Lisette's List (9 page)

It was from Maxime. I hurried home to read it aloud to André. Maybe Monsieur Laforgue had fired that woman.

19 SEPTEMBER 1937

Dear André and Lisette
,

Mother and I were finally able to get tickets to the Exposition Universelle. We stood in a crowd from all nations staring at the pompous, propagandistic architecture and sculpture of dictatorships—Germany and the Soviet Union facing each other with a snarl in stone. Seeing it, Maman held my arm and shuddered
.

Thirty works by Picasso were exhibited in the Spanish pavilion. They made me think your grandfather’s study of women’s faces might be his. Guard it well. It may be worth a fortune someday. Picasso’s most monumental and disturbing work was the central mural, Guernica, a Cubist jumble of anguished bodies in tortured positions and a screaming horse, the whole chaotic scene commemorating the Basque town destroyed by German bombers in April. The painting was shortsightedly dismissed by the press as the dream of a madman. As for me, I can’t get it out of my mind
.

We both felt more comfortable in the Finnish pavilion, surrounded by trees and made entirely of wood, with undulating ceilings and curved walls. You would have appreciated the craftsmanship, André. When night descended, the Eiffel Tower and the banks of the Seine were lit gorgeously, as though strung with diamonds. I wish you could have seen that
.

I miss you both and want you back in Paris soon
.

Your best friend
,

Maxime
             

The letter took me from the depths of foreboding to a vision of glorious splendor.

“No word about Monsieur Laforgue,” I said.

T
HE NEXT DAY WHILE
A
NDRÉ
was working in the courtyard, I asked Pascal to tell me more about Paul Cézanne. That pleased him, and he took out his pages.

“I haven’t told you about visiting him in his hometown, Aix-en-Provence, south of here. Julien and I hadn’t seen him since I had acquired that landscape of his, so I went there to set Julien’s mind at rest. I asked after him in galleries, in art supply stores, in cafés along cours Mirabeau, the shady main avenue lined with mansions. You must get André to take you there.”

“He’ll tell me he has to work. You tell him.”

“I stopped to watch a
boules
game and asked the players if they knew him. It was baffling. No one had heard of him—one of the finest painters in all of France. Had he no friends in his own town?

“Finally, I went to the Hôtel de Ville. A clerk of town records gave me an address, and there I saw him trudging home, hunch-shouldered under a slouch hat, looking like a tramp. He was carrying a game bag with the neck of a green bottle poking out and his oversized paint box, with an easel and a painting strapped to his back. His face was sunburnt and his beard was smeared with paint. He recognized me, Lisette. Imagine that.”

Pascal picked out his pages from the desk. “This isn’t exact. It’s just what I remember. I told him I had come to ask if he needed any more frames, but mostly to see his paintings.

“ ‘My paintings? Humph. I am only a beginner,’ he muttered.

“I told him not to degrade himself, that I had gone to his big exhibition three times, and that I wanted to see his paintings so I could remember them.

“ ‘It is no great thing to remember paintings,’ he said. ‘Look at nature instead. It’s fresh every day. Think of its author. You do not
get that in a painting. But we try. We try. Look over there, at the space between that tree and us. The air. The atmosphere. You can feel it, smell it, even taste it. But how the devil do you paint atmosphere? It’s a mixture of air and water, light and shade, constantly changing. I have to chase it.’

“ ‘Now, that tree is easier. It’s solid. A cylinder. And the foliage above it, a half sphere. The road, a trapezoid. That bush, a cone. See? The shadows of the divine create those shapes. But be careful. After all, art is a religion.’

“ ‘The same thing as soul?’ I asked.

“He answered, ‘You might say that. Or that it is created with soul. How you
appreciate
a thing is soul. Appreciate those vibrations of light in reds and yellows. Blues, too. You can’t feel the air without blues. If you’re living in the grace of God, you should be able to express it. I’m still working it out. I’m never satisfied. I’m afraid I won’t live long enough to paint with confidence. Do you know, monsieur, what it feels like to be called a fraud? The torment never goes away. And that makes life terrifying.’

“ ‘A fraud? Never!’ I told him. ‘You’re a master.’

“He turned to me at his doorway, and his eyes were moist and deep. ‘Am I?’ he asked. He let a moment pass as though he was trying to figure me out. Then he invited me in.

“It was a grim, cluttered old house. The studio had high ceilings and tall windows. I seem to remember a potbellied stove. Along a shelf there were white
compotiers
like my mother’s, straw-wrapped wine bottles, a candlestick, gray jugs, pitchers, and the green glazed
toupin
that’s in my painting.”

“What’s a
toupin
?”

“An olive jar. He called it moral pottery. He thought by painting it, he was honoring the rustic crafts of Provence. He said that a canvas and a marble block are luxury items, but the craftsman who gives an artistic touch to a simple piece of pottery or a basket, or a
panetière
, or wooden utensils, or pine furniture brings art to the
people. Think of that, Lisette, the next time you sit on that pine bench over there.”

“Or on André’s toilet seat.”

“He told me about the poet Frédéric Mistral’s Félibrige movement to restore and honor Provençal crafts and traditions and language, and he gave me a copy of
Letters from My Mill
, by Alphonse Daudet, a true son of Provence. You should read it.

“All the while, he couldn’t stand still. One after another, he pulled out unframed landscapes done around Aix showing a pattern of vineyards and orchards and pale
ocre de Ru
wheat fields alternating with green rectangles, often with Montagne Sainte-Victoire in the background, thrusting up like a pyramid. ‘My rock of a thousand challenges,’ he called it. ‘The queen of mountains.’ He said its roots dig down beneath civilization. He even called it his Mount Sinai.

“There were also paintings of
pigeonniers
, those round towers for roosting pigeons.”

Pascal consulted his notes. “ ‘Look! Look here,’ Cézanne says. ‘This
pigeonnier
is Provence, man and nature in harmony. Paris dealers don’t understand. They insult me. Why shouldn’t I paint what is important here? Pigeon droppings are used as fertilizer. What a thing to paint, they say, but from pigeon shit come apples, pears, grapes, the delectable fruits and wines of Provence. And who doesn’t love a good
salmis
, all its juices and herbs of the countryside mixing in a delicious pigeon ragout, eh?
Pigeonniers
are far more important in Provence than decrepit castles.
Cabanons
are too.’

“He showed me some paintings with stark, narrow cabins made of stone, one room stacked on one room. You’ve seen them isolated in fields and pastures. Farmers and shepherds use them from time to time. ‘Who will give us back our
cabanons
,’ he says, ‘when the big farms move in and tear them down for another two rows of apple trees?’

“I was afraid he was working himself into a fit of rage, so I tried to calm him.
‘Eh, bieng
, you paint them to preserve them.’

“ ‘It’s something I can do,’ he says. ‘Frédéric Mistral can compose a poem about
cigales
. Daudet can write a story of his windmill. I can paint
cabanons
and
pigeonniers
and
toupins
. I want to die painting them. To die painting. Do you understand? I do nothing but work, but the evidence,
la réalisation
, I don’t see it. I go to mass, I go to vespers, but I don’t see it.’

“His voice turned sad. He pulled out paintings of blocklike ochre rocks and cut cliffs of a quarry, one after another.

“ ‘The Bibémus quarry near here,’ he says. ‘I painted it from the upper story of a
cabanon
I rented. Without it being right there in a field, I would not have been able to get this view. But dealers don’t like quarries. They aren’t pretty like the Impressionists’ picnics. They don’t understand their importance.’

“ ‘But Julien Tanguy understood?’

“ ‘The only one. He saw what I did, that I painted the earth’s structure manipulated by man, yet all in harmony.’

“And with that I asked how many frames I should make for the quarry painting with Montagne Sainte-Victoire in the background.”

Pascal gazed at it steadily, his chest heaving, as though he were a quarryman resting from swinging a pickax. Perhaps he was drawing from the painting the substance of his soul. I envied that, finding a painting that could depict one’s own soul.

“Think of the shame of it, Lisette. That town below his studio, it knew
nothing
of how he struggled, day after day, working in a frenzy, draining himself with the effort to honor Provence. They didn’t even know he was there! A native son! There’s more to tell about him, but I feel
fatigué
. Tomorrow. Can you wait until tomorrow?”

“Yes, I can wait.”

He asked me to prepare
daube
for him on Saturday. His voice was pleading, almost like the whine of a child. I had to ask him what it was.

“A traditional Provençal dish, sort of a beef ragout simmered with red wine. It has orange peel and tomato and carrots and those little round onions. Pick some rosemary for it. Cézanne would have eaten it on a Saturday too.”

In a few moments, his eyes closed, his head dipped to his chest, and he snored lightly. To the soft rhythm of his exhaustion, I went out to the courtyard, where André was sharpening his large U-gouge.

“I’m not sorry we came here,” I said softly. “He’s giving me something I couldn’t get anywhere else. His memories of two great artists.”

“So are you beginning to feel privileged?” André asked.

“I am. If we three were living in Paris, I would be working, and in our free time there would always be something else to do. But here in quiet Roussillon with these empty afternoons, there is time for me to sit and listen.”

André set down his tools and enfolded me for a long, swaying moment before he whispered, “So now we know why we came.”

CHAPTER NINE

A GOOD LIFE

1938–39

I
T HAD BEEN A MILD WINTER, WITH ONLY TWO MISTRALS
. I
F
they were the fiercest they could be, I ceased to worry, and, after March, the month of contrasts, I enjoyed the coming of spring and the potent aroma of thyme on the hillside below our courtyard. Pascal came inside one April afternoon, the shoulder of his arm that held his pouch of
boules
sagging, his chin thrust forward. He was inhaling hoarse, congested breaths through his mouth.

“This is the worst day of my life,” he growled.

“Oh,
non, non, non
. Don’t say that. I’m sure—” I began.

“I’ll say what I want to say.”

He started up the stairs to his room, hung on to the railing a few moments, his thin chest heaving, then carefully set the
boules
sack on the second step and turned back. He made it to the dining table, slumped onto a chair, and swept his arm across the oilcloth as if sweeping away some bad experience.

I sat down next to him. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

Slowly he raised his head and looked at me.

“The color of your cheeks is like a Cézanne peach.”

I laid my hand on his arm.

“What’s that garlic for?” he asked.

“Daube.”

“Wrong time. It’s an early winter dish. Wait until November.”

“All right, but that’s a long time from now.”

I turned away so he might not read my reason—that I was making it now as a precaution. Instead, I should have recognized that Pascal’s complaint revealed his will to live.

He regarded his trembling hands.

“Not a single
boule
. I couldn’t fire or point where I wanted to. They called me names. Even Aimé did. I bent down to point and my knees gave way. I sank to the ground and Aimé had to help me up.” By now Pascal went to play
boules
only once a week. Even though he was
fatigué
—a worsened state than
peu fatigué
, but still not
très fatigué
—that was not enough to keep him home entirely. Ashamed, diminished, perhaps even fearful, he covered his face with his hands, as if the whole world had come crashing down on him without mercy.

“Wasn’t there anything good about the day?”

It took him a while to think of something. “Only one thing. Aimé stopped calling me names after he helped me up.”

His childlike thinking in the face of end-of-life concerns produced in me a warm sensation of mothering.

“They chased him. Did I tell you?”

“Chased Aimé?”

“Chased Cézanne. A gang threw stones at him, and at his painting. They called him an imbecile and other wicked names.”

“No, that couldn’t be.”

“How do you know? You weren’t there. I saw it.”

Getting up to crush the garlic cloves, I let him rage. I would use tomatoes, onions, and green olives instead of orange rind and anchovies, and white wine instead of red, and I would call it
boeuf à l’Arlésienne
instead of
daube
.

“Such a noble man,” Pascal murmured. “He devoted his life to art, and what did he get for it? Scorn, dissatisfaction, exhaustion.”