Norton learns of Johns’s death

Liz Norton learns that Edwin Johns is dead while visiting a retrospective of his art in London, and seeks the circumstances from Piero Morini in a late-night call. The encounter overturns her assumption that Johns was still alive in Switzerland and living in an asylum; the accident Morini describes makes the artist’s disappearance final, while leaving Norton to absorb the news alone in the gallery and afterward in the rain.

The news arrives in London

After leaving Santa Teresa, Norton returns to England in a fragile state. She wakes disoriented only briefly, then recognizes the familiar noises of her street and tries to regard herself as home and rested. Instead she cries for much of the day. She wishes she had stayed in Santa Teresa with the person she addresses in her letter, considers going back to Mexico, and has destructive impulses that include setting fire to her apartment, harming herself, abandoning the university, and living on the streets. These thoughts frame the gallery visit: the news of Johns’s death does not arrive in a settled period of her life, but amid grief, confusion, and estrangement from home.

Norton has been reading about the dangers faced by women living on the streets in England when she unexpectedly finds herself outside a gallery showing a retrospective of Johns’s work. The artist’s name draws her in. At first the gallery is crowded, and she waits across the street until it empties enough for her to enter. The delay makes the visit feel like a threshold rather than a routine stop: she has not come prepared to receive news, yet the exhibition will alter the way she understands Johns and his work.

The exhibition and the recognition

Inside, Norton stops before an early landscape of Surrey. She sees it as sad and sweet, profound without grandiosity, and initially decides that seeing this single painting is enough. A waiter approaches with one remaining glass of wine and silently offers it to her. Across the room, she then notices the exhibition poster: it reproduces the painting with the severed hand, the work associated with Johns’s self-amputation, and gives his dates of birth and death.

The dates disclose what Norton did not know. She had imagined Johns still living in Switzerland, in a comfortable asylum, able to laugh at himself and at those who watched him. The poster punctures that imagined continuation with a plain public fact: he has died. The glass slips from her hand. A tall, thin couple turn from a painting and look toward her, as if she might be an ex-lover or an unfinished living work that has just learned its painter is dead. Norton leaves without looking back and walks for a long time. She realizes that she is soaked by the rain rather than crying, and does not sleep that night.

Morini’s account of the accident

Unable to sleep, Norton decides to call Morini, though it is very late and she knows the call is an imposition. She turns off the light immediately after dialing, as if darkness could keep him from seeing her face. Morini answers at once. Norton asks whether he knew Johns was dead; Morini says that he died a few months earlier and had assumed Norton already knew. When she asks how he died, he explains that Johns went out for a walk to sketch a small waterfall near the sanatorium. Johns climbed onto a rock, slipped, and was found at the bottom of a ravine about 150 feet below.

Morini adds the circumstances of the drawing. Johns had a nurse and an orderly with him. At Johns’s request, the nurse sat on a stump and pretended to read a book. Johns, who had become quite proficient with his left hand, drew the waterfall, the mountains, the rock formations, the forest, and the nurse at a distance. When Johns stood on the rock, he slipped; the orderly tried to catch him, but Johns fell. Morini’s account is brief and matter-of-fact, distinguishing the fatal accident from the dramatic image of the severed-hand self-portrait that Norton has just encountered. There is no suggestion in the account that Johns intended to fall or that his death was anything other than accidental.

Aftermath and narrative significance

The call gives Norton facts but cannot restore the future she had attributed to Johns. Her imagined artist—alive in Switzerland, contained in an asylum, and capable of ironic laughter—gives way to someone who continued to draw with his left hand and died during an ordinary outing. The contrast between the celebrated image of the severed-hand painting and the modest circumstances of the accident sharpens the gap between Johns as an artistic legend and Johns as a person whose life ended beyond the gallery’s frame.

Norton and Morini are silent for a time after his explanation, before Morini asks how things went in Mexico. Their exchange thus places the death within a larger network of personal attachments and unfinished conversations rather than turning it into a self-contained revelation. For Norton, the news arrives first through a poster and a dropped glass, then through a telephone account given in darkness. The sequence makes recognition belated: Johns has already been dead for months, but the fact becomes real to her only when she sees the dates and asks Morini to confirm what they mean.