‘A dream come true!’ I said.
‘It was the worst thing imaginable, then. I said no. I was darkness. I was silence. I was gloom. I couldn’t do it. I made an excuse. I apologised, profusely; the dealer on the other end of the phone was quite shocked. The chance slipped by. Some days later I managed to summon up the energy and self-possession to leave the hotel. It was snowing, I remember making my way down the Rue Saint-Denis, with all its butchers’ shops and Roman arches, towards the Pompidou.’
‘To see the paintings, if not the man?’
‘Wait,’ he said: ‘Don’t spoil it: let me tell the story. You’ve got that awful urge to see ahead: to control. Just let life come to you. Take it as it comes—it’s the tropics; it’s the build-up!’
‘Sorry—it just seemed the way things were going.’
‘No—you’re right—of course: and that’s the sign a speaker and a listener are in harmony, when they’re together telling the tale. You’re right. I always used to go to the Cubist galleries at the Beaubourg; I spent hours there, every morning: I was memorising every Picasso, every Braque. I wanted to know them so well they’d be with me in my mind wherever I was, wherever life brought me—but that day I varied my routine. I found the Dubuffet room, and sat on one of the benches at the centre of the gallery, and set myself to absorbing everything, but in a different way: I tried to open myself, to be open to each work in turn, and the way they spoke to each other, what they said to me—and after some while in that state, sitting there, I felt someone’s presence, at a bench beside me. I looked over: and he was there, holding a walking stick, looking straight at me.’
‘It was him?’
‘It was Jean Dubuffet, watching as I gazed at his work. His look wasn’t a smile—but it was full of compassion, grace. No words. I glanced back towards the paintings, and lost myself in them again: and he stayed there, sitting, watching, by my side.’
‘Strange encounter!’
‘Of all my experiences with artists, that was the one that meant the most to me. I think back on it now, often. He was the last of the line for me: the last bright star at the end of the tradition, who breathed the same breath as those other masters I loved so much—and I felt him looking at me there, as if he was saying to me: It’s for you, now, the burden. I must leave the light; the sun, and sky. The time’s here for you. For you to look for yourself, and make some balance of your own with the world. Study’s nothing. Knowledge is nothing. Only painting. Only art.’
‘And that’s what you’ve been doing ever since: with your artists—with Jirrawun?’
‘Of course.’
‘And where are they all: Paddy, Freddie, Rusty? I thought they’d all be with you out here.’
‘At a funeral—that’s where they spend their lives, these days. Don’t you want to see the new studio? It’s not far. My temple: my folly! Haven’t you heard about it? Isn’t that why you came?’
‘Word had reached me,’ I said: ‘How could I not have heard? It’s a triumph: everybody talks about it. I’ve seen all the photos. When you told me about it, so long ago, I thought it was just one of those mad build-up dreams!’
‘The Fitzcarraldo Gallery. I remember—that morning, after we’d driven through the night—don’t worry! The strange thing is that the dream’s been fulfilled in life—in every detail; it looks just the way I first saw it in my mind’s eye: white-walled, with clean lines, high windows, a panoramic view across the ranges. It’s beautiful—and full of sadness, like every beautiful thing.’
‘Sadness?’
‘I’m sure you know exactly what I mean! In those first months, when the painting at the outstation had just started, when the artists were bringing out their stories one by one, and finding ways to show their world on canvas, I told myself that it was something forever: that those works were eternal things—they would hang in museums of art and outsiders would understand them; feel what was in them; feel the landscape, and what lies in it. But slowly, once I couldn’t hide any longer from the Kimberley, and the way the lives around me were being lived, I came to realise that permanence has gone from here. Transience is all there is: things fading, things vanishing. And I began to look at the paintings in a new way. Something shifted in my understanding of them—it felt as if they were becoming less solid, less self-contained: I had the impression that the fields of colour in them were changing before my eyes. I remembered what you used to say to me, about paintings radiating away their strength, being worn down in the world, being looked at too much—and I started to wonder if I really was a saviour in the North, if what I’d done meant anything at all. You know I’d always been afraid of what lay before us: you remember.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘That fear came to a head when we moved out here, from Kununurra to Wyndham, and we’d built the new studio: there was room to think: everything was calm and still. I used to go up to the gallery space, alone, after sunset, as darkness fell; I’d sit with the paintings, and watch the stars, and the clouds drifting; and there were all the noises of the night to hear: you could hear the owls calling, and the nightjars, and the dogs from far across the valley would howl—and I’d lie there, thinking how I’d done what I wanted to. I’d made a gallery, and filled it full of art, and that art was like a doorway: into what?’
I turned to him.
‘Don’t,’ he said: ‘Don’t speak. The words aren’t there. They aren’t in the universe, even to begin to say. If they were, if there were words to express that, why would you paint? Why would anyone?’
‘There are some people,’ I said, ‘who only have words.’
‘But you know words are just traps: mirages, nothing else. You know that as well as anyone: you’re always running, looking, moving—trying to see past the surface of the world. Isn’t that why people like you always come out here? Why everyone goes out into the deep bush—always further, further, as if they could reach places where the landscape’s still strong enough to unravel everything they are. To unmake themselves: and only when we get to that point do we believe we might begin to see. Isn’t that the truth?’
His voice was harsh. He gave me an assessing, almost vindictive look.
‘Shall we go out?’ I said, ‘And take a look through the studio together? After all, I came a long way to see it.’
‘You did,’ he murmured: ‘And I should show you, I know: go with you—give you the tour—occupy my dream. But I can’t. I can’t anymore. It’s all played out, now. There’s an art movement; there are paintings, exhibitions, collections—everything we longed for: but I can see the way things will be. That I can see with perfect vision.’
‘How will they be?’
‘One by one, the old artists will die. Hector’s dead. Paddy’s already halfway into another world: he’s leaving; very soon he’ll be gone. We’ll bury his heart at Bow River—there’ll be a funeral, the dignitaries from down south will fly up, and make speeches. I’ll write a eulogy, we’ll have the usual grief and ceremonial, and the grave will be left—left for the heat and storms—the world here will continue its dissolution, and all the children we see around us will grow up to lead dark, short lives. You go up—you go, and walk through it—I can’t: it gives me no joy any more. I realise now that I wasn’t building a temple—I built a mausoleum instead.’
*
All went as he saw it would. I spent some hours with him; our talk flowed on—Wyndham: its shifting atmospherics, his diversions there, his sense of what lay in wait: for him; for all his friends. I made my visit to the studio, alone. I gazed up at the paintings; I had the sense of being on a pilgrimage: I knew they were the last great works from Jirrawun. Late that evening, I drove back to Darwin. Within the month, the news reached me of Paddy Bedford’s death. A funeral was held; the obituaries appeared; Tony dropped from sight.
It was the next dry season before I began to hear word of his doings: the stories, as always, were baroque—he had fled Australia, and reappeared in Vienna, or Petersburg; he was i
n Manhattan, plunged once more among the modernists; he had returned to the haunts of his childhood, and was deep in the Yarra Ranges, living alone. These tales swirled around his name for some while, then subsided; the trail went dead; and it was only when I collided with the Melbourne gallery owner William Mora one day several months later, on a trip south, that the picture clarified: I learned the truth; it was more exotic still.
‘Tony? Yes,’ he said, and gave me his most quizzical look: ‘Yes. I can fill you in, if you like. It’s an unusual narrative. You might even want to go and visit him: it’s worth the trip.’
‘Where to?’
‘He’s in Vietnam,’ said William, and paused for effect.
‘Go on,’ I said.
The story tumbled out: the two of them, after the funeral, overwhelmed by their unbroken sense of grief, had decided to travel. They opted for a tranquil, little-visited stretch of the Vietnamese coastline, and found rooms at a small hideaway beside a fishing village, directly on the shore of the South China Sea.
‘The effect of that beach was peculiar,’ said William, and he cradled his chin on one hand, and assumed a reflective air: ‘The pressure of the tide seemed never to stop; you had the sense of being in a constant, unavailing battle; it was like being slowly pulverised, torn apart and remade: the light was so strong, and the sound of the waves so metronomic and intense.’
Tony made it his habit, on that trip, to stroll from the small retreat where the two of them were staying into the village close by, and there, one evening, as the sun was setting, he met a young woman of great reticence and charm of character. Something shifted, at that point, in his way of seeing the world. He came back to Vietnam: he rejoined her; they married; they had a child. He forged contacts in Hanoi: they were tentative; they deepened. He met the artists of the capital; he moved in their circles for some months. Soon he found himself giving advice to the Central Committee of the Vietnamese communist party on cultural relations with the wider world.
‘What a reinvention!’ I broke in.
‘Are you surprised? Really? I go up there to see him, from time to time. You could almost say he was happy—or at least on the edge of happiness. You should make contact with him again. The moment’s right. Although you still have to treat him slightly as you would a wounded, high-bred animal: you can tell he’s still recovering from a dreadful blow.’
‘You mean the death of the artists he knew? Or the end of his northern life?’
‘I mean the end of the dream that beauty can save the world. That’s what drove him away. That’s what he was running from. And he spent the first years of his Indochinese life travelling, constantly: up and down to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, steeping himself in that milieu. But I think now he’s come to rest—in fact, he’s building a house. It’s an intriguing design: French tropical meets antebellum South. It even incorporates a studio.’
‘Everything he builds incorporates a studio.’
‘Check it out,’ said William: ‘Go and see. Why not? It could be just what you need—a break beside the pounding, rhythmic ocean.’
‘I’d like that. There’s so much left open from our earlier talks. So much unsaid.’
‘That’s always the way. Probably what real friendships rely on. Here, then: take this—his details.’
With that he handed me a card, and vanished into the crowds of Federation Square. I glanced at it. On one side was a bright yellow five-pointed star set against a vivid blood-red ground; on the reverse, a sea of Vietnamese sentences, a set of numbers, and a name: ‘Mr Oliver—Cultural expert.’ Undeniably, I thought, and laughed to myself: from Fitzcarraldo to Colonel Kurtz’s apocalypse in one swift step!
*
And so, a few weeks later, almost by natural progression, I found myself crouched in my seat on a Vietnam Air jet bound for Ho Chi Minh City, staring down into the darkness, tracking our progress as we soared high above the lightning storms and thunderclouds. At last we dipped down towards the city’s lights and sprawl. Long before, in the days of Soviet influence, I had known it well.
I lingered there for some days, lost in memory and nostalgia—I immersed myself in its sounds and rhythms: by morning I roamed the avenues, and inspected the galleries of the fine-art museum; when evening came I read my way through histories of the guerrilla campaign and studies of the impressionist movement, which had flourished there in the last days of French rule. After this series of acclimatisations and forays, on the appointed morning for my rendezvous with Tony I drove the coastal highway north, through quiet towns and tourist precincts, past military camps and training centres, past schools and factories. It was a winding, twisting journey: more than half the day was gone by the time I reached my destination. There he was, waiting, smiling his wry, sad smile.
‘You thought you would never see me again!’
‘I was sure I wouldn’t,’ I said: ‘Life’s in chapters. Sometimes people turn the page on you.’
‘But lives have their themes, and those themes keep on coming back. Some people you never know at all; some you can never leave behind. Look!’
He waved his hand towards the beach, which was veiled by drifts of spray: it stretched to a promontory, a mountain, a cape. Tall dunes, rough shacks and houses, fishing boats at sheltered anchor: ‘My new world! Let me show you, before anything. It’s the softest, gentlest part of the day—see how beautiful it is!’
‘A good subject,’ I said, ‘for a painter with an eye for light.’
‘What was it,’ he said then, in an abrupt voice, and turned to me, and stared at me as if the stare’s strength would bring forth some vital clue: ‘What? What was I looking for, chasing after, all through those years when we were spending time together? What was that gleam in the North? I see you, and I send my mind back now—to the Kimberley, and the world of the old painters, and Jirrawun.’
‘And?’
‘And that was it: light. That’s what it was; that’s all it was—the gleam: the flame inside the light. It was that glow in the country they were trying to put down in paint—and that was the secret strength that pulled me there, and held me there.’
We walked: he was full of words, and tales, and there was a force and drive in what he was saying to me; he watched my face to see my reaction to every sentence that he spoke. How much he told me, in those hours, as dusk drew near: the artists, their strengths, all that they had given him, the decisions that he made, and failed to make; the ties he still felt to the Kimberley—the pressures that drove him to his drastic flight. Our steps had fallen into a rhythm, slow, dreamlike, as if we were trying to keep time with the sound of the waves and tide.
‘I’m glad you came here,’ he said: ‘To my exile. I wanted to show you this. All this: not just the sight itself, but what it seems to tell me at different times. Each time of day is completely distinct. There’s dawn, and the first glare: it’s hard, sharp light then, avenging light, that damages the viewer as much as the viewed. There’s the effect that comes when the tide’s pushing in, in the lush, soft mid-morning: everything seems part of a single creative act—everything is joined together by shafts of burning sun. And there’s the late afternoon: that’s a clean, documentary light; it picks out the colours of the painted wooden fishing boats, each shading of red, and blue, and grey and black; the tide’s out, then, the sand’s hard and flat, and all the boys from the village are playing on the beach, and the families of fishermen sit on the seawalls of their houses and feel the breezes blowing in. That’s the cycle. It’s a meditative cycle, for me: a conversation with the landscape.’
‘A talking cure.’
‘Every day; and each day seems to send those hard Kimberley times further into the past: I forget more and more of what I was.’
‘And that’s the aim?’
He smiled, as if absorbing this idea, admitting it gradually to the confines of his thought.
‘It doesn’t work completely, of course. I try. I aim at oblivion: release from what I saw, and what became of
me in my northern life. I watch the sea, sometimes all night long; I listen to the pulse of the ocean pounding on the beach, and see the clouds in their movement, and the stars, when the breaks in the cloud cover come—the stars shining down in their patchwork fields of Prussian blue. The winds, the clouds, the ocean—they’re like a language to me: continually speaking, continually forming, and dissolving, like thought itself.’
‘And saying what?’
‘How can you think of making anything literal from that? Not every language has to have words.’
‘It can be an abstract language?’
‘Of course! Moods, tones. It’s like a dance, where the meaning is just the dance, and nothing more—there’s no hidden code. Painting’s like dance for me: it always was; a kind of ritual, where you want to end everything and become one with what surrounds you.’
‘Become one,’ I echoed: ‘End it all. Remember? That’s where our friendship began: with you leaning on the driveway gate in Kununurra, at that Jirrawun house, all those years ago—turning over in your mind the best way to die.’
‘Death,’ he said, melodramatically: ‘The harshest critic! The only index of our life that really counts. It seems less abstract with each passing day. That beloved limit: that frontier where every single road runs out.’
‘But you don’t think there’s only death waiting for us, a full stop, do you? Your life’s full of presences and spirits—at least, it used to be.’
‘There’s nothing,’ he said, in a hard voice: ‘Nothing. That’s what being here helps me to sense: to know, and accept. All the spirits of the Kimberley: they have their energy, and force. How persuasive they were, how seductive. But they’re not for us.’
‘Then what’s left?’
‘Why question life like that? When I was much younger, I came across a lovely story: it taught me something. It was a novella, by Camus: you could see his thinking very plainly in it. It was short—from start to end no more than a hundred pages—and there was a passage that’s been etched into me ever since I read it, more than thirty years ago. I hardly ever remember anything I see in print—the words and thoughts just slip by and leave no residue: but it wasn’t like that this time. It’s the story of a young man, Meursault. He’s on his deathbed as we come to the last pages of the book. Camus frames the scene like a cinematographer: his central character looking through the open shutters of his window from his bed onto a blue ocean with a red fishing boat—and his lover, Lucienne, looking over him. Meursault thinks to himself just before his death about the fullness of her lips, and how after he’s died another man will kiss and enjoy them.’
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