Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  Taking up a small mallet such as marble-carvers use, the artist inserted an iron wedge into a hairline crack that ran along the top of the stony loaf and began to gently tap at it, all the while talking excitedly to his compatriot.

  “These men, William, are from the countryside near L’Aquila in the Abruzzan Apennines where lie the deepest natural anthracite pits in the entire peninsula—in all Europe, it is rumored.

  “If they speak truly, then I have at last found the pigment I have been searching for these past three years; the inevitable, yet almost ideal result of my studies and experiments; the base color I shall have ground and then mixed to make a linseed oil to complete my most perfect masterpiece—there, that large shrouded canvas you beheld earlier and questioned me about, and which I would not show you nor any man, and which has lain incomplete awaiting this final color.

  “If these men speak truly, William, we have before us what I have dreamed of, what I have required to prove my theory. I will be at last vindicated, within the fortnight, when the new salon of Rome opens and my painting walks off with the greatest acclaim.”

  Michaelis tapped a final soft blow upon the wedge and the stone gave off a sound soft as a sigh before it fell apart onto the surrounding cloths. Within it, the size of a man’s fist—of a man’s heart—lay a mass so black, so dense that the contadini and William too were forced to gasp and draw back from it.

  Michaelis stared, merely emitting a guttural murmur. “Ah, my beauty!”

  William was unable to draw his eyes from the dark mineral on the table. Its blackness was so intense it seemed to recede from his vision, drawing his sight deeper within itself.

  “What in the Creator’s name is it?”

  “Only a fine chunk of anthracite now. But when it is made into a pigment, William, then it will be Absolute Ebony!”

  William repeated those last two words to himself, with growing uneasiness.

  “All colors composed of light in our world mix to pure white,” Michaelis explained. “Goethe proved that. But all colors composed of earthly material mix to form black. Therefore I have painted a masterpiece in black so comprehensive as to make Rembrandt’s darkest works seem like summer fripperies. We must see how the coal pulverizes. Good as its hue is, it must powder correctly or it will mix poorly and be worthless to me.”

  So saying, he scraped one side of the wedge against the lump until a fine powder descended. This the artist held up on one finger, inspecting it by candlelight with great care and eventual satisfaction.

  “It will do,” the artist said, then sat down and sipped more wine, once more becoming pensive.

  William believed the arrival of the contadini with the coal represented a turning point in his friend’s life. He had never doubted Michaelis’s skill or ingenuity, but he sensed disaster impending from this latest event. In applying to an all-black painting a pigment blacker still, the artist would surely seal his fate in Rome. His canvas would be completed, true, hung at the salon, but surely it would be scoffed at, made the butt of jokes and lampoons. Michaelis would be utterly crushed. Then William’s arguments for a return to his homeland would fall upon more open ears, since that might be the artist’s only remaining alternative. Forced to consider his error, like the virtuous and true man William knew Michaelis to be, the artist would undoubtedly return to a more moderately developed philosophy, to a life of light and color.

  Yet the coal itself was strangely disturbing, and William was forced to busy himself in order to avoid having his eyes continually drawn to it. He paid the peasant out of his own purse and, finding the housekeeper, sent her to fetch Castelgni, the pigment maker, explaining that Signor Michaelis had urgent need of him, and he must be roused out of sleep.

  The artist did not move from his seat. He sat on, regarding the coal with a concentrated attention, as though he foresaw more than vindication in its depth, as though he could envisage an entirely new universe potential within its dark heart.

  So entranced was the artist, William had to at last shake him out of his reverie so he might take his leave.

  Passing out the front door of the building, William was greeted by the pigment maker, nervously, hurriedly ascending the wide, dim stairway to Michaelis’s studio.

  *

  After the pigment maker had scraped a chip off the lump of coal, he ground it to a fine point, then swept the powder into an old bronze dish aged with many previous mixings. Water was sprinkled in, the binder added—a concoction Castelgni had learned from his father, his father from his, going back, it was said, to the days and to the very studio of the great Veronese himself. When he had done, Castelgni called Michaelis, who meanwhile had been busying himself uncovering what seemed to the old Roman guildsman to be a large, obscure canvas.

  “How does the color look, old man?”

  “Nerissimo!” the mixer replied. “Blacker than any black before it.”

  Indeed, the flat dish, coated with but a quarter inch of the new pigment, seemed to hold more than a pint of it, as though it had suddenly dropped open to the size of a large flagon, as though ordinary laws of depth and foreshortening no longer held true in its presence.

  “Chip and mix all of it! But carefully, mind you,” Michaelis warned, “I’ll need all of it. Bring it as soon as you’re done.”

  He wrapped up the remainder of the coal, carefully sealing it back within its mantle of rock.

  “As soon as you’re done, you understand? No matter the hour. Leave the dishful. I must test it.”

  When Castelgni had gone, the artist picked up the dish, looked once more into its depths, and brought it to the palette board that had been set up facing the uncovered painting.

  Not even the Roman night was dim enough for the subtleties of darkness he had already committed to the canvas. The studio’s arras were drawn doubly. Two dim candles in wall sconces were foreshadowed by painted black baffles. Within this rare obscurity stood Michaelis’s new painting: the summation of his life’s work, unlike any work conceived of before.

  It was a life-sized painting of Michaelis himself, clad in the masquerade of a Spanish Grandee of a previous era. In the painting, he half turned from the observer, as though he had been walking away and, suddenly called, had turned back to face his caller—a most difficult view to achieve, even were it done with a live model. For it to be a self-portrait was amazing, especially as Michaelis’s care and technical skills ensured that the portrait would be a compendium of every refinement of proportion and perspective.

  But the unusual angle of the subject had another, more crucial purpose: to provide more than half the entire space of the canvas to one single area—which he would fill in with the new pigment—the area of a full-length cape that Michaelis wore. It fell heavily from his broad shoulders, plummeted leadenly, and swung slightly at the tops of his boots to effect a sudden movement, as though by the exorbitant force of gravity.

  This area had been long prepared for the new color. For months he had covered it with a base coat of his own perfecting, designed to totally wed pigment to canvas. Once that had dried, the artist had painted over the area with Lamp Black, the darkest hue available to artists. To others, that might appear to be the end of the matter. However, Michaelis had looked upon the Lamp Black with an emotion close to pain, knowing as he did how far from his ideal the Lamp Black proved to be. Yet after it too had dried and he had tediously scraped the entire area of the painted cape, he was pleased to discover how well his base had held. The razor point he wielded was so thin it almost sliced the canvas at moments, the area now to be repainted was so fine that should a person stand behind the canvas he or she might almost be discerned through the area; and yet it was black, front and back, fully primed for the final application.

  Michaelis decided upon yet another refinement—a caprice. He would let remain a thin border of the Lamp Black, no more than half an inch, to outline the cape, to bring into relief the new pigment, and then—as a further act of bravura—he’d also paint in various u
ndulating lines of Lamp Black to suggest the vertically flowing hints of the cape’s folds. Though Lamp Black themselves, against the new black, they might appear almost silver.

  He dipped a brush into the dish of the newly made pigment, careful not to miscalculate his touch because of the curious effect of extra depth. Emerging with the utter dab of darkness on the fine cat-whisker hair of his brush, he lifted it to the canvas.

  The pigment almost sprang onto the portrait of its own accord. Only a faint inkish stain remained on the bristles. It was fully, instantly absorbed onto the prepared canvas, standing out against the other blacks like a speck of eternity.

  Quickly, greedily, Michaelis dipped his brush and applied more of the pigment, broadening the spot, adding more, then more still, and then all of it, until the dish was merely blemished and once again possessed its natural flatness, and the new pigment, to the size of a man’s hand, covered the upper right-hand corner of the outlined cape.

  “Nerissimo!” Michaelis whispered, repeating Castelgni’s words. “Blacker than any black ever before.”

  The artist pulled up a bench and sat staring at the canvas, pondering his work, admiring the new color until the hours of night were obliterated. When finally—in answer to his housekeeper’s knocking—he at last left the studio chamber, he was astonished to discover that it was some time past sunrise.

  At dusk, the pigment maker arrived, accompanied by an apprentice who helped carry a large covered vat. When Michaelis had the lid prized up, he thrilled seeing the intense depths of the black pigment they had labored to produce. As he’d been promised, it mixed beautifully.

  The guildsman apologized for their tardiness. His wife, the old man said, would not allow the block of coal into her house. The superstitious old woman had lighted candles and had muttered litanies all day. Castelgni had been forced to beg work space in the atelier of a fellow craftsman to complete the grinding and mixing.

  Upon hearing this, the simple-minded young apprentice, already frightened by the intense blackness of the pigment, whined and pleaded for them to depart.

  “But it was a very easy pigment to make,” the phlegmatic old man said with a smile, ignoring his younger’s pleas. “Almost as though it was eager to become paint for the Signor.”

  *

  “It is said that the great Frans Hals knew twenty-seven different shades of black, and when to use each of them for perfect effect. Rembrandt himself provided twenty-nine different shades of black for the hats and doublets and backgrounds, to differentiate each of the doctors in his mass portrait, The Anatomy Lesson. The Chinese have an entire school of ink painting where no colors are admitted. Their gradations range from grays so indistinct as to seem the mere smudge of a virgin’s finger upon the petal of a white chrysanthemum, to that deepest of blacks, which is used to write but one word in their curious visual language—that signifying the eternal restlessness given to those who seek to usurp the throne of heaven. Their shades of black number thirty.

  “Already I have discovered one more shade than they. Intimate to me as to those Mandarins are these various tints and black hues with iron oxide bases and the merest hint of scarlet which seems to me to be the true color of bloodlust in battle and the fever of pestilence. Other tints of black with browns and green hinted at are luxurious, as though embedded in velvet plush. Some blacks are the colors of certain practices of Roman courtesans whispered in my ears by masked women during lewd street celebrations, while other shades speak of quiet diplomacies, of saddened courtesies, of the final noble words spoken by highborn men and women meeting their ends by treachery and the executioner’s block. Other blacks still are almost charming: One with a hint of blue indigo is as tart as a Parisian soubrette. Yet others are somber as widow’s weeds, heavy as the unheard curses of decades-old prisoners in airless dungeons. I have acquainted myself with these varieties of despair and in turn invented new hues to reflect those new despondencies I myself have experienced.

  “A pure Lamp Black from Liverpool is so black that in bright light it glitters almost silver white. But there! That only proves my point. What I’ve wanted, what I searched for was a different kind of pigment, one that would not reflect outwardly, by prismatics, but inwardly, by secret refinements upon nature itself.”

  Michaelis ceased to speak and fell into a brooding silence. William could do nothing but sigh.

  “Will you begin tonight?” he at last asked the painter.

  “The very minute you leave. And I will work on until it is done.”

  “Then good night. Tomorrow morning I ride for Pisa and thence on to Venice. But I will be returned before the exhibit is to open its doors. Promise me that day to return with me to America.”

  “After the exhibit, sweet friend, I will no longer need to go anywhere,” Michaelis said. “I will have arrived.”

  *

  It was in the earliest hours of morning, the following day, when Michaelis applied the last dregs of the ebon pigment to the final uncovered square inch of canvas. As with every previous brushstroke, the paint seemed to leap off the brush onto the canvas, as though rejoining that portion of itself divided in the act of application.

  During the exhausting labor, the artist had scarcely glanced at the canvas before him, or if he had it was only to ensure that the pigment lay evenly alongside the Lamp Black outline he had devised for its entire perimeter.

  Now, finished, he stood back to inspect his self-portrait, and instantly felt a catch in the back of his throat. It was precisely as he had fore-visioned it: the figure in is usual attitude against its dim background, his face half hidden by the gleaming Lamp Black domino he lifted with one black gloved hand, the shadows, the thirty other individual shades of black he had used for the costume, shading of silver blacks crosshatched to suggest the sheen of satin, golden blacks delicately embossed for the silken expanses of his doublet and pantaloons, blue blacks and indigo blacks in whorls and minuscule circles to intimate the textures of a throat ruffle, of shirt cuffs bursting from each dark sleeve, browner blacks in careful streaks for details of facial hair, and for the highlights of the broad-brimmed hat he wore, all wrought so ingeniously as to offer a palette as rich and complex as the brightest chromatics of David and Delacroix, his esteemed contemporaries.

  And even if one were so myopic as to misapprehend these many dark subtleties, dominating the portrait was the new pigment, the immense utter blackness of the cape.

  Looking at it, Michaelis felt as though he were seeing through a portal into an entirely new dimension—one intrinsically opposed to any ever seen by man before. Where the Lamp Black edging ended and the new paint began, so sharp a delineation occurred that it seemed to signal that another reality existed.

  The dark cape curved inward by some curious property of the pigment, drawing his vision inward, spiraling counterclockwise deeper and deeper within, until Michaelis felt unable to fix himself to any stable underpinnings of floor or walls or ceiling, nearly weightless. Suddenly afraid that he would fall into the blackness of the cape, he pulled himself away from the canvas and carefully sat himself down in an armchair at a fair distance from the easel.

  That precaution failed little to dispel his initial impression. From a dozen feet further back in the room, his sense that the newly painted area was both more and yet less than a flat surface was much intensified. As though he had assisted in representing the abysses of the heavens themselves, a starless heaven, somehow pulsing alive with the very negation of matter.

  A further curious side effect of the new pigment was that the large, gloomy studio itself seemed smaller, almost intimate, especially at that end of the chamber where the canvas was placed. One might infer that light itself could no longer exert its periodic powers or proportions wherever existed that utter lack of light.

  It was a bitter triumph, this ultra-black painting, yet it was a triumph Michaelis experienced. So entranced was he with his creation that he sat hours in front of it before falling asleep on the rough studio cot
.

  When he awoke from his extended yet signally un-refreshing sleep, the day outside his window was damp, gray, and airless. He was still fatigued, chilled by the sudden wetness that seemed to hold the city in thrall all that day. He passed the afternoon and evening enraptured by his masterpiece, discovering within its maw of absolute black echoes of all the suffering and unhappiness he had so long felt.

  That moment he was able to draw himself away from the canvas, particularly from the yawning chasm of the cape, he was filled with a vague sense of unease and restlessness. He picked at his solitary dinner, distractedly began and then put down unread a half dozen volumes of poetry and philosophy he’d had been wont to turn to previously as balm for even his most melancholy hours. That night, as he began to slip into slumber, he thought he heard the distant approach of flood waters rising.

  The consequent days were spent by Michaelis in an attempt to overcome a sense of exhaustion that strangely persisted. His housekeeper said she hoped he wasn’t ill, but as he could find no specific symptoms to complain of, the doctor that was sent for could do nothing for the artist, and went off again baffled, prescribing bed rest.

  Michaelis took advantage of this new regimen to actively avoid all contact with others. In fact, he had begun to find the presence of others intolerable to his sensitivities. He asked that his food be set outside his apartment door, where, often enough, Antonia would happen upon it, hours later, scarcely touched. He moved from sleep to waking through far easier transitions than ever before and a great deal more frequently during a single revolution of the hours. Soon it became difficult for him to fully separate these states of consciousness with his prior conviction.

  Instead, he began to inhabit an intermediate state, and in this he would find himself gazing out a window for hours, or—more frequently—leaning against the studio doorjamb, his work chamber grown tiny to his eyes, except for the portrait, looming immensely, its awesome depths flickering and breeding odd presentiments.