Authors: Eric Ambler
When I left the hospital for the day I went to see Elizabeth.
She, too, lives in one of the restored houses, though hers, unlike mine which is split up into apartments, is undivided. She has her studio there and a full-time femme-de-ménage. She also owns a gallery in the shopping arcade of the Hotel Ajoupa. Through the gallery she sells the work of other local painters as well as her own, and that of a talented créole sculptor who earns his living as foreman of a rum distillery.
St Paul is full of artists. The majority of them are pretty bad. The ones Elizabeth sells most of are a woman flower-painter with a hibiscus fixation and a garage mechanic who does oil-on-board daubs of island beauty spots. He uses a contraption made up in the garage to spray sand on his paint while it is still wet. The process serves both to conceal, at least partially, his banal incompetence and to impart the
illusion of an original technique. His work is much in demand during the tourist season (an American airline magazine called him ‘the Grandma Moses of St Paul’) and Elizabeth takes a malicious pleasure in charging high prices for it. The talented sculptor, on the other hand, is hard to sell. However, one or two American galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, now have examples of his work and Elizabeth is trying to get him a one-man show in Paris.
Her own work is of two kinds: trompe-l’oeil, which sell quite well, and her ‘vowel paintings’, which don’t.
It was I who coined the term ‘vowel paintings’. She calls them ‘commemorations’. They are large, violent canvases depicting, as if they were human participants in medieval torture sessions, massacres or dances of death, the letters A E I O U.
To understand them, or at any rate to understand why she goes on producing them, you have first to look at her passport.
The name she normally uses is Elizabeth Martens. The name in her passport, however, is: Maria Valeria Modena Elizabeth von Hapsburg-Lorraine Martens Duplessis. Martens is her nom-de-jeune-fille. Her father, Jean Baptiste Martens, a Belgian national, owns textile factories near Lille. Duplessis is the name of the French husband from whom she is separated. The rest of that imposing list derives from her mother who is – and Elizabeth has genealogical tables to substantiate the oddity – a great-great-great-granddaughter of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.
Hence, Elizabeth is, through a Spanish branch of the family, a Hapsburg; and A E I O U is an acronym. It was invented by, or for, a fifteenth-century Hapsburg, the Emperor Friedrich III; and the invention was intended to support his belief, justifiably waning at the time, in the ability of his line to endure. A E I O U stands for
Austriae Est Imperare Orbi Universo.
Elizabeth sees nothing absurd in her obsession with it; and there seems to be no ordinary snobbery in her inability to ignore or forget that part of her genetic heritage and the long, bloody chapters of history it represents. Indeed, her feelings towards this monstrous dynasty which haunts her are decidedly ambivalent. Though in the vowel paintings she is always ridiculing or reviling it – there is a sickening ‘commemoration’ of an imperial funeral at the Kapuziner Crypt – she is also capable of springing to its defence. She has been known to point out fiercely that it was not the British Empire upon which ‘the sun never set’ but the Hapsburg Empire of Charles the Fifth, who ruled ‘from the Carpathians to Peru’. Once, when she had drunk rather too much rum, she startled an inoffensive Boston art dealer and his wife with a sudden passionate appeal for their understanding of the pitiable plight of Charles the Sixth – gout, stomach trouble and disastrous pregnancies. It transpired, but only after some moments of utter confusion, that the pregnancies were those of his Empress and that what Elizabeth was justifying was the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713.
If this all makes her sound somewhat eccentric I should explain that for most of the time she is reasonably level headed. The locals’ word for her is
toquée
, but on St Paul this is not necessarily a derogatory term. A measure of dottiness is allowable, and if the possessor of it looks like Elizabeth it may even be regarded as an asset. There is nothing Hapsburgian about her lower lip and her jaw is anything but prognathous. She has a print of a Stieler portrait of the Archduchess Sophie which looks like a picture of her in fancy dress. If she herself seldom wears anything fancier or more voluminous than slacks and a shirt, only the wives of certain French officials have expressed disapproval.
Mal elevée
is their verdict.
I suppose it could be argued that few Hapsburgs have ever been anything but badly brought up, though not perhaps in the sense that the officials’ ladies are using the phrase. Elizabeth, well informed by her maternal grandmother
who as a young girl knew the court of Franz Josef, can be eloquent on the subject. The King of Hungary who sneered that, while wars were fought by strong nations, ‘happy Austria’ could usually get what it wanted by marriage, was not far wrong. When one hears about those wretched little archdukes and archduchesses with their pet names – the Franzis, the Maxis, the Bubis, the Sisis, the Lisls – all being taught deportment and court etiquette almost as soon as they could walk, and having their marriage contracts negotiated long before they reached puberty, it is hardly surprising that as adults most of them were more than a trifle neurotic. What
is
surprising is that over the centuries so few were manifestly insane.
Hearing Elizabeth speak of such things it is easy to assume that she shares one’s own abhorrence of them. To do so, however, is to misunderstand her. If she does not live in her family’s past to the extent of approving its grosser stupidities, she never wholly disapproves. For her the lovers of Mayerling were a disgraceful pair of fools who caused the poor old Emperor intolerable pain and inconvenience. The notion that they might be deserving of some pity is unacceptable. True, mistakes were made with Rudolph’s education. There was that fool of a tutor who locked the boy in a zoo with wild animals to teach him courage. Clearly not the way to teach a boy of six anything. But Rudolph was the Crown Prince, the Throne Heir. His sense of responsibility should have been innate. ‘Oh yes, I know you think I’m talking nonsense, but still …’
Elizabeth’s own formal education may have been of the kind appropriate to the daughter of a prosperous Belgian manufacturer, but her thinking in certain areas remains that of the maternal grandmother who curtsied to Franz Josef.
Her attitude towards her parents’ divorce is characteristic. It goes like this: since her father was a Protestant and always intended to remain one, the marriage was doomed
from the start and ought never to have been sanctioned. It would have been better if she had been born a bastard.
Her parents’ reception of this pronouncement has been mixed. Martens père, who has two other children by his second marriage, now accepts it with a resigned, kindly sort of amusement. On the other hand, her mother, who now lives with her second husband in Paraguay, resents it deeply. On her last visit to St Paul there was a bitter quarrel, with both sides hurling what appeared to be deadly insults at one another. I say ‘appeared to be’ because both charges and counter-charges involved historical allusions which were to me largely incomprehensible. It was for this reason that my attempts at mediation met in the end with some success. My abject ignorance became so evident that ultimately both disputants were driven to laughter.
On the subject of her own marriage Elizabeth is no less dogmatic. She has been legally separated from her husband for five years now. There are no children of the marriage. She neither needs him nor even uses his name. Yet – though to my certain knowledge she never goes near a church or a priest – she still considers herself irrevocably married to the man. She will not even consider divorce, and if he were ever to bring, as he could, a civil action for annulment of the marriage, she would contest it by every means available to her. Once, looking through one of the books she inherited from her grandmother, I found a passage about Anna of Tyrol who married the Emperor Matthias. It said that she kept a silver-tipped thong with which to lash herself for her sins. When I asked Elizabeth, apropos of her marriage, if she wasn’t doing the same thing, she lost her temper and threw a palette knife at me. There was paint on it and I had to send the slacks I was wearing to the cleaners.
It was just after that incident that she gave me, as a gesture of conciliation, one of her vowel paintings. The subject of it was The Defenestration of Prague. In my opinion Elizabeth is still fighting the Thirty Years War.
I didn’t tell her immediately about what had happened to
me with the DST that day. There was work to be done first, and in any case I hadn’t then made up my mind how much of it I was going to tell. The extra five hundred francs a month would have her approval, I knew; but unless I played down the Gillon interview I was sure that she would start pursuing the obvious lines of enquiry and speculation which I myself, at that moment, was trying to ignore. Better, I thought, to appear to be taking none of it very seriously. Better perhaps to concentrate my concern on Dr M’s diagnosis of Villegas as a hypochondriac and deplore the prospective waste of professional time.
When it came to the point, though, I told all.
It was working with her that did it. Having to concentrate on something other than the troubles of the day, I became relaxed and started telling her what had happened almost without thinking.
What Dr Brissac calls my ‘amateur photography’ is simply a chore I do for Elizabeth. When she was studying in Paris she worked part-time in a gallery on the Right Bank. The dealer who owned it taught her a lot about the business, and when later she started her own gallery in St Paul, she adopted his trading practices. One of these had been to photograph every work, good, bad or indifferent, that passed through his hands. Some of these photographs would be used to send to prospective buyers abroad, but most were for record purposes; prints or transparencies of every work handled were kept on file and cross-referenced to the account books.
For a while Elizabeth used the Fort Louis commercial photographer who usually covers local sporting and social events; but for what she wanted he was pretty useless. Photographing paintings in colour is easy if it doesn’t matter how faithful the results are to the original; but if fidelity does matter the job is anything but easy. Indeed, in many big cities there are professional photographers who specialize in this work. The man in Fort Louis couldn’t really be bothered; he has a shop selling cheap cameras and hi-fi sets
that takes up much of his time. So, two years ago when I was in Florida seeing my mother, I bought some books on the subject and a second-hand five-by-seven ‘view’ camera that was going cheap. With the help of one of the technicians in the X-ray department and after some experimenting I managed eventually to get acceptable results. With practice and the discovery of a reliable colour-printing laboratory in Caracas the results became fairly consistent.
For these photographic sessions we set up the camera and lights in a corner of the studio and do a whole batch of pictures, as many as we can, in one go. This way I can always use freshly opened film packs and seal the whole lot in damp-proof airmail bags immediately after exposure. That evening we had ten canvases and a piece of sculpture to do. With colour negatives as well as transparencies to shoot, that meant a long session. At intervals Elizabeth’s femme-de-ménage brought us cold white wine and little sea-food concoctions. It was during one of these pauses for refreshment that I again brought up the subject of our getting a new camera.
‘We’ve been into all that before,’ Elizabeth said. ‘This old thing works quite well for flat paintings, but this new module type would be more flexible when we are photographing three-dimensional objects. We would have more perspective control. Yes?’
‘Exactly.’
She waved a piece of bread at me. ‘I know what it is with you, Ernesto dear. You’ve been bitten.’
‘Nonsense. I merely wish …’
‘It isn’t nonsense. All this talk about perspective control may be true enough, but what you really want is to make beautiful pictures that will be reproduced in some New York gallery catalogue or shiny-paper magazine with your name there as photographer. I know. You have developed artistic ambitions.’
As there may have been a particle of truth in the allegation I was careful to dismiss it with no more than a
shrug. ‘It’s you who wants to push Molinet’s work, not I.’ Molinet is the talented rum distillery foreman. ‘Personally,’ I went on, ‘I don’t think this shot we’re doing now is going to do the piece justice.’
‘The inferior workman blames his tools. You can light it differently, bring out the texture.’
‘It will still look like a block of limestone with holes in it.’
‘Not to the educated eye. Besides, you told me yourself. This new camera would cost fifteen hundred dollars for the basic carcass alone, without even a lens. What it will have cost by the time you are ready to produce your masterpiece, God alone knows. Three thousand dollars? Four? My darling, the gallery is not actually losing money, even though those hotel pigs have increased the rent, but we cannot afford these American boxes of tricks.’
I was sponging some food I had spilled off my shirt, so my reply was less forceful than it might have been. ‘I’m not talking about American boxes of tricks,’ I said plaintively, ‘but about a widely used German camera system of proved design. Nor am I asking the gallery to indulge my soaring ambitions as a photographer. Today Dr Brissac suggested that I should get rid of my moto – which, incidentally, again refused to start outside the hospital – and buy a car. I may decide instead to have the moto properly serviced for once and spend the money on a camera.’
‘What money?’
So then I told her.
She listened carefully but made only one comment at the time. If Dr M had been getting five hundred a month, I should have asked for a thousand. It was latish before we had finished taking photographs and put everything away.