by Colm Toibin
“What will we do with Carlos?” she asked him. He made his way past her and out to the jeep. He lay down in the back with his head on the cushion and closed his eyes.
AUTUMN
She chopped up the boiled egg on a saucer for Isona. The child sat at the table in her nightdress and took a cup of milk in her hands. It was morning. Miguel was standing at the window with his back to her. “The snow is coming back. It won’t be long.” She spoke in English. “Qué dius?” he said. He turned and looked at her suspiciously.
She repeated her words in Catalan. He glanced back at the window and then at her. He didn’t speak but turned to the sink and began to stack the dirty dishes neatly. He filled the saucepan with water and put it on the gas. She went and stood at the front door.
It was as though a fire had scorched the valley. Everything was coloured shades of red, or gold, or brown, or rust. She left the child with Miguel, and walked down the road to Tirvia with some paints and paper. She kept her eyes on the valley and watched the way each colour and hint of a colour glittered as it caught the sun. She went back to the house for two chairs—one to sit on, one for the palette and paint.
It was easy to paint. Easier than anything else she could have done. The wood was ready for the winter and there were still a few weeks before the snow. There was nothing else to do except paint.
She needed ten colours: ten shades of rust, red, gold, yellow. And out of each shade she needed to make ten more. Each stroke of the brush had to carry a different colour, each stroke had to be a different size, with a different texture.
All morning the sense of decay impinged as though it were a colour. The paper was good to work on; it was easy to gauge the effect that the paint would have against the white. Also, the paper absorbed nothing, every mark she made stood out and she could test each new shade. But it wasn’t enough; she wanted to work on a bigger scale on canvas. She would have to ask Miguel to stretch the canvas for her.
Miguel spent all day with Isona, going to sleep with her in the afternoons, taking her into the wood on his shoulders. When Isona fell or cried, it was Miguel she wanted; or when she woke in the night. She was getting used to being with her father.
Katherine went back to the house and searched in the store until she found some large pieces of wood, a spade and a mallet. She took them back to the hillside and tried to force stakes into the ground to use as an easel. When she discovered that the ground was too hard she went back to the house.
In the kitchen she poured a glass of wine and brought it out on to the balcony. She lit a cigarette and sat down to watch the valley as the sharp light of the afternoon began to fade. She would need the biggest canvas she had ever used for the painting she had in mind. She would have two weeks at least before the snow. She stood up and looked at the scene again before going down to Lidia to collect the milk.
As usual, as every afternoon, Lidia’s questions in the cow shed were about Isona and Miguel and were directed at establishing why Katherine did not look after her own daughter.
“Your husband isn’t well,” Lidia said to her.
Lidia looked at her carefully from the side of her eyes as she said it, as though it were a threat or an urgent request. She repeated it: “No está bien tu marido.” Lidia gave her a bucket of milk and fumbled around the shed for a while before she gave her the change. “Está muy mal.” She said it a few more times.
As Katherine turned to go back towards the house she found Lidia’s mother standing in the shadows. The old woman was talking but Katherine could not understand her.
Isona was playing on her own in the garden. Katherine picked her up and took her into the house. Miguel was in the kitchen. Katherine put Isona down. There was hot water on the gas; she washed out the jug and poured in the milk from the bucket.
She asked Miguel to take the bucket back to Lidia. He was taking off Isona’s shoes and he looked up. She left the bucket on the table. “Down in the cow shed they say you’re not well,” she said to him in Catalan. “I’m fed up listening to them.”
He didn’t reply.
She asked him to stretch and treat a big canvas for her. Later, he said, later, he would do it later. They still had to eat and put the child to bed. Miguel seemed downhearted, dispirited. His depression had not lifted for weeks.
* * *
When he had put Isona to bed he took the lantern down to the store. He asked Katherine what size she wanted the canvas. Big, she said, big. Maybe three metres long and two wide. He went down to the floor below where the wood was kept and he came up with several long planks. All day she had watched the valley as though it were a painting and now she sat and watched him work by the weak light of the lantern in the fusty, untidy room with its dirty uneven floorboards. That, too, could be a painting. She was aware that she had begun to observe each thing as though it were a scene, as though she needed to fix it in her memory, as if she might never get a chance to see it again. He was still thin, even thinner than almost ten years ago when she had first met him. His hair was still thick and dark. He loved making things, using his hands. He worked quickly, with extraordinary dexterity.
She went over to some painted canvases resting against a wall. She found a number of small canvases packed in against one another. With one hand she held the outer ones and with the other she picked out one of the paintings nearest the wall and took it over to the light.
It was a still life: a dead rabbit hanging upside down, with potatoes, carrots, peppers, garlic, tomatoes on a shelf. The background was dark and the light came from behind the painter. She liked the painting and wondered why she had never seen it before.
Miguel was nailing two planks together. She showed him the still life and asked whose it was. He continued working for a time and ignored her question, then he stood up and walked towards her. He took it up and held it against the light. “It’s mine,” he said. “When I used to be a painter.” Miguel put the painting back exactly where it had been against the wall.
* * *
In the bedroom she closed the shutters of the window. She took off her clothes and stood there in the candlelight looking at herself in the mirror: a naked woman in a dim candlelit room; a naked woman of more than forty. In the background a large double bed with blankets pulled back as though waiting for someone to get in. An old tin candlestick with the stub of a candle.
She put her arms into the white nightgown first and then pulled it over her head. He always slept naked. Sometimes he wore a scarf, a short silk scarf around his neck to save himself from sore throats. Less and less he kissed her mouth. His hands became the conductor between his desire and hers. His hands moved over her incessantly. He kept his head buried in the pillow behind her shoulder and he put his hands everywhere he wanted. He used his hands to make his penis hard. And when that was ready he tested her for wetness with his finger and then he pushed his penis inside and began to move it in and out.
Sometimes he would get her legs and put them around his back. Sometimes he would move his penis in a sort of circular motion. Always he wanted to be finished quickly and, being an expert in all things physical, in lighting fires, chopping wood, stretching canvas, he knew how to reach orgasm quickly. He no longer cared whether she did or not.
In the morning she went down to the hillside where she had tried to stake an easel. She took only a pencil and a sketch pad. Miguel had left Isona with Fuster’s wife in the village and was busy stretching her canvas. He told her he would put the stakes in the ground for her.
She took a section of the landscape which included Tirvia, the valley, the distant mountains and the sky, and marked it out on the paper. She divided it into twelve sections and tried to work out what she wanted to do.
By afternoon Miguel had the canvas ready and he carried it down. Isona followed him, intrigued by the canvas and the stakes. Miguel was distant with Katherine but seemed concerned that she approved of the work he had done. She held Isona’s hand as Miguel hammered the stakes into the ground.
“Your mama’s going to do a painting,” she said. Isona smiled at her first and then laughed. “El Papa em porta al bosc,” she said. “Which wood?” Katherine asked in English. “Cap àlla,” she pointed. “And what are you going to do in the wood?” Katherine asked her. “El Papa em conta histories,” the child said. “Which stories?” Katherine asked. “La historia del llop que viu al bosc.” Miguel heard and turned around and growled. It was a game. Katherine watched him with relief. Maybe he was getting better. His front teeth, all except one, were missing. Isona ran to her mother as though she were afraid and when Katherine took her up in her arms she laughed.
When they had left she divided the canvas as she had the paper. She sat for a while and observed the valley and the range of colours in the valley. She noticed how exact each colour was. She narrowed her eyes so as not to focus them on anything.
She began at the top working at first with the pencil on paper to sketch what she planned to paint. She waited until four in the afternoon until the glare had gone from the sun before she began to paint. She had plotted only the lines and the direction of the brush strokes, but not the colours. She stood on the chair and began the colours, sometimes letting the drips run and other times wiping them away.
She was absorbed in the paint when she heard Lidia calling her name. She was tired of Lidia. Lidia was running towards her but she decided to keep painting and ignore her, to let her know that she was not concerned about her shouting. She grew louder, however. “It’s Miguel,” she shouted in Spanish. “He’s in the kitchen. He’s burning things. And the child is crying.”
Katherine got down from the chair and walked slowly towards the house.
“Gracias, Lidia,” she said, turning slowly around and making sure that the sarcasm in her voice was clear.
The child was indeed crying. She could hear the child crying. She walked quickly into the kitchen which was full of smoke, some of it thick and black. Pieces of canvas had fallen from the grate and were burning on the floor. Isona was hysterical.
Miguel had smashed the glass on some of the paintings and torn the canvases and broken the wood of the frames. Then he had thrown everything into the fire. He seemed not to notice her as she entered the room.
Since there was nothing she could do to stop him she took Isona sobbing in her arms and went out of the room, leaving him to destroy what was left to destroy.
TIRVIA
During the time she worked on these paintings she left the child with Fuster’s wife in the morning before she and Miguel carried the canvas down and rested it on the staked easel.
Miguel looked after Isona in the afternoon. By the time it was important, by the time the dead light of late afternoon appeared, Katherine was alone there working, trying to follow the plans she had made for the paint.
Michael Graves wrote as she knew he would, and said he would come as she had asked. She said nothing to Miguel before she drove down to meet Michael Graves from the bus. Now she would have to start rationalising, excusing, explaining. Now that she had asked him to come she would have to talk to him and listen to him.
Before the bus arrived she bought some bread and flour and fruit. She put these in the jeep. The bus was always late, and she sat in the bar drinking coffee.
There were two policemen in the bar. She had learned not to look at them or speak to them. She sat with her back to them.
* * *
When the bus arrived she went out and searched for Michael Graves and when she saw him she was surprised how pleased she was to see him. They went into the bar and she hugged him, ignoring the policemen once more.
“How is he? Is there something wrong?” Michael Graves asked her.
“I think he is very bad. I want you to tell me how bad he is.”
They set off in silence. After the first curve on the dirt track they began to drive along the rim of the valley. Suddenly, the autumn colours filled up all the landscape in front of them. Down the ridge and along the valley basin for miles were the yellows, browns, golds of decay.
“I wish I knew I could spend the rest of my life here,” she said.
“Why can’t you?” he asked.
“I always feel that I have just borrowed it for a few years. I watch it all the time because I will need to remember it. Maybe that’s why I’m painting it.”
“What’s wrong with Miguel?” he asked.
“If I tell you what I think is wrong with him and then tell you that I leave him on his own with Isona every day, you will think there is something wrong with me and not with him. Actually, I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
She stopped the jeep when they came to the canvas which she had left resting against the stakes. It was almost finished and the unfinished sections appeared deliberate.
The painting looked as though it had been drowned in a faded gold. The precise delineations of the valley had been carefully, almost academically included, but what caught the eye was the colour and then the detail within the colour.
“It’s only half done. I’ve finished three others. I think this is the best,” she said.
“It’s very strong,” he said.
“You don’t like it?” she asked.
“Like it? It’s not the sort of thing I would do, but I think it’s very good,” he said.
He sat down on the rug beside her and kissed her neck.
“I was glad when you wrote,” he said.
She wasn’t paying attention. Her eye had fixed on a point across the valley.
“There! Can you see? Look!” she tried to make him see.
“Can you not see?” she said. “It’s them.”
“What’s wrong?” Michael Graves asked her. “I can’t see anything wrong.”
“Can you not see them?” she asked.
“I can see someone’s there, but I can’t see anything wrong.”
“Can’t you see that Miguel has Isona with him?”
“Katherine, what’s wrong? What’s the problem. Please tell me what’s wrong.”
She did not answer for a while. She stood watching and then went back to the rug and sat down.
“I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes.
“I know you don’t understand. Since Carlos Puig died, since the day we brought him up here in a coffin, in the back of the jeep and buried him across there in Alendo—something I thought I would never have to go through in my life—I’ve been afraid. Since that time things have just fallen apart. You don’t know what it’s been like. We opened the coffin in the house. I don’t know why we did that. We had seen the body already, in the hospital. Miguel held Carlos’s hands until we shut the coffin again and brought him over to Alendo in the jeep.”
“Maybe we should go on to the house,” he said.
“We’ll drive up and come back down for the painting. I don’t want it out all night,” she said.
“Does Miguel know I’m here?” he asked.
“No.”
“Didn’t you tell him I was coming?”
Katherine started the jeep before she spoke: “I know you are going to think that there is more wrong with me than there is with Miguel. I want to assure you that you would be very wrong to think that.”
“Are you going to leave?” he asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“Why not take Isona down to Barcelona for a few days just to let things settle?”
“Nothing will settle.”
“Are you having problems with Miguel?”
“Do you know how long it is since I have talked to him?”
“Tell me.”
“It’s several months.”
“Then leave for a while. It’s so isolated here it would drive anyone out of their minds. Come down.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you so worried about Isona being with Miguel?”
“I think he has fixed on her in some way. I can’t talk about this without sounding ludicrous.”
* * *
After dinner Miguel drank a large glass of brandy in one swill, slammed his two hands on the table, stood up and took the child in his arms. Katherine asked him where he was going. He told her he was going to leave the child with Fuster’s wife so that they could go to the bar in Tirvia. She asked Michael Graves if he wanted to go, but Miguel had already left before he could answer.
“Do you want to go?” Michael Graves asked her.
“Do you?”
“I’ll do anything, Katherine. He seems very well. Maybe it’s just a first impression and it’s wrong, but he seems very well.”
“Yes it is a first impression and it is wrong. On the other hand, maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe it’s me you should watch carefully.”
Miguel didn’t want her to take the jeep. He wanted them to walk the four kilometres to Tirvia. There was no moon and only at certain points of the road could the lights of a village be seen. Sometimes it was impossible to see ahead. She could sense that Michael Graves was afraid so she stayed close to him. He complained of the cold. She could feel that snow was on its way and it would only be a matter of days before winter would set in.
There was no bar in Tirvia, merely a house that served drink in the kitchen. There were a few local men there already drinking. They sat on a bench on the other side of the room and ordered hot brandy. Several of the men came over and shook their hands, remembering Michael Graves from a previous visit, when he had spent the night singing. “Canta molt bé l’irlandès,” one of them said. The men talked among themselves for a while, then one came back over and asked Michael Graves to sing. Michael told her to tell the man that he was too cold to sing but he would sing later. Katherine asked the man if he could sing and he said that years ago he used to sing but now he didn’t. Years ago, before the war.