The Spanish Virgin

by V. S. Pritchett

  It was in those early days that William Bantock came to A—. He was looking for somewhere to paint. And the train brought him to that coast where the hot up-ended promontories sink their hulls of lava and hazed gold limestone into the seas—the Messina coast, where the coarse, top-heavy ranges shut in the interior. Where the cliffs dive thunderously down. Where the green coast valleys stand in the light of the lemons, the candle-light of a million young moons. Where the dark Mediterranean burns the coast. Where is the myriad silver of the olives. Where are the bronze statuary of the cactus, the bayonets of the aloes, the cottony cirri of the almond blossom, and the pruned regiments of the vines. Where the valley hills are terraced from floor to summit, emerald stairs of corn stepping up to heaven. And where that heavy pagan sky leans forward on the earth like a dozing body and somnolently breathes on the sun-eaten hills. Where on golden crags flash white villages like gulls on a swell; and the finger of distant Italy is lifted, lifted till the Straits are free of it.

  William Bantock came. He arrived from Naples by train. It was a hot humid journey. Being Sicily bound, he had dutifully brought an anthology of Greek translations with him. The boredom and vacuity of the journey drove him to cut a few pages of the book. He had never read a line of Greek literature in his life—not even in translation. He had bought the anthology because he wanted to know why there was always such fuss about the Greeks. But after reading a few pages of the anthology—Æschylus, I think it was—Bantock paused and, heart-beating, realised he was a Greek! He had always been a Greek, eternally! He had always known it! “We are all Greeks,” he cried in contenting, literary ecstasy. The train clanked before the purple summits of Calabria, soft smoke blackening over those long bays: clanked on and on, the double click-click of the bogies, the hollow voice of the curves, the jazz-hurled clatter of the whining, moaning tunnels. This was the jarring machinery of life, the undertone that never ceases. Bantock wanted to stop the train. No, wished the train could stop, wished time could stop, life could stop; anything to keep that rapture. The train chattered nasally along, pulled over points, pushed him against the window, tugged him slowly back. Two or three black cinders skipped in at the window and hit his book, hit Æschylus. He snapped the book to. He never read another line of it. He half knew you could not labour or hold a rapture. And half did not know.

  William Bantock stayed at the Volcano. Spidery, tweedy, bearded John Puigi had seen him arrive with most of his belongings in haver sacks and with only one suit-case. That had struck Puigi. Tourists generally brought suitcases.

  “You mustn’t miss the Greek Theatre,” said old Puigi by way of making himself agreeable to his new guest. William Bantock smiled at this. Miss the Greek Theatre! He liked that. What minds these provincial Italians had, with their oily, insinuating “Chiesa! Chiesa!” Thought no one knew about their beastly theatres and churches except themselves. But the hint sank in. Hints always got Bantock. He refused them at first. But he always took them in the end. He always acted on what he heard last and believed what he had last read.

  Old Puigi always boasted that Bantock went up to the theatre immediately. This might easily be true, for Puigi had begun that subtle ownership of the man which made their stories curiously one. However it was, up Bantock went sooner or later to that eminence risen sheer from the Straits where, like a dew-pond in a summit basin, the theatre stood. A few links of colonnade, a belt of walls and keyless, empty archways, the grassy bowl of the auditorium: all that Time had left of it. The azure of the sea was paved in adamant far away below. And you could see bitter white-coned Etna scorching the sky, ten thousand grey feet of her, in the southern distance. This hill seemed, as all heights can seem, the rare top of the world.

  William Bantock came down from the theatre with a light in his eyes. He came down into A—, that white, ripe-roofed village ledged on its cliff. A place sun-blanched and built in stillness, with one long tepid street, a canal of pavement flowing between its walls. There were golden churches with lichen-embroidered tiles. Their bells heaved and banged the occasional hours. The gilded hands of the clocks gestured over the hot black pauses not of time, but of eternity.

  He came down the hill, and old Puigi was sitting in the shade outside the hotel watching him; with pipe-stem bitten between his smoke-ambered teeth, his lips pulled away from them, showing the orderly amber ranks with smoke channelling between them. He sat there with his legs crossed, a bearded, tawny, tweeded spider in the middle of his web, his face as dark as nicotine. He watched and puffed and thought things out. He saw things as they were. He knew what he wanted. He saw dimly in a way how to get it. But he took no risks. Little by little he did things. Slowly. He sat in his warm limbs and drew at his pipe. It pouted smoke like a cauldron. Like Etna. He seemed to be concocting something. And at every puff you knew his business was increasing—or at least consolidating. That was the better word. Consolidating. Puff by puff. He was getting what he wanted. Getting it. He did not quite know how, but he was getting it.

  Bantock came down the hill. Puigi could see him coming, swinging his stick and poking it through the flaccid cactus. This impressed old Puigi unfavourably, so he told me. The English in him hated betrayal of feeling. A man who betrayed his feelings … well, it was clear. Bantock came up gaily enough. “Seemed about to poke me in the ribs with his stick. And then remembered himself,” old Puigi told me. Puigi said nothing but “Good evening. Did you have a nice walk?” Instinctively he led the artist on by affected indifference.

  “I have been up to the theatre,” Bantock said.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Bantock.

  His voice was not so corpulent in those days. He was slighter. His hair was bleached the colour of barley water, and was scant above the temples, the beginning of that moon-like baldness of the later days. You saw his eyebrows only when the sun picked out a hair or two of them in butter yellow. He was a featherless duckling: and with a thin voice that stayed stammering along his phrases, trying to remember his last word so as to connect his next word to it.

  “Of course Etna is the highest volcano in Europe,” began old Puigi judiciously.

  “Yes, Etna is magnificent,” said Bantock. “What a marvellous place that theatre is, isn’t it! That vision is—er—er—that view is—er—very nice. It is rather interesting. I mean. Don’t you think? Amazing!”

  Old Puigi saw the man needed constant, gradual prompting. Or perhaps old Puigi only felt it. He always knew instinctively how to handle a man.

  “It is more than that! Nice, indeed!” he cried, pulling his pipe out and tapping it on his boot. “Much more than that.”

  William Bantock hesitated. There was almost an intimacy in which the man had spoken, paused, and tapped his pipe. That won him; he had to tell someone.

  “To me,” plunged Bantock. “That theatre is one of the most marvellous things in the world. The Greeks were amazing. What vision to put a theatre sheer above the sea! What a situation! Even now the place is in ruins we can grasp something of the spirit of their age. Don’t you know? I mean. What the Greeks meant. The immensity of the—er—conception—er—remains. I mean, you see what they were after. From the—er—heights—the top you see the Sicilian hills are its auditorium, its amphitheatre the Straits, its stage the world. And behind all—er—at the—er—back is Etna, the Fury, the—er—smoking Fury, holding what you might call its eternal threat, its threat, do you know what I mean? When the Greeks built that theatre they built so that the colossal and—er—invisible forces which work beneath or behind the world might stalk—might stalk about and rise beyond the—er—little tragedies of men! Looming over them! Just as though—er—they were pitting the dwarfed white humans against the statuesque, against the statuesque background of the Powers and Presences. The Greeks brought the infinite to the stage. At least, that’s how it seems—er—to me, don’t you know. An actor declaiming to the auditorium was magnified to the—er—stature of the gods. Under the open sky, the Powers shadowing—i
f you see what I mean, dwarfed as it were.”

  John Puigi was taken aback by this and baffled by this straying, bleated eloquence. He admitted to me he was taken aback. He knew that tourists were as black as crows in the theatre some mornings, shouting this way and that, trying the acoustics; with cameras waiting for the clouds to slide off Etna. The aching click of the cameras, as if protesting against the sacrilege. But never had he heard …

  Ah, Bantock was off again:

  “I know what I have got to do. To get that on canvas. All that.” (All what? old Puigi asked himself.) “To get, to try and get some of the magnitude of that sight, something of the Greek conception—er—its naif intuition of infinity. To get something of that strangely inhabited firmament of that inner life they symbolized. That is—er—er—my work. My job, don’t you know. What I shall try …”

  Old Puigi went away dumbfounded. He understood the tourist. He came for pleasure and lived on his savings. He understood the archæologists, in a way. They messed about with the bricks. That was queer enough, but it was tangible. But for a man to make his living out of, out of—what was it? Powers! Presences! Naif intuitions! Good Lord, what words the man used! What did he mean? There was something fishy about it, about a man with ideas like that. He was not practical. Old Puigi didn’t know anything about painting, but he was damned if he could see what infinity had to do with it. Infinity was all right, as long as it didn’t interefere. But he greatly suspected it might. Old Puigi noticed that when a man had got nothing to brag about he always talked big. Big: infinity, the same thing. He always distrusted a man when he talked big.

  “It was a strange thing for you to take so much interest in one of your guests. I don’t see why you bothered,” I said to old John one day.

  This cornered him for a moment, but he thumbed the bowl of his pipe almost shyly—shyly for him—and said:

  “I don’t know why I bothered. I had a feeling that he and I— I don’t know. You know there is one thing I can’t stand— Well, I had a sort of feeling—”

  The truth was old Puigi was consolidating, succeeding, increasing, filling up his barns, puff by puff; and there is no man so sensitive to the approach of a failure as a prospering man. It is an attack, a rebuke. A successful man likes to see people succeed; he needs reassurance.

  All that talk about the Greeks. He was suspicious of that. He didn’t know much about the Greeks. Except that they had ‘made’ the hotel industry of the village. That was to their credit. He didn’t pretend to be a scholar. But he was sure, yes, he was damned sure, the Greeks weren’t stuffed up like that with high-falutin ideas. They must have had good heads on them, those fellows, to build a theatre like that with equidistant seating and graded tiers and good acoustics. Something as up-to-date as an English cinema. Good walls too. There was a decent bit of building in those walls, Not much infinity in that, eh? And to put a place in sight of Etna. Damn good business sense! Everyone liked to see a volcano; it was as good as a play. Bless you, wouldn’t many a London manager give his right arm to have a volcano for a drop scene! There was nothing vague and up in the air about the Greeks; he wouldn’t mind betting there was nothing exaggerated about them.

  He left it at that, so he told me. He didn’t bother himself about it. He saw Bantock about an odd time. He seemed to go about a good deal. He scarcely spoke again after that first outburst. He appeared to be painting hard. He was always up at Etna. He once volunteered. “I am—er—getting—I am getting—er—I am getting to grips with the—er—Powers.”

  But nothing more. He must have stayed three months or more.

  Old John, tweedy, bearded spider, went beading about the place, looking after it. Sitting in the shade and biting that pipe of his, fouling himself with smoke.

  The hotel was full. An English family were giving up their rooms. But three Americans were coming down from Naples. It all evened out. Those extra bathrooms had cost a bit. Americans demanded bathrooms. But the large rooms covered that. And he was getting more for the top rooms since he cut down those eucalyptus trees and got that view of Etna. That was the best day’s work he had done for a long time, cutting down those trees. Next year he might think of an annexe. He could make it out of that cottage at the end of the garden. It overlooked the sea. He could cut those big rooms into three. That was it. Two partitions, running water, a bath at the end. Leave the skylight. And the German chambermaid could look after everything. That was an idea. Give her a bit more and she could run it. That was a practical idea. He would just have to go into it carefully.

  The weather became hotter. The sea’s silver burned. The dust loaded the cypresses and the olives. There were a couple of hours of sirocco. The visitors began to intrigue for wagon lits, to leave one by one. But there was no talk of Bantock leaving. He stayed and painted. More people went. Not a sign from Bantock.

  He took the key of his room away with him one morning and the maid could not get in. She told Puigi, who climbed in at the balcony window. What a state the room was in! There were tubes of paint on the floor, on the washstand. There was a palette on the bed. Old Puigi trod on a tube of gamboge as he entered. There was a sketch propped up against the coffee jug. There were eight or nine canvases on the floor. Someone had trod on a stick of charcoal and heeled it in little black craters about the room. A pair of trousers was hanging by its braces from the bed-knob. There was a bottle of turpentine on the mantelpiece. I wish I could remember old Puigi’s description of how he opened the door and walked to his office with a tube of gamboge stuck to his heel.

  “I won’t have a room used like that. We don’t allow ironing and we won’t allow paint. Some people think because they pay a week’s rent they can live like pigs. I’ll let him have a piece of my mind,” bellowed old Puigi on the way to his office. “I’ll damn well stick it on the bill.”

  In came Gretchen crying, “You trod on some paint, sir. Oh, it’s on your heel, sir. It’s all over the carpet, sir. Yellow paint, sir.” Old Puigi looked at his heel.

  He went to the garden to calm himself. Bantock would kick at the charge, quite unreasonably of course, but he would kick. He would probably leave. But he would be probably leaving anyway soon. At this moment Bantock came round the corner.

  “Oh, excuse me, Mr. Bantock, but when—” began old Puigi. Bantock interrupted him before he could end.

  “I know what you are going to ask. When am I going? Well—er—I think I shall be staying quite a long while. I am very busy. I am getting at it now. Getting into my stride. I shall be beginning my—er—bigger work—my—er—bigger work soon.” And went down the passage to his room.

  Something made old Puigi hold his tongue. An idea was coming. He had a feeling. It was a bad thing to let things come to a head. It was fatal. It was always better to plod round a difficulty, to make something out of it. The idea became clearer. It seemed to old Puigi that he must have been thinking this for a long time unknown to himself. There it was. Thank heavens he had controlled himself and had said nothing to the man. It was now so clear. He would turn that cottage not into an annexe but into a studio. It should be Bantock’s studio. Only a quarter of the outlay and he would make him take it for a year. Distemper the walls. Put a bit of furniture in. Put a brass plate on the door: “W. Bantock, Studio”. Fine! Lord, he almost wished he were Bantock! What a change he’d make! All you had to do was to sit there and paint. Paint away as hard as you could. Turn them out. Not too large. Like that. Just big enough to go into an ordinary suitcase. Do the view of Etna with the theatre in the foreground. The thing that had “made” the village. He betted you could sell a dozen a week in the season to the tourists and get a good price for them.

  “I think I must have a bit of the artistic temperament myself,” said old Puigi to himself.

  William Bantock slammed his door behind him. Ah, who had been arranging his room again! Curse them! Why couldn’t those maids leave his things alone? The turpentine? The turpentine! Where was the turpentine? Where was it? Ah, there, in
the corner! What a place to put it! And the charcoal! Who had taken the charcoal! A new packet! The charcoal! Where had it gone? The charcoal! And damn! no gamboge either. No gamboge. Who the blazes had been messing about! He sat on the bed depressed. He wanted to get to work on something big, and whenever he tried to settle to it a stupid little commonplace upset him, put him off, blocked it. How could he get on? Going back every day to a bedroom like this. The almost indecent négligé of a bedroom. Its lean, utilitarian varnish. Its shiny nudity. Its smell of sheets, and tooth-paste and hairbrushes. He half thought of leaving the place. But, being William Bantock, only half thought of it.

  Old Puigi caught him as he passed the office after dinner. “I expect you would be glad of a large room now,” he said. “There’s one on the top floor. It would give you more room. You need plenty of space for painting, and now we’re not so full it could be arranged. I mean if you haven’t got a studio a large room is the next best thing, I suppose.” That was how he began, so he told me.

  “It is indeed very difficult without a studio.”

  “Ah, yes, it must be. A— is badly provided, as you say. No artist ever comes here. It’d be a gold mine to anyone who would. But without a studio—yes, I quite see. There is that top room if you think anything of it.”

  “I suppose you don’t—I mean you wouldn’t happen to know of a studio here?”

  “I am afraid I don’t. There is not one in the place that I know of.”

  “Hopeless. One must have somewhere to go.”

  “Well, I suppose you could get an old shed. There are plenty of old sheds. Plenty of them. But no studios. That is the trouble. Even I have an old shed. It’s got four walls and a roof. That is about as much as you can say of anything here.”

  “Your old shed?”