Lisette's List (5 page)

1937, 1874

T
HE MORNING AFTER WE ARRIVED
, A
NDRÉ AND
I
WERE
awakened by roosters, the first morning in my life that I had ever heard their raucous cackle. Apparently the roosters of Roussillon had a robust language too. We left Pascal snoring in rhythm with the roosters and with the
cigales’
scraping calls, harsher than a chirp, maddening in their incessant repetition.

André peered down a side street. “A sawmill. That’s good. I’ll need lumber to build sawhorses and a plywood work table.”

I gave him an apprehensive look. Who would buy a frame in a village that had no gallery?

In the
boulangerie
, a middle-aged proprietress who introduced herself as Odette wore a white daisy in her hair and a beauty mark made by twisting the point of an eyebrow pencil on her right cheekbone, a practice five years out of date.

“So Pascal prevailed upon you to come. This must be—”

“Lisette. My lovely, lovable, smart, spirited—”

“André, stop. You’re embarrassing me.”

“Wife.”

Looking me over, she said, “Your
Parisian
wife.” She shouted into the kitchen, “René, come take a look at André’s wife.”

Superb. What was I? A department store mannequin?

His cheeks and hands dusted with flour, the baker poked his head through the doorway, greeted us, and disappeared.

As a gesture of welcome, Odette refused payment for the two baguettes we wanted, something that would never happen in Paris.

At home we found Pascal sitting at the table in the
salle
, which served as living room, dining room, and kitchen, his elbows on the oilcloth in a posture of despair. He apologized again and said for the sixth time how happy he was that we had come.

André merely said, “We know” and left to go to the sawmill.

I looked for a place to sit and realized that there were no cushioned armchairs, only a bare wooden settee that demanded erect posture, a backless bench pushed against a wall, and four ladderback chairs at the table. It would be a long time before I could make cushions if I had to wait for every duck in the countryside to be caught by Maurice and plucked for its feathers.

“All the years that you grew up here, no one thought to put cushions on the chairs?” I asked.

He shook his head in the most dejected manner. “We
Roussillonnais
do not care much about comfort of the buttocks.”

“Where do people go to buy things?” I asked to distract him from my rudeness.

“There’s a big Saturday market in Apt, eleven kilometers from here, and we have our own smaller one on Thursdays.”

He pointed to a pine cabinet fastened to the wall near the sink, which had a drain but no water faucet. The cabinet had ornamental openwork to allow air passage and elaborately carved double doors.

“It’s a
panetière
, for bread, one of our traditional crafts in Provence. My uncle and I made it for my mother. I remember she said,
‘Poésie bien provençale,’
which I took to mean poetry in wood, a high compliment. I must have been fifteen, but that made me feel like a man. I’ve made others too.”

“It’s lovely.” I opened the doors and put the second baguette inside.

“We made that piece of furniture under it, too. It’s a
pétrin
, for kneading the dough.”

I stroked the rough wood marred by years of use as a cutting board as well. How long would it take for him to realize that I would never use it for kneading dough when there was a bakery here?

“I hope you will like living with the paintings.”

“
That
I definitely will.”

I walked from one to another hanging in a row on the north wall and stopped at each one, pretending I was in a gallery. Maxime had only just begun to instruct me in how to look at a painting. I had been overwhelmed by what there was to learn. Nevertheless, in front of a broad panorama of tilled fields with a distant mountain, I gathered the courage to ask, “Cézanne?”

Pascal grinned and nodded.

I was elated. In front of a soft-colored country scene with a girl in blue and a goat, I ventured, “Monet?”

“Pissarro,” he corrected.

I sank into inadequacy.

Before a grouping of red-roofed houses seen through autumn trees, I guessed, “Either Monet or Sisley or Pissarro again.”

“Pissarro.”

Standing before the next one, I had no idea what painter would paint flat slabs of rock. “Who?” I had to ask.

“Cézanne. It’s a quarry.”

Beside the stairway hung a still life of fruit. “Oh, this could be anyone. Manet?”

He shook his head.

“Gauguin?”

He shook his head again.

“Fantin-Latour?” I felt proud to name a lesser-known artist.

“Non.”

“Renoir.”

“Non encore.”

“Then it must be Cézanne.”

“You’re right! It can’t be anybody else.”

“But that awful one. Who would paint faces without bodies?”

He shrugged and held out his arm for me to come to him. In a plaintive voice he asked, “Do you want to know the real reason I wrote that desperate letter to André?”

“Yes, I most certainly do.”

“I want to tell you and André everything about these paintings and the men who created them while I still have time, while I can still remember. I’ve been afraid I would forget if I waited”—he broke off for a few moments before he added—“until the end. I want you to understand how important they are so you will care for them. Those painters used the ochres we mine here.”

“Were you a miner? With Maurice?”

“When I was young and spry.”

“You were pretty spry yesterday, lunging to toss that
boule.
”

“It’s the getting up that’s hard. I am not strong. Then I was strong. Going down into the mine at daybreak and working until nightfall, never feeling the sun on my face, damp to my bones, coughing all the time—what kind of a life was that? I begged to be allowed to work in the ochre drying beds as a washer, like I had done as a child. A child, Lisette. Fourteen years old. The
chef des opérations
wouldn’t hear of it. I had to put in more time in the mine before he moved me to the factory furnaces. They weren’t much better. We breathed dust and got so covered with ochre powder that it lodged in our pores. Walking home with our lunch tins, we looked like the ochre pinnacles in the canyons. I couldn’t accept that I had been put on earth for that.”

“So how did you get out of it?”

“I was young and brash and full of big ideas. I bragged that I could double the sales of our pigments in Paris by making calls on
art supply stores. I had this crazy notion that they would buy more from a true
Roussillonnais
who had dug the ores with a pickax.” Here Pascal chuckled. “I kept pestering the
chef
until he relented, saying that I was a thorn in his side.

“It wasn’t long before I knew which color suppliers still sold powdered pigments for artists to mix into paint, and which dealers sold only oil paint in tubes. Julien Tanguy sold both.”

“But how did you become a frame maker?”

“That happened in Julien’s shop. He was a pudgy little man with one eye much larger than the other, homely but amusing. I liked him because he was a provincial too, from Brittany, and wore a straw farmer’s hat. I appreciated his politics. He had been a Communard, had gone to prison for it. Artists adored him. They called him Père Tanguy because he slipped tubes of paint into the satchels of the poor ones whose talents he believed in when his eagle-eyed wife wasn’t looking. And he hung their paintings on his walls to try to sell them in his shop. He’s gone now, of course, but that shop still bears his name.”

“I remember it. On rue Clauzel. It’s bright blue.”

“When I came through the doorway to his shop once, the little bell rang merrily, but I saw a sobering sight—a grown man, bearded, wearing a worn suit of black, weeping. No sound, but his eyes were soaked with sorrow. He was telling Tanguy how he and his wife had just buried their young daughter. Her name was Jeanne, my mother’s name. Amazing that a person can remember such a little thing.”

“How old were you?”

He thought a while and scratched his bald spot, round as a monk’s tonsure. “I’ve got to write these things down. There’s so much to tell you. It must have been around 1874 or 1875, whatever was the year of the first Impressionist exposition, so I would have been twenty-two or so. What a marvelous time to be young and in Paris.”

Pascal seemed to retreat from the present moment. I thought he
had finished, so I stood to wash the dishes. His hand shot out to stay me.

“I’ll never forget the way the painter’s clasped hands shook, so full of anguish he was. ‘Such a thing,’ the man mutters, ‘just before our first big exposition. I need frames. I can’t hang my pictures without frames. That would disgrace my friends’ paintings.’ ”

I could tell by the softening of his voice that Pascal had stepped into the past with both feet. He told how a painting leaning against a cabinet had caught his eye.

“It was that one.” He looked at it hanging in the row of four. Cottages, a vegetable garden, a girl and a goat on a path going up a hill and around a bend. “It struck me then. The path was the same yellow-ochre I had dug out of the mine! Imagine that. The very hue I was selling as pigment, and here it was on a painting! It made me feel important in a way I had never felt before, and that Roussillon was important too. I had brought something out of the earth, and it was used to make something beautiful. I was part of a creative process. Can you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, and with this understanding came respect.

“See how the painting shows the light bouncing against the ochre houses and softening the edges of everything? The light does that here in the south. It makes things quiver.”

He gazed lovingly at the painting on the wall, and I did too, and saw what he meant. The sunlight shimmered with life.

“Ah, but the graybeard had a problem,” Pascal said. “ ‘I have to pay my share of the costs to the group,’ the painter says. ‘Then who will pay the rabbi and the cantor and the grave diggers?’ The poor man’s voice wavered, I remember. Think of it, Lisette. An old man like me remembering such a thing.”

“You have a fine memory.”

A rabbi and a cantor. I had seen Jews in the Marais quarter coming out of a large synagogue in rue Pavée, had noticed the fringes of the men’s shawls hanging below their coats, and had heard them
speaking beneath their broad black hats what might have been Yiddish or Hebrew, but I had never known any Jewish person. I remembered the women in their long dresses with long sleeves; I had smiled at them, wishing I knew just one friendly word to say to them that they would understand.

Pascal continued, “In that same instant, my heart cracked for the man who had made this painting with a substance that we had dug out of the earth right near our village. I would have thought Madame Tanguy’s heart would have cracked too, but she was shielding herself from pity by holding a newspaper in front of her face.

“I told him that I wanted to help. He raised one eyebrow and asked if I was a frame maker. I told him I knew wood and had made
panetières
, so I could learn to make frames.

“ ‘Puh!’ he says. ‘In a dozen years. That’s how long it takes to be admitted to the Guild of Encadreurs. That’s the frame makers’ guild. I need five frames in a week,’ he says, and his head sank down. I asked him if he would be content with simple uncarved molding. He didn’t answer. I asked Julien if he knew where I could buy molding and borrow tools.

“From behind her newspaper, Madame Tanguy declares, ‘No framer is going to lend tools to an upstart who is not in the guild.’

“ ‘Then let’s borrow one tool from five different people,’ I say.”

It was amusing, the way Pascal told it, how excited he became.

“The painter raised his head. ‘I have a tack hammer.’

“ ‘Four people then,’ I say. ‘Tell each one you need it to repair a chair.’

“Then madame lowers her newspaper and names some widow who might still have her husband’s miter box and saw. So I ask Julien if I can use the alley behind the shop. The painter nods in quick jerks of his head, but Julien says no, that I must not be seen, so he offers to clear a space in his back room.

“I ask him if he has any glue, and Madame Tanguy snaps, ‘
Bien sûr
, we have glue. What kind of a shop do you think this is, young man?’ She crumpled the newspaper and thumped a jar on the counter. ‘Sixty-five centimes. Up front. No negotiation.’

“I smacked the coins onto her open palm, and she dropped them into a drawer and slammed it shut.”

“This really happened?” I asked.

“It did, Lisette. It’s the very truth, I swear. Now the painter, he has hope beginning to shine in his eyes, so he tells me that wide molding painted white would do, and madame produces a jar of white gesso from a shelf. ‘One franc forty.’ She slaps the counter, and I count out the coins.”

I stared at Pascal in wonder. “How can you remember what people said? Or those prices?”

“When something changes your life, Lisette, you remember everything. Someday you’ll see.”

“So what happened?”

“Each day the painter shuffled into the shop as though the world would end soon and watched me work. I learned how to miter cleanly, and peg the corners as my uncle and I had done on the
panetières
. By the end of the second week, I had four frames, simple but acceptable. I inserted the four paintings. He called them
The Orchard, A Morning in June, A Garden of Pontoise
, and I can’t remember the fourth. He was astonished, Lisette. He had tears in his eyes. Four simple frames, and he was astonished.”

“I am the one astonished, that you can recite their names.”

“ ‘The white makes my colors glow,’ he says. ‘But I left five paintings here. Where’s the fifth? The one of Louveciennes?’

“ ‘Madame is holding it behind the counter,’ I say timidly.