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“Was she—? Did she—?”
Oskar said he did not know. All he could tell me was that an acquaintance Pierre Gaspard, from Oskar’s student days, a successful medical man we had once met for pastis, who had obviously enjoyed slumming it for the evening in a Montparnasse café with his artist friend and his friend’s young female companion—had tipped him off to the presence of an unclaimed body, given him the address of the hospital, the name of a helpful night porter. Had he not thought it strange, expressed misgivings, I asked. According to Oskar, the whole thing had seemed to excite him, to remind him of the pranks they played together as students.
“They found her in the river,” he said. “Pulled her out just downstream from the Pont des Arts.”
Some part of me felt surprise that her hair was not still wet.
Oskar had described the old Paris Morgue on the Île de la Cité to me once, how ghoulish gawkers—or those hoping to identify lost loved ones—were permitted to enter its imposing chambers, to wander and view from behind great glass windows corpses recovered from the Seine laid on copper slabs, their pitiful damp belongings displayed beside them. Suicides, victims of boating accidents, the murdered, murderers. Men, women, children. The unclaimed. The unidentified. The unloved. I said it sounded like a final humiliation. Oskar asked me if I thought the dead cared.
I took a step closer. Her face was peaceful. No, not peaceful. Expressionless. It is just sentiment, to imagine we detect emotion on the faces of the lifeless.
I suppose you could consider this a confession.
Because there had been times, as Oskar twisted, turned, and muttered in the night, sitting up, sweat-drenched, terrified, when part of me envied him the horrors he had seen during the war, those indelible images that haunted his early work. The shattered landscapes, scattered telegraph poles. The buildings like dollhouses kicked to pieces. The horse’s skull grinning up from the mud. Those uniformed bodies by the side of the road one bright morning in Belgium, wheat springing straight up out of their backs. Yes, I confess it, as I sat there in the dark soothing him, that I envied Oskar as an artist, even as my heart ached for him as a man.
Because it was not until I began painting Self-Portrait as Sphinx that I realized I too had seen terrible sights, lived through awful things, and began to wonder if getting them down on canvas might help to exorcize them from my own nightmares.
Because Oskar had always insisted that it is the duty of the artist to tell the truth without flinching, and I finally understood what he meant. That if I was ever going to finish my painting, this painting I had convinced myself it was my duty to complete, I had to confront the material reality of a body precisely like this one. Not a warm living body, like the ones I had sketched at the Slade, nor the cold Carrara marble statues I’d studied in Rome. Not what I imagined someone who had drowned might look like, never having been allowed to see my sister’s body, to say goodbye. But this, exactly this, the bruised, mottled, heartbreaking reality.
Because I was nevertheless fully aware that what we were doing here, in this room, would horrify my father, my mother, anyone I had known growing up, including myself. It is hard to express just how distant I have felt sometimes, here in Paris, from my own past, my own past selves. The little girl at Longhurst, with her dolls, her nurse, her bubbling imagination. The bold child who declared her intention to paint at the age of seven, according to family legend. The diligent, conscientious schoolgirl, who had earnestly lobbied to be allowed to study at the Slade. The ambitious young art student I was when I first met Oskar.
Because every time I spoke to Oskar about the painting and my fears about my family’s reaction, he reminded me that his father had not spoken to him for almost a year after Oskar first exhibited his painting Crucifixion. That there were relatives on his mother’s side who were still not talking to her. That his art had been denounced by newspapers, by politicians, from the pulpit, by some of his own former instructors and colleagues as obscene, as blasphemous, as degenerate.
Because that was how some people would always greet art that told the truth, that showed things as they really were, in all their ugly complexity.
Because there had been a moment, when he pulled that sheet back, when I had been expecting the face he revealed to be another face, a face that haunts my dreams.
Because even as I was looking down at the body on that slab, a body that had been a living and breathing girl less than twenty-four hours earlier, I was already thinking how glad I was that I had my pencils, my sketchbook with me.
Because all of a sudden, I had that sort of tingling feeling I always get in the tips of my fingers when it is time to start work.
Chapter 10
CAROLINE, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
I prodded Patrick gently on the arm, then sat up slowly, silently, in his narrow single bed. The alarm clock read 4:00 a.m. The only sound was the throaty rumble and occasional snort of Next-Door Terry’s snores through the walls.
Patrick didn’t stir as I put on my coat and boots, pocketed his keys, and closed the door quietly behind me. On the nights I stayed in his room, this had become my little ritual—sneaking out to wherever Patrick had parked to examine Self-Portrait as Sphinx. Once or twice, when I was sure there was nobody around, I had lifted the painting out entirely, examining the back of the age-blackened canvas and what looked like a pair of thumbprints on the stretchers, where someone—most likely Juliette herself!—had moved it with paint-covered hands.
It was an extraordinary work. Complex. Intricate. Unsettling. A painting you could get lost in, that you could spend a lifetime looking at. There was always some new detail to absorb, something strange and unexpected and intriguing which seemed to possess some very precise symbolic significance, if you could just work it out. Like the golden feathered wings neatly folded on the Juliette-Sphinx’s back. The wings being what made her a Greek Sphinx, like the one that pounced on travelers on the road to Thebes and asked them to solve a riddle, and if they couldn’t, gobbled them up.
I felt a bit like that traveler myself.
The Juliette-Sphinx occupied a clearing, in the middle of the painting, a patch of open ground studded with boulders in a landscape overgrown with fantastically entangled vegetation—great drooping flowers, sinister coils of thorns. In the gaps in the trees, all around the painting’s central figure, strange little scenes were taking place. Near the top of the painting, running down a narrow path through dark, tangled woods, was a girl with flowing auburn hair, resembling Juliette herself. What she was fleeing, whatever was pursuing her, the painting did not show. What was unmistakable was her expression: one of wild, blind terror.
Prominent in the bottom left corner stood the figure that Harry’s grandmother had reacted so strongly to: Juliette’s sister, Lucy, in a long white dress, soaking and translucent, with wet hair partly covering her face. Her feet were bare, in a shimmering puddle. Her arms and legs were pale and mottled. Her toenails, her fingernails, had a hint of purple to them. Knowing what I did about who this was, knowing the lengths to which Juliette had gone to get the detail right, only added to the impact. It felt like something you were not sure you should look at. It felt like something that demanded you did so regardless.
This was clearly a world in which time worked strangely. On the left of the painting it looked to be late afternoon, a storm gathering. On the right, the moon was shining and it was already night. Across the top was a pattern of dark clouds. Everywhere you looked, in every nook and cranny, were the sort of sinister flights of fancy so familiar from the doodles in Juliette’s journal, every bole on every tree, every shadowed stone or wizened branch holding at least the suggestion of something else: a leering face, a pair of eyes, a beckoning finger, something scuttling and many-legged. In the bottom right was that strange hooded figure in their boat, the same boat and figure as on the fragment of ancient papyrus I had seen in the Osiris clubhouse.
I could see why it had appealed to Breton. I could also see why it had upset the family. What I could not do was make heads or tails of it.
I had hoped that when Self-Portrait as Sphinx was in front of me, Juliette’s secrets would reveal themselves. Why she had withdrawn it from the exhibition after a single night. Why her family had been determined to destroy it. What the terrible accusations were that led to her incarceration in a mental institution. I could find none. Clearly, her sister was an important figure in the painting, but I had searched it in vain for any reference to the Missing Maid, whose disappearance must have further shadowed her childhood. Or to Oskar and his wife, who she thought was following her. Or to her father.
I was not so much disappointed by the painting—it was truly remarkable—as frustrated by it. Could it be that it contained no coherent meaning, no mysterious message to decode? Perhaps I was trying to make the wrong kind of sense out of it, and it was just a nightmarish attempt to capture on canvas the jumble of Juliette’s subconscious.
Then I would remind myself of her deliberate decision to paint herself as a Sphinx with a secret. How Harry’s grandmother had reacted to the discovery that the painting might still exist. How Juliette talked about the painting in her journal.
I only had one final entry left to read now, a few pages long, dated January 25, 1938.