Unlike Uncle Evelyn, said Austerlitz after a while, taking from his jacket pocket a kind of folder containing several postcard-sized photographs, Great-Uncle Alphonso, who was about ten years older and continued the line of the naturalist Fitzpatricks, looked positively youthful. Always even-tempered, he spent most of his time out of doors, going on long expeditions even in the worst of weather, or when it was fine sitting on a camp stool somewhere near the house in his white smock, a straw hat on his head, painting watercolors. When he was thus engaged he generally wore glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine veil that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes. The faint images that Alphonso transferred onto paper, said Austerlitz, were barely sketches of pictures—here a rocky slope, there a small bosky thicket or a cumulus cloud—fragments, almost without color, fixed with a tint made of a few drops of water and a grain of malachite green or ash-blue. I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea. In his childhood, he said, he used to walk beside the chalk cliffs of Devon and Cornwall, where hollows and basins have been carved and cut out of the rock by the breakers over millions of years, admiring the endless diversity of the semi-sentient marvels oscillating between the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, the zooids and corallines, sea anemones, sea fans and sea feathers, the anthozoans and crustaceans over which the tide washed twice a day while long fronds of seaweed swayed around them, and which then, as the water went out, revealed their wonderfully iridescent life in the rock pools exposed once more to the light and the air, showing all the colors of the rainbow—emerald, scarlet and rosy red, sulfur yellow, velvety black.
