A Masterpiece of Revenge Read Online Free PDF Page A

their order, as if each were parts of a single sentence, visual words.
    Jean-Louis surfing … ocean, tide, wave, undertow, drown.
    Jean-Louis playing tennis … court, serve, double fault, overhead, put away.
    Jean-Louis reading on his balcony … height, vertigo, fall.
    When you play this kind of game, danger lurks everywhere, even in the happiest of photos. Behind the tanned skier is the tree that can kill him. Beneath the foot of the young man hugging his girlfriend is the step waiting to give way. It was silly, regressive. Still…
    In the corner of the beach in the first photo was a brown-haired woman. Was she meaningful? Was her look malevolent?
    What about the flower bushes to the left of the tennis court in the second photo? Could they mean something malevolent, as they did in the tarot cards my grandmother used to read the future? One card had a bouquet of flowers in the corner, signifying, she told me solemnly, “I’ll luck to the man who strays from the straight path.” The simplest bouquet of flowers can foretell doom.
    My grandmother had attempted to initiate me in the obscure arts of divination. I used to laugh, though now I think it had some influence on my choice of careers. My life revolved around the search for hidden meanings.
    Symbols and signs are inscribed even in those paintings whose meanings seem self-evident. From the works of Cranach, Bellini, Piranesi, I had learned a thing or two about puzzles. Fm not talking about hidden figures, magic squares, crosses, skulls, or scales, all of which you can decipher with the help of a half-decent reference book. Fm talking about symbols that on first view don’t seem like symbols at all: a color, a chubby baby, a stone terrace, a bouquet of flowers.
    The
Allegory of Purgatory ,
 which for many years was attributed to Giorgione, then to Bellini, is a veritable hotbed of clues that yield unending interpretative possibilities. Thousands of feverish imaginations have focused on the painting, trying to account for all the arcane references and multiple meanings. To say the painting deconstructs itself is too easy an excuse for giving up.
    Observing Piranesi’s
Prison
or De Chirico’s abandoned cities, those factories of the uncanny, we learn that the only way they can be approached is through metaphor, in an association of ideas. You find the first word, which in turn gives you the second, and so on. By a sequence of decoding, the visual turns linguistic.
    Even were my son not involved, I would have spent the day poring over the photographs. I do not like being kept in the dark. Having devoted my life to deciphering the seemingly indecipherable, I know that it is possible to find meaning. The problem this time was that my judgment was clouded. Behind these photos lurked some danger. Instinct was telling me to beware.
    â€œPremonitions are like instinct,” my wife used to say. “They are infallible.”
    Sophie’s intuitions had been infallible. She could tell if Jean-Louis was ill before the symptoms appeared. She sensed when he had a fever. She would run to Jean-Louis’s crib even before he awoke in tears from a bad dream.
    Thinking of Sophie made me think I should ask for advice from someone, but I did not feel I had anyone to whom I could turn. I had always been a bit of a loner. It’s not that I’m misanthropic, for I’m not. I enjoy the company of good friends like Luciano and Sylvie.
    But I relished solitude more. That is perhaps why I chose the line of work I did. I enjoyed being alone with a work of art, alone with its beauty — even if the work contained some wisdom I might share with my fellow man, its pleasure for me lay in the poetry of contemplation. In solitary communion with beauty one achieves the highest state of awareness.
    The truth was I did not feel I could confide in anyone. Yes, there was my sister, and Sylvie, and Luciano, all of whom were above suspicion in that