Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  I stood up in victory and found Pascal writing what appeared to be a list with annotations. With his brows knitted together in concentration, he worked on it for an hour, using both sides of a second sheet, while I worked my way around the floor of the salle. Finally he sat back and let his arms flop to his sides, exhausted. He exhausted? What about me?

  “There. Today I shall tell you about Paul Cézanne.”

  “Maybe later.” I squeezed cloudy gray water out of a rag.

  “But it has to be now, while it’s in my mind.” The paper trembled in his hand. “Please, Lisette, sit down and listen.”

  “I can listen while I do this.”

  “You have to be still so I can think out my memories. All I am is my memories. You’ll learn that about yourself someday.”

  I surrendered, only too happy to sit for a spell. I just wished the settee were more comfortable.

  “I met Paul Cézanne in Julien Tanguy’s art supply shop. Julien was convinced that Cézanne would introduce something new in art. His shop was the only place in Paris exhibiting him. He told me that Cézanne needed cheering up because he doubted himself. At that, I recall Madame Tanguy saying something snide, like ‘With good reason.’ ”

  Pascal turned to look at the Cézanne still life. He was squinting, so I stood to take it off the wall and propped it on a chair closer to him. The painting left a rectangular outline of dirt on the wall where it had hung. In fact, the whole wall alongside the stairs that once had been whitewashed was now yellowish, stained by tobacco and woodsmoke. Pascal might have praised the color as pale yellow-ochre, but to me it was dingy and depressing. It was a disgrace to hang a beautiful painting on a grimy wall. I would have to clean the whole expanse. Since I was still standing, I dipped my rag in a fresh bucket of soapy water and raised it to the wall.

  Meanwhile, Pascal kept talking. “Cézanne came into the shop wearing a cape, and underneath it he was carrying this very painting. Take a minute to look at those pretty apples in that white compote dish, and the oranges spilling out of that tilted plate, and that one lone pear on the table.”

  When he said “one lone pear,” I stopped scrubbing, and in my mind’s eye I saw the single pear in the Madonna and Child painting in the chapel of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. It was just below the babe’s chubby toes, which looked like a row of corn. The golden skin of the pear made a lovely contrast with the Virgin’s deep blue cloak, and I thought how remarkable it was that a person’s memory could call forth such details from days gone by.

  Pascal looked up from his paper. “That blue patterned cloth is an indienne, made here in Provence with cotton grown here and indigo dyes. Everyone here has olive pots dipped in green glaze like that, made in Aubagne, east of Marseille. But it was the compotier, that shallow bowl on a pedestal, that brought tears to my eyes in Tanguy’s shop. Are you listening, Lisette?”

  “Yes,” I said, my mind still in the chapel. “So why did it make you weep?”

  “My mother had a compote just like that, which she had bought on a rare trip to Marseille. She was proud of it because it was more refined than the rustic terra-cotta vessels from Aubagne called terres vernissées, with only their upper portions glazed. In season, she filled it with fruit. When I was a boy, I knocked it off the table and it broke into pieces. She never got another one.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, my rag dripping water down my still upraised arm. “Tell me about meeting Cézanne.”

  “Ah, Cézanne. A saint of a painter.” He consulted his list to shift his memory back to what he had started telling me.

  “When Julien introduced us, Cézanne didn’t raise his head to look at me. He only said in a heavy Provençal accent, ‘I won’t offer my hand. I haven’t washed in a week,’ but when I answered, ‘Eh, bieng’ in an equally strong Provençal accent and extended my hand, he lifted his chin and gave me his.

  “Then, looking at the painting, Julien cried, ‘Magnifique.’

  “ ‘No, it is definitely not magnifique,’ madame interjected. ‘A pear can’t stand up at that angle. That’s ridiculous. And apples and oranges aren’t ripe at the same time. France doesn’t even grow oranges.’ She flung out her arm dismissively. ‘And they definitely can’t stay in place on that crazy, tipped plate.’

  “ ‘Ignore her,’ Julien said. ‘Leave the painting here for me to love until someone buys it.’

  “ ‘And you’ll hope no one will,’ says madame. ‘Meanwhile he won’t pay what he owes us.’

  “ ‘The apples, so smooth. I want to caress one,’ Julien said.

  “ ‘Non!’ declared Cézanne. ‘What do you think I want to hear—that it is real, that you want to hold it, take a bite out of it, or that it is beautiful because the passage of colors in it from green to yellow to red makes it unique in that pyramid of apples?’

  “I could not be silent. ‘That I want to take a bite,’ I blurted, ‘because it is real.’ But Cézanne shook his head.

  “ ‘Non. I paint to paint, not to depict. See with your eyes, man, not with your mind.’

  “ ‘What if I see with my memory?’ I say. ‘That painting means more to me than any apple. It means my mother and her compote that I broke. And it means Provence, the indienne, and the green terre vernissée. The colors of the apples and oranges mean Roussillon, where I come from. I used to mine those ochres.’ ”

  “ ‘Eh, bieng. Then you understand color. It remains to be seen whether you understand form.’

  “ ‘I want to buy it,’ I burst out.

  “ ‘Non. You are too quick. You have to study it until you forget about your mother and her compotier. See it as an ellipse. The foreground edge is straighter, and the background edge is more arched. Can you see that? It’s contrary to perspective vision, but that gives it character.’

  “ ‘You’re a fool, Paul,’ says madame. ‘Don’t give him a lesson. Sell it this instant so you can pay your debts.’

  “ ‘Let it hang here awhile, Julien, and you, monsieur, come in and look at it from time to time. I’ll come back in a month. If you have learned anything and still want it, then—’

  “ ‘I will want it, but I can only pay in frames, you understand. Do you need any frames?’

  “ ‘Frames? A painter always needs frames.’ ”

  Pascal straightened his shoulders as if that was all.

  “That’s a good story, Pascal,” I said.

  “I’m not finished.” He motioned to me to sit down.

  “In a minute.” I headed to the courtyard to get a ladder, wondering whether what he had told me was just a delusion of an old man, a real experience, or something in between.

  Irritated that he didn’t have my full attention, Pascal talked louder when I returned. “The next time I saw Paul Cézanne, I told him that his painting made me think that the apples and oranges knew each others’ positions, that they fit together comfortably, each tilted its own way, like boulders in the Calavon River when it’s dry, and that their colors were all friends—red streaks on the yellow apples, yellow streaks on green apples, the chartreuse of new spring leaves in our vineyards, and the orange of a Roussillon rock.

  “ ‘Don’t think of vineyards or rocks,’ he says. ‘See the parallel slanting brushstrokes. Notice how each piece of fruit displays its colors in visible steps.’

  “ ‘In streaks?’

  “ ‘Yes, if you want to call them streaks.’

  “That satisfied him, so he let me have it for eight large carved frames. Madame Tanguy sold me two bottles of gilt so the frames could look reasonably like the expensive ones with real gold leaf, only she charged me double because she made me pay for her instruction in how to apply it. In the end, everybody was happy except Julien, who pouted when I took the painting away. And that’s how it started, my second friendship with a painter.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Nice! Is that all you can say? That it’s nice? Just imagine, Lisette, what it was like to be in his presence! A man who painted to live, and lived to pain
t. They were the same to him. He thought only of painting, loved only painting. There was not a minute of the day that he did not respond to the world as a painter. He was obsessed, the poor man, and that separated him from normal life. He complained that he was never understood, yet he said that his progress was at least some consolation for being misunderstood by fools.”

  With that I went back to my scrubbing, knowing that I did not live to scrub. Or did I?

  Out of breath at the end of the day, I rehung the still life on the clean white wall. It looked all the more splendid. The colors were richer. The highlights sparkled. Pascal stood up in acknowledgment of what I had done and turned in a circle, mournfully surveying the other stained walls. His arm waved vaguely to them.

  “Yes, I will. But not today.”

  I carried the buckets outside. The instant I flung the dirty water over the cliff, a thought burst cleanly into my mind. This I could do for Monsieur Laforgue someday. I could wash the walls of his gallery. She-devil would be too haughty to do it. I could even wash walls for other galleries. Their paintings would look more brilliant, and I would be the cause of it, just like a framer sets off paintings. I could have gallery clients across Paris! Even the Louvre. And the Louvre had kilometers of walls. Floors, too. I could study the paintings as I cleaned. I clanked the wash buckets together in ecstasy.

  I would write to Maxime. I would write to Monsieur Laforgue. I would write to the Louvre!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AN EARFUL FROM CÉZANNE

  1937, 1897

  ANDRÉ HAD COME HOME FROM AVIGNON WITH A SUPPLY of hardwood and an order for two frames from an antiquarian shop selling Roman maps of Provence. He started working immediately. Pascal spent the morning writing at his little desk. From time to time, he pressed his fist against his forehead as if to squeeze out a memory. Their absorption in their work gave me time to write to the Louvre.

  I had to think out carefully what I would say—that I wanted to serve the Louvre by cleaning walls and floors to make the paintings even more beautiful, that I wanted to dust the frames and the sculptures, that I didn’t care how humble the work would be, that I just wanted to be surrounded by art. It seemed to me that Pascal was not dying and we could return to Paris soon, so I wrote that I couldn’t begin quite yet but that I would come to inquire the very day I returned to Paris.

  My letter probably sounded naïve, but it was from my heart. Before I could change my mind, I went to the post office and mailed it. If the Louvre rejected me, I would write to Monsieur Laforgue myself. When he saw how hard I worked, he would advance me above stiff-necked Madame Snob. Someday.

  BACK HOME IN THE courtyard, I watched André practice drawing acanthus leaves on the plywood board he had set across two sawhorses.

  “Pascal told me why he sent you that desperate letter. It was so he could tell us everything about the painters he knew while he can still remember them,” I said.

  “No. So he could tell you. He has already told me. Let him talk. He’s an old man.”

  “Oh, I do. His stories fascinate me.”

  André fell silent as he scribbled out some measurements and determined how many leaves there would be on each side.

  “Be patient with him. His love for those paintings runs deep. They’ve been his life. The paintings, and me, and now you too. It’s hard to let your life dissolve and your love amount to nothing. He wants it to live on, to show that he mattered, that Roussillon mattered, and still matters.”

  “I understand that now.”

  He lodged his pencil behind his ear. “Those paintings will be ours someday. It would behoove you to learn about them.”

  “I want to. And other paintings too.”

  I knew enough not to distract him while he measured and positioned the molding in his miter box. Carefully, he inserted his saw and drew it back, establishing the cut.

  When the piece was released, I said, “I wrote a letter to the Louvre today.”

  He gave me a look of complete perplexity.

  “You see how Pascal’s still life looks so good now that I’ve washed the wall behind it? I’m going to wash all the walls, so all his paintings will shine. I want to do that in the Louvre.” I knew that the next thing I would say would sound silly, but I had to tell him anyway. “So I wrote a letter asking for a job washing walls.”

  “Lisette! You mean you’re going to leave Pascal and me and go off on some fool’s errand to be a washerwoman?”

  “Not now. Someday, when we’re living in Paris again.”

  “Oh, my naïve darling.” He set down the piece of molding and put his arms around me.

  “Why do you think Pascal is so intent on telling me his experiences with painters?” I responded. “It’s because being a participant in art meant so much to him. I want that just as much.”

  “But not as a scrubwoman!”

  “How else? I can’t paint. I can’t go to university. I have no qualifications, no money. But what I can do is to be a frame duster or a washer of walls in the Louvre.”

  “Don’t think so lowly of yourself. A gallery assistant, someday. Maybe not at Galerie Laforgue. But no, oh, no. Tear up the letter. Or give it to me. Let me burn it.” He held the back of my head and kissed my forehead. “We’ve got to be patient, Lise. We’ll help each other be patient.”

  “I already mailed it,” I said against his chest.

  He grasped my shoulders and pushed me back to look at my face. “Truly?”

  I nodded.

  “Go back and get it. Tell the young woman in the post office that it was a mistake.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “I want to read what my humble darling wrote. Then I’ll burn it. Go now.”

  I did leave, dutifully, but I lingered in the bakery, chatting with Odette. She knew everything about everyone, and she shared recipes with every housewife in town, concocted herbal remedies, even helped to deliver babies. I liked her easy manner, the way she mothered the whole village.

  Between Odette and her daughter, Sandrine, the post office clerk, nothing slipped by unnoticed. Sandrine announced with good cheer, “The poste was just picked up, and your letter is on its way. My, my,” she said, her hand patting her heart. “To think you have important business with the Louvre!” She handed me a letter. “The driver left this for you.”

  It was from Maxime. I hurried home to read it aloud to André. Maybe Monsieur Laforgue had fired that woman.

  19 SEPTEMBER 1937

  Dear André and Lisette,

  Mother and I were finally able to get tickets to the Exposition Universelle. We stood in a crowd from all nations staring at the pompous, propagandistic architecture and sculpture of dictatorships—Germany and the Soviet Union facing each other with a snarl in stone. Seeing it, Maman held my arm and shuddered.

  Thirty works by Picasso were exhibited in the Spanish pavilion. They made me think your grandfather’s study of women’s faces might be his. Guard it well. It may be worth a fortune someday. Picasso’s most monumental and disturbing work was the central mural, Guernica, a Cubist jumble of anguished bodies in tortured positions and a screaming horse, the whole chaotic scene commemorating the Basque town destroyed by German bombers in April. The painting was shortsightedly dismissed by the press as the dream of a madman. As for me, I can’t get it out of my mind.

  We both felt more comfortable in the Finnish pavilion, surrounded by trees and made entirely of wood, with undulating ceilings and curved walls. You would have appreciated the craftsmanship, André. When night descended, the Eiffel Tower and the banks of the Seine were lit gorgeously, as though strung with diamonds. I wish you could have seen that.

  I miss you both and want you back in Paris soon.

  Your best friend,

  Maxime

  The letter took me from the depths of foreboding to a vision of glorious splendor.

  “No word about Monsieur Laforgue,” I said.

  THE NEXT DAY WHILE ANDRÉ was working in the courtyard, I asked Pascal to tell me more about P
aul Cézanne. That pleased him, and he took out his pages.

  “I haven’t told you about visiting him in his hometown, Aix-en-Provence, south of here. Julien and I hadn’t seen him since I had acquired that landscape of his, so I went there to set Julien’s mind at rest. I asked after him in galleries, in art supply stores, in cafés along cours Mirabeau, the shady main avenue lined with mansions. You must get André to take you there.”

  “He’ll tell me he has to work. You tell him.”

  “I stopped to watch a boules game and asked the players if they knew him. It was baffling. No one had heard of him—one of the finest painters in all of France. Had he no friends in his own town?

  “Finally, I went to the Hôtel de Ville. A clerk of town records gave me an address, and there I saw him trudging home, hunch-shouldered under a slouch hat, looking like a tramp. He was carrying a game bag with the neck of a green bottle poking out and his oversized paint box, with an easel and a painting strapped to his back. His face was sunburnt and his beard was smeared with paint. He recognized me, Lisette. Imagine that.”

  Pascal picked out his pages from the desk. “This isn’t exact. It’s just what I remember. I told him I had come to ask if he needed any more frames, but mostly to see his paintings.

  “ ‘My paintings? Humph. I am only a beginner,’ he muttered.

  “I told him not to degrade himself, that I had gone to his big exhibition three times, and that I wanted to see his paintings so I could remember them.

  “ ‘It is no great thing to remember paintings,’ he said. ‘Look at nature instead. It’s fresh every day. Think of its author. You do not get that in a painting. But we try. We try. Look over there, at the space between that tree and us. The air. The atmosphere. You can feel it, smell it, even taste it. But how the devil do you paint atmosphere? It’s a mixture of air and water, light and shade, constantly changing. I have to chase it.’