SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (23 page)

'Or woman. But then Picasso was telling a kind of truth, surely. We see in the minotaur's eyes, in the desperation of his desire, a kind of hopelessness in the man too. Isn't this a kind of truthfulness, which is one way of talking about the obligations of memory? Isn't the word truthfulness a way of saying that the obligations of memory are inescapable, in art or out of it?'

'Picasso also said he could look directly at the sun. He was the only man who'd ever lived who could stare at the sun without having his sockets scorched. Am I in focus at the moment, John?'

'No.'

'How out of focus am I?'

'Not sure there's an effective terminology for degrees of unfocus.'

'Is the world behind me in focus? The canals; the roof tops; the old mill?'

'Yes.'

'Well, I suppose if a man can't be in focus, at least his world can be.'

'And his memory, Owen? Can he leave that in a warehouse, I wonder?'

John twisted the lens and Owen was in sharp focus for the first time during the whole of that shoot.

'A warehouse. Memory in a warehouse. Was that where they were screaming then?'

'Only one of them was screaming, Owen. Don't you remember? You wrote the scene and insisted on playing it out that way. I could easily have made do with a few emblematic shots and some montage, but no, you had to have the screams and the scene
in situ.
You only hit her with the whole thing ten minutes before we had to do it. You only hit me with the whole thing at the same time. Don't you remember? I think you do remember, Owen. You can't do such things in life and then discard them by cutting the memories loose. I don't think that's truthful. And you always insisted it was the truth we were after.'

There was silence for a few moments and Owen's face became concentrated in the way that it did when he was really working. John kept the image in focus. We can go back out again later. But this was the image of the return of memory, and he wanted it sharp. He had assumed that the moment of memory's return would be redemptive; now he realised it might be tragic. Make for a better film.

'It was my hand, wasn't it, gripping her, keeping her in place, though the camera couldn't see that, could it, John? We'd set the shot up so that I could be invisible, holding her in place. You used the hand-held camera, so the confusion was part of what we were filming. She trusted me so much. "You'll be there, won't you, Owen?' She kept saying that, and I kept saying, "Yes Alex, everything is going to be fine." The softness: that's where they want their hardness to be. It's the delta where everything goes in, and I suppose everything comes out finally. So many shouts. They were Romans, weren't they, an
d Serbians, Soviet soldiers in
19
45 entering Berlin, Japanese conscripts in Manchuria with their comfort women. Their uniforms didn't matter. We had those anonymous baggy suits made for them with camouflage markings. A warehouse with a concrete floor Could have been a basilica, a transit hut, any house of detention in any town, at any time. That was the point wasn't it, to show the way history kept repeating itself. She didn't have any shoes on, did
she, Johnny
? It must have been cold for her; you know. Those hard men moving in. Heading for the triangle, the delta. They were going to get into that, even though the woman the triangle led into wanted to keep them out so badly. And her cries were real now, weren't they? This would be superb, wouldn't it, John, when we saw the footage afterwards? The awards would roll in for this one. A genuine passion play of our time.' Owen was smiling now, an oddly detached, entirely uncheering smile.

Very slowly, John Tamworth slid the camera out of focus, and let the video continue running, with a shadowy blur in front of it, now fallen silent.

The following morning, Owen tried to look at himself in the mirror, but he couldn't find anything there. Alex had told him some story, he remembered, about how it was a Taoist doctrine that evil couldn't look at itself in the mirror. The silent shriek of recognition abolished the looker. But it wasn't that. Each time he looked in the mirror his own face kept being replaced by that of Alex Gregory. He could even hear the gentle fluting of her voice as she said to him, 'Oh come on, Owen, you wouldn't really ask me to do that.' He had asked her though; more than asked her, hadn't he? Even held her in place while the images were made.

As he stood looking in the mirror, John Tamworth was knocking on the door of Sylvie's house.

'I need the coat. The greatcoat you told me about.' They sat together in the kitchen drinking coffee.

'It feels
bad,
J
ohn
.'

'It is bad, Sylvie. Somebody died this time. Owen wants to make a film about memory. Maybe he wants to turn his life into a film, the way we turned Alex Gregory's death into one. First we filmed it, then she lived it. Died it. I don't know. I want the greatcoat. The one he always wears when he switches off the lights inside and goes walkabout.'

'What are you going to do to
him,
J
ohn
?'

'Make him real.'

'By turning him into film?'

'That's how he made Alex real. Altogether too real.'

'What's happening with
D
e
va
?'

'Don't know. Not going to be easy, is it? Have you seen it yet?' She shook her head.

'Should I?'

'Don't ask me. It's very powerful. Too powerful maybe.

Images should keep their distance. Don't expect to be eating popcorn. You'd choke on it. Where's the coat?'

'Down in the cellar.'

So they went down together. He folded it over his arm. The tabloid newspaper was still sticking out of its pocket.

*

Deva.
Deva
Victrix
. A Roman goddess of war. She urged her troops on to slaughter. Chester, the city of the eagles, had been named after her, and the river still carried her name. The Severn was Sabrina. The Romans couldn't be in a place for a week before they populated the landscape with their gods. Gods in the sky, gods in the earth, goddesses in the trees, nymphs flitting back and forth, trying to escape the impregnating force of the big powers, never succeeding except by taking a different form entirely, taking on a different life. Metamorphoses. Vibrant constellations. Picasso was at home with this. He was the Ovid of the visual arts. The world of the
Vollard Suite
is a world of Mediterranean classicism. Ancient sculptors lay back with a glass of wine and a Roman beauty. Nakedness is a form of aristocratic languor. But breaking in to the world of plinths and memories and draperies and afternoon divans awaiting their sumptuous nudes, the minotaur arrives. So what's his place in this landscape then?

Not at home, that's for sure. Is any labyrinth a home? He is an asylum-seeker in the halls of a chilly culture, a vagrant appetite that can't be accommodated inside any museum. He is a hunter hunted. His animality cannot be denied, but neither can his intelligence. He is an animal who understands that what intelligence he has dooms him to extinction, but sadly for him he can't escape his own intelligence. Not only must he die, but he must watch his own dying. Sometimes he seems to be more of a man than the other men around him. But those horns of his will dig in to the flesh of others. The appetites cannot be put for ever out of focus, however intelligent the minotaur's eyes might be. His intelligence is at least in part an acknowledgment that he can't disown his own desire.

Picasso had been to the
corrida
thousands of times. He had seen how the bull's horns heave away at the picadors' horses, thrusting, goring, penetrating, even while the spears slice in to his bloody back. He cannot cease from this; this is what he does. Stopping is not an option. This tragic pressure was what held and fascinated Picasso. He simply couldn't leave the subject alone.

In some of the engravings and etchings, the creature wasn't far-off urbane, drinking his wine, caressing his sweetheart. In others the pressure of his physicality was urgent and baffling. In pressing against the body of the woman, he was pressing against his own body too, while youths with wreathed foreheads played their flutes. In one, astonishingly - what an artist Picasso was - the woman sat and watched him in his sleep, a curly tangle of unfathomability, veiled by a curtain.
In
another he was crouched on top of her, his bull-belly drumming away at the delta where his fluids might finally flow.
In
some of them he was the bull crouching in submission to his own final sword, except that there was no sword. There was a human presence, which was enough to quell him. Perhaps Theseus hadn't wielded his magic sword at all, merely spoken. The words themselves had made him realise that his miserable kingdom was at an end. And that was the other thing about the minotaur's death: it was so clearly desired. Not resisted but accepted. And the women looked on. Rows upon rows of women's faces looked on as the minotaur lay dying, his bellow now an aria. He had become beautiful at last.

Henry's favourite was the drypoint of
19
33,
Minotaur Kneeling
Over
Sleeping Girl.
He was entranced. There was no hint of violence, present or to come. It was only too evident that this was an act of adoration. If she had spoken in her sleep and demanded it, he would have accepted self-annihilation as his fate.

The bell rang and Henry rose from his reverie.
In
the gallery, smiling and be-ribboned, stood Marie Coleforth, owner of the Heights Gallery.

'Hello Henry. I've brought you a present. Two presents, actually.' From the Marks and Spencer bag she produced a bottle of chianti, and the vegetarian pizza which he had made for Miriam French. 'There's only one catch: I'm hungry and I wouldn't mind a glass of wine.'

So they sat in the Picasso Room and ate and drank.

'I'm beginning to think my beloved Pab
lo must have been
Italian.'

'How's that?'

'The amount of pizza and chianti that's consumed in here.'

'I'll bring you paella next time. But looking at these pictures, I
suppose we could check if there's a Spanish speciality involving bull's testicles.'

'I'm sure there must be, but I'd rather not find out. I've grown too fond of my minotaur friend in here to want to eat his balls.'

'Why are you fond of him?' He had only dealt with Marie on business matters before; it intrigued him how coquettish she seemed to have become suddenly. He wondered, was she normally like that with all men, or was it especially for him? Look at the way she's dressed. But then it couldn't be especially for him; they'd both been around far too long for that. She was certainly taller than Henry, though the hair she'd had spiked added a few more inches. And she wore heels too, so it was possible that in her stocking feet they'd come out evens. Brown eyes warm with amusement. Why are you so fond of the minotaur, Henry? The lady asked you a question.

'I wondered if we might have shared an address for a while inside the labyrinth.'

'You've prepared this really nicely, Henry.'

'I switched the oven on, yes. Odd how women always compliment you for heating things up. It's like being given a certificate for finding your way to the bathroom. What do you think? That the Meals on Wheels lady normally does my dinner? You must have a look at my shirts later. The way
I
wash and iron them, you'll probably have me crowned King of Hungary.' Marie carried on smiling. For a woman who'd just been ditched by her husband of fifteen years, she looked remarkably cheerful about things. Maybe it is my presence, he thought. Women did seem to smile at him a lot. Minotaurs and women: they both trusted him.

'Miriam really enjoyed her evening here, you know.'

'Evidently. She went
back and made you write down my
secret recipe for buying pizzas. Thank God
I
didn't do the minotaur's testicles with rice'