I spotted Hashimoto and Eva speaking to a man dressed as Caravaggio’s Bacchus. A garland of grapes encircled his head, his brown chest protruded from the white toga he had draped over his side, and a goblet of claret nestled in one of his chubby pink hands.
“Have you known Eva long?” I finally mustered the courage to ask my night’s companion.
“I met her when she first came to Paris. She bought a hat from me.” She was smiling from beneath her chestnut-colored mask. Behind the slits, her green eyes were dazzling.
“I’ve been making hats since I was a little girl.” But soon she had turned from me, her russet robes sweeping like a fox’s tail over my shins. The music filling my ears.
“Do you see the orchestra playing over there?” she mused. “How I wish you’d ask me to dance.”
I knew that Frenchwomen were far more forward than their Japanese counterparts. But still, her words froze me with fear. I had never danced with any woman before, Japanese or European. I knew not even the proper dance steps to attempt such a feat!
“Come, come,” she chided gently, “or we will miss this round!” She thrust her arm around mine and dragged me onto the dance floor.
She pulled herself close to me, her acorn-colored hair and gilded wreath aflame, the torchlight illuminating my perspiring brow. She smelled like the forest, deep and musky. I inhaled the sweet fragrance of the leaves she had fastened to her hair.
“Don’t be afraid, I will guide you,” she said from behind her mask. And it was true, she led me as the music swayed on. As celestial as a fairy, she moved over the notes of music, her body close to mine, so that I could continue to inhale her woodland perfume. Was it the high green of cypress, to match her cinnamon-red hair? My head bowed toward hers as she led me over the floor, the music filling my ears, my navy robe billowing with air. Indeed, I was lost in the winding curves, the dips, and the curtsies. For that brief moment, as the orchestra played on, I was hers.
The moon beamed ivory. Round, as if it were the sun cloaked in ermine, it shone on a sea of artists and their friends. It was only then that I felt slightly guilty that Noboru was not there with me.
Where was he now? I wondered as Isabelle and I removed ourselves from the dance floor. Was he asleep? Was he alone or with another, as I was? I had not betrayed him, I said to myself, even though this was the first time I had felt so intoxicated by another person besides my devoted Noboru.
When the night began to transform itself into dawn and Isabelle and I found ourselves separated from Eva and Hashimoto, the other guests departing, and the orchestra beginning to pack away the instruments, I did not protest when she suggested that we return together to my room.
She stood in my small chamber, the fading moonlight radiating off her doeskin form, the fur robe falling from her shoulders, and I could have wept from the sight of her golden limbs.
Was it the champagne that made me dizzy, or was it fear? I stood in the corner, watching as she remained steadfast in front of me, her mask still cloaking her face, her hair still bound with pearls.
She removed her robes first. The mask remained, the hair still piled high. And I gasped as she let the russet silk fall to the floor, like an autumn tree shedding its leaves, her nakedness revealed to me.
Her body glowed like amber. Translucent and deep yellow. Her thighs soft and round.
“If not for you, then for whom shall I undo my hair?” I said, remembering how Grandfather had used the ancient Heian poem to describe Grandmother.
And she raised her long, lean arms to unpin her titian curls. They fell like Bordeaux waters over her perfect, round breasts.
“Come to me,” she said, and stretched out her arms for me. I hesitated before I went to her, and when I did, she untied the ribbons of her mask.
“Yamamoto,” she whispered, and her fingers reached down under the folds of my robe. She could feel my body trembling next to hers, a body wrestling with fear, desire, and guilt.
My kimono fell to the floor. The navy silk formed a dark puddle around my feet, like spilled ink bleeding into the floor.
She kissed my forehead and ran her ivory fingers over my bony chest. Around me I inhaled the deep woodland smell of the forest and stroked the downiness of her loins. The night had left her wet, her skin damp and fragrant.
I was not so naive that I did not know what she desired from me. In Japan we have woodblock prints that could make a Western man blush. But in the end, my own loins failed me.
My heart was elsewhere, true to the person I always believed I would love.
I removed myself from the embrace of her sensuous form. Her breath was racing and her body flushed strawberry. My own sex hung slack and small.
I stood over her, both of us naked, she more beautiful and luminous than the most exotic flower. I marveled over the curve of her back, the plumpness of her derriere, the fullness of her breasts. The nipples the color of crushed poppies, the shadow cast underneath her arms the color of wet lilacs.
“What is the matter?” she finally asked. Her soft voice was nearly lost in the wind outside my window.
“It is just that you are so beautiful, I prefer . . . I prefer . . .” I stuttered nervously, looking past the curtains of my dank room into the quiet of the night.
“I prefer to paint you.”
And so, as the night gave over to dawn, I painted her. My Isabelle. Mine for the evening, in any event. Where I could record her on my canvas. Never before had I been so inspired. That night I blended my pigments like a great master. Her flesh rendered in a palette of primrose and burnt carmine. Her scarlet curls adorned by golden leaves and tiny faun ears. Like a character from Greek mythology, she hovered between flesh and foliage, a goddess of the woods.
Lulled by the rhythm of my brushstrokes, Isabelle slept in pose, only to awaken to find her mirror image forever cast on canvas.
“May I have your robe?” she asked me when she awakened from her sleep and found herself lying on my floor like an odalisque. The bright morning light had caused her to blush with embarrassment.
“Certainly,” I said as I rushed to hand her my yukata.
She tied the sash tightly and walked over to my easel.
“Is that me?” she asked modestly.
“Yes,” I said, scared that she would declare my rendering of her atrocious. She walked two paces back and squinted at the canvas.
“Monsieur,” she said with a smile. “I think it’s wonderful!”
FIFTY
This is your best painting to date, Yamamoto!” Collin cried when I showed him the painting of Isabelle, The Fairy Faun. “If you can work a little on the brushwork, you might just be able to enter it in the Salon next year.”
Collin placed the canvas on the center easel and took a few steps back. “Such an exquisite model! Where ever did you find her?” He looked back at me, his eyes shining.
“Such a splendid idea to have her mask half between her fingers and half dangling to the forest’s floor. And such a lovely body! You’ve finally gotten the proportions just right!” He moved closer and squinted at the detail of the nude. “It’s quite magnificent . . . the contrast of her creamy white body set against those rich red-brown robes.”
“I’m so glad you like it, Master Collin,” I managed to say. “It still needs improvement, I know.”
“Your brushstrokes need to be stronger, Yamamoto,” he said as he pulled at his voluminous white beard. “Start working on some other canvases and then come back to it. Your mind will be refreshed, and you’ll thank me for the advice afterward, I assure you.”
My painting of The Fairy Faun remained on the center easel all day, the easel that Collin reserved for his students’ most commanding paintings.
I began my day’s work, stretching out another canvas and priming it with gesso.
* * *
That night, I carried the canv
as of Isabelle through the streets as I made my way back to my room. I held the painted side toward me, so that her nakedness wouldn’t be revealed to the crowds, and so I could protect her unvarnished surface from the blustering wind.
I worked on perfecting her at home. I mixed the colors of my palette on my wooden board and blended the pigments until they were as rich as jewels.
The reds glowed like rubies, the greens like jade and ultramarine. I tried to give her face a truly three-dimensional quality. I painted in the delicate flare of her tiny nostrils, the faint trace of auburn hair that cascaded over her brow.
For the forest, I used my memory of Daigo as my guide. I imagined the tall, lean cypresses; the curling leaves of the cryptomeria; the flat blades of the sumac. I remembered the shadow of my own form as I lay down in sleep on the damp earthen floor.
There in the wooded kingdom she sleeps. The fairy faun. Her umber robes, her bedding, the sunlight bathing her flaxen form. And I keep her in my studio, to work on her until I have perfected her, as Collin inspired me to do.
FIFTY-ONE
Looking back, I can see a thin thread that connects my experiences in life with those of my art. All of my relationships, like all of my paintings, were struggles. During my days with Collin, I often found myself staring into my sketch pad or my canvas, hoping perhaps that it would speak to me. Guide me. Show me where I was headed in this often frustrating journey to create art.
But in Collin’s atelier, I was not Yamamoto Ryusei’s son. No one knew me as the only child of the mask carver and his lost love. I was simply Yamamoto Kiyoki, the Japanese who had come to Paris to pursue painting.
As the end of my third year of studies with Collin approached, I started to feel that my work was coming together. The painting of Isabelle, The Fairy Faun, had marked my turning point as an artist. Collin was perhaps the first to vocalize it, but I was beginning to feel it within myself as well.
For over three years, I had struggled within the walls of Collin’s atelier to reproduce the images that I saw before me.
I grieved painfully over my inability to reproduce what my eyes beheld, what my heart understood. In the slender figure of the young girl before me, I saw the slight curve that ran from her armpit to the valley underneath her breast; I saw the shadow that marooned itself like a puddle of Madeira at the back of her bent knee; and I saw the perfect shape of her shoulder blades, her spine falling like a single ribbon down her back and then curving outward like tied laces around her behind. I saw everything, sensed every contour, memorized every shape. But many times my eyes fell upon the image on my page, and I didn’t recognize it at all from the subject that stood before me.
But now I believed my luck was changing. Collin had gazed upon my rendering of Isabelle as the fairy faun and had seen what I had: her magnificent beauty cast in autumn hues. I had captured her radiance, her perfectly proportioned figure, her mystical allure, and seized it! I had forever preserved her within the threads of my canvas.
“You still have to concentrate on your brushwork, Yamamoto,” Collin said gruffly while looking over my shoulder as I painted with the others one afternoon.
“I will not have you returning to Japan until you have developed a style of your own, young man.”
“Yes, sir,” I said meekly.
“Don’t paint for the sake of the judges at the salon. Paint for your own sake. If you continue to paint exactly what has been painted for the last hundred years, how will art ever evolve?”
The others in the class were looking on. William peeked out from behind his canvas and winked with familiar fun.
“True, you all know I am a bit of a stodgy Academic in my own right, but even I have learned something from those Impressionists!”
The others managed a chuckle.
“As artists we must bring our own experience into our vision. Vision is as important as light and shadow!”
“Yamamoto,” he said, as he crept close behind my hunched shoulders. “Did you not tell me once that your father was a mask carver?”
And I stared at him as he brought the ghost of Father into this room where the emulsions we used would have rotted wood.
“And have you any carving experience?”
“Yes,” I replied, almost ashamed.
He then took a palette knife and a rag from the pocket of his white smock. He carefully stroked the shining blade with the pressure of his fingers and the cloth. Like my first set of chisels, the blade was silver in the light of the sun.
“Who says a canvas cannot also be carved?”
And then he walked away. The palette knife lay beside my scattered tubes of paint. I stared at the steel instrument and then at the soft bladders of pigment. The blade and the paint coexisting. That which I had always considered separate now mingled together.
Collin allowed me my own discovery. He vanished somewhere into the atelier as I applied those first few strokes of paint with my knife.
Perhaps the palette knife is not only for blending pigment, I thought to myself. And I held the blade in my hand. So much lighter than the chisel, its blade flexible to the touch, it extended before me and I swept it across the page.
I watched as it cut over the canvas, rippling the paint up over its edge. Then I applied some paint to another section and used the knife like a pencil. The image of Isabelle reclining on the forest floor seemed to be coming off the canvas, her flesh almost within my grasp. With the tip of the knife, I carved her out of the pigment.
Collin came over to me hours later, after I had transformed my canvas. She was as beautiful as she had been that night when I first painted her as a faun. But now she came forth. Entered space. Took possession of one’s eyes.
My master stood behind me, his eyes pressed into a squint, his long fingers laced before him like strings. “Very good, Monsieur Yamamoto.”
And I turned to him, my black smock smeared with paint, my hair wild from work, and I smiled. I can still recall how strange my teeth felt against my upturned lips. The sensation of a smile was as foreign to me as a loud, long laugh. He placed his pale hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
“Your eyes have finally met your hands,” he said.
And I extended my hands before me. Stared at their paint-spotted skin, flashes of orange and gold pigment flecked over the joints. I turned them over and marveled at the palms, these appendages of mine that gripped palette knife and brush in order to create.
“You have accomplished something here, my son.”
I stared up at him with glassy eyes. I wanted to remember this man before me for always. This teacher who called me his son. And I wondered if my own father looked down on me that shining afternoon and saw me carve. Because I realize I was not doing it for Collin, or for myself, but as a tribute to Father.
FIFTY-TWO
I am so proud of you,” Collin said, when my painting was selected for the Salon. He extended his hand and clasped mine. “When a pupil’s work is admitted to the yearly Salon, his teacher cannot help but bask a little in his glory!” he said, and his eyes were beaming.
I smiled. “It is all because of your patience and guidance, Master Collin. Without you I would still be doing awkward sketches, no doubt.”
“You are too hard on yourself, dear Yamamoto. In these four years you have made tremendous strides in your work. Your canvases reveal that.”
* * *
The same day I ran into Hashimoto and Eva on the street. They were not in the comfort of a carriage, and she was shivering underneath her cloak and muff.
“Congratulations, Yamamoto,” Hashimoto wheezed over a cough. “I heard that one of your paintings was accepted this year by the Salon!”
“Yes,” I said and blushed. “I was quite surprised.”
“I’ve been trying for eight years!” he lamented. “It must be some painting!”
“It’s really nothing
,” I said adhering to a strict sense of Japanese modesty.
“Well, we definitely will come to see it when the Salon opens next week,” said Eva. “The Salon is always such a social event in Paris. One simply must attend!”
I looked down at her rosy cheeks and plaited hair and nodded in agreement.
“Perhaps we’ll bring Isabelle. She speaks of you often. It was quite rude of you, Yamamoto, not to have called on her after the ball,” she said playfully.
“Oh,” I said, trying to muster a defense, “I’ve been so busy recently, truly lost in my work. I hardly ever see a soul.” But the thought of Isabelle attending the Salon and seeing herself displayed to the public petrified me. It would be almost too embarrassing to bear!
“I really doubt Isabelle would find the Salon very interesting.”
“Nonsense!” cried Hashimoto. “Who doesn’t find the Salon interesting? The lines to enter snake across the street. The cafés nearby make enough money to last the year! It is the art event of the season!”
I was mortified at the thought of embarrassing Isabelle. Even though I had not seen her since that night, I was still sensitive to her feelings. Had our positions been reversed, I would have been mortified to see a nude portrait of myself hanging in a public place. Worse yet, what would Eva and Hashimoto say upon seeing their friend displayed, her naked limbs and raspberry hair flowing across a massive canvas?
Yet there was nothing I could do. By Sunday afternoon, I would find out.
* * *
On Sunday I found myself standing next to the huge wall where my painting was exhibited among at least fifteen other canvases. The Fairy Faun hung exactly in the center. No one who entered the South Salon could miss it.
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