answered, tersely. An accusatory look sprung up in his eyes like the spire of a cathedral.
“What makes you think that?”
“You have a reason for living,” I said with conviction.
“As do you, your duenna, and your deceased husband.”
“You paint.”
“I paint? Hmm. I try to earn my daily bread, as do most men, in fact.”
“You are an artist.”
“You do not know how many things I have to take in silence from aristocrats like yourself in order to earn my living with what I like doing.”
“You, take anything in silence? With your character? I don’t believe it.”
After a moment’s pause I insisted: “You are an artist, you have a mission.”
“What do you mean, I have a mission? I am an artisan, and I do my job in the best way I can.”
“You are not an artisan. Artisans do not interest me. You are an artist.”
“In the end, perhaps you too are an artist, an artist of life.”
“What does an artist of life mean?”
“To live off what we have in the here and now,” he said, slowing down.
From time to time he kicked the little pine cones that covered the ground of the wood.
“I pursue something absolute, that is to say, undefined. The closer I get to it, the faster it runs away from me. As I want to have everything, I will never have anything.”
The suspicion in his eyes had given way to a reflective look. I longed for him to tell me something about life. He had to tell me, he was fifteen, twenty years older than I! But he talked about painting. For him life was painting.
“There are no rules in painting,” he said, “and the oppression or the servile obligation of having young people study or go all in the same direction is a great impediment for them and for all those who profess this difficult art, which is diviner than any other given that it signifies what God has created.”
The moon had already travelled far enough to be directly over our heads. I felt that it shone for us alone. Now we were walking slowly over the sand of the Guadalquivir. I took off my shoes. The painter fell silent and I listened to the music that was weeping in some distant place. It was a flute. I pointed it out to the painter. He didn’t hear it. I sighed. He was so involved in his own reflections that he didn’t even notice that his new shoes were sinking into the sand. In silence, I pointed at the moon. The man leaned back so as to contemplate the sky.
“What profound and impenetrable mystery is hidden in the imitation of divine nature, without which nothing is good, and not only in painting!”
I listened to the enthusiastic tone of his voice and the flute that accompanied it. I thought once more of Madame du Châtelet and her reflections on happiness. Truly rich and noble people who have been used to comfort all their lives do not know how to savor happiness and even less, how to find it. On the other hand these . . . these men and women from the villages, the majos and majas, know happiness. Why, indeed, do I look at Francisco as if he was an uncultured donkey? Paco, a coarse and brutal man? No, it is I who wishes to see him like this. If I saw him as a refined intellectual, the magic would disappear. I would begin to find him dull.
“I see nothing more than bodies and forms which are illuminated, and bodies and forms that are not,” he went on, looking at the cypress and pines, which shone as if someone had poured a basin full of mercury over them.
“Dimensions that move forward and dimensions that fall back; reliefs and depths. My sight never discovers lines or details. I do not count the hairs on the beard of the passerby or the number of buttons on his suit, and my brush must not see any better than I do.”
“That is true, but why do you tell me this right now, Don Francisco?”
“I tell you that nature is the only master of a painter and any other artist. Unlike nature, the candid masters see details in the whole and their details are always false and conventional. Nature is the only drawing master . . . ”
He did not know how to tell me what I wanted to hear. Why did he insist on not seeing me as a woman? In that enchanted moment,