The Portrait (3 page)

I think Lidewij was shocked by his tone.

I'm an idiot, too, he said. A Piet`a — I just blurted something out, and that bimbo took it seriously. No sense of irony whatsoever. Anyway, she promised she wouldn't put it in the interview.

I don't know where the conversation went from there, because suddenly I was completely overcome.

A Piet`a!

Meant ironically — but still, a Piet`a!

I really didn't have the slightest idea of what it might be: the only works of art I had ever seen in my whole life were a few of Creator's portraits in progress and the reproduction of flaming sunflowers that had hung diagonally opposite me in Van Schendel's.

During that first phase of my existence, I found it extremely difficult to get used to the idea that we canvases are not the only supports for images. It is possible to print entire pictures on much smaller surfaces. I even discovered that a likeness of a canvas can be recorded on a minuscule, shiny support called a photo or a Polaroid.

And one day I heard a woman who was about to sit for Creator talk about a support I never really fathomed completely. She asked Creator, Do you have a reason for not having a mirror in your salon?

This woman always called the studio a salon; it seemed to annoy Creator. When she's around I feel like a beautician, he once said to Lidewij.

Yes, I have a reason, Creator replied. Here in the studio, I'm the only one who looks.

Oh, I see, the woman replied.

I have never really managed to understand exactly what a mirror is. I deduced from the rest of the conversation that, like me, a mirror can be hung, and that people then look
in
it. But what a mirror actually represents was beyond me.

It must be something fundamentally different from what they are going to do with me, when I'm finally a painting, I thought. As far as I know, no one is ever going to look
in
me. Just
at
.

Confusing grammar. I found it a little unsettling, all the more when I realised that everyone who looks
in
the mirror sees something else. I often wondered whether I would ever understand what it was about, and it began to dawn on me that there were many things that I would never understand, simply because I didn't have any legs.

That was how I bided my time in the studio during the first and only autumn of my unpainted existence, and it became increasingly difficult for me to believe that I was ever going to amount to anything. I wasn't the only blank canvas in Withernot; in fact, there was a constant coming and going of blank canvases, always much smaller than me and always the same dimensions — ninety by seventy. They arrived by the half-dozen: modest, taciturn characters of a slightly lower quality than I, somewhere between Fine and Double Weave. They knew their fate. They would become a portrait, from just below the shoulders to the crown. They would, after their completion, be picked up relatively quickly by whoever had commissioned them; they would show a likeness first and foremost, and only then be beautiful or delightful; and they would end up in a room, on a warm wall, in a centrally heated, slightly-too-dry living room, in a life they would finally call their own.

Secretly, I pitied them: it was all so ordinary. You're ninety by seventy, Creator paints a face and shoulders on you — usually of a loving wife, or a radiant ten-year-old daughter holding a teddy bear, or, if you're lucky, of the chairman of the board of the convention centre. And through the eyes of this one face, you then view the world, hanging over a sofa, or in the curve of a staircase, or on the boardroom wall.

I knew I shouldn't think like that. My year in Van Schendel's had ennobled me and taught me to dream. I had been spared their format. But I was still uneasy. I admit it with reluctance. I had come to realise that, in the life of a canvas like me, only one thing counts. Even when you don't become a Piet`a, there is still that one question: Who was going to be painted on me? Who would I become? Whose countenance would become my countenance? Yes, it's true, words like that ran through my mind. Countenance. As if it was on special. Through whose eyes would I observe the world?

I told myself a thousand times, What difference does not becoming something make if you don't even know what that thing is? But it didn't help. Ever since that warm afternoon in October, I had felt an inexplicable regret. I realised that Creator would never carry out his plan, but I had no idea why not. No more than I understood why he had ever conceived the plan in the first place.

You can't follow them, people who want to make something they don't understand. The unknown can only slip through their fingers; I understood that much. They recoil from their deepest convictions.

If I was ever to become something, one day, it would not be what was intended.

A few days later, I was dragged back from the gates of hell. Don't ask me how. Creator was asked whether he would like to paint Cindy. Yes, that's the one, the wife of Fokke Ponsen, of Procter Poldermol, with whom she would soon be celebrating their first anniversary. Once again that year, Ponsen had made it into the top ten of the Dutch rich list.

Cindy was the first facelifted person that Creator would paint.

During the first interview, when specifying the details of the commission, he tried to approach her like anyone else — but he kept getting the feeling, as he told Lidewij afterwards, that if he accepted Cindy he would
not be painting
from life
. With her corrected mouth, her accentuated nostrils, her pulled-back cheeks, and her smoothed frown, it was, he said, as if Cindy was already a portrait. He was not happy about it at all, because he had already accepted the job; or, at least, he hadn't rejected it, such that it would be very awkward for him to turn it down now.

And damaging, he said, at this stage.

He meant: Now that Aunt Drea really is headed for a nursing home and we — if we want to buy Withernot — need to make as much money as we possibly can.

In moments like these, he always said ‘we'.

It seemed to me that the interview with Minke was still preying on his mind, and he kept thinking of her question — whether he got sick to death of all these blasé characters.

And then, suddenly, in Lidewij's presence, he made a decision and swore. I don't mean that he swore to do something. He started swearing and pulled me away from the wall, lifted me up by the cross at my back, turned me around, and carried me over to the easel. Lidewij was standing there and he asked her to hold me for a moment. Then he adjusted the easel so that I could stand on it, with my bottom at his knee height.

You're serious, Lidewij said.

I was standing on the easel for the first time in my life. But I felt faint at heart.

Creator shrugged. Why not?

Someone like Cindy on
that
canvas … you must be joking, Lidewij said.

Someone like Cindy is perfect, Creator said. She's fascinating, if you really look at her. Fascinatingly mask-like.

He knew he was lying, and that made him more and more convinced that he was doing the right thing.

Cindy Ponsen from head to toe — that's cutting edge, he said.

I noticed that he hadn't looked at me for a single second, as if I already had eyes for him to look away from. All I saw was how small and nondescript he was. With me upright like this, his shoulders only came up to my middle.

Lidewij looked at me. I remembered the apple-green shoes, to which I now added her chestnut eyes. She reached out with one hand and stroked my linen with her fingertips.

Why so cynical? It's not like you.

They went for a walk through the woods around Withernot, and for the first time I was able to look out into the world at my leisure, which is to say through the sliding doors and into the garden. I was still trembling from the unutterable menace I had faced, but also from the feathery touch of Lidewij's fingertips. For a moment, it had seemed to me as if she had turned my linen into human skin.

It was early November. I know that because, while looking around the studio, I discovered a calendar on a side wall, hanging next to Jeanine, who was always just on the point of not sliding her hand away from the left side of her face.

Lidewij, in particular, had often looked at the calendar, at the picture of the month. They had bought it in Rome, where they had spent a week together just before my arrival, and liked it so much they hung it up early. I have never been close enough to see exactly what they show, those pictures, but I have gathered that they are reproductions of paintings from the Vatican Museum. I remember that months later, in March, I could clearly make out the shape of a cross.I even thought, Why paint a canvas without frame or linen? They certainly came up with some strange subjects, the creators of the past.

But now that it was November, the Vatican calendar referred to days called All Souls' and All Saints'. Lidewij had wondered why, and had suggested that it might be something to do with the leaves of the trees; the last leaves were falling from the trees, and the Vaticanians wanted to celebrate nothing being lost. Her theories made Creator smile.

We're so ignorant about these things, Lidewij said. If you ask me, every day on this calendar means something.

I had already heard him outside, a screech of complaint sounding from the birch wood than ran down to the lake on the left of the deep garden, like a giant cat miaowing a loud lament. I knew he was an animal; I had made that much out from scraps of conversation between Creator and Lidewij. While painting, Creator would imitate his cry, making it sound like
peeow
. After calling, the creature generally walked into the garden to eat chicken feed from an aluminium dish that had been put down just in front of the sliding doors. It was a sound I had often heard while leaning against my wall: something pointy and hard scraping a metal bowl.

Good morning, Creator would say.

It all sounded thoroughly aristocratic. They called him Lord Peacock — but I couldn't imagine what he looked like. According to Lidewij, he had escaped from the playground at Old Valkeveen the previous spring: he heard the pheasants calling during the mating season, and disappeared into the woods. Odd, because pheasants, as I had learnt in the meantime, sound like the horns of old cars, and nowhere near as lofty and elegiac as Lord Peacock.

This is all quite apart from the story of my life, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fire I am about to feed. But when I finally saw him, that first Saturday in November, when I was free to look out into the world, I felt an immediate pang of regret.

He was as white as a sheet.

He was a completely white creature. As white as me. He was Quadruple-Universal-Primed-Linen white, and yet he could walk. He appeared entirely under his own steam and would, after eating the contents of the bowl, move off somewhere else.

And he didn't notice me.

He scraped the bowl with his vicious beak and dragged a clawed toe towards himself every now and then, making an unpleasant scratching sound. When the chicken feed was finished, he pushed the dish away with an impatient neck movement and looked up.

That was when it happened.

He started to shiver or, better, to shudder, and made gagging movements with his neck and, before I knew it, he had spread his tail, taking up my entire field of vision with his raised, white tail feathers. He didn't stop shuddering; it sounded like he was raising a stormy wind. He made himself even bigger than he was by standing on his toes. The strange thing was that, after the first shock, I immediately realised that it didn't have anything to do with me, this display. He hadn't noticed me at all. He did it because he was seen. But the one who saw him was invisible.
He was impressing
an invisible viewer. I couldn't see it any other way. The garden was deserted, Creator and Lidewij had walked into the woods, and everything in the studio was motionless.

And, despite his improbable whiteness, I saw that his tail feathers, which spread into circles at the ends, meant something; they
were
something. How can I put it? They looked like white circles, but they represented something. I could see that very clearly in the sunlight that lit them from the side; the sun must have been over the birch wood. Yes, what I saw very clearly was that they were eyes — hundreds of white eyes on long, shuddering feathers. Lord Peacock had put up all his eyes to exchange all those glances with someone who was nowhere in sight. And he folded them back down into a much-too-heavy tail that dragged along behind him as he dawdled off in the direction of the wood.

When they came back, Creator lifted me off the easel. I realised to my inexpressible relief that I would not become Cindy. And I ended up back in my corner.

She became a ninety by seventy. Creator mumbled something along the lines of
I paint her mask but capture her soul
. But that was so much bravado because, ultimately, he would remain dissatisfied to the point of fury with the result. Masterful emptiness is what it became — exactly what the art world thought of him. And having Cindy coo with admiration while accepting the painting, smothering Creator with hugs and kisses, telling him he'd done
a hell of a job
, that Fokke would be
ever so moved
and that he, Creator, was a magician who saw right through people and had managed to capture her
ultra-vulnerable self,
didn't make it any better.