Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 15

From the top, then. Very, very fine, dry blond hair which conforms to the shape of his head and, as he has aged, looks like a wig or the helmet-like hair you clip onto a Lego man. Good hair for a David Lynch. A forehead which is still miraculously smooth, the skin very tight to it, the bone very tangible, the first great curve of his head a section of a sphere. His whole face is full of spheres. The eyebrows are faint and fall away. The bridge of the nose is where there has been an impact of pain. There are two, not deep, vertical lines which, taken with the declining eyebrows, make him look harrowed. The curve of the eyeballs is very visible under his eyelids – his face has started to become beautiful. And unusual. He cannot seem to open his eyes very wide, as if the eyelids have too far to travel back up the curve of the eyeballs. The eyes themselves are ethnically unplaceable, a speckled pale blue. Under them are deep pre-Raphaelite shadows (which in time have become real pouches). These shadows are immensely beautiful. And now you begin to see just how exquisite the face is. The nose is incredibly fine and straight, a nose which ladies in Beverly Hills might pick from a catalogue. The ears are sleek to his head: he looks like a bird. In the hollows beneath the cheekbones, like ripples playing on the underside of a bridge, lines of beauty continually form and reform. Everything about the face keeps getting finer – you feel you could crush his bones like a sparrow's bones. The outline of the lips is as sharp as the outline of a baby's lips. The cut in his top lip is like the V of a child-drawn seagull. There is a gap between his teeth which adds to the general feeling of sickness – again, you notice how beauty and sickness are bound together here in this pre-Raphaelite way. The lips are red, like the lips in a Tennyson horror poem. They might be poisonous. Take the head in your hands and turn it to a three-quarter profile. It's heart-shaped, and the line that runs from his forehead to his sharp chin, full of double curves, is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. You're at a loss to say why – it's explicable by mathematics, no doubt – but that line looks like the definition of beauty. And everything is amazingly smooth and golden. A sick beauty, made of gold. The most beautiful: Christopher Walken.