The Portrait (4 page)

Thirty to go and then I'm free
.

I actually heard him hum that in those days.

Thirty more portraits.

I realised that he was struggling, fighting for his freedom.

In the meantime, the Cindy has become a famous thing, or so I hear. It even got a reaction from the art world. At least, it seems that, during a radio interview with Minke Dupuis, the curator of the Green Heart Museum said that
Felix Vincent's neo-realist surface was finally acquiring depth
. The curator had seen it hanging in Ponsen's palazzo in Bloemendaal. Minke even managed to elicit the phrase
undertone of tragic emptiness
from the curator.

I mustn't forget to mention that, after coming within a hair's breadth of turning into Cindy, I ended up against the wall in a different position. Not vertical, but horizontal.

It isn't easy to describe what this meant to me. For the first time, it began to dawn on me that I should be prepared for a completely different fate.

December had arrived with an early freeze. Creator kept talking about the reeds at the bottom of the garden, which had taken on a strange rusty colour and stood out superbly against the white of the frozen lake, in which a big hole refused to close over and offered a refuge to dozens of swans that floated on the water as snow-white, dazzling patches. The emptiness, Creator said, the wide, cold emptiness of ice — that's unpaintable.

Emptiness: that was a word he often hummed. He had made a song of it, with, if I understood it properly, a chorus that went,
He dabs and smears them less and less, the canvases of emptiness
.

I smelt the danger immediately.

When Creator says something's unpaintable, he means he's going to paint it.

I really did try to imagine myself as a winter landscape. It wasn't even difficult; I am white by nature, and now that I was horizontal it was easy to think of myself as
wide
. The hole in the ice would come somewhere in my middle, with the ice-cold water and the freezing swans. I couldn't help it — I found it a desolate prospect. I understood very well that, after all these years of painting richer and richer people and, especially after Cindy, a chill had got into Creator's heart. I could see that
something needed to happen to him
if he was to regain his old, inventive zest — but spending the rest of my existence as the embodiment of his disillusionment about Cindy …

One morning, he set up the easel right in front of the French windows. Then he laid me, lying as I was, across the easel. I stuck out a ridiculous distance on both sides. Somehow I could smell that it was boredom motivating him. Restlessness. He was working on the three children of the charismatic hypnotherapist, Henry Grinke: a girl of ten, boys of six and eight, small format, destined to hang in the cabin cruiser moored in Volendam.

Still, all indications were that this would be the great moment. That I was on the verge of being painted.

I didn't know then that, when Creator really begins, he first applies the
imprimatura
to the canvas. That's an even layer of grey, or drab green, or muddy umber that will determine the tone of the thing. Everything that is added afterwards is conceived from that imprimatura, more or less the way a piece of music is conceived from a melody.

Creator hardly looked at me. He kept his eyes fixed almost constantly on the view behind my back; it was as if the icy surface was reflected in the blue of his eyes, so that they were no longer blue, but metallic grey. I was shocked by the dull emptiness in his eyes and afraid of the thing I would become. If he succeeded in making me look as wintry as his present expression, what kind of chill would pierce the hearts of the people who looked at me when I was finished?

Who would want me?

He was holding a piece of charcoal. I saw now for the first time that he was left-handed.

Suddenly, with an unexpected, angry movement, he drew a horizontal line across me from left to right, from my perspective.

This was his first direct contact with me. The gritty tip of a thin piece of charcoal, which, despite Creator's intention of drawing a line of two metres across the full width of my completely untouched skin, broke off furiously — approximately twenty centimetres before my middle.

Creator swore and kicked the legs of the easel. It fell over, which is to say: we fell over. For a moment, I touched the ground with my left lower corner, then the easel wobbled and tipped forward, with me sliding off it.

I don't know how long Creator left us lying there like that.

Lidewij came in, saying that she had heard a bang. What happened?

Creator wouldn't stop swearing.

You have to get away a bit, Lidewij said. It can't go on like this.

TWO

I was back in my corner when, on the fourth of January that same winter, everything changed. The Vatican calendar, I had heard Lidewij say, showed an Adoration of the Magi. Creator had not cleaned away the charcoal line that ended twenty centimetres before my middle. I felt disfigured, like a man who has had a brand pressed to his forehead by a torturer. And, to add insult to injury, Creator had put me with my back to the wall. For the first time in my life, I felt naked. This then, this state of vulnerability, this inability to protect myself from the eyes of others, was what people call shame.

He arrived in a four-wheel drive. Suddenly, it was as if our woods were full of rhinos, Lidewij would later say. During that first discussion with Creator, which was over in less than thirty minutes, it seems that two young men with alert expressions stayed in the vehicle. Lidewij explained that she had invited them in, but they preferred to wait where they were. One of them was swarthy and very young. North African, Lidewij guessed. They were both clean-shaven and baldheaded.

They made calls now and then on their mobile phones, and once one of them leant against the front of the car to smoke a cigarette. Geese were flying over at the time; that was why Lidewij had stepped out of the kitchen door.

Ah, she thought, geese. The same ones as last year.

That's the kind of thing she tells Creator; she remembers insignificant details. It was exactly one year ago that her mother had been admitted to hospital, and a day later she got the call asking her to come in straightaway because her condition had suddenly deteriorated. Then, too, she had heard long rows of geese over Withernot.

The appointment with the visitor had been made shortly after the failed landscape, about a week after the appearance of the major article in
Palazzo
, in which Creator had said that art needed likeness. If it's not from life, it's from nothing, the headline announced. By-line: Minke Dupuis.

I'd noticed that Creator closed the
Palazzo
the moment he saw the picture of himself with Lidewij in the garden behind Withernot. Rather than being proud, he seemed uncomfortable and didn't deign to look at the text, as if it might be somehow embarrassing.

He doesn't want to look at himself the way he looks at the people who sit for him, I thought later. He is afraid of his own gaze.

In expectation of the visitor, Creator had turned all the paintings he was working on around to face the wall. He always did that before discussions he expected to lead to a commission. He turned around the thing of Beatrix, too, which he had started several days before, commissioned by the Queen's cabinet. For the first time in ten years, a new official portrait was required, and Creator was part of the select group competing for the job, even if he didn't end up getting it. He never managed to turn it into a real Vincent. I can't do a portrait of a stamp, he said, with all the nonchalance he could muster.

The only one Creator didn't turn around was me, with the charcoal line.

The visitor came in, leaning on a stick with an ivory knob, and had difficulty walking. He sat down at the head of the kitchen table that served as a drawing table. During the conversation, he regularly reached for his stick and then held onto it, with his left arm stretched out.

He was skinny. His suit hung loose on his body.

He must have introduced himself upon arriving, in the casual way that powerful people have of introducing themselves. Days would pass before I heard the name, but I didn't need to know that he was called Specht — Valery Specht — and that he was the feared art collector in person, to realise that the studio was alive with a special tension from the moment he entered.

Specht didn't ask Creator to turn any of his things around during that first conversation.

I know the work of Felix Vincent well enough to know why I am here, he said.

Creator did not find it unpleasant to have Specht talk about him in the third person like that; it sounded as if he could just as well have said ‘David Hockney' or ‘Francis Bacon'.

Felix Vincent, said Specht, is the only one who comes into consideration.

From where I was lying, I had a good view of Specht. And he saw me immediately; I know for a fact that I was the first thing his luminous eagle's eye settled on when he came in. I wished the ground could open up and swallow me. It was as if, for a fraction of a second, he was considering the charcoal line, as if to decide whether I was art. Interesting. Buyable. Then he turned back to Creator. His piercing gaze smouldered on, in the spot where the smudge of charcoal ended, exactly twenty centimetres before my middle.

The whites of his eyes were not white, but yellow. Intriguing piece, he said, in
Palazzo
.

Yes, Creator said.

I saw it last week and I thought, Felix Vincent, he's someone I'd like to meet.

His voice was rasping and high, as if it had never broken, with an unmistakable Rotterdam accent. I noticed that, like me, Creator was fascinated by his long bony hands, his thin wrists, and the emaciated face above the alarmingly long, Adam's apple-less neck. He had a brush of short grey hair, the ash-grey of someone who was once blond.

Did it work out, the Piet`a?

I heard Creator's breath catch.

How do you —?

His eyes went to the
Palazzo
lying on the table, and he realised that Minke Dupuis had not kept to their agreement.

When I read that, Specht said, that you wanted to start on that, with a theme like that, I knew. You, I can ask. He's got balls.

Creator remembered Specht's bright gaze as the gaze of a painter.

He looked at things like someone who creates, he said to Lidewij afterwards.

Still, this first introductory phase was no test of strength. Specht had sounded too sad for that. Tired and sad. He looked around the room again.

Ah, he said. There's Jeanine.

He stood up and walked over to the wall she was hanging on.

You know her?

Someone once sent her to me, as a postcard.

Funnily, Creator didn't ask whom. He didn't want to show how overwhelmingly flattered he suddenly felt.

Specht had sat down again.

I actually only have one question, he said.

His voice, which had been very quiet the whole time, had become virtually inaudible.

Do you also work from death?

He didn't wait for Creator's answer. His left hand was clenched around the knob of his stick, but he had slowly slipped his free hand into the inside pocket of his jacket.

I don't think he was expecting an answer.

He had pulled a chequebook out from his inside pocket.

Before I tell you what it's about, I want you to know that I am offering you one hundred thousand. Euros. Fifty thousand now, and fifty thousand on completion.

Specht brought thumb and index finger to his lips, licked them, leafed the chequebook open, and wrote down five figures. He then slid the chequebook to the middle of the table, where Creator could see it with his own eyes. It said €50,000. All it needed was tearing out and signing.

Creator managed to resist touching the cheque.

I know for a fact that he did the internal Withernot calculation and realised: this saves months. Fifteen portraits. Forty-five sessions. The amount was fifteen times his current asking price, even for his most time-consuming thing.
Aunt Drea can die now.

Creator had not noticed that Specht was observing him closely.

You know better than anyone else that a Vincent is worth it, Specht said. Shall we drop the formality? Call me Valery.

Creator tried as hard as he could to look relaxed. He cannot remember anyone ever looking at him as defiantly as in that moment.

Felix, he said.

Your work is fascinating, Specht continued. You have a rare skill. You can bring someone to life.

Only now did I notice that, despite the calm with which he spoke, Specht was perspiring. There were little beads on his forehead, and a glistening edge just below his hairline.

I realise full well that I am asking you to do something you've never done before, Specht said. Not for a moment did his left hand stop rubbing the knob of his walking stick.