Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (24 page)

Aloysius painted two blue ravens with abstract masks, a cubist ravenesque masquerade on the River Seine. The eyes, claws, crowns, and great beaks of the ravens were slanted, curved, and distorted by fractures. The curious breaks in contour feathers were touched with heavy blue hues, and the perceived faces of the ravens were restored with faint traces of rouge.

Henri and André, the
noms de guerre
, or war names of the two masked veterans, had served as infantry soldiers in separate units of the Rainbow Division in the American Expeditionary Forces. They were maimed on the very same day by enemy artillery. Henri lost his nose, nasal bone, and right cheekbone, slashed and crushed by shrapnel. André lost his jaw, lower lip and teeth, and his shattered right leg was amputated above the knee.

André turned directly toward my brother, and his bright blue eyes lighted the metal mask. Henri looked away, down the river, and told us they had met on an ambulance, heavily bandaged, and were transported and treated at the American Expeditionary Forces Base Hospital at Bazoilles-sur-Meuse, a commune near Neufchâteau, southeast of Paris.

Lieutenant Lucien Brun, the dental surgeon at the hospital, was interested in facial fractures, and restored by surgery sections of bone and skin on the faces of the soldiers. They were hospitalized for several months, and were denied access to mirrors. André related that he caught sight of his broken face for the first time reflected in a water trough for horses. He shivered and cursed the war, and then smashed the surface of the water with his fist. Some time later he looked in a mirror for the second time to see a marvelous mask that covered the grisly wounds on his broken face.

Henri and André were mutilated soldiers,
mutilés de guerre
, and became friends in the Base Hospital at Bazoilles-sur-Meuse. The hospital had been an estate, and the countryside was beautiful, a natural sanctuary. André told me that most of the wounded soldiers had returned home, but he and Henri refused to leave France. The reasons were personal, and the politics of aversion and rehabilitation in a military hospital at home would have been unbearable.

André told me that hundreds of wounded soldiers, many with mutilated faces, were paid with other soldiers to perform as a ghostly horde, the actual
mutilés de guerre
in the film
J'accuse
directed by Abel Gance. Some of the war scenes were real, filmed on the actual battlefields of Saint-Mihiel at the end of the war. André was a scary figure in a fantastic scene of the return of dead soldiers.

Henri caught another perch, and as he slowly removed the fishhook he told stories, almost recitations, about Liberty Limbs and the thousands of wounded soldiers on a wait list for facial surgery. Military doctors were restricted to minimal restorative surgery, and the government would not provide prosthetic masks.

André raised his fishing pole, changed the lure, turned, and stared at me in silence. I was caught in his uncanny gaze. The slant and mirror of light on the metal mask was marvelous, mannered, and spooky at the same time. He cracked his right wooden leg twice with a hook remover and explained that the military had provided only cheaply manufactured Liberty Limbs.
The government limb was fabricated of compressed wood fiber with a flexible knee and strapped at the waist, but the modular prosthesis was awkward and not reliable.

André refused to wear the composite military limb, and was wrongly reproached as a shirker who would not accept the new government policies of rehabilitation. He was a mutilated soldier and resisted in his own way the cultural aversions to disability.

The French and the American Red Cross provided basic peg legs, fastened with a shoulder and waist strap. He wore a peg leg for a few months and then carved an elegant resemblance of his right leg from selected
charme
, or hornbeam, a durable hardwood.

André handed me the fishing pole, reached down, lifted the pant leg, and presented a beautifully curved and polished prosthesis with simulated muscles and a bony ankle. The hornbeam leg was a work of art, hinged with precision at the foot and knee, and not a mere composite. The tree had been downed by enemy artillery.

Aloysius painted four abstract blue ravens on huge masks that were mounted on the bastions of the Pont Neuf. My brother wanted to paint a tiny blue raven on the metal masks, a mask with a natural image of motion, but the two wounded veterans refused and turned away. No, they would never change the masks, and revealed later that the very idea of a face mark, blue raven or beast, was a cheeky tease.

I insisted that we meet the sculptor who created the
mutilés de guerre
masks. Henri cleaned, filleted, and wrapped the four perch in paper for dinner. First we walked to their shabby hotel, and then continued a few blocks more to the Red Cross Studio for Portrait Masks for Mutilated Soldiers on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs between the Jardin du Luxembourg and Boulevard du Montparnasse. The studio was on the fourth floor, and the scent of plaster and paint was stronger with each flight of stairs.

Anna Coleman Ladd, the sculptor who had established the studio, and created the masks, was dressed in the distinct formal uniform, jacket, wide black belt, and the insignias of a Red Cross Nurse. I was enchanted by her affection and generous smile. She served chocolate and white wine.

Aloysius was interested in how the masks were made and painted with such precision. Anna presented the various stages of the meticulous creation of a distinctive mask, a plaster cast and thin galvanized copper. The
prosthetic masks were painted with enamel to avoid cracks and shines, and the hues of each mask matched the skin color of the soldier, even the bluish tint to simulate a shaved beard.

Each mask was original, an artistic creation, and not a mere disguise or camouflage. Dozens of plaster casts were mounted on the back wall of the studio, the chalky and poignant resemblance of the
mutilés de guerre
sentinels of the war. The avant-garde masks were the new aesthetics of war and mutilated soldiers.

Anna had created distinctive masks for André and Henri and three other Americans. She created more than ninety masks for other soldiers since the studio was established a year earlier. Anna was exact, and with the concentration of a humane artist she fashioned eyebrows with real hair.

Aloysius was inspired by the distinctive portrayal of the masks, the stature and guise of an aesthetic pose, and yet he worried about the ironic resemblance of the mutilated soldier as camouflage. My brother was determined to restyle the meticulous resemblance of the lost faces on the masks with abstract blue ravens. The masks would become an abstract work of art, not an aesthetic disguise.

› 16 ‹

G
ALERIE
C
RÉMIEUX

— — — — — — —
1919
— — — — — — —

Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu became one of those great artists inspired by the ancient vitality of the River Seine. My brother created a surge of blue waves on the river, and he painted a blue raven with enormous translucent wing feathers spread across the entire entrance to the Pont des Arts.

The Institut de France was on the south side of the pedestrian bridge and on the north side, the Musée du Louvre. At that moment on the Pont des Arts, in the middle of two national monuments, and the end of a savage war, we created a scene of native art, the presence of visionary ravens and the River Seine by expressionistic waves of color, poetic images, and the traces of totemic motion in words and paint. On that very first day in the city we revealed a native presence in our names, blue paint, and in my stories.

Naturally, we celebrated our notable surname and fur trade ancestors from France. The surnames and streets were ancient, and other artists and writers must have walked the same route through an alley to Rue de Seine. We turned right to L'Hôtel on Rue des Beaux-Arts. The street was messy, and the entrance to the hotel was shabby. No one was at the reception desk.

Oscar Wilde had died in L'Hôtel about nineteen years earlier. His name was posted near the entrance. We had expected at least an ordinary greeting at the hotel. The lobby stank of cigarette smoke, out-of-date newspapers were scattered on the floor, and the leather chairs were stained and cracked. We decided not to wait for anyone in that lobby. I left a note for Harry Greene that we had arrived and would be waiting in a nearby park on the corner of Rue de Seine and Rue Mazarine behind the Institut de France.

Aloysius painted several scenes of blue ravens at the Musée du Louvre and perched on statues in the park. We waited for several hours and then returned to L'Hôtel. No one was there and the note had not been read. The guest register was behind the desk, so we searched the pages and found
the name of Harry Greene, and the note,
une erreur dans la note
, an error in the bill. His room was located on the second floor. We knocked, and then entered the cold, dark, tiny room that faced another building at the back of the hotel. There were several empty notebooks on a table near the
window.

Harry Greene appeared after dark, surprised, and with many apologies. Later, after some conversation about the war, he conceded that he had actually forgotten the date of our arrival in Paris. Never mind, you are here on leave at last, he said, and we rushed out of the hotel to the nearby Métro at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He took us to dinner at the Café du Dôme in Montparnasse.

Harry was a familiar customer at the restaurant, so the waiters directed us immediately to a side table near the windows with a view of the terrace and the entrance. The novelist declared that we were new Dômiers, the artists and authors who gathered almost every day, in the late morning for café and late at night for wine and dinner.

Harry ordered a pitcher of white wine, declined the menu, and suggested that we try the
Saucisse de Toulouse
, salty, heavy pork sausage with mashed potatoes. We were hungry, the sausage was delicious, and later we learned that the signature sausage was the least expensive meal on the menu.

The Dômiers were seated at every table, but we could not recognize anyone. We were familiar with the names of some artists and writers but not with faces. Harry gestured with his eyebrows to one table and then to another as he pronounced the names of Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, André Breton, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, and even the newsy revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. Naturally, we looked in every direction of his eyebrow gestures as he mentioned each great name.

Where is Pablo Picasso?

Not here yet, maybe later.

Where is Modigliani?

Painting at his studio in Montmartre.

How about André Breton?

Yes, at the entrance, he likes to meet everyone.

Guillaume Apollinaire?

No, he died last year of influenza.

So, how about Vladimir Lenin?

No, not tonight, Lenin is at the Kremlin.

Aloysius heard the names of artists and painted blue ravens perched at window tables in the Café du Dôme. The ravens by gesture and wave hinted and teased the presence of the artists by the turn of a beak, talons on the back of a chair, or fierce eyes, and with slight traces of black and rouge on wing and shank feathers. Picasso was blue, a natural presence with a distinctive cubist beak. Apollinaire was a blue raven with a slight bandage and the obscure words
reconnais-toi
, perceive or recognize yourself, painted in cubist traces of rouge. Lenin was perceived with an intense gaze reflected in the eye of a raven. The waiter recognized at once the blue ravens as Dômiers. The easiest trace of artistic presence was a cubist tease.

Harry drank a large pitcher of wine that night, and he laughed louder with each glass. He sang popular music and stumbled on the way back to L'Hôtel. Once in the room he smiled, waved, and was asleep in minutes. Aloysius slept on the floor near the door.

I read book seven of
The Odyssey
in the faint light near the window.
The walls on either side were of bronze from end to end, and the cornice was of blue enamel. The doors were gold, and hung on pillars of silver that rose from a floor of bronze, while the lintel was silver and the hook of the door was of gold.

Aloysius awakened very early so we decided to write a note of appreciation for the dinner and stories and leave the hotel in silence. Wispy clouds caught the rosy sunrise on that cold morning in Paris. Only a few people were on the streets, mostly workmen and taxicab drivers. We walked down Rue Bonaparte turned right at Les Deux Magots on Boulevard Saint-
Germain to the Café de Flore.

André Breton and Guillaume Apollinaire once gathered with other writers and artists at the Café du Dôme and at Café de Flore. No doubt Apollinaire made the rounds of several master cafés to pose with poets, artists, and musicians.

There were only three other customers that early morning at the Café de Flore. One patron was a policeman who wore a natty cape. Paris apparently was not a sunrise culture. The waiter was silent, surly, and avoided eye contact. We ordered the same fare as the policeman, the standard
petit déjeuner
, a basket of croissants, baguette, butter, and café. That morning
we were content, even in our military uniforms, and we actually talked about how a native painter and a writer could survive in Paris. The Café de Flore was a delightful place to watch the city come alive in the morning. We sat at a small table near the window for about three hours, and by then most of the chairs were occupied. I listened to the customers and quickly learned how to speak with respect to the waiter. So we ordered more café,
s'il vous plaît
, and talked about our future in Paris.

Aloysius decided not to paint that morning, so we browsed in a nearby bookstore, Maison des Amis des Livres, at 7 Rue de l'Odéon, near Boulevard Saint-Germain. Mostly, we looked at the plain covers of new books and tried to translate the more obvious titles. Adrienne Monnier, the owner of the bookstore, rescued our most awkward translations and directed me to poetry, and my brother to books on art history. Adrienne was generous, slightly anxious, and her blue eyes were totemic, ready to touch the obscure. I was enchanted with her lovely round face, sturdy motion, the gentle movement of her hands, and the way she touched each book. The authors must have sensed her marvelous presence, and every book in the store waited to be touched by a reader.