Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  He’d been eating. He rose from the table and lifted the Study for Head of George Dyer from the wall and propped it against the silver Victorian wine cooler near his plate of meat. Imitating the George Dyer pout, he braced and gripped his steak knife and raked the canvas, two swipes, then held it on his lap. He marveled at the sight of his own knees through the slashes he’d made—the real world framed by the rags of the painting. He poked at the long slashes. Hearing him grunt, his servant, Manolo, opened the dining room door. “You okay, boss?”

  But Minor Watt’s feeling was muted. He’d wished someone had seen him, as Sonia had. Not Manolo, who had no idea, but a true witness—even better, a connoisseur.

  He called a friend, Doug Redman, who owned several Bacons, but prints, the limited-edition signed lithographs. Redman had often remarked on this painting.

  Redman came over that same night, because Minor Watt had said, “It’s about my Bacon. I want you to see it.”

  Minor Watt was sitting before his fireplace when Redman entered the room. At first he did not believe that the slashed painting in his lap was the Head of George Dyer. The profile was familiar, the frame unmistakable.

  Minor Watt said, “It’s the Bacon. You know it’s the Bacon.”

  “But what fuckwit damaged it?”

  “I did!” Minor Watt cried out, giddy from hearing his own shrieky voice. The man leaned closer and looked pained, seeing that it was the Bacon. Minor Watt threw it into the fire and at once the canvas caught and flames rushed over it, making a black hole in the slower-burning frame.

  Redman groaned and made as if to snatch at it, but the canvas was just smut and soot.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said in a tentative voice, too fearful to be angry, as though dealing with a crazy man who might run at him.

  He’d expected this art collector’s shock, but Redman’s terror made Minor Watt even happier.

  “Gone!” Minor Watt said, and Redman stepped back. “Totaled!”

  “How can you do a thing like that, especially in this economy?”

  “Your objection is that I’m wasting money, not destroying a work of art. You’re the fuckwit. You don’t deserve to live.”

  Afterward Redman talked, word got around, but no one asked straight-out if Minor Watt had destroyed the painting. To several friends Minor Watt said, “By the way, I fried the Bacon.”

  A witness gave the destruction a greater meaning and made it all the more satisfying. But the problem was to find someone who knew enough about such an eclectic collection to care. Most of the idiots had no idea. What good was it to smash something in private? Someone else had to know, someone had to care. Who better than the painter himself? The Noland target painting was an early one from 1965. Minor Watt invited Kenneth Noland to his house and encouraged the softly smiling white-haired man to admire his own painting. “One of my favorites,” the old man said. And then, with Noland watching, Minor Watt stepped close and shot an arrow into the bull’s-eye. Before the startled Noland could protest, Minor Watt threw down his bow and swiped at the painting with a dagger.

  “Whoa,” Noland said, staggering a little and raising his hands to protect his face, as though he expected to be assaulted. And then, cursing, he hurried from the room.

  “It was like wasting one of his children,” Minor Watt told Noland’s dealer, because the dealer had once asked to buy back the painting.

  The dealer said, “I don’t think anyone has ever done what you’ve done.”

  “People used to tell me that all the time,” Minor Watt said, “but for once I think you’re right.”

  He owned a set of crockery, a dinner service for eight, that had been used at Vailima by Robert Louis Stevenson. He invited seven friends, Manolo served a gourmet meal, Minor Watt told the story of the plates, how they had been brought by old Mrs. Stevenson, visiting from Edinburgh (“They’d been in the family for years”), explained the monogram, called attention to the gilded rims. Over dinner the talk was of selling valuables and budgeting. “We’re selling our plane.” “We’ve auctioned our Stella.” “We’ve put Palm Beach on the market.”

  When the meal was over, he asked the diners to carry the plates out to the upper deck of his penthouse. He stacked them and, fascinated by the oddity of the pile of plates resting on a rail, a pillar of bone china, the diners watched him push them over the edge onto the tiled terrace below.

  As a woman screamed, Minor Watt said, “Now we don’t have to wash them.”

  That look of joy meant he had to be insane, probably dangerous—they were afraid. They would never forget this, he knew. And he saw how they sidled away, made excuses to leave.

  About fifteen minutes later, one of them, Irby Wilders, came back.

  “Minor—you okay?”

  “Never better. You?”

  Irby’s mouth was shut tight, his eyes narrowed, like a man on the deck of a ship in a gale. He said, “I’m wondering where the bottom is.”

  “It’s down there,” Minor Watt said, pointing to the smashed plates.

  He knew this disillusioned investor thought he was crazed by the recession. But “never better” was exactly how he felt. He was strengthened by the dropping of the irreplaceable plates.

  Minor Watt did not say the word, but he knew the feeling that preceded this act of violence. It was disgust. Disgust had made him drop the Ming vase. What was the origin of his disgust? He did not know. It wasn’t money, but it was related to wealth, a kind of fatness. Many people he knew were embarrassing themselves in their economies. Now they believed him when he said, “None of that for me.” He was well aware that by ridding himself of the rare objects all the sourness in him was gone, and he had an appetite again.

  He saw the point of murder now, and not simple homicide, but cannibalism. He’d found the cabinet of skulls an aesthetic satisfaction, like a rare ossuary. He’d never understood the pleasure of eating the bodies of these men, of emptying these skulls of the brain and spooning it into a bowl and gorging on the gray jelly sponge. Now he appreciated the magnificence of eating flesh, the great appetite, the ritual devouring. The destruction of the vase and the plates and paintings—pieces as unique as any man—was not vandalism. It was enrichment, a source of power. He was eating art.

  Two couples, dinner guests at the plate-drop, the Diamonds and the DeSilvas, called separately, expressing concern, pretending to sympathize. “You must be under a lot of pressure.” And they suggested to Minor Watt that if there were any other items in his collection that he wanted to get rid of, they would be glad to accept them. He’d smashed the plates, therefore—their reasoning went—he didn’t care about them, and would probably hand over a precious object for nothing or very little.

  “But I do care,” Minor Watt said after he’d hung up. “That’s why I did it.”

  You do something spontaneously, perhaps accidentally, with no thought of the consequences, he thought, and sometimes you’re surprised at what you’ve provoked. His roofing career leading to real estate had proven that. Smashing china was a revelation, and a cure.

  The Diamonds said they had always been very fond of Minor Watt’s Tang celadon bowl, smuggled out of Cambodia, perhaps stolen from the National Museum in Phnom Penh. The man who’d sold it to him had remarked on its solidity, how this thick piece of pottery had survived through twelve centuries.

  “That piece could take a direct hit.”

  Minor Watt had always smiled, and felt small and somewhat in awe, remembering those words. He invited the Diamonds for tea. He called attention to the jade-colored glaze, the inimitable crackle, and allowed them to salivate at the prospect of the gift—they were actually swallowing, gulping in anticipation. Then he asked them to put on protective goggles. “You’ll see it better.” Humoring him—he was insane, wasn’t he?—they put them on, and Minor Watt took a hammer to the bowl and, with his tongue clamped in his teeth, pounded the celadon to dust.

  The DeSilvas had hinted on the phone of their liking for an Edwar
d Lear watercolor of the Nile depicting Kasr el-Saidi among some riverside palms. These people, too, pleased to be invited for tea, let their covetous gaze wander over the painting.

  “The color is brighter without the glass,” Minor Watt said, and removed the painting from its frame. He served tea, and after filling their cups he dribbled the pot of hot tea over the watercolor, as the man held his sobbing wife.

  Minor Watt said, “Sorry,” as mockery, but he thought, Of course I know what I’m doing. Power over works of art that he owned, but also power over these people. He had the power to terrorize them, too, without ever touching them.

  Each thing he destroyed strengthened him; each person he terrified through his destruction made him someone to be feared. It had never been his intention; it was all a revelation. Money had no meaning anymore. He’d amassed his art collection believing it would inspire respect—and it had, to a degree; and it had inspired envy, too. The assumption in New York was that he would eventually give the collection to a museum. To these people, and perhaps to a museum, these objects represented wealth—the absurd bias toward money. Even a museum would not regard them as collectors’ items, one of a kind. These days a museum would sell them, to stay afloat, and Minor Watt would be forgotten. It disgusted him to think that, transformed into money, they were replaceable. The collector’s conceit was always that he or she was a temporary custodian.

  “No—I am the owner—the last owner!” Minor Watt said.

  Destroying them meant that he was the equal of the person who made them—more than that, he was more powerful. He wiped these rare things from the face of the earth, leaving only a memory in which he mattered; and a memory was the more evocative, even mystical, for its vagueness. After centuries of use and veneration, of being handled and crated and resold, catalogued, photographed, admired, the small thin-rimmed jade bowl balanced on Minor Watt’s fingers, in his lovely kitchen, before the blinking eyes of the museum curator, was tipped into a blender. And before the man could react, Minor Watt clapped the lid on and poked the button labeled Liquefy.

  More ingenious in devising ways to destroy these works of art, each one appropriate to the object, his intention was to make the destruction as memorable as the object itself: the memory of its extinction.

  He had some supporters, all of them art students, video artists, creators of installations, one who worked with decaying food, another with human blood, who interpreted Minor Watt’s destruction as a form of art, a kind of ritual theater, performance art. They sent him letters. They praised him for turning his back on art history to create something new.

  “You are a total hero,” one of them said—a pretty purple-haired woman, very thin, black fingernails, neck tattoo, torn black clothes, greasy boots.

  Her praise alarmed him, though her look kept him watching. She had come with a group to his uptown office. He had agreed to meet them in the foyer, his security people in attendance.

  “You got a Rauschenberg?” a man in the group asked—spiky hair, mascara, the same boots.

  “An early one,” Minor Watt said. “Birds, animals.”

  “Wipe it! Whack it! Know what Rauschenberg did? Bought a de Kooning drawing and erased it. Erased it! Exhibited it as his own work. It’s in a museum. Is that radical?”

  “You’re way beyond that, man. You’re like a whole new movement—iconoclasm.”

  He smiled and sent them away. Iconoclasm was nothing new. The word had been in use for five centuries. Minor Watt continued destroying because destruction itself gave him a greater appetite for shattering a whole lovely thing. The breaking of each piece meant the breaking of a barrier that admitted him to a region of cold ferocity. The act of destruction had nothing to do with art. He laughed at the students who claimed his destruction as a form of conceptual art. No, he went on breaking his collection because—he felt sure—he had entered a realm of self-indulgence he’d never guessed at before. He was gluttonous for more. He was not an artist, he was a child smashing a doll, and he was also a ruler punishing a province, a tyrant carrying out a massacre. He did it with a smile, and knew that the great destroyers were smilers—destruction was the certain proof of wealth.

  He went on smiling and never uttered the simple truth that he had discovered: “No matter how outrageous my assault on art, no one can stop me.”

  He still bought art. And at auctions, when he saw how passionately someone wanted to acquire something, he wagged a finger and outbid them. Later, he contrived ways to show these people that he’d destroyed the thing they had craved. Other bidders hated to see him enter at a sale, but he could not be banned—and he knew that the auctioneers were secretly pleased that he was bidding, because he bid without limit.

  Who could prevent him from destroying a thing he owned? He jeered at his critics. “You’d think I was committing murder!” It was worse than murder for some of these people. And these were the same people who’d stood by, indifferent to the cruelty of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan—stoning women to death for adultery, hacking the hands from thieves, and after Friday prayers, the beheadings. And who cared? But when the Taliban dynamited the sixth-century giant standing Buddhas in Bamiyan, these hypocrites howled in pain, demanding military action, the overthrow of the Taliban, the siege of Kabul—and it had happened!

  But Minor Watt now understood the Taliban, and their earlier incarnation, the White Huns of the fifth century, who’d taken their saddle axes to the Buddhas and stupas of Gandhara, not far from Bamiyan. (He had such an ax, a tabar-i-zin, with Victory from God and Imminent Conquest engraved in gold on its blade in Persian. He used it on one of his Hockneys.) What lay behind these furious acts of purification was a demonstration of will. Never had these destroyers seemed stronger, fiercer, less sentimental, more resolute, more intent in their mission: inaccessible, unappeasable figures of pure horror and domination. It was certain that invaders or rulers who would dynamite a beautiful work of art placed a much lower value on human life, because artworks were one of a kind and people were pretty much the same. Even those people whom Minor Watt knew seemed to feel this way.

  So in vandalizing his artworks he was regarded as worse than a crank. He was a homicidal maniac.

  He told people he knew, who objected, that he might have stopped had the reaction against him not been so strong. He wondered if what he said was the truth, because the reaction—the sense of outrage, the condemnation—energized him. What right did they have to say “How dare you”?

  Though it was unimaginable to the art collectors and connoisseurs, the destruction became easier for him. “Why am I doing it? Why am I so effective and precise? Because I am a connoisseur!”

  How fragile, how insubstantial these objects were. A Japanese woodblock print was made of rice paper. Even his greatest Utamaro hardly raised a flame before the astonished and insulted eyes of Mr. Harada, and it left a mere smudge of ash. The value of a gourd cricket cage was its lid, a deeply carved cookie of ivory that could be pinched apart, and the gourd was easily crumbled. In a gesture of strangulation he broke these things in his hands, and to be certain they wouldn’t be reassembled, he stamped his shoe on them, grinding them with his foot sole. He slashed paintings, he crushed porcelain, he hammered silver pots flat.

  And he required witnesses—the effort was almost wasted without someone watching, especially someone who cared, who would report it.

  These witnesses believed they could persuade him not to destroy the thing. They tried (as they saw it) to talk him off the ledge. “Think of the implications of what you’re doing.” He thought of the implications. They were his motives. Their concern only made him more intent on finishing the job.

  Minor Watt never raised his voice; he was not angry. His calm way in this destruction unnerved anyone who watched him, as though he was about to stick a knife in their eye. There were always plenty of willing witnesses these days, since their hope was that at the last minute he’d have a change of heart. But the witnesses themselves roused his conviction.r />
  Something else that animated him was the desire to destroy each thing differently. “I could simply set my house on fire,” he told one collector. “I could stack everything I own onto a pile and set it alight. But that would be meaningless.”

  And he wanted to add that a massacre can mean less than a single execution.

  “So what you’re doing has a meaning?” Doug Redman had asked.

  “Yes, I think so. The experience of seeing a lovely thing leave the world forever. The drama of extinction, so to speak. It’s a death.”

  He was not, he said, the first person to destroy works of art. The Vandals had given the world a word by doing it. The Chinese emperor Ch’in Shih-huang had burned every book in his kingdom in 213 B.C. Spanish conquistadors had stolen golden ornaments from the Inca people and hammered them into crucifixes. In 1942 bombing raids by the Germans had targeted specific churches and museums, not only to demoralize the British but to demonstrate German might. Baron Gustav Braun von Sturm said, “We shall go out and bomb every building marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide.” The devastating raids on Britain called the Baedeker Blitz leveled thousands of ancient buildings, their contents—paintings, furniture, silver—reduced to ashes. Most of the Old Master paintings stolen by Irish terrorists in the 1970s from English houses and museums had never been found and had probably been kicked to bits or sold for guns.