Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  He began hearing soft sounds that seemed to derive from somewhere behind, and then upon closer inspection, somewhere within the canvas, sounds like those he had first taken to be rising waters, as though some liquid medium of great viscosity had been stirred somehow to life from a vast distance. The movement appeared to be caused in a quiet, yet dark, viscous pond, insistently, tediously lapping against the edge of the canvas.

  He began to have inexplicable fantasies, sleeping or awake, of a small, misshapen creature—black as the blackness of the cape—who hid within the pigment, and who softly whimpered its dreadful, its unfulfillable need.

  Once that was heard, the delicate lapping noises ceased. But the whimpering continued, sometimes for hours, at times barely audible, at other times so loud he could not hear himself think. Nor could he escape it. He found he was unable to step beyond an invisible yet still defined radius around the canvas without experiencing an unspecified although all-encompassing panic, and actually physical pain in the form of a megrim headache. At times, he fancied the whimpering noise so near that it was within his very veins and arteries. He dared not nick himself shaving, or his life’s blood would pour out of him not humanly crimson, but absolutely black too.

  *

  The childlike whimpering was approaching the door of his bedchamber. Although he slept and dreamt and knew he both slept and dreamt, still it slowly advanced through the precisely described dimensions and details of his bedchamber, black and small, almost viscous itself, moving toward the edge of his bed. A fearful thing! He turned away, but could not awaken. It came to the bed’s edge and slowly, viscously, clambered onto the bed linen, the whimpering subsided now into a soft panting, not so much respiration as the inverse of breathing. Still unable to awaken or move away, he huddled further away from it, within himself, dreading its approach, curling his body like an infant, to avoid it. The maddening sound was in his ear now; the creature from within the chasm that was his self-portrait stretched itself next to him, slowly, with infinitely minute pressure leaned its viscous form against his shrinking, dreading back, legs, and neck, as a freezing child might timidly approach a sleeping stranger for warmth. It caused him to tremble, then shiver, then shake so violently with its sense of living blackness and nothingness come to life and its sapping of all warmth and life and color from him that he did at last awaken, with a start. He leapt from the bed and rushed out of the room.

  He found in a cupboard a flagon of brandy and drank a cupful, to warm and steady himself. Its half century of bottled spirits helped a bit to dispel the more immediate palpitations from the terrible nightmare, and he wrapped himself in his outdoors cloak and more deliberately sipped another cupful of the old brandy until his hand no longer trembled about the chalice and his breath no longer frosted the cold metal edge. Yet he dared not fall asleep again, but passed the remaining hours before dawn huddled in the dining room chair, peering into the studio doorway left half-ajar, and, at times, out the window awaiting the first warming ray of the morning sun.

  The nightmare had shaken him out of his previous week of lethargy. He bathed and dressed rapidly, and even before Antonia could come to him, he went down to the ground floor for the first time since the pigment had arrived and asked leave to breakfast at the common table set daily for her family and for several other pensioners.

  After so long and so complete an absence, he was congratulated upon his recovery, as evidenced by the new prodigousness of his appetite.

  Cheered, he gathered up a wide-brimmed hat against the hot Roman sun and decided upon a long morning walk. Antonia was free to clean and air out his apartments, a task she’d long anticipated after weeks of being denied her housekeeping there.

  Michaelis returned past noon. Already most of the Roman citizenry had escaped the debilitating heat of the outdoors for cooler, afternoon siestas. The artist felt renewed by his walk, his fears of the night dispelled by the benign morning sunlight. He had just settled himself at his table and had begun reading his weekly Corriere, attempting to catch up on news of the town, and he was anticipating the coming evening’s dinner with William, who was expected back, when Antonia appeared before him, her various implements of trade in hand and an arch expression upon her kindly face.

  “You have worked very hard, Signore. Too much work, it is poor for your health. When you first appeared at our table downstairs, we were persuaded you were some baleful spirit.”

  Michaelis murmured the appropriate response.

  “Never have I met such a persevering artist,” she said, shaking one finger as though scolding him for his industry. “Why, you even paint in your sleep!”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Come look!” she said, leading him to the bedchamber. “Ecco! What did I say! Ecco! There! Those spots of black resisted all my efforts to remove them.”

  At the far side of the bed from where Michaelis usually lay down, two spots of the new pigment lay upon the floorboards. The artist wondered if he had been so distracted during the last stage of his work on the canvas that, unawares, he had tracked them into his bedchamber. He dismissed Antonia, assuring her he would ask the pigment maker for a solvent to remove them.

  After she had gone, however, Michaelis returned to the side of the bed to more closely inspect the spots. This near, they took on a more defined appearance: one was a mere half inch or so of black smudge, the indistinct shape of a semicircle. But as he looked more closely, it suddenly struck him that the other black mark could be nothing other than the pad and first three toes of a small foot: large and clear, the very impression that would be made by a small child with paint on its feet as it leaned to climb onto the bed.

  *

  “I was certain the painting would be done by now,” William protested. “You look as though you’ve worked on it without a minute of sleep since I’ve been away.”

  “Only one more night of work. Then I am done,” the artist replied, not unaware of his friend’s vigorous health, almost a censure to his own haggard appearance.

  “Do you still mean to display it?” William asked, looking toward the studio where the painting remained covered. “The salon opens tomorrow.”

  “It will be done.”

  William was yet to be appeased. “We were to celebrate its completion tonight. And also my return. We were to dine out. I have already accepted an invitation to a fete for us both, at the Marchesa de B———’s.”

  “You must go to that alone. Tomorrow night, after the exhibit, we will celebrate, you and I. Have a bit more patience with an old friend, I beg you.”

  “Tomorrow night for certain, then,” William agreed brightly. “You’ll have no way out, I assure you. I feel duty bound to see you done with this canvas. Its last stages of labor have taken a terrible toll on you, I fear.”

  Although exhausted and sad, Michaelis was calm, which William misperceived as the serenity of near completion rather than the resignation it in truth signified.

  “Let me only step into this pharmacy,” the artist said, “I am promised a draught to sustain me during the last hours of labor.”

  William left his friend at the herbalist shop. Michaelis received his prescription and ponderously took his way home.

  Arrived, he mixed the potent stimulants the pharmacist had prepared into a flagon of strong, hot espresso and, sighing, he brought the cup with him into the studio.

  Two large canisters sat before the shrouded portrait, delivered by his orders, via the pigment maker and his apprentice. Michaelis pried up their lids, then drank the potion he’d received, along with the first of a half dozen espressos he would continue to consume in the coming hours.

  A great initial effort was required for him to dip a paintbrush into the vat before him, and even greater effort to lift the brush to the area of the canvas where the Absolute Ebony had only just dried. but Michaelis made his nerves iron to his task. Only his heart was a waste of icy emptiness the moment he applied the brush to the canvas and began the destruction of his
masterpiece by applying over it the purest, thickest, whitest Zinc White to ever come from Castelgni’s workshop.

  Perhaps it was because of the precautions he had taken before beginning the task—the dozens of candelabra with the brightest tapers illuminating the chamber as though the grandest party were in progress—perhaps for other, unknown reasons, but he had already emptied one large canister of the bright new pigment onto the canvas and had begun dipping into the second when he began to sense a sort of pulsing from the remaining black pigment that formed the cape.

  He worked faster, dipping the brush more rapidly, applying the white in great swaths over larger areas of black.

  He became aware of the lapping sound, at first so quiet he merely sensed it: at the tips of his hair, on the very surface of his cheeks. It went on, growing ever stronger, louder, until Michaelis could hear no other sound and worked feverishly now, with greater dispatch to cover the remaining areas of the terrible black. Several times he felt the brush he was using almost twisted out of his hands by some force from within the canvas.

  When only a square foot or so of the original pigment remained, he switched over to another, larger, rougher brush. That’s when the whimpering started up. Like the lapping sound before it, it began scarcely audible, but as the artist dipped his brush and raised it with yet more Zinc White to the canvas, it became louder, growing to a crescendo of piteous, fierce moaning so encompassing he was certain the everyone in the surrounding dozen streets and houses must be able to hear it.

  He filled his ears with wax melting off the many candles around him, and, temporarily protected from the terrible sound, he worked on yet more feverishly.

  Now only a few inches or so remained of the black. But when he dipped his brush into the canister of white, it came up dry. The pigment was gone, used up. He frantically scraped enough from the sides of the canisters to cover a minuscule section of the canvas, cursing, kicking over empty buckets.

  The large canvas began to belly outward, as though attempting to reject the application of the white, as though whatever existed within it was pushing through, to get out—and at him.

  Michaelis ignored its buffeting as best he could, shuddering all the while, yet for all that concentrating all of his distracted attention to devise how he might cover that last spot of black. His heart beat wildly with the memory of last night’s visitor, and of the footprint he had seen, and the whimpering that now pierced through the wax stuffed in his ears, as though the sound derived not from without, but from within his very brain.

  Not a thimble full of white remained. It was four o’clock of the morning: impossible to secure more pigment. How could he cover it all?

  Michaelis almost went mad then. He sensed a power within that tiny remaining spot of black pigment that had to be obliterated lest it annihilate all else. The canvas continued to shudder from top to bottom, sometimes vertically, other times diagonally, as though to shake off the new paint. It would. It would, he knew, unless he managed to cover every last bit of the infernal hue.

  As though by inspriation, he suddenly recalled his own supplies, not looked into for the past several years since he had turned to darker colors. Ah, and there in the small cupboard it was—not a great deal, but still clean, clear, unsullied, an almost full tube of ancient Zinc White he had used for children’s dresses and maidens’ hands. Deafened by now, near to maddened by the piercing whining from within that still screeched on, he worked to extract the pigment into a dish. Looking up, he saw the canvas blowing in and out as though it were the topmost sail of a clipper ship under a typhoon’s gale.

  He managed to get enough white pigment mixed with water and binder, rapidly stirring until he supposed it thick enough to completely coat the last bit of black.

  He dipped his thickest brush into the paint, swirled it to soak up every atom of the liquid. But as he lifted the brush from the palette dish to the spot, the billowing canvas went utterly flat. From the remaining portion of Absolute Ebony the color seemed to emerge completely, as though the black had taken on full life. Before Michaelis’s unbelieving eyes, the pigment grew forward, forming itself into the grotesquely black lineaments of a small, unnaturally proportioned, three-fingered hand reaching out for him.

  He clenched his teeth to stifle an utterance of terror, then dabbed the brush with the Zinc White at those fingers, covering them with lines, blotches, streaks of white. As he did, the hand pulled back; simultaneously, a shriek emerged from the canvas so high-pitched, so fraught with fear and pain as to send him reeling backward.

  The scream ended as suddenly. When his head had ceased to ache from the sound, he once more approached the canvas. All was silent, the whimpering gone, the surface still and flat. Quickly, ruthlessly, he painted over that last spot; then, calmer, he inspected the canvas and returned that brush of Zinc White over every possibility of insufficient pigment, no matter how thread-thin any possible crevice, until he was satisfied that not a single iota of the awful black pigment remained.

  Exhausted, Michaelis slowly, arduously, dragged himself out of his studio and swooned onto his bed.

  *

  “Arouse yourself, dear friend. It’s past four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  Michaelis sat up in bed and looked about him as though he had awakened in a strange land.

  “Have a cup of this caffe latte,” William pleaded. “It will help you awaken.” He sat in a chair near the bed, holding out an earthenware cup. Late-afternoon daylight played over the floorboards through the open curtains of the window.

  “The exhibit has been open since midday,” William went on. “But now you must rouse yourself and have a bit to eat before we go.”

  The artist sipped the almost insipid liquid, coming slowly more awake, as though from some long dream.

  At once he started. “The portrait! It still must be brought to the salon.”

  “On that you may rest assured, my friend. It is already accomplished.”

  “But…!”

  “Accomplished. Carted to the salon. This morning, when I called on you, I found you sound asleep, fully dressed, wearing the paint-daubed wear you now sport. You had wax in your ears, I supposed so as to not be disturbed by noise during your well-earned rest. I called for Castelgni and his man, and they carted it off.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Alas, no. It was already covered over when the two brought it out, for its own protection, I presume. Meanwhile I tried unsuccessfully to awaken you.”

  William insisted that food be taken at a local trattoria nearby the salon, a place much attended by artists of various nationalities, at one time during his palmier days, Michaelis’s favorite haunt.

  Several times durng the course of their meal, the artist was recognized by colleagues and acquaintances, and though he greeted each, he held no converse with them.

  But as their sweet Zuppa Inglese was served, Riegler, the noted art critic and prestigious historian, came to their table and requested discourse.

  “I have seen your self-portrait on exhibit,” he said, taking Michaelis’s hand in a warm clasp. “Allow me to be the first to congratulate you and to acclaim it a masterpiece.”

  Seeing Riegler not repulsed by the formerly misanthropic artist, others now approached more closely. All had either already seen the portrait or just heard of it from others. All were filled with congratulations and that unrestrained heartfelt pleasure that true artists feel in a deserving colleague’s triumph over their shared and recalcitrant material and even more elusive muse. French Champagne was ordered by Reigler. Toasts were proposed to Michaelis and his work. The dinner became a fete.

  Soon the party spilled out into the piazza, and from there, it moved toward the salon with ever-increasing festivity.

  Michaelis had barely stepped over the threshold of the salon when a man who for the past three years had mocked him to all who would listen stepped forward to embrace the artist.

  “You have been awarded the Palma d’Oro, the highest h
onor Rome can bestow upon a work of art.”

  A cheer rose from the crowd. Others in the salon, hearing of Michaelis’s arrival, rushed to greet him.

  The President of the Society of Arts himself arrived and pinned the medal consisting of a golden palm-tree to Michaelis’s jacket front and launched into a speech of flowery laudation and excessive length.

  The artist heard and witnessed all this with a scarcely hidden sneer and with no great enthusiasm. What did these fools mean? The painting was a failure. A mere whisper of a possibility of what he had once intended—what he had idealized, what he had achieved if only briefly, and oh so perilously. Could these idiots not understand what he had done? What he had been forced to undo by his own hand? Would they never understand the depths of darkness which he had plumbed, first in his imagination, then—when the pigment was actually produced—in his art, in his life? If his undoing was the cause of so much honor, what would they have thought to see the painting as he had planned it, as he had first painted it?

  The president was at last done speaking. Applause was followed by more congratulation, more toasts, and by the drinking of more Champagne. Michaelis was asked to speak too, and he demurred. But William, who among all the others the artist truly believed was delighted in his friend’s good fortune—persuaded him to attempt it. So the artist spoke, quietly, sadly, of his travails, of his search for new modes of expression, of his experimentation with new and old forms and themes and techniques, of how the ideal he had envisioned would live on, although the finished work was compromised and would always be a failure, a mere cipher of that ideal.

  “Enough modesty. Let us see this marvel!” the President declared. “We have installed it at one end of the great salon, with no others nearby, for all would doubtless suffer by comparison.”