Affairs of Art (7 page)

I thought I'd left her because we had so little to say to one another, now that I was informed about the very newest paths of art. Her own assumptions were different. I no longer slept at her back. I tried to take her only on the floor, in corners, impatient beneath her caresses. One evening she arrived with champagne, candles, and a dress that was much too hard to unfasten. She had her hair up in a chignon, I thought she was as beautiful as a self-denying penitent, and she denied me. She told me what I'd done. She assumed that I'd had an affair in France, with a woman from the south, perhaps a gypsy, who had taught me about violence in desire. “I've never liked animals,” she told me, “or copulation. If you continue, we'll end up making love as men do with one another.” I'd reached the bottom of the bottle, I told her we weren't going to continue anything. She smiled, she left. For a long time the stone siren I'd bought her on the Via del Corso sat on her desk, in the dean's outer office. She stared out at me, in my aquarium.

I was often there, in the dean's office. I was preparing for the next session of the symposium that was to follow the one held at Saint-Paul-de-Vence, to which I wanted rn bring a more North American tone. Newborn and still lacking confidence, the university was prepared to lay out plenty of money in an attempt to make a name for itself in leading-edge studies. The guaranteed presence of Bruno Farinacci-Lepore would help us recruit other prestigious participants, in particular from New York. Montreal's tight little contemporary art world was simmering with excitement. The meeting would take place in June again, at Cité du Havre, where the curators of the Musée d'art contemporain, renowned for preferring international chitchat over works of art, would consent to emerge from their lethargy and offer, for once, a look at Quebec's avant-garde. The sculpture garden would be extended down to the St. Lawrence and the site transformed into an open-air artists' studio. The Port of Montreal would offer an ideal background, with its raw ugliness, its vacant lots and blind buildings. We would not be in New France, I didn't want prettiness.

During that academic year I lived like a monk; I had to finish my thesis, young teaching assistants trained in the U.S. were already showing up with their PhDs. I was a star in the department, because of the sole publication devoted to art and the rumour that was spreading about my European summer, but my lead was frail.

Marianne lost her husband in December, she'd had time to love him a little and above all to admire his stoicism in the midst of suffering, which had been hideous. Cancer makes the strongest men scream and he had barely moaned. I dropped by to take my leave of him on the eve of his death. I regretted not having known him. All that was left of him was the voice, which he moistened with water sipped through a straw, no longer able to hold a glass. He was naked save for the loincloth — a diaper, the skin on his long bones was the skin of birth, of the first helplessness. I was looking death in the face for the first time, and without fear. He talked about the children he'd have liked to have, about how time is unravelling over Quebec, about the impasse. He was utterly engrossed in a tomorrow he would never see. I was astonished. But not now. The only life that interests me today is the one that is preparing to break away from me. I shall resemble that dead man who is still slightly present, I'll be blind, I am told, but do not fear. A slow death brings a state of grace to the living.

The winter was grey then and Marianne had nothing to do. From her husband she had learned about class, she was starting to have some, she had time to cultivate it, especially because it requires very little in this country to appear less of a parvenu than the Laurier Street regulars. She had an inheritance, she was tall and still beautiful, her son's career in the art world was off to a good start, she learned how to entertain and often invited me. One evening I turned up with a Mexican historian passing through town, he was on his own in Montreal and I thought he was hilarious. Very handsome too, with black hair already turning grey, Inca eyes, a mixed-race complexion. I thought Marianne would like him, she thought I did. From some remarks she made the next day, I realized I could have told her about my nights with Bruno and she wouldn't have blinked. Indeed, she even found it appealing to tolerate my unusual loves in her elegant way. She would prefer by far handsome, talkative boys to a girl from Mentana Street who would resemble her. I wasn't there yet.

Bruno arrived two days before the symposium, Marianne put him up in a big room she had transformed into a black-and-white suite following my instructions. They went around together beginning on the first evening, she drove him to the mountain, he gave her his arm, in Montreal he was a copy of himself, he walked and lulled himself inside a huge dark brown pullover that was too hot and that had probably been knitted for Armani.

Once again I fell under the spell of his words when we visited artists' studios. I believed I was doing the right thing by taking him first to see Jérémie Wells, who had been one of the first to grasp the importance of photography in the return to representative art, which was just now taking off in the United States. Not very gifted as a painter, Jérémie had transformed his atelier into a darkroom and photography studio. To it he brought female beggars whom he'd warm up for a few hours and he'd pay them a few dollars: they posed for him nude in surrealistic settings that he built himself. The folds of their bellies were extended into the gathers of the velvet, their cracked sexes gave birth to orchids, the breasts hung more flaccid still beneath rivers of pearls. They had eyes closed in dreams, and the smiles of schizophrenics. Sometimes he would photograph only his setting, overprinting in the margins bits of their flesh, slabs of a back, of buttocks that resembled beaches.

Bruno questioned him with fierce intensity. First about his techniques, then about his relations with his models and about the meaning of his work. Jérémie replied at length, he thought he was taking human contradictions to their logical conclusion, by making of old age and poverty a form of pornography and by trying to sell to the rich his mockery of their wealth. “As a designer excellent, as a thinker worthless,” decreed Bruno as soon as the door was shut. There was enough for a book in what he told me about the relationship between art and poverty. Up to the nineteenth century it had been painted in the smiling colours of genre scenes or sacred art, then it moved on to the pure illustration of the tragic. But we were now at the frontier of the direct exploitation of the misery of others, of its production for the purposes of provocation, basically mercantile. “From the poor one steals even their grime,” he said. I was discovering his moral side and it made me admire him all the more.

In the industrial building that had become a congregation of artists, he had a few minutes for each of them, but to my delight he lingered over Charlene Lemire, a tiny woman with huge eyes who was striving to create on her smooth canvas those ghostly effects that raise you up inexplicably from a fear more physical than anguish. Today she would give no further explanations, not even for the famous Farinacci-Lepore. She told him all kinds of nonsense, said she'd found the texture of the ghost in cheesecloth and her fringes in the fur of an afghan hound that had, she thought, the eyes of Lucifer. She enjoyed herself, she thought she was outside the master's game. She asked about Italy, prided herself on being a better cook than any Italian woman, thanks to the teaching of her Sicilian neighbour and her own research.

And that was how the greatest international art critic came to Cartier Street, climbed a curving outdoor staircase, bringing several bottles of a great wine that bore the label of Quebec's Liquor Board, and entered the Quebecitude of art. All evening Charlene made him laugh, telling him how she paid her rent by teaching gouache to charitable ladies, and about her recent fierce battles with her closest friends to obtain a thousand-dollar grant and a two-week stay in France, in a shared studio outside Paris where she slept on a sofa and only barely had running water, which made her unkempt and hence desirable to her neighbour, a superior Frenchman who believed he was granting the grace of his body to a poor little thing from the colonies. Her paintings had ended up for a month in the cultural centre of Rueil-Malmaison, which attracted neither
Le Monde
nor
Artpress.
But she finally had a European line in her CV. It fills the horizon, it is the vanishing point for Quebec art, which was born at the wrong lat­itude. Charlene made fun of my own European line, remembered she'd known me as a stammering junior lecturer before I became a master and professor who now spoke about my own European line. She added up my sacrifices: I wore pure cotton shirts instead of T-shirts, I slept under uncomfortably hot down, I drank bitter coffee without sugar, I forced myself to read Lacan and to stay thin like a French intellectual. Only too happy to add it to the list, I talked about the sole publication devoted to art, which was going downhill, and about the despicable acts its editor would agree to in order to have Bruno write something for it, which he promised to do by making Charlene a star.

At coffee time, he became gloomy. Even with his blessing, he said, Charlene would go nowhere. She should have gone to live elsewhere, though in any case elsewheres welcome only the Jérémie Wellses, because there is a destiny in art that irrevocably crosses borders and is the only thing that counts. “This is the era of the cold, the calculated, the universal, there is no reason to shy away from it.” And that was why, if he were to add a zest of Montreal to his papers once he was back in Bracciano, he would say something fairly elliptical so as to sound positive about Jérémie Wells. “You'll frame the article and use it as a dart board or a conceptual piece.” His job was to predict the direction art would take in future, he was a meteorologist, it earned him a superb living and enabled him to travel. He would sometimes encounter a jewel among the
frauds and celebrate that, but he never went against the current.

We drank more wine, in silence, on the candlelit balcony. Across the street, a fat woman sat rocking in her chair. Bruno did not touch me, I could hear his slow breathing, a cat stretching, domesticated. “Quebec is a balcony on Cartier Street, Charlene, and we won't leave it.” I did not think I'd said it out loud. But she heard.

I slept with Bruno for the rest of the night, under my mother's roof. She had set three places for breakfast.

From that day I became François Dubeau, master of the balcony. I left the sole publication devoted to art and started
Parallèle.
The correspondence with Farinacci-Lepore brought both grants and the friendship of the young art historians who were beginning to take over the museums, and also the international influence that sells two or three copies to Quebeckers passing through the bookstore in the Musée d'art moderne in Paris. We never had as many as five hundred readers but we claimed two thousand, counting unsold copies and those sent free to government bureaucrats, journalists, and our counterparts around the world. I edited it for five years, then turned it over to a submissive assistant who was better at public relations.

It gave me pleasure, Vitalie. What I told you about that world was too often only the ridiculous, the petty, the pathetic. But that can be enjoyable when one has come up from insignificance. In art there is a clearing, a picnic ground between the birches, where young people lunch
sur l'herbe,
stripping themselves bare, while their parents go back to work again on Mondays, and all around them the city rumbles, consuming the last of their childhood friends who populate the suburbs. Gaining entry to that clearing, drinking there the sour wine of vernissages and sharing the tables at which freedom is being drawn, means entering into fear. Fear of losing oneself again, of losing everything, of finding oneself at noon ‘wearing a necktie, crossing the esplanade of Place Ville-Marie, of being wary of pigeons, of going to a place where nothing happens.

Then the young people close the pen behind them, they plant pickets, defend themselves against newcomers, and attach themselves to the master who is able to alleviate their great fear.

I played the part, taking as my model Bruno, who had guided me to the clearing. I took my first male lover openly in the village of Les Éboulements, below an inn, the Auberge des Aïeux, where the first Symposium de la jeune sculpture was being held during raspberry season, above the St. Lawrence. I had agreed to chair it during the summer vacation, to re-create a little of Sarzanello. There was the same slope down to the sea and the same cows in the meadow, as well as a steeply inclined street where a blacksmith for tourists stood in for the goose-boy. The inn had not yet been enlarged
into motels, the rooms were cells and each two shared a tiny bathroom. Jean-Pierre Daigle entered one naked just as I was getting into the shower, he apologized for not having heard me, he was slim and brown and smiling, with eyes that drill into the groin as they focus there unabashedly. I didn't move. But late that afternoon I stopped close to him, he was working at the southern edge of the property, just above the thin forest that went down to Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive. He was starting work on a steel-and-wood latticework whose foundations were enough to imprison you. I dropped my hand onto his shoulder as I questioned him. He was wearing a thin tank-top and my finger ran under the strap, two or perhaps three of his friends noticed, they slowed down their work I think, the sound of files and sanders seemed to me to diminish. We climbed up the entire site standing very close to one another, then we went and played in a bedroom where the sun, still high, did not enter. I opened the window, he leaned out, standing with his back to me, I hoped his panting could be heard down on the terrace where the artists were beginning to gather for the daily discussion. His sculptor's hands were not yet callused, he tasted of summer and wood and steel, he was the furthest thing from a virgin and he used those hands particularly well. I allowed myself to be venerated, nothing is easier once you're naked and consenting.