Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (19 page)

He continued walking through streets that became increasingly familiar … Because, he suddenly realized, he was near the Palazzo Zenobio and the bar that termed itself the Manchester Pavilion! What a stroke of luck! Now he knew what he could do: he could get a beer. It was like being in an advert for lager, or a Venetian remake of
Ice Cold in Alex.
Beer! He crossed over the Ponte del Socorso, the humpbacked bridge where they'd sat after the party at Zenobio that was too crowded to get into, the exact same steps.

‘Are you trying to look up my dress?’

The bar was open, but quite deserted. Even taking into account the fact that it was a Sunday afternoon, it was surprisingly empty. Staff were stacking chairs on tables. It had the look of a place that had been looted.

‘What's happened?’ Jeff asked.

‘We run out.’

‘Ran out of what?’

‘Drink.’

‘You mean there's nothing left to drink?’

‘Si, nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Niente.
Is all gone. Beer, wine, whisky. Finito.’ He seemed exhausted, proud, amazed and a little appalled by what had occurred. He had, evidently, never experienced anything like this. Or expected it. If an English football team had been playing in Venice, then he might reasonably have assumed there would be a huge demand for booze, but he had seriously underestimated the insatiable thirst of the international art crowd. Jeff was disappointed, obviously, but at some level it was a situation to relish. He had heard of such things happening, but this was the first time he had ever seen and – to give himself a little credit – played a tiny part in a bar being drunk dry. Clearly, there was no point in staying. Everyone who had come here had concluded the same thing. Like parched locusts, they had descended on this bar, drunk it dry, squeezed every last drop of alcohol from it and had then moved on elsewhere. Many people had already moved on, not just to another bar but to other cities, other countries. It was still, ostensibly, a bar but it was a place, now, of abandoned meaning. The atmosphere was woebegone, an architectural equivalent of a fearful hangover. It was as if an atrocity had been committed, something shameful that no one cared to remember but which permeated the walls, the floors and all the fixtures. It seemed quite possible that a curse had now fallen on the place, that it would never again enjoy the dizzy heights of the last few days when the booze flowed and flowed and then ran out, leaving in its wake an emptiness that could never be filled, an after-taste of waste and pointlessness. He thanked the barman and left, feeling more exhausted than ever.

He bought a bottle of Ferrarela from a grocery shop and walked on, looking for a place to sit down. There were lots of places to sit, but he kept going until, utterly exhausted, he sat down by any old canal, not even a particularly scenic one. A tennis ball was bobbing in the water. He took out his expensive, lovely glass, filled it with sparkling water and glugged it down. He did this repeatedly until both bottle and glass were empty. Then he just sat there, legs crossed, like a yacht-owner turned mendicant who had lost everything except for this exquisite blue and orange reminder of his former life of luxury. All very well to think, as he had the day before, or two days ago, or whenever it was – he felt like he'd been in Venice forever – that those wonderful, high moments made all the other moments worthwhile. Easy to think like that while you were in the midst of those moments, when it was all but impossible to remember the other moments, moments like this, when it was – already! so soon! – becoming difficult to remember those great, all-redeeming moments.

A pigeon gawked by. He watched as it pecked and twitched its way across the ground. It looked incredibly stupid, as if it were barely capable of carrying out its species-specific duty of being a pigeon. Just being a pigeon exhausted everything of which it was capable. It didn't even know how to fly, it just hopped. To that extent it wasn't even a bird, just a pigeon, a non-bird.

A boat went past, loaded with broken chairs and logs. Water lapped up the steps. An Italian family came towards him, mother, father and a dark-haired girl of five or six, bouncing along on something like a space hopper in the form of a kangaroo. She sat on its haunches and hung onto its front paws. Evidently this unusual mode of transport delighted the parents every bit as much as it did the child riding it. Holding hands, laughing, they greeted Atman warmly, happy
that a stranger could enjoy the sight of their daughter bouncing along on her kangaroo-hopper, could share their happiness. Atman grinned back. It was completely adorable. There was even a pouch, with a little baby kangaroo peeking out. If it had been possible, he would have climbed right in there, into the pouch, and gone bouncing along with them.

After the family and their kangaroo had passed from view, he didn't know what to do so he picked up his glass and started walking again. He passed through the Campo Santa Margherita, at pains to ignore the irritating mimes, painted silver, doing their motionless statue thing.

Eventually he came to a small piazza – not even a piazza, really – hemmed in by three churches, cheek by jowl. Two of them were bright white, and one of these – one of the white ones – was the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Feeling as worn out and used up as he did, the prospect of paying just five euros to get out of the heat and into the cool darkness of a church – with a massive helping of Tintoretto thrown in – was a welcome substitute for a drink in the Manchester Pavilion.

After the blaze of daylight, stepping into the interior was like blacking out. He had a quick scan around the ground floor and trudged up the stairs. Too bad the idea of the church tended to go hand in hand with a not inconsiderable thrust of verticality, that the notion of the bungalow had never really taken root in ecclesiastical design. He plodded onwards, climbing a stairway to chiaroscuro heaven. It was all happening up here. There was a lot to take in. Way too much. Walls, ceilings: every inch was crammed with prophets, angels and tough-guy saints. Everywhere you looked, figures came looming out of the muscle-bound darkness. Everything loomed out of the darkness. Wow, Tintoretto really painted up a storm in this place. Jeff's knowledge of the sources was a little sketchy;
beyond the fact that these were biblical scenes, he was completely in the dark. As far as he could make out, Tintoretto had compressed the best bits of both Testaments into one building. In a way, though, it was an easy book to compress, the Bible. Basically, things were always getting hurled – out of the light and into the darkness – or were ascending – out of the darkness and into the light, of which there was not a vast amount. Bearded prophets, swirling drapery and billowing clouds – it was all go up there. In marketing terms, though, the pitch seemed fundamentally and horribly flawed: the idea that we could be bullied into paradise.

Looking up at the ceiling was making Atman's neck ache. Then he noticed a few people walking around holding little wood-framed mirrors the size of portable TVs. He picked one up from the stack on the other side of the hall, the other side of the world in a sense. The first thing he saw was his own face looming out of the biblical swirl in the background. The mirror was like a square halo. Cubist. The halo, the mirror, the ceiling – the background – all loomed darkly. Everything blazed with light, but only because, in such a dark place, any bit of light, however scarce, was somehow sacred. As far as the weather was concerned, a devastating flood or torrential storm seemed a distinct possibility. He scanned the room. Apart from a couple of quiet Japanese, he was now the only person here. He flopped down into a chair, put down his glass, and emptied the remains of Laura's wrap onto the mirror. Using the leaflet explaining how Tintoretto had done all this knockout painting, he tapped the coke into a rough line. Surrounded by the mirrored darkness, the powder seemed whiter than ever, white as a cloud. He took another quick look around, dipped his head to the mirror and snorted it up. Partially blocked with dried blood, his nose made a sound like a pig snoring. Ha! He saw his pupils – already large from the darkness – dilate
further. This made the art of the past really come alive. Now everything really loomed and reeled. It was like staring up from the bottom of a well. There was nothing but dark and light, and everything was reeling. Swirling, looming and reeling. Everything loomed and everything swirled, and the swirling and the looming were one. And the paintings, he saw now, were explicitly – in the sense of allegorically – about getting high. Guests at the Passover looked like they were crowding round a table wanting to snaffle up more than their fair share of whatever was on offer. The halos of illumination around the saints' heads were like comic-book signifiers, signifying that of all these holy men were getting loaded.

With renewed energy Atman passed into the adjoining room, one whole wall of which was devoted to the crucifixion. Quite an epic. Everything reeled, still, but now, as well as looming and reeling, it converged. What appeared to have loomed could now be seen to converge, and it all converged here. This was the point of it all. A bit confusing, though. Ah, but now he understood: what he'd thought was a guy pointing an incredibly long spear at one arm of the cross was actually a rope – one of two, in fact – pulling up the cross with one of the thieves nailed to it. The weather, which had been unsettled in the other paintings, was catastrophically bad in this one. Giorgione's tempest was just a shower in a teacup compared with what was happening here. No rain was falling, but everything was drenched. Light was drenched in darkness.

He was still holding the mirror. He looked at his own face – old, excited, crumpled. He sat back on one of the chairs and gazed at this huge helping of art. It really was a mad painting, great if your idea of great painting was maximum action and maximum atmospherics on a maximum scale, which, at that moment, seemed a pretty good definition of maximum greatness. This was high concept art, all right, and
there was no doubting who was the star of the show, the focus of everyone's attention. Everybody in the painting he was looking at was looking at the crucified Christ, even the two thieves who were getting crucified alongside him, even people like the guy on the horse, who was looking at something else. Atman didn't know how long he sat there, staring at this painting, not having any thoughts about it, willing on an epiphany that never came, never happened, just seeing it, looking at it. Perhaps that
was
the epiphany, surrendering himself to what he was seeing.

Then, as happens, he'd had enough seeing and got up to go.

It wasn't just a shock, stepping outside, it was like getting resurrected. Bright daylight still. The world hadn't ended, the sky was the same deep blue. The eat was otter than ever. How quickly these little jokes took up residence – and how quickly they became sad, how sad they quickly became. He started walking again, past a woman in black, on her knees, begging. He dropped a couple of euros into the squat Pringles tube she was using as a begging bowl. When he came to a half-decent canal, he sat down beside it and didn't weep. Nothing was moving. Leaked oil had left a few threads of rainbow in the water. The air was stifling, he was drenched in sweat. He took off his damp shirt and sat there, bare-chested and skinny, trousers rolled up above the knees. Having done that, he was tempted to strip down to his underwear and walk straight into the canal, as if it were a long and stagnant paddling pool.

A gull swooped low over a passing water-taxi, a dead pigeon in its beak: an ill and not terribly hygienic omen. Maybe it was the pigeon he'd seen earlier. He lay back uncomfortably and looked up at the nothing sky. An aeroplane passed overhead, leaving a fine vapour trail in its wake. Slowly it expanded, becoming a line of powdered whiteness against the empty blue.

T
he thing about destiny is that it can so nearly not happen and, even when it does, rarely looks like what it is.

It's just a phone ringing routinely at three in the afternoon (not alarmingly in the middle of the night) and the person on the other end is not telling you that the results of your blood test have come back positive or that your girlfriend's partly clothed body has been discovered floating in the Ganges. That would be handy, that would lend narrative continuity and drive – albeit of a not very novel kind – to the purposeless drift of events. But no, it's just an editor at the
Telegraph
asking if you can go to India at short notice, to write a travel piece about Varanasi.

‘Should be really nice,’ she said. ‘Business-class flight to Delhi. Short wait for a connecting flight to Varanasi. Five nights at the Taj Ganges. I'd do it myself, if I could get away.’ The trip had been set up for one of her regular contributors, who had fallen ill. (‘You'd have thought he could've waited till he got there, like everyone else,’ she said.) That's why she was calling at the last minute like this. And she only wanted twelve hundred words. There was nothing I had to do in London in the coming week … So I said yes, OK, I'd go.

Two days later, the night before I was due to fly out, I ran into Anand Sethi at an opening for Fiona Rae at the Timothy Taylor Gallery. I'd known him slightly when we were both
students, ages ago. These days he was a banker (and therefore an art collector). He'd grown up in Bombay and had been to Varanasi several times, was going back in the spring, in fact.

‘Where are you staying?’ he wanted to know.

‘The Taj,’ I announced grandly, knowing that the Taj chain was one of the most luxurious in India. Apparently not. Anand shook his head. The Taj was on the outskirts of the city, so I'd be commuting to the ghats every day. And the traffic in Varanasi was terrible. The only place to stay was the Ganges View. It was, he said, one of the great hotels of the world. I made a mental note of the name even though, at this late stage, nothing could be done about changing hotels. I had an impulse to contradict or counter-boast in some way. Before I got the chance to mention that I was flying – was being flown – business class, Anand told me that he had bought a couple of Rae's paintings, including one the size of a garage door.