CHAPTER 1

The Man in the Turban

The long black hair of the odalisque unfurls in the dense, stagnant air. Her nude body reclines across a white sheet that spreads outward, engulfing the fabric beneath it, of a profuse and vivid red. Further up, high above the odalisque's head, there hangs a dark green curtain. The odalisque offers up her body, as she offers up the open palm of her hand. An Arab in a turban sits at her feet. A bangle winds around the odalisque's ankle and she gazes upward, scrutinizing the emptiness of the chamber. The crestfallen Arab strums a stringed instrument in the parsimonious darkness. Despite the shadows cast by the turban, the milky glinting of light, and the general murkiness of the chamber, the viewer seems to see the Arab's face.

As one draws near, the face seen up close gives the effect of a face seen from afar; but seen from afar, we know it to be nothing more than the idea of a face. The oil, a bit darkened over the desiccated cardboard, lacks the brilliant, waxen clarity of fresh varnish.

A painting is an autonomous space; but this autonomous space itself inhabits another visible space, in a concrete location. One with curtains, and brocade tapestries, and dark, heavy velvets thick with the suffocating layers of dust from a luxury now centuries dead, founded on petrified splendors and one day paralyzed. Thus the light of Rome crosses the garden with its classical statuary and settles on the white hat of the young woman – we know she is young, but we do not see her face – reclining on a swing, leafing through an album while speaking courteously to another woman seated before her, both vast and tenuous in her aeriform crinoline. In the half-light of the chamber, as with glimmers of flame at once faint and terrible, burns a jagged assemblage of lances and helmets; the feudal glinting of a suit of armor, a shield, an axe; the blind, immobile garb of a tartar horseman, seasoned in the open air, sun-dark from the torrid or snow-capped dunes, come down from the flickering depths of centuries to rest beneath a shelter of shawls overlaid with Coptic imagery and the carved wood of the paneled wall. There is an iron stove with a periscopic pipe, and a painting in the manner of Goya hidden on the wall, among the suffocating tapestries. The chisel of visible space has also chiseled into time, into the brilliance of this morning in 1870.

We didn't see, or thought we didn't see, or saw and didn't realize it, the face of the Arab seated at the odalisque's feet; nor do we now see particularly well the faces of the other two Arabs. There is a courtyard with one wall of ochre and another of white; or else, a white barrier and the ochre ashlar stonework of a larger building, perhaps the tower of a Moorish castle. An Arab in a bluish hat holds up the hoof of a mule while another Arab, kneeling on the the parched earth, brick-red and fissured, nails a horseshoe into place. The standing Arab is little more than a bronze nude grading into olive green; the face of the Arab blacksmith beneath his red turban is scarcely more than an arid smudge the color of a stump of chestnut. More or less like the Arabs of today; but whereas the sky in the courtyard where they were shoeing the mule was of a milky white like mist, the sky here presents a broad horizon with traces of thin blue clouds that vacillate from white to mauve, half-blended, at times, with the more diffuse clouds of smoke from the confusion of musket-fire and the dust kicked up by the Arabian horses thrown into a gallop on the mountain-ringed flatlands of Tétouan.

The uniform jackets of the Spanish cavalry are blue; the officers wear red pants and golden epaulettes, and brandish the white streaks of their unsheathed sabers, slicing the thin, dry air over an immutable background of imperious blue. Plunging in a single blurred breath down into the desolate and bitter scree, this incongruous multitude arrested in instantaneous movement, this band of Arabs dressed in white or green or red or yellow, or in a color that seems violet under the reddish standard tossed by a flamboyant blast of wind, this mass of riders has also not quite been endowed with faces. Terse in the incandescence of motion, they are all moment, a rapture of fulgid colors.

Their movement demands enormous patience with a minuscule paintbrush. The man who wields it – the man who, when he dies amid the exotic, malarial luminosity of Rome's environs, will not yet have finished this painting – we see in profile, bent over an easel bearing a diminutive canvas; one grander, perhaps, for its minuteness, as though it were the last redoubt of color. The man – Mariano Fortuny y Marsal – is seated in the same rocker where the young woman in the white hat had sat before. In the hovel of the odalisque's bedchamber, in the village where the mule is being shod, amid the anfractuosities of Tétouan, the Arabs are faceless. The contino, the count-in-waiting, languid in his riding jacket with his small sword and blue gaiters, may have a face, standing in the park against a stone balustrade carved with grotesques, beneath a whisper of exultant clouds – a harlequin of silk in an Italian garden, rendered in watercolors, and looking as if he himself were entirely made of water. Mariano Fortuny y Marsal may have a face as well: not attired as a Roman, or disguised as a Moor with a musket and leather boots, or dressed in the manner of the eighteenth century, contemplating a vase from Arabia, or in the sepia luminosity of photographs, but rather in a canvas painted by Federico de Madrazo, the father of the young woman in the white hat. Federico de Madrazo is a slender man with a dour moustache and eyes that form precise bull's-eyes under the gelid rondure of his spectacles. In the canvas of Federico de Madrazo, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal has black hair and wears a black jacket; the collar of his shirt is white, and a thin gold watch-chain trails from his vest pocket. Mariano Fortuny y Marsal looks back at his viewer from within the painting, his head askance. His hair is tangled by a powerful unseen wind; beneath his collar, nearly grazing the picture frame, his cravat is a scarlet smudge, a yellow haze, a mingled tempest of indistinct colors set alight.

We are living in the ephemeral glory of light in the Roman November, which from time to time gives promise of the sweetness of May's radiance. In the background, the naked bust of a goddess suffuses the garden with whiteness; under the chaste velvet spears of the cypresses, the young woman with the white hat, sheltered by a parasol, feeds on fluid clarities in transverberation. Only a few years back, amid the satin of the September sky in Paris, with parchment-yellow lighthouses on the bridges waylaid by green or blackish waters, Federico de Madrazo also painted a portrait of his daughter Cecilia, the young lady in the hat so white. From outside, all was compact and golden in a gloom of conic roofs and chimneys of sacred soot and imperial cornices stripped bare by the solemnity of daybreak under a cold white sky, dense and untrembling. Not a quiver in the stifling golden light of the Parisian September, which grazes – indeed, as if we were strumming a smooth string – the bobbin lace that adorns the picture window.

Cecilia de Madrazo in Paris, around September of 1867, has somber, tender eyes and a golden cameo on her breast, and a white blouse with trim, and a red shawl with green markings that covers her shoulder, and a black scarf around her neck. On her lips, on her cheeks, a slight, pure touch of pink. In days to come, this face will become another face. In Granada, with spurs of calcareous light in the coruscated gardens, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal will paint the lady of the castle on her deathbed. Upon the blue cushion is a yellowed face edging toward olivaceous; in the depths, the fabric is red, but the chamber turns dark and purple around the inanimate noblewoman with the black hair. Now – many years later – on her deathbed, Cecilia de Madrazo, wrapped in the suffocating luxury of ornamental tapestries, will be nothing more than whiteness beneath the bright flowers: a lily suffused with flickering ice.

The man who photographed Cecilia de Madrazo takes a few steps back in the desolate chamber, imposing in its silent immensity. The man who has photographed Cecilia de Madrazo so many times may also take a few steps back in time. He has a face, we see his face: he is wearing a turban. The Arab from the odalisque's sordid and suffocating seraglio, the ruddy-skinned Arab shoeing the mule, the Arab with the musket riding horseback through the outskirts of the tumult of Tétouan, are all now one man, with a man's face, painted and unpainted countless times in the radiance of the ancient Roman studio. The man with the turban, in this photograph, is not an Arab: he is a European, with black eyebrows, white beard, a kerchief knotted around his neck, and a black-and-white striped djellaba, very broad and roomy in the shoulders. The man with the turban and the djellaba looks at us: he is Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, in the Palazzo Orfei, in Venice, around 1935.

CHAPTER 2

The Outsiders

No one looks at the two men speaking English, at the two men falling silent in English. It is rather they who look at the others, who look beyond the others, who gaze on the imagined day within the physical day from the shelter of the undulate loggias on the Piazza San Marco. The two men speaking English – John Singer Sargent and Henry James – are emerging from the mahogany-tinted murk of a sitting room. In the Palazzo Barbaro, the eye of John Singer Sargent has come to rest on a pampered panoply of shimmering specters, the Curtis family: under Murano crystal chandeliers, the son-in-law wears white pants and a dark jacket, and the daughter-in-law, in a long pale dress, holds in her hand a cup of tea. Seated in the foreground, the lord and lady of the house: the lady, quite old, stares back at us, a grimace on her heron-like lips, and the old man, grey-haired and drowsy, leafs through an album. Silken and luxurious in the depths of the canvas, the darkness floods the scene with indistinctness.

In the Piazza San Marco, Henry James observes the faultless splendor, of porphyry and marble, of twilight in summer: quite luminous, warm, and clear. In flight from visibility, there is a stream of greenish waters, now splashing, now silent, and a ramshackle and creaky palace in the corridors of the mind, like a storeroom full of damp wood. A palace on the white page, a palace on the scrawled-upon page. Two women live there, like a pair of gutta-percha birds. The older of them, a sterile priestess, her past worn away, erased, and written out again on the calcified wall of the original memory, like the mossy tidemark on the staircase at the base of the precarious gothic edifice; the younger, a turtledove, or rather goldfinch, under cover of the iconic darkness, totemesque or tomblike, of her superannuated consort. The outsider will be someone like himself, someone like Henry James. He asks, amid the porticoes, against the contre-jour of mauve and the naked, shadow-dotted stones of the pearlescent courtyards, for a notion of a simulacrum of life to distend over the soft white clarity of the written page; the outsider will beg the doyenne's withered sterility and the docile suppleness of the youth for a funerary offering, incubated in darkness, purblind and miry as the canal: the secret papers of a dead man, Jeffrey Aspern. From London, the great vulture of dossiers, collector of dust-laden posthumous rarities, has glimpsed the glow of flesh.

At this hour, on an extraordinarily clear spring evening, you will detect in the silence, coming down a narrow canal, the stifled sonority of the oar blows as the black prow of the gondola cleaves the water's stately shimmer. It does not reach the Piazza San Marco. Seated on the terrace of the Florian, the two men speaking English hear, under the slow, luxuriant twilight, the frayed pomp of the café's summer orchestra. Inwardly, perhaps, Henry James is harboring other images. It is rare, in recent years, that the splendor of the cliffs of old England emerging from the radiant, bustling haze, before the deck of the vessel departed from the continent, has left his thoughts. It is rare that he has opened a closet, a wardrobe, going to retrieve a suit laid away, without a ghastly scene flashing before his eyes: the memory of a man shut up in an asylum. With black hair, and greenish skin, covered only by a sheet of coarse linen, the internee passes his day seated on a bench, facing the inhospitable wall. That man – that form – was he: beyond the horror, it was the I of a person who went by the name of Henry James. To write is to transcend, to overstep the limits, it is to extend the margins of horror. The palace's inhabitants are hinges that give a glimpse, like a shade that filters a light too bright, of the spark of panic, the night of the suffocating, vertiginous closet.

They arrive – the younger woman and the collector – from the far side: from the direction of the Piazzetta, coming up the quayside, on foot, brusque after stepping down from the gondola, soon with their backs to the great sheet of quicksilver, in the direction of San Giorgio, walking parallel to the sawtooth lace of the Palazzo Ducale. The piazza is also, in the soft light of the porticoes, a place of intimate shop-windows that shimmer like the filaments in bulbs. A place of temptations and confusions: in the frames of the display cases, in the flickering of the swordplay of the word, in the calligraphy of space, in the vicinity of the onlookers at the gilded dusk. Something crumbles, something slips away from line to line, from one word to the other; something vanishes amid the indecisions and incisions and the intimations of the summer crepuscule. Something – and one had to confront it with the equanimity of light in autumn and the measured indifference of London's austere darkness – was also disquieting and transitory in the furnished room at 3 Bolton Street, deep in the heart of Piccadilly, when Henry James, out for his afternoon walk, would happen, at times, upon John Singer Sargent, wandering beneath the waning sky. The sound of the orchestra of San Marco is vague and vacant in the calm, erratic air.

The eyes of Henry James do not change with the passing years: they are always steady and cavernous, vigorous and tender. Beneath his top hat, with great rings under his eyes, etched by time into his face's faultless flesh; clean-shaven, with a touch of weariness, and a defiant, unabated luster; or else redressing his baldness with a black beard, concealing the polished whetstone of his chin, firm and faint as the flourish, when he signs documents in Venice, that prolongs the S of his surname into an arabesque at once jab and filigree, pressing upward from the pale bottom of the page. It presses upward thus; implacable, impeccable, and delicate, the wall of this verbal edifice: the history of an outsider who, one summer afternoon, on the terrace of the Florian, asks a young girl for the papers of Jeffrey Aspern. When they return to the canal, the air has grown dense; beneath the window, arrested in the darkness, the gondola glides by, its course immobile and chimerical. The mirrored image of a lighthouse shimmers over the swaying, mirrored surface of the water.

At this moment we may read the story; it has the scent of ink about it, the shrill, abrasive memory of printing presses. Henry James and John Singer Sargent are no longer seated on the terrace of the great café. In Venice, in 1889, in the Palazzo Ca' Rezzonico, shielded from the empyreal gold of the abandoned ballroom like another shadow in the sedan chair, Robert Browning, who dreamt, in a poem never heard, of the clashing of an intangible toccata with masks and sabers in the scintillating night, has died. Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo is living with Cecilia de Madrazo in that scarp of Venetian silver, the Palazzo Martinengo.

A few months back, the world learned the turbid, stifling tale of the Aspern papers. At daybreak, in the piazza, there is no one: a diaphanous goblet of water. The light is clear and naked in the air, shimmering like a sword.