by Alex Miller
Theo nodded in Robert’s direction and confided to the cat, ‘My son is tired this afternoon, so we are eating our lunch in silence. This is our penance. This is something he learned from his mother, not from me.’
Robert said, ‘Oh, come on, Dad!’ and he smiled indulgently. ‘Mum and I used to have great conversations.’
‘Tell me about them,’ Theo said. ‘What did you two talk about? The absent father? I’ve no right to ask of course.’
‘We often talked about you, Dad. And you have every right to ask.’
Robert was looking older than his fifty years. Toni was intrigued by the grey patches of slack skin under his eyes, his cheeks tight, his features sucked in around the dome of his skull. He had begun to see that in his drawing Robert was becoming an effigy of his ailing father. The unforseen effect intrigued and excited him. The comparison of father and son was being stated and made apparent on the page with the blunt stub of charcoal. He realised that the drawing was an image of a man who was struggling. And as he drew, Toni was moved by a deep feeling of respect and affection for the older man.
Robert glanced up at Marina, as if he expected her to say something.
She did not speak but smiled and put her hand on his.
Theo observed these silent communications between husband and wife with amusement. He was steady today. His nerves smooth. His drugs doing their job. He had good days and bad days. Today was a good day.
They had forgotten to pose.
‘So what happened yesterday?’ Marina asked Robert. ‘You didn’t tell me in the end.’ Her tone was gentle, almost coaxing, and she kept her hand on his.
‘Here we go,’ Theo said softly to the cat at his feet.
‘What happened?’ Marina repeated, gentle but firm.
Robert breathed and glanced at his father, and rested his knife and fork on the edge of his plate. ‘The vice-chancellor reallocated the funding earmarked for my guest lecturer program without bothering to tell me,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to cancel the program.’
‘But can he do that?’ Marina asked.
‘It’s the vice-chancellor’s discretionary fund, darling.’
‘But not to tell you? Why would he be so rude?’
‘Our vice-chancellor’s not a he. Miriam Stewart believes being brutal is an efficient way for her to behave.’ He smiled. It was a smile that was without warmth or mirth. ‘It’s not like the old days at the college. It’s not like that anymore. People with only art on their minds getting along with each other. That’s all gone.’ He picked up his knife and fork. ‘Maybe I shall have to become like them.’ He resumed dealing with the last fragments of his meal.
‘You could never be like that,’ Marina said.
Theo asked the cat, ‘Who knows what we’ll do to save our skins?’
Marina persisted, ‘You care too much about people to ever be rude or brutal.’
‘That’s what I’ve always believed.’
Theo confided to Misty, ‘He’s forgetting the critical style he was so proud of. Some of those reviews he sent me! Phew! They were hot. This boy has burnt the pants off a few artists in his day.’
‘Why does this woman dislike you?’ Marina asked, ignoring Theo.
‘It’s not personal,’ Robert said. ‘Her behaviour is routine. Her methods work. And, anyway, she can be very winning. You’d probably find her a charming woman, if you met her. You’d wonder what I’m talking about. She’s got power in the system, and within the system people are afraid of her and so they do her bidding.’
‘But you’re not afraid of her?’
He smiled. ‘I don’t think you quite understand my position, darling.’
Was he accusing her of a lack of sensitivity? Once upon a time he had been resilient in the face of trouble and had flourished under pressure.
Toni was enjoying himself. He was in the zone with his work and only vaguely conscious of the tensions that were surfacing in the conversation. He flipped the sheet and switched from Robert to his unfinished drawing of Theo’s head . . . The old man might have been scanning Robert and Marina’s interior reactions through the livid blaze under his left eye, the privileged powers of a parental aperture. Seeing through a father’s eye what no one else sees. The bright red slash like a wound in the softly weeping tissue of the father’s face. A wound that was never going to heal. Not now. It was too late now for healing. It had become a permanent disfigurement, a chronic ulcer written off by his body’s overloaded immune system. Almost a badge of old age worn with a certain bravado; My body may be dying but my mind is still on fire! Defiant in the face of death. Was that Theo? He liked the mystery of the old man. It intrigued him to think that Theo had made his home in Germany for forty years or more and had now returned to die. Did he feel as if he had come home or had he returned to exile? Clearly Theo did not have much time left to bear witness to his son’s life. It seemed unlikely he had decided on something heroic and unselfish at the last minute, I’ll do what I can for the boy, a near-deathbed conversion to fatherly love after decades of indifference. The last thing on Theo’s mind, it seemed to Toni, was to make amends for having abandoned his family when Robert was a boy of seven. What had he expected to find in his son on his return? A man like himself? And wasn’t there something of the bully in Theo? A tendency to offer ridicule in the face of his son’s present difficulties? Was this a sign of impatience? A failure to appreciate the peculiar achievements of his son? Or was he jealous of Robert’s youth and his relationship with Marina and, perhaps, of Robert’s inner calm despite the hazards of his present situation—that quiet reassurance one always felt from Robert that, no matter how great the crisis, he would not give up on his private values? Was Theo jealous of his son’s strength, or was he impatient with his son’s weakness? . . . It was a nice question and Toni was only guessing its answer; putting these few cues together to form his picture of the man. He was aware that his own view was not a fixed or singular truth. Through his art, after all, these three were to become his fictions. He had no choice. They could not remain merely themselves. For in art, and they all knew this, it was the perfect lie that was generative of the perfect meaning, not the literal truth. There was no place in art for the literal truth . . .
A breeze lifted through the open window.
Marina said, ‘Shouldn’t you be picking up Nada, Toni?’
For an instant he wondered who Nada was: the name intensely familiar. He stopped drawing and looked up. The three of them were watching him. ‘Teresa’s friend Gina’s picking her up with her own daughter these days,’ he said. ‘Teresa organised it. She calls in at Gina’s place on her way home from the office.’
Marina said something, then she stood up and began gathering the dishes.
Toni struggled on for a moment longer with Theo’s head. There had been a glimmer, then nothing, the illusion of likeness surfacing then sinking away through the matrix of scumbled charcoal, the ghostly presence of Theo Schwartz a drowned likeness in the depths, elusive and tantalising, a faint message from a dead man: Here I am! Then nothing. The reverse likeness of father to son was not working. The son might resemble the father, but the father did not resemble the son. Some things could be made up, others refused to be invented and had to be uncovered, one delicate layer at a time, with great care. And perhaps Theo was enjoying playing a game with him? Cat and mouse. Hide and seek. The old man seeing him and getting his likeness. He was wondering how he might get a look into Theo’s black book. Perhaps the pictures held the key to the man?
Robert took a sip of water then replaced the tumbler on the table. He dabbed his lips with his napkin and sat looking up at Marina. ‘You’re smiling?’ he said. His manner was faintly cross-examining.
Father and son watched her.
‘I was just thinking how good it is to be back in Melbourne.’
Robert said nothing to this but stood and began helping her clear away.
Theo confided to the cat, ‘As a boy, we can be sure he was never a troubl
e to his mother.’
Misty miaowed and stood on her hind legs, gripping the table edge with her needle claws.
Robert said mildly, ‘You shouldn’t feed her at the table, Dad. She’ll scratch it.’
That word, Dad! Resonating in the lofty room. They all looked at the cat.
‘I’m not allowed to feed you at the table,’ Theo said, playfully dabbing his hand at the cat. ‘Only Marina is allowed to do that.’ He suddenly grasped the cat’s head and gave it a shake.
Toni rose from the library steps and began packing his drawings and materials away in his folder. He would not show them his work. His drawings were private documents. He would probably show Marina a couple of them next time she was sitting for him alone, but that was all. He fastened the ties on the folder and straightened.
The three of them were watching him, as if they expected him to say something to them after the concentrated silence of his work. He smiled. ‘Thanks. That was terrific.’ He wondered if he might be beginning to find his fictions of them more interesting than their realities. Something insistent in the way they stood that silenced his imagination. The Schwartz family, he thought, and realised at once it was the title for his painting. He was impatient, suddenly, to get home to his studio and begin work on the picture. He owed them something, at the very least a few minutes of conversation before taking his leave. But he had no energy for talk. Their curiosity would have to wait.
Robert went with him to the front door. ‘It’s good to see you working,’ he said, and stood and watched him go down the street to where his car was parked. At the car, Toni turned and lifted his hand in salute. Robert returned the sign and went back into the house.
eight
A few days later, when Toni arrived for another drawing session with Marina, it was Theo who answered the door to his ring. Theo was clutching his old dressing gown and was trembling and shaking violently. ‘She’s gone to the post office to pick up the advance copies of Robert’s book from the States!’ He shouted this information, as if he could not control the volume of his voice. ‘She won’t be long!’ He waited for Toni to come in, holding the door unsteadily and watching him managing his folio and bag. ‘You’re having a good run,’ he said. ‘Go on in! Go on in! I’ll make us some coffee in a minute. I’ve got to take my pills.’ He slammed the door and ushered Toni ahead of him.
Toni waited in the kitchen. He realised, suddenly, that Theo’s black sketchbook was lying on a stool by the benchtop. The rubber band and the draughtsman’s red and black pen beside it, as if the old man had been drawing until he could no longer hold steady and had abandoned them there. Toni stepped across to the stool, picked up the notebook and opened it. An exquisitely detailed pen and wash drawing of a naked woman bound to a tree with a rope, one coil of the rope passed loosely beneath her breasts and another coil pinioned her legs below her knees. The woman had one hand raised to her mouth and was evidently calling, perhaps for help or to her captor, her other hand raised above her head in a gesture of entreaty or farewell. The leafless branches of a pollarded tree rose behind the woman like a fan above her head, as if it were an enormous shock of wild hair. The woman had a cat’s head, the features an accurate likeness of Misty’s. Beneath the figure of the cat-headed woman a caption was inscribed in French in a tight spidery hand that was barely legible. Toni made it out to be, Le Pécher Mortel. Perhaps it was not a rope, then, that bound the woman to the tree but the coils of a serpent, indeed the serpent. The coils of desire. She was, presumably, bound to the tree of knowledge. The work was highly skilled and of a style and quality that Toni had seen only in reproductions of French and German etchings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He did not know what he had expected to find in the sketchbook, but it had not been anything like this. He turned the page. A sheet of nine miniature studies followed the bound woman, almost as if the drawing of the bound woman were the frontispiece to a set of illustrations. Each of the nine small studies depicted a fierce horned satyr of small stature struggling with a powerfully muscled woman of much greater size than he. The satyr and the woman were both naked, and the satyr was aroused. Once again, the woman had Misty’s head. Reading the nine drawings from the top left of the page to the bottom right, he saw that the cat’s features were subtly altered in each subsequent drawing until, in the final drawing in the bottom right-hand corner, the features of Misty had been replaced by Marina’s. The features of the satyr remained Theo’s throughout, his expression indicating various degrees of torment, desperation and lust. Each of the nine small studies was set within its own separate frame, so that the whole resembled a page from a comic book. The drawings had been brought to a high finish of intricate detail with pencil shading overlaying delicate pen work. There was a caption in the same spidery hand beneath each, the last bearing the heavily ironic title, Courtoisie Exagérée. Looking closely at this tiny picture, which measured no more than two centimetres square, and which was difficult to read not only because of its small size but also because the limbs of the woman and the satyr were so confusingly entwined, he realised that the satyr had at last succeeded in penetrating the woman. She had gained a deadly stranglehold with both her powerful hands around the satyr’s neck and was forcing his head and shoulders back, accentuating the anguished thrust of his hips. The muscles of the woman’s forearms were corded with strain, the veins raised in sharp relief, her features contorted by fierce emotion signifying either murderous rage or overpowering lust—or, perhaps, both. He held the picture close, examining its extraordinary detail with a feeling of excitement, surprised and impressed by the enormous commitment of energy that must have gone into Theo’s execution of this densely erotic fantasy-in-miniature.
A small sound, rather like a suppressed sneeze, made him look around. Misty sat in the doorway, neither quite in the room nor quite outside it, regarding him with the same haughty disdain he’d seen on the features of the cat-headed woman. Toni returned the cat’s stare until she blinked and looked away, as if, after all, it was not he who interested her. She began to lick her silvery fur. The house was quiet. He turned once again to the sketchbook. The next drawing was a full-page image of a naked young man lying on his back on a couch, his arms stretched out behind his head, his thighs spread, one knee slightly raised. The young man’s wrists were loosely bound by a rope in a careless manner similar to that with which the woman had been bound to the tree. The rope was evidently not so much a physical restraint as an indication of the young man’s state of passionate bondage. The young man’s head lolled over the lip of the couch, presenting the delicate curve of his throat. Incongruously, his features were Theo’s, his spectacles knocked sideways from his nose, hanging comically from one ear. His eyes were closed and his lips parted in an expression of sexual rapture. Marina, wearing the vestal robes of a priestess, knelt on one knee between the young man’s parted thighs. She gripped the head of his erect penis in her right hand, and in her left she appeared to clasp his scrotum. The drawing had been devotedly overworked to an exacting finish with a fine hard pencil; here and there, but sparingly, a descriptive touch of delicate pastel colouring indicated the blush of naked flesh. It was only after he had been examining the drawing for a moment or two that Toni realised the woman was not in fact holding the young man’s scrotum but was grasping a miniature reaping hook, or sickle, in her right hand, the inner curve of the blade lodged against the base of the man’s penis. There was a faintly sardonic smile on her face. The caption read, Nymphe Mutilant un Satyre. Toni sensed a movement at his shoulder and caught an oily whiff of Theo’s liniment. As he turned from the bench, Theo reached past him and delicately lifted the book from his hands.
‘There!’ Theo murmured, and he laughed or coughed. ‘So what do you think of the innocent pastime of a dirty old man?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Toni said. ‘I couldn’t resist taking a look. They’re some of the most impressive drawings I’ve ever seen.’
‘Thank you.’ Theo was steady again. T
he formality of his tone not entirely self-mocking. He was wearing his loose robe, which was soiled and smelled of the liniment with which he dressed his ulcers. He stood admiring his drawing of the nymph and the naked young man. ‘That’s high praise coming from a real artist.’
‘Now you’re mocking me,’ Toni said. ‘I guess I deserve it.’
‘Not at all. Robert has assured me that you are dedicated to the pursuit of the real thing. These are not the real thing. Unfortunately, they are not even original.’ He tapped the drawing. ‘The Master L.D. After several centuries of scholarship we still don’t know who he was or even what his real name was. There’s magnificent anonymity for you. He concealed himself behind his work, which became his beautiful mask. So we still admire him and wonder about him. He borrowed his subjects from artists far greater than himself, just as I do. If you’re going to be a thief, you may as well steal the best. Unlike you young people, I don’t attempt originality. It can’t be helped. I’ve been making pictures for German companies for more than thirty years. It’s my trade.’ He smiled. ‘I’m not an artist. I’m a tradesman.’
Toni said, ‘They’re brilliant.’ He waited. ‘You knew I was coming over to see Marina and yet you left your sketchbook lying about here. It seemed partly an invitation. I mean, you normally keep it close by you.’
‘I’m glad you like my little pictures. I was overdue for my life-saving drugs and was in a hurry. Then you rang the bell. But you’re probably right. There are no accidents without intentions.’
‘It’s kind of you not to be angry.’
‘And of you not to be offended.’ He looked fondly again at the drawing of Marina as the mutilating nymph. ‘I worked with Wolf & Son in Hamburg. They were wonderful days. They were some of the great commercial illustrators of their time. They are all forgotten, except by the collectors, who will preserve their works and their memories for the day when fashions change and the young become eager to rediscover them. I’m very pleased you like my drawings.’
