The Turquoise Mountains by Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio

My first canvas hangs on the wall of my art studio in Waltham, MA. It is an abstract landscape of blues, browns, and purples, evoking mountains, lakes, and volcanoes. 

Throughout the first part of my life, shrinks and others including my mother have pointed out my lack of femininity, my aggressiveness, my strong animus, my being a phallic woman, my masculinity. When I fell in love with a sixteen-year-old man and created my first canvas in 1973, Lacanian philosophy, a revival of the Freudian concept that creativity was exclusively male, was predominant. To summarize: having a penis was a prerequisite to creativity.

My choice to be a painter in the early seventies was by itself a transgression. 

At the time, I was a high school student at the Lycée Sophie Germain. It was at my father’s suggestion that I had selected a high school located in Paris’s oldest Jewish district, Le Marais, so as to be in contact with different cultures, to meet with Jewish classmates.  

The Lycée had an imposing façade, with heavy wooden doors topped by a balcony with the French Flag standing in front of large French windows.  Inside the rectangular interior schoolyard, the plate on the pedestal holding the bust of an austere looking woman read: Sophie Germain, Mathematician and Philosopher, 1776–1831. This is all I knew about her. Our high school was named after a female mathematician and philosopher named Sophie Germain, who lived during the French Revolution, and survived it.

The building was located a few blocks away from the Charlemagne High School for boys, and a bridge away from Notre Dame Cathedral. The narrowness of the street made each of the institutions look even more imposing and out of proportion with their surroundings. During class breaks, our comings and goings were scrutinized at all times by la Surveillante Generale, a six-foot-tall, red-haired, middle-aged woman who stood guard in a booth on the right side of the entrance.

Despite its ongoing gentrification, Le Marais had retained its medieval flair with its narrow, serpentine streets; its kosher butcher and custom tailor shops signaled by big Hebrew letters. 

On the back of Sophie Germain, the green spread of a large, open lawn lay in the front of the Palais de Justice. Sitting on the grass during a break between classes, our group of high school girls sang out the lyrics of “The House of the Rising Sun,” one of us playing the guitar. Across from me, a boy lay on his belly. Because of the reflection of the grass in his eyes, I thought they were green, but his eyes were brown and almond-shaped. Jean-Pascal was a tenth-grade student at the all-boy high school le Lycée Charlemagne. 

I have no recall of whether the class we returned to was French, history, math, or English, but the teacher’s warning to us, giddy eleventh-grade girls, about the early spring sun still resonates with me. “Le soleil de Mars rend fou.” March Madness. It was the first day of spring, March 21, 1973.  The romance lasted for five months, until my family moved to Toulouse at the end of August.

***

When we first met, between kisses, he told me that he was sixteen and that his birthday was in November. 

“Scorpio?” I asked. 

“No, the end of November.” He was a Sagittarius like Beethoven, his favorite composer. 

“Pomp, pomp, pomp, pomp,” I hummed. 

“Oh please, there is much more to Beethoven,” he answered. My heart had dropped into my guts, and it stayed there, pulsing, radiating from my lower belly to my inner thighs. 

One afternoon, I sat with his mother while he played “The Moonlight Sonata” on the acoustic piano. During this musical interlude, I felt captivated by the melody springing from the smooth moving of his long-fingered hands. I sat next to his mother, who was knitting quietly. She shared her son’s almond eyes and cheekbones, but her face was round. Their apartment had become like a second home for me. They lived in Bagnolet, a town on the outskirts of Paris, while I lived in downtown Paris between the avenue de l’Opera and the Bourse, the stock-exchange building.

In contrast to my mother’s fast typing in her home office, Madame le Goff offered a peaceful presence. 

“You have a romantic and contemplative nature, Anne-Marie,” she told me. 

***

My mother was a reporter constantly preoccupied with the world and had little patience with my introverted nature. In 1962, toward the end of the Algerian War of Independence, she was alone with three young children when a bomb planted by an extreme right wing terrorist group, called the O.A.S, destroyed the wall that separated my parent’s bedroom from the outside landing. My parents were activists supporting the Algerian rebels and my father had been arrested and in jail when the attack occurred.  I was six at the time, my brother Pilou, four and a half, and my sister Sophie, a toddler.

My mother called me lazy, dreamy, and selfish. She told me once, when I was much younger, that if I did not get better grades, I would end up as a streetwalker.  

“Do you know what a streetwalker is?” I had no idea, but it sounded like something terrible. When she threatened me with a doomed future as a streetwalker, I was in my pajamas, trying to do my middle-school homework after dinner. I was looking at a picture of a cow with her massive udders, and at the text that read that cows had many stomachs and a complicated digestive system.

I wanted her to understand how mad and scary she was. I wanted to get back to the immobile cow in the picture in my textbook. I wanted her to leave, to leave me alone. She did not. She asked me to turn my back to her and to pull down my pajama pants and spanked me with all her fury. This time it was my bad grades that had triggered her rage.

Even though I went to bed with my face soaked in tears, my body felt all warm, relaxed, and soft, and I fell into a deep sleep. It was changing in a way I could not control. Hair covered my armpits and pubis. My chest, tender and itchy, had given way to two little mounds.

As a child and a tween, swimming made me feel at home inside my body. “You should start wearing a bra,” my mother said as we were heading toward the blue rectangle of water of an outside public pool. 

“No, I don’t want one!” I answered. 

After a few laps, I lay flat on my belly on the shallow side of the pool, enjoying the warmth of the sun on my bare back, wearing only a pair of black swim shorts and cropped hair. Giggles startled me out of my reverie. I felt the grip of hands on my wrist and arm, pulling me down. I opened my eyes and saw them, four little girls, in soft hues of green, blue, and pink bikinis, and long hair, one of them blonde. “Let’s get that boy in the water!” 

I sat facing them, showing my face and my uncertain chest with its timid nipple sprouts. 

“Stop it, I’m a girl!” 

“Sorry,” they said, “we thought you were a boy!”

***

When I did not listen to Jean-Pascal playing the piano, we read French poetry from an anthology. However, we were most of the time making out. One afternoon, I was lying on a bench along the Seine River, my head on his lap, Jean-Pascal’s hand inside my blouse, caressing my breasts, when I saw a man looking down at us from the street, behind the parapet. 

At another time, Jean-Pascal sat on the parapet above the quay of the Seine while I stood on the sidewalk, facing him and kissing him. While I was doing so, a group of men passed by, laughing. I felt a finger from a stranger moving along the crack of my butt. I stopped, turned away, enraged, in tears, and the men continued walking, turning their heads and mocking me. Jean-Pascal looked at me, not understanding what happened. At that precise moment, I felt angry with him, that boy, so frail, so young, and unable to protect me.

Our public displays of affection were not welcome. We got kicked out of public squares by angry guards mumbling about brothels and decency. My parents and his were nervous, frequently knocking on the door of my room or his and interrupting us in various stages of nudity. We were often topless but young and inexperienced; we never reached below the belt.

I read manuals of sex education, and one popular book said that the missionary position was the best, the safest, and one where the man was emotionally supporting the woman. In my home, we found an illustrated erotica book written by surrealist French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, titled “Les Onze Mille Verges.” The title was a pun on a medieval tale called “Les Onze Mille Vierges.” The first title translates to “The Eleven Thousand Dicks.” The medieval tale is called “The Eleven Thousand Virgins.” In French between vierge and verge, virgin and dick, there is only one “I.” The story was a mix of political satire and pornography.

We did not think that the book was put on the top shelf for a reason. It just happened that Jean-Pascal was tall and could reach it. We were openly looking at it when my father saw us, picked it up, and afterward it was nowhere to be found, at least by us. 

***

When I was younger, my father used to take me to art and science museums, zoos, art galleries, and historical monuments. One afternoon I stood with him in front of a very old painted wooden statue of the Virgin nursing baby Jesus, in a Roman church. The Virgin’s robe had a slit in it that exposed her nursing breast. “That slit in her robe is so convenient and ingenious to feed the baby!” I exclaimed. I saw him blushing and turning his head away. 

When I was a fourth grader, I found myself walking in a dark winter evening with a group of my schoolmates inside the arcades of the Palais Royal Gardens. We were threatened by a playful group of boys who were running after us. 

Instead of running away giggling with the other girls, I stopped, pivoted, and facing the boy who was left behind the pack, whipped him with my jumping rope. There were people in the gardens. Nobody stopped me. I felt powerful and excited, and fierce like Brunhilda, the Valkyrie in The Ring of the Nibelungen, a tale in a children’s version of Nordic legends my father had given me, and that kept me awake at night. 

***

One afternoon in my room, while Jean-Pascal lay on the bed, moaning under my touch, with his head thrown backward, his long, slender neck exposed, I felt the urge to put both hands around his neck and squeeze it. 

When I told my mother how scared and frightened I was by the impulse of strangling Jean-Pascal, she dismissed my concerns. 

“You are just a passionate, hot-tempered young woman.”

Earlier in my relationship, I had written in my journal how much I loved Jean-Pascal despite all his physical imperfections. I love Jean-Pascal with his yellow, irregular teeth. I love Jean-Pascal with his skinny body. I love Jean-Pascal with his acne. I read it to him, unaware of my cruelty. 

“This is not nice,” he said. 

I would not have remembered any of his imperfections if I had not written about them and read them to him. He was a beautiful boy. He had a long, oval face and a slightly receding forehead, which, in combination with his almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and long, dark hair, gave him a feline look. His legs were shapely, the muscles of his calves well defined, and his sharp profile and slender silhouette reminded me of the male figures in the Egyptian murals in the basement of the Louvre.

I often carried a pencil and a notebook, and the Louvre was a frequent stop on my way home from my high school. At the time it was a deserted, silent, and free place. Of all the treasures and wonders the museum hosted, the mummies and Egyptian funerary art were my favorite.

By the time I met with Jean-Pascal, I attended an artist workshop in a working class suburb of Paris.  Every Saturday, I took the subway and two buses to travel from our home in downtown Paris to Genevilliers. The studio was a loft on the top floor of a tower, surrounded by glass doors that opened on a rooftop terrace. The sun shone on the wood floor, and the place was under the airborne and pervasive scent of turpentine.

Each of the participants had their own spot and easel, and there were about fifteen painters, men and women, participating in the workshop. At seventeen, I was the youngest one. When Jean-Pascal came to visit, I was working on my first canvas.  As the two of us stood together in front of my work in progress, Bernard, the head of the workshop, asked us if we were siblings. 

“No,” we answered, with laughter in our eyes.

The following week, Bernard commented to a visitor in my presence, about my “sensual colors, and sensual brushstrokes.”

I had done a lot of studies with gouache on paper before tackling my first canvas. I was shy, unsure of myself, and not very comfortable about hearing a man twenty year older than me talking about my sensuality. Bernard was blond, soft-spoken, and enigmatic. 

“What are you planning to do after high school?” he asked me in the elevator down as we were leaving the studio. 

“I am going to be a schoolteacher,” I said. 

“Great, a lot of painters marry schoolteachers!”

I did not want to be the wife of an artist and support him as a schoolteacher. I wanted to support myself as an artist by being a schoolteacher. 

***

On a Saturday afternoon, I went out of the studio to the rooftop terrace. In the presence of others, I climbed the parapet, and walked on its narrow top, looking down at the tiny streets and the toy-looking cars below, scared and thrilled by the imminent danger, pondering on how fragile life was. Bernard asked me to step down back on the firm ground. Still standing on the ledge, I noticed the hint of a shadow over his blue-green eyes, while his voice remained calm. 

Summer was coming, and our families relented in giving us permission to go camping together on the island of Noirmoutier. My mother warned me to lower my expectations about first time sex, while pointing out that we were obviously in love with each other, although she would have preferred an older, more experienced man as my first lover.  

I was sitting between Jean-Pascal and his younger sister at a Sunday family lunch, when his father, a tall sinewy man stood up and erupted, his tense body ready to fight against the elements. “As I told you before, no ass at sixteen,” he said. However, we had his mother’s blessings.

I went to an ob-gyn, a man who told me I was a very, very young woman, while peering inside my vulva and quickly sticking one gloved finger inside my rectum. He also told me that a more experienced man would be better for my first sexual experience and wrote a prescription for the pill, which was later handed to me by a constipated-looking pharmacist. 

Finally, off we went to Noirmoutier. We bought groceries at the supermarket and cooked perfect soft-boiled eggs on the camping gas in three minutes. We often visited the friends of his parents who owned a round beach house on the island. We cycled along the marshes and went swimming. 

The friends had a daughter who was blonde and pretty and a boyfriend who was tall, handsome, and muscular. They looked like the perfect couple. I hated them. I felt more and more aware of my curvaceous, hyper feminine body, and of Jean-Pascal’s androgynous look, although his solid erections were not ambiguous at all. 

His erect penis, the first erect penis I ever saw in my life, felt like a threat. I was still aroused, but every time he tried to penetrate me, my vagina closed shut.

“I heard that women have a very sensitive organ called the clitoris.”

“What are you talking about?” I answered, pushing his hand away. “You mean the urethra? There is no such thing as a clitoris!” 

He said masturbating helped him to sleep. I should do the same. I had no idea how. We did not lose our virginity. 

In September, I followed my family to Toulouse, where my father, a space engineer, was transferred. Jean-Pascal wrote to me that he already had a mother and did not need another one. I read it as a comment on my failure to have sex with him. 

***

In Toulouse, I attended the twelfth grade in a co-ed high school, le Lycée Bellevue, a big sprawling building next to a highway and across from a medical complex. After graduating in 1974, I passed the high school diploma and was accepted at the entrance exam of the Toulouse area teacher school, a two-year program at the time. 

I slid head on into the seventies, unsure about what to paint, uncomfortable in my own body, indecisive about my future, ashamed first about still being a virgin, and then about being frigid.

When the crate sent from France by my brother, arrived at Boston Logan Airport in mid November 2016, I had just obtained the American citizenship, after living in this country for thirty years, teaching French part-time, getting married, raising two children, completing a bachelor’s degree and two masters, and pursuing a few artistic directions, still unable to find my voice.

My mother had passed away a little bit more than a year before. 

The crate, carefully crafted by my brother, contained a fine piece of furniture from the nineteenth century, a sewing table from her grandmother, she always had wanted me to have, and an Indian terracotta elephant, that was part of her wide collection of elephants. 

It also contained a few of my artworks; oil on canvases from the late seventies and acrylic on canvas from the early eighties, wooden sculptures and my very first canvas, an untitled oil canvas, with my fading signature in pen in the back.  Looking at all my past artworks, I saw the influence of French Modernism. Looking at my first canvas, I recognized myself. Reflecting on my relationship with Jean-Pascal, I saw a young person grappling with the complexity of a first passion. However, the intensity of that young person’s feelings was the most genuine.

The canvas is slightly caked with dust, a little bit awkward, but such a gift to my present self from my past self. Tightly linked to the memory of my first passion, it is a celebration of my lust for life, my non-gender conforming sexuality and abundant creativity. 

The imprint of my coming of age as an artist and sexual being, manifested while working on the thesis of my third master’s, an MFA in Visual Art, completed in 2020.  I wrote on how I had felt psychologically and creatively castrated in the seventies.

Whenever I paint, I slip out of space and time, my hands becoming the hands of the younger self who created their first canvas, absorbed in a song and dance of colors. My oil abstract landscape has a name now: “The Turquoise Mountains.”

Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio is a French-born visual artist and writer recently diagnosed with ADHD. She is the recipient of three art related master’s degrees and has exhibited her artworks throughout New England. Her writing has been published in a few literary magazines. Find more at anne-mariedelaunay-danizio.com