Mistral's Daughter (3 page)

As Maggy was
about to reply she felt a hand fall on her arm and turn her around abruptly.
"What have we here?" Two men were looking at her. The one who had
spoken was shorter than she, dressed in a dandy's piped jacket and perfectly
pressed trousers, a stickpin in his tie and a straw hat tipped to one side of
his head.
 
He had small, clever eyes and
a grin that showed tiny, yellow teeth.
 
The second man was as monumental as the massive tree trunk against which
he leaned.
 
His eyes, as blue as open
water, were disconcerting in the steadiness and the fixity of their gaze.
 
He was six feet four inches tall, and there
was a wild, yet noble air about him that was doubly startling in this crowded
city scene because it was untamed by urban custom or consideration.
 
He might have been a mountain climber
surveying the world below from the height of a conquered peak.
 
He had a splendid head set arrogantly on a
thick, strong neck, a broad open brow, a dominant, high-bridged, confident
nose and a wide mouth.
 
His hair was dark
red, curly and unkempt.
 
As he looked
appraisingly at Maggy he had the air of a gallant, battle-bound cavalier riding
out of the past, in spite of his workingman's brown corduroy trousers and
open-necked blue shirt.

"Mistral," the
smaller man said to him, "what do you think?"
 
He put his hand under Maggy's chin and slowly
turned her head from one side to another.
 
"Very interesting, eh?
 
The
eyes
—
a most curious color.
 
And
decidedly there's something unusual
—
even odd
—
about this
mouth, just a touch cannibalistic, wouldn't you say?
 
Van Dongen couldn't make much of it." He
fingered Maggy's hair as if it were fabric in a shop, rubbing it between his
thumb and index finger.
 
"Hmmm-at
least it's clean and she hasn't cut it."

Maggy stood rigid in
shock.
 
No man had touched her like this
in her lifetime. In automatic self-defense she focused on a neutral object,
three bunches of leeks the taller man was carrying under his arm as if they
were a book. As the shorter man's fingers lifted her hair away from her ears so
that he could inspect her profile, she stepped forward, reached out and
snatched a big white leek by its hairy, grayish roots. She held it up to her
mouth and bit the vegetable cleanly in half, its long green leaves falling to
the pavement. The man in the piped vest, Vadim Legrand, known to all as
"Vava," let his hand fall as he watched her chewing. She took another
bite. "You could say 'please,' " said Julien Mistral.

"When you look at the
animals in the zoo, you must also feed them," Maggy answered, her jaw
moving vigorously.
 
Mistral didn't smile.

"Mistral," Vava
said with an air of decision, "I'm going to take her into the academy and
see what she looks like.
 
Come
on."
 
He motioned to Maggy to follow
him into the painting academy of La Grande Chaumière, a few steps away.

"Why? You've been
looking at me.
 
What more do you
want?" Maggy demanded.

"He wants to see your
tits," the boy told her with an air of importance.

"In there? Now?"
she asked, bewildered.

The boy's mother laughed with
malice. "Get your ass moving, my girl. Go strip down in any empty
classroom just like the rest of us. Do you think you're hiding something
special that they've never seen before?
 
Oh, these debutantes!
 
She thinks
it's made of mother-of-pearl."

"Are you coming or
aren't you? Make up your mind," Vava insisted. "I don't really need a
model today."

"Yes," Maggy heard
herself saying. "Of course."

She turned and followed him
rapidly, trying to get out of sight of the crowd of models before they could
notice the wave of heat she felt rising on her face, the blush that tormented
her life.

"Wait up, Vava."
Mistral passed her in one stride and stopped the smaller artist. "I'll
take this girl."

"I saw her first."

"What the hell
difference does that make?
 
Do you have
me confused with someone who gives a shit, Vava?"

Vava gave his yellow
grin.
 
"That makes a dozen times
you've done this to me."

"When I want something,
not merely to annoy you."

"Ah, bravo!
 
That's as close to an apology that anyone has
ever had from you, Mistral.
 
Take her.
 
Take her!
 
I have to work on the portrait of Madame Blanche anyway.
 
Nobody buys your stuff so you have the time
to indulge your curiosity; just tell me, can you afford to pay a model?"

"Who the hell can?
 
But I can't afford to spend my time doing
flattering portraits of rich women either,"
 
Mistral said with indifference, not caring
if Vava was insulted or not.

"Come along,"
Mistral said to Maggy, giving Vava's hand a quick shake of farewell.
 
He took out his pocketknife, sliced the roots
off another leek, handed it to her, and began to walk down the boulevard du
Montparnasse without turning to see if she was following.
 
Maggy took the leek and tucked it like a
handkerchief into the pocket of
the young boy who had talked to her, and
rushed after him, whistling a phrase from the melody of the Java
—
an
insistent catchy dance tune that she had heard the night before, floating up
to her window from the open door of the
bal musette
next to her
cheap hotel.

Julien Mistral was in a
filthy mood as he took the shortcuts to his studio on the boulevard Arago.
 
For years now he'd been pounding at his
painting as if he were a convict in chains, given a mighty rock and a small
hammer and ordered to reduce the rock to dust.
 
He was engaged in the struggle that had become his only goal from the
day he had walked out of a class in the École des Beaux-Arts of the Sorbonne
and decided to paint his own way, to paint from his feelings and not from his
brain.
 
In the four years since that day,
Mistral had found that it was almost impossible to turn off his head, to escape
from the narrow prison of French education, to go freely beyond the classicism
that has always dominated the core of French painting.
 
He was consumed with the attempt to get the
paint on the canvas
without
the rule of his trained French brain.

The tall man hurried under
the ancient trees of the park of the Cochin hospital, ignoring the girl who had
to run to keep up with him.
 
He forgot
her existence as he thought wrathfully of the exhibition he had visited with
Vava earlier that morning.

Even that bugger Matisse,
even
he
is
stuck in chess playing, not painting.
 
He uses the contrast of two colors to create
a third color
—
one that just isn't
there,
damn his eyes
—
why doesn't he call himself a mathematician and be done with it?
 
Or an interior decorator?
 
And as for that damned acrobat Picasso and
his friend Braque, gray, boring, imitative,
dreary
Braque, the
two of them are no better
—
chasing Cézanne's bullshit about reducing
all nature into a cone, a square and a circle, beating it right down into the
ground until they drain out all the life, all the air
—
to the lowest
circle of hell with all of them!

He was so angry that he
walked right past number 65 and only realized that he had passed his
destination after half a block.
 
He
turned abruptly, with a curse, and, with Maggy close on his heels, flung
through the open doors that led to a covered passage.

The artists'
cité
of
the boulevard Arago, built in 1878, was like a village in Normandy.
 
A cobbled street led to rows of two-story,
half-timbered houses with high gabled roofs and walls of glass.
 
Long gravel walks bordered an overgrown
garden filled with apple trees, hollyhocks and geraniums.
 
Each of the small studios also had its own
small private garden, enclosed by boxwood hedges and low gates.

Maggy followed Mistral as he
climbed three steep steps and opened his front door.
 
He went to his shambles of a kitchen and
looked angrily about for a place to put the leeks while she stood just inside
the doorway, intimidated by his silence and the way he seemed to project
himself through the air as if it were an enemy.
 
She was flushed from the long, fast walk, her chin tilted high to cover
her sudden and inhabitual shyness.

Finally, Mistral threw the
leeks on the floor and turned into the big studio, jerking his head at Maggy to
follow him.
 
She looked around in
amazement.
 
Everywhere there were canvases
and everywhere there was color, such color as she had never seen before, such
color as she had not known existed within any walls of any room, color on which
she felt she could swim as on a great river.
 
There were rainbows and clouds and stars and giant flowers;
 
there were children and circuses and
pinwheels;
 
there were soldiers and naked
women and flags and horses jumping and a fallen jockey and always there was the
river of color torn from the sun itself.

"That's the
bedroom," Mistral told her, pointing the way. "Go get ready. The
robe's in there." Maggy found herself in a small room containing little
more than a bed.
 
On a hook behind the
door hung the dusty red silk kimono Mistral kept for models.

Maggy took off her skirt and
blouse, folded them neatly and put them on the bed.
 
She stopped, dry-mouthed.
 
"Painters paint skin," she told
herself in a panic, turning to her high school art lessons for
reassurance.
 
"Rubens painted
mountains of white skin with red patches. Rembrandt painted yellow-green
skin.
 
Boucher painted pink and white
skin.
 
Skin is the single most painted
substance in the history of painting."
 
With shaking fingers she unrolled her lovely new silk stockings.
 
"Painters are like doctors
—
a
body is only a body
—
an object, not a person," she told herself in
a rising inner wail.

Many times in her life Maggy
had propelled herself into a situation through which only her inborn
self-confidence could carry her.
 
She had
realized, when she first determined to run away to Paris and become an artists'
model, that of course she would have to pose naked.
 
With her usual bravado she had decided that
she could do it, and gone on with her plans.

Now, on a sunny morning in
May, she found herself shivering and trembling and sweating all at once.
 
She had reckoned without taking into account
her life's experience.
 
No man had ever
seen her naked, not even a doctor, since she'd never been sick in her life.

She tried to whistle a phrase
from the tune of last night's Java as, with frantic resolution, she let the
straps of her chemise slip off her shoulders, but her mouth was too parched by
fear to whistle as she shrugged out of the garment she had only possessed for a
few days, her first grown-up underwear.
 
Underneath the white batiste chemise, oh, the shame of it, she had on
only a new pair of widelegged, white knickers, as flimsy as the new style
dictated.
 
Nothing, no power on earth,
could make her take them off she realized.

"What the hell is taking
so long?" Mistral called roughly from the studio.

"Coming," she
answered faintly.
 
The impatience of his
voice made her throw on the kimono over the knickers and wrap it tightly around
her waist.
 
The floor was so cold under
her bare feet that she put her shoes back on.
 
Flustered, she fumbled with the little buttons, gave up and walked out
of the bedroom with the straps of her shoes flapping and making a little noise
at each step she took.
 
She stopped ten
feet away from Mistral, who stood ready before an easel, and waited for
instructions.
 
All the light of the room
was sucked toward the clash of her orange hair and the red Japanese silk.

"Go stand by the window,
one hand on the back of that chair."
 
She obeyed and stood very still.

"For Christ's sake, the
kimono," Mistral snapped.

Maggy bit the inside of her
lip and felt her hands trembling as she undid the sash and let the robe fall to
the floor.

Maggy had broad shoulders and
the long vertical curve of her neck, as it met the sweeping horizontal of her
collarbones, was strong and passionate.
 
Her breasts were tenderly alive, so young that they were almost like
cones, high and well separated, with tiny nipples that stood out in firm
points.
 
The line of her rib cage from
armpit to waist had a fine tension and a perfect clarity.
 
Her skin was so polished, so white, that .it
drew the lapping, splashing light into it and then reflected it back so that
she glowed as if she were illuminated from within.