Annemarie's story
Could it be?
Henri Rousseau never left France; so we are told. Despite a popular rumour during his lifetime that he had travelled to Mexico, he eventually admitted that the story was not true. Famous for his lush jungle scenes with exotic animals, he based his paintings on his own imagination and visits to the Jardin des Plantes and natural history books and museums.
However, just like Agatha Christie's mysterious disappearance, there was also a mysterious missing fortnight in 1897 when Rousseau was fifty-four years old. He had retired from his job as a toll collector and was concentrating on his art. Did he decide to take a secret holiday?
I ask this because a few years ago in a Parisian flea market I bought an 19th century art book - "Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux" by P.J. Stahland - and tucked between the pages were a few battered leaves from an old note book. Predominantly a travel journal but a few sketches as well.
Since childhood I've always been an admirer of Rousseau's art and on the off chance decided to get the tattered pages investigated by Juliette Degennes, Heritage curator at the Musée de l'Orangerie and a leading expert on Henri Rousseau. Finally, and with the additional help of a renowned handwriting expert, those battered leaves have been pronounced genuine. I will read just a couple of his somewhat scribbled pages, which, I think, proves that he did leave France during that vital fortnight and he spent the days somewhere in North Africa... And inspired one of his most famous paintings.
I have brought one of the original pages, which I have translated - excuse my translation.
From Marrakesh I travelled into an ancient land of desert sands, with my easel, chair and paints. The nights were chilling cold, the days were blazing hot, my blistering feet on burning ochre sands. Beneath a distant range of ghostly mountains I rested in the lengthening shade of a solitary tamarisk tree. Then came a gypsy woman, skin like ebony, hennaed hair in twisted cords. She wore a robe of rainbow stripes - azure, orange, greens and scarlets melting into indigos and violets, amethysts and golds. Slowly she tilted her gargoulette and placed it carefully to her lips as I imagined the water gurgling from that terracotta pitcher. And carefully again she placed the pitcher on the yielding sand, the red against the yellow. With slender fingers she picked up her lute and plucked a chord across six strings, then gently laid the lute beside the pitcher. She placed a folded bundle beneath her head and lay full-stretched on the shifting sands, her wooden cane grasped firmly in one hand. The evening sky descended, and a hunters moon arose, the opalescent disc illuminating the gypsy. From the darkness a tawny lion walked into our desert camp. Perhaps it would have been expedient to leave the scene but mesmerised I watched the creature standing behind the sleeper, tail pitched high in the air. It bent its head and smelt the sleeper; it turned its head and looked at me, bared its teeth and growled. Then tears fell from this mighty lion's eyes. Those teeth were rotten, the stench was putrid and he left the sleeping gypsy with her dreams. This lion was going cold turkey, this lion required a dentist.
The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau
________________________________
Jackie.
Yellow, Expedient, Cord, Turkey, Dream, Dentist, Tears_______
He knew something was wrong the moment he walked into the surgery. The screen beside the entrance scanned him from head to toe, taking in all his information simply in a second. Then, to his horror, it wrapped a long spiral around him, made up entirely of words.
A friend had recommended this new surgeon, but judging by the yellow curtains, yellow chairs and yellow carpet, the surgery felt less like a dentist’s office and more like being trapped inside a giant lemon.
There was no receptionist, cloaked figures filled the waiting room, he wondered whether he was in the right place. As he sat in the dentist’s chair he closed his eyes and opened his mouth. The dentist examined his tooth and picked up a very large drill. Don’t worry said the dentist this drill is programmed to alleviate the pain. “programmed !!! he screamed looking at the size of it and hearing the whirring of blades. Tears started to pour down his cheeks – this must be a dream” how can you program a drill. A metal smile crossed the surgeons face , screws and bolts and nails that made up his head churned and spun in different directions. A robot he thought in terror as he perceived bio plastic wheels with flashing yellow lights and just behind the right ear it was turning red to purple. The transparent eyes were looking straight ahead and not at his teeth
In the end the dentist had to pull out his patients tooth with a cord as the drill had disfunctioned – the turkey in the garden next door screamed so loudly the rest of the patients in the waiting room turned yellow with fear, and he decided that the most expedient thing to do was to run before the machine removed his whole head!
