Art & Lies (11 page)

The train, vibrating in its own power, as gun dogs do, rushes for the bridge as the signal goes, and splashes through the tracks in a siren of joy. A little boy leans out of the window, shouting with the double bell of the long train.

The train passes, a yellow band pulled through a black cloth. The houses spring back and take up their rightful place in the darkness. There’s nothing here but bricks and dirt, but metal and dirt but habit and dirt. The 5:45 to the suburbs.

There is more; a lean of beauty as the train judges the bend; an arc of mechanics that allows 180 degrees of admiration between the hard metal and the curve it implies. The simple clash between subject and style is a painterly one; the uncompromising line is made to yield to a curve. Only this defeat makes movement possible.

The curve seems to be so many afternoons, travelling slowly to the sea, the silver train towards the gold coast. The long wind back to childhood through memory, the romance of the train not killed by the 5:45. Each carriage articulated to its next, takes the bend, the vertebrae of the train that runs through my past like a rosary. So many afternoons travelling slowly to the sea; the rocking train and the rolling water. My mother smiling at the sea.

The smiling of women and the motion of great waters. These things moved Leonardo. Both at once mysterious and transparent, he took them into his paintings as things and meta-things: Madonna of the Balances, Madonna of the Lake, Madonna of the Rocks, La Gioconda, Saint Anne, Medusa, whose snake hair parts in reptile waves, sea-hue on her dead cheeks.

Leonardo who knew neither Latin nor Greek, and who described himself as an unlettered man (‘omo senza lettere’), loved words and fought with them, receiving many wounds. Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. No love that leaves the lover unmarked. In later life, Leonardo, branded by words, gave up painting and worked only on his fugitive manuscripts, writing from right to left. Who knows what he hoped to find? For me, it was found already, in the fearful face of Mona Lisa, corrupt crimson on lips and cheek, faded now into a modest blush, that rises so strangely beside the sea.

The train had reached the sea. The sea caught between two legs of concrete where the ferries unloaded their blunt cargo. The convenient sea, still as a child’s pony, but further out, past the hobbled water, the white-maned waves hurdled the buoys.

*

The unsaddled sea twice daily ridden by the moon. The 239,000 mile distant moon that daily rides the sea. Outrageous, the connections of the natural world; the planets in musical intervals around the sun. The canyons here that have made the mountains there. Even the flowers in my garden seed themselves in yours. The moved and still moving world rotating on its axel-tree. The daily death and resurrection of the self-renewing world.

I wanted to open the window to hear the sea no longer glass-paned. The tenor of the sea and the pitched gulls. The beauty of the sea in its movement and mass. The deep tidal swirls that cease as soon as it is contained.

What contains me? Fear, laziness, the opinion of others, a morbid terror of death and too little joy in life. I am shuttered at either end, a lid on my head, blocks under my feet. The stale self unrhythmed by art or nature.

Does it matter? Yes, to me, who suspects there is more than the machine-tooled life offered as a nice copy of millions of others. Won’t a reproduction do? Who can tell the difference these days? There’s no such thing as art. Settle for a designer suit to throw across your carcass. No-one can tell the difference between the living and the dead. And who are you to judge? This is a democracy isn’t it? We’re all equal now, apart from the money, all equal now. One size fits all.

It doesn’t fit me.

‘Why blame yourself? Why blame yourself?’ the liberal consolations of the anecdotal Vicar who’s missed his birdie putt.

Who else shall I blame for this drought stricken life? My mother? My father? My brother? The world?

I’ve been unfortunate, it’s true, hard-hurt and despised. But should I tell that tale to every passer-by? Should I make my unhappiness into a placard and spend the years left decorating it?

There is so little time. This is all the time I’ve got. This is mine, this small parcel of years, that threatens to spill over on to the pavement and be lost among careless feet. Lost. The water out of the sieve and the river run dry. The quietly contained sea where the waters don’t break.

I want to run up the hill in the freedom of the wind and shout until the rains come. I call the rain with my head thrown back. Fill up my mouth, fill up my nostrils, soak the parched body, blood too thick to flow the channels. I will flow. Flow with summer grace along a crystal river. Flow salmon-flanked to the sea.

Why dry? Why dammed up when the hidden spring informs the pool? How to bore down to where the water is? How to cut an Artesian Well through the jelly of my fear?

I blame myself for my part in my crime. Collusion in too little life, too little love. I blame myself. That done, I can forgive myself. Forgive the rotting days where the fruit fell and was not gathered. The waste sad time. Punishment enough. Enough to live wedged in by fear. Call the rain.

Call the rain. Drops of mercy that revive the burnt earth. Forgiveness that refills the droughted stream. The rain, in opaque sheets, falls at right-angles to the sea. Let me lean on the wall of rain, my legs at sea. It is giddy, this fluid geometry, the points, solids, surfaces and lines that must undergo change. I will not be what I was.

The rain transforms the water.

Handel

S
HE IS
, perhaps, thirty-five. She wears her hair as lions do. Male lions of course. Why, when we compliment our women, do we compare them to the male beast? Lion hair, eyes of peacock blue, a swan’s neck (the male’s being longer and whiter), panther grace, skin soft as antelope hide. I had an Arab acquaintance, a homosexual as it happens, who told me that the male antelope is the softer. The female coarsens through breeding. ‘Isn’t that so?’ he said, as we were walking past the Maternity Ward.

Men prefer one another, I am quite sure of that, women are a kind of indulgence. I don’t expect my Arab friend to like them, he doesn’t, but I find it odd when my heterosexual friends don’t like them either. My colleagues don’t like their wives. They do desire their mistresses. Other women do not come within the scope of their consideration. There are nurses, mobile bedpans, we call them, and there are an increasing number of doctors who are women. Fortunately most of those remain in the lower ranks, either out of vocation or family ties, I say fortunately and I mean fortunately for them. Consultants are not well mannered except to paying clients. I work with a man who always asks the women whether or not their breasts get in the way of the stethoscope. They blush, he laughs, slaps me on the shoulder in that chummy conspiratorial way, ‘Handel will see to you,’ he says. ‘Best pruner in the business.’

I do apologise. I do apologise. I do apologise …

*

‘Will you stop saying “Sorry,” Handel? They are the ones who are supposed to be sorry. That is what they have come for, to say sorry, this is Confession.’

My priest despaired of me. It was his duty, my training, that we should sit side by side in the little veiled box that separated us from the penitent by a thin lattice of sin.

‘Father I have sinned.’

‘Sins of the flesh or sins of conscience?’

‘Sins of the flesh.’

Yes, always sins of the flesh, nobody has any conscience.

‘Begin.’

Those long Friday afternoons, the stories the same, no matter the teller always the tale. No evidence there for the individual life. Shop lifting, wife beating, work dodging, betrayals, infidelity, infidelity, infidelity, the common denominator crime. The men bragged, it was in their voices, the women trembled and cried. There was one, I remember, a sparse woman, with whom the priest was particularly harsh. What had she done but take one night to make sense of the space between her legs. The neglected space where her child’s head had been, where her husband’s pleasure had been, the thing that had become the drain to let out the gin.

She said ‘I don’t love him but I had to have him. I’ve never wanted a man before, not like that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What if my children find out? What if my husband finds out?’

I didn’t say, ‘Your husband comes here to relieve himself on me every Friday, just as he goes to relieve himself on a prostitute every Thursday pay night.’

I said ‘You must never see the man again. Pray to God to help you.’

She said ‘My body thinks of him.’

I thought of her body underneath his hips. ‘I’m sorry.’

My priest and I walked with long strides through the Seminary’s covered avenue. The wind blew back our skirts, revealing socks held up by short suspenders, and long-toed lace-up shoes. I watched our feet hit the flagstones in four beats, each to the rhythm of the angry priest. He lectured me on God’s Will for Humanity, not seeing it in the cloud-cracked sky where the sun tipped out in a golden yolk. Not seeing it in the huge trees wind-thralled. God’s will, this small blue planet. God’s will that we are spirit in skin and bone.

‘She sinned greatly.’

Did she? What if I had told her to give thanks for her feelings?

To give thanks for her body, his body, their pleasure? Would she have loved God more or less?

I did not say this to him, for whom the wind blew or did not blow. For whom the sun shone or did not shine. He was talking to me about erections, about controlling his erections, and I wanted to say ‘Damn it man, she wasn’t talking about an erection, she was talking about the most intense moments of her forty-two years.’

Why had she been sitting in a booth telling a twenty-five-year-old virgin boy about that?

What does it say in my notes? ‘To understand the problems of his flock the priest need have no experience of them. He has the authority of God.’ What about the imagination of God? Mozart, dear, drunk, divine Mozart, would have made a better priest than me. I sat alone, in my darkened room, the shaded lamp behind me, and listened to the close of
The Marriage of Figaro
, where the Countess Almaviva offers forgiveness to those who have least reason to expect it. Forgiveness. And I?

*

I did not succeed as a priest. Gone the humble desire to take my medical bag and a missal to the heathen sick world. I lacked authority. I lacked imagination. It is so easy for the Voice of God to sound just like my own, plus forte. I am entirely justified by the Scriptures, but the odd thing is, so is every other Catholic I know, liberal or strict. I do not wish to be unfair to Catholics, what I say is true for Jews, Muslims, Baptists, Methodists, Calvinists, Evangelicals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and ordinary bigots everywhere. The accommodation of the Scriptures is a marvellous thing. I have not lost my faith in God but I long ago lost it in men.

And women? Look at her, slender as the reeds of Solomon, her hair in Absalom trails. What to do with beauty? I have never been quite sure …

My mother, between the hours of three and four o’clock, said to me, ‘Handel, when we meet a beautiful woman, you must compliment her, but never intrude.’ What can I do? A compliment is an intrusion nowadays isn’t it? Women don’t want to be beautiful, they want to be barristers and medical men. At least in the Catholic Church they won’t be priests. Shall I say that to her? Shall I lean forward and whisper, ‘Miss, there is so little beauty in the world that we can’t afford to lose yours.’ Already my face is slapped. She wants to wear a ridiculous curly wig and shout ‘OBJECTION!’ at a lecherous and senile judge, who, if she is lovely, will privately believe that she is perverting the course of justice, and take against her in his heart. Why does she want to thicken her ankles pounding hospital linoleum? Why does she want to pilot Concorde, be a Member of Parliament, ruin herself up the north face of the Eiger? Why does she want to succeed in big business when succeeding in big business will rob from her the time allotted, in a short life, to understand something of what life is?

It’s our fault, men like me I mean, we’ve spent so long trumpeting the importance of all that we do that women believe in it and want to do it themselves. Look at me, I am a very wealthy man, at the top of my profession, and I’m running away like a schoolboy because I can’t sit at my desk even for another day. I know that everything I am and everything I stand for is worthless. How to tell her that?

The light lay on the sea. A taut white film of light, full stretched, horizon to beach wave. The light gauzed over the green sea, pale wings atomising the water, butterfly light on the spread of the sea. The light fluttered, its scalloped margins shading the rocks that made a breakwater for the fishing boats. The light rested on the bruised prows.

The light had salt in it. Cleansing light that polished the sand and pumiced its fragments to diamonds. The light abrased the smooth concrete columns of the harbour and gave them back the rough dignity of the sea. The unman-made sea and the scouring light.

What things matter? What things have a value of their own instead of a borrowed glory? Is there such a thing as intrinsic worth? It’s fashionable to say no. To say a tree is only its wood, that any painting is a work of art, that journalism can be literature, that love is self-interest or that ethics are mores. It is right to question standards but wrong to assume that there aren’t any. Where there are no standards the market-place obtains.

I like markets, like the bustle and the jostle, the haggling and the lies. I enjoy the effrontery of badly made goods parading as craft, I’m keen for the scent of a treasure, here, there, somewhere.

But who controls whom? Is the market for me or am I for the market? The human pig trussed up and sold in quarters off a greasy stall. Long pig, favourite delicacy of the market, never count the cost to the human soul.

In Chungking on the Yangtze River, a place where I spent some years, the peasants walk in to the town before dawn to queue to work. Arms outstretched, Madonna of the Supplication, at the mission we run there. On their knees, arms outstretched, begging for work.