We moved on past paintings of lesser quality, among the frolicking marble nudes that the pompiers did so well. We passed into a room devoted to Gustav-Adolf Mossa and stopped at the doorway. It was overpowering. The colors were vibrant, almost harsh after the gentle treatment of the pompiers, and the subject matter was grotesque. The paintings were hard edged super-realism, all portraits of women, or rather of one single woman in a dozen horrifying guises. Her face looked like a Mucha face that had taken up devil worship. The size of the eyes was exaggerated; the mouth was tiny and perfect, smiling just a little and self-satisfied. In one painting she sat, quite nude, with her legs together and her upper body turned toward the viewer. Her breasts were enormous. As she leaned forward, with her weight on her hands and her elbows together, her breasts jutted, round, rich and full, with huge aureoles that faded imperceptibly into the white flesh beyond. Her only adornment appeared to be a Victorian hat and she sat on a pile of hay, or perhaps seaweed.

As we approached, the hat resolved itself into two ravens perched on either side of her coiffure, and within the nest of hair on top of her head were three tiny human skulls, resting like raptor’s eggs.

The painting was masterfully constructed. The eye was caught by the painter’s skill, and carried through the picture on a cunningly conceived path. From the shock of the hair nest, one’s eyes could only return to the ample breasts, down the arrow formed by her arms, past the darkness that lay at the base of her belly, to her thighs where they rested on the sea wrack.  They were splattered with tiny drops of bright red blood. And then the sea wrack resolved itself into what it really had always been:  hundreds, thousands, of bloody, broken, twisted human bodies.

Repelled by the pile of bodies, the eye darted back to the breasts and face, but there was no relief. Instead, the serene, enigmatic look had lost it’s mystery. Now one knew exactly why she looked so self-satisfied.

All of the bodies were male. This was no allegory of war. This was the all-devouring female.

Raven’s fingers dug into my arm as we stood before the picture and she whispered, “Horrible.” But neither of us could look away.

The picture next to it was stranger still, subtler, and therefore more terrifying. more tomorrow

We rinsed off under the open fresh water showers, then walked down the beach carrying our outer clothing until the sun had dried us. Raven pointed up to the top of the concrete wall that lined the beach. American tourists with long lensed cameras were recording the scene below. I wondered if any of them saw the beauty, even vaguely, or felt a deep ache in their belly from knowing that they could have come down those narrow stairs and joined the dance, instead of watching and sniggering from above.

Life is not a spectator sport.

We left the beach and hid from the sun among the tree shaded streets. Raven mailed her letter, and we talked. She wanted to know more about the rest of Europe, so we could plan the weeks ahead. She only knew the Europe of tours and hotels, not the Europe of streetwandering.

We found ourselves climbing a narrow street in the south end of Nice, where the sun beat down directly out of a pale blue sky. We hid from the heat in the Musee des Beaux Arts, and wandered around the vast converted mansion admiring the delicate marble statues and sumptuous paintings. 

At the turn of the century in France, impressionism swept the art world and changed the face of painting forever. The victory was so complete that those they ousted from prominence, the pompiers, were all but forgotten. It was too bad. The pompiers had their faults; their subjects were antique, their treatment was too romantic and studied. Yet they produced a body of beautiful work, far more to my taste than the impressionists.

There was a Clement, Egyptian orange merchants, depicting two women, dark skinned and richly robed with a spill of oranges that glowed against the darkness of their clothing. The Nile behind them was shadowy, faded tan, almost like a mirage.

Down the wall was Thamar by Cabanel. It showed a powerful, robed, dark skinned man with a half nude white woman collapsed in his lap. She appeared to be sleeping, or lost in grief, but she might have been dead. The pompiers had a romantic view of death.

“I wonder if Thamar is French for Othello?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it,” Raven said.

“The colors are warm and rich. His face and outstretched arm are powerful statements.”

“Yes, but the girl is a half-fat, pasty wimp. I can’t get past her to enjoy the rest of the painting.”

“How about the next one?” That was Thaïs by Tanoux.

Raven laughed. “Come on, Ian. Great fruit, great cloth, great leopard skin on the bed, great background. And she’s not fat, but why is she naked while he is fully clothed? And what has he just asked her to do that she should look so shocked?”

“I can imagine.”

“Me, too. But if I were her, I wouldn’t listen to a word he said until he stripped down and joined me on the bed. Two people clothed is ordinary; two people nude is erotic; but a naked woman with a clothed man standing over her whispering shocking suggestions is pornography. It reminds me of an off-color Victorian novel.”

I smiled. “Feminism has just ruined a whole school of art for me.”

“I’ll bet.  You’d love to be him.”

“Do you really think so?”

Raven gave me her full attention. “You probably don’t want to think so, but in your heart, you would.” more tomorrow

Chapter Thirteen

Nice is an exchange point where trains from France and Italy meet. When we got off at six in the morning, it was busy. Three hours later, it would be jammed.

When I had been released from the Army, the first place I visited was the Riveira. Palm trees, secluded beaches, beautiful women, bright air and warm water in an ambiance of riches – everything a kid fresh out of Wisconsin could dream of. I had spent a week in and around Nice, so there was a certain feeling of homecoming when we stepped off the train.

We stowed our packs in a locker, ate breakfast at the Freetime – France’s equivalent of McDonalds – and headed down Avenue Jean Medecin. Nice is a major city, with all the virtues and vices that implies. The storefronts displayed the latest haute coture but the gutters were filled with garbage. We shared the street with high fashion ladies and kids in ripped denim.

A lot had happened to us in twenty four hours, and a few hours sleep on the train was not enough to wipe it away. I felt gritty and irritable and Raven was keeping long silences. My mind was like a VCR stuck on replay; the events we had experienced kept repeating themselves in my mind as we walked. Raven on the beach, the night attack, the sight of tendons moving at the bottom of my wound, the night ride with Will, and the man with the newspaper. Had he only been an innocent traveler?

Probably, but I wished I had been awake when we passed back through Marseille.

Most of all, I remembered Raven’s statement that I didn’t know myself – implying that I was still trying to win a contest of wills with her. We had been happy on the Wahini, during the crossing, when I had known everything and she had known nothing. Once we were on land, it all started to fall apart.

Enough! Too little sleep and too much philosophizing are a bad combination. Mind, I said, shut up!

I began to just enjoy the day. Nice was never intended for deep thought, but for grasshopper enjoyment of the sun, the sea, women, and the day at hand. Perhaps Raven was made the same way, and I was trying too hard to understand what we had.

Raven bought a change of clothing while I waited on the street, people watching, and we went on down past the Place Massena. For several hours we alternated walking the beach and wandering through the streets near the Promenade des Anglais. We ate fruit and bread from an outdoor market, then went down to the beach and lay in the sun for an hour. I slept while Raven wrote her father a full account of all that had happened to her.

Peace, time, and the sun warmed some of the irritation out of us. Raven woke me from my nap with a gentle kiss on the forehead. When I opened my eyes, her lips moved on down to mine and we lay for a long time just holding each other.

She had gone topless again, but this time as a French woman would, quietly, naturally, and without the bravado that reveals uncertainty. As she sat up from our embrace, I saw her against the sea and sky, full breasted, smiling quietly, serene and at peace with herself. I took her hand. It would have been gauche to touch her intimately in so public a place. It embarrassed me to remember what we had done only yesterday. Like dogs rutting; not like love at all.

A little girl of six or seven was playing nude in the sand at the water’s edge. A boy of like age was chasing seagulls, his tiny penis bouncing as he ran. Old men and young men were lying in the sun; young women had wound down the tops of their one-piece bathing suits and sat by twos and threes with their boyfriends, talking and laughing. Bare breasted grandmothers followed their naked grandchildren from place to place. It was not a scene of Playboy titillation, but of serene beauty. more tomorrow

“There is a whole universe of things about you I don’t know, but that in itself tells me volumes.

“In ordinary life, you are friendly; in bed, you are a fireball; but in anything that touches any deep part of you, you are an ice maiden. Sexually liberated, but emotionally frigid.”

She stared out the window with such intensity that I thought the glass might melt. I shut up. You can only go so far with a monolog.

After some miles she said, “You aren’t blind.”

“I’m a lot like that, myself.”

“I know, Ian. I’m not blind, either. But we get into habits, and act out parts we have become comfortable in.” She was speaking with metronymic precision. When she joked around, her Hispanic accent sometimes became thick. When she was thoughtful, it almost disappeared. Clarity of speech was an index of her mood.

“I tend to dominate situations,” I said.

“You are a master of understatement.”

“And you don’t like being dominated.”

“Not at all.”

“So you decided to show me who was boss.”

She nodded.

“You knew I was hooked on you. So you used Will for leverage, to put me in my place. To demonstrate the precise length of my leash.”

“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t calculated. It was an impulse.”

“So it wasn’t planned – it comes to the same thing.”

After a moment, she shrugged half agreement.

“But it didn’t work out. I wasn’t the only one who was hooked.”

Raven laughed harshly. “That is one way of looking at it.”

“How else could you look at it?”

“I could say that you answered my challenge in a way I could not resist.”

“Oh, come on!”

Raven looked puzzled. Our conversation was losing its central thread. Somehow, we had stopped talking in a shared language, and I did not know when it had happened. She said, “I can’t believe you underestimate yourself.” She stared out the window again, her face lovely and opaque. Speaking into the glass, she said, “What do you think we are?”

“I think we are two domineering people trying to fall in love, and trying at the same time to see who will end up as boss.”

That amused her. Her view was obviously different. She said, “Who is going to win?”

“I hope it will end in a draw. An equal partnership.”

“You know me a little,” she admitted, “but you don’t know yourself at all. Why do you stay with me?”

“I like you.”

Her eyes flew wide. “Like me!” she cried out. “Just like me?”

I laughed out loud. She could no more have helped that reaction, than a wet cat could keep from spitting. more tomorrow

According to the train schedule, we passed back through Marseille at 4:58 AM. I had planned to watch for any passengers who got on, but I didn’t wake up until a middle-aged Italian woman with her two grandchildren invaded our compartment at St.-Raphael. She told us in bad French that she was returning to Milan from visiting her daughter, and that her daughter would be coming along in two weeks to pick up the children. She scolded the children in a strident voice, threw open the train window and leaned out to shout across the platform to her family, then offered Raven and me cookies when she gave them to her grandchildren. I took one. It had been a long time since the picnic on the beach.

Raven spoke no French. She looked puzzled at first, trying to follow a clumsy conversation in a third language, engaged in by two people who both spoke it badly. Eventually she gave up and stared out the window.

I slipped my bare foot up beside her on the seat and nuzzled it against her hip. She looked irritated at first, but she finally put her hand on my ankle. I blew her a kiss, a brief pursing of the lips that brought an equally brief smile. She said, “Sorry, Ian. I’m not at my best when I’m short on sleep.”

“Me either. We can talk if we remain circumspect.” Raven looked sideways at our compartment mates; the woman had settled back to knit in silence and the children were mercifully asleep. I went on, “She doesn’t speak English. It is always the first question I ask, bad as my French is. But she would probably know a few words, so talk around things.”

“Where are we going?”

“Nice. It is close to Marseille in case we have to go back quickly, and it is the gateway to the Riveira. Big yachts, blue waters, topless beaches.”

She shot me fiery look. Raven did not like being teased.

I settled in against the window, with one eye on Raven and the other on the russet semi-desert outside. Past St.-Raphael the train hugs the coast and the Mediterranean is in view most of the time. I said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about yesterday. I’m not too happy with either of us.”

Raven nodded toward the grandmother and asked, “Is this the time to discuss it?”

“Why not? We’ve been more intimate in a public setting.”

She actually blushed. I said, “When you apologized to Will, you said you had been jealous. I think that was only the least part of what was going on in your mind.”

“How the hell do you know what was going on in my mind!”

“I don’t, of course, but I know what was going on in mine. Now I do, that is. Then I was just reacting. I think you were just reacting, too.”

I paused for comment, but she just shrugged. I went on, “I think you were jealous, but at the bottom of it all, I think what happened was a challenge to me.”

“That’s clear enough, Sigmund.”

“Not a sexual challenge, Raven. A much deeper challenge hidden within a sexual challenge.”

Our compartment mate’s eyes dodged furtively sideways and her whole shapeless body seemed to come alive with listening. She might not understand much English, but she knew “sexual challenge”.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Raven said. “How can you guess what I think.”

“After two months of enforced intimacy? Come on, Raven. I know a bare minimum about your family, less about your past, and you won’t even commit yourself about what kind of art and music you like. There is a whole universe of things about you I don’t know, but that in itself tells me volumes. more tomorrow