The Masterwork of a Painting Elephant

by Michelle Cuevas

  “What wretchedness it must be,” he said, “to believe only in what can be proven. We once lived in the sea, non? And the moon was once touchable from the earth.” We all looked toward the night sky and nodded at the turtle’s cosmic explanation.

  “Also, I’ve been working out,” Pierre added.

  And so we all walked. The storm had passed, we were free, and I couldn’t imagine anything in our way. I thought about the earth and how we perceive there to be light and dark. But really, there is only constant light, and it is the earth that spins away into shadow and then toward the brilliance once again.

  TWELVE

  Catching Silver Fish

  “How does it feel to be free?” I asked the animals.

  “Good,” a monkey said. “I mean, I think it’s good. It’s an awfully big world out here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but that’s one of the best parts about it,” I said. “Now let’s get onto a plane and fly to Hollywood.”

  So the collection of golden creatures marched on through the night, crossed over a bridge, and passed through the shadows to Kennedy Airport. There, I wrote out luggage and handle-with-care tags and had all the animals attach them to their limbs. “Now,” I told the animals, “remain as still as statues.” It worked too; when the baggage handlers came to load the plane, they complained about the passenger who was bringing all these heavy golden statues back to Hollywood.

  “Be extra careful,” one handler said. “These look expensive.”

  “Only some movie-star type would buy these. Look at the golden monkeys. Talk about ugly.”

  Before I could stop him, one of the monkeys stretched out a paw and gave a karate chop to the back of the baggage handler’s leg. The man spun around frantically, but the monkey was once again as still as a statue.

  “I think I’m losing my marbles,” the shaken handler said to his coworker. “Let’s get this over with,” he added. “I feel like I’m in a zoo.”

  The plane landed in Los Angeles, and we were unloaded and left on the tarmac for pickup. When the workers went on their lunch break, we just sneaked away and then, like mystical creatures, slipped soundlessly into the shadows.

  Birch and I bade farewell to the other animals and wished them luck in their new life of freedom and sunshine. I was unsure what would become of them, but felt hopeful and calm. Birch always taught me that animals have instincts, that they have skies and stars memorized, lit up like wee planetariums behind their wild eyes.

  * * *

  Hollywood was a lot different from where Birch and I came from. The buildings were fancier and the cars were shinier. We visited the Walk of Fame and gazed up at the big H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D letters in the hills. “Look,” we heard a woman say, “an elephant! They must be shooting a movie here!” A group of tourists gathered around and snapped pictures. We then went down to the beach, where there was a boardwalk, a Ferris wheel, and big crowds of people. The air smelled like sand, hot asphalt, and something sweet. We bought hot dogs and watched a man strum a lovely song while tourists tossed change into an open ukulele case.

  That’s when I saw them—a couple standing on the boardwalk. They were sharing an apple, the woman taking one bite, then the man, until it was gone. They threw the core in the trash and began dancing to the ukulele song.

  “Birch! It’s my parents!” I shouted.

  “But you haven’t seen them since you were a baby. How do you know?”

  “I just do. A bearded woman and a man in a frog suit.”

  We approached them, and when we were behind the couple, Birch tapped them on the shoulder with his trunk.

  “Excuse us,” I said. The couple turned around, and I realized I’d been mistaken. The bearded woman turned out to be a man with a beard, and the frog turned out to be a woman wearing a green tracksuit and a baseball cap.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled as we walked away. Trying to find two people out of the billions on the earth was like trying to catch those tiny silver fish that dart through shallow water in the spring. There are so many, you’d think you could just put your hand in the water and catch some, but that’s not the case. Those slivers of silver keep slipping through your fingers time and time again.

  Birch treated me to an ice cream cone. We gazed out the big windows of the sweet shop and watched the sun finish its setting. I lifted the body of a dead bee from above a light fixture near the ceiling, and it was almost weightless, this thorax and the crystal wings. How long had it been there? Forever? Sunsets, ukuleles, insects, people, love. The workings of the world were still a mystery to me—a tiny flea circus, wonderful to watch, but with the nuts and bolts still hidden.

  THIRTEEN

  Slim Spatucci: Talent Guru

  I did some research and scheduled a meeting for us with a talent agent so Birch could be discovered. I was surprised when we were escorted into the office with the words SLIM SPATUCCI: TALENT GURU written on the door. When I saw Slim, I noted that his name could have been Squat Spatucci. Or Sunburn Spatucci. Or Silly Toupee Spatucci. Anything but Slim.

  “What artistic schooling do you have?” Slim asked Birch without looking up from his paperwork.

  “Well, he was a circus performer for a while,” I replied.

  “Not exactly applicable. Let’s see your portfolio.” Birch pulled out some of his paintings and showed them to Slim. Slim looked through them excitedly. “Hey, these aren’t half bad. These aren’t even a quarter or an eighth bad. I can sell these, no problem.”

  I could feel Birch’s excitement mounting. “Just one thing,” Slim said. “Nobody’s ever going to believe that a big, silly elephant painted these. So we’re gonna tell everyone that you did,” he said, pointing at me.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. We’ll play up the child-genius angle. The press will love it.”

  “I don’t mind,” Birch whispered to me. “As long as people get to see my art.”

  I protested. I listed for Slim Spatucci all the animals I could think of that were also artists. Dogs, cats, and even termites.

  TITLE: La Joie au Muck, exhibition catalog, Lyon, 1988.

  GENRE: Abstract Expressionism; Dogs

  DESCRIPTION: The dogs would go outside, play in the mud, and then prance over the light-toned carpets in the house.

  TITLE: La Muse, temporary installation, dining room carpet, 12 × 13 cm.

  GENRE: Installation Art; Cats

  DESCRIPTION: Meticulous construction with hairballs and tangles of yarn on carpet shows great maturity and a clear sense of purpose.

  TITLE: Breakfast, private collection, wood, 1987.

  GENRE: Spontaneous Reductionism; Termites

  DESCRIPTION: Termites chew away the wood of a house to reveal large areas of negative space—suggests motifs of greed and destruction.

  “Listen, kid,” Slim said. “I’m single, I don’t dress very well, and I often exude a strange odor. Basically, I don’t know much. But I do know art, and nobody’s going to buy a painting by an elephant. If anybody asks, you did them. End of story.”

  * * *

  Little did we know that at the moment Birch and I were signing our lives over to Slim Spatucci, news of our other adventures were filtering back to our too-small-for-a- name town and the evil Ringleader. He sat wearing a monocle over one eye, hunched over the newspaper.

  “It says,” he read, “that a boy on the back of an elephant spent the night in a zoo and painted the entire inside of the cell. And look there,” the Ringleader exclaimed. “There’s a photo. That’s Birch and his boy, all right.”

  The article described the paintings, and there were pictures. That night, in the zoo cage, Birch had laid out his paints, palette, and brushes. Looking them over, he decided he’d need mostly blues and greens for the night’s project. On the walls he painted a vast forest with thick stretches of trees, ominous shadows, and the glowing eyes of creatures in the night. He filled in the sky above them, and the clouds were so real, it looked like it could rain right there in that dingy
, dark zoo cell. Birch stood back and admired his work with pride. It filled his heart with happiness to take a place so ugly and make it so beautiful.

  “Rocks are just rocks,” he’d said, “until the day someone imagines them as a palace.”

  The Ringleader got very angry to see how beautiful the paintings were. He liked them about as much as he liked song melodies and kitten paws and ballroom dancing. That is to say, he didn’t like them at all.

  “‘The elephant and boy are no longer in the zoo’s custody,’” the Ringleader continued reading. “‘However, there has been great interest in Pigeon Jones’s paintings from art collectors in New York, London, Paris, and beyond.’

  “Well, I’ll be,” the Ringleader said, putting down the paper. “I know very well that the elephant did those paintings. He was always fiddling with his silly art. A big dumb elephant. A big dumb elephant that’s going to make a fortune. A big dumb elephant that belongs to me.”

  FOURTEEN

  A Signature Is Not Hard to Find

  And soon I, Pigeon Jones, a simple boy, became the most famous artist in America. (Though, technically speaking, I couldn’t even draw a stick figure.) I did interviews on the radio, in magazines, and even on a few late-night talk shows.

  “So you’re a child and an artist,” one host said, “and you live on the back of this Indian elephant?”

  “Yes, that is correct,” I said, and the studio audience clapped.

  “You are certainly a unique boy,” the host said. “Where did you come from?”

  “My mother was the Bearded Lady,” I replied. “And my father wore a frog suit.”

  The host scratched his head, and then laughed. “Well, you’re an artist. I suppose you’re expected to be a bit … eccentric.”

  You’d think Birch would have been upset that I was getting all the attention for his work, but the truth was, he didn’t seem to care at all. At first it confused me, but then one day a very old woman came into the gallery and walked around the room to look at all the paintings. She stopped in front of a painting of a red-dahlia-colored bird and stood there for a long time.

  “Are you an artist?” I asked.

  “Oh no, not me,” she replied. “But my late husband was.”

  “What did he paint?”

  “Well,” the woman said, “he painted pictures of me mostly.”

  Birch closed his eyes and nodded his head, understanding what this meant and that this woman had been loved.

  “It was amazing,” she continued. “When he painted a picture of me, critics said you could see so much. That you could see every woman any great artist ever painted: Velázquez’s sleeper seen in a mirror, Tiepolo’s nymph in dewy skies, Boucher’s beautiful shepherdess, Fragonard’s woman of nobility, Delacroix’s golden sultana, Cézanne’s bather, Renoir’s young woman blissful beneath an endless sun.”

  The old woman dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “The first night I met him, we were standing on the sidewalk waiting for a bus, and he showed me a snapshot of the sky that he kept in his wallet. He said, ‘One day, I was lying on the beach in France, and I signed my name on the back of the sky. Ever since that time, I’ve always hated birds, for they keep trying to make holes in my biggest and most beautiful work.’” She paused, then finally said, “And now, sometimes when the house gets too lonely, I go outside and look up. You know, I think he was wrong about the sky being his finest work of art. I think the life we spent together, though not as lofty, was much greater. I turn my heart over and over and his signature is not hard to find.”

  I realized then that this is what Birch was doing as well. He was painting the world he loved, a gorgeous world, a place the size of heaven. A world you could gaze at and wonder how you ever got so lucky just to be in it.

  That night I made a promise to myself—a promise that at our Paris art opening, I would tell the world about Birch being the real artist. I was unsure how to do this, but hoped that when the opportunity came, I would just know. I fell asleep wondering how anything recognizes the perfect moment: how the tree knows it’s time to fall or how the river knows it’s time to branch. I wondered, as I began to dream, how a seed feels in the soil when it starts to grow.

  That same night, unbeknownst to us, a shadow sneaked through the bushes outside Birch’s studio. The shadow peered his beady little eyes through the window and watched Birch paint. “Aha,” the shadow whispered. “I knew it. The boy is not the artist at all. It was the elephant all along.”

  The shadow was, of course, the Ringleader in all his dastardly, ghastly sneakiness. He twisted the points of his mustache and smiled his crooked yellow smile. “It’s time to get back what’s rightfully mine!”

  FIFTEEN

  A Beret and a Cupcake

  “Wake up, wake up, time to wake up, my boys!” It was Slim Spatucci and he was right. If we didn’t hurry, we’d miss our plane to Paris.

  Once we settled onto our chartered transport plane and took off, I realized I would not miss Hollywood, with its fancy glamour and fancy people. I looked out the window of the plane and watched the heat lightning flashing in the distance. Every few seconds the whole world would light up, as if a giant were taking pictures of the neighborhoods and hills.

  “Well, I’ll be,” I said. “Even the buildings want their photo taken in Hollywood.”

  * * *

  I liked the way Paris looked from the air. The Eiffel Tower is tall, and at night they light it up and it looks like a ride at an amusement park, one where you might slide down its curved sides, laughing all the way and yelling “Bonjour!” to the air and, eventually, to the ground.

  When we reached our room on the top floor of our hotel, I looked down at the crowds. Opening the window, I saw that the street below was crawling with head-tops resting upon suits and skirts, sliding in and out of cafés and shops; they looked like animals foraging for croissants and baguettes. An old man sipping espresso at a café on the corner looked up and saw me at the window, thinking, maybe, that I was going to jump.

  “Excuse me,” I yelled down. “Have you seen a beautiful acrobat?”

  The old man smiled a broad, misinterpreting smile. “Silly Americans,” he said, and laughed.

  “Birch,” I said, “how on earth are we ever going to find her? This city is full of people, and we don’t even speak French!”

  Birch, who had been taking a meditation yoga class back in Hollywood, had his eyes closed and was doing some sort of stretch. He took a deep breath. “Have faith,” he told me. “Maybe if you just relax, she’ll find us.” Birch closed his eyes again and started to hum, “Ohhhhhm,” he chanted. “Ohhhhhm. Ohhhhhm. What we need is to get our minds off it for a while,” he continued. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we go out and see a bit of the city?”

  And so we put on our berets and ventured out onto the Paris streets. Birch’s hat was too small for him, and he looked the way I would look if I decided to wear a cupcake on my head. I couldn’t understand what most of the people around us were saying, since they spoke French, but much like listening to birds chattering to one another or dogs howling at night, it was a lovely feeling to hear strange words.

  It was a peaceful day. As we walked through a park, I saw bees bowing inside flowers to collect nectar. I watched as squirrels turned their paws purple eating berries and a dog stuck his nose inside a fallen wasp’s nest, only to run away a moment later. Everything seemed to be looking for the sweetest part of the world. Birch did this too, stopping in his tracks every time he saw a woman wearing bright red or orange.

  “Is that Dahlia? Is that the acrobat?” I’d say. But no, it never was.

  Later that afternoon we signed up for a private walking tour of the city. Our guide had a face like the body of an old cow, all angles and crags and shadows. “Pardonnez-moi,” he said, “but you two gentlemen look awfully familiar.”

  “We’ve been on TV,” I told him.

  “Non, don’t watch TV.”

  “We’ve been in magazines
.”

  “Non, don’t read magazines.”

  “And newspapers.”

  “Non, don’t follow newspapers.”

  “We were in a zoo for a while.”

  “Non, don’t know much about zoos. Art,” he said. “I really love art. I know I’m just a lonely tour guide without much in this world, but ever since I was a boy, I just loved looking at art.”

  “Well, we’re sort of artists too,” I said.

  The man’s face lit up. “Oui, that’s exactly how I know the two of you. You’re the painter boy who lives on an elephant’s back. I’ve got a celebrity on my tour today.”

  “You want to know a secret?” I said. “Birch is the real painter.”

  “Well, that’s not too surprising,” the guide said. “A painting comes from what’s in the heart, and elephants have mighty big hearts.”

  “And this week,” I said, “Birch is having his Paris art debut. Want to know another secret? He’s hoping that the acrobat he loves will come to the show, find him, and fall in love with him too.” Birch blushed.

  When the guide dropped us in front of our fancy hotel after the tour, Birch offered to give him a painting lesson. The concierge found a few sheets of paper and Birch rustled up some old paints, but in our mess of luggage we couldn’t find a paintbrush.

  “You can use my tail,” Birch told him. It worked too. An elephant’s tail looks a lot like a paintbrush. Birch taught the old man how to layer the colors and how to see the shades of light in the world and then how to translate them onto the page. He told him that you don’t have to paint the world how everyone else sees it. You can paint the world how you see it. They are both the truth. You paint what defines a feeling for you and you alone—a color, an angle, a dash of the brush. The man finished a whole painting before he had to go. It was a picture of a yellow dress, his mother’s favorite from her younger years, dancing in the wind on a clothesline. He said that one gust of air moving that yellow cotton dress defined the feeling of his whole childhood.