I feared the worst: despairing of finding the overall truth of a face, had the painter simply attacked its individual features, drowning his finest touches under a poor glaze, thickening the color where he should have instead lightened it? No, the portrait was irreproachable: you just fell in love with it the moment you saw it.
The painted surface came to life before me. It made me think of those faces that sleep with their eyes open: they’re motionless, but you have no doubt that they’re alive. These sleeping beauties never gaze at their onlookers, but this Venetian woman by Bellini was staring at me intently. One would have to find the source of movement, however slight, that justified this illusion. The painting was immobile, and my glance was not distracted. I imagined that there must have been some phenomenon in the air—between my face and this painted face—some change in the atmosphere, some alteration of the light, to which I had failed to pay sufficient attention.
I moved this way and that in front of Caterina Cornaro. I observed the other canvases as well (with their perfectly inert faces, their formal beauties), but again and again I returned to Caterina Cornaro. The flesh coloring of her face remained ever vivid—a striking anomaly that at once called out to me and made me afraid. Meanwhile, I vehemently rejected any notion that I was here encountering a real woman in the flesh: I preferred the sensible inertia of an image completely divorced from its deceased model, the expected absence of a being whom I would never come to know. In an ancient portrait such as this—quite the reverse of an image glimpsed in a mirror—is not the evocation of a woman supposed to be an image frozen in time?
I leaned forward once more. My gaze sought out the eyes in the painting and met them, lost in anticipation—a summons that refused to die out. “Your painted face clouds over the moment I look at you, yet your eyes are begging for life.” These were words I whispered to the painting, but what did they mean? There was a subtle exchange between us. “Your gaze is insisting on the life it lacks.” I concluded: Yes, it’s as if she were begging me, and I closed my eyes, utterly in love.
Deprived of a model for several centuries, the figure in the painting was crying out for a live woman. The relationship between face and portrait had in this case been reversed. Time itself, like some inept god, had been annulled. “Caterina!” she was saying, “Let your face come forth; let it agree to correspond to mine feature by feature!” A crazy request, which I was at a loss to answer, but which I sensed as I stood before her. I addressed the portrait in person. A voice rang out in the silence of the gallery, filled with joy and anguish. It was not my own.
Later, I turned around. The visitors were passing by Caterina Cornaro. Nobody was looking in my direction. They didn’t know that a painting was in the process of awakening, engaged in a freakish argument with time. The ancient gaze was calling out to me. But it was not entirely aimed at me. Instead, it stared right through me and sought out a woman—the model who was yet to come and who would at last appease the portrait by finally offering up its lost resemblance to it.
Feeling like a rejected lover, my eyes left her face to wander over the patrician interior of the museum, inspecting its furnishings, its wall hangings, its dimmed bedrooms—the prison space that kept the deceased Caterina from stepping out of her frame and rejoining me in the here and now.
Then I turned away from her portrait. On the wall facing it were windows opening onto a lighted space. I made my way out onto the cold street, just barely tinged by the November air, and headed for Kálvin Tér.
Unable to focus my attention, I walked around for a long time. The painted face wouldn’t leave me alone. I tried to act decisively, but went on one fool’s errand after another. At one point, I bought some Serbian and Bulgarian periodicals, although I didn’t know a word of either language. In another place, I bought a pocket mirror I would never use. Several times I took the same bus in both directions—the number nine, from Kálvin Tér to Déak Tér, from Déak Tér to Kálvin Tér. I was humiliated by the painting; I needed to find a life that was less haunted, a life made up of ordinary things. Finally I got back to my hotel and went to bed without dinner, exhausted by my errancy and the endless stream of cars.
The next morning, I was glad to meet up with the painter Bálint in Szentendre. We walked slowly through the alleyways; he showed me the designs on the windows, the wrought-iron decorations, the statuettes, pointing out the various architectural details of the houses. The old man often halted in the middle of his sentences to catch his breath. We drank some coffee as we spoke of painting; then he left, making me promise to come see him before I left Budapest. I was planning on buying two of his drawings. They are in my study as I write this: a tumbril for the dead, the seventh arcanum joined to the thirteenth, both the color of dawn—black, blue, white.
One hour later, I settled into a börözo (a cellar tavern) and ordered some excellent kéknyelü from Badacsony, some bread, and some fruit. I had brought along a book of short stories by Kostolány and picked out a quiet spot in a corner.
I found the reading so riveting that I lost track of time, and when I looked up it was getting dark. The börözo was filled with customers who had just finished their workday. Glancing behind me, I saw a group of young people and two lovers who were kissing passionately. A drowsy old man was trying in vain to raise his head, and next to him, on the other side of a pillar, a young woman was writing letters. She had seen me arrive, had smiled at me, and had forgotten me the whole time I was reading (though I was watching her, distractedly, while appearing absorbed in my book). When I finally closed the book, I studied her features, her fine, long hands, and, as I looked at her pointedly, trying to remember where I had previously met her, she got up, arranged her letters in a blue canvas bag, approached my table, and introduced herself in German: “Ich bin die Katalin Koszorú. Hallo, François.”
I invited the young woman to sit down, looking for a way to let her know—without appearing ridiculous—that I had already made her acquaintance. She picked up my book and leafed through it, putting on a serious air, as if to make fun of me.
“François, I saw you at the National Museum yesterday morning. You were standing in front of Gentile Bellini’s Catarina Cornaro, and I was behind you, against the window that you noticed just as you were leaving. Take a good look at me, I’m asking you.”
I complied with her request somewhat reticently, for I knew I would have to admit that I was here faced with a striking resemblance to the woman in the portrait. I was thinking about leaving as soon as possible, I was looking for any pretext, but Katalin interrupted me, placed her hands on mine, and said with a smile, “Relax, I’m just going to sit here and read.”
She opened the book, more or less in the middle, and told me how I had spent the previous day, dredging up the most minute details I had remembered. Alarmed, I heard her pronounce, word for word, the very sentences I would have formulated had I been asked to describe my disarray in front of Bellini’s portrait. I protested halfheartedly.