Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

‘No.’

‘When you say “no”, Leonardo, do you mean “no, she is not beautiful” or “no, I disagree with you, she is beautiful”?’

‘She is not beautiful,’ said Leonardo.

‘It seemed to me that her hands were coarse and bony, but you painted them as if they had no bones in them. But she must have been an easy person to paint, because she moved less than anyone else I ever met in my life.’

‘Yes, nothing but the blinking of her eyes told you that she was alive,’ said Leonardo. ‘But sometimes she moved her hands. Occasionally she took her right hand from the back of her left hand, and loosely locked her fingers together. But generally she let her hands fall into her lap, where they lay relaxed, with the palms upwards. You see such a disposition of the hands in good old women who have done their work and are content to sit and look at their grandchildren. I have seen hands like hers on death-beds – the death-beds of women who have lived contentedly and died in peace with all their sins forgiven.’

‘Yes, she must have been easy to draw,’ said the Duke. ‘She kept so still. Now if you were drawing me, Leonardo, that would be quite a different matter, because I can’t keep still. I pick something up, I put something down, I walk here, I walk there, I take hold of a curtain or a piece of tapestry….’

‘On the contrary, Magnificence, that would make you all the easier to portray.’

The Duke, putting forward his right hand, said: ‘And what do you think of my hand?’

‘It is a perfectly good hand,’ said Leonardo, without enthusiasm. ‘It will do everything you want it to do. I see by the third and fourth fingers that you are a horseman. The first and second fingers, and the thumb, tell me that you are a swordsman, and the tendons of your wrist tell the same story.’

The Duke said: ‘Her hands really were a little too large and hard. What made you draw them so round and soft?’

Leonardo replied: ‘I softened them to make a symbol of terrible strength.’

‘I saw no terrible strength,’ said the Duke, ‘only pretty hands – pretty, soft, yielding hands.’

Leonardo repeated: ‘Terrible strength. Soft and yielding. What is softer and more yielding than a quicksand or a quagmire? And what is stronger? What is more terrible? In the sea, what is stronger and more terrible than those soft, yielding things that lie still in the dark and lay their pliable fingers, or tentacles, upon the diver?’

‘I don’t quite follow you,’ said the Duke, ‘but, as I was saying, I could have fallen in love with that woman. I couldn’t get to the bottom of her.’

‘You had better thank God that you did not fall in love with her, Magnificence,’ said Leonardo, ‘and as for getting to the bottom of her, that is impossible.’

‘Yes, as I said, the Madonna Lisa is deeper than the sea.’

‘No. She has no depth to which you could dive and no height to which you could climb. She is nothing at all. Del Giocondo will have discovered that much by now. She is, as you might say, God’s judgment upon him, that poor devourer of women. He loves her insanely – and she smiles. He bites his fingers, beats his head against the wall, and goads himself into madness in his hopeless endeavour to find something in her that is tangible – something upon which he may lay his hand and say: “At last I have found you.” And all the time she smiles, and is silent. He may fall on his knees and weep on her feet. She will smile. He may lock her in her chamber and starve her: she will smile. He may humiliate her, beat her with sticks, strike her before the servants … she will continue to smile. This I say with authority, because I have seen it all. And he knows that if he cut her throat, she would smile that enigmatic smile even in death … and he is exhausted, defeated. He is exasperated and worn out (just as I might have been) by his effort to know her.’

‘But you know her, Leonardo?’

‘By the grace of God and an ape.’

‘How, an ape?’

Leonardo was tired of it all. He made a gesture like a man who is shaking water off his finger-tips, and said: ‘Oh … like del Giocondo, like you, like a dozen others, I lost sleep thinking of her. The smile, the smile, the smile. I have seen every face in the world, from the Throne to the gutter. I can read faces as your secretary can read a book. As a cut key fits the wards of a lock, so the shape of a face falls into position in a keyhole in my mind. Very good, this one baffled me,’ said Leonardo, laughing grimly. ‘I saw the agony of del Giocondo and the calm of the Madonna Lisa, and I wanted to know. I talked to her, watched her, employed ten thousand artifices to get her off her guard. And still she smiled. That smile came between me and my sleep. I hated her bitterly because she was too much with me. Then, to be brief, when the portrait was finished and my brushes put away, God sent the ape.’

‘What ape?’

Leonardo said: ‘Del Giocondo filled his house with musicians, tumblers, dancers, and all that, in order to amuse his wife. There was a choir of little boys that sang. There was a man who made me laugh – even me. Madonna sat with folded hands, quietly smiling. I finished the portrait. Then something happened. Del Giocondo had several large hounds. One of them, a buff-coloured dog almost as big as a donkey, used to lie at her feet. This gigantic hound had hanging jowls and an expression of indescribable melancholy. When I showed the Madonna Lisa the finished picture, she nodded and said, through a pin-hole in her compressed mouth: ‘That is good.’ At this, the great dog, whose ears had caught some warmth in her voice, came forward lashing about with his great tail which disturbed a little sleepy ape no bigger than your two hands.’

The Duke looked at his hands.

Leonardo continued: ‘This absurd ape, enraged as little things are enraged, leapt upon the dog’s back and pulled his ears, grimacing and chattering. The patient dog looked up with such absurd melancholy that it was impossible not to laugh. There was this gigantic dog, which might have killed a leopard,’ said Leonardo, half laughing at the memory of it, ‘and there was this preposterous ape chattering and chattering with ape-like anger while the dog feebly gesticulated with his tail, one friendly touch of which had been sufficient to knock his assailant head-over-heels. I laughed. Monna Lisa laughed – and then, by God, in the bursting of a bubble everything was clear. Then, Magnificence, I was a happy man, because I had uncovered a trivial truth, so that a thousand unconnected pieces fell together and made sense. La Gioconda threw back her head and opened her mouth and laughed, and then I knew why she had always smiled that strange quiet smile.’

‘Why?’ asked the Duke.

‘She has very bad teeth, that vain and empty woman,’ said Leonardo, laughing, ‘but I have been thinking——’

‘ Very bad?’ asked the Duke.

‘Rotten. Her smile is the secretive smile of a woman with bad teeth. Touching the matter of the water supply; I believe——’

‘I detest women with bad teeth,’ said the Duke, yawning. ‘And to the devil with your pipes and water-tanks.’

SECRETS such as Pommel told me burn holes in the pockets of the brain. If I could tell you the real name of the King and his country, your eyebrows would go up and your jaws would go down – and then, more likely than not, you would damn me for a sensational rogue and a dirty liar.

I met the Count de Pommel in the Casino at Monte Estoril, in Portugal. At first I thought that he was a confidence trickster operating under a mask of shy reserve. The Count de Pommel had lost all his ready money on the third block of numbers, and was feverishly convinced that his luck was about to change. Offering me his watch as security, he asked me to lend him a thousand escudos; about ten pounds. In England, as things were then, almost any watch that ticked was worth ten pounds. I gave him the money. Then he began to win. In three-quarters of an hour he won eleven thousand escudos, stopped playing, and returned my money in exchange for his watch, with a thousand expressions of gratitude and the offer of a glass of champagne. He gave me, at the same time, six square inches of visiting card: he was the Count de Pommel, of the Quinta Pommel at Cascais and the Villa Pommel, Lausanne, Switzerland. The watch, he said, was worth four hundred pounds.