Killing Commendatore: A novel (18 page)

But meeting Menshiki and, as a result, having this large-scale excavation take place—was it really all just coincidence? Had it all just fallen together by chance? Weren't things just a little
too
convenient? Hadn't the scenario been all planned out in advance? With all these unanswered doubts, I went with Menshiki to the house. He carried the bell we'd unearthed. He never let go of it the whole time we were walking. As if trying to read, from the touch of it, some kind of message.

As soon as we got back inside Menshiki asked, “Where should I put this bell?”

Where indeed? I had no idea. For the time being, I decided to place it in the studio. Having that weird object under the same roof didn't sit well with me, but that said, I couldn't just toss it outside. It was, no doubt, a valuable Buddhist implement, imbued with a certain soulfulness, so I couldn't just neglect it. I decided to put it in the sort of neutral zone of the studio, which felt like a separate annex. I cleared a space on the long, narrow shelf used for painting materials and placed it there. Next to the large mug used to hold brushes, it even looked like some specialized painting tool.

“What a strange day,” Menshiki said.

“I'm sorry you had to use up your entire day for this,” I said.

“No, don't apologize. It's been very interesting,” Menshiki said. “And this isn't the end of it, I would imagine.”

Menshiki had an odd look on his face, as if gazing far away.

“Meaning something else is going to happen?” I asked.

Menshiki chose his words carefully. “I can't explain it well, but I get the feeling that this is only the beginning.”

“Only the beginning?”

He held his palms upward. “I'm not sure, of course. Maybe that'll be it, and we'll just be left thinking what a strange day that was. That would probably be the best outcome. But nothing's been resolved. The same questions remain. And these are
very important
questions. That's why I have a hunch that something else is going to happen.”

“Something connected to that stone-lined chamber?”

Menshiki gazed outside for a moment before he spoke. “I don't know what's going to happen. It's just a hunch.”

And of course it turned out as he'd felt—or predicted—it might. Like he said, that day was only the beginning.

That night I had trouble sleeping. I was anxious whether the bell I'd left in the studio would start ringing in the middle of the night. If it did, then what would I do? Pull the covers up over my head and pretend not to hear anything until the next morning? Or take my flashlight and go to the studio to check it out? And what would I find there?

Unable to decide how I should react, I lay in bed reading. But even after two a.m. the bell hadn't rung. All I heard was the usual drone of insects. As I read my book I checked the clock next to my bed every five minutes. When the digital display read 2:30 I finally breathed a sigh of relief. The bell wouldn't be ringing tonight, I figured. I closed the book, turned out the bedside light, and went to sleep.

The next morning when I woke up before seven, the first thing I did was go check on the bell. It was as I'd left it the night before, on the shelf. Brilliant sunlight illuminated the mountains, and the crows were in the midst of their usual noisy morning routine. In the light of day the bell didn't look ominous at all. It was nothing more than a simple, well-used Buddhist implement from the past.

I went back to the kitchen, brewed coffee in the coffee maker, and drank it. Heated up a scone that had gotten hard in the toaster and ate it. Then went out to the terrace, breathed in the morning air, leaned against the railing, and looked over at Menshiki's house across the valley. The large tinted windows glistened in the morning sun. Probably one of the tasks included in the once-per-week cleaning service was to clean all the windows. The glass was always clean and shiny. I looked over there for a while, but Menshiki didn't appear. We still hadn't yet reached the point where we waved at each other across the valley.

At ten thirty I drove my car to the supermarket to buy groceries. I came back, put them away, and made a simple lunch, a tofu and tomato salad with a rice ball. After I ate, I had some strong green tea. Then I lay down on the sofa and listened to a Schubert string quartet. It was a beautiful piece. According to the liner notes on the jacket, when it was first performed there was quite a backlash among listeners, who felt it was “too radical.” I don't know what part was radical, but something about it must have offended the old-fashioned people of that time.

As one side of the record ended I suddenly got very sleepy, so I pulled a blanket over me and slept for while on the sofa. A short but deep sleep, probably about twenty minutes. It felt like I had a few dreams, but when I woke up I couldn't remember them. Those kinds of dreams—the kind where all sorts of unrelated fragments are mixed together. Each fragment has a certain gravitas, but by intertwining they canceled each other out.

I went to the fridge and drank some cold mineral water straight from the bottle and managed to chase away the dregs of sleep that remained like scraps of clouds in the corners of my body. I felt a renewed awareness of the reality that I was living, alone, in the mountains. I lived here by myself. Some sort of fate had brought me to this special place. I remembered the bell. In the weird stone chamber deep in the woods, who in the world had been ringing that bell? And where on earth was that person now?

By the time I had changed into my painting outfit, gone into the studio, and stood looking at Menshiki's portrait, it was past two p.m. Normally I worked in the morning. From eight to noon was the time I could focus best on painting. I liked the sort of domestic quiet at those times. After moving to the mountains I'd grown fond of the brilliant and pure air that the teeming nature around me provided. Working at the same time in the same place each day has always held a special meaning for me. Repetition created a certain rhythm. But this day, partly because I hadn't slept well the night before, I spent the morning without accomplishing anything. Which is why I went to the studio in the afternoon.

I sat on my round work stool, arms folded, and from a distance of some six feet gazed at the painting I'd begun. I'd started by using a thin brush to outline Menshiki's face, then with him modeling before me for fifteen minutes also used black paint to flesh this out. This was just a rough framework at this point, though it gave rise to a productive flow. A flow that had its source in Wataru Menshiki. This was what I needed most.

As I stared hard at this black-and-white framework, an image of a color I should add came to me. The idea sprang up suddenly, all on its own. The color was like that of a tree with its green leaves dully dyed by rain. I mixed several colors together and created what I wanted on my palette. After much trial and error, I finally arrived at what I'd pictured and, without really thinking, added the color to the line drawing I'd done. I had no idea myself what sort of painting would emerge from this, though I did know that that color was going to be a vital grounding for the work. Gradually this painting was beginning to stray far afield from the format of a typical portrait. But even if it doesn't turn out as a portrait, I told myself, that was okay. As long as there was a set flow, all I could do was go with it. What I wanted now was to paint what
I
wanted to paint, the way
I
wanted to paint it (something Menshiki wanted as well). I could think about the next step later on.

I was simply following ideas that sprang up naturally inside me, with no plan or goal. Like a child, not watching his step, chasing some unusual butterfly fluttering across a field. After adding this color to the canvas I set my palette and brush down, again sat down on the stool six feet away, and studied the painting straight on. This is indeed the right color, I decided. The kind of green found in a forest wet by the rain. I nodded several times to myself. This was the kind of feeling toward a painting I hadn't experienced for ages. Yes—this was it. This was the color I'd wanted. Or maybe the color the framework itself had been seeking. With this color as the base, I mixed some peripheral, variant colors, adding variation and depth to the painting.

And as I gazed at the image I'd done, the next color leaped up at me. Orange. Not just a simple orange, but a flaming orange, a color that had both a strong vitality and also a premonition of decay. Like a fruit slowly rotting away. Creating this color was much more of a challenge than the green. It wasn't simply a color, but had to be connected with a specific emotion, an emotion entwined with fate, but in its own way firm, unfluctuating. Making a color like that was no easy task, of course, but in the end I managed. I took out a new brush and ran it over the surface of the canvas. In places I used a knife, too.
Not thinking
was the priority. I tried to turn off my mind, decisively adding this color to the composition. As I painted, details of reality almost totally vanished from my mind. The sound of the bell, that gaping stone tomb, my ex-wife sleeping with some other man, my married girlfriend, the art classes I taught, the future—I thought of none of it. I didn't even think of Menshiki. What I was painting had, of course, started out as his portrait, but by this point my mind was even clear of the thought of his face. Menshiki was nothing more than a starting point. What I was doing was painting for me, for my sake alone.

I don't remember how much time passed. By the time I looked around, the room had gotten dim. The autumn sun had disappeared behind the western mountains, yet I was so engrossed in my work I'd forgotten to switch on a light. I looked at the canvas and saw five colors there already. Color on top of color, and more color on top of that. In one section the colors were subtly mixed, in another part one color overwhelmed another and prevailed over it.

I turned on the ceiling light, sat down again on the stool, and looked at the painting. I knew the painting was incomplete. There was a wild outburst to it, a type of violence that had propelled me forward. A wildness I had not seen in some time. But something was still missing, a core element to control and quell that raw throng, an idea to bring emotion under control. But I needed more time to discover that. That torrent of color had to rest. That would be a job for tomorrow and beyond, when I could return to it under a fresh, bright light. The passage of the right amount of time would show me what was needed. I had to wait for it, like waiting patiently for the phone to ring. And in order to wait that patiently, I had to put my faith in time. I had to believe that time was on my side.

Seated on the stool, I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. In the autumn twilight I could clearly sense something within me changing. As if the structure of my body had unraveled, then was being recombined in a different way. But why
here
, and why
now
? Did meeting the enigmatic Menshiki and taking on his portrait commission result in this sort of internal transformation? Or had uncovering the weird underground chamber, and being led there by the sound of the bell, acted as a stimulus to my spirit? Or was it that I'd merely reached an unrelated turning point in my life? No matter which explanation I went with, there didn't seem to be any basis for it.

“It feels like this is just the beginning,” Menshiki had said as we parted. Had I stepped into this
beginning
he'd spoken about? At any rate, I'd been so worked up by the act of painting in a way I hadn't in years, so absorbed in creating, that I'd literally forgotten the passage of time. As I stowed away my materials, my skin had a feverish flush that felt good.

As I straightened up, the bell on the shelf caught my eye. I picked it up and tried ringing it a couple of times. The familiar sound rang out clearly in the studio. The middle-of-the-night sound that made me anxious. Somehow, though, it didn't frighten me anymore. I merely wondered why such an ancient bell could still make such a clear sound. I put the bell back where it had been, switched off the light, and shut the door to the studio. Back in the kitchen, I poured myself a glass of white wine and sipped it as I prepared dinner.

Just before nine p.m. a call came in from Menshiki.

“How were things last night?” he asked. “Did you hear the bell?”

I'd stayed up until two thirty but hadn't heard the bell at all, I told him. It was a very quiet night.

“Glad to hear it. Since then has anything unusual happened around you?”

“Nothing particularly unusual, no,” I replied.

“That's good. I hope it continues that way,” Menshiki said. A moment later he added, “Would it be all right for me to stop by tomorrow morning? I'd really like to take another good look at the stone chamber if I could. It's a fascinating place.”

“Fine by me,” I said. “I have no plans for tomorrow morning.”

“Then I'll see you around eleven.”

“Looking forward to it,” I said.

“By the way, was today a good day for you?” Menshiki asked.

Was today a good day for me? It sounded like a sentence that had been translated mechanically by computer software.

“A relatively good day,” I replied, puzzled for a moment. “At least, nothing bad happened. The weather was good, overall a pleasant day. What about you, Mr. Menshiki? Was today a good day for you?”

“It was a day when one good thing happened, and so did one not-so-good thing,” Menshiki replied. “The scale is still swinging, unable to decide which one was heavier—the good or the bad.”

I didn't know how to respond to that, so I stayed silent.

Menshiki went on. “Sadly, I'm not an artist like you. I live in the business world. The information business, in particular. In that world the only information that has exchange value is that which can be quantified. So I have the habit of always quantifying the good and the bad. If the good outweighs the bad even by a little, that means it's a good day, even if something bad happened. At least numerically.”

I still had no idea what he was getting at. So I kept my mouth closed.

“By unearthing that underground chamber like we did yesterday, we must have lost something, and gained something. What did we lose, and what did we gain? That's what concerns me.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to reply.

“I don't think we gained anything you could quantify,” I said after giving it some thought. “At least right now. The only thing we got was that old Buddhist bell. But that probably doesn't have any actual value. It doesn't have any provenance, and isn't some unique antique. On the other hand, what was lost can be clearly quantified. Before long, you'll be getting a bill from the landscaper, I imagine.”

Menshiki chuckled. “It's not that expensive. Don't worry about it. What concerns me is that we haven't yet taken from there
the thing we
need to take
.”

“The thing we need to take? What's that?”

Menshiki cleared his throat. “As I said, I'm no artist. I have a certain amount of intuition, but unfortunately I don't have the means to make it concrete. No matter how keen that intuition might be, I still can't turn it into art. I don't have the talent.”

I was silent, waiting for what came next.

“Which is why I've always pursued quantification as a substitute for an artistic, universal representation. In order to live properly, people need a central axis. Don't you think so? In my case, by quantifying intuition, or something like intuition, through a unique system, I've been able to enjoy a degree of worldly success. And according to my intuition…” he said, and was silent for a time. A very dense silence. “According to my intuition, we should have got hold of something from digging up that underground chamber.”

“Like what?”

He shook his head. Or at least it seemed that way to me from the other end of the phone line. “I still don't know. But I think we have to know. We need to combine our intuition, allow it to pass through your ability to express things in concrete form, and my ability to quantify them.”

I still couldn't really grasp what he was getting at. What was this man talking about?