A Finger of Blue

Elsa Gribinski

Illustration by Hugo Muecke

Saturday, October 15

           This morning, I went to the dry-salter’s. I found a single measly banknote in my inner jacket pocket. From deep in my trousers, I dredged up a few more coins. I walked by the butcher’s at Les Halles; the stock had just come in, the refrigerated truck still parked outside. I gazed at the carcasses in the window. I thought of Rembrandt. Then I thought of Bacon. At the dry-salter’s, I asked for white, a big tube of the cheapest acrylic. On my way back, I passed by the butcher’s spread again. I felt a craving for red meat. From my pocket, I pulled out whatever I’d saved by giving up on color. I dithered. In the end, I went home.

 

Sunday, October 16

            I lined up the tubes of color along a slat of floorboard. They weren’t very tubelike anymore. Apart from the yellow, which still had a little left, there wasn’t much to be gotten from them.

            I felt another pang of craving for red meat. I spent the day looking at the tube of white paint.

 

Monday, October 17

            I’d had an idea that I would make colors from white. It turns out well enough with blues and with reds. Shades of yellow in a light palette probably won’t work.

            I’ve never understood why butcher shops close Mondays.

 

Tuesday, October 18

            I counted up the change I’d been saving since Saturday. The tubes are still lined up along the slat of floorboard.

 

Wednesday, October 19

            I went to the butcher’s at Les Halles just before they shut for lunch. I walked right in, I was afraid they’d close up shop. I asked for a chunk of ground beef. The owner said it couldn’t be done. With a chipper look, he turned to his apprentice and said, “You can’t have it both ways. Either you want chunks, or you want it ground!” I think he was talking mostly for the apprentice. Still, he filled my order.

            The cashier smiled, handing over my package. She said, “It’s so red, you could have it blue.” You never know if the cashiers at butcher shops are married to the butcher.

 

Thursday, October 20

            I haven’t touched the meat, I won’t have enough to buy more. I haven’t opened the tube of white, either.

 

Friday, October 21

            I got up this morning and I began moving the tubes around one at a time. Changing the order of their lineup along the slat yielded an impressive number of color combinations. That’s how I spent my whole day. I was sorry I didn’t have a camera. I’ll start again tomorrow.

 

Saturday, October 22

            I haven’t touched the meat yet. It must be graying slightly by now.

 

Sunday, October 23

            I spent the whole day moving the tubes around again. I can’t seem to remember the exact order of each combination.

            The bag from the dry-salter’s is still atop the mantel.

            I put the tube of white in the fridge, next to the package from the butcher’s, so I won’t be tempted.

 

Monday, October 24

            I’m afraid of accidentally kicking the tubes when I get up at night and not being able to reconstruct yesterday’s exact combination in the morning.

            I don’t know what I was thinking, picking a floorboard right in the middle of the room to line them up along; that wasn’t very smart. Tomorrow I’ll move the whole thing.

 

Tuesday, October 25

            I gave up on moving the tubes; that’d change everything.

 

Wednesday, October 26

            I felt very weak upon waking. At first I thought I hadn’t slept well. Then I realized I hadn’t eaten in ten days. I took the package from the butcher’s out of the fridge. I peeled back the paper. The meat was rather blue on the surface, with hints of green. I remembered what the lady at the butcher shop had said. I dithered a bit. I wondered what notions she entertained of blue. I decided to wait. Carefully, I wrapped the meat back up and I stuck it in the fridge.

            Before going to bed, I’ll place a frame around the floorboard. I’ll sleep better that way.

 

Thursday, October 27

            Last night, I wanted to frame the floorboard. All I could find was a small rectangular frame deep in the foyer closet. It was short, lengthwise. Not by much—a few centimeters. I immediately envisioned reducing the number of tubes; specifically I envisioned removing the yellow, but it bothered me, having to restrict my color combinations to keep the thread going. At any rate, the frame was too wide as well. In the end, I took it apart. I had to push hard, I cracked one side of it near the corner. In framing it, I thought, I was actually unframing it.

 

Friday, October 28

I nailed the sides of the frame to the floor all around the floorboard. Once I almost smashed my index finger. The second time, I did. Right away, my finger turned blue. There is no such thing as color without matter.

 

Saturday, October 29

            Late in the day, I pulled three books off the shelf at random. I thought reading would do me good. I looked at my finger, I uttered aloud: “Be still my aching, let thy tossing cease!” or something like that, and leafed through one of the books until sleep overtook me. I read that color is a physical sensation of short duration, like cold. I felt like opening the fridge to see but thought better of it. A bit further on, a sentence mentioned the white becoming of blue. That was reassuring.

 

Sunday, October 30

            I dreamed the lady at the butcher shop cut off my index finger and framed it in the display.

            I didn’t sleep very well.

 

Monday, October 31

            I’m not sure acrylic stands up to cold very well, even of short duration.

            I moved the bag from the dry-salter’s to the crisper.

            There I found a slab of butter on a plate. I had no memory of it. I thought: it has no business there. Then I thought: it must be rancid. I set the plate beside the package from the butcher’s.

            I will change the order of the tubes this afternoon.

 

Tuesday, October 32

            I went back to the butcher at Les Halles just before closing. The apprentice was alone. I was relieved the lady was nowhere to be seen. I went in; I asked for beef, hatched. I stipulated that I wanted a lightly cross-hatched piece of beef and not beef hash. I added, “I only have a little pocket change today, so make it a small piece.” The apprentice pointed to the meat grinder. He said, “I just cleaned it.” He said, “See? Gleaming.” The word sounded odd to me coming from his mouth. I noted that his face was gleaming too. I left empty-handed.

 

Wednesday, October 33

            I went to the butcher’s as soon as it opened. I peered through the glass door. The lady was there. I went in anyway, thinking of the gleaming grinder. I thought it would lend my piece of meat a special tone. There was already a small crowd inside. Salads and a few prepared dishes were lined up on the counter leading from the register. I checked the price of beef tongue, but the sauce interested me especially. I pointed to the dish. I said, “That’s paprika brown.” The lady turned toward me with a look of surprise. I felt a slight apprehension. I think she was waiting for me to make up my mind. I informed her that the blue of her meat had hints of green. This is how I put it: “The blue of your meat has hints of green.” I added that I’d come for some colors. The lady gave me a strange look. “Just a pinch of blue,” I said. “A finger.” They wouldn’t open a tab for me.

 

Thursday, October 34

            I opened the fridge. I shut it right back again.

 

Friday, October 35

            I started all over, moving the colors around again. I’d given it some thought and decided I should be more methodical. Every night from now on, I will write down the exact order of the day’s combination.

 

Saturday, October 36

            I remembered I still hadn’t opened the white. Then I thought about how much yellow I had left. I took the butter from the fridge; I grabbed a knife to cut it in half. I studied the outer surface of the butter, then its inside. The two yellows were fairly different.

            I wanted to put the plate that now had two slabs of butter on it back into the crisper. It wasn’t easy; it was a bit too big, I had to pull the drawer all the way out. I gave up. I set the plate next to the package from the butcher. I dithered a bit. I put one of the slabs of butter into the crisper, right up against the side of the drawer, next to the tube of acrylic.

 

Sunday, October 37

            Last night, I got up and tripped over the frame. I woke with this phrase: “The meat beingness of meat.”

 

Monday, October 38

            I have made considerable progress in the logic of color combinations. The idea of writing down the order is a good one.

 

Tuesday, October 39

            I studied the two slabs of butter for comparison. They were more or less the same: in both, the area around the cut remains the lightest. I divided them further, taking care to slice perpendicularly to the first cut. Now I have three shades of yellow.

 

Wednesday, October 40

            This afternoon, I set a small pat of butter between the tubes to lend the color combinations rhythm.

 

Thursday, October 40

            It rained all day. At eleven, I felt like going back to the butcher’s at Les Halles. I think it was because of the gleaming. The day was gray, I stayed in. I gazed at the floorboard with its frame, I thought of an installation I’d seen last year in a contemporary art museum. And then I thought nothing more at all.

 

Friday, October 40

            I dither over using the yellow I have left.

 

Saturday, October 40

            I woke to my finger. I gave it a close look. It was fairly black around the nail’s edge. I consoled myself with the thought that color does not exist in and of itself, it is only a sensation. I spent the afternoon trying to sense color. Most of all, I sensed smells.

 

Sunday, October 44

            The doorbell rang. I didn’t answer.

 

Monday, October 45

            The day felt very long. At one point, I felt fairly useless. I opened the window. I dithered. I shut it again because of the flies. I don’t much like flies, they’re not part of my project. I waited for evening, staring at the floorboard. It seems I’ve lost the thread of the colors. I shouldn’t have framed the tubes, the frame finished them off.

 

Tuesday, October 46

            I dreamed that meat was the color of time.

 

Wednesday, October 47

            Rising in the night, I tripped over the frame again. I thought of the butcher lady, I wondered what she’d done with her Monday. I started out imagining her doing a series of things. Then I imagined those same things in reverse order. I found that I lacked imagination. I found this a bit annoying. I went to the kitchen. I think I stood in front of the fridge a while, thinking. Finally I took out the package of meat. It didn’t smell very strongly, thanks to the cold. Nor could I tell what color it was, since I hadn’t turned the lights on. I began making little meatballs. Then I alternated these with the things I’d imagined the butcher lady doing. I cut the butcher paper into four strips, taking care to ensure they were of equal size, and then I folded them carefully, as with an Exquisite Corpse. I framed the butcher lady’s Monday. Then I went back to bed. I fell asleep again with a great feeling of peace.

 

Thursday, October 48

            This morning, I very attentively considered the little pats of butter between the tubes, then the variety of the whole. I noted that the relationship between the colors was what mattered, not color in and of itself. I thought of my fingers, I also thought of the meat. For a moment, the idea of the relationship between colors comforted me.

 

Friday, October 49

            I wanted to put the three books back on the shelf. In the end, I put two in the refrigerator door, and I opened the third. I let my wounded index finger fall randomly on the page; I read: “What is inside the frame of the painting, or what is inside the frame in the painting, protects the image from contaminating continuity.” I didn’t get it. I thought of the butcher lady’s Monday, and I tidied the book away into the crisper, beside the tube of white.

 

Friday, October 49

            The surface layer of the butter pats grows ever yellower. Maybe I could clarify it.

 

Friday, October 49

            I don’t dare re-open the package from the butcher’s. I’m scared I’ve lost the blue forever.

translated from the French by Edward Gauvin



Elsa Gribinski, Toiles © Mercure de France, 2024.

I first encountered Elsa Gribinski’s writing in 2018 as part of Paris Déco Off, a citywide interior decor fair that, every wintry January, welcomes the public into showrooms of the latest fabrics, wallpapers, and trimmings. Four short fictions were put forward by Un Autre Monde, a Bordeaux arts collective specializing in multimedia installations with a literary basis, then set in French and English to animated accompaniment by a visual artist and screened at several venues during the fair. Gribinski’s contribution, entitled “Jouy” (and drawn by no less than the Angoulême-winning cartoonist Alfred), opened from the pastoral motifs of the eponymous printed linen, an eighteenth-century darling, onto a meditation on modernity—the shape of a city, after all, changes faster than the human heart—as its nameless protagonist navigates Paris before and after a glancing connection at a fabric shop. All this, in under the thousand words a picture is said to be worth.

Nested in the dense weave of its swift prose was a network of allusions, associatively darting among images glimpsed and remembered: literary, painterly, historical, geographical. Meanings within meanings, atop meanings, rippling invisibly outward from meanings . . . As a wordsmith, Gribinski favors pithiness in prose and lyric in story—sound poems, short fictions, hybrid forms—and finds her subject matter in the meeting of art, the archival, and the living, often honing her practice against other disciplines: theater, music, fine arts, and dance. Small wonder, then, that the collection later to include “Jouy” would be called Toiles. Meaning, in its most basic sense, a cloth of coarse weave the word “toile” has over time capaciously extended warp and woof to encompass other materials (canvas, silver screen) and metonymically their products (paintings, movies), while never severing its connotative ties to webs: archaic arachnid and modern world-wide. Toiles consists of sixteen fictions, each starting from a work of art they then go on to interrogate, complicate, stray from, subvert, even as that inciting image, often unnamed, continues to suffuse the whole.

“I think I’m one of those writers without much of an imagination,” Gribinski bemoaned in explaining her turn to images as a spur to creation. But to say so is to discount her talent for meticulous detail: how mentally energizing, how imaginatively generative. In “A Finger of Blue” she delivers—in tones so strictly neutral I had repeatedly to rein in my inveterate belletrism—a haunted, slightly demented diary that drops off the cliff of the known calendar. For Gribinski, the image is a fiction in potentia.

Elsa Gribinski (b. 1971) is a Bordeaux-based essayist, poet, and playwright whose debut fiction collection Toiles (Mercure de France, 2024) was nominated for the Goncourt de la nouvelle. These sixteen ekphrastically inspired stories draw on various genres of visual art—a conceit in keeping with her frequent interdisciplinary collaborations involving actors, artists, dancers, and musicians. For Mercure, she has also assembled and annotated three literary, eclectic, and incorrigibly “subjective” anthologies: of fabulist fiction, depictions of women, and discussions of words. A Slavicist by training, she once—long ago!—translated a volume of previously unpublished stories by Mikhail Osorgin. These days, she can often be found leading creative workshops for all ages.

Edward Gauvin translates from French with a personal focus on post-Surrealist literatures of the fantastic, as well as graphic novels, of which he has translated more than 450 to date. His writing and translations have appeared in McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Harper’s, and Subtropics. He has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim and Lannan foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, the Fulbright program, and the French and Belgian governments. His fiction debut, The Ear in All the Night, is due out in December 2025 from 7.13 Books.