“If I do not labor, I cannot be idle,” Julien replied. “There are constant supervisions and I would be sent back if I didn’t perform well. After nine months we are allowed to live in the city and begin to work more on our own—or not, as the case may be. But I may not have much encouragement in corruption. Everyone at the École, who will be my comrades, will be people like myself.”
“Which means?”
“Earnest, hardworking, and dull,” he said. “We cannot help it. Dissipation is not on the curriculum.”
“In that case,” the father said, “you will miss what is most charming and educational about Rome. We must come and rescue you. I have to come to Italy at least once a year, and I offer you an exchange. You show me Rome, which you will no doubt know better than I in a short while, and I will show you the Romans. They, at least, I know well.”
“I accept with great pleasure,” Julien replied happily. “And you must keep your word. I shall now be looking forward to your arrival and will be greatly disappointed if I don’t hear from you. Might I ask why you come to Italy?”
After near an hour of conversation, this was the first initiative he had taken, the first time he ventured to move the conversation away from himself, partly aware that he must be seeming terribly self-centered, but more because the two people were making him relax in their company.
But the father waved his hand. “Neither important nor interesting,” he said. “But merely work. It will take a generation to replace what was destroyed in a few years. Perhaps longer, as the politicians seem determined to waste as much time and money as possible. It is my job to make sure they have no excuse but their own lassitude. But it is not exciting, not in comparison to what you do.”
Was that a joke at his expense? Julien thought so, but Julia translated for him. “Father is a scholar manqué,” she said gently. “He always wanted to write books. But he became rich instead, so is not allowed.”
“And you, Mademoiselle?”
“She is an artist,” Bronsen said, smiling at him.
“Are you really?” He addressed his question back to her, and noted that she was scrutinizing him carefully as he spoke. False admiration? Disdain for the rich hobbyist of no talent? Incomprehension and slight disapproval of the possible bohemian? “What sort of artist?”
“A painter,” she said, but gave no more away.
“A good one?” He persisted.
Again, her father answered for her. “Yes, she is. She is exceptional.”
Julien’s smile, understanding but with too much insight, prompted her to respond a little more fully. “No, I am not,” she said. “Not yet.” She said it with such care that Julien, who could easily have changed the subject then to pursue matters less obviously sensitive, was minded to probe further.
“I sense a little divergence of opinion here.”
“Father speaks from hope. I speak from knowledge. I am not being self-deprecating. I have the ability to be a good painter. More than that, perhaps. But I am a long way from that point yet.”
“And what is required? What is missing?”
“Work,” she said. “Labor. The sweat of my brow. A great painting is not genius with a paintbrush. It’s years of concentrated effort. A journey without maps, with only a faint idea where you are heading.”
“She is being disingenuous,” Bronsen put in with a smile, patting her affectionately on the shoulder. “You should not be fooled by her modesty. She has none, in fact. She is perfectly aware of her abilities. As are the committee at the Salon d’Automne, which chose three of her pictures for hanging last year.”
“Now it is my turn to congratulate you. Although without seeing something for myself, I will have to suspend judgment,” Julien said. “I would like to see what you do. If you have no objection. Although I warn you in advance that my opinions are worthless.”
Julia gazed at him carefully. “We’ll see. Perhaps.”
ABOUT HALF WAY through the cruise, Julien began talking amiably and purposelessly to a middle-aged man—a jovial, good-natured, kindly fellow, the sort who is instantly likeable. They had just left Athens and were heading for Palestine; the weather was beautiful, all had relaxed into complete pleasure in their shared experience.
“I am surprised to see you spending so much time with those two Jews,” came the remark. “If you’re not careful, people will think you’re one, too. Personally, I think it spoils the atmosphere, having them on the ship.”
A pointless, casual remark, made even without malice. For the flickering of a second the comment nestled in Julien’s mind, and made him anxious, but the brilliant, hypnotic glittering of the water was too magnificent for him to worry too much and he soon forgot it. He said nothing in reply to either justify himself or praise his companions’ qualities. Rather, he shrugged with feigned indifference and looked out over the sea; he understood the comment. It was a moment, he realized later, that summed up his whole existence in a tiny moment, like the world reflected in a tiny bead of water as it falls to earth.
JULIA WAS sitting cross-legged on the ground, sketching, in the hills above Jerusalem, where they had gone for an overnight stop. Brown arms and a concentration so perfect even a wasp—the one thing that made her genuinely terrified—could walk up her leg unnoticed. Julien watched, enamored of her self-possession, recognizing something in her, a faintly stirring unease about him as he did so.
This image lodged in his mind like a photograph, and stayed with him until his death. Such things happen; the entire voyage, the wonderful things he saw—cities and towns, ruins and pyramids, temples and churches—were slowly effaced from his memory, or became the sort of memory that can be summoned when necessary but, for the most part, rests undisturbed. This one vignette had a life of its own. It nagged him, called him, imposed itself on him. As he went to sleep, sometimes when he was buying a newspaper or walking in the street or sitting reading by a warm fire and his mind drifted off, it would take him back to that precise moment—always unvarying, never changing.
Everyone has a glimpse of paradise in their lives; this was Julien’s. All he had to do was reach out.
Later, he decided he had been constrained by the morality and timorousness of the provincial bourgeois; the man who returned from Rome in 1927 would have been subject to no such doubts and hesitations; he would have become Julia’s lover then and there, and given the magical moment a fleshly guise. He knew, however, that the explanation was a false one, designed only to disguise and reassure. He was not afraid of being rejected but rather was afraid of being accepted. He knew that she was the one person he would never manage to let go. He was afraid of falling in love with her.
A few moments later she sighed and began packing her paper back into her bag. She didn’t know why she sighed, she did not do it often. Perhaps she, too, realized something had been missed at that moment.
And Julien came away with his shard of memory, forever glinting in the hot Mediterranean sunlight, as a reminder of something offered but turned down. It stayed with him until he had learned more and was ready. Until then he had that moment instead, that look on her face as their eyes met.
HE TRAVELED around the Mediterranean to see and learn, an idea that would never have occurred to people of Olivier de Noyen’s age; they had little energy, or money, or time to spare for any type of luxury, and the wasteful use of all three simply never crossed their minds. Nor did they find nature so wonderful; they knew it all too well already, and had no soft illusions about its benevolence. Occasionally, in lyric verse, we catch a slight hint of appreciation, when the light breeze awakens the lover’s heart, or falling leaves indicate a love that is dying, but in general the works of the age are quiet about nature’s beauty except as metaphor.