Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/230

 created so easily by the crayons of the masters. Dissections witnessed in hospitals were evident in even the smoothest contours. Perhaps their breathing life lines had resulted from the fact that horrors of disease and death were then not always so discreetly hidden as today from public gaze. He wondered whether his physician father, remembered dimly as two warm brown eyes and a smiling mustache, had been nauseated as a medical student. Scalpel precision, observed in Europe, certainly taught you cannot paint man unless you know his form, which is not only his body. "The body which of itself," as Leonardo said, "fills the whole surrounding air, that is by its images." So when one saw a scrap of paper in it was twisted a life which also had been present at similar discoveries as far back as one could remember. A silhouetted tree was once an anatomical exposition of a man on horseback. Or what freed the buoyant line of boats as they pushed their pulsating forms?

But working with images before their realization in a concrete song or painting had little interest for Simone. Thus, leaning from their Venice window to watch the gondolas, Simone had indulgently encouraged his reminiscence of his running away on the Albany night boat when he was nine. But the image being created before their eyes had no interest for her. The mauve overcast sky freed itself of its burden of spring rain and opposite them Santa Maria della Salute, which had been riding a silver canal in all its baroque chiaroscuro splendor, became a wet line drawing running into its inky depths. A passing gondolier, braced on the body of his black swan, caught it on the tip of his pole, a jongleur de Notre Dame, and his passenger obliged the eye by opening a black umbrella, adding a third cupola to the two of the Cathedral. A miraculous study of balance and structure of no interest to Simone. She had gone to lie in the white veiled bed, impatient at this rival for attention. What the eye saw beyond the human anecdote had no existence for her; to her Venice was only a continuous bed of lovemaking. Her interest was exclusively in what was a personal, physical relationship to herself, so that a song composed by someone else became in her thought her creation because she sang it. She loved herself in his lovemaking, incapable of envisioning a separate existence for her lover apart from herself. Even so, from initiation by Grandma's nurse when he was fourteen to subsequent girls of Washington Square and Paris, he actually had experienced lovemaking for the first time with Simone. Even now, because of her, being with the occasional others since Brussels had been tame. She had been as fine 218