Gauguin's Flowers

Sara took off her lenses and rubbed her eyes tired because of the light of the halogen spotlights. In her myopic world, the butcher shop across the street merged into liquid shadow with the drugstore beside her. She put her glasses back on in time to see the dust enter the door as a strangled truck passed through the narrow, dark street. Together, a strong odor of gunpowder stung her nostrils.

A late customer peeped out. Two eyes pinned sharply on her straight hair and on her depressed face: “Are you closing, dear?”

“No, not yet, come in, ma’am.”

“Listen, dear, for tonight, I would have thought about changing the color of my hair. I’d like a nice mahogany tone. “

Sara focused on the woman. Stringy bob, beret on one side, withered breasts, squeezed into the lamé shirt. “Red would certainly suit you,” she said, thinking that those like her withered her soul. “What are you doing tonight?”

“I’ll go dancing at the club, and you?” The woman was asking her, but she could see that she didn’t care about her answer. Her pupils darted among the goods on display.

“Me? Nothing special.”

She showed the client the color chart, and she noticed that her hands were shaking. It often happened to her while she worked, but never when she held the brush. Sara knew how to paint all sorts of flowers, from the yellow sunflowers of Van Gogh to the scarlet petals of Gaugin.

It was precisely because of Gaugin’s “Les seins aux fleurs rouges” that she had received the first email from F. They had met by chance, in a chat line for Impressionist painting enthusiasts.

“Color expresses more emotion than reality”, she wrote flirtatiously, signing TAHITI, as the island loved by Gaugin. “This is revolutionary art, it is the road that leads to Picasso”, he thundered, virile. He always closed his letters with that one, disturbing, initial: F.

Thus began a long exchange of messages. They talked about many topics, but above all about painting. She had learned to recognize F.’s mood from punctuation, from the words he chose, from his silences. And, although they had never met in person, she had fallen in love, just like Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail”.

“Can you tell me how much these lipsticks cost?” The client was staring at her in annoyance.

“9.99, ma’am.”

She wrapped the lipstick along with the hair dye. She typed the irrelevant amount on the cash register. She felt her fingers tingling and strange. She found herself looking at her hand as something detached from her body. It was petite, with pink fluff and short nails. The hand of an aged child.

“Look, I gave you a fifty piece.”

“Excuse me.”

The client walked out, wishing her a listless happy new year. The road was emptyng. A group of children lit one firecracker after another on the sidewalk in front of the shop window. She felt them all bursting inside her.

Who knows how F. would have spent that night of celebration?

She only knew that he lived in Rome, that he was no longer a boy, that he had a family of his own. She had put everything else. Day after day, with the strength of her imagination, she had invented a love for herself. With the powerful brush of her heart, she had painted a face, creating it truer than truth, like those orchids that she painted in the manner of Gaugin. And now she was missing that face, she missed those imagined eyes, that hair she had invented, that laugh she only sensed. She lacked that very slight nothingness that she had about him and that was everything to her.

The last passersby returned home exchanging cold greetings. A couple got into a fight in a car. Sara caught a glimpse of sequins and the neck of a bottle of sparkling wine.

It was time to close. Her father was waiting for her at home to toast the new year together. Widower and ischemic, she didn’t feel like leaving him alone and then no one invited her anymore, now.

She removed a few banknotes from the cash register, then she marked the bloodless receipt on the register, next to the date: December 31, Tuesday.

“And for this year too…”

She put on her coat and buttoned it tightly, because the wind was wet and bad outside. She thought of F., of his life that she did not know, of the ardor with which he described Degas’s dancers, of his caustic, brilliant phrases. “Dreams belong only to those who dream them,” he had said.

F., who hadn’t written to her for months.

“The game is good if it doesn’t last long,” he said in his last letter.

Sara looked for the umbrella. She felt heavy, cold. “Maybe I have a little fever”, she murmured, touching her forehead, then she turned off the light. The smell of perfumes took shape from the darkness, pungent, unhealthy, like rotting flowers.

Then, suddenly, in the darkness she saw a blue mountain appear, a dense cobalt blue sea, and fleshy scarlet flowers, painted with strong strokes of light and dark.

Then she smiled. With a firm blow, she pulled the shutter down.

“Tonight,” she told herself, “when everyone else dance, I’ll paint.”