The matter of the light bulbs may seem of dubious relevance, but for Jasper Gwyn it had, instead, become a crucial issue. It had to do with time. Although he still hadn’t the least idea of what the act of writing a portrait could be, he had come up with a certain idea of its possible duration—as it is possible to decipher the distance and not the identity of a man walking at night. He had immediately dismissed something rapid, but it was also hard to imagine an action whose ending was random and possibly very far off. So he had begun to measure—lying on the floor, in the studio, in absolute solitude—the weight of the hours and the texture of the days. He had in mind a journey, similar to what he had seen in the paintings that day, and he intended to work out the pace at which it could be made, and the length of the road that would bring it to a destination. He had to identify the speed at which embarrassments would dissolve and the slowness with which some truth would rise to the surface. He realized that, as in life, only a certain punctuality could make that act complete—as it makes some moments of the living happy.
In the end he had decided that thirty-two days might represent a first, credible approximation. He determined that he would try one work session a day, for thirty-two days, four hours a day. And here was the importance of the light bulbs.
The fact is that he couldn’t imagine something that stopped abruptly, at the end of the last sitting, in a bureaucratic and impersonal way. It was obvious that the end of the work would have to be an elegant process, perhaps poetic, and possibly unpredictable. Then he found the solution he had been working on for the light—eighteen bulbs hanging from the ceiling, at regular intervals, in a perfect geometry—and he imagined that around the thirty-second day those bulbs would begin to go out one by one, randomly, but all in an interval of time that was no less than two days and no more than a week. He saw the studio glide into darkness, in patches, following an arbitrary pattern, and he fantasized about how they would move around, he and the model, in order to make use of the last lights, or, on the contrary, to take refuge in the first dark places. He saw himself distinctly in the weak light of a last bulb giving belated touches to the portrait. And then accepting the darkness, at the dying of the last filament.
It’s perfect, he thought.
That was why he found himself in the presence of the old man, in Camden Town.
“No, they should just die, without agonizing, and without any noise, if possible.”
The old man made one of those indecipherable gestures that artisans make to revenge themselves on the world. Then he explained that light bulbs were not easy creatures, they were affected by a lot of variables and often had their own, unpredictable form of madness.
“Usually,” he added, “the client at this point says, ‘Like women.’ Spare me, please.”
“Like children,” said Jasper Gwyn.
The old man nodded in agreement. Like all artisans he spoke only as he worked, and in his case this meant holding in his fingers some small bulbs, as if they were eggs, and immersing them in an opaque solution that looked vaguely like a distillate. The purpose of the operation was openly inscrutable. Then he dried them with a hair dryer as old as he was.
They wasted a lot of time digressing on the nature of light bulbs, and Jasper Gwyn ended up discovering a universe whose existence he had never even suspected. He particularly liked learning that the shapes of light bulbs are infinite, but there are sixteen principal ones, and for each there is a name. In an elegant convention, they are all names of queens or princesses. Jasper Gwyn chose the Catherine de Médicis, because it looked like a teardrop that had escaped from a chandelier.
“Thirty-two days?” the old man asked when he decided that this man deserved his work.
“That’s the idea.”
“I’d have to know how many times you turn them off and on.”
“Once,” Jasper Gwyn answered, impeccable.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
The old man stopped and looked up at Jasper Gwyn. He stared at him, so to speak, in the filament of his eyes. He looked for something that he couldn’t find. A crack. Then he lowered his gaze back to his work and his hands started up again.
“It will take a lot of care to transport them and mount them,” he said. “Do you know how to hold a bulb in your hand?”
“I’ve never wondered,” Jasper Gwyn answered.
The old man handed him one. It was an Elizabeth Romanov. Jasper Gwyn held it cautiously in the palm of his hand. The old man grimaced.
“Use your fingers. Like that you’ll kill it.”
“Bayonet joint,” the old man stated, shaking his head. “If I give you the ones with screws you might do me in before they’re lighted.” He took back his Elizabeth Romanov.
They agreed that nine days later the old man would deliver to Jasper Gwyn eighteen Catherine de Médicis destined to go out in an arc of time that would vary between 760 hours and 830 hours. They would go out without gasping, in vain flashes, silently. They would do so one by one, in an order that no one could predict.
“We forgot to talk about the type of light,” said Jasper Gwyn as he was about to leave.
“What do you want?”
“Childlike.”
“All right.” They shook hands goodbye, and Jasper Gwyn realized that he had done so cautiously, just as, many years earlier, he had been accustomed to do with pianists.