The Mask Carver's Son (23 page)

I
arrived at Raphael Collin’s studio the following Thursday. He stood in the entranceway, sliced from the shadows, his voluminous beard flowing like a waterfall of white. He was a tall man with a thin build and generous, thick gray curls parted in the middle. His eyebrows were platinum and full, the thick tufts of hair offsetting his dark eyes.

“I have been waiting for you,” he said, and his voice seemed refreshingly kind. His tall, slender body leaned on a long ebony walking stick; its carved ivory handle, in the shape of a small mongoose, fit snugly in his palm.

I bowed reverently to him, so deep that my black hair nearly grazed the floor.

“You must be Yamamoto Kiyoki,” he said, and he bowed his head in return, not extending his hand for the customary shake.

I followed him through two large doors as tall as elm trees, the veins of the wood running through them like rivers. I thought of Father. Touched the wood as I walked past and remembered the sensation of cypress. Recalled its high green smell and, for a brief moment, forgot where I was.

“Monsieur Yamamoto,” Collin called, and I raised my head to discover a large room encircled by easels. I noticed the drop cloths speckled with paint, the tall windows with the heavy curtains drawn aside.

“I thought I would show you this room first,” he said, with his lean arm extended. “But let us walk to the second-floor parlor so we may talk in comfort.”

With my sketchbooks tucked underneath my arm and my portfolio clutched between my fingers, I walked behind him. I followed him up a small iron staircase, carefully switching my satchel so I could balance with a free hand, and arrived to a second-floor sitting room that was tastefully arranged.

“Take a seat, Monsieur Yamamoto,” he urged politely, and I awkwardly smoothed the back of my jacket before sitting in a bright red armchair. Around me, long windows were dressed in chintz, and paintings by lesser-known Academics covered the walls. My eyes darted around nervously, hoping to anchor themselves on something comforting and familiar. I noticed a small piece of Imari porcelain discreetly displayed on an end table and found comfort in its red and blue glaze.

“Might I offer you some coffee?” he asked politely.

“If it is no trouble to you.”

Collin rapped his walking stick against the wooden floor. The sound echoed throughout the room, startling me with the strength of its strike.

“Flora . . . Flora!” he called out. From behind a silk pleated screen, a woman appeared.

I was served coffee from a large silver tray. Cream and sugar were generously spooned into the porcelain cup. The steaming pot rattled nervously against the milk jug, Flora’s tiny hands gripping tenaciously at the coiled handles.

“She is my model, not the servant,” Collin said almost apologetically. He turned to her and smiled as he reached for his cup.

“I want to paint another version of
Floréal
this afternoon,” he whispered into her ear, and I caught the thin flash of her smile in the mirror behind him. She exited demurely, and I buried my face in the cup of steaming coffee.

“Have you brought any of your paintings, so that I might see your experience?” he finally asked.

I placed my cup on the table and reached for my portfolio. “Yes, sir, I have,” I answered, my voice betraying my anxious nerves.

“Well, let me take a look.” I handed him the leather folder and let him withdraw the sketches and small selection of my awkward ink paintings.

His brow now curled intensely, his small eyes focusing on my every line.

“You were studying in Tokyo, at the School of Fine Arts,
non
?”

“Yes, for nearly two years.”

“Your sketches are not bad. I especially like this one of the mountain.” He turned the paper to face me, revealing my sketch of Mount Daigo.

I felt a breeze coming through the curtains and wondered if it was the ghost of Mother.

“Have you painted in oils yet?” Collin asked.

“I have tried, but it is difficult, not knowing the proper techniques.”

“As you must already know, I instructed two of your countrymen, Kuroda Seiki and Kume Keiichiro. And I hear that Monsieur Kuroda has become quite famous back in Japan.”

He pronounced the names of my compatriots with ease, and I found myself greatly impressed.

After a few moments of contemplation, he spoke. “If you are serious about painting, Monsieur Yamamoto, I will offer you my instruction.”

I could not believe that gaining acceptance into his atelier could have been so easy.

“I am so honored, Master Collin.” I blushed.

“Don’t be. I learned a lot from my former Japanese students. They influenced my work greatly. The paintings that Kume and Kuroda did before returning to Japan revealed enormous proficiency. I really was quite pleased with their work.” He paused, looked at my eyes—wide with shock that I would be receiving instruction from this great master—and decided to change the direction of our conversation.

“Would you like a tour of the studio?”

I stood up, glad to have a chance to see once more where I would be working. I followed him carefully and respectfully, much as I imagined a small child would follow his father.

*   *   *

Collin descended the stairs gracefully, the vents of his black coat billowing behind him. When we reached the large drawing room that had been converted to the atelier for his students, he walked past the circular rows of easels and stepped onto the podium where the model typically reclined.

“This is where the students spend the majority of their day. If I do not ask them to go to the Louvre to sketch, they paint here,” he said, encircling the room with the tip of his walking stick.

The high-ceilinged, white-walled sanctuary was filled with easels and littered with short wooden stools. There were bottles of turpentine and flasks of linseed oil on the shelves. A pail of gesso stood next to the sink.

“I encourage a five-year course of study, and I insist that you learn the foundations of drawing before you begin to paint. A complete comprehension of anatomy is essential. You will never be able to paint the human form without having studied it extensively. The beginning students practice sketching from sculpture before they are allowed to join my advanced students in the classes in which I have a model. And I caution you, Monsieur Yamamoto, that itself can take up to two years.”

I nodded, trying to disguise my disappointment that I would be unable to begin painting at once. I was inspired, however, by the paintings around the studio. They revealed that Collin encouraged his students to develop their own style of painting, as long as they could support their vision with a mastery of technique.

“As for my own style,” Collin began, “I have great respect and enthusiasm for the work of the Impressionists, but I myself will always be a bit of an Academic painter. It’s my training, and I believe it mirrors my nature.

“That isn’t to say,” he continued, “that I don’t encourage my students to seek the influences surrounding us in this day and age. The work sometimes scorned by the Salon is in fact fresher and more impressive than that of a lot of the Academic painters, perhaps myself included.”

I looked at the old man standing on the podium, his white beard now fluffed with the energy produced by his exuberant mouth.

“But, Monsieur Yamamoto, I must warn you. You will probably encounter the same difficulties as Kuroda and Kume did while studying with me.”

“I am not sure I understand,” I admitted.

“During Kuroda’s and Kume’s last years with me, after they had achieved great proficiency in the techniques of the old masters and the comprehension of anatomy and perspective, I encouraged them to forsake the concept of copying and to begin cultivating their own style. This, however, proved the most challenging task for them in all their years of training.”

“In Japan, copying the masters is the only method to learn,” I said. “It is also the way we pay respect. Only when one possesses the skills necessary to replicate the techniques of our great masters has one achieved a level of excellence.”

“We train similarly, Monsieur Yamamoto, but we are expected to create something new in the process. In Europe we encourage our students not only to master the fundamentals but also to reveal their unique
vision
of a particular subject.”

His words were revolutionary to me. Originality was indeed a foreign concept to us Japanese. In the past, when I had seen reproductions of Western paintings, I only dreamed I would be given the chance to create similar paintings. Never before had I considered bringing something to the canvas that was uniquely my own.

I wondered silently if I had anything inside me to bring.

“Perhaps it might be easier if I show you what I mean,” the old man said as he descended the small model’s podium and placed a blank canvas on an easel at one side of the room.

“Have a seat on one of the stools, Monsieur Yamamoto, and make yourself comfortable.”

Collin now stood only a few strides in front of me, stationed at his easel, tall and straight. He removed a brush from one of the tins and squeezed it dry between his thumb and index finger. I watched as he effortlessly prepared his palette.

Titanium white, red ocher, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, and vermilion were neatly arranged on his palette. He dabbed the brush’s bristles into the undiffused lines of pigment and began creating subtler shades around the perimeter. He hesitated for a moment, looked at me, and then at the canvas. Then at me once more.

With a newfound intensity, his eyes returned to his palette. He cleaned his brush in a clear glass of turpentine and then gently dried it with a small white rag that had been tucked under one of the easel’s legs. Returning to his palette once more, he dipped his brush into a light brown wash, and then suspended it briefly over the stretched canvas.

He pressed the side of his brush onto the board, dragging the first stroke of color across the page. That first gesture of color. Blue-green. Like a vine of seaweed floating across a sea of white.

“Your face is quite extraordinary, Monsieur Yamamoto, even when you are standing perfectly still. It seems to change before my very eyes.”

His voice awakened me from my trance. Seeing the great master apply stroke after stroke had transfixed me. Each thin layer of pigment was built up with another. Strong color was contrasted with weak color, and the juxtaposition of complementary shades created depth. I realized I had not been concentrating on
what
Master Collin was painting, but rather
how
he was painting. What emerged from his abstract strokes and swatches of color was a portrait of me.

A strange feeling of nausea began rolling inside my stomach, as Collin stepped back to study his most recent creation.

He had painted me in my dark brown suit, each stroke feverishly rendered. My fingers were long and white, palms facing downward, stretching almost painfully over the slopes of my covered knees.

But it was my face that haunted me.

My face, painted blue-white, transparent glaze after transparent glaze, was ghostlike. My cheeks were sunken, my eyelids thin and sweeping, my gaze directed downward. Somehow Collin had inadvertently portrayed me as the very image of the Shunkan mask, the mask that we use to personify a man in exile. I was aghast.

“Is something the matter? You look ill,” Collin said, his concern revealing a deep, paternal nature.

“Oh, no, it is nothing,” I lied. “I am only nervous that I will be an inadequate student for someone who is so gifted as you.”

“Do not worry,” he said kindly. “You, Monsieur Yamamoto, will do just fine. It is the concept of originality that frightens you Japanese. In contrast, our European students suffer over precision and accuracy. The very areas in which you’ll undoubtedly excel.”

I stood up from my stool and looked past the lines of easels into the tall windows overlooking the street. The sun was beginning to set over the city. The street lanterns were just being lit. And after I bade my farewell to Collin, instead of making my way back home, I walked for hours, lost in the city’s dark haze.

W
e are all haunted. I learned that early on in my sojourn in Paris. Everyone has his ghosts. Mine belonged to the other world. I would see my mother in a cloud of lavender, her robe long and lilac. I would see my father’s gaze in the swirling grain of a block of wood.

But for men like Takada, it was different.

Whereas my ghosts swirled around me, their features often blurred, their voices forever muted, Takada’s still lived. Separated by only an ocean, their outstretched hands grasping to reach his shores.

“Yamamoto-san,” he told me one day, “I envy you.”

I looked at him, sunk in a wicker chair at the café, and wondered how my friend could possibly envy a lonely, mediocre exile like me.

“You have nothing calling you back. No family. No obligations.”

“I did leave someone behind,” I confessed.

“Love evades me, my friend.” And he looked into his coffee, stirring with the spoon as if it were a bowl of tea leaves capable of foretelling his future.

“Why do you wrap yourself in such sadness?” I asked him, somewhat confused. Emotion articulated always made me uncomfortable. Because, deep down inside, that was what I craved.

“I have received a letter. My father has requested that I return to Japan.”

“Can you not ask for an extension of your studies?”

“He has already begun investigating future brides for me. An arranged marriage awaits me. A career in politics is already secured.”

He tapped his chest, and I could see the faint outline of an envelope behind the fabric of his jacket.

“When I return, my life will be unbearable. Married to a woman I do not love. Shackled to a career in which I have no interest. Such is my fate! I cannot bear it!”

Takada’s glasses slipped from the bridge of his nose. His pink cheeks inflated with angst, his speech filled with a mixture of ire and despair.

“I envy you, Yamamoto-san, because you are free. There is no such struggle in your life.”

Only I knew how very wrong he was. As he spoke, I saw myself once again at the
genkan
, my father standing there like dead timber. Watched as he pressed the shard of dried plum wood into my palm. And wondered if such a thing was even possible. That one day I could be
free
. Free of my memory.

“My struggle is with ghosts, as real to me as your own parents,” I said over my steaming cup. “They too hold me tight. So do not envy me.”