Framed

by Tonino Benacquista

  Every trace has been cleaned away, some new carpet squares clash slightly with the old ones, some sections of the right-hand wall in the corridor have been repainted.

  After a good hour of farce and nitpicking details, the policeman turned to me, but I think he was really trying to get through to the big boss lady.

  “We have his description. If this really is someone from the art world, and more particularly the world of contemporary art, we still have a chance. But in my opinion this was commissioned by a collector. Someone wanted Morand’s last painting, and someone else got it for him, that’s all. If the piece had had enormous market value we could have made different assumptions. But in this case . . . Morand . . . well, who’s heard of him? How popular is he? I’ll ask our experts to investigate requests and possible collections of this artist’s work, but I don’t think many buyers would be interested.”

  He looks casually towards Coste and asks her what she thinks. And, after all, he’s right. I mean, I care as much about Morand’s bloody popularity as I do about the future of art.

  “The bulk of his work comes from the United States. I decided to do this retrospective because I liked the idea of displaying the work of an émigré who – just like any other émigré – was trying to find work in a different country. And Morand grasped straightaway – I mean, as soon as he arrived there in 1964 – that most developments would begin in the United States. I chose works from his last studio in Paray-le-Monial which I visited in his lifetime, a year after his return.”

  I’m bored. I want to go home. My eyes come to rest on one of the plinths on which a particularly ugly contraption is mounted.

  “When, at the time of his death, he left his work to the nation, I just felt it should be displayed, that’s all. From the depths of his workshop I selected things that corresponded most closely with the general trends in his work, the black canvases and three sculptures which I believe are a sort of counterpart to his graphic works, but they are radically removed from the American influence.”

  One by one, I go through every element that makes up this appallingly pretentious oeuvre. Coste drones on with her great speech, so earnest you’d think she was the Pope. She really loved the Morand exhibition, but I’m wondering by what criteria she chose this latest one.

  “And then, there was that unique painting called Attempt 30 . . . It was an enigma to me: his very last exploration, a picture in which the subject has its place, a work of denial, I think. That’s why I chose it, because it’s as if Morand were leaving us with a question. Art enthusiasts, and I mean informed enthusiasts, might take an interest in the decade from 1965 to 1975, because that was when Morand produced a summary of what was to come. But then . . . with that one painting . . . that, um . . . you could call it iconoclastic painting . . . I admit I don’t understand.”

  Delmas is taking notes. The boss lady knows about public speaking. She once even gave a lesson on new figurative representations to a minister who punctuated her spiel with a “yes, yes” every now and then. Jacques and I hammered just a little harder than usual at the time.

  Everyone is on the move, Liliane, the boss lady, the policemen picking up their files and their coats, I’m aware of a general indistinct movement towards the exit, no one’s talking to me any more apart from the superintendent who would very much like to be contacted if any more details happened to come to the surface. At the hospital he told me that he was having a lot of trouble with the Post-Impressionists at the moment. I didn’t get to the bottom of why but, idiotically, I pretended to be interested.

  That’s it.

  End of reconstruction.

  Alone and surprised by the silence, I wandered through the rooms a little to gather my wits and to start getting used to the idea that no one was interested in my pathetic situation. Over in a corner I caught sight of a sort of construction based on lengths of guttering stacked one inside the other. There were Venetian masks attached to the pipes, hanging in every direction. A card by the base explained: UNTITLED. 1983. Plastic and plaster.

  For a second I almost shouted out at this imbrication of rubbish. In that brief moment I explored all the absurdity of what had happened to me, just a few feet from there.

  I looked over towards the gardens and remembered the piles of rust-coloured dead leaves that had covered it the previous summer. Some artist had thought it would be interesting to create a slightly autumnal atmosphere bang in the middle of June. Not one visitor noticed. Apart from the gardener who distanced himself a little further from contemporary art – and he wasn’t the only one.

  The word “theft” seems to satisfy everyone. At one point I felt like telling them that it all seemed too simple to me. That painting had hardly any value, and if it was stolen then it must have meant something else. It was Coste who said it, and it’s so blatantly obvious. That’s a job for a specialist, reading what’s in a painting, detecting the mysteries within it. It’s because of all that that I lost a hand. If they don’t find my attacker, I’ll die without knowing what that painting was trying to say.

  As I go down the steps I realize that I have been sweating. I will have to resort to taking my coat off more often if I don’t want to catch too many chills. In spite of my pride.

  “I need to talk to you, Antoine. Can you come up to my office . . .?”

  I am just about to walk through the gate, and Coste has raised her voice. It’s the second time she has ever used my Christian name. The first was when I tinkered with the transformer on a mobile casing which refused to light up. I don’t feel like following her upstairs and getting a sweat up again. I need to get out, and I imply this with a rather ungracious shake of the head.

  “I would have preferred to talk to you in my office, but I understand that you must be tired with all these difficult questions . . . Well, um . . . don’t let’s beat about the bush, you won’t be hanging any more exhibitions . . .”

  I say no. Although I don’t really know whether it is a question.

  “I’ll find someone else to help Jacques. But I don’t want to leave you in the lurch.”

  She leaves gaps between her sentences, and I can’t think of anything – not anything – to fill them.

  “I imagine you can’t keep your summer job at the depot. Do you have any other source of income?”

  “I’ve got a disability pension from Social Services.”

  “I know but. . . You can’t just stay like that . . . without work. . . I thought. . . Well, listen, I’m going to need Liliane to do secretarial work, and I wondered whether I could take you on as our attendant.”

  “As what?”

  “As an attendant, full time.”

  She can’t hide a little hint of excitement as she finishes her announcement. I don’t say anything. I couldn’t give a stuff. I just wait. I’m cold.

  “Thank you.”

  I don’t know what else to say, and she doesn’t understand. As I walk out under the porch I wipe my forehead and leave the premises.

  Not now.

  A little further on, as I turn a corner, I take out the catalogue that I have carefully slipped into one of my coat pockets. I put it down on the ground and leaf through it to get to the right page.

  Attempt 30.

  I pick it up between my lips, rip it out with a sharp jerk of my head and stuff it into my pocket. The remains of it, sitting by the edge of the gutter, might intrigue a passing tramp. There are all sorts of tramps, even art enthusiasts, even misunderstood painters.

  *

  Museum attendant, for life. . . As if my life had ever been there, even just for a second. It was well intentioned, mind you. Madame Coste must have told herself that it was one of the few jobs in which you didn’t need your hands. That’s all. At one time there were even the halt and the lame at the Louvre, with one blue sleeve folded back with a big nappy pin. Nothing new about that. It’s all part of the compulsory five per cent of disabled employees.

  But that’s not important. What is important is w
hat I have in front of me now, pinned up by my bed. On the way home I stopped off at a photocopying place on the Boulevard Beaumarchais to have a colour enlargement made. They reproduced Attempt 30 for me, eight inches by eleven. The yellow has run a bit, but it will do.

  The telephone rings, right by the bed, and I still tend to put out the wrong arm automatically.

  “Hello . . .?”

  “Monsieur Andrieux, good afternoon, it’s Doctor Briançon. Don’t hang up. Could I come to see you? It would be easier.”

  It’s his weekly phone call, he’s been doing it since I left Boucicaut. He wants to get a place for me at a rehabilitation centre.

  “Listen, thank you for carrying on trying like this, but I don’t understand why. What you call rehabilitation is . . . is . . . well, for me, it’s . . .”

  “You really mustn’t be afraid of it, quite the opposite. All you have to do is –”

  “I don’t want to learn how to be one-armed. I won’t get back what I’ve lost. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Listen, what you’re feeling is completely normal. You have to cross a desert, a desert of resentment, of course you do, but you will get out of it.”

  A what? Now, when doctors start getting all lyrical. . . Why not a mountain of bitterness or a sea of pain? Doctor Briançon and his killing metaphor. . . I’d rather listen to that than have one hand. If I let him carry on with this, I’ll be in for the whole medical catechism, like in hospital.

  When I hang up I knock over the two big books that were perched on the edge of the table. One of them, the more expensive one, has the corners of a few pages turned down. Three hundred and sixty francs for a great doorstep of a book on the last thirty years in French contemporary art. The doctor’s very kind, but I couldn’t give a stuff about his sessions. I unplug the phone. He’ll run out of energy in the end, no one pushes their preaching that far. What would I want to do in Valenton in the Val-de-Marne with a load of limbless people?

  Morand is cited only as an “exile from the crisis that hit French art in the 1960s”. It’s not as clear as what Coste said, but it conveys the same idea. They only devote about ten lines to him in all. In the other book it’s half as many, apart from a bibliographical note which refers the reader to an American study in which, apparently, they say a bit more about him. I have also found a reproduction of a 1974 black canvas that was exhibited at the gallery. I have to lie on my stomach to read, given the weight of the book, and it hurts my back. The small of my back will never recover. The catalogue for the retrospective is, in fact, the only relatively complete work on Morand: a virtually incomprehensible preface by Coste about “the mental space of an artist in transit” and a biography which starts its life in New York and dies two lines later in Paray-le-Monial. Nothing I didn’t know already.

  Or is it?

  Somewhere in the depths of my mind I have a couple of convictions that are becoming clearer and clearer, they are slowly gaining ground and I’m leaving them to grow at their own sweet pace. They’ve been maturing for a month already. Soon I’ll be able to formulate them out loud. It could come into the category of what the policeman called “details coming to the surface”. Yes, you could describe it like that. But if he knew what was really coming to the surface for me, I think it would give him more to worry about.

  The stolen picture first: we have met before, that picture and I. Perhaps not exactly that one but something close to it, created by the same mind or the same school. A copy? A life-size reproduction? I still don’t know yet, it’s just a ghost, a presence that takes on a little more weight every day. A movement, a colour, that yellow – so light and even. And the subject, a church spire, painted with such precision at the top and with great sweeping brushstrokes across the bottom. It just emerges from a layer of yellow, as if still growing, straining to grow. Around it there is more yellow, but it is more aggressive, a magma, an impending explosion, something is about to burst out, perhaps it already has, perhaps it is the spire itself. And I’ve already seen that eruption somewhere. I’m sure of it, but I don’t know anything about it. The painting poses problems even for a specialist like Coste, so it should quite logically be completely beyond a philistine like myself. I’ve never visited any other galleries, not even the Pompidou Centre, I hardly know the Louvre, and painting in general has only ever inspired a sort of gloomy contempt in me. I wasn’t receptive to it. When I came to Paris I didn’t feel like guzzling on national treasures. My great uncle in Biarritz had given me the address of the Académie de l’Etoile, and I went straight there.

  Sometimes, when I was hanging exhibitions, I worried about my non-involvement, my lack of feeling, the thing all the catalogues talk about so sententiously. I thought I was sterile and cut off from all these different forms of plastic exploration, all this art with a capital “A”, because people say “artist” when they just mean “painter”, and “work” when they want to say “painting”. I’ve always refused to say “work”, I thought it was indecent and exaggerated, so I said “piece” which was more technical, more neutral. I could feel my own art churning in my insides, a quest for beauty in the kissing touch between three balls, nothing that needed to be looked at in a particular way or talked about at length, and there wasn’t a Coste in the world who could have understood that. People who like painting do a lot of talking, and I’m not that talkative. Yes, there have been things I’ve wanted, things going on inside my head, but without the questions and without the neurotic search for a meaning.

  Now I’ve been amputated from everything, and it’s now that the questions are starting to come. Because nothing is going to end like this: I’ve only just started, on my own, without the experts and the superintendents. The urgent quest for me now is to understand, even though there is no hope of ever restoring the order of things. No one can imagine the damage I have suffered, and all because of a yellow painting that says more than people realize. My forty promised years have been reduced to nothing in a splatter of lemon yellow.

  I’ve seen that painting. And, now that I come to think about it, my unashamed ignorance on the topic can only be an asset. There aren’t exactly thousands of places in Paris where I could have seen it. It definitely wasn’t in a book – the one in front of me is the first I’ve ever opened. Any painting or sculpture can only have appeared in the context of my work, and for several days I’ve been thinking about the depot, the reservoir of art. For the last two years I’ve spent the month of July there tidying up and inventorying old stuff that no one wants and that doesn’t have a hope of ever being exhibited. I’ve handled hundreds of pieces there, all covered in dust. I’ll go over there a bit later and have a look, just in case. If not, I’m sure I’ll find it somewhere else; it will take a little longer but I’ll eventually work out where I saw that picture.

  At lunchtime I went out to buy a typewriter. At first I thought I might hire one but I quickly realized that the thing would be a part of my life from now on. This useless left hand is never going to help me write a letter. So I paid cash. The salesgirl asked me some questions to try and establish which model would best suit my needs and, after a few moments’ uncertainty (when she saw the stump which I’d parked very obviously on the counter), she said she was new and that her boss would be better qualified to help me. The boss woman actually was better, and she sold me an electronic machine, a really straightforward one with an automatic return and a key to erase the last character. I started getting to know the thing, and I even thought I could put it to use straightaway:

  The letter to the parents.

  I have already perfected a few turns of phrase. But the hardest part is getting the paper in, and it often fails. Right now I’m on the greeting – “Dear you two” – slightly crooked but it’s my best result so far. Never mind, this letter will just have to be untidy and a bit crumpled, with typos I can’t go back and correct: the hardest bit is still to come. None of my phrases say anything, I don’t know how to call a spade a spade. My parents are fragile
; they had me late.

  I rang Jean-Yves again, but he didn’t tell me any more about the yellow painting than last time. I asked him to try a bit harder, to remember what he had said about the texture of the paint. “It was just an impression, really, I’m so sorry. . .” He said I would do best to forget it, and when I asked him what he didn’t know how to answer.

  I’ve managed to sort out the problem of what to wear a bit more by finding a bag of old clothes, particularly a couple of sweatshirts that you just have to put on and that’s it. There’s an old worsted wool jacket that someone really tall left at the academy. It’s three sizes too big so I can slip it on just like that. By tomorrow I’ll have a pair of ankle boots and some trousers with a zip. I just look a bit more scruffy than usual. I’ll have to have the front door repaired, till now I’ve been keeping it shut by blocking it off with something, but with the warm weather coming back the wood will swell, like it did last year. It’s a good thing I’m patient.

  *

  The first time I came to the depot was two years ago. Before setting foot in the place I’d imagined it as utterly sacred, a sort of sanctuary. I thought you had to put on white gloves and adopt a religious fervour to approach this collection of contemporary works that the country has been putting together for over a century. Experts in the plastic arts, critics and advisers have been meeting regularly since 1870 to build up what will constitute the French national heritage in contemporary art. Sixty thousand works to date. Three quarters of the pieces – and the best of them – are actually distributed amongst national organizations, town halls, public buildings, embassies etc. They have all been helping themselves for a hundred years, and now what’s left?