So Much Fire and So Many Plans

by Aaron S Gallagher

  She led him on.

  The next room held a pointillist landscape of the forests below the house, with São Paulo in the distance, and Brent, recalling the way Ossirian had described them, could see the way the city moved as he brought himself in closer, and the focus of the millions of tiny dabs and dots of paint coalesced into swirling, blended colors that seemed to breathe from the walls and floor and ceiling into the air around him. Despite the explosion of colors, he realized that, even here, he could see the different styles as he moved his eyes over the walls. Seurat’s meticulous precision, Signac’s hard-handed discipline, Cross’s golden trees, Luce’s sullen edging, Angrand’s forlorn distances, the trees in the foreground bore Wilkerson’s fruit, the faint capping of snow was Morren’s work, the sky held Pourtau’s elongated dabs, and the tiny villagers at the edges were of Villierme’s beloved but almost abstruse figures.

  Shaking his head, he followed Carolyn into the next room. It was a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes, all of which appeared random at first, but as he stared, he realized he was looking at a representation of the outside of the very house in which they stood. It was bursting at the seams with intent and attempting to encapsulate the indefinable- a pure representation of Symbolism. He recognized brush strokes from Klimt, leaves and branches of Kahlo’s, perspectives of Picasso’s, upswept walls of Moreau, animals of Chagall’s frenetic design, Böcklin’s waves, and the subtle grays of Brooks.

  The next room held walls of Expressionism. Figures moving, running, fleeing. There were buildings on fire, and the scarlet flames bled into the crimson sky, overseen by ominous clouds and a glowering sun overhead. He again was awestruck by the styles, sometimes clashing, always distinct. He recognized Kandinsky, Munch, Schiele, Marc, Klee… all brought together to bring something new forth in the styles of these giants.

  They weren’t rooms. They were paintings. Paintings with six sides to the canvas. His mouth became dry at the idea.

  And on.

  They proceeded around the upper level of the main room, stopping at each door. Carolyn left the doors open as they went, the lights on. Even now, looking back, he could see the glimpses in each room of the madness and mystic beauty of a thousand artists rendering one painting each.

  The final room was an oddly-shaped room, bare of furniture like the rest, with oblique walls, foreshortened on one side and lengthened on the other. But more strange than the shape of the walls was the mix of black and red lines across every available surface. The script he could not read, but like the shape of the foyer, it appeared so familiar.

  “What’s with all the graffiti?” he asked.

  “It’s not graffiti. It’s called pichação.”

  He listened to the word in his head. Peeks a cow. Uneasily, he realized he heard her voice in his head, not his own.

  “All right,” Brent said, his eyes roving over the lines, following them around the room, trying to take in a sense of purpose. “What is pichação?”

  She smiled. “It’s graffiti, naturally. However, instead of vandalism for vandalism’s sake, or pretty pictures, pichação is about expressing one’s political beliefs, desires, and outrages. It has never been safe to be a radical in Brazil. The government has not always been kind to us. Pichação began in the late fifties as a way to protest. It’s a summation of frustration. It’s the literal explosion of something what has been contained until it can no longer be so.”

  She gazed around the room, taking in the striking lines, the bold colors, and to Brent the anger and dissatisfaction of the art seemed to seethe through. He could feel the anger and repressed emotion, the frustration at a lack of… of voice.

  “It’s… well… it’s not beautiful, but it’s stirring,” he said. “Not Modernism. Neo-Modernism, perhaps, or almost Post. It’s powerfully moving.”

  “It is.”

  Brent’s head throbbed as he attempted to take in everything he had seen. He looked back at the rooms once again, mouth dry. He jumped as Carolyn took his hand, startling him from his reverie. He blinked at her, dazed.

  “It is much to take in, but I needed you to see. To understand.”

  “You’ve said that already. Understand what?”

  She gave him an oblique look. “What happened next.”

  She led him down the curving stairway to the first floor where they again stood beside the remarkable waterfall door. Remarkable… that word doesn’t mean what it did… he checked his watch and stared. “Shit. Two hours?”

  She watched him, that bemused smile playing across her face. “You’re an avid reader of paintings. He would have loved you.”

  A jolt traveled the length Brent’s spine when she said this. He was transfixed by the idea that Ossirian, the great Ossirian, would have liked him. Hero worship overtook him, and he found himself grinning idiotically.

  Carolyn flicked on more switches, and alcoves and hung paintings all along the walls of the bottom of the floor began to light. He could see that they were standing in a gallery of dozens, perhaps a hundred, paintings. He hadn’t seen them because they had been shadowed.

  She tugged his hand. “Come. Now you have seen, now you can understand.” She led him to the first painting. He studied it. It was the house, from the outside, but it was a beautiful Italian villa. Curling olive trees, huge engorged clouds, warm and suffused light.

  The next canvas was the house as it would have been had a courtier painted it. The curling brocade of the cloth, the edging of the tiled roof; it was rich with inlaid gold, but still recognizably the house in which they stood.

  Next came a lush, arbor-based painting, the greenery fairly leaking out of the space, curling around the edges of the same house, but different.

  The next painting fooled him. He had to lean in to touch it before he could tell the brush strokes and the edges of the paint. It was paint, but it was hyper-realistic, almost a photograph, an exact representation of the house.

  Next came a dreamy, soft-edged light-and-haze rendering of the house again, but with impressions of where the house ended and the land and sky and forest began. Colors bled into one another, the dream-like quality suggesting rather than stating. It was magnificent.

  The same house, the same angle, but in the pointillistic style. The single dots of color all blending at the right distance from the surface to produce colors both vivid and unreal, the dots of pigment being blended by the eye rather than the brush, so that his eye produced the rich aubergines and mellow viridians and soft and glowing corals that were not physically there.

  Again this house, but in chaos, all angles, walls that seemed longer than the roof, the roof that seemed to cup the sky, the sky that seemed to bulge outward. A house, but an abstraction.

  And the last canvas was all stark lines and spray, black and red and white exclusively, a suggestion of a house, a hint of trees, all the while in the style and even the words of pichação

  All of the canvases on the bottom floor were the house, this house, but in the same style as the rooms above. They had proceeded from the upper left to the bottom right, and the bottom right to the bottom left, back to where they had started. Or finished. Or whatever.

  “Do you see?”

  He hesitated. He almost got it then, but it eluded him. “I don’t know what you’re trying to get me to see.”

  She didn’t seem disappointed. “No matter. Come. I’m hungry.”

  He followed her from the main hall down a corridor to one wing, which opened up into a huge, well-appointed kitchen. An enormous industrial stove occupied most of the far wall, with a dozen burners atop it, inert under their cast-iron grates. A gigantic double-doored refrigerator loomed to one side. She opened it and rummaged, producing an armload of packages. Bemused, he sat at the island while she assembled a meal from some already-prepared dishes, as well as a side of fresh slices of a vegetable he couldn’t identify, but fell instantly in love with. She vanished below the island, and he realized there was a wine cellar under the kitchen when she reemerged wi
th several dusty bottles, pouring them each a glass.

  As she stirred and manipulated and fussed, he examined the kitchen, sipping at the tart wine. It had been styled much the way the house was, with concessions made for modern equipment. He grinned. You could hide much with wood, and to that end this room had been styled like a restaurant, the clean lines and rich dark colors lending an air of friendliness to an otherwise sterile scene.

  Carolyn returned to the island with a tray of bowls. The aroma of the food caught him and he started to salivate.

  “Feijoada,” she said, handing him a bowl of wild rice over which she ladled a dark, thick stew. “Dried meat, sausage, garlic, onions, lovely spices, and, oh,” she interrupted herself, dipping into the serving bowl and producing what he first took to be an oversized mushroom. She set it aside and smiled at him. “A pig’s ear, for flavor.”

  He looked at the ear, looked at her. “What, you didn’t have a bay leaf?”

  She laughed merrily. “If São Paulo had a trademark dish, this would be it. Try it.”

  He dipped his fork into the stew, and lifted the rice and stew to his lips. He blew on it and tasted.

  His mouth exploded.

  At least, it seemed so. The flavors of the dark stew were extraordinary. The spices were prickly and tart, and heat suffused him as the mouthful was chewed. The meat was succulent and sweet-hot, the gravy was layered and had a dark depth he’d almost never encountered outside of Louisiana.

  “Oh my God,” he mumbled.

  “This,” she said, and bent to her own bowl, inhaling, “this is São Paulo.”

  They ate in silence, a comfortable companionship. Brent enjoyed every bite of the wonderful stew, as well as the discs of vegetable she had put down.

  “Jiló,” she supplied. “It’s… sort of an eggplant.”

  “It’s delicious. All of it.”

  “Thank you. My caretaker always makes extra when she knows I’m coming home, and leaves it in the fridge. Proper feijoada can take hours to prepare.”

  He finished and sipped his wine again. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “I’m not trying to tell you anything, dear boy,” she said. “I’m trying to give you what you wanted.”

  “Which is?”

  “The missing pieces of the puzzle. You said you weren’t interested in the answers qua answers. That you wanted to understand for yourself.”

  “Yes,” he said. Could it have been just three short days ago? “I’ve always felt that I’ve been missing something in Ossirian’s work.”

  “Do you have an idea what it might be?”

  “No. I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know.”

  “And what did you make of the gallery?”

  “Which part? The upper rooms or the lower level?”

  “What makes you think,” she asked, giving him those direct, intent eyes, “that there is any difference?”

  He seemed to go still. The pieces clicked into place.

  I want you to understand.

  I want you to see them in order.

  “…they’re a pathway,” he said, musing.

  She raised her eyebrows. Her voice held a note of hope. “To what?”

  He searched for the words. Inspired, he said, “To Ossirian. To who he really was.”

  A sunny smile broke over her somber features. “Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.”

  She set down the glass of wine. “Come. It’s late. And if we’re going to keep talking, I need something stronger than this wine.” She went to the sideboard and picked up a bottle. Brent recognized the lethal liquid. Trago de caña. She picked up two glasses and tilted her head. “Let’s start in the Library.”

  He looked down at the dishes.

  “It’s all right. Efigenia will clean up in the morning. Come.” She led him out of the kitchen into the west wing of the house. The corridor was of similar make as the waterfall, rich, dark wood carved with figures and shapes that, again, he did not recognize.

  “Legends, myths, and beloved characters of Brazil’s history,” she commented. “This corridor is a memory palace for the richness of our history.”

  “It’s amazing,” he said. “Who carved this?”

  “Senhor de la Luna,” she said. “In addition to being an architect, he was a sculptor. He and Ossirian had many conversations about these carvings, many discussions about three-dimensional style in painting.”

  They emerged into a wide Library, a two-story open room with books lining all four walls, both up and down. Brent’s eyes widened. In the center of the room were large, overstuffed chairs, and in between each were easels holding paintings. They were of the immense open gallery from the front room. They were technically perfect- photo-realistic paintings of the main house gallery. But they were… different. In each, the walls and rooms had been painted different colors. Brent circled the easels. There were eleven, each done in a different way. All perfect, all framed from the entranceway, but each of them with different paint on the walls.

  “It reminds me of Warhol,” he said.

  Carolyn rolled her eyes. “I hoped you wouldn’t say that. You’re not paying attention.”

  He took the chastisement well, she saw, and he again circled amongst the paintings. He realized that the color schemes were patterned. The first displayed painting was very dark, with rich blacks and browns, the woodwork of the room prominent. As you followed the paintings, the colors lightened, until last one was done with rich creams and whites. How did I miss that?

  “These are…”

  “They were practice.” She sat in one of the overstuffed, comfortable chairs that faced inward to a conversation area. He sat across from her and she opened the first bottle. She poured a glass and passed it to him. He waited until she had poured one of her own. He held his up.

  “To art?”

  She made a face. Another test, he thought.

  “To Brazil?”

  She tilted her head from one side to the other, but shook her head.

  He shrugged. “To us, then.”

  “To us,” she agreed, and touched her glass to his. He sipped, but she tossed off a decent shot in one swallow and refilled her glass.

  “So he owned this house?”

  “Ossirian did not own this house. I own it.”

  “Did you buy it from him, or was it bequeathed?” He winced, wishing he’d thought of a kinder way to reference Ossirian’s tragic death.

  She did not appear bothered.

  “No. I’ve always owned it. I bought it from Senhor de la Luna. In fact, Ossirian never owned anything and he died penniless.”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “Ossirian didn’t care about money. He empowered me to take possession of the payment for his first show at the gallery of Ruffiero, and we kept the arrangement. I started the corporation to handle his finances and mine, and we kept that arrangement until his death, even when we weren’t together, or even speaking, which sometimes happened.”

  “You fought?”

  “Not very often. Mostly we would be in other parts of the world from one another. But about the house. Senhor de la Luna sold it to me shortly after we met. With lifetime tenancy for he and his wife, Miciela. Lovely people they were, and chose to remain here. Miciela was much happier when the east wing was built to house the bedrooms. Ossirian’s work habits had made him something of a bother around the house if you weren’t used to him. He worked all day and all night, rarely sleeping, and he was constantly covered in, and trailing droplets of, paint everywhere as he experimented with different recipes.”

  “He made his own paint?”

  “Not at first, but when he started having trouble choosing the correct colors, he attempted to make his own. He had mixed results, at first.”

  “I understand all the old masters had mixed results at first. Hell, we still don’t know how Da Vinci made his lacquers.”

  “Interesting you should mention him.” Carolyn sipped at her second drink. Brent rem
embered that he had his, and took a swallow of the potent liquor.

  “Why is that?”

  “We had been coming to casa de la Luna for months. I had just graduated from university, and arranged a second show for Ossirian, convincing him to exhibit a dozen canvases, despite his protestations that they were sketches. To his dismay, it was another rousing success. The party spilled over from Ruffiero’s gallery to the Case de la Luna. We took a cab to the house-”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Carolyn and Ossirian were late arriving because he had stopped the cab to climb out and look at the city lights from the nearly-complete darkness of the road as it wound through the trees. She paid the driver and told him they would walk the rest of the way.

  Ossirian stood at the edge of the road, staring into space. She joined him. She could hear his mind spinning away behind those unfathomable eyes.

  After a long time, standing quite still in the growing darkness, he asked her, “How do I go on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what to do, my Muse. No matter what scribble or jot I put on canvas, those… those… simplórios keep insisting it’s art.” He turned to her, his eyes glittering in the dark. “I know what it is. They are not just mistaken, but hugely deceived.”

  “Ossirian, you just sold a dozen more paintings. The least of which sold for almost a hundred twenty-five thousand real! You are… well… you’re rich.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said mournfully, and she felt a pang of pain at his chastisement. “I’m poor. Poor, poor me.”

  She took his hand. “I know you don’t like to think about money-”

  “The pictures aren’t even interesting!”

  “Your paintings are brilliant, my love-”

  He gaped at her. “Oh. I meant money. The pictures on them are boring. My paintings were adequate, I suppose, for practice, or lining a bird’s cage.”

  She snorted. “You’re not from this world I know, Ossirian.”

  “That is true.”

  “Tomorrow I will go collect the money from Ruffiero. We can go anywhere you want to. Anywhere in the world.” She bit her lip, and plunged ahead. “If you want me to come with you, that is. Or I could-”