Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [178]
I’s the eyes I look at now. I used to think these were self-righteous eyes, piggy and smug inside their wire frames; and they are. But they are also defeated eyes, uncertain and melancholy, heavy with unloved duty. The eyes of someone for whom God was a sadistic old man; the eyes of a small town threadbare decency. Mrs. Smeath was a transplant to the city, from somewhere a lot smaller. A displaced person; as I was.
Now I can see myself, through these painted eyes of Mrs. Smeath: a frazzle-headed ragamuffin from heaven knows where, a gypsy practically, with a heathen father and a feckless mother who traipsed around in slacks and gathered weeds. I am unbaptized, a nest for demons: how could she know what germs of blasphemy and unfaith were breeding in me? And yet she took me in.
Some of this must be true. I have not done it justice, or rather mercy. Instead I went for vengeance.
An eye for an eye leads only to more blindness.
I move to the west wall, where the new paintings are. They are larger than my usual format, and space out the wall nicely.
The first one is called Picoseconds. “A jeu d’esprit,” says Charna, “which takes on the Group of Seven and reconstructs their vision of landscape in the light of contemporary experiment and postmodern pastiche.”
It is in fact a landscape, done in oils, with the blue water, the purple underpainting, the craggy rocks and windswept raggedy trees and heavy impasto of the twenties and thirties. This landscape takes up much of the painting. In the lower right-hand corner, in much the same out-of-the-way position as the disappearing legs of Icarus in the painting by Bruegel, my parents are making lunch. They have their fire going, the billy tin suspended over it. My mother in her plaid jacket bends over, stirring, my father adds a stick of wood to the fire. Our Studebaker is parked in the background.
They are painted in another style: smooth, finely modulated, realistic as a snapshot. It’s as if a different light falls on them; as if they are being seen through a window which has opened in the landscape itself, to show what lies behind or within it.
Underneath them, like a subterranean platform, holding them up, is a row of iconic-looking symbols painted in the flat style of Egyptian tomb frescoes, each one enclosed in a white sphere: a red rose, an orange maple leaf, a shell. They are in fact the logos from old gas pumps of the forties. By their obvious artificiality, they call into question the reality of landscape and figures alike.
The second painting is called Three Muses. Charna has had some trouble with this one. “Risley continues her disconcerting deconstruction of perceived gender and its relationship to perceived power, especially in respect to numinous imagery,” she says. If I hold my breath and squint, I can see where she gets that: all Muses are supposed to be female, and one of these is not. Maybe I should have called it Dancers, and put her out of her misery. But they are not dancers.
To the right is a short woman, dressed in a flowered housecoat and mules with real fur. On her head is a red pillbox hat with cherries. She has black hair and large golden earrings, and is carrying a round object the size of a beach ball, which is in fact an orange.
To the left is an older woman with blue-gray hair, wearing a waltz-length lavender silk gown. In her sleeve is tucked a lace handkerchief, over her nose and mouth is a gauze nurse’s mask. Above the mask her bright blue eyes look out, crinkly at the edges and sharp as tacks. In her hands she holds a globe of the world.
In the middle is a thin man with medium-brown skin and white teeth, smiling an uncertain smile. He is wearing a richly worked gold and red oriental costume reminiscent of Balthazar’s in Jan Gossaert’s Adoration of the Magi, but without the crown and scarf. He too holds out a round object: it’s flat