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Prose

The secret life of Madame F

I have a very public kind of job. It’s nothing special, just a part of everyday life in my country, but I’m very good at it and I’ve been doing it for longer than anyone else I know of. Most women can’t stand it for more than a few months, but I’ve been here for two years now, and I don’t mind admitting that I enjoy it. I really enjoy it. What is my wonderful job? Everyone is surprised to learn that I’m an attendant in a men’s public toilet near the Tuileries in Paris.

Normally when you see attendants in public toilets, the first thing you notice about them is that they look bored, so bored that they might die of it at any moment. I can understand this. When I first took the job I thought I wouldn’t last the week. In fact on my first Friday, my fifth day, I’d already decided to leave, but that afternoon something happened that made me change my mind and I’ve been here ever since.

I have another job which is rather more private. I took the public job partly because I knew I’d be able to pursue my private job at the same time as fulfilling my meagre duties in the toilet. I have a secret career as an artist, you see, and I can work on my sketches in pencil very easily while I’m sitting at my little table. No-one notices as I’m very discreet and it’s the last thing that they’d expect to see.

At first I was a little uncomfortable with this idea. Taking my paper in there seemed sacrilegious to my art somehow – made a stain on the sheets, so to speak. But I quickly got over this prejudice once I’d made my discovery. We’re all slaves to our bodies, after all. The atmosphere doesn’t affect the shades and hues, my proximity to the plumbing doesn’t sully my art. In some cases, as it became apparent, quite the reverse.

In the evenings I work at home in my little studio, a spare room in my apartment, pursuing my portraits in oils. My current project has been going on for a while. I’m trying to capture a whole range of human expressions using the same face. My first canvas was joy – that was relatively easy and my patron, who runs the little gallery where I exhibit and sell, was delighted. I chose a man at random from a crowd watching some buskers by the Eiffel Tower and took his photo, without his knowledge of course, as he responded jovially to the performance. I did that one entirely at home before I started my job at the toilet. For some reason I next chose frustration. This was not so easy. I had taken some other photos of the man while he had a more neutral expression, but now I had to impose frustration on him. Somehow I had to find this from somewhere else.

I keep my art a secret because, apart from my patron who I met by accident, no-one has ever taken it seriously. My father thought I was crazy, my mother thought I’d fall in love and forget it, my friends thought I’d never succeed. This was in Nevers, a town in the middle of France that’s squashed around the elbow of the Loire, where artists like myself will forever founder and die trying to paint the gentle banks of the river. So I did the stereotypical, romantically idiotic thing and moved to Paris. I told myself that I needed to paint the drama of lovers by the Seine with the towers of Notre Dame raising hope and despair behind them. I needed to walk the streets of Montmartre in the footsteps of all my heroes and then go and stand on my own in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre when all the tourists had gone home. I needed to escape mediocrity.

I started out in a shabby bedsit of course, working as a waitress with barely enough time to do any painting. One Sunday, the only day I got completely to myself, luck intervened as I really couldn’t have expected it to just as I was near the point of giving up and returning home. For some reason I decided to try a head and shoulders portrait, something I’d never attempted before. I got one of the men from the restaurant kitchen to sit for me in the Tuileries gardens, my bedsit was much too small, and made him swear to secrecy. Half way through my work a lady came over and asked if she could look at what I was doing. She picked up the canvas and inspected it closely, then told me she thought it was excellent. She told me to bring the painting to her gallery when it was finished and she would display it. This was the start of a relationship which began slowly to change my life.

The portrait sold, so I did another for her, that sold too, so I gave her a third. The money enabled me to rent the apartment I’m in now with the spare room studio. I had hoped that I’d be able to give up my job altogether and just paint, but it was difficult to get out of the cycle. I could only finish a painting so fast, then it might be several months before the gallery could sell it. I didn’t have the confidence to take the risk, I didn’t want to lose my apartment. But at least I was building a reputation, or rather Madame F was, this being the deliberately mysterious signature that I put on each canvas.

Then quite suddenly the restaurant owner announced that he was moving to Provence, where he was sure he could get rich from the English tourists, so the restaurant would be closing. That was when I found the job in the public toilet and my fortunes improved once again. I thought I’d only be there a few weeks, I considered it a stop gap until I could find another waitressing job. Had a man not happened to drop a coin onto the floor on that first Friday afternoon, I‘d have left by the end of that day.

It was at this time that I was working on frustration and I had so far been frustrated in finding the inspiration for it. It was by far the most difficult thing I’d attempted, and on top of this I didn’t like my new job. Now this stupid man had dropped his coin on the floor which rolled under my little table, under my chair and spun to rest just behind me. I dragged back in my chair to pick it up, then as I sat up again an amazing sight caught my eye. Just by the partition there was a mirror on the wall for the men to inspect their appearance on the way out. But just at the angle from where I now sat I could clearly see the head and shoulders of a man standing at the end urinal. Much to my astonishment, his face was a picture of frustration. The very picture I’d been searching for.

I discovered later that he had prostate trouble, but right at that moment I couldn’t have cared less what the source of his frustration was. I picked up the coin and returned it to its owner, then took out the sketch pad that I always carried and began to draw the expression of its poor owner. There was nothing improper in this, please understand, I could see no further than the man’s shoulders, his privacy was intact, except for his expression of course. My memory is fortunately quite photographic, so I didn’t have to carry on staring at his image in the mirror, a couple more glances were enough – I had my sketch. I was able to take it home and super-impose the frustrated expression onto my original model.

You can imagine how delighted I was at this discovery. By moving my little desk and chair back just a short way I had a permanent and discreet view of whoever chose to stand in the end urinal and whatever expression they wore. You’d be amazed at the range of expressions you can find in a public toilet! There are the obvious ones, relief of course and concentration. Then there are the more interesting ones; pride, envy, pain, disappointment, alarm and one or two others which it’s probably better not to go into – I’ve no wish to be unprofessional.

It took me a while to collect all these expressions, you understand. Sometimes I’d go for months without encountering a new one. Some days no-one chose to stand in the end urinal at all, but each time a new expression came along I knew I had another painting in the making to provide to my gallery. None of them have ever found me out, though some of the regulars talk to me and sometimes inadvertently reveal the reason for their expression, like poor old prostate.

I won’t be working at the public toilet for much longer. Madame F has begun to earn a reputation in the world of portraits and is on the verge of making a living from commissions. She’ll be able to move to a better home, have a proper studio instead of a spare room and finally convince her father that she’s not crazy. I’ll be Madame F full-time instead of that strangely contented young woman in the public toilet who sits and waits patiently, day after day, for the next expression to come along.

Bare Nibs

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