Vadim sees her in his mind’s eye: the woman is just about to put on her coat in the cloakroom at the Café Idiot in Saint Petersburg, and, along with her winter coat, the waiters are bringing her so many flowers that she is almost buried under them. This tall, fragile woman exaggerates the weight of the flowers; to amuse her friends, she pretends she is collapsing under the enormous bouquets, like a lady from the past swallowed up by an overly tight corset. Everybody laughs, but in a different way from her … as if they were in a museum, admiring a statue of Buddha that had unexpectedly opened its mouth to tell a joke.
Vadim had noticed her earlier, when she was sitting at the next table with her friends, wearing jeans and a black sweater. She had been talking with the others in such an animated way that her sunflower-colored hair fanned out around her face—as if an invisible hairdresser were fooling around with a hairdryer, Vadim thought. She behaved like a student, though she was clearly older. In the bohemian basement café, nothing distinguished her from the other customers, although her appearance would surely captivate anyone who chose to take notice of her. Why was one brought under such a spell with this woman? As much as Vadim mulled over the question, the only answer he could come up with was a banal one: the aristocratic gesture of the fingers of her right hand. When the waiter helped her put on her coat, Vadim was taken by surprise: How was it that such a great lady didn’t float off toward the exit bundled up in an ermine coat, or a beaver coat for that matter? How come she didn’t have a smooth, shiny fur coat with a hood, the type that most Russian women would like to have in their closet? How come she had wrapped herself in a common, cheap flannel coat, and, with a quick movement, had covered her head with a black beret?
The unknown woman was leaving; she waved goodbye to her friends who were sitting in the café—she moved her hand from one side to the other, ding-dong, like a pendulum—and then she was on the street. Vadim glanced through the little window that was close to the ceiling, and, from below, saw how the unknown woman threw her bouquets of flowers into a huge Mercedes—woosh, woosh, woosh, like she was tossing cushions onto a sofa—and how she then got into the back seat of the magnificent car, decorated with a little American flag and driven by a uniformed chauffeur, who also had a flag on his lapel. They pulled away with a buzz, while the murmur of conversation around the café cheered the atmosphere. It seemed to him that he was the only one who had noticed the departure of this obviously well-known personage.
“Who was that?” Vadim asked his friend Boris, the owner of a small art gallery and the editor of a magazine Vadim wrote for.
“Don’t you know? Didn’t you go to the opening of her show this afternoon?” Boris asked, as he toyed with the ashtray.
“I spent the whole afternoon here, writing an article. Until you came in just now and saved me. Did I miss anything?”
“An American woman of Russian extraction …”
Yes! Now Vadim remembered that the unknown woman spoke a strange, foreign Russian. Her appearance—long legs, skinny arms, languid movements, posed body—suggested to him that she could be an Estonian from the Gothic city of Tallinn. But a far more distant accent marked the unknown woman’s Russian.
“Here, in Petersburg, the American woman wanted to have an exhibition of a very personal nature. Her grandparents were from here, but not from Petersburg. In fact they were from Petrodvorets, but it doesn’t matter, there’s hardly a difference. It was one of those noble families that had to flee after the Revolution. She … maybe you’d get along with her.”
Boris raised his eyes from the full ashtray, and went on, “This painter is fascinated with Japan, like you.” Boris smiled, and then resumed his interest in the cigarette stubs. “By the way, when are you thinking of going back to the university to finish your Japanese studies? Or maybe you no longer feel like it? Next to all those twenty-year-olds, you’d look like a grandfather, an eternal student, aged thirty-five.” He continued without waiting for Vadim’s answer. “The American woman you’ve seen paints in a distinctly Japanese style: still lifes and landscapes, but also portraits, both of individuals and groups. Her paintings are half hidden under a translucent veil of sensuality that is sometimes a little perverse.”
“You can’t be talking about Patricia … ?”
“Well, yes, I’m talking about Patricia Pavloff.”
* * *
You get the three o’clock bus. In twenty minutes, you’re at the crossroads where the driver has suggested you get off. There are two hours to go before the appointment … But you don’t mind. You’re happy that you’re not going to be late and that you have time to think things over calmly. To prepare yourself for the meeting. To get your thoughts, your questions, in order. To introduce yourself yet again, without forgetting anything important on your mental list. And above all, you have to find her house!
Following instructions, you climb the winding path that weaves through the vines. To the left, there is a unique, solitary tree. What is it, a fig tree? No, if it were a fig tree, it would be bearing fruit. This morning, in the market, you’ve seen masses of figs. You know these knotty branches, like the arms of peasant women who have spent their lives working in the fields, from her paintings. The paintings of the unknown woman. No trees like this grow in your northern Russia. Could it be an almond tree? How charming it must be when it blossoms! A single almond tree among mounds and mounds of vines!
You move forward through the muggy Mediterranean afternoon, making your way through the dense heat, impregnated by the sun and by smells that are unfamiliar to you. Two weeks ago, when you left Petersburg, you couldn’t imagine this desert. Desert! Why, everything you can see is green! That doesn’t matter, it’s a desert, you conclude, une petite Afrique, as your French friends would put it.
You turn off your path to embrace the tree. Trees possess positive energy, you felt it yourself more than once: their roots penetrate the earth, their branches reach to the sky. From the earth and the sky, they extract energy. And then you realize that you’re not bearing a gift for the unknown woman, just a few of your essays about her work and the outline of the book that you intend to write. What will she think when she sees you without a bunch of flowers in your hand!
* * *
The red flames of the tulips, with little specks of black charcoal—the pistils; hazy landscapes, longed-for landscapes; still lifes with white vases, all of them more animated than living people; a cat and a woman, the latter more perfidious than the feline; a black jar in a dark niche; all the objects, all the figures submerged in shadow, just as Vadim knew from the treatises on traditional Japanese art that he had studied for a few years, an art that he had once loved and that he had now somewhat forgotten. Now he had to reintroduce himself into that whole universe from his past, with all its fragrance and longing. Each picture was signed on the left: Pavloff. Every day Vadim went to the gallery, every day he stood back and observed the tulips from the furthest corner of the room and again and again he discovered that he was seeing not flowers but a woman’s eyes, that the black perianth was the eye of the painting’s creator. Every day he observed the burning tulips, he entered them as if entering a chapel, he closed himself within them to escape from the world and immediately let himself be carried away by his imagination.
One day when Vadim was standing, as usual, before the paintings, he had the sensation that someone was looking at him. He glanced around … and saw that in a corner of the gallery was the artist herself. Quickly, both of them averted their eyes, but when, a second later, Vadim looked back in that direction, there was nobody there. He ran his eyes over the two rooms, but saw nothing except two shadows wearing astrakhan hats. The shadows were pointing at a platter full of cherries and a wasp. “Listen, can’t you hear the buzzing of the wasp, happy to wander over the cherries?” said one shadow to the other. Vadim ran out into the street … just in time to see a black Mercedes turning the corner. But he couldn’t be sure whether it was her car, that is to say, the American embassy’s, or if it was just some nouveau riches who only bought the latest models of the most expensive cars.
* * *
It is too hot, too humid even for the birds and the animals. Nothing moves; nothing, nobody makes a sound, not even a whisper. In extreme heat, as in the extreme cold, nature is dead. You stop to listen to the music of silence … but mainly to tie the laces on your sneakers. The death produced by heat is only apparent; how many insects there are on the ground! You marvel at them as you crouch over your right shoe. Now the curious chant of a cricket has livened the air; afterward, another one starts singing, and yet another; the crickets here are different from those of the meadows of the north; this one, to your left, isn’t singing but is making a rubbing sound, like the fabric of a dress in a dance hall, the one on the right is clearing his throat, gra-gra-gra-gra-gra-gra. What a concert is being produced by this parched landscape, with its dry grass and stony earth! From time to time, you feel the caress of the salty, perfumed sea breeze. How is it possible that you can smell the sea when you’re so far away from it …? How many miles? Maybe five, ten at the most? And after you got off the bus, you covered another couple or so on foot. Here is the bend that she mentioned … and on that little hill there are trees growing, cypresses, yes, a remotely Tuscan landscape, they look like the long, bony fingers of the fanatic Florentine monk, Savonarola. And the garden … you somehow sense it, you wish to find it, and to find it right there, on the incline. Yes, yes, there is a white smudge dancing there, a wall, a house with a palm tree growing next to it, a cheerful house. Can it be hers?
* * *
One day, when he was immersed in the fire of the tulips—although not with the same concentration and enthusiasm as before, now that he couldn’t stop glancing around in search of those eyes framed by fine, black lashes—he realized, thanks to a poster hanging on the wall, that they had just opened an exhibition of Islamic art at the Hermitage and he had promised Boris that he would write an article for the magazine about it before the week was over. And it was already Thursday!
A little later, he went up the ostentatious staircase of the Hermitage with its low steps; unusually low, yes: the architect had probably designed them like that so that the Tsarina and the other ladies didn’t tread on their dresses as they climbed up, and so that the arrival of the Tsar at the ball was a solemn one, so that his stout Majesty didn’t enter the ballroom out of breath, like a horse after a race, Vadim thought, smiling.
He entered the ballroom in which the exhibition had been installed. In the semi-shadows shone golden bowls from Egypt, diadems and jars from India covered in precious stones, Turkish swords, daggers from the Caucasus, plates from Persia, and embroidered hats from Indonesia. The thousand and one nights. But he felt disappointed; for him all of this was no more than scrap iron. Shining, magnificent, yes, but scrap iron all the same. However, he was under an obligation to write his article, so he didn’t waste time and started taking notes.
He was observing an earthenware vase garnished with the sinuous black lines of the Arab alphabet; behind it, they had placed a mirror so that visitors could admire it from all angles. From the depths of the mirror emerged a pair of eyes framed by black twigs. These eyes floated across the surface, separated from the body, from the face, as if they had a life of their own. He knew—he realized it at once—that they were her eyes. He knew that, by means of the mirror, she was staring him right in the eye. But he still hadn’t noticed that she was there beside him, that her elbow was almost touching his. He had the feeling that she had recognized him too.
“Good morning, what a coincidence—” said Vadim, genuinely pleased.
“Sorry?” she interrupted him. She lengthened every syllable. It was difficult to imagine more indignation and disdain expressed in just two syllables; she couldn’t have done it better than Cleopatra herself when ordering an impertinent slave to abandon her palace.
“Of course, you don’t know me, although I … Ahem, excuse me. Allow me to introduce myself.”
“Pardon me, but …” Her disdain made her curl her lips, and there was a trace of irony trembling in her voice. Vadim felt like a slave who had just been caught tasting wine out of Cleopatra’s golden goblet. He realized that this woman was a queen. And he couldn’t imagine anyone, man or woman, who would be capable of being in an armchair at her side and sitting back comfortably with a cigarette and a glass of beer.
He didn’t know what to say, it was quite clear that the woman wanted to get rid of him. Hesitantly, he looked at the vase … and he heard the woman leaving! He mustn’t let her go! He watched her as she walked and stopped in front of a Moorish-style door that was so skillfully chiseled, it looked like a decorated grille. Vadim hurried over. He stopped at the other side of the door-grille. Now he could see her in fragments, as if in a mosaic: the fair hair, the black sweater, the worn jeans, the black boots covered in mud, of which there was plenty at that time of year in Saint Petersburg. Her eyes, framed by those fine lines, floated in one of the door’s grille-like octagonal holes.
“I went to see your exhibition …,” he started, timidly. And he added, almost imperceptibly, “What I liked most …”
“You’ve made a mistake,” said the woman, mocking him before making as if to move away; but this time he didn’t want to play the role of scolded slave.
“I have just come from your exhibition—” he repeated firmly.
She interrupted him again. “You must have mistaken me for someone else.”
Her impatience made her American accent more noticeable, to the point where it sounded like she was speaking English rather than Russian.
“Your tulips caught my attention. I haven’t been able to take my eyes off them.”
“They were a friend’s idea. In fact, the work is by her,” she said in a way that was no longer at all real. Her eyes filled with tenderness. When he heard her words, Vadim had the sensation that, in the dead silence of the exhibition hall, broken only by the echoing snores of the guards’ walkie-talkies, someone was playing a gentle Arab tune with a lute.
“A friend’s?” He felt her distancing herself from him, although she stepped closer on the other side of the ornamental grille.
“She drew them, I only added the color, like a child with a coloring book.”
“And the pistils?”
“What about the pistils?”
“They stand out from the painting as if they were human eyes. They are holes through which one can see until … well, see deep inside …”
Embarrassed, he added with a laugh, “We Russians would say inside the soul. But in America you probably don’t talk about the soul.”
An elderly woman, who worked as a guard at the Hermitage, was walking over to them and looked with surprise at this couple talking through a grille, like a nun with a visitor. She signaled to them to move away a little from the valuable exhibit. Both took a step back at the same time. And then they burst out laughing. They felt closer to each other.
“Soul?” said the woman in low voice, as if she was trying to remember something, “In my country, that word has a religious ring to it.” Then she gave a hint of a smile. “As does almost everything, in fact. We Americans don’t know how to do anything without getting obsessed about it, without being fanatical.”
Vadim thought about how one of the most important words in his sentimental vocabulary was only used in a marginal way in America, and therefore also in Patricia’s vocabulary. How could he get along with a woman like that? The soul, thought Vadim. He felt how the woman’s presence gave off a heat and a light … that reached his soul. Could he ever tell her that? How could he get along with a person who was so rational that she didn’t use the word “soul”? But then he remembered her exhibition, dozens of still lifes, so full of tenderness that he had seen nothing like them except in Japanese paintings. He remembered the red tulips and was flooded by a wave of admiration.
He realized that she was looking him up and down. How old must she be? Forty, he thought. But she looked thirty-eight … not much older.
“The black pistils of your tulips look like …,” he stopped himself, he wanted to say something he felt was important.
“Excuse me, but I don’t have a second more to spare,” she said, again with that royal coldness. Cleopatra was speaking to the slave who, instead of holding a parasol over the head of his queen, had taken the liberty of squashing a spider with his foot and showing her the corpse, thus interrupting her walk through the royal gardens. Cleopatra, who … but he didn’t finish his thought. With a quick movement, he caressed the grille that was also a door, as if it was a friend with whom he wished to share an experience. The ornamented door, through which he had talked with her. The embossed door, which still guarded her breath.
Before the elderly guard could reach him, he walked off.
* * *
An oasis in the desert! The garden of the thousand and one trees. The garden of deep shadow and a hundred lighter shadows that dance in the sun. The garden full of bitter and sweet fruit, a kind you have never tasted. You step up close to the garden gate. No, you have to keep your distance. They might see you from the windows of the white house, and there is still plenty of time to go before the hour she appointed for the meeting. Here they have garage space for several cars. The garage doors are closed, you don’t know if they have guests. How does Patricia live? Alone? No. With a husband and children? Yet she seems so untraditional, so unconventional … What must her studio be like? Does it have windows that look onto the garden, or is it one of those that doesn’t have an opening at eye level, so the painter doesn’t get distracted, leaving her captive like a medieval princess who’s been locked in a castle tower by her cruel father, the king? You walk around the house and the garden … and you begin to feel like a guard dog; so you take the path leading off to the left, toward the valley in which a ditch marks the existence of a stream. Everything is dead, made of stone. It is the end of life, the end of the world … not after the Flood but rather after a fire.
* * *
It wasn’t too difficult to get Patricia Pavloff’s address: Vadim went to see her art dealer and asked his advice regarding the planned biography about her and her work.
“Start working on it as soon as you can!” the dealer said enthusiastically. “You are just the right person for the job: an American or European wouldn’t be able to fully understand her Russian roots; but you can.”
“But …”
“But what?”
“She’s forty, tops. Does it make sense to write a biography about such a young artist? I’m not so sure. At forty, you haven’t lived long enough, you’re at the stage where you’re still finding out who you are.”
“That might be the case when you’re forty. But Patricia Pavloff is fifty-three years old.”
They heard the bell of the church opposite: fifty-three tolls on the hard copper, majestic tolls like the blows of a drum announcing the name of the new king on the main square. Fifty-three years old. Eighteen years older than him. Bang, bang.
“Right,” he said, somewhat uncertain of himself, “so a biographical sketch would be justified.” He looked at the address. Spain. Why had Patricia abandoned her native Chicago to go to Spain? The address was a P.O. box number in a town called Sitges.
“It’s about twenty-five miles south of Barcelona, by the sea. But she lives inland, quite a way out of this town, Sitges,” the dealer explained.
Vadim wrote a long letter to Patricia in which he told her about his project and many other things. He wanted to correspond with her. He didn’t get a reply. He wrote another, shorter, letter. Nothing. A third one, sober, concise. No response at all. He sent her an e-mail, and yet another, with the same result. He couldn’t get started on this project that he was growing more and more enthusiastic about as the days went by. Everything seemed to have come to a halt because of the painter’s unavailability, so Vadim thought, and he closed the folder containing his project.
* * *
Olive trees that look like old women with arthritic joints, olive trees like black monks, olive trees—ghosts of the desert. And the cry of the ghosts: the racket of the invisible crickets. You say a few words and the breeze tears it out of your mouth before you can so much as hear it. The sun blinds your eyes painfully, that savage, terrible sun, yes, terrible, because it lights up everything and burns and destroys. Under this scorching sun, only the trees with arthritic arms and thick leaves stay alive, even though they seem to crouch under the flaming beams. Yes, a little like when in winter, the bushes and the woods from where you come from, there in the north, send their prayers to the sky begging for a sign of mercy in the form of a cozy blanket of snow. Il faut connaître les pays dans leur saison violente, someone once said. That’s true. Only when you get to know a country during its harshest season can you understand the essence of the land and its people. Patricia knew Petersburg like that, and you are now discovering the Mediterranean at a time when its flowing landscape is being cruelly punished.
* * *
Sitges … you’d imagined it differently. As if it were a fishing village. In Petersburg, in a travel agency, you saw a photo of the blue sky against which the golden tower of the church stood out, together with the green sea and the white beaches, with splashes here and there of colorful boats and fishing nets spread under palm trees that were forever laughing. A typical travel agent’s image. But … one of those palm trees winked at you: like a little demon, like a girlfriend you just met, it winked at you with its right eye as it raised the right corner of its mouth and wiggled its upturned nose. At that moment, you knew that it was giving you a sign, and that it would not be long before you set off on a long journey in search of its invisible shadow. You knew that this advertising image had well and truly gotten to you.
During the long journey from Petersburg to Prague and from Prague to Barcelona, you imagined that the sea, that sea that you had just seen in the photo, was stuck to the beach and that you would unstick it: quite simply, you would take a hold of it with your fingers and unstick it from the white sand and have a look at what was hiding under that carpet woven with little grinning waves. And then you would take a teaspoon, as if you wanted to taste that reign of Poseidon; you thought about Ulysses and his shipwrecks and about Ariadna and her desperation. You promised yourself that every day you would get up at dawn to go and taste the sea, in spoonfuls, as if it were peach jam, as if it were walnut and chocolate ice cream. Good morning, Mister Dalí!
* * *
Vadim spent whole days walking along the beach and the promenade, under the palm trees. He was searching obsessively for his palm tree and his painter: when he wasn’t looking upward he looked the summer tourists straight in the eyes to see if he could find the black pistils of a tulip in them. Some of the people who were spending their vacation there had noticed this, and they started calling him the lunatic. He also searched for her in the local galleries. They knew her, certainly, they pronounced her name in the Catalan fashion, Paulòf, with an open ‘o’ and a veneration that was almost religious. Both things made him laugh. Until one day, in the library, of which Patricia was a member, the librarian, who had short hair and red-framed spectacles, smiled like a naughty girl and gave him Patricia’s phone number, and, what was more, wished him a good vacation.
He dialed the number ten times a day, but all he got by way of an answer was an unknown voice, recorded on the answering machine. In English and badly pronounced Spanish. A couple of times he left his name and the phone number of the guest house where he was staying. Ten times a day he asked the receptionist if anybody had left a message for him. The woman burst out laughing as soon as she saw him and called him a lunatic behind his back. The Russian lunatic, hee hee hee!
One day, when he was out having a walk, he noticed a terrace restaurant that had a tulip on every table. Blue, made of plastic. With black pistils inside. He remembered the red tulips that had been taken down a while ago from an art gallery in Saint Petersburg, he imagined that chapel of fire in which he had immersed himself like a pilgrim seeking refuge from the wind in the ruins of a monastery. He took it as a sign. He stayed there, waiting.
And that was when he saw her. First he noticed her blonde hair, scattered by the breeze. Tanned skin the color of milk chocolate, a narrow black ribbon around her neck, a black camisole with narrow straps. Now she was no longer Cleopatra. More like Diana. An Amazon woman. She was having lunch on the terrace of a restaurant, accompanied by a dark-skinned woman, from the south of Spain, perhaps, or rather from some North African country or from Turkey, and by a couple who never stopped laughing.
Although he had a table reserved for lunch in the dining-room of his guest house, and two Irish women who lived on the first floor were waiting there for him, although he was wearing nothing but a bathing suit that could be taken as a pair of shorts, Vadim decided that he preferred not to have lunch and to let the midday sun burn his skin rather than move away from her, now that he had found her. He walked up and down on the opposite side of the pavement, while the sun set everything on fire, even though it was already five in the afternoon. Up and down and back again, whole mountains of waves with white hats, the church behind, surrounded by houses and palaces that reminded one of Italy, the smell of suntan cream … the dolce far niente of all the European nations on vacation. Up and down, to the other end of the beach, and then back again along the promenade … his hair clung to him like a bearskin, streams of sweat burned his cheeks … Up and down, up and down, to and fro, while the Amazon woman sat and laughed, with a cigarette in one hand, and tasted her white wine with little sips under the shadow of a great white umbrella that was open over the table. Il faut connaître les pays dans leur saison violente … up and down, and back again … even the swallows seemed to have hidden themselves under the eaves, more intelligent than the bodies getting toasted on the beaches. To and fro, to and fro …
Finally, they got up from the table. Six in the afternoon, he thought. Patricia looked straight at him. She had probably been warned that there was a man who was marching around her like the Queen of England’s royal guard; the only thing missing was his busby. The couple had gone on ahead. Patricia walked arm in arm with the dark-skinned woman. Vadim went up to them, timid and trembling. The Arab woman unlinked her arm and walked a little apart, discreet. Patricia didn’t remember him.
Of course, that was it! Then, in winter, he was white as snow, like all people who come from the north. In Sitges, on the other hand, the sun had transformed him into a chestnut fresh off the grill. And he’d lost weight, with all that heat. Vadim reminded her of their brief encounter in Petersburg, but she couldn’t find it in the drawer of her memory. He was hoping that her painter’s eye would pick out a man who she’d met. But in fact … in fact they’d only spoken a little through the grille of the Arab door, and she hadn’t really seen him. Now she was talking to him in a friendly, natural way, but treating him as someone she was meeting for the first time in her life.
Patricia stopped walking, and asked, “How come you don’t have any hair on your body? Men usually have loads of disgusting hair, and you have nothing at all, not a single hair!” and she laughed like a schoolgirl.
“That’s because my ancestors came from Siberia.” Vadim hoped that the brown of his tan would disguise the blood that was rushing to his face. “But you wouldn’t see that by looking at my father, his features were pure Slav. Sorry, are, are pure Slav.” He corrected himself and became even redder.
“From Siberia!” Patricia repeated with a sudden interest that Vadim found inexplicable. “Yes, of course, your eyes are a little almond-shaped.”
Patricia saw that her friends were waiting for her. Quickly, she said to him, “Come and see us one of these days!”
Us? he thought, but he answered immediately, “You always leave the answering machine on …”
“Leave your phone number or e-mail address.”
“And how will you know who it’s from?”
“Say it’s the Japanese man!” she said, and waved goodbye. To and fro, to and fro, like a pendulum.
The Japanese man, she said. How does she know? How could she have guessed that, before having to leave university and become a computer salesman—for economic reasons, of course—he had been studying Japanese culture? Vadim’s face filled with admiration. Patricia was the only person who didn’t look at his hair, as blonde as that of any Hollywood actress, or his green eyes with their long, golden lashes, washed by the sun and the sea. She perceived that which nobody was able to see: that slight lengthening at the corner of his eyes.
The painter was already sitting in a large, white, convertible sports car, which was taking her along the beach.
Patricia. A legend.