Portraits That Follow
追う肖像
The long gallery ran the width of the house, and along it the dead of my family kept their .
Portrait after portrait, they hung in frames blackened by the smoke of two lost centuries.
My grandmother had told me once that a family is not a tree but a debt passed hand to hand.
I had laughed then; I did not laugh now, walking beneath the of so many painted eyes.
Their gazes, the guidebooks would say, merely follow the viewer by a trick of perspective and paint.
Yet a trick, however often explained, does not cease to feel like an intention while one endures it.
The first ancestor, a judge, regarded me with the calm of a man weighing an old .
Beside him hung his wife, whose folded hands seemed less at rest than lately, reluctantly, unclasped.
I moved along the row, and each face surrendered its attention only to pass me to the next.
Was I imagining, I wondered, or did the eyes contract a little as I approached, then widen as I passed?
Down the gallery came a draught that lifted the dust and set the nearest frames faintly trembling.
She would not be intimidated by , she told herself; she had done nothing these faces could reproach.
But the thought arrived , and its very phrasing betrayed how much reproach she had come expecting.
Somewhere among them, my grandmother's portrait hung, painted the year before the I had never mended.
I had refused her letters; I had let the quarrel harden; I had learned of her death from a stranger.
The face in the frame did not accuse me, which was, of all things, the hardest to bear.
An cannot forgive, for it cannot be wronged; forgiveness, like injury, requires the living.
And so the debt she spoke of remained precisely where debts remain when the creditor has died: with me.
I stood before her longer than before any other, waiting for a pardon paint could not give.
The eyes, painted decades ago, held mine, and I could not decide whether they pitied or condemned.
Perhaps, I thought, the portraits follow us because we cannot bear that the dead should look away.
To be watched is terrible; to be no longer watched, by those we failed, is more terrible still.
A cloud crossed the window, and for an instant every painted face darkened as if in unison lowering its gaze.
Reason offered the cloud; something older in me offered the possibility that they had simply looked elsewhere.
I turned to leave, and my own shadow, thrown long across the portraits, seemed to join their silent company.
, I understood, is not the faces that watch you but the face you cannot yet meet in the glass.
At the gallery's end a single frame hung empty, its canvas cut cleanly away, its subject unknown to me.
And as I stared into that vacancy, I felt, unmistakably, the sensation of being at last looked back at.