Mistral's Daughter (53 page)

"It's never come for me
—
not for 'good and all,' so why should it come for you?
 
Each canvas must lead into a new problem, you
must wake up every day wondering what you are going to discover, what you are
going to teach yourself, what new things you didn't know this morning you will
know by this evening...
 
but how often
have I said this to you, my Fauve?
 
Will
you ever start to believe me?"

"I keep thinking I
should be better," Fauve muttered.
 
Her painting was the only area in which she found herself increasingly
baffled, unable to make progress because of a growing insecurity and
frustration.

When she was little
—
and now, looking back it seemed like an innocent's paradise
—
she had
had such daring, she had known no limitations to what she would try to draw or
paint, but every year the burden of being Mistral's daughter had become
heavier.
 
She sometimes wished she had no
artistic talent at all
—
it would make life so much simpler, not to want
to work in the same field as her father.

As Fauve demolished her fish
she remembered that first summer at
La Tourrello
when, after a day or
two of consideration, Mistral had allowed her into his studio on the condition
that she stay perfectly quiet while he worked.
 
He'd given her sticks of charcoal, paper and then, as an afterthought,
some old, almost used-up tubes of paint, and a few worn-out brushes and a
canvas, and installed her in a corner.

At first she had just watched
him, but he walked about the studio for so long between each lightning attack
of his brush that she soon lost interest in his odd movements and turned to the
materials he'd given her.

At home in New York she'd had
only pencils, sticky crayons and pastels, which promptly broke, and sets of
watercolors, which she had tried, over the years, to copy the illustrations in
some of her favorite story books, but no one had ever thought of letting her
near oil paints.

The smell of the tubes was
immediately inebriating, she clearly remembered that instant when she had
rubbed the paint on her fingers and sniffed with rapture.
 
Then, imitating what she had watched Mistral
do before he started work, she squeezed a dollop of paint out of each tube and
arranged them in a semicircle on the wooden board he'd handed her.
 
What next?
 
She had wondered, confronting the first blank canvas of her life.
 
She wanted to ask father but didn't dare to
interrupt him.
 
There were no books
around for her to search for pictures to copy, no flowers in a vase or fruit in
a bowl.
 
The immense paintings on the
walls all around her were too confusing, too complex for her to dream of trying
to copy them, so eventually Fauve dipped her brush into the darkest of the paints,
a deep, rich blue, and started to outline the most central object in the
studio, her father's easel.

She pulled her red eyebrows
together in a straight line as she concentrated on it, freely and boldly,
undaunted by the problem of perspective since she didn't know what perspective
was, and saw only what was literally before her eyes.
 
She worked so steadily and quietly that it
was an hour before Mistral remembered her.
 
She was so engrossed that she didn't notice when he came up behind her
and took a look at what she was up to.
 
His hair rose on his arms and the back of his neck in a shock of
recognition.
 
She sees the way an artist
sees, he thought, not needing to explain to himself what he meant.
 
He made no comment that day but the next day
he gave her a sprig of grass in a vase to work from, and the following day he
gave her an apple.

"Regard! Regard,
Fauve...
 
use your eyes, my little one, you must learn
to see...
 
see that apple...
 
it looks round, doesn't it?
 
But if you look
—
if you truly look
—
you'll see that the top is higher on the left...
 
it isn't round at all, is it?
 
And why doesn't it roll like a ball, this
apple? Because it's almost flat on the bottom
—
do you see that with
your own eyes, little one?
 
And that
little scar on the skin of the apple...
 
can you tell me where it starts and where it finishes? What color is the
scar, Fauve?
 
Is it almost white?
 
Regard!
 
Do you see how the red of the apple is touched by yellow?
 
And do you see where the yellow becomes
brighter, just at the side? Now
—
Tell me, can you see where, on your
board, you have placed these colors, this red, this yellow?
 
It's all there, Fauve, if you only use your
eyes."

Then, as he had been aching
to do from the first day, in a moment that would never be forgotten by either
of them, he had finally reached out and put his huge hand right on top of
Fauve's hand and guided it with his powerful fingers so that her brush moved
under his direction, his force passing into her own fingers.
 
She relaxed her small hand but kept a firm
grip on her brush and allowed her wrist and bones and tendons to
lean
into
his, the way a good dancer follows a strong partner, neither too yieldingly nor
too stiffly, and as she saw and felt her brush make stroke after stroke, she
drank in knowledge with her muscles as well as with her mind.
 
  

This was what it should feel
like
, his hand was informing her hand,
this is the way it goes.
No
matter how original an artist must become, Mistral believed that in art, as in
language, there was a basic grammar that has to be learned before true speech
is possible and it was in this grammar that he trained Fauve.

That summer of Fauve's eighth
year, the summer when her art lessons began, was also the year that Mistral
started to frequent the café in Félice again.
 
After an absence of twenty years he began taking Fauve there with him
before dinner every day merely to be able to order a drink "for my
daughter, Fauve."
 
Little by little
the men of the town, who had almost never set eyes on him since the War had
interrupted all of their lives, began to gather around and admire the little
girl while he offered them round after round with a joviality he couldn't
contain, a friendliness they began to accept, slowly at first and suspiciously,
but won over by the lively, curious, friendly child.

Mistral had never taken his
daughter Nadine into Félice with him.
 
Even if he'd wanted to, Kate would have discouraged it.
 
When he returned from his wanderings in 1956
he discovered, without any regret, that from the time she was eight Nadine had
been sent to boarding school in England.

In spite of Nadine's first
four years at the village school, Kate had always considered it unthinkable
that her daughter should be brought up for long in the countryside, for she was
to be a citizen of the great world in which Kate had lived before she met
Mistral.
 
Nadine was very young when she
had learned to consider Félice as a rather inconsequential and old-fashioned
oddity in her own important life.
 
It
existed, like a backdrop, painted in a whimsically naive style, a living Brueghel,
that set off the qualities of Mademoiselle Nadine Mistral in a valuable
way.
 
Kate allowed her daughter to
consider
La Tourrello
itself merely a charmingly unconventional choice
of residence, dictated by the whim of a famous, therefore permissibly eccentric
father.

As she grew older, Nadine
discovered for herself that
La Tourrello
had great usefulness in her
scheme of things, for it was famous all over the world, and when she spoke of
it to her friends, its name was received with the same reverence as if it had
been a castle.
 
The
mas
became a
showplace that she displayed from time to time to especially favored friends
before she rushed off to stay with them at the more civilized and desirable
spots where they spent their summers.

Nadine, exquisite Nadine,
with her cool, aquatic green eyes, straight, shoulder-length blond hair and
that eternal little smile that was not a smile at all but the shape of the
upper lip of her delicate pink mouth, was exceedingly unpopular in Félice.

When Mistral first brought
Fauve to the café in the summer 1961, no one worried overmuch about what
Mademoiselle Nadine’s reactions might be to the arrival of a little half-sister
who had appeared out of nowhere, or rather out of the superb scandal they knew
very well, for had it not been in every newspaper and magazine, and was it not
the sort of story one could scarcely forget?
 
Nor were Kate's emotions treated tenderly in the torrent of gossip that
inundated Félice at Fauve's arrival, another chapter in the endlessly chewy,
delectably juicy explorations of Mistral's home life that occupied the
villagers for many a pleasant hour over the years.
 
Kate Mistral did all her shopping in Apt or
in Avignon, ignoring the village stores, a detestable and unforgivable trait in
anyone who lived in the vicinity, and one which guaranteed her an ever-mounting
degree of enmity.
 
Kate barely deigned to
stop at the village gas station to fill up her car.
 
But what could you expect of a woman who
thought she was better than her neighbors?

None of the other rich
families who had bought homes in the Lubéron were the object of anything like
the speculation directed at Mistral.
 
The
others' homes were used for summer vacations, they were visitors only, clearly
not of the countryside.
 
But Mistral's
position was ambiguous from the day he had settled in Félice in 1926.

He had become almost, but not
truly, a part of the village in those years when he was the chief stalwart of
the boules team, those years before the war when Kate had been content to live
in relative tranquility, entertaining too often, it was true, but then she was
American, after all.

After the war the climate of
the village itself changed; eight men from Félice had been killed and a dozen
had spent years in Germany doing forced labor, while many of the younger men
had been in the
Maquis
.

The café, where once the most
animated discussions had concerned the relative merits of the boules grounds
of other villages, politics were now argued seriously and the talk had away of
turning ugly; the supporters of de Gaulle refused to drink with the men who
voted Communist. Mistral, with his loathing of politics, avoided the café, and
his absence was perceived as a feeling of superiority, a belief clearly
substantiated when Kate ordered the construction of the swimming pool.
 
No one single thing she might have done would
have more alienated her from her neighbors whose incomes depended, in the most
basic way, on the amount of rainfall every year.

The distance that both
Mistral and Kate put between themselves and the life of the village after the
war did nothing to stem the gossip about them; quite the contrary, for were
they not still there, as if defying their neighbors?

Nor did it help when Marte
Pollison couldn't resist dropping certain details about life at
La Tourrello
into the ears of her cousins who owned the hardware store in Félice.
 
Soon every housewife in the town knew
precisely how much Madame Mistral spent on champagne for those parties she
gave, how many kilos of pâté de foie gras and smoked salmon were delivered from
the finest grocery store in Avignon before a grand reception, how many extra
servants Marte supervised during the busy summer season.

Nothing could surprise them,
they said to each other, about this woman who had actually installed five
bathrooms with hot water and tubs in
La Tourrello
when she had first
come to live there, at a time when many of the richest farmers of the valley
had not yet installed running water in their homes.
 
What folly!
 
Did the Mistrals not realize that the tax inspector could not fail to
notice them?
 
It would not have made any
difference if the people of Félice had known that, in 1960 at Parke-Bernet in
New York, an early Mistral had sold for half a million dollars. They had enough
trouble crediting the details of the decoration of the room that was installed
for Fauve during the six weeks that passed from the time Maggy agreed to let
her visit for the summer in 1961, and the day she arrived.

A stonemason who was employed
on the project of restoring the circular upper tower room in the
pigionnier
was
able to reduce them to silence by his account of its decoration.

"But yes I assure you,
the walls are covered in fabric, from the floor to the ceiling, in deep folds
like a curtain but running around from one window to another, hundreds and
hundreds of meters of it, printed in lavender and white flowers.
 
The housekeeper told me that it came from the
factory of Monsieur Demary in Tarascon."
 
He paused to make sure everyone was paying close attention. "And
the bed," he continued, satisfied with his audience, "has a canopy of
the same material and a headboard carved like one of the old chests in the
Hotel de Ville, fit for a princess.
 
Tiles on the floor, of course, but also a white rug that Marte Pollison
said came from Spain, and a white birdcage with lovebirds in it.
 
Yes, I saw them myself.
 
You know that bathroom Mistral made the
plumber put in so quickly.
 
Well, the
bathroom walls are also covered in fabric!"