Francis Bacon in Your Blood (12 page)

‘There were comic sides to it as well. We went away together on a boat once and I'd brought all these suits and things for the trip. And as soon as the boat left we had a row and Peter pushed the lot out of the porthole. I had absolutely nothing left, I just had to try and buy some shorts on board.

‘The whole trip was comic in a way. Looking back on it at least. Peter used to behave in such an extreme fashion. He was dead drunk the whole time and he used to go around with a very menacing look. People came up to me and said, “Who is that awful man you're with?”, and of course I had to say, “Well, I don't really know.” And all the stewards were queer, they always are on those boats, and that made the whole situation even more curious. But Peter was completely impossible. We tried to live
together for a while, in a place out in the Thames Valley where there's just one luxury pub after another. It didn't last, naturally. In the end, he left me. He fell for some boy and went to live in Tangier. When I knew him, he was really tough, tougher than me. But after he left and went to live in North Africa he lost that kind of toughness. I think it had something to do with the Arab men.

‘Of course, by that time, he was drinking three bottles of whisky a day, which nobody can take. This boy had left him and so on. In the end, I think his pancreas simply exploded. Anyway, he no longer wanted to see me. Of course. And well . . . I was very upset because I had been deeply fond of him. Outside of certain artists, I think he was the most remarkable man I've ever known. But he just left me and said he never wanted to see me again. He called one day, before going off to Tangier, and said, “From now on, consider me as dead.”

‘And then, much later, for some reason he sent me this telegram asking me to go out and stay with him in Tangier. It was all over between us, but like a fool I went. It turned into a real disaster. Peter wasn't there when I arrived. Of course. But there was this Arab boy, well it sounds mad, but he was sitting up in a fig tree in the courtyard and he asked me whether he could pick the figs. I said yes certainly he could. And in the end he climbed through the window and, well, he was terribly good-looking. Anyway, Peter came back just then, I'm afraid, and found us both in bed and he got so absolutely mad, he went round and broke everything in the place. He became so impossible. Even though there was nothing between us any more. He broke everything. In the end, I had to go out and try and spend the night on the beach. I can see now that he was absolutely neurotic, even mad at times. He really killed himself with drink. He set out to do it, like a suicide.

‘And then the day that exhibition of mine opened at the Tate a couple of years ago, along with the other telegrams I got this one saying he had just died.'

5

Conversations at Night

No sooner do I get back to London than I find I'm obsessed, not by the mysterious alleyways of Tangier or Andalusia's Arab palaces, but by memories of the bright girls in the bars of Barcelona. The easy naturalness with which they ply their trade is unlike anything I've known and I can't get it out of my mind. It's not the actual commerce that draws me, since the idea of love for sale would put me off in all but the most desperate situations; I'm also vain enough to think that I don't need to pay for it, despite regular indications in my life that demand in this department is always going to be greater than supply. The lasting allure of Barcelona for me lies in the extraordinary freedom it seemed to convey, like an explosion of the senses, with sex, food and wine all on offer after a day spent swimming and taking in the sun on the beach. Then the laughing girls in their tight skirts slit up the sides and stiletto heels tottering from dance floor to bar and to bed in a kind of continuous homage to pleasure. They called me ‘
el inglés
' and ‘
el rubio
', which have an agreeably mythical ring, and one of them, on the mere basis of a gin-tonic and a quick trot on the dance floor, introduced me to all the other revellers as ‘
mi hombre
', which would have rung alarming marriage bells in English but sounded heroic in Spanish. It's as though there's a big party going on, with all the excitement you can handle, and you only have to go back
there to join in. Thinking over our trip as I try to get to sleep at night, it's not the admirable balance of France nor the exotic foreignness of Morocco that attracts me. It's the romance of Spain, where love and death seem so closely intertwined.

Now that we're back in London, we've all stuck together, my old friends from Cambridge and me, and we've decided to rent a basement flat on Tregunter Road in Chelsea. It's been let to us by a mannish woman who lives with her mother in the big house above and who calls all of us ‘guffins', which we take to be her own, fairly affectionate way of saying we are nincompoops. We move in and create the same comfortable, careless chaos we lived in at University, which comes back to haunt us when Pete leaves a pot of honey spilling slowly but surely over all our treasured 78 records. He and Magnus already have jobs whereas I seem impervious to the odd offer that comes along and reluctant to get myself started on the first rung of whatever ladder I'm meant to be climbing. I go on doing my exhibition reviews but my heart is no longer in it, and any notion of securing a more permanent position as junior art critic on the
Observer
falls conveniently away. I scribble down disjointed thoughts, maxims, scraps of poetry and exhortations to myself to get up earlier, be more disciplined, write something worthwhile, and I fail on all counts. Deep down there's only one thing that I really long for, and that is to return to Spain for a whole year.

Once I knew what I wanted, I felt I knew who I was, and from late mornings spent at the launderette or wandering among the graves in Brompton Cemetery, I am fully focused on finding a job, not in the Smoke but in the land where the cicada sings, although pinning something down in Barcelona is proving tricky. There is however an Oxford Institute of English in Gijón, right the other side of Spain on the Asturian coast, that has shown interest in my willingness to teach, and since I'm pretty sure I can use it as a stepping stone to Barcelona I snap the offer up. Things begin badly enough on the first evening I arrive. I come down for the evening meal at the cheap local
pensión
and polish off the
whole litre of strong ‘black' wine that's been left provocatively on the table, and when the grinning waiter asks me if I want another I order one more, as if I've got something to prove, then spend the rest of the night in a sleepless stupor. The man running the Institute is a former British navy officer who's joined some mysterious religious order but who's kind and tolerant. His best friend in Gijón runs a maritime insurance agency who impresses me because he was tortured by the Japanese in the war and had all his fingernails pulled out one by one. While teaching I acquire a girlfriend, clearly intent on marriage, with whom I go for stately walks, accompanied by her aunt, through the quiet little town to the port. I've found a room with an elderly couple who make wicker baskets for a living and every evening before dinner we raise a toast ‘To Churchill', but my Spanish is still too feeble to take the conversation much further. I miss my friends and I miss the evenings out on the town with Bacon, with whom I feel a tenuous link because my mother is sending me a weekly allowance just as his mother did when he was in Berlin and Paris (that was in the 1920s, and I somehow feel his allowance must have stretched further than mine appears to be doing). I'm plotting my next move and when the man from the shipping insurance says he can get me a paid berth as third mate on a coal steamer going all the way round the coast to Ceuta and then up to Barcelona I jump at it.

Edging round the whole Spanish coast on this slow old bulker takes a couple of weeks, which I while away by reading an English dictionary, the only book on board, from cover to cover and comparing my much admired Zippo lighter with those of the other crew members when we gather for lunch at 10am and dinner at 5pm, both meals usually centring round salt cod and a dessert made of Carnation milk, followed by unlimited contraband cigarettes and Torres brandy. When we drop anchor in Barcelona harbour, I and my luggage are rowed ashore by a sturdy cabin boy, who insists on carrying my bags until we arrive at the foot of the Ramblas. I stand there alone for
a while, savouring the moment, too excited to regret that I am not wearing a white linen suit with a Panama, and convinced in my bones that a major page in my life is just about to turn.

Day after day crisscrossing the
barrio gótico
until I know it by heart and gazing at the street girls and the bar girls until I've had my fill has left me no further forward in my grand plan to make Barcelona the new hub of my life. The narrow medieval streets with their palaces and churches are all powerfully evocative, and while the girls plying their trade there seem considerably less attractive than those I remember, I enjoy the sense of licence they give to daily life. I've rented a small hotel room by the week and identified the best cheap restaurants around the huge food market. The area is full of elderly beggars with terrible loss of limb and other injuries caused during the Civil War. There's a café I pass every day that's full of people gesticulating wildly, which I avoid because I imagine the noise inside must be overwhelming. Then I go in one afternoon out of curiosity and am astonished to find it's completely silent because the city's deaf-mutes all congregate here to communicate in sign language.

Since I have no paid work to do, however, I soon find I can barely make ends meet. I also feel I'm not going anywhere or meeting anybody. I occasionally get into conversation with tourists, but I avoid it because I am determined to transcend my current status as
el inglés
and merge with the city as seamlessly as possible. Meanwhile I am finding my exalted solitude increasingly oppressive and decide to play the one potential trump card I hold. Before I left England, the mother of a friend told me that a young Spanish poet had boarded with them while he was studying at Oxford some ten years earlier and that they had stayed in touch ever since. She had written to him to say I'd be arriving at some point in Barcelona and to me she had given an imposingly enigmatic address where I could contact him: Sr Don Jaime Gil de Biedma, c/o Compañia General de Tabacos de Filipinas, Las Ramblas 109, Barcelona. Having agonized for
hours over whether to address him as Dear Señor Don Gil de Biedma or Dear Señor Gil de Biedma, I opt for Dear Don Jaime, which seems both grander and more intimate, despite a slightly worrying Mafia overtone, and I take my letter round directly to this august personage, leaving it with the receptionist in the foyer of his office building where the air conditioning feels icy cold after the afternoon heat lying heavily on the Ramblas outside.

‘Don Jaime' is back in touch the next day, suggesting lunch over the weekend. As soon as we meet, I can see there is nothing sinister or particularly grand about him. He is on the small side, compact and powerfully built, with well-defined, sensual features. What surprises me is just how fluent his English is and how well he knows modern English poetry, particularly Auden and Eliot, whose
Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
he has translated into Spanish. We go on talking, drinking and smoking until early evening, and I'm entranced, tucking away certain phrases of his that strike me as particularly witty. When he tells me that he first thought he wanted to be a poet then realized that deep down he wanted to be a poem, I know I want to go on seeing him. Later, since Jaime's invited me to go with him to have drinks with his friends at a bar called El Cristal uptown, I tag along and in one evening I meet most of the people who are going to transform my stay in Spain: the publisher Carlos Barral, the novelist Juan Marsé and the Catalan poet Gabriel Ferrater. By the time I weave my way back through the dark streets, where people are calling out ‘
¡Sereno!
' for the night watchman to come and open their front doors, I have the promise through my new friends of finding a bigger, better room to live in and a paid job as reader of English, French and German novels for Seix Barral, Carlos's publishing house.

I see Jaime at least a couple of times a week from then on, usually for dinner and a trawl round the Barcelona bars. We talk about all kinds of books and he gives me a copy of Borges's
Ficciones
which, quite apart from amazing me by their brilliance, are written in such limpid prose that my Spanish takes a noticeable
leap forward. Juan Marsé is often with us. He looks pugnacious and I notice the girls in the bars treat him with respect. I read Juan's
Últimas tardes con Teresa
, which takes me further into the grittiness of Barcelona life. On one occasion in the spring, with Jaime's friend Luis Marquesán, we all drive out of Barcelona for a feast in the Catalan countryside where there's a prize for the person who can eat the most
calçots
or spring onions, grilled alongside lamb cutlets over a wood fire and served with a fiery sauce. On the way there Jaime gets agitated in the car that Juan is driving, and when Juan asks him if he is
nervioso
, he replies with impressive aplomb: ‘
¡No, estoy nerviosa!
' This makes me laugh because it sounds so much like the queer banter I remember from Soho. I find Gabriel Ferrater very amusing, too, because he is always ready, not unlike Bacon, to push an argument or a situation to the limits. Although pale and cadaverous, he is a great trencherman, and he invites me with his American girlfriend to lunch out in Barceloneta. The lunch turns into a gargantuan feast whose highpoint is seafood paella served in a vast flat frying pan. As we finish the meal late in the afternoon, Gabriel asks me whether I have enjoyed it, and when I enthusiastically confirm I have, he summons the restaurant owner and orders the same extravagant menu for the three of us all over again.