The Portrait

by Antoine Laurain

  During my sleep, while my body was safely stretched out under the covers, my mind wandered to unfamiliar places. Before this point, I had only had dreams of the erotic variety, and even then, rarely. A few years earlier, one such dream had caused me to develop an accidental obsession with our young local florist. For several weeks she kept coming to me in my sleep, begging me to do the most unspeakable things to her in her shop – invariably on the shelf with the cactuses and carnivorous plants. I ended up having to change florist. It had become impossible to go in and buy Charlotte a bunch of roses without pornographic images from the previous night flashing before my eyes. I started frequenting another florist much further up the boulevard. The large, moustachioed man who tied my bouquets there never featured in any dreams.

  There was nothing sexy about the dream that now haunted my sleep. I was walking through a devastated landscape and the pavement, or perhaps the earth itself, beneath my feet had been replaced with ash. The fronts of the buildings were also coated in ash. There was no way of knowing if this was now or some point in the past. The only time I could remember seeing such an apocalyptic scene of a lifeless city covered in dust was after September 11. But in my dream no catastrophe had taken place. The ghost town I was walking through had long been shrouded in ash and silence; perhaps it had always been that way. I kept going along the empty streets, my suit covered in dust, as I searched for signs of life. There were none. Emerging into a small square like a Venetian campo, I came upon a guillotine, far more modern than the contraptions used during the Revolution. I couldn’t help thinking it must have been made quite recently, but what was it for? ‘We got rid of the death penalty,’ I told myself. ‘So who’s been making this?’ I was mulling this over while inspecting the guillotine from every angle when suddenly invisible hands grabbed me from behind and began to lift me off the ground.

  I was being dragged towards the scaffold, almost flat on my belly. ‘I beg your pardon? I beg your pardon?’ I kept saying, which I recalled was a frequent expression of my uncle’s, one that I never used. I felt as light as a feather and, far from putting up a fight and screaming, I was thinking how it would not be uninteresting to feel the ‘chill’ on my neck that the device’s inventor spoke of, just to experience it, out of pure curiosity, since afterwards I would merely have to take my head from the basket and put it back on my neck for everything to return to normal.

  The guillotine fell in cocoon-like silence and I barely felt the supposed chill; this was slightly disappointing. I peered into the basket which ought to have caught my head, but there was no sign of it. I’m not sure how I realised this, as I was supposed no longer to have a head, but dreams have a way of getting around such minor details.

  This mystery of the missing head filled me with concern. I knew I had to find it before I could go back to work, as I wouldn’t be let back into the office if no one could recognise me.

  I was gripped by anxiety, and then panic. I had to get my head back and there was no one I could turn to for help. I was getting so worked up I thought I was about to have a heart attack, when suddenly the whole scene lit up.

  The ash was replaced by fine, hot, honey-coloured sand. I was no longer wearing my loafers and could feel the sand burning the soles of my feet. I noticed that my shirt and tie had gone and I had nothing on but my black suit trousers. The guillotine had disappeared too. A stunningly beautiful woman was standing in front of me. I knew she was beautiful, but I couldn’t see her. I moved towards her and realised she was holding my head in her hands. She was also coming towards me, and distressingly I could not make out her facial features. At last she placed my head on my shoulders. All at once I came back to life and no sooner had I opened my mouth and eyes than her lips met mine in a kiss.

  I still couldn’t see her face, but this no longer bothered me as it had done moments before. I didn’t care what she looked like; I was in love. Madly in love.

  At that moment, a thought occurred to me: why had she been holding my head? I started to pull away in order to ask her.

  The question was never answered because at that moment I always woke up, bringing both dream and kiss to a close.

  I woke feeling bereft. I wanted nothing more than to find that woman again, even if it meant going back to the dusty city and the guillotine. I tried to go straight back to sleep, but I could never return to the dream.

  The evening the portrait arrived we were having a couple of friends round for dinner. Over the aperitif I could not resist showing off my latest find. I slipped off to my study and returned proudly carrying the portrait. I placed it on an armchair and waited for a reaction. Charlotte was going to be embarrassed when her lack of visual sense was publicly exposed. But what I so ardently desired did not in the event come about, and it amused Charlotte to highlight my disappointment by declaring: ‘Pierre-François thinks the picture looks like him!’

  Our friends responded with incredulous exclamations.

  Was it possible that no one but me could see the resemblance? Yes, it was possible. Simon’s days were spent staring at screens monitoring the Bourse and Nathalie’s counting her stock of Chanel suits over and over. It was hardly surprising that people like that were incapable of noticing.

  Their ways of seeing had been ruined by modern life, their brains dulled by gazing at magazine covers and advertising billboards. They could no longer perceive anything.

  Just before going to bed I reached for my bedside book, Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorrain, searching for a sentence on looking. I feverishly consulted the entire book. There were many sentences on looking, since Monsieur de Phocas had a veritable fixation with eyes, claiming to be able to detect all sorts of mortiferous and erotic crimes by studying irises. But I remembered a short paragraph on modern eyes and their inability to see.

  ‘Modern eyes? They have no soul; they no longer look up to heaven. Even the most pure are only concerned with the immediate. Vulgar lust, petty self-interest, greed, vanity, prejudice, cowardly appetites and envy. Those are the abominable emotions swarming in today’s eyes. We have the souls of notaries and cooks. That’s why the eyes of the portraits in museums are so spectacular; they reflect prayers and tortures, regrets and remorse. Eyes are the source of tears; the source has run dry, the eyes are dulled; only faith makes them come alive, but you can’t reignite cinders. We walk with our eyes fixed on our shoes: our expressions are the colour of mud. When eyes appear beautiful to us, it is because they are full of the splendour of lies, because they hark back to a portrait, to a gaze in a museum or because they regret the past.’

  Standing in the middle of the bedroom, I finished reading aloud. I had read with such vehemence that I felt out of breath. Lying on the bed, Charlotte was watching me in silence. She was holding a women’s magazine. On the cover a young blonde woman in a blue bikini was smiling vacuously.

  ‘What are you implying?’ she asked calmly.

  ‘You don’t know how to look,’ I replied. ‘You no longer know how to see; Jean Lorrain was already writing that a hundred years ago.’

  ‘I can’t see that you look like the man in the portrait, is that what you mean? Well, have it your way,’ she said, turning back to her magazine.

  I could see the cover headline: ‘Me and my breasts’

  Jean Lorrain’s prose held no interest for my wife. I felt as if I had been slapped and I was about to ask her if that was all she and her breasts had to say about my portrait, when Charlotte looked up at me. ‘How much did you pay for your picture?’

  ‘It was €11,760 including costs.’

  I have only a hazy memory of the domestic scene that followed. When I think of it, what comes to mind is the ceiling of my living room.

  Charlotte rose swiftly from the bed to go into the living room, as if it was essential that the portrait should also witness the scene. She raised her eyes skywards then began to scream. I thought then that it was the perfect illustration of that expression ‘to raise your eyes skywards’. A few years earlier I
had had the ceiling redone by an artist from the national museums. In the sky he had painted there were little cumulus clouds tinted pink on the edge of the mouldings. It was glorious. All the five-hundred euro notes in the secret safe had been spent on it. That evening, I wished the atmospheric pressure on my ceiling would change, to make the cotton-wool clouds turn into huge dark blocks, followed by thunder and a lightning bolt that would strike the woman shrieking in front of me.

  It was not the cost of the painting that mattered, nor Charlotte’s reproaches and yelpings over my recklessness at the auction. What mattered was that she had not seen what had immediately struck me, the resemblance between myself and the portrait. Charlotte could not see me. That was the only possible explanation. For how long had I been invisible to her and to others?

  Then Charlotte snatched the book out of my hands. She turned it over and read out the author’s biography in a triumphant tone.

  ‘“Jean Lorrain, gay dandy, make-up wearer, ether addict; he is the chronicler of decadence”; so that’s the kind of books you read!’ she said before going on to mention a passion for objects, financial ruin and the habits of Uncle Edgar which I had imprudently mentioned to her.

  The distant coldness that existed between us over the next few days reached its height at bedtime. I no longer desired her in any way at all. I now considered her nothing but a rival, a soul who had always refused to be in tune with mine. An enemy, in fact. As if she were aware of how I now viewed her, Charlotte rallied her troops, drawn from amongst our close friends.

  ‘Show them your portrait!’ she would cry in the living room over the aperitifs, or over dinner.

  Always followed by, ‘Pierre-François thinks the painting looks like him …’

  One morning, I took my portrait to my office. After half an hour spent looking for a hammer, a nail and a pair of pliers, I yanked out the hook that for ten years had held the old canvas-mounted advert for the French Line. I was just hanging my portrait up, whilst balancing on a shaky stool, when Chevrier pushed my door open. Sweating and red in the face, I turned towards him.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked innocently.

  I decided to put the French Line back in its place and return the pastel to the apartment.

  A few days later I got up in the middle of the night to try something that had occurred to me as I was about to fall asleep. What if the pastel only spoke to me? Perhaps it contained secret vibrations that acted like a screen reflecting the gaze of the person looking at it.

  I laid the painting flat on the parquet floor of the study. On all fours in my pyjamas, I began to try to make a pendulum turn above the painting. Would it turn clockwise or anti-clockwise? I could not remember the basics of how pendulums worked. I looked up. Charlotte was staring at me in silence from the door.

  ‘Try using a table,’ she said evenly, before going back to bed.

  Perhaps turning to the occult was not such a ridiculous idea. I began to search through a large tome I had bought at university: a late-nineteenth-century edition, which nevertheless reproduced very precisely the recipes and magical preparations used by the witches and wizards of our regions. The chapter devoted to potions for ‘clairvoyance’ particularly caught my eye. It set out all the mixtures that could be concocted to open someone’s eyes to whatever it was their brain refused to accept. It was exactly what I needed.

  ‘The blood of a bat, an apple picked by a young virgin, powder of rat’s claw, the feather of an owl. Crush the ingredients and leave them to macerate in mead for seven days and seven nights before serving.’

  As I would be unlikely to find these little-used products in my local Monoprix, and it would also be awkward to ask my greengrocer about his sex life, I fell back on butterfly lemonade with unicorn powder, a little easier to make. A unicorn’s horn was just, in fact, a narwhal’s tusk, and I had one in my study. The thirteen butterflies mentioned could easily be obtained from my collection. It seemed to me that it would be quite easy to prepare the concoction and I was proposing to trick Charlotte and the next visitors to the apartment into drinking it, when I noticed a little stipulation: the butterflies had to be alive before going into the pot. City fauna being extremely limited, hunting down thirteen butterflies, even over several years, would be all but impossible.

  In the end I gave up on these gastronomic experiments and the possibility of convincing my circle.

  ‘Go and get your picture, Pierre-François.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My collections are my affair and I’m not sharing them,’ I replied tartly that evening, gulping down my orange juice.

  Our guests and my wife watched me in silence until one of them ventured timidly, ‘And how is work? What case are you on at the moment?’

  I embarked on an account of Durit BN-657 which held absolutely no interest for me. Now all my attention was focused on coats of arms. I spent my evenings on the internet poring over the hundreds of pages devoted to heraldry. I was investigating myself and I went at it with all the determination of a solitary navigator in the midst of a storm.

  The coat of arms which graces my amazing portrait had turned into a full-blown obsession. It was the key to unmasking the figure in the picture, almost a sample of the man’s DNA. On the left side of the shield, a black cat stood on its hind legs facing a medieval sword that was pointing upwards; on the right was a kind of carrot in human form. The cat and the sword were on a white background, the vegetable on black. The longer I looked at it, the more the cat seemed to be performing a magic trick; the two clawed paws it was holding out seemed to be exerting some untold power over the sword, lifting it off the ground by willpower alone. That evening, while comparing the coat of arms to a roughly similar design found among the 457 pages of results for ‘family crests of France’ online, I heard Charlotte’s voice from the dining room. Over the past few days, I had noticed a slight shrillness creeping into my darling wife’s voice.

  Admittedly I had taken to spending entire evenings lying on the sofa flicking through page after page of dictionaries and documents discovered on the internet. When Charlotte entered the room, I didn’t look up from my reading. All I saw were her legs: disapproval in every step, exasperation in the ankles.

  ‘Din-ner is rea-dy!’ she shouted for the third time.

  From the next room, I thought I heard the crystal chandelier – picked up at a flea market one summer afternoon five years earlier – tinkle slightly, probably on account of my wife’s voice. I pushed my wireless mouse away scornfully and followed her into the dining room, as apparently nothing mattered more at that moment than eating avocado vinaigrette.

  ‘How’s your research coming along?’ she asked, all sweetness and light.

  ‘Badly. I’ve hit a wall,’ I grumbled.

  ‘We’ll never know who it is,’ she said, taking a bite of avocado.

  ‘We will, I swear we will!’ I replied a little overdramatically, which made Charlotte giggle.

  As her high-pitched laughter rose towards the ceiling, I gave the chandelier a glance.

  Like the oil in my avocado, which sat on the surface of the heavy vinaigrette, it was all stubbornly refusing to come together. This was what I was so desperately searching for, for everything to blend and produce some kind of alchemy that would alter matter, even life itself. For the past three weeks, I had been calling upon every neuron I possessed, a good hundred billion of them, to try to put a name to this mysterious coat of arms.

  ‘Eat your avocado.’

  I made the mistake of sighing and pulling a face. Like a mongoose, Charlotte immediately seized upon my expression and the few decilitres of air that had just been expelled from my lungs.

  ‘You don’t like it? Is that it?’ she challenged me.

  ‘Yes, I do, it’s very nice …’ I said, scrambling to save myself. ‘It’s lovely, and the presentation, the way you’ve arranged the slices of lemon and pepper, is really … exquisite.’

  ‘Exquisite,’ s
he muttered poisonously, as if I had just insulted her.

  She put down her fork and looked me straight in the eye. The anger she had been trying so hard to contain suddenly burst out.

  ‘I’m not hungry and I’ve had enough!’ she shouted. ‘You can eat by yourself, Pierre-François Chaumont!’

  This time there was no need to check my crystal chandelier to appreciate just how far the pitch had risen. I was about to trot out a few soothing words, the way men do (‘Oh come on, darling’), but it was too late. The bedroom door was already being slammed shut, opening again seconds later with a shout of ‘You get the quail out!’

  The door banged shut once more and the apartment was quiet again, with just a slight hum coming from the computer hard drive.

  A few moments later, I took four perfectly cooked quail out of the oven. The birds still had their heads intact. As they lay in profile in the earthenware dish, I began to examine them, intrigued. Four quail lying side by side, not quite perfectly aligned, beaks turned westward. Was there a coat of arms depicting four quail?

  It must have been the quail or possibly the delicious burgundy. I wanted to make love in spite of our quarrel at dinner. In fact, was that not the best way for a couple to make up? An argument could produce some excited anticipation, and so I approached the bed quietly in the dark. I wanted to make love to her but most of all I wanted to rediscover the young girl I had fallen for at university.

  Where had that Charlotte gone? The girl with long hair who used to wear a headscarf tied round her head in summer. The girl who organised cheap holidays for our little group of university friends to far-flung places: Afghanistan, Jordan, Yemen, the Sahara. That time was long past; everyone had married, everyone had children. The time for friendships and for taking off on trips had gone for ever. Charlotte had cut her hair. She was no longer the free, enthusiastic woman I had married; and yet that was the person I wanted to find again for a moment.