The Portrait
Page 4
It was the first time Specht smiled.
Is it necessary to know why someone died? I mean, if you had Singer before you now, alive, and you had agreed to do his portrait, would you want to know how he was going to meet his end?
Creator got the impression that Specht had carefully prepared this part of the conversation.
That sounds like a story by Borges, doesn’t it? The portrait artist who knew how his sitters would meet their end …
The silence he left now was commanding.
I have to admit, he said, that I wondered whether to tell whoever gets the job that Singer is dead at all. But you would have asked why he hadn’t come with me.
Absolutely, Creator said. I’ve only ever worked from life.
I know, Specht said. You say so yourself in Palazzo: If it’s not from life, it’s from nothing. And that is exactly what I am about to ask. Paint my son. Bring him to life. Forget he’s dead.
I could see that Specht’s face had become imploring. The expression I had, up to that moment, taken for the weariness of an invalid now looked like the exhaustion of someone who was completely miserable. A drop of sweat rolled past his temple. But Creator still couldn’t bring himself to say that he would accept the job.
Think about it, Specht said. This isn’t the only photo I have of Singer; there’s a video, too. I can describe him. He pulled the chequebook back towards him, tore off the top cheque, and got the fountain pen back out from his inside pocket.
Believe me, he said, with every word sounding more and more whispered. You’ll be saving a life.
Creator remained silent. I remember that very well; it was because he was shocked by something he could not place at all, something that was diametrically opposed to the self-assured Hollywood gesture with the cheque: all of the blood in Specht’s face seemed to have drained away.
There wasn’t a lovelier person on the whole planet, he said.
What I’m asking for, Felix, is Singer. My son.
Specht signed the cheque.
Afterwards, when Creator had shown Valery Specht to the door and returned to the studio, I knew not only that he would accept the job, but also that I was the one who was destined to support Singer.
Or however you say that.
It was on me that the unknown dead boy would be commemorated and painted to life.
Strangely enough, I seemed to know this before Creator himself — at least, the only thing he said to Lidewij a little later, when she came into the studio, was that he had had a request that was completely wacko, a job that nobody in their right mind would ever take on.
But in the meantime he had slid me into the middle of the room and leant me against the easel. He had squatted down and used a small brush to clean off the charcoal line. He did it like a household chore, but I rejoiced within because I was certain that it was a gesture. He had begun to really want me; he just didn’t know it yet.
Moments before, he had put the cheque away in the drawer of the large table, between the pencil stubs and the rubbers; but when Lidewij came in to hear how the meeting had gone, he told her everything — except about the cheque.
It just happened: putting away the cheque and sliding me into view. He would keep quiet about the cheque and the amount, and he brushed off the charcoal. None of it was something he’d planned in advance.
I mention this because, later, Creator got the cheque back out of the drawer a few times. I was on the easel by then, and Creator had slipped into his habit of rhyming and calculating. That’s how I know with absolute certainty that he was thinking one, compulsive thought, If I take the cheque and cash it, then —
Nothing much followed that then, except an ungrammatical construction ending with trash it — after which he put the cheque back in its hiding place.
No hurry, he mumbled.
Specht has to see the thing first and accept it.
Lidewij listened carefully to his account of his first meeting with Specht.
Were they really his words, she asked — If you’ve ever worked from death?
She whistled through her teeth.
Creator noticed how difficult it was to explain just what was so strange about Specht’s request.
And then Specht said you’d be saving a life?
Creator nodded.
Imagine, Lidewij said. Your son is dead and you want to be able to see him; you want to have him around you again. What an assignment, Felix. What an assignment.
Creator had told her the little that Specht had said about Singer: that he came from Africa, from one of the countries on the west coast. The name had slipped Creator’s mind for a moment; it was synonymous with chaos and cruelty. Specht had spent some time there for a big job, almost under war conditions; it was an enormous dredging job, and on the beach just near the compound he’d stumbled upon a boy of about eight, literally stumbled — the child was asleep on the lawn in front of the apartment block. It was in the days when rural children were being press-ganged into a rebel army in the north. Imagine it, a boy like that asleep on the lawn — he opens his eyes and wants to trust you; imagine the coincidence. But what is coincidence in moments like this other than providence? Singer was looking for him, Specht. Specht wasn’t looking for Singer. Anyway, in the end, it was all done completely legally, with all the adoption papers fully in order — you can’t imagine the red tape involved — and, of course, as always in those parts, it took a lot of … not just money, but also, let’s call it diplomatic pressure that didn’t come cheap. For him, it had been nothing short of a miracle that it finally succeeded.
Did he mention anyone else?
What do you mean?
It usually takes two to adopt.
There was something, Creator said.
Has she got a name?
If she’s a she, Creator said. All I know is they live in Antibes. Specht and —
She? Did he say she?
Does it matter?
If you ask me, they both wanted to say that it mattered whether Specht was married to a man or a woman, but they just laughed it off.
No, Lidewij said. For the painting, it doesn’t matter. Or does it?
She didn’t ask whether Creator had accepted the job. But she did look at the photo lying on the big table.
Crete, Creator said.
Lidewij looked at the photo and fell silent.
Her gaze was drawn into the boy’s eyes, just like Creator’s a half hour earlier, in Specht’s presence.
Hey, kid, she said quietly. Where are you?
She had sounded as if the boy in the photo was still alive. As if the photo was a living person and could answer her.
I think that was the moment that Creator knew what I already knew: that he would paint Singer.
Lidewij passed the photo back to Creator.
Did you see his hand? The one he’s giving the finger with. He doesn’t have a thumb.
Creator looked again at the boy called Singer.
Now you mention it, he said.
It’s incredible how people can just disappear, Lidewij said. Did you hear the geese over the house just now? Hundreds of them?
I am certain that Creator then thought, I’ll paint him.
Look at Lidewij, I thought. Look at your wife, at how the photo has just touched her, and make something that touches her just as much. And Specht. And everyone who has lost someone. Make something. Make someone. From me.
THREE
Creator decided to stick as closely as possible to the working methods he used when painting someone who was alive. In other words, he arranged three sittings with Specht. During these fortnightly Saturday meetings, each of which lasted for several hours, they would talk about Singer, leaf through albums of snapshots, and watch the videos that had been made of him. In the
meantime, Creator did sketches to show Specht; but he soon realised that, just as when he was working from life, the likeness would not be the problem.
The problem was the expression or, rather, the movement in his eyes — the characteristic gesture. Technically, Singer was a challenge mainly because of the colour of his skin. New tints would appear on Creator’s palette: dioxide purple, carmine, ultramarine, burnt umber, caput mortuum, cadmium yellow. Creator explained to Specht that, when he was working on a thing, the skin was the alpha and the omega. You don’t look at my things with just your eyes, he had said to Minke Dupuis in Palazzo; you use your fingertips as well.
He would soon decide to base the portrait on one particular video recording, the one that had been shot early in the morning, or was it late in the evening, where the camera enters a room in which a dark, underexposed figure — Singer — is lying asleep on a large bed with green, almost turquoise, sheets, with his knuckles to his mouth, and his head turned aside towards the window whose venetian blinds are slowly opened during the shot, making a pattern of bright stripes of light that are about to make the motionless, sleeping figure blink. That is the precise moment at which the recording stops, just when the eye contact with the camera is about to be established.
It wasn’t easy to estimate Singer’s age in the video. He was naked and, as Creator saw it, more angular than in the photo with his blond friends. If he was sixteen in the video, Creator asked Specht, how long before that was the photo taken? Specht’s memory didn’t seem very precise with things like this. Creator realised that he would have to decide for himself how old Singer would be in his painting.
The green of the sheets was pushing it, Creator said, but everything of value balances on the edge of kitsch. He wanted the pink of Singer’s lips and nails and the palms of his hands to burst out of the painting. He was searching for a Singer who was more childlike, less remote, than in the video.
When Creator saw the video recording, he knew immediately that Singer would be lying down — and I resigned myself to my fate. I was horizontal now to stay, but didn’t really care, almost blinded as I was by the concentration in Creator’s eyes when he came to stand before me now and then, without touching me with a single finger. By that time, he had studied Singer at length, projected larger than life on a white wall. He continually skipped forward a few images, for hours at a time, as if each jump might provide the one glimpse of Singer that would definitively put him to work. And then he tore himself away from the projection and looked at me with a sated expression, as if trying to project what he had seen onto me. Once he even aimed the video projector at me, which had an alarming effect, not just because of the intense heat of the light, but also because I felt like I was moving, even though Singer himself was only sleeping on me. It was a foolish experiment; Creator concluded that soon enough, but it made me realise that I could count myself very lucky not to have come into the world as a film screen. I couldn’t do it — exist inasmuch as light moved over me. You’d have to be some kind of saint for that.
It was a sun-drenched scene, the one Creator was basing the portrait on. When the video was playing, you heard children’s voices through the open window behind the venetians. That was Loutro beach, Specht said; the ship’s horn you can hear is the ferry to Chora Sfakion. It moored three times a day right in front of our house.
Paradise, Creator said, and Specht gave a vague smile.
Creator tried to ask how long exactly before Singer’s death the video had been made.
Sometimes Creator got the impression that the sight of the dead boy was too much for Specht to bear: beads of sweat would start running down his temples again, and his white-knuckled hand would clench his stick.
Creator pointed at Singer’s upper arms, his visible shoulder, and his thigh — there was something glittering there, beach sand, streaks of white gold.
Yes, I see it now, too, Specht said. I never noticed it.
Skin, Creator said. A painting is actually just a skin applied to a skin.
It was clear that Specht was doing his utmost to make Creator forget that his subject was dead, and Creator got better and better at playing along. They soon stopped talking about the boy in the past tense.
That is the grand purpose of our enterprise, Specht said. If I succeed in making Singer live for you, it will be as if you have painted him from life. Then how could he be dead?
You see, he said on another occasion, if you succeed in making people believe you painted from life, then I have succeeded in making him live for you.
He also said, This way, no one’s dead.
There was no mention of the circumstances in which Singer had died. The less you think of his end, the more alive it will be. As alive as a Felix Vincent, Specht said.
The only thing he told Creator was that it was an accident.
A stupid accident.
On Crete?
The movement of Specht’s left hand over the knob of his walking stick was a clear indication that Creator should not pursue this line of questioning.
On another occasion, he asked whether Singer had been born without a thumb.
You don’t miss a thing, do you?
Here, too, Specht refused to be drawn. Creator got the impression that he knew very little about Singer’s life before he was eight, when he moved from Sierra Leone to Antibes. When he was taken there. Singer spoke a bit of French by then, African French, and must have spoken the language of the tribe he came from, but Specht was never, so he said, able to find out which tribe that was. And in the South of France, Singer’s French became more and more French.
Creator asked about Singer’s voice.
While sketching, he had become increasingly aware of how important the voice of the person he was painting was to him under normal circumstances. He couldn’t say just what difference it made to the painting itself, but it was somehow key to his concentration. More than anything else, the voice played a major role when he was working on a painting after the sitter had returned home. It was then that he really heard the accent — whether it was loud or quiet, the way the speaker interrupted their own sentences and paused. As if painting was Creator’s way of carrying out an imaginary conversation with someone.
Specht asked whether he had played with dolls when he was a child.
That might explain it, Creator chuckled in reply. Maybe that was when I learnt it, doing portraits. And he told Specht that he had been an only child and, for as far back as he could remember, had drawn one special face, very crude, but that was Tulix. That was what he called the face, and he used to talk to it, until he was eight or nine at least.
No, Specht said during that same conversation, we don’t know whether Singer had a brother or a sister. I wonder if he ever really was a child at play in his whole life.
One day, Creator also told Specht about the blind woman he once painted, at her husband’s request. At the end of the story, which didn’t really have a point, other than that Creator had to keep the conversation going throughout the sitting to keep the woman from turning away from him, Specht asked, Why are you telling me this?
Because it ended up as one of my worst things, even more dismal than Cindy. That’s one of the reasons this, this thing of Singer, is so difficult now. Because he doesn’t look back. Do you understand? I’m starting to see him before me. I think I know exactly how I’m going to arrange him as well, how I’m going to put him on the canvas, but …
Creator hesitated, I believe because he now realised what was so difficult about the commission.
The blind woman had no idea, he told Specht. Do you understand? She didn’t realise I was searching for something, she wasn’t trying to hide anything, she couldn’t see how I was looking at her — and that’s why I, in turn, didn’t actually see anything. Nothing particularly paintable, I mean.
Specht nodded seriously.
Specht was silent for a few seconds while Creator advanced the video. I didn’t have a good view of Specht, but I heard him give a whispered cry, between a sigh and a groan. Creator must have heard it, too. It was as if he moaned, Mercy or, Spare me. They weren’t really words you could make out. Creator was moved. Later, he told Lidewij that he now knew that pictures could be fatal.
He broke out into a cold sweat, he said. I thought his heart was breaking.
He’s not playing around, Lidewij said. This is deadly serious. But it will be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever done.
My masterpiece, according to Specht. He knows how to butter me up.
Those were the kind of things they were saying even before the imprimatura had been applied.
Creator added, after a long silence, that it was only now that he understood why he had become a painter. And he told Lidewij that the thing would be horizontal, with Singer as an awakening sleeper, head to toe.
So it’ll be a nude, Lidewij said.
Creator didn’t answer — because this, as I now realised, was the question.
Lidewij never got to see the video of Singer motionless — I didn’t, either, at that stage. They were ridiculously strict about things like that, Creator and Lidewij. Even before entering his studio for the very first time, she had told him that she never wanted to see any of his work that wasn’t finished. Not a sketch, not a scribble, nothing. If I get drawn into the process of thinking about what you’re making, there’ll be no end to it. I have enough on my plate with who you are. She kept to this resolution with ritual determination. She can enter Creator’s studio and stop in front of the thing he’s working on without noticing anything about the painting at all. And Creator knows it: he has got completely out of the habit of thinking that she, when standing there, sees anything of his work. It is only when a painting has been completed, and it’s time for the client to come and pick it up, that Creator asks Lidewij to finish the thing off. That’s what he calls it. For him, her first look at what he has made is as decisive as his own signature — which he generally adds immediately afterwards.