The Season of Migration (14 page)

There was often a crowd of children clustered by his cart when Vincent approached, their faces streaked with the dirt of a day spent in the streets, their caps worn and dusty. Sal had his long and frayed cloth draped over his shoulder, streaked with the colors of his flavors where he'd wiped his hands: strawberry pink, raspberry purple, lemon yellow. “Ciao, Vincent!” he'd call over the heads of the urchins, who would all turn to look. Sal loved his celebrity, the way the children looked up at him from their spots in front of the cart with eyes full of wonder. He would pull the ice from beneath the cloths he kept over the wooden bucket and slip it into the paper cones, concealing it all as best he could on his side of the cart while he poured on the sugar water, so that he could then present it over the top of the cart to the children as if it were magic.

That day, Vincent pulled the print from his satchel and showed it to Sal. They had often stood together on that bridge as the sun waned, exclaiming together (as best they could with the language between them) over the colors that nature displayed, the beauty of the bridge, which was man-made and yet so pure that it seemed to wholly belong to the earth. Sal told Vincent the Westminster bridge was his favorite place to sell ices, even though it was a fair distance from Saffron Hill, where he lived, and though he had to push his cart all the way home after sunset and often got back far later than his colleagues, which sometimes meant that he got the worst spot for leaving his barrow overnight in the barrow yard.

He looked at Vincent's print, with the two women bent in the field; Vincent held it up to him because he was afraid he might get the sticky sugar on it if he were to take it in his hands. Sal peered over at it and Vincent could see that he was really looking. Was he curious to know where Vincent found value? Vincent didn't think Sal knew much about art, but this was just why he wanted to share the print with him; it was why he loved that print, really, because he felt in it something that would translate to anyone, not just to someone who had learned how to read the language.

And it seemed like Sal understood. He nodded and looked at Vincent's face, and he said, “
Bella
.” And then he told Vincent about his mother, who worked in a vineyard in Italy and who always had grape stains on her clothes. And he smiled, pointing to his own stained hands, and said he knew something about the way love and work was passed on.

That evening, Vincent unveiled the print in the sitting room after dinner, and Eugénie and her mother cooed over it just as he imagined they would. It was an image of the two of them, looking at an image of the two of them, art and life reflected back at each other. Watching the two of them looking at that print, Vincent was deeply moved. He helped Eugénie to hang it on the wall next to the fireplace—Eugénie holding her finger in the right place while he leaned over with the tool to hammer in the nail. He placed the nail where her finger was and for a mere fraction of a second their hands touched, and a fire blazed in him.

Eugénie had often asked where it was Vincent walked on his long afternoons of rambling, and he had told her about some of the places he liked to visit: Rotten Row in Hyde Park, where hundreds of ladies and gentlemen rode on horseback, all the parts of town where there were beautiful parks with a wealth of flowers such as he had never seen anywhere else. One Sunday in May, a few weeks after he gave her the Goupil's print, she asked to go with him on a walk to Covent Garden. On their way, they walked through Lambeth, and Vincent told Eugénie about a couple he had met who worked in Covent Garden, the wife as a flower woman and the husband as a horse keeper, his hours daily from four in the morning to eight at night. They had come to London from the country, hoping for higher wages, and lived in Lambeth, but they had been turned out of their last home because of the most recent flooding of the Thames, when the rising water had flowed right into their room and climbed up their walls, and in one terrible night they had lost everything they had, including their infant child, who had caught an illness that night while they sat up with her above the water and had not lasted for a week beyond. The walls in their new home were stained with water, and there was mold in all the corners, but it was clean and they were settled again.

Vincent caught himself telling all this to Eugénie and felt foolish, for what girl wants to hear about the trials of the poor? These were stories that interested him, and he found them beautiful, but he knew enough to understand they were not the images of seduction, and that Eugénie was a delicate girl who surely wanted to think more about the growth of flowers than the deaths of babies from floods. He shut his mouth and tried to keep quiet, to walk in silence next to her, but he could not keep himself from chattering. She pointed to a robin and he behaved as if he knew everything there was to know about robins, their mating habits and their nocturnal rhythms, the number of feathers they had on each of their wings.

By the time they reached the Westminster Bridge, Vincent felt wretched and wanted to turn around. But there was Sal. “Ciao, Vincent!” he called, as he always did, and they made their way toward him. Inside, Vincent was grumbling, his mind turned dark. He needed to tell Eugénie how he felt. What good were all the words he had to offer, if he couldn't say “I love you”?

Sal cleared all of the children away to make way for Eugénie to approach his cart, swinging his arms and ushering the urchins back. He made a real production of making her ice, hiding it beneath his cloth, and then presenting it to her with flourish, using his hands as if he were unveiling a magic trick, and she clapped and reached for it with joy. He looked at Vincent and declared Eugénie “
bella
,” and winked, and Vincent felt a fraud. For all those months he felt that all was understood between Eugénie and him, and yet suddenly he felt it exposed for what it was, which was something imagined, something unreal, and therefore sinful. He was suddenly jealous of Sal, of the way Eugénie reached for what he had to offer her, of the easy way that he declared her beautiful. He felt a bolt of hot anger. He imagined himself with long, battering-ram arms; he wanted to sweep them across the bridge and push all of those children, and that cart, and Sal, too, clear off and into the river. He saw the group of them in the water, their hands thrashing above the surface, grasping for something to hold on to, their mouths like the mouths of goldfish, starved for air. He clenched his fists and commanded himself to remain still.

They kept on for a ways beyond the bridge, Eugénie eating her ice, but inside him was a great tumult and he knew he could not keep on for long. He tried to stop the tide in him; he could feel the rush in his gut and his groin; a tingling had begun under his skin. They walked next to each other and he closed his eyes. He savored those last few moments of walking as if they were steps taken on a gangplank over a cold ocean.

They came to a stop before an Italian street band; a boy played a harp, another a fiddle, and a man with a bushy beard the guitar, a pipe hanging from his mouth and slowly emitting smoke, the occasional puffs he took causing it to bounce up and down. The music they made was dissonant and interesting, it sounded like no tune Vincent had heard before, and it gave him a deep surge of confidence. He grabbed Eugénie's arm. “Eugénie,” he half whispered and half rasped, his throat closing on him, “I love you.”

She turned to him and blinked, surprised. She looked down at his hand on her arm. “What?” she said, though of course she had heard him.

He pushed on. “I love you,” he said again, leaning toward her. “I have always loved you.”

She wriggled her arm from his grip and her face fell into shadow. She shook her head as if she were trying to shake off an insect. “Vincent,” she whispered, embarrassed, and her next word was said with force: “No.”

She moved away from the musicians and he followed, his heart leaping, his blood like drums inside his ears. She walked quickly, her face flushed, her eyebrows turned into each other and the piece of flesh between them raised in little hills. She was still shaking her head; she had learned something she had not wanted to know.

“I am engaged, Vincent,” she said, hustling now toward home. “I am going to be married. Don't you know that? Didn't you know that, Vincent?” Her voice had a mix of accusation, of anger, of frustration, and of pleading.

He had not known. His name was George, she told him, and he had been the lodger before Vincent; he had slept in Vincent's room, in his bed. He had looked out Vincent's window; he had looked up at his same ceiling; he had looked in Vincent's mirror and seen his own face.

Vincent went to his room that night reeling and sick, shamed and angry. He didn't want to stay there, but where could he go? He already had a trip home planned; he was to leave at the end of June, and it was agreed that after that he would not come back to the Loyers' home. The family that had been his were now strangers; they were crumpled puppets. They turned from him when he came into the room. He had once again become a ghost. He stumbled through his days as if shades had been pulled down before his eyes; the city turned sinister and frightening, filled with spirits and wickedness, a city of broken hearts and dirty corners, old and twisted bony fingers that reached for your money and clasped onto your soul. He faltered at work, the women in long silken dresses asking after paintings that meant nothing were intolerable, and he scowled at them and retreated to the cover of the dark back room for entire days.

It was one long night that June that he found the woman called Anna and gave to her what he had been imagining for so many months would be shared with Eugénie. He had passed Anna's house many times and had looked in with curiosity, but he had never gone inside. The first floor was a pub, as was the case in most of those houses, and there was frequently music, the beat spilling out to the sidewalk, men and women dancing and twirling, skirts swishing and boots stomping, loud laughter rolling and voices catching and competing with the melody.

He went inside timidly, and the smell of the place came over him as if he had entered the bulb of a pipe: it was smoke and drink and bodies, sour and sweet, leather and whiskey and breath and perfume wafting from skin. He sat at the bar and ordered a drink. He was feeling wretched, and something about the atmosphere in that place calmed him. There was an equality to it; no one cared who you had been before you came through the door, if you'd ever done anything you were proud of or anything you wished you could take back, only that you could hold your drink and enjoy a tune. It was invisibility of a different sort, not brought on by who you were, by something you had done, or by anyone else that had come before you; invisibility, rather, that was fellowship, invisibility that was welcome, belonging, invisibility that was granted to all.

Around his second drink, she sat down next to him. She was perhaps ten years older than he, and told him her name was Anna, his sister's and his mother's name, a fact that gave him pause. But this woman was so unlike his sister and his mother that he quickly left this fact behind, a ripple in a lake that gently and gradually went calm again.

She was rather tall and strongly built—she did not have a lady's hands, but the hands of one who works—but she was not coarse or common, and had something very womanly about her. Dark curls that barely hung together and dark charcoal under her eyes, one of which was diverted always to the right, as if it were keeping watch. She reminded him of some curious figure by Chardin or Frère, or perhaps Jan Steen. She had had many cares, one could see that, and life had been hard for her; she was not distinguished, nothing extraordinary, nothing unusual. He thought of a quote from Michelet: “Every woman at every age, if she loves and is a good woman, can give a man, not the infinite of the moment, but the moment of the infinite.”

She took him up the staircase to her room, where there was a wooden four-poster bed with one side covered by a faded pink curtain, presumably to block the light coming from the window beyond, where the hanging curtain was thin and torn. There was a worn couch that appeared to have once been brown velvet but was now patched and bald in places, and a washbasin on a stand by the base of the bed with a stack of cloths next to it. Other than that, the room was bare. The wallpaper peeled and cracked like sunburned skin; his senses were so alive, he was sure that he could hear the fragments crumbling, disintegrating, and floating away.

It was a journey between darkness and light, the hours he spent with Anna. She was a warm woman, and she took her time with him. He was angry and heartbroken at the same time that he was awestruck by what he saw before him, by what was given him to touch: a woman's body, available, every inch of flesh revealed. He was lucky and grateful and in love with Anna that night. He wanted to treat her with great loving care; he wanted to give back to her the compassion he saw when she looked at him, when she bent to kiss his face, when she laid her palms on his skin. And at the same time he wanted to crush her. She was a woman, as Eugénie was, and who was to say that compassion wasn't the same as pity? He felt out of control and rabid; he could not rein himself in. There was no distinction between inside and out; his organs were touchable; she closed her hand around him and he felt his lungs, his liver, his heart, his intestines respond.

He seethed. She was beautiful, she was ugly; she was not Eugénie, she was Eugénie; he would flay her, he would puncture her perfect goose bumps, she did not love him. Love was hatred, love was love. He couldn't see; he was blind; he saw the world in a collarbone. Her breasts were his mother's, they were hers, they were flopping and used, the site of so many men's hands, so much love and violence, and then they were tender and sweet golden apples, Eugénie's breasts, which he took into his mouth with tenderness that brought tears. He felt sure that when he brought his head to her chest he could leave it there; he would lift his neck and his head would remain, buried and burrowing, disappearing into her skin.