‘But, Mirabelle, it’s so expensive. I’d be happy to paint you for nothing, but then I’d want the painting myself. Also I am running out of francs.’
‘You may have the painting for yourself, in any case. I would prefer that. But you cannot paint it for no money. I want you to charge me a regular price. This is a commission.’
‘It would be my first commission, Mirabelle. But you have no idea of the cost. I must charge three hundred francs for each painting to have enough to live.’
‘I will not pay three hundred francs.’
She pauses. I’m off the hook. She just has no idea. I see her differently now, though. I see her as a painting. I would like to paint her if she would be willing to pose. I’d like to paint her inner calm, vitality, separateness, courage, if those things can be painted. It’d be more money down the tubes, more paint out of the tubes, but I still have a few francs left and then there’ll be the tourist money this summer. Maybe I’ll go up onto the hill at Montmartre, play animal with the others in the artists’ zoo; I’m sure I could sell something there.
‘Jacques, I must pay at least a thousand francs or you cannot paint my portrait. I would gladly pay more if you want it.’
Hell, I’m not off the hook! In fact I’m really hooked. Mirabelle gets up and glides in that special way she has, not dragging her feet but hardly lifting them, feeling forward with them, as if she’s sliding her feet into slippers with each step, moving quickly to the cupboard again. What other delicious goody will she pull out?
She takes down a metal box with pictures enameled on it. She pries the lid open, reaches inside, and feels around. She pulls out one, then two, five-hundred-franc bills. She closes the box and puts it up on the shelf again. She comes back to the table.
‘Now you know where the blind old lady hides all her money. She does not hide it from herself.’
She holds the bills out to me. I don’t want to take them.
‘Wait till I’m finished with the portrait, Mirabelle. This is crazy.’
‘No, but it is crazy waiting until the painting is finished before I pay you. What is the difference. This way you can have the money now and I would only keep it in that box doing nothing. You can buy paints with it so the painting can be better. That makes much more sense.’
She leans the money closer to me, looking into my eyes the entire time. I take the money. She’s right.
‘If I come over to where you are painting now, on La Place Furstenberg, may I stay beside you? I will not be a bother, I want to feel you painting, know you are seeing, really seeing, that which I can only remember. Would that be all right?’
It’s okay with me, but how’s she going to get over? It means crossing boulevard Saint-Germain and that’s a fast-moving, wide street, not exactly the kind of street a blind old lady should try to cross.
‘You can come with me if you want. I’ll help you across boulevard Saint-Germain.’
‘No, I shall clean up here first. You would be surprised how I can find my way. I go anywhere in Paris I want. At the boulevard, I listen to the feet. When they start moving across the street I go with the others. Also, there is always someone to give an arm to an old lady in a red costume with a white cane. I can sometimes almost see myself in my mind. Of course, the boulevard was completely different when I last saw it, but I can tell much from the sounds and smells.’
So I take off. The light should be just right now. I’m realizing that, in the end, I’ll be running two paintings at the same time if it’s going to take me several days to paint each one. I’ll need one canvas for morning light and one for afternoon. I’ll really have good use for that thousand francs, just keeping myself in paint and canvas.
I’ve been painting about an hour when I look beside me and there’s Mirabelle sitting in a little collapsible chair. She smiles.
‘Oh, now you see me. I have been here awhile and you have been so busy looking, you didn’t know I was here. Sometimes looking so hard can make one blind. Is that not interesting?’
I’m just getting into painting the globes of the light stand in the center of the Place. I swear each one is a slightly different color. If you didn’t look closely, you’d think they were only white, but one’s slightly bluish white, one’s greenish, one yellowish, and the other has a violet tinge. I never would have guessed it until I tried painting them. I try explaining this to Mirabelle. Again she closes her eyes as I talk as if she’s trying to cast up the images in her mind. We’re quiet for a while.
‘Jacques, do you mind if I talk about what I am seeing here, myself, in my mind, listening to the wind against the trees, smelling the street, the paint, you; remembering from when I was a little girl?’
‘No, I’d like that very much, Mirabelle.’
‘Well, first I remember it was like a giant room, as if it were not outside at all. The trees make a great cover like an umbrella. There were benches on each side of the lamp and I would sit and stare at each of the globes, moving my head back and forth to watch my reflection move in each of them. The walls then were gray, blue-gray, violet, brown-gray, and when the sun would shine on them, they seemed to glow with a white luminescence not much different from the white in the sky between the leaves.
‘Now I understand the walls have all been painted white and yellow and light colors of brown. It must be beautiful, but it is not what I have in my mind.
‘It seemed then, as a child, that the street down to the rue Jacob was very long. We would roller-skate down that street, our skates strapped to our shoes, and we would roll hoops. There were very few automobiles and many horses. Only part of the street was smooth, the rest was stones. The rue Cardinale was only dirt. The windows were mostly open and will always be open in my mind, with flowers at the windows and clothing hanging on little lines, like butterflies against the green of the trees.
‘Also, at certain times, the trees would have purple flowers, the flowers would then fall, and we would gather them in our skirts and throw the petals at each other. It was a wonderful time.’
She stops. She still has her eyes closed. She’s brought such a freshness, a dreamlike vision to what I’m seeing, I find I’m integrating some of her feelings into my painting. I have alternatives for almost any decision I make in the painting now. There’s what my eyes see, there’s what my mind is seeing, the selective vision of the painter; and then there’s the vision of Mirabelle’s mind. It’s the same as it was with the pigeons against the sky over Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I’m flying in her dream, painting her desires.
She keeps on talking, resurrecting the memories she’s stored, cherished, all these years, speaking of the way it was, and it seems so much more real than what I’m seeing before me.
I begin to think I’m going blind myself, then realize it’s only getting dark. I have no idea what time it is, but the painting is almost finished. I never believed I could get so far along on a painting in a single day. And what I’ve done is good, it holds together; more than that, it sings out the feelings I have, about Paris, about Mirabelle, and in many ways her feelings about Paris as a young girl, and now as a blind old woman.
I pack up the box. Mirabelle has some grains with her for the pigeons. Many from the flock at Saint-Germain-des-Prés come here to this Place and pick up bits of food tourists or others leave on the ground. When my box is packed, I lean against the wall beside where Mirabelle is sitting. It’s a great little folding stool she has, I wish I had one for myself, sometimes my back gets tired standing. She turns to me.
‘I feel it growing cooler. Is it really becoming dark? Is that why you have packed up your paints?’
‘That’s right, Mirabelle. It was getting so