Upon the Bay of Angels

By Marjorie Vernelle

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 15, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462817993

Marjorie Vernelle

Marjorie Vernell started traveling as a child by leaving Nebraska for summer vacations in Colorado. As an adult, she has traveled and lived in Canada, Mexico, and France. She currently divides her time between San Diego, where she teaches, and Antibes, France, where she writes and paints.

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Prologue

The View from Blue

Nothing prepared me for the blue—everywhere, the blue. I arrived in Nice on twilight’s blue slipstream. The plane glided carefully, just under the blue-gray clouds, just above the blue-violet mountains, as if flying between dimensions assured it of heavenly protection. I rode along, slipping through this crack in the universe, gliding between heaven and earth, acclaim and anonymity, youth and old age, only able to focus on the deep sapphire waters of the Bay of Angels in early evening. My body pressed hard against the few meager inches of glass and steel that kept me from falling out of that blue into water the color of midnight.

They say, those critics who like my painting, that I paint atmosphere, that the paintings have sound and scent as well as images. Mallory Edwards achieves in her painting what jazz men strive for—the blue note, the perfect confluence of all the senses, said one reviewer in Los Angeles. Of course, that was written before the shooting at the mural site. The power of art stopped by a stray bullet. What Nice’s verdict would be still lay in the future. I would just have to keep my eyes and ears open.

The first sound I focused on after my arrival in Nice was on the taxi’s radio—Charlie Parker’s Just Friends. The scent was Chanel No. 19, a faint trace of the very French lady whose cab ride had preceded mine. We drove down the Promenade des Anglais that curved like an arched back around the edge of the bay. Evenly spaced lampposts, each with a bright white light, lined the street like a long strand of radiant pearls. The blue through which I had descended had gone inky black.

The driver looked at me in the rear view mirror. Hazarding a guess that I was African-American, he asked about the music, Is Shar-lee Pah-kerr, no?

Yes, it’s Charlie Parker, I replied.

I like Shar-lee Pah-kerr, he said, nodding his head in affirmation and smiling a quiet little smile that may have meant he was happy I understood his English, as well as his musical tastes.

I like Charlie Parker too, I smiled back, feeling comforted to arrive in a place that not only played Charlie Parker on a local station, but also had people who knew who he was.

The French radio station moved on in its selections, first to something Brazilian and then to a classical piece, very different from what I listened to in L. A. I looked out at the street to see a bus heading in the opposite direction—#7A. My head followed it as it passed, and a shiver crept across the back of my shoulders. A sense of loss and sadness came over me as I remembered the curious and bittersweet dream I had had as I tried to catch some sleep on the airplane.

The beautiful, young girl in my dream had caught Bus #7A, and we had waved good-bye to one another until the bus was out of sight. I remember how it began—the dream. I was packing my bags to go off somewhere, but I stopped to walk a young friend to her bus stop. I couldn’t quite remember her face, but I knew it was pretty. She was tall and slender, with golden brown skin. She wore an oversized black leather coat. Her hair was pinned up, and wisps of it blew in the breeze. I could see the sun sparkle off of her silver hoop earrings. I remember thinking that she had a certain style, but certainly could have been helped by having more money. She was undeniably lovely, though. We talked and talked, and periodically, she would look over her shoulder to see if the bus were coming.

In fact several of them came, yet she stayed with me. Then finally, she had to go. Her shoes had very high heels—too high heels. She had to take them off as she ran to catch the #7A. I watched her go with great sadness. We watched each other, waving to one another with both hands, like children do. We waved and waved until the bus turned a corner, and the sight of one another was abruptly cut off. I turned to go back to my packing, feeling such sorrow. Then I heard a quiet voice say, You just said good-bye to your youth.

My throat caught in pain as a great sob welled up in my chest. Before I could think any further, the taxi stopped, and the driver turned to me saying, You must get out ‘ere. I can’t drive Zone Piétonne.

Oh, I see, I said, realizing we had reached Nice’s pedestrian zone.

He pointed to a building and added, ‘Your hotel iz ‘ere on Rue Paradis. "

I saw the entrance of the Hotel Paradis and laughed a little. Nice to wind up in paradise.

He was more focused on my paintbox. When he saw me looking, he said, ‘You are professionelle?’

"Well, I claim to be professional. I’m here to participate in an arts program, the Arts Quake—Le Tremblement des Arts. " His eyebrows lifted, as if the mention of an Arts Quake shocked him as much as a real earthquake might.

You will like Nissa, he began, calling the city by a special name. Some say that she iz past her prime, but she iz still beautiful. You just have to look and listen. She will show you what lovely things to paint. He paused dramatically, She will tell you her secrets. With that he wished me good luck and good painting. What better wishes could there be?

Yes, I had come to Nice to paint, to capture the soul of the city with my pens, my inks, my brushes and colors. However, Nissa, as she was known in the local dialect, had her own plans for me. Even as she gave me the most extraordinary colors: yellow ochre, poppy red, burnt umber, raw sienna, viridian green, cerulean blue, and best of all the deep inky blue-black of midnight, she also presented me with settings, plots and characters, all in wonderful interaction with one another. I had had no intention of writing stories, but that was not Nissa’s will.

Something as simple as going to a movie would take on a life of its own, complete with an authentic character. One day upon seeing a poster showing a beautiful expanse of heavenly water with the handsome faces of two actors superimposed over it and a dolphin dancing in the background, I entered the watery depths of Luc Besson’s classic Le Grand Bleu. After the movie, my head still swirling with the images of the film, I stopped in the ladies’ room. As I threw some cool water on my face, an elder lady joined me at the washbasins. She was short, stout, and white-haired with a sturdy frame and a very practical air about her. She started speaking to me in French, something like asking me if I had just seen the movie with " le grand poisson. " I understood "the big fish» to mean the dolphin in Le Grand Bleu and replied yes. Her face held a curious look as she asked whether the male lead had died at the end.

Oui, jecroi, madame, I replied saying that I thought so. She then made some comment about how could he leave his pregnant girlfriend like that and was he malade de la tête.

I just shrugged.

She then shifted her head and her attitude. She became pensive and rather soft. She began musing about how his emotional problems came from the poor boy having seen his father die. I pointed out that his best friend had died too. She shook her head with grandmotherly concern, murmuring, "le pauvre, le pauvre. " So we left the restroom, the old lady and I, both of us in agreement that the poor boy had just seen too much tragedy, which is why he finally swam off with "le grand poisson. " It seemed a reasonable assumption.

I am never sure that anything is completely reasonable in Nice, which may be both her most charming and her most distressing feature. But I will let you judge that for yourself.

White Night in the City

Nissa dozed lightly in the late afternoon sun. She slowly raised her eyelids in a soft, dreamy awareness that the time of the sieste was over. The relative calm of lunch, when her inhabitants turned away from buying and selling and focused their attention on restoring themselves with wine, bread, and succulent delicacies from the blue-green sea, was followed by a soft languor, which the fortunate used for taking a mid-day nap. Now, however, it was time to prepare for the evening that lay ahead. Nissa narrowed her feline eyes and smiled slyly.

When places and humans meet and mix their energies together unusual creations are born. Such is the case with Nissa. Beautiful she always was—a golden child of nature with a happy laughing mouth and seductive sideways glance. Humans adorned her with their roads and towns, their carefully tended farms and orchards, their villas and gardens, and more. She accepted their creations as tribute, gems she could use to show her wealth.

Nissa, though, wore her jewels in unusual places. She had necklaces of perfect, high-walled, mountaintop villages draped over the curves of her breasts. Her toes were adorned with ancient Roman rings, bearing names like Cimiez and Luceram. A string of pearls laced the curve of her back. All the world saw them glimmering in the night, evenly spaced, perfectly round, glowing spots of light that sent long streaks of white out into the darkened waters of the sea. It was the most commonly remembered view of Nissa—the one that humans saw when they faced the city.

Nissa, herself, did not face the water. She lay, instead, with her pearl-lined back gently forming the shore of the ice-blue bay. She did not concern herself much with those celestial blue waters, leaving the bay in the care of the angels for whom it was named. Nissa preferred the veins and arteries of her streets and the blue-violet hills of what was known as her back country. The rhythm of her heartbeat controlled the flow of life for her inhabitants. Her moods became theirs without their ever knowing. Some blame the sun. Some blame the sea. Some blame the balmy warmth of the night for the surplus of sensuality that pervades the town. It is only Nissa being herself. For it is her way to weave melodies for the eye and paint pictures for the ear, thereby confounding her citizens’ abilities to decipher what is at the heart of their collective mood.

So in the lowering light of late afternoon, Nissa squinted her deep brown eyes and searched the horizon for the first signs of a Moon as yet made pale by the insistent rays of the Sun. She waited as quietly as a tiger, allowing the unsuspecting to go about their business. She focused on the blue-violet mountains and looked east toward Italy. She lay still in all her earthly loveliness, made golden by the vigor of the Sun, whom she would soon forsake for the pale, poetic one she awaited. When finally he showed his ivory face in the lavender mists of evening, Nissa lifted her smooth beautiful arm, gently out-stretched her hand in welcome and declared, There will be no sleep tonight.

Les nuits blanches, white nights, as people call these sleepless evenings, come to everyone from time to time, but there had never been a sleepless night quite like this one. Nineteen babies were conceived; 51 couples fell in love; six fires broke out; two men killed their wives; three women killed their husbands; a local flower vendor sang for the first time at the opera house, receiving rousing applause; the FLNC exploded a bomb in front of a France Telecom office; the power went out in Nice Riquier; two sets of triplets were born; a battered green Citroën drove about town, carrying a priceless statue of the Virgin Mary that seemed to wink at passersby; and songbirds sang the whole night through, the night Nissa and the Moon made love. No one slept.

Certainly not Laurent DuBoisblanc, who appraised his sallow reflection in the poorly silvered surface of what could pass for a real Louis Philippe gilded mirror. He was used to sleepless nights. They came with the antiques business. Anxiety, age, and defeat had etched their patterns into his face. He lifted his chin a bit to allow his face to catch the light better. He raised his right hand to smooth his salt and pepper hair only to have his fingers suddenly snatch the elegantly silvered toupee from its secure location and fling it down onto a replica of a Louis XV table.

DuBoisblanc’s eyes widened in angry terror