darkwall
Well-known member
As the skies of Juan les Pins open up, I abandon my portrait of you and snatch up this notebook. Laughing, you grab my hand and try to pull me through the doors of the studio and out into the garden - but I cling on to my book, determined to sketch you.
Your face is beautiful in the pouring rain, and your black dress is embroidered with flowers. You spin, and laugh, and taste the sweetness of life while I record each posture jealously. I want to drink the rain that falls from your chin. You are a ballerina, and I an artist: it is your body, dancing now in the warm watery haze, which expresses your grace.
I am delirious with happiness watching you, sketching the positions you make onto the border of the notebook, wishing I had the names for them: a battement, an arabesque … I think to myself, what fool of a man could ever think he could own you? I sketch your charcoal hair flowing from the clasp I had told you to wear, and your panting red lips, your features made unreal by the faint lines of flowing water.
I think of the Portuguese word I once learned - "saudade". The friend who told me it said that "saudade" can never properly be expressed but to yourself, when you are alone; it is a hopeful nostalgia pierced with fatalism, which is not meant for others' ears. I feel saudade as I watch you, writing this, knowing that eventually it all must end for us, the ugly dwarf and the goddess he merely hypnotised. I think of the tall Italians who chase you, while you chassé away, and I feel torn by pride and jealousy. Why else do I keep mistresses, if not to protect myself from the burden of your misplaced love?
On the canvas behind me, you look like what you were, a bored dancer in an artist's room. I arranged the folds of the embroidered dress to bring colour to your tired face. But now they are wet and heavy on your body: the garments cling to your heaving breasts, and you have become a sensual woman unclasped from me. Out here is what you are: a beauty, turning and laughing in front of the pink rhododendrons that seem to set your marble flesh alight.
I look at you one last time, before I must attend to the drying pastels. My love for you is so powerful that it cannot be fully conceived in my mind, but rather sipped at, like a thick and endless liqueur. I hope with all its strength that we may somehow retain this moment forever. Beautiful Olga, like a Russian river running darkly and soulfully beneath the ice. When I am with you, I am absolved.
Your face is beautiful in the pouring rain, and your black dress is embroidered with flowers. You spin, and laugh, and taste the sweetness of life while I record each posture jealously. I want to drink the rain that falls from your chin. You are a ballerina, and I an artist: it is your body, dancing now in the warm watery haze, which expresses your grace.
I am delirious with happiness watching you, sketching the positions you make onto the border of the notebook, wishing I had the names for them: a battement, an arabesque … I think to myself, what fool of a man could ever think he could own you? I sketch your charcoal hair flowing from the clasp I had told you to wear, and your panting red lips, your features made unreal by the faint lines of flowing water.
I think of the Portuguese word I once learned - "saudade". The friend who told me it said that "saudade" can never properly be expressed but to yourself, when you are alone; it is a hopeful nostalgia pierced with fatalism, which is not meant for others' ears. I feel saudade as I watch you, writing this, knowing that eventually it all must end for us, the ugly dwarf and the goddess he merely hypnotised. I think of the tall Italians who chase you, while you chassé away, and I feel torn by pride and jealousy. Why else do I keep mistresses, if not to protect myself from the burden of your misplaced love?
On the canvas behind me, you look like what you were, a bored dancer in an artist's room. I arranged the folds of the embroidered dress to bring colour to your tired face. But now they are wet and heavy on your body: the garments cling to your heaving breasts, and you have become a sensual woman unclasped from me. Out here is what you are: a beauty, turning and laughing in front of the pink rhododendrons that seem to set your marble flesh alight.
I look at you one last time, before I must attend to the drying pastels. My love for you is so powerful that it cannot be fully conceived in my mind, but rather sipped at, like a thick and endless liqueur. I hope with all its strength that we may somehow retain this moment forever. Beautiful Olga, like a Russian river running darkly and soulfully beneath the ice. When I am with you, I am absolved.
