Inevitable

XI

“WHAT DO YOU CARE about those strange people?” he asked.

They were sitting in his studio, Mrs Van der Staal, Cornélie and the girls, Annie and Emilie. Annie poured tea and they talked about Miss Taylor and Urania.

“I’m a stranger to you too!” replied Cornélie.

“You’re not a stranger to me, to us … But I couldn’t care less about Miss Taylor or Urania. Hundreds of ghosts haunt our lives: I don’t see them and feel nothing for them …”

“And aren’t I a ghost?”

“I’ve talked to you too much in Borghese and on the Palatine to think you a ghost.”

“Rudyard is a dangerous ghost,” said Annie.

“He has no hold over us,” replied Duco.

Mrs Van der Staal looked at Cornélie. She understood the look and said, with a laugh,

“No, he has no hold over me either … Yet, if I had had need of religion — I mean church religion — I’d rather be Roman Catholic than Calvinist. But now …”

She did not finish her sentence. She felt safe in this studio, in this soft, multi-coloured swirl of beautiful objects, in their sympathetic presence: she felt in harmony with all of them: with the charming and worldly air of the rather superficial mother and her two beautiful girls: a little doll-like and vaguely cosmopolitan, quite vain about young marquesses with whom they danced and cycled, and with the son, the brother, so completely different from the three women and yet visibly related in a movement, a gesture, the occasional word. It also struck Cornélie that they accepted each other lovingly as they were; Duco his mother and sister with their stories about the Princesses Golonna and Odescalchi; Mrs Van der Staal and the girls, him, with his old jacket and dishevelled hair. And when he began talking, especially talking about Rome, when he put his dream into words, in words that were almost fit for a book, but which flowed so gradually and naturally from his lips, Cornélie felt harmonious, felt safe, interested, and lost a little of the urge to contradict that his artistic indolence sometimes awakened in her. And apart from that his indolence suddenly seemed to her only apparent, and perhaps affectation, since he showed her sketches, watercolours, none of them finished, but each watercolour vibrant with light, especially with light, with the light of all Italy: the pearly sunsets across the fluid emerald of Venice; Florence’s towers drawn with dreamy vagueness in tender rose-coloured skies; fortress-like Siena blue-black in bluish moonlight; orange sunflares behind St Peter’s, and especially the ruins and in every light: the Forum in fierce sunlight, the Palatine in the evening twilight, the Colosseum mysterious in the night, and then the Campagna: the dream skies and hazy light of the cheerful and sad Campagna, with soft pink mauves, dewy blues, dusky violet, of the brash ochres of pyrotechnic sunsets, and fanning clouds like purple phoenix wings. And when Cornélie asked him why nothing was finished, he replied that nothing was any good. He saw the skies as dreams, visions and apotheoses, and on paper they were water and paint, and paint could be finished. And then he lacked self-confidence. And then he abandoned his skies, he said, and copied Byzantine Madonnas.

When he saw that his watercolours nevertheless interested her, he went on talking about himself, telling her how he first enthused about the noble and naive Primitives, Giotto and especially Lippo Memmi … How subsequently, spending a year in Paris, he had found that nothing compared with Forain: dry, cool satire in two or three lines; how then, in the Louvre, Rubens had revealed himself: Rubens, whose unique talent and unique brush he had traced among all the imitation and apprentice work of his numerous pupils, until he was able to say which cherub was by Rubens himself in a sky full of cherubs painted by four or five pupils.

And then, he said, he did not think about painting for weeks, and did not pick up a paintbrush, and went to the Vatican every day and was totally absorbed by the noble marbles.

Once he had spent a whole morning sitting dreaming in front of Eros, once he had dreamed up a poem accompanied by a very faint monotonous melody, like a devout incantation: at home he had wanted to put down the poem and the music on paper, but had not been able. He could no longer stand Forain, found Rubens disgusting and coarse, and had remained loyal to the Primitives.

“And suppose I painted a lot and sent a lot to exhibitions? Would I be happier? Would I feel satisfaction at having done something? I don’t think so. Sometimes I finish a watercolour, sell it, and I can survive for a month without troubling mama. I don’t care about money. Ambition is totally alien to me! But don’t let’s talk about me. Are you still thinking about the future and … bread?”

“Perhaps,” she replied, smiling sadly, and around her the studio darkened, the silhouettes of his mother and sisters faded, as they sat quietly and languidly uninterested in easy chairs, and all colour dissolved silently into shadow. “But I am so weak. You say you are no artist, and I, I am no apostle.”

“Giving direction to one’s life is the difficult thing. Every life has a line, a direction, a way, a path: it is along that line that life must flow into death and what comes after death; and that line is difficult to find. I shan’t find my line.”

“I can’t see my line before me either …”

“Do you know, a restlessness has come over me. Mama, do you hear, a restlessness has come over me. In the past I used to dream in the Forum, I was happy and didn’t think about my line. Mama, do you think about your line, and do my sisters think about theirs?”

His sisters, in the dark, sunk in the deep chairs like cats, giggled a little. Mama got up.

“My dear Duco, you know, I can’t follow you. I admire Cornélie for being able to appreciate your watercolours and for understanding what you mean by that line. My line is the way home now, as it’s getting very late …”

“That is the line of the next moment. But I feel restlessness about my line of the days and weeks afterwards. I’m not living the right way. The Past is very beautiful, and so peaceful because it’s over. But I have lost that calm. The Present is really very small. But the Future … Oh, if only we could find a goal! For the Future …”

They were no longer listening to him; they groped their way down the dark stairs. “Bread?” he wondered.