The Restoration Artist

by Lewis Desoto

  Père Caron said, “All of us, everybody on the island, contributes to his care in one way or the other.”

  “And his schooling?”

  “He prefers the company of the goats to other children,” Étienne said.

  “I tried to place him on the mainland with a family,” Père Caron explained, “so that he could go to school there. But he was isolated, mocked by the other children. He ran away and hid aboard a boat coming back here. More than once. Eventually I undertook to educate him myself. As best I could. We have both learned a rudimentary sign language, but he can read and write as well as any other boy his age. Other than that, nature is his teacher.”

  “But what do the authorities say?”

  “It is better not to involve them, don’t you think?” He put his hands in his pockets and tilted his head at me. “We don’t want him put in an institution or some ‘special school’ far away. This island is the only home he has ever known.”

  I did not have to think very hard to imagine what the boy’s life was like, the isolation, the loneliness, the confusion. I knew what it was to be an orphan.

  Père Caron said, “Tobias has his ways. Someone not familiar with him would naturally be confused by his behaviour. Sometimes I myself am confused by him. But he is a very intelligent boy. Nothing is wrong with him, except for the fact that he doesn’t speak.”

  On the way back down the hill we walked in silence. Eventually, I said, “Thank you for letting me meet Tobias.” I was grateful for the kindness of the priest. I understood now how much he cared for the boy.

  When we parted and I continued on to the chapel, I was wondering if there was a way to help Tobias. It was all very well to run around like Pan with his goats, but later, when he grew up? What then? But what could I do? What right had I to interfere?

  I wished I had Claudine to talk to. She’d always known the right thing to do. And that thought brought back all my old feelings of despair.

  CHAPTER 15

  THAT AFTERNOON I CROSSED THE CHANNEL between the main island and the chapel, and walked across the dry kelp-littered sand in my bare feet, carrying my shoes in my hand. The tide had been out since the morning, although it would turn soon and come flooding back. Reaching the chapel, I went immediately to the painting. My eyes took in the details again, the two people moving across the landscape, the woman with the lyre, stretching a hand back to the man who came behind. And beyond them, the humble little building, the chapel of Notre-Dame de la Victoire.

  In the last few days I had done a substantial amount of cleaning on the surface, especially on the two figures, which were now illuminated against the surrounding shadows like actors spotlit on a stage. What drama were they enacting? In the gap between the two outstretched hands was all the abyss of loss. Would it ever be bridged? Would they ever reach each other? Where did that path lead? What awaited in the building on the hill? Standing closer, I searched the darkness that still shrouded the rest of the landscape. Was there another shape hidden in the obscurity? For a moment I looked for the outline of a boy, watching from the trees.

  “Who are they?” a voice said from the shadows.

  I spun around with surprise. A figure rose from a pew in the first row near the altar.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Lorca Daubigny said.

  “I didn’t see you there. I thought I was alone.”

  “I was going to announce myself when you came in, but you seemed so engrossed in the painting that I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  She stepped towards me, and I was better able to see her in the light from the doorway. Her hair was pushed back from her face, a little unruly, and she carried a straw hat in one hand. She was wearing a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a dark skirt that came down to her knees. Her sandals were white leather with very thin straps. I noticed that her toenails were painted crimson.

  “I came to tell you that I talked to Père Caron,” she said.

  “He told me you’d been to see him the other day.”

  “You don’t mind? You did ask me to try to find out about the boy.”

  “Yes, I did. And thank you.”

  “So you know who he is, at last.”

  “Tobias. Tobias Leroux. I’ve met him now.”

  “The priest was worried about you.”

  “Did he explain what happened to Tobias? That he is mute?”

  She nodded. “It’s awful. The poor child. What will become of him in the long run?”

  “You know, that day when I heard him trying to play your clarinet, I really had the impression that he had some innate musical talent.”

  “Oh?”

  “Perhaps the fact that he doesn’t speak has made his hearing develop more acutely.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I don’t know much about music, but what I heard touched me.” A sudden idea occurred to me. “Maybe you could listen to him? You could even give him a few lessons.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said slowly.

  “You’re planning to stay on La Mouche for a while, aren’t you?” I realized that I wanted her to remain on the island. “It would be a challenge for you, if nothing else.”

  “Are you repainting this picture?” she asked, obviously wanting to change the subject.

  “No, just giving it a cleaning. Or trying to.”

  I had earlier lifted the painting down from its place above the door and positioned it against the wall near the entrance where the light was better. She stood next to me, leaning forward a bit to look at the picture, a faint scent of her soap reaching my nostrils, sweet against the oil paint smell that had become a permanent part of the chapel’s atmosphere since I’d started work in here.

  “I said I would do it as a favour for Père Caron. He hopes I can restore it, but the painting is in terrible condition really. Years of exposure to the sea air have degraded the pigments so that I’ve no idea what the original colours were.”

  She squatted in front of it, peering at the area I had cleaned. “And the subject, is it a variation on Orpheus and Eurydice?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, two figures moving out of what looks like a cave, which could be the underworld, one of them carrying a lyre. Do you know the story?”

  I nodded. “I suppose it is a story that most musicians would be familiar with.”

  “Naturally. It flatters us, that music can bring back someone from Hades. But in the original myth Orpheus carries the lyre when he comes to rescue Eurydice. Here, the roles are reversed—the woman looks like she is leading the man out of the underworld.”

  “Apparently an expert from Paris came before the war and said it should be called ‘Love and the Pilgrim.’”

  “I like that title better.” She put her finger over the space between the outstretched hands of the two figures.

  “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

  Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

  She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss,

  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”

  She had spoken the lines in English, and I said, “Keats.”

  “We studied the poem in school. I had to memorize the whole thing and it stuck in my mind forever.”

  I responded with the last couplet of the poem. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

  “Do you think that is true?” she said.

  “I used to. Once.”

  “I understand,” she replied softly.

  She reached into her pocket for her Lucky Strikes and lit one, crossing her arms casually as she contemplated the painting. “‘Love and the Pilgrim.’ Who is which, do you think?”

  “I assumed he was the Pilgrim, reaching towards Love,” I said.

  “Not necessarily. Love is always personified as a woman in art, as if only men can have an object of longing and desire. Perhaps she is the pilgrim here, and she is
reaching out for love.”

  “That would make it a very different picture.”

  “It would.” She took a drag of her cigarette and exhaled. The smile she gave me through the smoke was enigmatic.

  I ran a finger across the canvas and examined the tip.

  “Having to clean all of this seems like an immense job,” Lorca said.

  “It is. And I’m not sure it’s possible. Too bad, though. Père Caron is so enthusiastic about it.”

  “If you think restoring this painting is impossible, why don’t you make a new one?”

  “A new painting?” I raised my eyebrows “For this chapel?” The idea had never occurred to me. I shook my head. “No, I’m finished with all that. I have no inspiration any more.”

  “Because of what happened?”

  “Art doesn’t change anything.” I remembered saying something similar to Serge Bruneau once.

  “It could brighten this chapel,” she said. “Think of it as something for others, seen only by those who come here seeking peace or consolation. A little bit of beauty is not such a bad thing.”

  “Is that how you approach your music, as the creation of beauty?”

  “In a way,” she said. “I just want to make one small true thing in this world. Like that Grecian urn in Keats’s poem. It’s a worthy aspiration for an artist.”

  I looked down at the dark painting. “I wouldn’t know what to paint. Besides, it would take months.”

  “Do you have somewhere else to be? Paris? Canada? Maybe you need to be here.”

  Père Caron had asked me the same thing. Had they been discussing me? Or was it just obvious that I needed something or someplace to belong to?

  “And what would my subject be?”

  “Paint this place.”

  “What, the chapel?”

  “The island.” Almost to herself she said, “There is a strange beauty here. So quiet, somber in a way. Yet always with the sensation that something is about to happen. Something strange and beautiful.”

  “I could paint you,” I said.

  “Me! I didn’t mean that.”

  “I’m serious.” I didn’t know why I’d made the suggestion. As a way to keep her here? “If I painted the island landscape I’d have to put some people in it. Just like this artist, Asmodeus, has done.”

  “And how would you like me to pose?” she said. “Not as a fleeing Eurydice, I hope.”

  “Just the way you are now,” I said. “But more in the light. Without light there is nothing.”

  “You mean like this?” With a smile she assumed a pin-up posture, hands on her cocked hips, a coy smile, making a game of it. “Venus on the half-shell?”

  “Then you’d have to be nude.”

  “Ah, but that would be a different painting entirely.”

  An image came to my mind, unbidden, of her standing naked. I’d painted many nudes in art school, and Claudine at one time also posed for me, but the image I saw now had nothing to do with art. She smiled again, but her eyes had an expression I couldn’t decipher.

  “That would be altogether different,” she repeated, as if aware of my thoughts.

  Embarrassed, as if I had been caught peering through a window, I looked away. “I haven’t painted in a long time. It’s as if I have forgotten how.”

  “Why don’t you try?”

  “What good would that do? Being an artist belongs to another life.”

  “It might take you away from yourself.” There was something caring in her face when I looked at her again, not the bantering attitude of a few minutes ago. She said, “Why don’t you attempt a quick little sketch? I don’t mind posing for a few minutes.”

  Her seriousness prompted me to consider the proposal. Stepping to one side, I studied her, and as she turned to face me the light was behind her, streaming, just as it had that very first time on the cliff when I’d come back to consciousness and seen her as an apparition. That is what I should attempt to paint. But I felt incapable of using paint and brushes for my own purposes, as if I had no right to be a painter any longer. I reached for a pencil.

  “All right, why not?” I said. “Turn a little more to the side. To your left. Just relax in a normal position.” Approaching, I gently touched her chin, adjusting the tilt of her head a degree. My fingers lingered, then I stepped back.

  The sunlight from the open doorway fell on one side of her face, contrasting the flesh tones with the darkness of her hair, an inky black with highlights that seemed blue. She was beautiful, but in an unusual way. Her features were angular, chiselled almost, but also a little worn, as if she had lived intensely. Claudine had been pretty and very feminine. This was a face that was beautiful in a much different way.

  I directed my attention to the page. A few lines appeared as my pencil moved, roughing in the general shape of her head. A little mark for the eye line, a dot where the tip of the nose sat, another line for the lips. With the side of the pencil I blocked in patches of light and shade, drawing her hair. Then I set to work on the features. It was like being in the portrait class in art school again: visually measuring the proportions, judging one form against another, paying particular attention to the shape of the upper eyes and the corners of the mouth. For some reason, if you got those right you were well on your way to getting a reasonable likeness. I had always been good at faces, ever since those long-ago days at the Guild, and I’d retained that facility despite the fact that I chose to paint landscapes and not people.

  Taking my time, I constructed her features, erasing, adding, subtracting, noting the strong angle of her chin, the very slight curve of her nose, the elongated teardrop shape of the nostril, her straight eyebrows and her dark eyes. I worked on the mouth, the little upward curve hinting at a smile, the full sensual lower lip. I stopped drawing and stared at her, my pencil hovering over the paper. My eyes went to her hands, the pale scars on her wrists. What had happened there?

  She turned her head and met my gaze. Unblinking. Intense. Her forefinger toyed with the strap of her watch, an unconscious gesture betraying an inner tension.

  I made a few more quick adjustments, a little shadow beneath the chin, and sat back. Lorca relaxed and sat down next to me, her shoulder touching mine as she studied the drawing.

  “How very strange,” she said.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I don’t mean that. It’s a very good likeness. I just mean how strange to see myself so unexpectedly, through someone else’s eyes. I’ve never had my portrait done before.”

  I leaned forward and with the tip of my eraser made a tiny highlight on the black iris of an eye. The expression came alive. Just that one small touch made all the difference.

  “And is that who I am?”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “Although with a portrait it’s always more the artist’s interpretation than a real likeness. We can never really understand how we look to others.”

  “Have you flattered me? I see something tender in the eyes. But the mouth is seductive.”

  An image flashed through my mind—a different occasion, a different woman asking to see my drawing, a different portrait. I had not thought of Claudine as much lately. Sometimes I forgot her. Piero was still alive in my mind, because of Tobias, but Claudine seemed to be receding further into the past.

  For long seconds Lorca contemplated the drawing in silence. I was aware of her scent—tobacco and soap, Lucky Strikes and lily of the valley. I could also detect the flintiness of the stone walls and traces of furniture polish from the pews, a familiar smell from long, long ago.

  “Maybe it’s how you want me to be,” she said at last, turning to me, her voice a little hoarse, smoky. Our faces were only inches apart.

  I put a finger on her cheekbone, where the faintest hint of colour, barely perceptible, as if a smudge from my own brush, showed the remnant of her bruise. “I know nothing about you,” I said.

  She gave a slight shake of her head, forestalling questions.

  I ran my
finger across her lips, felt the softness of her skin, the warmth of her breath on the back of my hand, heard the sound of her breathing. She tilted her head up so that her lips brushed across my fingers and nuzzled into my palm. Then she lifted her face and kissed me.

  The touch of her mouth on mine came as a shock, as if I had been dreaming and this was suddenly real. It lasted a minute, and then she broke away, placing her hands on my chest, palms flat, pushing, separating from me. She stood up and moved to the window, remaining there with her back to the room.

  “The tide is coming in,” her voice said. Beyond the walls of the church the ocean sighed, the sandpipers called on the beach. When she turned again, she studied me with a serious expression, as if regarding a stranger.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I wonder if I should have done that.”

  “Are you regretting it?”

  “No. No. But still.”

  I said to her, “Would you pose for me again?”

  She walked over to the door and opened it wider. Light entered, the smell of the ocean, the sound of the incoming tide. When she spoke, her voice was flat. “Don’t have any illusions about who I am, Leo. Or what I can be.” She stepped out through the doorway. Holding her sandals she quickly crossed the sand, skipping past the puddles, lifting her skirt high on her thighs when her feet splashed the water up around her legs. On the other side she bent to slip her sandals on before turning to look back—like the woman in “Love and the Pilgrim.” But she did not stretch out her hand, and she was quickly gone.

  I turned back to the painting. And there, as my eyes adjusted to the darker interior, the scent of Lucky Strike cigarettes hanging in the air touched some chord in me and I was plunged into another world.

  THE PINK AND ROUNDED CURVE of the woman’s breast was a few inches from my face. I was naked, so was she. We had not exchanged a word in the last hour. I hadn’t even seen much of her face, just her pink nipple and the curve of her breast rising and falling very slightly with her breathing. The overhead lights were bright, without shadows, and beneath her skin I could see the line of two bluish veins.