Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (15 page)

On my last day it rained. The Grand Canal was a great pulsating river and the low tide, forced by the wind, gurgled on the ground of St. Mark’s Square and against the great doors of the Basilica. Venice swayed like an immense raft, she appeared to be sinking, now she was afloat, miraculously sustained at the last minute by some tiny bridge or other there on the city boundaries. In compensation for the inevitable, I found myself thinking of Fabrizio Clerici’s painting which shows Venice without any water, the city’s buildings raised on tall stakes while the bottom of the Adriatic is covered in the same mist which earlier had enveloped the city, now open and with clear, sunny skies overhead.

I have no intention of entering into any arguments about the Biennale. Amid the frenzied protests and impassioned eulogies I wander around with my tiny instruments of understanding, accepting and rejecting (frequently accepting and rejecting in rapid succession or vice versa), and I cherish the memory of a turbulent chaos which, in retrospect, strikes me as being singularly harmonious.

I shall never be able to forget Trubbiani’s birds made of zinc, aluminum and copper, birds with huge wings, tied onto racks used for torture, and paralyzed in that instant preceding death, before that shriek-cum-croak we are asked to conjure up in our minds. And I fear that my nights will be disturbed by nightmares inside that
Nursery
painted by the Austrian artist Oberhuber: a suffocating, empty room, the walls lined in canvas, with monstrously large children painted in vague tones, almost indistinguishable yet quietly intimidating.

What else should I mention here?
Cattle Raising
by the Brazilian artist Espíndola, a genre painting with a feeling for ambience which engaged one’s vision, touch and smell; the glass fibers of the Canadian Redinger, crumpled cylinders scattered over the floor and reminiscent of huge, blind worms; the painted panels of
The Five Seasons
by Otašević from Yugoslavia;
People
by the Polish artist Karol Broniatowski, dozens of human figures made of papier-mâché, life-size and naked, but covered in newspaper and arranged in every conceivable position, on the ground, seated, lying down, dangling in clusters from the ceiling, invading the space where visitors move around as if trying to attack them, to embrace and possess them; bronze figures by the Hungarian András Kiss-Nagy, which resemble prismatic formations of basalt; etchings by the Uruguayan artist Luis Solari, most of them quite small, Goyaesque, human figures replaced or accompanied by animal doubles; hideous photographs by the American Diane Arbus, or the hideous captured on film.

These references will suffice to show how I responded to works which, in one sense or another, are rooted in an exalted and controversial expressionism. This is probably due to my personal inclinations rather than any attempt on my part to make value judgments which are beyond my competence.

On leaving the castle gardens, where the Biennale wearily scatters its pavilions, I prepare for my departure. The vaporetto advances slowly through the restless, murky waters, along the Riva dei Sette Martiri and the Riva degli Schiavoni, from where I have just emerged. A chilly melancholy hangs over the entire city. The façade of the Ducal Palace, which in sunlight becomes pale orange, turns to dusty pink and becomes quite delicate as the rain starts falling. Under the arcade, looking onto the Piazzetta, five American youths are seated on a long stone bench, genuine hippies who doze off leaning against each other in a fraternity which is altogether touching.

I take my leave of the Tetrarchs, the warriors of porphyry, Egyptians or Syrians embedded in the corner of the Basilica, right at the entrance of the Porta della Carta. Embracing each other fraternally, these comrades in arms, like the hippies, have come from afar but here they will remain, watching the multitudes, clutching their swords in one hand, the other resting on their companion’s shoulder. I love these Tetrarchs, I run my fingers over the red stone as a farewell gesture, then walk on. When shall I return?

On the eleventh of March 1944 (almost thirty years ago), bombs fell on Padua. The Church of the Eremitani was virtually destroyed, and Mantegna’s frescoes depicting the life of Saint James either disappeared or were severely damaged (the painter was seventeen when he first stood with his paints and brushes before the bare surface of a wall). I look at what remains of Mantegna’s pictorial world: monumental architecture, human forms as ample and robust as rocky landscapes. I am alone in the church. I can hear the sounds of a city which has forgotten the war, the drone of airplanes and explosion of bombs. Just as I am about to leave, an elderly English couple arrives, tall, dried up, wrinkled, so alike. As if in familiar surroundings, they head straight for the Ovetari Chapel, painted by Mantegna, and there they stand, lost in contemplation.

But Padua (the city of Saint Antony and of
Gattamelata,
Donatello’s equestrian statue which no one making equestrian statues in Portugal today appears ever to have seen) is, above all, the Chapel of the Scrovegni, where Giotto painted the frescoes of
The Life of the Virgin, The Life of Jesus, Christ’s Passion, The Ascension and Pentecost
and
The Last Judgment.

These paintings may lack the narrative appeal of the cycle of
The Life of Saint Francis,
which Giotto painted in Assisi, but I can think of no style more suited to this warm cocoon, to these perfect proportions in the Scrovegni Chapel. The figures appear aloof and at times almost priestly. For Giotto they belong to an ideal world of premonition. In a world thus described, the divine extends serenely over the concerns and vicissitudes of this world, like some predestination or fatality. No one there knows how to smile with their lips, perhaps because of some flaw in the painter’s powers of expression. But the open eyes, with long, heavy eyelids, often light up and exude a tranquil and benign wisdom which causes the figures to hover above and beyond the dramas narrated in the frescoes.

As I strolled through the chapel, once, twice and for a third time, examining the three cycles in chronological order, a thought suddenly occurred to me which I have still not been able to unravel. It was a wish rather than a thought: to be able to spend a night there in the middle of the chapel and wake up before dawn in time to see those groups slowly emerging in procession from the shadows, like ghosts, their gestures and faces, that translucent blue, which must be one of Giotto’s secrets, for it is not to be found in any other painter. At least not in my experience.

Let no one imagine I am betraying some deep religious feeling. I am simply trying to find out in the most mundane terms how an artist can create such a world.

I
F I AM CAPABLE
of being at the same time, or successively, the author and judge of my actions, then I believe Carmo’s offer had some influence over this second exercise. This time (at least this is my impression) the narrative is much more vigorous, the style more polished and controlled, as if aware of being observed. Both exercises are linked, as much in the period they describe as in the period when I wrote them, but the first exercise is unprepared, exempt, innocent, whereas this one has become literary, who knows whether for better or for worse. I would say probably for worse when one tries to ennoble gestures and phrases, the expressions becoming labored and no longer natural or fluent, and the same care could have been taken to say something more meaningful, more considered, more immediate and therefore probably more personal. If this is the case, then spontaneity should be greatly mistrusted and artifice warrant the highest praise, this so-called art, artifact or artemages as one says in the Alentejo (or used to say at a time when the word was still common) and which is clearly a popular expression for the magic arts. Or do I mean the art of images? Not having entirely forgotten that I am a painter, this last hypothesis whereby painting is called artemages appeals to me. How much nicer to be known as an artemagista than a painter, and how much more suitable a name for someone who can do so many different things remote from painting.

No doubt I am being extremely ingenuous. These writings of mine are worthless and Carmo was not serious when he spoke of publishing a manuscript he has never read and will do everything possible to avoid reading once he has sobered up. Sitting beside Sandra, feeling her heavy breasts and perhaps rubbing his leg against hers, Carmo would have volunteered to go into space, the first man ever to do so should Gagarin have fallen ill at the last moment and the Soviet Union have no other astronaut in reserve. There are many ways of making heroes and saints; the difficulty is finding them in that brief moment when three or four vectors previously disconnected meet each other in optimum space. That moment is brief, and it is common knowledge that the point of encounter is also the point of crossing, and the factors which fail to meet immediately disperse forevermore, unless, as I was taught at school, space is infinite and circular or spherical, and therefore the encounter can be repeated. It is a simple fact that none of us can yet have touched this precarious point: time is incapable of waiting so long. Anyhow, there is still some hope: so long as Sandra, out of whatever caprice or deep despair, should be or appear to be interested in Carmo, the promise, guarantee, or what was virtually an oath cannot be forgotten. Carmo will not want to descend from the heights he scaled that evening. There is only one way of playing Don Quixote: to enlarge one’s ideals. There is only one way of slowing down the passage of time: to live someone else’s time. The astute take advantage of the one and the other, unlike me, for I shall say no more to Carmo about my travel notes on Italy.

I would probably exchange all my talent as a painter (which does not amount to much but is all I have) in order to discover the deeper motivations which lead people to write. The same could be said of painting, but I repeat, writing strikes me as being the more subtle art and probably reveals more about the writer. I can swear that in Venice (let anyone who doubts me check the catalogues) those birds I mentioned were really there, those birds by Trubbiani made of zinc, aluminum and copper, held down by their half-severed wings on a torturing rack, the mechanical device which aims and releases the blade of the guillotine, fires a revolver or simply prolongs a painful death. But why should this have made such a deep impression, why should this have so caught my imagination that it was the first thing I mentioned, thus betraying myself? I was not conscious of this when I wrote it, but I am aware of it now as I write it again (an important lesson: nothing should be written only once). Frankly, I betrayed myself, but who was to know, because the first time one always uses the secret language which divulges everything yet allows no understanding whatsoever. Only the second language explains, yet everything would go back to being obscure if the code of the first language were to be forgotten or lost at this precise moment. The second language, without the first, is useful for telling stories and together the two of them constitute the truth. So what did I betray? I betrayed a torture practiced for many years, long before the episode with the police and the leaflets of the Portuguese Popular Front. How time passes. There are those who say there is a cruelty one can associate specifically with childhood and there are those who deny it. But if pressed, I should say that this cruelty certainly exists, when the person concerned can testify to this experience at a later date and in different circumstances. At a later date and in different circumstances, but in the right place in my judgment.

High up on a tree (an olive tree, to be exact) sits a bird. A sparrow. Creeping about below is a young lad with a catapult in his hands. The picture is familiar, the objective simple. Nothing cruel about it: sparrows were born to be stoned, boys to stone sparrows. This has been so since the world began, and just as sparrows refused to emigrate to Mars, boys have not taken refuge in monasteries overcome with remorse. (Although that is what the pilot did who dropped the atom bomb over Hiroshima [or was it Nagasaki?], but this time the exception does not prove the rule.) So once the elastic has been stretched and aim taken, there goes the stone. However, the sparrow did not come down. It neither came down nor flew away. It remained in the same spot on the same branch, chirping in a manner difficult to define but which, as later became apparent, was one of resignation. The stone had missed its aim, breaking off several leaves from the olive tree, which came floating down, swaying like the pendulums from a wire extending all the way down to the ground. The boy felt successively annoyed, bewildered and pleased. Annoyed because he had missed, bewildered because the sparrow had not flown away and pleased for the same reason. Another stone in the sling (also known as a catapult), another and more cautious aim and the sudden noise of friction in the air, the sound of humming. Discharged upward, the stone soared above the tree, a black dot getting smaller against the blue background of the sky, almost touching the white border of a tiny round cloud, and once on high, it paused for a second as if taking the opportunity to examine the landscape. Then, as if going into a swoon, it dropped, having already chosen the spot where it would settle on the ground once more. The sparrow remained on the branch. It had neither stirred nor noticed anything, the poor bird did nothing except chirp and shake its feathers. From being annoyed-bewildered-pleased, I began to feel simply ashamed. Two stones, one bird quiescent and alive. I looked around me, hoping to find someone to help me improve my wretched aim. The olive grove was deserted. There was nothing to be heard other than snatches of song from the other birds, and perhaps a few meters away a green lizard at the entrance to its lair in the hole of a tree might be looking at me with fixed, stony eyes, trying to grasp what it was seeing. A third stone whizzed through the air, and then another, and another. Seven or eight stones were fired, increasingly less steady, my hand becoming more and more shaky, until the sparrow, without so much as moving or interrupting its chirping, was accidentally and almost without force struck on the breast by one of them. The bird flitted from branch to branch, beating its wings with that restless flutter of something taking its leave of the atmosphere’s elastic stability before dropping at my feet, its claws quivering spasmodically and opening its malformed remiges like fingers (remiges, artemages, both words clearly Gallicisms). It was a young sparrow, which must have left its nest for the first time that day, so young that its beak still had yellow corners. It had managed to fly onto that branch and there it perched until it could regain some strength in its wings and tiny soul. How beautiful the crested peaks of the olive trees look when seen from the air, and there in the distance, if the sparrow’s vision does not deceive it, those other trees, ash trees and poplars planted in rows and covered with leaves resembling tiny waving hands or fans stirring up a breeze. I lifted the sparrow from the ground. I watched it die in my cupped hands; first the black pupils dimmed, the eyelids, almost translucent, went up and stayed there, leaving the tiniest of gaps for sight to pass through during those last few moments. It died in my hand. Alive to begin with, then it died. It died for a second time in Venice, tied down onto a torture rack. Twisted slightly to one side, the head turned an eye swollen with horror in my direction. Which death is the real one? Traveling backward in time and therefore displacing itself in space over Italy, France and Spain, or hovering dead over the rejuvenated waters of the Mediterranean, Trubbiani’s bird in copper and aluminum came to rest in the palm of my hand to take the place of the bird I had killed, its corpse still lukewarm but beginning to turn cold. In the hot and silent olive grove, the boy begins to perceive that crimes have their own dimensions. He takes the dead sparrow home and buries it in the yard, right up against the fence where the hoe cannot reach: a tomb for eternity.