The Last Nude (33 page)

WHAT DOES IT MEAN, that the devil has cloven hooves? That there’s nothing firm to stand on. I was raised in comfort. I married a count. When the Reds took my husband away, they took away the ground on which I stood; no, they took away my very means to stand. They cleft my feet in twain. When I circled from prison to prison, when I painted in a frenzy, I did it with broken feet. My painting had a cloven-footed mountain goat’s confidence until I married Rollie, became a baroness, resumed the life I was bred for: it had the confidence borne of balancing eight points on broken rock, the devil’s confidence, bent on reclaiming heaven. That’s what I was painting for. Not for gallery owners. Not for critics. Not for my teachers. Least of all for other painters: painters were poor, and I wanted to be rich. I was painting to recover a lost world and to claim a place in it. I was painting for the people who would buy my work and make me rich again. I was painting as a way to stand apart from all the penniless White Russian ballerina girls desperate to sell themselves back into nobility. There weren’t enough aristocrats to marry us all, and I wasn’t young or thin enough to go it on looks alone.

And this is the devil’s part, the genius part: I just happened to be painting for anyone else who had lost a world, too, and because of the war, that was everyone. I was making our heaven myself, stroke by stroke, with the materials to hand. Prince Gabriel with his borrowed uniform. Suzy Solidor with her phony name. I took the chips and splinters of a broken world and I burnished them whole again. I recovered paradise, and from its depths called forth exactly what I needed: Baron Kuffner. My shaggy Galatea, my little homunculus. Indulgent daddy. Cock-at-dawn. Once I had him, the devil’s work was done. You would think, then, that I would have turned into a baroness wife, the kind of woman who paints as a hobby, who could just as easily throw parties or breed dogs. And maybe I could have once become her, when I was still young and unformed. If the two men hadn’t taken away my first husband. If we had emigrated together before they came, if we had joined my family wintering in Copenhagen, already fled, maybe that’s how I would have turned out.

But they took him, the two men. Until then, we could have left any time.
He’s
the one who needed to stay and be a hero for the Czar.

It happened at night, when we were in bed together. They pounded at the door: the Cheka, the Bolshevik police. They didn’t even wait for Thade to go to the door; they just kicked it open. Then they came upstairs.
We’re taking you in for questioning, Lempitzky,
they said.
Get dressed.

Could you give us a little privacy?
my husband asked. And they laughed. I couldn’t get dressed because they were standing in our bedroom. I was naked in the bed with the sheets wrapped around me and they were standing in their leather jackets, staring at me. Black and white: those jackets, my own pale skin.

 

 

 

I could not find the prison where they kept him. I asked everyone I knew for help. I went to the Swedish consulate and the official told me what he wanted. “But how do I know you’ll help me?” I asked.

“You don’t,” he said.

Afterward, I went outside and vomited in the snow: I slid and fell, and landed—yes, I landed—on a dead horse. They took my husband away and they threw me onto the body of a dead horse. A cloud of flies leapt at the wet thump. I screamed. And when I looked down, I saw that parts of the horse had been chopped away with knives, for meat.

 

 

 

So I left Russia. I had my own passport. I couldn’t save my husband. All I could save was myself.

 

 

 

And in Paris I became a painter. No dirt. No mess. Not one line out of place. And even though I stopped needing to summon the devil, once I started, I never stopped needing to trace runes on the floor and chant. Now that I have what was cut from me, you would think money and a title would have closed the wound. But I lost myself to Rafaela along the way, to painting her: I’ll always leak a wire of blood here, at the corner of the mouth.

25

NOW ROLLIE IS DEAD, so I can live anywhere. I just heard Hector’s pretty cousin Ana call Cuernavaca a
rich expatriate bubble
under her breath, to which I replied, full voice, “And why is that a problem?” The fact is, I chose to live here for the volcano. The gardener has somehow managed to spend all morning hanging a new lamp, but look there, past the ladder he left out: El Popo, through the bougainvillea, smoldering whitely in the distance. I told Hector that when I die I want my ashes scattered over El Popo, and he said,
Okay, querida.
Everyone here from the good old days finds it exotic that my best friend is a Mexican boy, but Hector Oliveras is a sculptor. Artists understand one another. He is a homosexual—all the good-looking ones are—but I like to think I’ll change his mind one day.

Inside, at my white Saarinen table, Kizette brings the mail as we sit to eat. Romana and her husband are bringing that handsome nephew they’ve talked about, so we’ll be seven for dinner, but we’re four for lunch now: my daughter and myself plus Hector and his young cousin Ana, returning to Mexico from New York City. “What’s in it, Hector?” I ask.

Kizette surrenders the mail, wounded. Her expression annoys me: she’s sixty-odd years old; surely she has more to live for.

Hector gives Ana an apologetic glance before sorting through the cards and letters. Not yet forty, Hector is boyish, but Ana at twenty-two might as well be a child. “You’re all creamy and golden, aren’t you?” I can’t help noting. “Like a little pot of flan.”

Ana looks uncomfortable and Kizette pouts. Kizette was pretty once too; I don’t see what she has to complain about. “Invitations to parties,” Hector reports.

“We can go over those with my schedule later.”

“Oh, oops, the Osaka gallery’s listing your birthplace as Moscow.”

“Warsaw,” I say more sharply than I care for Ana to hear. “Make them correct it.”

Ana gives me a shrewd, alert look. “Why did they say Moscow, then?”

Hector glances from her to me and, like me, he pretends he didn’t hear her. “The Zurich people want to show
Rafaela,
too,” he says, holding up another note.

“Did you send Osaka my letter about that?”

My daughter jumps in. “I thought we agreed to hold off on that,
chérie.
”

“Excuse me? Kizette. I asked you to send my letter and you didn’t send it?”

I can’t see the look Kizette and Hector give each other, but he surprises me by taking her side. “Tamara, remember? The three of us talked about it and you decided to send the Osaka people
The Dream
for now, and then offer your new
Rafaela
once everything’s firmed up.”

“Osaka? Zurich? Rafaela?” Ana looks from face to face. If I were younger, I simply wouldn’t talk business in front of a girl that pretty, but these days I never know how much pep I’ll have.

“Mother has a solo show in Japan coming up, and she has work in a big Art Deco show in Zurich, too.”

“La Belle Rafaela,”
I say, pointing.

I follow Ana’s eyes to the photograph over the doorway. “Oh!” she says, startled. Fifty-three years later, it still shocks: I’m pleased.

“It’s her most famous nude,” says Kizette dryly.

“I feel like I’ve seen it before,” Ana muses. “Yes! When I was a kid.” God help me. For her, eight years ago is
when I was a kid
? “Hector sent me a poster from your big rediscovery show.”

“I was not
rediscovered
.”

I know the child is not trying to provoke me, so I
am
controlling myself, but Kizette hears the ice in my voice and breaks in quickly, anxious. “
The Sunday Times
called
Beautiful Rafaela
‘perhaps the most important nude of the twentieth century.’”

“And they reproduced it in
The New York Times
last year,” Hector chimes in. I know what they’re doing, buttering me up, and I resent it, but I’m grateful, too.

“Wow,” says Ana.

It’s gratifying when the youth stop condescending, isn’t it? “I made a million dollars by my brush before I was thirty,
guapa,
and don’t you forget it.
”
The girl looks from Kizette to Hector to see if I’m joking, and back to me, impressed. “Arsène Alexandre called me
a perverse Ingres.
I think the Osaka people should be flattered by my offer.”

“A copy—” says Kizette.

“It’s a de Lempicka. It’s a contemporary interpretation. It’s not a copy.”

“What happened to the original painting?” asks Ana.

“After the big ’72 show,
La Belle Rafaela
was bought by a private collector. And he won’t lend it out anywhere.”

“That’s the problem? They only want the one painting?”

“They’ll take other work. Tamara’s too important for them not to.”

“And there
is
another option, an obvious one—”

“There’s the one I proposed, Kizette. I don’t see why you and Hector are being so difficult about this. I can paint a
Rafaela
for Zurich, too.”

Ana looks back at the painting, and asks, “Where is she now?”

Hector looks grateful to Ana for changing the subject, but clips a glance my way. Am I so difficult to lunch with as all that? “Who?” I ask the girl.

“Beautiful Rafaela. The model in the painting. What happened to her?”

“She went to
couture
school and opened a dress shop with some friends. Then she married a part-time journalist who got himself killed in Spain.”

“Where is she now?”

Is
she trying to provoke me? I shrug. “Wherever she wants to be, I suppose.”

“She was just a model,” Hector explains quickly. “That was fifty years ago.”

“Oh. But, I mean, you’re copying her now, so I figured you’d know . . .”

“It’s the
image
she’s copying, not the person,” he says.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, child,” I say, touching her cheek. “Just be your beautiful self.” It’s easy. She smiles. Bless Hector for saying the right thing at the right time.

She is bright as well as pretty, it seems. She has won a scholarship to graduate school, she tells us over lunch, but her Pinochet dissertation bores me.

“All the men I talk to know something, but they aren’t telling,” she says, some minutes into her explanation. “All the women
could
know something, and maybe some of them aren’t telling, but many of them—I feel it—aren’t
asking
their husbands and fathers. And I’m interested in this business of not-asking. What I, a privileged North American, see from the outside as an unforgivable lapse of curiosity? It might just be a survival strategy.”

She
is
sharp. But she can’t cut me.
An unforgivable lapse of curiosity:
Was that for me? “I showed her a good deal more than
curiosity
in 1939 and look at how she repaid me.”

They’re staring. All three of them. “I’m sorry?” asks Ana.

She’s just like my daughter. Think you can fool me, all wide-eyed? “I saved Rafaela Fano from the Nazis, and she never spoke to me again.”

Ana looks at Hector, alarmed. Kizette, who is not clumsy, knocks over her wine and calls for the maid.

Ana says something soothing in Spanish to Luz as she swabs, excluding me, so I turn to Hector. “While you and your cousin are in town—there’s money in my purse—would you pick me up a tube of vermillion?”

“Of course,
querida.
”

“The good Belgian stuff.”

“I know what you like.”

“Don’t let them sell you anything else. None of those cadmium reds,
écoutes
?”

“Yes, Tamara.”

Luz asks if I need anything else and I wave her away. “China red, darling. Real ground cinnabar.”

“That’s right,” Hector assures me.

With Luz gone, Ana looks at all three of us and decides, it seems, to humor the old woman. “Is it for the painting you’re doing now?” she asks.

“That’s right. Nothing makes me feel so alive as painting for a show.”

Kizette’s jaw stirs. Hector says nothing. One of them is hiding something from me, but not well.

“May I see?”

“No, child. I’ll unveil it when I finish.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I’ve always been private about my work in progress,” I say, giving Kizette and Hector a sharp look. I was not private about my work in progress until a specific incident last week, as they well know. I wonder which one of them will dare to contradict me.

26