Small Change Read Online Free PDF

we moved here, I picked up a small book about Cézanne. This was in September. I opened the book to dry landscapes and cool still lifes, to late summer and early fall, to the pleasure and pain of seasonal change, the detachment of weather. This is the detachment we seek and usually fail to find in friendships – an unbegrudging, clear-eyed, undemanding, infinitely interesting and natural presence.
    Here were pears on a table, apples in a bowl, a flowered pitcher, a leafy piece of fabric. Everything gave the impression of being aware of every other thing but in a way that transcends the human.
    I began to read the biographical notes and came upon the description of Cézanne’s friendship with Zola, a deep and long friendship that began in Aix in 1852 when Cézanne was thirteen, and ended in 1886 when Zola published a novel about a painter who hanged himself in front of the painting hecouldn’t complete. Everyone knew the painter was Cézanne.
    I reread the paragraph about the end of their friendship. “Although he spoke of it to no one, it could be seen that Cézanne’s grief was bitter and irremediable. Perhaps it was partly because of the sincere compassion expressed in the novel that Cézanne’s grief was so inconsolable.”
    I wondered how sincere Zola’s compassion was. I wondered how it was known that Cézanne’s grief was inconsolable if he spoke of it to no one, and how it was known that he spoke of it to no one. I wondered about Zola’s ulterior motives – his desire to hurt an old friend, his competitiveness, his honesty, his dishonesty. The book said that Zola had moved away from his Impressionist friends and no longer believed in them, having been their most valiant champion. But my main interest was Cézanne and the way he dealt with the discovery that his oldest and dearest friend considered him a failure and used him as subject matter in a book.
    No more letters passed between them, apparently. There were no more greetings, and they did not meet again.
    In 1886 Cézanne was forty-seven. His friendship with Zola had lasted more than thirty years. The first time Zola left for Paris and Cézanne remained in Aix, they were about twenty. Cézanne wrote to him: “Ever since you left I am tormented by grief. This is the truth. You would not recognize me. I feel heavy, stupid and slow.”
    The book has two self-portraits: an unfinished sketch in 1880 when he was forty-one, half bald, heavy forehead, dark beard, large face; then
Cézanne in a Soft Hat
ten years later,several years after the break with Zola and several years in the making. His nose and chin are more pointed than broad; his beard is white and grey; the colours of his coat, hat, and jacket are repeated in the colours of the wall; and he seems less massive – flimsier and more decorative. He is known for his persistence in the face of doubts and for how slowly he painted.
    In early October we were beside a river with two friends. The woman was telling us that old friends of theirs had just moved away. They had moved away one morning, and in the afternoon she had walked past the empty house and couldn’t believe how relieved she felt. She laughed about it and went on talking, compelled to tell us, her new friends, about these old friends.
    She said it was the woman in the couple who had pulled away, and she had never understood why. Simply, the invitations stopped, the Christmas gifts ended, various courtesies vanished. With their disappearance arrived her confusion and sense of hurt, so that when she walked her dog past their house she was never sure whether the woman came down the steps because she wanted to say hello, or because she felt she had to.
    She said, “I talked a lot about work with him, maybe she felt left out. And then she went through a lot of changes herself and got her own friends.”
    But none of these reasons was sufficient to explain a change so drastic, and she knew it.
    She peeled a peach as she told the story. She avoided