The Watercolourist

by Beatrice Masini

  Now Bianca smiles complacently, folds up her imagined composition and puts it away, pleased. She could try to reconstruct it for someone to see how much of it is clear. But whom? Everybody is already too caught up in the web. Bianca fears, rightly, that her taciturn nature might tangle the threads even further. There is always a third option: delve deeper, continue her investigation outside of the family, alone. To what end? Just to know. To be certain. Then she will be able to decide what to do. What will it take, really? The courage to ask a couple of questions and trust the answers. The guests that come to the house are interesting, intelligent and honest people – they will surely be pleased to satisfy the curiosity of such a pleasant and alert young lady. All she needs to do is guide her conversations with the lawyer, the official, or the full-breasted benefactress in the right direction. Bianca applies herself to this puzzle with the zeal of a young scholar who wants to achieve excellent marks. She makes witty remarks here and there. She prepares her terrain. If she hesitates, it is only because the timing has to be just right. She knows how to do it and she enjoys the wait. Also because, whether she likes it or not, she has to roll up her sleeves and work.

  Away from the envious eyes of Minna and the silly kitchen maids, Pia blossoms and prospers. It is as if, all of a sudden, she has taken a step forward, detached herself from the shadows of domestic help and reclaimed her place at the front of the stage in a key role. No one scolds her if she reads or lounges about because that’s what everyone does during that endless winter. And she doesn’t really lounge about that often. She spends most of her time with the children. She is more joyful than Nanny and more creative at inventing games for them to play, keeping them happily distracted. The children don’t venture out in the city. Both mother and grandmother are against it. There are vapours from the sewers, they say. There is the danger of whooping cough. And there are the other kinds of children, hordes of them, ready to attack.

  ‘But they would have such fun. They could ice skate on the frozen lake,’ Bianca insists, but in vain.

  And so the tiny prisoners are kept within their confines. They don’t suffer that much because they don’t realize what they are missing and therefore don’t even desire it. And Pia does everything she can to make their captivity more enjoyable. Christmas comes. There is the scent of honey from the forced hyacinths that grow along the windowsill and colourful wooden toys from Germany. There is the medicinal scent of tangerines that lingers so long in the air it becomes bothersome.

  A new year comes but nothing changes: the city is still frozen, closed under skies that appear to have forgotten they too once possessed a colour. Everyone remains happily at home. The chimneys and the fireplaces burn at full force, but Donna Clara doesn’t complain about the bills from the wood and coal suppliers, even if they deliver enough fuel to power a steamboat.

  Bianca works hard, like a madwoman, she thinks to herself. It is a happy damnation, because it makes her feel at one with the world, worthy of her place, which belongs to no one but her. Her work brings her money, too, cash in velvet and damask pouches.

  To think that only a couple of months earlier, when winter descended on them all of a sudden, she suffered and thought she wouldn’t make it. She became obsessed with flowers during the one season that denied her them. For several long weeks she did nothing but colour in corollas, like a child. Here, do this, good, fill in the empty spots, don’t go over the lines. Without the true colours in front of her, though, and because her ruled blocks of paper now seemed pathetic, she got frustrated. What would she do until spring returned? And what if it never returned, as the lugubrious, short, grey days suggested?

  ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ Innes quoted to her, in an attempt to console her as she traced the streaks of rain on the window with her finger.

  ‘Nice. What’s that?’

  ‘A verse by a friend.’

  ‘No. Spring, what’s that?’ she replied, depressed, without even looking at him.

  A slow, thick melancholy had settled inside her, a profound dullness that could not be dissipated even by the vivacity of the children. You should go out, she told herself, as she ripped out pages from her sketchbook – more images of dead leaves. But where would she go? With her empty pockets and four outfits? The thought only made her angrier, and it was followed by bitterness and unease. My dear father, what am I to do now? If I cannot even do this, what place shall I have in this world? She would have preferred to have an entire army of human models, male or female, chubby boys or bored ladies, to draw. It would be better than her vain efforts.

  One morning though, Pia brought her a vase full of bare branches. Not one leaf on them. Empty and yet full at the same time.

  ‘What . . . ?’ Bianca stuttered. Then she was silent and looked more closely. She looked harder still and then that was enough. She saw. The tall white vase was simple and lacked adornment, not even a touch of gold; it had probably been fished out from under some staircase. The branches, in all their bony grace, pushed upwards, reaching out arthritically towards something – towards the idea of leaves, the leaves that betrayed them, left without warning (as is their habit), at the beginning of autumn.

  And just like that, Bianca made up her mind: I will draw you, poor dead hands. And we shall see where it takes us.

  Surprisingly, she produced one of her better works. Actually, it was more than better. It marked the beginning of a new era, a fresh way of looking at the world that excluded colours and instead opened her eyes to new shapes. Flicking through some of her old sketchbooks, Bianca smiled. It took her but a moment to reject an entire army of colourful corollas made with complicated patinas and to embrace this new direction, composed of straight, curvy and broken lines, light and dark silhouettes. Leaves and flowers were reduced – no, elevated – to their essence. The intricate bare branches had been collected from the Milanese garden. They turned out to be an ideal subject for her new artistic calling. Her marks were clean and neat. The branches were bones of black ink, freed of one meaning and prepared to take on another.

  Her audience was uncertain when they saw the new work.

  ‘Miss Bianca, did you run out of colours? I can lend you mine, if you’d like,’ Giulietta offered, perplexed.

  ‘I liked your roses better,’ added Matilde, nodding her little head to stress her statement.

  ‘These are so . . . strange,’ Donna Clara said.

  ‘It’s true. I have never seen such modern botanical drawings,’ Donna Julie interrupted, surprising all of them.

  And her husband, so frugal with displays of affection, took Donna Julie’s hand and kissed it.

  ‘Well done, dear wife. You have caught the essence of her work, just as our Bianca has done with her neo-botany.’

  Donna Julie blushed but did not pull back her hand, delighting in both her husband’s tenderness and Donna Clara’s uncomprehending gaze.

  Even Innes complimented her work.

  ‘Brave is she who sails unknown waters,’ he said, winking at her to soften his words.

  And so, released from other obligations, and indeed encouraged, Bianca closed her box of watercolours and expanded her collection of pencils and charcoals. She spent an entire morning in Brera at the dimly lit Barba Conti shop. It was an odorous cavern where paints and powders were crowded together on high shelves, and filled with gleeful and impoverished students from the Accademia. While she waited her turn, she took her time to explore the place.

  That afternoon a shop boy in a dark apron delivered a package of four reams of fresh, heavy paper and an entire set of charcoals. Against all logic, the much despised and feared winter became her season of renewal, a spring of experimentation and new endeavours. Oh, what pleasure she found getting her fingers dirty and extending her thought process down to the charcoal stick itself, her dowsing rod, foreseeing and extracting life from dead things. It was pure joy not to think and just to act, to trust in instinct. Technique gave her confidence, but it was the spontaneous mo
vement of her hand that made invention possible. But there really was nothing to invent. Leaves and flowers existed already. They weren’t the little faces of false young mistresses, trapped inside senseless poses within miniature ovals. Nor were they landscapes depicting orderly ruins and roaming shepherd boys and musicians. Leaves and flowers had their own unmistakable traits. It was the way one presented these – overlooking colours in favour of texture, getting to the basics – which continued to transform the working habits of this young artist. Because that was what she was. An artist. She had finally found her calling.

  Dear Father, if you could see me now you would approve. You always appreciated the new over the old. You would be the first to receive a collection of my very own alive/dead leaves, or dead/alive, if you prefer. Truthfully they are more alive than ever, first when they flow from my fingers, and then when they are framed under glass . . . they are my natural preserves, delectable to the eye. I feel a deep pleasure in distilling them: it’s my own way of removing them from the corruption of the world. Just as Daphne transformed herself into branches and fronds in order to escape Apollo’s grasp, I, too, seem to be able to transform into that which I draw. I feel those veins and the sap that runs through them mixing with my blood . . . I know what I am fleeing: triviality frightens me most of all.

  Like any artist, Bianca knew that she had to confront her public. Friends and family were called upon to express their opinion. Her first series of four branches in black and white had been carefully framed by Signor Grassi and hung above an antique table in the house’s main entrance. The opinion was divided.

  ‘She’s got an odd little noggin,’ Bernocchi exclaimed, looking more and more like a large frog in his dark coat. ‘I’d be curious to know what goes on inside it . . .’

  The women were unpredictably enthusiastic. There was a moment of suspense as they awaited the decisive opinion of Signorina Caravatti. Then, after a long pause of intent silence, the lady tipped her bountiful white head of hair to the side.

  ‘I could never imagine a branch and a few leaves to be so expressive. I want my own series. Of course, if and when your time permits,’ she added, alluding politely to the binding contract which tied Bianca to the family, of which no one spoke explicitly because, after all, Bianca wasn’t a servant. What was she? It was hard to say. A dependant? In order to survive she was dependent on the commissions of others. But truthfully, she was also the owner of her own time and her own hands.

  ‘I am certain my husband will have nothing against it,’ Donna Julie said immediately.

  Bianca felt like she was floating. To work for others as well as for the family would allow her to boost her savings. This was her first true step towards independence. Only now could she fully understand her past occupation: she had been, essentially, a masked governess. But no longer. Now she had a profession. She started to fantasize as the other women, following Signorina Caravatti’s comments, devoted themselves to paying compliments and giving her comical directions.

  ‘Perhaps a bouquet of roses, you know, the ummm . . . what are they called again? Well, you certainly know better than I.’

  ‘Or the modest jasmine.’

  ‘I do love jonquils so . . .’

  Please, let them be, Bianca was about to say, but refrained. She recalled the enchantment of the English fields in springtime, the bicoloured daffodils blowing in the wind and the clouds chasing the sun. She remained silent. After all, she was a businesswoman now and the flowers belonged to those who bought them.

  She thus welcomes the silent joy of habit into her day. Her desire to feel a struggle is once again renewed. She wants to carry through: to prepare, work hard and bask in the result. All of this in order, with order. Bianca’s ambitions thrive on planning her personal black-and-white garden. Her funds grow inside her armoire and she counts and recounts the money with a passion that borders on greed. If it weren’t for her sense of irony, she would be like a greedy princess from an eastern fable.

  As her secondary obligations to the external world increase, she reminds herself that she needs to maintain her primary ones. She can dedicate herself to the art of commerce only in her free time and still has to take part in the family’s mundane events, obligatory visits, and the occasional, unavoidable Mass.

  Being a perfectionist, Bianca devotes herself entirely to her activities, disdaining any shortcuts of repetition. Each and every drawing has to be unique, or at least quite different from the others. Once she has exhausted the possibilities of the household garden, which has given her twisted branches of every shape and size, she starts to look elsewhere. Donna Clara, her accomplice, is able to secure for her an off-season visit to the botanical gardens. The numb, vegetal architecture of late winter there serves as inspiration for one of her more happy works: the sleeping hawthorn.

  She finds inspiration everywhere. One day, a piece of a leaf slips out from the pages of her red morocco leather-bound Bible. It is as fragile as a relic, the colour of tired hay, only barely more than dust. It brings back memories.

  Dear Father, how bizarre was your ability to find four-leaved clovers in any corner of wild grass. You used to say that all you needed to do was read the anomaly in a repeated schema of threes, and the four would appear out of nowhere. It was obvious to you. I remember how, when we were out for a walk, you would suddenly kneel down with an air of understanding. I knew in that moment that you would stand up with a four-leaf clover in your hand, for me.

  Remember the time we stayed out all afternoon when I was only a little girl, and you were able to come across an entire bouquet of them? You tied them together with a strand of grass and gave them to Mother as a gift. She looked at you with delight and clapped her hands as if you had offered her a precious stone. Remember? Remember?

  She doesn’t know if he can remember from where he is now or even if she remembers correctly herself. And yet, it is precisely this random recollection that inspires one of her more successful series. She draws long and wide meadows of clovers in which is hidden one single, isolated, four-leafed clover. Everyone wants one; it is a game: they scrutinize the picture with their naked eye or with a magnifying glass, and have the utmost fun. And that’s when it stops being pleasurable for her, and when she begins to understand Tommaso’s advice about art that is also fashion – which this has definitely become.

  ‘I can never thank you enough, Pia.’

  ‘For what, Miss Bianca?’

  ‘For your idea. For . . .’

  Bianca points to the objects scattered on the table: leaves, her English pencils, charcoals, sketches, and the branches in their vases.

  ‘For everything.’

  ‘It was just a moment’s whim, Miss Bianca. Nothing more.’

  ‘But in order to be inspired one needs to have both a heart and a brain.’

  ‘I don’t know about that but I definitely do things better when the heart is involved.’

  Pia is clumsy. This awkward speech, which comes out hesitatingly, is not her style. Bianca’s eyes mist over.

  ‘I’d like so much to . . .’

  But she is unable to complete her sentence because Pia curtseys quickly, turns and leaves the room, avoiding the embarrassment of gratitude. Bianca shakes her head, amazed once again at the young maid’s mild manners. It doesn’t matter; there will be all the time in the world for me to repay you, she thinks to herself. And you’ll see . . . you’ll see what a surprise is in store for you.

  The market offers its own marvellous displays of cut flowers and bouquets. They arrive twice a week on trucks from the Ligurian coast and are as colourful as they are odourless, as if somewhere along the journey a toll collector has demanded their perfume as tax. It doesn’t matter to Bianca, though. She only needs their shapes, lines, positives and negatives. She becomes friendly with one vendor, a small, heavy man with piercing grey eyes whose name is Berto. He saves her his choice cuts of the first blooms from the greenhouse: carnations with ruffled heads, noble and pale calla lilies, and
a certain kind of rose that climbs incredibly high and that seems cold despite its warm colour. Bianca has many preferences but only one aversion. She detests gladioli, with their off-tone colours, the primitiveness of their green fleshy stalks, their swollen tonguelike buds, and their flaccid bells. She pushes them away as though just the sight of them is painful. Berto doesn’t even try with these any more. Instead, being a polite and astute businessman, he offers her the best of a small private creation: miniature narcissus flowers with white bells that seem to capture the purity of snow, clusters of tiny white muscari firmly connected to their bulbs, their home and source of food. Bianca takes the trays and keeps them far from the fire and close to the windows so that they can at least taste the cold air through the cracks and live longer. After they have bloomed, she places the wrinkled, potato-like bulbs back into their jute sacks as she has been instructed to do, confident that they will bloom again, although she barely has the patience to wait an entire year.

  Her heart, though, belongs to hellebores. Until now she has only known the kind that grow in English gardens, clouded with frost, candid and simple, with a few striations of green and pink. The ones that Berto brings her have double and triple blossoms; they are opulent, of an intense violet and blue, and in stark contrast with the cream-coloured stamens. Sometimes they are fringed with purple, reminding her of the veils of frivolous widows. Often they are green, almost an acid shade, and veined with crimson. There are some that are speckled like wild beasts, dotted with lavender on pale pink.