husband?” I said.

“It’s complicated.”

Neither of us spoke for a time.

Then I asked, “Why
did
you make love to me?”

“Because it was pure. Without questions or answers.”

“Was this a revenge on your husband?” I knew I sounded bitter.

“Don’t be cheap, Leo. It doesn’t suit you.”

“We just made love. Is that cheap?”

“Do you think you can fall in love so easily? With a stranger. You want to know about me? Well, where should I start? The day I was born? Or is it my husband who interests you?”

“Sorry.” I stroked the warm skin of her back, already desiring her again. “Perhaps you were just being kind to a lonely man. Is my desperation that obvious?” When she didn’t answer, I said, “Or did you just need a little recreation to relieve the tedium of a rainy afternoon.” I said it to provoke her, to get a reaction.

She spun round and glared at me. “What do you want from me, Leo? Someone to replace your dead wife?” She jerked away, pulling the kimono over her shoulders.

For a second I was speechless. Then I was getting up, pulling my pants on, grabbing my shoes and shirt, already going down the stairs, face hot with anger, shame, humiliation.

I heard her calling, “Leo! I didn’t mean that.”

Too late.

As I passed the table and grabbed my sketchbook, I noticed that the poppies in the bouquet were already wilted.