Chapter Fourteen #3
I can hardly recall their faces, even when they stare up at me from the first few pages of the now open sketchbook. They are no more than charcoal smudges in my memory, the colours of their hair long since faded, the sounds of their voices lost to the erosion of time.
“It was fine for a time. I enjoyed the work, enjoyed the freedom to paint, enjoyed the praise the painter gave me when I did well. But all good things must come to an end, as they say, and soon enough, I was forced to realize that sometimes a dream is not worth the pain needed to get there.”
“You wretched little beast! What is this? What good is this filth supposed to do me? How dare you think—”
A cool breeze dusts across the back of my hand, and I offer Kolfina a small smile to soothe the worry now pinched in her little nose.
I take a breath, flipping through the next few pages of the book to show her various sketches of that old city, of the people who lived there and the ones that only traveled through.
Some were fairly normal pieces, others laced with darker tones—animal carcasses being overtaken by foliage and fungi, skulls with flowers sprouting from eye sockets and mouths, faces of people I didn’t know rotting away with age.
“I ran away when I was fourteen, hiding away in carriages and carts until I made it all the way to Paris. I spent a year on the street before a constable found me and dropped me off at a parish.” His face is easier to recognize on the next page, his mustache thick and distinct, though I am sure I’d exaggerated it a bit more than necessary.
“The nuns didn’t much like me, convinced I was wicked from the moment I stepped foot in the church, but I made myself useful enough. ”
Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still feel the sting of their switches along the back of my hands.
Can still smell the acrid scent of the lye soap they shoved in my hands and feel the ache in my knees from hours and hours spent scrubbing at the floors.
My fingers would be withered and weak by the end of the day, but it never stopped me from sneaking my sketchbook out from underneath my cot and sketching late into the night, my eyes straining in the low candlelight.
I flip past the sketches of the nuns, their habits torn and tattered, and past the mother Mary holding her son's heart in the cradle of her hands.
I bypass page after page of stained-glass windows, each made with bone and sinew instead of glass and stone.
Until finally, I reach a page with only one drawing on it—a portrait of a man, handsome in his own right, with a sharp nose and even sharper jaw.
His hair falls in loose curls around his face, as if creating a frame around the deep, endless eyes that peer up at me now.
Kolfina brushes her fingers over the page, a contemplative look on her face. She gestures to the door once more, forming the vague shape of a head and shoulders with her fingers. It takes me a moment to realize what she means.
“Ah, yes. He is the same man as the bust I have at the bottom of the stairs.” Guilt claws at the inside of my skin, but I swallow it down and continue turning pages in the book, showing off the numerous drawings I’d done of the same man, then of my siblings who came after.
“I was sixteen when he found me. I used to run away from the church sometimes to avoid Mass, and I would find myself a park or a fountain or an alley to hide away in, sketching whoever or whatever crossed my path. One day, a man stopped to watch me draw and expressed an interest in my art.”
Kolfina’s face screws up in something akin to concern, and I cannot help but laugh at how adorable it looks on her pretty, round face.
“Yes, I was rather hesitant myself. I might have been a child, but I was no fool. I’d lived on the streets long enough to know when to be careful of grown men and their sweet words.
” Even when I wasn’t on the streets, when I was still in that small shop in Lyon, I knew the dangers that came with men who pretended to care.
“Nikolai Alilovi? was his name,” I continue.
“He was a lover of the arts and had a habit of finding people of like-mind to sponsor in their passions. He offered me such sponsorship, and before I knew it, I was adopted, given a home and a family, a studio for my art, and all the supplies I could ever ask for. He asked for nothing in return other than for me to be happy.”
The surprise is evident on Kolfina’s face when I glance at her. I cannot blame her. It was a hard thing to grasp myself, back then.
“He used to tell me, ‘My little darling, we have so much to do, so much to love, and only one life to do it. We must take the time to enjoy that which makes our hearts beat, or what is the point of living at all?’”
A soft laugh tumbles out of me at that, the guilt twisting even harder in my stomach, forming a painful ball that tries lodging somewhere low in my throat.
It had taken me a while to understand what he meant all those years ago.
Even now, I struggle with it sometimes. The dreaded human need for validation.
For recognition. That greedy child in the heart of everyone that yearns to be seen and told they’re doing well.
To be told that someone is proud of them.
“He was always so kind to me. Supportive to a fault. I’m not sure I have ever believed myself to have deserved it.”
Kolfina’s chill seeps into my shoulder as she leans closer to me, her eyes locked on mine as if searching. I can tell she wishes to say something, that bottom lip once again pinched between her teeth, so I wait.
After a long moment, the little ghost presses her fingers to the painting once more, then to the sketchbook, her brows furrowed as she asks for the connection between my story and the painting she'd asked about.
“While my father has never required that we make profit or fame from our passions, it is an inevitability with so much time now given to us.” Suddenly feeling too bare, my chest flayed open for all to see, I quickly gather my sketchbook and tie it shut once more, tucking it back into the drawer where it belongs.
“My brother Jonas has played in orchestras all over the world; he was even invited to play for King Louis a few years ago. My youngest sister’s fashion designs are desired all throughout Italy and France. And my art…”
I pause, swallow thick around the stone blocking my airways. I cannot tear my eyes away from the lock on the buffet, cannot stop my fingers from tightening around the key until it whines in protest.
“I was well known once. My portraiture skills were sought after by dukes and princesses and actors. My landscapes have been displayed in the Louvre and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. My father was… very proud of me.” At least I had hoped he was.
He came to every showing he could, displayed my works throughout the villa and spoke of me at length to anyone who expressed even a small note of interest in one of my pieces.
It used to warm my chest to see him smile at me with that proud look in his eyes. Like I was something beloved, treasured. Like I was more than some little monster he plucked up off the street out of pity.
“Then one day, I allowed myself to believe that the love for my work and the fame I’d accrued over time could shield me from the scorn of polite society.
” I gesture to the room around us, a bittersweet smile on my lips when I finally draw my eyes to Kolfina.
She looks half frightened, half despondent, and though I hate to see such sadness in her lovely features, I do not know how to wipe it away when she had asked for the truth.
“Jonas convinced me that this was what my heart desired to paint. That this was what would have me remembered, what would leave a mark on the world in the way we all strive to do. I believed him, and the world turned against me for it.”
I still remember the frightened look on the faces of those who wandered their way into that gallery.
People who praised and worshiped my art before, now sickened and despaired at what they found beneath the mask I once wore.
I remember the articles in the newspapers the next day, the cruel words printed for all the world to see.
I remember the whispers and the shouts, remember the fear of word getting back to my father.
Jonas assured me our father and siblings did not care for the pitiful rumors and insults that were being lobbied against me. He promised that Father was proud of me for trying, proud of me for showing that raw, vicious part of myself, despite what others might think.
But I am a fragile thing, so easily broken in the face of my own inadequacies.
So, I locked myself away in my little house in the center of Paris.
I tucked away my paints and refused letters or visits from anyone aside from Jonas.
I spent over a year wasting away in the dark, until the absence of a paintbrush in my hand grew more painful than the ache of my spiraling insecurities.
A month later, Jonas was helping me pack my things and complaining his way up the side of my new mountain.
A month later, I was setting up a new studio in the back office of a French chateau, overlooking an ocean and an odd little village.
A month later, I was painting again.