“You are Christoph,” she said.
His face lit as from behind with the glow of pleasure. “Of course my Muse would know me!” he said. “How foolish of me.”
“I’m Carolyn. You may call me Carolita, if you wish,” she told him.
“The goddess Carolita!” he exclaimed.
“I’m not a goddess,” she said, and the blush crept to her cheeks.
“You are,” he declared. “You are Carolita. You are the patron saint of foolish painters and mad creators.”
“Well,” she said. “If you insist, I suppose I must be. Though I hope there aren’t more of you. I’m not used to being a patron saint of anyone. I expect the hours are negotiable. I have classes to attend.”
His eyes lit. “Ah! You are a student! What do you study?”
“I’m a student of art history.”
“Pah!” he sneered. “Why?”
She stepped back, afronted. “Because Brazil has a rich history of artists, and it’s important that they be recognized.”
“Painters,” he corrected loftily. “And would you recognize them? If these great painters appeared to you?”
“Of course,” she said.
“How?” he demanded, his brow furrowed. “You did not recognize me.”
She sputtered. “You’re not a great Brazilian painter! You’re French, are you not?”
“I am a great painter,” he told her. “And I am in Brazil. This makes me a great Brazilian painter, does it not? And French? How dare you? That is insulting.”
She shrugged. “You’ve a French name, Christoph. Ossirian is certainly not Brazilian.”
“Nor is it French,” he told her with dignity.
“Then where are you from?”
“Wisconsin.”
Silence. Then: “Wis-”
“Wisconsin. The United States. America. Wisconsin.”
“How on Earth did you get to São Paulo?”
“I walked,” he told her. “May we eat something?”
CHAPTER FOUR
“He walked?”
“I was as flabbergasted as you. But of the many legends he inspired, this one has the virtue of being absolutely true. At seventeen years old, on a Tuesday at eight o’clock in the morning while on his way to school, Ossirian turned south and instead walked from Wilmot, Wisconsin to São Paulo Brazil. It took him six months. He grew two inches, he lost his boyish looks, he lost a kilo of weight, and he lost his virginity in a brothel in Mexico City to a woman thrice his age. When the pimp that ran the place found him curled up in her bed, penniless, he wanted to beat the boy. She convinced him to put Ossirian to work instead. He worked in the brothel for three weeks before escaping back onto the road. Along the way he acquired a set of paints and brushes and worked for scraps and a place to sleep as he went. He was a farmhand, a stage hand in a theater, picked all manner of fruit and vegetables, and even found himself the guest of a small tribe of natives outside of Brasilia, a tribe which no one has seen or heard from since.”
Brent shook his head. “That story… one of the minor mysteries, and it’s more impressive than Kerouac. He walked… what… three thousand miles?”
Carolyn shrugged. “I don’t remember the distance precisely, if I ever did know.”
“How did he get across the borders?”
Carolyn shrugged again. “No one knows. He never did get a passport until he was almost thirty. That was a hellacious affair, I can tell you. Trying to get the Brazilian government to issue a passport and accept that Ossirian wasn’t a Brazilian citizen. By then he was perhaps the most famous painter in São Paulo. His work was exhibiting in Paris, and he couldn’t even fly there to see it.”
“The details of his life in America are sketchy. I had a friend at the State Department run down what he could. He found an extradition order on file, but no criminal charges were ever brought.”
Carolyn locked the gallery door and led him to the rear office. “In the end it was easier to deport him than sort it out. Nothing about Ossirian was easy. He was a mystic, you know.”
“A mystic,” Brent repeated. “Like… psychic?”
“Of course not. But Ossirian was not rooted in the world we perceive as real. He lived with one foot in this world, and one foot in another.”
“That sounds about right,” Brent admitted. “By all reports, he was difficult to talk to.”
“He couldn’t be talked to,” she said. “He could be listened to, or talked at. Whether he participated in conversation is a matter of semantics.”
“It’s a wonder he had so many lovers, being so flighty.”
He thought she would rebuke him again, but she said, “Ossirian may have lived with one foot in this world and one in the other, but his penis was firmly on this side of that delineator.”
“He was very… well, by all accounts he was obsessed with sex.” Brent said with a faint blush.
“He considered it a more worthwhile pursuit than painting. Art came secondary to sex. And everything else came secondary to art.”
“Priorities.”
“Exactly. His were in the right place.” Carolyn moved further into the depths of the gallery and arrived at the office door. She went into the office and closed the door behind. After a moment he heard the heavy slam of a safe door. She emerged with a stack of several currencies. He saw pesos, Brazilian real, dollars, even lira. He swallowed.
“I’ve no pockets. Will you carry it?”
“Sure, okay.” He tucked it into his shoulder bag.
“We will stop for food and gas, after which we go to the house.”
“Where’s the house?”
“In the hills outside São Paulo. It is quite isolated. We’ll need to refuel, and we’ll need food, and because we need food, we’ll need beer.”
“Uh-”
“Don’t worry, silly boy,” she said. “This is my home. I know what I’m doing.”
He took a last look around the gallery, admiring again the bronze sculpture in the display window. She set the alarm, locked the door, and led him to the car.
The all-night cafeteria she brought him to appeared to have been constructed in the previous century, and have had several purposes, only the most recent of which was a restaurant. He followed her into the yellow lights of the outdoor garden and sat as she waved over a lackluster employee. The young man slouched over and shot a stream of disinterested Portuguese at her. She replied in kind. While they waited, he watched her stare out the window.
He watched the curve of her smile as she caught his eyes in the reflection. Enormous plain bowls of milky-white broth arrived with four brown bottles with no labels. Enormous beads of condensation clung to them. She inhaled deeply the scent emanating from the bowls and sighed. “Some things cannot be reproduced elsewhere no matter how one tries.”
“What is it?” He dipped his spoon beneath the milky surface of the soup.
“Pescado Encocado. Spicy fish soup you’ll spend the rest of your life lusting after,” she assured him, watching his face carefully as he sipped.
He smacked his lips and began to sweat. “Lord,” he said, sipping at one of the beers. “That’s spicy.”
“What do you think?”
He considered it. “It’s delicious.”
She gave him an approving smile and ate. After consuming a third of her bowl, she sat back with the cold beer and sipped with satisfaction. “Few pleasures so pure, few days so simple.”
“Amen to that.”
“I’m pleased this place is still here. The memory does not, after all, want to have to work so hard.”
He frowned. “Meaning?”
“I worried this place would be gone. So much of the past is. It’s harder to recognize the difference between the real and the mournful memories we alter with our desires,” she said. “Here I can point and say ‘There. That is the first place I dined with Ossirian.’ I don’t have to imagine. This is why paintings are important. They show you what is, rather than what you wish.”
/>
He nodded slowly, then frowned. “You’re not being facetious? This is-”
“Yes,” she told him. She pointed at the next table. “Right there, Ossirian and I shared the first of many meals. And it set the standard for every meal we ever shared.”
“How do you mean?” he asked, eyes bright as he ate more soup.
Carolyn smiled. “Christoph Ossirian was unique. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met before. I fell in love with him in this restaurant. I’ve loved him every day since.”
Her eyes became unfocused as she stared at the past.
CHAPTER FIVE
She and her new companion walked through the darkened streets in silence. She watched the boy with unabashed curiosity as his eyes darted everywhere, wide and absorbent, as though he were trying to swallow everything he saw. The crowds thinned; it was close to ten now. They followed rough cobbles up the hill toward a little café. He stared at the light emanating from the windows and she saw his hands twitch, gestures and movements that made sense if you pictured him before a canvas. She started to open the door for him and he took her arm. “My Muse, wait.”
She turned, and his eyes widened. His gaze followed the line of her jaw, up the side of her face, around the oceanic curl of her dark hair. The yellow light from the café had outlined her with a fiery halo.
“What is it?”
“I… I cannot explain. I can but paint,” he explained, stumbling through with his stilted Portuguese.
“We can go back to-”
“No,” Ossirian shook his shaggy head. “I cannot. That… that-” he struggled for words. His hands fluttered like angry birds in the air, and he lapsed into English. “-cocksucker!”
He broke off, chagrinned. “I… I’m sorry.”
She smiled warmly. “It is okay, Christoph. You don’t have to worry about your language. I’ve heard worse.”
“No, no! I’m sorry! I don’t- I can’t say… you speak English?”
“Some. I have been reading a little at university. I learned some of the… more interesting words from Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I looked up some more.”
Ossirian shook his head more furiously. “No, no! I’m not- I can’t… tell me, please how you say… cocksucker?”
“Oh,” she said. She thought for a moment. “Er… filo de puta.”
His eyes lit up. “Ah! I see! I cannot go back to that cocksucker at the gallery. He displayed that trash without asking me. It wasn’t meant to be seen.”
She bit her lip and said, “He already sold them, Christoph. He-”
“Please stop calling me that,” he said, his fury vanishing as quickly as it had come. His eyes roved over her face as he studied the play of light on her skin. “I dislike it.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. What do you prefer?”
“Ossirian.”
“You don’t like your first name?”
“No, no, I’m not- I haven’t been clear. I hate it. I always have.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand.”
He said, gesturing with those thin, ever-moving hands, “I hate my name. It reminds me of where I am from. Of who I am from. And I must never become comfortable. If I become comfortable, I will forgive. I will forget. And I must never do that.”
She couldn’t say anything.
He gestured and blushed. “Could you please buy us food? I have not eaten today. Or… I think, yesterday. I haven’t any money, but I could-”
“It’s all right,” she soothed. “And yes, I’ll buy you something to eat.”
He bowed his head. “Thank you, Muse.”
“You may call me Carolyn,” she said, smiling at him. “Carolita, if you wish.”
His eyes shone with that fire. “It is too familiar, perhaps.”
“How much time will it take to become familiar?”
He shrugged. “As long as it takes to find your bed.” He opened the door to the café. She blinked after him and followed him inside. The waiter at the counter pointed at a table in the courtyard, under the window. Ossirian stared at it for a moment. He squatted in front of it, closed one eye, and examined it. He stood and wiggled it with a finger. Shrugging, he sat. Bemused, Carolyn joined him.
“You act as though you’ve never seen a table before.”
“Of course I’ve seen a table. I was looking at the way it was constructed.”
“Does that matter?”
“Do you want a lap full of hot food?”
She gave an involuntary chuckle. “No.”
“Then it matters.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Also, I like the way the slope of the legs compliments the angle of the plane.”
She frowned and bent over to look.
“I don’t see what you see,” she said, straightening.
“No one does,” he said absently, and for a moment he seemed sad. She reached across the table and took his hand. He stared at her hand. He looked up.
“I will find some way to repay you, my Muse,” he whispered. Again, that sadness flickered across his face. He looked, to her, very young.
“It’s isn’t necessary,” she said. “It is just a meal.”
“No. For your kindness.”
“Kindness is a gift,” Carolyn said. “It needs no repayment. It is yours to keep.”
“Then I will find a gift suitable for you in return,” he said to her seriously.
The waiter came to them. “Yes?”
Ossirian frowned and looked at Carolyn. “What shall we order?”
She smiled up at the waiter. “Two of your special, please. And four beers.”
The waiter nodded, glanced at Ossirian, and retreated. Ossirian ran his fingertips along the stucco of the wall.
“What is it?”
“The patterns… they’re trying to tell me something, but I’m not sure how to read them.”
She examined the random peaks and valleys of the plaster. “Do you not speak its language?” she asked, her voice light and teasing.
He shook his head. “It is the way of things, is it not? We are adrift in a sea of isolation, unable to communicate with one another.”
“The walls and you?”
He turned his eyes up to hers. “Everything and me. Everything and you.”
“But we speak the same language.”
“No. Your interpretation of what I say to you is what you hear. We each impose our own meaning on what we see, hear, and feel, do we not?”
She thought about it. “I suppose we do flavor the things we experience with our own context.”
“It is ever the way,” he said. “What we have seen, what we have experienced, it gives a filter to what we next experience. It changes how you feel, think, how you see. We each understand a different language.”
She looked again at the wall.
“If I could read this, perhaps I could understand what the wall is trying to say. Or perhaps it isn’t that simple. It expresses itself physically. Its language is what it causes us to feel when we touch it. But we cannot speak that kind of language. And therefore I can’t understand what it wants to tell me.”
She stared at him. “You’re from Wisconsin?”
He nodded.
“How did you come to be in São Paulo?”
“I read about it. So many millions in such a small space; living, breathing, moving. I wanted to see it.”
“But how did you get here?”
“I walked.”
“No, really,” she chuckled.
He gave her a narrow look. “I walked.”
“All that way?”
“If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.” He looked puzzled.
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. Only you could.”
She stared at him for a long time. He gazed back, apparently unconcerned at her silence or her gaze. The moment was interrupted as their food arrived.
Ossirian stared, enraptured, as the steam rose from the bowls of pescado encocado. She watched
his hands twitch and his fingers trace the air like the curls of steam he was studying. She picked up her spoon and tucked in. The hot, spicy dish warmed her through, although the night was also very warm. Soon she began to perspire and it cooled her.
He picked up his spoon and became distracted by his reflection in the bowl of it; the parallax switch showed him upside down, the image refraction caused his forehead to swell to gigantic width as his jaw receded. He smiled and his reflection bared blocky, malformed teeth. He muttered to himself.
“Pardon?”
“I want to paint now.”
“Oh. Well, you need to eat.”
“I need to paint. I can eat later.”
“You can paint later.”
He stared at her, the first hint of temper directed at her flaring behind his eyes. “Later I will paint something else,” he said, controlling his ire with visible difficulty. “Right now, I need to paint this.”
“What?” she asked, taken aback by his vehemence.
He tapped a finger against the side of his head. “This, this,” he insisted. “But that… that… gods… how did you say it?”
“‘Filo de puta’,” she supplied.
The waiter looked over and frowned.
“Thank you. That cocksucker has my tools. He has my blanket. He… he… he sold my sketches! I told him they weren’t ready.”
The boy seemed ready to cry. She took his hand. He stared at her fingertips. “It’s okay,” she soothed.
“It’s not okay. He has everything. I have nothing.”
She gave him a reassuring smile. “You have me. And that bastard will not keep your money. Perhaps you didn’t want to sell your… your sketches, but it is done now. And you have a considerable amount coming to you, I should think.”
“All I want is my brushes and a canvas.”
“What would you paint?”
He gestured at the rising steam. “The motion. The ephemerality. The distinct vagueness of being.”
“How?” She cocked her head.
“I can’t answer that without a brush and paint,” he said glumly.
Her skin prickled. She had studied painters and painting for years, and that inability to express the fundamental process by which they created was a familiar expression in her studies.
So Much Fire and So Many Plans Page 6