The Portrait (5 page)

Don't say no straightaway. Think it over. You'll be saving a life.

He was tired, I could see that plainly now. Dead tired. Or deathly ill.

Again his right hand moved towards his inside pocket.

I'm asking you for a portrait. Of my son. He's dead.

Specht had laid a photo next to the chequebook. Creator slid it closer.

Specht, a father! That was as difficult to imagine as a round Mondrian, he would later tell Lidewij. For a moment, I was at a complete loss for words.

As far as Creator knew, Specht, who had inherited a well-known dredging company, had gone through public life in the exclusive company of young men.

Creator concentrated on the photo.

Loutro, Specht said. You know Loutro?

Creator shook his head.

He had been prepared for many things, but not this: a holiday snap showing two blond children, a boy and a girl, with their arms around a slightly smaller, dark-skinned boy. Loutro is Crete, Specht said. South coast. We've got a place there.

He pointed at something in the photo.

That's the corner of our terrace.

Specht looked at Creator.

It's about my son.

With difficulty, Creator looked away from the dark boy with the dark expression, who was in the process of raising his middle finger. He concentrated on the laughing boy on the right, who was making a V sign with his left hand.

Nice-looking kid. First form?

The photo was taken seven years ago, Specht said.

Then your son would have been nineteen now?

Creator was feeling his way as he spoke, trying to find the tone in which to speak about a dead child with a man who was old enough to be his own father.

There was a silence in which Specht seemed to be adding something up, but it wasn't that. He said, It's about Singer. In the middle.

He didn't give Creator time to recover from his surprise. He didn't give him a chance to ask, Is your wife black then? Let alone, Are you married? or, Do you have a wife?

Later, he would tell Lidewij that he had only had one thought in his head: all of the one hundred and fifty portraits that made up his oeuvre at that moment were of white people. He felt uncomfortable, as if entering unknown territory, a minefield of sensitivities.

This photo was taken three years before Singer's death, Specht said.

Creator looked at the dark boy with the half-raised middle finger, who was now irrevocably called Singer and had now irrevocably died four years ago, and he felt like he was twisting into the boy's eyes, like water irrevocably swirling down the plughole of a bath.

Smiling lips, suspicious eyes.

It was so quiet in the studio that I wondered whether Creator actually understood what Specht was going to ask him to do. I had worked it out long since; I felt myself tight with tension from stretcher to stretcher. Creator didn't know a thing about that boy and yet his consciousness was suddenly fully occupied with a single spiralling thought. He told Lidewij about it later.
Everyone I have painted will die.
And every painting will one day be seen the way I now look at this snapshot.

Why is he dead? Creator realised how strange his question sounded.

Do you really want to know?

It was the first time Specht smiled.

Is it necessary to know why someone died? I mean, if you had Singer before you now, alive, and you had agreed to do his portrait, would you want to know how he was going to meet his end?

Creator got the impression that Specht had carefully prepared this part of the conversation.

That sounds like a story by Borges, doesn't it? The portrait artist who knew how his sitters would meet their end …

The silence he left now was commanding.

I have to admit, he said, that I wondered whether to tell whoever gets the job that Singer is dead at all. But you would have asked why he hadn't come with me.

Absolutely, Creator said. I've only ever worked from life.

I know, Specht said. You say so yourself in
Palazzo
: If it's not from life, it's from nothing. And that is exactly what I am about to ask. Paint my son. Bring him to life. Forget he's dead.

I could see that Specht's face had become imploring. The expression I had, up to that moment, taken for the weariness of an invalid now looked like the exhaustion of someone who was completely miserable. A drop of sweat rolled past his temple. But Creator still couldn't bring himself to say that he would accept the job.

Think about it, Specht said. This isn't the only photo I have of Singer; there's a video, too. I can describe him. He pulled the chequebook back towards him, tore off the top cheque, and got the fountain pen back out from his inside pocket.

Believe me, he said, with every word sounding more and more whispered.
You'll be saving a life.

Creator remained silent. I remember that very well; it was because he was shocked by something he could not place at all, something that was diametrically opposed to the self-assured Hollywood gesture with the cheque: all of the blood in Specht's face seemed to have drained away.

There wasn't a lovelier person on the whole planet, he said.

What I'm asking for, Felix, is Singer. My son.

Specht signed the cheque.

Afterwards, when Creator had shown Valery Specht to the door and returned to the studio, I knew not only that he would accept the job, but also that I was the one who was destined to support Singer.

Or however you say that.

It was on me that the unknown dead boy would be commemorated and painted to life.

Strangely enough, I seemed to know this before Creator himself — at least, the only thing he said to Lidewij a little later, when she came into the studio, was that he had had a request that was completely wacko, a job that nobody in their right mind would ever take on.

But in the meantime he had slid me into the middle of the room and leant me against the easel. He had squatted down and used a small brush to clean off the charcoal line. He did it like a household chore, but I rejoiced within because I was certain that it was a gesture. He had begun to really want me; he just didn't know it yet.

Moments before, he had put the cheque away in the drawer of the large table, between the pencil stubs and the rubbers; but when Lidewij came in to hear how the meeting had gone, he told her everything — except about the cheque.

It just happened: putting away the cheque and sliding me into view. He would keep quiet about the cheque and the amount, and he brushed off the charcoal. None of it was something he'd planned in advance.

I mention this because, later, Creator got the cheque back out of the drawer a few times. I was on the easel by then, and Creator had slipped into his habit of rhyming and calculating. That's how I know with absolute certainty that he was thinking one, compulsive thought, If I take the cheque and cash it, then —

Nothing much followed that
then
, except an ungrammatical construction ending with
trash it
— after which he put the cheque back in its hiding place.

No hurry, he mumbled.

Specht has to see the thing first and accept it.

Lidewij listened carefully to his account of his first meeting with Specht.

Were they really his words, she asked —
If you've ever worked from death
?

She whistled through her teeth.

Creator noticed how difficult it was to explain just what was so strange about Specht's request.

And then Specht said you'd be saving a life?

Creator nodded.

Imagine, Lidewij said. Your son is dead and you want to be able to see him; you want to have him around you again. What an assignment, Felix. What an assignment.

Creator had told her the little that Specht had said about Singer: that he came from Africa, from one of the countries on the west coast. The name had slipped Creator's mind for a moment; it was synonymous with chaos and cruelty. Specht had spent some time there for a big job, almost under war conditions; it was an enormous dredging job, and on the beach just near the compound he'd stumbled upon a boy of about eight, literally stumbled — the child was asleep on the lawn in front of the apartment block. It was in the days when rural children were being press-ganged into a rebel army in the north. Imagine it, a boy like that asleep on the lawn — he opens his eyes and wants to trust you; imagine the coincidence. But what is coincidence in moments like this other than providence? Singer was looking for
him
, Specht. Specht wasn't looking for Singer. Anyway, in the end, it was all done completely legally, with all the adoption papers fully in order — you can't imagine the red tape involved — and, of course, as always in those parts, it took a lot of … not just money, but also, let's call it diplomatic pressure that didn't come cheap. For him, it had been nothing short of a miracle that it finally succeeded.

Did he mention anyone else?

What do you mean?

It usually takes two to adopt.

There was something, Creator said.

Has she got a name?

If she's a she, Creator said. All I know is they live in Antibes. Specht and —

She
? Did he say
she
?

Does it matter?

If you ask me, they both wanted to say that it mattered whether Specht was married to a man or a woman, but they just laughed it off.

No, Lidewij said. For the painting, it doesn't matter. Or does it?

She didn't ask whether Creator had accepted the job. But she did look at the photo lying on the big table.

Crete, Creator said.

Lidewij looked at the photo and fell silent.

Her gaze was drawn into the boy's eyes, just like Creator's a half hour earlier, in Specht's presence.

Hey, kid, she said quietly. Where are you?

She had sounded as if the boy in the photo was still alive. As if the photo was a living person and could answer her.

I think that was the moment that Creator knew what I already knew: that he would paint Singer.

Lidewij passed the photo back to Creator.

Did you see his hand? The one he's giving the finger with. He doesn't have a thumb.

Creator looked again at the boy called Singer.

Now you mention it, he said.

It's incredible how people can just disappear, Lidewij said. Did you hear the geese over the house just now? Hundreds of them?

I am certain that Creator then thought,
I'll paint him
.

Look at Lidewij, I thought. Look at your wife, at how the photo has just touched her, and make something that touches her just as much. And Specht. And everyone who has lost someone. Make something. Make someone. From me.

THREE

Creator decided to stick as closely as possible to the working methods he used when painting someone who was alive. In other words, he arranged three sittings with Specht. During these fortnightly Saturday meetings, each of which lasted for several hours, they would talk about Singer, leaf through albums of snapshots, and watch the videos that had been made of him. In the meantime, Creator did sketches to show Specht; but he soon realised that, just as when he was working from life, the likeness would not be the problem.

The problem was the expression or, rather, the movement in his eyes — the characteristic gesture. Technically, Singer was a challenge mainly because of the colour of his skin. New tints would appear on Creator's palette: dioxide purple, carmine, ultramarine, burnt umber, caput mortuum, cadmium yellow. Creator explained to Specht that, when he was working on a thing, the skin was the alpha and the omega. You don't look at my things with just your eyes, he had said to Minke Dupuis in
Palazzo
; you use your fingertips as well.

He would soon decide to base the portrait on one particular video recording, the one that had been shot early in the morning, or was it late in the evening, where the camera enters a room in which a dark, underexposed figure — Singer — is lying asleep on a large bed with green, almost turquoise, sheets, with his knuckles to his mouth, and his head turned aside towards the window whose venetian blinds are slowly opened during the shot, making a pattern of bright stripes of light that are about to make the motionless, sleeping figure blink. That is the precise moment at which the recording stops, just when the eye contact with the camera is about to be established.

It wasn't easy to estimate Singer's age in the video. He was naked and, as Creator saw it, more angular than in the photo with his blond friends. If he was sixteen in the video, Creator asked Specht, how long before that was the photo taken? Specht's memory didn't seem very precise with things like this. Creator realised that he would have to decide for himself how old Singer would be in his painting.

The green of the sheets was pushing it, Creator said, but everything of value balances on the edge of kitsch. He wanted the pink of Singer's lips and nails and the palms of his hands to burst out of the painting. He was searching for a Singer who was more childlike, less remote, than in the video.