Water Lilies

Giverny, 1906. Dear Marthe, you asked about the work. It sounds like nothing. I am paid to keep a pond clean for a man who paints it.

I go out in the flat boat before he comes down. I pull the duckweed, I lift the yellowed leaves off the water with a long pole, and when the road has been dusty I rinse the lily pads one by one so they shine. Monsieur does not like to find the pond in a different state from the day before. He will stand at the edge in his hat and say nothing for a quarter of an hour, and I have learned that saying nothing is the good sign.

Yesterday he let me look at the canvas he has been fighting with since spring. I expected the bridge, or the willows. There is no bank in it at all, no sky. He has painted only the water, on a canvas nearly square, the view of a man who has fallen face first toward it and stopped a hand’s breadth from the surface. The clouds are in there, upside down, and the dark of the trees runs through the middle like spilt wine. Lilies crowd one corner low on the left and drift up toward the right, and between them a path of blue goes nowhere you could walk. There are a few flowers, pink, and some the colour of butter. I recognised a pad I had turned the right way up.

He scrapes and changes them constantly. He calls it an obsession, and he does not smile when he says it. I used to think a garden was finished when the planting was done. Here it is never finished; it is kept. Every evening the pond goes back to being a pond, and every morning I make it fit to be looked at again, and he looks at it like a man who has never seen water before.

Tell Mother I eat well. Tell her I have been put in a painting, though nobody will ever find me in it. Your brother, Henri.

Henri is imagined. The painting, one of roughly 250 Monet made of his water garden, is in Chicago; the signature and the date, 1906, sit in the lower right corner, in a red the colour of the blooms.