Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal

Author:Maylis de Kerangal [Kerangal, Maylis de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2021-05-12T17:00:00+00:00

PAULA OPENS HER EYES AND LOOKS AROUND. SHE recognizes the place but it takes her a moment – an unusual moment – to surface. She lets herself be swallowed up by consciousness and the rising day, slowly reconstituting the chain of events of the previous days. Everything happened very fast. A five-week job cancelled at the last minute – the patina for a three-hundred-square-metre apartment in the centre of Turin – and the series of arrangements that topple like a house of cards: she gives up her room on the via Giotto, gathers up her few things, which barely fill two big holdalls, the paint box, computer, chargers; leaves the keys and the rent in cash on the table in the hall and then slings one bag over each shoulder, and, balanced like this, sets off for the station to wait for the bus that takes her to the airport – in the check-in queue, she watches a woman her age for a long time, who shuffles forward, kicking her bag, eyes never leaving her phone. A few hours later, Paula pushes open the door of the building on the rue de Paradis and then stops short in the lobby, attention caught by the fake marble patina on the walls – a Red Verona that’s barely believable, nodules too thick and the ammonite fossils weirdly distributed – that she is really seeing for the first time.

*

Paula listens to the sounds of the apartment – her parents are up and the toaster pops in the kitchen. She’ll have to play a tight, close game – listen, I’m not moving back in, it’s just temporary – and hold her head high. Hey, you two, she calls out, party’s over, I’m baaack!

This room is her room. The only bedroom she knew until she turned twenty. She slept here as a baby in a straw Moses basket with red gingham trim on a rattan stand, then in a child’s bed beneath a wooden mobile depicting the extraordinary voyages of Nils Holgersson – a wild goose ridden by a little boy in a red waistcoat and royal-blue trousers – then in a wrought-iron bed repainted sky blue by her mother, and finally in this double bed which she’d had to fight for at the beginning of her last year in school and which, it’s true, takes up a lot of room. The room had been redone then, she remembers, the arrival of a new bed providing the occasion to repaint the walls white, to change the carpet, to replace the flowered curtains with shuttered blinds, and to chuck out everything that was a relic of the little girl she’d been: the small desk varnished white, the dozens of boxes of knick-knacks, the glitter pens, the faded stuffed animals, the notebooks, the huge jumble of photos she’d spent so long arranging, disassembling, rearranging – photo booth shots of friends, three or four crammed onto the bench, postcards of paintings by Rousseau Le Douanier, ads for perfumes or fashion photos, “Le Baiser de l’hôtel de ville” by Doisneau, Leonardo DiCaprio.

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