So it’ll be a nude.
Creator understood the ramifications of Lidewij’s suggestion perfectly. Singer, nude — it was almost inevitable, and yet it had to be decided. During his sittings with Specht, Creator had realised more and more clearly that the only correct name for the expression he always sought, the one that got him started on each new portrait, was the naked expression. Specht had said as much as well, in the beginning, before asking him to call him Valery. I admire the shyness of your work. Gesturing at Jeanine.
If, with Singer, it was not possible to find that expression — that special, shy vulnerability — then surely his entire self needed to be naked.
Specht didn’t interrupt while Creator proposed it during the last sitting. He described the enormity of it: two metres wide, one metre twenty high, a sea of sea-green sheets and pillows, the angled light of evening falling through an invisible window on the right … and Specht smiled.
This was what he had secretly hoped for, he said. Something more than a portrait, but he hadn’t wanted to suggest it himself.
A twelve-year-old nude?
Creator nodded.
That will take courage, Specht said. A twelve-year-old nude.
Creator gave him a questioning look.
Nothing is as difficult as innocence, Specht said. Or as rare. Nothing as scandalous, either.
It seemed to me, at that moment, as if Creator was overcome by a strange sensation of Specht and Lidewij conspiring together to put him to work — their reactions to his intentions, although entirely independent of each other, seemed motivated by such similar thinking. Sometimes he even felt as if the commission wasn’t just coming from Specht, but from Lidewij, too. As if it wasn’t just about Singer, who had really existed and could be seen on videos and photographs, but also about someone who did not yet exist.
He’ll be on a green background, Creator said at one stage. A sea of folds.
A sea, Specht said. He got used to the idea.
Or do you mean a womb?
Creator realised that, for the first time in his life, he, the photographic realist, was going to do something fundamentally different from working from life. Instead of capturing something that he had seen, as if in a flash, he had to start on someone who was fundamentally elsewhere.
Creator didn’t put it like that, of course. Words like fundamentally elsewhere never passed his lips. He described the unknown territory Singer would take him into by saying that if he didn’t pull it off, his arse would be showing.
A womb, that’s the word, Creator said. A womb of sea-green folds.
When Specht said goodbye after the third session, Creator was, if I’m not mistaken, almost as feverish as when he came to pick me up from Van Schendel’s. Before saying goodbye, Specht had asked, unnecessarily, So I take it you really have accepted this commission?
Creator, equally unnecessarily, assented.
They were again sitting at the large table.
All I can do now is wish you strength, Specht said.
Specht stuck a hand in his inside pocket and left it dangling there awkwardly for a long time, as if making a tremendously difficult decision.
Perhaps this will be of some use to you, he said, pulling out a Polaroid.
His long, bony hand trembled and flapped as if he had lost control of his muscles. He let go of his stick to help his right hand with his left. The stick fell clattering to the floor. Creator leapt forward to pick it up.
For a moment, the studio was full of fluttering consternation, as if a gust of wind had torn through it.
When Creator sat down again, the Polaroid was in front of him. Specht watched closely, studying his expression.
Creator could not suppress a sigh of disappointment. For a moment, he had hoped to finally catch Singer’s eye. But the Polaroid revealed little more than the video. The same bed, the same pose: Singer with his eyes shut. The only difference was that the fold of sheet that covered Singer’s genitals on the video had now been slid a few inches to the left, but without making Singer fundamentally any more naked — Creator saw that immediately.
Thanks, he said. Every little bit helps.
Specht cleared his throat. Clearly, he found it difficult to speak.
When will my son be ready?
Without thinking, Creator said, Easter.
Easter was a couple of months away. He seldom allowed so much time.
Specht seemed fully recovered. He looked at his watch, and asked whether it would be all right for him to pick Singer up on Holy Saturday.
Creator glanced at the calendar. Is that what it’s called? Holy Saturday?
One last thing, Specht said, after making the appointment. In no way must it get out that you have accepted this commission. Or that I have given it.
Creator replied that he had already said that that went without saying during their first meeting. That wasn’t true at all; he had never said anything of the kind. Much later, he would tell Lidewij that he couldn’t understand why he had been in such a hurry to let Specht know that he understood that the commission was top secret.
Not a soul gets to see Singer, you understand?
At that moment, Lidewij appeared outside carrying skates, headed for the ice at the end of the garden. She waved briefly to Creator and Specht.
Except Lidewij, Creator said.
If there’s no way round it, Specht said. But otherwise, not a soul. And the material — the videos, the photos — no one gets access to it. And no one takes any photos of him when he’s finished. Not one.
He had started sounding like the captain of industry he had not been at all in the last few weeks, emaciated and diseased as he was.
No photo, no Polaroid, nothing.
Creator didn’t know whether to laugh or be angry, he told Lidewij afterwards. It was actually rather pathetic, that last moment before Specht’s departure, when he reached for his mobile phone to let his chauffeur and the smoking dark-skinned youth, who were waiting at the four-wheel drive just a few dozen metres away, know that he was on his way.
The way he was going, Creator said, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d said, If anyone sees Singer, I will turn you into a tube of paint.
After the car had driven out of the garden and disappeared into the woods, Creator realised they hadn’t said another word about the money.
I saw him walk to the drawer to check whether the cheque was still there. He stood in the studio’s winter light and listened until the sound of Specht’s car dissolved in the woods around Withernot. He kept his eyes fixed on me the whole time — but I don’t think he saw me.
I didn’t really understand what it means to be a support until the imprimatura had been applied. Something appears on you, but you don’t get to see it. That’s what it comes down to. You see the looks of others taking in more and more, but understand less and less about yourself. Of course, being painted is an indescribable experience: first with the wide, flat brush with which the imprimatura is applied — in this particular case, raw umber — and then, several drying days later, with the pointed, lightning-fast brush that draws the outline of the depiction on you, with sketching, self-correcting movements; and finally, for many weeks, with countless brushes of constantly varying thickness and pointedness, slowly but surely concealing what you have been up to this point — the canvas. But no matter how unguent and stimulating the period of creation is, it all goes to impress upon you ever more harrowingly that you can only become the great unknown of your own existence.
Now that I really think about it, I found it a period of mindlessness more than anything else, regardless of how sensual and sensational the paint drying on my skin sometimes felt. Creator was continuously humming, mumbling, drinking coffee, taking a few steps back, biting his lips, hissing through his teeth, sticking the little finger of
his right hand up his nose, studying what he had picked out of it, looking at me again, squeezing the end of a tube flat, walking over to the window, strolling to the table, studying the Polaroid, striding back over to me, squinting, adding a brushstroke … He was, to me, at his least savoury. I had the strong impression that he thought himself completely unwatched, as it were; he was all eyes, looking not just at what he was making but also, and mostly, at nothing. I have no better word for it — it seemed to me that very often he was staring at nothing, with an empty, if not dead, look, staring at the garden, where it had started to thaw, at the cuticle of his thumb, at a detail on me that was apparently finished.
Lidewij wasn’t around — she had gone skiing for a couple of weeks with a friend — so I couldn’t expect any relief from her. This was besides the fact that she, when standing opposite me before I was finished, would have no doubt limited herself to resolutely non-seeing glances. And I had a strong suspicion that Creator’s feverish compulsion to work was also related to Lidewij’s absence. He was the kind of person who wasn’t good at being alone in a house that was completely empty; but when he found himself in that situation, it released forces within him, a voracious restlessness that didn’t know when to stop.
It wasn’t until Creator reached a spot in the middle, about twenty centimetres more or less to the left of my middle, that I picked up some kind of creative tension from him. I mean, it was only then that he was like the creator I had imagined and only then that I saw that painting really was difficult and demanding. He painted for a quarter of an hour with the squinting concentration of a bomb-disposal expert. All things considered, this was the only moment in which I thought I was going to be something special.
One day I was finished.
That, at least, was my conclusion from the way Creator came into the studio without choosing a brush, without picking up the triangular piece of particle board he used as a palette, without squeezing out a tube of paint. He just came over to stand before me and looked.
Holy moly, he said.
Beyond expectations, he said as well and, Calling all nations. And, Boy-oh-boy, he knows his stuff.
He took a step towards me and bent forward, towards the spot in my middle, and started humming.
Nothing wrong with that, he mumbled to himself.
I felt like he wasn’t looking at his own work, but at something new that just happened to have been placed in his studio.
Good job, he said out loud. A bloody good job.
He took a large step to the side and bent forward again. This was where Singer’s face was. I knew that, because I had sometimes heard Creator swearing, just there, because it was so bloody difficult, a flat nose like that. He didn’t want it turning into Tintin in the Congo.
He looked at the wind-up alarm clock that stood on a crate somewhere in the studio. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. I heard the car keys tinkling in his left hand. Only now did I notice that he was wearing different clothes — only his shoes showed that he was a painter.
Suddenly he spoke directly to me, speaking loudly and clearly. What do you reckon? You ready?
I understood what he meant.
Am I finished?
It was, I can’t put it any other way, a moment of splitting. Not for Creator — but for me. He had spoken directly to me before, with a question he already knew the answer to. But this time it was as if the question was no longer for me, but for someone else — the person who had ended up on me. It was for Singer, who I had to assume was the person who was now on me. I realise how hopeless my sentences are becoming; my grammar is not up to my history. When Creator spoke to me he was no longer speaking to me, but to Singer. But who was I if I was Singer?
Oh, van Schendel, who was I if I was Singer?
Brace yourself, Creator said. Lidewij will zoom down out of the sky and then she’ll see you, hie-dee-hie.
He winked.
I had rarely seen him so childish or carefree.
Good luck, he said and disappeared, rattling the car keys.
Without Lidewij, Withernot had been dead quiet. Singer had arisen in silence, underground, as it were. For weeks, Creator hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone; he hadn’t answered the phone or known another person’s glance.
It was as if I had become something terrible — I can’t put it any other way.
I don’t know how I came to this idea, because the last glance Creator gave me before driving to Schiphol to pick up Lidewij was cheerful. Elated. And yet, during the ninety minutes that separated me from Lidewij’s return, I felt like someone who is regaining consciousness after a coma and is about to see for the first time how others react to his burnt, disfigured face. Don’t ask me how I came to this horrific thought — what did I know of disfigurement, I, who from the far corner of my left eye had only very rarely seen the movement on the television in the adjoining room?
I only knew about disasters and blazing infernos inasmuch as they were discussed on the evening news and current affairs programmes. I was shocked by the intensity with which I suddenly knew that my face was burnt — it was as if I had a memory that wasn’t mine.
Creator wasn’t there when Lidewij stepped into the sunroom. It was getting on for six. He had taken her skis to the shed before lugging her suitcase upstairs to the washing machine. He obviously wanted to give her some time alone with me first.
Strangely enough, she didn’t walk up to me after coming into the room. Instead she strode over to the far-left corner to tug on the cord of the venetian blinds, which were hanging down at an angle in front of the section of window that was furthest from me.
The day had been overcast, but a wind had risen in the course of the afternoon and long March clouds were racing across the sky. There seemed to be as many clouds as patches of blue.
In the very moment the blinds uncovered the window, a cloud moved away from the sun and an almost horizontal beam of light shone into the studio. It seemed to skim in just over my right-hand corner; for a second, I understood what it must be like to screw your eyes up against a glare.
Lidewij turned and smiled.
Rather than looking at me, she was looking, as far as I could tell, along the beam of light that shone into the sunroom and lit up the side wall to my right or diagonally above me.
The light was coming from behind her. I saw her as a black patch with overexposed edges.
She stayed standing there like that while the sun sank into the tops of the birches bordering that part of the garden. It took less than a minute. Only then did she come up to me and turn into Lidewij. Tanned, blond, skiing-holiday Lidewij, with her apple-green scarf and her red lips — she was the first person to see me. At that moment, and I am fairly sure of this, I was not thinking of Creator’s promise to Specht not to show me to anyone, that not a soul on earth gets to see Singer.
Lidewij stood there and looked at me or, rather, she looked at the person who had arisen on me over the last few weeks, and that person, finally seen, opened his eyes — that’s what it felt like to me — and saw her.
Immediately after the imprimatura, when Creator sketched Singer’s outline on me, I realised more or less where my face would be. And later, when he spent hours working on two closely adjacent spots in that same area with a tickling, unspeakably fine brush, I knew that that was where my eyes must be — but what did I know? Whether they were closed, drooping, or wide open — I had no idea. But now, now that Lidewij, after a flashing glance which seemed to take me in as a whole, let her own eyes be drawn to the place where I knew my eyes to be, I became, or liked to think of myself as having become, really seen for the first time.
Strange, how soon this exchange of looks was over.
Had I expected her to gaze into my eyes for minutes at a time like a lover or a young mother communing with her child?
I had absolutely no sense
of something having been exchanged.
I noticed to my dismay that there was no question at all of eyes seeking eyes.
This confused me so much that the gesture that followed took me completely by surprise.
In the unfathomably brief span of time after the incomprehensible exchange of looks, her gaze had slid to the left, away from my face, to the spot twenty centimetres left of centre — where Creator had spent the last two days before Lidewij’s return working with the same concentration and intensity he had brought to my eyes. And before I knew what was happening, Lidewij had stepped forward and touched me.
There.
Involuntarily, like someone touching the fontanel of a newborn.
She said that a few minutes later, when Creator came into the studio. She used the word fontanel, which I heard for the first time in my life. Creator smiled when he heard her say that word, and I noticed his right hand slide briefly, involuntarily, towards his crotch.
I didn’t feel it. I mean: Lidewij had already touched me and pulled her hand back again before I realised what was happening. She looked, apparently shocked, at the tips of her index and middle fingers, but there was no paint on them.
She stepped back and sighed.
Then she used the fingertips that had touched me to wipe the corner of her right eye.
Felix?
She hadn’t taken her eyes off me, but Creator had already entered the studio and was standing behind her, looking with her.
Felix, come here! Look at this.
Mysterious words. She knew he had painted me.
But still she said, Felix, come here! — as if wanting to show me to him.
Look at this.
She turned and laid her head on his chest, as if to hear the beating of his heart.
It was getting dark.
The Portrait Page 5