LITMIR.BIZ

       DREUX’S DEER

      I first encountered Dreux on an afternoon in autumn; the deer, precisely five years later. In Dreux’s case, I left the house one day under blue skies only to be caught in a sudden downpour. The narrow, winding streets of Belgrano were soon in full spate. Women clustered together on the sidewalks trying to establish the best places to cross; an old lady assailed the side of a bus with her umbrella when the driver refused to open the doors; and before long the shop owners, watching the deluge through their window displays, brought out the metal barriers they had armed themselves with after the previous flood. I was due to take some foreign tourists around a private art collection. That was my job at the time, not the worst job in the world, but that day, while I sheltered under the awning of a bar to wait for my clients, a car came past hugging the curb and drenched me and my pristine yellow dress. Three more plowed through the same puddle in quick succession, the rain stopped—as suddenly as it had begun—and of course who should pull up seconds later but my tourists? They were a middle-aged couple from the U.S. She was dressed all in white and he all in black; stepping out of the taxi they looked immaculate, improbably dry, as though they and their clothes had come directly from the dry cleaner.

      We made our way to a house that had formerly been a small hotel with extensive gardens and was now boxed in between one neo-rationalist monstrosity and a lurid California-style duplex. A porter let us in and then led the way through to the living room, gliding eel-like ahead of us between the furniture. A quarter of an hour later a hidden door slid open and the owner of the collection appeared. She looked at me; I looked at her: a game of chicken she won hands down. She was dressed in gray, and her mouth had the lines of a woman bitter at finding herself the wrong side of forty. Her nose was more bladelike than aquiline, and on her cashmere sweater she wore a golden brooch of a small creature that, because of the distance she kept throughout our visit, I never managed to identify.

      She looked me over with the same incredulity she had voiced on the phone the previous night. She couldn’t understand why I wanted to come when she could very well show any visitors the paintings herself. In my firm I was director, secretary, intern, and guide all rolled into one—that was how I kept things afloat, as I had tried to explain, though not in so many words. “Quite the go-getter,” she had said. “Very well, see you tomorrow.” And see me she did, dripping grimy water onto the gleaming parquet. She sent for some dry footwear. A few minutes later a pair of fluffy white slippers appeared, and as I stepped into them my clients’ loss of respect for me was complete. My only chance: to show them how good my eye was, deliver a particularly insightful commentary, and once I got going I felt I was doing okay, more or less, until I was confronted with a dapple-gray horse, galloping straight at me under pewter skies. I glanced over at our hostess—for less than a second, but long enough:

      “Alfred de Dreux.” She smirked, mounting a cigarette in an ivory holder with her long, elegant fingers, almost preening. “Nineteenth century. Didn’t they cover him in college?”

      “Of course. A magnificent piece.”

      Two lies for the price of one: I had never heard of Dreux, and the piece struck me as little more than decorative. The work of someone technically gifted, but nothing more.

      My clients looked back at me with identikit American smiles. Their expressions, in combination with their monochrome outfits, brought to mind the fake smiles in Jorge de la Vega’s Puzzle.

      As I say, I saw Dreux’s deer for the first time five years later, on another stormy April afternoon, this time in the National Museum of Decorative Arts. I was on my own, as I always try to be when seeing something for the first time, and prepared for a washout in my chic wellington boots—ankle-cut wellington boots. Maybe it had something to do with my footwear, but this time it was fireworks, what A. S. Byatt called “the kick galvanic.” It reminded me that all of art rests in the gap between that which is aesthetically pleasing and that which truly captivates you. And that the tiniest thing can make the difference. I had only to set eyes on the painting and a sensation came over me: you might describe it as butterflies, but in fact for me it’s less poetic. It happens every time I feel strongly drawn to a painting. One explanation is of dopamines being released in the brain, and the consequent bump in blood pressure throughout the body, though Stendhal put it rather differently: “As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart; the wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” A couple of centuries later, the nurses in the emergency department at Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, shocked by the number of tourists swooning before Michelangelo’s sculptures, dubbed it Stendhal syndrome.

      On this second afternoon, in an attempt to keep my cool, I went out into the winter gardens. I tottered on the roof of a boat, reeling, my eyes spinning like compasses with the magnets removed. After some air I went back inside, feeling psychologically prepared this time, and it was a relief to find Dreux’s deer still there. The painting hung in what had once been the Errázuriz family dining room, a baroque imitation of one of the salons at Versailles. The space was large, but not disproportionately so, and it might have been pleasantly warm if the autumn sunlight had been allowed to stream in through the garden windows, but the security guards, seeming to think an electric heater no bigger than a brick was sufficient, kept the blinds down. You could just about see your own breath.

      There were in fact two paintings by Dreux in the room, both hunt scenes, both painted around the middle of the nineteenth

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