Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (13 page)

‘Call yourself pick-pockets? You couldn't steal the piss from your mother's cunt.’ As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he felt suddenly un-invincible, frightened that this was an insult so grave it would have to be avenged immediately, that their honour demanded they come back and stab the person who had uttered it. Fortunately, it seemed their English wasn't good enough to understand what had been said. Not so the elderly Italian next to Jeff, evidently a connoisseur of invective, who clapped him on the shoulder and said,
‘Bravissimo! Bravissimo!’
Looking bewildered and fearful – their fear of getting lynched was greater than Jeff's of getting stabbed – the two culprits slunk off, looking harmless, poor, foreign and hopelessly outnumbered. Some tall Africans were nearby, selling knock-off Prada bags. From their long-limbed, indifferent demeanour it was impossible to tell where their allegiances lay. Did they feel solidarity with their poor Slavic brothers, on whom the fury of the mob could so easily have been unleashed? Or were they enjoying the opportunity to affirm, however passively, their own relative law-abidingness, to show that while it may not have been strictly legal to be flogging leather goods that no one wanted they were, in the larger scheme of things, honest tradesmen, starting out on the road to what might turn out to be a legitimate career in retailing?

Jeff emerged onto the Riva degli Schiavoni – or the promenade, as he seasidely thought of it. It was still crowded, with
tourists and the stalls catering for them, but after a hundred yards it became pleasantly quiet. The view of the sea or the canal – he wasn't sure at what point the one turned into the other – was obstructed by huge yachts: the
Ecstasea
, the
Neptune
, the
Sea Breeze
, a name that alerted everyone to the fact that there was none, that the baking city was becalmed in windless heat.

Along with the national pavilions at the Giardini, the Arsenale was the other key component of the Biennale: a selection of work by artists from around the world, chosen or commissioned by the director of the Biennale and united (allegedly) by some kind of theme. That this theme was impossible to discern from the apparently random array of art on display did not diminish the experience – or not Jeff's experience, at any rate. There was a ton of stuff to see: paintings, installations, photographs, video streams, sculpture (sort of), even, quaintly, the odd drawing. He breezed through it all, taking it all in, even if, much of the time, he took nothing in. He'd been watching a video loop of a kid playing keepy-uppy in the bombed-out ruins of a city – Belgrade, it turned out – for five minutes before he noticed that it wasn't a football he was dribbling around: it was a human skull.

A few minutes later, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted some colour photographs of tanned naked flesh. Porn! That was the great thing about the art world these days – you were never far away from Adults Only, sexually explicit, hardcore, triple-X material. Except, as he moved closer, they turned out to be the opposite of porn. These were full-colour pictures of a woman giving birth. Blood everywhere, the intestinal-looking umbilical cord and, finally, the fluid-smeared, crumpled little alien baby. Ugh! That stuff should be banned. It was deeply
offensive. It could put you off sex for life. And not just sex. It could put you off
life
for life.

Needless to say, these pictures – like all the other photographs on offer – were the size of
The Raft of the Medusa.
So what if they were just snaps of someone jerking off in a leather armchair in an apartment in Zurich? So what if it was just a half-eaten, pre-packaged egg-and-cress sandwich abandoned on the seat of a bus shelter in Stockholm? So what if it was a portrait of the artist's sour-faced grandmother pushing her shopping trolley round a poorly stocked supermarket in Barnsley? Blow 'em up big enough and they looked … Well, they looked like shit, frankly, but they looked like art too.

As at the Giardini, there was a constant flow of people to greet and compare notes with: what they'd seen this morning, what they'd got up to the previous night. Never one to kiss and tell, Jeff would have liked nothing more than to boast and brag and generally yell from the rooftops about his adventures of the night before but he managed, somehow, to restrain himself. Everyone he met was more hungover than they had been yesterday and some had got their hands on free T-shirts as well as free bags and catalogues. The most resolute were even getting stuck into the free bottles of Asahi that were already being handed out from ice-crammed bins, strategically located.

Stretched out on cushions and orange and red rugs under a blazing jungle of neon, Scott Thomson waved to him to come on over. Since everyone else was respectfully walking round or briskly through the installation, Jeff expected him to get thrown out by security but Scott called out, ‘C'mon dude, it's allowed.’

Jeff walked over and joined him on a pile of comfy cushions, gazing up into this mad tangle of neon allsorts and
illuminated chillis and plastic bananas and God knows what else.

‘This is more like it, isn't it? This is a
bit
like Burning Man,’ said Scott.

‘They have this kind of stuff there?’

‘Loads of it. But more far out. You'd probably get some kind of performance thrown in as well. Or at least a bunch of people making out or serving cocktails.’

‘Who's the artist?’

‘Jason Rhoades. And all these signs—’

‘Yes, what are they? Mexican beers or something?’

‘No, man. Synonyms of pussy.’

Jeff looked again, tried to decipher and isolate the red, blue and purple letters: House Under the Hill, La Tortilla, Hombre (what was that all about?), Rinkly Stinkly, Bank, Birdy, Filthy Hatchet Wound (jeez, what sort of sick fuck had come up with that?), Lovely Meal, Pink Panther … There must have been a hundred more of them, but he got the point.

‘And what's the piece called?’ Scott shrugged, handed him the guide and pointed to the title:
Tijuanatanjierchandelier.

‘Quite a mouthful.’

‘There you go: you've come up with another synonym.’

Funnily enough, last night…
Jeff didn't say the words, but his face must have been beaming some kind of message of gleeful well-being.

Scott said, ‘You know that expression “a shit-eating grin”?’

‘Yes?’

‘That's exactly how I'd describe your face now. Haven't seen you look this happy in years.’

‘I haven't
been
this happy in years,’ said Jeff, liking Scott more than he had for years. He would gladly have continued the conversation, but it was almost time to see if the source of his happiness had turned up for the first of their possible
rendezvous. He got up to go, smiled goodbye to Scott. Now that the ice had been broken, quite a lot of other people were sitting and chatting in the midst of the installation.

Jeff waited for Laura at the ticket desk till ten past two, hoping they'd be able to relax together in the neon lair of
Tijuanatanjierchandelier.
Then he waited ten minutes more. She was not going to come. He was about to plunge back into the Arsenale when, some way off, he saw a bunch of Africans selling their knock-off bags in the bright heat. Even here, they were at it, hustling their wares! They really were irrepressible – and optimistic. What were the chances of
selling
bags when they were being given away free all over the place? But people were buying them, or at least showing an interest, entering into negotiations about price, quality and the possibility of discounts for bulk purchases. And a surprising number of people were filming or taking photographs of these happy Africans and their prospective customers. That's what caused the penny, eventually, to drop. The Africans were a work of art, a real-life installation, simulating the outside world the way their bags simulated the Prada and Louis Vuitton originals, thereby raising questions about authenticity, value, commodification, exploitation and several other things, probably, that didn't spring immediately to mind. Porn that was childbirth; a football that was a skull; commerce that was art: nothing today was quite what it seemed. And though it may have seemed as if Jeff was absorbed completely by the conceptual implications of the Africans and their bags, this was itself a form of dissimulation and disguise, camouflaging the fact – from himself as much as anyone observing him – that he was contriving a way of waiting a little longer for Laura. Eventually, though, he had to accept that she was not coming and, with a final look behind, headed back inside.

He soon spotted something he'd missed first time around:
photographs of celebrity academics and intellectuals, lecturing, hosting seminars and generally making the life of the mind look, if not glamorous, then certainly lucrative. There was Linda Nochlin contemplating ‘The Glory and Misery of Pornography’ in a colloquium in Paris; there was Eric Hobsbawm explaining how history means never having to say you're sorry; and there was Edward Said – so handsome, cuff-linked and dapper it seemed Richard Gere had already signed up for the biopic – guiding a group of adoring students through the minefields of orientalism, late style and why the Oslo Accord sucked the big one.

Under normal circumstances he wouldn't have had the patience to sit through videos, but today, feeling tired, he was glad to flop down in darkened rooms and let them take their course, even though many of them, of course, had no course to take. One showed a woman, filmed from behind and slightly above, silhouetted against a river. She did not move, but her coat and hair moved in the breeze. In front of her a grey blur of water moved slowly from left to right, filling the entire screen. Every now and then bits of garbage drifted by: bottles, clumps of branches, plastic bags. At one point a large lump floated past. It was impossible to tell what it was, but it looked like some kind of animal, a dog or a cat perhaps. The river kept flowing, hazy, trash-strewn, endless. Bird shadows darted over the water. Atman watched for a long time, continued to do so even after the tape had looped back, returning the river to the place where it had begun.

Another video showed a shaven-headed boxer shadow-boxing, ducking and diving, throwing punches at a woman who stood absolutely still. He never quite hit her, but his fists came within inches of her impassive face. She never flinched but, like the laundry woman, a few strands of her hair moved in the draught left by his blows. At one point, when he missed
her only by millimetres, her nostrils flared slightly. He bobbed and weaved, protecting himself at all times, probing with jabs, making that boxerly snorting sound through his nose, looking for openings and then unleashing a brutal combination of blows, a flurry of lefts and rights, uppercuts and hooks, shots to the body, the face, the head. And all the time she stood there impassively, unharmed and lovely.

From the vaporetto he saw Laura in the middle of the Accademia bridge, talking to a man he did not recognise. By the time he got off the boat, the guy she'd been speaking to was nowhere to be seen. He walked up and stood in the place her companion had been standing. She was wearing a white dress. She raised her parasol a few inches. More of her face came into the sun. Her hair was pinned up, making her neck seem longer, her cheekbones more pronounced. She raised the parasol still further. Her eyes were lit up by the sun.

‘Come into my shade,’ she said. He moved towards her and she lowered the parasol again so that their faces were in the shade. He kissed her on the mouth. She smelled slightly, and tasted, of cherries.

‘It's nice in here,’ he said. It was like being in a capsule, insulated slightly from the world.

‘Yes. The eat is otter than ever. But it's fractionally cooler under here.’

From her Freitag bag she produced another bag – polythene – of cherries. ‘Have one.’ She held a cherry by its stalk in front of his mouth. He closed his lips around it, like Tess in the Polanski film. She tugged the stalk free. Then she took one for herself so that she was left holding two stalks while they chewed. His hand was on her hip, near her tattoo. Beneath the fabric of her dress he could feel the slight ridge of her underwear. She turned him towards the canal. They gazed out
together, at the terrace of the Guggenheim, the nameless palazzos, the idle gondolas, the hitching posts like barbers' poles. He said, ‘Did you get to the Arsenale?’

‘My lunch was put back till two, so I went straight over there after changing. I was sure I'd see you there. Then, at one-thirty, I had to leave.’

They compared the things they'd seen. There must have been so many near-misses when they'd almost bumped into each other: she'd spent ten minutes in the vaginal neon of
Tijuanatanjierchandelier
, had seen the shadow-boxing and the river videos … It was a shame, but it didn't matter because they were here now.

‘What about now?’ Laura said. ‘Is there anything you have to do?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘So, shall we stroll?’ Without waiting for his reply, she began walking. He fell in step beside her.

They walked through the Campo Santo Stefano and into a tighter network of shopping streets, where it was too crowded to hold hands. A very small shop specialized in gloves, displaying them in such a way that it looked as if they were praying to be purchased. They crossed a bridge spanning a small canal, in which there was a log jam of gondolas. One of them had a single occupant, sitting in his throne-like seat as if he were Genghis Khan, belatedly coming to terms with the futility of a life devoted to conquest. The passengers in the other boats all shared a diluted version of the same expression, one that reluctantly acknowledged that, in agreeing to travel by gondola, they had been sold one of the oldest pups in existence.

They came to a shop selling glasses, vases and lights made of glass, all decorated with dots, swirls and streaks of bright colour: the most beautiful glasses in the world, surely, and probably the most expensive as well. A small glass – the size
a very small orange juice would come in – was eighty euros. There was a moment of shocked disbelief and then, almost immediately, the idea of a glass costing eighty euros began to be assimilated. Dostoevsky might have had these glasses, these prices, in mind when he defined man as a creature who got used to things.