Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  “You mean there’s nothing holding up the arches?”

  “Just geometry. It’s quite safe, and our accuracy made it beautiful. Six generations of miners have worked here. Ochres from this mine have been sent all over the world.”

  We entered into the cool air of one of the entrances and heard the echo of pigeons warbling and trilling. As we walked the downward slope, it became darker, so we turned on our battery torches. Instantly a flock of bats flew out at us. I screamed and ducked.

  “Oh,” Maurice laughed. “I forgot to warn you.”

  “Merci bien, monsieur le chevalier. Are there any other creatures in here?”

  “Only a fire-breathing dragon, but we tamed him. All the same, stay close behind me.”

  Where I shined my torch, the walls were what Maurice called deep cadmium yellow and cadmium orange, but farther into the mine, some veins were the color of gold, and other bands were creamy white or maroon. It was all eerily strange and wondrous. I picked up loose rocks, wanting to show Maxime the colors, until I could hold no more.

  Peering ahead, I could see the ribs of the arches diminishing in size the way they did in the nave of Notre Dame. In Paris, I knew them to be all the same height, so I assumed these must be also, although the farther ones did appear shorter. Here was a cathedral, excavated for the extraction of ores that made the beautiful paintings of the world. To be in the earth instead of on it thrilled me.

  “Do you think any other woman in Roussillon has ever been here, inside the earth?”

  “No. No woman would want to.”

  No other woman was as motivated as I was.

  Sometimes the ground dipped downhill sharply and I lunged forward, which brought my heart into my throat. The sound of water dripping made me uneasy, and some areas were muddy and slippery. Pillars of stone diminished in girth as I looked up, and white stalactites, wet and glistening, diminished in thickness as I followed them down with my eyes. We found a lake of sulfurous-smelling liquid and had to pick our way along its slick edge.

  Every so often, a perpendicular gallery stretched to the right and left, and from these, other galleries had been opened parallel to the main gallery. I soon lost all sense of where I was. We walked each side gallery its three hundred meters until we reached the blunt, stepped ends, like giants’ stairways of blocks, each step about a meter high. Then, methodically, we returned to the main gallery, crossed it, walked the opposite gallery to its end, and came back.

  Occasionally at the crossing of galleries, niches carved into the walls held eroded carvings of Sainte Barbara, which made the space seem even more like a church. In every instance, we looked behind her and removed loose rocks, but we found nothing.

  Maurice aimed his light on the map he had drawn and said, “This is as far as I pickaxed, but I see they have penetrated much more. I’d like to keep looking, if you don’t mind.”

  By this time I was tired and cold, but I wanted to go on. Maurice noticed me shivering and gave me his jacket.

  “You are a true chevalier after all, not just on the roads but under the roads.”

  The jacket had pockets, so I could load my pieces of ore into them and pick up more.

  He turned the map over and drew as we proceeded.

  “How far have we gone?”

  “Each cross gallery is three hundred meters apart.”

  “How deep do you think we are now?”

  “Not very deep.”

  The statues of Sainte Barbara were in better condition as we proceeded through the more recently excavated galleries. At the end of one of them, Maurice shined his light on the top platform, probably eight meters above us, as he had been doing at each gallery’s termination. Rocks had been placed side by side to form a neat little wall. The end of no other gallery had such a careful arrangement.

  “What is that for?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  He huffed and puffed as he hoisted himself up backward to sit on each step until he got to the top step and could remove the row of rocks.

  “Oh! Lisette!” He lifted out a roll of something. “This is either the engineer’s map—”

  “Or a painting!”

  He brought it down carefully, and, taking great care, we unrolled it.

  “The still life!” I shouted.

  Still life still life still life echoed through the gallery.

  “Who would have thought to put it here?” he said, more baffled than inquiring. He rolled it loosely, just as it had been. “The others may be here too. I’ll come again another time. This is enough for today.”

  “No! We found one here. The others may be near. We’ve got to keep going.”

  We searched futilely for what seemed like hours, exhausting the tributaries of the main gallery. I was freezing, and Maurice was breathing hard.

  He accompanied me home in order to see Maxime’s reaction. I called his name just inside the door. No answer. I rushed upstairs. His bed was mussed but empty. Maurice checked in the courtyard. A note lay on the dining table: Do not worry. I am with Louise.

  We hurried back downhill the distance of five houses and found him calmly spooning minestra, Louise’s thick Corsican bean and vegetable soup, into his mouth.

  “Look!”

  Maurice unrolled the painting.

  “Cézanne!” I shouted.

  “Cézanne,” Maxime affirmed with a nod and a broad smile.

  Louise hugged me.

  Tumbling over my words, I described the interior of the mine, and Maurice described the hiding place.

  I laid down the ore samples. “Look at these! Ochres of all hues, in stone and on the fruit in the painting.”

  Maurice poured pastis for us, and we congratulated ourselves.

  “This was not put there by André,” Maxime said, a dispirited declaration. “He would have known not to roll the painting. This was rolled painted side inward, which could make the paint buckle. If it had to be rolled at all, he would have rolled the painted side out. Anyone who works with paintings knows that.”

  That information pointed to a thief.

  AT HOME, MAXIME TOOK great care in stretching and cleaning the canvas, and I found the frame that fit it.

  “I want it hanging over André’s cabinet, where it was before. I want all of them where they were before.”

  “Then where do you want your Chagall?”

  “For now, here, between these two windows.”

  I tacked it there while Maxime hung the still life over André’s cabinet, and then I arranged the ochre rocks on top of the cabinet.

  At first, we were quiet, just taking in Cézanne’s painting. On its left was a green glazed olive jar of the sort that was in my kitchen and Louise’s, and just to the right of the jar, nearly touching it, a plump blue-gray ginger jar encased by willow netting. Farther to the right was a white porcelain compote dish containing apples. Tilted precariously in the foreground on a bunched-up white tablecloth, a small white plate spilled over with oranges. And one yellow pear stood by itself.

  “All the colors of Roussillon are swirled onto that fruit,” I said. “And the blue cloth with shadings of darker blue is what I imagine the Mediterranean Sea to be like. I love it.” The painting blurred in my adoring wet vision. “There were days during the war when I thought I would never be reunited with it.”

  Maxime’s arm stole around my shoulders. “Monsieur Laforgue told me a legend that Cézanne, with typical Provençal impetuousness, boasted, ‘I will astonish Paris with an apple.’ ”

  “He is astonishing us with five apples.”

  “You had better value each of them separately. He probably worked on each one for days, meditating over it until he discovered its individuality in order to create its shape on the flat canvas.”

  “By subtle hue changes,” I added, showing off.

  Maxime chuckled. “I always knew you were smart.”

  I lifted my shoulders and grinned.

  “Cézanne’s conscience was so pure that he n
ever depended upon a prior painting of an apple—his or someone else’s. To him, each apple had a unique character—”

  “Like people,” I blurted.

  “True, my unique darling. Cézanne discovered each apple’s uniqueness little by little, loving each discovery.” He smiled at me, and I knew he meant more than apples. “Then, with effort, he could quiet his passion for each apple and put it to rest in the painted apple forever. He was as devoted to every object he painted as a saint is to his God.”

  “Did he use five apples for any particular reason?”

  “Look at them—four in the dish, and one resting on the four. Squint until your eye straightens the curves and obliterates details. What is its form?”

  “A pyramid.”

  “Good. That’s why he used five. He simplified shapes by seeing his subjects in geometric forms. Cones and spheres here. What about that pear?”

  I puzzled over that until he suggested, “A small tipped cone on top of a sphere. Why do you think he painted only one pear?”

  “For its uniqueness!”

  “And because there is a dynamic principle in playing a lot against a little.”

  I saw that the five apples and three oranges contrasted in importance and weight to the single pear, but what moved me more was the memory of the weight and importance of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child in contrast to that single pear in front of them in the painting at the orphanage.

  “Would you still call this Impressionism? It’s not feathery like Pissarro’s work.”

  “We call it Postimpressionism now. It stems from Impressionism, in that the white cloth takes on the colors surrounding it. So does the blue-gray of the jar and the yellow-ochre streak on that apple. But Cézanne didn’t let the principles of Impressionism restrict him—in this case, perspective. See how the plate is tipped? It can’t be resting on that fluffed-up cloth, yet he positioned it that way intentionally to give us a better view of the oranges. He meant to violate the rules of perspective and gravity. That’s his own primitivism, something he didn’t borrow from any school or movement. He worked it out himself over a long period of time.”

  Maxime stepped closer to the painting, and I followed. The slow, curving gestures of his hand traced the repeating roundness of the plate, the ginger jar, the apples and oranges. I found myself looking at his hand, which would be here for only a matter of days, instead of at the painted plate and jar, which would be with me forever. I noticed that the curve of the scar on his hand was parallel to the curve of the edge of the plate. It almost made me weep. That curve must have been cut the instant the grenade exploded, the moment we lost our André. It traced an arc that bound us together.

  As if to himself, Maxime murmured, “We’re looking at the work of a genius.”

  That brought my mind back to the painting, and I said, “I see now that the pear is more yellow on the side of the oranges and greener where the blue cloth is behind it. The colors move into one another with such minute gradations that you can’t tell where green stops and yellow begins.”

  “So natural, as if every dash of color were aware of all the other dashes of color, shoulder to shoulder, like friends in an army.”

  I felt a scowl pinch my forehead.

  “It’s not a negative thing, Lisette. A color comes into its own in response to another color, just like soldiers do, like friends, like lovers. Our proximity to each other brings about our wholeness.”

  He turned to me with an uncomplicated smile that melted my doubt about his well-being. He was winning his victory.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  MARZIPAN

  1946

  AFTER TWO MORE DAYS OF SEARCHING IN THE MINE WITHOUT success, we came to the conclusion that no more paintings were hidden there. Maxime suggested that we stop. I agreed. It wasn’t fair to him to make him stay home alone day after day just because I knew that if he came with us to the mine entrance, he would naturally follow us inside it.

  Instead, accompanied by Aimé Bonhomme, we searched Mayor Pinatel’s house. It was obvious that he and his wife had left in a hurry, abandoning so many lovely things. If the mayor had found the paintings when he’d emptied the woodpile, he must have taken them with him. Now they could be anywhere, lost forever. I wept on Maxime’s shoulder.

  “It’s not necessarily the end, chérie,” Maxime said when we came home. “It could have been that constable fellow who brought you wood, so be sure you don’t antagonize him. And don’t ask him directly. If indeed he was an opportunist and stumbled upon the paintings and was going to use them to advance his position with Vichy or the Germans, thinking that he might be found out might prompt him to burn them. We have to be cautious. We may even have to search his house.”

  “Oh, no, Max. That would be dangerous.”

  “How badly do you want the paintings? For the sake of France, if not for yourself, they should be in the right hands. See if you can find out if he will ever be away from Roussillon.”

  Resolutely but with misgivings, I agreed.

  I TRIED TO THINK of something lighthearted to do while Maxime was with me. I put a teacup upside down on André’s cabinet right under Cézanne’s painting, then covered it with a white napkin just as Cézanne had done with a tablecloth. I placed the marzipan fruit on a white saucer and set it at a slight angle, leaning it against the cup. The precious pieces of fruit rolled off. I scrambled to catch them before they fell to the floor. Max laughed, which made me laugh too.

  “How did he make his oranges stay in place?” I asked.

  “He might have used thick globs of gum arabic, a binding agent in watercolors used to make the pigments adhere to paper.”

  In Maxime’s gift of marzipan, there was a glimmer of the former Max, the prewar Max, the Max who could be frivolous, who enjoyed small things. This was the greater gift.

  “There is Paris in these marzipans,” I said.

  “Can you hear her singing to you?” he asked.

  “I’ve been hearing her for a decade. Can you hear Roussillon sing to you?”

  “Yes, faintly. The baas are the melody and the clucks are the harmony.”

  “I have an idea to make the song more robust.”

  I gathered the pieces of ochre I had placed on the cabinet top and went out into the courtyard. Facing the smooth rosy ochre stucco of the house, which was still damp from last night’s rain, I asked, “How do you think those cave artists did it?”

  “They spit.”

  “You don’t know that. You weren’t there.”

  Nevertheless, I spit on an ochre rock, rubbed my saliva around on it, and drew it horizontally across the wall. It left a red-ochre line. “I’m painting!”

  “A fresco,” Maxime said.

  I spit again and drew a shorter parallel line under my first line, then joined them with a vertical line at each end.

  “Brava. A trapezoid. Cézanne would approve.”

  “It’s more than a trapezoid. Watch this!” I spit again and made a cone protrude at one end, and a smaller cone that angled down from the first one. “It’s a head, in case you don’t recognize it.” Then I drew four very narrow rectangles descending from the body. “What is it?”

  “Hmm. If it had horns, it would be a goat.”

  “It’s Geneviève!” I drew two arcs pointing from her head back across her body. “Come here, Geneviève, to approve your portrait.”

  She approached at my call, took one cursory look, then turned her head away, like an aristocrat of the barnyard, and walked off.

  “Maybe she doesn’t recognize herself,” Maxime said. “Maybe she’s looking for her udder.”

  “Oh, I forgot.” Giggling, I drew a half circle under her belly and added teats so she would be proud. I dragged her over to her portrait and held the sides of her head, forcing her to look.

  “Baa. Baa. Bad.”

  Maxime laughed. “Any new style of art is first met with criticism. The cave painters suffered from it, I’m sure. Now you know how the Impre
ssionists felt.”

  “Watch this!” I spit on a different rock.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to dip it in a bowl of water?”

  “No. Spit’s the thing. It’s more authentic. Didn’t you know? It’s a binding agent.”

  I reached up high and drew an oval—Kooritzah’s body tumbling upside down in the sky, her wings spread wide, her toes splayed, her beak open. “She’s squawking the song of Roussillon.”

  The act of creating was infectious. Maxime picked up a chunk of rock, spit on it, and drew a tall, very narrow rectangle and a wide half sphere at its top.

  “A tree!”

  “No. The tree.”

  Together we put some almonds in it.

  “What else?” I asked.

  He looked around and, with much hacking and spitting, drew a tall trapezoid, narrower at its upper reaches, topped by a small half sphere.

  I stroked my chin like an old man might do, pondering something. “I hate to sound like an ignorant critic,” I said, “but close up it’s incomprehensible and awful. Seen from afar, it’s awful and incomprehensible.”

  “I’m not finished,” he said. “Be patient.”

  He added four trapezoids, their narrow ends attached just under the half sphere and radiating out like spokes.

  “The windmill! Moulin du Sablon in all its former glory! Oh, Max, it’s exquisite!”

  “Wait. One more thing.” He chuckled as he drew a section of fence with something oval on the top rail. “Monet’s magpie. Now our fresco is a Cézanne, a Chagall, and a Monet all in one.”

  THE NEXT DAY, UNABLE to leave it alone, we added some small touches: a fleur-de-lis flag on the windmill, hooves and eyelashes on Geneviève. Maxime departed in far greater spirits than when I had seen him off after his first visit.