Les Tournesols

It was early October when Robert Simmons met the young Nathan Renaud.

Nathan was a young French student who had only been living in London for about a month before he met Robert. He was freshly turned twenty years old and had been living in Marseilles with his rich family before taking the train over to England. His family had sent him overseas to improve his English and study the culture before returning to France, but he himself just wanted to stay there, and explore the art and history buried in the city. He came across Robert in a small art shop in the back streets of Westminster, the French boy looking for decent charcoal pencils while Robert shopped for new watercolours.

“You are a painter?” The soft, deep French accent somewhere behind his shoulder made Robert jump, and he turned around to face the boy who had spoken. Robert was almost taken aback, not used to being spoken to or approached like this in public.

“Yes,” he replied a little hesitantly, looking over the boy that stood in front of him. He was about an inch taller than Robert and had very pale blonde hair and blue eyes, a muted shade of blue that looked almost grey. He was very light-skinned, almost translucent-looking, and had rosy and plump lips. He wore a creased white shirt buttoned up to the collar, a moth-eaten tweed jacket over that, and some dusty black jeans rolled up above his bare ankles, fitting him very tightly despite his skinny frame, with a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Robert thought he looked something like a male model; he was very attractive in the sense that he was already seeming like a stereotypical pretty boy. He arched an eyebrow, before he turned back to looking at the racks of individual tubes of watercolour paint. He was very aware of the French boy hovering around behind him.

“What do you like to paint?”

It was such a vast question that it almost aggravated Robert. He glanced over his shoulder, the stranger still visible in his peripheral vision.

“What does it matter to you?” He countered, not meaning to be as rude as he made it sound. He was just confused. He didn’t really like it when people spoke to him. He was nervous.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the French boy said, a hint of a small and shy smile on his large lips. “I’m just very curious. I draw, I’ve never met a painter, before.” He spoke with very hesitant English, thinking for a few seconds between every few words that he said. He was peering over Robert’s shoulder again at the tubes of paint he was already holding. Robert cleared his throat slightly, wanting to be polite, but still feeling very uncomfortable. He figured that the French boy would go away soon.
“I paint a lot of things,” Robert began honestly, unsure where to actually start. “I like nature, I guess. And sometimes, landscapes. The city, you know.”

“Oh, I understand,” the French boy replied, and he was smiling a little wider now. “That’s interesting. I like to draw people. I have books of… uh, portraits. Faces.”

“That’s nice,” Robert muttered, and cursed himself for sounding sarcastic. No matter how much he hated conversation he could never excuse himself from one about art, especially if someone was interested in his art; despite how rare those kinds of things came up.

“I’m not very good,” the French boy said, and started to wring his hands a little. “I came to London to take lessons. Do you take lessons?”

“I used to. But I don’t anymore, I like to teach myself.” Robert offered him a small smile. “What’s your name?” He was trying to be nice now. Trying to make a good impression. It couldn’t hurt either of them, right?

“Oh,” he replied, seeming to get flustered, and he tucked his tin of charcoal pencils under his arm before extending his right hand. “Je m’app- non, my name, my name is Nathan. Nathan Renaud.” He grinned, a little nervously, and Robert shook his hand briefly.

“Robert Simmons.”

“It’s nice to meet you,- Robert.” Nathan said his name very slowly, trying not to do the French thing and pronounce the second syllable of the name differently. He said it right and grinned like a triumphant child, and then there was a little pause before he spoke again. “Do you come to this shop often? I just found it.”

“This is my favourite shop,” Robert said with a nod, and he was once again becoming nervous because small talk was taking over their conversation and he had no idea what to say. There was a slight lull there.

“Do you only paint with watercolour?” Nathan suddenly asked, just as Robert was about to excuse himself. He cleared his throat slightly, and he shook his head.

“No. Only recently. I like oil paint better.”

“Then why don’t you keep using it if you like it better?” Nathan looked generally confused and intrigued.

“You need variety as an artist, don’t you?” Robert arched a coal-black eyebrow, and Nathan just grinned as if he had just been told one of the dark secrets of the universe. “You can’t just stick to one thing. You won’t develop.” There was another pause. “Do you mind if I go and pay for these? I’d love to stand here talking but I have somewhere to be.” That was a lie- Robert was free for the rest of the day, as it was a Saturday.

“Oh, sorry,” Nathan murmured the same way he had before, and Robert stepped past him, placing his tubes of paint on the counter and waiting for the clerk to come back. Nathan followed him, and he let out a little sigh when he realised this. “Do you think developing is a good thing? I- apart from doing what you’re… Comfortable with, I mean.” He had a little trouble pronouncing the larger words, Robert noticed.

“Well of course it is,” Robert almost scoffed, and continued talking while the clerk came over and rung his items up on the register. “I think you have to enjoy as many things as you can. Aren’t artists supposed to be hedonistic? You should do everything that makes you happy, and I found that quite a few of elements of making art appeal to me.” Nathan looked painfully confused, Robert having said more than a short sentence. Robert sighed, absent-mindedly paying for his items. “You should do what makes you happy,” he repeated briefly, and Nathan nodded in sudden understanding. “Try new things. Maybe you would like painting.” He nodded at the charcoal pencils and Nathan almost laughed.

“Oh. I understand, yes. I don’t know. I was never good at painting.”

“You really think I’m that good at painting?” Robert smiled, not even realising that he was waiting for Nathan to pay for his pencils before he actually left the shop. He was involved in the conversation now, interested, engaged.

“Well I’m not- I’m not sure,” Nathan said in confusion, wrinkling his angular nose.

“It was a joke,” Robert said. He lingered on the pavement, thinking desperately where to go. He looked at Nathan briefly, continuing his sentence. “I meant, not all artists are good at what they like to do.” Nathan nodded, his eyes wide and ears pricking up behind his blonde hair, like a keen dog learning a new trick. “I like to paint and I do it because it makes me happy. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m very good at it.” Robert paused, already developing the habit of stopping to make sure Nathan understood. Robert loved talking about art- he wanted Nathan to understand him. He wanted Nathan to walk away from this conversation knowing something more, or liking Robert, at least; Robert didn’t know where these desires to educate or even socialise had come from. “Do you- Would you like to walk with me?” The slightly older man asked, gesturing across the road. “We could sit down somewhere and talk some more, if you like.”
“Yes, of course,” Nathan said, smiling with enthusiasm. In fact, his whole body was practically bouncing and buzzing with excitement. Robert half-expected to see Nathan with a wagging tail behind him. “Yes, let’s do that. I like talking with you, you’re very interesting.” If Nathan hadn’t been foreign with such slow English, Robert would have taken his words as a sarcastic remark.

They crossed the road, Nathan almost running after Robert who walked quickly over the crossing. Catching up, Nathan ran a hand through his hair, glancing down at Robert several times.

“How different is painting, from drawing? I haven’t tried it in a long time, and it’s hard for me to remember.” Robert turned to face the Frenchman with an arched eyebrow, silently wondering if it had been a serious question. Nathan managed to interpret his expression, chuckling softly. “No, I know the difference. I just want to know if- you get a different feeling. Doing it.”

“Oh,” Robert said, he laughing a little this time. “Yes. I mean, of course, there’s a totally different vibe- feeling that you get from it. To me, there’s more freedom. Do you feel free when you draw?” He glanced sideward as they resumed walking, and was surprised at the speed and confidence with which Nathan suddenly started to speak.

“I definitely feel different,” he said, and started to gesture wildly with his hands, almost catching Robert in the face twice. “I feel like- like I’m flying. Ça plane pour moi, you know that?” Robert nodded; he knew the song and he knew what the title meant, and that’s as far as it went. “I feel like everything is okay and that I can do anything.” Nathan then started to blush, and he shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s like that.”

“No, that’s good,” Robert said, making a soft, pleased noise that sounded like a laugh in the back of his throat. “That’s really good. It makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it?” Nathan nodded, once again returning to beaming at Robert, something he was already getting used to. “It makes me feel powerful, too. Like- Like I’m a weapon or something.”

“Yes,” Nathan said softly, and for almost a minute they walked along a quieter street, in silence between them before Nathan spoke again. “Like a weapon.”

Robert had his mind halfway into somewhere else by now, daydreaming.

“It makes me happier than anything else,” he said. It was almost as if he was talking to himself, ignoring or oblivious to Nathan’s presence. He had a stupid smile on his face, as small as it might have been. “Like I get so warm inside when I paint. I can see colours making images in front of me and even if it’s a bad painting it’s beautiful to me because it’s something that my mind thought would be a good idea and I’m creating it. I just-…” He stopped, before laughing and rubbing a hand over his face. “I love it. Nothing’s ever really felt that empowering or had that effect on me.” He ducked his head, watching their feet on the pavement. Nathan’s feet were bigger than his. The Frenchman was grinning to himself and he spoke softly after a few seconds.

“You are so passionate,” he marvelled, his deep accent sounding strange when it was hushed in such an awed way. “It’s amazing. I’ve never met anyone that talks of art like you do. It’s very interesting.” He was nodding quickly along with the words that he spoke. “A lot of people in Marseilles that knew me thought I was weird.” Nathan was speaking slower now, as if saddened by the thought. Robert frowned a little, if only slightly. “The French love art, is that what everyone else thinks?” Robert gave a little nod. “They don’t. Not all of them.”

“Some of the boys at my school thought I was- they didn’t like me because I did drawings.”

“Because you were different from everybody else,” Robert said softly, and Nathan nodded. Robert understood almost too well what Nathan was saying, and almost willed him not to say any more about it.

“But you, you’re very different too,” the French boy said, once again wearing his childish, victorious smile. “Even different from my art teachers. They were- old, and- enneyeux.”

“Boring?” Robert asked, racking his brains for his minute French knowledge when Nathan didn’t correct the word into English. He nodded, and continued to speak.

“I thought artists were that way all the time,” the Frenchman laughed, and Robert smiled fondly. “I thought artists could only be old because they were the only kind I knew. I saw- photographs, of artists and they were all old.”

“Did you think you couldn’t be an artist until you were old?” Robert was trying not to snicker, but figured it was okay seeing as Nathan was laughing too with him.

“Oui- Yes!” Nathan said loudly, and was laughing loudly now. “So then I was even more different. I tried to research young artists, because I wanted to be more like them. But my family stopped me from studying my art because they wanted me to get a job. And- I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t want to get a job.”

“You wanted to keep drawing,” Robert finished for him.

The two men had come to a café, one that Robert had not even realised he had been heading for. He shook his head before looking at Nathan with a little smile, feeling oddly comfortable around the mysterious young man.
“Du café, monsieur?” He said with a slight quirk of his brows, sending Nathan into an almost theatrical bought of laughter because his French accent barely even sounded like one. He nodded, though, and the two stepped inside the café before resuming their conversation. Robert had given up thinking about how out of character this was for him, sitting down and talking with a complete stranger. Wrong, he told himself. Artists were never strangers to each other. They always had one thing in common and that would never change.

“My art teacher at school said I would be no good at being an artist,” Nathan said almost matter-of-factly while Robert ordered them a latté each with only half his divided attention. Robert cocked an eyebrow once again, looking over at Nathan sceptically.

“That’s never a wise thing to say to a student about what they want to study,” he said, being reminded of the one haunting thing said to him by Mr Evans, the maths teacher, all those years ago. Nathan nodded in agreement.

“He said I dreamed of things too much,” Nathan started, before Robert let out a strange, unattractive and very loud snort of laughter. He covered his mouth apologetically, laughing softly, leaving Nathan looking very confused. “…Qu’est ce que..?”

“I’m sorry,” Robert said innocently, pursing his lips to try and stop the laughter from getting worse. “I’m sorry but that is just- Such a terrible thing to say. It’s ridiculous. You can’t say that an artist dreams too much. Art is almost entirely made up of dreams. That’s – It’s crazy.”

Nathan was still looking rather shocked from Robert’s short, sudden outburst.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said, and Robert took their coffees from the counter, ushering the French boy over to a small table right by the window. They sat down opposite each other, and Robert spoke as he began to rip open sachets of sugar and empty them into his coffee.

“Most of the time it’s not even actual dreams; but it’s your imagination. Hardly any of the things that I paint actually exist, or I’ve never seen them before; I see them in my head. That’s still dreaming. And sometimes I paint things that I want, places I want to go, and that’s dreaming too. And let me tell you something, Nathan.” Nathan’s eyes were wide once again, interested, listening to Robert’s philosophies intently. “Artist or not, nobody can dream too much. Dreams are the realities that normal people don’t grasp because they’re told that they’re dreams. They get disillusioned and think that their day jobs are reality. No. They’re realistic dreams.” Robert winked, and though Nathan looked confused he carried on, encouraged by the excited glint behind the clouded blue of the Frenchman’s eyes.

“That’s why artists have an advantage,” Robert said. “We live in our dreams. Trust me, kid- You can’t dream too much.” He stopped and sipped his coffee, noticing that Nathan was staring at him with the expression of someone who had just had their mind blown to pieces.

“Are you saying that we are better than other people?” Nathan asked after a few moments of staring quizzically at Robert, almost looking through him. “Because we’re artists?”

“Yes. We can get lost in our dreams. We’re free. Art makes us free.” Robert grinned, like he had just won an uphill battle, or cracked an unbeatable code.

“So… Normal people,” Nathan said, whispering now, like he didn’t want the normal people to hear and get offended because they were suddenly the different ones. “They’re prisoners? Because they don’t accept art… Into their lives? They’re slaves?”

Robert laughed triumphantly, slamming his palm down on the table, the sound being louder than he had intended and startling everyone in the café, including Nathan, who jumped in his seat. Robert pursed his lips once again, glancing at the people who were staring at him before he continued to speak anyway, not caring about all the normal people looking at them. Robert didn’t care about them. He was an artist.

“Exactly,” he whispered back to Nathan, who then grinned straight back at him. “See. You’ve got something up there in that head of yours.”

“You are amazing,” Nathan said, running his long and bony fingers through his pale hair before curling them around his coffee cup, sipping from it. He spoke again when he set it back on the table. “I have never met someone with- With a mind like yours. It’s… Magnifique.” He laughed, making Robert laugh with him in the middle of a mouthful of his coffee.

“I’m just being honest,” he replied, and he folded his hands on the table, leaning closer. “I think you need to look at yourself differently if you’re an artist. I don’t think you should let people think that you’re just different from them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that you should see yourself as a different kind of person. You’re not even a person. You’re an artist. You’re almost like a higher being. Normal people, the ones without art- they’re the slaves. You see?” Nathan nodded briefly. “It’s like they’ve had chains around their neck since birth, and we managed to break out of ours. We see things differently and I think we should consider them separate from us. They try and keep us quiet, with their general education and television brainwashing. But, Nathan, do you know what?”
Nathan was staring again, looking puzzled, his lips parted as if he were just about to gasp.

“What?” His voice was hushed again, his lips barely moving.

“I think they’re scared of us. Normal people. The government. Everyone else. I think they’re scared of us because they know just what we can do. We can dream. We can change lives with our art.”

There were a few, very long moments of silence. Nathan was silent partly because he was trying to turn everything Robert had just said into French so that he could understand it fully, but also because it all made so much sense. If he were to really think about it, and because of Robert he was thinking hard about it now, people were scared of art. People turned a blind eye to it because they didn’t understand, that was what he had thought before. But now he knew, almost for certain, that people didn’t want to acknowledge the greatness of art because, once, they had underestimated its power. Art had the strength to move an entire planet, if you were going to compare it that way. Art could start world wars. Art had the power to get someone killed. And people ignored it because they were afraid that, if they gave it too much attention, it would thrive.

Art could dominate all things. Art could take over the world if the normal people let it.

And Nathan pondered on this as he looked at Robert. Robert had just changed his life because he had a way of looking at things that Nathan had never even considered, heard about, or could have possibly imagined. Robert was like a prophet. Robert was put there to guide Nathan, to teach him. Nathan looked up at Robert again, almost spilling his coffee over himself in the midst of his thoughts. He could hear Robert somewhere in the distance, talking to him, asking if he was okay, but Nathan was more than okay. He felt enlightened. He smiled, setting down his coffee cup and folding his hands on the table the way Robert had.

“Where did you learn these things? Can you teach me more about art?”