Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

If you think about it, it was kind of strange. I was lying there next to a woman I’d known for only about three months, listening to her talk about her daughters, whom I’d never laid eyes on. She was even asking me my opinion on what sort of path they should take in life. And the two of us there, without a stitch on. Admittedly, though, not a bad feeling, to take a random peek into the lives of people I hardly knew. Brushing past the lives of people I would never have anything to do with. Their lives felt right before me, yet also far away. As she talked, the woman toyed with my now flaccid penis, which was slowly coming back to life.

“Have you been painting anything these days?” she asked.

“Not really,” I answered honestly.

“No creative urge welling up?”

I hesitated. “…Well, tomorrow I have to start on a commission I got.”

“You’re going to paint on commission?”

“That’s right. Have to earn some money sometimes.”

“What sort of commission?”

“A portrait.”

“Is it, by any chance, a portrait of that person you mentioned on the phone yesterday, Mr. Menshiki?”

“It is,” I said. She was so sharp at times it took me by surprise.

“And you want to know something about this Mr. Menshiki, right?”

“At this point he’s a mystery. I met him once and we talked, but I still have no idea what sort of person he is. I like to know what kind of person I’m going to paint.”

“You should just ask him directly.”

“He might not give me a straight answer,” I said. “He might only tell me what he wants me to know.”

“I could look into it for you,” she said.

“You can do that?”

“I might have an idea.”

“There were zero hits on him on the Internet.”

“The Internet doesn’t work well in the jungle,” she said. “The jungle has its own communications network. Signaling with drums, tying a message around a monkey’s neck.”

“I don’t know much about the jungle, I’m afraid.”

“When civilization’s devices don’t operate, it’s worth trying drums or a monkey.”

My penis had now grown fully erect under her soft, busy fingers. She skillfully and greedily began to use her lips and tongue, and a meaningful silence descended upon us for a while. As the birds outside chirped and went about the work of making a living, the two of us began a second round of sex.

After our long second bout of lovemaking, punctuated by an intermission, we climbed out of bed, lazily gathered our clothes from the floor, and dressed. We went out to the terrace and, sipping hot herb tea, gazed across the valley at the large white concrete house there. We sat side by side on the weathered wooden deck chairs and breathed in deeply the fresh dampness of the mountain air. Through the woods to the southwest was a small patch of sparkling ocean, a mere fragment of the enormous Pacific. The mountain slopes around were already dyed with autumn colors, minute gradations of yellow and red, with an intrusion of green from the clumps of evergreens. The mix of these vivid colors made the white concrete of Menshiki’s house stand out all the more. It was an almost obsessive white that looked like it would never be dirtied or treated with contempt by such things as wind, rain, dust, or even time itself. White is a color, too , I thought distractedly. Definitely not the lack of color. We sat there on the lounge chairs for a long time without saying a word, silence an entirely natural companion.

“Mr. Menshiki in his white mansion,” she said after a while. “Sounds like the beginning of an amusing fairy tale.”

But what awaited me was, of course, not some “amusing fairy tale.” Or a blessing in disguise, either. But by the time that became clear to me, there was no turning back.

On Friday at one thirty Menshiki appeared in the same Jaguar. The deep roar of the engine as it climbed the steep slope grew louder as it approached, and finally came to a stop in front of the house. As before, he shut the door of the car with the same solid sound, and removed his sunglasses and slipped them into the breast pocket of his jacket. An exact repeat of the previous visit. This time, though, he wore a white polo shirt with a blue-gray cotton jacket, cream-colored chinos, and brown leather shoes. He was so impeccably dressed that he could have been a model in a magazine, though he didn’t give the impression that it was all too perfect . It looked casual, and naturally neat. And that abundant white hair of his was, like the walls of his mansion, a pure, unadulterated white. Just as I had the first time, I watched him approach through a gap in the curtains.

The front doorbell rang and I opened it and let him in. This time he didn’t hold his hand out to shake mine. He just looked me in the eye, and gave a small smile and a brief nod of greeting. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d been a bit anxious that every time we met I’d have to go through one of his firm handshakes. Once again, I showed him into the living room and had him sit on the sofa. And brought out two cups of freshly brewed coffee from the kitchen.

“I didn’t know what I should wear,” he said, sounding apologetic. “Is this outfit all right?”

“It doesn’t matter at this point. We can decide at the end how you should be dressed. A suit, or shorts and sandals, we can adjust the clothes later on however we want.”

Or show you holding a Starbucks cup, I added to myself.

“Knowing you’re going to be modeling makes you anxious. I know I won’t have to take off all my clothes, but it still makes me feel like I’m being stripped down.”

“You could be right. Models for paintings sometimes pose nude—in most cases actually nude, in some cases more metaphorically. The artist wants to view the model’s essence, meaning he has to strip away the clothed, outer appearance. To do that, of course, takes great powers of observation and a sharp intuition.”

Menshiki spread his hands on his lap and seemed to be inspecting them. He then looked up. “I heard that you don’t use a live model when you paint a portrait.”

“That’s right. I meet the subject once and have a long talk with him, but don’t have him model live for me.”

“Is there a reason for that?”

“No real reason. I’ve just found, through experience, that things go more smoothly that way. When we first meet I concentrate as much as I can, trying to get a take on the subject’s looks, expressions, quirks, and tendencies, and brand those into my memory. Once I’ve done that, it’s just a question of reproducing them from memory.”

“That’s very intriguing,” Menshiki said. “So, days later you take the memory you’ve burned into your brain, rearrange all that as an image, and reproduce it as a work of art. You must have a gift to do that—to have such extraordinary visual recall.”

“I wouldn’t call it a gift, exactly. More of a skill set, I’d say.”

“Maybe that’s why, when I saw some of the portraits you’ve done, I sensed something unique in them. Compared with other standard portraits—portraits done purely as commodities. The way everything’s reproduced so vividly, you might say…”

He took a sip of coffee, took a light-cream linen handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and wiped his mouth. “But this time, unusually, you’ll be using a model—with me in front of you, in other words—as you do the portrait.”

“Exactly. At your request.”

He nodded. “Truthfully, I was curious. About how it feels to become part of a painting, right in front of your eyes. I wanted to actually experience it. Not simply have my painting done, but to experience it as a kind of exchange.”