Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [33]
"I used to pose for classes when I was in France." Catherine leaned back on the rail of the veranda and slowly sipped. "I posed for art students in Paris. That's how I made my living for a while."
"How was it?" Princesse asked, her eyes closed against the glare of the sun as it bounced off the glass of clear white rum in Catherine's hand.
"It was very difficult for me," Catherine answered, "just as it is for you. The human form in all its complexity is not the easiest thing to re-create. It is hard to catch a likeness of a person unless the artist knows the person very well. That's why, once you find some-one whose likeness you've mastered, it's hard to let them go."
Catherine picked up the pad once more. Princesse lay back and said nothing. A wandering fly parked it-self on her nose. She smacked it away. A streak of coconut pomade melting in Princesse's hair fell onto the white sheet stretched out on the veranda floor beneath her. The grease made a stain on the mat like the spots her period often made in the back of her dresses.
"No two faces are ever the same," Catherine said, her wrist moving quickly back and forth across the pad. The pencil made a slight sweeping noise as though it were grating down the finer, more resistant surfaces of the white page. "The eyes are the most striking and astonishing aspects of the face."
"What about the mouth?" Princesse asked.
"That is very crucial too, my dear, because the lips determine the expression of the face."
Princesse pulled her lips together in an exaggerated pout.
"You mean like that?" she asked, giggling.
"Exactly," Catherine said.
Catherine flipped the cover of her pad when she was done.
"You can go now, Princesse," she said.
Princesse dressed quickly. Catherine squeezed two gourdes between her palms, kissing her twice on the cheek.
Princesse rushed down the steps leading away from the beach house. She kept walking until she reached the hard dirt road that stretched back to the village.
It was nightfall. In a cloud of dust, an old jeep clattered down the road.
Someone was playing a drum in the fight yard. The calls of conch shells and hollow cow horns were at-tempting to catch up to the insistent rhythm.
A man wept as he buried his rooster, which had died in one of the fights that afternoon. 'Ayïbobo," the man said, chanting to the stars as he dropped the bird into a small hole that he had dug along the side of the road. One of the stars answered by plunging down from the sky, landing in a fiery ball behind a hill.
"You could have eaten that rooster!" the old drunk hollered at him. "I'm going to come and get that bird tonight and eat it with my wife on Sunday. What a waste!
"I am giving it back to my father!" hollered back the distressed man. "He gave me this bird last year."
"Your father is dead, you fool!" cried the old drunk.
"I am giving this bird back to him."
The old man was still sitting by the fence cradling his leaf-crammed bottle of rum.
"My great luck, twice in a day, I get to see you," he said to Princesse as she walked by.
"Twice in a day," Princesse agreed, the wind blowing through her skirt.
The human body is an extremely complex form. So Princesse was learning. A good painting would not only capture the old man's features but also his moods and personality. This could be done with a lot of fancy brush strokes or with one single flirting line, all depending on the skill of the artist. Each time she went to Catherine's, Princesse would learn something different.
The next day, Catherine had her sit fully clothed on a rock on the beach as she painted her on canvas. Princesse watched her own skin grow visibly darker as she sat near the open sea, the waves spraying a foam of white sand onto her toes.
"In the beginning God said, 'Let there be light.'" Catherine's brush attacked the canvas as she spoke, quickly mixing burnished colors to catch the harsh afternoon light. "Without light, there is