B007P4V3G4 EBOK (27 page)

A. F. Th. van der Heijden

'Sight ... taste and With both index-fingers
Lex Patijn described tiny little circles, fast as lightning, a little way
away from his eyes, ears and mouth. When these fall away, you've
... you've got absolute loneliness. Panic, fear and absolute loneliness. Take my word for it. Only the sense of smell remains. And
not even that, for you can only smell the plaster.'

He was saying it for the fifth or sixth time already, in a voice
getting more drunk by the minute and without remembering that
he had brought up the matter earlier on. 'No, honestly: hearing,
sight, speech, He couldn't dismiss it from his mind. His
words were being dictated by his cowardice. One could smell his
sweat in the little dressing room. 'Loneliness, absolute, but I mean
absolute ... loneliness.'

Being a sculptor, Patijn had worked on the conversion of an old
monastery into an 'educational theme park' for youngsters. He
himself had modelled for a number of characters from mythology
(crouching as Atlas, for instance, with a big ball on his neck) which
had meant that he had been wrapped in plaster-of-Paris bandages,
head to toe, after which the plaster cast had been cut into
segments in order to be welded into a single entity again and
finally painted. The panic and fear and loneliness he had undergone
each time, prior to being cut open, had given him an idea. Here he
was being handed the possibility, as a sculptor, of giving shape to
his idea of

That evening, we celebrated the first night of a play (a free
adaptation of The Chinese Wall by Frisch) in which Lex's lover,
Jody Katan, was playing the lead. Before drunkenness had struck,
Lex told me about his bursary for Naples.

'Not exactly a centre of modem art,' I pointed out to him.

'I've rented a studio in Naples, that's all. Pompeii's the point for
me. I'm going to make sculptures like ones that exist there.'

'Has Lex Patijn converted to classical art?'

'I'm not talking about those three, four sculptures they've hauled out from underneath the ashes, no: I mean the corpses. The petrified
bodies of Pompeii's inhabitants. They are the true statues ... Not
shaped by the limp mitts of some artist but by a malevolent quirk
of nature. I'm going to apprentice myself to Mount Vesuvius, if
you get my drift. I want to change into a rain of ashes.'

I asked about his materials, his new working method.

'Together with a chemistry student, I'm busy perfecting plaster
bandages. We're a good way there but I'd like it to be
even more pliable, even more so the model can impress
his last convulsions upon my material. Without it tearing. I have
my models assume a as naturalistically as possible
... They must die in the harness I apply. The moment the stuff
begins to set, I'll cut that plaster suit into pieces I weld together
again into hollow dolls. I'll give them a wooden skeleton, if need
be.'

'Hm. The hand of the artist isn't lacking ..

'Not entirely. Not yet. My hand - the hand of the one who
applies the bandages and cuts open the harness, the artisan's hand,
that is - that's the one that may be discernible in it. But the hand
of the artist I am must be kept from it as far as possible. Through
direct contact with my material the model transforms himself into
a work of art. That's the creed of my realism. Look ... that
wireless transmission of model to material, that's what I want to be
shot of. That's how it's always been, hasn't it: the model stands
and poses there - and here, at five metres' distance, I stand at my
easel and dip my brush, functioning as an aerial, in the paint on my
palette, and my transmission to my white paper or canvas is
wireless. The artist as telegraphist. My pursuit now is to carry my
paper, my canvas, my white sheet to the model and ... and drape
it around him, cutting his suit according to my cloth, so that the
model, like Christ with Veronica's cheese cloth, can imprint himself
directly on my material.'

When alcohol had begun to heat our feelings and I no longer
kept my criticism of Patijn's realism to myself, he began calling me
names, making me out to be an 'idealist', by which he probably
won't have meant that I entertained such things as ideals.

'You, you see everything through the rose-tinted spectacles of
... he shouted. The deal that had been struck was not to
utter the word.

'You, Lex, are a drinker. Alcohol eats away your liver, your
heart and your muscles. It'll give you tits and your balls will dissolve in it. What you think is a theory, is nothing other than
your own jadedness.'

Jody, in his white overall of 'Nowling' or 'Presentman', kept
himself to himself and didn't take sides.

2

In order radically to divest myself of the horseflies that had latched
on to me in Amsterdam, I accompanied Lex Patijn in late November
1978 on his study trip to Naples. Jody would be following him
midway through December when the little theatre on the Nes was
to close for a week and a half.

The slightly built Katan, who had only just enough time before
curtain-up, took us to Central Station in a taxi. He was wearing his
white costume and was already in full make-up. With him between
us, we drew a lot of attention, lending something public and
theatrical to our goodbyes. The troth my two friends pledged in
all haste had perhaps no eternal value, but it would be sufficient
until Christmas, in any case.

Our reserved seats were in the rearmost carriage which was
otherwise empty - and remained so even when the train was
about to leave. I was very chirpy. At the beginning of the evening
I had let all poison I still possessed go up in smoke and had
inhaled it. For this, I used the coloured little pipes from the 'Blow
Football' game - grudgingly, for it was the most revolting of
family games from my childhood days: the slimy saliva dripping
jelly-like from the tubes on to the But, now I was an
adult, I no longer needed to blow on them, just suck. And
any inconvenience and all roundabout ways were
preferable to me than intravenous or subcutaneous applications.

When, at almost midnight (six hours after my last game of blow
football), the train approached Cologne, I noticed that the large
dose was beginning to lose its effect - however, this was without
my mood suffering in consequence. I was even able to resolve
with perfect equanimity never to take anything again. A precious
oath, hysterically sworn, wasn't even necessary. Later on, between
Bonn and Koblenz, it had left me completely. The chains fell away
from me. A solemn moment: here was where my freedom began.
Not a trace of the weariness I knew so well ...

The great restlessness only came towards morning, on reaching the Swiss border. Listening meekly to Lex ('Art will only have
reached its completion when, in its attempt to depict reality, it
coincides with reality itself and thus becomes superfluous. It's art's
ultimate task to render itself superfluous, that's to that
to approximate that state of superfluity as closely as possible. In
other words: art must attempt to destroy itself ... it must attempt
suicide, incessantly. In any case, art must strive to make itself as
superfluous as possible. To create, in the no-man's-land between
traditional art and reality - until the frontier between this noman's-land and reality has been approximated as closely as possible,
bar the crossing of I began to yawn. It seemed perfectly
normal after a night awake like that, but this was a kind of
yawning that provided no relief though it did give you cramp in
your jaws.

'Fine, sure: if you're not Lex said, irritated, and he
took another swig of Joseph Guy.

'I can't help it. I'm not yawning from hunger or sleep or
boredom ... I've never known it like this.'

As I yawned, tears began to flow from my eyes, copiously. A
little later a runny nose joined in. In order to dispel my disquiet, I
went and walked up and down the corridor. But weakness in my
legs which no longer knew how to brace themselves against the
train's jolting, soon forced me to sit down again. Severe shivering
started. At the same time, I was perspiring from head to toe. The
yawning became so bad I was barely able to get my mouth shut at
all. I produced gorging noises during this.

Lex, suddenly quite bewildered, fiddled with the heating regulator. We moved to another compartment where it was warmer but
the shivering only got worse. Ceaselessly, moisture poured from
my eyes and nose and pores. Face, neck, shirt - all wet.

In Basle, the train was given a different composition. Shunting
to and fro for almost an hour, which only made me even more ill. I
was the one being pulled apart and put together again - carelessly,
no body part was in its right place any more.
backwards ... a bang in front, a bang at the rear. Again and again,
the deck was being shuffled. It was no longer the train we had
boarded the previous evening, not by a long chalk. Things would
never come right again. When, without interruption, the new train
had been running along - almost soundlessly - in the same
direction for a few minutes, I fell asleep.

I dreamed of the game of 'blow football'. On the strip of aluminium foil with which I had clad the inside of a tea-strainer I was holding
above the flame of a candle, the fine grit began to turn into vapour. This
was the moment to inhale, but I could not make a choice from the
coloured little pipes. Red, green, blue, yellow ... I didn't know which one
to take. My free hand hung above, undecided. And meanwhile the
precious substance

No they weren't goosepimples that covered me from head to
toe on waking up. Worse: on every square centimetre of my skin,
chilled through and through, the little hairs were standing on end.
I felt myself to be a hairy caterpillar waiting desperately for the
breaking of the cocoon - to be a butterfly again.

Between Rome and Naples I never left the toilet. In my belly
the gut was behaving like strands of wrung-out laundry: I could
see them wriggling beneath the skin. I sat on the bog like a
cowboy on a young bull. The train - shaking me about, tossing
me up and hurling me down, quartering me - was pulling me
down to the lowest point rather than toward a final destination.

All the way down there, at that lowest point, Lex lugged our
suitcases to a luggage depot. On our way to the nearest boarding
house, I was forced to let my juices, my slaverings, my crap run
freely - twice, no less. . .

That the room had no windows didn't strike one immediately.
In one of the walls pasted over with floral paper, there was a
square opening which offered a view on to the corridor wall, the
wallpaper of which was also floral ... The room amounted to a
perfect simile for my condition.

'Keep calm,' Lex said. 'I'll rustle something up. Back in an hour.'

And he left me alone with the fears which came to keep my
physical terrors company. I tapped the walls: cardboard. The
boarding house was on the fifth floor, which could only be reached
via a narrow stairwell. Were fire to break out, I would be surrounded by a labyrinth of floral-papered walls, corridors and blank
Hobbling up and down between bed and toilet I waited
for Lex's return. Four times, no less, without having touched
myself, I'd had an involuntary orgasm. Searing ejaculations devoid
of any pleasure. Hellish pain rather than satisfaction.

Late at night, Lex returned with four innocent-looking cigarettes.
He had got them for little money from a member of the crew of an
American aircraft carrier permanently lying at anchor in the bay. Lex helped me smoke one, my tremors preventing me from
holding the cigarette myself. After this, my hands had calmed
down to such an extent that I was able to light the second one
myself.

'There're special bars here for American servicemen,' Lex explained. 'So-called piano bars. All of them in the neighbourhood of
that big fort on the waterfront. They drink Heineken there from
little disposable bottles. And there's quite a bit of opium-popping
going on there, if you ask me. Even though there's a kind of
military police hanging out there. Two of those guys per bar at
least. They've got 'SP' marked on their I'll take you
along there tomorrow.'

In a quarter of an hour, I had perked up completely. Lex just
couldn't understand how that stuff could do such wonders ...

Lex's studio (he had not seen it yet: the rental agreement had been
reached by telephone and by post) was high up above the centre
of town and the harbour, of which it had a splendid view. It was
on the third floor of a house on a comer, painted red, situated on a
square which was used as a car park on the top of Monte Echia. As
dusk fell, small cars congregated there, their windows pasted shut
on the inside with newspaper. A number of the shuttered vehicles
would rock gently on their springs ...

Thirty years ago, Patijn's father, together with a friend, had
taken up employment in an Eindhoven car factory. At first, they
had both worked there in the paint shop but soon the friend had
gone on to higher things within the same company. His promotion
had gone over Lex's father's head, more or less; reason why the
friends became enemies. Years later - Lex was paintshop
worker had hurled himself from the highest storey of the factory
building, on top of his rival's car. That evening, the boss drove
home, bowed under the imprint of his subordinate's body.

Lex showed me the photo in an American magazine of a woman
who had landed on top of a parked car after jumping from a
skyscraper. The roof of the vehicle had moulded itself, elegantly
almost, to her shape. D'you see? Like a spoon in blancmange.' He
was shouting himself down with that joke. I knew that, with all his
indigestible theorising about 'realism in art', he was solely in search
of the shape his father had left behind in the tin roof.

I helped the sculptor weld a frame, comparable with the frame of a small bungalow tent. Within that set of tubes, the model would be
tied down by his arms or legs in order not to tear the plaster
bandages while still soft.