Sugar and Other Stories (27 page)

When they had first rushed into the Villa Colomba, chirruping children and pinch-mouthed, disapproving cook, and had found nothing but echoing, cool space between the thick walls with their barred slit windows, she had looked to Joshua in alarm, whilst the children cried out, “Where are the chairs and tables?” He had found an immense hour glass, in a niche over the huge cavernous hearth, and said, smilingly, “We are indeed in another time, a Saturnine time.” Civilization, it turned out, existed upstairs, though cook complained mightily of ageing rusty iron pots and a ratcheted spit like a diabolical instrument of torture. Everything was massive and ancient: oak tables on a forest of oak pillars, huge leather-backed thrones, beds with heavy gilded
hangings, chests ingeniously carved on clawed feet, too heavy to lift, tombs, Tom said, for curious girls. “A house for giants,” Joshua said to Juliana, seeing her intrigue and anxiety both clearly. He drew her attention to the huge wrought-iron handles of the keys. “We are out of the nineteenth century entirely,” he said. The walls of the
salone
were furnished with a series of portraits, silver-wigged and dark-eyed and rigid. Joshua’s bedroom had a fearful and appalling painting of fruits and flowers so arranged as to form a kind of human form, bristling with pineapple spines, curvaceous with melons, staring through passionflower eyes. “
That
,” said Juliana, “is bound to appeal to Mr Browning, who is interested in the grotesque.” Tom said he would not make much of the family portraits, which were so similar as to argue a significant want of skill in the painter. “Either that, or a striking family resemblance,” said Joshua. “Or a painter whose efforts all turn out to resemble his own appearance. I have known one or two portraiture painters like that.” Sitting now on the rim of the fountain trough, watching him frown over his drawing, look up, correct, frown and scribble, she wondered if by some extraordinary process her undistinguished features might be brought to resemble his keen and handsome ones. He was gipsyish in colouring, and well-groomed by habit, a kind of contradiction. Here in the mountains he wore a loose jacket and a silk scarf knotted at his neck, but knotted too neatly. He was smaller and thinner than Tom.

Joshua worked on the mouth corner. He had chosen a very soft, silvery pencil for this very soft skin: he did not want to draw a caricature in a few sparing lines, he wanted somehow to convey the nature of the solidity of the flesh of cheek and chin. He had mapped in the rounds and ovals, of the whole head and the hat brim, and the descending curve of the looped plait in the nape of Juliana’s neck, and the spot where her ear came, and parts of the calm wide forehead. The shadow cast on the flesh by the circumference of the hat was another pleasant problem in tone and shading. He worked in little, circling movements, feeling out little
clefts with the stub of his pencil, isolating tiny white patches of light that shone on the ledge of the lip or the point of the chin, leaving this untouched paper to glitter by contrast with his working. He filled out the plump underthroat with love;
so
it gave a little,
so
it was taut.

“I wish I could see,” said Juliana, “what you are doing.”

“When it is done.”

It was almost as if he was touching the face, watching its grey shape swim into existence out of a spider web of marks. His hand hovered over where the nose would be, curled a nostril, dented its flare. If anywhere he put dark marks where light should be, it was ruined. No two artists’ marks are the same, no more than their thumbprints. Behind Juliana’s head he did the edge, no more, of the flat stony texture of the solar face.

Juliana kept still. Her anxieties about Mr Browning and the massive awkwardness of their temporary home were calmed. Joshua’s tentative pencil began to explore the area of the eyes. The eyes were difficult. They must first be modelled — the life was conferred by the pinpoint of dark and the flecks of white light, and the exact distances between them. He had studied the amazing eyes created by Rembrandt van Rijn, a precise little bristling, fine, hair-like movement of the brush, a spot of crimson here, a thread of carmine there, a spider-web paste of colour out of which a soul suddenly stared. “Please look at me,” he said to Juliana, “please look at me — yes, like that — and don’t move.” His pencil point hovered, thinking, and Juliana’s pupils contracted in the greenish halo of the iris, as she looked into the light, and blinked, involuntarily. She did not want to stare at him; it was unnatural, though his considering gaze, measuring, drawing back, turning to one side and the other, seemed natural enough. A flood of colour moved darkly up her throat, along her chin, into the planes and convexities of her cheeks. Tears collected, unbidden, without cause. Joshua noted the deepening of colour, and then the glisten, and ceased to caress the paper with the pencil. Their eyes met. What a complicated thing is this meeting of eyes,
which disturbs the air between two still faces, which has its effects on the heartbeat, the hair on the wrists, the flow of blood. You can understand, Joshua thought, why poets talk of arrows, or of hooks thrown. He said, “How odd it is to look at someone, after all, and to see their soul looking back again. How can a pencil catch that? How do we know we see each other?”

Juliana said nothing, only blushed, rosier and rosier, flooded by moving blood under her hat, and one large tear brimmed over the line of lower lashes, with their wet silkiness which Joshua had been trying to render.

“Ah, Juliana. There is no need to cry. Please, don’t. I’ll stop.”

“No. I am being silly. I — I am not used to be looked at so intently.”

“You are beautiful to look at,” said Joshua, comparing the flowing colours with the placid silver-grey of his attempt to feel out her face. He put down his drawing, and touched at her cheek with a clean handkerchief. The garden hummed with insect song and bubbled with water; he was somehow inside it, as he was when he was drawing; he looked down and there, under the tight pink muslin, was the generous round of a breast. It was all the same, all alive, the warm stone, the water, the rough grass, the swirl of pink muslin, the troubled young face. He put his two hands round the little ones that turned in her lap, stilling them like trapped birds.

“I have alarmed you, Juliana. I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry.” Small but clear.

“Look at me again.” It was said for him; it was what came next; they no sooner looked but they loved, a voice told him; the trouble was delightful, compelling, alarming. “Please look at me, Juliana. How often do we really look at each other?”

She had looked at him before, when he was not looking. Now she could not. And so it seemed natural for him to put his arms along the soft round shoulders, to push his face, briefly, briefly, under the brim of the hat, to rest his warm lips on the mouth corner his pencil had touched in its distance. Juliana could hear
the sea, or her own life, swirling.

“Juliana,” he said, “Juliana, Juliana.” And then, prompted by some little local daemon of the grass plot and the carved smiler, “Juliana is the name of the lady in one of the poems I most love. Do you know it? It is by Andrew Marvell; it is the complaint of the mower, Damon.”

Juliana said she did not know it. She would like to hear it. He recited.

“She was not very kind,” said Juliana.

“We do not know what she was,” said Joshua. “Only the effect she had upon the Mower.”

He gripped the little fingers. The fingers gripped back. And then the children came bursting down the pathway under the trees, announcing an expedition to the village.

Juliana was in no doubt about what had happened. It was love. Love had blossomed, or struck, like lightning, like a hawk, as it was clearly seen to do in novels and poems, as it took no time to do, voracious or sunny, in the stories she lived on, the scenes her imagination and more, her moral expectations, naturally inhabited. Love visited all who were not ridiculous or religious. Simply, she had always supposed her own, when it came, would be unrequited and lowering, was unprepared for kisses and poetry. She went to bed that night and turned on her dusty bolster among her coarse sheets, all vaguely aflame, diffusely desirous, terribly unused to violent personal happiness.

Joshua was less sure of what had happened. He too burned that night, less vaguely, more locally, making a turmoil of his coverings
and tormented by aches and tensions. He recognized the old cherub for what he was, and gave him his true name, the name Juliana gave him, honourably, not wriggling into demeaning her or himself by thinking simply of lust. He went over and over every detail with reverent pleasure, the pink muslin, the trusting tear-filled eyes, the flutter of a pulse, the soft mouth, the revelations of his questing pencil. But, unlike Juliana, he was already under the rule of another daemon or cherub; he was used to accommodating his body and mind to the currents of the dictates of another imperative; he felt a responsibility also to the empty greenness that had existed in his primitive innocence, before. He wanted, he loved; but did he want enough, did he love enough? Had he inadvertently behaved dishonourably to this young creature, certainly tonight the dearest to him in the world, certainly haloed with light and warm with charm and promise of affection? He was twenty years old. He had no experience and was confused. He finally promised himself that tomorrow he would do as he had already promised himself he would do, set off early and alone up the mountain-side, to do some sketching — even painting. He would look at the land beyond habitation. He would explain to her: she would immediately understand all, since what he should say would be no more than the serious and honourable truth; that he must go away.

He rose very early, and went into the kitchen to beg sandwiches, and a flask of wine, from cook. Gianni was sent off to saddle his mule, to take him as far as the village, Lucchio, which could be seen clinging to the face of the mountain opposite. It was barely dawn, but Juliana was up, too; he encountered her in the dark corridor.

“I am going up the cliff, to paint,” he said. “That was what I had intended to do, before.”

“We must think a little,” he said. “I must go up there, and think. You do understand? You will talk to me again — we will speak to each other — when I return?”

She could have said: it is nothing to me whether you go up the mountain or remain here. But she was honest.

“I shall look out for you coming back.”

“Juliana,” he said, “ah, Juliana.”

The mule skidded on the stones. The road was paved, after a fashion, but the stones were upended, like rows of jagged teeth. Gianni walked stolidly and silently behind. The road circled the hill, under chestnuts, then out onto the craggier ascent. It twisted and the sun rose; the mule passed from cold shadow to whitish glare and back again. Hot stone was very hot, Joshua thought, and cold stone very cold. He could smell stone of both kinds, as well as the warm hairy sweating mule and the glossy rubbed ancient leather. He looked backwards and forwards, along the snaking line of the river that cut its way about and about between the great cones of the Apennines. The sky had a white clearness and emptiness, not yet gleaming, which was essentially Italian. He knew the mountains round: the Libro Aperto, or open book, the Prato Fiorito, velvety and enamelled with flowers, the Monte Pellegrino, covered with silvery edible thistles and inhabited, once, by hermits whose diet they were. He thought about the mountains, with reverence and curiosity, and his thoughts on the mountains, like those of many of his contemporaries, were in large part the thoughts of John Ruskin, who had seen them clearly, as no one else, it seemed, had ever seen them, and had declared that this clarity of vision was the essence of truth, virtue, and good art, which were, in this, one. Mountains are the bones of the earth, he had written. “But there is this difference between the action of the earth, and that of a living creature; that while the exerted limb marks its bones and tendons through the flesh, the excited earth casts off the flesh altogether, and its bones come out from beneath.” Joshua thought about this, and looked at the working knobs of bone at the base of the mule-neck, under their thin layer of skin, and remembered, formally and then excitedly, the search for Juliana’s bone under the round cheek. Ruskin was a
geologist. His ideals of painting were founded on an intricate and analytical knowledge of how the movement of water shaped and unmade and shifted the eternal hills, of how clefts were formed, and precipices sheered. It had been a revelation to the young Joshua to read in
Modern Painters
how very young was man’s interest in these ancient forms. The Greeks had seen them merely as threats or aids to the adventures of gods and heroes; mediaeval man had on the whole disliked anything wild or savage, preferring order and cultivation, trellised gardens and bowers to wild woods or louring cliffs. John Ruskin would have delighted in the mediaeval names of the hills through which he now travelled: the Open Book, the Flowery Meadow, the Pilgrim’s Mount came straight out of Dante into the nineteenth century. Ruskin had characterized modern art, with some disparagement, as the “service of clouds”. The mediaeval mind had taken pleasure in the steady, the definite, the luminous, but the moderns rejoiced in the dark, the sombre. Our time, Ruskin had said, and Joshua had joyfully learned, was the true Dark Ages, devoted to smokiness and burnt umber. Joshua had not understood about the necessity of brightness and colour until he came south this first time, until he saw the light, although intellectually he had been fired by Ruskin’s diatribes against Victorian darkness and ugliness in all things, in dress, in manners, in machines and chimneys, in storm-clouds and grottoes.

Only, in Paris, he had seen something which changed, not the desire for brightness, but the ideas about the steady, the definite, the luminous. Something which should have helped him with the soft expanse of Juliana’s pink dress, which he remembered, turning a corner and seeing the village again, clutching the cliff like thornbushes with half their roots in air. It was to do with the flesh and the muslin, the tones in common, the tones that were not shared, a blue in the pink cloth … you could pick up in the vein or the eyelid, the wrist, a shimmer, a thread … The hot saddle shifted beneath him: the mule sighed: the man sighed. Gianni said, “Lucchio, una mezz’ora.” The white air was also blue and
the blue white light.