Assorted Prose by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

productions; but I had not been warned that the shack was mounted on ten-foot stilts. The only access to the hovel was by means of a movable ladder which, to judge from the sounds of altercation within, someone was reluctant to put down. At last, however, after I had nearly exhausted my battery in beeping the horn, a cheery red female face appeared at one of the windows, and a diaphanous old derelict clad in baggy blue coveralls, grumbling in a language I could not understand, lowered the rickety steps into place. This grim wraith was Alphonse Peintre.
    I had an excellent opportunity to study his face when, as I carried my cameras up the ladder, a rung snapped and to preserve my balance I seized his Orientally long, silken beard. His face was eroded by wrinklesas if by some never-ceasing geological process. His lips were thin and hard with peasant cunning. His ochre cheekbones suggested a possible Mongol strain in his blood. He wore a drab puce beanie on his abundant but unkempt locks, clotted with snaffles and burrs. But it was his eyes that held my attention. They were round with astonishment, their blue bleached as if by a sudden infusion of pain, and an indignant glint flashed deep in their lucid, oddly youthful depths.
    His wife rushed forward to lift us both into the cottage. As I felt her broad crimson hands, roughened by homely labor, tighten around my abdomen, I realized who of the couple provided the physical strength. This faithful helpmate was
de la terre
. I perceived a paradox in so airy an art loyally sheltered by such powerful, earthy muscles. Mme. Peintre cradled her husband like a child and set him in the room’s one furnishing, a worm-riddled rocking chair. “You have brought us luck,” she confided to me. “You will pay for the chickens?”
    It was a dispiriting room. A little wan light dribbled in across the thatched windowsills. Pots, peanut-butter jars, dried tubes, twisted coat hangers littered the floor. An icon hung cockeyed in one corner. The walls were entirely of canvas, punctured here and there where the good wife had snipped out pieces to sell to the American museums. Through these rents I saw a landscape from which all color had been drained by the vivid fancies of the artist’s remorseless imagination. Some sections of the shabby wall writhed with superimposed scribbles, like the magic caves near Lascaux.
    The venerable eremite slowly allowed a few words to escape his canny reserve. Though he had been a contemporary of Balzac, his words were not those of a senile man. How remarkably old these visual sorcerers live to be! It must be the relaxed work hours. “Giotto … blotto,” he said, in response to a question of mine. “Michel Agnolo … a little dude.” He called him “Agnolo,” as you would a childhood friend. “Monet
 … nada
. Poor Cézanne … a grind. He seemed always to be preparing for an examination that was never scheduled. Art is not like that. Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. Do not take down my words,” he protested with a sudden sly wave of his beautifully withered hand, encrusted with Byzantine rings, the ancient ascetic’s one luxury. “They are foolish. Art is foolish. Since Watteau,
nada
. And myself. I try. The moon is coming closer. I am not afraid. It is no bigger than a pie plate. Do you have enough?”
    We ate peanut-butter sandwiches—a typical meal of this
pays de Caux
. Mme. Peintre, a girlish grace imprisoned in her heavy body, adroitly usurped the rocking chair and fell asleep. Peintre scowled and squatted on the floor and began to twist coat hangers into unique and exquisite shapes. Absentmindedly he spat on my tripod, near my shoes. I assured him it was an accident. In the mysterious way of genius, he seemed to have retreated into himself. My conversational gambits fell unanswered, as if into an inscrutable primeval pool. Regretfully, I took my leave; in going out the door, I forgot—so