Portrait of a Girl (21 page)

Mathilde was relieved. She smiled radiantly at him. How nice of him to visit her, and more importantly, her heart calmed down when she saw that it wasn’t his friend standing there in the doorway. She asked him to come in and sit down next to her. Somewhat formally, he handed her the bouquet of flowers he had brought, a combination of tiger lilies and Turk’s Cap lilies, brilliant orange and purple. To Edward, the colors seemed reflected in her cheeks.

“How beautiful they are,” she said in delight.

“There are a few places where they grow in great profusion.”

Mathilde smiled. “Would you be so kind as to look for a vase? Either in my room or you can ask the nurse. And then, if you please, come right back. You must tell me what you’ve been doing the last few days. It’s a bit boring here,” she wrinkled her nose deprecatingly, “and I’m not allowed to walk a lot yet. But I am supposed to eat a lot.”

“It won’t do you any harm to gain a little weight. At least, that’s what I think.” Edward took the flowers and went in search of a vase.

He was scarcely out of the room when Mathilde jumped up, looked critically at herself in the mirror, put on some powder, and tried to put her stubborn curls in order.

“Oh, let the curls do what they will,” Edward said. He had come back without her noticing. Mathilde, caught unawares, let her hands sink down and looked a bit abashed. Now he must think that she was trying to look pretty for him. And to her own surprise, it was true. A short silence ensued, but not an unpleasant one.

Then Edward said, “If you will permit me. I’ve come to see you as James’s representative. You know that James i
s . . .
” he laughed, hesitated, for he didn’t want to step on her toes or offend her. “In any case, I thought I could pass the time with you now and then when James can’t come.”

She took a deep breath intending to give him an angry reply, but bit her lip instead and said nothing. He couldn’t know what had happened between James and her, and that she had sent James away. Of course, she had waited longingly the next few days, hoping that James would come back in spite of everything. But he had taken her at her word, and that was more proof, she thought, that he didn’t care all that much for her. Whatever. The worst was the way that Kate, right after the illicit hour of bliss and disaster, had rubbed James’s nose in the fact that she was engaged. Oh well, it was all quite horrible.

Yet, from another viewpoint, it was nice that Edward had come to stand in for James. And she had never before been presented with a bouquet of flowers that glowed with such extraordinary fire.

Reluctantly Kate started packing her things. She had asked Andrina to come and help her. But whatever Andrina did seemed to be wrong.

“Good Lord! How stupid can you be!” she said angrily. “Do you think that just because you have a pretty face you don’t need to work?” Kate pushed the chambermaid roughly aside. “Don’t simply stand there getting in the way!” She dropped the salmon-colored silk coat she had just taken out of the closet. Andrina tried, dutifully, to pick it up but Kate hissed at her, “Leave it alone! That’s not for you to touch with your peasant hands. Go away, you’re not helping at all!”

Andrina left feeling hurt that the woman she had taken as her example had treated her so contemptuously. She had to do everything, everything possible in her life to rise above this job as a chambermaid. Who wants to let people order them around and humiliate them like this for the rest of their lives?

But just then, she heard Mrs. Simpson, already calling her to come back.

“Go and tell the room service waiter that I’d like some hot chocolate brought up. It will calm my nerves. And then pack the hats in the hatboxes. But be careful.”

The hot chocolate actually did seem to soothe Kate.

“By the way, do you know whom I happened to see in St. Moritz?” she asked Andrina. “You’ll never guess. That beautiful young girl who works in the hotel garden. And you know with whom? With that man with the dark, curly hair, the painter from Maloja. What was his name again?”

“Segantini?” prompted Andrina.

“Right, Segantini. I think that’s his name. How about that? Quite improper, don’t you think? That little peasant hick walking around St. Moritz among all the hotel guests, it’s quite unthinkable. Well, she’s quite pretty and seems to be profiting from it.” She turned gloomy again. Looking at Andrina, she said casually, “She’s prettier than you. But so what. A painter isn’t a particularly special conquest.”

The Interview

James had prepared for his conversation with Segantini, which surprised his friend.

“You ought to know by now that I take my work seriously,” James told him, “even though not every assignment is fun. I’m going to get that ‘painter of the mountains,’ the ‘athletic Christ,’ as someone called him, to reveal some of his secrets. Don’t you agree, Eddie, that he envelops himself in a sort of prophet’s aura?”

“Don’t know.” Edward was in a hurry because he was planning to visit Mathilde. “He is an impressive figure, strong, very masculine, I’d describe him more as a patriarc
h . . .
”

He picked up his hat, waved briefly to James, and was out the door.

James, for his part, went to Maloja. He hoped the young man who had volunteered to act as interpreter would do his job well.

Achille Robustelli had already introduced Giovanni Segantini and Fabrizio Bonin to each other and informed the staff to reserve a quiet table in the library for them.

Young Bonin was a nice-looking fellow. An ash-blond Venetian in his midtwenties—not as dark and striking in appearance as Segantini—well dressed but not conspicuously so. His clear, pleasant voice was as unassertive as he was, and still, Robustelli thought, you would not overlook Bonin. He had presence. Robustelli, in any event, had liked him from the outset.

Count Primoli, with whom Bonin was traveling, had agreed to exhibit some of his photographs of Venice at the hotel before he went on to Paris, and Bonin was taking care of the practical aspects of the show.

“Do I have a message?” Segantini said, repeating James’s question. “The light. Pure, unmixed color.”

James sat quietly, waiting.

“When I was at the academy in Milan,” Segantini explained, “I did my first oil painting,
The Chancel of Sant Antonio
.” He smiled remembering those days. “The sun was streaming in through an open window and over the carved wooden seats of the chancel, flooding them in light. Even back then, I tried above all to capture the light. But if you mix the colors on your palette, you get neither light nor air. So I sought a way to make the colors look genuine and pure, and I found it by setting them next to each other on the canvas, unmixed, leaving it for the retina of the viewers to meld them as they looked at the painting. In this way I achieved an animation of color, along with a greater degree of light and air in a way that felt faithful to life.”

Segantini had an inkling that James Danby would now ask about his training, his models—all the others did that. So he immediately continued, as soon as Bonin had translated his last words. “I registered at the Milan academy for life drawing and was accepted without any difficulties because I had already attended evening courses in decorative art. But only a few months were enough to convince me that academic instruction was useless for anyone born with an artistic soul. I taught myself what I needed to know. The academies train a lot of painters who are not artists,” he added in a dismissive tone.

He waited to be contradicted, but James did not contradict him.

“So you haven’t modeled yourself on other painters?” he asked instead.

“No,” Segantini replied, slightly irritated, “I already said that. Later, my friend Grubicy showed me reproductions of pictures by Millet, and of course I exchanged views with friends and colleagues.”

Segantini sank back into his memories, but then took up the conversation where James had interrupted him. “After having arrived at this knowledge by myself, I went to live in Brianza for almost four years. Bice came with me, our children were bor
n . . .
”

James sat forward in his chair and interrupted.

“Brianza? What is that? A region?”

“Yes,” Bonin said, answering for Segantini. “Brianza is the countryside north of Milan and south of Lake Como.”

Segantini nodded, realizing that Bonin was speaking about Brianza.

“I was attracted to nature, the out-of-doors,” he went on. “Nature had become for me, as it were, like an instrument that gave off musical sounds that accompanied everything that my heart was saying. Again and again, it is in the calm harmonies of sunsets that I find myself. In outdoor light, I find sweetness in the melancholy that has repeatedly filled my spirit since the days of my childhood.”

“You lost your mother very early,” James broke in. “Your brother, your father. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke called you not only the ‘Painter of light from Maloja’ but also ‘a great solitary.
’
”

Segantini pricked up his ears yet didn’t elaborate on this, but rather continued with his account. “I realized that I needed the light of the mountains. I was attracted to the high altitudes, always farther upward. I sought brightness, light. Milan is a swam
p . . .
”

James, who had collected some information about Segantini in London, added, “Then you moved to Savognin in 1886.”

Segantini laughed aloud and helped himself to some of the pastries that the waiter had put on their table. “Yes, my friend Dalbesio had gone on an excursion in the Grison mountains and was so enthusiastic that Bice and I decided to hike on some hair-raisingly dangerous paths across the Bergamasque Alps into the Valtellina,” he said, laughing again as he remembered the exertion involved. “We rented a one-horse carriage and had it take us through the Bernina Pass into the Engadine, and then I continued on over the Julier Pass to the north, past Savognin to Tiefencastel. But suddenly I had the driver stop and return to Savognin. I knew instantly: this was the landscape I was seeking, which already had its counterpart within m
e . . .
”

Bonin translated, and James took notes.

Segantini waited politely and ordered a bottle of the local wine and three glasses. Then he went on, “Although I was penniless and unknown in Savognin, the hotel owner, Signor Pianta, had faith in me and helped me with the required security deposit so that I would be permitted to settle in Switzerland. Perhaps you already know this, but due to certain unfortunate circumstances, I am stateless.” After the wine arrived and was poured into glasses, he raised his with a nod to James, and took a drink. “In August 1886, I brought my family to our new home in a carriage loaded to the top with our belongings and thirty-five
centesimi
in my pockets.”

He made no further mention about how much Pianta had done for him or the debts he had incurred by the time he left Savognin in 1894.

“I was captivated by the strength of the colors, the crystalline clarity of the mountains. I kept going higher and higher up, alone. I immersed myself in nature, the quiet, the stillness.”

James interrupted Segantini. “The same basic motifs keep turning up in your pictures: maternal love and the common destiny of men and animals—death.”

Segantini nodded. “That’s what nature teaches you: the inescapable cycle of birth, life, death. We are part of it, like the plants, and the animals. Nature is not good and it is not evil; nature is. Religion doesn’t mean much to me, but my love of nature is boundless. The ultimate aim of my efforts is to achieve an absolute and complete knowledge, an understanding of nature in all its shading and nuance, from sunrise to sunset, in its structure and in all the variety of its beings—people, animals, plants. I want to use all my power to create a work that will be ideal.”

James felt uncomfortable whenever the word “absolute” or “ideal” was used, for he found that life in general and he himself were very fallible, and he mistrusted all absolute truths. It pleased him that Segantini was at least partaking freely of the wine.

“But nature is not ideal,” James said. “You yourself say she simply exists.”

Segantini loved discussions, and wine and ideas warmed him up. “Nature exists, but art shapes, creates. Matter must be worked on by the mind so that it can grow into eternal art. A picture is a thought, an idea that has been flooded with light. Art without an ideal would be like nature without life. After all, what is art if not a true image and a criterion for the perfection of the human soul?”

James poured some more wine into his glass, seeing that soon the bottle would be totally empty. “I have some doubts about the perfection of the human soul,” he said, countering the artist’s glowing statements, which Bonin had translated faithfully but without much emotion.

Segantini took off his jacket and ran his fingers through his black curls. “But we have to strive for it. Real life is nothing but a dream, a dream to eventually approach an ideal that is as distant and high as possible, so high as to extinguish matter. I pursue this ideal. I search for it up in the mountains, outdoors, where the paint freezes on the canvas in the icy col
d . . .
Human greatness begins where the mere mechanical work of our hands, the crude action stops, and where love and mental effort begin.” He leaned back in his chair, adding, “If you would like to, you can come with me to some of the locations where I’m working just now. I usually work on several paintings at the same time. I leave them outside through all sorts of weather; but they’re kept safe in wooden boxes.”

James, who preferred the streets of a big city, wasn’t sure whether this offer was attractive to him, but he thanked Segantini and said he would think about it. And because he preferred not to discuss the question of whether love began with the intellect, he changed the subject and asked, “What is beauty, Mr. Segantini?”

Bonin looked at James Danby in surprise, and then translated his question.

“Beauty,” Segantini replied without hesitating, “Beauty! You need only look at a flower. It tells you better than any definition what beauty is. Art is love enfolded in beauty.”

“But is the bellowing cow in the pasture that you painted beautiful?” Danby asked.

“Yes. Because I saw her with love, and because the picture is true. It shows the creature—and we are not very different from her—the way I saw her with my inner heart and the way I understood her with my mind.”

James nodded after Bonin had translated Segantini’s words. He had actually wanted to direct the conversation to
The Punishment of Lust
, the painting that had caught his eye in Liverpool because of its technique, and whose message he did not approve of at all. Because in addition to the Madonna-like women, there were those “evil mothers” who were hanging in trees, half-naked, their bodies ecstatically curved backward, one of whom had at her breast a nursing child with a face that seemed to be more like that of a man. The expressions of ecstatic pain in the faces of these women with the long reddish hair reminded James more of passion than the punishments of Hell. Was a picture of pure maternal love the only thing that could fill Segantini’s soul with peace? Did these sensual figures, surrounded by ice, embody all those strange, menacing feelings he was trying to shut out of his life? Did the women who found grace in Segantini’s eyes have to resemble the image of his mother as he wanted to see her?

James suddenly remembered his days in boarding school. He had been furious with his mother, had hated her, because she had sent him to England, abandoning him to loneliness. She wanted only the best for him. He knew that. And for that reason he ought not to be mad at her, ought to avoid letting her see his anger. But this only made him more furious. Perhaps Segantini had a similar experience.

James suddenly knew that he could save himself that question. Segantini had painted an answer, but he had not understood it as such. By painting loving mothers, he painted for himself an ideal of the thoughtful maternal figure that he had lacked as a child. And his paintings of the “evil mothers” reflected his rage against this deprivation. And even though his mother was not to blame for her own early death, he had to punish her, not in a realm where his mind held sway, but where hidden feelings ruled. He would never admit those hidden feelings, not to James nor to himself.

Segantini had escaped the darkness of his childhood by seeking light, and he had found his ideal—although he, like no other painter, gave masterful expression to the transitions between brightness and darkness. He was best at depicting not only that which he loved, but also what he feared: dusk, the twilight hour, which held the sweetness of melancholy but in which also lurked the darkness of being lost.

Segantini sought an ideal without shadows; he painted the idea, the thought. But he was most brilliant in giving form to the broken light that embraced the pain he had tried to get away from all his life long.

James returned to St. Moritz. He was impressed by Segantini, by the battle people fight against the ghosts of their own histories in an attempt to give meaning to the meaningless, to counteract indifference with beauty and love. Or what they thought they were.