—
When I was a child, he would sometimes sing a song in English:
My grandfather’s clock
Was too large for the shelf,
So it stood ninety years on the floor…
He would tap out the rhythm of the closing lines on his tray:
But it stopped (tum tum) short (tum tum)
Never to go again
When the old man died (boom—boom).
I later heard the song on a vinyl record given to him by one of his brothers, but didn’t realize what it was trying to tell me, all those long years of slow-witted innocence.
—
There is a great deal on this planet to arouse an enduring sense of wonder, especially when seen in the light of one’s impending departure. The way molecules move in water, for instance, yielding the subtlest play of shifting light as evening falls over the sea in a southern bay—say, on the rocky beach of the Italian coastal town of Rapallo, when the wind has dropped and the pink of the evening clouds performs endless variations with the deepening blue of the sky mirrored in the sea—and how living beings with eyes and consciousness, two incomprehensibly complex adaptations to this whole wondrous biosphere, can take it all for granted and go on breathing, flawlessly designed for just this sort of system.
In the last few years before his death, my grandfather, a highly trained observer, still saw much to surprise him. If anything, his surprise seems to have deepened over the years. He possessed that wondrous capacity of the very old to take an inexplicable joy in each new day simply because he was still there, and could still be part of something that far surpassed him and seemed to bear him up. I would even venture to say that in those final years, for the first time, he experienced a happiness free of care. Yet little of that can be found in the stately gloom of his self-portrait. He depicted himself hat in hand, wearing a white shirt with his signature black bow tie and a midnight-blue jacket. The look in his eyes is severe, or even glassy, and because the overall effect in no way compares to the subtle, vibrant impression made by the portrait of his wife, this self-portrait, which hangs beside it, appears somewhat vacant and soulless. While he put everything into her portrait that he had wanted to give her, he emptied himself, so to speak, and even with the help of his mirror—the same one in which he confronted his image, day after day—he proved unable to bring himself to life, however deeply he stared into his own eyes. The wordless pathos of the artist’s failed attempts to paint himself is another secret that only gradually revealed itself to me over the years, and when I look at the two portraits now, I see a reprise of the silent tragedy that bound the two of them together all their lives.
—
Strikingly, he painted a second self-portrait a few years later, this time with his painting of Gabrielle in the background (and a still life on the other side, a faintly ironic touch). Here, too, he is bareheaded, as if he has removed his hat in front of the mirror. He looks us full in the face. In one hand is his palette, with his thumb sticking through the thumb hole. The odd thing is that he holds this palette in front of him stiffly, as if it were a heraldic shield on which he is pointing out secret symbols with his brush, a means of accounting for himself. It seems like anything but the romantic attribute of the precise painter he had always been. His attitude no longer shows the same severity; instead, he looks to me like a kind of Douanier Rousseau, the naive painter of dream animals and exotic leaves. The look in his eyes is no longer glassy, but penetrating; his pose seems artificial, but there’s something so touching about it. His shoulders have become so small. At the center of the composition are his bright blue eyes with their piercing look. The hand looks like a young man’s, and the brush seems to rest in his fingers almost weightlessly, just like the feather pen in Schubert’s hand.
—
Where he failed in his self-portraits, he triumphed in his copy of the man with the golden helmet. This austere portrait of a retired military man, the darkness around his head, the spectacular illumination that lights up the helmet with a golden glow—this is my grandfather in his final years, precisely as I remember him. And again, he has transformed the copy into a masquerade: amid the features from the original painting, the look in the eyes is unmistakably his, the way he would stare into space when he thought no one was watching, thinking about God knows what. And while he could not expel the soldier from his first self-portrait and thus failed to do himself justice, he pulls off an extraordinary victory of the painter over the soldier in his copy of this pseudo-Rembrandt—a cliché of the art world, reproduced by countless amateurs. The truth in life often lies buried in places we do not associate with authenticity. Life is more subtle, in this respect, than linear human morality. It goes to work like a painter-copyist, using illusion to depict the truth.
—
This paradox was the constant in his life, as he was tossed back and forth between the soldier he had to be and the artist he’d wished to become. War and turpentine. The tranquility of his final years made it possible for him to slowly overcome his traumas. Praying to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, he found peace. On the eve of his death, he went to bed with the words, “I was so happy today, Maria.” His daughter nodded and gave him a good-night kiss. He went to his room.
credit 10
There he placed his fedora on the table by the window, as he did every night. He removed his smock, untied his black silk bow tie, and hung it carefully over the arm of the chair at his bedside. He took off his white shirt, and then his undershirt, revealing the blue indentations in his back, the scars of the brutal years in the iron foundry. And when he took off his long underpants, he uncovered another bluish indentation, this one in his sagging underbelly, right next to his groin, and yet another one on his skinny thigh. The proud badges of his heroic acts, inscribed in his body. He put on his long flannel nightshirt and went to bed. In the early morning, he must have fallen ill. He threw up in the large white enamel bucket beside his bed—just a little gall, really, not even food, but the kind of fluid that seems to come straight from some bad dream. Then he lay down again, a little sulky, a little wheezy. In his dream he got stuck in a large shrub somewhere, a bush on the verge of blowing away, with very thin branches and thorns. Like a wounded beast, he hung there, with his arms and legs spread like an animal splayed open on a ladder, and stopped breathing. All the lights in his head dimmed and dissolved into a dark, unknown space. The foolhardy hero of the Yser front, who had risked his life time and again under enemy fire, died peacefully, almost seventy years later, in his sleep. His daughter found him a couple of hours later, with a perfectly calm expression on his face, his lips slightly parted as if the last thing he’d seen in his life had come as a pleasant surprise. Sunlight poured in through the east window, in the garden the irises were blooming a deep blue, and Pentecost bells were chiming all around them. My mother hesitantly touched him. He was still warm, she later said, crying.
—
So, only a scrap himself now in a wood of memories, he rises, lighter than a plume of smoke on the wind. At the gates of his long-awaited heaven, although itching to see his loved ones, he stands stiffly to attention and waits for admission, as if facing the army doctor in the barracks again.
Sergent-Major Marshen? St. Peter finally asks, leafing through the interminable list of wounded veterans.
Non, mon commandant. Je m’appelle Mar-tien, pas Mar-shen, à vos ordres.
He salutes.
Credits
Image credits: 1: portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer, University Library Frankfurt am Main, Archives Center; 2: The Slaughtered Ox by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1655 © photo by Leemage/Getty Images; 3: The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus) by Diego Velázquez, c.1648 © photo by M. Carrieri, De Agostini/Getty Images; 4: The Skaters by Emile Claus, Royal Museum for Fine Arts Antwerp, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent © photo by Hugo Maertens, Art in Flanders, www.lukasweb.be; 5: portrait of Peter Benoit, Royal Museum for Fine Arts Antwerp, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent © ph
oto by Hugo Maertens, Art in Flanders, www.lukasweb.be; 6: Il Quarto Stato by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Associazione Pellizza da Volpedo; 7: portrait of a young woman (La Bella) by Palma il Vecchio © photo by Heritage Images/Getty Images; 8: painting of St. Martin dividing his coat by Anthony Van Dyck, c.1621, The Church of St. Martin, Zaventem, Belgium; 9: portrait of Franz Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder, 1875 © photo by Leemage/UIG/Getty Images; 10: portrait of the man with the golden helmet, attributed to the circle of Rembrandt, c. 1650 © photo by Dea Picture Library/De Agostini/Getty Images.
All other images from the author’s personal collection.
Quotations: this page: from All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (translated by Brian Murdoch), published by Bodley Head, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited and New York University Press; this page: from Vertigo by W. G. Sebald (translated by Michael Hulse) © 1990 by Vito von Eichborn, GmbH & Co Verlag KG, English translation © 1999 by Michael Hulse, published by Harvill Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited and New Directions Publishing Corp.
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War and Turpentine Page 30