Written to the prompt L is for Laundry
The Washerwoman
The men do not take the trouble to get to know me, but they are fascinated by me. They bring their easels and brushes and colours and stare at me as I work. If they want me to stop so they can catch the light from the water as I heave a sodden sheet from the washtub, or preserve in paint the sweat that dampens my hair, they must pay extra; I cannot afford to pause my labour for free.
They come – Manet, Gauguin, Pissarro and others – to paint a peasant at work. They are stupid, all of them, for who would want to buy a painting of a poor washerwoman? Who would want that hanging on their fine panelled walls alongside the portraits of their noble ancestors? Not me. Were a fortune to drop in my lap, I would have no picture to remind me of what I was; I have memories of it. And if memory failed, the picture would mean nothing anyway.
Besides, these men only paint what they see on the surface. They have a foolish notion of capturing on canvas the purity and nobility of honest toil – they who have never known hard graft. They do not paint the labour of trudging back and forth to the well, lifting and carrying pail after heavy pail of freezing water. They do not paint the early morning time when I have to set the fire under the cauldron. They do not paint the veins that run like ropes under my skin, nor the inflamed and scaly patches on my hands and arms caused by soap and water. They do not paint the backache, nor the damp that seeps through to the bones, nor the rheumatic joints, nor the cough. They do not paint the scalds and burns. They do not paint the poverty.
To my mind, they do not paint very well. Their colours are all wrong, either too insipid, like Pissarro’s or too intense, like Van Gogh’s. However they try, they do not capture the light properly.
I do not tell them this; they would not believe me, and for my impudence they would stop coming and paying.
Instead, I take their money, and save what I can, and pray for the day when the men of science make a machine that does the washing, so that I may take out my easel and brushes and colours, and capture the light that I see.
© Carol Carman 2024
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