The Beholder “A Rediscovery of Life and Love”

By Mort Keilty

A down-at-the-heels New York journalist, Raymond McAndrews, has a long-standing passion for the Impressionist art of renowned and reclusive Brazilian painter, Thomas. The artist has removed himself from society and the art world for thirty years.
When McAndrews learns that the old artist may be alive in Rio, he flies to Brazil to investigate for his own edification. Through the homeless children of the Rio streets, he finds Tomas living in splendid isolation. In almost three decades, Tomas’s only contacts have been the street children and the caretaker and cook of his secluded manse.
Tomas befriends McAndrews and reveals the epic canvas of his life in a series of taped interviews – from the artist’s beginnings as a national prodigy to the events that alienated him from the world.
He gives McAndrews the most significant gifts of both their lives: renewed purpose and faith in friendship, the beauty of love and the love of beauty, and a mysterious package, crated and wrapped in brown paper – all life-changing.
Set in Rio de Janeiro and New York, this is a story of the dynamics of life and art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brighton Publishing LLC
• Release date: Mar 3, 2013

Mort Keilty

Mort Keilty established his credentials as a writer by working at the craft in virtually every form. Since 2000, he has ghost-written and co-authored five non-fiction books: Oh, by the way; Be Yourself; Golf & Me; I can, I will, I believe; and It’s all up in the air. Fiction is his writing preference, and The Beholder is his first published work of fiction. He has been a counterintelligence agent in Europe, a competent country club golfer, a successful business owner, and a fair father. Apart from writing, his primary continuing interests revolve around family—his sons and their children. He loves kids, classic movies, great writing, and Impressionist art. He resides and writes now in Groton, Connecticut.

Book preview

The Beholder

A Novel

by

Mort Keilty

Brighton Publishing LLC

501 W. Ray Road

Suite 4

Chandler, AZ 85225

www.BrightonPublishing.com

Copyright © 2012

ISBN: 978-1-62183-086-3

eBook

SMASHWORDS EDITION

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Chapter One

A Rainy Night in New York City

Everything happens for a reason, and things mostly turn out for the best. I always expect the best. If I can’t find it, I try to see the bright side and the beauty. Life comes at you in disguise. To see it clearly, you need a sense of humor.

I’m a wise guy; that’s how I think and that’s how I talk, always a wisecrack. But I’m serious about the things I love: kids, old movies, great writers, Impressionist art. I’m your prototypical New York creampuff, wise on the outside and a pushover on the inside. I mostly follow my heart, and I’m glad that I do. Otherwise, I would not have known Tomas.

I promised him I wouldn’t open the package. I gave him my word, and I have honored it. The large rectangle, wrapped in heavy brown paper, sits safely within the protective crate in its place of honor in my apartment. It has not been disturbed since I removed the plastic wrap.

The old man didn’t like plastic. Not natural, he said when the crate was wrapped to protect it from the rain. Living things need to breathe. Paper permits the air. Plastic suffocates. It used to be there was no plastic. Everything was more natural.

A trivial thing like the wrapping upset him. Perhaps he was bothered by my imminent departure. I’d like to believe it was that.

Senhora Polima once confided to me that the old man was living mainly by habit. She said that little things out of place or gone wrong troubled him, but that one had to know him well and observe carefully to understand that he was annoyed.

"It is his mestizo nature carried over from childhood that makes him so hard to figure out, she concluded. He has a temper. I know his moods because I have been in his employ for more than três décadas."

The rainy day of departure was the last time I saw the old man. In my honor, I think, he had shaved and bathed and put on a blue shirt and white trousers. Without the grizzle of a week-old beard, with his dense gray hair brushed, in dress clothes, he looked younger than a man whose life had spanned nine decades. On that day, his appearance hinted back to the handsome, darkly serious artist from the photographs in the books I had collected; the painter written about by expatriate authors; the man included among the world’s greatest artists before the world lost sight of him.

He never said the package contained a painting, although I presumed immediately that it did. Senhor Polima placed the crated, plasticked package in my rental car while the old man said a few, final words to me.

I have thought carefully of what to give you as a friend who is leaving and one I may not see again. In the package is the last of what I retain from my past. It is fitting you should have it. I desire that it be in the eyes of one who appreciates. Only promise me that you will not open the package until I am gone.

I made the promise, and he said something I will not forget.

An old artist should die with blank walls surrounding him. Then he will know his life is complete.

He had told me during our interviews that he had never been good at farewells, probably because I am Indian, and Indians never say goodbye.

That last day, he said simply, You go. I will think of you often.

My final sight of him through the rain was of a solitary, slight figure on the wide porch. I thought he gave a subtle wave of his hand as he stood watching me drive away. It was hard to tell because he seldom wasted motion, as he rarely wasted words.

To contact him, I could only write a letter and mail it to the Polimas. The old man hated the telephone and would not permit its installation. For many years, silent isolation had been his answer to the world’s curiosity.

I wrote him notes and letters, one a week at first, but he never replied. His lack of response bothered me. I began to make arrangements to visit him, but a lengthy writing assignment took me north for a month. It took me another month at home to finish the writing, and then I discovered it was too late to see him again.

Too late. I recalled his words from one of our after-supper conversations. Most things in life are realized too late. We think we have enough time until we find there is no more time. It is a grand illusion. Our lives pass at high speed, but in slow motion. Our perceptions deceive us.

I read of his death in the New York Times two days after it happened. No service, no ceremony, simple cremation. That was his way, even in dying, because he was very much an Indian, and Indians never say goodbye.

I sat in my writing room the entire night, rereading the Times article and staring at the package and replaying the interview tapes of the old man. I felt helpless to register my sadness at his passing. It was too late to go there. I thought of telephoning his lawyer but dismissed that idea as inappropriate. There was no one to whom I could pay respects, with whom I could grieve. No one. I had an eerie realization of the old man’s strength in loneliness.

Senhor and Senhora Polima would do the right thing, carry out their duties, and grieve genuinely. Then they would stoically move on with their simple lives, enriched because of the old man, sharing his house in hollow luxury.

I wondered about the details of his death. Who had reported it to the news services? Had the National Museum made any attempt to pay homage? Perhaps some art league had held a small ceremony? Did they even know or care about his death? I hoped someone in the art world had known and cared. The obituary article in the Times was not a fitting end for a great artist, not the tribute or acclaim he deserved.

The obituary was absurdly brief: Tomas Carrao. Reclusive Artist in Brazil in subhead bold type. Details were skimpy—born in the early years of the last century, actual date uncertain. Known simply as Tomas in the art world. Educated in Paris. Famous before World War II for numerous paintings of his wife and children. Created a sensation and a one-man school of art with his Individual Natural style. Caused controversy by refusing to sign his work. International awards and critical acclaim and wealth. Stunned the art world with his Neo-Natural paintings, ridiculed and vandalized at the 1964 World’s Fair. Ceased work in 1965. Shunned all contacts and became a recluse in Brazil. Recent publicity and revival of interest due to drawings found in the possession of the street children of Rio de Janeiro. Most popularly known painting, the priceless Modern Madonna, residing in the Louvre. Predeceased by two sons, Emile and Carlos, and by his estranged wife, Marie (Mittand). Death expected to escalate the auction values of any works not already in important collections.

Tomas was written off in six column inches. Many lesser men have been granted much more. There was no accompanying photograph of the handsome face with the flashing ebony eyes and perfect white teeth, not even the one by Stieglitz that captured the artist with a pleased expression in a tuxedo and wearing the wide-brimmed peon straw hat that now hangs on the wall of my writing room.

How quickly, and how completely, celebrity fades. As the old man said, Only exceptional work and myths endure.

I held my own private wake for him that night, with coffee and the cognac he favored in the evenings. I poured two snifters, one for each of us, and replenished mine as I played the tapes, listening to his voice from fourteen months ago and to his vivid recollections from long years ago and to his words still living on the recorder.

His art had always been my consuming passion. Tomas embodied the spirit and the mystery of the artist for me. As long as I can remember, his images most caught my eye and captured my fancy. In college, I wrote my thesis on Post-Impressionism and focused it on his Individual Naturalism. Whenever and wherever his work was exhibited, if it was within my means, I went to see it. I collected any book that reprinted his paintings. As a young man, I went to the World’s Fair and returned to the Brazilian Pavilion several times to see his controversial Neo-Naturalist mural and paintings. I saw them before the incident that started his estrangement from society, and I was there the day they closed the pavilion and removed the damaged works.

Lacking the talent to become a fine painter or the facility to become a commercial artist, I dabbled in photography for a while. I finally turned to writing as a means of artistic expression and later as a way to earn a living. For me, words were easier to compose than images. I rose to mediocrity as a stringer for several magazines, supplying short stories and solicited articles. Early on, I tried to get into art journalism but gave up when my self-bestowed credentials were rejected by the editors I attempted to impress.

One candid copy chief put me straight when he told me, Mr. McAndrews, you know a lot about one segment of art, but you are severely limited when it comes to the big picture.

Severely limited turned out to be a prophetic description of my career as a freelancer. While I had moments of minor success and flashes of minimal brilliance, they came as snags in my slide down to the safe regions of lesser journalism.

As Tomas the Artist withdrew from art and society, I entered into matrimony and indentured husbandhood. He lost his wife and the eye of the art world but gained privacy and perspective. I gained an unhappy wife and lost all privacy and perspective.

In the thirtieth year of Tomas’s self-imposed isolation, I lost my wife to a long-anticipated divorce and most of my material possessions to the settlement. My ne’er-do-well writing career suffered accordingly. In the process, I forgot about the artist, except when an occasional print or a rummage through my old books briefly brought him to mind.

In the 1960s, when I first learned of his reclusion, I had the sophomoric notion to make my way to Brazil and somehow talk him out of it. More than thirty years later, his name and paintings were remembered enthusiasms nudged aside by the demands of daily life.

I must have been born on a rainy day, because everything important in my life has happened when it was raining. I got married and divorced in the rain. My sons were all born on rainy nights. When I got my first job and sold my first freelance article, it rained. I like rainy days; they slow things down and give you time to read and think and appreciate comfort.

On a rainy January Sunday in New York more than a year ago, my interest in the artist was rekindled by an article in the Times. The article appeared in the Arts Section under the headline, Rio Street Children Refuse to Sell or Surrender Unsigned Sketches. It reported that drawings thought possibly to be the work of Tomas were discovered in the hands of homeless children in Rio de Janeiro. More than ten sketches had been counted by two reporters, but the children refused to sell or surrender the drawings for evaluation. It was incredible that these children of extreme poverty would not exchange the sketches for money.

The children claimed to have received the drawings as gifts from an old man who came to watch them play on a deserted stretch of beach past the slums bordering the city. He sometimes brought a pad of paper and sketched birds and shore creatures and the children themselves, and they gathered to watch him draw. He always gave his sketches away, each time to a different child. According to the children, the old man once brought some paints and several brushes and decorated the homemade kite of a young boy.

The children would not point out the boy with the kite. For being weak and poor and nuisances, the street urchins had been persecuted, sometimes murdered, under government sanction. Their fear had made them secretive and silent, suspicious of adults and authority.

Neither, if they knew it, would they reveal the identity of the old man. They described him as avô, a grandfather, very old and gray and dressed in a simple peon shirt, pants, and sandals. He always wore a battered straw hat such as the inland farmers wear. To them, he was the grandfather artist who gives us wonderful drawings to keep for ourselves.

When the children, ranging in age from seven to fourteen, were pressed by the authorities, the sketches disappeared, and the children would not talk about them.

Reporters watched the beach for two weeks. When the old man did not appear, they gave up their vigil, suspecting their presence kept the old man away.

The reporters and others who had seen the sketches, none of them experts, described the drawings as crayon and pencil renderings of remarkable simplicity and beauty. Some likened the sketches to the famous Tomas drawings on permanent display at the National Museum. After a visit to the museum, two reporters declared the children’s sketches amazingly similar in style to those on display.

The article went on to briefly describe the artist’s history and ended, Until several sketches are obtained for authentication, no one can know whether these are the work of one of the world’s great artists or brilliant drawings by a talented imitator.

The article galvanized me. I got out the old books and stared at the color prints. Coffee cup in hand, I sprawled on my sofa, books opened to his works strewn about me on the living room floor. I felt motivated to do something.

The article about Tomas and the street children caught me during a lull in my life. The previous six months had been a dull, slow period. I was trapped in a writing slump, a shrunken freelance market, and the miserable climate of New York in mid-winter. I was lonely and bored and down, with nothing in the offing. I needed a flight of fancy.

Here was something that moved me, something I could go and investigate in a place I’d always wanted to see—something and someone at the core of my interests and daydreams. The old artist, the children, the article were all part of a personal signal to me. Fate, kismet, destiny, the realization of a lifelong dream; something I could write about, something I cared about, something I could do.

I flew to Rio de Janeiro in search of Tomas.

Chapter Two

Days of the Kite

I’d spent almost half of my budgeted travel money and two weeks walking the beach before I saw the kite. It dipped and darted and soared above A Praia do Apostolo Pobre, the Beach of the Poor Apostle, where the street children congregated.

The kite was fashioned in the popular hawk shape, homemade of white butcher’s paper, with a rag tail, but it was not the details of construction that caught my eye. It was the design painted on the paper, a proud rooster with wings arched ready to defend his roost, colorfully and clearly Tomasian, one of his favorite subjects. The colors glowed with life in the bright sunshine, a beacon to attract me.

The cock-kite seemed to hover of its own accord as I hurried up the beach and skirted the outcropping of gray stone that separated me from the kite flyer. The rooster was attached far below to a small brown boy who stood pigeon-toed working the kite, separate from a group of boys and girls wading, swimming, and splashing in the gentle surf. Their laughter and shouts offset his quiet concentration.

I walked up, stood just behind him, and watched the kite. If he was aware of me, he did not show it until I said in Portuguese, It is very beautiful, your kite. Bold and beautiful.

Then he looked back and up at me without surprise and nodded solemnly in agreement. We stood together without speaking for several minutes, he handling the kite and I watching it.

The splashers and swimmers immediately noticed me and gradually gathered around us. I think they had grown accustomed to seeing me on their beach and were curious about my purpose in approaching their friend. I recognized most of them as regulars I had smiled at, carefully cultivating acceptance as one would with wild creatures. The two reporters had told me of the children’s apprehension over adults and their skittishness with strangers.

With typical honesty and disregard for the formal, the locals and the children had renamed the secluded beach A Praia dos Pobres, the Beach