Winter sleep, p.17
Winter Sleep, page 17
When I woke up Natsue had breakfast waiting for me. She watched me eat, telling me to try the vegetables and giving me other motherly advice. Then she left.
I went to the studio on the second floor and came down carrying an easel and other painting supplies.
The terrace was now dry. I set up the easel and put a size ten canvas on it.
Winter would be over soon. I wanted to paint the winter that was about to vanish.
The white mountains, the fir tree branches heavy with snow, the crisp, clean air. I didn’t want to paint any of it.
Instead I wanted to put my inner winter on the canvas. I didn’t need scenery. I was on the terrace for the winter light—a light different from summer’s. The light that filtered through the studio glass didn’t say nearly as much.
I put on my jacket and cotton work gloves. I had cut off the fingertips with scissors. The temperature was still low, and if I didn’t wear a jacket and gloves I would freeze.
I closed my eyes.
My heart, which had been empty, had suddenly become full. This was something new to me. The shadow of violence had retreated, replaced by a repose that was also strength.
I kept my eyes closed for a while. Then I squeezed vermilion from the tube onto the canvas. I saw it as a vermilion insect, crawling.
Using the knife I’d whittled wood with, I spread the vermilion over the canvas. I had palette knives of all types, but I didn’t want their flexibility now. I also didn’t want to use the whittled sticks.
I wanted something hard, something that would break before it would bend.
I was used to the feeling of the knife in my hand. I had whittled hundreds of sticks.
I spread the vermilion neatly, mixing it with white paint on the canvas, until it became a light pink. I added more vermilion and spread it. I did this again and again. The canvas was vermilion, nothing but indistinct shades of vermilion. I felt that I was getting closer to something.
I applied red. It didn’t go with the vermilion. I spread this harsh color with the tip of my knife over the canvas. In places where there was too much, I scraped it off, again with the tip of my knife. There wasn’t much excess red and I felt as though I were performing an operation.
In the winter light I could hear the vermilion and the red shouting at each other—it was almost funny. I could hear voices from the canvas. I could hear the voices of the colors themselves, talking, shouting, screaming. This was the moment when I felt I was truly painting a picture. I watched the voices calling out in the winter light.
The shadow of a cloud fell on the canvas. Even so, I could hear the voices.
The wind was blowing, though I hadn’t noticed. The temperature had dropped as a result, but my whole body was covered with sweat.
Yellow. A murmur. A faint whisper from the canvas.
Once again I was spreading vermilion on the canvas. Vermilion covered red and yellow.
The murmuring ceased.
I wiped the sweat from my face with the work glove.
Leaving the easel in place, I went into the living room.
The fire had gone out in the fireplace. Even the embers had stopped glowing. I added some twigs and started the fire again. I thought that I had been at the canvas only a short while, but four hours had passed. It was already evening.
I sat by the fireplace.
I smoked one cigarette after another. I had forgotten that I smoked. Even though I was sitting next to the flames, I felt colder and colder.
Before the light disappeared, I brought the easel and canvas into the room and set the canvas facing the wall. That way, I wouldn’t have to look at it.
I filled the bath with hot water and got in up to my neck. I slowly started to feel warmer. I hadn’t eaten lunch and now it was time for dinner.
Getting out of the bath I put on fresh underwear, a thick sweater and the rest of my clothes, then went outside.
The surface of the snow had hardened. Freshly fallen snow became quite different once it was exposed to the rays of the sun. You could tell from touching it.
I started the engine of the subcompact and let it warm up, while I sat in the driver’s seat, staring out into space.
I started the car. Snow was still on the road. The sound of it under my tires was dry and crunchy, not like snow but something else entirely.
I arrived at Akiko’s cabin. The roof of the Citroen 2CV was covered with a thin layer of snow.
The front door was open.
In the living room, leftover food was scattered about. I felt as though I had entered an animal’s cage. There was no sign of Akiko. The heater was on, and the room was hot.
I went up to the second floor.
When I looked in the bedroom I saw Akiko and Oshita in an embrace, asleep. They looked like two fetuses in a womb. Surrounded by plenty of amniotic fluid, the fetuses rested content.
I went downstairs and took food out of the refrigerator. I started cooking, trying not to make a sound.
Chapter Eight
Buds of Spring
1
The snow fell, as always, though it didn’t pile very high. It hardly ever rained until the beginning of April. Even so winter was coming to an end. Voices were telling me that. They didn’t say so in words, or even sounds. I just started to sense, with my ears, the end of winter.
The size ten canvas was in the studio. I had titled it “Voice of Winter.” It was full of reds, yellows and blues, but it was still winter. I didn’t know how much of the light I could paint. The light on the canvas was the harsh light of a winter’s day. I didn’t think I had captured it simply because I had applied the colors with a knife. I would have been able to express it with a palette knife or a brush as well. I didn’t believe just any tool would do, but I also thought the type of tool alone was rarely decisive. In other words, whatever felt like an extension of my fingers was good. On the other hand, if I used my fingertips to paint, they may not even feel like my own. Sometimes a stick or a knife felt like my own fingers; sometimes a brush or a palette knife did.
“Voice of Winter” was my first painting since the one of Akiko. But after finishing it, I didn’t feel any exhaustion. I also never doubted that I could finish it. I painted it in three days. I thought of it as a meal I had eaten—it was already done and gone. After the fourth day I never touched it.
I wasn’t exactly bursting with the creative urge, but I prepared a size fifty canvas anyway. I began by spreading colors. I didn’t start my abstracts with a sketch. Instead I began by getting rid of everything that suggested a certain form. This didn’t mean that I couldn’t draw. In fact, I seemed to be quite exceptional at it. But after painting picture after picture of things that I could not express with forms, I had seen that my real path lay in abstracts.
It’s usually an artist’s fate to be captured by the form of things. I knew only a few painters who had started with the idea of going beyond form. Some were world-famous names, others were unknown, and still others couldn’t be called painters at all. It was a distinction that had nothing to do with excellence or recognition.
I couldn’t critique other artists. For me, everything always came down to the question of what is and is not a painting. If something is not a painting, as far as I’m concerned its maker is not an artist, no matter how loudly the world may proclaim him a master.
The size fifty canvas was still white. I could paint—I had no doubt about that—but I simply couldn’t see anything I wanted to paint. Then, off in the distance, I thought I saw something.
Natsue came from Tokyo on the eighth. I embraced her ripe body, but only to satisfy my lust. I was no longer sleeping with Akiko and I hadn’t been to the town below to buy a woman. I knew, better than anyone, that my attitude toward sex was completely selfish. I thought that Natsue would forgive me for it, though. Natsue mingled her sadness with mine, and I responded by taking my own pleasure. Her nipples stiffened, her vagina contracted, and her goose-pimpled skin quivered. Natsue was able to endure her sadness, I was able to get what I wanted.
“You’ve started to paint again,” Natsue said, after coming down from the second floor in her bathrobe. Natsue had changed somehow. She had left her bag in the car she had driven from Tokyo. Also, she only had one bathrobe, which came down to her heels. When she opened her legs I could catch a glimpse of her white inner thighs and her pubic hair, like black fire. I liked looking at Natsue’s pubic hair. Unlike Akiko’s it was bursting with a vital force. Akiko’s pubic hair was wispy and fine and seemed to rise up like smoke. Natsue’s blazed.
“What are you going to do with that painting?”
“I’ll give it to you.”
“I can sell it easily. American museums would pay anything for it.”
“When I paint something I don’t think about how much it will sell for.”
“You’ve changed. When you’re fucking me, you look at me. You know how I feel about being with you. So even if you’re fucking me like a sex doll, I can almost think you love me.”
“I don’t understand that word.”
“You’re beginning to. I’m not asking you to love me. You’ve been maturing slowly over forty years. A normal person matures in fifteen, maybe twenty years. It’s taken you forty years to see what’s what. When you were finally trying to become an adult, the woman you met was me. Whether or not I’ve been good for you, I feel I came along at a crucial moment.”
“Let it go, will you?”
“I know words have no meaning for you.”
“So shut up.”
“I will. Your sperm is moving around in my body right now. I don’t think it’s something you can put into words. Same thing.”
“But you’re putting it into words.”
“I’m only human.”
Natsue laughed.
I sat on the sofa next to Natsue and drank a beer. I was keeping up with my daily training. I was also drinking beer.
Had I really changed from what I had been in the fall? I could say that my life had changed, but it wasn’t the sort of thing outsiders could see and recognize as change. An eccentric artist spends the winter at a mountain cabin—nothing unusual about that.
But my paintings had changed—anyone could see that. My attitude had changed. I had never agonized about how I should paint, but I used to face the canvas to expend every particle of mental and physical energy I had. I’d needed to keep renewing myself, day after day, and it hadn’t been easy.
I no longer went through as much pain. I did feel that there was something deceptive about this lack of pain. Perhaps I should say that I was worried. Maybe I was painting with technique alone. I realized now that abstracts could be made that way. “Voice of Winter” was definitely that sort of painting. I was also sure that I had finished it. Without Natsue telling me, I knew it would get a fairly good reception. I had once felt as though I were enclosed in a silky membrane, unformed, soft, sensitive. But I could also feel the membrane gradually becoming thicker. Instead of being unformed, soft and sensitive, it now seemed to be keeping my inner and outer worlds from contact with each other.
I sometimes felt that I might come to need painting less and less. I might be able to live without it. That idea had a certain freshness. I had hardly ever thought of cutting the cord between my painting and my life.
“That work is going to get noticed.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“Really? I wonder. When you painted that nude, you weren’t thinking about praise, that’s for sure. But you painted ‘Voice of Winter’ because you wanted to impress people. Perhaps a small group, a handful. Maybe only one person at first. Who knows, maybe me.”
Or Akiko or Oshita. Was I thinking that in some corner of my mind?
“Do what you want with it.”
“What do you mean?
“Throw it away. Yes, throw it away.”
“I don’t insult talent that way. At the very least, that painting is average. Maybe I feel the way I do about it because I’ve become your alter ego. To the public, it will look more polished and refined than your other work.”
“Enough.”
“I can get a good price for it. But I don’t feel the same pressure I did when I sold that nude. I won’t choose the buyer. If someone’s got the money, it’s sold.”
“All right.”
“You know, I’m still a businesswoman who uses people. There’s only one reason I put up with being treated like your errand girl—I sense genius in you.”
Natsue looked at me and smiled.
I had never thought of myself as a genius. I had been called that to my face, but I had always thought it so much bullshit. I didn’t believe that geniuses existed.
“Let me have the painting. It’s a size ten but I can sell it for ten million yen.”
I raised the beer can to my lips. I had been sipping it, and now I noticed it was empty.
2
Akiko’s cabin had become like a den of wild animals. She had been discarding leftovers just anywhere and letting the dishes pile up in the sink. Even the garbage in the plastic bucket was overflowing.
It differed from an animal’s den only in that there was paint all over the place. Whether it was red or blue or some other color, it looked like blood, shed by the cabin itself.
A male and a female animal were living there. They thrashed about in agony as they painted. Not satisfied with their work, they suffered even more. They had discovered that if they painted side by side, they felt more at ease. Growling, fighting, and licking, they had quickly built a world that outsiders could not enter.
I went to Akiko’s cabin every other day. She and Oshita were usually painting when I arrived, but sometimes they would be fucking by the entryway as though possessed. They were like two animals mating and took no notice of me even when I walked through the door. I would wait in the living room, looking at what they’d painted, until Oshita cried out and climaxed.
From their work, I could understand their state of mind. They were childish, full of passion, and fatally lacking in something. They differed in what they lacked, though. Strangely enough, when they painted together, their deficiencies vanished. More than I did, they knew what each of them was missing. I could see that one had whatever it was the other needed. They completed each other. At the same time, they both wanted to be alone. They were extremely irritated by the fact that they were two, not one. They had intercourse as though they wanted to enter into each other’s bodies.
The result of this irritation were the rooms strewn with trash, the paint flung about everywhere, the ceaseless screwing.
Every other day I brought groceries that I had bought in town and spent several hours with them.
Akiko had changed. The Akiko I had known no longer existed. The seed of madness that I had occasionally glimpsed had grown to monstrous proportions. It was something at once bestial and sad. Oshita, on the other hand, had hardly changed at all.
It was the difference between a young woman who was not yet twenty and a man who had turned thirty.
“Both of you are painting pictures now. They’re so bad I want to cover my eyes when I look at them, but they’ve also got fiber—they’re the real thing.”
I made this same comment again and again when one or the other looked at me solicitously.
“It’s weird. I get irritated when I paint alone, but when I see her painting, I calm down. It’s been a repetition of that.”
“You’d better stop painting.”
“There’s no hope for me then?”
Alone, he was hopeless. He would always need someone who could supply what he lacked.
But I couldn’t say that to either of them. Their meeting was something like fate. Perhaps it was partly my doing, my plan. Even so, they complemented each other in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
Oshita seemed to have forgotten that he had killed Nomura and was on the run. Akiko also seemed to have forgotten that, until recently, she had been sleeping with me.
Unlike Oshita, I couldn’t supply what she lacked. It was probably because I’d managed to fill my lacks on my own, or if not, at least maneuver to render them insignificant. At any rate, my deficiencies hadn’t required another person to fix.
Or was that untrue? Was I really the only person I needed?
“Sometimes I want to sleep with sensei too,” Akiko said.
Oshita heard this, but gave no sign it bothered him. I no longer wanted to sleep with Akiko. I felt I could no longer connect with her, on her level.
Instead of having sex, I drew quick sketches on the paper that was scattered about. I drew the leftover food, the light fixture hanging from the ceiling, and Akiko and Oshita’s hands and feet. When they saw these sketches, they fell silent. Then one or the other would say something, in a low, slugged voice, and they would both dash into the bedroom and start screwing.
Maybe I showed up every other day just to deliver this sort of blow and enjoy their reaction. Maybe I wanted to see how far they could take their painting in tandem.
I sometimes lent them my bath, and that room too became soaked with a heavy atmosphere of sex. In fact it wasn’t just the “atmosphere”; I could smell it.
They didn’t emerge from Akiko’s cabin for days on end. I even started delivering painting materials to them. Akiko’s Citroen 2CV came to look like part of the cabin, while the only footprints in the snow outside were mine.
Returning to my own cabin, I faced the canvas. I wanted to paint something—without relying on technique. I would begin by murdering my own technique. I had expected the brush to stop, but my hand moved. I tried to smother the technique ingrained in my hand.
