The Autograph Man

by Zadie Smith

  Alex squinted.

  “Oh, yes,” said Green. “The pretty black girl? Yes, she passed by here moments before you. She told us about her heart. So affecting! Like something from a film!”

  Alex considered stabbing Green to death with a broken biro he had in his pocket, but he needed the information. “Well? How was she?”

  Three blank faces.

  “I mean, how did she act?”

  More nothing.

  “Did she look all right?”

  “Oh, she looked—she really looked—” stuttered Darvick.

  “Oh, yes. She did,” murmured Green.

  “What?”

  Rubinfine opened his mouth, closed it and opened it again. “Beautiful,” he said.

  THERE IS SOUTH LONDON. And then there is South London. And then there is South London. And then there is Pemberton Hill. And Pemberton Hill made Alex feel unwell. He couldn’t help it. He knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on. But you feel how you feel. And Alex had always felt like a North London boy, though it was an affiliation out of character. His instinct was to detest grouping of all kinds—social, racial, national or political; he had never joined so much as a swimming club. But for this corner of the world he felt that irrational something which enabled him to almost understand why people behave as they do in the contentious, blood-slick places of the world.

  North versus South. Huge row about it once, nuclear row, sitting in a park one summer with Ads, during a heat wave. Shorts rolled up, legs in the air, decimated picnic. A troop of ants determined to cross a teacup into a land of pâté. A perfect London summer’s day, in short, marred by this ancient row over North versus South. Stupid and offensive pose, Adam had said, furiously demolishing Alex’s defenses one by one (houses, parks, schools, pints, girls, weed, public transport), revealing them for the shibboleths they were. Soon enough, the ants found a shortcut over their bellies. Finally, tired of rowing, Alex had stretched out in the high grass to bleat the only honest reason he had: I think it’s because nobody knows me in South London. And I don’t know anyone. It’s like being dead.

  EVERY THURSDAY MORNING, Alex died. Every Thursday morning, Duchamp was the only mourner. In a covered market in Pemberton Hill, covered by concrete, under an underpass. Plants, old books and chipped china for sale, the sunlight breaking over all this in columns, a ballet of dust in these columns. Unspeakably sad, the whole place. Old women, rain hats tied in girlish bows under their chins, walked up and down lines of stalls, in a fretful, lonely way, looking for something like war widows threading though a cemetery of unmarked graves. Alex always held his breath as he passed through, only releasing when he got to the end of it all: three school desks pushed together, Duchamp, his autographs, his toxic smell.

  “Now . . . it’s Alex, innit? The Chinaman. My eyes . . .” said Duchamp, coming up close. Alex stepped back, reeling. “What can I do for you, squire?”

  Duchamp looked dreadful. The deterioration, even from the day before, was terrible to see. His mind had given up some time ago, obviously, but now his body was giving up. And there’s no way back from that. He didn’t look scared, though. That’s the safety net of madness, Alex supposed, that’s its gift. Duchamp had no goyish fears, thanks to that net. It was only Alex who was feeling a terror grip him. A selfish terror. How few Thursdays Duchamp has left to him! How many do I have?

  “Nothing, really,” said Alex, moving to the other side of Duchamp, the side without the mouth. “Actually, I’m not buying at the moment, Brian. I’m selling.”

  “Sorry, chief, didn’t catch that—”

  “I said, I’m not buying right now, Brian. I’m selling.”

  Duchamp took out a handkerchief, the more frankly to pick his nose. Exploring his bare gums with a fat tongue, he waddled down the line of desks, finished fiddling with his nose and now held the handkerchief to his mouth. Whilst he spoke he coughed up yellowish stuff flecked with red, and would not or could not stop shaking his head.

  “Oh, now look, Tandem, look, I can’t help you, mate. . . . You can’t sheriously expect me . . . I ain’t buying, Tandem—I’ve gorra sell if I want to live. You can’t ask an old git like me to buy, now, with the market like it is, flooded with fakes—I’m selling, Tandem, I aint buying. I’m like whassisname.”

  Alex made the International Gesture for Sorry, Brian? (Hands holding invisible football, squinty eyes, head at an angle.)

  “Oh, don’t give me that—come on, whassisname . . . oh, bugger it—him, the fat one, oh come on, squire! It’s Alex, innit? Tandem—it’s you, innit? Well, Tandem’ll know. Nuffing Tandem don’t know about this business. He’s the innellekchewl, inny? Every bugger knows that. You should ask ’im.”

  “Brian . . . I don’t . . .”

  “Yes, you do, come on, now, in the films . . . Don’t be a nonce all your life—”

  “Brian, I don’t know . . .”

  Duchamp’s nodding grew faster, frightening.

  “Oh, God, Brian, I don’t know . . . is it Oliver Hardy?”

  “Piss off.”

  “Brian, I just don’t have time for this, today—no, all right all right all right . . . Charles Laughton? Sydney Greenstreet?”

  “No, it weren’t no one like that . . . funnier than them; a funny one, you know. Fat, like. Huge!”

  “Brian—please. Could we just—”

  “W. C. Fields! In that one he did, you know that one, the Dickens one . . . I’m like ’im, watching me money . . . come on, you know it! What was it he said? Funny, it was. Come on. It was, er— Oh, now I know it, it was: Expenditure twelve pounds and three shillings. Result: happiness. Income—no wait, how’d it go, no wait—bloody ’ell—it’s the other way round innit, it’s Income, twelve—”

  People who are about to die, and the insane. These people speak into the middle distance, eyes clouded by some sort of a film, like a thick uncryable tear, and with their hands going, distractedly picking at their chests. In Lauren Bacall’s autobiography, one of Alex’s all-time favorite books, she described Bogie’s death that way. The odor (I realized it was decay) the hands picking at the hairs on his chest as though things were closing in, and he wanted to get out. The fight to die. Duchamp was still on his feet, by some miracle, but death was on him. Alex could smell it, see it, feel it, just as Lauren did. Lauren Bacall: not the goddess of all sex (as has been claimed) but the goddess of all compassion. And now remembering Lauren’s honest book made Alex step forward and take Duchamp’s busy hands, and place them by his sides and say, “All right, Brian, all right. What have you got for me, then?”

  A 1936 MGM fan album, unsigned, photo of the actress Angela Lansbury, unsigned, a toothbrush holder, one slipper (“Danny Kaye’s slipper, mate. He gave it me”), six stills signed by the horror actor Vincent Price, all forged; a picture of Brian’s sister, June. And more. And more.

  IT BEGAN TO RAIN heavily. Alex helped Brian move his three school desks out of the range of errant raindrops. After they’d lifted everything ten yards, and picked up whatever had fallen, Brian offered him a small plastic school chair to sit on and took one for himself.

  “Stay here a bit, eh?” said Brian, shivering.

  Alex stayed. He brought up a box from under the stall and began working through the folders. There was good stuff in that box. Quite a lot of it. Duchamp had a cracking Harold Lloyd, for example. Some good mid-range forties studio stars: Tyrone Power, Joel McCrea, Van Heflin, Mary Astor. And a very nice Merle Oberon. All under the desk. On top of the desk, he was offering the public a broken anglepoise lamp. With no real hope of a reaction, Alex suggested that this situation might be reversed.

  Brian breathed on him and then rubbed his eyes, over and over.

  “But, Brian, it would be better if—”

  “Have you a lady friend at present, Tandem?”

  “Sort of. She doesn’t want to be my friend much right now.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Duchamp, firmly. “Women are the answer. They are. If you’ll only
let them into the story. Women. They are the answer.”

  “What’s the question?”

  Duchamp laughed at this as if Alex had just told the oldest joke.

  Duchamp had a flask under his chair and a spare cup. Alex now poured out tea for both of them. He spotted a stall for homemade cakes and came back with two fruit slices, moist and fat with raisins.

  “Ta. Well. This is a bit of a turn-up. Fruit slice. Dear me.”

  Duchamp turned it over in his hands a few times and smiled at it with a mixture of fondness and awe, as at a family heirloom. It was a few minutes before he seemed willing to eat it. They sat side by side. To make his fruit slice soft enough for his gummy mouth, Duchamp had to soak each piece in tea and then slurp it from the cup.

  “That was a treat,” said Duchamp finally.

  “Brian,” said Alex, “there is actually something you can do for me. I wondered if you could take a look at this for me.”

  Duchamp neither moved nor made any sign of comprehension. Alex removed his Kitty Alexander from the pocket of his bag. He took Duchamp’s cup out of his hands. He placed the autograph on Duchamp’s lap.

  “Brian, could you . . . ?”

  Brian brought the autograph within inches of his eyes. “Oh, yes.”

  “Brian?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “What, Brian?”

  “Kitty Alexander. Worth a bundle.”

  “You think it’s real,” said Alex, very quickly.

  Duchamp shrugged. “Looks real. But needn’t be. ’S like you said. Sometimes birds ain’t the answer, they’re the fahkin’ question. Ha!”

  “But in your opinion,—do you think it’s real?”

  “I think I’ve seen some bloody good forgeries in my time. See that lot?” Duchamp pointed to the box Alex had just been working through. Alex picked it up.

  “This?”

  “Mostly forged.”

  Alex raised his eyebrows. “Your forgeries?”

  Duchamp nodded.

  “Well, they’re bloody good, Brian. I couldn’t tell the difference.”

  “Yeah, well . . . there’s not many that can. I’ve sold you a few in the past. Ha! Now . . .” he said, not looking at Alex but reaching out to him with his stubby arm, physically trying to connect him to a memory, “you . . . you’re the Kitty man, int ya?”

  He bent over the box Alex held on his lap, thumbing through the papers in it with a real expertise. He pulled one out. A photograph.

  “A Kitty Alexander, squire . . . forged, of course, I did it meself—but I did it back then . . . back in fifty-summink . . . so the age of the ink is fine. No bugger in the world spot that for a fake.”

  Alex studied the thing closely. Taking it out of its sheath and bringing it under the light. He placed his own Kitty by its side. They were almost too close, and with dread he placed them now one on top of the other and held them up to the light. Maybe Brian was confused—maybe his was a later forgery, an Autopen? And if Alex’s fitted Brian’s perfectly, then they were both Autopens, for no man can sign exactly the same way twice over. We are not so precise. But no. Alex’s A slanted a little further to the left. The sweeping, Elizabethan tail of Brian’s X came lower than it did on Alex’s.

  “Looks so real,” said Alex with admiration.

  “ ’Tisn’t, mate. I did it meself. You forget, Tandem, I worked in these studios. There weren’t no one better than me.” Duchamp wiped down the photo with a piece of chamois from his pocket.

  “I met her once. Beauty. None like her. But, mate, you’re twenty-five, and then”—Duchamp clicked his fingers, incompetently—“you’re sixty. Nobody told you that, did they?” He laughed, grimly. “People like her should disappear. Poof! Them on the screen like that, they ain’t meant to get old. No one wants to see an old bitch, do they? The people don’t want that.”

  They’re not too keen on old buggers like you, either, said Alex’s brain, but he shut his mouth and stretched out his fingertips for the treasure. Duchamp drew it back from him with an unpleasant smile.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Bet you could sell this on to them mugs in Neville Court, eh? Or down Jimmy’s Antiques? If you can’t tell, they ain’t gonna be able to, is they? Three thousand quid or more, no doubt! Cut yourself a percentage, eh?”

  “Well,” said Alex, blushing, “you’re not even allowed into those shops anymore, are you? I could sell it for you. I’ll just take fifteen percent of whatever I get.”

  “Why don’t you sell your own, if you’re so keen, eh?”

  “Brian, mine’s the real thing. I’m a big fan. The biggest. I’d like to keep it.”

  Duchamp tutted. “Oh dear, oh dear. That’s no good in this business. You can’t get sentimental. Just ink. Just letters. The real thing . . .” he said. “As if it mattered! The little difference that makes all the difference. What a way to make a living, eh?”

  “I’ll take it, then?”

  “You sign an agreement first. I know this business, mate. Here—here’s some paper. I’ll write it. You sign it. So. I, Alex-Li Tandem, agree to keep no more than ten percent—”

  “Ten percent?”

  “Ten—of the sale of Brian Duchamp’s Kitty Alexander. That’ll do, wunnit? Ain’t the bloody Magna Carta, but it’ll do. There—sign it, then.”

  Alex took the piece of paper. The handwriting was atrocious.

  “Just—read me that bit, Brian.”

  “Bloody hell, you deaf as well as stupid? Ten percent—and that’s all you’re getting, so just sign it.”

  Alex signed his name. As soon as he was finished, Duchamp whipped the paper from him.

  “Call that a signature? Looks like a bloody scrawl to me. Never trust an Israelite. In Hebrew, is it? Eh? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  Alex felt a heave of disgust. He stood up.

  “All right, all right—that’s enough. Give me the Kitty. Ten percent. You canny bastard.”

  And for a moment, he did look canny. Ugly, smelly, laughing that filthy death rattle—but still here. Still dominating the scenes. Not yet accepting the role we all get cast in, eventually: the walk-on (fall-down) part with no lines.

  2.

  Somebody at a tube station wanted to be famous. They wanted to be known, all over the city, if only for fifteen minutes. They let their heels cross the white line, they took a quick breath, they leapt into forever. Thanks to this passenger action (a truly majestic new euphemism, emphasizing the inconsideration), it took Alex almost two hours to get from the South to the center of town. At the mouth of the tube exit an unsmiling Adam met him, opened a giant candy-striped golfing umbrella and gruffly instructed Alex to take his arm. And so they set off through a downpour, dependent on a colorful piece of canvas like two men in a balloon. Past a grand theater and a seedy bar, straight past the girls paid to beckon at them, the Left-handed Shop (Yes, Al, very goyish. You can make a note later, all right?), the gay bars, the mixed bars, the strippers—like two determined Hasidim, straight past all temptation! They reached a favorite cake shop. Adam stood in the doorway to draw in the umbrella while Alex hunted for an indoor table. A minute later they were back outside, being led to a miserable archipelago of tables standing in dirty water, their tops barely covered by the awning of a barbershop. A lean Italian waiter tried to make a run for it the second the two young men were seated. People in the center of the city were known to be callous and impatient.

  The cakes and coffee arrived. Soon they were speaking quickly, with nothing extraneous, in the semaphore of old friends. Except they were not merry today. They were off-key. It had begun with lateness and now stretched to a lack of choreography—each took his turn spilling a perfectly solid sugar bowl—and then the same disease spread to the conversation. Neither could make himself understood. Each seemed to the other vain and self-centered. To each it seemed as if this man sitting opposite spoke only about himself. Adam talked excitedly and incomprehensibly about his latest studies. He stood up to demonstrate to Alex how the ten sef
irot also corresponded to points of the body; he stretched his arms out like a madman. Alex cringed.

  “You see, my spine,” said Adam, “runs where Tif’eret—that’s Beauty, Compassion—my spine runs where Tif’eret lies. So to get from Netsah—which is my right leg—to Tif’eret I meditate on the idea of my spine. That’s the Path of Yod. There are thirty-two paths, according to Ari. But here”—he thrust the base of his spine, and with it his backside, into the air. The pretty boys across the road smiled, pointed—“here is where the soul goes beyond its earthly place to find better seed. I feel I’m halfway there, man. After all these years.” He pointed to the air above his head. “I’m moving towards the crown, to Ayin, to Nothingness. To the essence of God.”

  “Yep. That must be great for you. Waiter! A bottle of red please, two glasses.”

  They sat without talking. A wind was getting going. Adam looked wistfully at another table, as if he wished he were at it. Alex took out his tobacco and tried to roll a cigarette in the manner of a man who has been unjustly wronged. He had been betrayed—this is how he felt. Why tell Esther about Boot? What kind of friend does that?

  Just as he was about to make the accusation, the wine arrived. Adam sent his glass back; Alex filled and drained his as if it were grape juice. Adam watched him, one hand scratching his head violently between two dreads. Alex poured himself another and began to speak of the Boot development, subtly, hoping to detect some guilt in Adam’s gestures. Nothing. Not a dicky bird. But maybe the total absence of guilt was in itself a sign. No one can appear so innocent all of the time, can they? Can they? Someone must have traduced Alex T. And if it wasn’t Adam, then who?

  Alex continued to drink, talking rapidly about he knew not what. Fifteen minutes later he knew his mouth was still moving, but it had been a while since his brain was attached to the words. Bored, Adam exploded a glazed strawberry under his fork.

  “But all these women,” he said, cutting Alex off, “they’re all the same woman, really. Don’t you see that? Kitty, Boot, Anita—they just overlap each other. Think of an art restorer peeling the paint off a portrait to find other portraits underneath. You ruin a perfectly good painting out of some misplaced curiosity—the possibility of other portraits. It’s a kind of endless substitution—and all because you don’t know how to deal with things as they are.”