“I bet it’s totally gone by curfew,” Beatriz says.
“Tibetan monks spend months making sand mandalas and then they brush them away and throw them into a river.”
She turns, pained. “Why?”
“Because it’s not permanent and that’s the point.”
Beatriz looks at the ruins of our sculpture. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she says, and she picks up her water bottle and starts walking. “Are you coming, or what?”
Today she is taking me to a site that is part of a former penal colony. It’s a two-hour hike through parched terrain, past scrub and cacti and, yes, poison apples. Even though we have left early, the sun is strong enough to make my shirt stick to my back with sweat, and I can feel my scalp burning where my hair is parted.
Beatriz is still cagey with me, but there are moments when she lets down her guard. Once or twice I’ve made her laugh. It may be foolish to think that she’s any less sad in my company, but at least I have eyes on her. And as far as I can tell, there aren’t any fresh cuts on her arms.
“I thought art was supposed to be something you left behind so everyone would remember you,” Beatriz says.
“Something doesn’t have to be finished and hanging on a wall for you to remember who made it,” I say. “You ever heard of Banksy? He’s a British street artist and activist. One of his paintings—Girl with Balloon—was auctioned off by my company in 2018. Someone bought it for $1.4 million … ?and as soon as the gavel came down, the canvas started to slip out of the frame, in shreds. On Instagram, he posted Going, going, gone, and said he’d built a shredder into the frame intentionally, in case the work ever sold at auction.”
“Were you there?”
“No, it happened in England.”
“What a waste of money.”
“Well,” I say, “actually, it went up in value when it was torn into ribbons. Because the real art wasn’t the painting—it was the act of destroying it.”
Beatriz glances at me. “When did you know you wanted to sell art?”
“In college,” I admit. “Before that I thought I’d be an actual artist.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. My father was a conservator. He restored paintings and frescoes that needed fixing.”
“Like the Banksy?”
“I guess, although that wasn’t glued back together. Conservationists usually focus on really old art that’s literally crumbling to pieces. He’d bring me to his sites, when I was little, and let me paint over a tiny bit that wouldn’t mess anything up. I’m sure he didn’t tell his bosses. The best days of my life were the ones where I got to go to work with him, and he’d ask me things as if my answers really mattered: What do you think, Diana, should we use the violet or the indigo? Can you make out how many claws are on that hoof?”
I feel the same black shadow that always comes on the heels of a memory of my father: the acrid smoke of unfairness, the knowledge that the parent I wish was still here is gone.
“Does he still let you do it? Paint with him?”
“He died,” I say. “He’s been gone about four years now.”
She looks at me. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“I am, too.”
We walk a little further in silence. Then Beatriz says, “Why don’t you paint anymore?”
“I don’t have time,” I reply, although that’s not true.
I haven’t made time, because I haven’t wanted to.
I remember the exact day I put away my painting supplies, the shoebox with its arthritic tubes of acrylics and the palette with layer after layer of dried moments of inspiration, like rings on a tree. It was after the student exhibition at Williams, when my father said my painting reminded him of my mother’s work. But I somehow couldn’t bring myself to throw away the tools of the trade. When I moved to New York, the shoebox came with me, still unopened. I set it on the highest shelf of my closet, behind sweatshirts from college I no longer wore but couldn’t bear to donate to Goodwill, and the winter hiking boots I bought but never used, and a box of old tax records.
Beatriz is looking at me with sympathy. “Is it because you weren’t good at it?” she asks. “That you stopped painting?”
I laugh. “You could argue that any time someone intentionally leaves a mark behind, it’s art. Even if it’s not pretty.”
She tugs her sleeves down over her wrists. Even in this heat, she has chosen to hike in a sweatshirt, rather than show me the scars on her arms. “Not every time,” she murmurs.