These were the kinds of moments that popped up again and again in Engales’s artwork; these were the kinds of people who populated his life with their flaws. He loved the flaws; they were invariably the most interesting parts of people’s faces and bodies, the parts that held the strangest lines, the most beautiful shadows. Wounds and deformities and cracks and boils and stomachs: this was the stuff that moved Engales. Usually while he detailed a broken nose or sketched a lumpy body he felt as if he was zeroing in on what it meant to be alive. He could hear his father saying: The scratches are what makes a life.
He had started painting portraits the year his parents died, thanks to an obese and kind art teacher named Señor Romano. Aside from English, art was the only class he never skipped, much because Romano had taken a special liking to him that was beyond the pity that the other teachers doled out — the same pity that he hated to feel in any form now. If Romano pitied him, it had never shown; he seemed to understand that what Raul wanted was to be treated like a human, not a child who had lost his parents. In class, they did boring drawing projects and elementary color wheels, but when Señor Romano saw the way Raul engaged with the materials — his sketches of fruit became deranged faces, he cut up his color wheels and collaged them together to make an entirely new rainbow — he sent Raul home with a wooden briefcase full of half-squeezed bottles of oil paint and used brushes. “This doesn’t come out with water,” Señor Romano had told him, his only piece of instruction. He also gave him a tin of turpentine and a new name; he’d call him by his last name, Engales. That would be his artist’s name.
Engales had begged paper off Maurizio, the butcher down the block. Maurizio, like everyone else in the neighborhood, would give Raul or Franca most anything they wanted; he and his sister only had to blink their eyes like the orphans they were. They got free steak from Maurizio; gross, free candies from the grocer; free bread from the bakery where Franca worked. When Raul got home he taped a sheet of the butcher paper to the wall of his bedroom and squirted some of the paints onto one of his mother’s china plates. Here was one perk of having dead parents: you could paint with the china, and use the walls as your easel. The first thing that came to his mind to paint was Señor Romano himself: his tomato cheeks, his puffy eyelids, his big body, which filled the huge piece of butcher paper. He started with Romano’s edges, and then he found himself zooming in on small areas he had noticed: the deep lines around Romano’s eyes, the handsome lips, the tie that slung down over his huge stomach and was covered in a paisley pattern that Engales remembered almost photographically. It felt so completely natural to him it was as if he wasn’t even in control of his own hand, as if the hand were re-creating Romano all on its own. He could see Romano there in the room with him, and he could feel him. For the first time since his parents had died, he did not feel entirely alone.
The painting then became obsessive. He painted after school and into the night. He asked Romano for more supplies, and with his own money, Romano bought him an entire stock of brand-new paints and brushes to add to the wooden box. Engales populated his bedroom with figures: the lady in the red hat who he passed on the street on his way to school; the old man who made them lemonades at Café Crocodile, whom they called El Jefe; Maurizio, whose face was shaped like a laugh; the girl he thought was beautiful in his English class, whose top lip looked like a half-moon. He painted tens and perhaps hundreds of portraits of his sister, who was the only one who would actually sit for him: Franca in a party hat; Franca wearing their father’s suit; Franca with a flower in her mouth like a tango dancer; Franca frowning, because that was how he knew her face the best. When his bedroom walls became too small to hold all the large sheets of paper, he began to store them under his bed in big stacks. One morning he woke up to see that Franca had found his stash, and that the paintings had been pinned up on every empty wall throughout the house. He found Franca herself standing in the hallway outside their parents’ bedroom, touching a rendition of her own face.
The painting also did something else: it pointed toward escape. Just a month before he died, Engales’s father had spent a week in New York City and had returned with an infectious enthusiasm for the place. “It’s swarming with artists and musicians and writers,” Braulio had reported over dinner. “I mean, just listen to this!” Engales’s father then put on a flamboyant jazz record that bipped and bopped and hiccupped and screeched on the player through the rest of Braulio’s exotic descriptions of the far-off city: underground poetry rooms, fantastic fashion, smoke that rose like breath from the holes in the street. Taken by his father’s excitement, fourteen-year-old Raul asked bluntly, “When can I go?” Braulio chuckled, leaned back, wiped steak sauce from his big face. “Whenever you want, son. Thanks to your fetal impatience, you can go to America whenever you see properly fit.” Raul had been born a month before his due date, at the tail end of his parents’ stay there, and it had become one of their little family jokes: Raul was born for New York City.
And now here he was: a part of that world his father had described, or at least about to be a part of it, if he could bring himself to finish this Chinese woman’s bulbous cheek. He paid special attention to the cheek, painstakingly adding wrinkles, highlighting it just right. But then he had been working on it for hours and it wasn’t just right. It wasn’t the woman who he remembered. The face did not feel like her face. Instead of acknowledging the viewer with forgiveness, she held a look of mistrust. Where was it coming from? Her eyes? The creases around her mouth? The cheek itself?
He stood back to take a look. The flaw didn’t feel like a flaw, it felt planned.
The Winona George complex, Arlene had named the uneasiness he felt now, the whirlpool of doubt that had begun to circulate in the studio and in his head. He had always wanted exactly what he had now: to be able to paint for a reason. But now that he had one, he felt that the reason was arbitrary, which made the painting seem that way.
A panic swept through him, and he felt his confidence sliding down the epic slope of almost-failure toward failure itself. Quickly the panic mixed with the fear he had felt in his dream that morning, creating a spiral of things to add to Franca’s list. Left his sister with a stupid, spineless husband in a country that was practically self-destructing. Left without turning around to look at her, without saying good-bye. Never returning her letter, never finding out her big news. Why was he thinking about her now?
From across the room, he heard Arlene yelclass="underline" “Do something else, Raul.”
This was code for one of Arlene’s earliest studio lessons: when you start doubting, you stop painting. You eat a sandwich, walk around the block, do jumping jacks, make sketches. Anything to circumnavigate the doubt, change its course. Doubt was the fucking enemy, Arlene said. Of all good art.