Omer Pasha Latas

by Ivo Andrić

  “I keep wondering what that man is selling, that makes him so pleased with himself and haughty.”

  And it was the same everywhere. The Travnik beys, with their dark, hard faces, as though carved from stone, with no other expression than a bleak, unapproachable, fruitless and impenetrable conceit. Omer Pasha’s divan-effendi, an Anatolian, Ahmet Aga, the kavedžibaša, with a bloated face, slanting eyes that exuded contempt, and thick, full lips that looked as if they were about to spit rather than utter a word. The other officials in the vizier’s residence in Travnik and in Omer Pasha’s in Sarajevo were all more or less, each in his own way, equally self-important, grim-faced, unapproachable. Even ten-year-old boys had an expression of scornful smugness that gave them an offensive expression beyond their years.

  And now, in Omer Pasha’s eyes, he saw that same arrogance, developed and refined to a passion, an art and an energy that had no need to scowl and puff itself up but was expressed in a contemptuous smile from unknowable heights.

  Out there in the world he came from, Karas had also known self-importance and understood that, like a kind of uniform, a greater or lesser degree of conceit went along with name, rank and position. He well remembered the faces of citizens of Zagreb, officers and nobles, the patronizing smile of Count Revitsky and other, lesser Austrian diplomats in Rome. There was a glint of superiority also on the face of the famous sculptor Thorvaldsen, when he received the unknown artist from an unknown land in the icy, marble studio of his Roman villa and invited him formally to sit down, without shaking his hand because he held both his hands, like two sacred objects, in a small muff of white fur. Karas had spotted the same glint in the cold northern eyes of the German painter Overbeck in his spacious studio, where all the pictures were jealously covered and wrapped like odalisques, when he had announced that he could not take him on as a permanent student, lowering his eyelids deceitfully, concealing that same proud glint, jealous no doubt of him too, as of everything else.

  He had seen all this and remembered it, but the conceit of people in the West was softened by complex ceremonials and innumerable formulas of politeness, something like a symbolic, thin, barely visible yet felt barrier dividing caste from caste, one “world” from another, something defensive and impersonal, like a general rule that applied to all, hallowed by tradition. But here it was different, here that arrogance, that contempt and belittling of the other was manifested everywhere. It struck a person directly, roughly and personally, without formality or compassion, with no code or rules of behavior. The arrogance of these Turkish people represented a real force, like the power of a muscle or a weapon, and served openly as a means in a struggle, as one of the ways in which one man suppresses, subordinates, exploits or destroys another.

  Personally, he had not experienced this arrogance as particularly oppressive or insulting because he was completely absorbed in observing it and so becoming almost insensitive to it, but it interested him, made him think, provoked in him the desire to discuss it with some reasonable and humane person. But with whom?

  When he took everything into account, in both Travnik and Sarajevo he had so far come across just one man with whom he was able sometimes and up to a point to talk about something outside and above the needs and immediate concerns of daily life. This was Friar Grgo Martić. Whenever he invited him to dine, the priest would discuss Zagreb writers, recite Latin and Italian verse, question him about painting in Italy. They spoke also about Bosnia and the Turks. Karas relayed his impressions, including the Turks’ special, crude arrogance. Friar Grgo acknowledged it, he never denied anything, but he talked about it, as about everything else, in a humorous, resigned tone. He told him what one of the foreign consuls had once said, as they discussed the possibilities of exports from Bosnia:

  “You know, if arrogance and insolence were commodities sought on the international market, Bosnia, with its viziers and beys, would be able to compete with all the other countries of Europe.”

  And Friar Grgo had added for his own part:

  “That’s how it has always been here, maestro: the strong ride horses, while the weak trot along on foot.”

  Friar Grgo used to end every conversation in that or a similar way, without any real connection with the topic, without adopting a specific position or attempting to enter more deeply into the issue, sheltering deftly behind proverbs and wise sayings, which suggest a lot but say nothing, retreating always into a joking, insincere neutrality.

  These thoughts came to Karas swiftly and vividly, in the few moments that he had to study Omer Pasha from head to foot, with the free, calmly inquisitive gaze of a painter, returning constantly to his eyes that glowed with cold madness, the glow of an inhuman pride.

  During that time, adjutants passed through the drawing room softly and quietly, their spurs barely clinking, while the serving lads moved armchairs and tables, adjusted the curtains on the bay window, carrying out the painter’s wishes silently and humbly, under the pasha’s stern gaze.

  As soon as these preparations began, the relationship between the painter and his model abruptly changed. Both the adjutants and the servants watched in amazement, out of the corner of their eyes, as the small bearded man in his modest German clothes was now giving orders and arranging things in the residence, while the pasha, their terrible pasha, listened to him and accepted everything, stood up, sat down and placed himself however the foreigner suggested.

  At last the two were left alone, the pasha in an armchair, and the painter in front of him, on a small stool, holding a board with paper stretched over it in his left hand. The work began.

  Omer Pasha gazed straight, over the painter’s right shoulder, somewhere into the distance that could be made out in the bright, still slightly misty day through the window, while Karas now lowered his eyes to the paper, then raised them, looking in a new way straight at his model’s face, screwing up his eyes and occasionally throwing back his head and the whole upper part of his body.

  In the depths of the misty distance, Omer saw himself clearly the way he imagined himself and the way he wanted the painter to see him and later everyone to see him in the picture. Karas saw only his stretched paper and on it the as yet nonexistent contours of the pasha’s face at one specific moment, which was meant to contain all moments. He could make out in the distance the picture he wished to capture and retain, while it kept shifting, breaking up and reconnecting, shimmering and trembling like water that flows ceaselessly, coming and going, always new and always the same, both close and elusive.

  In this game of apparitions and his struggle with a picture that would not let itself be caught, the painter bent forward and then threw himself back increasingly often and vigorously, while at the same time whispering a string of half-intelligible words, like a man running, breathless from the chase, through dense undergrowth and parting the green bushes with his hands, hurriedly seeking and occasionally glimpsing a familiar face that was somewhere nearby but would not let itself be captured. The whispering turned into a hoarse, incoherent muttering, then into counting and chanting which expressed precisely the course of his pursuit of the restless lines and in which could be made out individual local and foreign words, often repeated, broken up or stretched out, according to the movement of the head and body accompanying them.

  With a light, happy smile on his face, the painter sang softly, following the movements of his hand with his voice:

  “Yes, ye-es-s . . . that’s it, tha-a-at’s it. Wa-a-a-vily . . . more-more wa-a-a-a-vy! Bene, be-ene, be-enissimo! . . .So it goes. . .wa-vy. . .No, no-o-o . . .”

  When he ran into a problem, he would stop halfway through a word, his smile gone and without movement or sound stare at that spot, as if suddenly sober, but then he would continue again moving forward and backward, and his smile reappeared, and the melody of fragmented words with no apparent connection or sense began again, turning at times into a song in which it was no longer possible to make out single words, because all that was left of them were vow
els, twisted and stretched in strange modulations.

  This soft singing, linked to the steady movements of his hand, head and upper body, rose at times with those movements, becoming thin and high, so that the young bearded man, in the rapture of his work, resembled a chanting, swaying dervish.

  While the painter, lost and entranced, experienced the whole world only as an endless thicket in which, forgetting both himself and who was sitting opposite him, he was playing hide-and-seek with every single line of the face that kept dissolving and vanishing before him, and then again taking shape and coming to life, the pasha was thinking about himself, about his picture as an object of admiration for countless people, down the generations, and about the painter, rocking here in front of him, softly wailing, absent and transformed. That was at first interesting, then odd, and in the end annoying, even insulting: making him feel ridiculous and superfluous, that he was not being accorded the proper respect otherwise shown him by everyone, always and everywhere.

  What is this painter? the pasha wondered a little crossly and spitefully. What is he? A weakling and a pauper, a church mouse. And how could such a thing exist? How does he travel, what does he eat? Does he own anything? How does he come by money, clothes, women? He paints, which is to say: he virtually begs. So he lives and so he will die, a down-and-out, hungry and thirsty, wanting everything, snatching what crumbs of life fall by the wayside, too weak to take anything of it for himself and make it his own. And this thing goes slinking through the world, looking for something, hoping for anything; he appears not even to notice the emptiness and banality of his existence. And here he is now, squirming and humming incoherently, humming joyfully and smirking from a height with pitying superiority, as though he was not a vagrant, abject wretch roaming the world for a crust, but an invisibly crowned figure, confident and imperiously indifferent in his arrogant anonymity, above all human concerns, troubles and needs.

  The pasha coughed drily and sullenly, but the painter just narrowed his eyes all the more and threw his head back, steadily smiling his sleepwalker’s smile from on high. Uncomfortable and for some reason incapable of bringing this absurd situation to an end, the pasha endeavored to alter the course of his thoughts. To hell with the painter! As soon as the picture was finished he must be paid off and chased back where he came from. It was preposterous that creatures like this should be needed even for a moment. And who knew what else the man would paint? Here the pasha began again to think about his portrait and to see it through the eyes of countless people and future generations. These thoughts soon diffused his bad mood, leaving him gentler and more cheerful. He was now living with his portrait and, hidden behind it, he caught the admiring glances and exclamations of thousands of people looking at it, hundreds of years hence. His life-size portrait hangs on a wall, but not in Sarajevo or Istanbul, not in Turkey, but in an imperial gallery in the heart of Vienna, and in it he is not dressed in the uniform of a Turkish marshal but an Austrian field marshal, with shining stars and a steel-blue sash across his chest, with the Order of Maria Theresa round his neck. At the bottom of the gilded frame on a little copper plate is written Feldmarschall Michael Lattas von Castel Grab. The curator of the gallery explains the painting to visitors, listing all his battles and victories. And among the spectators Omer himself is always invisibly present. With relish he seeks and drinks in the admiring glances and expressions of awe that his picture attracts, and so cures himself of the long concealed bitterness and secret sorrow of his life, he floats on waves of public triumph and hidden revenge for all that his father, shamefully discharged from that same imperial Austrian army as a supply lieutenant, and that he himself, the former aspiring cadet of the Lika regiment, the deserter and Turkish convert Mićo Latas from the village of Janja Gora, has had to endure.

  Losing himself in those images of unrealizable dreams, the pasha forgot the disagreeable painter and began himself, at first slowly, but then increasingly vigorously, to rock as if on waves, completely transported. A smile of perfect happiness spread over his lips, fixing the lines of his face in that strange expression of slight drunkenness and smiling pride that satisfied vanity confers for a moment on the faces of the insatiably conceited.

  So the painter and the pasha sat facing one another, swaying, lost each in his own trance, looking at but not seeing each other, entirely forgetting each other and themselves, the time and place and everything around them.

  It was only when the muezzins began to call the midday prayers from the Sarajevo minarets that the spell was broken. The pasha was the first to stir. He passed his hand lightly over his face and suddenly, with a commanding movement, announced in a dry and unnecessarily raised voice:

  “Enough!”

  The session was at an end.

  Both the pasha and the painter needed a few minutes to collect themselves. At a sign from the pasha, the adjutant with the copper-red face and ginger beard came in, followed soundlessly by two lads. Everything was restored to its former state. The pasha again stood by a table, straight as a candle, giving abrupt orders, while Karas gathered up his drawing materials, small and humble as he had been before he started work.

  On the broad sheet of paper the pasha’s face could be discerned only in its main lines. The mouth, beard and moustache were already slightly shaded, but the eyes were only outlined, still white and empty, as on marble statues. The pasha merely cast a quick glance at the sketch. He was surprised how little had been achieved during that time, which had seemed to him endlessly long, and how little those misty lines resembled his dream of a great portrait, but he showed nothing of his surprise and disappointment, just told the painter condescendingly and benevolently that he could continue his work the next day at the same time. He spoke in German again, as though he wished to place a foreign language between himself and the painter.

  “Auf Wiedersehen, Herr. . .”

  And, not knowing what to call him, the pasha repeated more softly and gently:

  “Auf Wiedersehen!”

  The drawing session began the following day at the same time and then continued from day to day. The work with paint, on canvas, went more slowly and less easily, but the seraskier did not appear to notice anything. Each day he sat for an hour and gave free reign to his imagination and memories. He rarely had an opportunity for that otherwise; but the proximity of this unusual man, whom he continued to despise, seemed to have infected him with a need for fantasizing and a boundless rapture which was for him like a new, previously unknown game and at the same time relaxation.

  Karas now worked standing and moved about as he worked, stepping back, bending forward, humming half-intelligible Italian words without rhyme or reason. But that did not disturb Omer Pasha in his recollections and imaginings. The minute he sat down on his Viennese chair, he seemed to become a different person, he forgot everything he had been doing until a moment before and everything that awaited him after the session, convinced that here before him his person was being composed for future generations, that this was crucial and everything else must take second place. And what was his real persona and what must be included in the painting as its essential component? Everything. This, and this, and this! Everything, only transformed and altered for eternity and his descendants. Memories and desires welled up, crossing each other, suppressing each other, fighting for precedence. There had been many in Omer Pasha’s tumultuous and exceptional life. And that other man, the one now sitting as a model, knew Omer Pasha Latas, the one before and the one after the painting session, and his life, public and secret, conscious and unconscious. That was the one who was being painted, and he knew everything that had been, foresaw all that could be in the future, encompassed and understood what Omer Pasha Latas, the living one, never saw and never guessed even in his thoughts or dreams.

  As soon as he sat down in front of the stretched canvas, he forgot the painter and the rest of the world. For just a moment or two he thought about his position, about painting in general, each time with the same wonde
rment. Painting was not ordinary work, nor was being painted an unimportant business. It was a miracle. You were born again, came into being, grew, rejoiced, suffered, fell ill, grew old, everything, but you did not die, on the contrary, you endured in your transience, almost eternal, firm and real as no one who knew you saw you but as you had secretly always wished to be.

  Only now did he see that this was his natural state, that always, in everything, in his mind, energy and will, in his work and all his actions, he had been just a model for that future portrait. Amazing!

  His amazement grew constantly, and along with it thoughts and memories surfaced, long forgotten dreams and actions acquired their real meaning and full explanation. Before him arose the unknown but real life of Mićo Latas from Janja Gora, and that was also the life of Omer Pasha, the powerful and famous seraskier who was now, here, being painted the way he was and the way he had to be.

  Everyone lives according to his instincts, taking from life as much as he can, as best he can, of all he needs to feed himself, procreate and maintain himself in the most favorable circumstances and greatest possible security. It is rare for an individual to step off that natural path. Before such an individual, with the very first steps of his conscious life, there forms, in the far distance, his image of himself. With time, that image becomes his main and only aim, his promised land. And the man increasingly loses sight of himself, who he is, the way he is, and of his real surroundings, he has an ever weaker sense of his responsibilities to those around him, and with every day he sees himself more clearly as what he is supposed to become, as he wishes to be and endure in the eyes of his contemporaries and future generations. One might conclude that such an exceptional person does not really live, because his life and work are entirely in the service of that future image, everything is subordinated to that image and adapted to it, and the man has just one goal: to come as close to it as possible, as fast as possible. By all means and at any price, crossing, skirting around or treading on whatever is in his way: everything that other people see as a need, a law and sacred duty.