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  (Treatise on the Correction of the Intellect, Paragraph 20)

  It began like this. About ten years ago, Nella was in Moscow, staying with some old Russian friends. One day she passed a junk shop. Maybe it considered itself an antique shop. People at that time in Moscow were selling whatever they could find in their cupboards because wages and pensions had collapsed. One could buy family silver on street corners. For Nella, second-hand shops in any city in the world are as irresistible as dictionaries. She goes in to turn the pages. This time she found a painting. Oil on canvas. A small still-life of some red chrysanthemums.

  She bought it. Signed and dated: Kleber, 1922. It cost less than a song. Far less.

  Back in Paris she didn’t know where to hang it. It looked right nowhere. Here and there little flakes of paint – the size of salt grains –had fallen off, and you could see the white of the canvas. When in doubt Nella waits for the doubt to disappear. It usually does. She put the canvas in a black plastic sack in the garage alongside other packages of clothes, books and nondescript objects forgotten by those passing through. Before hiding it away she showed it to me, and I thought: Flowers in a nineteenth-century interior, with no hint of change, could only be Russian. The chrysanthemums were lying on a narrow ledge. Behind them stood an empty glazed vase. Were they about to be arranged in this pot? Or had they been taken out, a little too early, to be thrown away? In either case, better to leave it in the garage.

  Time passed. One year the garage got flooded. Nella took the painting out of its sack and propped it up in various corners of the lived-in rooms. More paint had flaked off, leaving more spots of white canvas. The damage was by now far more arresting than the image.

  I can’t bring myself to throw it away, Nella said last week.

  I found myself replying: I’ll try to repair it. It can’t be restored properly, it’s too far gone and I don’t have the skill. I can just colour the white spots.

  So I started. Mixing the colours on a white saucer. For many years I hadn’t used oil paint. When drawing I use inks or acrylic. No other colours mix like oil colours. You search touch by touch for a timbre on the saucer and then you discover whether or not, when applied to the canvas, the colour matches the ‘voice’ you were searching for.

  There were hundreds of white flaked-off spots to cover. Blackish crimsons for the flowers in shadow. Guitar browns for the wood of the drawer under the ledge. Shellfish greys for the walls in the corner where the ledge was. An indescribable magenta pink for the petals in the light. Everything suggested the room was small, with probably, in 1922, many people living in it.

  I lost count of time as I covered white spot after white spot. With this loss of a sense of time, my sense of identity slackened. Touch by touch, tone by tone, I was approaching a systematic vision which belonged to a pair of eyes which until then were not mine. These eyes were in another place.

  I was observing flowers thrown on a ledge in the corner of a small room in the afternoon light of a late September day in the year 1922. The Civil War was over. It was nevertheless a year of widespread famine. Nearly all the white spots are now covered.

  I went to look at the painting several times during the night. Or rather to look at the painted corner in the small room. I couldn’t leave them like that. Neither the flowers on the ledge nor the painting. You could still see where the white spots had been. Pockmarked. I had to return them in better condition to that late September afternoon, before the dreaded cold of winter arrived.

  I needed to paint more freely. Yet I could not treat the painting as mine; it was Kleber’s. More thoroughly his than I could have previously imagined. If I wasn’t free, the light wouldn’t come back.

  The next day early in the morning I continued. Sitting with the canvas on my knees and the saucer on the table beside me. There are some lines in a poem by Akhmatova on the theme of mourning which refer to a chrysanthemum crushed by a boot on a sidewalk. These lines were written twenty years later. The crimson chrysanthemums in this still-life are still innocent.

  I paint freely, inspired by the longing of what is there on the canvas. I discover how in the corner of a small room the light, falling on two peeling walls and half a dozen thrown-down flowers, is a kind of promise from some distant, unimaginable future.

  The job is done. There it is, a painting by Kleber, 1922.

  A moment has, for a moment, been saved. This moment occurred before I was born. Is it possible to send promises backwards?

  As long as a man is affected by the image of anything, he regards the thing as present, although it may not exist, nor will he regard it as past or future save in so far as its image is connected with the image of time past or future. Wherefore the image of the thing considered in itself is the same whether it refers to time present, past, or future, that is the constitution of the body, or, the emotion is the same whether the image of the thing be present, past, or future. And so the emotion of pleasure or pain is the same whether the image of the thing be present, past, or future.

  (Ethics, Part III, Proposition XVIII, Proof)

  A house stands on one side of a square in which there are tall poplars. The house, built just before the French Revolution, is older than the trees. It contains a collection of furniture, paintings, porcelain, armour which, for over a century, has been open to the public as a museum. The entry is free, there are no tickets, anybody can enter.

  The rooms on the ground floor and up the grand staircase, on the first floor, are all the same as they were when the famous collector first opened his house to the nation. As you walk through them, something of the preceding eighteenth century settles lightly on your skin like powder. Like eighteenth-century talc.

  Many of the paintings on display feature young women and shot game, both subjects testifying to the passion of pursuit. Every wall is covered with oil paintings hung close together. The outside walls are thick. No sound from the city outside penetrates.

  In a small room on the ground floor, which was previously a stable for horses and is now full of showcases of armour and muskets, I imagined I heard the sound of a horse blowing through its nostrils. Then I tried to imagine choosing and buying a horse. It must be like owning nothing else. Better than owning a painting. I also imagined stealing one. Perhaps it would have been more complicated, owning a stolen horse, than adultery? Commonplace questions to which we’ll never know the answer. Meanwhile I wandered from gallery to gallery.

  A chandelier in painted porcelain, the candles held aloft by an elephant’s trunk, the elephant wearing green, the porcelain made and painted in the royal factory in Sevres, first bought by Madame Pompadour. Absolute monarchy meant that every creature in the world was a potential servant, and one of the most persistent services demanded was Decoration.

  At the other end of the same gallery was a bedroom commode which belonged to Louis XV. The inlay is in rosewood, the rococo decorations in polished bronze.

  Most of the visitors, like me, were foreigners, more elderly than young, and all of them slightly on tiptoe, hoping to find something indiscreet. Such museums turn everyone into inquisitive gossips with long noses. If we dared, and could, we’d look into every drawer.

  In the Dutch part of the collection, we passed drunken peasants, a woman reading a letter, a birthday party, a brothel scene, a Rembrandt, and a canvas by one of his pupils. The latter intrigued me immediately. I moved on and then quickly came back to look at it several times.

  This pupil of Rembrandt was called Willem Drost. He was probably born in Leiden. In the Louvre in Paris there is a Bathsheba painted by him which echoes Rembrandt’s painting of the same subject painted in the same year. Drost must have been exactly contemporary with Spinoza. We don’t know where or when he died.

  She is not looking at the spectator. She is looking hard at a man she desired, imagining him as her lover. This man could only have been Drost. The only thing we know for certain about Drost is that he was desired precisely by this woman.

  I was remin
ded of something of which one is not usually reminded in museums. To be so desired – if the desire is also reciprocal – renders the one who is desired fearless. No suit of armour from the galleries downstairs ever offered, when worn, a comparable sense of protection. To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody can reach in this life to feeling immortal.

  It was then that I heard a voice. Not a voice from Amsterdam, a voice from the great staircase in the house. It was high-pitched yet melodious, precise yet rippling, as if about to dissolve into laughter. Laughter shone on it like light through a window onto satin. Most surprising of all, it was resolutely a voice speaking to a crowd of people; when it paused there was silence. I couldn’t distinguish the words, so my curiosity forced me, without a moment’s hesitation, to return to the staircase. Twenty or more people were slowly coming up it. Yet I couldn’t make out who had been speaking. All of them were waiting for her to begin again.

  ‘At the top of the staircase on the left you will see a three-tiered embroidery table, a woman’s table, where she left her scissors and her needlework and her work could still be seen, which was better don’t you think than hiding it away in a drawer? Locked drawers were for letters. This piece belonged to the Empress Josephine. The little oval blue plaques, which wink at you, are by Wedgwood.’

  I saw her for the first time. She was coming up the staircase alone. Everything she wore was black. Flat black shoes, black stockings, black skirt, black cardigan, a black band in her hair. She was the size of a large marionette, about four feet tall. Her pale hands hovered or flew through the air as she talked. She was elderly and I had the impression that her thinness was to do with slipping through time. Yet there was nothing skeletal about her. If she was like one of the departed, she was like a nymph. Around her neck she wore a black ribbon with a card attached to it. On the card was printed the famous name of The Collection and, in smaller letters, her own name. Her first name was Amanda. She was so small that the card looked absurdly large, like a label pinned to a dress in a shop window, announcing a last-minute bargain.

  ‘In the showcase over there you can see a snuff box made of carnelian and gold. In those days young women as well as men took snuff. It cleared the head and sharpened the senses.’ She raised her chin, threw her head back and sniffed.

  ‘This particular snuff box has a secret drawer in which the owner kept a tiny gouache portrait, no larger than a postage stamp, of his mistress. Look at her smile. I would say it was she who gave him the snuff box. Carnelian is a red variety of agate, mined in Sicily. The colour perhaps reminded her in some way of him. Most women, you see, see men as either red or blue.’ She shrugged her frail shoulders. ‘The red ones are easier.’

  When she stopped talking, she did not look at the public but turned her back and walked on. Despite her smallness, she walked much faster than her followers. She was wearing a ring on her left thumb. I suspect that her black hair was a wig for I’m sure she prefers wigs to rinses.

  Our walk through the galleries began to resemble a walk through a wood. This was a question of how she placed us, herself and what she was talking about. She consistently prevented us from crowding around whatever she was explaining. She pointed out an item as if it were a deer to be glimpsed as it crossed our path between two distant trees. And wherever she directed our attention, she always kept herself elusively to the side, as if she had just stepped out from behind another tree. We came upon a statue, its marble turning a little green because of the shade and dampness.

  ‘The statue depicts Friendship consoling Love,’ she murmured, ‘for Madame de Pompadour’s relation with Louis XV is now platonic, which hasn’t stopped her wearing, has it?, the most gorgeous dress.’

  Downstairs, one gilded timepiece after another chimed four.

  ‘Now we go’, she said, holding her head high, ‘to another part of the wood. Here all is fresh, and everyone is freshly dressed – including the young lady on the swing. No statues of Friendship, all the statues here are cupids. The swing was put up in the spring. One of her slippers, you notice?, has already been kicked off! Intentionally? Unintentionally? Who can tell? As soon as a young lady, freshly dressed, sits herself there on the seat of the swing, such questions are hard to answer, no feet on the ground. The husband is pushing her from behind. Swing high, swing low. The lover is hidden in the bushes in front of her where she told him to be. Her dress – it’s less elaborate, more casual, than Madame de Pompadour’s and frankly I prefer it – is of satin with lace flounces. Do you know what they called the red of her dress, they called it peach, though personally I never saw a peach of that colour, any more than I ever saw a peach blushing. The stockings are white cotton, a little roughish compared to the skin of the knees they cover. The garters, pink ones to match the slippers, are too small to go higher up the leg without pinching. Notice her hidden lover. The foot which lost the slipper is holding up her skirt and petticoats high – their lace and satin rustle softly in the slipstream – and nobody, I promise you, nobody in those days wore underwear! His eyes are popping out of his head. As she intended him to do, he can see all.’

  Abruptly the words stopped, and she made a rustling noise with her tongue behind clenched teeth, as though she were pronouncing only the consonants of the words lace and satin without the vowels. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them, she said: ‘Lace is a kind of white writing which you can only read when there’s skin behind it.’

  Then she stepped sideways out of sight. The guided tour was over.

  Before anybody could ask a question or thank her, she disappeared into an office behind the book counter. When she came out, half an hour later, she had taken off the ribbon around her neck with its card and put on a black overcoat. If she had stood beside me, she would have come up to my elbows, no more.

  She walked briskly down the front steps of the house into the square where the poplars are. She was carrying an old flimsy Marks and Spencer’s plastic bag which looked as if it might tear.

  This endeavour, when it has reference to the mind alone, is called will (voluntas); but when it refers simultaneously to the mind and body it is called appetite (appetitus), which therefore is nothing else than the essence of man, from the nature of which all things which help in his preservation necessarily follow; and therefore man is determined for acting in this way. Now between appetite and desire (cupiditas) there is no difference but this, that desire usually has reference to men in so far as they are conscious of their appetite; and therefore it may be defined as appetite with consciousness thereof. It may be gathered from this, then, that we endeavour, will, seek, or desire nothing because we deem it good; but on the contrary, we deem a thing good because we endeavour, will, seek, or desire it.

  (Ethics, Part III, Proposition IX)

  What was in the Marks and Spencer’s bag? I imagine a cauliflower, a pair of resoled shoes and seven wrapped presents. The presents are all for the same person and each one is numbered and tied up with the same golden twine. In the first a sea shell. A small conch about the size of a child’s fist, perhaps the size of her fist. The shell is the colour of silverish felt, veering towards peach. The swirls of its brittle encrustations resemble the lace flounces on the dress of the woman on the swing, and its polished interior is as pale as skin habitually sheltered from the sun.

  The second present: a bar of soap, bought at a Boots Chemist shop and labelled Arcadia. It smells of a back you can touch but can’t see because you’re facing the front.

  The third packet contains a candle. The price tag says 8.5 EURO. In the fourth another candle. Not made of wax this time but in a glass tumbler which looks as if it is full of sea water with sand and very small shells at the bottom. The wick appears to be floating on the surface. A printed label stuck onto the glass says: Never leave a burning candle unattended.

  The fifth present: a paper bag of a brand of sweets called wine gums. This brand has existed for a century. Probably they are the cheapest sweets in the world. Despite their very varied
and acid colours, they all taste of pear drops.

  The sixth present is an audio cassette of Augustinian nuns singing ‘O Filii et Filiae’, a thirteenth-century plainsong written by Jean Tisserand.

  The seventh is a box of graphite sticks and pencils. Soft. Medium. Hard. Traces made by the soft graphite are jet black like thick hair, and traces made by the hard are like hair turning grey. Graphite, as skins do, has its own oils. It is a very different substance from the burnt ash of charcoal. Its sheen when applied on paper is like the sheen on lips. With one of the graphite pencils she has written on a piece of paper which she has put in the box: ‘On the last hour of the last day, one must remember this.’

  Then I went back to look at the woman who was in love with the Dutch painter.

  The idea which constitutes the formal being of the human mind is the idea of the body, which is composed of many individuals, each composed of many parts. But the idea of each individual composing the body necessarily exists in God. Therefore the idea of the human body is composed of the many ideas of the component parts.