The elbow – a clot of petrified lime; the splayed fingers sunk fast into yellow ochre. For two hundred years the forearm muscles are taut with a tension that cannot break through the dry film of varnish. This gesture of despair is addressed to the firing line whose rifles have long since rotted along with the names of the executioners, but whose lead muzzles still hold their aim at the chest. The skin – impasto strokes congealed in spasm; beneath it no warmth pulses, only the coarse linen weave grows into the vertebrae.
On the other side of the frame, blurred patches drift. Shadows in woolen coats that smell of damp vestibule and the acrid chlorine of yesterday’s cleaning. They stop, searching for the correct composition, calculating the golden ratio of my agony. Their pupils glide across the open mouth, but no one hears the rasp drowned in zinc white. For them, I am a plane. The voices of the tour guides reach me through the thickness of varnish – slow, distorted, as if from underwater. Beneath my nails, sunk into the air, the dust of epochs compacts as they rush past like passing shadows. They blink and turn away. My time, however, is measured only by the network of craquelure that scars the face.
The deaf Spaniard did not ask for my consent. He stood before the easel, locked in his own silence, kneading my death on the palette. We looked at each other – two prisoners on opposite sides of the plane. Before this, there was someone else – the one who still remembered how to hold a spoon. The blunt end of the brush drove my shadow into the canvas, nailing the heels to the filthy ground. The lantern placed at the feet will never go out. Its aggressive, unnatural light burns out the eyes, making the white shirt a target that glows in the darkness of eternal May. To my right – a pool of black blood and a monk curled in prayer, but I cannot even turn my neck to see their faces.
The hammer is cocked. It froze in that fraction of a second that does not end. I wait for the blow that will tear the chest and bring the peace that will never come. This is where the real punishment hides – in the impossibility of falling.
And then the hall empties, the light goes out, and I remain in mute emptiness – where there is no one left even to be a target for.
Fatigue fills the bones with molten lead. If only it were allowed to lower the forearms. By a millimeter. To unclench the fingers, bring the shoulder blades together, close the bleached lips, allow the heavy head to sink to the chest – to step over the massive gilded frame and dissolve into museum silence, to become a pale patch on the polished parquet. But space is compressed to the size of the canvas stretcher. Each of my muscles is stretched on wooden pegs.
You call this immortality. Come closer. The bullet could have brought mercy – but it froze in the canvas. The scream comes out of it endlessly and soundlessly.