Significant Things. Helen McLean
all the pictures of herself with the young men and women in London, and the entire album of the British Royal Family. She wept while she did it, but it had to be done.
5
He sat stupefied, gazing up into a beautiful face whose every feature he already knew, scarcely aware of his surroundings or the murmuring sounds of the Sicilian noonday — the rustling of leaves in the branches overhead, sparrows chirping, the laughter of a group of women working in a vineyard below the terrace, cutlery tinkling at a nearby table, wine purling from the neck of a bottle. All this blended itself into a harmony that rose and ebbed in the perfumed air while Edward stared at the angelic being standing in front of him.
He felt himself suddenly overwhelmed with an uprush of unspeakable joy, an explosion of happiness so extraordinary that he began to tremble. Was this creature real or a hallucination brought on by the heat and sun? He took off his dark glasses and rubbed his eyes, struggling to regain a sense of reality. The angel in the white waiter’s jacket was holding a pad of paper in one hand, a pencil poised above it in the other, and he seemed to be asking Edward something — for the second time, or possibly even the third: “Have you decided yet, signore?”
Edward looked down and scanned the menu, so flushed and dazzled he was hardly able to read what was written on it, and quickly ordered the first things that caught his eye.
“Antipasti del casale, then the house specialty — I saw it here somewhere — il risotto con i funghi?”
“Bene, signore. And after, a grilled breast of chicken, perhaps?”
“Yes, by all means, il petto di pollo diavolo.”
“E, per contorni?” The man seemed to move back and forth between the languages as though he were hardly conscious of doing it.
“Just a green salad,” Edward said, still gazing into those astonishing eyes.
“L’insalata verde.” The waiter smiled, folding his pad. “Benissimo.”
It was a larger meal than he usually ate at noon, but he wanted it to go slowly, last long enough so that he could figure out what to do, find a way of getting into a conversation with this young man, as he absolutely must. As the waiter turned away after taking his order Edward surprised even himself by impetuously catching the man’s elbow with his hand.
“I think you must be a descendent of the Norman invaders, with that blond hair,” he said a little breathlessly — a weak reason for detaining him, but the only one he could think of on the spur of the moment. He was grateful now for his sporadic studies of the Italian language over the years and his recent reading on the history of the island.
The waiter turned back toward him with surprise, smiling.
“That’s possible, I suppose,” he said in his unaccented English, “but I think it’s likely I got it from someone who came more recently. That’s my father over there.” He tipped his head toward the old man, who was smiling broadly.
Edward looked back at the son again, and now saw in his features a resemblance to the woman who had shown him to his table.
“Oh,” he said, feeling foolish, “and the lovely lady who greeted me when I arrived must be your mother.”
The young man and his father both laughed.
“No harm done,” the father said. “I’m old enough to be his grandfather. I’ve been doubly blessed. Not only a beautiful young wife but handsome offspring as well to cheer me in my old age.”
“You’re a lucky man,” Edward said. “I envy you both your blessings, since I have neither.”
The food was good but he hardly tasted it. He did his best to stretch out the meal, eating slowly, engaging the young waiter’s attention when he could, fabricating questions about the vineyards below the terrace, whether they belonged to his family, what other crops were grown hereabouts. He consulted him about the various dolci on the menu, finally ordering sliced blood oranges with toasted almonds and amaretto. It was just to slow things down; he’d already had more than enough to eat. When his oranges were finished and he’d asked for an espresso he still hadn’t been able to initiate a conversation, as he desperately wanted to do.
He drank his coffee. The old man had nodded off to sleep, leaning back in what seemed to be his permanently reserved chair, hat tilting off to one side and his cane fallen to the stone paving. Edward noticed the tender way his son picked up the cane and laid it across the table, straightened his father’s hat to protect the old head from the dappling sun. A party of six Germans had arrived, and a couple of Italian businessmen in dark suits, and he went to attend to them. His mother was seating another party, two fair-skinned elderly couples who could have been Dutch or British. If he couldn’t manage to speak to him now, Edward told himself, he’d come back again in the evening, or the next day, as often as it took. He finished off what remained of his wine and went into the restaurant in search of the bagno.
The indoor dining room was large and cool, the tables laid with white cloths, large green plants in terra cotta pots set about in the corners. An espresso machine hissed at the bar. There were works of art on the white-painted walls, and when Edward’s eyes had adjusted to the indoor light he began to look at them more carefully. For the second time that day he found himself gaping in astonishment. What in God’s name was work like this doing on the walls of a tiny restaurant in the middle of Sicily?
He walked slowly from one painting to another. Each canvas was composed in areas of colour as glowing and pure as those Matisse might have used. There the resemblance ended. These compositions were energetic and elaborately conceived, the shapes complex, the surfaces raised here and there in a rich impasto. The eye was not left sitting on the picture plane as it was with Matisse’s later work, glued there by strong outlines, but was led into depth and brought out again a dozen times as it travelled across the canvas, all by means of contour and colour. Edward found his attention drawn away from the subject matter by the dazzling vibrant hues that reflected the glorious Sicilian sun. The artist, whoever he was, handled the paint with genius.
The subjects were commonplace — fruit, vases of flowers, a table in the sun with a few glasses or bowls, the natural shapes sometimes attenuated or warped to accommodate themselves to the overall design. Things seemed to be slipping in and out of focus so that no one area of the canvas or single object dominated the composition or captured the attention more than any other. There was a considerable degree of distortion from reality, but each picture had as its starting point some clearly recognizable natural motif. Several paintings were different versions of the same small collection of objects — pottery bowls, fruit, a jug, flowers — rearranged in different lights, sometimes viewed close up, and in others from a distance. It looked as though the artist could have gone on happily painting the same objects ad infinitum without ever becoming bored with them, because they were really of no importance in themselves, merely vehicles for his colour and composition. He had as clear a grasp of the possibilities of his little cluster of motifs as Cézanne had of his apples, or Edward’s adored Morandi of his bottles and jars.
He was enthralled. He could imagine an entire exhibition in which the subject of every painting was that same little collection of inanimate objects. It would be a tour de force, a virtuoso performance. In addition to the still lifes there were several figure studies and one stunning large landscape, a scene framed by the architecture of a window giving onto a terrazzo and the distant countryside — in fact, he realized, shifting the focus of his eyes, the very window before him, the terrace on which he’d eaten his lunch, and all that lay beyond.
“They’re my son’s work. Do you like them?” The woman was standing a little behind him, on her way outdoors with a tray of little cups of coffee. She had spoken, as before, in Italian. Edward could hardly believe his ears. He was the artist! Again, he was stunned. Some things are too meaningful to be explained away by chance. He felt as though his coming here had been preordained from the day of his birth.
“They are absolutely beautiful,” Edward said. “Marvellous. Your