Mr. Gwyn (15 page)

In his bed, Tom seemed to become smaller every day, and the silence in which he was surviving was like a mysterious disappearance. Every so often he turned toward the corner where he expected to see Jasper Gwyn and he always seemed relieved to find that it wasn't empty. When they took him away to do some test or other, Jasper Gwyn stared at the unmade bed and in that mess of sheets he seemed to see a form of nudity so extreme that it no longer needed a body.

He worked by weaving together memories and what he could now see in Tom that he had never seen. Not for a moment did it cease to be a difficult and painful activity. Nothing was like the studio, in the embrace of David Barber's music, and every rule he had established there was impossible. He didn't have his pieces of paper, he missed the Catherine de Médicis, and it was hard to think amid all those objects that he hadn't chosen. The time was insufficient, the moments of solitude rare. Noteworthy was the possibility of failure.

Yet the evening before the operation, around eleven, Jasper Gwyn asked if there was a computer, in the ward, where he could write something. He ended up in an administrative office, where they gave him a desk and the password for the employee's PC. It wasn't a normal procedure and they kept emphasizing it. On the desk were two framed photographs and a sad collection of windup mice. Jasper Gwyn adjusted the chair, which was annoyingly high. He saw with disgust that the keyboard was dirty, and intolerably so on the most frequently used keys. He would have thought the opposite should happen. He got up, turned off the overhead light, and returned to the mice. He turned on the desk lamp. He began to write.

Five hours later he got up and tried to figure out where the hell the printer was, which, he heard very clearly, was spitting out his portrait. It's odd where people put the printer in offices where there's only one printer for everyone. He had to turn on the overhead light to find it, and he discovered that he had nine pages, printed in a font he didn't especially like, paginated with margins of an offensive banality. Everything was wrong, but also everything was as it should be—a hasty precision, in which the luxury of details was removed. He didn't re-read, he merely numbered the pages. He had printed two copies: he folded one in four, put it in his pocket, and with the other in his hand he went to Tom's room.

It must have been four in the morning, he didn't even check. In the room there was only a single, fairly warm light, at the head of the bed. Tom was sleeping with his head turned to one side. The machines connected to him every so often communicated something and did it by emitting small, hateful sounds. Jasper Gwyn brought a chair to the bed. It made no sense, but he placed a hand on Tom's shoulder and began to shake him. It wasn't the kind of thing that would please a passing nurse, he realized. He brought his mouth to Tom's ear and uttered his name a few times. Tom opened his eyes.

“I wasn't sleeping,” he said. “I was only waiting. What time is it?”

“I don't know. Late.”

“Did you do it?”

Jasper Gwyn held the nine sheets in his hand. He placed them on the bed.

“It came out a little long,” he said. “When you're in a hurry it always comes out a little long, you know.”

They talked softly and had the air of boys who are stealing something.

Tom held the sheets of paper in his hand and glanced at them. Maybe he read the first lines. He had raised his head off the pillow, with the appearance of making a tremendous effort. But in his eyes there was something alert that no one had ever seen, in that hospital. He let his head fall back on the pillow and extended the pages to Jasper Gwyn.

“Okay. Read.”

“Me?”

“Do I have to call the nurse?”

Jasper Gwyn had imagined something different. Like Tom reading it while he went home, finally, to take a shower. He was always a little late to admit the bare reality of things.

He took the pages. He hated reading things he had written out loud—reading them
to others
. It had always seemed to him a shameless act. But he began to do it, trying to do it well—with the necessary slowness and care. Many sentences seemed to him imprecise, but he forced himself to read everything just as he had written it. Every so often Tom chuckled. Once he made a gesture to stop him. Then he let him understand that he could continue. Jasper Gwyn read the last page even more slowly, and to tell the truth it seemed to him perfect.

At the end, he arranged the pages, folded them in two, and placed them on the bed.

The machines continued to emit inscrutable messages, with a vaguely military obtuseness.

“Come here,” said Tom.

Jasper Gwyn bent over him. Now they were really close. Tom pulled an arm out from under the covers and rested one hand on his friend's head. On the nape. Then he hugged him—he leaned his friend's head against his shoulder and held it there. He moved his fingers slightly, as if to be sure of something.

“I knew,” he said.

He pressed his fingers lightly on his friend's neck.

Jasper Gwyn left when Tom fell asleep. One hand was lying on the portrait, and to Jasper Gwyn it looked like the hand of a child.

51

Rebecca was in the office when the news arrived that Tom hadn't made it. She got up and without even taking her things went out to the street. She walked quickly, as she never did, sure of what street to take and oblivious of everything around her. She arrived at Jasper Gwyn's house and rang the bell. Her desire for that door to open was so persistent that the door, finally, opened. Rebecca said nothing but threw herself into Jasper Gwyn's arms, the only place in the world where, she had decided, it would be right to cry and not stop for hours.

As often happens, it took a while to remember that, when someone dies, it's incumbent on others to live for him, too—there's nothing else appropriate.

52

So the fourth portrait Jasper Gwyn did was of the only friend he had, a few hours before he died.

Then it was hard to start again, for many predictable reasons, but also because of the unexpected sensation that making those portraits had also been a way of challenging a person who wasn't there anymore, and through whom, probably, he had been persuaded to challenge that whole world of books he wanted to escape. Now he had no one to convince except himself, and the privacy in which he had always imagined his career as a copyist had become a sort of secret battle, almost without witnesses. He began to get somewhat accustomed to the idea that it was so, and to regain the clarity of a necessary desire. He had to go back to remember the purity of what he was looking for, and the cleanness he wished for, in the heart of his own talent. He did it calmly, letting the joy he knew re-emerge by itself—the desire. Then, gradually, he went back to work.

The fifth portrait was the one he had to do of the boy who painted, and he didn't like it at all because he had to start again from the beginning—a thing objectively doomed to failure. The sixth he did for a forty-two-year-old actor with a very strange body, like a bird's, and a memorable face, as if carved out of wood. The seventh was two very rich young people who had just married and insisted on posing together. The eighth he did for a doctor who for six months a year sailed on merchant ships, all around the world. The ninth was a woman who wanted to forget everything, except herself and four poems of Verlaine—in French. The tenth was a tailor who had dressed the Queen, without being especially proud
of it. The eleventh was a girl—and that was the mistake.

Rebecca, who in choosing the candidates tried to protect Jasper Gwyn from unsuitable subjects, had in fact never met her. But there was a reason: the father had come to her, and he was not just anyone but Mr. Trawley, the retired antiques dealer, the first man in the world who had agreed to spend money to have a portrait made by Jasper Gwyn. The girl was his youngest daughter, her name was Audrey. With the courtesy and civility that Rebecca recalled appreciating when she met him, Mr. Trawley had explained that his daughter was a difficult girl and he was convinced that a singular experience like the one he had had in Jasper Gwyn's studio would perhaps help her find a truce—he said it exactly like that—where she could regain some serenity. He added that whatever Jasper Gwyn wrote in her portrait would provide for his daughter a path clearer than any reflection in the mirror and more persuasive than any lesson.

Rebecca discussed it with Jasper Gwyn and together they decided that he could do it. The girl was nineteen. She came into the studio on a Monday in May. Sixteen months had passed since he had done her father.

53

Her nakedness was like a challenge—her young body a weapon. She talked often, and although Jasper Gwyn showed no sign of answering and was repeatedly driven to explain to her that silence was indispensable to the success of the portrait, every day she started talking again. She wasn't recounting anything, she wasn't trying to
describe something: she chanted a perpetual hatred, and an indiscriminate cruelty. She was magnificent, not at all childish, and powerfully animal. For days she insulted, in a ferocious yet graceful way, her parents. Then she digressed briefly on school and her friends, but it was clear that she did it hastily, imprecisely, because she was aiming at something else. Jasper Gwyn had given up silencing her, and had grown used to considering her voice a detail of her body, only more intimate than others and in some way more dangerous—a claw. He didn't pay attention to what she said, but that caustic singsong became so vivid and seductive that it made David Barber's sound cloud seem vaguely useless, if not actually irritating. On the twelfth day the girl reached the point she had been aiming at, that is, him. She began to attack him, verbally, flare-ups alternating with silences in which she merely stared at him with unbearable intensity. Jasper Gwyn became incapable of working, and as his thoughts spun vainly he reached the point of understanding that there was something tremendously perverse and seductive in that aggression. He wasn't sure he could defend himself against it. He withstood it for two days, and on the third he didn't show up at the studio. Nor did he for the four days that followed. He returned on the fifth day, almost sure he wouldn't find her, and strangely disturbed by the idea of not being wrong. But she was there. She was silent the whole time. Jasper Gwyn felt, for the first time, that she had a dangerous beauty. He began working again, but with a troubling confusion in his head.

That evening, at home, he got a phone call from Rebecca. Something unpleasant had happened. In an afternoon tabloid, there had appeared, without specific proof but in the usual vulgar tone, a curious story about a writer who made portraits, in a studio behind
Marylebone High Street. It left out his name, but it mentioned the cost of the portraits (slightly inflated), and there were many details about the studio. There was a malicious paragraph about the nudity of the models and another that described incense, soft lighting, and new age music. According to the tabloid, having a portrait done in that manner had become, in a certain high London society, the fashion of the moment.

Jasper Gwyn had always feared something like this. But over time he and Rebecca had understood that the way of working in that studio led people to become extremely jealous of their own portraits and instinctively inclined not to damage the beauty of the experience with something that invaded the private sphere of their memory. They talked about it a little, but of all the people who had been in the studio, they couldn't think of one who would have taken the trouble to contact a tabloid and cause that mess. It was inevitable, finally, to think of the girl. Jasper Gwyn hadn't said anything about what was happening with her in the studio, but Rebecca by now could read every little detail and it hadn't escaped her that something wasn't working as usual. She tried to ask questions and Jasper Gwyn confined himself to remarking that the girl had a very special talent for spite. He wouldn't add anything else. They decided that Rebecca would monitor how the rumor circulated in the media and that for the moment the only thing to do was go back to work.

Jasper Gwyn returned to the studio the next day with the vague impression of being a lion tamer entering a cage. He found the girl sitting on the floor, in the corner where he usually squatted. She was writing something on the cream-colored pages of his notebook.

54

Nothing much came of that story in the other papers, and Rebecca looked for Jasper Gwyn to reassure him, but she couldn't find him. He showed up after a few days, and had little to say, only that everything was fine. Rebecca knew him well enough not to insist. She stopped looking for him. She cut out the articles, just a few, from papers that had picked up the story. She said to herself that all in all it had gone well. She worked in a tiny office that Jasper Gwyn had found for her, a pleasant cubby, not far from his house. She met with three candidates (all three had read the tabloid) but none of them truly convinced her. A week passed, she waited for what always happened when the inscrutable will of the Catherine de Médicis decided that the time was up. In a few days Jasper Gwyn would deliver to her a copy of the portrait. She would then summon the client, who would come to get it, settle the bill, and give back the key to the studio. It was all habitual and repetitive, and she liked that. Only this time Jasper Gwyn was late in showing up, and instead one morning Mr. Trawley appeared. He had to say that, according to his daughter the Catherine de Médicis had gone out, and had done so in a rather elegant fashion, but the truth was that when that happened Jasper Gwyn had not been to the studio for nine days. His daughter hadn't failed to go there every afternoon, but she hadn't seen him. Now Mr. Trawley wondered if he should do something particular or just wait. He wasn't worried, but he had preferred to come in person to determine whether everything had gone well.