The Fugitivities, стр. 77
“I think I will, yes. If that’s all right with you.”
“Good. I would like that.”
She put down her drink and moved across the couch, leaning in over him so that her hair was falling over his arm.
“Don’t move.”
“Okay.”
She put her lips to his softly. And as he started to kiss her back, she took his hand in her own and placed it against her breast. When she had felt what she needed, she got up and led him to the bathroom where they undressed. She held him against her body as they waited for the water to rise. When it was ready, she turned off the faucet, threw down a pile of towels for her comfort and, having smoothed them to her satisfaction, turned to confront him with her sex. Afterward, they slipped into the hot water; the tub sang like a whale as they slid against its hull.
It wasn’t until they were drying off that Jonah even thought to inquire about Salvador, and he was alarmed to learn that the owner of the house had been there the entire time, painting in his studio upstairs. Laura was nonchalant.
“I told him you might come by and he agreed to meet with you if you did. Why don’t you go upstairs and you two can get acquainted? I’ll be ready and have something for us to eat this evening when you come down.”
After he’d dressed again, Laura led him through the inner courtyard, and over to a stone staircase that wound around itself. The air outside was immensely pleasant, and dramatic pinkish light was coloring streaks of high cloud above. She motioned for him to go up, then turned and headed back inside the main residence.
—
The studio of Salvador Aussaresses occupied an entire wing on the second floor. Jonah found himself on a landing with a small window adorned with a box of bougainvillea. He made his way across a short hall and found himself immediately facing the great open space of the studio itself. The chipped ceramic floor tiles were covered in rust-colored drips, and on what looked like a drafting table there were piles of soiled canvas rags. Paintings in various stages of completion were stacked together haphazardly along the walls. The stinging smell of oils hung in the air.
In the very center of the room, a man sat on a thick wooden stool squinting at the mounted canvas before him. He wore a pair of khaki shorts with a braided leather belt, flip-flops, and nothing else. He was tanned, the effect of his tall, angular build somewhat belied by a leathery neck and tufts of white hair sprouting at his shoulder blades. The column of his spine popped out to accommodate his spry corpulence as he leaned forward to apply the nib of his brush. Directly in his sights was a very pale naked girl reclining on a taupe divan, one arm draped along a wad of ragged throw pillows.
Jonah instinctively froze in his tracks and was about to turn and back out when the artist, without turning to acknowledge him, made a loud snort and motioned him in with the back of his free hand. The reclining model tried to look over at Jonah with her eyes, but at the quiver of her neck Salvador made an abrupt hissing sound and she became fixed in stone again. Jonah could tell that she was an adolescent, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. She had a mousy face, concentrated in an expression that might have been intended to convey coquetry but that suggested something more like masked terror. The artist continued his work uninterrupted. The model tried to sneak another look.
“Mírame,” Salvador muttered under his breath. But the incident had broken his momentum. “Please sit down, pull up a chair,” he ordered without taking his eyes off the canvas. His English was impeccable, with a touch of Oxbridge in the accents. There was a stool by the wall. Jonah pulled it over and sat toward the quarter of the room behind the painter so that they both faced the scene of subjection.
“So…you are the young man my Laura has been telling me about. I’m glad you came. I knew from the moment she told me that you would. As I’m sure you can see, Laura is a beautiful woman. We have a good understanding, she and I. She knows my nature, and I, in turn, know hers.”
He paused at this, considering the exposed model on the makeshift couch.
“Tell me, young man, do you care for painting?”
“Painting? Sure.”
“What part of her do you like best? What part catches your eye? Do you like her breasts? It’s okay, you know, you can say so.”
“I like the hands.”
“Ah! The hands. Good, that’s very good. Did you know that human hands are the hardest thing to paint? One hand alone, if a painter wanted to get it perfectly done, would take a year to paint…Even Rembrandt struggled to paint a good hand. But, the hands of the father in the Return of the Prodigal Son…now there is a hand painted in pure truth, the truth of our greatest fear…the fear of our own choices. I will tell you a little secret. Do you know which Rembrandt contains the greatest hand of all?”
“No.”
“The Slaughtered Ox. Musée du Louvre, in the Richelieu gallery. A genuine masterpiece. Maybe his greatest work. True, it not a painting of a human hand. It is far greater, more ambitious than that. It is a painting of the hand of God.”
The poor model, who hadn’t moved an inch, sneezed. The light in the studio was failing. She must have been getting cold. Salvador dipped his brush in a jar of water