Part 7 (1/2)

”Interesting,” said the Princess thoughtfully. ”Make it actually speak, and I'll permit you to talk with me again about these matters.” So saying, giving him a mysterious smile-perhaps mocking, perhaps affectionate; in the frail moonlight and the glow of the palace not even a wizard could have decided for sure-she turned from him, gave a little tug at the leashes, and walked away toward the arched palace door with her greyhounds.

”Make it actually speak!” thought the artist, his heart beating wildly. It was hopeless, of course. Though a man had ten times the talent of poor Vlemk, no amount of care and skill could make a painting so true to its original that it could speak. If he couldn't make a painting so perfect that it could speak the Princess would never again talk to him. And if he couldn't find some way to talk further with the Princess-bask in that beauty that had struck him like an arrow in the chest this morning-how was he to paint? He was boxed in for certain, this time!

On the other hand, he thought, walking more rapidly down the hill toward the city, perhaps it was possible. It was, after all, an effect he'd never before attempted. The idea grew on him, and when he reached the city limits he was running full tilt, his long white artist's frock flying out behind him, his hat mashed down on his head under one long hand.

”Ah, he's himself again,” said the regulars at the tavern as Vlemk ran by. The four-the barmaid and the three who carried arms-said nothing.

He ran full tilt, as if devils were chasing him, until he came to his house, paused only long enough to jerk open his door and slam it shut behind him, then ran full tilt up the stairs to his studio in the attic, overlooking the city. He sorted through his boxes, took the best he had on hand, and began on his project that same night.

2.

When Vlemk had worked for six weeks without sleeping, he began to get morbid, unsettling ideas. Sometimes it crossed his mind that what the Princess had said to him might be nothing but a grim, unfeeling joke, that she had no intention whatsoever of marrying him, indeed, that her purpose in giving him the seemingly impossible task was simply to make sure that he never again spoke to her. As an artist, he had difficulty believing such things, for if one gives in to the notion that visions of extraordinary beauty are mere illusion, one might as well cut off one's hands and sit on street-corners and beg. With all the strength of his carefully nourished and trained imagination he cast back in his mind to that morning when he'd seen her in the carriage, peeking out through the curtains, and with all his dexterity and technical trickery he labored to set down that vision in paint. He could not doubt the intensity of the emotion that had surged in him or the accuracy of the vision he set down line by line. Every flicker of light in her pale blue eyes was precisely correct; the turn of the cheek, the tilt of the nose, the seven stray hairs on her forehead-all, insofar as they were finished, were indisputable.

Nevertheless, he was bedeviled by misgivings. It occurred to him for instance that the paint was controlling him, creating not an image of the Princess but something new, a creature never before seen under the sun, the painting growing like a plant under his brushes, faithful to the form of its parent but unique, evolving to singularity by sure, ancient laws-the white of the earlobe calling to the white in the lady's eyes and demanding from the painter infinitesimal changes not true to the actual lady but true, instead, to the natural requirements of the picture on the box. It alarmed him to discover that the throat was taking on, slowly but inexorably, a greenish tint very rare if not unheard of in human beings. ”Yet why am I so fretful?” he rebuked himself. ”Is it not true that the emotion I feel when I look at the painting is precisely the emotion I felt when I looked at the lady, except for certain small mistakes which can easily be fixed, such as the c.o.c.k of the nostril and the false glint of the eyelid?” He stood back and looked at the painting to see if it was true. It was. ”Then all is still well,” he said, moving the brush again, his left eye closed; ”let the throat be green as gra.s.s, so long as it feels right!”

But that was the least of his misgivings. It struck him that the feeling that had surged in him that morning was mere chemistry, nothing more. ”I'd drunk a good deal the night before,” he said aloud, bending over his table, mixing paints. ”Just as now if I straighten up suddenly, tired as I am and tending toward dizziness, the room will strike me differently than it would if I rose slowly, so that morning-dehydrated, soaked to the bone with dew and gutter wash-I must undoubtedly have seen what I would not have seen at some other time, in some other physiological condition. Is it possible that I'm painting not the Princess but, say, my own uric-acid level? my blood pressure?” The question vexed him, but even this misgiving he was able to quiet, to some extent, with the thought-which burst out of him when he was standing at the window looking down at the old crooked streets of the city-”Very well, my condition was abnormal that morning; but the abnormality was one very common among mortals-or anyway human beings-so that the vision can hardly be called freakish or divorced from reality.” If the answer was not as comforting as the painter of boxes might have liked, it was nevertheless an answer, and Vlemk for a time went on painting.

But the greatest misgiving of all was this: the character of the face taking shape on the box was not altogether admirable. One saw faint but unmistakable hints of cruelty, vanity, and stinginess. He did his best, as any honest artist would have done, to undo them or overcome them, but the faults seemed ineradicable; they went, literally, to the bone. Vlemk stood patting his beard, pondering. It was not the first time he'd had this experience. Indeed, more often than not when he'd set out to capture some image which had given him pleasure, he'd found as he painted that the image, under scrutiny, proved slightly less appealing than he'd imagined. This had not much troubled him on those earlier occasions, because his purpose then had been simply to paint a pretty box. As a public minister un.o.btrusively rephrases the remarks of an irate king, fixing up the grammar, dropping out the swear words, here and there inserting a line or two that the people will perhaps find more memorable, so Vlemk had offhandedly edited Nature, straightening crooked stems, giving life to drooping leaves, suppressing all traces of dog manure. In the project at hand, that was, of course, impossible. He began to perceive clearly the fact that he'd known all along but had never quite confronted: that Beauty is an artist's vain dream; it has, except in works of art, no vitality, no body.

Abruptly, Vlemk found himself profoundly depressed. Slowly, meticulously, as if going through empty motions, he cleaned his brushes and carefully capped his paints, saw to it that his oils and thinners were exactly as they should be, removed his painter's frock and hung it on its hook, then poked his arms into his overcoat, stepped out of the studio, and locked the door behind him.

At the tavern, things were just beginning to hum. The regulars were singing and arguing politics; the sullen, fat barmaid was pretending to smile in the arms of an old drunken seaman. Old Tom was, as usual, asleep under the stove.

”Ha!” cried one of the regulars as Vlemk came through the door, ”it's Vlemk the box-painter!”

Instantly, everyone smiled, delighted, for it was a long time since they'd seen him. ”Vlemk!” they shouted, ”where have you been? Pull up a chair!”

Soon poor Vlemk was as drunk as he'd ever been in all his days, riding on a horse with a milk wagon behind it-where he'd gotten the horse he had no idea-milk bottles cras.h.i.+ng on the cobblestone streets at every jolt or sudden turn, bringing cats from every doorway; trees careening by, looking drunker than he was; people on the sidewalks going flat against the walls at his approach. Then, sometime later, he had no idea how long, though he dimly remembered sitting in some woman's apartment, staring with drunken fixity at the birthmark on her throat, he found himself chatting with an old, bony monk in a graveyard. They were sharing a bottle of some fennel-flavored drink.

”Ah yes,” said the monk, ”Beauty is momentary in the mind, as the poet saith.” He handed Vlemk the bottle. After a moment he continued, ”I'll tell you how I got into this business in the first place. It had to do with women.”

Vlemk tipped up the bottle and thoughtfully drank. The graves all around him tilted precariously then righted themselves.

”By the highest standards I am able to imagine, I have never known a beautiful woman,” said the monk, ”or even a good woman, or even a relatively good mother.” He sighed and tapped the tips of his fingers together. ”It occurred to me early on that since we can conceive of a beautiful woman, or a good woman, or even a relatively good mother, though we find none in Nature-always with the exception of Our Saviour's Mother-” He cleared his throat as if embarra.s.sed, and a quaver came into his voice as he continued, ”It occurred to me early on that Nature is not worthy of our attention. Even the best we mortals can conceive, if we believe old books, is but a feeble reflection or ethereal vibration of the beauty G.o.d sits in the midst of, millennium to millennium.”

Whatever more he had to say, Vlemk did not hear; he was fast asleep.

Sometime much later, as the sun was rising, Vlemk found himself standing at the door of his house, studying the doorway with tortuous attention, noting every stipple on the wall, every crack in the wood, making sure it was indeed his own doorway. He had never examined it quite so carefully before, which was perhaps the reason that, the more he looked, the more uncertain he was that the doorway was his own. What he did know, with certainty, was that the doorway was extremely interesting, as these things go. He ran his numb fingertips over the stone and cement and then, carefully, for fear of splinters, over the wood. He thought, for some reason, of the arched door of the palace where the Princess lived, and suddenly there welled up in him an emotion as curious as any he had ever experienced: pity for the Princess's doorway. It was not that there was anything wrong with that grand, solemn arch. Its proportions were perfect-though more appropriate, perhaps, for a church than for a palace. Its elegance was properly understated, its craftsmans.h.i.+p inspired though not original-the quatrefoils, the lozenges, the mournful beaked face that formed the keystone were all done to perfection. Yet the fact remained that, like his own humble doorway, it was obscurely ridiculous. No sooner had he thought this than he was ambushed by another thought more curious than the first. If he were to be granted, like Saint John in the Bible, a vision of heaven, he would certainly feel this exact same emotion, a faintly ironic amus.e.m.e.nt mixed with pity. Let all the architects of heaven and earth work together on the project, the result would be the same: not disappointing-nothing at all like that-but touchingly ridiculous.

Say heaven's gates were of pearl, and its streets pure gold. How could one look at those effects, however grand, without drawing back a little, with charitable amus.e.m.e.nt, thinking, ”Ah, how labored! how dated!” One would recognize in a flash that the dragons on the pillars were Ming Dynasty, or Swedish, or French Imperial; that the structures were Mayan, or London 1840s, or Etruscan. Suppose to avoid this G.o.d made Himself a heaven as humble as a shepherd's hut. ”How artfully simple,” one would say, as one said of a thousand such creations. Or suppose G.o.d chose in His infinite wisdom to make something brand new, unheard of on earth or on any other planet. ”How new!” one would cry, and a billion billion other risen souls would cry the same, in antique harmony.

Thinking these thoughts, more pleasant than grim, for if they ruled out the ultimate value of all art, they gave mud beetles, humankind, and G.o.d a kind of oneness in futility, Vlemk opened the door and entered, hoping the house was indeed his house, still waiting for some sure sign. He found the stairway more or less where he'd expected he might find it, carefully avoided two sleeping cats, and began to climb. The bannister was as smooth as dusty, dry soap, like the bannister in his own house, which perhaps it was. When he came to the door to the studio, locked, he was virtually certain that this must be the place. He tried his key. It worked.

The first thing he saw when he entered the studio was his painting on the box, the Princess's face. With a start he realized that the picture was essentially finished. The lines he had doubted-the lines suggesting a touch of meanness in her character-were exactly right, no question about it, not that these were the most obvious of her lines. There was kindness too; generosity, a pleasing touch of whimsy. Indeed, an ordinary observer might never have noticed these slightly less pleasant qualities, though certainly they were there.

Vlemk sighed, pleased with the world in spite of its imperfections if not because of them-and made himself a large pot of coffee. The city below his window was still fast asleep except for, here and there, a garbage cart. He thought of the bony old monk in the graveyard, the woman with the birthmark. He poured himself coffee and sat looking at the painting on the box, smiling. Though she was a princess, she was no better, it seemed to him-though he knew that it might well be the alcohol-than the barmaid, the monk, the woman with the mark on her throat. Wherever the life-force could find a place to push it pushed, he mused-into barmaids, princesses, dandelions, monks, even box-painters. He laughed.

He was conscious of looking at the world as from a mountaintop. Yet even as he thought these serene, fond thoughts an uneasiness came over him. Make the picture speak, the Princess had said, and I'll permit you to talk with me again about these matters. It was true that she was beautiful, for all her faults, more beautiful than he'd ever before realized. If it was true that all the universe was one in its comic futility, it was also true that certain comically imperfect expressions of the universal force were for some reason preferable to others to any given life-expression, such as Vlemk. Having come to understand the Princess, both the best and the worst in her, poor Vlemk had fallen hopelessly, shamelessly in love. It was not some vague, airy vision now, it was something quite specific. He wanted to be in bed with her, talking, earnestly but in full detail, as if they had years to get everything right, about questions of Life and Art. He glanced down at his coffee. Did she perhaps prefer tea? He studied the painting. It told him nothing.

Abruptly, urgently, hardly knowing what he was doing, Vlemk uncapped his paints and seized a paintbrush. He painted furiously, with nothing in his mind, putting in without thought every beauty and deformity, working almost carelessly, almost wildly. Soon the painting was so much like the Princess that not even the Princess's mother could have told the two apart.

The picture began to speak. ”Vlemk,” it said, ”I put a curse upon you. You shall never speak a word until I say so!”

Vlemk's eyes widened and he tried to protest, but already the curse was in effect; he was unable to make a sound.

3.

Now began a terrible period in the life of the box-painter. He had achieved what no artist before him had achieved, had succeeded in the most arduous love-task ever dreamt of, but the victory was ashes; he was as mute as a stone. If the picture remained stubborn, and Vlemk had no reason to doubt that it would, he would never in all his life say a word to the Princess, his love and inspiration.

He made feeble attempts at adjusting to his fate. Occasionally he'd take an order for a snuff box with pansies on it, or a quill box with a picture of the owner's house, but his work was inaccurate and shoddy; his heart had gone out of it. People began to haggle and try to put off paying him, even local doctors and bankers who could easily have afforded to pay if they'd wished to-a sure sign, as all box-painters know, that the work was no longer giving pleasure-and as the weeks pa.s.sed business grew worse and worse; fewer and fewer people climbed the narrow stairs to his studio. That was just as well, in fact, for these days and nights Vlemk worked slowly or not at all. Even if he put in long hours, as he sometimes did in a fit of anxiety or anger turned inward, he got very little done. Ever since he'd finished his painting of the Princess, all other kinds of painting seemed beneath him, a betrayal of his gift. He found that he literally could not paint what was asked of him, and even if by dint of superhuman stubbornness he got through a given job, no one any longer praised his work, not even the stupidest oaf who came up off the street.

His fall was dramatically underscored, in Vlemk's mind, when occasionally, to his annoyance, some customer would glance unhappily from the painted box Vlemk had just finished for him to the box, nearby, on which he'd painted his portrait of the Princess. Sometimes they would say, ”It looks real enough to speak!” ”It does,” the painting on the box would pipe up, and the customer would stare, disbelieving. Soon there were rumors that Vlemk had made a pact with the Devil. Business got still worse and eventually dropped away entirely.

”Woe is me,” poor Vlemk would think, sitting alone in his studio, pulling at his knuckles. And as if he didn't have troubles enough these days, the painting would start speaking again, complaining and criticizing, trying to offer helpful suggestions. ”How can you call yourself a painter?” it would say in its ringing little voice, a voice not much louder than an insect's. ”Where's your dedication? Is this what your disorderly habits have at last brought you down to?”

Vlemk would put up with this-or would leave for the tavern to get away from it-though it seemed to him brutally unfair, to say the least, that the masterpiece of his life should prove his curse and his soul's imprisonment. At times, throwing dignity to the winds, he would plead with his creation, imploring her in gesture-even going down on his knees to her-that she give him back his voice.

”No!” she would say.

”But why?” he would ask with his hands, fingers splayed wide and shaking.

”I don't feel like it,” she said. ”When I feel like it I will.”

”You have no mercy!” he wailed in gesture, raising his fist and sadly shaking his head.

”You tell me about mercy!” cried the box. ”You created me, you monster! Do you know what it's like, stuck here in one place like a miserable cripple, owning nothing in the world but a head and two shoulders-not even hands and feet?”

”Forgiveness is the greatest of all virtues,” Vlemk would signal.

”No,” the box would say. ”The curse is still on!”

Vlemk would groan and say nothing more, would get up stiffly from his thick knees, and to punish the box in the only way he could, he would put on his hat and coat and descend to the street and make his way to the tavern.

Except for the inconvenience his poverty caused him, Vlemk could not honestly say he was sorry that his business as a box-painter had failed. It had never been a highly respected occupation, though people were amused by it. It had none of the prestige of gargoyle carving or stained-gla.s.s-window making or the casting of bells, and to Vlemk, who believed himself vastly superior to those other, more respected artisans, it was a relief to become, for all practical purposes, a simple citizen, no longer an artisan looked down on by artisans he despised. His inability to speak, his inability even to whimper or grunt, soon made his anonymity complete. He spent more and more of his time at the tavern, cadging the few coins he needed by holding out his hand and looking pitiful. His landlady was a problem, but only in the sense that it embarra.s.sed him to meet her. The rumor of his friends.h.i.+p with the Devil kept her civil and distant.

It was winter now, picturesque in Vlemk's city if you were a rich man or only pa.s.sing through. Icicles hung glittering from the eaves of every shop; snow put pointed hats on every housetop and steeple; horses in their traces breathed out hovering ghosts of steam. He was not altogether indifferent to all this. He observed with interest how shadows changed color behind a steam cloud, how the droplets on the nostrils of a horse gleamed amber in the sunlight. But his interest was tinged, inevitably, with gloom and anger. To Vlemk and those like him, cold weather meant misery and humiliation. His clothes were thin and full of holes to let in every wandering chill. ”On my wages,” thought Vlemk, bitterly joking-as was more and more his habit-”I'm lucky I can still afford skin.” It was a joke worth saying aloud, he thought, but the curse prohibited it, so he stared straight ahead, living inside his mind, raising his gla.s.s with the others in the tavern, now and then joining in a fistfight if the cause seemed just.

Day after day, day after day, he would walk to the tavern as soon as it opened, trudging with great, gaping holes in his shoes over ice and through slush, hunched in his frayed old overcoat, snow piling up on his hat and shoulders, his fists clenched tight in the pockets that no longer held things. ”What a box!” he would think, then would quickly shake his head as if the voice were someone else's, for he grew tired of his thoughts, now that he had no one to vent them on-tired and increasingly critical, for it had struck him, now that he must listen and not speak, that an immense amount of what was said in the world was not worth saying.

As the cold settled in and the snow deepened, fewer and fewer strangers were to be found in the streets of Vlemk's city, and begging became increasingly difficult. Sometimes whole days went by when Vlemk couldn't gather enough coins for a single gla.s.s of wine. On these days Vlemk walked bent double from hunger pains-not surprisingly, since wine was now almost all he lived on. If he was lucky one of his unsavory friends-the petty thieves and marauders who gathered at the tavern every evening-would give him some of their wine; but the generosity of thieves is undependable. Sometimes their mood was wrong; sometimes they'd found nothing to burgle for weeks, so that their stomachs were as empty as Vlemk's.