If you don’t learn to make it bearable, guilt can be a bottomless well. Over time I’ve managed to work it out so that, of all the guilts I drag around, only two are particularly burdensome: my mother’s death and abandoning Konrad. Father never recriminated me for anything, but a snippet of conversation overheard randomly became one of the most painful discoveries of my life. With his back to the door, not realizing that I had gotten out of bed and was listening right outside the dining room, he said: “Ilse never recovered from the birth.” It took me a long time to understand what he was talking about, because it had never occurred to me that I could be the one responsible for my mother’s absence. I remember that I went back to my bedroom with my feet frozen and didn’t fall asleep until the early morning. For the first time, an accusing finger, invisible but devastatingly effective, turned me into the key that explained a world of silences and evasive replies. Whatever the case, and even though it could seem like a lame argument, I’ve always been consoled by thinking that there was no way I could have prevented Mother’s death. With Konrad it’s different, because I could have stayed with him and, perhaps, who knows, taken him down to the basement in time, but my living situation with Erika and the siege by the National Socialists were so asphyxiating that I was overcome with a desire to be free of them, and as such unable to predict the full scope of my decision. And when I realized the mistake I’d made by fleeing Berlin it was already too late. Besides, in addition to my regret over abandoning Konrad, there is the added guilt of having survived him. I’ve asked myself the same question a handful of times,“Why him and not me?” but I still don’t have the answer. And, the way things are going, I doubt I’ll ever figure it out. All I know is that it’s not easy to outlive your son.
I suppose that things could have been different but, luckily, there’s no way of knowing if they would have turned out better or worse. And now it doesn’t matter. Although it’s hard for me to accept — especially at night, when it’s silent enough to hear the woodworms chomping on the floorboards and life seems reduced to an exhausting wait for a daybreak that never arrives — I know I have no reason to complain. After all, despite the many shadows that darken my life, the weight of the losses — as painful and impossible to forget as they are — don’t shift the overall balance. My father gave me the gift of a magical childhood, I survived the carnage of the trenches, I’ve been able to devote myself to painting. . Perhaps I didn’t do so well with women, but at least I have the mesmerizing memory of Alma.
Also, I was quite lucky during the occupation. Luckier than many other people. Once I got used to the gnaw of hunger and the blackouts, the worst was waiting for the clamor of the anti-aerial cannons and the uproar of the bombings, especially when they came from the outskirts to the heart of the 15th, just past the Montparnasse cemetery. If the planes had veered off course a little, Hofer might have had to settle for cursing in front of the remains of my studio while he tried to think how to explain to Göring that he had lost the opportunity to acquire a new Cranach for him.
The three figures in the painting rest beneath the branches of a languishing fir tree. The Madonna has the child Jesus seated on her lap. Her gaze is unfocused and her eyes are sad, but it’s a resigned sadness. A transparent veil covers the golden curls that fall over her shoulders. She wears a blue shawl over a garnet-colored tunic. Her left hand supports the holy child’s back. Her right, with the fingers half closed, holds up a cluster of grapes. Saint Joseph, with a red cape over a brown tunic, looks at the Virgin tenderly. Bearded, and with a considerably receding hairline, he holds a hat in his right hand and a cane in his left. The child Jesus, with a large head and an old man’s face, brings a grape to his mouth with his right hand and rests his left on the cluster. In the foreground, lower right, there is a columbine and, to the left, a mallow bush without a single bloom.
All of it is there for a reason, the blue wrap, the grapes, the columbine, but, despite being somewhat stereotypical, the whole is fascinating. To simplify the work for his disciples and get the most out of them, Cranach produced the models needed to make the paintings he was commissioned and developed a technique that was effective and easy to copy. With that way of approaching the work, placing professionalism and the prestige of his workshop above the pretensions of a genius creator, it’s not surprising that there are hundreds of works with his signature. It’s so different from the individualist vanity of our time, where pretty much everybody thinks they’ve invented the wheel. Well. . there’s no point in harping on that anyway. It’s just one more losing battle. Alma used to tell me: “You waste too much energy on problems that can’t be solved.” And she wasn’t wrong. I’ve always been like that. But anyway, at this point, with one foot in the grave, the only thing I can really do properly is get riled up over things.
Alma’s favorite color was blue. I would have liked her to hear my father’s explanations of the fortuitous origins of Prussian blue and the use of indigo to protect from snakebites. It’s a shame they never met. Every once in a while, it would have been nice to share father’s company with Alma. And vice versa. Sometimes, when I am missing them, I imagine them sitting in the Hauterive garden talking about the best way to graft, or how to prune the magnolia. I’m sure they would’ve understood each other, because Alma was as curious as father, if not more so. When she wanted to know something, she wouldn’t stop until she found it out. And they both had the rare ability to get me talking. It was impossible to hide anything from them. And they were both great listeners, better than anyone else I’ve ever met. They could turn a shared silence into the finest of comforts. Erika, on the other hand, was very different from my father. Even though she was the daughter of one of his closest friends, he never understood my marrying her. “She’s not right for you,” he once told me. Only once. Then he always behaved as if he had never said or even thought that. He was too scrupulous to reveal his opinions about people. Or criticize them. Even when my relationship with Erika started to fall apart, he refrained from reminding me that he had never thought it was a good idea.
The blue was simple, but choosing which color should go on each of the other vertices is much harder for me. And I suppose that someone as learned as Auguste Laugel would tell me to go to hell if he saw me using his chromatic star for such a trifle. Every time I’ve tried to read his book on optics and the arts, which I found in my father’s library, I could never get past the first few pages. Maybe because, deep down, instead of his physiological meditations, I’m more fascinated that two hundred grams of dried saffron stigmas can color a hundred thousand times their volume of water. Or that, according to some medieval recipes, men’s urine works better than women’s when preparing the violet that the illuminators extracted from the orchil. What I find most disconcerting though is that I remember my father’s stories so well but I don’t know so many other things, like why he kept Laugel’s star hanging on the wall of his study. When people disappear, all we’re left with is a territory covered in signs that are impossible to interpret. Isolated indications. Enigmas. Sometimes I try to imagine what the person who will have to empty out my studio will think about the indecipherable remains of my life: the zoetrope, a postcard of the Pont Alexandre III, my mother’s sewing box, Hofer’s list, a poster for the Schall und Rauch. .