Affairs of Art (6 page)

And I did not know, I'll never know, if I'd had sex with that man because he was Bruno Farinacci-Lepore, undisputed master of the new criticism, who had singled me out. I, the Quebecker with his pallid words, who barely dared to speak and was only a little more ready to write for a magazine of which not a single copy could be found in Paris. The master didn't know me, I certainly had not shone, he'd only wanted ass and I'd exchanged it for a crumb of his glory. I was a pitiful little prick of a parvenu.

And that was it, degradation of the worst kind. For if I was able to explain to myself why my desire had drifted in a glowing Provençal night, deep down I despised the image of the disciple who starts out as a sweetheart. I had not paid court to anyone to arrive where I am now, I knew how to sniff the wind, but I myself had never dreamed of blustering, I thought I was someone who wrote about art, who would chip away from across the Atlantic and from almost-America at certain veins rich enough to spill over as far as Montreal. I did not aspire to overshoot my own orbit, I didn't believe in that. And here I discovered, skulking in my head this time, an appetite. If Bruno Farinacci-Lepore hadn't completely forgotten me already, at this hour when he was probably having something to eat somewhere on the Riviera, if I could find a way to remind him of me over the next two months, if I followed precisely the itinerary he'd provided me, I would perhaps hold the key to the centre of my universe. Who would know that I'd got there via sex or, rather, who would be offended by it? I was not calculating so precisely, my thoughts were far too murky, but I'm quite certain I'd detected a glimmer. A little file card left lying around that you imagine you could use to light up the darkness. I was experiencing the shame of an adult who is adapting himself to small betrayals, who will repeat them.

Late that afternoon I copied his address into my address book and boarded a bus to Monaco, where I dined on the terrace of a bistro for tourists, looking them over from head to toe. They were more con­temptible than I because they'd been more duped. I drank a lot of wine, which reconciled me with the day before. I tried to return at midnight, the last bus had gone, I spent the night in Monte Carlo, on a park bench in the harbour where the lights never go out. There were few revellers and plenty of little couples with their silly little caresses. I dozed till very early the next morning when the iron gate of the public urinal, ruled over all day by an old lady, slammed open. It was cool inside her lair, I splashed icy water on my face, in the chipped mirror I looked like a thug. I went back to Nice, I shaved, I bought the groceries of a thesis-writing bachelor, and I changed the sheets. Then I wrote to my
Susannah at Her Bath,
I talked to her about Cézanne and Matisse and the alleys in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and the tourists in Monaco, I told her that the apartment wasn't sunny enough for her and that I would make love to her in the light of the arena which I had yet to see, and that the pebbles on the beach were too hard for her curves in which I buried myself incessantly in my dreams. I told her the symposium had been un­eventful and that France had started with chitchat more than anything. Because I loved her, I believed myself.

On my Michelin maps I marked in red all the places the master had recommended. The route zigzagged from Bordeaux to Venice by way of Cologne, and I couldn't visit them all. There was one red dot between Rome and Civita-Vecchia that blazed and that was the address of Bruno Farinacci-Lepore. I would write to him, as well, before I started out.

Save for my stay at Bruno's, forty-eight hours, the summer was chaste. He lived with his mother in a minute pavilion on the property she'd inherited, which looked down on the Lago di Bracciano. He told me nothing about the Farinacci family, in fact I didn't even meet his mother, though she fixed sumptuous meals for two that were brought to his terrace, from which a tired grove of olive trees sloped down towards the village. That was fine. I wouldn't have known how to respond to the knowing look she'd have bestowed on our decadence, the lady I pictured as very brown, very long, very wrinkled, wrapped in heavy cashmere shawls at the first sign of the evening chill here in the hills, perhaps with a young lover to massage her. Her discretion testified to Bruno's habits, to the parade of nameless creatures who came to Bracciano to kneel and to be dubbed, as I myself bent double twice on my way out of the bath, no longer knowing who I was. The shower, as I remember so well, was all white, tiled from floor to ceiling like a Raynaud. I understood the reference later, I did not yet know Raynaud. But Bruno knew everything.

The rest of the apartment, a single octagonal room, was also a theatre of the minimal. Brief black carpets under three Bauhaus chairs, a long glass table on stilts where he wrote and no doubt dined in winter, a bed, very narrow and very low, which precluded any notion of a regular lover. On the walls, also white, not one picture. Nothing. I asked no questions, for that, I sensed, was how he declared himself most eloquently. Genuine critics do not like art, individual works even less, and artists, rarely. They study, classify, define, mediate. Entomologists do not live with ants.

I wasn't ready for such renunciation, so I would never be a genuine critic. But I admired, I was making my own entrance into the avant-garde, I absorbed all these unforeseens without argument. In any case, when he described works of art I could see them. And so it was an equitable exchange, it was fitting that I lend my body to his, always so ravenous, in return for the aesthetic initiation he so generously lavished on me. Did I go so far as to vaguely fall in love? It took me years certainly to acknowledge that his mania for white could be an antidote for his self-loathing and not an intellectual statement, a reflection of the ultimate blank canvas that had been the final statement of the artists of his age. I was at least smitten.

And infinitely troubled when afterwards I went to Rome to lose myself, where I was poorly lodged in a very cramped hotel open to the noise from the Piazza del Popolo. I wandered unseeing, the centuries weighed too heavily, the baroque turned my stomach and the Renaissance bored me, I was behaving like the lout I was. I disappeared into crowds of tourists, to be no one. And to congeal there, while mulling over my pain.

I had to find out why I'd experienced neither recoil nor repulsion during that first night, and especially why I'd gone back for a second, and a third. You're familiar with men's skin, Vitalie, it is not uniformly smooth, the muscles bulge, the throat is rough. There is nowhere one can lose oneself without stumbling. It is the hardness that makes desire rise, and today I'm convinced that most men would be aroused if they approached their male friends without constraint. In Rome, though, I wavered. I watched the Roman women walking by, movie stereotypes with their skirts slit high up on their thighs and their breasts offered, I was consumed with desire for a girl — small-boned, with a round belly and swollen vulva, who would kiss me for hours. She was not to be found on the street.

So then I turned back to my own, whom I pictured pink and golden on a beach in the Laurentians, a trifle sad because she could not embrace me in the sun. I wrote her of the sweltering heat even at the fountains, the stone siren I'd unearthed for her at a secondhand shop on the Via del Corso, a vague urge to go to Sardinia, and my interesting reunion with one of the participants at the symposium, a great Italian critic I'd run into in a museum, who'd invited me to dinner in his beautiful villa on the Lago di Bracciano. His name is Bruno Farinacci-Lepore, I told her, and he would accept an invitation to Montreal if my university were willing to follow up on the meeting at Saint-Paul-de-Vence. She could have a word with the dean, who surely knew him by reputation. There are times when there are good reasons for lies to grow.

I sent her my written caresses, drawing my inspiration from the beauty of the Roman women and from a minor figure in a Caravaggio in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. She would like the idea of being taken in a confessional, those in Rome are immense, velvet, and always deserted. I described every moment to her. And it would have taken little to send me back to such serene desires, I'd have gone to be granted absolution. For the first time in my life as a baptized Catholic, brought up in a faith now lost, I understood the power of contrition — the illusion of a return to innocence.

I left Rome and her putrid fumes, I would return to Nice with a detour to an artists' colony in Liguria, I would limit myself to taking the air and to understanding art, and I would find myself again.

But I never did find myself again, for I was living through the summer of a lifetime. Bruno's name truly was a passport. I realized that from my first stop, on the road leading to the fortress of Sarzanello. Some German artists had restored a ruin there, now fitted out with every modern convenience, which opened on the south side onto a series of covered terraces that also served as studios. They had financed the work by transforming the outbuildings into dormitories and seminar rooms, cool, austere places where students from Germany or northern Italy came during vacations, drawn there as much by the sun as by the companionship of their betters. The driving force behind the place was an Aryan colossus who laid down timetables with military rigour and was putting the final touches to a work of death by applying to large surfaces,
à la
Pollock, membrane after
membrane of a glue that would become a shroud. He then peeled it off with a scraper and the viewer found himself confronting the very notion of an aborted life, openings barely scraped and then closed in again and vanished, leaving an infinitesimal trace.

I am inventing the metaphor here, for he talked about everything but his own work. Artists rarely know how to talk, and when they do they often pile on foolish remarks and clichés, giving in to girlish sentimentality or simpleminded militancy. One should listen only to that which they offer to be seen.

Bruno's formula was the right one. In my English which was as weak as theirs, our
lingua franca,
I tried to convey their work to them during the six p.m. discussion session that brought their monastic days to an end. At the first moment of drowsiness, the ruin would be transformed into a festive hall where bread, wine, game, pasta, and tiramisu multiplied miraculously in the kitchen. At midnight, after so much laughing and drinking and smoking, the women would still taste of olive oil, the men of burnt garlic. I would get involved with neither one nor the other but would content myself with imagining the nights and the stirring of the scratches, now reanimated, to which they would give birth.

Some kept to themselves, crying into their
vino rosso
over their dead-ends. A very young Milanese, who froze for hours over the same sheet of paper till he finally laid down on it a stroke of genius, just off-centre enough to translate all the perversity in the world, flew into a drunken rage when the moon rose, and tore up his work. His girlfriend, blonde and sad and Germanic to her very ankles, would integrate the shreds of paper into ambitious collages that would have more body than wit, and they too would die at Sarzanello.

Evenings, it was my turn to be silent, I would go from table to table, I accumulated a thousand stories: about their mothers, possessive or cruel, about their imbecilic families, about their squabbles with the boorish local dignitaries and with the critics they'd have the hides of one of these days. Only artists are in full possession of bitterness, including its laughter. I observed greedily, I let myself become clouded over too. Usually I dislike noise, but I don't think I could have tolerated, so soon after Bruno, the clear silence of the countryside, the shrouds of midnight, the chirring of the insects that keep watch over remorse. Only in the morning did I isolate myself, volunteering to run errands in the village while the hive was at work. There was even a fluteplayer along my way, he looked after picture-postcard geese, meeting him I had a view of the Apennines that had been the beginning of the world I was now taking over. During that first week post-Bruno, I wrote two letters to my lover. I wish I could get them back today. I'm sure that I turned the goose-boy into a story, that I was picturesque and false and dripping with love while I was learning about distance and about that slight chill that protects a master from any form of touching.

I returned to Nice, where I pretended to be slogging away at my thesis between two similar excursions. It rained often. And I was penetrating deeper, like a voyeur, into the helplessness of the artists of our time, sad parrots whose intelligence was locked inside our words, the words of us professional view/ers. They were exposed, I exploited them, their impotence would serve me well, by demonstrating the death of inspiration. I see myself now as a vulture but I was nothing of the sort, Vitalie. I was hungry for their martyrdom, in company they knew how to lighten it, I thought I was a discoverer. I was certain I was emerging at last from my hidebound provincialism and that I was brushing against the spirit of the century, henceforth incapable of expressing the absurd but perfectly capable of surviving it. To sober up and strive, as if creation were still possible. And thus was born, out of despair experienced amid a white light, the art of hardware. The flight into the machinery of which I've spoken well, out of pity, but of which I thought so little.

I came back at the end of August, crammed with new hunches, pleased with my original ideas, forgetful of Bruno's body and convinced that I'd retained something of his wit. I left my lover at the autumn equinox, she was perhaps already consoled, because she became pregnant by her engineer in December and was not known to have any subsequent liaisons.