Lisette's List Page 7

  “ ‘Now, that tree is easier. It’s solid. A cylinder. And the foliage above it, a half sphere. The road, a trapezoid. That bush, a cone. See? The shadows of the divine create those shapes. But be careful. After all, art is a religion.’

  “ ‘The same thing as soul?’ I asked.

  “He answered, ‘You might say that. Or that it is created with soul. How you appreciate a thing is soul. Appreciate those vibrations of light in reds and yellows. Blues, too. You can’t feel the air without blues. If you’re living in the grace of God, you should be able to express it. I’m still working it out. I’m never satisfied. I’m afraid I won’t live long enough to paint with confidence. Do you know, monsieur, what it feels like to be called a fraud? The torment never goes away. And that makes life terrifying.’

  “ ‘A fraud? Never!’ I told him. ‘You’re a master.’

  “He turned to me at his doorway, and his eyes were moist and deep. ‘Am I?’ he asked. He let a moment pass as though he was trying to figure me out. Then he invited me in.

  “It was a grim, cluttered old house. The studio had high ceilings and tall windows. I seem to remember a potbellied stove. Along a shelf there were white compotiers like my mother’s, straw-wrapped wine bottles, a candlestick, gray jugs, pitchers, and the green glazed toupin that’s in my painting.”

  “What’s a toupin?”

  “An olive jar. He called it moral pottery. He thought by painting it, he was honoring the rustic crafts of Provence. He said that a canvas and a marble block are luxury items, but the craftsman who gives an artistic touch to a simple piece of pottery or a basket, or a panetière, or wooden utensils, or pine furniture brings art to the people. Think of that, Lisette, the next time you sit on that pine bench over there.”

  “Or on André’s toilet seat.”

  “He told me about the poet Frédéric Mistral’s Félibrige movement to restore and honor Provençal crafts and traditions and language, and he gave me a copy of Letters from My Mill, by Alphonse Daudet, a true son of Provence. You should read it.

  “All the while, he couldn’t stand still. One after another, he pulled out unframed landscapes done around Aix showing a pattern of vineyards and orchards and pale ocre de Ru wheat fields alternating with green rectangles, often with Montagne Sainte-Victoire in the background, thrusting up like a pyramid. ‘My rock of a thousand challenges,’ he called it. ‘The queen of mountains.’ He said its roots dig down beneath civilization. He even called it his Mount Sinai.

  “There were also paintings of pigeonniers, those round towers for roosting pigeons.”

  Pascal consulted his notes. “ ‘Look! Look here,’ Cézanne says. ‘This pigeonnier is Provence, man and nature in harmony. Paris dealers don’t understand. They insult me. Why shouldn’t I paint what is important here? Pigeon droppings are used as fertilizer. What a thing to paint, they say, but from pigeon shit come apples, pears, grapes, the delectable fruits and wines of Provence. And who doesn’t love a good salmis, all its juices and herbs of the countryside mixing in a delicious pigeon ragout, eh? Pigeonniers are far more important in Provence than decrepit castles. Cabanons are too.’

  “He showed me some paintings with stark, narrow cabins made of stone, one room stacked on one room. You’ve seen them isolated in fields and pastures. Farmers and shepherds use them from time to time. ‘Who will give us back our cabanons,’ he says, ‘when the big farms move in and tear them down for another two rows of apple trees?’

  “I was afraid he was working himself into a fit of rage, so I tried to calm him. ‘Eh, bieng, you paint them to preserve them.’

  “ ‘It’s something I can do,’ he says. ‘Frédéric Mistral can compose a poem about cigales. Daudet can write a story of his windmill. I can paint cabanons and pigeonniers and toupins. I want to die painting them. To die painting. Do you understand? I do nothing but work, but the evidence, la réalisation, I don’t see it. I go to mass, I go to vespers, but I don’t see it.’

  “His voice turned sad. He pulled out paintings of blocklike ochre rocks and cut cliffs of a quarry, one after another.

  “ ‘The Bibémus quarry near here,’ he says. ‘I painted it from the upper story of a cabanon I rented. Without it being right there in a field, I would not have been able to get this view. But dealers don’t like quarries. They aren’t pretty like the Impressionists’ picnics. They don’t understand their importance.’

  “ ‘But Julien Tanguy understood?’

  “ ‘The only one. He saw what I did, that I painted the earth’s structure manipulated by man, yet all in harmony.’

  “And with that I asked how many frames I should make for the quarry painting with Montagne Sainte-Victoire in the background.”

  Pascal gazed at it steadily, his chest heaving, as though he were a quarryman resting from swinging a pickax. Perhaps he was drawing from the painting the substance of his soul. I envied that, finding a painting that could depict one’s own soul.

  “Think of the shame of it, Lisette. That town below his studio, it knew nothing of how he struggled, day after day, working in a frenzy, draining himself with the effort to honor Provence. They didn’t even know he was there! A native son! There’s more to tell about him, but I feel fatigué. Tomorrow. Can you wait until tomorrow?”

  “Yes, I can wait.”

  He asked me to prepare daube for him on Saturday. His voice was pleading, almost like the whine of a child. I had to ask him what it was.

  “A traditional Provençal dish, sort of a beef ragout simmered with red wine. It has orange peel and tomato and carrots and those little round onions. Pick some rosemary for it. Cézanne would have eaten it on a Saturday too.”

  In a few moments, his eyes closed, his head dipped to his chest, and he snored lightly. To the soft rhythm of his exhaustion, I went out to the courtyard, where André was sharpening his large U-gouge.

  “I’m not sorry we came here,” I said softly. “He’s giving me something I couldn’t get anywhere else. His memories of two great artists.”

  “So are you beginning to feel privileged?” André asked.

  “I am. If we three were living in Paris, I would be working, and in our free time there would always be something else to do. But here in quiet Roussillon with these empty afternoons, there is time for me to sit and listen.”

  André set down his tools and enfolded me for a long, swaying moment before he whispered, “So now we know why we came.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  A GOOD LIFE

  1938–39

  IT HAD BEEN A MILD WINTER, WITH ONLY TWO MISTRALS. IF they were the fiercest they could be, I ceased to worry, and, after March, the month of contrasts, I enjoyed the coming of spring and the potent aroma of thyme on the hillside below our courtyard. Pascal came inside one April afternoon, the shoulder of his arm that held his pouch of boules sagging, his chin thrust forward. He was inhaling hoarse, congested breaths through his mouth.

  “This is the worst day of my life,” he growled.

  “Oh, non, non, non. Don’t say that. I’m sure—” I began.

  “I’ll say what I want to say.”

  He started up the stairs to his room, hung on to the railing a few moments, his thin chest heaving, then carefully set the boules sack on the second step and turned back. He made it to the dining table, slumped onto a chair, and swept his arm across the oilcloth as if sweeping away some bad experience.

  I sat down next to him. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  Slowly he raised his head and looked at me.

  “The color of your cheeks is like a Cézanne peach.”

  I laid my hand on his arm.

  “What’s that garlic for?” he asked.

  “Daube.”

  “Wrong time. It’s an early winter dish. Wait until November.”

  “All right, but that’s a long time from now.”

  I turned away so he might not read my reason—that I was making it now as a precaution. Instead, I should have recognized that Pascal’s c
omplaint revealed his will to live.

  He regarded his trembling hands.

  “Not a single boule. I couldn’t fire or point where I wanted to. They called me names. Even Aimé did. I bent down to point and my knees gave way. I sank to the ground and Aimé had to help me up.” By now Pascal went to play boules only once a week. Even though he was fatigué—a worsened state than peu fatigué, but still not très fatigué—that was not enough to keep him home entirely. Ashamed, diminished, perhaps even fearful, he covered his face with his hands, as if the whole world had come crashing down on him without mercy.

  “Wasn’t there anything good about the day?”

  It took him a while to think of something. “Only one thing. Aimé stopped calling me names after he helped me up.”

  His childlike thinking in the face of end-of-life concerns produced in me a warm sensation of mothering.

  “They chased him. Did I tell you?”

  “Chased Aimé?”

  “Chased Cézanne. A gang threw stones at him, and at his painting. They called him an imbecile and other wicked names.”

  “No, that couldn’t be.”

  “How do you know? You weren’t there. I saw it.”

  Getting up to crush the garlic cloves, I let him rage. I would use tomatoes, onions, and green olives instead of orange rind and anchovies, and white wine instead of red, and I would call it boeuf à l’Arlésienne instead of daube.

  “Such a noble man,” Pascal murmured. “He devoted his life to art, and what did he get for it? Scorn, dissatisfaction, exhaustion.”

  Points of light appeared on his wet lashes, and then full round tears spilled onto his lower lids. I walked over to the doorway to the courtyard and motioned to André to come inside. He brushed sawdust off his clothes, took one look at Pascal, and sat down next to his grandfather. He laid his head on Pascal’s shoulder and reminded him of how he, Pascal, had once made a small wooden boat and rigged it with a handkerchief sail and a tow string for André to sail in the pond of the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris.

  “I remember.” Pascal sucked in a long, rattling breath. “You were still in short pants. You fell and skinned your knee and let go of the string. I waded into the pond to retrieve it.”

  “Wearing your Sunday trousers.”

  “Oh, life.” A sigh erupted from some deep, private place. “I came back to Roussillon because I wanted to feel young again with my good friends, and now I feel old. How does it happen, André?”

  I held my breath, waiting, wondering, while André searched for the words. “Little by little.”

  THE SPRING AND SUMMER of 1938 slipped quietly into autumn, the diminishing season, when the cigales stopped their scratchy mating calls, laid their eggs underground, and died. Farmers left their fields fallow. Black figs disappeared from the market stalls and were replaced with Marseille figs, which Pascal called “the pope’s balls,” chuckling at my shock. Three-day rains sent Pascal and André to the café earlier than usual, where they grumbled over their apéritifs. They came home talking of men’s things, hunts for sanglier, the wild boar of the Monts de Vaucluse, while this woman’s appreciation of petals had to wait for half a year.

  There were trying days, heavy days, turbulent days. Pascal’s habits began to irritate me. He slurped his grand café and swished it around his mouth and let the bowl slam down on the table, splashing the oilcloth. Morsels of food clung to his mustache. It was unpleasant to pick them off, so I offered to trim his mustache. That brought on a fit of crying. I hadn’t meant to embarrass him.

  He was constantly clearing his throat in a guttural way, saying, “I have to tell you …,” then demanding that I stop moving even when what he wanted to relate to me flitted away like a moth.

  Apparently he overcame his humiliation about not being able to fire or point because he began going to the boules terrain again, but I suspected it was only to watch. I noticed that Monsieur Voisin, the café owner, had moved a chair with arms next to the players’ bench so Pascal could push himself up from it. After the first sign of cool weather, I insisted that he wear his winter overcoat. He fussed at me, saying that I was overdressing him, as if he were Saint George going out to slay a dragon, but he eventually relented.

  Once after he went to the café to play belote, he came home grumbling, holding on to the bent arm of a man I didn’t recognize. André greeted him as though they were acquainted and introduced him as Bernard Blanc, the garde champêtre, constable of the commune, which consisted of the village and its surrounding farms, orchards, and pastures. André invited him inside.

  “I found Pascal teetering in place de la Mairie, so I thought I had better help him home,” the constable told us.

  “Thank you. That’s very kind of you,” André said.

  Irritated, and maybe even ashamed, Pascal extricated himself from the constable’s grasp, collapsed onto a chair, and said, “Now that you’re here, young man, you might as well take a look at the paintings.”

  He did so, standing in front of each one, so tall he tilted his head down to look at them, not saying anything while André and Pascal watched him.

  “A fine collection. Are they by well-known painters?”

  “By famous painters!” Pascal bellowed. “Pissarro and Cézanne!”

  The constable nodded, as if he knew the names, but something told me he didn’t. After a few minutes, André saw him to the door and stepped outside with him, thanking him again.

  ANDRÉ AND MAURICE MOVED Pascal’s bed downstairs because Pascal complained that his sitting bones ached when he sat on the bare wood chairs. I worried on the days when he slept long hours, his breathing like pebbles pouring out of a jar, his mouth open, his head at an angle, drool darkening his shirt. With André working in the courtyard or going back and forth to Avignon, who would urge Pascal to eat if I weren’t here? Who would bathe and shave him, rub his feet, put cool cloths on his forehead when he was feverish, sit with him and listen endlessly? It was right that I was here. This was now holy ground.

  Once he risked his balance and lunged across the room, teetering toward me.

  “You won’t go back to Paris before …”

  “No, Pascal. We’ll be with you.”

  “You will be happy again in Paris.”

  “I am happy now, with you.”

  “How old am I?”

  “When were you born?”

  “In 1852.”

  “Then you’re eighty-six.”

  “Eighty-six,” he said with wonder. “Who would have thought I would live so long?”

  “And still be handsome.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one. Twenty-two in November.”

  “I want to ask you something, minette.”

  “Anything you want.”

  A bashful look came over his face and he stroked my cheek. “Will you call me Papa?”

  “Yes, Papa. I’m happy to call you Papa.” Descending softly, the word sounded both strange and right. I couldn’t remember ever saying it before, certainly never to the ghostly father who’d left me at the orphanage like a sack of grain, then went to some far-off country and died there, my mother too.

  WE KNEW WINTER HAD come when the silence of the countryside was pierced by the reports of hunters’ rifles and the raucous barking of dogs. Woodsmoke from the burning of the vines and the oily scent of olives being pressed rose to our hilltop perch. Ice crystals formed on the moss of the village washbasin. That suggested that a harder winter than the last one lay ahead. More mistrals. Colder ones.

  Pascal normally had a throw-open-the-windows-in-winter attitude, but now he complained that it was as cold in the house as it had been in the mine. He fell asleep breathing cold air, woke up choking, and struggled to say through stiff blue lips that the mine had collapsed on him. Contradicting him would make him angry or feel foolish. “How terrible! Grâce à Dieu, you weren’t killed,” I said, letting him have his imagined moment of triumphant survival.

  He drifted into
a reverie, naming the hues made from the ochres of the Usine Mathieu, the pigment factory on the outskirts of Roussillon. “Rouge pompéi, fleur de guesde, cuir de Russie. I sold them all in Paris. Jaune nankin, prune de monsieur, désir amoureux.”

  I told him I liked hearing the names.

  “Maurice was much younger, so he had to wait some years before he could work. Because he could pickax right-handed and left-handed, he was the miner of progress, like a captain, pickaxing at the farthest point of our gallery. The rest of us chiseled and scraped and dug out the ore from the walls. Fifteen meters high, those passages. We made them arch perfectly so they didn’t need wooden beams, and when you looked down the gallery line, each arch appeared smaller than the one closer. It looked like a cathedral, Lisette, and we made it. Even the life of a miner is worth living when you recognize beauty.”

  He had called the passageways galleries. “Then the mine was a showcase of your work,” I said.

  He nodded, pleased with me. “There were bats in those galleries. Scared the piss out of us when they streaked by our heads.” He chuckled at the memory, but that lasted only a minute. His expression darkened. “Some of the mines are shutting down now. You can’t tell me they aren’t. You don’t see as many men coming home wearing clothes caked with ochre. That can’t mean anything good.”

  ONE MORNING PASCAL THUDDED down his coffee bowl and pushed himself upright. “I’m going to the ochre quarries. The colors glow at this hour.”

  “No, Papa. The cliffs are too dangerous.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do. And don’t follow me.”

  I burst out crying.

  “You are too sensitive.” He slammed the door behind himself.

  André was in Avignon, repairing the massive, elaborately-tooled dining table in the Palais des Papes, and would return with the first two of the twenty-four carved chairs to mend and restore the carving at home, an important commission. He had ridden Maurice’s bus and wouldn’t be back until the next day. I fretted about Pascal’s impulsive departure, then threw on my coat and went after him.