Gasoline (11 page)

“Video also fascinated him. He had seen a video camera at the Barcelona Institut de Teatre. Here, though, it was being used in a much freer way. Video’s the art of the future, he had declared in a letter to his parents, by way of justifying his third year in New York with his interest in this new medium. Through specialized journals he kept track of the activities of the foremost American video artists. At the end of his third year (now he was making his living as a busboy in a Soho bar), he decided he would just stay and, with the help of a lawyer friend of a friend, he initiated the process of getting permanent residency. At the same time, after all the qualms of those years, he began to paint again and, even more to the point, to paint on canvas. For two years he painted and painted every morning, and on Sundays from sunrise to sunset, before going in to work at the restaurant (the fifth year he had advanced to being a waiter in TriBeCa, which led him to believe that if he continued along this path, working in restaurants farther and farther south in the city, the following year he would be working at the World Trade Center, the year after that he’d sink into the estuary, and the year after that he’d surface in Staten Island
. . .
). When the Mary Boone boom took off and everyone started talking about New Expressionism (or new wave, or new image, or maximalism
. . .
), Humbert saw that he had not been mistaken in returning to the canvas. He studied the work of those artists. Schnabel seemed perfectly mediocre to him, a total bluff. And the rest of the pack were just more of the same
. . .
He feverishly devoured the articles on postmodernism that appeared in the city magazines and newspapers
. . .
He took notes. He made lists in order to derive needed constants. He knew he had to be patient. He thought: ‘It was logical for the canvas to have made a comeback.’ Wary of futile optimism, though, he knew that the return to the canvas must be undertaken with prudence, mindful of the advances achieved in other mediums. That was why he had begun to work again with all kinds of materials and diverse techniques, even when they seemed to contradict one another. He used fabric, wood, photographs, videotapes, cassettes. For the first time he tried his hand at sculpture. And once in a while, out of nostalgia, he would do a photocopy. Even though he had been told time and time again that using all those mediums, so different from one another, would seem tasteless and lacking in style, Humbert defended himself from such accusations by declaring that it was precisely that lack of style that constituted his personal style. How agents had loved to reject him! They had criticized him with the same ferocity with which now they were hitting themselves in the head for not having had the insight to see that in that ‘garish clutter’—as one gallery owner had dismissed his entire oeuvre—was the key to his style. How blind they had been! Impetuous, unprejudiced, pragmatic, and with a keen nose for the new, Humbert Herrera had sensed that an artistic moment in which—among many other trends—Jack Goldstein of the Metro Pictures gallery could get away with barefaced plagiarism, and take pride in it, was not only an interesting moment artistically, but also one in which things could happen. In Italy, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Sandro Chia were emerging. In Germany, Rainer Fetting, Anselm Kiefer, Helmut Middendorf
. . .
”

•

What Humbert did not tell the reporter was that when Heribert Julià had burst onto the scene a few months later, establishing himself as the new star, breaking with and going beyond all those trends without belonging to any of the in-groups, he had decided to dig a bit deeper. The fact that Julià was also from Barcelona—though he had remained aloof from the so-called Catalan colony and had been an American citizen for many years—could only work to his advantage. Helena Sorrenti seemed to hold the key to the situation. Not only did she run the gallery that had launched Julià and established his dominance, she also seemed to be his wife. At the restaurant where he worked, Humbert asked to work only the lunch shift for a month. He followed her. He studied her habits. Sometimes she had dinner at The Odeon. Sometimes at Les Pléiades or Ballato. Once in a great while at Da Silvano. Every Tuesday, though, she had dinner alone in a plain old Blarney Stone, always the same one. That bit of simplicity touched Humbert to the core!

On the fourth Tuesday, he made up his mind. That morning he withdrew all his savings—a pittance—from the bank. At noon he swept his studio, dusted, put fresh sheets on the bed, and lined all his paintings up against the walls. That afternoon he showered, shaved, put on a clean shirt, a jacket, and tennis shoes. That evening, as he walked toward the Blarney Stone, he couldn’t stop thinking that maybe that night he wouldn’t be going home alone. Outside the restaurant, he stopped for a moment to work up his courage: he opened the door, crossed the room with determination, and sat down at the table where Helena Sorrenti was sitting, all by herself. He introduced himself, still not entirely sure she wouldn’t call the waiters over to send him packing, a possibility she did indeed entertain for a few seconds.

He
looks at his feet and finds them to his liking. He wiggles his toes a little. Satisfied with the effect, he picks up a little notebook (which he always carried with him to jot down ideas he will later copy over into the big notebooks) and writes: “My feet. Self-portrait.”

Helena was doing laps.

“I don’t know why we’ve bothered to come here when we haven’t been to the beach once.”

To the beach
. . .
But what if, suddenly, all the muses descended upon him and he is so far away from the studio that by the time he gets back they’ve all fled? The mere thought of such a possibility sets his nerves on edge. What if his greatest insights slipped away because he didn’t write them down fast enough? Or, even worse, if he is too slow to realize that the fleeting image in his brain is a stroke of genius? How many ideas must fail to materialize, hidden behind layers of veils, not quite able to penetrate his consciousness? What if everything he was able to portray was nothing more than the shadow of the residue of the great ideas that had died in his unconscious? Perhaps he should consult a psychoanalyst who would help him reach the inner world that was lost to him. What about the seconds in which he wasn’t thinking? Aren’t they, in effect, wasted seconds? Perhaps it is precisely during those seconds that the perfect notion, the greatest he could ever produce, may emerge? And all that thinking, about ideas and images
. . .
Why think? Each second lost in thought is irretrievable. If, instead of lying there, he were face-to-face with a canvas, he wouldn’t have to rationalize at all: the only thing he would have to do would be to allow the image in his brain to secrete its fluid down his arm which, by means of the hand, would transfer it to the canvas, without rationalization, alive, passionately
. . .

He leaps to his feet. He goes to the bungalow he’s using as a study, next door to the one they are staying in. He drops his sunglasses on the table and finishes a painting he had started the day before, full of people pursuing one another or running around in every direction. He starts a new one: one man strikes another in the stomach and despite the blood that flows from his navel, the victim is laughing.

He finishes the painting, signs it, washes his hands, calls Xano. What a waste of time to have to dial so many numbers. Xano isn’t in the hotel. He isn’t at the gallery either. Humbert leaves a message. He goes to the pool and has a swim. Helena, who is sunbathing, joins him. Under the whitish-blue water, they play tag. One of those Mexican swimmers, who risk their lives diving into the water from the dizzyingly high cliffs of Acapulco, reaches the pool through a secret tunnel and drags Helena along the ground as she laughs, offering herself to him and resisting him at the same time, arousing him. He wonders: should he get out of the pool and write the idea down, or let the idea run its course. He decides to take a chance. He goes over to Helena and whispers:

“I was imagining you were with one of those Mexican swimmers who dive into the water from the dizzyingly high cliffs of Acapulco
. . .
”

When they are done, Helena goes off to shower and dress. Humbert stretches out on the grass surrounding the pool. He dreams a dream that’s very similar to another he had had recently: it was so simple to fly, you only had to know how to make a certain motion while holding your arms bent, as if they were wings, and move them with the necessary precision.

The sound of the horn of the car that has come to pick them up awakens him. He gets up quickly, showers, and puts on his contact lenses. Every time he does this he remembers those green glasses that had made such an impression in the press at the time of his discovery. Had sticking them on one of the paintings he had done this fall, which would be seen in the Chicago show later this month, been too impulsive?

“Hurry up. They’re here to pick us up.”

As he put his clothes in two small carry-ons, an idea occurs to him: a woman wearing a raincoat and a skirt is going quickly down a flight of stairs, looking over her shoulder in distress. At the top of the stairs appear the shoes and cuffs of a man’s trousers. He takes the small pad from his pocket and makes a note of it.

Back in the bungalow he used as a studio, he sticks the notebooks into another tote bag.

“Tell them to be careful when they move the paintings.”

They get into the car. They shut the doors with a sharp click. They take off. Humbert is afraid that the painting of the woman going down the stairs will slip away from him. He should have stayed behind and painted it that same afternoon. Everything had its own precise moment of realization
. . .

•

Waiting for their luggage, all the passengers raised the collars of their overcoats and put on their woolen hats. A child is sleeping soundly in the arms of a man in a shirt and tie, with a small carry-on bag, his raincoat folded over his arm. Two Germans are looking at each other and complaining about the cold. A married couple and a twenty-year-old girl are trying their best to speak French to two French girls who don’t speak a word of English, even though they are getting in from a month in Toronto. A Santa Claus is picking up his suitcase.

As they go by the enormous cemetery that stretches out on either side of the highway, Humbert thinks he sees a figure draped in white wandering among the tombstones. He makes a note of it in his pocket notebook. He is quite pleased with the previous note he made as they approached the city: “The city, by night, as seen from the air: millions of tiny white, blue, and yellow dots.”

Back home, exhausted, they leave their suitcases unopened and get into bed. All at once they are very tired. They fall asleep in each others’ arms, and Humbert dreams that he slips from Helena’s embrace to go to the house where she had formerly lived with Heribert; this is a duty he has always avoided, though he knows he will have to face it some day. This is the moment, then, and (no longer able to put it off) he is finally on his way. There is something he has to look for (he doesn’t quite know what), and he rings the doorbell (not knowing if Heribert still lives there, or if someone else does, or if no one does). When Heribert himself finally opens the door, Humbert asks himself what he would have done if no one had lived there, as he certainly doesn’t have the keys. Heribert is a ghostly presence, almost immobile, who smiles at him from the threshold. Humbert is tense; he can’t stand Heribert looking at him that way, his mouth in a sarcastic curve, as he had always looked at him since their first meeting. He thinks: “I ought to get rid of him, once and for all.” But killing him seemed too awkward, though not half as awkward as he knew it must be in reality. Then he goes out into the inner courtyard of a country house with fig trees in the back, and then into a wheat field, where he runs around amid the tall wheat which is just about ready to be harvested, sticking his head out from time to time to see the bell tower of the town church, gloomy as a blockhouse.

•

“What I’m most interested in (and this is nothing new; what I mean is that it’s one of the mainstays of my discourse), what I’m most interested in, as I was saying, is the interrelationship between mediums. What I’d most like to do in this exhibition, you know, where I’m working, above all, in two different mediums (a photographic foundation and paint—and, in this regard, I’d like to stress that it’s been interesting for me to get back to oils, even if only to cast the contrast between such diverse techniques in starker relief) is to confront each work with total honesty, stripped of all prior notions, to discover that it is the work itself which has been carrying out its own process. I think this is important. Because what’s the point, unless the work itself is taking you where
it
wants to go, what’s the point, unless you are nothing more than the
. . .
the
. . .
high priest
of
. . .
well, the instrument of its creation. A play of opposing shades has taken place (I wouldn’t speak of light in this series: I would speak of shades, shades and color), opposed, but reconciled. Shades and textures. Think of the June exhibition, in São Paulo. Oh. That’s right, you weren’t able to go. Well, so, in that show what I was most interested in, what occupied my space, and my interest, was the background, and the backgrounds. They were the protagonists. Even unfinished, they were the center of my attention. I was interested in their being unfinished. Because even now, in the kind of painting we can say needs no justification, there is an excess of reality. Yes, yes; just think about it. This excess of reality, this
reification of the excess of reality
, holds no interest for me. No interest because it’s a step backwards and, at this stage in my artistic discourse, I can’t afford to take a step backward. I must go forward, continue forward however I can, because if I stop for a second, bam!, the machinery of the discourse breaks down; and I find myself at an interesting juncture now. You know what? What I’m working on now
. . .
Well, not working just yet, but considering working on, is iron plates, because what matters most to me is the support of the work: I’ve worked on paper, on canvas, on wood, on cardboard, on walls, on plastic, on photographic support (for the Chicago show), and now I’m interested in working on metal: on iron, on steel
. . .
Because I’m interested in the dialectic between one medium and another, between the media. Some time ago (before the trip to Jamaica), I thought of working out a dream sequence, on iron. Just imagine it: dreams, the most ephemeral thing in the world, worked out in such a hard medium
. . .
This is why I take such an interest in recording my dreams on tape as soon as I wake up, so they won’t slip away from me. I’d like to be able to retain them all, written or on tape, filed away. Can you imagine being able to keep a record of all the dreams of your lifetime? It would be like a parallel life. A parallel life that would explain the other life to us. Since we always forget some of them, there’s no way to know whether we’d have the key to something if we could remember
absolutely all of them
. Want some jam?”

“No.”

“I also get holistic ideas from them, unconscious reflections on the work I’m doing.”

“What have you gathered from today’s?”

“Nothing, yet.”

“It’s not good to tell people your dreams. Then everything is out there. I never tell mine to anyone. Just like certain peoples of Africa, who think you are stealing their soul if you photograph them
. . .
”

“More coffee?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s easy to tell when what you’re saying is revealing more than it appears to; I don’t know if I’m being clear
. . .
”

“No it isn’t. I learned that Heribert was going out with another woman precisely because of a dream he told me, and he told it to me without realizing exactly what he was saying. And it’s not the first time this has happened to me.”

“He was seeing someone else?”

“He was going out with a woman I knew because she was the friend of a friend: Hildegarda, Marino DelNonno’s wife. I imagine he went out with other women, too. Before or after her, or before and after her. But I found out about this one from the dream; I think she must have been the one he was most involved with. Mmm. No sugar in the sugar bowl.”

“I’ll go get you some.”

“Not for me, for you. You poured yourself another cup of coffee. I don’t take sugar in my coffee, remember?”

“Of course I remember. I don’t know what made me think you might want some now. I’m going to get to work.”

“Give me a kiss.”

•

In the afternoon, Humbert looks over the newspapers. He considers the space they devote to city politics excessive. He reads an article about the alarming spread of herpes, an article on Policarpo Paz García, an article on Fats Waller, an article on unhappiness. He comes across an interesting piece of news: a week before, a man had become a millionaire by playing the lottery. As soon as he collected the money, and before spending a cent on anything else, he went to a casino and bet the lot of it, right down to the last penny. “Surprisingly,” the paper says, “he won and multiplied his millions in such a way as to become one of the most notable multi-millionaires not only in the city, but in the entire country.” Humbert sees a very clear moral to the story: you should never be satisfied with what you have achieved. He also finds the word “surprisingly” out of place: “A thing could happen. If it did happen, that means it could. If it could, then, there was nothing surprising about it.”

He also reads a review of the Nina Hagen concert and looks for quite a while at a photo of Cherry Vanilla, who performed at the Ritz. He looks closely at an ad for the Mudd Club. Turning the pages, he comes across the ad for the Metropolitan Opera. Marino DelNonno was singing
Madame Butterfly.
It’s been ages since he’s been to the opera
. . .
The music has never meant a thing to him, and he finds the libretti ridiculous, but he loves the sets. He calls to see if there are seats for that evening. There are.

Helena is in the living room, reading a book with illustrations by Folon: into a building that is nothing more than a windowless cube, a stream of men is entering through one door and leaving through the other, going on to enter another, similar building, and once again leave it, and once again enter another
. . .