The Plimsoll Line (4 page)

He could have written:

The author’s sculptures preserve something of the old eclecticism of the 1980s—the kitsch, the irony, the appropriation of traditional icons, and a certain theatrical and hence postmodern baroque appearance in the lines, but the way they have been put together—and the final result, therefore—comes across as an imposture. Yes, the works were executed very carefully, but in the end, the collection on view suffers from the absence of any firm base of support and descends into a mass of aesthetic contradictions. Something similar occurs
, ma non troppo
, with positioning of the sculptures in the hall. Here is another salient point that does not resolve but heightens the preceding chaos. Some of the works seem to hearken back to a different period, on account of both the technique employed and the proposal put forth. There is a stripping down that is much to be appreciated, as if the author did not know how to unite the iconoclastic breath of his sculptures with a more reflective, mature process or without vain, stylistic displays. In this emptying of forms, there is a tension that could shelter a new expressive space where the Logos could really appear. It’s just a shame that the author was unable to unite the two ideas and that everything gave way to an aesthetic cocktail of no interest beyond that of its own expressive stammering. In any case, we will not despair and shall await his next exhibition with curiosity. G. A
.

But he wrote:

The author’s extensive career is backed by a solid commitment to the most transgressive of projects. And yet his work cannot be ascribed to any of those ephemeral currents nurtured by the cultural industry; rather his work is a successor to modernity’s riskiest adventures. There is no frivolity here, therefore, or concessions, because his sculptures demonstrate that the artist is conscious that creative work has its roots in personal determination, separate from aesthetic sects, fashions, and calculations of probability. It is delightful to walk past these pieces of iron covered in rust, twisted and arranged with consummate success and effectiveness to extract the maximum degree of openness and significance from the works themselves. These pieces of engines, these sheets wrinkled like aluminum foil, acquire before the spectator the muteness of a meaning that refuses to be revealed. They are unknown quantities, objects that in their almost metaphysical quietude appear to be waiting, driven away from their surroundings and uses, like aerolites or fragments of satellites. The works’ titles admit of no conceptual whims, they are centripetal, self-referential titles, but they are borrowed from a semantic field that hovers on the border between the purest form of nihilism and provocation. And so we offer our most devoted admiration to this collection of iron pieces that serves to confirm something we have suspected for quite a long time
—
art is not in crisis when there is genius. G. A
.

He burned his tongue. The violet-haired women had disappeared, together with the pancakes and syrup. He looked at the steam rising from the kettle and wondered what the hell he was doing in Chipre if, deep down, all he really wanted was to get home, forget his classes, departmental meetings, reviews, conferences, and sleep for ten or twelve hours straight, and so driven once again by an irrepressible sense of urgency, he paid for his drink and, without waiting for the change, went out into the street.

A timid, cold rain was falling, but he couldn’t stop sweating. He reached the next roundabout, and then his heart started quivering beneath his jacket for no reason. He sheltered under some eaves and began to mutter,“Laura, Laura, Laura,” without paying attention to the figures passing by or the random music produced by the line of cars rushing to leave the city at the end of a Friday. He said “Laura, Laura, Laura” while standing in the middle of the crosswalk, next to the VIPS restaurant and the young beggar woman collecting puppies whose shit he had just stepped in with idiotic precision, and carried on repeating “Laura, Laura, Laura” as he walked across the plaza, past the fountain, which added an unnecessary note of dampness to the evening, until the psalmody of “Laura, Laura, Laura” became incomprehensible, because it divested the name of any reference (face, smile, body), tearing Laura from Laura until she turned into a mantra that suddenly dissolved his anguish—Laura finally reduced to a sound as pure as the banging of a door, a car horn, a jet of water in a fountain; a loop of air, nothing.

“Fucking Polanski,” he mutters, seated at the kitchen table opposite a glass of semi-skimmed milk and a column of María Fontaneda cookies stacked high like casino chips.

He lifts the day’s newspaper and opens it energetically. The cat chews unenthusiastically on the dried biscuits the man, having shaken the box of Whiskas with gratuitous insistence, has deposited in its plastic bowl. This sound, typical of pet food commercials, has instantly replaced the olfactory image of a slice of boiled ham with a texture of compressed food that will never conquer a palate like the cat’s, educated no doubt for greater gustatory heights. It longs for the days when its mistress used to prepare exotic dishes. She would always set aside a taste of things, especially raw seafood—the tail of a prawn, the tender tonsil of a hake—but since she departed, the quality of food has been reduced to a war-economy diet of Whiskas and milk. The biscuits condemn it to chewing noisily, like a homeless dog. “Biscuits for you today, Polanski,” says the man with an insidious chuckle while smoothing out the newspaper on the table, and the animal senses in his tone of voice the old rancor of solitary males forced to share the same territory, and in his chuckle the irrefutable proof of an old offence. And so it abandons the Whiskas with a gesture of contempt, shakes a paw, and leaps up onto the kitchen counter, on a level with the man’s chest; another jump, this one more calculated, and it reaches the summit of the fridge, a watchtower that affords it a kind of superiority, safe from risks, where it indulges in a superficial toilet befitting of the menu. Through its skin, it can feel the vibrations coming from the insides of the appliance. This hum consoles it. It purrs. Through its eyelids, the man down below is a silhouette doubled over the newspaper, an atmosphere of shadow vibrating in unison with the evening light and the hum of the fridge, something the man does not appear to notice, absorbed as he is in reading the newspaper. Without looking up from the pages, he dips a cookie in the milk and holds it in the air, between his fingers, and half a soggy cookie is on the verge of breaking off and falling onto the floor. The man resembles his own frozen image now, bent over the newspaper, his hand raising the cookie like a baton, as a drop of milk detaches itself, foreshadowing the imminent domestic disaster of a María Fontaneda colliding with the kitchen floor. The cat observes a smile, or at least an amused state of mind, in the silhouette of the observer, who now sits down next to the man. But it closes its eyes and remembers the man staring at the strip of photo-booth pictures his wife had just discovered in Laura’s toiletry bag. Some photos hidden away among pencils, lipsticks, a yellow hair clip, and other cosmetics his daughter was just beginning to use, with, in his opinion, scant skill and excessive daring. He thought it was a strange place to keep photos, or maybe his daughter had taken a portrait of herself in order to try out a new style of makeup. That must have been it, she hid behind the curtains of the booth, the toiletry bag on her lap and her entire range of cosmetics in front of a hand mirror until she was satisfied with the result. She kept the photos in her toiletry bag so that every Friday evening, she could copy the same distribution of eye shadow, mascara, and blush, the model from the photo booth tucked into one corner of the bathroom mirror. He felt a strange disposition, somewhere between curiosity and fear, when Ana picked up the photo strip with the tips of her fingers. His wife came out with a gesture of disgust just like the one she used whenever she discovered one of the offerings Polanski insisted on leaving on the porch as proof of his nocturnal skirmishes—a mouse, a baby bird, or a lizard. She looked at him from the bathroom door with an expression that suggested exasperation, sadness, or simply disgust, a look that seemed in recent months to have occupied not only her eyes but her whole countenance and erased any previous traces, as if the muscles in her face had all agreed at once to forget the facial disposition required to convey affection, laughter, or pleasure. He was afraid Ana would keep the photos, but she put them back, closed the zipper, and hid the Chinese-red toiletry bag in the cabinet in Laura’s bathroom, because everything had to remain the same as it was before the night of the accident—the clothes, the sneakers with air cushions in the heels, the alarm clock, the coffee cup with a picture of the Tasmanian Devil, the plastic-wrapped textbooks . . . This obsession with keeping everything in place as though it were some provincial museum, safe from the passage of time, also included the old domestic habit of the lemon-scented air freshener. That’s why, every morning, his wife would continue to spray the aerosol, and thousands of particles would float like an ether between the hallway and the room of his dead daughter, a space he always crossed while holding his breath in an attempt to avoid the nauseating invocation of Laura floating in a cloud of lemon air freshener. And in this same fashion, holding his breath, one afternoon when his wife decided to take a break in front of a cinema screen in the city where they were showing “one of Woody Allen’s” (the man is unable to differentiate between Woody Allen’s movies, they all strike him as the same, “one of Woody Allen’s”), he recovered Laura’s Chinese-red toiletry bag and carried it up to his study in the attic. He sat down at his desk and lit the halogen lamp. Far from illuminating his daughter’s face, which was repeated with slight variations in four passport-sized photos, the fluorescent tube made it look blurred, giving it a cold, flat aura, an impression that was mysteriously enhanced by the sudden barking of the stray dog jumping around outside, on the other side of the garden fence, opposite Polanski. It couldn’t have been a fleeting impression, because the ficus with the strong, dusty leaves in a corner of his study also seemed to shrink back for a moment, and encouraged by this semblance of an exhortation, the man undertook the morbid task of a physiognomist, trailing his index finger over Laura’s four-times-repeated face—the oval chin, the very white skin, a little too pink around the cheekbones because of the hastily applied makeup, the beauty spot on her cheek, which gave her adolescent face the strange appearance of a woman painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, the medium-length hair the color of dead leaves, the large, catlike eyes displaying a disproportionate sense of expectation lighting up a young face whose features had yet to be defined, a coat that implied an unpleasant winter’s afternoon just outside, on the other side of the photo booth curtains. The sequence reproduces Laura’s face with only slight variations, but the man, driven by an imperious need to clarify the details, as if the hidden meaning to his daughter’s life were encoded in these variations, took care to identify them—a slight turn to the right, another to the left, further to the left in the second-to-last photo, as if she had been practicing in front of the camera to determine the angle that best suited her features. Finally, Laura returned to her initial hieratic state, but on this occasion she allowed herself a half smile that stretched her skin and revealed a dimple in her cheek, under the cabaret woman’s beauty spot. His attention was drawn to a detail—her eyes did not match her smile but remained open, frontal, oblivious to the position of her mouth, and here the man thought he glimpsed a lack of symmetry, an imbalance that belied the daring of the half smile, as if she realized that she was simply playing to the gallery and shouldn’t accentuate the gesture with a look that might foreshadow a premature death. For this reason, the man concluded, her eyes grew hard, frank and honest, without a hint of fear, in static awe before the camera’s final flash.

“Fucking María Fontaneda.”

The cat opens its eyes. It didn’t hear the soft thud of the cookie meeting the ground, a barely audible splat, but it did hear the voice of the man squatting under the table on all fours, holding the disintegrated cookie in his fingers while wiping the tiles with a wet cloth. It endeavors to remove the particles of Whiskas from its taste buds and replace them with the image of the mole boring through the earth in the garden, the promise of some living, leathery flesh. It guesses everything, with feline exactitude of time, while the humming of the fridge merges with its own purring—the man will sit back down at the kitchen table, turn the pages of the newspaper, and then smoke one of those disgusting black-tobacco cigarettes, the smoke of which will reveal the tubular rays of light coming in through the window. He will spread lotion on his left arm and not look at the clock on the wall, the hands of which stopped at twenty past ten five months ago. He will then squeeze a blue rubber ball for fifteen minutes, drop it onto the floor, and get up from the kitchen table with an autistic’s assuredness in order to open the window to the garden. He will only close it when the cat is back from its nocturnal outing, the next morning, but on opening it he will say, by way of farewell, while stroking the cat’s back the wrong way, “Come on, Polanski, time for a little exercise.”

The moonlight will force it to dilate its pupils. But if the night promises nothing good or the forest air comes wrapped in strange silence—and it will only know this once it jumps off the windowsill and sniffs the night air—it will return before morning without any mole corpses to deposit on the porch, or traces of fights, youthful conceits it no longer gives in to even when the weather would allow it but which have left one ear calloused and a scar on its skull, old wounds it links to the image of a cross-eyed, orange cat whose territory forms a natural border between the ravine and the gas station. It will return home when the sparrows start chirping on the eaves. There are times the window is closed, and then it will knock on the glass with its paw,
tap
,
tap
,
tap
. That’s what the girl used to do to make herself heard whenever she was late coming home, she would knock on the kitchen window with her knuckles,
tap
,
tap
,
tap
, until her mother came down to open the front door. Then it will drink water from its plastic bowl and go up to the bedroom to sleep at the man’s feet. The succubus will wink, but the cat will ignore it, satisfied at having completed its rounds and marked the surroundings of the house with its diluted, neutered-cat urine—an unaltered timetable that is never broken and must be followed again today, despite the silhouette that is still watching everything without disturbing anything, confused by the light, the shadow, the monotonous, horizontal movement of the eyes of the man reading the newspaper.