Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [34]
For the moment, Catherine was painting the rock and the sand beneath Princesse, ignoring the main subject. She was waiting for just the right moment to add Princesse to the canvas. She might even do it later, after the sun had set, when she could paint at her leisure. She might do it the next day when the light would have changed slightly, when the sun was just a little higher or lower in the sky, turning the sea a different shade.
"It's dazzling how the light filters through your complexion," Catherine assured Princesse. "They say black absorbs all color. It blots and consumes it and gives us nothing back. That's wrong, don't you think?"
"Of course," Princesse nodded. Catherine was the expert. She was always right.
"Black skin gives so much to the canvas," Catherine continued. "Do you ever think of how we change things and how they change us?"
"How?" ventured Princesse.
"Perhaps the smaller things—like human beings, for example—can also change and affect the bigger things in the universe."
A few days later, Princesse sat in Catherine's bedroom as Catherine sketched her seated in a rocking chair holding a tall red candle in each hand. Black drapes on the window kept out the light of the afternoon sky. A small mole of melted candle wax grew on Princesse's hand as she sat posing stiffly.
"When I was just beginning to paint in Paris," Catherine told Princesse in the dark, "I used to live with a man who was already an artist. He told me that if I wanted to be an artist, I would have to wear boots, a pair of his large clunky boots with holes in the soles. That man was my best teacher. He died yesterday."
"I am sorry," Princesse said, seeing no real strain of loss in Catherine's eyes.
"It's fine," Catherine said. "He was old and sickly."
"What was it like, wearing those shoes?" Princesse asked.
"I see where your interests lie," Catherine said.
"I am sorry if that was insensitive."
"I would tell him to go somewhere and per-form obscene acts on himself every time he told me to wear the boots," Catherine said, "but whenever he went on a trip, I would make myself live in those shoes. I wore them every day, everywhere I went. I would wear them on the street, in the park, to the butcher's. I wore them everywhere I could until they felt like mine for a while."
The next day when Princesse went to see Catherine, she did not paint her. Instead they sat on the veranda while Catherine drank white rum.
"Let me hear you talk," Catherine said. "Tell me what color do you think the sky is right now?"
Princesse looked up and saw a color typical of the Haitian sky.
"I guess it's blue," Princesse said. "Indigo, maybe, like the kind we use in the wash."
"We have so much here," Catherine said. "Even wash indigo in the sky."
Catherine was not home when Princesse came the next afternoon. Princesse waited outside on the beach-house steps until it was almost nightfall. Finally, Princesse walked down to the beach and watched the stars line up in random battalions in the evening sky.
There was a point in the far distance where the sky almost seemed to blend with the sea, stroking the surface the way two people's lips would touch each other's. Standing there, Princesse wished she could paint that. That and all the night skies that she had seen, the full moon and the stars peeking down like tiny gods acting out their will, plunging and sometimes winking in a tease, in a parade ignored by humankind. Princesse thought that she could paint that, giving it light and color, shape and texture, all those things that Catherine spoke of.
Princesse returned the following day to find Catherine still absent. She walked the perimeter of the deserted house at least three dozen times until her ankles ached. Again Princesse stayed until the evening to watch the sky over the beach. As she walked along, she picked up a small conch shell and began to blow a song into it.
Princesse wanted to paint the sound that came out of the shell, a moan like a call to a distant ship, an