Someone Like You Read online

  And how he could paint! It was coming back more clearly now – the street, the line of refuse cans along the length of it, the rotten smell, the brown cats walking delicately over the refuse, and then the women, moist fat women sitting on the doorsteps with their feet upon the cobblestones of the street. Which street? Where was it the boy had lived?

  The Cité Falguière, that was it! The old man nodded his head several times, pleased to have remembered the name. Then there was the studio with the single chair in it, and the filthy red couch that the boy had used for sleeping; the drunken parties, the cheap white wine, the furious quarrels, and always, always the bitter sullen face of the boy brooding over his work.

  It was odd, Drioli thought, how easily it all came back to him now, how each single small remembered fact seemed instantly to remind him of another.

  There was that nonsense with the tattoo, for instance. Now, that was a mad thing if ever there was one. How had it started? Ah, yes – he had got rich one day, that was it, and he had bought lots of wine. He could see himself now as he entered the studio with the parcel of bottles under his arm – the boy sitting before the easel, and his (Drioli’s) own wife standing in the centre of the room, posing for her picture.

  ‘Tonight we shall celebrate,’ he said. ‘We shall have a little celebration, us three.’

  ‘What is it that we celebrate?’ the boy asked, without looking up. ‘Is it that you have decided to divorce your wife so she can marry me?’

  ‘No,’ Drioli said. ‘We celebrate because today I have made a great sum of money with my work.’

  ‘And I have made nothing. We can celebrate that also.’

  ‘If you like.’ Drioli was standing by the table unwrapping the parcel. He felt tired and he wanted to get at the wine. Nine clients in one day was all very nice, but it could play hell with a man’s eyes. He had never done as many as nine before. Nine boozy soldiers – and the remarkable thing was that no fewer than seven of them had been able to pay in cash. This had made him extremely rich. But the work was terrible on the eyes. Drioli’s eyes were half closed from fatigue, the whites streaked with little connecting lines of red; and about an inch behind each eyeball there was a small concentration of pain. But it was evening now and he was wealthy as a pig, and in the parcel there were three bottles – one for his wife, one for his friend, and one for him. He had found the corkscrew and was drawing the corks from the bottles, each making a small plop as it came out.

  The boy put down his brush. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘How can one work with all this going on?’

  The girl came across the room to look at the painting. Drioli came over also, holding a bottle in one hand, a glass in the other.

  ‘No!’ the boy shouted, blazing up suddenly. ‘Please – no!’ He snatched the canvas from the easel and stood it against the wall. But Drioli had seen it.

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘It’s terrible.’

  ‘It’s marvellous. Like all the others that you do, it’s marvellous. I love them all.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ the boy said, scowling, ‘that in themselves they are not nourishing. I cannot eat them.’

  ‘But still they are marvellous.’ Drioli handed him a tumblerful of the pale-yellow wine. ‘Drink it,’ he said. ‘It will make you happy.’

  Never, he thought, had he known a more unhappy person, or one with a gloomier face. He had spotted him in a café some seven months before, drinking alone, and because he had looked like a Russian or some sort of an Asiatic, Drioli had sat down at his table and talked.

  ‘You are a Russian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Minsk.’

  Drioli had jumped up and embraced him, crying that he too had been born in that city.

  ‘It wasn’t actually Minsk,’ the boy had said. ‘But quite near.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Smilovichi, about twelve miles away.’

  ‘Smilovichi!’ Drioli had shouted, embracing him again. ‘I walked there several times when I was a boy.’ Then he had sat down again, staring affectionately at the other’s face. ‘You know,’ he had said, ‘you don’t look like a western Russian. You’re like a Tartar, or a Kalmuck. You look exactly like a Kalmuck.’

  Now, standing in the studio, Drioli looked again at the boy as he took the glass of wine and tipped it down his throat in one swallow. Yes, he did have a face like a Kalmuck – very broad and high-cheeked, with a wide coarse nose. This broadness of the cheeks was accentuated by the ears which stood out sharply from the head. And then he had the narrow eyes, the black hair, the thick sullen mouth of a Kalmuck, but the hands – the hands were always a surprise, so small and white like a lady’s, with tiny thin fingers.

  ‘Give me some more,’ the boy said. ‘If we are to celebrate then let us do it properly.’

  Drioli distributed the wine and sat himself on a chair. The boy sat on the old couch with Drioli’s wife. The three bottles were placed on the floor between them.

  ‘Tonight we shall drink as much as we possibly can,’ Drioli said. ‘I am exceptionally rich. I think perhaps I should go out now and buy some more bottles. How many shall I get?’

  ‘Six more,’ the boy said. ‘Two for each.’

  ‘Good. I shall go now and fetch them.’

  ‘And I will help you.’

  In the nearest café Drioli bought six bottles of white wine, and they carried them back to the studio. They placed them on the floor in two rows, and Drioli fetched the corkscrew and pulled the corks, all six of them; then they sat down again and continued to drink.

  ‘It is only the very wealthy,’ Drioli said, ‘who can afford to celebrate in this manner.’

  ‘That is true,’ the boy said. ‘Isn’t that true, Josie?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How do you feel, Josie?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Will you leave Drioli and marry me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Beautiful wine,’ Drioli said. ‘It is a privilege to drink it.’

  Slowly, methodically, they set about getting themselves drunk. The process was routine, but all the same there was a certain ceremony to be observed, and a gravity to be maintained, and a great number of things to be said, then said again – and the wine must be praised, and the slowness was important too, so that there would be time to savour the three delicious stages of transition, especially (for Drioli) the one when he began to float and his feet did not really belong to him. That was the best period of them all – when he could look down at his feet and they were so far away that he would wonder what crazy person they might belong to and why they were lying around on the floor like that, in the distance.

  After a while, he got up to switch on the light. He was surprised to see that the feet came with him when he did this, especially because he couldn’t feel them touching the ground. It gave him a pleasant sensation of walking on air. Then he began wandering around the room, peeking slyly at the canvases stacked against the walls.

  ‘Listen,’ he said at length. ‘I have an idea.’ He came across and stood before the couch, swaying gently. ‘Listen, my little Kalmuck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have a tremendous idea. Are you listening?’

  ‘I’m listening to Josie.’

  ‘Listen to me, please. You are my friend – my ugly little Kalmuck from Minsk – and to me you are such an artist that I would like to have a picture, a lovely picture –’

  ‘Have them all. Take all you can find, but do not interrupt me when I am talking with your wife.’

  ‘No, no. Now listen. I mean a picture that I can have with me always… for ever… wherever I go… whatever happens… but always with me… a picture by you.’ He reached forward and shook the boy’s knee, ‘Now listen to me, please.’

  ‘Listen to him,’ the girl said.

  ‘It is this. I want you to paint a picture on my skin, on my back. Then I want you to tattoo over what you have painted so that it wil