3
HE STANDS BEFORE US like our own reflection distorted in a mirror, known yet strange. What is he doing here, on this raised ground, in this gilded, inexplicable light? He is isolated from the rest of the figures ranged behind him, suspended between their world and ours, a man alone. Has he dropped from the sky or risen from the underworld? We have the sense of a mournful apotheosis. His arms hang loosely forward from his sides, his splayed feet are arranged in a parody of the mannered stance of prince or soldier posing for an heroic portrait. He seems trapped, held fast by invisible constraints. He might be in the stocks, or worse. We notice the pipe-clayed slippers tied with crimson ribbons in enormous, floppy bows, the broad satin trousers that are too short for him, the outsize coat of white twill, with its sixteen buttons, the rucked sleeves of which seem ample enough to accommodate the arms of an ape. Who has dressed him up in this clown’s attire? For he has the look of having been bundled into his costume and thrust unceremoniously out of the wings to stand up here all alone, dumbfounded, mortified, afraid to move lest an unseen audience break into a storm of laughter; yet although for now he is lost for words, we have the feeling that at any moment he may burst out and talk and talk, unstoppably. He wears a limp ruff of white lace, a skullcap, or perhaps it is a headband, and a hat with a wide, circular brim pushed far back on his head. The head is oval, with a broad brow and receding chin. His gaze is at once remote and penetrating, his eyes are a greenish brown. His hair, what we can see of it, is black, or perhaps red. He seems weary. The eyelids, lips and nostrils are tinged with pink and appear to be inflamed; has he been weeping? Yet the corners of his fleshy mouth are dimpled in a sort of smile, distant, pained perhaps, without warmth. We have the impression of past suffering and a present numbness. Perhaps behind that pensive gaze he is laughing at us.
The X-rays show beneath his face another face which may be that of a woman. Pentimenti will out. (See fig. I. Behrens Collection, recent acquisition.)
The figure of Pierrot derives from the Italian stock characters Pedrolino and the Neapolitan Pulcinella. These characters were introduced to the Paris Fairs by the King’s Company of Italian Comedians towards the close of the seventeenth century and were transformed into the more familiar French form not long before Vaublin’s arrival in Paris from his native Holland in the early 1700s; he would have seen the part played at the Comédie-Française by the great Biancolelli among others. Pierrot, disguised in outfit and in personality, is the childish man, the mannish child. Traditionally, as here, he wears a headband or skullcap and pleated ruff, broad silk trousers, a buttoned coat of silk or white twill with loose sleeves and white or black pumps. He appears in whiteface, though not always. Not always. In certain manifestations he is endowed with a humped back and a protruding chest, reminding us of his roots also in the character of Punch, that malign figure which itself dates from the time of the Roman circuses. He does not usually carry a club; in this instance, he does.
*
It is a large work, more than two metres high. Pierrot is slightly greater than lifesize. This disproportion, and the elevated placing – he seems somehow to hover in mid-air — lend a sense of lowering massiveness to an otherwise unremarkable, even absurd figure. Note too that Pierrot, for all his centrality in the design, is not centrally placed in the composition, but set a little way to the left; the small displacement creates an unsettling subliminal effect, which it is hard to believe is not intentional. Yes: a subtle harmonics is at work here, which plays upon our expectations of symmetry and balance; in the overall arrangement is there perhaps a sly parody of the rules of golden section? It is difficult to say which effects are intentional and which accidental.
The design of the work, the strange yet strangely pleasing asymmetry in the placing of the figures within the enveloping frame of trees and clouds and hazy, far-off sea, which strikes the viewer as at once arbitrary and inevitable, generates an air of mystery over and above the question of what it is that is happening and who or what the figures may be meant to represent – beyond, that is, their commedia dell’arte roles. Similar treatments of such subjects, by the same artist and others (Pater, Lancret, Watteau in particular), are equally baffling as to plot, if the term may be so employed, yet these works have not become the objects of unremitting, often ingenious yet for the most part futile speculation, as is the case with this work. Evidently there is an allegory here, and symbols seem to abound, yet the scene carries a weight of unaccountable significance that is disproportionate to any possible programme or hidden discourse. It is first of all a masterpiece of pure composition, of the architectonic arrangement of light and shade, of earth and sky, of presence and absence, and yet we cannot prevent ourselves asking what it is that gives the scene its air of mystery and profound and at the same time playful significance. Who are these people? we ask, for it seems to matter not what they may be doing, but what they are. Above all, who is this Pierrot? He is presented to us upright in darkening air, like a figure from the tarot pack, lost inside his too-large costume, mute and solitary, sorrowful, laughable perhaps, and yet unavoidable, hardly present at all and at the same time profoundly, palpably there, possessed it seems of a secret knowledge, our victim and our ineluctable judge.
Who is he? – we shall not know. What we seek are those evidences of origin, will and action that make up what we think of as identity. We shall not find them. This Pierrot, our Pierrot, comes from nowhere, from a place where no one else lives; nor is he on his way to anywhere. His sole purpose, it would appear, is to be painted; he is wholly pose; we feel ourselves to be the spectators at a melancholy comedy. See how strangely he fits into his costume; he seems not so much to be wearing it as standing behind it, like a cut-out paper doll. Notice the small size of the head in relation to the trunk, the unnatural length of the arms, the very broad hips, the oversized feet. He is almost deformed – almost, when we look long enough, a freak. He seems someone to whom something terrible has happened, or who has done some terrible thing, the effects of which upon his personality are suggested by these marked and at the same time subtle physical exaggerations. What is it he has done, what crime is he guilty of? And from whom is he hiding, if he is hiding? That smirking Harlequin mounted on the donkey seems to know the answers. Is it he who has lent Pierrot his club?
How deeply do we look into these depths? There is no end to what we may see. Consider this sky. Supposedly it is blue; we say, Pierrot stands outlined against a blue sky. In fact, what blue there is is more a faded, bluish green, and the effect is further softened by a scumbling of ochreous pinks. lower down, the shades range from turquoise through a watered mauve to deep indigo towards the barely discernible horizon of the sea; as is frequently the case in this master’s work, evening is coming on, seeping up like a violet mist out of the earth. The cloud-mass on the right, behind the trees, is particulary well executed, a tarnished, whitish gold bundle, corpulent and dense. We might think that this is one of those high, smoky gold skies of early October, were it not for the tender foliage of the trees and the general sense of movement and expectancy. It is spring, surely, a cool, restless evening late in spring. We note the crepuscular, fulvous light, the softly thickening shadows; we feel the wind in the trees, in the clouds, and sense the stirring of the earth, the green shoots rising and the tight buds preparing to unfold. This is the springtime not of fêtes and fairs and gambolling milkmaids, but a more savage season, quick with a sense of the struggle in pain and darkness of things being born.
The crowded assortment of trees – oaks, poplars, umbrella pine – suggests a park or pleasure garden by the sea. Is this a calculated irony, a mocking gesture towards our feeble notions of pastoral? We have only to look more closely and the wildness of the scene becomes apparent. The wind blows, the clouds tumble, the trees shiver before the encroaching dark, while that statue of the scowling satyr – Pan, is it, or Silenus? – looks down stonily upon the action, his fleshy lips curled. Perhaps this tawny light is not the light of evening
but of storm; if so, has the tempest passed, or is it only gathering? And whence comes this fierce luminescence falling full on Pierrot’s breast, transforming his white tunic into a shining cuirass? It is as if some radiant being were alighting behind us from out of the sky and shedding upon him the glare of its shining wings.
*
The question has frequently been asked if the figures ranged behind Pierrot are the products of the artist’s imagination or portraits of real people, actors from the Comédie-Française, perhaps, or the painter’s friends and acquaintances, got up in the costumes of clowns and carnival types. They have a presence that is at once fugitive and fixed. They seem to be at ease, languorous almost, yet when we look close we see how tense they are with self-awareness. We have the feeling they are conscious of being watched, as they set off down the slope towards that magically insubstantial ship wreathed round with cherubs that awaits them on the amber shore with sails unfurled. The boy at the rear of the little procession is puzzled and frowning, while his slighter, somewhat wizened companion seems prey to a sort of angry longing. The woman dressed in black casts a backward glance that is at once wistful and resigned. The mood she suggests is a complex one; it is as if she were on her way to a sublimer elsewhere yet filled with regret for the creaturely world that she is leaving. There is about her a suggestion of the divine. If this is the Golden World, or the last of it, is she perhaps Astraea, regretfully withdrawing into the innocent sky? And is it Pierrot upon whom her last, lingering glance is fixed, or something or someone beyond him, which it is not our privilege to see?
The little girl with braided hair who leads the woman by the hand is eager to be away; what is Aphrodite’s island to her, what does she know yet of the pains of love? At the other extreme of this little human chain of youth and age is the old man in the straw hat who looks away from us, over his shoulder, as if he has just now heard someone call to him from the shadows under the trees.
The presence of the donkey has puzzled many commentators. This creature is simultaneously one of the most mysterious and most immediate of the group, despite the fact that we see no more of it than a part of the head and one, pricked-up ear, and, of course, that single, soft, auburn, unavoidable eye. What is it that looks at us here? There is curiosity in its look, and apprehensiveness, and a kind of startled awe. We see in this unwavering gaze the windy stable and the stony road, the dawn-light in the icy yard and the rain-lashed corner of the field at evening; we feel the hunger and the beatings, the moment of brutish warmth in the byre, we taste the harsh straw of winter and the lush grass in the summer meadow. It is the eye of Nature itself, gazing out at us in a kind of stoic wonderment – at us, the laughing animal, the mad animal, the inexplicable animal.
Of that smirking Harlequin mounted on the donkey’s back we shall not speak. No, we shall not speak of him.
At the window of that distant tower – we shall need a magnifying glass for this – a young woman is watching, waiting perhaps for some figure out of romance to come by and rescue her.
What happens does not matter; the moment is all. This is the golden world. The painter has gathered his little group and set them down in this wind-tossed glade, in this delicate, artificial light, and painted them as angels and as clowns. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.
4
I CONFESS I had avoided them all day. Oh, I know I pretended that I recognised in them what I had been waiting for since I first came here, the motley troupe who would take me into their midst and make a man of me, but the truth is I was afraid of them. I am not tough, not worldly-wise at all. It takes courage to expose yourself to the possibilities of the world and I am not a courageous man. I want only comfort, what little of it can be squeezed out of this life on a planet to which I have always felt ill-adapted. Their coming was a threat to the delicate equilibrium I had painstakingly established for myself. I was like a hungry old spider suddenly beset by a terrifying swarm of giant flying things. The web shook and I scuttled off into the foliage for shelter, legs flailing and eyes out on stalks. I saw old Croke walk up the hill and saw him too when he returned, staggering, from the beach where he had fallen, with the boy at his heels. I watched from hiding as Sophie set off into the hills to find the ruins she had come to photograph. I witnessed Felix pacing the lawn in the sun with a hand in his side pocket, smoking a cheroot. Oh yes, I skulked. And when late in the afternoon I screwed up my nerve and ventured back into the house it was I who seemed the intruder.
The kitchen was deserted. The debris of their lunch was still on the table, looking disturbingly like the remains of a debauch. I poured out the tepid dregs of Licht’s chicken soup and ate it standing at the stove. I wanted one of them to come in and find me there. I would nod in friendly fashion and perhaps say something about the weather, claiming by this show of ease that I was the true inhabitant of the house while they were merely transients. No one came, however, and anyway, if someone had, probably I would have dropped my soup bowl and taken to my heels in a blue funk. I have always suffered from a tendency to generate panic out of my own fears and imaginings; I think it is a common weakness of the self-obsessed. There are moments of quiet and isolation when I can feel within me clearly the tiny, ceaseless tremor of impending hysteria that someday may break out and overwhelm me entirely. What is its source? It is the old emptiness, I suppose, the black vacuum the self keeps rushing into yet can never fill. I’m sure there is a formula for it, some elegant and simple equation balancing the void on one side and the endless inward spin of essence on the other. It is how I think of myself, eating myself alive, consuming myself always and yet never consumed.
Some incarnation this is, I have achieved nothing, nothing. I am what I always was, alone as always, locked in the same old glass prison of myself.
Why is it, I wonder, that silent, sunlit afternoons always remind me of childhood? Was there some marvellous moment of happiness that I have forgotten, some interval of stillness and radiance in which the enchanted child lingered on the forest path while his other self stepped out of him and blundered on oblivious into the dark entanglements of the future? I stood in the ancient light of the hallway for a long time, gazing up into the shadows thronging on the stairs, listening for them, for the sounds of their voices, for life going on. I do not know what I expected: cries, perhaps, arguments, sobs, wild laughter. I had got out of the way of ordinary things, you see; life, being what others did, must be all alarms and confrontations and matters coming to a head. I could hear nothing, or not nothing, exactly, only that faint, pervasive pressure in the air, that soundless hum that betrays the presence of humankind. How thoroughly the house had absorbed them, as if they really were the ones who belonged here; as if they had come home.
Flora was waiting on the landing, hanging back in the shadowed corner between the window and the bedroom door. She had thrown a blanket over her shoulders, she clutched it about her like a shroud. The dark mass of her hair was tangled and damp and her eyes were swollen. Through the window beside her I could see far off in the fields a toy dog chivvying a toy flock of sheep. She had to clear her throat to speak.
‘I thought you were Felix,’ she said.
And almost smiled.
Licht had put her in my room; his idea of a joke, I suppose. Startling what a transformation her presence had wrought already; nothing was changed yet I would hardly have recognised the place as mine. The air was warm and thick with her smell, the musky smell of her hair and her hot skin. I shut the door behind me. She walked to the window and stood looking out at the dwindling afternoon, thick with slanted sunlight. Although she was on the far side of the room from me I had an extraordinarily vivid sense of her as she stood there with her arms folded ar
ound herself and her shoulder-blades unfurled, barefoot, in all her wan, popliteal frailty. I tend not to take much notice of other people – I have mentioned this before, it is one of my more serious failings – and on the rare occasions when I do put my head outside the shell and take a good gander at someone what strikes me as astonishing is not how different they are from me, but how similar, despite everything. I go along imagining myself to be unique, a sport of nature, a sort of tumour growing on the world, and suddenly I am brought up short: there it is, not I but another and yet made of skin, hair, clothed bone, just like me. This is a great mystery. Sex is supposed to solve it, but it doesn’t, not in my experience, anyway (not that nowadays I have anything more than the haziest recollection of that universal palliative). Perhaps that is all I ever wanted to do, to break open the shell of the other and climb inside and slam it shut on myself, terrible spikes and all. What a way that would be to end it all.
‘Have you lived here long?’ Flora said.
I felt nauseous suddenly. My palms were clammy and my innards did a slow heave, as if there were something alive in there. I had a teetering sensation, as if I had grown immensely tall, looming over the room, a great, fat, wallowing thing, a moving puffball stuffed with spores. I was frightened of myself. Not many people know the things they are capable of; I do. I wanted now to take this girl in my arms, to lift her up and hold her hotly to my heart, to feel the frail bones of her ankles and her wrists, to cup the delicate egg of her skull in my palm, to smell her blood and taste the silvery ichor of her sweat. How brittle she seemed, how easily breakable. This is what the poor giant in the old tales never gets to tell, that what is most precious to him in his victims is their fragility, the way they crack so tenderly between his teeth, giving up their little cries like lovers in the extremity of passion. He will never know what he yearns to know, how it feels to be little like them, gay and gaily vicious and full of fears and impossible plans. The human world is what he eats. It does not nourish him.
Ghosts Page 22