All the Lights (13 page)

‘Father,’ he says, ‘why haven’t we got a house by the sea?’

‘What would we want with the sea, son? What do you want with the sea?’

He knows his father is scared for him; all he does now is paint, paint and draw, and although he still eats the fruit and he still likes the taste his father knows something’s changed. ‘If you want,’ says his father, ‘if you absolutely have to go to the sea …’

But his father doesn’t take him to the sea, doesn’t buy a house there either although that would have been an easy matter for him; business is going well. His father takes him to the art school, introduces him, his father has connections; business is going well. And Johannes Vettermann, seventeen years of age, stands facing the professors flicking through the portfolio of his drawings and pictures, and he sees gigantic insects above their heads. His father barricades him into a little room at the warehouse for a week, only fruit and steaks from the meat wholesaler next door. The foremen kept an eye out to make sure he didn’t run away, didn’t run to his painted walls where the women and men want to dance with him. So he danced on his own, in bed at night, there’s always
something
and
somebody
there, and he heard them, the workers and the flies. And he imagined what it must be like to live in the sea.

‘You have extraordinary talent, Mr Vettermann.’

‘But you must bear in mind that it won’t be easy.’

‘And you’d be the youngest student at the academy.’

‘But we have to be certain you’re prepared to adapt a little here, after that school business …’

‘I am prepared to,’ says Johannes Vettermann; their heads are peaches and apples and over-ripe pears. On one of the pictures lying on the table in front of the professors is a man holding a huge, brown mosquito in one hand and plunging the insect’s long sting into his arm, laughing, but his eyes are so vacant and white that the laugh is no longer a laugh.

‘I want to join the family business, father, I want to earn money.’

‘What about your pictures?’

‘There are no more pictures in art now, father.’

And Johannes Vettermann, twenty-two years of age, first-class student at the academy, stands up on the bridge, below him the crates and the fruit and the workers, it’s night, and the nights pass, and Capt’n Johnny sees all the colours, sees the fruit flowing, hears the workers and the trucks humming, it all disappears in his head and he doesn’t let it out any more – ‘There are no more pictures in art now, father.’

Some nights he thinks of picking up the brightly coloured fruit and putting it together, Mrs Apple and Mr Pear enjoying their evening off on a little wooden bench, and Mrs Pear wishing for nothing more than a particularly virile banana floating half-peeled above her, held by invisible threads. ‘Johnny Vettermann, the wholesale fruit artist, supplies the best and freshest and sweetest installations!’

But who cares about what’s been done before? Some nights on the bridge, the fruit flowing and the work humming below him, he still dreams of his apples and pears, bananas and peaches in New York and Paris, but then he thinks that it’s action that counts.

And Johannes Vettermann lies naked on the load bed of a truck, parked outside a gallery whose owner he knows from art school, in the middle of one of the town’s widest streets. He presses his face against the wood and can still smell the fruit and hears the slap of the whip, but he hardly feels the lashes, and later he looks in the mirror in surprise at his back, now scored with red welts. If he turns his head slightly he can make out the woman with the enraged face standing above him spread-legged, black leather and white fishnet stockings and her lovely skin. He hears cars beeping, voices, now and then calls; action, he thinks and presses his face back against the wood. And later, when the police turn up, he’s happy.

The telephone rings. It rings and rings, and then it’s silent for a moment, and then it rings again. Johannes Vettermann is sitting on a kind of podium on the pavement outside the gallery, speakers attached to his clothes, and he feels them vibrating; he’s not listening to the voice any more, it’s been saying the same sentences over and over for thirty or forty minutes but he’s not sure about that, it might be over an hour now. All he sees is darkness; he’s wearing two large eye patches that cover half his face. A slow and monotonous male voice,
his
voice, coming out of the speakers. He recited a couple of lines by an electronic band he likes listening to onto tape, and they’ve been playing in an endless loop along with a couple of recordings from the charity fair he and his father organised on the grounds of the wholesale fruit market. ‘We’re standing around and exhibiting ourselves. We’re the shop-window dummies. We’re the shop-window dummies. We’re being watched and we’re feeling our pulse. We’re the shop-window dummies. We’re looking around and we know it’s a pose …’ And the telephone rings and rings, ‘Number thirteen please, who’s got number thirteen, and the drum goes round and round, buy your raffle tickets, ladies and gentlemen.’ And Johannes Vettermann, thirty-five years of age, is standing in amidst the brightly coloured people at the charity fair, he sees the children waving on the little wooden horses, it seems as if they were waving at him, and he clutches his tape recorder to his chest and sweats and he’s scared. ‘We’re the shop-window dummies … We move around and we break the glass. We step outside and we walk round the town.’ And Johannes Vettermann feels the monotonous voice on his body, and he imagines the crush of people staring and the police arriving, and he waits there in the dark behind the eye patches, and
something
and
someone
waits there with him. He feels as if strapped to the chair, isn’t he strapped in, his feet and his shoulders? He lies still and can’t move, but he doesn’t want to get upset, he admitted himself voluntarily – ‘Help me, please help me’ – and he knows the flies and spiders and bugs will come to him; they love his sweat. He’s never understood why insects are so crazy about opiates. He had a plate of heroin dregs in his flat. Flies and ants and spiders perched on the plate and around the plate. He feels the vibrations of the speakers on his body, the telephone still ringing in the background, everything arranged, voices and rings and a man who can only see the darkness. There are no more pictures in art now, father.

No one knows he’s lying up here, twenty-seventh floor. Perhaps it’s reception, room service or the hotel manager himself. Johannes Vettermann crawls slowly, one eye opened slightly, but everything around him is blurred and unfocused. All he knows is that he has to crawl towards the ringing. How often has he thought he was going to die, knew it and waited for it? But he survived every time. The good healthy fruit, he thinks, all the vitamins protected me all those years. And suddenly he’s very warm, although he was freezing and shivering a moment ago, and he feels as if the hundreds and thousands of peaches, apples, bananas and kiwis he’s eaten ever since he could eat, so for almost fifty years (and he ate them puréed too when he was a wee thing with no teeth), he feels as if now they were warming him and protecting him; their concentrate, or their souls, he thinks with a smile, he feels himself smiling, their souls are still inside him, and when one day in many years he’s rotting in the ground the worms will come across a man made of vitamins, and they’ll live a very healthy life down under the ground with him. Johannes Vettermann crawls across the five-star suite, he’s crawled across so many five-star suites in his time, he’s lain on the floor or in the bathtub, with water or without, he’s looked out of the window, walls of glass, New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Mexico City. 1989 brought big money. Bananas and kiwis and oranges for the East. They had to buy new trucks to take the fruit to all the new places. We supplied the whole of the East, he thinks and now he feels that the telephone must be very near by, even though he can barely feel anything now and the ringing has stopped. It’s perfectly silent in his suite; he doesn’t even hear his own breathing.

‘We’re rich, Johannes.’

‘Haven’t we always been rich, father?’

‘If you want to buy that house by the sea now, a villa for two million, we’ll still have more than enough.’ His father, who had started out over fifty years ago with a weekly market stall, is happy, standing with his son Johannes Vettermann, who hasn’t painted a picture for over fifteen years, up on the bridge of the wholesale fruit market, and they watch the fruit flowing and they both laugh very loudly at the great flow of cash, holding each other by the shoulders. But Johannes Vettermann doesn’t buy a house by the sea or a villa either. Johannes Vettermann buys pictures; suddenly he sees that there are pictures in art again, even if they’re not his pictures. He buys pictures, pictures he doesn’t understand at first, which he stands in front of and looks at for so long that he feels, it’s coming to get me now.

And then Johannes Vettermann buys pictures, photographs, sculptures, installations; travels the world, dines out with artists in the finest restaurants, attends art auctions in tailor-made suits – ‘Sculpture “Bunny”… going once … going twice … does anyone bid more than number thirteen, the gentleman in the blue suit … and sold, “Bunny” goes to number thirteen for …’ – and Johannes Vettermann sits in his spacious home, surrounded by pictures and photographs, and looks at ‘Bunny’, a white female torso sitting on a chair, no head, one long thin arm that looks very dead hanging down at the side of the chair, and her legs are as long and thin as locust legs. Two bent over, white sausages in the place where her head ought to be, bunny’s ears, protruding behind the back of the chair like the handless arms of a strange puppeteer,
someone
and
something
, thinks Johannes Vettermann and strokes Bunny’s black fishnet stockings on her thin legs. He sits with the woman who created her in a hotel room, wearing a vest and sweating and sweating and he feels the irregular beat of his heart. First he injected something to come up, a party, a reception and lots of people and lots of art, then he took something to come down, to find some kind of calm again, a long signal and a short one, no good for your ticker, it can be all over like a shot, that’s how the film maker died who he admired so much, over ten years ago now. She’s sitting by him on the bed, fully dressed, he puts his arm around her and presses his head against her shoulder, and she talks to him in a quiet voice, as if to a little child. ‘All right, Johnny, it’s all right.’

He had a girlfriend, he met her in Italy. He’s a well-known art collector now, he’s well-known for discovering young talents, and sometimes he wonders whether he’d have bought his own pictures, the ones he painted when he was young. ‘You have extraordinary talent, Mr Vettermann.’ He strokes Bunny and wonders whether he loved her, his Italian girlfriend, wonders whether he’s ever loved anyone. He doesn’t have children. He thinks of the sculpture of a pregnant woman he saw a few years ago. I have to meet the artist, he thought back then, and later he did meet him and bought other sculptures by him. The pregnant woman had one hand on her bump, one half of her body was grey, the other half exposed, without skin, so that you could see her yellowish skull, her muscle cords, the brownish tissue of her breast and the foetus and the umbilical cord inside her. Could I have had children? Could I have loved your mother, Bunny? He thinks of his mother; she died not long ago.

‘Johannes.’

‘Yes, mother?’

‘Promise me you won’t destroy yourself.’

‘I promise, mother. I want to sell a lot more fruit and buy a lot more art.’

Johannes Vettermann, fifty-one years of age, is lying in his suite on the twenty-seventh floor and he can tell he’s dying and he’s trying to reach the telephone; the doctors have brought him back a couple of times before. A long signal and a short one. He’s only creeping a centimetre at a time, although he knows he must be there any moment now. A long signal and a short one. He thinks of all the pictures he bought, of the celebrated exhibitions he put on with his collection, thinks of his own exhibitions in the past few years since he started painting again.

‘Slit-eyed Charlie was the end and the beginning, right, Johnny?’

‘Get out of here,’ he whispers.

‘The Vietcong is everywhere, right, Johnny?’

‘Leave me alone,’ he whispers, ‘or help me.’ He’s not scared, even though the man standing in front of him looks like he’s always imagined Mephisto. But this man is really his best friend, a painter he discovered and promoted and bought, and whom he once painted so that he looked like the devil himself.

‘Start again, Johnny, you have to paint, paint, Johnny. Art, only art you make yourself can save you.’ And Johannes Vettermann painted, even though he hadn’t picked up a brush for almost twenty years. And now his friend Mephisto, the man who wanted to save him, is standing in front of him, blocking the last fifty centimetres to the telephone and saying things about the Viets. ‘They were the end and the beginning, right, Johnny?’

And he’s right; a couple of years after 1989 the Vietnamese started taking over the fruit market. They brought the prices down but he and his father didn’t give up that quickly; they stood up on the bridge of the wholesale fruit market, swaying in the storm, gripping each other by the shoulders, and they were fearless and they knew they could be victorious, but the competition grew and grew – ‘Vietnamese, Johnny, as if they came from China’ – and the prices fell and fell, and Vettermann’s wholesale fruit market went bust, and his father, who’d started out with a weekly market stall over fifty years ago, turned into a broken old man, and they sat in banks and financial institutions and watched the red grow and grow. ‘The colours, Johnny, never forget the colours …’

‘And another painting from the Vettermann Collection, ladies and gentlemen, at a starting price of …’ Johannes Vettermann had paid far less for the picture. It’s his favourite picture and he sorely misses it. A man standing in a boat, fishing. The colours of the water and the sky are very pale, violet and blue, mist on the water, and the man stands dark like a shadow, and behind him on the banks the shadow of the forest. Neo-romantic, almost kitsch, Johannes Vettermann thought at first, but then after a while he was still standing in front of the picture and he began to feel the loneliness and the beauty.