Serena stopped reading. Zermano became even more agitated, calling her Louise and urging her to continue. Then I understood. This was what Serena had meant about his going in and out of reality, between the present and the past. As Serena read, Zermano’s rush of words flowed over Louise’s and I heard him clearly:
“Life is a clever and untamed thing, empty as a desert where it never rains, but the mirage distance is filled with the ocean. Expect what you least expect and you won’t be surprised. Look! Do you see Louise? She is a space carved of volatility, attracting calamity, offering a slippery place for a fool to rush in. She condemns me for sending her away. She condemns and forgives. Burning wax! I wake up with the scent of burning wax in my nostrils. A beehive burning. Holy candles burning. The scent of shame and hoped-for atonement in the church where Llull chased his love after pursuing her on horseback. The gargoyles on the steeple above laughed with antic delight, knowing what a fool he was. Knowing that his blunt romantic notions would be destroyed in the confessional when she unwrapped the soiled bandages from her breasts and death’s rancid smell of mildewed oranges would explode his illusions. Instead of embracing his suffering love he fled. Llull’s shame at running away is my shame. Louise, forgive me. I tried to put our love into one boat but like Llull trying to gather all faiths into one boat, the weight was too much. The boat sank.
“Louise, I see myself looking out the window of the train riding back to Paris after leaving you, my heart breaking over what I knew would seem to you a betrayal. Outside the window, the road running parallel to the track is a river of cars loaded down with the personal effects of those fleeing from the east. Carts and wagons, piled high with household belongings, were being swept along too, pulled by horses, pushed by terrified families. The train stations were filled with boxcars full of people on the side tracks, huddled in blankets against the cold, waiting for a locomotive engine to hook up and pull them south or north, wherever their fate might be. On and on my train went, unimpeded for it carried mostly soldiers. The people outside were on foot now, with their bundles strapped to their bent backs; old men on older bicycles, pale mothers carrying babies and dragging ragged children, ancient women too weak to go further, abandoned and crying on the roadside. Dead young men with ropes around their necks hung from telephone poles, the word TRAITOR painted in white on their black leather jackets. At every village we passed I glimpsed some wretched human catastrophe. All I could think of, selfishly, was that you were safe. Was I a criminal for that? You were safe and I was headed back into the belly of the beast. My reason was clear: the further I went from you, the safer you were. In Paris, cars raced through night streets with their lights off; intersections were not only sandbagged but had been turned into concrete fortresses with machine guns and checkpoint guards. The air during the day was filled with the drifting ash of papers burned in fireplaces, people consuming their past, destroying any evidence that might incriminate them. Paris with coils of barbed wire surrounding every important public building. Paris where black Citroëns now patrolled, packed with men and electronic apparatus, hunting for clandestine radio transmissions. Paris with its underground Métro cars hurtling along, crowded with people in paranoid silence, the sickly yellow overhead light staining their faces. And I am thankful you are not here to be stopped by the innumerable gendarmes, inspectors, guards, militia, all checking identification papers. Suspicious eyes are everywhere. Bombs fall on factories in the suburbs, I hear the distant thud of explosives, like a man clubbing a chained dog. Dirty snow in empty squares. Roof rats sell for fifteen dollars; four dollars for the rat’s tail so you can have a little meat in your soup. My greatest fear is that you have died or vanished in Ville Rouge.
“I prowl the whorehouses of Pigalle searching for women to use as models for my painting—women who might resemble you by the look in their eyes, their hair or skin. I find a young gypsy whore, a Communist who fled Barcelona years ago thinking she would be safe here; now she hides by day, hunted even more than she was in her own country. I bought her for the evening so I could paint her. The next night I went back to the streets of Pigalle but she had vanished. Was she swept away in one of the police raids rooting out the ‘foreign trash’ in the whorehouses? I kept looking for weeks. She was a clever enough survivor to slip through holes in their net. Finally I came upon her on the banks of the Seine; glowing coals from a brazier illuminated her naked skin, pinpricked by foggy cold. I took her to the atelier and warmed her with bean soup and brandy. I bathed her and massaged her breasts with olive oil and lemon juice, I broke sprigs of rosemary in my palms and rubbed its fragrance into her cheeks. I wanted her to smell like you, to carry the scent of Provence. I wanted that fragrance to mix with the scent of my oil paints. But the girl would not hold still for me to paint. She did not want to be a model, she wanted to be a whore and get paid. She brought her naked body to me and offered it. She smelled like you. She grabbed the paintbrush from my hand and swiped its tip across her breasts, leaving a glistening vermilion streak. She smelled like you. I pulled that scent of you to me, but it was the body of a girl, not the woman you are. I pushed her away. She laughed and grabbed me between the legs, forcing her tongue through my lips. When her tongue came into me I felt the tip of her own loss. She opened her legs with a sigh of mourning deeper than my own. I awoke the next day wanting to paint her naked in first light, as I had painted you. But she was gone, and so was all my money. In Spain we say, Never turn your back on a bull—or a gypsy girl with a hunger bigger than your own. The scent of you still lingers in my atelier.
“My Louise, with traces of earth on her palms, holding her open hands to me, pressing her fingers against my face, saying, ‘I can’t believe you are real. That we are real!’ I miss your touch—not just your beauty and grace, but the caress of your spirit on my daily life. Do you hold me responsible for the Day of the Bees? I couldn’t have prevented that. My knees were smashed, I was forced to crawl, forced to bear the humiliation of having you ripped from my side, the rib torn from my body. Louise, I will never surrender you! Absence is to love what wind is to fire: it extinguishes the weak, rekindles the strong.
“Everything is black and white now in my atelier; there is no texture, no saturation. I am still crawling toward you in my painting: streaking, stroking, striving. When you live only in memory your life dies. All day alone I push a brush against canvas trying to get to you, but it is like making love with my hands tied. I need to feel your flesh, slide my body against the grain, tattoo the canvas. I’ve got this energy to create amidst all this destruction. A painter must earn his eyes. How I remember your eyes…. Now I am losing mine, for it seems a frivolous act to make art in wartime, to paint a goldfish in a bowl, an arm being blown off by a grenade, flowers in a vase, a field of wheat crushed beneath armored tanks. Your eyes rise from the flattened field, give it shape again. Ironically, only the art will be left after the destruction. What the artist does is actually an act of recovery. I must fight the inertia of despair, force myself to stare into the volcano, see color again, earn my eyes, bear witness to the sulfurous eruption that is war. But how does one see such ancient hate in a new light? I must find a way, create an irreverent invention. No one knows that I am trying to construct from chaos, trying to order the destruction of my heart, the collapse of myself without you. The reality is immediate, for each war is personal, each battle is intimate.
“Forgive me for keeping you away. Both of us should not have been in harm’s way. Inevitably the war would end. People would be liberated out of one confusion only to end in another—like us separated as lovers. Our history, so intense, crucial and close, becomes distant and removed. There is no middle ground in the heart. Once cut off from love one lives either in the past or the present; one must choose. You are the mistress of my memories. You had the power to write me, to choose a future after the war. And you were writing! All of it locked in a secret vault now exploding into daylight … I hear your voice in my ear, I hear your story. Don’t stop
speaking. I don’t want to be without your voice now that it’s returned. I can never go back to the solitude that once sheltered me …
“Do you remember that day in the cherry orchard? The Officer who surprised us had a gun. I walked away because I had nothing to defend you with. I had to pretend to be a coward. I got the tire iron from the trunk of the Bearcat and came back to confront him. Then, later, I insisted you stay in Provence instead of returning with me to Paris. I could not say then why I did that, but now I can. Like that day in the cherry orchard, my only way to defend you was to appear to leave you. I intended everything to be revealed when you went to the farm of Elouard and found what I had hidden for you in the Bearcat. Then you would see, and we would be together. I slept with nightmares for years after losing you. Then I slept without dreams, not out of release but of escape. Memory distorted the physical vision of you; your body became a blur, the blur became a spirit, and that spirit became the foundation of my art. Anyone who claims to create art devoid of the heart is a liar, for they are not making art, they are making only Voltaire’s famous sausages—rules of the intellect that fall before the whims of the muse. It’s not the danger of painting that attracts me, but using it to reach the corrosion beneath the surface lies of the world. One must not be afraid to confront artifice and crack it open, just as the jackboots of the conquering army marching through this city of conspirators split open the earth. I stared down into the earth and I painted the shivering crowds in the Métro, the one place where true democracy flourished: everyone was forced to be there because no gasoline was available for cars. I captured faces melting with fear, betrayal, and torture in the Métro’s putrid yellow light.
“Why do I feel compelled to confess my past to you? I hoped that when the new emperor returned Napoléon’s son to Paris, Napoléon’s own tomb would break open and he would arise, swear the conqueror’s army to allegiance, and send them marching back east. Then everything would change and I could marry you in public. But it was not to be. We were married the night Napoléon’s son returned, but in the most secret of ceremonies. The falling rain of our last summer still bruises my heart, wet droplets striking the dusty grape leaves, gently invading the vineyards. At the end of each row of vines a rosebush blooms. You left the surprise of flowers for me wherever I worked, their fragrance surrounding me as I sketched the curve of your arm, the turn of your cheek. Heaven has no value unless hell exists. Your morning kisses cover my face, raindrops of love; where each drop falls, a scar of memory fades. From the open door of my Villa Trône studio I see bees buzzing in the lemon groves. Through the window of my Mallorca studio I see a black vulture in flight. Above the bird is the vaporous trail of a jet moving toward its destination. Everything moves so fast, my time away from you slips through my fingers. The landscape of Provence has been petrified, tamed to picture-perfection. The savagery of the Spanish countryside has been scraped away, old paint chips blowing in the exhaust of cars. No more rough edges: one currency, one people, no difference.
“Louise, I have so many things to tell you, half a century of changes! The army took over Villa Trône, officers lived there. How could I return after the war and restore it, waiting for you to come? I had questioned every postwar commission for displaced persons in every country, asking for news of you. Nothing. The Villa Trône was damaged from fighting, our dreams scorched by gunfire. How could I go back, knowing that the soldiers who once lived there now drive luxury cars, masturbate to money, and come dreaming of the days when they were paid to kill? I remember the flowers you left the last time you went to my Villa Trône studio—wild petals from the fields, as if God had laid out His loveliest palette of colors and you presented it to me.
“When it rains in the high mountains, the peaks get lost in mist and my arthritic knees ache with remembrance. I recall watching you naked, singing while you cooked at the stove. Sometimes sauces splattered your skin and you licked the flavors off. You don’t know I’m watching you. You don’t know it, but I rebuilt Villa Trône here in Mallorca—the same kitchen, your stage. No one knows I built the house for you, the house I promised, so that you might enter like a ghost, touching the life we lost amidst the new one I created: the family, the children. Often I would walk through the house at night and discover you there, naked and waiting. I would put my ear to your breast and listen to sea waves and birds’ wings beating in your heart. I married you when I pierced you with the gold ring. Since I never found you, we have never been divorced.
“What joy that day we danced in Ville Rouge, so oblivious, like lambs, our animal minds not understanding the language of humans as we were being led to the slaughter. Time is leaping backward and forward. The bells of Paris are ringing in liberation but there is no liberation for us. We’re not there. The black vulture flies toward Mont Ventoux, sentiments cut from my heart, carved from the anguish of your years of silence. Your baby, our baby? The bees! My God! I cannot console you. Something’s been broken that cannot be made whole again; all my words, all my paint on canvas, useless. I can only offer the key that has hung around my neck for half a century. The key that will unlock it all …”
“Papa!” Serena’s cry cut through Zermano’s voice as she dropped the letter she was reading and leaped up to catch him just as he fell back exhausted into his wheelchair. His breathing was labored, his head slumped on his chest. I knelt beside him on the other side of the chair. I looked across at Serena, her face twisted with worry.
“Forgive me. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
She shook her head. “No, it had to be. He’s been waiting all his life for this. I was wrong, thinking that he was losing his mind between disjointed bouts of ranting and lucidity. Now I see everything was part of one life. The sequence of events no longer matters in the end.”
“I’ll help you carry him to his bed.”
“Yes, that would be best.”
We lifted him together. His body was surprisingly light. The sun was sinking into the sea and cast golden light across the terrace as we held him between us, walking him into the small bedroom carved into the cliff. We placed him on the bed. Serena tucked a blanket over him. His face was white, as white as his long hair and beard. Serena sat next to him, wiping perspiration from his brow with a damp cloth. I leaned against the wall in the corner, watching them both as the light outside faded.
Slowly the roar of the sea subsided, and the throb of crickets announced the night. Serena lit candles. Hours passed. The torrent of Zermano’s words still resonated in my mind. Few spoke like that anymore, few thought like that anymore; fewer still loved with such passionate ferocity and refusal to let go. He was alive because he loved, and because he loved, he did not fear death. Candlelight flickered in the room. Serena had resumed reading the letters in a quiet voice. She squinted, trying to decipher the once exquisite handwriting that had been reduced to a pathetic scrawl when Louise’s hands were mangled.
The scent of sea air drifted into the room and mixed with that of burning beeswax. A moth fluttered erratically toward a candle flame. With a subdued hiss, the flame snuffed out its life. The moth dropped to the floor. On the wall next to me a spider was already moving toward the moth, soon to entomb it in its web. More candles were lit. A glow fell on Serena’s face and bare arms. I could only imagine what thoughts must be running through her mind as she read. The scent of her skin mixed with that of beeswax and sea air. I wondered why she had never married. Was she married to her father’s myth? Or perhaps it was true what they said about Mallorcan women: that like the wild olive trees growing on the island, they bore the most fruit if they weren’t pruned.
“Louise!”
Zermano reached out in the night, the flesh of his hand thinned by age, the bones gnarled by time, the fingers grasping at air.
“Louise!”
Serena took his hand and leaned her cheek against it.
“Louise, I can’t hear you!”
Serena softly began reading again.
Louise was safe now, s
he could row her boat across the clouds back to Zermano. I’m certain he heard her words, for long after Serena had finished reading the last of Louise’s letters and the sun began to rise, there was peace on his face, even though he had stopped breathing.
Serena did not move, nor did she let go of Zermano’s hand. Outside the first birds began to chirp. The morning sun shone through the window and cast its light on the floor where the moth and spider had been. Serena released her father’s hand. Her fingers traced his face and ran down his neck, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling it open. Around Zermano’s neck was a leather loop with a key knotted to it. The key was not modern and lightweight, but heavy and dulled by age. It rested on his chest above a still-visible scar carved into the skin above his heart: L.
Serena slipped her hand under the key and closed her fingers around it. She turned to me:
“I’m going to Elouard’s farm. Do you want to come?”
PART SEVEN
The Key
IT WAS no simple matter for Serena and I to find the farm of Elouard. In his letters Zermano mentioned that his man Roderigo had driven the Stutz Bearcat to the farm and hidden it there before he returned to his native Spain. Perhaps a subdivision of houses or a shopping mall now stood on the site. The only way to find out if the farm still existed was to trace the ownership of the painting Big Blue One. Zermano had traded this painting to Elouard in exchange for the car in the early nineteen forties. Big Blue One itself was now embroiled in controversy, for it was the most important modern work in a London museum’s collection, and its provenance was being contested.
How the museum acquired the painting was clear. Blue was purchased from a Japanese insurance company, which had bought it from a prestigious gallery in Zurich during the speculative run-up of modern art prices in the nineteen eighties. The gallery had, in turn, obtained it from a prominent collector in South Africa. The collector had recently stated in court documents that he had purchased the painting from someone “very high up” in the French government in the nineteen fifties. The heirs of Elouard brought suit against all parties involved, maintaining that the painting, and others by modern masters, had been illegally appropriated after Elouard was arrested in Paris during the last days of World War II. No records existed as to Elouard’s fate after his arrest.
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