The News from Spain (21 page)

Anyway, when I got home, I kept doing little oil sketches of women’s faces. Sometimes if I’d been with Johnny and noticed him looking at a waitress or someone we walked past on the street, I’d paint that person. Or friends of his, actresses he’d worked with, anyone I thought he might have made a pass at. But mostly I just painted anonymous women, from life or from photographs in magazines. The point after a while wasn’t
Who had Johnny slept with?
It was
Who might Johnny sleep with? Who would he want to sleep with?
In other words, all women. Each
woman. What would Johnny see, if he looked at this one, or this one?

It sounds crazy, I know. But I was happy, doing those paintings.

It didn’t keep being about Johnny. After a while the work wasn’t about him anymore; I barely thought of him when I did it, except as a kind of joke: Hey, Johnny, your horrible friend gave me your big catalog of women; well, here’s mine. But I was in love with the pictures themselves, the fun and interest of doing them, all those women.

The next time I had a show, I planned it as usual around the architectural paintings. Those have always provided a living for me—good in some years, in others pretty scant. But there is a long alcove off the main space in the gallery where I show my work, and I decided to fill it with some of these small pictures of women. The show got only one review, a short one, which praised the large paintings but referred to the portraits as “trite, solipsistic wallpaper” and suggested I stick to painting buildings.

I should have a thicker skin by now, but I guess I don’t. Those were thin-skinned pictures.

7

And what Elvira knew by now about Rosina: A few years after she and her husband had divorced, she had fallen in love. The handyman, who had adored her all those years ago, had returned from the army. He looked her up, and came to visit her in the apartment where she was then living in Seville. She began the affair out of a kind of tired, residual, martyrish spite toward her ex-husband, even though they weren’t in touch
anymore. You thought this is what I was doing? Fine, then, I’ll do it.

But the young man was kind, loving, steadfast.

They had never married, but they’d been happy together for ten years. Then he’d been killed in a skiing accident, and she had moved away, with their son.

8

Friendly reader! Though why I begin this chapter with these words I do not know, as I am fairly certain that what I write here will be crumpled up and thrown into the fire before any reader, friendly or otherwise, has been permitted to see it.

Given the voluminous size of my memoirs, and the frequency with which further installments have been issued by the publisher, the reader may perhaps doubt my ability to view any of the words I write as less than indispensable. But I assure you: as much as there is, there could have been more. I add, remembering and inventing; and I subtract, when in the rereading something strikes me as unworthy: too small, a private memory that would only be diminished, were I to publish it. The story I am about to recount here may be excised later not because it is too sensational but because I may judge that it is not sensational enough.

It concerns a night spent in Mozart’s company. I have written elsewhere of the second opera he and I wrote together, and of the disappointing reception it received in Vienna, after its initial triumph in Prague. In Prague they cheered; in Vienna they yawned and caviled. I have written that Mozart responded to the emperor’s remarks on the occasion with great poise—that when the emperor said that the Viennese did not seem to have
the teeth for this music, Mozart suggested equably that they be given a little more time to chew on it. In truth Mozart said nothing of the kind. I wasn’t there to overhear whatever he said to the emperor. I was in the alley behind the opera house, parting company with my dinner. I’m sure that Mozart’s actual conversation with the emperor was perfectly polite and innocuous, if perhaps less pithy than the exchange I invented for publication. I am equally sure that it had nothing to do with Mozart’s real feelings on that night.

What Mozart said to me, when I told him that the emperor had opined that the Viennese hadn’t the teeth for the music, was, “Then they can eat shit.” We were sitting up late that same night in my lodgings, and we had sent the servant out for punch, once, twice, and a third time. We went over the performance, the glory of the music, the grandeur and buffoonery of the drama. We recalled the delightful time we’d had writing the opera in Prague, with my old friend Casanova looking over our shoulders and providing unnecessary but vivid advice on seduction techniques and the strategies a rake might employ to escape from a tight corner. We dwelt bitterly on the inexplicably chilly reception our beautiful creation had that night received. Vienna’s indifference felt like cruelty, mockery.

The conversation began to wander. I told him of the occasion when I was young and first began to write verses, and a boy who was my friend came up behind me as I sat at my desk, snatched away the paper on which I was writing, and read aloud my ode in deep, overwrought, satirical tones. I was angry at my friend—whom I ceased to call by the word—but even more I was humiliated. He had caught me in a moment of tenderness and passion, doing something I was proud of and wanted publicized but which was also deeply secret to me,
deeply serious in a way that did not require anyone’s approval but could ill withstand anyone’s mockery.

Mozart, in turn, told me that when he was little more than a boy he had fallen in love with a beautiful young singer who returned his feelings. He left for a period of several years, to travel and give concerts. When he returned, not much richer but as much in love as ever, he went to a gathering at which he knew the young lady would be present. He wore his best red coat, thinking as he donned it how grand it would make him look in her eyes. But while he had been gone, she had become a celebrated singer and had been taken up by a protector who had both enriched and hardened her. At the soiree she ignored him; when he approached she was too haughty to talk to him, but turned instead to her cavalier and made fun of Mozart’s red coat.

He laughed a little, after he told me this story; and I laughed too, to remember my despair when my treacherous boyhood friend was dancing around the room, declaiming my verses and waving the paper out of my reach. We drank more punch. We noted with philosophical wisdom that these hurts go deep, but he had loved again and I was still writing. What we did not say was that with these hurts an edge is worn down. It happens out of necessity—it would not be safe to carry a knife that sharp. But something is lost too: that early, perfect, impractical sharpness, which is so beautiful but which cannot survive being seen.

We felt better after that night. The work was performed again, and its greatness was gradually admitted.

One more brief addition, before I end. A story went around that someone had asked Mozart how he intended to refute his detractors.

“I will refute them with new works,” he said.

It was a confident, valiant thing for him to say, everyone thought. I thought so too, when I invented the story; and I still believe it today.

9

When Elvira dies, in her early sixties of a heart attack, she will leave her house and her money to her brothers, and all the contents of her studio to Rosina.

It will be almost a year before Rosina can make herself go out there, and then only because one of the brothers calls to say the family is trying to get the place ready to sell. She knows by now that grief is mostly endurance, understanding over and over that the person you loved is not coming back. The drive itself smites her: the dull, flat landscape around the highway, the orchards, the two falling-down farmhouses with trees growing in the middle of them, the village—passing these things that used to mean she was getting closer to Elvira, all the landmarks, not remembered for so long but now seen again and remembered perfectly.

She cries in the car, and dreads driving up to the house itself; but by the time she arrives she is calmer. No one is there. It’s a strange, sultry afternoon in August: the sky a molten pewter, and the light is white, fierce, burning. The silence, too, is immense. She walks through the high grass—nothing tragic here, it was that way when Elvira was alive; she never cared about cutting it—to the barn and opens the padlock with the key that came in the mail from Elvira’s lawyer.

She knows the inside of Elvira’s house by heart. The
smoke-blackened wall above the living room fireplace, the kitchen with its sagging cupboard doors, the toppling piles of frayed towels in the linen closet, and the fresh smell of the sheets on the small bed in the guest room and on Elvira’s wide bed, where they sometimes spent nights talking in the darkness until they both fell asleep. Rosina was never sure what that meant to Elvira, whose feelings for her might have had a romantic piece. If it was true, she was pretty sure there hadn’t been any suffering involved, though she also knew that believing this was easier than admitting the possibility of anything different.

Yet with all the time she spent in the house, she’s been in the studio only once, early in the friendship. When she flips on the lights that August afternoon, she will see a vast, whitewashed, raftered space, crammed with stuff, neither neat nor messy, just occupied-looking. This will choke her again, sting her eyes. It looks just like what it is: a workroom someone walked out of one afternoon, expecting to be back the next morning. Magazines lying open, pens uncapped, a mug with a tea bag trailing out of it, an address book, a crumpled tissue. There is a painting on the easel, and next to it a table jumbled with paints. Crusted brushes in a crusted glass. The canvas is a small one, about seven inches square: a woman’s face. A direct gaze, hair pulled back but with pieces coming loose around the face, a funny asymmetrical half smile, lips slightly parted. Impossible to tell her age: Elvira hadn’t painted her skin yet. Rosina will be surprised to find this picture. She had thought, from the way Elvira had told her the story of that disastrous show, that she’d stopped doing these paintings of women.

But what she finds next surprises her even more. Dozens of these small portraits, hundreds of them, stacked in the plywood
shelving that fills the old horse stalls. The big paintings of buildings are here, but most of what’s here are these women, painted steadily and in utter privacy, apparently for years.

So now there will be years of trying to get these pictures shown. Arranging to have them photographed. Cataloging them. Creating a binder. Writing a description of the show. Naming it: in the end Rosina decides on “1172 Women,” which, astonishingly, is how many there are, and she feels strongly that they all need to be seen together, at least to begin with. What was wrong with Elvira’s earlier show, she decides—aside from the fact that the critic was an asshole—was that there weren’t enough pictures shown. The paintings are individually lovely; but it’s the quantity that is crazily beautiful, the dogged, obsessive, insatiable, repetitive power of face after face after face.

Nobody wants it. Nobody has room for it. Finally there’s a happy, or happy enough, ending. A woman Rosina sits next to at an opera fund-raising lunch mentions that she has a friend who directs a museum at a college in Texas. Rosina mentions the pictures, the woman offers an introduction to her friend, and eventually the paintings travel (Rosina charters the plane), are shown, are reviewed and praised. Then they travel back, and Rosina puts them into storage. She will keep trying to find them a permanent home.

But before any of that happens, Elvira’s house will be sold and the studio emptied. There are a few boxes piled against one wall: books, old sketchbooks, Christmas ornaments. And one box—just a regular brown cardboard box like the others, but this one taped shut—with a piece of paper taped on top of it. A note:

Rosina—This is the box I was talking about that night at the Cristinos’ dinner party. E
.

Rosina will take this box home with her (the rest go into storage for now), and will consider for some weeks what to do with it. She will think of opening it. She will think of keeping it and never opening it. She will not remember Elvira’s exact words, but she knows it was something about how the box needed to take its chances, that it needed to go to someone who would do something unforeseen with it. She will remember Elvira talking about happiness, about the times of her life when she was most happy.

Rosina will take a piece of paper and think about what to write on it.
Voi che sapete. Voi sapete
.

Then she’ll decide the hell with it, and she will send the box, with no note, off to what seemed to be the latest in the long string of addresses Elvira had written down for Johnny.

The News from Spain