Chez Max Read Free Page A

this speech or slinking away, ashamed. Then his face suddenly changed, he cried angrily, ‘Yes, I felt like God Almighty! Except that God didn’t collapse after three days out of sheer terror that he couldn’t keep the standard up. Or else he simply didn’t realize what amazing stuff he was creating. As for me, I stood looking at my ten pictures, ten out of the twenty, I could already see the delighted faces of visitors to the gallery, I heard the critics’ praise – and then suddenly, literally, I could hardly move any more. It began with numbness, first in my shoulders, then in my arms, and a few days later the shaking began. To this day the doctors haven’t found out what’s wrong. My muscles, my sinews, my brain – apparently they’re all fine, but as soon as I pick up a brush or a pencil and get in front of a canvas, or just sit down with a pad of paper…’ He raised his arm and mimed an uncontrollable tremor. ‘No kidding. It’s been like that for over fifteen years. I can write letters by hand, I can even thread a needle, but the moment I so much as think of drawing or painting… Oh, I still have my studio in Palermo, sometimes I fly there for an evening, sit by the sea, drink a couple of glasses of wine, act as if everything was normal, try to relax, to dream, I talk to a waiter I’ve known for the last fifteen years, I listen to the waves, and when the wine and the salty sea air have made me feel strong enough I pay the bill, and the waiter, who doesn’t know anything about my block, wishes me good luck with my painting in his usual way. Then I go over to the studio in the old warehouse, just to sit with my easels and canvases for a while, breathing in the smell of paint and turpentine and smoking a cigarette or two. I have a cleaning lady who comes in once a month, there’s no dust lying around, and it looks as if I’d painted my last picture only yesterday. So I sit there, I look around me, I smoke – everything’s fine. Until I suddenly think of a flower or something like that. Usually it’s flowers, always something really simple like daisies. And I see the flower more and more clearly in my mind’s eye, I know just where to position it, how the shadow will fall, how I’ll use the colours, and then I tell myself: no, just a simple sketch. No colours, no background, no shadowing. A quick drawing of a flower, the sort of thing you’d doodle while you’re talking on the phone. After all, when I made a note of something yesterday I could still use a pencil…’
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    I looked at the TEF and sighed. What a disaster! What Leon had told me that evening still seemed to me total proof of his artistic vocation, even more so at this moment, when he was probably already in handcuffs. The honesty of his description of his torments and his megalomania, his contempt for his own corrupt nature, the intensity he devoted to everything. And of course the pictures. I’d looked on the Internet the next day, and through various roundabout links I’d finally tracked down two reproductions of works by Leon Chechik in a Budapest gallery: ‘Apples In Front of a Blue Sofa’, and ‘Almond Blossom Ecstasy’. I downloaded them to my smart three-by-three metres BTL original-reflection wall, and was fascinated. Sure enough, I’d never seen such fantastic almond blossom in real life. It positively exploded into the room out of a blue, sunny sky; it seemed as if I could touch the sea of flowers bathing me in a clear, pale pink light. I automatically thought of springtime, youth, being in love. I seemed to smell the sweet scent of the blossom. To think that an oil painting could do something like that! And because of the zero per cent additional lighting of the original-reflection wall, I could be sure that the colours in Budapest were at least as bright as those I saw here. How I would have liked to tell Leon