A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,60
found furniture; when sat on the sofa gave a sigh and belched dust.
Gabriel took out the paper to examine it. It was dotted with wormholes, as all old paper was. The holes would soak up his ink and betray the fact that though the paper was of the proper age, the drawing was not.
Gabriel silently thanked his first-year drawing instructor at the École. He had insisted the students prepare their rag paper à la the old masters. Gabriel had learned to make ink, to size paper evenly.
He mixed gelatin and hot water. While it dissolved, he emptied the boxes that were stacked on his floor. Here they were: his notes from those sessions with the professor. He continued to paw through the boxes. Gabriel had spent hours in the rain visiting various Chinese herbalists until he found the jet-black ink he was looking for. He over-watered it, so he mixed it with gum arabic. It had been labor-intensive; Gabriel had cursed him. At four a.m., stoned nearly unconscious, he was shaking a mustard jar of turpentine and walnut oil. Now, leaking into the box below it, but still useable, the old mustard jar was full of ink. He was in business.
He took a wide brush and spent more time cleaning it than usual, meticulously paring each bristle, trimming the ones that seemed to point in errant directions. He was ready.
The sizing would determine how authentic the drawing looked. He knew he could draw like his ancestor, but if the sizing was uneven, darker in patches or streaked, then the forgery would be obvious. He took a deep breath, steadied his hand, and bathed the paper in glue. The professor had explained that artists should relax their wrists when sizing paper.
“It is like you are on a swing,” the professor had said. “No, it is like you are pushing your lover on a swing, back and forth, with care and force equally.” Gabriel found that the French compared most things to sex. Spanish analogies mostly had to do with food or body functions.
The sizing complete, Gabriel took the page into his room; it would take a few hours to dry. He went back into the kitchen and cleaned the brush again. Then he dumped the rest of the sizing out into the garbage and scrubbed the bowl. He was probably being too clean. His roommates would be suspicious of the washed dishes and the wiped counters. So he made himself a coffee, making sure to let some grounds linger.
Sitting in his kitchen, listening to the sound of the coffee bubbling and waiting for the paper to dry, he remembered being a first-year student. His first few months in Paris were simultaneously exciting and disorienting, tinged with worry for his mother—justified, as it turned out, as she was diagnosed just a few months later. She didn’t tell him, didn’t want to worry him, until the very end, and he went to see her, taking the bus twenty-six straight hours until he was at her bedside holding her hand.
They’d brought her home from the hospital, and the neighbors, who were as much an extended family as any he knew, had arranged for a hospital bed to be placed in the kitchen, so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs. As it was, she never left the bed again. He sat with her and petted her hand, smoothed the hair off her dry, shrunken forehead. She had always been plump, but in her last days she was as thin as a paintbrush, brittle and desiccated. He gave her sips of water through a straw, fed her ice.
She stopped eating two days after he got there and lived for three more. He sold all of her possessions and earned just enough to bury her and pay his rent for a year. The copied Connois he gave to neighbors before he returned to France. He wasn’t sorry to have left it there; it would have been a constant reminder of his duplicity.
Would the pueblo feel different to him now? Look different? Smell different? It felt strange to think of a Spain without his mother in it. The world would never again taste her croquetas or the bread she baked and sold at market. He had not gone back since then because he had no money, nor anyone to visit. If he didn’t return, then his mother was still alive, still in her kitchen. Spain was like a photograph, perpetually frozen in his memory.