THREE APPLES AND A MOUNTAIN Poem by Stefan Hertmans

Le principal dans un tableau
c'est la distance.
Paul Cézanne



1

Three apples and a mountain -
enough to sit still for years
and seek out that one correct look.
The moon is full above the Sainte-Victoire,
at night too it is still
a glowing mass of rock, scorched and
burning on the southern flank.

He wrote to a friend, after the last
of about fifty attempts: I am
too old and too ill, I cannot do this.
To Ambroise Vollard:
I have made a little progress.
Why so late and so difficult ?

The painter is a walker.
A hot road lies rolled up in his eyes
and sleeps there like a snake.

Midday heat, evening of a life.
Blinded by a surfeit of light.

In Aix the Cours Mirabeau lay in shade,
once, under the great plane trees
the enlightened little despot had
reached for ripe fruit - then still quite round
and unaware of any mischief.

Coolness in the courthouse and in the old offices.
The painter's footstep was preserved.
Further on the studio lies concealed
in a garden overgrown by staring eyes.

But only against that high wall
of distant opacity
did things take shape and grey
became the colour of colours.

A cross stands inaccessible in
an air of melting lead.
You have to climb a mountain
with nothing other than your eyes
and the path is full of little ugliness.

Bellevue, Beauregard, Vauvenargues.
A mill and a village asleep.
A wash-place since the time
of the Romans.


2

Brushes keep still in a hot silence,
even if the colours cry out in the sun.
He knew what distance was.
Stepped into bodies, apples
the better to hear what the mountain said.
It lies there scorching in facets,
does not reveal itself to the visitor
and whispers with the black owls
in your ears at night.
You can sit out your life there,
since children everywhere grow up themselves,
water always flows towards a source.

But all those forms thought to pieces
in his head: how did he put them
together so cleverly that in a dream I
recognize them as something once mine
and yours, everyone's who knows
what the warmth, the silence is
of a timeless afternoon in the south ?

He squashes insects to death on the terrace,
drinks not too much absinthe and
talks silently with the water.
He lets the evening sink into itself.


3

A village sometimes has many voices;
the paper is only just beginning to
be silent in his hand.
Mountain, how can I conquer you like
the apples and onions on the window sill?
How can I taste you, who
thrust me from your face once again,
back into my own eyes,
which I believe more and more?

Rilke walked round in the summers
of this landscape, but first
saw at the autumn show
where the roads were going.

Never has a painter shown
like this that colours want
to do the work themselves, that you
have to set them free. Because one day
they will understand each other.

That was nineteen seven.
The mountain lay glowing in its stony face,
wound its way into the world,
into his eyes, into an alien consciousness.


4

The traveller who wishes to see the philosopher's stone
now, exactly like brushes saw it then,
will not always end up in
villages of yesteryear.

A concrete estate is called Les Lauves
where he once stood looking at the grass:
the way back-light sears the membrane of the eye.

Somewhere in a backstreet, between two blocks,
the view is suddenly perfect,
if you live on the second floor.

Those possessing this view include
a gas fitter, a judge and
an old maid - who, in silence,
lets me in. A blue cuckoo ticks
against concrete and ply.

The time is in keeping: a little sad for
what has just passed and scattered
like sand against the open view.
She has a table with a still-life
and dried fennel.

At her window clings an impenetrable
painting, le support suprême, that
ceaselessly changes appearance
in the light of what goes by.

She lets me out and mumbles.
You walk through heavy traffic
back to the quiet studio.

A little rearrangement
of his bookshelf yields
among others, the following:

Journal des demoiselles,
volumes forty-one to
forty-four; Plutarch and Virgil;
the Magasin Pittoresque,
Beauté du spectacle de la nature,
Hyppolite Taine's Voyage en Italie,
and then a spine printed with gold:
Avant d'entrer dans le monde.

An entry that was outside, in the main -
Les Grandes Baigneuses, for example:
before they went naked into the world,
they required a hole in the wall, metres high
to disappear out the north side.

He also left the house and garden for what
they were and went back to Paris.

But here in Loubassane, Bibémus,
Beaureceuil and Jas de Bouffan
children throw stones through
the large windows of the day.


5

The foot of the mountain was later occupied
by a torero with a palette.
He took up residence in the castle
at Vauvenargues, swore that he
could buy that dream with his paint.
He became old and crabby there,
profusely creative, fought with
the devil of the old masters
and in the end brought no one to their knees
except his burning self.

He was not a drifter like that other,
did not speak to adders and pines,
simple tables or a cloth covered in dust;
forgot to look and to be silent,
and only poured his fury onto
the smallest surfaces of
this sleeping cosmic village
that bordered on the blue,
that glowing mass of stone,
those twelve Carpaccio trees
around the house.

I drink here till late in the night.
Crickets land on the table top,
they look something like a cross
between dragon flies and centaurs.
The bull sleeps in his grave.

And under Orion walks the master of Aix,
he who could look things to pieces
and later put them together again:

time on a palette full of crusted paint,
the conqueror of a mountain
that bent to no one's wishes,
did not move, only waited
for that hand.


6

I cannot rid myself of this double image
tonight: up there luminous stone
drops down behind
a high tombstone, like a silent
witness to the sleep that pours
time into people's heads.

While my beloved, sleeping
discerns herself in her own form,
two rooms in the castle light up
making bloodhounds wake.
The little sign by the gate
expresses hate: go away,
don't be insistent,
le musée est à Paris,
we don't want any witnesses.

The old master snores next to me
on a bench. He has two brown
patches on two fine hands.

Only now, the very last cricket silent,
I hear how his brushes whisper,
excitedly, confused, afraid of what
will happen tomorrow if that whole
glorious mass proves not to have cooled.

The stone is almost finished, after several million years.
The paint is drying. A black owl floats over the crest.
First light is already rising over the high ridge.
Wind is cooling the colours of the night.

You stroke the woman sleeping next to the painter
as if you were sleeping with her for the first time.
We shall never wake again
if the mountain does not sleep.


7

Then the man, roaming about in such a ravage, faltering and
sometimes dizzily groping about, realised that since the fire on the
Sainte-Victoire he had lost a way.
Peter Handke