Museum Musings: Novel Snippets

This morning's work on my ongoing novel, A Fool For God, a book about the delicate balance between doubt and faith in the experience of wonder. I woke up thinking about the astonishing painter Remedios Varo, with whom Lilya has an as-yet-undetermined connection. I'm not sure yet how I feel about threading Varo into my book this way - she was a very real, very important woman and I don't want to steal her life. Maybe I can justify it as having a Borgesian moment -- maybe. I'm not including any of Varo's paintings in this post, firstly because none of them are out of copyright and secondly because I don't want to give away the references, but you should check out her brilliant, beautiful, wild paintings here and trust me that the photos I am using convey, at least some of the spirit or aura of her way of seeing the world.

Baths of Lady María de Padilla, Alcázar of Seville
By ivan m v (Baños de Doña María de Padilla)
[CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Outside the café it had grown dark, and the streetlamps left their bruised light all over the walls. The clouds were a dullness above. Lilya walked, and looked. Everything changes color after sundown. Green and blue vanish, and the world becomes iron colors, rust and dying lilac and dry bone. Sunlight is impossible to imagine in its absence. At night things become opaque. The transparency, the lucidity, the lightness of day becomes dreamlike, a figment. The streets were silent as she walked, and more dead than the moon. The mountains of the moon are austere and sublime; empty streets are not even lonely, but flat, solid. She saw herself from above: a labyrinth of narrow orange walls with no minotaur. Nothing at all, not even bones. People asleep in doorways. No myth there, no secret meaning. The world presented itself to her eye as impermeable.

She held herself alert to shadows and quick footsteps, vibrating with the gravitational sensitivity of women who walk alone – who disturbs my orbit? – and it left a black tea of resentment under her tongue. Without the threat, the constant complex sine and cosine of danger and her anger at the looming fear of danger, she thought she might see mysteries instead. She was watchful and furious at having to watch, secretly certain she was missing a hundred holy sigils hidden in the shadows. A fleet of jaunty bandits flying by in frock coats, turned by suspicion into a flutter of starlings. A shadow casting a man on the steps of the bank building. A woman feeding the moon through her window. The alchemical transmutation of the night she could not see because it is impossible to look for the hidden properties of matter and still stay safe in the dark.


She slammed the door of her house with some vehemence. Inside, she remembered she hadn’t done the dishes. The dim shapes of the walls bent down. For a brief flash before her eyes adjusted the rooms swam like twilight and the doorways showed the curved shapes of distant trees, and the leaves were blowing blew in to the warm lamplight like a cat crouching at her feet and dragonflies came from the cracks in the walls. Her eyes adjusted quite against her will, too quickly. The house was just her house, the furniture slumped and ordinary. She squinted, but she could not call it back, and the walls were almost mocking. After a moment her vision was so normal she found she couldn’t manage to imagine what she had even seen. She did the dishes, violently, and stared furiously out the window into the dark.

Double staircases in Grazer Burg, Styria, Austria
By E.mil.mil (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0]
via Wikimedia Commons

Later she called George, but he wasn’t there. She hesitated after the beep and then hung up. She sat with the phone in her hand and thought idly about someone breaking into her house and murdering her, nothing left of her but that tremulous breath on the end of the line. She wondered if she could talk her way out of being murdered. She wondered if it would hurt. She was startled when raindrops struck the glass in front of her, but not unpleasantly. She threw the window open and the smell of wet pavement rose up to her, a stony, musky incense. She wondered what was closer to reality, murder or the smell of the rain.

It pattered briskly on the pavement; the night came alive outside her window. A light like wet oranges crept into the kitchen. All around she could feel the rain, surrounding the apartment like a silver and saffron veil. She sat and thought about bringing her easel into the kitchen. She didn’t want to move. After a while she reached out and lit a candle in the middle of the table. The rain hammered, and she imagined a wind coming in and whirling up the tablecloth, stirring up the dishes and the apples and pomegranates and sending them into orbit around the flame.

The phone rang under her hand; the rain crackled. It was George. She felt like singing down the line to him. He wanted to have dinner. She hung up and listened to the glad clamor of the air, and her heart leaped madly as a deer.