The Color Red

To Aphrodite, in the talks of her heart

He was a painter ...
And his canvases were always the most beautiful.
And never was there one who could grasp the secret of the colors ...
And the color, always, was one.
Red ..
In every canvas a red color ..
Say rather: "a peacock of colors."
And in every canvas, too, beauty and art.
But .. the most beautiful .. and the best ..
forever stir up questioning .. and jealousy ..
and, if you like, envy.

*

"But how far is the dullness of those canvases from the vitality of this one and its allure!"
So said the onlookers .. and the critics.
And the painter-artists believed what the people said .. and supposed that with this painter lay the certain knowledge.
So they asked him, inquiring:
"Whence, man, do you get this color, and how do you mix it?"
And he smiled at their naïveté, and answered, bent over his canvas:
"The craft has a secret — would that I could divulge it!"
So they dispersed ...
Except that one of them thought he knew ..
He set off headstrong and made for the farthest reach of the light ...
And he returned ...
He returned bearing the costliest of colors ..
And he bent to work in his studio, plying his brush in imitation of the most beautiful thing the brush of the supreme singer had created ..
And he finished the canvas ... and his own soul applauded him ..
But .. it was not long before the colors faded and their magic drained away ..
And his soul shrank .. and a strange sorrow clung to him ..

*

And another thought that in the ancient books the buried secret lay hidden ..
So he searched long ... and read much ..
And came out at last with the rarest of colors ...
But ... it died straightway upon the canvas ..

*

And the days passed ... and the nights rolled on ...
And what are the days and the nights to the artist in his studio but greedy leeches draining his blood, day after day and night after night ...
And they served only to increase his pallor and his withering and his wasting.
And to increase his canvases in freshness and vitality and youth!!

*

And on a warm spring day, as the light was singing ...
a shepherdess found the artist's body flung upon the shoulder of a knoll ..
the breezes toying with his locks and the light kissing his lips ... and near him a canvas on which was painted a bouquet of red irises ...

*

And just before sunset the men carried him away to bury him ..
while the painters searched among the crucibles of his colors, hoping to be led to his secret red, or to stumble upon it.

In vain do they try ...

And never did they find any color they might call the red ...

And while the men were stripping from him the garment of the living to clothe him in the garment of death ..

one of them said:

"Look .. here is the trace of an old wound, not yet healed, in his chest near his left breast."

And another said:

"It is an old wound, very old, and it seems it was his companion all his life."

And a third said:

"The edges of the wound are almost horny — the nights have hardened them."

Yes ... but now death has set its seal upon the wound forever ..

And the artist was buried, and the people forgot him ..

But his red still pulses with vitality and freshness and youth in the veins of his immortal canvases ..

And strangely, people still ask: "Whence did he bring his red .. whence?"

And in the spring the company of the irises holds a funeral for the artist, rending their collars and beating their cheeks, until that blood takes body in their cheeks ...

I do not know ... so they say ...