Affairs of Art

ALSO BY LISE BISSONNETTE

Following the Summer

affa
IR
s of a
R
t

a
NO
ve
L

LI
se
BI
sso
NN
ette

t
R
a
N
s
L
ate
D
B
y
SH
e
IL
a f
I
sc
H
ma
N

Anansi

Copyright ©
É
ditions du Bor
é
al, Montr
é
al, Canada, 1995

English translation copyright © 1996 House of Anansi Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author's rights.

This edition published in 2013 by

House of Anansi Press Inc.

110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

Tel. 416-363-4343

Fax 416-363-1017

www.houseofanansi.com

First published in French as
Choses crues
in 1995

by Les
É
ditions du Bor
é
al

Cataloging in Publication Data

Bissonnette, Lise

[Choses crues. English]

Affairs of art

Translation of: Choses crues.

eISBN 978-1-77089-115-9

PS8553.I877288C5613   1996    C843'.54    96-930637-7

PQ3919.2.B57C5613   1996

Cover design: Pekoe Jones/
multiphrenia

eBook development:
WildElement.ca

House of Anansi Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council in the development of writing and publishing in Canada.

For Godefroy-M. Cardinal

One

T
HE MONK CARLOS MORALES ENJOYED
the lives of women and women who had lives. He was a painter, sculptor, and nephew of the great conquistador, who had built him a convent on the site of evaporated ponds. In vast workshops the poly­chrome woods for the empire's churches were prepared; in soggy-bottomed gardens people had sex amid comfort and coolness, in the shadow of the high fences. Morales's masterpiece, the Christ of Santo Domingo, has the legs of Mary Magdalene
—
a countryside Conchita whom he'd baptized in order to make her his official mistress. A note in his memoirs declares that the final touch was given to the knees, a pink verging on yellow, on the very day when Mary Magdalene stopped being beautiful.

Thus began his final article for
Parallèle.
The ultimate deception. He hated writing but the words had started to fly beneath his fingers as if Morales's manuscripts were open on his left, between the printer and the water jug. To restore fever's sweat.

Morales, he would tell them, had been the first painter and sculptor to treat crucifixions as installations. Others in the past had attributed this prescience to Grünewald, to the Issenheim Altarpiece, where the narrative and the three-dimensional were deployed simultaneously. But the altarpiece really prefigured video, and it would be another century before Carlos Leon, known as Morales — a borrowing from the Spanish painter Luis Morales, whose pathetic history of exile to Mexico in punishment for debauchery he closely studied and cultivated — would put an end to the simple depiction of crucifixions. His Christs served as true environments, as Morales had been the first to report. François Dubeau was able to consult it after long research that had taken him from the church of Santo Domingo to the archives of a deserted monastery in the suburbs of Puebla that was about to become a yogurt factory. He had been given permission to transfer the precious notebooks to the University of Mexico, where experts would continue the research. By which time he would be dead.

In
Parallèle
he would deliver only the broad outlines of his discovery. He would tell how the Christ
of Santo Domingo had been designed to be transformed when touched by men in pain and by women in tears, the left leg snaking onto the right and concealing it from touch but not from view, so that a century would come, before the millennium, Morales thought, when the flesh of the primary surface would be scraped down to the veins. As no blood would flow, believers would turn away from the imposture and that would be the end of submission in this godforsaken corner of the world. But in trying to disabuse others, Carlos Morales had deceived himself. Christ's left leg was fissured like an old woman's skin, hard and soft, and today supplicants' fingers believe they are touching eternity.

At the time of the Council, when kitsch became part of the music and the habits of priests, penitents devised a new way to fill the collection plates. Pins in the form of arms, legs, hearts, decorated with a red ribbon, were offered as
ex votos
that could be pinned like an offering onto a cork background, where henceforth the Christ would rest his back. The contrast was striking, Dubeau would explain in
Parallèle,
between the torn body and its bed of paper butterflies, hoard of all the martyrs of the poor, now given over to a hoax perpetrated by an atheistic monk. From those scarlet ribbons poured the blood of their dreams. The perfect installation, he would decree, now broken free of its creator.

He would add a few theoretical considerations, and then an
amen
so that his final word would be indeed the last — and most memorable. Because his drama would end there, at the sale of nine hundred copies of an issue rendered historic by his death. He would insist that the cover be composed of red ribbons, allowing him to bleed their illusions in turn.

And to serve as a reminder of the red, heart-shaped pin that no one would ever find, that he himself had stuck in at the level of the Christ's loincloth whose face he had not regarded. Among the requests for grace, his own: an
amen
he still refused himself, even as he scrawled it here in the church of Santo Domingo, on the card that had been the source of so much pride. Conceptual grey letters centred on a white background: François Dubeau, Director, Centre for Multidisciplinary Research in Contemporary Aesthetics, P.O. Box 8888, Station A, Montreal, H3C 3P8. Telephone: (514) 282-3737. When the sacristan cleared some space for new requests for favours, at All Saints' Day perhaps, the last trace of him would land in some garbage dump, along with some sun-rotted fruit. He would be dead before it was.

No witness to relate the true witches' sabbath that was Mexico, these weeks of shadow when he got drunk and never opened a book, in Room 28 of the Geneva Hotel, with its view of the Zona Rosa's malodorous garbage. Without fear now, he would inflict on himself cold showers that would hasten the final pneumonia. But he managed only to vomit up a life that still clung fast, and he barely coughed. On the eve of his return,
he went out in the early February dusk and a Beetle taxi left him at the Zocalo, brown with a crowd in which children finally allowed him to hasten the end. They cried out, stunned by the sight of minuscule kites. Colours fell in a rain of polyester tears and his pain was plastic, durable and light, and he forgot it for a moment when he took an interest in the corbelled constructions in the alleyway that led to the Plaza Santo Domingo. Adolescents with suspicious looks urged him away, in the direction of the still-open church.

The pain was there. The unbearable insignificance of having lived.

Amid the secular filth smouldering under the incense, tourists and the faithful shuffled past the altars, carried along like insects in a slow swirl of dirty water. There weren't many, a mere sprinkling of humanity. Faces and bodies desired at this moment by no one, being thought of by no one. For a long time he had enjoyed travelling for the intoxication of finding places where no one he was close to could find him, where he could disappear. During an unexpected stopover in Sudan, or a night in the Johannesburg airport, he had touched what he believed to be nonexistence. The anguish of an intellectual who buys a plane ticket.

Nonexistence was flat and white, in the invisible link between the faithful and tourists who kill time around altars. He was one of those, and leaning stiffly against it as he watched them, rather than moving as they did, changed nothing. They would all be glad to know that death would take him before them. He could get to his feet, announce it, ask them to light all the candles to accompany him, and change for them the meaning of this day, making it a memory. (
You know, I was in a church near the centre of Mexico City, I was waiting for your father who'd gone outside for a cigarette, when this weird-looking man, very thin, started screaming something in French.
) He would leave a little of himself to these nobodies who would never read what he would write.

His suffering was turning into a performance, which anaesthetized him better than alcohol. He pulled himself together. The detachment, the vanity of thinking nonexistence rather than embodying it like those shadows unaware of their own distress. He turned his attention to what was happening on his right, where a large crucifix bathed in a rather harsh light. A scrawny woman, squeezed into her Sunday suit, was slowly stroking the Christ's ankle, which she could barely reach, from the
prie-dieu
at which she knelt. Her rump stuck out, he assumed she was mourning an empty womb and yearning as she imagined God between her thighs. But no sooner had she crossed herself than a man followed her, standing, furtively touching the knee of the figure on the cross, then dropping some coins into the collection box that had no candles. Three or four other members of the flock filed past, locals, one of them a young madonna who kissed a scrap of paper before pinning it to the right side of the Christ. His choking diminished as he observed them, at once jealous of and fascinated by their trashy hope.

This is a classic Christ, he decreed, mocking the mannerism that had forbidden the sculptor the slightest suggestion of horror. The draping of the loincloth, the slender body abandoned to his cross as to the languor of midday, the insipid pink beneath the still bright varnish: it all pointed to an artist who had courted the wives of patrons rather than working next to the preacher, horrifying souls. If I'd been a sculptor in the age of the tyrants, he thought, I'd have crushed the flesh of the martyr and made the body swell until it tore. But the tyrants' ladies bathed in milk and loved their elegant statues that were the colour of offered bosoms on the night of a grand ball. Horror, true horror, was in the very beauty of the Christ of Santo Domingo, a masterpiece that blossomed today before a bed of superstitions, petty pleas from petty people who would reproduce themselves to infinity. No work in progress in any artist's studio in the world would ever equal the brilliant infinitude of this crucifixion beneath its eternal caresses.

Thus did François Dubeau invent the monk Carlos Leon known as Morales, to whom he attributed an avant-garde life and writing, shortly after six p.m. in a church just off the Zocalo where he had been driven by the suspicious looks of some teenagers who'd thought he was cruising. From now on he recognized his non­existence, but he didn't think he had to flaunt it in
Parallèle.
On the contrary, he would publish there an ultimate lie, which would confirm nothingness for him alone. And suddenly it gave him pleasure to think of Morales taking his tender colours from women's folds, painting a virgin's child after spattering whores with his consecrated sperm. In the church of Santo Domingo he tasted their blended juices and he was not yet dead.

A sacristan started turning off the lights. François Dubeau approached the Christ. Because he was going to die in any case, he knelt as he had in childhood, his eyes level with the calves of the man on the cross. His hand was icy when it touched the left leg that snaked over the right one, warm in the harsh light. The curve filled his palm and he wanted a woman, he who was soon to die for having touched so many men. Nailed with grace, the feet of the man-woman of Santo Domingo stirred his last desires and bored into his final lies. From the ground there rose like spittle the cold dampness that finally made him cough himself dry, drained.
Amen,
he would inscribe his despair below a red-ribboned heart, amid their trivial little hopes. He dropped a few coins into the collection box, the sacristan shook it noisily to empty them. The night was driving away the six o'clock light. His life was non­existent and it now was spent.