BIBLIOGRAPHY:

© 2007, RomanPayne.com | To request reprint rights for this content, please email us at info@romanpayne.com.

Back in Paris after an alpine revelry. I came into the Gare de Lyon. It was ten o’clock at night: that singular hour, peculiar and undistinguished. The métropolitain zipped fast underground. After the Palais Royal, I traversed the gilded tunnel. I walked like a winter stick on a balance beam across the Pont des Arts, on past the golden coupole of the Institut de France, I was headed to call on the beautiful Nadja in her fortunate place on the rue Jacob. She had hailed my traveling soul with a gracious invitation the way the shore hails the sight of a weary sailor when favorable winds are abound.
Pleasant stairs took me up to her lofty room.
“Aleksandre?” she called from behind her easel.
“Aye, good girl! . . . Let me see what you’re working on.” I went to have a look.
Nadja smiled and showed me her picture, saying that I had inspired the theme. The Death of Calypia, she called it. In it, a young girl with blood burnished legs was draped over a cot in a clearing of woods.
“I wanted to walk down to the bridge before you came,” she said, “but it was too cold. It gets so cold in Paris!” Nadja had a peculiar fondness for bridges. “…Nevermind that. I cooked for you.”
She had indeed cooked for me: well-cured foods from her native land. A winter meal heavy of sauce, fine of spice, and not lacking in wine. I kissed the fair girl as she placed her brushes aside to attend to boiling pots. Sweet hopeful Nadja, she had paint dabbed on the backs of her elbows and on her wrists. Sapphire-eyed and supple-skinned Nadja. When I had met her, her skin was copper like silt in the twilit summer sun. Now she’d traded her gold for winter white.
Thinking back of that time we met…
It was long about summer, a year and a half ago, on the rocky beaches of Croatia. Nadja was alone by the water, sitting. The way she reclined on the sand, her glistening bronze body balanced on her elbows, wrists set pressing softly against sun-browned hips, her body making no effort, having no anxiety. Her long legs, like the stems of golden spoons, were extended outwards. Her back sloped magnificently as she looked out over the water, squinting to see, or not to see, in the bright sunlight. One guessed she was studying the sun’s effects on the waves rippling across the Adriatic, or was looking blankly in thought, or was not thinking of anything, but just allowing the healthy oil-dark sun to play on the surface of her skin. Her hair was made straight and almost black with a semi-matte sheen from the saltwater. Every few moments, she’d take her gaze off the sea and put her golden chin down against her collarbone to examine her tummy which was small and firm and went in a gentle slope to where it disappeared beneath the taut elastic of her bathing suit. She wore no top as she tanned. On her body, her breasts rose and sat firmly and beautifully on her chest – one would say drops of sweet honeycomb wax were dripping from a candle. As the sun dropped over the horizon and shade was cast upon us, she covered her bare breasts with her bikini top and it was only then we spoke for the first time.
She said she was on the coast traveling with her father. They had a summer villa alongside a tiled road, on a sunny stretch of land beyond the ruins of the Roman palace that crowned the aquatic city. Her father, she said, was a serious man who stayed in to work all days and throughout the evenings, while she, Nadja, spent most everyday at this beach, trying to make her skin as evenly dark as the sunburnt rocks along the shore. She told me in her manner of attractive indifference, that she was planning to go to Paris to study painting, and she was happy to learn that I lived there. I gave her an address of where she could write to me and said I would be happy to familiarize her with the city, if and when she came; and the two of us walked up the road to a peninsula where some strange flowers were growing. She walked barefoot, with a light yellow cloth wrapped around her waist, hips swaying as rhythmically as a dancer’s, as effortlessly and unconsciously as a young girl walking; her top stayed comfortably bare but for a bikini on a thin strap. I wore pleasant sandals on my well-traveled feet and felt the hot sun on my own skin as we walked along. At a restaurant on the peninsula, we sat on the patio together and ate dinner and drank cold, sweet Dalmatian wine. Nadja’s suntanned throat swallowed with tranquil pleasure as she looked out at the wayward sea and talked coolly to me. She talked then as she talked now.
Now that she was in Paris, studying painting as she had said she would, she often stayed up late at night, telling tender words about her pleasures, or occasional references to things past, always over wine or coffee or a lip’s embrace, her mouth sought sensual joys. On the first night I visited her in the new apartment her father rented for her on the rue Jacob, we made love and laid long together. My hand rested gallantly on her hip bone, knowing no other raptures could be as fine. she told me of the house she had to herself with a walled garden in a city of tiled rooftops and winding canals; a city far east of the islands of the breezy Dalmatian Coast where we’d come to know one another. She mentioned too having had a lover back home, a young man of a sensitive nature, who had come to a tragic end somehow or other – something involving a pistol and a basement room. As I found such generalizations about suicides to be vulgar, I moved the subject away when she spoke about it.
A false spring came in February and lasted a week; and each morning Nadja would walk up to Montmartre to paint watercolor scenes of the sunlit cobbled streets. She came to see me often after with a pouting mouth and a look of defeat.
“I will try again tomorrow if it’s sunny,” she would say.
The first painting she was happy with, she presented to me as a gift. She kissed me on the mouth and slid it under the bed. I promised her I would show it to no one.

 

PLATE 01 – Nadja’s Triumph in the False Spring.