Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  Her appetite for our trip was still lively, lacking my fussy annoyance, and the souk was an easy walk from the hotel. She had a camera, a fancy one she had been wielding the past week wherever we went. A person with an eye sharp for detail, her curiosity buoyant and benign. I could tag along with her, could maybe silence my inner grumble, and rise again to the occasion of travel, the pure act of looking. In any case, I was still a little wobbly, and she was my angel.

  There was the feeling of entering the souk, as if the narrow streets constituted a sort of crumbling ancestral house, the streets being in effect corridors leading to chambers that were somehow secretly attached, all belonging to one large, breathing self, an organism of architecture. Passageways along the open stalls gave way here and there to a little coffee shop embedded like a fossil under a building’s arch. The market radiated a satisfying paradox as if permanence and flimsiness met in an eternal congruence that held everything mysteriously together.

  It was deeply satisfying to walk along the passageways, taking in the ancient buildings where people still lived in dark, cavelike apartments cool from age, not air-conditioning, the collapsible-looking market stalls on the ground floor spilling into the walkways, their corrugated roofs sloping, creating dusky interiors, produce and wares piled along the common hallways of the streets.

  We allowed ourselves to get lost, reassured by the landscape of fruits and vegetables, the sharp sniff of coffee, the dust of sugar from the sweets on display, milled chickpeas, baskets of speckled beans, lacquered olives in stone vats. Narrow shops displayed bright woven fabrics—a heavily embroidered gown that seemed to contain all of Araby and flimsy silks lofting in the breeze like delicate soutanes. Clothes of the desert.

  A double row of Palestinian men carried aloft a dark shape on a pallet—a body on the way to burial: they turned between two buildings and were gone with their wrapped package held above their heads. We saw—I did anyway—smiles gleaming behind the display tables, eyes sizing us up: no sale to these hotel dwellers. But mostly it was a refreshing nonhuman moment, just the vegetables and us, the pleasure of passing along the brilliant stalls as if through a pure element without any meaning beyond the delight of color.

  Then my companion came to a halt, seized by the display of a spice merchant. We were in the densest part of the souk, surrounded by stalls before us and behind us, the passageway turning to yet more mounds and baskets. But this was the picture for her. She asked me to hold her bag for a moment while she snapped it. “I just have to get all this color,” she said. And it was wonderful—the deep saturated dye of turmeric, a hypnotic yellow having nothing to do with the sun, belonging entirely to the mineral earth, sumac crushed to powder like pulverized red wine, baskets of color so intense they were delicious already, just looking at them. She put her face close to the fragrant surface, drawing in scents.

  I reached for her bag as she had instructed. As I bent down I saw the face of the boy standing behind the tableful of spices. He could not have been more than twelve. I felt my own face begin to move into its let’s-be-friends tourist smile—your spices are beautiful. My companion lifted the heavy camera to her pale face, aimed down at the palette of color. The boy was shaking his head, saying something, frowning. He was becoming agitated. It took me a moment to understand he didn’t want her to take the photograph. She saw nothing, her head down and focused on what she had framed.

  It happened fast. Which is to say slowly, in the endless way of moments that will be inscribed in memory. The boy said something harsh, turned to me, finding no hope of getting the attention of the woman taking the picture. He said something again, hissed across the dazzling table of his wares. Then he spit. A sharp, targeted bullet of projectile fury. It hit me sharp in the eye, exactly where he intended, I think. His own eye was dark, radiant with hatred.

  He did not turn away, did not look abashed. Calm descended. I knew with that uncanny knowing of real experience, Ah, so this is why I came—for this. Real travel wants to be dangerous, wants to smoke out the truth of the other—providing of course you get out alive.

  I put my hand to my face, astonished, my fingers damp with his thick wrath.

  …

  SO IT IS POSSIBLE to take what doesn’t belong to you—just with a glance, a look. But like all appetites too ferocious to be explained away as a fascination with “the exotic,” Matisse’s attraction to the decorative arts—all those madly patterned “Eastern” draperies and harem costumes—was primal, homebound, a donnée for him. His father came from a line of weavers but rose to own a general store and eventually became a successful seed merchant. His mother was a milliner whose hats, people recognized, had a certain something. (Matisse married a hatmaker in his turn.) Following the fashion of the age—but with unusual finesse—his mother later took up porcelain painting. Matisse claimed he got his color sense from her. The economy of his home and of his town was predicated on the flummery of ornament and the appetite for the unnecessary. Decoration was, paradoxically, essential.

  In the foul streets of Bohain, Matisse first beheld not the beautiful but the gorgeous. The liberated delight of color, the delectable quality of pattern was his birthright. He was surrounded by leftover beauties, snippets and patterns, bales of woven wealth on their way to other people’s lives. Labor was literally woven into beauty as he first perceived it.

  Cézanne was his man. “When color is at its richest,” Cézanne said, “form is at its fullest.” And where to find this saturation, this richness? Good counsel came from Gauguin: “O painters who are looking for a color technique, study rugs. You will find all the necessary knowledge there.” Not just any rugs: “Always have the Persians in mind,” he added. Even earlier, Delacroix famously made the same judgment: “The most beautiful pictures I have ever seen are some Oriental rugs.”

  This would have been confirmation, not news, to Matisse who lived among those who concocted the dazzling fields of silk and wool that swirled around the hourglass figures of the fashionistas of the age and swept across the furnishing fabrics of the best design houses of Paris. These colors and patterns swirled first from the hands of the workers and designers of the Bohain textile mills. Home was the workshop of the exotic. The source of the glorious was here in the northern mud, a worker’s dream—and livelihood.

  By the spring of 1903, after several years in Paris, Matisse’s early dreams of earning fame as a painter had been shattered. He had returned in financial desperation to Bohain with his wife and three children, and later admitted he “practically decided” to “give up painting altogether.” His plan was to take a job as a colorist in a rug factory. Designers were in demand, and the pay was good. In fact, Matisse’s first art school had not been the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but a provincial night school for the sons of weavers. Even in Paris he had prudently enrolled for a diploma at the École des Arts Décoratifs. The business of ornamentation, he knew, could pay the bills.

  Yet this was a young man possessed by painting. His biographer, Hilary Spurling, has found a sketch of an iris he doodled in the margin of a legal document in the law office where his father first apprenticed him. He may have been possessed by painting, but his iris isn’t the wistful sketch of a repressed artist nailed to his scrivener’s stool. He was practicing the decorative craft. His iris is not “in nature” but is a wholly decorative object, its natural ground not the earth, but a carpet, a scarf, a textile.

  And cut flowers, the stuff of hybridization and home gardens, are not wild, not “natural,” but decorative. Horticulture and rug making, botany and Persian carpets—these crafts shelter under the same umbrella, the vulnerable, ornamental corner of human endeavor given over to what only appears to be decoration. This desire for the riches of decoration is not trivial, but as inevitable as the recurring human ache for a God in his heaven.

  Matisse’s first artistic allegiance was to the paradisal surface of the decorative crafts of his northern factory town. The flat floral fields of textiles were all about
him—and Eden, after all, was not a mountain eyrie, not a seaside vista: it was an enclosed garden, a flat surface patterned with flowers. And not wholly utilitarian—Genesis puts us in the Garden, not on the Farm.

  Upon the earthly plane of fabric, color and form display themselves without the forced hierarchy of perspective, on a democratic level, joyous floral designs of stacked-up millefleurs tapestries, and now, unfurling from the Bohain mills, the minutely twisted gold and silver gossamer of industrial fiber. These were—what else?—pictures.

  And they were luxury. The textile mills of Bohain might be exploitative factories feeding the refined tastes of the Parisian design houses, but they laid out a banquet of promise to the masses as well. During his life—and long after his death—Matisse was routinely dismissed for displaying a “decorative” sensibility and for indulging his relish for loveliness. In this, he suffered the slight that women often suffer from a love of beauty, of domestic pleasures and “touches.”

  It didn’t help that he was his own theorist, eager to explain himself, and that he wrote a lot about his artistic philosophy, thus encouraging rebuttal, rather than cannily cultivating an artistic mystique. In an oft-quoted (against him) testimony from “Notes of a Painter,” his first published essay (1908), he says his dream “is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be . . . a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue.”

  Oh-oh. How to nail yourself as unrepentantly bourgeois, a virtual philistine, in one sentence. The remark followed him the length of his long life and beyond. Never mind that earlier in the same essay he speaks of his attempt, when working with the model, to achieve “the deep gravity that persists in every human being.”

  Yet he did not misspeak when he enshrined the armchair and invoked relief from fatigue. His dream of beauty was in solidarity not with the idle rich but with the exhausted working poor. Only one who had seen the unforgiving circumstances of industrial labor could understand that the odalisque does not loll on her divan as an erotic opportunity but is even more deeply sensual, an image of pure leisure, that commodity most cruelly denied the poor of the earth.

  Yet even to my contemplative nun leisure was essential to her monastic business, her mystical day job. And she was pledged not only to obedience and chastity, but also to poverty.

  Matisse was on the side of the decorative, the frankly made-up, the brilliant and luscious. I must be, too, having sucked in my first draft of beauty also from the indulgences of life in my father’s greenhouse in St. Paul, the big glass houses of geraniums, the walk-in iceboxes (as they are still called) where the cut flowers waited in tubs for funerals and weddings. It was all beauty for its own sake, for the show of it. For much of my girlhood, Memorial Day was still called, especially by older people, Decoration Day, and it was understood that the most solemn fact of life—that we die—is best honored by ornamentation.

  Is that what drew me to Matisse and not to Picasso, his great rival? I felt the deep taproot of the decorative instinct in Matisse as I could not in Picasso. Yes, the deep root of decoration, for the surface of decoration gives way, for those who live close to its truth, to the labor and the pride in the labor that Matisse knew in the Bohain textile mills and that my father and the old Austrian growers knew at the greenhouse, their backs humped over from lifting flats of petunias, their hands cracked from tamping down the dirt around a seedling’s squiggle of white root. They were the ones with real taste, my father always insisted. They could judge.

  Matisse had faith that color was substance, not surface. It was a lyric faith, a belief not proved, but affirmed. Probably he was born with it, raised in its midst. This was not the gloomy northern Catholic stranglehold he rebelled against, but the enduring faith of his town, his hatmaking, porcelain-painting mother, his long line of weaver ancestors. He held to it.

  Matisse subscribed to the old democratic weavers’ definition of the decorative arts as “something more precious than wealth, within everyone’s reach.” The poor in spirit could hope to inherit, if not the earth, then at least a length of paradise in a bright factory-made cloth ingeniously imprinted with “a pocket jungle.” He may have dressed like a bourgeois in his tweed suit and vest, but Matisse was a working boy who saw early how the lavish hungers of the rich were sated with exotic beauty, and he perceived the power of unnecessary pleasures. His harsh northern, priest-crushed Catholicism, the careful clawing for a perch on the ladder up and out of scarcity that was his father’s lot—all this did not engender a bourgeois complacency. It made him a Fauve, a wild beast.

  Matisse stood like a lightning rod between the sumptuous aesthetic of the rich that demanded the fabrics of Bohain and the proud craft of the laborers of the muddy town who provided the objects that, alone, connected the two worlds. Beauty was business; it was food and shelter. In such a hierarchical world, a world in which beauty rules daily labor and provides the very bread on the table, poverty cannot be untouched by the glories it is consigned to create. It seems Matisse never forgot that the hunger of the poor is, as the old union hymn has it, for bread—and roses.

  FOUR

  Camera Obscura

  Directly above the glass houses of my father’s greenhouse in St. Paul you could see the bulging sunroom of the Louis Hill mansion, your eye drawn irresistibly from the lowlands of the old immigrant houses where my family lived up to the nineteenth-century architectural fantasias of Summit Avenue. The Louis Hill house filled the bluff property adjoining the brownstone citadel of his father, James J. Hill. But Louis Hill’s house was no castle keep like the Empire Builder’s. It was a rosy confection of fine patina brick and ivory pillars, a gracious porte cochere at the front, large arched windows all around. Not the stronghold of a king, but an indulged prince’s graceful pleasure palace.

  The houses of father and son, side by side, presented contrary images, an architecture of oppositions. Two generations—two American centuries—were set shoulder to shoulder, at deep stylistic odds with each other, facing Summit Avenue with their visual argument. The Empire Builder’s nineteenth-century pile bespoke the lonely kingliness of monstrous success, the sacerdotal nature of great American wealth. Gloom and doom and righteousness. The poor boy’s astonishment at making it had somehow to be manacled to the earth, and James J. Hill’s sooty brownstone was an abode above the abyss, a fortress hulked over the Schmidt brewery where my Uncle Frank had died in a freak industrial accident in 1936 and where the little Czech immigrant houses with their tidy survivalist vegetable gardens still endured. All that was the underworld, the world you had escaped or eluded if you had achieved Summit—“Crest Avenue,” as Scott Fitzgerald called it in a short story.

  Next door to the Empire Builder’s gloomy grandeur, Louis Hill’s mansion was a great meringue. It suggested wit, elegance. Its laugh chimed all the way to the bank, and it carried its grandeur lightly as if placed upon the earth in the dancing slippers of the well brought up and well turned out. Someone said Queen Marie of Romania had done the Charleston there at a party on the third-floor ballroom during the twenties. Of course there was a ballroom. You sensed it even without having been inside.

  Yet, during my girlhood in the sixties, both houses had met the same fate: each had come into the possession of the Catholic Church. The Archdiocese had long ago inherited the Empire Builder’s house. This had a certain geographic logic because the cathedral was right across the street from the dark mansion. Catholic Charities—or was it the tribunal on marriage annulments or the Legion of Decency or perhaps all of these fiefdoms of righteous morality?—had piled typewriters and tall gray file cabinets into the big parlors, along with bulky desks and the other drab paraphernalia of canon bureaucracy, leaving long, negligent scrape marks on the bald wood. Some areas were covered with linoleum.

  The spacious woody rooms were crowded with mimeo machines and partitioned work spaces, metal desks slammed against m
ahogany paneling. A central stairway that looked eerily like the grand staircase in pictures of the Titanic led upstairs to more offices, more bulky desks, more shifting paper. Farther on high, in little chambers on the third floor, a priest or two was billeted. Coffee was left to stew in a staff lunchroom somewhere off the main entrance. The Archdiocese had been installed in the building a long time, and the dry must of the place was probably the molder of Church documents. For all its grandeur the atmosphere of the house was forlorn. In fact, the words house, not to mention home, seemed strange and distant terms to describe this bad dream of a dwelling.

  The dark green baizelike wall coverings of the ceremonial entrance hall were mounted with massive Piranesi architectural engravings, big pearly studies of perspective. They may have been the only leftovers in the house from the Empire Builder’s collection. One of the much-remarked features of the house was its art gallery, complete with a skylight and pipe organ. The relation of the pipe organ to the gallery was never clear. But everyone in the Archdiocesan office seemed to take pride in the presence of the gallery (the paintings were gone) when I went there one day as a girl, sent by the cloistered nuns of my high school to deliver a package, and was allowed to look around the place.

  The Empire Builder had been a collector. He had some European masters—including a Delacroix—and more contemporary works as well. He favored monumental landscapes of the West, hoisting on the walls of his gallery and his downtown office the very lands he had girdled with his railroad. He oversaw every detail of construction for his Summit Avenue house. He even sent back for revision Louis Comfort Tiffany’s first designs for the stained glass windows; the elder Hill was a man uncowed by art and attitude, confident of his taste.

  His son’s mansion next door was only apparently more modest, perhaps because it was light to the Empire Builder’s dark; champagne to his claret. It looked like a place where you’d have fun being rich. This building, too, had passed into the hands of religion. An order of nuns owned it or perhaps simply maintained it. They used it as a retreat house for women.