She heard Amelia make some remark; she could also hear the sound of her footsteps and her rapid breathing, but she did not turn to look.
When Amelia gave her a shout to come and see the drawing, Ginia had to close her eyes to get accustomed to the semi-darkness. Then she quietly bent over the paper and recognized her hat, but her face looked like someone else’s; a dreamy face, expressionless, the lips parted as if she was talking in her sleep. ‘A kind of abstracted look’, said Barbetta, ‘Is it true that no one has ever drawn you before?’ He got her to remove her hat and told her to sit down and chat with Amelia. As they sat there looking at each other, they felt a great desire to burst out laughing. The artist went on covering more sheets of paper. Amelia signed to Ginia, telling her to forget she was posing.
‘Abstracted’, repeated Barbetta, looking at her from the side. ‘One would say that the virgin profile is not yet resolved into a definite form’. Ginia asked Amelia if she was not going to pose too and Amelia slowly replied, ‘You’re his discovery today. He will certainly hang on to you’.
While they were talking, Ginia asked her if they could see the drawings he had done of her on previous occasions. Then Amelia rose and looked out a portfolio at the back of the room. She opened it on her knees, saying, ‘Have a look!’ Ginia turned over several sheets; at the fourth or fifth, she was in a cold sweat. She did not dare to say anything, feeling the grey eyes of the man behind her. Amelia, too, was looking at her expectantly, and said finally, ‘Do you like them?’
Ginia raised her head, forcing a smile, ‘I don’t recognize you’, she said. She proceeded to turn them over, one by one. By the time she had finished, she was more composed. After all Amelia was there in front of her, with her clothes on and smiling.
She remarked, feeling an idiot, ‘Did he do them?’ Amelia, baffled, replied, ‘I certainly didn’t!’
When Barbetta had finished the next batch, Ginia would have liked to have waited a little while with her eyes closed as they were dazzled by the light outside. But Amelia shouted to her to come and Ginia was astonished when she looked at the large sheet of paper in front of her. There were lots of drawings of her head, dashed down all over the sheet, some distorted, some showing an expression which she had certainly never worn, but the hair, cheeks, nostrils were true to life and definitely recognisable as hers. She turned to Barbetta, who was laughing; she could not believe they were the same grey eyes of a little time back.
Then he had been letting fly at Amelia who began abusing him and insisting that an hour was an hour and that Ginia worked for a living. She repeated that she had just come along with her casually, without any intention of stealing her job. Barbetta laughed between his teeth and said he must leave them. ‘Come along, I’ll buy you an ice. But then I’m off’.
FOUR
They returned there together next morning. This time it was Amelia’s turn to pose. ‘Look out for yourself’, said Amelia, ‘if you take my place again. That scoundrel knows you are partial to ices and is ready to exploit that virgin business’. Ginia did not feel as pleased as she had on the previous occasion and as soon as she was awake, she had thought about the sketches of herself all amongst the nudes of Amelia and how worked up she had been. She nursed the hope of getting him to give her the drawings, not so much from a wish to possess them as because she did not like the idea of them lying there among all the others for anyone to gape at. She could not convince herself that Barbetta, that plump, pompous old artist, had drawn, rubbed out, squared up Amelia’s legs, back, belly and breasts. He daren’t look her in the face.
1 comment