Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (39 page)

I read book twenty-three of
The Odyssey
on a park bench under the chestnut trees at the Square du Vert-Galant near the Pont Neuf.
When Ulysses and Penelope had had their fill of love they fell talking with one another. She told him how much she had had to bear in seeing the house filled with a crowd of wicked suitors who had killed so many sheep and oxen on her account, and had drunk so many casks of wine. Ulysses in his turn told her what he had suffered, and how much trouble he had himself given to other people. He told her everything, and she was so delighted to listen that she never went to sleep till he had ended his whole story.

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Odysseus, our friend the trader, came to mind that afternoon on the River Seine. Paris might have become the sanctuary of the traders. I raised my hand to salute his presence, and reminisced about his grand gestures and ironic stories. Odysseus would have recited a few lines of a poem and then teased me about the womanly scenes of adventure by Homer.

The Square du Vert-Galant was a prominent point downstream of Île de la Cité, and with a spectacular view of the Pont des Arts and Musée du Louvre. The sun was radiant between the thin curtains of clouds, and the reflections bounced with the wake of steamers and tugboats on the river. The chain steamers and barges carried loads of timber, manure, wine, stone, bricks, and coal. The veterans told me that wounded soldiers of the British Expeditionary Forces were once transported down the river by steamers to hospital ships in the port of Le Havre.

André and Henri, the
mutilés de guerre
, and other veterans who wore metal masks to camouflage broken faces, were always in my thoughts near
the River Seine. I searched for the masked veterans at every quay and bridge on the river, saluted every fisherman who wore a fedora, or caught a perch, but never heard from them again. The last time we saw them was about four years ago with Anna Ladd at the Red Cross Studio for Portrait Masks for Mutilated Soldiers.

Pierre Chaisson delivered lunch to the wounded veterans once a week at the Square du Vert-Galant. He served white wine, fresh baguettes, sausage, ham, and cheese. Most of the veterans were French, only one was American. They recounted the stories of the war, and disguised the memories of their families. The war stories were never the same, of course, and the obvious wounds were never mentioned over the late lunch.

I was heartened by the courage and humor of the veterans, and moved by the spirit and generosity of the stories. Most of the stories were ironic, the chance encounters with the enemy. The stories of the wounded veterans at the square would have inspired an audience of natives on the reservation. The sounds of the war, the rumble, crash, and shatter of explosions were hard to describe, and every veteran created original metaphors of sound. One veteran used the specific sounds of the river, the screech of steam whistles, the bump and shudder of heavy barges on the wooden docks.

The sounds of the Great War were over, and should have been forgotten, but the visual scenes and necessary metaphors continued in ordinary peaceful places and the River Seine. I had imagined the sound of enemy machine guns in the dry leaves that scraped across the river stones.

Pierre was one of the best storiers, and he declared that our stories as veterans were the only trustworthy memories and histories of the war. Our stories were reliable histories, he repeated at every lunch, because our stories were inspired by visual memories. The stories were original, and not mere recitations, so the storier never told exactly the same version of the story. Liturgy was a religious and political recipe of authority, and not creative or reliable as the visual memories of stories.

Pierre was a native teaser, and a clever storier, but the wounds of war were never the secure sources of taunts or ironic decoys. The veterans practiced the tease of manners, gestures, and clothes, service chance and regrets, the wave of a middle finger, threadbare trousers, saintly socks, a pink shirt, mismatched colors, but never scars or war wounds. No one ever commented on scars, burns, broken faces, or severed limbs.

The commune of river veterans became our native sanctuary, and we were the only native veterans of the Great War. Granger Gross was the only other river veteran from America. Naturally, my reservation accent was mocked, and the veterans teased me about my notebook, and my brother about blue ravens. I never directly wrote in the presence of anyone. My notes were discreet, and yet the mere practice of private records was a separation, a pose of authority. So, on the third river meal with the veterans my private notes were translated into French and read out loud by a wounded veteran from a farm near Château-Thierry.

Granger translated and then my notebook was passed around several times over lunch. My imagistic entries, notes, and selected descriptive comments were read openly with constant teases, shouts, critical overstatements, and astonishment in a particular tone of voice. Three weeks later the notebook scenes were no longer a source of ironic humiliation, or even communal mockery. The native tease on the reservation was mostly a trial by chagrin, and the mockery by wounded veterans was the same. The ordeal ended and the veterans actually started to dictate notes and heartfelt stories to me, and those notes became another source of my stories about wounded veterans of the First World War.

Aloysius painted every day and completed thirty-six original paintings in the series
Thirty-Six Scenes of Blue Ravens and Bridges on the River Seine
for the special exhibition that early summer at the Galerie Crémieux.

Nathan had widely advertised the exhibition, and he posted notices at museums, bookstores, and in public places. The notices described the series as visionary native portraits of the River Seine. The portrayals were creative scenes of more than twenty individual bridges, and some were painted several times. My brother painted the Pont Neuf and Pont Mirabeau several times, and each portrait in the series was an original abstract perception of the bridges.

ÉCOLE INDIENNE DES CORBEAUX BLEUS
Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu
White Earth Reservation
State of Minnesota
Trente-Six Scènes des Corbeaux Bleus
Thirty-Six Native Scenes of Blue Ravens
Bridges over the River Seine
Saturday, June 14, 1924

GALERIE CRÉMIEUX

Nathan framed the entire series, thirty-six scenes of the river, and displayed the paintings on three walls of the gallery. He placed four scenes of the Pont Neuf on separate easels near the entrance to the gallery. The crowd of artists, art collectors, students, and some veterans from the café and river commune were naturally drawn to the four easels and portraits of blue ravens and the glorious bastions and stone arches of the Pont Neuf.

The Pont Neuf was built with twelve bastions over the river on one side of the Square du Vert-Galant, and eight more bastions on the other side of Île de la Cité. Aloysius painted twenty stone bastions afloat with great blue ravens on enormous crests of white and blue waves on the River Seine. The bastions floated with uneven cants in the faint rouge shadows, the broken shadows of the Pont Neuf. The waves in the portrait of the bridge were traced by inspiration to
The Great Wave
, a woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai.

The second abstract portrait of the bridge was a fractured scene, cracked and crooked in the hues of a muted sunrise on the River Seine. Great blue ravens were perched at the seams to steady the bridge. The third portrait thrust the sections of the bridge out of the dark blue river in the claws of blue ravens. The waves reached to the sky with the sections. The fourth abstract portrait of the bridge was in natural flight over the huge muted blue leaves on eddies in the river, and the billows of clouds were the wings of the blue ravens.

Aloysius painted the faint rise of the sun, only a trace of rouge on the horizon, and created the slight rouge reflections of the sun in wavy tiers on the River Seine. The reflections of the bridges in the series were broken by waves, and the fractured, erratic, breach of the watery reflection became the portrait of the bridge and blue ravens.

Native visionary artists created a sense of presence with the perceptions of motion, a native presence in the waves of memory, and in the transience of shadows. Birds and animals perceive motion in water, rain, the waves on
lakes and rivers, the shimmer of light and fugitive reflections on the water, as an artist might with contour and colors, and breach the image and custom of the seasons and the perceptions of the ordinary.

Misaabe, the native healer, taught me to create stories with the perception of motion and the belted kingfisher, and with vigilance breach the surface of reflections to catch a fish. My brother painted to fracture the obvious reflections of the bridge with images of great blue ravens. Native perception and imagination can easily reverse the course of waves, and the familiar images and reflections of faces and monuments. The Pont Neuf and other bridges were always more beautiful in the natural motion of waves and in the fractured reflection of a sunrise.

The Pont Neuf abstract portraits were compared to river scenes painted by Camille Pissaro and Claude Monet. Pissaro painted the original impressions of ephemeral winter lights on the River Seine. Monet painted
Soleil Levant
, an inspired bloody sunrise with muted water blues and greens, and the incredible reflection of the sun on the harbor at Le Havre. Pissaro, Monet, and other serious and original visionary painters were not comparable to my brother. Yet the casual resemblance to the water scenes created by Pissaro, Monet, and Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu revealed a natural obligation to create motion with hues of color and an abstract sense of presence with fractured or cubist reflections.

The art collectors crowded in silence around the four portraits of the Pont Neuf. Nathan stood nearby and listened to the comments about the blue raven portrayals. I observed that most visitors to the gallery expected a native artist to represent some traditional scene, or at least depict a trace of native culture or inheritance in the portrayal of the river scenes.

The Great War fractured the ordinary stay, wily scenes, native reflections, ethnographic warrants, and empire cultures, and nothing has ever been the same on the White Earth Reservation, Montbréhain, Rue Mouffetard, or the River Seine.

I moved closer to the four portraits on the easels, introduced myself as a native veteran and writer, and explained to the visitors that blue ravens were native visions, and the historical name of the Pont Neuf was not always a representation of the real bridge. The name was figurative, and the meaning of the bridge was discovered or perceived in the traces of natural motion in stories, but not in the cultural liturgies or structural expositions.

I pointed at each of the four scenes and told the visitors that the presence of the bridge was imagined, and not the mere copy of an image or reflection. The abstract scenes of the bridge were visionary, and that was a common native practice in stories and art, similar to native visionary scenes of blue horses painted in magical flight on ledger paper.

Franz Marc came to mind in the conversation at the gallery because he had painted great blue horses, and was plainly inspired by native artists and by Marc Chagall. Natives had painted abstract horses in bold colors long before the portrayals of blue horses and red cows by other painters. Only the mere mention of a German, Franz Marc, a member of
Der Blaue Reiter
, was a serious detraction to some of the visitors at the gallery, but that awkward reaction was allayed when the visitors learned that the artist had died in the First World War.

Seven years later the hatred of the enemy had become an obsession. The sentiments of vengeance had reached into the very heart and authenticity of avant-garde art, and the marrow of popular culture. Cubism was once denounced as a German perversion, and the censure was so persuasive that some cubist and avant-garde painters changed styles during the war. Pablo Picasso, who did not serve in the military, shunned cubism and turned back during the war to classical themes and portraiture.

Aloysius painted the Pont de Passy as a blue skeleton under the gauzy waves of the River Seine. The scene was horizontal, just below the reflection on the water, and revealed enormous concrete piers and ominous spiny creatures. Three blue ravens floated on the mirage of the river with wings spread widely between the cutwaters and elegant metal arches.

Four great blue ravens were perched on the stone pillars at the entrances to the ornate Pont Alexandre III. The bridge was built for the Paris
Exposition Universelle
, World Fair in 1900. The blue ravens had unseated four elaborate golden statues on the pillars, the statues that represented the symbolic history of France. Aloysius had painted traces of rouge on the claws
of the ravens. Some artists at the gallery were rather amused by the tease of aesthetics and ironic conversions of national narratives, but other visitors were sidetracked by the creative arrogance. The French were rightly protective of state art and monuments.

The Pont au Change was curved under water, and envisioned in a current of blue raven feathers. Sections of the bridge emerged, and the shadowy
buildings were afloat on the river. The Palais de Justice and La Conciergerie at the Île de la Cité were portrayed as reflections in the water, and marbled blue.

The hazy images of the buildings were buoyant, the towers wavered, the windows were wispy hues of blue on the river, and the stone statues were daubed with traces of rouge and faint black. The medallions of Emperor Napoleon were bent and creased as pendants in the huge claws of two blue ravens. Gauzy shadows of the blue ravens were spread over the broken surface images of the Palais de Justice.

Aloysius painted with a trace of rouge the abstract silhouettes of a guillotine on the windows of La Conciergerie. Only the most perceptive viewers of the Pont au Change might have noticed the slight silhouettes of guillotines. Marie Antoinette was imprisoned there, and later executed by guillotine.