Time passes, and time doesn’t pass, it is “the endless summer,” the two young Portuguese have now moved into and become part of, indefinitely, “the rest of your lives, if need be.” By now they are a little colony numbering too many to fit into the rusty van, they leave it where it is and really don’t go anywhere, not even out to the little town on the coast, dinner at the so-called hair artist’s place is allowed to sit and rot like one of those “nature mortes” in paintings by Rembrandt the elder’s Flemish colleagues, which far from being “morte” teem with mites, flies, and drops of the dew of purification, only the mother occasionally drives in and visits her mother and does a spot of shopping for the orgy of milk, bread, and wine, semisoft table cheese and leeks from the neighbor’s field (no soft-boiled breakfast egg, no fried egg in the dusk, from twelve crowing roosters in the cage by the gable), which is the miracle of which life on the farm is composed and for which she is by and large the only one who pays, using the child support money that the just a few months ago long-since-missing stepfather (against his will, but forced to by the system) transfers to her account. Life at “the white farmhouse” starts to resemble the stuff of which dreams are made, like life a century earlier in the so-called artists’ colony at Skagen (the light of which the two Portuguese never ever arrived to see), a life that is simultaneously in the midst of and completely beyond time, a world of its own, apart from the fact that life in the colony at “the white farmhouse” has no higher purpose, no ideas or ideals of the sublime, of symbols, of composition, of community and everyday life, no dreams, in life as dream. Their lives are one life, they get up in the same day and go to sleep in the same night. The only one who, like the mother, seems to have a life outside the community is the younger of the two Portuguese, the small dark one who is quite clearly also the poorest. His movements are soft and self-assured, not trying to be someone, he just is, a self-confident incarnation of the pride we, without having encountered it before, recognize as the pride a country or maybe rather a culture might have, and which is its very existence and survival in the physical body of its people beyond any economic system and completely independent of whether the state in which it is currently occurring endures or goes bankrupt and is placed under the supervision of more powerful nations and market forces, the incarnation of that Portuguese man born along with the far-reaching expeditions of discovery in the late fifteenth-century and who later voyaged through history as conqueror, seducer, poet, aristocrat. His shoes and clothes are threadbare hand-me-downs from older brothers, uncles, at any rate they have certainly been worn by others before him, but everything is always clean and looks freshly ironed, put together with a discreet but expert sense of colors and the tactility of fabrics. He knows who he is, unlike the others who—apart from his two-years-older buddy, “o Vikingo,” who after consultation with his father, the patriarch of the family, has reached the idea that when he returns from his trip to Denmark in early autumn, he will embark on some form of natural science course—don’t know who they are, or what to do with their lives, and therefore in a sense are nothing other than the very life they are living here and now in “the endless summer.” Perhaps that is what makes him—even though he is the youngest but one, the girl being a year younger—the only adult, the only man. From time to time he vanishes without a word and stays away for half or whole days and comes back with a drawing, a sketch, or a watercolor of a church or a manor house that none of the others, apart from the mother, have ever seen or had any idea existed. He doesn’t say much and never tells them anything about himself, so the other one, the two-years-older and obviously wealthier buddy, “o Vikingo,” tells them his story. Vikingo is clearly proud of him, and you get the feeling that he has brought him along and maybe also paid for some of the trip in order to show him off and tell of him: he’s an artist, from a poor background, of course, discovered or found inadvertently one morning by the little provincial town’s (only) rich man, on the town square where the then eight- or perhaps ten-year-old boy, whose own family can’t afford to send to school, sits drawing whatever the passersby want to see, to earn his living and that of the family, mother, father, grandmother, and the twelve older and younger siblings, who all live together in two rooms in the basement of a house in one of the oldest neighborhoods—where the town’s poorest live and rent out their basements to the even poorer families, the slightly darker, more restless, unsettled, untrustworthy, those with gypsy blood in their veins, basements entered via the narrowest of passages in the network of narrow passages in the densely built-up area of small houses—with kitchen and hencoop in one and the same cement room, separated by wire mesh with a quivering door, made of the same wire mesh stapled to a rough wooden frame, which is always open so the hens can move freely between the kitchen and a chicken yard devoid of sun and partially concealed under the little cement bridge that takes the wealthier families on the first floor across and down to the little sunny backyard in which they grow their own vegetables and flowers, and having stood for half an hour in the shade of the fashionable Italian hat with its silk band that he, being the richest man in the town, always wears (along with the silver-mounted cane with ivory handle on which he is at this moment resting his hands), contemplating the little boy’s astonishing sketches (which those few of the other town residents who take any notice whatsoever of the boy, and perhaps even let him draw their silhouette or that of their young daughter, do not view as anything other or more than a poverty-stricken lad’s venerable attempt to earn a respectable coin or two, unlike the older brothers in the family who, as everyone in the little town knows, only leave home—thereby giving the younger brothers just a bit more room in the bed, in the furthest back of the two rooms in which they all sleep crisscross every night—on the day they are sent to prison for the first time), the rich man decides then and there to be the boy’s patron, first paying for his schooling and private lessons with the town’s greatest (and only) artist, and later funding his studies, which he embarks upon when just fourteen or fifteen years of age, at the art academy in the capital, Lisbon, eighty kilometers southwest, out by the sea. He is the only one in the little colony at “the white farmhouse” who spends the time it takes each morning to polish his shoes, which are not tennis shoes or sneakers like the other three boys wear, but classic light-brown men’s shoes, well-worn but well-maintained, with laces and leather soles. And when, late in the evening, he comes walking as if out of mere nothing across the fields toward the farmhouse, they can already recognize him at a great distance by the hat, which is not a patron-hat but, of course, a very slightly more “personal” and broad-brimmed hat, and so even or perhaps especially in the sharp light over the flat, north Funen fields it is obvious, merely from the silhouette, that “there goes an artist.”
One day, nonetheless, one of the two Danish boys, the oh so fine and slender one, has been into town and brought back the friend with whom he shared a room in the life he has now dropped out of. The friend, a lanky lad from Odense, who the others also see as an artist, is attracted to the Portuguese and maybe in particular to the certitude he carries with him, a glow of the “lightning destiny” that the Odense lad and his artist-dreaming friends in the provincial town long for and often talk about, but have never personally felt or seen in the older artists they occasionally visit but only know from an almost century-old poem, the point of which is precisely this: that the lightning destiny is no longer possible, it is over and done with, a destiny both he and his friends would be not merely happy about, but would be redeemed, liberated and definitively determined by, and would display with pride, but which the young Portuguese simply carries as a matter of course. The Portuguese takes the lanky Odense lad with the prematurely receding hairline, the broad beak-like nose and long loose-jointed arms, the source of his nickname “Twiggy,” along on his walks across the fields, and late in the evenings they return to the farmhouse and the kitchen with sketches and charcoal drawings and sit together in the candlelight glow with omelet, c
hunks of bread, and wine, talking about the light in the old masters and madness and the intensity in Van Gogh. One day, in return, the lanky lad takes the Portuguese along to show him the town, or perhaps it’s more a case of parading the young Portuguese and his lightning destiny and the glow it casts upon him personally in the local graphic studio, where he himself is the young hope in whom the older artists—who have long since abandoned the dream of revolutionizing the world through their art and are resigned to the safety found in being part of a small community where everyone knows everyone and they all go to one another’s private viewings and are more or less evenly spread across the local selection committees deciding who can exhibit this year as artist of the year or “Funen resident of the year” at the local public museum of art—see a trace of the dream of a lightning destiny that they themselves once had, and have therefore given him unrestricted access to machines and materials in the graphic studio they run together, with municipal support, and in which he and the young Portuguese now drop out of the world, and from which they do not return until several days later to the farmhouse and the kitchen, carrying etchings, woodcuts, and drypoint prints. The lanky, somewhat nervy and restless Odense lad, who despite his obsession with art never really comes to believe in his own talent, is now part of life at “the white farmhouse,” but at the same time he carries on with his life in the other world, occasionally goes to the graphic studio or visits older artists who have moved out to the countryside, living in forest ranger houses or hunting lodges they rent from the local estate owners, and with whom he spends several sleepless days and nights drinking home-distilled apple and plum brandy and discussing art and writers, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and Avignon Quintet (not a word about the contemporaneous and zeitgeisterly new wave, not a word about punk and an unruliness and a rebellion far beyond rock music, not a word about the pure noise and the ecstasy of destruction), and in the course of the summer, which in the world outside the farmhouse is not endless, but totally natural with a culmination, a midsummer evening and a late summer, he gets a place at the local art academy, and a couple of years later he holds his first exhibition in the capital, at a café. The central exhibit, “Hysteric”—a multicolored and wild and very yellow intaglio print of a grotesquely-distorted female with his own bony limbs, oblong skull, and, in the golden section, a big toe with a luminous red nail, transparent, trembling like a jelly slab atop the cream-filled discs of a confectioner’s cookie—takes on a mythical quality among the survivors of “the endless summer,” and later in life he never surpasses it, the lightning from the jelly slab becomes his destiny.
Abruptly, “the endless summer is over,” the lanky lad leaves the town and moves to the capital city and together with a slightly younger and far more purposeful friend, a young Jew who does tai chi, is a black belt, and has spent a year with his master in Beijing or Shanghai, he takes over the running of a small art school and for the next few years these two, along with their pupils and possibly without him really realizing, live the synthesis of art and life that the twentieth-century avant-gardes and in particular the second, the nineteen-sixties’ avantgarde, and the situationists prophesied as their version of the twentieth-century Utopia. He moves into and lives his life in the studio’s new world, and everything they do there, every movement and the things, forms and phenomena produced by these movements, are equal portions art, life, and world; instead of washing the dishes, they look at them, move the elements around, arrange them in new shapes, gaze into the pan of rice and the last pinch of curry powder as if this is the new world before they eat it, and the act of consuming it is a gesture, a “throw,” an in-it-iation, a quantum leap out of time and into a completely different, seventh dimension, a completely different notion of existence and community, rice and curry, the collision of the white, almost chalk-white of the rice, no, more like the white flesh of the codfish on the white plate, yes, the North Sea, the ocean, the unknown icy-cold depths, the last white patch on the planet, eleven kilometers below the surface of the sea, and the intense desert-dust-burning, globe-core-searing yellow of the curry. Art is life, and life is art. At any rate, that’s what it’s like for him. The slightly younger friend, the Jewish tai chi expert, is more pragmatic, he is well aware that the synthesis of art and life, of work and creation, is not a Utopia, a proposal for a new and better world and a new and better human community, but a strategy in the one world that exists. He intuitively understands that his personal selling-point must be his incorruptibility and his radicality. After a couple of years, this younger friend wins a place at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and while still a student he is taken on by one of the most important international gallerists in the city, the works in his first exhibition, the prices set unusually high, already get sold out at the private viewing, museums abroad phone in to secure, whatever the price, one of the paintings they haven’t even seen yet, just heard the buzz about. In the subsequent interviews, published in newspapers and art journals, he tells his story as a myth, his tai chi classes turn into a past in “Chinese boxing,” and his Jewish background—with strong family ties, rituals, the historical weight that no ordinary citizen in the country embodies, but can only envy or try to identify with in novels, poems and plays, the brother who has moved back to Israel, life in conflict between two cultures, two identities—becomes a commodity on the art market, a signature he ensures isn’t too “authentic” by transforming the authentic surname with its Yiddish-German ring and vocal ornamentation to a single letter of the alphabet, a personal symbol, an R, as historyless as The Market will allow a commodity to be. Soon he is transporting himself around alternately on a carrier cycle with his two lovely children, like a young artist with great “integrity,” or, like a shooting star, in the Jaguar on which he has spent a half or a quarter of his first million, while the other, slightly older and now former buddy, the lanky Odense lad with the ever-more-receding hairline, hauls his rusty bicycle up to the second floor and into the studio he now inhabits all by himself—without his buddy and without pupils—and tries to fix the bike chain back on, and apart from that doesn’t go anywhere, on the contrary, he stays living in the studio, but his paintings and sculptures and traces of the life lived no longer have the grotesque and trembling lump of jelly on the big toe of the “Hysteric,” or the “shock of the new” as triggered by the gaze into the pan of rice. Instead of letting things be what they are, and work on arranging their forms, he starts seeing them as symbols, and instead of just talking about the mad expressionists, about Munch, Nolde, and Schiele, he tries to paint like them, which of course merely results in symbol-laden Nolde-like anachronisms, paintings that no one has the patience to look at. One day, he has suddenly abandoned his own belief in art, or at least the notion of himself as artist. He’s going to make films instead. He spends several months writing a screenplay about two men walking through a flat landscape, across fields and along gravel roads, one of them staring relentlessly at the horizon and what might be beyond it while the other just stares down at the ground ahead, at everything there is and is passing by. But the film never comes to anything. Instead, he meets a woman, has two children, and moves with them like a little family into the second floor of an old detached house in one of the capital city’s run-down outlying suburbs, and you can occasionally encounter this lanky, now aging Odense lad with the two children in the front carrier of the bicycle, like a proper family man. All at once, he has moved out, takes a bit of work as a graphic designer, and one morning like so many other mornings when sitting on a bench in a park or next to one of the city lakes, he gets into conversation with a slightly older man who shows him a book he absolutely must read. Soon you can be sure to meet him or be overtaken by him when walking across City Hall Square, like a head clerk who, having been absent for half a century, suddenly reappears in a completely wrong era with his boring brownish gabardine trousers, his boring brown shoes and a boring dark-blue wind-breaker, and, after a quick hi and “how are things with you,”
yet again tries to give you a copy of the book you absolutely must read (about sin, evil and Jesus Christ, the Son of God who is the only one who can save humankind from its state of perdition, and so forth). From time to time, he is still visited by his two children in the small dark three-room apartment he has moved into temporarily, with its toilet off the back staircase, but when his mother falls ill he moves home to be with her and his father in the small detached house on the outskirts of the provincial town he had left twenty years earlier, because he had wanted to live a completely different, more authentic, real and artistic life. Throughout his childhood, his father had worked as a low-ranked engineer in a largish company and designed solutions for smallish units (of what? and for what? the son had never understood), and being the youngest of three children, the only boy, with two older sisters (who didn’t become engineers like their father or stay-at-home housewives like their mother, but, devoid of desire to do anything else, nonetheless carried on the life their parents had lived, with long-term employment, a small detached house, a husband, children, and a perfectly ordinary, cheap-to-run and not too flashy car), he had started drawing at an early age, from the very outset with the awareness that he wouldn’t be drawing technical solutions to smallish units, but visions of other worlds and other creatures and a completely different light. He had more or less consciously done everything that the parents and the two older sisters didn’t understand: looking at paintings, reading poems, playing the violin, and going with friends in strange clothes to strange places to hear strange music that didn’t “sound like anything the rest of us know.” At seventeen he had dropped out of school and left home to live his very own life as an artist. And unlike most of his friends, all of whom wanted to be artists too, but at the same time, as a precaution, would first sit their final high-school exams and perhaps, so as to have something to fall back on, start a course of further education on the side, it seemed as if he not only knew what he wanted to do, and believed in it, but also really did it. But maybe he had never managed to leave home completely, maybe he had, unconsciously, left a door ajar, quite literally: having lived in various rented rooms and shared apartments the first time round—long before the jelly slab’s lightning and escape to Copenhagen—he moved into his own apartment, a rather dark, three-room, first-floor apartment in one of the provincial town’s old working-class districts, it was neither his current girlfriend nor his upstairs neighbor who—just in case—had the spare key, but his parents. And at frequent intervals, when they knew he probably wasn’t home, the engineer and his wife arrived in their cheap-to-run car, let themselves into their son’s apartment carrying a vacuum cleaner, bucket, mop, and various cleansing agents, and started to clean, tidy, removed dried-up condoms from the floor next to the mattress, made the “bed,” put books back in the shelving unit, and also cleared away the son’s, the would-be artist’s meticulously arranged composition of fruit, wine, glasses, and bowls on a cloth draped over a round table a few meters in front of the easel with its still only half-finished “nature morte,” the disgracefully shriveled apples and mold-spotted peaches were thrown in the trash and the glasses and bowls nicely washed and put back in the cupboard above the kitchen sink. The engineer and his wife then locked the door behind them and drove home to the small detached house, and neither they nor the son ever mentioned it to one another, not a word. During the final months of his mother’s life, it is now he, the lanky son, who takes care of her, washes her, feeds her, and puts her to bed, cooks dinner for his father and does the dishes, vacuums, cleans, puts everything away and tidies up after them, all three. But when at the end of her last months, which by now is half a year, the mother is finally dead and has been given a good Christian funeral, and he has done his duty as a Christian and good son and can return with a peaceful mind to life and his two children in the capital, he stays living with his father in the very run-down and dark detached house he had left twenty years earlier because it represented everything he didn’t want to be and never in his life would become.
The Endless Summer Page 6
