The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (3 page)

Human beings melted to skeletons before my eyes, and the stink that hung in the air that day still follows me no matter how far I travel from Chinochik."

He confessed that the conflagration had been as demoralizing to his own troops as it had been to those of the enemy.

As a result of his invention of the Dragon, my father was invited to New York to receive a medal of honor, as well as his payment, from the military. I, his only child, made this trip with him. It was the first time I was ever in the city, and my head swam with the sights and sounds of the exotic metropolis. We went to a huge building with grand Roman arches, which I have never since been able to find again, and he was given a bag of gold and a medal by a group of mustached men in ribbon-bedecked uni-forms.

Once the ceremony was over and we were again on the street, he lifted me up and hugged me to him.

"Come with me, Piero," he said, and set me down. Taking my hand, he led me swiftly down crowded streets to another building. We entered and passed down long marble corridors lined with paintings. I was dizzy from looking up at them. I begged him to stop and let me exam-ine them more closely, but he pulled me along by the hand, saying, "That is nothing. Come, I will show you."

We entered an alcove, and at its center was a fountain that by way of some magical plumbing produced a mournful music. With the fine spray at our backs, he pointed up at M. Sabott's newly painted masterpiece, The Madonna of the Manticores.

The figure of the fair Madonna, whose placid outward gaze evoked a sense of utter calm in me, had no equal for beauty, and every single strand of hair, row of ivory teeth, luminous red eye, and fatal stinger of the weird tripartite beasts prowling at her feet was brimming with the energy of aberrant nature held tenuously in check.

"Here is something," he said.

I was enchanted, and while I stood there with my mouth agape and my eyes wide, he whispered urgently into my ear, "I began life wanting to create something as beautiful as this, but all my time and energy, all my talent, has gone to waste. Now I can only build machines of death for money. I have won battles and in the process lost my soul. Create, Piero," he told me, clutching me by the shoulders. "Create something beautiful, or life is mean-ingless."

He was to die the following year, when I was eight, cut to ribbons by a weapon he was developing called the Way Down, a self-propelled tornado of shining blades. I had been helping him in his shop that day and was unable to save him. I have erased the horrible imagery of that moment from my mind. Soon

after he was buried, I began to draw, trying to capture his likeness so as not to forget it. As a result, I

discovered I had inherited my father's creative ability. My mother encouraged me in this direc-tion as a tribute to the husband she had loved.

I believe his spirit has somehow followed me through life, because years later, by a strange coincidence, I was to become the apprentice of M. Sabott, artist of The Madonna of the Manticores, as I am sure my father would have wished. Perhaps it was not the Reeds and their pitiful situation or the champagne or chandelier or even Watkin that had set me on this course of thought, but my father, from the night's plutonian shore, sending me a message imbued with such importance that it succeeded in leaping the chasm between life and death and traveling to me on the first wind of autumn.

My evening finally ended with the bottle half empty. I was bleary-eyed and my head hurt, but I remembered to blow out the guttering candle. I went to my bedroom, undressed, and lay down.

The birds had begun to sing across the street in the park, and for a few moments I studied an interesting pattern on the wall projected by the moon shining through lace curtains.

In my sleep I had a most disturbing dream of watching my father being rent to pieces by M.

Sabott's manticores. It was so vivid, so immediate, I woke with a scream to the light of the sun now streaming through the lace. My mouth was dry and my head thick from the alcohol and cigarettes. I felt nauseated, but it did not stop me from scrabbling out of bed. I went directly into the parlor and found the jacket I

had worn the previous night. Digging into the pocket, I retrieved the rose-colored envelope Watkin had handed me. I tore it open and pulled out a sheet of paper of the same rose color. On it, written in a looping style, was an address. I recalled the old man telling me "a job like no other" and in that instant decided I would take it.

My Patron

If I had gone about things intelligently, I would have waited to meet my mysterious new patron before sever-ing the agreements I had made with those already in line for my services. This was a bold move on my part; bolder than I had at first given myself credit for. With each missive I penned, gracefully disengaging myself from my promises, a new and stronger wave of doubt passed through me, and my hand quaked slightly as I signed the last of them. All I could picture was that hapless hotel waiter at the betting window, placing all his money on an oat-burning nag incapable of winning any race but the one to the glue factory. Still, there was a certain thrill that also came along with the act, and although I felt disaster hard upon my heels, the future swept open like a door before me. As I stepped through into a nebulous world of light, that which had a moment before been an entrance suddenly became the solitary exit. It slammed shut behind me, and all my nervous agitation was instantly replaced by a sense of calm, as though I were now floating among the clouds like a kite.

My tether, as it were, was my plan, if you could call it that. I would take Mr. Watkin's employer's commission, do the work to the best of my ability, craft any portrait the sitter required, and then collect the promised enormous payment. With the promised amount—triple what I had expected to receive over the next year—I would be free to pursue my muse without want for quite a long time. The prospect of overthrowing the tyranny of vanity, of actu-ally painting something other than a face trembling with the exertion of proving itself worthy to future centuries, buoyed me up. I tell you, it even reduced the effects of my hangover. I daydreamed of traveling to an exotic location and taking my easel outdoors to capture the ageless visage of Nature or, more important, journeying within myself to find and release those images I had so long ignored.

After washing, shaving, and dressing in my best gray suit, I put on my topcoat and set out toward

Seventh Avenue to catch the streetcar uptown. The address on the sheet of rose-colored paper
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undoubtedly belonged to one of those new monstrosities constructed in the last decade way up past where the city's sprawl had by then extended. Designed and raised by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, the residences of the upper reaches of Manhattan were a hodgepodge of classical styles melded with the novelty of a contemporary New York look—

Byzantine meets Broadway, so to

speak. Constructed with the finest imported marble and limestone, they were some of the most opulent monoliths in the country. I had visited quite a few by way of attending parties and in fulfillment of commissions. The address was a comfort in that it indi-cated my patron would certainly have the means to back up the outlandish deal Watkin had set before me.

Although the day had begun with sunshine, it was now growing overcast, and the cold wind that had blown into town the previous night seemed determined to stay. Scraps of paper and dead leaves scuttled along the side-walk, and my breath came as steam. Others I passed were bundled up for the weather in scarves and mittens, and I had to check my memory to recall what had become of my summer. I relished the fact that painting was not like fac-tory or office work with set periods of labor steadily reminding one of the disintegration of precious hours, but it usually left me with only a vague sense of what day it was.

Most of July and all of August and September had been swallowed whole by what was to become the dissat-isfaction of Mrs. Reed, leaving me only a faint impression of their suffocating heat. Prior to that, April, May, and early June, the delicate months of spring, were represented by the besotted Colonel

Onslow Mardeeling, whose nose, with its eruptions and crevices had been a true study in lunar geography. All of my mature years presented them-selves as a gallery of the faces and figures of others. I

had to ask myself, "Where was I in all of this?"

It was well past noon when I finally arrived at my des-tination, a two-story edifice with marble columns, looking more like a downtown financial institution than a resi-dence. In its white weight of stone it exuded the solemnity of a mausoleum. The amethyst skies had opened the moment I left the streetcar, and it was now raining rather fiercely. A huge maple tree standing before the house was losing its orange five-pointed leaves to the downpour, the brisk wind scattering them across the small lawn and the path that led to the front door. I stopped for a moment to double-check the house number. Then came a flash of lightning, and this prompted me to move.

I had barely withdrawn my hand from the brass knocker when the door opened inward. There before me stood Mr. Watkin, his head with its milky-white eyes shifting rapidly from side to side.

"May I help you?" he asked.

I did not speak immediately, waiting to see if the old man could again place me by my scent.

Just when I thought I had caught him off guard, he sniffed the air delicately and said, "Ah, Mr.

Piambo. Good choice, sir. Please, come in out of the storm."

I remained silent, wanting to give him no satisfaction.

He ushered me into an antechamber off the foyer and instructed me to wait there while he announced my arrival to the lady of the house. To my amazement, what was hanging over the divan on the wall facing me but an orig-inal Sabott. I recognized the piece immediately as one I had worked on while an apprentice in my mentor's studio. It was called At Sea

—a fanciful portrait of Mr. Jonathan

Monlash, a well-known ship's captain of the seventies with a famous predilection for the effects derived from smoking hashish. I had been no more than twenty at the time the work was done, and I could still recall the old sailor's high spirits and unfailing sense of humor. If I remembered cor-rectly, I had painted some of the demons dancing in a dizzying whirl around the head of the
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long-faced subject. At Monlash's insistence, Sabott had rendered him with the nozzle of the hookah between his lips. Though made of pigment, the billows of gray-blue smoke issuing from the side of his mouth were so airy they seemed to be rolling and rising. I shook my head at the sight of this long-lost friend, knowing the piece must now be worth a small for-tune. So distracted was I by the discovery of the portrait, I forgot where I was and did not notice Watkin's return.

"This way, Mr. Piambo," he said.

"Where is your violet suit today, Watkin?" I asked as I followed him out of the chamber and down a dark hallway.

"Violet?" he said. "I don't recall owning a violet suit. Perhaps you are thinking of the puce."

He led me through a sumptuously decorated dining room with crystal lamp fixtures whose reflections sparkled in the mirrorlike gloss of a long table. The walls were hung with paintings 1

recognized as originals by renowned artists, old masters as well as contemporaries of mine. We passed through a study lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes, and then down a hallway

paneled with aromatic cedar, no doubt from Lebanon.

Finally we came to a room at the very back of the house. My guide opened the door and stepped aside, motioning with his hand for me to enter. As I did, it struck me that Watkin had navigated the entire journey through the heavily furnished rooms without a hitch. I didn't remember so much as one of his fingers touching a wall to find his place.

I found myself alone in a large, nearly empty space. There were no adornments here, and there was hardly any furniture to speak of. The ceilings were at least fifteen feet high, and there were two arched windows on either of the side walls. The left-hand view was of a fading rose garden in the rain, a few pale yellow petals still clinging to stems. The opposite view showed a piece of the neighboring house, its architecture silhouetted against the drab sky. To the very left at the back, there was an open door, revealing a shadowed stairway leading up. The floor was magnifi-cent, of a pale maple inlaid with arabesques of a darker wood and waxed to a high sheen. The walls were papered with a green and gold floral design on a cream back-ground. At the very center of the room there stood a screen, five feet tall, consisting of three panels in hinged cherrywood frames. On these panels, the color of old parchment, was depicted a scene of falling brown leaves.

Positioned in front of the screen was a simple wooden chair with a short back and wide armrests.

Watkin, who had stepped into the room behind me and shut the door, said, "You are to sit in the chair.

My employer will be with you momentarily." I walked forward, my steps echoing as I went, and did as I

was told. The moment I sat down, I heard the door open and close again.

I was excited at the prospect of finally meeting my patron, and concentrated on gaining a modicum of com-posure so as to better represent myself when she appeared. The item I focused on in order to effect this was the subject of what price I would ask for the commission. If Watkin had spoken truthfully, she was willing to part with an extraordinary amount of money. I smiled at the great sums that slithered through my thoughts like eels, and practiced whispering one to see if I could speak it in a voice that would not betray my awareness of how ridicu-lous it was.

The first sounded convincing enough, but when I tried a number a few digits higher, I was startled by a vague noise from behind the screen in front of me.

"Hello?" I said.

There was no response, and 1 was beginning to think that the insubstantial sound of someone clearing his throat had come from my own conscience, directed at my plan of artistic piracy. As I
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