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Optic Nerve. Maria Juliana Gainza
Читать онлайн.Название Optic Nerve
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781948226172
Автор произведения Maria Juliana Gainza
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Alfred de Dreux was seven years old when, on a walk around Siena one day with his godfather, he met the great Théodore Géricault, the martyr of French Romanticism, who was there to study Simone Martini’s lines. It was Géricault’s mission to single-handedly arrest portraiture’s inexplicable decline, and in circumspect little Alfred he immediately saw an exquisite model. He painted him standing on some rocks while a dry, warm foehn blew down from the Sienese slopes, flushing the boy’s cheeks. (The portrait sitting in fact took place in his studio; the background came afterward.) The painting was ahead of its time in an era that tended to look on the young as nothing but adults in miniature: the boy Alfred stands out for the spirited look in his eye, his apparent cool indomitability.
A fateful encounter, it would seem, because when Dreux visited Géricault two months later in Paris he found that the master dealt not only in epic scenes of shipwrecks and hair-raising portraits of madmen, but also rather stripped-back animal pictures: portraits of horses, lions, and tigers, evincing the same penetrating eye as his portrayals of people. These images left an impression on Dreux, and when, years later, the Duke of Orléans wanted someone to paint his horses, he chose Dreux from among hundreds of candidates, thus sealing his reputation as the best equestrian painter in all of France. He came to the attention of King Louis-Philippe, who, in exile in England after the 1848 Revolution, invited him to cross the Channel several times on commissions. Dreux died at the age of fifty in Paris, of a liver abscess that had dogged him since his time in England, though a view prevailed in the salons that it was a saber wound from a duel with General Fleury, Napoleon III’s aide-de-camp, after a disagreement the details of which the court-in-exile sought furiously to suppress.
What would the guests of the Errázuriz family have thought of these paintings? Would any of them have stopped to look at the Dreux? Or would their eyes have slipped over them the same as they did the beige wallpaper? I picture a group of them sitting around the table. The first course finished, the door opens and the head butler enters bearing the meat, served on a bed of boiled potatoes, a knob of butter and some fresh parsley on top; behind him comes one of the staff with the silver gravy boat, a hunting-horn motif etched along its sides. Someone mentions the treaty with Chile: war has been avoided. This is Señor Errázuriz’s cue; in his capacity as ambassador, after all, he knows more than most. His wife, Josefina, smiles; a recent addition, she still thinks she’s expected to show an interest in male conversation. She steals a look at the drawn face of the woman sitting on her right. She realizes—is alarmed to realize—that this will quite soon be her own face. She shakes out her hands, arresting the passage of time with a momentary drop in her blood pressure, which also has the effect of accentuating the whiteness of her skin. After dinner, the refuge of a game of whist. The only person to look at the painting is the older woman, Señora Alvear, once upon a time the famous soprano Regina Pacini: in fact her eye travels back and forth constantly between the deer in the picture, still alive, and the other one, dead and served to them in lean cuts. In the Renaissance-style parlor next door, a carved wooden clock chimes. The Señora Alvear shivers; a cold draft, she assumes. It has been some time now since she has known what it is that she feels.
Hunting scenes were quite common in Dreux’s day, evocations of a sport that had been a class marker since the Middle Ages, when the hunt became an elite pastime and often the only means of preparing men for war. An unintended by-product was that it gave the nobility a way of measuring itself—though only against itself. The first ever enclosures of forests and common land came about to enable exclusive access to big game. Commoners had to make do with birds and rabbits; bears, wolves, and deer became the landowner’s right.
The Gothic art of the late Middle Ages emerged out of a meeting of Sienese and Flemish styles. The illustrated Book of Hours known as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is one of its best examples. The folio depicting the December “labors of the month”—activities undertaken by the duke’s court and his peasants according to the time of year—shows hounds snapping at a boar’s heels in a forest clearing, and could almost be a Dreux in miniature. It is likely that he saw the Très Riches Heures when he visited the Château de Chantilly with Napoleon III. The visual acuity he learned from Géricault was then combined with the languid, stylized approach of the manuscripts, and the resultant images, crammed with detail, had not a jot of empty space inside them: matter pervades every last inch.
Dreux pulses with atavistic symbolism: the struggle between good and evil, light and dark. The deer is about to die. One of the dogs sinks its fangs into the back; another, a leg. The deer, on the verge of giving in, neck elaborately contorted, tongue out, is goggle-eyed with the same helpless astonishment as the hare described in Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “Don Fabrizio found himself being stared at by big black eyes soon overlaid by a glaucous veil; they were looking at him with no reproval, but full of tortured amazement at the whole ordering of things.” How well Lampedusa understood the unpredictability of events, their tendency to go full circle at the last, always leaving in their wake something akin to a glinting snail trail: ultimately ephemeral, certain to be lost in the mists of time.
Three years ago, a girlfriend of mine from university went for a walk around the edge of a hunting reserve in France. She was there visiting her Paris-based sister, a rising star at Lancôme who had met a Belgian millionaire and borne him two children. My friend was newly single and, being incapable of holding down a job, broke. But her sister bought her the plane tickets and insisted she come.
When she arrived, on a Friday morning, her sister announced that they had been invited to spend the weekend at a château in the country. They drove out in the afternoon despite dire weather warnings. An area of low pressure had come in and when they pulled up to the house the heavens opened. My friend found a bed and slept ensconced in a feather duvet until late the next morning. I picture her getting up and washing her face, and jumping when the gong was struck. She hurried downstairs. And saw out in the gardens twenty or so guests advancing zombie-like in the direction of a marquee in which a long table had been set for lunch. She fell in behind them. Her sister appeared a short while later and sat at the far end; the ski jacket of the previous night was gone, replaced by a green loden cape. Occasionally a gust of wind lifted a section of the marquee, giving a brief view of the rolling grounds, the lake with its thick covering of leaves, the enormous trees still dripping from the previous night’s downpour. Some of the trees were so ancient that metal girders had been brought to prop up the branches, giving them a stooped look, like giants on crutches. The couple sitting next to her were both architects, and they talked for a while, but there was a chill to the northern air and at the first chance she dragged her chair over to a patch of sunlight to warm her bones. Coffee was still being served when she got up and said she needed to stretch her long legs—since the age of nine she’d had the spindly legs of a deer. One of the young men, French, offered to accompany her. He suggested they go to the end of the long allée and back.
They walked slowly. The path was muddy and the wind rushed about in the casuarina trees. “We’re bound to see some hares,” said the young man. “It’s the time of year for them.” They came to the end of the allée and started back. In the distance, from some neighboring woods, a horn sounded. Someone calling the hounds in. Just then, my friend’s boot became stuck in the mud. She strained to lift it out, but when her companion offered his hand, she waved him off impatiently: “I can manage.” A second later a stray bullet hit her in the back, entering through one of her lungs.
She dropped to the ground; according to the Frenchman, her look was one of pure surprise. “Was that all?” it seemed to say. “Is that it?”
A month before, she and I had bumped into each other in the street. It had been ten years, and we stopped and caught up, or made a stab at it. She was attractive, thirty-five years old, and had got herself a new boyfriend and a job, too, in an auction house. She said she had been doing long hours for not very much money but, because she’d never felt the urge to have children,