Mr. Gwyn (8 page)

“Tomorrow I'll send you Rebecca. In the Laundromat, as usual?”

“Maybe a somewhat quieter place would be better.”

“The bar of the Stafford Hotel, then. At five?”

“All right.”

“Don't stand her up.”

“No.”

“Did I already tell you I love you?”

“Not tonight.”

“Strange.”

They spent another ten minutes talking nonsense. A couple of sixteen-year-olds.

24

The next day, at five, Jasper Gwyn appeared at the Stafford Hotel, but only out of courtesy, because in the meantime he had decided
to forget about it, having reached the conclusion that the idea of talking to that girl was completely outside his ability. Still, when Rebecca arrived, he chose a quiet table, right against a window that looked onto the street, and the first remarks—about the weather and the traffic that at that hour made everything impossible—weren't difficult. Eager to order a whiskey, he ordered an apple juice with ice instead and remembered some little pastries they did very well there. “For me, coffee,” said Rebecca. Like all truly fat people, she didn't touch pastries. She was radiant, in her aimless beauty.

First they talked about things that had nothing to do with it, just to take the measure of things, as one does. Rebecca said that elegant hotels intimidated her somewhat, but Jasper Gwyn pointed out how there are few things in the world as nice as hotel lobbies.

“The people who come and go,” he said. “And all those secrets.”

Then he let out a confession, something he didn't usually do, and said that in another life he would like to be a hotel lobby.

“You mean
work
in a lobby?”

“No, no,
be
a lobby, physically. Even in a three-star hotel, it doesn't matter.”

Then Rebecca laughed, and when Jasper Gwyn asked her what she thought she'd like to be in the next life, she said, “An anorexic rock star,” and she seemed to have had the answer ready forever.

So after a while everything was simpler, and Jasper Gwyn thought he could try it, say what he had in mind. He took a slightly roundabout route, but that was, in any case, his way of doing things.

“May I ask if you trust me, Rebecca? I mean, are you sure that you're sitting across from a well-brought-up person who would never put you in situations that are, let's say, disagreeable?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Because I'd like to ask you something rather strange.”

“Go ahead.”

Jasper Gwyn chose a pastry, he was searching for the right words.

“You see, I recently decided to try to make portraits.”

The girl bowed her head almost imperceptibly.

“Naturally I don't know how to paint, and in fact what I have in mind is to
write
portraits. I don't even know myself exactly what that means, but I intend to try it, and I had the idea that I would like to start by making a portrait of you.”

The girl remained impassive.

“So what I would like to ask you, Rebecca, is if you would be willing to pose for me, in my studio, pose for a portrait. To get an idea, you could think of what would happen with a painter, or a photographer, it wouldn't be very different, that's the situation, if you can imagine it.”

He paused.

“Shall I continue, or would you prefer to stop here?”

The girl leaned slightly toward the table and picked up the coffee cup. But she didn't bring it to her mouth right away.

“Continue,” she said.

So Jasper Gwyn explained to her.

“I've taken a studio, behind Marylebone High Street, an enormous, peaceful room. I've put a bed in it, two chairs, not much else. A wooden floor, old walls—a nice place. What I would like is for you to come there, four hours a day for thirty days, from four in the afternoon till eight in the evening. Without skipping a day, not even
Sunday. I would like you to arrive punctually and, whatever happens, stay for four hours, posing, which for me means, simply, being looked at. You won't have to stay in a position that I choose, just be in that room, wherever you'd like, walking or lying down, sitting where you feel like. You won't have to answer questions or talk, and I won't ever ask you to do something particular. Shall I keep going?”

“Yes.”

“I'd like you to pose nude, because I think it's an inevitable condition for the success of the portrait.”

This he had prepared in front of the mirror. The woman in the rain scarf had honed the words for him.

The girl still had the cup in her hand. Every so often she brought it to her lips but without ever making the decision to drink from it.

Jasper Gwyn took a key out of his pocket and placed it on the table.

“What I'd like is for you to take this key and use it to enter the studio, every day at four in the afternoon. It doesn't matter what I do, you should forget about me. Imagine that you're alone, in there, the whole time. I ask you only to leave precisely at eight in the evening, and lock the door behind you. When we've finished, you'll give me back the key. Drink your coffee, or it will get cold.”

The girl looked at the cup she was holding as if she were seeing it for the first time. She put it down on the saucer without drinking.

“Go on,” she said. Something had stiffened in her, somewhere.

“I talked to Tom about it. He agreed to give you a leave for those thirty, thirty-five days, at the end of which you'll go back to work at the agency. I know it would be a huge commitment for you, so I propose the sum of five thousand pounds to compensate you for
the inconveniences it may cause and for your kindness in putting yourself at my disposal. One last thing, which is important. If you agree, you mustn't talk about it with anyone: it's work that I intend to carry out in the quietest possible way, and I have no interest in having the newspapers or anyone else finding out anything about it. You and Tom and I would be the only ones to know, and for me it's extremely important that it should remain between us. There, I think I've told you everything. I remembered them being better, these pastries.”

The girl smiled and turned toward the window. She watched the people passing for a moment, every so often following one with her gaze. Then she stared again at Jasper Gwyn.

“If I do, will I be able to bring books with me?” she asked.

Jasper Gwyn was surprised by his own answer.

“No.”

“Music?”

“No. I think you should simply be with yourself, that's all. For an entirely unreasonable time.”

The girl nodded, she seemed to understand.

“I suppose,” she said, “that the nudity part is pointless to discuss.”

“Believe me, it will be more embarrassing for me than for you.”

The girl smiled.

“No, it's not that…”

She lowered her head. She smoothed some wrinkles in her skirt.

“The last time someone asked to look at me it didn't go very well.”

She made a gesture with her hand, as if she were chasing something away.

“But I've read your books,” she said. “You I trust.”

Jasper Gwyn smiled at her.

“Would you like to think about it for a few days?”

“No.”

She leaned forward and took the key that Jasper Gwyn had placed on the table.

“Let's try,” she said.

They sat in silence, with their thoughts, like a couple who have been in love for a long time and no longer need to speak.

That night Jasper Gwyn did something ridiculous, he stood naked in front of the mirror and looked at himself for a long time. He did it because he was sure that Rebecca was doing the same thing, at her house, at that same moment.

The next day they went together to visit the studio. Jasper Gwyn explained to her about the key and everything. He explained to her that he would work with the windows darkened by the wooden shutters and the lights turned on. He insisted that she not turn them off when she went out. He told her he had promised an old man never to do it. She didn't ask him anything, but pointed out that there were no lights. They're about to arrive, said Jasper Gwyn. She lay down on the bed, and stayed there for a while, staring at the ceiling. Jasper Gwyn began to arrange something upstairs, where the bathroom was: he didn't want to be with her, in silence, in that studio, before the time was right. He came down only when he heard her steps on the wooden floor.

Before she left Rebecca gave a last glance around.

“Where will you be?” she asked.

“Forget about me. I don't exist.”

Rebecca smiled, and made a face, as if to say yes, she understood, and sooner or later she would get used to it.

They agreed that they could start the following Monday.

25

Altogether, two years, three months, and twelve days had passed since Jasper Gwyn had communicated to the world that he was going to stop writing. Whatever effect it had had on his public image, he wasn't aware of. The mail went, by a long-standing custom, to Tom, and sometime earlier Jasper Gwyn had asked him not even to send it on, since he had stopped opening it. He rarely read newspapers, he never went on the Internet. In fact, since he had published the list of the fifty-two things he would never do again, Jasper Gwyn had slipped into an isolation that others might have interpreted as a decline but that he tended to experience as a relief. He was convinced that after twelve years of unnatural public exposure, made inevitable by his profession as a writer, he was owed a form of convalescence. He imagined, probably, that when he started to work again, in his new job as a copyist, all the pieces of his life would reawaken and would be reassembled into a newly presentable picture. So when Jasper Gwyn left the house that Monday, it was with the certainty that he was entering not simply into the first day of a new job but into a new period of his existence. This explains why, coming out, he headed resolutely toward his regular barber, with the precise intention of having his head shaved.

He was lucky. It was closed for renovations.

So he wasted a little time and at ten appeared in the workshop of the old man in Camden Town, the one with the light bulbs. They had settled things on the phone. The old man took from a corner an old Italian pasta box that he had sealed with wide green tape and said that it was ready. In the taxi he didn't want to stick it in the trunk, and he held it on his legs the whole way. Given that it was quite a large box but one whose contents were obviously light, there was something eerie about the agility with which he got out of the taxi and went up the few steps that led to Jasper Gwyn's studio.

When he entered he stood still for a moment, without putting down the box.

“I was here once.”

“Do you like vintage motorcycles?”

“I don't even know what they are.”

They opened the box cautiously and took out the eighteen Catherine de Médicis. They were wrapped individually in very soft tissue paper. Jasper Gwyn got the ladder he had bought from an Indian around the corner and then stepped out of the way. The old man took an unreasonably long time, by moving the ladder, and climbing up, and climbing down, but in the end he achieved the hoped-for effect of eighteen Catherine de Médicis installed in eighteen sockets hanging from the ceiling in a geometric arrangement. Even turned off they made a good show.

“Will you turn them on?” asked Jasper Gwyn, after closing the shutters on the windows.

“Yes, it would be better,” the old man said, as if an inexact pressure on the switch could possibly compromise everything.
Probably, in his sick artisan's mind, it did.

He approached the electrical panel, and with his gaze fixed on his bulbs pressed the switch.

They were silent for a moment.

“Did I tell you I wanted red?” asked Jasper Gwyn, bewildered.

“Quiet.”

For some reason that Jasper Gwyn was unable to understand, the light bulbs, which went on in a brilliant red color that transformed the studio into a bordello, slowly faded until they stabilized at a shade between amber and blue that could not be described as anything other than
childlike
.

The old man muttered something, satisfied.

“Incredible,” said Jasper Gwyn. He was genuinely moved.

Before leaving, he turned on the system that David Barber had prepared for him, and in the big room a current of sounds began to flow that apparently dragged along, at an astonishingly slow rate, piles of dry leaves and hazy harmonies of children's wind instruments. Jasper Gwyn gave a last glance around. It was all ready.

“Not to pry into your business, but what do you do in here?” asked the old man.

“I work. I'm a copyist.”

The old man nodded. He was noticing that there was no desk in the room and, instead, a bed and two armchairs were visible. But he knew that every craftsman has his particular style.