The Restoration Artist

by Lewis Desoto

  “I have also decided to give you as much peace and quiet as you need. Services will now be held in the hotel. The chapel is yours.”

  “Absolutely not. I can’t drive you out of your own church.”

  He smiled. “With all these odours, you will probably drive out my parishioners anyway. But seriously, it is no bother to anyone, and a small gesture in return for the gift you are giving us.”

  “All right. But you can throw me out at any time.” We began to carry the equipment into the chapel. I cast an eye in Tobias’s direction. “How does he seem to you today?”

  The priest shrugged. “The same boy that he always was. No better, no worse.”

  “He probably doesn’t need that bandage any more. The incision from the operation is healing nicely.”

  “Yes, I looked at it,” he said. “But a few more days, just to keep it clean.”

  In the past ten days, since our return from Paris, I had been to the clinic in Saint-Alban with Tobias three times, and once to Rennes on my own. Tobias was apparently suffering no ill effects from the surgery to his throat. On Tuesday the doctor had removed the three small stitches binding the incision in the boy’s neck, leaving a thin vertical line of puckered skin about an inch long. Otherwise, he was given a clean bill of health. He was no longer on a liquid diet, broths prepared by Linda in the hotel, and had switched to mashed potatoes and soft stews and rice pudding.

  During the last visit to the clinic, out of earshot of Tobias, I had asked the doctor, “Is there any hope? Should I arrange for a speech therapist to see him?”

  “Too soon,” the doctor replied. “Much too soon. Let the body heal itself first. If he is capable, the sounds will come naturally. Only then can you consider trying to form those sounds into words.”

  Nevertheless, I had been to Rennes to see a speech therapist. Her advice was to not force matters. Before the operation, Tobias had often made sounds, guttural utterances that were obviously an attempt to form words. He was familiar with language, the therapist said, and I should continue to talk to him. There would be no point in therapy until, and unless, he actually formed a sound with his vocal cords. She too advised me to wait.

  After we returned to La Mouche from Paris, Père Caron had thought Tobias should stay in the presbytery while he was recuperating. In an aside he told me that since Étienne was fond of sampling his own Calvados, the boy might be better off under more watchful care. I realized I’d been hoping, somehow, that he could come and stay with me, but it didn’t seem the time to suggest it. He did, however, move a few things to my place, some books and his precious Laguiole knife.

  While he was still his usual cheerful and mischievous self, there seemed to be a new fragility about him, as if his experience in Paris had shaken him in some way. For the first days he attached himself to me like a shadow. I was glad of the company. For too long I’d lived in silence. Now I talked constantly to the boy, even though the conversation was one-sided, wanting him to hear language, to be comfortable with the flow of words.

  I had seen Lorca only once, at the Hôtel des Îles, where I had taken Tobias for an ice cream. She too seemed more fragile than before, and withdrawn. She mostly talked to Tobias, and when I had a moment alone with her she said, “I must be on my own now, Leo. I’m working. Hard. And I have to think about things. It’s all been a little overwhelming.” She squeezed my hand and kissed me, warmly, but in the end I was somewhat relieved when she left us.

  The new painting progressed. Although, it was still in a rudimentary stage because I changed my mind about the composition often, wiping out and repainting. The picture was a landscape made up of elements from the island. But no figures.

  Yesterday, while out walking in the late afternoon in the misty air, I had come upon a cluster of dark yew trees silhouetted against the sky. The foliage was like black ink splashed against the mist and the whole mass of twisted curving branches seemed alive, bending in a wind, although the day was very still. It might have been made to order for me—a motif in dramatic isolation, imbued with mystery. I could feel it inside me, that smear of darkness against the ashy light, dense and contained and mysterious.

  Plain lamp black pigment would not give the richness of that darkness. It was too flat, too opaque. I wanted a colour like the glow in a raven’s eye. I mixed Payne’s grey and viridian green and burnt umber into a rich luminous inky green, black as her eyes when they looked into mine. When I brushed it onto the canvas the effect was like a burst of music, like the first bars of a Beethoven symphony. I worked through the day; the trees took shape, the sky appeared, pale and silvery, the chapel began to form, Naples yellow the perfect colour for the stone walls.

  I made the sky darker than the land, so that the light on the chapel walls seemed to come from an unknown source, an effect I’d seen often along the dunes before a storm. Dramatic and vaguely eerie. The whole landscape was tonally restricted, almost monochrome, but at the same time luminous and atmospheric. I was painting again, in my old style, with my usual colours, dove greys, slate and stone, muted greens. My Corot tones.

  Père Caron dropped by a couple of days later.

  “What do you think?” I asked, as he sat in the battered wicker rocker, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers.

  He squinted at the picture, then scratched his chin. He cocked his head to the left, then to the right, half closed his eyes, opened them again. “You have captured something of the island. No doubt about that. Yes.” He puffed at his cigarette. “Yes, very interesting.”

  I smiled. “When people say ‘very interesting’ they are being polite to the artist, usually when they don’t like his painting.”

  The priest raised his shoulders and let them fall. “I don’t know. You have painted our island as a very lonely place.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m only giving my personal opinion, and I really don’t know anything about painting. You must do as you like, you are the artist.” He opened his hands in a placatory gesture. “We are all grateful for your work.”

  I didn’t resume until after he’d left. His words had planted a doubt in my mind. This was my kind of subject, my motif, I’d been doing it for years, creating the kind of landscapes that I yearned for, that I could inhabit. Did he mean that he’d like a figure in the painting? I never included figures. It was a signature of my style, I suppose.

  Was there more to it? I wondered now.

  Claudine had voiced something similar when we quarrelled once, at an exhibition of de Chirico’s paintings. He too had favoured solitude in his pictures, deserted arcades, long shadows, statues in empty plazas. I had been quite taken with them, but Claudine described them as desolate and lonely. When I said that I preferred pictures without people, she responded, with an edge in her voice, that I seemed to prefer a life without people too. It had never occurred to me, until now, that she might be saying she was lonely.

  Now my picture seemed dishonest, relying on old familiar forms and gestures, metaphors and themes. My usual bag of tricks, so to speak. I had resolved to make the truest painting I could. But was this it? And was it appropriate for the chapel? My painting was not as dark in tone as “Love and the Pilgrim,” but it was certainly darker in spirit.

  I was rescued by Tobias. He appeared in the chapel, as silently as he always did. Often when I turned and saw him nearby I wondered how long he’d been there. This time he’d brought with him an old mirror in a simple wood frame and a bag of seashells, mostly cockles and the little spiral-shaped ones called turitelles. He wanted my help gluing the shells to the frame. It was a passion of his lately, to decorate objects with shells. I wondered how long it would be before he hit on the idea of decorating his paintbox.

  While we were in Paris, I’d gone out and bought him a fine rosewood box with brass fittings, just like the one I used, the one with Piero’s name engraved on the lid. Now, as we sat in the sunshine on the leeward side of the chapel, an idea occurred to me. I went back inside to fetch my b
inoculars.

  “We’re going to try something, Tobias,” I said as I unscrewed the smaller lens from one end of the binoculars and had him place the paintbox in the bright hot sunlight. Holding the lens, which concentrated the sunlight like a magnifying glass into a small bright spot, I waited until the wood began to smoulder, giving off an acrid smell of burnt lacquer, which was soon replaced by the more pleasant smell of wood smoke. Tobias sneezed.

  Gradually moving my hand and blowing away the puffs of smoke, I slowly formed the letter T. “We’re going to engrave your name on your box,” I explained, “just like the other little boy’s name on my paintbox. You want to do the rest?”

  Tobias nodded.

  “Let me mark out the letters for you.” With a piece of chalk I outlined the rest of his name.

  At first shakily on the letter O, but with gathering confidence, Tobias began to burn his name onto the lid. The tip of his tongue showed pink between his white teeth as he concentrated. The way the light fell on Tobias’s profile caught my eye, like a golden line down the edge of his forehead, across the bridge of the nose, lost for a moment under the nostrils, then resumed over the curve where the two lips joined. A smaller patch of light touched his upper eyelid and was echoed on his chin. He glanced up at me as he worked, and smiled. And I wondered how I could ever have mistaken him for Piero. Tobias’s smile was beautiful, and very much his own.

  I fetched my own paintbox and a small prepared panel. I began to paint directly, without bothering to make a pencil drawing. I used broad strokes, forgoing detail, just aiming for the effects of the light. Once a rudimentary but accurate head was in place on the panel, I took more time to mix the exact colours of the light that delineated the boy’s face—touches of cadmium yellow into the flesh tones on the eyelid, a little vermilion on the chin, more white in the mixture for the bridge of the nose.

  Then the sun moved behind the clouds, the band of light on his face disappeared, the colours dulled. But I had enough. I let my brush rest.

  Sitting upright, Tobias blew on the letters burned on the box, then brushed his fingers over them and proudly displayed the results to me. “Nice work,” I said. Tobias scampered back into the chapel and immediately began to arrange his brushes and paint tubes in the rosewood box. I didn’t even notice when he left and crossed over to the main island, for by then I was busy at the big canvas. An idea had come to me. A way to proceed.

  Beautiful as the black yew trees were, I nevertheless wiped them out. In their place I would put an apple tree, like the ones in Père Caron’s orchard, with a scattering of fallen fruit on the grass. A glimpse of forest to the far left, a curve of shore and sea to the right side. The chapel would remain, but the sky would be brighter. Not grey but cerulean blue. And my little donkey, he too would have a place. And just off-centre in the mid-foreground, the two figures would stand. The woman and the boy.

  I worked intensely for the next few hours with an absorption and concentration that I hadn’t experienced since I was a student. I worked on as the light changed and it was necessary to start up the generator and switch on the lamps Père Caron had provided. I worked until I was weary, hungry and exhausted. But only in body.

  When I finally left the chapel and headed for home my heart and my spirit were soaring.

  CHAPTER 31

  SOMETIMES IT SEEMED THAT THE ONLY RESULT OF the operation was a small scar on his neck, a little squiggle that sat above the ropy line encircling his throat. Be patient, I told myself, it will take time. But time had passed. Tobias almost seemed to have forgotten the trip to Paris. He was his old self again, he came and went, sometimes sleeping at La Minerve, sometimes at his grandfather’s. He visited Père Caron, he helped me in the chapel, he tended to the goats. But no sound that could be called speech had passed his lips.

  He probably visited Lorca too, but I had not spoken to her in a while now. In fact, I had not even glimpsed her. My walks took me all over the island, from the lighthouse to Les Hauts-Vents, from Le Bassin to the long empty beaches near LeBec. Inevitably, I contrived to pass La Maison du Paradis. I knew Lorca had not left the island. Smoke sometimes rose from the chimney, and Linda at the hotel mentioned that Lorca had been in for a drink. But I had not managed to cross her path.

  Once, I heard music from her cottage, and I listened, but not for long. The sound of her clarinet pained me in a way that I could not explain and I left after a few minutes. I was resolved not to go to her. If there was to be anything between us, then the sign, the gesture, must come from her.

  On my walks, I noticed a subtle change in the light, especially in the mornings, when the sun cast long shadows and the air seemed thick, almost palpable, no longer the white of full summer but with a crimson tinting the gold. Signs of a change in the season appeared, here and there, on the edges of summer, like the slight fraying on the edge of petals in a bouquet past its prime.

  In the garden of La Minerve the figs were soft and pulpy, dropping in the slightest breeze. Starlings gathered in the branches twice a day, morning and evening, making a cacophony of whistles and chirps and sudden screeches. Bees hummed lazily on the fallen fruit.

  Tobias was still engaged in his project of decorating objects with seashells. Lately he’d been gluing them to unusually shaped bits of driftwood. Perhaps he was going to be a sculptor and not a painter. His mania now was only for troques, the little spiral-shaped shells, like miniature escargots, that were coloured with delicate red stripes, as if a fine watercolourist had been at work on them.

  One early morning I went out with him when the tide had just turned, the optimal time for beachcombing. The best place for them was on the sands at Le Colombier, below Lorca’s cottage. There was dew underfoot and a fine morning mist on the dune grasses as we descended to the beach. The tide line was fifty metres away and receding, leaving an array of shells sparkling in the rising sun.

  Tobias had a straw basket slung over his shoulder. He immediately rushed down to the beach, chasing a flock of oystercatchers that lifted off in a grand arabesque. I sat down and removed my canvas shoes and rolled up the cuffs of my trousers. The black and white birds returned, digging into the sand with their long red beaks. Tobias scattered them again, dashing among them with his arms flapping, sending them into the air with high indignant cries.

  I wished one of those cries had come from the boy. Just a sound would be enough, not even a word, just a sound.

  I strolled along in the opposite direction, leaving Tobias to his games, my footsteps taking me towards the headland near La Maison du Paradis. When I reached the dunes directly below her house, I paused and looked up, remembering the day of the dog fight and how angry I’d been with Lorca, thinking the dog was hers. What became of those dogs? I wondered. I’d never encountered them again. Perhaps they had belonged to someone visiting the island.

  The beach here was dense with scallop shells that had been washed up on the tide, all of them picked clean already by birds. Among them were little clusters of the periwinkles I was collecting. I gathered the prettiest ones and stowed them in my pockets.

  When I looked up I saw Lorca. She was facing away, looking in the opposite direction at a white ship heading out into the Atlantic on the distant horizon. The way she stood was so much like the classical contrapposto pose, with the upper torso slightly turned away from the hips, the shoulders and chest angled in a different position to the lower body, that I immediately regretted not bringing my sketchbook this morning. I tried to memorize her posture, imagining how the pose of the woman in my painting could be adjusted.

  When she turned and saw me, she took a step backwards, as if to hide herself, but I was already waving and I shouted her name. She returned the wave and came down the dunes to meet me.

  I took her hand, her fingers were cold, and kissed her. “How are you?” I asked. “Are you managing all right?”

  “I’m fine.” She blinked, smiled. She looked a little worn, I thought.

  “I’ve missed you,” I told h
er.

  “Is that Tobias down there?”

  “It is. Why don’t you come and say hello. I’m sure he misses you too.”

  “Oh, he was here yesterday.”

  “I’m jealous that he gets to see you and I don’t.”

  “He invites himself. Not that I mind. He wants to play the clarinet.”

  “You mustn’t let him!”

  “Don’t worry, Leo, I know better than that. In fact, I was a bit harsh with him last time.”

  “Harsh, how?”

  “He walked in, as he will, and just picked up the clarinet and started to blow on it. I grabbed it out of his hands and shouted at him. He’s so odd sometimes, like an animal. He put the clarinet down and stepped away, sort of in slow motion, like a deer, you know the way he lifts his feet sometimes, as if he is walking on glass. I said to him that he mustn’t strain his throat, that it was for his own good, but he just gave me a reproachful look and disappeared.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much. He never stays upset for long. Père Caron and I took him into Saint-Alban again the other day.”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s healing well. His throat is a bit raw inside still, but otherwise fine. He’ll be ready to go and see a speech therapist soon. Maybe even start the clarinet again.”

  She paused and put a hand on my arm. “Leo, I know he needs someone to mother him, and my heart breaks over it, but it can’t be me. The closer I get to him the harder it will be to leave him. And I have to, eventually. A little boy like that will fall in love so easily.”

  “You are something quite glamorous in his life,” I said, wondering if her words had been meant for me too. She fell silent, scuffing one sandalled foot in the beach sand.

  “How is your music coming along?” I asked. “Are you composing much?”

  Lorca shook her head. “I’ve done neither playing nor composing these last couple of days.”

  “Oh. That doesn’t sound good.”

  “No, it is good. I’m listening.”