Affairs of Art (5 page)

They listened. Even asked him questions. About the sculptor's training, his social status. Or about the symbolic coupling of the fertility figures. Their provenance. About the road he himself had taken. Nothing about Pellan. He evoked at length the suburbs of Abidjan. That afternoon, in a windowless lecture room where the silence finally was lightened, I understood the power of a strange setting, of openly discussing sex, of colourful memories, of testimony true or false, of anecdotes, of the fringes of knowledge. Those who would arrive at the essential wouldn't need my file cards to guide them. As for the others, I just had to amuse them. To add colour, like Pellan.

It took me some time to master digression, but I was on the right track. I savoured those slight lies, as if I were giving wine to that thesis of mine which was so austere, yet I was still determined to deny inspiration as the genesis of the work of art. I am not penitent. For it was at the frontier of the lie that I finally encountered the pain of love, the real thing.

She was my age, she was the dean's assistant, she was round as a
Susannah at Her Bath,
she was nearly
naked under djellabahs in the summer and sheepskin jackets in the fall, she had seen V
a
ncouver and San Francisco, she had the hair of an angel and eyes from purgatory, I swear they were pink underneath the burnt chestnut. And she was married to the engineer in charge of the university buildings, all temporary and all decrepit, which kept him very busy. She knew nothing about art but she knew all of us, assigning classrooms to some and studios to others, reworking timetables and examination results, at once firm and considerate. I was not a habitue of her office, where so many others would go with their complaints just to see her flush with effort or to imagine themselves her favourites.

She came alone, one evening before Christmas, to the pitiful department party. And we left together, because I had taken her hand to plough through the crowd of talkers, a hand that I'd guessed in advance would be cool and plump but that was burning. She came to my place without arguing, she really was naked under a woollen sheath, she knew everything, on her back, on her belly, in her mouth. It was the first time I had dared to pour myself into a woman's throat, I thought myself perverse but she caressed herself contentedly. I dropped her off at her place in the middle of the night, in the shelter of a suburban snowdrift, and the engineer was asleep. It would not always be so.

How did I hold on to her? Neither through art nor through writing, though she carefully read everything I produced, for she was curious and easy to domesticate. Perhaps I knew how to touch her, how to describe her form and her colour — and how to make her live the lie without exhausting her. Most often I was content with noontimes, with cold meals and hot half-hours. Time incises the pleasure of sex there, the belly registers the seconds, the smile is the smile of a violent separation, soon, again. We wrote to one another about definitive loves. I thought constantly about her engineer, who must assuage his own desires now and then — it was impossible that she would push him away — the two of us were mingled in her sublime body. I was so unhappy and so alive, at last.

In one year she gave me a single weekend, planned long in advance with her best friend's complicity. The inn was noisy, the fjord of the Saguenay barely visible from the promontory, the mosquitoes massed in armies, the croissants dry on the breakfast trays we had brought to us in bed. Doubt never crossed my mind. I wanted her also in adversity.

She was not pregnant, we didn't wear one another out, we didn't separate in a final conflagration. It came about one summer in France and Italy, where she couldn't accompany me. We'd thought we would survive it.

I had missed France. A number of my colleagues had studied there, were still registered in the Paris universities where they'd experienced May ‘68 on the barricades on which for years they would impale their minds, sniffling into their beer and over their unfinished doc­torates. I kept my own pipe dreams, which were very outdated, to myself. One was indescribable. In it, France tasted of Cézanne's green countryside, the roughcast of Provençal farmhouses and shacks beneath the most ancient suns, the wine and bread broached in the heart of these lives stilled in beauty on checkered tablecloths. And I clung more darkly to the low-down Paris of Francis Carco. I was sure I knew all the dead ends of Montmartre, the acid morning that had risen over every one of Utrillo's drunken binges, the luxuriant nights that disguised the pockmarked girls. When I melted into Paris as if I'd always lived there, I would not be shocked by the corruption of what were once the artists' neigh­bourhoods, by the omnipresence of merchants in the temple, from the Sacré-Coeur to Saint-Sévérin. I enjoyed its cruelty, its vulgarity, the final episode of a universe that, save for a few evenings amid the warmth of cheap restaurants, had been only misery, hard times, episodes of violence, quarrels, consumption, despair. From Carco and this world I took the epigraph for my thesis:

They drank for the sake of drinking and for Inspiration, which the bourgeois and the theo­reticians have turned into I know not what cold figure of a school, of rhetoric, and only then would Inspiration visit them. Since there are now fewer drunkards, there are fewer poets. And no one can do anything about it.

Carco had signed this notice of the death of inspiration shortly before the second Great War, while recalling places and creatures from before the first. I had all the time I needed to draw conclusions from it.

I'd been working on my thesis a little at a time when the sole publication devoted to art asked me to represent it in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, at a symposium on the new criticism, which would take place at the beginning of summer. All expenses paid. My turn had come. I would stay on after the meeting, in an apartment in the old section of Nice that was occupied by a succession of tenants from Quebec. The coast, the sky, nearby Italy — I had it all for two months of golden solitude in which to write sulfurous letters to my lover. Guilty of deserting her, I put infinite care into writing my paper for a workshop at which room had been made for four other promising beginners, all from eccentric countries.

I arrived in Paris at dawn and experienced twelve hours of rain and two cafés. I took the night train to Nice, as I considered it refined to travel thus across a France that was still imaginary, still fast in its own sleep, like a blind man.

Saint-Paul-de-Vence had not yet become a shopping mall for herbs and pottery. It was hard to find the road to the Fondation Maeght, its hill buried in foliage. Along the old wall of the village I walked at length in the noonday sun, impervious to the scorching heat, crazed by the truth of Cézanne's green that blocked the entire horizon, which seemed to descend to the sea, invisible. France is a lost happiness, I resent it for not giving me on that day in June even the illusion that I might touch it. Never, ever would I have a geranium at a window open on the centuries.

The premises of the Fondation were more familiar. Large ordinary rooms for the art, small ordinary rooms for the
symposium
, and the dampness that stood in for air-conditioning.

I worked diligently to justify the journey. The new criticism was European and so it spoke French, believing it would finally regain the ascendancy that the now aging Greenberg had monopolized in postwar New York. I felt the strain of the anti-American tirades, I defined myself as a creature of two worlds, and I was irritated to the point of rudeness when I asked a somewhat impertinent question of our grand master, the great Italian critic Bruno Farinacci-Lepore, who declared inadequate and fearful the nonetheless arrogant judgments laid down by Greenberg and his disciples. Henceforth, he said, the critic must predict the new avenues of creation: then the artists would come there to join him. What was needed was to “dare to be prescient and to impose it,” he said over and over, proud of his formulation.

By way of response to my unseemly question, he suggested that I read his latest work, which had just been translated. I was a wisp of straw. From the margin to which he'd consigned me I had ample time to observe rather than listen to him. He had arrived late, didn't apologize, had crossed the room not quite reeling in his very clean, very faded, very washed jeans. A white shirt open just so on a long aging neck. The beginning of baldness gave him a lean and large-eyed lunar face. He was certainly myopic but he didn't wear glasses, I'd long been able to spot the vanities of men inclined to their own sex, so numerous in the worlds of art. At mealtime, he picked at his food while reaping tributes, constantly interrupted and glad of it. He had opened the symposium, he would close it the following day, this time without bothering to spend all day there. He appeared around six in the evening, loose white tunic, very high style in the casual mode, and he was brilliant. He knew everything that we had haltingly debated. He was indeed prescient.

There was a dinner for thirty, in the biggest mezzanine restaurant in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, I remember the copious
vin rosé,
which was like mass wine to me, ablaze with spices. By midnight, our words were as penetrating as his in the alleys that led to where the buses stop. The paving stones smelled of cat piss and the excessive heaviness of summer. Bruno, whom we could now call by his first name, claimed he was driving directly to Italy in his two-seater convertible that was as white as his smock. I looked at the car, he looked at me, I said something idiotic about the leather or the door­handles, perhaps even about my North where such a delicate mechanism would never survive.

“Getting in? I'll drop you in Nice or wherever you want.” I was a wisp of straw who had been chosen. He guessed that I was a tourist, new and starving for every turn in the road, for every landmark in the France of my dreams. He turned off now and then into low sleeping villages, he drove slowly and the wind stayed between us, warm, he described knolls and stars. But France, he said, was not Italy, where the genuine painters' villages were to be found, across the border to which I must now make my way. The roads became streets, the city was drawing near, there was a promontory where he switched off the lights and let the car glide to the very edge of the escarpment.

Everything was dark, Vitalie, when he placed his right hand on my left thigh and I didn't push it away. He was gentler than a woman as he unbuckled my belt. We drank each other, one after the other, and I did not hesitate for a moment. Afterwards, as he stroked the nape of my neck, he asked me my name. Bruno Farinacci-Lepore spent the night with me, in my furnished apartment in Nice, teaching me acts of which I had been prescient. I learned. I was in an elsewhere, my body was foreign to me and it broke away, happy.

He left rather late the next day, after coffee and croissants at an Arab bistro in the Marché aux Fleurs. He chatted on and on, he'd started speaking again as he'd done at the symposium, his tone so sharp and definitive that it erased the night. Already I was pretending to be used to it, able to change registers as I changed lovers. I seized the moment, for I believed it to be the last, surely Bruno Farinacci-Lepore enters a number of lives that way, lavishing a little of his glory along with his sperm, all the while truly teaching the ways of contemporary art, where I had the impression I was starting from scratch.

Nice was not a place for a long sojourn, he said. The best galleries dared not show anything more modern than Pignon or Fautrier, and even in Saint-Paul-de-Vence the Fondation Maeght was becoming a little too embedded in its rich fifties slot. “Surely you won't spend the summer studying Giacomettis.” On the back of an envelope addressed to him he made a list of his favourite places in France and Italy, secluded or common avant-garde galleries where I'd be received as an equal when I turned up with a recommendation from him.

He drove away in his white convertible and his now wrinkled tunic. It was close to noon. Despite the harshest of suns, he knotted a silk scarf around his neck, red with black stripes, which he'd extracted from the glove compartment. I'd had just enough time to think him ridiculous when he disappeared on the street that goes up to the Citadel.

I had been in France for a mere four days and already everything had been deflowered: the promenades, the Mediterranean, the historical sites being trampled by tourists. I'd got over everything. Matisse had been merely a painter of balconies, like the thousands of those that looked down on and concealed a coastline reeking of automobiles, his colours came from the market, and his odalisques were trashy and cheap. A stickiness was making my stomach turn.

I came back to the apartment under the eaves of what had been a bourgeois Savoyard house, where the walls were peeling in perpetuity. It was nearly as dark in the daytime as at night. In the lamplight the sheets on the unmade bed were yellow, two big flies buzzed around the light and the reek of sweat that would take a while to evaporate in the still moist air.

I realized that the stickiness was in particular the fluids of the night before finally being plastered to my belly. I spent hours sitting upright in an armchair in the corner, aghast.

I had quite readily enjoyed sex with a man, with a body like my own. I had understood and accepted all his desires, and hours later I still was not rejecting them. And yet never until then had I been stirred by boys, no matter how beautiful. I was tolerant of the men who loved them, I associated with the first couples to declare themselves openly, in their lofts so attractively decorated where the most beautiful cats in the city lay about, majestic. Sex was first of all freedom and I saw nothing more wrong with their transgression than with my own, with Suzanne who was married and a liar, out of love and necessity. We were all brothers in a quest for pleasure, which is first of all hot and young. How was it that the pleasure I had taken the night before, so violent and so sweet that it still rose within me, was to me clearly a sin? I experienced the shame of children who touch themselves for the first time, who will start again.