Skip to main content

The beginning

I scraped into the night, a primordial world swarming outside my window, warm, fetid Paris air and pestilence.

I scraped at an old canvas by the glow of a candle. The excess of paint and grime came up in disgusting ribbons around my gloved hands, and I wiped at it absently, never taking my eyes from the canvas, from the face that glowed with light into the early morning darkness.

My master did not arrive for another hour. In the dark, quiet emptiness I brooded over the beacon-like face, the pale countenance and eyes the color of an ocean that must be boundless and bottomless, so deep and variant was the color.

The painting had obviously been crafted from the most costly materials. The unaffordable lapis was dashed liberally over the canvas, as the subject wore an axtravagant sapphire-colored gown to accentuate the color of her eyes.

The warm gloom around me was soon dispelled by the sound of footsteps. Giraud came into the room and put his things down, drew off his coat, and came over to inspect my progress.

"Gisele, you have an instinct," he commented, referring to my declaration the previous day that something was definitely beneath the bleak landscape portrait he had salvaged.

"Where did you find this painting?"

He averted his eyes. "It was in an alley, with many others, discarded."

"You have an instinct as well, Giraud," I said.

I knew that my employer was a thief as well as an art restorer. I asked the question because I desired to know more about the painting. I was not troubled by the dishonest taint to my work. There were so few things a woman alone in Paris could do for work. I would keep this and dispel my troubled conscience occasionally.

Though it was late summer, and hot, the sun seemed never to rise that day. The sky began to glow later that morning through fog the color of hydrochloric acid haze. The air felt equally stifling in my lungs, and I was not sorry to remain in a small, dark room, with a candle to illuminate that work.

I stayed in the studio after my master was gone. The painting was now nearly completely restored. I would coat it with a protective varnish once I was sure my treatment was dried.

I took a pile of heavy burlap tarpaulins and dropped them near the canvas. I balled my sweater under my head and crouched near the painting, watching it in the last spurts of my dying candle, till my heavy eyelids closed, and I slept deeply.

Popular posts from this blog

Cocoa rose

My first cocoa rose bloomed today. There are many more buds opening up, and soon we will have some cuttings.

Love oneself

I have found a new barometer by which to judge my actions, or rather, it is an involuntary barometer that is improving me perhaps without my say. For every weak thing I do or begin to do, I ask myself if I would admire myself for it. I have felt so critical of myself lately, so ugly, so awful, and out of it has sprung this quest to improve myself. I don't want to become a slave to style magazines; rather, I could not admire myself for doing that. At the same time, I want to look right and decent and keep from embarrassing myself. I feel like my hygeine is always falling short, just like the housework. Every time I turn around, there's hair where hair shouldn't be, there's stuff under my toenails, my tee shirts are shrinking up and showing my stomach; to say nothing of my wildly oxidizing jewelry, scuffed shoes, &c. I don't understand why I don't see anyone else with these problems! Do they spend all their time at home cleaning their jewelry and ironing their

Then, they let Margot out.

Work is going to be really tough for the next month and a half. There is really no margin for error in the goal I have set. I will have to make and run at least one sample, sometimes two, every day. I am going to have to work overtime in the beginning just to leave myself a little room. Long ago I read this story about people who colonized Venus. The storms cleared, the sun shone, and plants grew only one day every hundred years. On the day the sun was to come out some children locked the nerd (I'm sure that would be me) in the closet, and after the day was over, they let her out. That is how I felt yesterday. I could only get a table far in Starbucks, so I didn't know what the weather was doing. I had planned to shop for my spring wardrobe and I did that very well. It took two hours, which is really a lot less than it would take in person, and the things I got were very much to my taste, but I stepped out into warmth, sunshine, and balmy air, and there was only an hour left in