The San Sebastian Chronicles, Part XIII
The Studio and the Captain.
I had risen near dawn to go through my hiking gear and other supplies. This was made easier by the fact that I was still in my stiff and itchy uniform when I first stirred, having fallen asleep before even finishing my nightcap. (Do not fear, reader, upon my rise I finished the drink in one swallow.) My arousement was spurred on too by my knowledge that assessing the state of my outfitment and selecting the matériel that would accompany me on my journey would take longer now that the army had unceremoniously moved into my house and displaced my equipage to a heap in a storage room down the hall from my drafty new billet. Despite the gloominess of the night before and the dire mood that had followed me to bed, I’d awakened quite refreshed and chipper, helped by the delivery of coffee, brandy, and breakfast to my room by a young Second Undercorporal’s Mate. Thus fueled, I seized the opportunity to separate, tally, and organize all my mountaineering supplies before selecting the accouterments for my penitent odyssey. (I was operating on the assumption that as my batman, Desotto would have our other supplies ready by the next day.)
Continued from…
This stock-taking and provisioning took me nearly four hours and so absorbed was I in it that not until I was done and bathed, at nearly eleven, did I recall that I was to have collected my statuettes from my erstwhile room (I would not call it the captain’s office). But it was almost time for my departure and I still had much to do before the journey, not the least of which was to spring Johnny from the stockade in some legitimate way. So I decided I would leave the figurine retrieval for my mother and I would only stop briefly at my studio before leaving on my personal soul-saving crusade.
*****
My studio was in the new house, facing away from the lichen-encrusted ruin where I’d slept. Large windows comprised the better part of one wall, providing a view first onto a portico and then a lawn and fountain inside a low walled courtyard. To the left as you looked out beyond the courtyard was the forest which surrounded the rear of the house, the same one I’d eyed leerily from mother’s vivarium the night before, and which ran all the way to the mountains in bounding sylvan slopes. Straight ahead was a fine view of verdant foothills to the left and the broad valley floor opposite, with just a few trees and outbuildings in the distance to liven the ‘scape.
Though when I’d frequented my studio the view had rarely contained a human form, it had inspired me. Perhaps contemplating the jagged, Jagganathine massifs and their violent eruption from the womb of the soft and verdant meadows below them evoked my lapidarian creative impulses; I’d heard there were plans in America to create giant sculptures in the faces of the immense exposed batholiths of the country’s interior, of presidents and chiefs, large enough to dwarf the Madara Rider in Bulgaria or the Descent of the Cross in Saxony (though surely not as magnificent and poignant as the Lion of Lucerne).
There was a large French door in the center of the windowed wall of the workshop, and in addition two of the windows on the wings extended to the ground and could, with sufficient effort, grease, and care to avoid shatter-inducing twisting, be revolved upon center-mounted pins into a perpendicular direction that allowed breezes and guests to mingle freely when the weather permitted.
Based on these implements I’d guessed that the room had been intended as a salon cum dining hall wherein guests could be entertained with a convivial view of any outdoor festivities and ease of opportunity to join therein. Whatever the frequency of their use in my mother’s youth, the window-door contraptions and the room itself had been employed, in the short years that my mother, father, and I lived here, together quite seldom, and never since his adieu. Given the dearth of guest-entertaining in the Mant home after my father’s departure, once my interests had developed with age to the point that they could be ascertained to be free of a young child’s caprice, around fifteen I think, I had been permitted to claim the room as my atelier. And so I had more than nine years ago, laboring in it all my spare hours until my enlistment in Die Gran Königliches Esercito des San Sebastian at the outbreak of the war two years before.
Now the room was dark and musty from disuse. Thick felt-and-satin curtains, indigo in color, hung over the windowed wall to keep the winter drafts out. I wanted to see it in the light. I managed to open them to the midpoint of the wall, but only after first discovering through trial and error that I would have to grab the fabric from a point as high as my hands could reach in order to achieve leverage sufficient to overcome the inertia of the heavy drapery combined with the grabby layer of dust that had taken up residence on the top of the brass curtain rod that suspended the assemblage.
Thick beams of late morning sun were thus freed to fall upon the wide oak floor beams, a firmament of dust captured in them, dancing in the first movement of air this room had likely felt in over a year. Outside in the courtyard, I could see soldiers criss-crossing on errands, but they did not seem to interested in my actions. Two officers walked by on the portico. One took a short glance inside but did not appear interested or concerned. I suppose in my uniform they assumed I was sizing the room up for its possible use by the brigade, a military body that I knew was large enough to allow for unsuspicious anonymity among its number, especially in these war times.
I looked around the room for the first time in a long while. In a corner, chisels, saws, files, and other sculptor’s tools. Canvas drop cloths, stained with plaster and mud, were folded adjacent to a toolbox, with a few others still on the floor around the room. A large cistern was against the wall, under a water spigot I’d had specially installed. Clay cubes, two feet on a side, still wrapped in wax paper, were close by. A large draftsman’s desk sat on another wall, stacked high with sheafs of folio paper full of sketches and stained by coffee, tea, clayey water and sweat. At spots around the edges of the room were sculptures of various sizes and disparate states of completion. Rough clay approximations were strewn about. A block of marble still untouched sat in one place. In another was a bust of Cicero, in near final form, awaiting only some finework around the eyes, mouth, and hair. Some were only heads. Some were full bodies. Male and female. Real and imagined. Facsimiles and original works. None larger than about four feet tall. And then there was the pedestal.
It sat in the middle of the room, circular, only about a foot tall, but nearly seven feet across. It was polished black dolerite with a gilded edge around the bottom wrapped in wax paper and taped tight. It had cost nearly two thousand koroni. I’d borrowed the sum from mother. An advance on my inheritance we’d called it, back when her interests were performing better. Before a venture scotched, a lode sapped, a rights dispute lost.
Now I saw a sergente in the courtyard idly ashing his cigarette onto the lawn as if it were a tavern’s side steps. I thought of the captain reclining in my bedroom. The clapping of boots around the place all day. The strangers attending to mother (her valet, maid, and cook having long ago been drafted or given their severance). The countless interlopers traipsing all over our family’s once quite private abode.
No doubt there was plenty of filching going on too. How had she secured all the family’s knickknacks and assorted virtu? Had she even, other than with a sheet thrown over the occasional end table, clock, or sofa? Sticky fingers were bound to abound in this environment. An ashtray here. A vase there. It would not be hard to do for an enterprising young quartermaster’s assistant, despite whatever assurances had been made regarding inventories and fidelity bonds.
Atop the pedestal was nothing.
“Good morning, dear.” Mother had appeared in the door behind me, which I’d shut but failed to latch.
“Good morning,” I smiled. We met near the pedestal with a peck and a small embrace.
“Surveying the studio?”
“Yes, taking stock, I suppose.”
“Well, once this dreaded capitalist dogfight is over, you can get right back into it. There’s some busts here that are nearly done. Maybe you could even get just a few weeks’ leave.”
“My leave is going to visit some silent monks. Two years already. Who knows how much longer. ”
“No one can know, but you’re so young. Your enlistment could also expire if the war goes too long.”
I shook my head. The expiration of my enlistment was two more years away. That would mean four years of war! Unthinkable considering the modern technologies in the powers’ employ: Marconi sets; acoustic location; spiritual telepathy (or some said an aunt); poisonous gases; machine guns; serrated blades; propeller-driven balloons; trenches, tunnels, and other deep holes; telegraphs; automobiles; louder bugles…. Yet the slim chance of early discharge was why I’d declined to accept a commission; officers were in it for the duration.
Mother went on, “They also might broke a deal to get our little polity out of this fire, the margraves or the executives and diplomats; they got us postal service once upon a time. Either way, trust me, dear, a few years is nothing, even though it may seem to you to be an eternity.”
It will be an eternity if I’m killed, I thought. I caught just the slightest flinch on her face. I think she thought it too.
“I know,” I stepped back and smiled, fishing grandfather’s pipe from my pocket, loading and lighting it in a few seconds. “I’m just anxious to get back to it. Although, I must admit, sometimes I wonder whether I should bother.”
“Bother with what? Sculpting? Darling, you’re wonderful at it. Such a talent.”
“Yes, quite a talent,” I huffed, “may as well have been born with a knack for alchemy or dowsing or composing Gregorian chants.”
“Ridiculous.”
“I’m only saying there isn’t much of a market for classical sculpture these days.”
“But once the war is over.”
“The only people buying statues are museums and they are only seeking ancient ones.”
“Nonsense. There’s a market for sculpture. I read about it all the time.”
“Pssh, modern sculpture perhaps. Welding together plumbing, iron sticks, and rubbish tin lids. Even then, I would have to be in Paris or London. And a patron in the high reaches of the nobility or international plutocracy would help greatly.”
“Charl, this is your talent. The money will come along, and it should not be for the money anyway.”
Thus speaks the communist, bourgeoisie heiress. “Ha. I will have to earn an income if I am to keep this place one day, and once the army moves out that day may come much sooner. And, as we know mother, even if money were something that would simply arrive in perpetuity in a badger-stamped envelope from a lawyer’s office in Barnatz, carried by a money-pixie-postess from the land of milk-made bank notes and honey-coated specie, dolerite pedestals and marble blocks are far from free.” I tapped the pedestal with my foot. “I only wish I’d inherited a talent that was less dear.” I stepped onto the pedestal now, mocking a melodramatic tour de force for mother’s amusement. “One can act for nothing. Writing’s nearly free. Painting’s done for pennies. Poetry’s no fee. Dancing it comes gratis. Small cost to strum along. Wood carving is a pittance. Singing’s just a song.”
“Ha, yes, Charl, you can be a poet and an comic actor instead.”
“Indeed,” I said. My pipe had by now generated a great cloud in the room that was illuminated in a most entertaining manner, purple eddies and vortices swirling among the sunbeams holding in suspension the aroused dust, now tiny aureate sparkles. “My point, mother, is that there are some arts, some among the foregoing in fact, that can actually generate an income for the artiste. And classical sculpture is not commonly thought among them.”
“Then what? You would become a stock speculator or a lawyer or an industrial brass-fitting salesman?”
“Perhaps I will be an industrial brass-fitting salesman. It served father well. Or I could be a card sharp. Or a fast-talking billiards hustler. Or a cunning defrauder of banks and corporations. Or a whiskey connoisseur. Or a peripatetic philanderer.” These were some of father’s other reputed occupations.
“Charlemagne. That would be an atrocious waste. And we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead… to me,” she grinned.
I sighed in agreement. “I suppose I just want to leave something behind.”
“Well, if you got married and had some children, you could leave them behind.”
“Like father did?”
“You know my meaning.”
“Something for them then, the pitter-patterers, should they come. We’ll all live in a rat-infested sculpture studio above a stinking gondola dock in Venice and I will rent the little beans out to seamstresses and livery stables to pay for my marble and granite.”
Mother shook her head. “Sell this place when and if you need to.”
“And when that is gone? And your grandchildren are forced to auction of my life’s work to a residential stonemason for use in barristers’ bathrooms to pay for food?”
“That is quite a cynical view.”
“Is it? It seems horribly selfish to me, standing here now among all this money in the form of pedestals, to pursue something so inordinate and with so little chance of reward, especially if I am to have a family.”
“So remain a bachelor.”
“Would that my loins permit it.”
“Charl,” mother swatted at me. “I have a better solution. Two birds….”
“What?”
“With one stone. Accept your damned commission, start attending formal military balls at all manner of manses and courts, and marry a count’s daughter! Or a miller’s or a brewer’s or an industrialist’s if one of those is more easily ensnared. On that line, I hear sweet Nanetta is newly freed from her father’s phalanges.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Mutschke, that is terrible.” Maybe she was right. We had just enough ourselves, at least as on now, to get me in the door. And then I could become a penniless, bohemian sculptor, denuding my wife’s estate to the eternal shame of her and her family.
Continued…
