The Portrait

by Willem Jan Otten

  During my first months in the studio, I listened in to one sitting after the other and discovered Creator’s gift for making people curious about his special view of them. He always got people talking, and it was almost always about the very thing they were afraid he would somehow exaggerate in the painting — their birthmark, their wrinkly neck, their pudgy wrists — and although I never really worked out how he managed this, he often succeeded in turning the most feared into the most special. With my back turned to the scene, I got to know dozens of people without seeing them for a single second.

  But Creator himself — he remained the great unknown. He was the tactful elicitor of the most detailed intimacies, without ever revealing anything of himself. No wonder I was often unable to control my daydreaming about his plans for me. It became a kind of craving: I was going to become something immeasurably important, something fundamentally unutterable. Something whereof one cannot speak. I mean, I landed in his studio, against the cold wall, when he was up to his neck in commissions; there was no question of his working on something for himself. Creator has a plan, I told myself, otherwise how could he have been so sure of my dimensions and, above all, of the fact that I was going to be standing. He has a plan for me, a plan that has sprung entirely from his imagination. Something he doesn’t have to do for the money, or on commission, or because he just happens to be so good at capturing people …

  I was going to become something hugely important.

  And then, for a few seconds one afternoon, I thought I knew what Creator had in mind for me. That was late October, a little more than a year ago now. Creator and Lidewij called it an incredibly warm autumn. The trees were bare, but they kept the sliding doors open from early in the morning until late in the afternoon. Sometimes a restless breeze sprung up; I heard leaves rustling into the studio.

  Creator had let someone in, and I soon realised it wasn’t someone who had come to sit for him. She was called Minke. Minke Dupuis. She had come, she said, to make a portrait of him. They had to laugh at that, Creator and Minke. It turned out they knew each other from high school. Minke Dupuis worked for Palazzo, a glossy magazine that mainly existed to be leafed through by people who lived in large, free-standing houses, or at least by people who dreamt of living in large, free-standing houses. I’m doing it on the side, Minke said — the pay is fantastic. It was clear that the portrait Minke would write about him was in Creator’s best interest, given that his work generally came to hang in large, free-standing houses. Minke sounded apologetic; she would have preferred to be doing an in-depth interview with him for Art & Facts, for which she also worked from time to time.

  At that stage, I couldn’t form an image of her. I heard her voice, which was slightly husky, a husky contralto. Creator just said she hadn’t changed a bit. And she said something similar. Lidewij had led her to the studio through the garden.

  After Lidewij had left them alone together, Creator said, Weird, you here, all of a sudden. And Minke said that his eyes were that same old gruesome blue.

  He sniggered and said, Look who’s talking.

  A silence I didn’t know how to interpret followed.

  So this is where you live, Minke said.

  Yep, Creator replied. I’m working my fingers to the bone to buy it.

  These words didn’t actually break the silence.

  Afterwards they disappeared into the garden where Lidewij had put out tea for them, on the round table near the reeds. There, essentially out of my earshot, they had the conversation that would lead to the portrait in Palazzo — about Creator, his work, how he lived, and who with. That same week, a photographer would come to take photos of the studio and Withernot.

  They still ended up late that afternoon in the studio, Minke and Creator. The interview was clearly over. Minke said that she had enough material; more than enough.

  Don’t expect too much of it, she said.

  Apparently she was looking at the things Creator was working on.

  Don’t you get sick to death of all these blasé characters?

  Creator must have answered with a gesture.

  I noticed that she was walking in my direction.

  And that? Is that going to be it?

  She was taking liberties; Creator’s silence told me that much.

  I felt myself being pulled back and saw, for a second, the female face that must have been Minke. And I felt her hair brushing over me, more or less where, if I became someone, my face would be.

  Long, auburn hair. But her eyes weren’t gruesome blue. They were dark green.

  I haven’t started yet, Creator said.

  I noticed, Minke replied. She let go of me and I fell back against the wall, wafting her hair up away from me.

  I’d rather it wasn’t in the interview, Creator said.

  God, no, she said. Palazzo readers aren’t interested in something like that.

  She sounded extra husky, and there was a clearly mocking undertone to her voice.

  I meant it ironically, Creator said.

  As far as I could tell, they said goodbye without touching. Minke said that the portrait would be in the December issue.

  Don’t expect too much of it.

  After she had disappeared, Lidewij entered the studio from the garden. She was sliding the glass door shut when Creator came in from the house.

  You never told me that, Lidewij said. That you were planning that for that big canvas.

  Were you eavesdropping?

  I just happened to hear. I was on the other side of the garden; the bulbs need planting, Lidewij said. Wasn’t I supposed to hear it or what?

  A silence fell.

  It’s not going to happen anytime soon anyway, Creator said.

  That’s not what I mean, she said. It’s just strange you never mentioned it.

  Creator sounded irritated.

  We don’t need to tell each other everything we’re planning.

  You don’t have to tell me anything, but why tell it all of a sudden to a complete stranger who’s come to interview you?

  Minke’s not a complete stranger. We were in sixth form together.

  It was easy to hear that Lidewij was trying not to sound jealous.

  Why don’t you tell me things like that?

  The plan sucks, Creator said. It’s nonsense. That’s why I told her. So I’d realise it’s nonsense. Genuine, god-awful nonsense.

  I think Lidewij was shocked by his tone.

  I’m an idiot, too, he said. A Piet`a — I just blurted something out, and that bimbo took it seriously. No sense of irony whatsoever. Anyway, she promised she wouldn’t put it in the interview.

  I don’t know where the conversation went from there, because suddenly I was completely overcome.

  A Piet`a!

  Meant ironically — but still, a Piet`a!

  I really didn’t have the slightest idea of what it might be: the only works of art I had ever seen in my whole life were a few of Creator’s portraits in progress and the reproduction of flaming sunflowers that had hung diagonally opposite me in Van Schendel’s.

  During that first phase of my existence, I found it extremely difficult to get used to the idea that we canvases are not the only supports for images. It is possible to print entire pictures on much smaller surfaces. I even discovered that a likeness of a canvas can be recorded on a minuscule, shiny support called a photo or a Polaroid.

  And one day I heard a woman who was about to sit for Creator talk about a support I never really fathomed completely. She asked Creator, Do you have a reason for not having a mirror in your salon?

  This woman always called the studio a salon; it seemed to annoy Creator. When she’s around I feel like a beautician, he once said to Lidewij.

  Yes, I have a reason, Creator replied. Here in the studio, I’m t
he only one who looks.

  Oh, I see, the woman replied.

  I have never really managed to understand exactly what a mirror is. I deduced from the rest of the conversation that, like me, a mirror can be hung, and that people then look in it. But what a mirror actually represents was beyond me.

  It must be something fundamentally different from what they are going to do with me, when I’m finally a painting, I thought. As far as I know, no one is ever going to look in me. Just at.

  Confusing grammar. I found it a little unsettling, all the more when I realised that everyone who looks in the mirror sees something else. I often wondered whether I would ever understand what it was about, and it began to dawn on me that there were many things that I would never understand, simply because I didn’t have any legs.

  That was how I bided my time in the studio during the first and only autumn of my unpainted existence, and it became increasingly difficult for me to believe that I was ever going to amount to anything. I wasn’t the only blank canvas in Withernot; in fact, there was a constant coming and going of blank canvases, always much smaller than me and always the same dimensions — ninety by seventy. They arrived by the half-dozen: modest, taciturn characters of a slightly lower quality than I, somewhere between Fine and Double Weave. They knew their fate. They would become a portrait, from just below the shoulders to the crown. They would, after their completion, be picked up relatively quickly by whoever had commissioned them; they would show a likeness first and foremost, and only then be beautiful or delightful; and they would end up in a room, on a warm wall, in a centrally heated, slightly-too-dry living room, in a life they would finally call their own.

  Secretly, I pitied them: it was all so ordinary. You’re ninety by seventy, Creator paints a face and shoulders on you — usually of a loving wife, or a radiant ten-year-old daughter holding a teddy bear, or, if you’re lucky, of the chairman of the board of the convention centre. And through the eyes of this one face, you then view the world, hanging over a sofa, or in the curve of a staircase, or on the boardroom wall.

  I knew I shouldn’t think like that. My year in Van Schendel’s had ennobled me and taught me to dream. I had been spared their format. But I was still uneasy. I admit it with reluctance. I had come to realise that, in the life of a canvas like me, only one thing counts. Even when you don’t become a Piet`a, there is still that one question: Who was going to be painted on me? Who would I become? Whose countenance would become my countenance? Yes, it’s true, words like that ran through my mind. Countenance. As if it was on special. Through whose eyes would I observe the world?

  I told myself a thousand times, What difference does not becoming something make if you don’t even know what that thing is? But it didn’t help. Ever since that warm afternoon in October, I had felt an inexplicable regret. I realised that Creator would never carry out his plan, but I had no idea why not. No more than I understood why he had ever conceived the plan in the first place.

  You can’t follow them, people who want to make something they don’t understand. The unknown can only slip through their fingers; I understood that much. They recoil from their deepest convictions.

  If I was ever to become something, one day, it would not be what was intended.

  A few days later, I was dragged back from the gates of hell. Don’t ask me how. Creator was asked whether he would like to paint Cindy. Yes, that’s the one, the wife of Fokke Ponsen, of Procter Poldermol, with whom she would soon be celebrating their first anniversary. Once again that year, Ponsen had made it into the top ten of the Dutch rich list.

  Cindy was the first facelifted person that Creator would paint.

  During the first interview, when specifying the details of the commission, he tried to approach her like anyone else — but he kept getting the feeling, as he told Lidewij afterwards, that if he accepted Cindy he would not be painting from life. With her corrected mouth, her accentuated nostrils, her pulled-back cheeks, and her smoothed frown, it was, he said, as if Cindy was already a portrait. He was not happy about it at all, because he had already accepted the job; or, at least, he hadn’t rejected it, such that it would be very awkward for him to turn it down now.

  And damaging, he said, at this stage.

  He meant: Now that Aunt Drea really is headed for a nursing home and we — if we want to buy Withernot — need to make as much money as we possibly can.

  In moments like these, he always said ‘we’.

  It seemed to me that the interview with Minke was still preying on his mind, and he kept thinking of her question — whether he got sick to death of all these blasé characters.

  And then, suddenly, in Lidewij’s presence, he made a decision and swore. I don’t mean that he swore to do something. He started swearing and pulled me away from the wall, lifted me up by the cross at my back, turned me around, and carried me over to the easel. Lidewij was standing there and he asked her to hold me for a moment. Then he adjusted the easel so that I could stand on it, with my bottom at his knee height.

  You’re serious, Lidewij said.

  I was standing on the easel for the first time in my life. But I felt faint at heart.

  Creator shrugged. Why not?

  Someone like Cindy on that canvas … you must be joking, Lidewij said.

  Someone like Cindy is perfect, Creator said. She’s fascinating, if you really look at her. Fascinatingly mask-like.

  He knew he was lying, and that made him more and more convinced that he was doing the right thing.

  Cindy Ponsen from head to toe — that’s cutting edge, he said.

  I noticed that he hadn’t looked at me for a single second, as if I already had eyes for him to look away from. All I saw was how small and nondescript he was. With me upright like this, his shoulders only came up to my middle.

  Lidewij looked at me. I remembered the apple-green shoes, to which I now added her chestnut eyes. She reached out with one hand and stroked my linen with her fingertips.

  Why so cynical? It’s not like you.

  They went for a walk through the woods around Withernot, and for the first time I was able to look out into the world at my leisure, which is to say through the sliding doors and into the garden. I was still trembling from the unutterable menace I had faced, but also from the feathery touch of Lidewij’s fingertips. For a moment, it had seemed to me as if she had turned my linen into human skin.

  It was early November. I know that because, while looking around the studio, I discovered a calendar on a side wall, hanging next to Jeanine, who was always just on the point of not sliding her hand away from the left side of her face.

  Lidewij, in particular, had often looked at the calendar, at the picture of the month. They had bought it in Rome, where they had spent a week together just before my arrival, and liked it so much they hung it up early. I have never been close enough to see exactly what they show, those pictures, but I have gathered that they are reproductions of paintings from the Vatican Museum. I remember that months later, in March, I could clearly make out the shape of a cross.I even thought, Why paint a canvas without frame or linen? They certainly came up with some strange subjects, the creators of the past.

  But now that it was November, the Vatican calendar referred to days called All Souls’ and All Saints’. Lidewij had wondered why, and had suggested that it might be something to do with the leaves of the trees; the last leaves were falling from the trees, and the Vaticanians wanted to celebrate nothing being lost. Her theories made Creator smile.

  We’re so ignorant about these things, Lidewij said. If you ask me, every day on this calendar means something.

  I had already heard him outside, a screech of complaint sounding from the birch wood than ran down to the lake on the left of the deep garden, like a giant cat miaowing a loud lament. I knew he was an animal; I had made that much out from scraps of conversation betw
een Creator and Lidewij. While painting, Creator would imitate his cry, making it sound like peeow. After calling, the creature generally walked into the garden to eat chicken feed from an aluminium dish that had been put down just in front of the sliding doors. It was a sound I had often heard while leaning against my wall: something pointy and hard scraping a metal bowl.

  Good morning, Creator would say.

  It all sounded thoroughly aristocratic. They called him Lord Peacock — but I couldn’t imagine what he looked like. According to Lidewij, he had escaped from the playground at Old Valkeveen the previous spring: he heard the pheasants calling during the mating season, and disappeared into the woods. Odd, because pheasants, as I had learnt in the meantime, sound like the horns of old cars, and nowhere near as lofty and elegiac as Lord Peacock.

  This is all quite apart from the story of my life, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fire I am about to feed. But when I finally saw him, that first Saturday in November, when I was free to look out into the world, I felt an immediate pang of regret.

  He was as white as a sheet.

  He was a completely white creature. As white as me. He was Quadruple-Universal-Primed-Linen white, and yet he could walk. He appeared entirely under his own steam and would, after eating the contents of the bowl, move off somewhere else.

  And he didn’t notice me.

  He scraped the bowl with his vicious beak and dragged a clawed toe towards himself every now and then, making an unpleasant scratching sound. When the chicken feed was finished, he pushed the dish away with an impatient neck movement and looked up.

  That was when it happened.

  He started to shiver or, better, to shudder, and made gagging movements with his neck and, before I knew it, he had spread his tail, taking up my entire field of vision with his raised, white tail feathers. He didn’t stop shuddering; it sounded like he was raising a stormy wind. He made himself even bigger than he was by standing on his toes. The strange thing was that, after the first shock, I immediately realised that it didn’t have anything to do with me, this display. He hadn’t noticed me at all. He did it because he was seen. But the one who saw him was invisible. He was impressing an invisible viewer. I couldn’t see it any other way. The garden was deserted, Creator and Lidewij had walked into the woods, and everything in the studio was motionless.