Adolfo the painter went out each day in the morning on his veranda and painted scenes of the city below. He loved the morning for its palette of colors, for its pale golds and tile-roof reds that spilled out of the horizon and soaked the streets with such a promising, syrupy glow that even a mediocre day could be canonized by a fine sunrise. Though he knew well a winy, purple evening and a wax noon, it was mornings he loved best. The kind, paternal sun of Bruegel greeted him always at the appointed hour, touching with his fingertips the faraway mountaintops, then the fields with delicate hues, coming to sprawl languidly on the quiet canals and the great bridge, revealing in tiny flecks of blue the most ancient depressions of the old Roman roads, then rushing all at once like a stage curtain to reveal the waking city.
In a lifetime he had come to know the palette of that morning sun, and had prepared on that veranda always mixes of the soul of gravel and the scent of blooming moss. Nothing in the early hours was hidden to him; he had a brush for the lustre of a weaver’s hair, a knife to dish out clouds, and a great many sold paintings from which he had learned. Adolfo had attained that rare degree of satisfaction which only comes from mastery, and he was likewise loved and respected and patronized.
One day, when the majestic hour had faded, and he had laid down his tools for the day, the painter went down into the city. He was always struck by how little the people coming and going resembled his images, how one woman’s shirt had ceased to be that certain mix of azures, how short-legged so many men seemed, and how all faces hid an unspeakable character only revealed from his vantage at that peculiar hour. But, unwilling to degrade himself or the city, he held to believe that the two landscapes present in his mind, the painted one of the morning and the lived one of the day, were not in contradiction, but reflected two valid perspectives of one thing, a different sort of optical law not unlike those he dealt with professionally.
He had come down on this day to see a friend and associate of his, a pigment and dye trader from Cartagena named Raul. No one else sourced such rare colors as Raul, who brought in from across the sea those exquisite stones and powders that animated the beauties of Botticelli.
“A fine malachite from Sinai,” Raul said in a hush as they drank warm wine on a porch off the town square, “a grain, a touch, will enliven any leaf or acre.” He placed a tiny pouch on the table between. But Adolfo shook his head.
“Malachite, cinnabar, the purple of Tyre, these hues you have satisfied. Today I only ask for an ounce of ochre and an ounce of ultramarine. Only ochre can fill the richness of the earth, only ultramarine can fill the richness of the morning sky.”
Raul shifted his gaze and, returning the pouch to his dark pockets, replied: “You wed heaven and earth with such carelessness, asking for a sultan and a slave in equal measure. But your mornings are so agreeable and ennobling to my eye that I cannot refuse. So I will only ask one thing in return, and not a ducat if you can do it. When you go out tomorrow morning and set to work, you must paint the exact color of the sky.”
Adolfo thought for a moment, anticipating to find some trick. Nothing could be more natural to him than that color, its mix was always kept ready, he had used it a thousand times. So he agreed.
The next morning, before the first murmurs of day struck the horizon, the painter began his work. Much of the canvas flowed freely from the ewer of expertise, and half the scene was in place before he even needed to look at his subject. There, in his palette, was stored those memories of the sunrise over the city, murky and tan seeds promising blooms of hyacinth walls of amorphous plaster, precious scraps of corners overfilled with luminance, a dazzling core framed in cloud stamens. As always, the background was shaped from twin hemispheres of ochre and light aquamarine. And as dawn gently spread her wings over the landscape, he was pleased to see that the city of memory so closely resembled the real city that only another painter might recognize the difference. Only a few small touches were needed to realize the vision, but in the meantime he had to capture the color of the sky.
Loading his brush with the pale, familiar blend, he held it up to check whether he needed to blend in a touch of coral or rich Indian yellow. It was a little warmer than usual this morning, and a faraway haze distorted the scattering of sunlight by a tiny shade that might have been imperceptible to an untrained eye. But he saw it, and made the necessary adjustments to begin filling in the nave of the horizon. The sun was rising fast, another trick of the haze, and he knew he needed to work just as quickly to keep his word. Blending darker and richer towards the zenith, he almost began filling in the corners when he realized that somehow, he had made a mistake. The seat of the sunrise was not really the pale, almost white color depicted, but, like a lady’s makeup so skillfully applied that we imagine she is decorated not at all, held a subtle rouge. Furthermore, the remainder of the sky was aching for a certain brightness, though the zenith was muted by an infinitesimal blur of gray verging on olive, distorted still by that atmospheric haze. Again he returned to his palette, mixing and comparing, but a bud of uncertainty had awakened in him.
As he continued to paint, each successive layer seemed to take him further and further from the morning scene which was only yesterday a comfortable friend. Every gesture was felt with a greater and greater burden as one pigment overwhelmed the next, tiny suggestions becoming grand overcompensations, adjustments to one side revealing the fault of the other as morning started to slip away. The painter’s pace became frantic, his strokes sloppy. Now the city itself, once so well remembered, had to be rebuilt to buttress that toppling sky.
He took a step back.
There was the color of the sky before his eyes. Familiar, elusive, bright, and certain. Still sat the haze on the horizon, in drifted clouds over the mountains. The city was awake now, people were stepping out of doors, pitching tents and hitching carts in those lively ochres, the colors and forms still only visible from the veranda which was itself turning into some gray-gold textured shape he did not recognize. And there, standing askew like a hunchback with a cane, his easel, bearing an array of battered, rusty tools, a sagging palette, streaks of charcoal, presenting to his eyes a visage of supreme ugliness; a ruin of repulsive shades that did not even exist.