The Special Profession
This is where I work: a café-restaurant on the top floor of a six-story commercial complex. Not that I manage the place or own it. I don’t take orders or prepare them. I paint here.
The café has a terrace from which almost the entire city can be seen. By an unwritten agreement between me and everyone at the café-restaurant, the left-hand corner of the terrace belongs to me. I am not a painter, either. I simply paint. I know nothing about painting styles, art history, or the great names in the field. I paint whatever I like, with whatever I feel like using. Sometimes I bring nothing but colored pencils and a sketchbook. Sometimes watercolors. And sometimes I bring my easel and oil paints for several days, and the owner kindly lets me leave them there so I don’t have to carry them back and forth.
It is a large café-restaurant, and thanks to its service and its relatively mediocre food, it never gets so crowded that it interferes with my work.
My regular order is a latte. Even so, they have never served me the same latte two days in a row, and they never let me fall into repetition. Every day, my first sip is a small surprise, and for that I am grateful to their hopeless barista.
My paintings sometimes sell, at prices that have very little to do with my skill or precision. The prices people pay depend entirely on the character and wealth of the buyers. Most customers encounter my work right here. Every now and then, someone suddenly becomes absorbed in the painting I am working on and tells me there is something in it—something I am usually unaware of myself.
Today, inspired by the unfinished tower and the skyscraper crane that had been seesawing above it since morning, I was drawing hopeless, crooked lines, trying to capture the tower as it rose higher and higher.
A couple suddenly stopped beside me and introduced themselves as architects. Everything they were wearing seemed like a work of art in its own right. They spoke about my painting in such specialized, technical terms that I understood almost none of it. Eventually, I gathered that the lines I had drawn were, in their eyes, an expression of the mysterious complexity of their romantic relationship.
Since they had taken that interpretation from my painting, there was no reason for them to discover that the unfinished building had been my actual source of inspiration. So I positioned myself in such a way that I blocked their view of it.
Not only because the two of them were competing over how much to pay for the painting so that its price would better reflect the value of their love. More importantly, because just as I was innocent of all the praise they were heaping on my work, I would probably also be innocent if they felt humiliated upon noticing the resemblance between my painting and that unfinished building.
They gave me a sizable check, along with the address of their workplace, so I could send them the painting when it was finished. At least I can say this one broke my sales record.
After they left, I could not add another line to the painting. I was afraid that anything I added might undermine the mysterious quality of their love. And I certainly could not paint that half-finished building into it. So I stopped right there and decided to leave the completion of the painting until a better time, when a solution might occur to me.