Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

When he came, he brought gifts for her, all sorts of things he would never have considered before the war. He spent time going around book-stalls finding old books with blank end pages that she could use for her printing, cutting them out in a way that previously would have appalled him. He knew every pharmacist in the city who would set aside the acid she needed for biting her plates. Ironmongers and scrap merchants received constant visits also, and would collect plates of copper for him, beating them flat into a usable shape once more. Once he discovered some oranges, and bore them to her in triumph; they ate them together on the flat grass outside the chapel door, getting themselves sticky as the juice ran down their faces and clothes. The wasps came, and Julia ran away screaming in fright; Julien ran after her, pounding at them with his hat to drive them away before they both scuttled into the chapel and shut the door, sitting in the darkness and laughing themselves silly.

Both of them were happy in a way neither had ever imagined. Often they scarcely even talked for days on end, but were merely in each other’s company. She did her work, outside when possible, inside if not, and he did likewise. They would take such food as they could find with them up to the chapel and spend the day there, often sleeping there at night, waking up at dawn and eating a crust of bread together before washing each other down with the water Julien brought up from the river in an old metal bucket. Or she would go on her own and Julien would busy himself in the garden. He grew potatoes and tomatoes; there was an olive tree and a fig tree, and he carefully tended four tobacco plants, whose leaves he would pluck and press and dry and shred. They smoked the result with a couple of old clay pipes when cigarettes were unobtainable.

Julia returned to herself, and to her work, in his company and with the stimulus of the chapel. She slept, for the first time in two years, she said, and slept so hard Julien could scarcely wake her in the morning. Then she would bustle about making tisane, for there was no coffee, and went to see if the hen she’d acquired had laid any eggs. Generally it hadn’t, but occasionally she would return from the henhouse she’d built, bearing the egg with the most immense pride in the bird’s achievement. And she would boil Julien the egg, and serve it with all the ceremony of Escoffier himself, concocting one of his fragrant masterpieces in an age now long forgotten.

They were playacting, they knew, and the realization made it the more precious. They were living out the pages of a child’s book, pursuing the life of bucolic simplicity to fend off the ever grimmer news that came through from the outside; the shortages, the arrests, the Allied landings, the bombings, and the murders that became daily events. There was nothing they could do about it except survive, and celebrate their survival and the love that grew stronger with every glance and every shared moment.

It was Julia who pointed out, when she read some of the late poetry of Olivier de Noyen, tossed onto the floor as Julien worked, that whomever he might have loved, this “woman of darkness, wisdom touching the light” (to quote one of his latest poems) surely could not have been Isabelle de Fréjus, at least not if her supposed portrait was truly her.

“Look,” she said impatiently one evening, brushing her hair out of her eyes in the way Julien had first noticed on his Mediterranean cruise, and which he had loved ever since. A competent, businesslike gesture of someone whose profession was seeing, done with a slight toss of the head and which always left her face and neck and hair arranged in a perfect harmony. “Look at the damned woman.”

Julien had finished his article for perhaps the fourth time, but was still not pleased with it. It had lain now for several months on his desk, and every time he had gone back to it, he had a feeling of impatience welling up inside him; he could not settle down and work on it again. It was true; everything he said about the poet was right. About the betrayal of Ceccani, the casting off of all accepted obligations. Yet he knew he did not have the whole picture, for although he could reinterpret some of the poems, others were stubbornly intransigent. They were love poems, and however much he might reconsider Olivier as a man, as a poet he could not persuade himself that his last words were anything but remarkable.

He mentioned this and she read both the poems—struggling through in the Provençal—and listened to his argument. Then she looked at the portrait of Isabelle reproduced in a guide to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lyon. It came from a book of hours, and the attribution was venerable enough to be believable; Pisano had given it to her. Then she stated the obvious.

“I’m a mere painter,” she said. “But were I a poet, I would never dream of describing someone with fair hair as a woman of darkness, whatever I might mean. It would be lazy, not to say incompetent. I think I would make myself work a little harder to make the metaphor match the physical appearance.”

Julien grunted, then chewed his lip. “Well,” he said reluctantly. “You’re right, I suppose.”

“Of course I’m right,” she replied cheerfully. “Sorry.”

Afterward, he let the remarks brew on their own in his mind. Of course she was right; of course this woman of darkness could not have had fair hair. Could not have been Isabelle de Fréjus. But the fact remained that Olivier had loved someone. Did it matter whom he had loved?

His mind turned the question upside down and presented him with a different solution many months later. From the notion of Wisdom he thought of Sophia, then of the chapel that Olivier had written about. This came to him in Avignon, and the next time he visited—in winter this time, when even Julia had stopped going up the hill because of the lack of light and warmth—he asked her about how the painter had portrayed Saint Sophia. She rummaged in the large folder she had made to protect her precious paper.

“I did some watercolors,” she said, handing one over. “They’re not so good. But she does have dark hair.”

“And these?” he asked, picking up a pile of papers wrapped up in the same bundle.

“Ah, well,” she said, settling down on her haunches, an air of anticipation, pleasure, about her.

So Julien looked, and instantly understood the self-satisfaction in her tone. He looked for a long time, picking up one, then the next, then the next. Eventually he looked up. “Congratulations.”

It was deserved. She had finally overcome the barriers that he had so harshly pointed out to her some ten years before and attained a simplicity and originality that was breathtaking. Pisano had set her free; Julien never considered that he might have had a hand in it as well. She had taken his work and allowed herself to range over it; sketching parts of it time and again, renewing and revisiting, bending and breaking, stripping the image down and building it back up again. She gave the faces depth, then flattened them to abstraction, reduced them to a mere line, stressing first one feature then another, until she came to her goal, which was an almost perfectly harmonious blending of herself with his pictures. She now neither broke with the past nor imitated it; rather she grew out of it, extended it in unimagined directions.

She was leaning back against a chair by the fire and lit a cigarette; it was an important moment for her, she had three to get to the end of the month. “What do you think?” Still a little anxious, wanting compliments, but sure of getting them.

“These I would buy. Alas, now I don’t have any money. You just don’t have any luck, do you?”

She laughed. “I was going to give them to you anyway. They’re my wedding present to you.”