I’m embarrassed to say it, but my parents house still makes me uneasy. I’ve always felt like somebody's watching me.
Mom and Dad love antiques, and as far as I remember I grew up in a home plagued with paintings, sculptures, furniture that wasn’t meant to sit on. Even the kitchen resembled a poorly designed gallery, hosting an uncurated collection.
Whenever I walked through the living room at night I’d have to look down and make blinders with my hands. For some reason, I would sense that I wasn’t the only one tip-toeing around the place. That something, perhaps one of those ghastly busts or one of the religious figures, awaited for me to raise my stare and meet their eyes, so they could then try to catch me.
I was watching a game from the 1986 world cup when my parents brought home the portrait. Dad walked in holding a big wooden canvas, shortly before France took lead of the match. I wasn’t curious to know the painting’s image, and only glanced as he brought it up the stairs.
Those stairs led to a narrow hallway, and that hallway to the entrance of the room I shared with my older brother. From our bedroom door one could see the end of that small corridor, where a wall stood with the staircase to one side, and a rococo vase to the other.
Which is why that evening I jumped as soon as I walked out and saw a figure on the other end of the dark hallway, staring right at me. My brother laughed at my sudden reaction. I had somehow missed the portrait a few hours earlier, when going up to our room.
In itself, the painting wasn’t disturbing. It portrayed a woman, some sort of priestess or Virgin Mary, wearing a delicate silk veil and holding a smoking staff. Behind her was a perfect sky, blue and sparsely clouded.
However, her other characteristics made me nervous: how she looked straight ahead, her life-like size, and her expression. Like with the Mona Lisa, it was hard to pinpoint the emotion on her face, a relaxed, softly smiling countenance that also held a pair of widely open eyes. As if trying to bewitch, or not lose sight of you.
All of it always made me feel that there was a window right in front my door, with an odd person perpetually looking out of it to see me go in and out of my room.
I looked down and covered my sight as I crossed the hallway, went downstairs and walked to our bathroom, for some reason located at the other end of our home, which was as weirdly designed as the antiques it harbored.
Till the day I was 24 and I moved out of the house and to a different city, I kept looking away whenever I passed the portrait at night, seeking to avoid its eyes. I eventually found out it was named “Pax”, or “peace” in latin.
Years later I visited town alongside my 7 year old son, Ernesto. My parents allowed us to stay at their place even though they were away, travelling abroad. My childhood bedroom, on top of those narrow stairs, was left prepared for their grandson to sleep in.
One evening I was having a hard time falling asleep. I was staring at a hanging chandelier when I heard the faint sound of my son calling my name.
I went up to his room and, much to my regret, saw the damn painting was still there. Everything in this house had changed: the wall paper, the furniture, the decor… all but that portrait, which still hung at the end of that hallway.
I walked in to my son sitting on what had once been my bed. He didn’t wait to tell me he was scared and I laughed, knowing exactly the source of his fears.
“What?” I asked as I turned to see the portrait. “Are you afraid of the Virgin Mary?”
And then I stopped.
I swear, for all that I care in this world, that the woman blinked. Just slow enough to see her eyelids covering her eyes.
I couldn’t move, and became invaded by a dread I hadn’t hosted since being a kid.
“Do you mind staying for a bit Dad?” I could tell in Ernesto’s tone that his nerves were alerted by the sudden change in my demeanor.
I tucked him in bed, trying to shake off what I had just seen. I told myself I just needed to see the portrait again to realize it had just been my imagination in concert with the poor lighting. So I peeked out once more before closing the bedroom door.
But what I saw froze the blood in my veins. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
I struggled to look away from the painting as I shut the door, and locked it. I turned back around, praying my son had not seen what I just witnessed.
Ernesto was sitting up again. For a moment, his pale and alarmed face led me to think I had failed. That he also saw it.
“What happened Dad?” he asked.
An immense relief rushed over me. His fear came from noticing something scared his Dad. But, fortunately, he didn’t know what.
The woman had disappeared from the portrait.
All that remained of the painting in the canvas was its backdrop, the idyllic blue sky. It was as if the priestess had left the frame, escaped the artwork…
“And gotten into the house”, I thought.
Struggling to sound cool and collected, I told my son I had spotted a couple of moths fluttering around the portrait, and that it was important I told grandma and grandpa about it to stop them from ruining it. But I could tell he wasn’t buying it. He could detect the war waging inside of me to preserve my own sanity.
And to escape the image of a figure walking around the dark house below us, dragging a long, silky veil. Hunting for someone to catch.
Eventually I was able to calm Ernesto down, and guaranteed him “from one man to another” that this “small scare” would be our secret. I slept there that night, in my brother's old bed.
The next morning, I took advantage of waking up first and quietly made my way to the door. I took a deep breath before opening it.
Fortunately the woman was there, back in the painting. The Sun also helped, since I was never scared of it during the day. The morning light reduced it to just one more of my parent’s antiques.
But as I got closer I noticed something. A slight difference that only someone who grew next to that portrait, and of those eyes which dare you to look away, would pick up.
Its subtle smile was gone, and on top of her now resting lips her stare was now contaminated, by something far from peaceful and more akin to anger, or a deep displeasure. Even hate.
I’m embarrassed to say this, but all I could do was look away like a child as I went downstairs to make breakfast.
