Say heaven’s gates were of pearl, and its streets pure gold. How could one look at those effects, however grand, without drawing back a little, with charitable amusement, thinking, “Ah, how labored! how dated!” One would recognize in a flash that the dragons on the pillars were Ming Dynasty, or Swedish, or French Imperial; that the structures were Mayan, or London 1840s, or Etruscan. Suppose to avoid this God made Himself a heaven as humble as a shepherd’s hut. “How artfully simple,” one would say, as one said of a thousand such creations. Or suppose God chose in His infinite wisdom to make something brand new, unheard of on earth or on any other planet. “How new!” one would cry, and a billion billion other risen souls would cry the same, in antique harmony.
Thinking these thoughts, more pleasant than grim, for if they ruled out the ultimate value of all art, they gave mud beetles, humankind, and God a kind of oneness in futility, Vlemk opened the door and entered, hoping the house was indeed his house, still waiting for some sure sign. He found the stairway more or less where he’d expected he might find it, carefully avoided two sleeping cats, and began to climb. The bannister was as smooth as dusty, dry soap, like the bannister in his own house, which perhaps it was. When he came to the door to the studio, locked, he was virtually certain that this must be the place. He tried his key. It worked.
The first thing he saw when he entered the studio was his painting on the box, the Princess’s face. With a start he realized that the picture was essentially finished. The lines he had doubted—the lines suggesting a touch of meanness in her character—were exactly right, no question about it, not that these were the most obvious of her lines. There was kindness too; generosity, a pleasing touch of whimsy. Indeed, an ordinary observer might never have noticed these slightly less pleasant qualities, though certainly they were there.
Vlemk sighed, pleased with the world in spite of its imperfections if not because of them—and made himself a large pot of coffee. The city below his window was still fast asleep except for, here and there, a garbage cart. He thought of the bony old monk in the graveyard, the woman with the birthmark. He poured himself coffee and sat looking at the painting on the box, smiling. Though she was a princess, she was no better, it seemed to him—though he knew that it might well be the alcohol—than the barmaid, the monk, the woman with the mark on her throat. Wherever the life-force could find a place to push it pushed, he mused—into barmaids, princesses, dandelions, monks, even box-painters. He laughed.
He was conscious of looking at the world as from a mountaintop. Yet even as he thought these serene, fond thoughts an uneasiness came over him. Make the picture speak, the Princess had said, and I’ll permit you to talk with me again about these matters. It was true that she was beautiful, for all her faults, more beautiful than he’d ever before realized. If it was true that all the universe was one in its comic futility, it was also true that certain comically imperfect expressions of the universal force were for some reason preferable to others to any given life-expression, such as Vlemk. Having come to understand the Princess, both the best and the worst in her, poor Vlemk had fallen hopelessly, shamelessly in love. It was not some vague, airy vision now, it was something quite specific. He wanted to be in bed with her, talking, earnestly but in full detail, as if they had years to get everything right, about questions of Life and Art. He glanced down at his coffee. Did she perhaps prefer tea? He studied the painting. It told him nothing.
Abruptly, urgently, hardly knowing what he was doing, Vlemk uncapped his paints and seized a paintbrush. He painted furiously, with nothing in his mind, putting in without thought every beauty and deformity, working almost carelessly, almost wildly. Soon the painting was so much like the Princess that not even the Princess’s mother could have told the two apart.
The picture began to speak. “Vlemk,” it said, “I put a curse upon you. You shall never speak a word until I say so!”
Vlemk’s eyes widened and he tried to protest, but already the curse was in effect; he was unable to make a sound.
3
Now began a terrible period in the life of the box-painter. He had achieved what no artist before him had achieved, had succeeded in the most arduous love-task ever dreamt of, but the victory was ashes; he was as mute as a stone. If the picture remained stubborn, and Vlemk had no reason to doubt that it would, he would never in all his life say a word to the Princess, his love and inspiration.
He made feeble attempts at adjusting to his fate. Occasionally he’d take an order for a snuff box with pansies on it, or a quill box with a picture of the owner’s house, but his work was inaccurate and shoddy; his heart had gone out of it. People began to haggle and try to put off paying him, even local doctors and bankers who could easily have afforded to pay if they’d wished to—a sure sign, as all box-painters know, that the work was no longer giving pleasure—and as the weeks passed business grew worse and worse; fewer and fewer people climbed the narrow stairs to his studio. That was just as well, in fact, for these days and nights Vlemk worked slowly or not at all. Even if he put in long hours, as he sometimes did in a fit of anxiety or anger turned inward, he got very little done. Ever since he’d finished his painting of the Princess, all other kinds of painting seemed beneath him, a betrayal of his gift. He found that he literally could not paint what was asked of him, and even if by dint of superhuman stubbornness he got through a given job, no one any longer praised his work, not even the stupidest oaf who came up off the street.
His fall was dramatically underscored, in Vlemk’s mind, when occasionally, to his annoyance, some customer would glance unhappily from the painted box Vlemk had just finished for him to the box, nearby, on which he’d painted his portrait of the Princess. Sometimes they would say, “It looks real enough to speak!” “It does,” the painting on the box would pipe up, and the customer would stare, disbelieving. Soon there were rumors that Vlemk had made a pact with the Devil. Business got still worse and eventually dropped away entirely.
“Woe is me,” poor Vlemk would think, sitting alone in his studio, pulling at his knuckles. And as if he didn’t have troubles enough these days, the painting would start speaking again, complaining and criticizing, trying to offer helpful suggestions. “How can you call yourself a painter?” it would say in its ringing little voice, a voice not much louder than an insect’s. “Where’s your dedication? Is this what your disorderly habits have at last brought you down to?”
Vlemk would put up with this—or would leave for the tavern to get away from it—though it seemed to him brutally unfair, to say the least, that the masterpiece of his life should prove his curse and his soul’s imprisonment. At times, throwing dignity to the winds, he would plead with his creation, imploring her in gesture—even going down on his knees to her—that she give him back his voice.
“No!” she would say.
“But why?” he would ask with his hands, fingers splayed wide and shaking.
“I don’t feel like it,” she said. “When I feel like it I will.”
“You have no mercy!” he wailed in gesture, raising his fist and sadly shaking his head.
“You tell me about mercy!” cried the box. “You created me, you monster! Do you know what it’s like, stuck here in one place like a miserable cripple, owning nothing in the world but a head and two shoulders—not even hands and feet?”
“Forgiveness is the greatest of all virtues,” Vlemk would signal.
“No,” the box would say. “The curse is still on!”
Vlemk would groan and say nothing more, would get up stiffly from his thick knees, and to punish the box in the only way he could, he would put on his hat and coat and descend to the street and make his way to the tavern.
Except for the inconvenience his poverty caused him, Vlemk could not honestly say he was sorry that his business as a box-painter had failed. It had never been a highly respected occupation, though people were amused by it. It had none of the prestige of gargoyle carving or stained-glass-window making or the casting of bell
s, and to Vlemk, who believed himself vastly superior to those other, more respected artisans, it was a relief to become, for all practical purposes, a simple citizen, no longer an artisan looked down on by artisans he despised. His inability to speak, his inability even to whimper or grunt, soon made his anonymity complete. He spent more and more of his time at the tavern, cadging the few coins he needed by holding out his hand and looking pitiful. His landlady was a problem, but only in the sense that it embarrassed him to meet her. The rumor of his friendship with the Devil kept her civil and distant.
It was winter now, picturesque in Vlemk’s city if you were a rich man or only passing through. Icicles hung glittering from the eaves of every shop; snow put pointed hats on every housetop and steeple; horses in their traces breathed out hovering ghosts of steam. He was not altogether indifferent to all this. He observed with interest how shadows changed color behind a steam cloud, how the droplets on the nostrils of a horse gleamed amber in the sunlight. But his interest was tinged, inevitably, with gloom and anger. To Vlemk and those like him, cold weather meant misery and humiliation. His clothes were thin and full of holes to let in every wandering chill. “On my wages,” thought Vlemk, bitterly joking—as was more and more his habit—“I’m lucky I can still afford skin.” It was a joke worth saying aloud, he thought, but the curse prohibited it, so he stared straight ahead, living inside his mind, raising his glass with the others in the tavern, now and then joining in a fistfight if the cause seemed just.
Day after day, day after day, he would walk to the tavern as soon as it opened, trudging with great, gaping holes in his shoes over ice and through slush, hunched in his frayed old overcoat, snow piling up on his hat and shoulders, his fists clenched tight in the pockets that no longer held things. “What a box!” he would think, then would quickly shake his head as if the voice were someone else’s, for he grew tired of his thoughts, now that he had no one to vent them on—tired and increasingly critical, for it had struck him, now that he must listen and not speak, that an immense amount of what was said in the world was not worth saying.
As the cold settled in and the snow deepened, fewer and fewer strangers were to be found in the streets of Vlemk’s city, and begging became increasingly difficult. Sometimes whole days went by when Vlemk couldn’t gather enough coins for a single glass of wine. On these days Vlemk walked bent double from hunger pains—not surprisingly, since wine was now almost all he lived on. If he was lucky one of his unsavory friends—the petty thieves and marauders who gathered at the tavern every evening—would give him some of their wine; but the generosity of thieves is undependable. Sometimes their mood was wrong; sometimes they’d found nothing to burgle for weeks, so that their stomachs were as empty as Vlemk’s.
“What am I to do?” his friend the ex-violinist would growl at him. “The rich have nothing but their money on their minds. They walk around the city with one hand in their billfold and the other on their pocketwatch.” And with a stubborn, guilty look, he would drink his cheap wine, if he happened to have any, himself.
“Don’t look at me with those mournful eyes,” his friend the ex-poet would say to him. “Solomon in all his glory was not guarded and zipped like one of these!”
The axe-murderer—or rather, would-be axe-murderer, for so far he’d never found the perfect occasion, the aesthetically perfect set of murder victims, and he was nothing if not a perfectionist—the axe-murderer would sit staring at the table with his icy stare, lost in thought—perhaps thoughts of killing Vlemk for his belt and shoelaces—and would let out not one word.
“I must do something,” thought Vlemk. “Life is not fit to be endured if a man’s cold sober!”
One night as this was happening—that is, as he was sitting at his table in the tavern with his misbegotten friends, clenching his belly against the hunger pains and shivering from the cold he had no wine to drive away—he saw the fat, sullen barmaid serve wine to a customer, a stooped old man with a white goatee, and leave his table without asking him to pay. In great agitation, Vlemk poked the poet with his elbow, pointed at the old man, and splashed his hands open to show he had a question. The poet studied him, managed the translation, then turned around to look at the old man.
“Oh, him,” said the poet. “She always serves him free.” He returned his attention to his drinking.
Again Vlemk poked him and splashed open his hands, this time raising his eyebrows as well and jerking his head forward, showing that his question was urgent.
“ ‘Why?’ ” said the poet, translating.
Eagerly, Vlemk nodded.
“The old man is a composer,” said the poet. “Years ago he wrote the barmaid into an opera. She’s showing her gratitude.”
The axe-murderer slowly closed his eyes in disgust. So did the tomcat beside him. The ex-violinist looked depressed.
Abruptly, Vlemk stood up, said goodbye with his hands, and hurried, bent over with hunger, to his freezing-cold studio. He painted all night like a man possessed, grimly ignoring the comments of the picture of the Princess, which stood watching, objecting in its piping little voice to every stroke he set down. He painted quickly, easily, as he’d painted in the old days, perhaps because his project, however suspect, was his own idea and had a certain morbid interest. In the morning, when his new painted box-lid was finished, he went to curl up in his bed until the paint was dry. As soon as it was safe, he wrapped the painted box in a scrap of purple satin, which he’d stolen from the laundry chute weeks ago, and carried his gift through the slanting, soft snow to the barmaid.
When he set it on the bar, nodding and smiling, pointing from the box to the barmaid and back, the barmaid for a long time just stared at him. She had never really liked him—she liked almost no one, especially men, for she’d been badly used. Sometimes (Vlemk had noticed it only as he painted) she would come in bruised and battered from a night with some sailor who had strong opinions, or some farmer who knew only about cows. Sometimes—and this too he had remembered only when his brush reminded him—her eyes would suddenly fill with tears as she was pouring a glass of ale.
But at last the barmaid accepted the present, seeing that only if she did so would she ever be rid of him, and with a look oddly childlike, fearful and embarrassed, she removed the purple cloth. When the barmaid saw the painting she gave a cry like a brief yelp of sorrow and her lips began to tremble; but before you could count ten, the tremble became a smile, and she reached out with both plump hands for Vlemk’s bearded face, drew it close, and kissed it.
Vlemk was bitterly ashamed, for nothing was ever less deserved than that kiss, but he forced himself to smile, and he smiled on, grimly, as the barmaid ran from table to table with her gift, showing it to the regulars one after another, all of whom heartily praised it.
No one seemed to know except the ex-poet, the ex-violinist, and the axe-murderer that the painting on the box was a lie, a fraud, an outrage. He’d given the barmaid a childlike smile, though it was as foreign to her sullen, lumpy face as Egypt to an Eskimo. He’d given her the eyes of a twelve-year-old milk-maid, though her own eyes had nothing but the exact same brown of the irises in common. He’d reddened her chin and removed certain blemishes, turning others—for example the birthmark on her throat, which he paid close attention to only as he painted it—to beauty marks. He’d lifted her breasts a little, tightened her skin, raised a sagging eyebrow, increased the visibility of her dimple. In short, he’d made her beautiful, and he’d done it all so cunningly that no one but an artist could have told you where the truth left off and the falsehood began.
“Wine for the box-painter!” cried one of the regulars.
“Wine whenever he wants it!” cried the barmaid, and abruptly, as if changed into some other person, she smiled.
The troubles of Vlemk the box-painter were over—or at any rate Vlemk’s most immediate trouble. From that night on when he went to the tavern he got all he asked for, wine, beer, and whiskey until only with the help of a friend could he f
ind his way home, and sometimes not even then. As for the barmaid, a curious thing happened. She became increasingly similar to the fraudulent painting, smiling as she served her customers, looking at strangers with the eyes of an innocent, standing so erect, in her foolish pride, that her breasts were almost exactly where Vlemk had painted them. The success of her after-hours business increased, so much so that Vlemk began to worry that perhaps she would get married and leave the bar, which would throw him back on begging. Sometimes to his distress, he would catch her stealing a little look at the box, which she kept prominently displayed, and once—far worse for Vlemk’s sense of honor—she gave him a look that made him think for an instant that she knew what he had done. Why not, of course. Wasn’t she also a dabbler in visions, a creator and destroyer? She said nothing, however; for which Vlemk was profoundly grateful.
With other people, Vlemk was all too often less fortunate. Because he was a mute now, people began telling him things, all of them eager to share their troublesome and shameful secrets, yet concerned that their secrets remain unknown. Women, looking into his gray, all-seeing eyes, and assured that he was voiceless, as safe as a boulder, would reveal to him such horrors of frustration and betrayal, remorse, inexpressible indignation, and despair, that his sleep would be troubled for weeks by alarming dreams. Gentle old men told him stories of rape and arson, cruelty to animals, and heaven knows what else. Vlemk the box-painter became a walking cyclopedia of the sins and transgressions of humanity—more scapegoat than priest, alas, since he was powerless to forgive or condemn.