Ink on a Page
Agnès Madrigal
Agnès Madrigal writes works of fiction. This short “vignette,” drawn from our archive, is one of several about writers writing in cafés.
Using a cheap and bleeding ink pen, a narrator writes and draws on a piece of paper in a café—but ink on a page is seldom as simple as that. “Ink on a Page” is a short story by Agnès Madrigal. Photograph by Far Knot
A man drew in ink on the blank, vanilla-colored page of his small sketchbook. Another man sat in front of her, his languid body a creation of spilling lines and its accompanying form, shadows, pieces of light. Perhaps it was time for her to think in images again. She had left them for the year’s delicate winter, for the still-thawing springtime of words. Words, she had written, that cut and chiseled meaning from the paper, in a language less wide and less forgiving than the language of images—images that, without alphabet, extended infinitely further in other directions, if that was possible. It seemed possible.
“Words, she had written, that cut and chiseled meaning from the paper, in a language less wide and less forgiving than the language of images—images that, without alphabet, extended infinitely further in other directions, if that was possible. It seemed possible.”
—Agnès Madrigal, “Ink on a Page”
It was this infinity that both coddled her and crazed her. She remembered now, in an art class years ago, her piece of paper filling with her reckless lines. It was one of twenty or so white parallelograms that faced the same constellation of the model, wood chair, lamp with shade, a few hats, and a tousled blanket. Each artist approached the same tableau. Each drew from a slightly different perspective in the room, but the scene was otherwise the same—the heap of junk, the naked woman. But even if the angles had been identical (an impossibility in itself, she mused) the depictions could not be. Each artist brought forth a different version of the situation, as though the space between each set of eyes and each drawing hand was made of a different composite—of ancestry, of environment, of small muscle acuity, of the day’s mood, et cetera. It was one of an infinity of brief glimpses of infinity—and whatever small fraction of that infinity that made each being ungraspably unique.
Infinity, it surrounded one in every breathing moment. The re-shuffling of objects (chairs and tables, in this case, coffee cups and saucers), of bodies (sitting and rising, coming and going through the screen door, of passers-by through the windows), of music on the stereo (electronica, then jazz—Cecil Taylor), of words written and words spoken (next to her, a man and woman quibbled over the next item on their to-do list; elsewhere, a baby cried). Even those words of her notebook page, combinations unlike any others, they felt partly ordained as they swirled out of her into the black ink and atmosphere. Infinity: why was it so difficult to grasp, so impossible to believe? Shouldn’t it be easy, if not the easiest of things, to understand? Sometimes, she considered that the things closest to one’s self were the least obvious, as though observation required a few centimeters at least, and probably thousands of miles or whole other dimensions.
“Infinity: why was it so difficult to grasp, so impossible to believe? Shouldn’t it be easy, if not the easiest of things, to understand? Sometimes, she considered that the things closest to one’s self were the least obvious, as though observation required a few centimeters at least, and probably thousands of miles or whole other dimensions.”
—Agnès Madrigal, “Ink on a Page”
From the meter or so between his body and her own, did she see him better than she could if he and she became lovers? It was as though in that intimate proximity something of her own self would need to exert itself so powerfully that what she had previously been able to see of him was lost. It had seemed to happen something like that in the past, over and over, in fact, despite her intentions otherwise and to the better. Well, it could be assured that he would do the same to her also and she would let him do it. This reason, and a multitude of others, fostered her belief that despite the eons of evolution, the human species remained strangely, fundamentally flawed.
From the meter or so of distance between them, she lightly sketched him in the margins of her notebook, his hip tipped atop one foot slung under him, his knee bent off the side of the caned chair, his fingertips gently touching his chin and upper lip, his other fingertips laced between the soft pages of the newspaper that spilled off the edge of the table. She felt herself wanting to trace with her actual fingers the vessels that designed the backs of his hands. She felt herself wanting to undo the braid of his hair that rested easily on his scapula, the sun through the window caught the occasional glints of silver in it like tinsel.
The words blooming on her notebook page made it feel partly real to her, as did the small drawing that she concealed behind her coffee cup. She touched the cheap ink on the page with her fingers; it smeared, the ink that barely made an indentation into the coarse paper. She traced with her fingers his shoulders and his face in that ink, causing contours, shadows. And she imagined again the strands of his hair undone in her split hands, her mouth open upon his own, and her allowing, as she would, like the inked page left in the sun too long, her vanishing to begin.