The Galisteo Escarpment. Douglas Atwill

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      For Agnes and Mary Louise

      Preface

      Behind an adobe wall near my house I have several piles of building materials, bricks of different sizes, quarried stones, river rocks, wooden lintels, short ends of vigas, a fireplace surround, a pair of shutters from Virginia, windows taken out of houses about to be demolished, doors of curious dimensions from the flea market and other oddities. The sensible man can leave them for what they are, happy stacks of like matter, but the obsessed man sees a house wanting to be realized, or a studio, or a pergola. The pieces ask him aloud to be brought together, knowing they will be greater combined than left apart. Cooks probably have the same fixation, unable to ignore the ripe peaches alone in their wicker basket, imagining the glory of the succulent pie appearing later in the day, unable to leave well enough alone.

      When I shifted focus this summer from building to writing, the twenty-one stories I wrote a few years ago became so much construction fodder, peaches awaiting their fate. This character asked to be brought back, another came forward reluctantly, this incident needed expansion, that incident changed in its outcome and there was a setting in another story the perfect size to contain them all. Thus, this book is built from bricks that were laid up before, and if parts seem familiar, this is the reason.

      Moreover, it may be a preference of mine, something deeply imbedded, to use materials that had a former life. I remember with rue a small house for sale near Grasse many years ago, a four room farm-house built with the stone blocks stolen from a nearby ruined temple, the Roman numerals and letters turned this way and that, an elaborate cornice piece squeezed without ceremony over a window. Roman stones relaid in the eighteenth century, waiting quietly for me. How could I have passed them up?

      As the title indicates, Galisteo, New Mexico plays a part in this story. Dozens of painters have fallen under its spell, not so much the village as the whole basin surrounding it. It may not be such a queer thing to bond with a place, to take up its parts as you might the tresses or eyes of a human paramour, to be entranced by them. You see colors there like nowhere else; blazing yellow light; patterns of darkness, almost blackness, even at mid-day; clay-reds and the full spectrum of siennas; greens that walk all the way to orange; clouds that pick up speed as they cross overhead, then slow down thereafter, and vistas nearly to another country.

      So Galisteo is the unfinished business, at least one of them, that concerns our man Bronson, the young man becoming a painter. The story takes him other places, distracts him, seduces him, but in the end he cannot ignore its multi-colored call.

      1

      Beautifully Rendered

      Neil Bronson woke when the first light started to glow across the horizon and he knew that the coming day would be clear, hot and still, a perfect day for painting outside. The secrets to French weather, particularly to the weather of Vaucluse, were clearer to him in this third month of the painting expedition. If the day started with a small breeze stirring in the branches outside his windows, he knew it would later blow a gale, and only heavy rocks on ropes could hold the easel from flying away down-wind. On the rare morning when it was cloudy at dawn, a thunderstorm could be counted upon to spoil the middle hours of a painting day, drenching the unfinished canvas and the painter alike. This day, however, would offer a long stretch of uninterrupted countryside painting. Neither breeze nor wisp of cloud marred the day’s prospects.

      “Sam, wake up,” he said to the man who shared the room.

      It was a small upstairs bedroom with wallpaper of faded tuberoses, stacks of canvases with their faces to the wall filled the spaces between the rustic furniture. The two casement windows looked into the top branches of a horse-chestnut tree in the adjoining garden, black birds raucously cavorting there in the early sun.

      “Ummm.” Sam rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows. His hair was as dark as Neil’s was light. Both were in the twenties, short men by standards of their peers, but with long backs, good for lifting. If judgment had to be made, it would be that both were from stout, peasant stock, descendants from the cottage rather than the castle.

      Neil said, “It’s still and clear. No wind. A perfect day.”

      Sam made another wordless noise, acknowledging the day’s attributes.

      “I’ll wait for you downstairs.”

      He strapped a new, white canvas onto his easel and shouldered the easel pack as he left. Their room was on the second floor of the Metropole Café, one of six rooms rented by the week. The café shared a common wall with garden of the cathedral in Gordes. A group of Gordesiens wearing identical black berets was already in place at the café downstairs, standing over their café noirs at the high bar. Smoke filled the room already replete with the decades of Gauloise aroma.

      “What for the painter? The painter who will make Gordes famous,” said the barman, acknowledging the talent of the upstairs resident.

      “Café au lait, s’il vous plait,” Neil said.

      Despite the bartender’s enthusiasm, acceptance came slowly in a town like Gordes and maybe never completely to these two young Americans on a quest perhaps done better by French sons with talent. How could foreigners know more about art than countrymen? France almost invented Art. The men at the bar nodded amiably to Neil as he sat down at one of the small tables, evidence of a progress, however slight, on the road to approval. The locals had noted the incredible zeal of his day-after-day work and it earned him marks. Zeal was