Krik? Krak! (11 page)

The next day, Catherine had her sit fully clothed on a rock on the beach as she painted her on canvas. Princesse watched her own skin grow visibly darker as she sat near the open sea, the waves spraying a foam of white sand onto her toes.

"In the beginning God said, 'Let there be light.'" Catherine's brush attacked the canvas as she spoke, quickly mixing burnished colors to catch the harsh afternoon light. "Without light, there is nothing. We might as well be blind people. No light or colors."

For the moment, Catherine was painting the rock and the sand beneath Princesse, ignoring the main subject. She was waiting for just the right moment to add Princesse to the canvas. She might even do it later, after the sun had set, when she could paint at her leisure. She might do it the next day when the light would have changed slightly, when the sun was just a little higher or lower in the sky, turning the sea a different shade.

"It's dazzling how the light filters through your complexion," Catherine assured Princesse. "They say black absorbs all color. It blots and consumes it and gives us nothing back. That's wrong, don't you think?"

"Of course," Princesse nodded. Catherine was the expert. She was always right.

"Black skin gives so much to the canvas," Catherine continued. "Do you ever think of how we change things and how they change us?"

"How?" ventured Princesse.

"Perhaps the smaller things—like human beings, for example—can also change and affect the bigger things in the universe."

A few days later, Princesse sat in Catherine's bedroom as Catherine sketched her seated in a rocking chair holding a tall red candle in each hand. Black drapes on the window kept out the light of the afternoon sky. A small mole of melted candle wax grew on Princesse's hand as she sat posing stiffly.

"When I was just beginning to paint in Paris," Catherine told Princesse in the dark, "I used to live with a man who was already an artist. He told me that if I wanted to be an artist, I would have to wear boots, a pair of his large clunky boots with holes in the soles. That man was my best teacher. He died yesterday."

"I am sorry," Princesse said, seeing no real strain of loss in Catherine's eyes.

"It's fine," Catherine said. "He was old and sickly."

"What was it like, wearing those shoes?" Princesse asked.

"I see where your interests lie," Catherine said.

"I am sorry if that was insensitive."

"I would tell him to go somewhere and per-form obscene acts on himself every time he told me to wear the boots," Catherine said, "but whenever he went on a trip, I would make myself live in those shoes. I wore them every day, everywhere I went. I would wear them on the street, in the park, to the butcher's. I wore them everywhere I could until they felt like mine for a while."

The next day when Princesse went to see Catherine, she did not paint her. Instead they sat on the veranda while Catherine drank white rum.

"Let me hear you talk," Catherine said. "Tell me what color do you think the sky is right now?"

Princesse looked up and saw a color typical of the Haitian sky.

"I guess it's blue," Princesse said. "Indigo, maybe, like the kind we use in the wash."

"We have so much here," Catherine said. "Even wash indigo in the sky."

Catherine was not home when Princesse came the next afternoon. Princesse waited outside on the beach-house steps until it was almost nightfall. Finally, Princesse walked down to the beach and watched the stars line up in random battalions in the evening sky.

There was a point in the far distance where the sky almost seemed to blend with the sea, stroking the surface the way two people's lips would touch each other's. Standing there, Princesse wished she could paint that. That and all the night skies that she had seen, the full moon and the stars peeking down like tiny gods acting out their will, plunging and sometimes winking in a tease, in a parade ignored by humankind. Princesse thought that she could paint that, giving it light and color, shape and texture, all those things that Catherine spoke of.

Princesse returned the following day to find Catherine still absent. She walked the perimeter of the deserted house at least three dozen times until her ankles ached. Again Princesse stayed until the evening to watch the sky over the beach. As she walked along, she picked up a small conch shell and began to blow a song into it.

Princesse wanted to paint the sound that came out of the shell, a moan like a call to a distant ship, an SOS with a dissonant melody. She wanted to paint the feel of the sand beneath her toes, the crackling of dry empty crab shells as she popped them between her palms. She wanted to paint herself, but taller and more curvaceous, with a stream of silky black mermaid's hair. She wanted to discover where the sky and the sea meet each other like two old paramours who had been separated for a very long time.

Princesse carried the conch shell in her hand as she strolled. She dug the sharp tip of the shell into her index finger and drew a few drops of blood. The blood dripped onto the front of her white undershirt, making small blots that sank into the cloth, leaving uneven circles. Princesse sat on the cooling sand on the beach staring at the spots on her otherwise immaculate undershirt, seeing in the blank space all kinds of possibilities.

Catherine came back a week later. Princesse returned to the beach and found her stretched out in a black robe, in her usual lounging chair, reading a magazine.

"Madame," Princesse called from the road, rushing eagerly towards Catherine.

"I am sorry," Catherine said. "I had to go to Paris."

Catherine folded the magazine and started walking back to the house.

As Princesse had expected, all the painted canvases were gone. Catherine offered her some iced rum on the veranda. This time Princesse gladly accepted. She would chew some mint leaves before going home.

Catherine did not notice the blood stains on the undershirt that Princesse' had worn every day since she'd drawn on it with her own blood. Catherine sifted through a portfolio of recent work and pulled out a small painting of Princesse lying naked on the beach rock with a candle in each hand.

"I had a burst of creativity when I was in Paris," she said. "Here, it's yours."

Princesse peered at this re-creation, not immediately recognizing herself, but then seeing in the face, the eyes, the breasts, a very true replication of her body.

Princesse stared at the painting for a long time and then she picked it up, cradling it as though it were a child. It was the first time that Catherine had given her one of her paintings. Princesse felt like she had helped to give birth to something that would have never existed otherwise.

"My friend, the artist whose boots I used to wear," Catherine said, "I wanted to go to Paris if only to see his grave. I missed the funeral, but I wanted to see where his bones were resting."

Catherine gave Princesse two T-shirts, one from the Pompidou Center, and another from a museum in Paris where she hoped one day her work would hang.

"I wish I could have let you know I was going," Catherine said. "But I wasn't sure myself that I would go until I got on the plane.

Princesse sat on the veranda next to Catherine, holding her little painting. She was slowly becoming familiar with what she saw there. It was her all right, recreated.

It struck Princesse that this is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her. The sky in all its glory had been there for eons even before she came into the world, and there it would stay with its crashing stars and moody clouds. The sand and its caresses, the conch and its melody would be there forever as well. All that would change would be the faces of the people who would see and touch those things, faces like hers, which was already not as it had been a few years before and which would mature and change in the years to come.

That afternoon, as Princesse walked up the road near the cockfights, clutching an image of herself frozen in a time that would never repeat, a man walked out of the yard, carrying a fiery red rooster with a black sock draped over its face. The rooster was still and lifeless beneath the sock even as the man took sips of white rum and blew it in a cloud at the rooster's shrouded head. A few drops of blood fell to the earth in a circle and vanished in the dirt.