Mr. Gwyn Read online

  Maybe he made a wrong turn, it was likely that he hadn’t been very attentive that day, so he found himself on a street he didn’t recognize, and the only thing that was the same was the rain, which had started suddenly, and was beating down hard. He looked for a café to take refuge in but there were none. Finally, trying to return to the clinic, he passed an art gallery. It was the sort of place where he never set foot, but then the rain made him inclined to seek shelter, and so he surprised himself by glancing in the window. There was a wooden floor, and the place seemed large and well lighted. Then Jasper Gwyn looked at the painting in the window. It was a portrait.

  12

  They were large portraits, all similar, like the repetition of a single ambition, to infinity. There was always one person, nude, and almost nothing else, an empty room, a corridor. They were not handsome people, they were ordinary bodies. They were simply standing—but the force with which they did so was particular, as if they were geologic sediments, the result of millennial metamorphoses. Jasper Gwyn thought that they were stone, but soft, and living. He felt like touching them: he was convinced that they were warm.

  At that point he would have left, that was enough, but outside it was still pouring, and so Jasper Gwyn, without realizing that this would mark his life, began to look through a catalogue of the show: there were three, open, on a light wood table, the usual large, ridiculously weighty books. Jasper Gwyn observed that the titles of the paintings were the rather stupid type you might expect (Man with Hands on His Lap), and that next to each title was written the date of execution. He noticed that the painter had worked on them for years, twenty, more or less, and yet, apparently, nothing in his way of seeing things, or in his technique, had changed. He had simply continued to paint—as if it were a single action, but very extended. Jasper Gwyn wondered if the same thing had been true for him, in the twelve years when he was writing, and while he was searching for an answer he came to the book’s appendix, in which there were photographs taken while the painter was working, in his studio. Without realizing it he leaned over a little, to see better. He was struck by a photograph in which the painter was sitting placidly in a chair, turned toward the window, looking outside; nearby, a model whom Jasper Gwyn had just seen in one of the paintings on display in the gallery was lying nude on a couch, in a position not very different from the one in which she had been caught on the canvas. She, too, seemed to be gazing into emptiness.

  Jasper Gwyn saw in it a time he hadn’t expected, the passing of time. Like everyone, he imagined that that sort of thing happened in the usual way, with the painter at the easel and the model in place, motionless, the two engaged in a pas de deux whose rules they knew—he could imagine the foolish chatter, meanwhile. But here it was different, because painter and model seemed, rather, to be waiting, and one would have said that each was waiting on his own account—and for something that wasn’t the painting. He thought that they were waiting to settle at the bottom of an enormous glass.

  13

  He turned the page and the photographs were similar. The models changed, but the situation was almost always the same. One time the painter was washing his hands, another he was walking barefoot, looking down. He was never painting. A very tall, angular model, with big, childlike ears, was sitting on the edge of a bed, grasping the headboard with one hand. There was no reason to think that they were talking—that they had ever talked to each other.

  Then Jasper Gwyn took the catalogue and looked for a place to sit. There were only two blue chairs, just in front of the table where a woman was working, amid papers and books. She must be the gallery manager, and Jasper Gwyn asked if he could sit there, or if it would bother her.

  “Go ahead,” said the woman.

  She was wearing bizarre reading glasses and when she touched things she did it with the caution of a woman who has manicured nails.

  Jasper Gwyn sat down, and although he was at a distance from the woman that made sense only in the light of a mutual desire to exchange a few words, he set the book on his lap and began looking again at those photographs as if he were alone, at home.

  The painter’s studio seemed empty and rundown, without a trace of conscious cleanliness, yet you had the impression of an unreal disorder, since there was nothing that could, if necessary, be put in order. Analogously, the nudity of the models seemed to be the result not of an absence of clothes but of a sort of original condition, existing before any modesty—or much later. One of the photographs showed a man of about sixty, with a carefully trimmed mustache, and white hair on his chest, who was sitting on a chair, drinking from a cup, maybe tea, his legs slightly spread, his feet placed slightly on edge on the cold floor. You would have said that he was absolutely unfit for nakedness, to the point of avoiding it even in domestic or erotic intimacy, but there he was, in fact, perfectly naked, his penis lying sideways, rather large, and circumcised, and although it was undoubtedly grotesque it was also, at the same time, so inevitable that for a moment Jasper Gwyn was sure that man knew something that he didn’t.

  Then he raised his head, looked around, and immediately found the portrait of the man with the mustache, a big one, hanging on the wall opposite: it was him, without the cup of tea, but in the same chair, naked, his feet placed slightly on edge on the cold floor. He seemed enormous, but above all he seemed to have arrived.

  “Do you like it?” the gallery manager asked.

  Jasper Gwyn was understanding something particular, which was to change the course of his days, and so he didn’t answer right away. He looked again at the photograph in the catalogue, then again at the painting on the wall—it was evident that something had happened, between the photo and the painting, something like a journey. Jasper Gwyn thought that it must have taken a lot of time, some sort of exile, and certainly the overcoming of many resistances. He didn’t have in mind any technical trick, nor did the skill of the painter seem important; only it occurred to him that patience had set a goal, and in the end what it had achieved was to take home the man with the mustache. It seemed to him a very beautiful act.

  14

  He turned to the gallery manager, he owed her an answer.

  “No,” he said. “I never like paintings.”

  “Ah,” said the gallery manager.

  She smiled, understanding, as if a child had said that when he grew up he wanted to be a window washer.

  “And what don’t you like about paintings?” she asked patiently.

  Again Jasper Gwyn didn’t answer. He was thinking of that idea of leading someone back home. It had never occurred to him that a portrait could take someone home; in fact, he had always found just the opposite—it was evident that portraits were made to display a false identity and pass it off as true. Who would ever pay to be unmasked by a painter, to hang on a wall of your house the part of yourself you labored to hide every day?

  Who would ever pay? he repeated slowly to himself.

  He looked up at the gallery manager.

  “Excuse me, do you have a piece of paper and something to write with, please?”

  The gallery manager handed him a notepad and a pencil.

  Jasper Gwyn wrote something, a few lines. Then he looked at them for a long time. He seemed absorbed in a thought so fragile that the gallery manager remained motionless, as when one doesn’t want to cause a sparrow to fly off the railing. Jasper Gwyn said something in a low voice, but something indecipherable. Finally he took the sheet of paper, folded it in four, and put it in his pocket. He looked up again at the gallery manager.

  “They’re mute,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t like paintings because they’re mute. They’re like people who move their lips to speak, but you don’t hear their voice. You have to imagine it. I don’t like to make that effort.”

  Then he got up and went to stand in front of the portrait of the man with the mustache, and for a long time, again, remained absorbed in his thoughts—a very long time.

&nbs
p; He went home heedless of the rain that was still beating down, and cold. Every so often he said something out loud. He was talking to the woman with the rain scarf.

  15

  “Portraits?”

  “Yes, why?”

  Tom Bruce Shepperd considered his words carefully.

  “Jasper, you don’t know how to draw.”

  “Right. The idea is to write them.”

  A couple of weeks after that morning at the gallery, Jasper Gwyn had telephoned Tom to tell him that there was a new development. He also wanted to tell him to stop sending him contracts to sign which he never even opened. But mainly he telephoned about the new development.

  He had to tell him that, after searching at length for a new job, he had now found it. Tom didn’t take it well.

  “You have a job. You write books.”

  “I stopped, Tom, how often do I have to tell you?”

  “No one is aware of it.”

  “What do you mean?

  “That you can start again tomorrow.”

  “I’m sorry, but even if I had, absurdly, decided to start writing again, what a nerve I’d have, don’t you think, after what I wrote in the Guardian?”

  “The list? Brilliant provocation. Avant-garde act. And then who’s going to remember?”

  Tom wasn’t only his agent, he was the man who had discovered him, twelve years earlier. They went to the same pub, at the time, and once they had stayed till closing talking about what Heming-way would have written if he hadn’t shot himself with a hunting rifle at the age of sixty-two.

  “Not a goddamn thing,” Tom had maintained. But Jasper Gwyn had a different opinion, and finally Tom had guessed, in spite of four dark beers, that this man understood literature, and had asked him what he did. Jasper Gwyn had told him and Tom had made him repeat it, because he really couldn’t believe it.

  “I would have said professor, or journalist, something like that.”

  “No, nothing of the sort.”

  “Well, it’s a pity.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea, I’m drunk. You know what I do?”

  “No.”

  “Literary agent.”

  He had taken out a business card and handed it to Jasper Gwyn.

  “If by chance someday you happen to write something, don’t do me the injustice of forgetting me. You know, it happens to everyone, sooner or later.”

  “What?”

  “Writing something.”

  He had an instant of reflection.

  “Also forgetting me, naturally.”

  They hadn’t talked about it again, and when they met at the pub they sat together gladly, often talking about books and writers. But one day Tom opened an enormous yellow envelope that had arrived in the morning mail, and inside was Jasper Gwyn’s novel. He had opened it at random, and had begun to read at that point. There was a school that was on fire. It had all started there.

  Now, however, everything seemed to be ending, and Tom Bruce Shepperd didn’t even understand why. The list of fifty-two things, all right, but it couldn’t be only that. All true writers hate the trappings of the profession, but no one stops for that reason. Usually one more drink is enough, or a young wife with a certain propensity for spending money. Unfortunately Jasper Gwyn drank one glass of whiskey a day, always at the same time, as if he were oiling a clock. Furthermore, he didn’t believe in marriage. So it seemed there was nothing to be done. Now he had also added this business of the portraits.

  “It’s a very private thing, Tom, swear you won’t discuss it with anyone.”

  “You can count on that, since who do you think would believe me?”

  When Tom married Lottie, a Hungarian woman twenty-three years younger than he was, Jasper Gwyn had been the witness, and at a certain point during the dinner had stood up on a table and recited a Shakespeare sonnet. Only it wasn’t by Shakespeare, it was his, a perfect imitation. The last two lines were: If I have to forget you I will remember to do so, but then don’t ask me to forget that I remembered. Then Tom had hugged him, not so much for the sonnet, which he hadn’t really understood, but because he knew what it must have cost him to climb up on a table and get people’s attention. He had really hugged him. Now, for the same reason, he couldn’t take the business of the portraits well.

  “Try to explain it to me,” he asked.

  “I don’t know, I thought I’d like to make portraits.”

  “Okay, that I understand.”

  “Naturally I’m not talking about paintings. I’d like to write portraits.”

  “Yes.”

  “But all the rest would be the way it is with portraits…the studio, the model, it would all be the same.”

  “You’d pose them?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I imagine it would take a lot of time. But at the end I’ll start writing, and what comes out of it will be a portrait.”

  “A portrait in what sense? A description?”

  Jasper Gwyn had thought about it for a long time. In fact that was the problem.

  “No, a description, no, that wouldn’t make sense.”

  “That’s what painters do. There’s the arm, and the painter paints it, that’s it. And what would you do? You’d write things like ‘the white arm lies softly’ etcetera, etcetera?”

  “No, exactly, that’s not even thinkable.”

  “And so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. I’d have to put myself in the situation where I’m making a portrait and then I could discover what it means, exactly, to write instead of paint. To write a portrait.”

  “That is, at this moment you don’t have the slightest idea.”

  “Something, some hypotheses.”

  “Like?”

  “I don’t know, I imagine it would be a matter of taking people home.”

  “Taking them home?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think I can explain it to you.”

  “I need a drink. Stay on the line, don’t even think of hanging up.”

  Jasper Gwyn kept hold of the receiver. He heard Tom muttering in the background. Then he put down the receiver and walked slowly toward the bathroom, while a lot of ideas whirled around in his head, all having to do with the portraits. He thought that the only thing to do was to try it, and, besides, he certainly hadn’t known where he wanted to end up when he started the thriller about the disappearances in Wales—he had just had in mind a certain way of proceeding. He peed. And then, too, if Tom had made him explain before he started to write what he intended to do, likely he wouldn’t have known what to say. He flushed. It makes no more sense to start a novel, the first, than to rent a studio to make portraits without knowing exactly what it means. He went back to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

  “Tom?”

  “Jasper, can I be sincere?”

  “Of course.”

  “As a book it will be colossal nonsense.”

  “No, you don’t understand, it won’t be a book.”

  “What, then?”

  Jasper Gwyn had imagined that people would take home the pages he had written, and would keep them shut up in a drawer, or put them on a low table. As you might keep a photograph, or hang a painting on the wall. This was an aspect of the matter that excited him. No more fifty-two things, just an agreement between him and those people. It was like making a table for them, or washing their car. A job. He would write what they were, that’s all. He would be, for them, a copyist.

  “They’ll just be portraits,” he said. “The people who pay to have them done will take them home and the thing ends there.”

  “Pay?”

  “Of course, people pay, no? To have a portrait done.”

  “Jasper, those are paintings, and, anyway, people long ago stopped having their portraits done, except for the Queen and a couple of feeble-minded types who have walls to
fill.”

  “Yes, but mine are written, it’s different.”

  “It’s worse!”

  “I don’t know.”

  They were silent for a moment. He heard Tom swallowing his whiskey.

  “Jasper, maybe it’s better if we talk about it another time.”

  “Yes, probably, yes.”

  “Let’s sleep on it and then talk again.”

  “Okay.”

  “I have to metabolize it.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Otherwise everything’s fine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “No. That is, one thing, maybe.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Do you know a real-estate broker?”

  “Someone who looks for houses?”

  “Yes.”

  “John Septimus Hill, he’s the best. You remember him?”

  Jasper Gwyn seemed to remember a very tall man, with impeccable manners, dressed with meticulous elegance. He was at the wedding.

  “Go to him, he’s perfect,” said Tom.

  “Thanks.”

  “What is it, are you moving?”

  “No, I thought of renting a studio, a place for attempting that portrait.”

  Tom Bruce Shepperd rolled his eyes.

  16

  When John Septimus Hill handed him the form to fill out, in which the client was asked to specify his requirements, Jasper Gwyn tried to read the questions, but finally he looked up from the papers and asked if he could tell him.

  “I’m sure I’d manage to explain better.”

  John Septimus Hill took the form, looked at it skeptically, then threw it in the wastebasket.

  “I’ve never yet met anyone who had the kindness to fill it out.”

  Then he explained that it had been an idea of his son’s. His son had been working with him for several months; he was twenty-seven, and had decided to modernize the style of the firm.

  “I tend to believe that the old way of doing things worked very well,” continued John Septimus Hill, “but you can imagine how one always behaves with a sort of mad indulgence toward one’s children. Do you have children, by any chance?”