Portrait of a Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wearing gown, toga, and a crown of laurels, you grumble and grouse as you climb the four steps to the podium …
    He stares at a blank spot on the wall. Tomorrow, tomorrow perhaps. Tomorrow dawn, or death. Or life. Or both, or neither, an intermediate state, a status quo. Why don’t you drop in on me in my purgatory, the other side of no man’s land …
    Go looking. Go and look, of course. Look for light, for daylight on the other side. The other side of the mountain … The always fataloutcome of repetitious movements of the hand, the same skilfully adjusted dose of colour, the same trap set once again beyond overweening ambition? To strive for a
chef d’œuvre
. The ambition of Tintoretto and Titian resuscitated, risen from the ashes. Monumental ambition? Monumental mistake.
Antonellus Messaneus me pinxit
. Without the look, the certainty, or the confidence. A tin-pot portrait of a man. A mere princeling, a pasty-faced cad, a hairless and miserly coward. A Condottiere who’d taken the wrong turn, a miserable bit-part actor who’d not had time to learn his lines. And what about him? What was he doing mixed up in that – he, the one and only, the prince of forgers and forger of princes, with his fine nose and his eagle eye, his poison voice and magic hand. He who thought he could draw on the purest spring and summon from his ultra-modern easel the supreme quintessence of Italian art and the indisputable apogee of the Renaissance? Was he master of the universe? Meister Gaspard Winckler! Why shouldn’t you laugh out loud? Señor Gaspard Winkleropoulos, alias El Greco. The world in his right hand. A walking art gallery!
    You’ve killed a man, you have, don’t you see. You committed murder. You think it’s easy. Well, it’s not. You think that committing murder has a meaning. Well, it doesn’t. You think it’s easy to paint a Condottiere. Well, it’s not. Nothing is easy. Nothing is quick. Everything is wrong. You could not but get it wrong. You could only ever end up like this. Caught in your own trap, by your own folly, by your own lies …
    *
    My future all of a sudden is laid out before me in time and space. Just these few yards still to cross. Just these few hours still to get through. It all comes down to this. This is where it all comes to a halt, where it all comes to a stop. It’s the edge and the threshold. It has to be crossed, and then anything can happen. The minute I get through the wall of this room maybe everything will begin to have a meaning again: my past, my present and my future. But first thousands upon thousands of meaningless gestures have to be performed one by one. Raise the arm, lower the arm. Until the earth shakes. Until the wall bursts and night shines forth in starry splendour. It’s simple. The simplest thing in the world. Raise the arm, arm raised, like …
    Gather your strength, try to summon it all up for a single push so as to begin living again, take this first step and be something other than a man lying on a bed playing at being dead in his own grave, the man you’re staring at as if he were somebody else. Why is it so easy? Why is it so hard? You don’t move. What’s the point of having a conscience? You killed a man. That’s serious. Very. Not a thing you should do. Madera hadn’t hurt you. Why did you kill Madera? No motives. He was fat and alive, he puffed like a sea-lion, he was ugly, he was heavy, he wandered around the laboratory, dangerously, right behind you, saying nothing, not looking at you; he hovered around the easel with his hands behind his back and his lips slightly parted, wheezing from asthma; he would go away and slam the door and you could hear his steps echoing in the stairwell, under the arch, and for a long time after that as you got back to painting with slightly unsteady hands, feeling outraged without knowing why, almost ina panic from the presence of that man,