Elementals - A. S. Byatt [57]
‘I don’t know,’ said Dolores, frowning. He tilted his head the other way. Her head was briefly full of images of the skeletons of fishes, of the whirlpool of golden egg-and-oil in the bowl, of the pattern of muscles in the shoulder of a goat. She said, ‘It is nothing, what I know. It is past in a flash. It is cooked and eaten, or it is gone bad and fed to the dogs, or thrown out.’
‘Like life,’ said the painter. ‘We eat and are eaten, and we are very lucky if we reach our three score years and ten, which is less than a flash in the eyes of an angel. The understanding persists, for a time. In your craft and mine.’
He said, ‘Your frown is a powerful force in itself. I have an idea for a painting of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary. Would you let me draw you? I have noticed that you were unwilling.’
‘I am not beautiful.’
‘No. But you have power. Your anger has power, and you have power yourself, beyond that.’
She had the idea, then, over the weeks and months when he visited from time to time and sketched her, and Concepción, or ate the alioli and supped her red peppers and raisins, praising the flavours, that he would make her heroic, a kind of goddess wielding spit and carving knife instead of spear and sword. She found herself posing, saw him noting the posing, and tried to desist. His interest in the materials of her art did indeed fire her own interest in them. She excelled herself, trying new combinations for him, offering new juices, frothing new possets. Concepción was afraid that the girl would fall in love with the artist, but in some unobtrusively clever way he avoided that. His slit stare, his compressed look of concentration, were the opposite of erotic. He talked to the girl as though she were a colleague, a partner in the mystery of his trade, and this, Concepción saw without wholly knowing that she saw it, gave Dolores a dignity, a presence, that amorous attentions would not have done. He did not show the women the sketches of themselves, though he gave them small drawings of heads of garlic and long capsicum to take to their rooms. And when, finally, the painting of Christ in the House of Martha and Mary was finished, he invited both women to come and look at it in his studio. He seemed, for the first time, worried about their reaction.
When they saw the painting, Concepción drew in her breath. There they both were, in the foreground at the left. She herself was admonishing the girl, pointing with a raised finger to the small scene at the top right-hand corner of the painting – was it through a window, or over a sill, or was it an image of an image on a wall? it was not clear – where Christ addressed the holy staring woman crouched at his feet whilst her sister stood stolidly behind, looking also like Concepción, who had perhaps modelled for her from another angle. But the light hit four things – the silvery fish, so recently dead that they were still bright-eyed, the solid white gleam of the eggs, emitting light, the heads of garlic, half-peeled and life-like, and the sulky, fleshy, furiously frowning face of the girl, above her fat red arms in their brown stuff sleeves. He had immortalised her ugliness, Concepción thought, she would never forgive him. She was used to paintings of patient and ethereal Madonnas. This was living flesh, in a turmoil of watchful discontent. She said, ‘Look how real the eyes of the fishes are,’ and her voice trailed foolishly away, as she and the painter watched the live Dolores watch