The Man in the Tree (11 page)

"No, that's all right," Gene said, flushing. "I just wanted -- Could I
look around your studio?"
"Sure." Avila stood up. "Come on, I give you the grand tour."
Under the windows there were big bins for clay, sacks of plaster spilling
their white dust on the floor, and a cluttered bench that ran half the
length of the room.
"I never saw any place as big as this before," Gene said.
"It's a loft," Avila told him. His voice was deep and resonant. "Before,
they use them for manufacturing -- some places you can still see where
the machines were."
Farther down the room there was a large wooden platform on wheels;
between it and the windows stood three modeling stands, one of them
draped in moist cloth. "Is this something you're working on?" Gene asked.
"Sure. You like to see it?" Avila lifted the bottom of the cloth and
carefully pulled it free of the damp clay. Gene saw a blocky figure,
contorted, half kneeling. Parts of the surface were lumps of clay
carelessly mashed together; other parts showed the marks of tools. "Not
finished yet," said Avila, and draped the cloth over it again.
The end of the room was a warren of head-high racks on which stood plaster
casts, plaster of paris molds, some of them three or four feet tall,
and armatures made of wood, pipe, and wire.
The two men in the middle of the room looked up as they passed going
the other way, then resumed their low-voiced conversation. This end of
the room evidently was Avila's living quarters. There was a kitchen
area with a hot plate and a coffee pot, some cabinets, a sink and a
clawfooted bathtub. Under the windows, a small area had been partitioned
off with plywood painted bright yellow; through the doorway Gene could see
a bed with a red-and-white coverlet. "I had a guest room," Avila said,
"but I tore it down. Some bum was always sleeping in there, or some guy
making out with his girl. You want coffee?"
Avila poured from the coffee pot into a blue ceramic mug. They joined
the others and sat down.
"So, Mr. Davis," said Vlismas, "you are an art collector? Your parents
must be rich."
"They died in a plane crash. I have a trust fund."
"Oh, too bad. So you spend your money on art?"
"Sometimes."
Avila was sitting in an upholstered chair with a glass of wine in
his hand, one leg draped over the arm of the chair. He looked at Gene
steadily. "Is that all you do?" he asked.
"No -- I want to be an artist. A sculptor like you, Mr. Avila. I was
wondering, do you think -- would it be possible for you to take me as
a student? I could pay you whatever -- "
"So, you could pay," Avila said. "Mr. Davis, I am not a teacher. There
are plenty of good schools where you could study."
"I can't go there," said Gene with embarrassment. "I have a kind of
problem, with places where there are a lot of people."
Avila looked at him in silence for a moment. "Where have you studied
already?"
"At the Porgorny Institute, in San Francisco."
"Porgorny? I know her!" said Avila. "Ten years ago I met her there. How
is she?"
"All right, I guess. I haven't talked to her since I left. Mr. Avila,
I brought some sketches -- " He picked up his coat from the floor, drew
out a sketchbook.
"Let me see." Avila took the book and began to turn the pages. Presently
he showed one page to Hernandez, who leaned over to look at it but said
nothing. Avila leafed through the rest of the book and handed it back.
"żQue piensas?" he said to Hernandez.
The young man shrugged. "No sé."
"One thing I like," said Avila after a moment. "Some of these drawings,
I think you are seeing solid forms when you make them. That is not so
common. What have you done in sculpture?"
"Some clay. Piece molds. A few wood carvings."
"I tell you what. We try it for a month. You come here every day, whatever
time you want, but not before nine o'clock and not after five, and you work
here at least four hours every day. You pay me one hundred dollars for the
month. If I ask you to do something, you do it. After the first month, if
I like it, if you like it, we continue. If not -- goodbye. All right?"
"Yes, that's wonderful. When can I start -- tomorrow?"
"Sure, tomorrow."
When he came the next day, precisely at nine o'clock, Avila gave him a
modeling stand at the far end of the room near the windows, showed him
the clay bins, the shelves of armatures, the racks of tools. Gene chose
a wooden armature and began to build up a simple bust, the head of a bald
old man. The piece went slowly, because it was hard to keep from watching
Avila at work. He moved like a dancer, weight on the balls of his feet,
forward and backward in a hypnotic rhythm -- adding clay with one hand,
cutting it away again with a metal tool in the other; and as he worked,
the clay figure evolved through a sequence of organic changes, all
different and all beautiful.
When the phone rang Avila would answer it briefly; if it rang too often
he would take the receiver off the hook. At noon he brought out bread
and cheese, sliced yellow onions, hot peppers, milk for Gene and wine
for himself. While he ate, he looked at what Gene had been doing, but
made no comment.
In late afternoon people began dropping in, and when Gene got up to go
at five, Avila said, "Stick around. After while we all go out to dinner."
Avila's friends and hangers-on were numerous: there was a cigar-smoking
half-Korean silversmith and his father, a white-bearded painter and
calligrapher; a plump, short-haired woman ceramicist who was interested
in kundalini yoga; several jazz musicians, a poet, a man who owned a
sandal shop. The most frequent visitor was Darío Hernandez, who was from
Uruguay. He was an expert in building large armatures and in scaling
up figures; Avila had no work for him now, but gave him small sums
of money when he asked for it. Darío had a girl-friend, Peggy Wood,
a ripe young woman with a sullen mouth and a mane of dark-blond hair;
they were married or living together, Gene was not sure which. Often in
the evening they came together to the loft, but other times Darío came
alone, and when Gene left he was still there.
Peggy Wood's clothing surrounded her like a loose cocoon: she wore heavy
sweaters and skirts within which her body moved with slow grace. In her
silences there was something that was all the heavier for being unspoken.
Sometimes Gene glanced up and found her looking at him with an expression
that made him uneasy.
It was not clear what Gus Vlismas' principal occupation was. He had
various things for sale, which he carried around in his pockets: sometimes
gold rings and pendants, sometimes small Japanese carvings in wood or
ivory. He was a silent partner in various business enterprises. He knew
where to buy almost anything at a discount; he could fix traffic tickets.
One evening he unfolded a little packet of white paper and showed
Gene the heap of tiny stones it contained. "You should buy diamonds,"
he said. "Diamonds are the world's best investment. They always go up,
never down."
"I don't like diamonds."
"You don't
like
diamonds?" The gold tooth showed in an incredulous
smile. "What do you like?"
"Opals. Star sapphires, things like that. I like some of the semiprecious
stones -- agates, jasper."
"Do you know, my young friend, how much a flawless one-carat diamond is
worth today?"
"I don't care how much it's worth."
One morning Gene saw an envelope on the table; it had a foreign stamp,
and was addressed to "Sr. Manuel Avila O." "What's the O for?" he asked.
"O-eenz," said Avila, and spelled it: "0, apostrophe, h, i, g, i, n, s.
That is my name, Manuel Avila O-eenz, but if I use it here, they call me
Mister O'Higgins." Avila's father, he said, had emigrated to Colombia
from Mexico; his mother belonged to an old Colombian family, descended
from Irish settlers. "On my father's side, too, there is Irish blood. So
I am maybe one-quarter Spanish, one-half indio, one-quarter Irish.
Here they call me a mick-spick."
He had studied at the National University in Bogota, and later in Mexico
City, where he had known Orozco and Rivera. He had also worked as a
stone-cutter in Yucatán for a sculptor named Obregón. He had lived in
many places; he talked with nostalgia of Rome, London, Paris.
"If you liked it there so much, why did you come to New York?"
He shrugged. "The money is here, and besides, I like New York because it
is crazy. Other places crazy too, but not like this. Everything is sex,
the toothpaste is sex, but there is no sex, only frustration. To me is
like a big machine making energy that goes in the air. I am here now
seven years, and still I get excited when I walk on the street."
Avila and Darío spoke together sometimes in English, more often in
rapid soft Spanish. After a while Gene began to pick up the sense of
what they were saying. Darío, who had a streak of malice, never used
Gene's name when he was talking to Avila: he called him el pollito,
"the little chicken."
One afternoon when he heard Darío use this phrase, Gene turned from his
modeling and said, "No soy pollito."
The two looked at himjn astonishment. Avila said, "Asi, żhablas espańol?"
"Un poco."
"Bueno." Avila turned to Darío and said something Gene did not quite
catch, and they both laughed; but there was a glint of anger in Darío's
eye when he looked at Gene. After that he began to use other nicknames:
polla, which was like pollito, only more insulting because it was
feminine; maricón, which Gene understood to be more insulting still,
although he could not make out what it meant even after he had looked
it up in Avila's Spanish-English dictionary. When Darío spoke to Gene
directly, he was polite, even friendly, but always with an edge of
mockery in his voice.
Presently Avila began correcting Gene's grammar when he spoke Spanish.
Gene read the books Avila gave him, and discovered in himself an appetite
for words. He began to realize that a language was not just a set of
arbitrary symbols but a way of looking at the world; there were things
that could be said in Spanish very easily and simply that could be said
in English only with difficulty, or not at all; and it was the same the
other way around. It took six words in Spanish to say "flush the toilet,"
but there was a single word that meant "to dig around the roots of vines."
When Gene's clay figure was done, Avila came over and looked at it,
turned the stand to see the other side, turned it back. The head was
simple and stylized; Gene had made it a bald old man in order to emphasize
the domed shape of the skull, and also to avoid the problems of hair. He
had built up the head with bits of clay, then smoothed them with his
fingers until all the curves flowed into one another: the arched nose,
the cheekbones, the brow.
Avila said, "This your idea of an old man? Jesus Christ!" He dug his
strong fingers into the clay, pulled it off in great lumps, threw it
back in the bin. "Take your sketchbook, go over to Washington Square,
for God's sake, draw some old men."
Gene dutifully went out with the sketchbook, came back with many drawings,
and started afresh. When the second piece was done, Avila said, "Better? A
little, maybe." He threw the clay in the bin.
Gradually he came to understand what Avila meant by art: it was a
flowering of form that could only come about by working and reworking the
material until the original shape had been transformed through many deaths
and rebirths into something that had never existed before and could not
have come into being except by this torment. A sculpture by Avila was
a multidimensional object, shimmering with self-references, containing
in itself the vanished forms of previous conceptions, and at the same
time it was integral, itself and nothing more, as self-explanatory as
a flower or a shell.
One morning he found Avila at his bench playing with some little brass
shims, tilting them against each other to make tent-shapes, stacking
others on top until they fell down. His eyes were vacant; he did not
seem to be watching what his fingers were doing.
Later Gene saw him cutting the shims with a pair of tinsnips, making
narrow rectangles of various sizes. After lunch he began cementing
the pieces together to make curving shapes like staircases, or like
fanned-out playing cards. At the end of the day he had assembled these
into a standing hawk-headed figure, a bird-man or man-bird whose arms
seemed in the process of turning into wings, or the wings into arms. The
next day he took it apart and started over.
"That was beautiful," Gene said. "Why didn't you keep it?"
"Not what I want," Avila grunted. He spent the next two days building
up another figure, larger and more complex than the other, and took
it apart. The third version occupied him for a week. It had horns now,
ending in little brass balls, and it stood in a haif-crouching position
as if prepared for flight.
The next day, while Gene watched in fascination, he made a two-piece
rubber mold around the figure, then a plaster shell to cover the
mold. When the plaster was dry, he took the shell and the mold apart,
carefully inspected them, and put them back together. He melted beeswax
in a pot, upended the mold in its shell, supporting it in a bucket of
sand, and poured the hot wax in. After a few moments he poured it out
again, leaving a thin coating on the inside of the mold. When he took
the mold apart, he had a hollow wax image of the figure, but the tips
of the horns were missing.
"No good," he said. "I worry about that." He broke up the wax, dropped
it back into the pot and melted it again. This time, before he put the
mold together, he brushed hot wax into the pieces that would make the
horns. The wax image came out complete and perfect. Then for two days
he worked with the wax, smoothing irregularities, sharpening edges with
a knife, adding bits here and there.
"Couldn't you work in wax to begirt with?" Gene asked.
"Sure, but the wax has to be hollow or there will be too much bronze,
too heavy. Watch what I do now." He dipped his fingers into the cooling
wax-pot, formed the soft wax into little bails, rolled them into
cylinders. He carefully attached these to the figure to make vents and
pipes. Two narrow ones went from the head to the tips of the horns. "If
I don't do this," he explained, "the same thing will happen with the
bronze. Better to make your mistakes in wax."