Island of Demons (2 page)

The whole building was cool and practical – and very cheap. I had not made much money but had learned to value physical comfort, judiciously purchased. Any fool can be uncomfortable, as my friend Walter used to say to excuse some new extravagance. Around us, tinkled water and ponds, the remains of the ancient water palace, rehabilitated, planted with reeds and blue lotus. I had seen them on my first visit to the sacred springs at Tampaksiring and asked a delightful, bathing farmer their name. I knew them, of course, as the ancient Buddhist symbol of the human striving for Enlightenment, the soul struggling up from the mud, through the murky water to the light it somehow knew, even from the seed, was there. As a fugitive from another, colder Enlightenment, I treasured them too. He had shrugged and grinned. “Don't know their proper name,” and towelled off unselfconsciously a barbarous magnificence of genitals, “but I grow them for the pigs. They love 'em. Just gobble 'em right down.”

“… the centre of it all was Walter Spies,” he was saying.

“Mmm?”

He finally took a swig of the Coca-Cola and grimaced – made what Walter called a
schiefes Gesicht
, a “crooked face”.

“Warm.” Then said again the name. “Spies.” He spoke louder, obviously assuming I was deaf, as if the distraction of boredom were the exclusive privilege of youth. “It's time to lay the ghost of Walter Spies.”

Yes. I had thought it would end up there. One way or another, it always came down to dear Walter. And being laid, as a ghost, now
that
would have amused him greatly. Walter had never outgrown the very worst schoolboy humour.

***

I too was young at the time. I know that is no excuse and these days, in my dotage, youth itself seems to demand its own extenuating circumstances. Nevertheless, there it is. I was young and Walter was simply the most magical person I had ever met. There was a golden glow about him. It was always as if the sun were somehow behind him and his features were blurred by its radiance and there was a force of enthusiasm in him that knocked you down – like one of those big-pawed puppies that rushes at you, expecting your love, overwhelming you with its lapping tongue until all you can do is laugh and submit.

You must understand that I had been raised in grey, wool-stockinged Amsterdam, in a home of solid bourgeois comfort where God and his disapproval daily cast a long shadow. Only the presence of six brothers and sisters created a sufficient pool of anarchy to dent the obsessively regular existence of my parents. My father was a schoolteacher who had worked himself up to be a successful businessman so there were no foolish notions about the value of education for its own sake to be found lurking in that house. Mathematics was studied so you could keep accounts, literature so you could write a sound business letter. It was my misfortune to be attracted to art. To my father that signified poverty, vice – worse – impractical improvidence. My mother, learning of the reason that her son – one of her several sons – was crying himself to sleep at night, avoided confrontation but undermined him slowly with nocturnal whispers. She saw herself as artistic and had executed several fine works of embroidery in the English style. A compromise made my vocation acceptable. It was decided that I was to become a commercial artist. To my father this meant the acquisition of a sensible, useful skill where visual seduction would not exceed that of the corpulent ladies of a certain age to be sketched for the whaleboned corsetry advertisements. (In fact, the few of these ladies that I ever met were both immodest and rapacious women.) As I completed the course and filled my folder with loving depictions of shoes and hats, my mother began to whisper again and I found myself the assistant of an art dealer, Jacob Vorderman, a surprisingly coarse and unaesthetic man who constantly puffed cheroots. The shop was full of perfectly presentable Dutch paintings of cows and windmills and bowls of fruit but, in the back, he pursued a guilty passion for the crazier contemporaries – people like wobbly Kokotschka and poor mad Kandinsky. The walls of his upstairs apartments blazed with their deluded colours.

“What do you think of that?” he would ask, shoving a mass of Kandinsky polychrome spaghetti under my nose. He always wore patent leather evening shoes that crackled as he walked, like a man treading on hot coals.

“It shows a rudimentary sense of form and arrangement,” I opined in my self-righteous schoolboy voice, turning it this way and that. “But what is it? Art cannot be self-referential. It needs a subject. What
is
it?”

He laughed and snorted, coughed on his cheroot and firewalked away. “The future, lad.”

By now, a further string had been added to my bow. I had started to be offered scholarships and nothing was more tragic to my father than to refuse a proffered cheque. True, they were not large cheques but it was to him an overwhelming idea that I might be paid for doing – as my father saw it – absolutely nothing. All I needed now was to unworthily encourage his suspicions that the art dealer – a man whose thoughts were very far from God – was seeking to convert me to Judaism and I was finally released into the arms of the Muses.

Their embrace, alas, was less warm and more marmorial than I had expected. At the Keyserschool, over the next few years, the ensoured staff taught me to translate a work of art into the rules and techniques that underlay it, into a series of obstacles to be serially overcome. I imposed grids, balanced compositions, calculated perspective. I framed and counterposed. On free days, I crept through the galleries, hitherto closed to my eyes by parental disapproval, to coldly probe, according to instruction, the bosomy flesh of Rubens, the withered skin of Rembrandt, the feral teint of Breughel and reduce them to well-documented visual devices. Caravaggio, alone, moved me strangely. Who knows how long this would have continued but I was saved by – of all things – a resented family holiday.

My father had sold a ramshackle property on the Jodenbreetstraat for an unexpectedly high price and, in an equally unexpected response, resolved to carry off the whole family to Italy. A rambling villa, the country property of a line of dilapidated noble pretension, complete with well, chestnut trees and squabbling retainers, was hired in the mountain village of Lansoprazole and we all set off – children, grandchildren, sons- and daughters-in-law – like a caricature of an Italian extended family, for six weeks of
dolce far niente
. I hated the idea. I had work to do. But my mother shouted and then whispered. I gave way.

Predictably, as we travelled, first by train and then by cart into sunshine and – yes – light, it was as if sudden electricity began to course through me, as if eyes and ears and nose, sealed for so many years, abruptly unthawed and popped. I discovered a world of softened forms, bevelled by time, grown organically and not in accordance with civic ordinances. Everywhere the picturesque lay in ambush, ready to be made back into pictures. Every wall and path exuded a symbolism of passing time, the cycle of the seasons, the mutability of human endeavour. Even my father felt it and slipped off his jacket to parade around in shirtsleeves and braces. As I looked from my window into the trees that tumbled down the broken slopes into purple heat haze, I was not the first northerner to be seduced by a fiery southern orange, each one a miniature sun nestling in deepest green. Nor, come to think of it, by Luigi, the stableboy.

I am shy of the depiction of the sexual act in my work. Its shadow is to be found there, by the observant, in the cast of a glance or the tilt of a shoulder. But with black, flying locks, olive skin and muscled thighs, it seemed to me that Luigi was the perfect model to pose for me in emulation of David and – it was revealed – had been more blessed by God in one aspect than David by niggardly Michelangelo. Moreover, it became apparent that his duty or privilege had always included the matter-of-fact servicing of tenants who might require it. He immediately understood my unarticulated needs better than myself and I was astonished to be swiftly mounted with the smiling uncomplicated complaisance with which he would have greeted a similar desire in my sister or – I was almost sure – the donkeys that he cared for out of season. I shall draw a veil of discretion over the long, sultry afternoons spent amidst the smell of horses and tumbled straw as I explored his endlessly affable body with my sketching charcoal and trembling fingers. Language played little part in our relationship as we worked our way through the poses of the entire classical canon and the worship of his flesh flowed into the worship of my art as I hotly deployed all the devices I had so coldly mastered in the north. Luigi presented and preened and laughed and disdainfully kicked my own body into poses for his own pleasure as he saw fit. At the end of an afternoon, he would yawn and pout and – in an eloquent gesture – swipe his palm across his chest to flick the sweat and such other of our fluids as had accumulated there to the ground, before silently holding it out, still damp, for his fee. Then he would stalk away with a not-unfriendly tweak to my nose as I gaped at the departing – almost Florentine – buttocks. So, little by little, my unknown senses were coaxed into life and stretched their stiff muscles as my scrawny, white body hardened and blossomed in the reflected sunlight. I grew a moustache.

“When you all return home,” I informed my mother with careful casualness at breakfast one morning, “I think I shall stay on for a bit. I'm getting a lot out of Italy. ” Several teaspoons clattered simultaneously onto the tabletop. My father paused in the slicing of ham.

“Impossible!” She breathed sceptical cologne into the coffee smell. “How could you possibly keep on a house like this on your own?”

My brothers and sisters, sensing an approaching storm, seized bread, fruit, slices of ham and sidled away from the table to the bright sunlight of the garden.

I smiled reasonably. “I didn't mean to stay on here, mother. There is a boarding house for hikers just up the hill where I can get a room very cheaply out of season – the place where Luigi takes care of the donkeys.” I blushed. “It is my chance to build up a portfolio of my own work. I can travel around the hills, the villages, record the daily life.” I addressed my father. “That is the business capital of an artist,” I hazarded. “The development of an artist's career must follow a certain logical progression.”

He pursed his lips and pared cheese with the folding knife he carried always in his pocket.

I took a deep breath and drew a piece of paper from my own. “It will save money. It is so much cheaper for me to live here than Amsterdam. I have all the figures.” I passed them across and my father dug out pince-nez and ran a doubting finger down the columns. I had naturally omitted certain items, such as Luigi's … fees.

My mother returned to the chase. “But what of your commitments at the school? Your professors? You have not yet received your diploma.”

“There is nothing here for laundry,” observed my father, papertapping.

“I have submitted all the necessary course work, mother. My diploma can be mailed to me. I am completely free.” As I said it, I knew it was true and felt a sudden fear grip my heart. There is nothing more terrifying than absolute freedom. I have hidden from it all my life.

“Surely this figure is inadequate for painting materials. Are they cheaper or more expensive here, so far from the city? Have you even checked?”

“You are too young to live alone, my son.”

“I am twenty-three, mother. Most of my contemporaries already have their own place.”

“What about footwear? If you are trekking through the hills you will need a lot of boots.”

“So that is it. You want to be alone to do as you wish, to live the wild life of an artist. It is not, I think, drink. You have only taken the wine here in moderation. Do you have some model?” She looked at me coldly and her mouth shaped with distaste. “Some woman?” Only another woman could put so much contempt into the word.

“No woman,” I said carefully but the words caught in my throat. I coughed and tried again. “I can assure you there is no woman, mother.” How little we really deceive our mothers. “I wish only to work undisturbed.”

“That I do not believe. It is something else,” she said, fumbling at her bosom for a handkerchief. Her voice dropped to a hiss. She was whispering again, this time not for my father's ears. “Something much worse. Something I don't want to even think about. I have read about such things with artists. The other day, I happened to look in your portfolio and did not greatly like what I saw. Too many naked bodies, men's bodies.”

I was stung. “Mother, you had no right … That is to say …” I smirked condescendingly. “Those are not naked bodies. They are nudes, part of the tradition of Western art. Where bodies are concerned, the artist is like a doctor. He is above the excitement of … of …”

“Socks!” shouted my father, waving the page at us like holy writ. We both turned open-mouthed, having heard something much worse that we did not want to think about. He took off his glasses and stared into our astonishment. “Socks,” he urged. “You will get through six pairs or more a month. You know what Italian men's socks are like. Cheap, yes, but wear them for three days on the trot and they go all in holes. And, say what you like, you can't go without socks for long. No man can. Not even an artist.”

And so I won the argument, by default, by putting in my mother's hands a weapon so devastating she dare not pick it up.

I settled in comfortably with the Widow Traverso and her hollow-eyed daughter, Gabriella. There was a vast and cosy kitchen, with bubbling stockpots, strung-up hams and sausages and a great fireplace haunted by cats. Its flanks were lined with pots of dried herbs and fruits and from it emerged big, heavy dishes involving dumplings, beef bones, offal in a hundred forms. She and Gabriella were the local wise women, midwives, herbalists, bone-setters and, like all people credited with special powers, they were at the margins of the social and had a whiff of witchcraft about them. Local boys walked past with their hands thrust deep in their trouser pockets to protect the glory of their manhood with propitiatory gestures of clenched fists and horns made with fingers. But Western medicine had yet to reach this remote valley and was anyway too costly for the local farmers, so they were tolerated and the fact of their not going to church was never mentioned in Lansoprazole.