Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  I think it might be best if I spoke to Gustave alone. Man to man, as it were.

  Madame Toux tossed her head a little—I wouldn’t have guessed she’d had it in her—and trotted out.

  Father Juneau waited until her footsteps had receded. He took papers and a pouch of tobacco from his desk and began rolling a cigarette. My drawing tablet lay open before him on the gigantic metal slab that served as his desk. I tried not to look at what was drawn there but paid attention to the view out the window over Father Juneau’s shoulder. It was gray. There was a weedy meadow, and beyond that a drainage ditch, then the trees started. Father Juneau smoked and leafed through pages. He glanced up at me standing there.

  Sit down. These drawings. They are yours?

  I looked down at my shoes, then up into his face. It took a moment to recognize the line of yellow teeth he showed me as a smile. He was looking at my bloodhound Madonna. He gestured with his cigarette.

  You have an eye, he said. An eye for sin, to be sure. But an eye for form as well, for line and volume and… character.

  Thank you Father, I said wonderingly.

  And well you should thank me, he murmured, turning the pages of the tablet, lingering here and there. He lifted the tablet to show me an older drawing of Genevieve, in which I’d given her the head of a horse, viewed from the front, with her small left breast nearly on a level with the horse’s right eye.

  Have you ever heard of Picasso, my son?

  Something my mother had said once flashed across my memory. A dirty old man, I said. A pervert.

  Father Juneau did not smile. I think it’s time, Gustave, that you received a proper education. Something to accompany and complement the very improper one you’ve so far carved out for yourself.

  And that is how I became, in a manner of speaking, Father Juneau’s apprentice. Every day after school I would follow the priest home to the rectory of the little church in the center of our village, where his housekeeper Madame Lustig, a widow with a neat little mustache reminiscent of Hitler’s, would serve us tea and loudly berate Father Juneau for the shag tobacco cigarettes he rolled and smoked, one after the other. Then we would retire to his study, a miniature shrine to art, for Father Juneau had a passion, illicit as all passions are illicit, for modern painting and sculpture. The shelves were piled with books, the walls were lined with prints—except for the obligatory crucifix over the door the entire space was consecrated to Picasso, Miro, Matisse, Giacometti, Chagall…. I told my mother I was going to be an altar boy and she crossed herself and lifted her eyes to the heavens in gratitude. My father only shrank a little farther behind his newspaper. But in fact I spent nearly afternoon in Juneau’s company, as he divulged mystery upon mystery to me: modeling, perspective, color. And also the history of painting, his passion: he’d pull down the heavy volumes one after the other until they stacked high upon his desk, where I sat in his chair and he hovered over my shoulder, pointing with his brown finger: Greek sculpture, manuscripts illuminated by monks, the Byzantine, the Gothic, the Italian masters, baroque and rococo, the neoclassical travesties (his word) of the French Academy, English landscape painting, the Impressionists (he worshipped Van Gogh with a touching simplicity, and I believe he styled his own austere bedroom on the famous one at Arles), the German Expressionists, the French Cubists, Picasso and all of his periods up until the war, at which catastrophe his knowledge of the history of art stopped dead as if he himself had died, for I eventually inferred that that was the moment he had gone underground, so to speak, the moment in his own life in which one sacred calling was superseded by another, and though it was perfectly easy for him to order new books and prints, and even perhaps to visit the galleries in Strasbourg, if not Paris, once in a while, for him the glorious world of European art came to an abrupt and appropriate halt with the Guernica of Picasso, which he had a print of that he did not display on the wall, but instead leaned in its frame mixed with a pile of blank and botched canvases that he kept for some reason in the rectory’s tiny attic, a crawlspace really, into which he crept one day so as to retrieve the print and show it to me, wordlessly, his bulging pupils flickering over my face as I took in the appalling image, and only downstairs again in his study, before cups of tea brought by a disapproving Madame Lustig, did he explain to me what Guernica was and where it was and what it meant. This went on for months and months, with all the passion and clumsy secrecy of an affair, though in spite of what other boys whispered he never laid a hand on me; or rather, if he did, if he placed his hand on my shoulder while showing me the sketches of Leonardo and massaged quietly and insistently at my collarbone, if he insisted every time on my evening departure that I wash my hands of the chalk or oils that he’d had me sketching with, and stood in the doorway watching me with fervent, furtive intensity; if in fact on more than one occasion there’d been brandy mixed with the tea, and afterwards he’d sit beside me on the little settee in his study which offered the best vantage point for contemplating the only real painting in his study, a ragged impasto of a barley field with a single startling gray streak of paint in the middle of it, like a dull knife or wing in all that burning gold, which he had never quite admitted to having painted himself, if as I say he sat next to me on the settee and rested one hand on my knee and massaged it, and then perhaps the thigh, and then so upward, what of it? His real crime, we both knew, was his love of art, which was a merciful distraction from the idiocies of life in a small rural parish, but a distraction all the same, and a sin, a mortal sin that far exceeded the venial sins of his flesh, for in his love of art was concentrated all his mingled pride and despair, his hopeless unrequited love for what was not god, nor even the image of god (he showed no particular feeling for specifically religious art, instead constantly calling attention to the modeling of the flesh of Christ’s thighs in a painting of the Deposition, or to the interplay of shadow and light on the ribcage of Caravaggio’s John the Baptist. Next to that passion for form, for light and line and color, how could a few furtive little caresses and soft insincere words compare with that greater crime in which he and I were co-conspirators? I had never before considered the possibility that for every grim and foolish face in my village there was a past, a beforetime, an imaginary peak from which each of them was forever tumbling downward. Father Juneau had not always been Father Juneau; he had been Jean-Paul Juneau, a son of la Belle Époque, not a Frenchman at all but a Belgian who’d been a soldier in the Great War when he was only a little older than I was then, who’d seen terrible things, who’d lost, it was intimated, his one first great love in that war (face of the lute-player in a black-and-white image of a Frans Hals painting in a book, Les Maîtres Néerlandais, that I sometimes caught the good father lingering over, cigarette ashed and forgotten in his fingers), who after the Armistice had not returned home to his destiny as the son of a mercantile lawyer in Brussels but had boarded a train to Paris, from which he disembarked and, bearing in his hand a letter of introduction that he’d had from the superior officer who’d admired his drawings (another beauty, no doubt, and no doubt killed in action like the lute player), a letter of sufficient import to permit his immediate matriculation at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he began, as he too colorfully put it, “to run down the Muse,” to pursue art with a maniacal hunger, not only for himself but for the two dead men he’d loved, slaving day and night to master technique, following the instructions of his teachers to the last degree, absorbing uncritically their freaks and opinions, their wisdom inseparable from their outbursts and tantrums, worshipping with his whole soul the very sawdust on the floors of the studios, feeling each day as he entered the grounds of the Palais that he was again wrapped in le rêve sacré, the sacred dream that had been his birthright and from which it had taken a world at war to awaken him (he was given at times to bathos, but I too was young, I too was uncritical, I too was at that time possessed by dreams, and I let much go), standing before nude young men and women, before bowls of fruit, blood blooming in his mind, under
the skin of the nudes, under the skin of the fruit, but rendering only their perfect surfaces, that is to say the truth of nudes and fruit, and no one would look his classmate Claude in the eye, Claude who painted with his left hand only in jagged, ungainly stabs of the brush, because the right arm had been taken off at the shoulder at Ardennes, Claude who once turned to Jean-Paul in the w.c. with his cock hanging out, asking for help zipping up again after pissing, or maybe he was asking for a blowjob, it doesn’t matter because Jean-Paul turned away in horror (of what was missing? of what was there?), and Claude was found with his throat cut, inexpertly but sufficiently, in the studio the next morning, not in front of his easel but sprawled on the little pediment where the nudes were accustomed to pose, and Jean-Paul left the studio, he went out into the streets and cafes, and he discovered the terrible secret of art—his exact words, the terrible secret of art—which was that it can’t, won’t, be taught in academies, or by masters to apprentices, or at all, yet it must be learned somehow, and he saw the paintings that his teachers sneered at, if they acknowledged them at all, by men just a little older than himself, men who’d given miraculous birth in the years just before the war to what we all now universally acknowledge as the modern, and he met the Americans who had begun to arrive as he had, after the war, men and women who seemed the very children of the modern, birthed by the war, stained in its blood and yet innocent, so innocent, and he began to move in new circles, circles that rippled inward rather than outward, with famous personalities at their centers, personalities that dazzled with the cruel completeness of their gestures, personalities that seemed to need no one and that everyone needed, that were surrounded naturally by accretions of imitators and lovers and models and sycophants, as a glacier carries the earth with it on its travels down from some incomprehensible north, and leaves that earth behind when it withdraws just as inscrutably, in its own good glacial time, and so the years fled and Jean-Paul labored in nearly perfect obscurity, making paintings that sold just occasionally and often enough to keep him from starving, not that he was in much danger from that, as he still received remittances from time to time from his loving mother, without his father’s knowledge (I am, he’d said with a smile, a Father disowned by his father, or did he say a Father disowned by the Father?), and so he suffered inconsequentially up until the thirties, when he and everyone else began to suffer in earnest, the remittances stopped with the failure of his father’s business and his mother’s dementia and death, the market for talented amateurs (that’s how he referred to himself, aggrandizing and deprecating at the same time) dried up, and everyone in starved Europe began to gorge themselves once again on an appetite for epic, for big history, but Juneau’s hunger led him elsewhere, back to the Church, the masses he’d attended while still a student in the church of Saint Germain des Prés, which he once again began to haunt in spite of its being a long walk or a short Metro ride from his digs in Montparnasse, the church’s Romanesque architecture no doubt attracted him as a total antidote to the modern which was once again threatening to leave him high and dry, a spiritual amputee, the winds of a new war stirring his thinning hair, and he became a lay brother of the Dominicans though by temperament he was surely a Jesuit, but no, he was a Dominican, and then took his vows three weeks after the Germans began their offensive, and it was not long after that he was in his black cassock high up in the north tower of Notre Dame watching the Wehrmacht swagger over the Pont Neuf, and thus he entered a dark territory of which he never spoke, from which he never fully emerged, of which only flashes are visible in his slightly hunched back, his chain-smoking, his brown nervous fingers smoothing and smoothing pages or his surplice or what was left of his hair. Then after the war he began his rise, administering masses in the great cathedral, writing sermons and editorials for Le Figaro, a posting to Rome, but all the time he nourished undying the flame of modern painting in his heart, and continued to paint a little himself, on the sly. And in 1950 he had his downfall—something political, no doubt, an impolitic word overheard by malicious ears, but the way he spoke, or didn’t speak, of the matter somehow persuaded me that it was his passion for art that had been his undoing, that some superior had caught him in flagrante, so to speak, with proscribed books in his rectory or paying some young Italian to model for him, nude of course, which made us brothers under the skin, another cliché he tossed around with ambiguous irony: You and I, Gustave, we are brothers, aren’t we, brothers under the skin. Which is a very strange thing for him to have said, since he was old enough to be my grandfather, but perhaps my youth inspired him, and after all it was true that art had brought the both of us nothing but trouble, and it has also brought us together, which was another form of that same trouble. And so it came to pass when I was seventeen (but I looked older, no matter how often I shaved my jaw was blue, as it’s gray now, and I stood before Father Juneau in the suit he’d bought for me for my journey to Paris and asked him how I looked and he told me, a convict), when I was seventeen I came to his study and he had a bundle for me (the suit and about a hundred francs in small bills, held together with a paper clip, and also his old brushes, and a tarnished badge or medal that he didn’t identify, with a crown at the top, the ribbon long decayed, subsequently determined to be his Croix de Guerre, signifying either bravery in the face of the enemy or else mere endurance, persistence, duration, I don’t know which) and also a letter which he’d written, which he handed me with an ironic twitch of the lips, and then he told me or rather filled in the outlines of the story of his own life, which I’ve just done for you. And that very morning I left the village of my birth forever for Paris, incomprehensible city which I nevertheless knew better than Strasbourg from Father Juneau’s stories and the books and maps we’d pored over, explorers planning a last assault on a lost kingdom populated by hostile natives, and from the Gare de l’Est I made my way on foot, goggling and no doubt goggled at, a giant in a too-small suit and a pair of clogs, and arrived as Father Juneau had done at the gates of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with his recommendation letter held tightly in my hand. There I was, a creature from the nineteenth century, or maybe even something older than that, medieval, Hugo’s hunchback, in Paris, an art student, 1966. Two years later I was absolutely modern, absolutely in love, with a beautiful woman, absolutely beautiful. If I now, an old man, take the most convoluted route possible toward contact with her, toward reminding her of those times, with a message delivered by a messenger unknown to her, to another messenger she may never meet, it is only because I am still at heart that coarse young man, but one who has learned to live, to fit his skin, in spite of everything.

  Watching the screen, after midnight or in the haze of late afternoon, when the world is dead, his mouth moving. Like a clean streak in a dirty window in which everything gets reflected so dazzlingly that your chances of seeing through the window are reduced to almost zero. That’s what it is like listening to him, the foreign man, the fat man, Gustave.