“Désiré” by Breughel

I am looking at a Breughel, not a Rubens, from my window seat at Désiré de Lille Tea Room. I would frame the artwork better by switching my own seat with the two ladies at a nearby table. Petite, well dressed, mature women. They both have silver hair, cut short and youthful. I think they are sisters catching up on family news, not just the what of it, but the why and the how, going deep inside the family stories to make meanings of new alliances and old fractures. They are wearing skirts and low heels. One wears glasses, one does not. The window begs to be bordered by their warm russet and brown brocades.

If they sit here in my place at the window table, the word Désiré will be just above their heads as read from the outside looking in. How would Breughel frame this? Will that word become the title of the entire piece? I like Breughel’s busy composites of folk sayings or parables. Each tiny scene is an illustration of some human foible. What is going on in my Breughel?

A woman walks into a shop labeled with a blue fluorescent sign. It might be a jewelry store. I can’t quite see from this angle. The name of the store is clear however. It is Choice. What is she going in there to choose?

Another woman, dressed in brown with short dark hair and glasses, walks out of a shop with a package over her arm. She is purposeful, stepping into the flow of pedestrian traffic to her right with eyes only for the next steps of the day. What is in her bag?

There is a large Buddha statue in the window of the shop she has just left. Buddha is holding a lit candle in his lotus-flower hands. The shop is called Rituals: Home and Body Cosmetics. Above and behind the Buddha is a board with writing on it. It begins . . . “Onze filosofie . . .”

Two women in slacks and short coats with their collars up walk a medium sized black poodle. We see only their backs as they walk from the center of the canvas off to the right. The woman on the left is older, perhaps the mother to the daughter on the right, the one with longer hair and slighter build. They aren’t touching, but their bodies say intimacy.

Two young men in shirt sleeves unload flats of water onto a hand cart just to the left of the center of the scene. Their bare hands grip the heavy trays.

A boy in a black coat is running, running through the scene. He is not alarmed, just late. Late to pick up a package from a shop closing soon? A package he has promised his mother he will bring home, but he was talking on his cellphone so long that he’s late. The twilight is shading down on him and soon that sharp scimitar, Magritte’s moon (in Breughel’s painting!) will be hanging over his head.

Tequila tempts passersby two or three at a time. Tequila’s final letter, the “A” is designed to look like the top of a minaret. The door of the minaret, as well as the spaces within the letter “e” and the letter “q” are filled with a deep pink, almost red color. What is Tequila offering besides a blush of intoxication? Costume jewelry, scarves, bags are visible along with an elephant and a giraffe. Outside on a pole a deep pink package tied with matching ribbon beckons with an exchange of imagination for possession.

The clerk of Tequila keeps busy in the tiny, spot-lit shop: folding and unfolding scarves, organizing small leather wallets in a display box. A mother and daughter, arm in arm, pause, turn away, and then turn back and enter the minaret’s door. They are darker than Northern Europeans. Are they from a minaret or from tequila? Drawn by the aura of the bustling shop, another woman enters.

A little family doing passagiata –two tiny girls, and mom and dad. A shopgirl on her cellphone making plans for the evening.
Which of us is Icarus, falling from the sky with melting wings from the dizzy heights and fiery sol?

Behind the tingle of the minaret’s door, is it the young woman in houndstooth trying on a scarf?
Or the young girl behind the Buddha who has just blown out the candle?
Or the young blond woman with a stiff-legged walk?
Or the woman with graceful packages pausing beside the “60% Off Sale” sign?
Or is it me?

The young man carrying two suitcases, one red, one grey, crosses from left to right and then from right to left ten minutes later. Where is the woman who belongs to the soft things in the red bag? Is she lost, or is he?

This tea room is really a series of rooms, each one lined in framed mirrors and deeper, deeper into the perspective of distance mirrored back smaller and smaller.

Tequila! Tequila! Number 11, the magic windows, the magic door. Did the woman whose face I never see put one irresistible gem among the fake chains and baubles?

The boy in the black coat runs across the scene again, in the opposite direction. On this little street, Schrijnwerkers Straat, are we at the fold of time? Every action will have its mirror, its reverse, sooner or later?

It’s almost dark; our reflections go deeper within the lighted windows and enfold one another across the narrow street.
No one goes in or comes out of Hush Puppies despite the pastel-bright colors splashed across the windows. Perhaps Breughel’s eyes cannot see into pastels. We’ll ask Renoir for his view.