Her Portrait in Black
by
Kassandra Alvarado
Copyright 2014
Cover Art designed by Author
Table of Contents
Her Portrait in Black
Author Note
~*~Her Portrait in Black~*~
Visiting hours were over, the security guard walked the halls whistling under his breath. Most were tourists who filtered in twos and fours, sometimes in tour groups with a guide droning in bad English for their benefit. The guard took three turns and would’ve mistaken the sole figure in exhibit four save for the soft exhalation of breath echoing in the three walled chamber.
“The exhibit’s running for three months.” He called from the arched doorway, smiling self-satisfied into the darkened room. Few artifacts resided in square glass cases lit within by track lighting. Worn fumi-e, metal plaques depicting Christian religious figures traditionally tramped down as a means of ascertaining one’s religion. The painting was the highlight of the exhibit, a rare seventeenth century image of a Kirishitan lady of high rank.
The student shook his shoulders and turned with a rueful smile. Wavy black hair flopped over a high forehead, narrow aesthete cheekbones arched gracefully inherited from a Eurasian mother. They’d made conversation over the last week and the guard had learned that while the family had adopted France as their home, their roots were once deep in eastern Asia.
Similar to most of foreign-born heritage, the student fancied himself wholly Japanese in thinking yet was shocked none so pleasantly to find fantasy was far from reality. “That seems a short time,” the student added, “ah, I’ll probably be out of the country by then.”
“Your scholarship ends?”
“Autumn break,” the student grimaced, stepping from the inner gloom. Then, he stopped and looked back into the darkness where the portrait was mounted. “She’s very lifelike, isn’t she?”
“I believe it was the artist’s intention to almost breathe life into his paintings.” The guard filled in respectfully, he’d overheard enough from the curator’s lectures to know some of the history of the more unusual pieces in the museum’s collection. As a privately funded entity, the museum operated on the arcane, the rare and sometimes forbidden.
“There’s pamphlets in the front...?”
“Thanks,” the student nodded, drifting dreamily after the guard. The pamphlets were behind an advertisement for a larger folk art display from the Ryukyu Islands, cradled in a clear plastic holder on plain dull paper instead of glossy finishes like so many of the museum’s publications. The student took one and smiled ruefully, “is it so strange that I feel terrible not knowing of the persecution?”
“Most don’t,” the guard replied sympathetically for there were legends in his family of Keikyo origin. “It was almost like a dirty little secret studied now only in depth.”
“The past shouldn’t be buried,” the student seemed to say to the printed image of the painted woman. “No, it shouldn’t be,” the guard agreed amiably and opened the door for the young man who exited out into the sultry air of late July. They exchanged the brief waves of acquaintances, going their separate ways. For the student that meant a walk along a lonely stretch of a by road, picturesque during daylight hours but now somber in its moving shadows.
He wasn’t afraid with a rational mind and a smile quirking his thin lips. He recognized deep within himself a kind of kinship with the young woman whose likeness was captured forever in European oils and thick canvas. It was perhaps a lack of female company, a disinterest in the art of wooing other young men his age practiced like connoisseurs. He could admire a beautiful woman but found he was terribly awkward and fumbling when speaking to attractive members of the other sex. His father, a wise steel-haired lawyer commonly said their boy would grow into a little hunch-backed man with spectacles surrounded by a thousand books and loyal hound dog at his chair side.
The picture wasn’t completely appealing although he now lived alone in a set of rooms lent by a colleague of his father’s. It was a summer place on a lake green with algae. The mosquitoes were something terrible when sitting on the generous porch, their rampancy necessitated sleeping within a confining net draped over a low western-style bed. But, for the discomfort afforded by the quaintness of the location, the student reveled in the isolation. He cooked, cleaned and looked after himself while viewing online lectures on the sometimes-fussy internet service. Once a week, he traveled into the larger city to attend full classes in a blended type of setting.
Most of the time, he was alone.
Even that was okay, he could visit the painting during daytime hours then return to the cozy place he’d begun to think of as home and compile notes for a thesis on early Christianity in Asia. He had a good notion of where he wanted things to go from the first sentences to the last. With his head filled with the buzz of future grades, he made good time arriving at the steps of the lakeside retreat. Stamping his loafers twice, he found the key in the semidarkness beneath the porch light buzzing with a dozen hungry mosquitoes.
There was always a moment of near helplessness in darkness as his hand fumbled to find the switch simultaneous to slipping off his shoes in the exact order near the door. He rarely wore slippers inside the house preferring to make as little noise as possible; he worked best in silence and solitude.
Aha!
His hand found the switch and light flooded the room. The student smiled to himself, securing the door with the habits of a city boy. Methodically, he went room by room, flipping the lights on, diffusing the darkness. When that was done, he prepared a bowl of instant noodles, carrying it to the back den where he sat on the old patched couch, reviewing his notes.
Surprisingly, there was little about the princess’s life other than the record of her birth in the Shogunate’s officious records. No notation of death..., the student circled the words, the bowl of noodles grew cold on the center table. It was as if she’d vanished from history. No one had been able to trace the remainder of her life after a certain infamous incident on the first of August.
The student stared long at the grainy image reprinted dozens of times on museum brochures until his eyelids grew heavy and he swayed in his seat.
Faintly far away, he seemed to hear the roughness of an older woman’s voice..,
“Marina...Marina...?”
The blackness of oblivion faded to a forest clearing, a young girl with loose unbound black hair scrambled up from the brambles, fixing her lightweight summer yukata before setting off at a brisk run through the undergrowth. The student was aware of himself in a drifting, detached manner. He could not tell whether he was the girl with a fast beating heart or the maternal warmth of the woman who waited with hands on her broad hips standing on the wide veranda warmed by the sun. Zen ideals had vanished from the tiny courtyard garden walled off by prying eyes. Grass and wildflowers flourished in the intertwining paths of buried stone markers, a few precious lilies of the valley resided in crude stone pots.
The girl pushed apart a plank of the wall, squeezing through the narrow aperture with a sunny smile. Long grass tickled bare feet, lacking the grace of a lady, the girl sauntered with an awkward gait to the waiting woman.
The student watched their exchange from afar. Lips moved, arms gestured but wane of voices was like a murmur of the rippling grass. The older woman seemed to berate the girl on her state of dress; the girl giggled and twirled up the veranda, her bare feet brown with caked mud. The woman’s lips fought a smile off with a kind of maternal detachment that made the clever student think of an aunt to a younger sibling’s child. He had no way of knowing whether or not his thinking was correct, but upon further reflection decided it didn’t matter.
&nb
sp; He was conscious of dreaming yet questioned his reason for dreaming. When I sleep I dream..., yes the phrase was accurate but to what purpose? In his mental quest for answers he looked up surprised to find the stilted figures had moved on down a separate path away from the low peaked roof and sliding doors of a traditional dentoutekina.
Slightly annoyed, he wandered through a grove of trailing flowers where a small door had been left ajar snagged on a ball of roots. On the other side, a thin trail meandered through a bamboo grove of tall verdant stalks reaching up to the sky. The student walked immaterially through the silent grove, again he felt outside himself drifting through the