The Irises of Provence

The Irises of Provence

It was a painting hanging on the wall above the bed. He did not notice it until the second day after moving in. It hung on the white wall at the head of the bed, and there was nothing else on that wall besides the painting. He had stayed in many chain hotels like this one, but had never before paid attention to the presence of anything like an oil painting. Yet when he returned to the hotel on the afternoon of the second day, the painting entered his sight as if it had appeared out of thin air. The hotel as a whole was on the same level as others of the same brand, but this painting suddenly gave the room a sense of familiarity and warmth. The hotel no longer seemed to be merely a temporary stopping place; it could almost be called a temporary shelter.

He pulled over a chair and sat in front of the bed, studying the painting carefully, searching his mind for similar scenes in hotels he had stayed in before. But he could not recall a single one. Walls adorned with paintings or calligraphy certainly existed, of course, but whether they were the grand, imposing works in five-star hotels or the richly inked Chinese paintings and calligraphy in stylish apartments, he could not summon the slightest impression of them now. The days that had passed before seemed to have flowed over him like water. All his impressions appeared to lie beneath a thin layer of sand under the water, but he was often unable to call them to mind, as if beneath that sand there were a bottomless abyss, ruthlessly swallowing every memory whole. Yet those memories had not truly gone far. He could feel them there, motionless at the bottom of that abyss like crocodiles, mouths open, eyes wide, silently waiting for their chance. At some careless moment, they would leap out and tear him to pieces, just as before.

The background of the painting was a range of distant mountains shrouded in pale purple mist. At the foot of the mountains, a village could be dimly made out, stretching all the way toward the foreground. The houses varied in height and style, yet all had red roofs and white walls. Their windows were small and set high, bearing something of the style of old Huizhou architecture. But the broad swaths of flower fields in the painting seemed to declare in unmistakable capital letters: this is Europe. Indeed, there are no flower fields in Huizhou with such distinctly Provençal character. In this painting, the vast flower fields were the true subject. The background and the village occupied only the top and the right side of the canvas; every other space was given over to the flowers. It was a field of irises—if he was not mistaken. Of the few flowers whose names he could barely manage to identify, iris seemed the closest fit. From near to far, they stretched on without end. The weather in the painting was bright and clear, as though at any moment a few children might come running out from the nearby house, a dog bounding after them, chasing one another into the flower field before tumbling together and rolling about happily. Or perhaps, in some distant corner of the landscape too far away to be seen clearly, a pair of lovers were kissing passionately in the shade of a tree on the hillside. He waited, but no one ever appeared. A scene that sat quietly waiting for people to enter it—he thought—was rather fitting for the way a hotel received its guests. The empty painting reminded him of his own situation. It took him a moment to remember where he himself was: here and now, he was alone, in some corner of a distant city, sitting listlessly on a chair before the bed, staring at a painting just as solitary as he was.

His thoughts drifted out of the painting, pulled like a kite by the taut string of attachment, crossing layer upon layer of invisible time and space, returning to the city he had left behind. He thought that it was probably still gray and overcast there, and that even there, nothing could likely be seen clearly. But what was it he wanted to see? It seemed there was much, and yet he could not quite say what any of it was. Like the painting before him, his heart was standing open, and yet empty of people. Behind him, the crocodiles that had been eyeing him hungrily seemed to find their chance at last. They lunged forward with jaws wide open. He closed his eyes, and the painting vanished from before him. In his vision, nothing remained but darkness.