Death. Like the light that comes through the window and plays with the dust floating in the air, its color is constantly changing. Sometimes, seated in front of the easel, when my hands can hold the brushes, I try to capture it, but fail. Perhaps because I’m incapable of deciphering my true feelings. Since Alma died, six years ago, I move restlessly between my eagerness to disappear and my refusal to accept surrender. I’ve never missed anyone so much. Maybe my father. Or my mother, although I can’t remember, because she died too soon. Just like Alma. Too soon for both of us: she left so much undone; and I didn’t have her with me long enough to be able to accept her absence now. How I wish she were here now. I’m sure she could find the right words to help me.
I met her at the theater, shortly after the war. During rehearsals for The Human Voice, by Cocteau. Even though I had read the play to make sketches for the poster they’d commissioned, I was impressed by the power of her monologue. I remember Alma’s unsettling presence, barefoot and with her hair uncombed, wearing a jacket over her slip, moving over the stage with a telephone in her hand; the inflections of her voice, adapting to the sinuous text like melted wax: from whispers to shouting, from fear to remorse; the cutting intensity of the silences, with her eyes lit up and her body tense, lying in wait for the absent words of the lover who has just left her. I returned to the theater a few times after that first evening, even though I didn’t need to for the poster. It was just to see her. Now I have to settle for a recording of the play she made right before she died. I listen to it often. I put on the record and close my eyes. For a little while, Alma’s voice lessens the cold and the dread, staves off the clawing loneliness.
It took me some time to make up my mind. One late afternoon though, I approached the stage to talk to her. “You’re not sick of listening to me yet?” she asked. On that first meeting, Alma was very taciturn. Over time, I realized that was just a protective strategy to disarm people and keep them at a distance. Yet once the obstacles were overcome, she opened up with surprising candor. Like on her first visit to my studio.“I want you to paint me,” she said.“Now.” When she saw me preparing the paper and charcoal, she laughed. “You didn’t understand what I meant. I want you to paint my body.” And she took off her clothes, in silence, without looking at me. For hours, as if I were once again magically protected by Laugel and Blanc’s chromatic stars hanging in my father’s study, I traveled over her body with my brushes and my fingers smeared in paint, I turned it into a chaos of shapes and colors. With no obstacles or limits. Painting had never given me such intense pleasure, such feverish eroticism. It wasn’t the last time. My years with Alma were the best years of my life. And since she’s no longer here, like the woman who clung to the telephone in The Human Voice, I feel as if I’m in a diving suit and someone’s cut the tube that was keeping me connected to the surface.
As it progresses, life transforms into an accumulation of absences. People, objects, landscapes, colors. . Paintings. And I paced up and down with Hofer’s list in my hand and a lump in my throat: “House On The Hill, 60 x 45; Seated Figure, 70 x 88; Green Interior, 68 x 70. .” Every title conjured up a unique story: the hills of my childhood, my mother’s distracted gaze, the clarity of the dusk sifting through the studio’s curtains. .“You decide.” The paintings or the Cranach. They say that Göring had more than seventy. He took them directly from collectors or museums or swapped them for works by banned painters: four Kirchners, seven Groszes, twelve Noldes for three Cranachs; six Kandinskys, a Picasso, five Grises and eight Schieles for two Cranachs. Hofer’s list for one Cranach. My Cranach.
My father gave it to me shortly before he died. When I asked him where he had gotten it, he gave me one of those enigmatic smiles of his. I’d always found them unsettling, ever since I was quite small, because they were unpredictable. He sometimes smiled that way before scolding me for some misdeed or while he proudly savored one of my modest successes, like a tooth pulled without a tear or a drawing prize at school. Sometimes I think that it was merely a smirk, an involuntary sign of confusion at having to express his feelings. Because my father was a man of contrasts. He could be the most affable person in the world, but he had a hard time showing his emotions. There was always a hidden, inaccessible space. After losing Alma, I realized that perhaps my mother’s death left him, too, without breathable air.
I know that they first saw each other in front of a Cranach. I can imagine the situation perfectly, because I heard him explain it many times. Father, stock still, focused, at just the right distance from the painting so he could take it all in as a whole without missing the small details. Everything at once. Balance. He always talked about the balance between the whole and the parts. And about the color, the color particularly. Not Mother. She was never still. Back and forth. To the right, to the left. From the other end of the room or with her face a few inches from the painting. As if she could only capture the essence of the work when she was in motion. Usually my father had a few choice words for anyone who disrupted his enjoyment of a painting but, on that day, he didn’t say a thing. Something about her left him speechless. “Her eyes,” he told me many years later. “Of the softest green, like malachite pigment. Like yours.” What I don’t know is what she must have thought of that stern man who watched her out of the corner of his eye until she left the room. Even though eight months passed before fate brought them together again, father said that he would occasionally visit the Cranach just to bring her to mind more vividly.
Curiously, now that my days are numbered, I feel I’ve become a haven for those who are gone; for the isolated, arbitrary, and vague memories of those who came before me. Memories that will vanish along with me, because Alma and I never had any children. We would have liked to, but it was too late. Now it would be a comfort to know that something of me would live on in someone. A physical trait, a way of smiling or moving their hands, an expression. Or memories of Alma. Or of me. Or my father’s stories. But I am the last link in a genealogy of shadows. After me, there will only be room for oblivion.
It’s raining. The color of the damp grass between the paving stones hasn’t changed. It persists with the steadfastness of the words and feelings that trigger the memories. It was also raining the day Hofer brought his list and, like today, the scent of damp earth came drifting up from the alley. That smell is inextricably linked to two highly contradictory feelings: the safety of my bed, as a child, when the aroma of the garden slipped in through the window, winning out over the terrifying wrath of the thunderclaps; and, a handful of years later, the paralyzing disquiet of indecision. Even though it didn’t match up with what I’d been told about Hofer, I spent a few days telling myself that maybe he’d end up forgetting his offer and leave me alone, that surely there was more tempting prey, that just one Cranach wasn’t worth wasting more time on. Despite that, I was constantly on guard, tensing over murmurs in the stairwell or cars stopping at the entrance to the alley. I tried to paint but every once in a while my eyes would happen to land on Hofer’s list, and I would get a knot at the top of my stomach. Then, like an unrelenting echo, his words floated among the objects in the room and obfuscated the comforting presence of the Cranach.