The Last Canvas

episode 10 | Bed for one

To replace the walls erased from his drawing, the engineer had set wooden columns in a regular distance from one another, into which he could insert partitions whenever he wanted to close the rooms to the veranda. He had crafted himself those partitions from palm leaves, but the wind blew many of them away during the years of abandonment that followed his death, while the rest had simply moldered. Armand replaced them with colorful curtains, in geometric patterns typical from local tribes. 

Wide enough to accommodate the retractile stair -- spacious enough, even, for a car to drive through it --,  covered like the house itself, the veranda framed the house, guarded by an uneven guardrail built from driftwood, but otherwise completely open to the enveloping landscape. As we navigated it while Armand showed me each room, he opened the curtains, that had been fastened before he left to the Elder Sisters Islands to meet me. The sunlight immediately invaded and conquered the rooms, liberating them from the darkness in which they had slept for weeks, while the breeze, blowing through the rectangular openings that provided the ventilation, located in regular intervals at the bottom and top of all walls, took the curtains on magic carpets flights, instantly replacing the damp atmosphere with a pungent scent of salt and rotting guavas. 

It is my first memory from the house, as I stood on the veranda at the Northeast corner, in front of Armand's room where he had gone in to change.

Looking South, and West, I saw two rows of a dozen curtains undulating in the breeze. As they flapped, specks of dust sparkled flying through beams of sun. One curtain down the veranda ascended as high as to touch the ceiling, and then, loosing momentum, in a gracious arch fell back against the wood column that sustained it, with a lash. Sometimes, the tips of palms leaves would be sucked by gushes of wind inside the veranda, to kiss the stretched curtains. But there was no rhythm to that choreography, as the choreographer roamed freely through and about the house, and each curtain seemed to surf its own wave with a very personal style. Right before me, starting a steady ascent coming from Armand's room, a curtain lifted itself in the air. I watched a cloud of tribal patterns in yellow, red and purple stretch towards me, like a giant tongue or a snake, until it touched my left arm. Shy in its caress, it retreated and descended to my thigh, to suddenly gain the space over my head, in a curve stretching to my other shoulder, where it flapped a little, until the wind sucked it back into the room. That moment, I felt like the house was welcoming me. Set against the blocks of  morning sun drawing squares and triangles on the old boards of the floor, having the blue sea and sky in the background, the curtains seemed to dance that stunning aerial ballet in an homage to freedom and gaiety like I had never seen before. And that was already Armand's soul quest for beauty interfering with the stiffness of the original house -- made of rough but light cotton, the curtains incorporated the sun and the wind, adding movement and color to the building like Herr Weissmann's partitions never had. 

In the stronger contrast that light and shadows played in the tropics, the lesson taught by Impressionists -- that shadows had shades of colors --, seemed to be no longer valid. Standing in the blinding sun, my glasses in the pocket of my shirt that I had left by the beach, the far end of the room where Armand changed his clothes  seemed immersed in  pitch black darkness. His tanned skin having blended with the shadows, only his hair indicated where he was, a cascade of gold that shone like a meteor crossing the night. Like paper lanterns suddenly catching fire inside a cave, his tan line flashed white and equally floated in the air for a minute or so, as naked, he fumbled through the dresser -- and I had to start wondering how would it be to share a house without doors, not even at the bathroom.

Next, Armand emerged wearing tennis shorts only. They were impossibly bright red, a color I had never seen him wear before. I finally relaxed, inferring I could go in my underwear for the rest of the day, too. The clear thump of his barefoot steps on the wooden boards of the veranda, as he led me to the kitchen on West, reminded me that he had always worn old-fashioned velvety slippers in the apartment we had shared in Paris. The town suddenly seemed to belong to a lost civilization.