The Biographer (12 page)

When she came to, sunspots danced in front of her eyes. It took a while, minutes perhaps, before she became aware of the muffled sound of giggles and a tickling sensation on her back. She'd been oblivious to what was a little mound of feathers, leaves and flowers tossed by three brown islander children, crouched a few yards away in undergrowth at the edge of the sand. Had they stolen up in her oblivion and draped them on her writhing back? There was nothing for it but to laugh with them and she did, guffawed helplessly until her eyes streamed and her stomach muscles ached.

I must have been delirious, she thought now. In a hallucinatory state, I needn't
mince words, of near-constant arousal. Mostly frustrated, mostly suppressed,
and always adroitly concealed from my husband. I suppose they were three weeks
of delayed shock, really.

The proverbial clouds hovered on the horizon beyond the blurring of blues that
separated sky and sea. And remained there in the forgettable distance, exiled
to the outer reaches of my consciousness. In the stakes of love, I can be brutally
honest about it now, intimations of some future reckoning had negligible bargaining
power.

I had taken a bite of the apple. It was an addictive drug I had tasted, and notions of duty and caution hadn't a hope of competing with that. The scarlet blaze of passion and euphoria versus the dun colours of duty and responsibility – it was that simple.A classic,no-contest situation.

Tony Corbino lost no time in making his presence felt. After breakfast with Rollo, Greer drove down to the village for a cappuccino with friends in the bar. Then she forced herself to do a circuit of the co-op and pick up items for Tony's kitchen to supplement the basics that were always left in place in the guest cottage.This task had been neglected in advance of his arrival. It was a case, she knew, of wilful neglect.

They had agreed Tony would cater for himself at breakfast and sometimes lunch
too, as was the custom for visitors. Mischa himself rarely stopped for a midday
meal. Instead he ate bananas or apples and gnawed chunks of bread and cheese
more or less continuously as he worked. Agnieszka reported finding caches of
chocolate in dark corners.

Greer saw Tony emerging from the studio as she got out of the car and unloaded the boot.The sight was unwelcome. Their paths were on a collision course and they intersected on the parade ground. He looked cheery and chipper.Today he wore a leather bomber jacket over an oatmeal polo-necked sweater, with a denim version of a briefcase slung over his shoulder on a strap.The denim was rope-trimmed, like espadrilles, she noticed.

'A few iron rations for you,' she said, avoiding his gaze by looking up at the sky. It was heavily overcast and the wind was frigid. She was wearing a belted raincoat of cherry red, hooded against the wind.

'Hey, you didn't need to shop for me, but major thanks anyhow.' He took the basket from her.'What a cool outfit. You look like Little Red Riding Hood.'

His tone was playful. For a second she toyed with saying, do I now? And who does that make you?

'What time do you generally knock off for lunch?' he went on. 'Should I drop by afterwards for a bit of a chat? Start the ball rolling?'

'You can start the ball rolling whenever you like. I'm on holidays this week.'

I should offer to share my lunch with him, she thought, but I won't. Come and get it over with, was the unspoken subtext. She had a feeling he was wise to that.

'Well, I'll go stash those goodies in my fridge, fix a bite to eat and see you in a bit.' He turned away, then looked back. 'How about we make it in around an hour? I need to get some urgent housekeeping done. If I don't cross-reference every single interview tape as I go along there's a scarily high risk of systems failure.'

'Fine by me, I'm not going anywhere.'

In the house she pulled the boxes out from under the bookshelves in her study and assembled them in the neutral space of the sitting room floor. Only two were proper archival containers with fitted lids.The others were cardboard grocery boxes. She was amused to see that one had contained Kellogg's cornflakes.That had probably come from Rollo.

Before Tony's arrival she had given the boxes a cursory going-over. She was confident there was nothing to be afraid of in them. Nothing incriminatory. Nothing much, indeed, to do with her.

The doors to the office were firmly bolted against the weather, but Giulia's
shapely back was visible. She was talking animatedly on the phone.Tony observed
her before heading up the stairs to his front door. He went to the fridge,
poured a glass of mineral water and made a submarine sandwich with cheese and
ham. He bit into it and sat back with a notebook in a winged armchair upholstered
in a faded cotton weave of pastel flowers, conical shells and leaves.

The cottage had been done up and furnished for guests by Rollo as a top priority, long before the arrival of Greer and Mischa. Its village name was Casa Nova, contracted to Casanova to no one's surprise by the first sparky guests back in the 1970s. Greer and Mischa had camped here themselves for a year while their future home, Casa Vecchia – the old house – was rendered liveable again and the watchtower reclaimed from the vipers and shoulder-high brambles that had colonised it.

Rollo and Guy had naturally picked the plum for themselves: Casa Canonica, the
priest's digs – always the biggest and best in any village.And indeed a stooped old monsignor
had finally moved out only weeks before Rollo and Guy moved in, the sole remnant
of a little community that had numbered fifty-eight in its heyday. The priest's
house had also functioned during his tenure as the village bar, boasting the
only working TV in the area. A dressmaker once lived in the basement. Now it
was Guy's wine cellar, with a perfect year-round temperature.

The guest cottage was full of Rollo's decorative fingerprints: a bedhead delicately
painted with fruit baskets, a Jacobean high-backed sofa, rugs, cushions and
bedspreads in splashy, variegated fabrics picked up from markets around the
world. Rollo liked to claim that he was Matisse's soul mate, colourwise if
not in all otherwises. On the mantelpiece facing Tony was a collection of
old pottery fragments and bottles of milky glass that had been found during
the restoration period.

Tony wrote, 'Tape one: Mischa's studio', and the date. A second cassette recorder was already sitting on the side table. He spoke into it, fluently and without a pause.'Mischa's studio is in what they call the watchtower. You reach it through a small grassed courtyard with a covered well.The tower itself was built,'he consulted the notebook,'in 1170 as a lookout post for the Sienese republic.The studio occupies what were once living quarters.

'The first floor's like an airplane hangar divided by an archway, with a bathroom tucked away in one corner. He does the big pictures and murals here, but it's mainly used as a workroom and for storing paintings and materials.There's some of the largest painting racks I've ever seen.And stacks of firewood. A basic structural renovation's been done, it's plumbed and wired, the ceiling's been fixed and concrete posts put in for support.

'The walls are rough and unplastered, at least five feet deep. And the floor's original, still paved with flagstones, heavily worn and uneven. Beautiful. Plenty of natural light streams in from two vast windows that have been cut through the south wall to look over the valley.That must've cost a bundle in itself.

'You climb eighteen steps and shove open a mother of a great door to get into the main studio.This was once four rooms – some jagged slabs of the dividing walls are still in place, buttressed by steel struts.There's coir matting on the floor, and he's added radiators and rows of lights with conical shades suspended from ropes – each one on a pulley and individually adjustable. He has a bar fridge and a primeval stone butcher's sink sitting next door to a state-of-the-art coffee machine. He's very proud of that – made me a neat espresso.

'Huge arched windows look over the internal courtyard and the tower. Opposite, that's to the south, you get stunning panoramic views over the countryside and distant mountains to the sea, forty miles away.There's no way in the world an invading army could've snuck up here without being spotted, but now that Mischa's commandeered the tower they could surround the place and he wouldn't even notice.

'It's a view to die for, but when he's working he insists he doesn't even see it. I believe him because his powers of concentration are awesome.There's no clock in the studio, and he wasn't wearing a watch.When I remarked on that he looked at me like I was some kind of a retard and retorted that he doesn't need to know the time, and if he does his belly will tell him.

'There's a humungous fireplace which he still uses. You could roast an ox in there – it must have been butt-numbingly cold in the old days.Today all the lights were on and he had a fire blazing away and roaring up the chimney. It threw out such a blistering heat you couldn't get near it, and it did a pretty amazing job of warming that cavernous space.'

He broke off and drank some water.

'It's impossible to describe the studio in words. It's kind of like a visual
cacophony. We'll need full-colour photo spreads to do it justice.Alongside
all the usual junk, the literally hundreds of squashed tubes of oils and acrylics,
tins and jars of brushes and so on, it's crammed with personal stuff from their
travels. Probably stuff she won't have in the house. A wild boar's head with
a paintbrush in its mouth, paper kites in the shape of weird hybrid birds suspended
from the ceiling, a row of spears and tribal figures with bulbous tits and/or
dicks.Whatever's at hand – the edge of a table, bar stool, school desk, even an old wooden bed – he's liable to use it as a palette. They're everywhere, encrusted with historic
pyramids of paint.

'He assembles his stretchers from cedar and even occasionally still makes his
own easels, like he always did, even though they all say he's no handyman.
I told him Rollo says only amateurs make their own easels. He just laughed
and said, yeah, that was right, that's all he was.There's a stack of tools
on one wall: hammers, set squares, drills and saws. Rolls of the Belgian linen
he favours, and heavy French paper that he cuts with a metal ruler and Stanley
knife.

'He loves to draw on thick,lush paper,he told me.The way he confided this, it
was almost like he was an informer divulging a secret about himself. If he
thinks that was revealing information, I guess it was.'

Tony stopped speaking and took another large bite of the chewy bread. He ran his index finger along an elaborate panel on the narrow side table to the left of his armchair. It was incised with an intricate design, a vine trailing bunches of grapes and pears, pine cones and acorns. Animals and birds were shown running along the stem and gobbling up the fruits.They had beady eyes and voracious gaping beaks.

He started again,more slowly this time.'I didn't expect to find the studio such a profoundly –' He broke off once more, gazing at the etched creatures frozen in their telltale moment. He got to his feet, picked up the dictaphone and paced around the room with it.

'The studio is a total shambolic mess, sure, but it's a hugely atmospheric space and what I didn't plan on finding is this: it's kind of an emotional place to be in.Why's that? I think maybe it has something to do with the ancient history of the place,its original purpose,which was a vigilant purpose to warn and protect its people.Then you juxtapose that with this anomalous present usage that the original inhabitants could never in their wildest dreams have imagined, but which has something satisfying and right about it too.

'I guess, and this is the nub, it's because the place is being used with passion. It's not just another crumbling heritage ruin, it's lived in and used. More than that – it's potently alive, crammed with the raw materials and oily, pungent smells of an artist's trade.There are a few gestures here and there to civilian life, like worn leather armchairs and the corduroy sofa with a threadbare patch where he puts his feet up sometimes, but basically what it says is this: I don't arse around here, guys.This is the place where I do what I love.'

Tony left the machine recording and switched the first one on. His own voice issued forth on the tape.

'Mischa, I'd somehow assumed you were always going to be a painter, but your friend Evzen said that way back you wanted to be an astronaut.'

'Rubbish.' Mischa's dismissive voice sounded far off, as if he had turned away.

'Evzen Kolar.You were pals through primary school.'

'I don't remember him.'

'Well, he remembers you. Said when you were both six he wanted to make movies and you were going to be a spaceman.'

'That's right. I am a spaceman, not an astronaut. And what did he do?'

'Evzen? He produces movies now. How do you mean, you're a spaceman?'

'I fill spaces.'

Tony stopped the tape and spoke into the second machine that was recording this.'He points to the eight by six he's working on. It's going to be another picture about loss or displacement, but it's blank except for a road snaking from lower right to centre left. As I watch he makes fast emphatic charcoal marks on the virgin canvas. Just a few strokes, but enough to create people, their backs to the viewer, vanishing into a distant black hole. And he turns to me triumphantly.'

He switched on the other tape.

Mischa's voice rang out:'There,you get it now,Tony? I dictate what occupies the
space. Sometimes I'm a benevolent dictator,sometimes not.Whichever way it goes.'

'And how do you choose which way it goes? According to what?'

'According to the feel of it.'

'The feel of it? How you're feeling about yourself? Or about the subject?'

'The feel of the picture.'

There was a short pause.

'So, you do think about the picture when you're painting.'

'No. I don't do that.'

'You don't think about what you're painting? What you're communicating? The structure and meaning of it?'

'I paint the painting, but not with any of that in mind. I just let it do its job. It's a mistake to search for meanings, Tony.You shouldn't look at pictures that way.'

'But there's something guiding you as you paint, right? Your hand is responding to something, impulses, in your mind.'

'No. I don't think through my mind. I think through the brush.'

Tony switched off the first recorder.

'With that he turned his back on me and ripped into his work.The old trick where you zip your lip and wait for the subject to fill the silence or drop his guard doesn't wash with Mischa. I left him to it for a bit while I poked around. At one end of a rack of pictures against the wall I found a couple of very small, very detailed studies from the "Old Cypress"series.I lifted them out.They were from the latter experimental period when he was exploring the interior of the trees, where the small tight cones transmogrify into dark, semi-abstract forms suggestive, like McCaughey has written, of fecundity and amniotic fluids.'

Tony activated the other tape. 'What was it with the cypress trees, Mischa? When you first arrived at the Castello you were obsessed with them for quite a while, weren't you? You've never really let them go.'

'Like Van Gogh. They spoke to him too. I have good company there.'

'They speak to you?'

A laugh.'They are always communicating.'

Laughing with him.'How do they communicate? What do they tell you?'