Red is Really a Complicated Color

My Friend the Painter / Lygia Bojunga Nunes

                      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SantaCruz-CuevaManos-P2210651b.jpg 

            Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song – the joy that makes the earth

            flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers,

            life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the

            tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its

            tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has

            upon the dust, and knows not a word.

                                  ~Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, #58  (1910)

White

Do me a favor and listen to what I'm telling you.

   Claudio's friend is a painter, and he put together a notebook to explain to Claudio how to understand color.  "My friend told me that the more you look at a color, the more you get out of it.  I sat there staring at him without understanding."  Then one day Claudio understood, but he had no one to tell because his friend was dead.  For the next two weeks, Claudio will think only of his friend.  He'll relive their conversations, study the colors in the notebook, examine dreams about his friend, and gather together as much information as others will allow him.

   Because Claudio is ten years old, no one will talk to him about death.  "At your age you should be thinking about life and not death," his mother tells him.  "You have other friends—"  But his other friends don't understand him.  His family tries to give him simple answers.  The caretaker and his daughter taunt him for his love.  Claudio has to work through his grief alone.

Yellow

This morning here was life in the air 

but it now looks as if it wants to die.

   We never learn the painter's name.  Claudio refers to him only as "my Friend" and "my Friend the Painter" ("I think it's better to write it with a capital F and a capital P," he tells us).  We never see the Painter except through Claudio's eyes.  We hear him through Claudio's voice.  He lived alone, in his apartment above the boy, and they played backgammon together and discussed color and art.  Age made no difference between them, except when the Painter wanted to avoid a subject:  "Politics is a really complicated affair."  "Red is really a complicated color."

   Claudio loved his friend and was pleased when the Painter said he loved him, "Sometimes I like you as a father….But at other times…I only want to be your friend…Sometimes I like you because you're my playmate; at times because I wish I was you….And if you put them together, you'll see that I like you a lot.  You'll see that it's love."

  

Color-of-Longing

One day you'll understand.  Or you won't.

   Claudio doesn't understand why his Friend took his own life.  Neither does anyone else around him.  But they all think they know.  Only Claudio searches.  His are the eyes and the mind of the young, inexperienced at life and ignorant of the lives of others.  The adults are inexperienced at life and sophisticated, just as ignorant of the inner lives of others but less willing to admit it.  The Painter was crazy, he died for love, for politics, for art.  Everybody knows.  They just know different things from one another.  Claudio has the soul of an artist, sensitive, able to read his Friend's paintings and to learn from memory and dream.  Unlike the adults, he has no answers.  He seeks for them in grief and in love.

Green

"How does one get crazy about politics?" I asked.  

                                        "Is it just like getting crazy about girls?"

   Memory brings back Claudio's Friend, tells him about his Friend's three passions, Clarice, the woman he loved; politics, for which he went to jail and still had to answer for to the police; and painting, which he struggled to make come to life.

   Dreams help Claudio bring these insights together.  They help him make sense of his confused thoughts and emotions, in the absence of adult help.  Of all the characters, Claudio is the only one who tries to reconcile the Painter's passions, to make sense of each aspect of his Friend's life, to see how each contributed to his Friend's suicide and his love.

Red

And so I put them together.

   A heart that lacks sensitivity divides, separates one person from another, one aspect of a person from all the rest.  A sensitive heart unites, brings together people and all their passions.

   My Friend the Painter is a novel about grief, about love, and about the colors of human passion, told through the eyes of a sensitive boy over the two weeks after his Friend's death.  Passions, reasons, emotions, ages, and colors come together in this short novel.  Its narrator grows through his attention, to detail, to the things his Friend told him, to the emotions his Friend felt, symbolized by Claudio's study of the meaning of color.  Nunes tells her story simply, in rich, painterly detail and realistic understanding of its young narrator.

"And then something happened:  yellow began to appear there inside my red."