They Met...

He walked into one of those old, forgotten shops beside the closed theatre. Sebastian hardly looked like an outsider, the impression he gave to any stranger is that of a fellow  apprentice from some private studio in Paris - young, clichéd, yet well-paid. At first the store looked deserted, locked from inside. It was too dark to see, but then a tall man with an overcoat walked out of it, towards the narrow lanes lined with bird-sellers. It was a busy day at Dominique Square. The market was overflowing with buyers, sellers, merchants, sailors, travellers, musicians,church-goers, revellers. Young nuns in black clothes were seen buying incense and rosary from a temporary stall, right next to the statue of Kafka. Prostitutes in bright yellow and red dresses thronged outside the Church gate, hoping to start the day's business. Two of them mocked at the priests walking out of the five hundred years-old Chateau de Nicholas. Once inside , Sebastian saw a grey-haired man in blue suit, counting coins at the counter. Not knowing too much French the visitor managed to say that he was looking for oil paints. The old man showed him the corner where pails of colours, paint brushes, palettes were all piled up, uneasily, almost forgotten. There was another woman, almost twenty-seven, light-haired, fair-skinned with regular features, near the farthest counter. Sebastian approached her in broken French, with a strong Spanish accent. She answered him in Spanish, without even looking up from the yellowed French translation of Shskespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost", which she was reading. She told him that they have run out of white paints, that he can buy grey or green or blue  if he wants. When Sebastian insisted on the colour white, she first looked up, into his face and said in a tone meant only for sixteenth century courtly exchanges, that they no longer keep white paints for no one asks for them. The pallor of her vanilla-white dress and her thick-rimmed glasses would almost force, even her most ardent lovers to miss the lightly misleading yet divine glint in her ocean green eyes. "Divinity has its own new meaning in this part of the world" Sebastian thought to himself. He knew if he would paint her, and put her portrait in his studio, it would definitely draw attention from a host of buyers with handsome offers. He even might get orders from rich merchants and lawyers to paint their wives and children. He would name his painting the "Woman In White”, he thought.