The Restoration of Otto Laird (3 page)

‘If a building is made of concrete, then
show
that it's made of concrete,' he once told an audience while lecturing at Yale. ‘Don't go hiding it behind cladding or paint – explore the possibilities of its concreteness.'

Otto was a great fan of concrete. He considered it to be among the most beautiful of all materials, and he waged a constant battle against those who believed otherwise. This campaign was fought on two fronts: out on the streets, in the form of his buildings, and in the world's lecture halls, where he regularly gave provocative talks comparing Auguste Perret's Le Havre to Haussmann's Paris. Otto's passion for concrete hadn't waned with the years, but the tide of public opinion against which he swam had finally exhausted him. Nowadays, he sought refuge in designing in the vernacular of the Jura, a labour of love he could pursue in perfect peace, without ever needing to defend his actions. A few years ago he had undertaken a detailed study of transhumance in the region, visiting the remains of abandoned huts and taking copious notes in his sketchbook. Recently, he had designed a contemporary eco-house, constructed on the forested slopes near his home from pine and local stone. It was an exquisite piece of work, but hardly original – the kind of building even his harshest critics would struggle to find offensive. These days, Otto aimed to please as much as to provoke with his work, taking on small private commissions as they caught his fancy. He no longer cared for the ideological fray.

As he cut deep into the loaf and contemplated the challenge awaiting him in London, his earlier resolve began to waver. People in Britain had never really understood his work, so why should they do so now? He was especially concerned about Angelo's suggestion that he might want to consider giving some telephone interviews to the press. It wasn't much to ask, given that Angelo would take care of the campaign to save the building. Yet despite having promised that he would give it some thought, he had his misgivings.

Otto missed many things about his adopted homeland, but its press, in general, was not one of them. Throughout his career, he had encountered problems with journalists, the result of his natural aloofness and a refusal to curb his ferocious intellect in their presence. They found Otto to be short-tempered, arrogant and slightly baffling. He saw them as irredeemably shallow. Some of them left the interview room with a sense that he had deliberately humiliated them. But in truth he rarely noticed as they struggled to keep pace with his acrobatic mind. This gained him a reputation for being difficult and obscure. For some people, at least, the opportunity to poke fun at him was too much to resist. Back in the early 1970s, for instance, when Otto had taken part in a series of highbrow televised debates on the state of late twentieth-century culture, a well-known satirist had parodied him in a series of sketches, mimicking to a T his tangential flights of logic.

More than forty years later, Otto remained wary of the British media. The feeling would doubtless be mutual. From what friends had told him, the country's innate mistrust of intellectuals had grown even stronger since his departure. To a new generation of writers and broadcasters – cynical, irreverent and respectful of no one – the bookish and serious Otto would seem like a man out of time; a hopeless historical anomaly, like his buildings. In short, they would eat him alive.

He contemplated the prospect as he laid out slices of Emmental, searching the shelves for the black pepper.

Do I still have the stomach for the fight? he thought, smiling at his unfortunate choice of words.

Much of Otto's stomach, like his prostate some years earlier, had been removed during a series of operations. The last of these had taken place just three months before.

Show a little gumption, he thought to himself, firmly turning the pepper grinder in his hands. If you can cope with evisceration, you can certainly handle a few newspaper hacks.

He finished constructing Anika's sandwich and started on his own. He had developed a fondness for the local Bleu de Gex, admiring the stray blue threads of its marbling as much as its taste. He split the block of cheese with a knife, popping a thick slice into his mouth as he laid out the rest. Its flavour stopped him in his tracks, an emotional response – way beyond thought – sparking in his cortex.

If sight and touch had gained a near-hallucinatory quality for Otto, then taste, too, had an added intensity these days. All his senses, in fact, seemed to be firing on overload. It dated back to his recent batch of operations, as though the trauma of the experience had enhanced his awareness of the body's capacity for registering sensation. Of all kinds. Alongside – and countering – his daily pain and discomfort, the continual pitfalls of old age, he also felt a deeper and more profound awareness: of the body's ability to feel pleasure, fleeting and intense; of its extreme sensitivity, if properly nurtured, to its surrounding environment. With this deepening awareness, he had become alert to each passing sensation, to every nuance of his own physical experience. And the days without pain, when they came now and then, were a source of boundless joy. It was like retreating through time. Everything again felt fresh to him. On days such as those, he was awake to sensuous experience as almost never before.

He remembered the first time it had happened. It had been some weeks earlier, shortly after the discomfort that followed his last operation had started to ease. Sitting at his writing desk one summer afternoon, he had suddenly savoured as never before the slight breeze through his study window, the sweet scent of pine from the adjacent forest, the dense canopy of birdsong. Laying down his pen, he had wandered into the forest in a state of unthinking rapture; bending to stroke the wild flowers carpeting its banks; pausing to enjoy a shaft of light as it fell between the trees, briefly illuminating a patch of blue gentians. He pursued a white butterfly, agile as a fly half, and drank in the mossy air, the hints of wild garlic and woodsmoke, the omnipresent symphony of the birds. Like a modern-day Wordsworth, Otto was drunk on nature; drunk on existence, his own above all. That surge of elation had resurfaced often in the weeks that followed. It seemed as though, faced with the failings of his anatomy, he had embarked on the one act of defiance now left him: to turn whatever remained of his life into a conscious celebration of the physical world.

There was a cruelty about the timing of all this, he realised – his senses reaching a peak of refinement just as his physical powers were deserting him. Even as he found the wisdom to fully savour bodily experience, some of its greatest pleasures were closing off to him. Take sex, for example. Surely that would have felt incredible to him now. If the shape of an egg or a slice of cheese could bring him such transcendence, just imagine what coitus might do. But it wasn't to be. Several episodes of surgery had put paid to that possibility. Instead, Otto experienced sexual excitement vicariously, through Anika, whose generous sensuality had gradually become a substitute for his own. In the afternoons when she had no appointments, she would stretch her long body on the bed beside him and suggest that he undress her. She would guide his movements with little gasps and exhalations, his hands caressing her breasts and belly with a curious, detached intensity; his fingers following her own inside as she drew him towards her great cry of release. It was a beautiful experience, but cerebral rather than physical, despite the pliant wonders of Anika's flesh beneath his hands, and the way she bit his bottom lip as she came.

Otto was grateful to her for this facsimile of lovemaking. He knew it was done for his benefit alone, as she could experience the real thing whenever she wanted with any of her small squad of lovers. Yet try as he might, he could never completely lose himself to its rhythms. An orgasm felt through the fingertips was no substitute for the real thing; and passion recalled, but no longer experienced, was like a memory of music unheard.

‘Any sign of lunch?' asked Anika, appearing in the kitchen just as Otto finished making the sandwiches.

‘I'm not sure about those eggs,' he replied. ‘I think they might be off.'

‘I'll throw them out,' she said, making for the pantry.

He blocked her path with the proffered sandwich.

‘I'll do it later. I've made us these.'

Three

The following day, as the weather had improved, they decided to eat lunch together on the rooftop terrace. Anika had prepared two mushroom omelettes, served as Otto liked them with a sprig of parsley and a salad of green leaves. With the clouds of the previous day deserting the wide sky, the autumn sun had regained its strength and now emitted a heat that was almost Mediterranean in its intensity. Even this late in the year it could surprise unwary hikers, but Anika understood its moods and sat wearing a wide-brimmed hat for protection. Otto chose to sit in the shade.

The strong afternoon light gave the surrounding hills an insubstantial quality, their liquid shimmer contrasting with the raw physicality of the Alpine giants across the valley. With the change in light and visibility (a celestial telescope, finding its range), Mont Blanc and its companions appeared much closer than the day before, their white peaks outlined with shocking clarity against a topaz sky. The lake below, a deeper blue, lay sunken in its own haze.

Anika and Otto sat quietly, their eyes half closed in the languid warmth, and listened to the spirited scraping of the year's last cicadas. Sometimes, the Lairds enjoyed a leisurely glass of wine with their lunch. A fragrant white from the Valais was their current favourite. But they both had things to do that afternoon, and Otto couldn't spare the hour or two needed to sleep it off. He sipped a glass of sparkling water instead.

‘What time's your tennis lesson?' he asked.

Anika had recently joined a new club in town and was currently working on her topspin. She was keeping herself busy following her retirement from a desk job at the United Nations.

‘Three-thirty,' she replied. ‘You won't be needing the car?'

She raised her sunglasses as she spoke.

‘Not today. It will take me a couple of hours at least to get through all that paperwork. I'll go later in the week.'

Otto's current passion was eco-housing. Once a week he drove to Lausanne to conduct some research at the institute of technology. But a large pile of correspondence awaited him in his study, and he decided he could delay it no longer. Shortly afterwards, drawing up a chair at his mahogany desk, he ran a hand forlornly through the thick wad of letters and listened to the Bentley pulling away over the gravel. He paused to remove something from his pocket – the egg, now wrapped in his handkerchief – and slipped it into a drawer. At least one had been saved from the wrecking ball.

He wearily lifted a letter from the pile and looked at the postmark on the buff envelope. Paris: the 10th arrondissement. It was from Pierre, his old friend at the Sorbonne. Otto had always been a voluminous writer, exchanging regular letters with influential friends from academia and the arts. Often he used this correspondence as a sounding board for his never-ending flow of ideas. In recent years, however, he found that he had less and less to say. Now he was starting to regret his former wordiness. The letters were becoming a chore, but he didn't know how to halt them. He couldn't just admit that he had given up on thinking. To his academic friends, it would be like admitting that he had given up on breathing.

‘Should have kept your mouth shut all these years,' he muttered to himself, taking a paper knife and slicing open Pierre's letter.

As ever, it was composed in perfect English. The handwriting was microscopically small and claustrophobically spaced. Thirteen pages of the stuff. Otto sighed, flicked briefly through its contents and noted the references to the usual suspects: Foucault and his panopticon, Lefebvre and space production. It was like some game of academic tennis, this ferocious hitting back and forth of different names and systems of thought. Pierre and Otto were in the depths of a discussion about the architecture of control, its uses by various political regimes as a way of securing and maintaining power. It was an important topic, but one with little bearing upon Otto's current field of research. It was a misunderstanding between them, really; a sign that, with the passing years, Pierre and he were steadily drifting apart. The themes of their discussions were broadly the same as they had been many decades before. But Otto, at least, had moved on.

Pierre still thought of Otto as a pioneer of the ‘Brutalist' style of building. He remembered him as the energetic and committed young socialist who saw in architecture – the art of arranging space – the means to contribute to both social and personal liberation. Architecture in those days was a political act, no less. Otto and many others at the time believed that by creating large housing estates it would be possible to ensure that everyone lived in a clean, safe and comfortable environment. The well-kept public spaces would encourage interaction and neighbourliness; the uniform size of the apartments would abolish notions of hierarchy. People from all backgrounds, he had argued, would eventually want to inhabit these estates. They would become a microcosm and a foretaste of the society to come: peaceful, progressive, egalitarian, and free from all physical and social division.

That was more than fifty years ago and things had, of course, worked out differently. Otto himself had also changed. Unlike some of his fellow travellers, he hadn't abandoned his ideals completely in the rush to embrace Neoliberalism, a trend that began as a trickle in the late 1970s and became a great flood after 1989. But he
had
let those ideals quietly slip. He had laid them carelessly aside, one day, and conveniently forgotten where he had left them. Now all he wanted was to build unobtrusive houses in the Jura hills and tend to his broken body, grabbing moments of happiness where he could. And if most days he barely had the energy to walk down the hill in order to fetch a baguette from the local store, then battling the worst excesses of capitalism was clearly no longer on the agenda.