Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is by Michael Langan

Author:Michael Langan [Langan, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2019-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

Paul, Paris — 1868

He had thought to see Émile tomorrow but his friend’s note insisted he couldn’t wait another moment, not now he knew of Paul’s return. Pulling his greatcoat tight around him he shivers uneasily. It must be the damp from the river. The city is unusually, damnably, cold, though not like the Provençal cold that braces and cleanses the body from the inside out. How he misses it. He should be out walking in the forest, tasting the sharp, green air, bathing in the fresh green waters.

“The light here is no good!” he declaims, to no one but himself. It doesn’t have the dazzling blue-white brilliance of the sky at Aix. Nor is he truly inspired here as he is by the depth and variety he perceives in the mountain and the trees, in the hills and deep valleys and the small towns tucked in the folds between.

How quickly his excitement for Paris wanes. No patience for the daubers and their disciples, the time-wasting café-dwellers. “Shithead fools, all of them.” Passers-by look at him askance at the best of times, even more so when he curses into the air like this. He hates them all the more for it.

Like those two women there, across the boulevard, staring and laughing at him, mimicking his upward gaze with a mocking intensity, he’s sure of it, but he doesn’t care. “Imbeciles!” strutting up and down but going nowhere, he wants nothing to do with them. Yet… he cares what they think. But why does he?

The more he cares, the more he craves the countryside and the freedom to paint, as a caged animal craves the freedom to roam and hunt. He will stalk the hostile streets on the way to join Émile, all the while imagining he inhabits the beloved landscape of their youth.

There is, perhaps, rain coming. This morning he’d woken into thin, early spring light but the sky was clouding over. It was usually his favourite time in the studio, but he’d felt so listless, lying there on the divan, and felt the half-finished canvas that sat on the easel summoning him.

Realising his nightshirt had twisted round his body during the night, and was restraining him like a shroud, he had pulled himself up, torn the shirt off and kicked his way through the oily rags and dirty palettes covering the floor (he sent a paintbrush, sticking to his foot, clattering into a corner) to fling open the window and gulp for air. His exposed flesh had tightened and goose-pimpled — as it did when he and Émile plunged into the ponds after one of their long treks — and the accompanying contraction in his groin awakened the memory of the morning’s dream-vision, pulling to the surface his desire for the model who had lain the day before on the very same divan where he slept. Some of her scent must have remained there, like an infection.

Heavy-limbed, with delicate hands and feet, her corn-gold hair and clotted cream skin had emitted an astonishingly radiant glow.

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