Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (8 page)

‘I thought I might have seen you at the Iceland party last night,’ Jeff said. They both picked up more darts and stood side by side, chucking them, aimlessly, at the wall of unmissable targets.

‘I was at a dinner for Ed Ruscha.’

‘That was last night? I thought it was tomorrow.’

‘There's one tomorrow as well.’

‘So, every night there's an Ed Ruscha dinner?’

‘And – one hundred and eighty! – probably a breakfast every morning.’

They threw the last of their arrows. Ben said he had it on good authority that later this afternoon, at the Venezuelan pavilion, chocolate-covered cockroaches would be served. With that they went their separate ways, Ben to the Swiss pavilion and Jeff to an installation by a Finnish artist whose name – Maaria Wirkkala – meant nothing to him.

A simple wooden boat was adrift in a frozen sea of broken, multi-coloured Murano glass – discards and fragments, presumably, from the factories near Venice. Painted a dull red, the interior of the boat was gradually filling up with water dripping from the ceiling. Every now and again – so infrequently Jeff wondered if he was imagining it – the boat rocked slightly. He was transfixed by this, glad that he'd seen it right at the beginning of his tour, before he became punch-drunk, sated and oblivious.

Australia and Germany were packed, so it was a relief to
come to Uruguay, where there were no queues, no crowds – and no art. They'd hung a few rags on washing lines but, even by the low standards of some of the other pavilions, this was pretty derisory. And they weren't giving away any free stuff either. Many pavilions were handing out free canvas bags, some of them rather elegant, all very useful (for stuffing in free bags from the other pavilions). Produce a press card and some places would throw in a lavish catalogue as well, but the Uruguayans were not playing the game at all.

In the compressed geography of the Giardini Uruguay was bordered by the United States, featuring Ed Ruscha's long, horizontal paintings of buildings, some in colour, some in black and white. Fine, good, seen that. Jeff went briskly from pavilion to pavilion, using his little digital camera as an aidememoire to be consulted – in tandem with the catalogues – when he wrote his article. Extraordinary – there was all this art and yet there was very little to see, or very little worth looking at anyway. Some of it was a waste of one's eyes. Good. Because even though there was nothing to see, there was a lot of it to get round and Jeff had to at least poke his nose in at everything. Quite a bit of the work on display could have been designated conceptual, in so far as the people looking at it were conceived as having the mentality of pupils at junior school. Fair enough, except most of it looked like it was
made
by someone in primary school, albeit a primary school pupil with the ambition of a seventeen-year-old Russian whose widowed mother had saved every ruble to get him into a tennis academy in Florida. The work may have been puerile, but the hunger to succeed of which it was the product and symbol was ravenous. In different historical circumstances any number of these artists could have seized control of the Reichstag or ruled Cambodia with unprecedented ruthlessness.

Within a very short time the pavilions all started blurring together: it became impossible to recall, with any certainty, which art was to be found in which pavilion. The big, bright, psychedelic druggy paintings were in the Swiss pavilion. The video shower, tiled with monitors so that you were surrounded, on three sides, by a torrent of images – tennis, porn, news, Formula 1, cheetahs, football, more porn, breaking news, wildlife porn, deserts, bushfires, boxing – was Russian. But the red plastic castle – you stepped inside and it was like being in a red world – which nation's world was that? Not the same nation, obviously, that had come up with the completely blue room. Nothing but blue in there. No corners, no angles, no shadows, just blue nothingness. It was a highly abstract environment, a space of light, even though there was no obvious source of light except for the blueness that was everywhere, all around. Atman had entered this installation at a time when it was completely empty. The only corporeal thing in the room was him, but that was enough – he was enough – not to
ruin
the experience but at least to severely qualify it. The fact that he was here, in the midst of it, meant that it was not the non-corporeal experience it came tantalisingly close to being. He sat on the floor so that he would be less conscious of the body he was dragging round, nearer to dissolving into directionless, sourceless blueness. Still, it was pretty cool and came closer than anything he'd seen to what people – or Atman, at any rate – wanted from art, a space where you could trip out, lose yourself: installations raised to the level of complete immersion. Ideally, the perfect art installation would be a nightclub, full of people, pumping music, lights, smoke machine and maybe drugs thrown in. You could call it
Nightclub
, and if you kept it going twenty-four hours a day it would be the big hit of the Biennale.

As Jeff made his way from pavilion to pavilion, he kept
running into people he knew, some of them from last night, some of whom he was encountering here for the first time. Most had hangovers. After Haig's had stopped serving, at two, some diehards had gone on to the Bauer, which had been so packed the terrace was in danger of collapsing into the Grand Canal. Everyone had their favourite pieces, their recommendations and aversions, and everyone had an assortment of free bags. No one else had seen the rainy Finnish boat in its sea of shattered glass. It was as if Jeff had hallucinated it. The more he told people about it, the more that boat meant to him. Scott Thomson was adamant that the art here lagged a million miles behind the art at Burning Man. Bottles of water and fans were being handed out. Some people suffered from the heat more than others, but everyone agreed that the heat was unbelievable. They stood in the warm shade of trees, fanning themselves, drinking water, clutching their free bags and catalogues, comparing plans for the evening, feeling relieved and vindicated when it turned out they were going to the same parties. They said goodbye and then ran into each other half an hour later, on the way to the Spanish pavilion, enthusiastic about Serbia, delayed by the airport-level security checks for Israel. Jeff bumped into still more people he knew and recognized lots that he didn't – Nick Serota chatting with Sam Taylor-Wood, Peter Blake talking to himself (nothing unusual about that, half the people here were glued to their mobiles), and someone who may or may not have been the actress Natascha McElhone – but he never saw the person he most wanted to see, never caught a glimpse of Laura.

At a pay phone, he tried Julia again. This time someone answered.

‘Buongiorno.
Hello. Is that Julia Berman?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Ah, good. My name is Jeffrey Atman. From
Kulchur
magazine.’ At this point she would, ideally, have said, ‘Yes, indeed. How are you?’ Failing that, some kind of encouraging noise – ‘uh-huh’ – would have been helpful. But there was nothing, just the faint sound of breathing, breathing that sounded irritable. ‘I'm sorry to call you out of the blue like this. But not entirely out of the blue, I hope. I think my editor, Max Grayson, has been in touch with you?’ More breathing. ‘About my perhaps doing a short interview with you about, well, about your life and your daughter's record? That kind of thing.’

‘What was the name again?’

‘Jeffrey Atman.’

‘And the magazine?’

Tempted to say
Razzle
or
Cheeks
, he responded politely and accurately,
‘Kulchur.
With a “k” and a “ch.”’

‘I think I do remember something about that.’ Her accent was English, slovenly posh. Jeff waited for her to continue but it was, evidently, his turn to speak again.

‘So, um, if it wasn't too inconvenient, could we perhaps do the interview sometime in the next couple of days?’

‘When would you like to do it?’

‘Whenever and wherever would be convenient for you.’ A gamble, this. There were plenty of times that would be extremely inconvenient for him, but it was part of the etiquette of being an interviewer that you had to let the interviewee call the shots. It made them feel important and being important hopefully made them more amenable – though, in practice, as often as not, it just made them feel even more important, which manifested itself in their being extremely difficult.

‘How long would it take?’

‘Not long at all, if you're busy.’ He had been doing this kind of thing for long enough to realize that there was no
need to spend hours conducting an interview. You could cut it down to twenty minutes and still have enough quotes to cobble a half-decent piece together – and half-decent was still twice as good as it needed to be. In any case, he had better things to do in Venice than spend his time listening to this old has-been (a euphemism, generally, for a never-was).

‘Tomorrow is impossible, so perhaps today. Quite soon. At about four o'clock?’

‘Perfect,’ said Jeff, meaning it.

‘Could you come here?’

‘Yes, certainly. Um, where are you?’ She gave him an address – completely meaningless – and instructions on how to get there.

Her directions were unambiguous and easy to follow. Having taken a vaporetto from Giardini to Campo d'Oro, Atman arrived at her building exactly on time. He pressed a metal bell, unable to hear if, somewhere within, this action manifested itself as a ring. There was no sound of movement, no footsteps or doors opening. He waited, was about to try again when he heard a lock turning. The door opened. It was so bright outside that he had trouble making out the figure shrouded by the darkness within. As his eyes adjusted he saw long dark hair, threaded with grey, a thin face whose ageing was indicated not by a softening of features but by the skin being stretched more tightly over the skull. She held out her thin hand, asked him to step inside, into the cool. The door clanged behind them. She was wearing a knee-length dress, blue. He followed her up the dark staircase – she was barefoot – to a third-floor apartment. It was large and airy, simply furnished, but he had no opportunity to look around as she led him straight out onto a terrace. There was a small metal table, painted white, and two chairs, shaded by a large canvas
umbrella. She asked what he would like to drink. Sparkling water was fine, he said, and she went back inside. The view was of a small canal, and some other apartments, all with their own terraces.

She returned with a bottle and glasses piled with ice, each topped by a slice of lemon. The ice creaked and cracked as she filled the glasses. The whole thing was like an advertisement for the word ‘refreshing.’ He took a gulp.

‘Very refreshing,’ he said, stupidly, before hunting for his Dictaphone in the collection of bags he'd amassed at the Giardini. ‘Have you been to the Biennale yet?’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow.’ He told her about the things he'd seen so far, the dartboards, the Finnish boat slowly filling up with water on its journey across the sea of coloured glass. He found the Dictaphone.

‘Would you mind if I recorded our talk?’

‘That's fine.’ He placed the machine on the table between them, pressed
Record.

‘It's, um, voice-activated,’ he said. ‘How cool is that?’ It was another stupid remark and, as such, he was happy to have made it. Years ago he had tried to impress his subjects with how astute, on the ball, up to speed and generally smart he was. This, he had learnt, was a mistake. Interviews worked much better if the subject thought you were a complete numbskull. They let their guard down, became more expansive, actually tried to compensate for your manifest failings. Not, he began to suspect, that that was going to make much difference here. She was not unfriendly, but she was entirely business-like. Interviewees generally tried to charm you; she did not bother. But she did pour more water into his glass. She wasn't interested in him – interviewees never were, they were only interested in how they would appear in print – but she seemed equally uninterested in herself.

‘Perhaps I could start by asking you about Niki's record.’ He found himself squirming as he spoke. ‘What do you think about it?’

‘I like it,’ she said. He waited for her to continue. She didn't.

‘Would you like to expand on that a bit?’

‘I like it a lot. They're nice tunes. I like the lyrics too, some of them.’

‘Any ones in particular?’

‘I can't remember them off-hand, but I think she has a nice turn of phrase.’

‘What about the recording? I see that you actually sing backing vocals on one of the tracks.’

‘That was sweet of her to ask me. Obviously I can't sing for toffee, but it doesn't matter because there's so much else going on you can't really hear me.’
For toffee.
It was years since he'd heard that expression.

‘Well, I like it,’ he said, even though he had not yet bothered listening to the presumably crap CD that the PR had biked over to his flat with an urgency appropriate to desperately-needed blood. ‘Um, is it the kind of thing you listen to normally? I mean, what kind of music do you like to listen to?’

‘I like older music. I'm showing my age, but I like Bob Dylan. I like The Doors.’

‘Did you ever meet Dylan?’

‘No. I saw him at Blackbushe in nineteen seventy whenever.’

‘Eight. Me too. Great, wasn't it?’ This was it, the breakthrough, the moment they discovered they had something in common even though it was the thing that everyone from twenty to seventy had in common: an interest in Bob Dylan. With a bit of conniving on Jeff's part, the interview could now genuinely become what it always tried to masquerade as: a chat. ‘I was at Earl's Court too.’

‘I didn't make that.’

‘Who else do you like?’ he asked, resisting the temptation to go completely Dylanological.

‘Tangerine Dream,’ she said. ‘Van der Graaf Generator.’ He couldn't tell if she was joking.

‘Did you ever see Van der Graaf?’ he asked, responding in kind.

‘I knew Pete Hammill slightly’

‘Did
you? What was he like?’