Gasoline (9 page)

What if he can never paint again? Perhaps he is crippled, or will be an invalid for life. He requests a diagnosis. The nurse doesn’t know. He will have to ask the doctor. Maybe that’s what he needs, something to grab onto: the struggle to overcome an infirmity. He asks what day it is. Friday the 8
th
. He was admitted the day before. He’s only been there for one day? If she had said it was a month he would have believed it all the same. He can still decide, sick as he is, to make a heroic gesture and do the paintings for the exhibition: a feat worthy of a Greek demigod.

•

Helena arrives with a bouquet of flowers. Heribert recalls that just a short time before he had seen another bouquet of flowers. He looks around the room and quickly locates it, in a corner. Someone must have moved it. What a coincidence: two bouquets of flowers. Life is full of coincidences. One bouquet and another bouquet are a coincidence. He tries to find more. Helena has two feet, and so does he: voilà, another coincidence. He looks for more. A window with a blind and, next to it, another window with a blind: another coincidence. Looking for more is harder for him. He thinks that he has come up with quite enough for the first try: no need to overdo it.

“Who brought the other bouquet?”

“Humbert. You remember him, don’t you?”

•

The doctor seems like a good man. He jokes with him the whole time. He asks what the paintings he does from now on will be worth in the event they can’t save his leg and they have to amputate it, or if one arm ends up a bit shorter than the other? Will they be worth more or less than the ones he had done before? He also tells him not to mess with the nurses, and he smiles to show that it is only a joke. Heribert finds him charming and intelligent and makes a firm pledge to speak with him at length, some day.

•

There is a knock at the door. Heribert says to come in. Hug comes roaring into the room, telling him that Helena has decided to put on the exhibition any way she can, that they are all casting about for an idea that can save them. Heribert closes his eyes, hides his head under the pillow, and when Hug doesn’t leave, he calls for the nurse and asks her to escort him out.

•

The doctor’s comments lead him to think he has not devoted much attention to the nurses, which he proceeds to do from that moment on. The nurse on the night shift is more attractive than the one on the day shift. Maybe now that he’s all banged up he’ll start feeling passionate again. What’s more, nurses have always been a persistent part of popular erotic mythology, leading one to foresee miracles. At one point, when the night nurse is picking things up from the bedside table, Heribert lifts his hand to caress her thigh, but then lowers it. He concentrates on counting the tiles, the bars on the bed
. . .
He could add them all together
. . .
but what a bore! If here were in a ward, with a lot of other patients, he could watch them, make fun of them, listen to their conversations. He would have company. But no sooner does he have this thought than he realizes it would be horrible to have to put up with all that half-dead, skinny, pale, sick riffraff and their crying and moaning. Let them all die! He doesn’t want to see them! How glad he is to be in a room by himself!

•

He reads an article in the newspaper about the creative crises many painters, filmmakers, and musicians are going through nowadays. “Is there anything left to say?” the journalist asks. “Lately, the speed with which new fashions and cultural tastes succeed each other leads one
. . .
” He drops the paper. He picks up a novel Hilari has lent him, in which there are no dead bodies. He used to think they were boring. Now he thinks the ones with dead bodies are phony.

•

The doctor comes in, with traces of blood on his gown and in need of a shave. There is a nurse with him. They are standing by the side of the bed, looking at him with a smile Heribert finds hard to categorize. The doctor announces that they will be releasing him that evening. He is much better. Soon, the doctor says, if he puts his mind to it he will be able to paint again. Heribert’s blood boils. What is this fool saying? How dare he insinuate something like that? What does he know about it? He had thought him to be an intelligent man, and now he comes out with this nonsense! He musters all the strength he has and spits at him. The arc of the sputum is weaker than he had intended, and it falls on the sheet on top of him. The expression on the doctor’s face changes and gets serious. The nurse wipes the spittle off with a Kleenex. There is a knock at the door. Helena comes in. She speaks with the doctor. Heribert studies the two of them, one right next to the other: Helena and the doctor, observing him. “Is she also getting it on with this quack?” Then the doctor and nurse leave the room. Helena has brought another bouquet of flowers. Why so many flowers? Heribert tries to think of some vulgar phrase that will annoy her, like: “Bring me a nice little eleven-year-old girl, and don’t bring me any more flowers,” but it seems like a cheap shot. For some time now (ever since the doctor and nurse had left), Helena has been telling him that the following day there will be a business lunch at their house, and that Hug will be there, along with other people who have money in the gallery, and Humbert. They have to fill the gap he has left them in, and they can’t do it just any old way. There were just a few days left, and they had to find an artist whose work was so good that this deplorable incident would not have lasting consequences for the gallery. They have to create a brilliant success, turn this error into a new leap forward, convert a debit into an asset. They have to use this opening to fly higher. This is why they can’t use a vaguely-familiar, second-rate artist—it would be like admitting defeat. There is only one possible move: they must introduce a complete unknown, someone whose body of work would amaze the critics, the public, and collectors alike. Humbert has the stuff. Tomorrow, all of them, together, will discuss what has to be done, and she’s telling him now so that he doesn’t think they’ve been plotting behind his back. But Heribert has been thinking the whole time about the “leap forward.” About how perfect metaphors, and strings of metaphors, were for whiling away the hours at play. Why can’t he just stay forevermore in that place, where, as if by a secret pact, everything is white and everyone is dressed in white, juggling similes and metaphors like a circus performer?

“Where to, kid?”

“Where?”

“Yes, where. What else?”

“Oh, I thought you meant it figuratively.”

—Francesc Trabal,
L’any que ve

He
is dreaming of a swimming pool like the one he is sitting beside: white, spotless, blurred as if drawn in pencil and watercolors; or like a Hockney: lots of colorful awnings and tables with tall glasses. A woman with dark glasses is lying in a white hammock, sunbathing. It’s Helena. When she realizes he’s watching her, she smiles, raises her sunglasses until they are resting on the top of her head, looks back at him, and opens her mouth as if she were speaking, without emitting any sound. And, even though her voice can’t be heard, she is saying: “I’m upset you don’t want to make love with me.” “Make love!” Humbert snorts, and dives into the pool, where everything is warm and light blue, and he can swim for ages and ages underwater without having to come up to the surface for air. It was so easy to breathe underwater
. . .
You just had to open your mouth like a fish out of water, but unlike a suffocating fish (for whom air is a foreign medium), he can breathe perfectly. “What a shame,” he thinks, “that this pool is only a drawing, so the sounds from above can’t reach me. Though sound wouldn’t reach me in a real pool, either.” When his head comes to the surface, Helena, who is sitting on the edge of the pool and splashing her feet in the water, is looking at him from behind her dark glasses, set against a desert background filled with singing Berbers. She has a straw sun hat on. “Do you love me?” she asks. In response, Humbert simply bites her foot, and everything goes into slow motion. Helena says, “Sometimes I think you’ve never loved me, and I mean nothing more to you than that diving board.” “What a great image,” Humbert thinks, “the diving board. As if it had all these different registers and levels of meaning
. . .
” He hears someone laugh. He looks at the diving board, but the sun hurts his eyes, and he is now back in the water, his lungs full of air. He contemplates the bubbles that come out of his mouth. He thinks, “When I get out now, there’ll be a beer by the side of the pool.” When he gets out, a smiling Helena hands him an icy mug of beer with a snow-white head which drips and falls into the water, leaving patches of color that shouldn’t
. . .
As he drinks the mug down, Helena kisses him on the forehead. “If only it could always be like this
. . .
” He plunges back into the water and thinks, “When I get out, I want this house surrounding us, the house I live in, to be gone. I want to be on a beach.” He gets out and opens his eyes: he is on a beach. Wincing at the sunlight, he goes under again. “When I get out, I want to see the signature of the Hockney I’m in, in a corner somewhere.” When he gets out, in a corner of the sky (a cardboard sky right over his head) he sees Hockney’s signature, fading away as if written in smoke. Every time he gets out the sun pierces his eyes. If only he could always live under water
. . .
“I could live there forever if it weren’t for the fact that every time I come up the sunlight hurts my eyes, and the longer and longer I stay under, and the longer and longer I take to come out again, the more it will hurt, until the times comes when I will bleed like a Christ figure, like a menstruating woman, like a wounded soldier, like a fish in a basket
. . .
” A man jumps out a window and falls onto a tumbling mat. He runs down the street. Death is so sad. If he could only hide in a shadow
. . .
To hide in a shadow is like not being there at all; he can only be touched or nabbed if he is in the sun, but then he has to stop, surrounded by the sands of a desert in the center of the world, under a red sun wearing dark glasses with frames the color of the girls riding down the highway on bicycles, on their way home, never arriving because they get lost on dirt trails, beyond the fences, rolling up the mountainside, those girls in the pictures of Helena as a teenager, sitting in meadows, wearing short skirts and high-heeled shoes, always smiling, wearing short pants and socks, with those flaming lips that scorch you as you die with pleasure.

•

Humbert wakes up when the rays of sunlight hit his face with such intensity that it hurts. He opens his eyes, looks at his watch (1:30), and jumps out of the lawn chair. He does some push-ups. He thinks, “I wouldn’t mind having an orange juice now.” He leans on the porch rail and looks toward the pool. “I would love to paint a pool. If only it hadn’t been done so often
. . .
” He puts on shorts and thin-soled shoes. He goes toward the kitchen. He peels an orange. He eats it. He takes out four more, turns on the squeezer, and prepares himself an orange juice.

In the bungalow where he has his studio, he sits down at the table. Against the long wall rests a row of eight half-painted canvases. He gathers up the newspaper clippings, organizes them, and he reads snatches from them as he files them in different folders. The
Times
says, “Rarely in the history of contemporary art has there been a more meteoric rise than that of Humbert Herrera. We have certainly become accustomed, of late, to more or less rapid ascensions—a case in point being that of Heribert Julià, whose unfortunate accident is responsible for our making the acquaintance of Herrera, who, as Julià’s replacement, has produced his first, and definitive, exhibition
. . .
”
La Reppublica
says: “With the exception of Miró, the most renowned Catalan artist to precede Julià and Herrera, perhaps not since Picasso’s death has an artist so exclusively captured the attention
. . .
” Another, from
O Globo
: “After two solid decades of artistic disarray, of wave upon wave of pictorial fads, each superimposed one upon the other, finally one young man—and his youth must be stressed, for it holds out great hope for the art world—seems at last to have taken up the challenge of art as a totality, and has responded with a cohesive body of work which—though written off as a hodge-podge by envious pens—manages to make eclectic and unselfconscious use of elements taken from all the artistic trends of these years of confusion, from conceptualism to the new expressionism, to build an articulated body of work—perhaps the most coherent oeuvre of the post-modern aesthetic. Herrera plays all the chords of human sentiment and ratiocination, from tenderness to irony, to cynicism, thus taking up where the extraordinary momentum of Heribert Julià’s appearance little more than a year ago left off. Needless to say, the art world hopes that this new direction will be consolidated and not turn out to be, as has occurred on so many recent occasions, a mere promise, frustrated in the end
. . .
”

He looks through his mail. A postcard from Tokyo: “Even before opening, almost everything is already sold. Ciao, Xano.” A package: the finished catalog for the Milan exhibition. He closes his eyes to daydream. He’d like to celebrate the opening of the exhibition by turning off all the lights in Milan for one night; the only lights on would be those of the gallery. On a white sheet of paper filled with notes he writes: “Speak with Milan City Hall.” And when they ask why? Humbert observes that the lack of a theoretical framework, common to all the latest generation of painters, while handy on occasions, is problematic at other times. He takes a notebook from the desk drawer and writes: “Smooth out the rough edges of the theoretical framework, particularly with regard to alterations in the routines of big cities.” Another postcard from Xano, dated two days after the previous one: “Paintings not sold before opening are now sold. Keep up the good work! Big hug, Xano.” A letter from an Australian museum requesting more paintings. He thinks: “Odd that I don’t have any in New Zealand yet.” On the sheet full of notes he writes: “Find out what’s going on with New Zealand.” He takes another notebook out of the drawer with the word
paintings
on the cover and jots down: “Do a totally disconcerting and false landscape and title it
New Zealand
.”

He feels happy. There’s so much to do! The notebook labeled
paintings
is full of notes. “So many paintings I’ll never get to
. . .
Life is too short for all the work one could do. I ought to hire people, find a team of collaborators to assist me.” He takes out a notebook, the one where he wrote about smoothing out the theoretical framework—labeled
ideas
—and writes: “Find team of collaborators. Or commission paintings to others? Commission other artists to paint them? Would they be offended? How about selling them the ideas so that they can develop them, or use them as is?” He shuts the notebook and drops it on top of another one that says
environments
.

Helena is turning the gold doorknob on the bungalow door. Humbert jumps up from his chair and goes over to hug her. They kiss. Helena carefully spreads the contents of the bag she is carrying on the floor: cheeses, pâtés, spinach salad and cole slaw, apples, frozen yogurt, and a bottle of vodka. Humbert looks at the label, takes the
paintings
notebook out of the drawer, and writes: “Do fake labels.” Then he thinks better of it: he crosses it out, puts the book in the drawer, and takes out another one, labeled
objects
. He writes: “Do fake wine labels, fake jars, fake wrappings. Do cardboard boxes for liquid products: soup, wine
. . .
Do plastic bottles with fine wine labels. Do tin cans for champagne.”

“I’m starved
. . .
” Humbert says.

They eat the cheese, the pâtés, the salad and slaw, the apples, and the frozen yogurt. They open the vodka, drink from the bottle, and have sex on the floor. When they are finished, Humbert gets up, opens the
paintings
notebook, and writes: “Couples having sex, in many colors and extravagant positions.” He thinks for a moment and adds another line: “Totally black painting titled
Love in the Dark
.” In the
environments
book he writes: “A boxing ring completely covered over with a white sheet. Audience in bleachers. In the ring boxers fight unseen by audience.” He opens another notebook, labeled
concepts
, and writes: “A dictionary with all the ‘obscene’ entries crossed out and replaced with ‘proper’ entries. And vice-versa. Two dictionaries, then. Possible variations: rewriting of political, urbanistic, botanical, and psychological terminologies
. . .
” He shuts the notebook and looks at it. Though Helena didn’t see eye to eye with him at all on this, and thought that he would be better off tossing notebooks titled
concepts
and
environments
into the fire, he believes that those, shall we say, “objectual” styles of the previous decade, done with a little bit of flair, would not have passed under the art-business radar without a trace.

“Don’t you think conceptualism would have been more fruitful if it had been done with a little more style and wit?”

Helena doesn’t answer. She’s fast asleep. He looks closely at her, stretched out face down on the floor of the studio, amid the salad bowls and wine glasses. Two men burst through the door and, just as she is lying, face down, they use her sexually (use her sexually?), like animals. Not two men, three. He takes out the
paintings
notebook and jots down: “Variation on the theme of the painter and his model, as done above all by Picasso: the model with two or three men, and the painter watching and painting, or with a video camera.” He takes out the
videos
notebook and “Reflect on pornography in video.” Then he does a couple of sketches of Helena in soft pencil on sheets of paper. He also takes out his camera and photographs her. He takes advantage of the time she is asleep to finish up three of the half-finished paintings, plan five new ones, and read a brief guide to Jamaican art that he had picked up at the airport when they landed. When Helena wakes up they have sex again, and afterwards he dashes right down to the swimming pool and dives in.