Sacré Bleu

Lucien was trying to calculate how they had come so far into the dark and still not found his traps, and Jacques’s questions were distracting him. “Jacques, be quiet or we will have to rape and kill your grandmother and put her in a pie.”

Lucien was fairly sure his parents would have been proud of the way he had handled the problem, but when Jacques started to sniffle, Lucien added, “Because that is what pirates do.” What a baby. Why did children get so upset about a little pie?

“No!” said Jacques. “No you won’t! I’m—”

But before Jacques could announce his intent, a scratchy voice sounded out of the dark.

“Who’s there?”

And with that Jacques was off, wailing toward the entrance, and Lucien took off behind him. After a few steps, Jacques’s candle went out, and after a few steps more, Lucien tripped and fell headfirst against the wall of the mine shaft. When his head hit, a splash of bright white lights fired across his vision and he heard a high-pitched note in his ear, as if someone had struck a tuning fork inside his head. When he was finally able to push himself up on his hands and knees and the points of light cleared from his vision, he was in total darkness, with no sense of which way was out of the mine. He could no longer hear Jacques’s steps retreating or where they might have faded to.

He crawled a few feet, afraid that if he stood he might trip again. The

powdered gypsum on the floor of the mine was soft on his hands and knees, and after his abrupt encounter with the wall, he thought he’d take his chances closer to the ground. A few feet more and he thought he might be able to see some light, and he stood up. Yes, there was definitely light.

He stood and started toward it, probing cautiously ahead with a toe before planting each foot. He saw a shape, an orange rectangle, and thought it might be the mouth of the mine, but as he moved, the shape revealed itself as something that was illuminated from the side, not the source of the light, and he realized he’d been moving around a bend in the mine. It was a canvas, he thought, but it was the back of the canvas. He could see the nail heads on the stretchers, illuminated by the light of a single candle.

From behind the canvas, the sound of labored breathing.

Lucien moved a little farther around the corner and stopped. Stopped breathing. There was a little man there beyond the canvas, naked, brown, his feet and legs dusted with white gypsum powder, bent over something, a dark, long shape on the floor. He was scraping the dark thing with some kind of blade. The blade looked like it might be made of glass, but it looked very sharp.

Lucien started to shake from holding his breath, so he allowed himself a breath, slow, shallow, quiet. He could feel his heart beating in his temples, behind his eyes, yet he dared not move.

The little man would scrape the blade down the length of the dark shape, then he would scrape the blade into some sort of earthen jar and sigh, as if with satisfaction. It was the motion that Father used when scraping flour from his bread board after the loaves were formed.

Then the shape on the floor moved, moaned, the sound of an animal, and Lucien nearly leapt straight up in the air but managed to catch himself. It was a person, a woman, and she’d moved a leg into the narrow band of light thrown from the candle. The leg was blue. Even in the dim orange light of the candle, Lucien could see it. Now he could make out how she lay, on her side on the floor of the mine, one arm stretched out above her head until it disappeared into the black.

The little man tapped the blade into the jar, then turned and placed the blade right where the woman’s face would be and pressed down. The woman moaned, and Lucien’s breath caught again, this time with a bit of a yip.

The little man wheeled toward Lucien with his blade up, his eyes like black glass, in the darkness. “Who’s there?”

“Merde!” Lucien said for the second time ever, although it came out in a very long, siren wail behind him as he bolted into the darkness, his hands held before him, and he kept trailing that audible “merde” until he saw the light of day and escape—the sweet green light on the thorn-bushes outside—and he was nearly there, almost there, when a long arm reached down by the mouth of the mine and snatched him up.

Part II

The Blue Nude

In each picture is a whole lifetime imprisoned, a whole lifetime of fears, doubts, hopes and joys.

—WASSILY KANDINSKY, CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

So, for instance, if you know that it is dangerous for you to have colors near you, why don’t you clear them away for a time, and make drawings? I think that at such moments you would do better not to work with colors.

—THEO VAN GOGH, LETTER TO VINCENT, JANUARY 3, 1890

Seven

FORM, LINE, LIGHT, SHADOW

Merde!” SAID LUCIEN.

In the creation of any work of art, there is some point, no matter how much training and experience is brought to bear on the work at hand, when the artist is taken with a feeling of both exhilaration and terror, the Oh shit. What the hell have I gotten myself into! moment of flailing panic, akin to the feeling of falling from a great height. Lucien’s “merde” moment came when Juliette dropped the sheet she was using as a cover and said, “How do you want me?”

And although every experience in his life had somehow added up to this moment, this very moment, and he was uniquely suited and chosen to be in this moment, he could think of nothing whatever to say.

Well, he could think of something to say: On the divan, against the wall, on the floor, bent over, wrapped around, upside-down, downside-up, fast, slow, gentle, rough, deep, hard, loud, quiet, kicking over the lamps, wild, while Paris burns, again and again until there is no more breath in our bodies, that’s how I want you.

But he didn’t say that. He didn’t need to. She knew.