Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  ‘He suffered more,’ she sighed.

  ‘Of course some people call it cowardice,’ Morris mused. ‘Sneaking up from behind.’

  ‘What has to be done has to be done,’ she said.

  ‘And if it were done, then t’were well it were done quickly,’ Morris echoed.

  They mainly agreed on things these days. There was a reassuringly routine, even conjugal predictability to their exchanges. Though Mimi was definitely not in favour of Painting Death. She told him that right away, as soon as he came into the room. It was not so much the risk he would be running, drawing attention to his fascination for killing, as the feeling that something private between them was to be exposed to the gaze of others. She feared they would lose the intimacy of these daily chats in The Art Room where Madonna and Child presided over a compendium of carnage. ‘This is my room,’ she told him. ‘I’ve always felt that Morris. That you made this room for me.’ Sickert’s Camden Town Murders were her favourites. She liked the gloomily penitential posture of the man sitting beside the naked girl’s corpse with his head in his hands, as if to signify that the murder was a defeat for both of them.

  ‘Not that I ever think of you as defeated, Morris,’ the young mother assured him.

  Morris liked to think of his first but never really ex-girlfriend as having somehow become the mother of God. What greater recompense could there be? For himself, he found Sickert’s canvases rather morbid. Sick Sickert, he thought, getting his models to pose as murdered whores, of the lowest class too, and in slum accommodation. The paintings would definitely have gained from more affluent interiors. In this case, though, since he actually owned two originals, there was no question of asking a copyist to make changes.

  ‘The fact is’—it was important to give her his point of view—‘I feel that if I have anything to offer people, I mean by way of art and expression, it’s a fresh perspective on crime and killing: you know, the whys, the wherefores, the consequences’—one of the sections in the show, he decided, should definitely be called ‘The Aftermath,’ showing the butchered corpse and that expression of awful realisation on the faces of the onlookers: Botticelli’s Discovery of the Body of Holofernes, for example, the general’s neck carved like a Sunday joint, surprisingly bloodless, come to think of it, the bedclothes still very white, as if the trunk had been brought out of a freezer for display. It was a strange painting.

  ‘And like I said, it all goes back to the question of vulnerability, Mimi. Greatmen are always vulnerable. Perhaps vulnerability is a mark of greatness. I feel that more and more.’

  This time the girl was silent. Morris would have liked to press the point, it seemed a more interesting line of reflection than their usual sweet nothings, but there was much to do and he had to be careful to limit these dialogues to a post-prandial quarter of an hour or so, otherwise he would have been perfectly capable of frittering away the whole day in her company, talking about paintings and murder and the perils of prominence. He leaned forward to examine Forbes’s brushstrokes in the big Botticelli. Impeccable. It was sad the old man had had to go. Nobody had ever really replaced him. The hacks and art students Morris hired these days copied faithfully enough; he could hardly deny them their fees. But there was something perfunctory about their work. In Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents, for example, you couldn’t quite believe that that sword was really going to come down on the naked babe. Only Forbes had put heart and soul into copying.

  ‘Our children make us vulnerable,’ Mimi reminded him, hugging dear little Jesus to her breast and showing once again how well she could read his mind. ‘We suffer for our children, Morri.’

  ‘Damn, yes!’ Morris looked at his watch. ‘Mauro!’

  What Cardinal Rusconi had wanted of him in the end was some cut-price construction work on a new Catholic school in the outlying village of Sant’Anna. Red cloak wrapped round red tunic, giving the impression of some expensively festive upholstery, the bulky man had been standing in Morris’s path as he pushed through a group of white-robed sheiks to exit his moment of glory.

  ‘As you know, the Curia is asking us to invest first and foremost in Christian education. The future belongs to the young.’

  Morris did indeed know all too well how these things went. An outlying congregation was persuaded to vote for a certain ultra-Catholic parliamentary candidate on the understanding that the Church would then build them a school so that their precious bambini need no longer mix with hordes of undernourished Moslem immigrants in the state establishment ten kilometres away. The problem being that once their man was elected the school had to be delivered, or at least started, before the next election, this despite the fact that there was not a shred of economic sense or social justice in the project. Still, they must be desperate, Morris thought, to enlist the services of no less than a cardinal to ask such a trivial favour of a devout entrepreneur like himself. Perhaps the interminable paedophile scandals had reduced the flow of cash into the Curia’s coffers, though it was hard to understand why, since deep down people had always known about this stuff. More likely the Church itself was spending heavily to buy the victims’ silence. In any event, these were hard times. Next thing they’d be obliged to give the infidels a mosque just to attract some foreign investment. Though the rich sheiks usually seemed serenely unworried about the availability of prayer facilities for their immigrant brethren.

  After only a moment’s reflection, still excited by his announcement, indeed invention, ex nihilo, of the Duckworth Foundation’s first major art exhibition—himself as curator perhaps!—what Morris asked of the cardinal in return, rather modestly he thought, was just a little flexibility on the sale of artworks held but rarely displayed in the Veneto’s hundreds, even thousands of churches, shrines, sanctuaries, baptisteries, chapels, crypts, cathedrals and ossuaries. What was the point, Morris suddenly and rather passionately demanded of this powerful man, realising as he began to speak that he had been waiting years for a chance to express this opinion to someone who mattered—what was the point of the ignorant parish priests locking this wonderful artwork away unsung, unseen, and above all unprofitable, for heaven’s sake, and often in the dampest and dirtiest of attics and cellars? Why not sell the paintings before they rotted away and build more schools with the cash? Art, after all, Morris opined, had long since lost its function of drawing people to the Faith, had it not? Especially the baroque art of the Veneto, now decidedly out of fashion when not considered positively grotesque.

  The men were standing on the steps of the town hall looking down on all the feverish pre-Christmas activity in the piazza. Morris was frankly impressed how rapidly he had bounced back from the news of his son’s arrest, how very sensibly he had chosen to put the matter and its possibly calamitous consequences aside until the big occasion was over. ‘And just when the rascal’s father has been granted the freedom of the city!’ he had laughed with the mayor as the detestable man released him from the kind of proletarian embrace that reminded Morris of his father’s bear hugs on those rare occasions he had returned both victorious and halfway sober from Loftus Road. For a moment, picking up his scroll and silver key, Morris had even been tempted to lift the mayor’s hand and raise a shout of ‘Forza Hellas!’—it would certainly have been well received by most present—but in the end he feared he might not convince. If there was one emotion Morris had never understood, it was male camaraderie. Much more attractive was the kind of intelligent and strategic exchange between men of cautious wisdom that he had once enjoyed with Forbes, very occasionally with Don Lorenzo, and now rather promisingly, with Cardinal Rusconi.

  ‘Is anybody’s soul saved nowadays, Cardinal,’ Morris concluded his reflections, ‘by meditating on San Sebastian’s arrows? Does anyone get on his knees at the sight of Cain slaying Abel?’

  The cardinal was quiet for a moment, black brows arching above a bulbous nose. It occurred to Morris those small red skullcaps must have been invented to hide bald spots.

  ‘Is that r
eally the point, Signor Duckworth?’ the cardinal eventually asked.

  ‘Well, it was supposed to be the point, surely. What other reason was there for painting all those martyrs?’

  A Martyrs’ Room would be good.

  ‘Observe our Christmas comet,’ the cardinal said quietly, lifting a smoothly shaven double chin to nod towards the square.

  Every December, at great expense to the local population, an impressive steel structure was erected in Piazza Bra: sprouting from the top of the Roman arena a great white girder first curved upwards to the wintery sky, then arched rapidly down, tapering as it went, to meet the porphyry cobbles where it exploded, as it were, in a highly stylised, geometric steel star some five metres high. Children in garish bubble-jackets were climbing on its lower ‘rays’ and sliding down again.

  ‘Observe,’ the cardinal repeated.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ Morris objected, reflecting once again that Anderton-Dodds wasn’t all wrong: Verona’s Christmas comet was kitsch of the worst variety.

  ‘Is this extravaganza really intended to give people a sense of the mystery of Christmas? Does anyone think of it as an invitation to lay down their pretensions and riches before the infant Christ?’

  ‘More a case of bread and circuses,’ Morris agreed.

  ‘Quite. A question of keeping the masses entertained, getting them through the four seasons.’

  ‘In the crassest fashion.’

  ‘But effectively.’ The cardinal smiled. ‘And that, alas, is the function our old paintings no longer serve. They don’t distract people’s attention while their wiser peers get on with the job; that is why they are decomposing in cellars and crypts. At least that steel monstrosity there can be melted down when it no longer amuses.’

  Morris hesitated, unsure whether this odd analogy between art and junk was entirely pertinent. But he enjoyed conversations that played out slowly, like a tough game of chess, even if he had never been any good at chess.

  ‘All the more reason, Cardinal,’ he decided to probe the Churchman’s defence, ‘to let me do a little snooping and see what’s actually there in the cellars and crypts. I’m not interested in buying paintings for resale, you understand. I don’t need to make money. I just want to bring them into the light of day. Perhaps something for this show I was mentioning: Painting Death.’

  ‘Ah yes, a most unusual idea.’

  Lighting a small cigar in the cool winter air, the cardinal smiled indulgently, evidently amused to find himself embroiled in such a delicate discussion. People were always favourably surprised, and challenged, Morris had frequently noticed, when he revealed a little of his true self.

  ‘However, as you may know,’ the cardinal resumed, ‘all artworks in Church possession, valuable or otherwise, have long since been catalogued in files held by the local council’s Department of Cultural Heritage. They are no longer ours to dispose of, Mr. Duckworth.’

  So cheered was he to hear his name pronounced properly for once—the Jesuits still had their standards, it seemed—Morris almost made the mistake of switching to first-name terms. But it was too soon. That would come when Sant’Anna’s primary-school foundation stone was laid.

  ‘Naturally I’m aware of that, Your Eminence,’ he replied. ‘But does anyone ever actually bother to make inspections, to see if the pictures are where they should be?’

  And even if they did make inspections, Morris wondered, would the council employees be able to distinguish a well-made copy from an original? Forbes had thought not.

  The cardinal blew smoke across the piazza and sighed. He wasn’t sure. One would have to ask the clergy ‘on the ground.’ He pronounced these words as if he himself had long since been raised far above any such earthly contact, along with his cigar smoke perhaps. Morris found it deplorable that a man of the cloth could indulge such boorish vices, but he had learned not to pass judgement.

  ‘I know someone who works in the Heritage Department,’ Morris proceeded affably.

  The cardinal again arched a shaggy eyebrow.

  ‘She tells me the cataloguing you refer to is, how shall we say, chaotic.’

  ‘I can well imagine.’

  ‘And vulnerable.’

  The cardinal dropped his cigarillo on the steps and stood on it. This was something the young Northern League mayor had explicitly banned, along with eating kebabs on the public pavement. A vigile was constantly at hand to fine transgressors. But not the cardinal.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ the prelate smiled.

  Then Morris said he had a contractor working on a furniture warehouse in the Caprino Veronese area who should be free shortly. That wasn’t too far from Sant’Anna. No doubt something could be done. ‘To get things moving.’

  ‘The point is they are eager to open the school next September,’ the cardinal explained.

  ‘Ah,’ Morris observed and added, ‘Of course any paintings I buy would be bequeathed to the State on my death, so one needn’t feel that anything was being subtracted from the national heritage. On the contrary I would pay for any restoration work required. For the State it’s a bargain. For the Church an income.’

  Pulling out his iPhone to check a text message, the cardinal said that the parish priest of Sant’Anna would be in touch shortly with plans and details. ‘I’m afraid I have another engagement now.’ He held out his hand. ‘Congratulations once again, Mr. Duckworth, on your honorary citizenship. You are a credit to our community.’

  ‘Cardinal Rusconi!’

  The man in red was at the bottom of the steps, already opening the door of a waiting BMW, when Antonella came rushing out of the town hall followed at a fretful hobble by the long-suffering Don Lorenzo.

  ‘Cardinal Rusconi, please!’ Morris’s wife called breathlessly, ‘I was just wondering’—now she had caught his attention she paused—‘Yes,’ she took a few steps closer. ‘I mean, I was asking myself if there was any chance that you, or someone, I don’t know, could put in a word for our boy, Mauro. I mean, you heard he’s been arrested. There must have been some kind of mistake. Perhaps a phone call to the questura?’

  Morris was deeply disappointed; it really wasn’t appropriate to address a cardinal so abruptly, never mind to call aloud to him across an open space where anyone might hear. The smallest thing that went wrong and his dear wife completely lost her sense of decorum. In her haste, her silk dress had wriggled up around her considerable thighs and her maroon midriff was pulsing, her great gold crucifix trembling. Antonella generally achieved presentability through stateliness, through the dignity of composed mass. Hasty, wobbling and tearful, she seemed little better than a fat schoolgirl who had outgrown her uniform.

  Turning, the cardinal shifted a quizzical eye from the fleshy woman in her mound of fur to the skeletal Don Lorenzo, wringing mummified hands on the step behind. The ancient spiritual adviser was evidently torn between dedication to a wealthy benefactor and respect for his eminent superior. Without a word, the prelate frowned, produced another cigar in his ringed fingers and bent his head to his lighter.

  ‘Absolutely not!’ Morris came hurrying down the steps.

  Antonella looked up in consternation, as if her husband might have been forbidding the cardinal to smoke.

  ‘The last thing we want,’ Morris announced, ‘is for the boy to think he can go about behaving like a thug and not pay the price like anyone else.’

  ‘But he’s in gaol, Morrees!’

  ‘In a police cell,’ Morris corrected. ‘If we discover that Mauro really is innocent, then, yes, we might want to appeal to someone who can help. But first we must find out what’s happened and give the authorities the benefit of the doubt.’

  Hovering at her shoulders, Don Lorenzo said, ‘I fear your husband is right, Signora Antonella. We must pray for guidance.’

  Sighing, Antonella seemed to pull herself together. ‘Do forgive me, Cardinal. It’s just so worrying . . . for a mother.’

  Her voice appeared to be on the edge of tears, but when s
he looked over to her husband again there was a cold glint in her eyes. It did not worry Morris in the slightest. This was one quarter from which he was not expecting trouble.

  * * *

  Morris Duckworth and Antonella Trevisan, for Italian women do not necessarily surrender their surnames in wedlock, had a rather wonderful marriage. For both, of course, it was a second try. Indeed, it was while commiserating each other over the near simultaneous demise of their first spouses that the two had drawn close, an intimacy legitimised by the pain of discovering, from the circumstances of those curious deaths, that both their partners had been flagrantly unfaithful. Comforted by an already decrepit Don Lorenzo, Morris and Antonella had vowed that no such clouds would ever muddy the transparency of their own affections. In the throes, at the time, of a profound religious crisis, Morris had read the Bible morning, noon and night with Antonella and confessed himself daily to Don Lorenzo who eventually advised the troubled young man that there was no need to be so assiduous in one’s penitence if the only sin one had to admit was resentment over one’s failure to speak perfectly fluent Italian. Morris had been unconvinced. ‘Sometimes, Padre,’ he muttered, ‘I feel that just waking up and breathing is a sin.’ Not to mention thinking, he might have added, presiding day by day over the products of Morris Duckworth’s busy and increasingly uncensored mind. If he were to be honest, Morris often thought, he ought to spend his days confessing over and over to the mere fact of being alive. On the other hand, there was actually nothing Morris liked better than being alive, than waking in the morning, taking a deep breath and plunging into the day’s disturbing reveries. It was because he loved it so much he knew it must be a sin.

  Antonella, in contrast, was serenely without sin. In this, Morris’s second and, he at once understood, ‘real’ wife reminded him intensely of his mother. The quietness and absolute reliability of her devotions, whether spiritual or conjugal, was fantastically reassuring after the wayward behaviour of her younger sister, his first wife, Paola, a woman perfectly capable of pleasuring herself in the passenger seat of her Porsche, smearing pheromone-perfumed fingertips across her chauffeur husband’s freshly shaven lips as he tried to pass a tractor on a blind bend. Paola had driven Morris crazy and eventually paid the price. If I caught her with Kwame, he reflected, reliving as he occasionally would the moment when he had climbed the spiral staircase of their duplex to see naked black shoulders towering over red sofa cushions, his wife’s foxy chin propped on an ebony neck, a beatific smile stealing across her cheeks as she panted towards paradise, and the eyes—those desperate, animal eyes she had!—begging her polite and proper English husband, over the black hunk’s shoulder, please not to interrupt until the last drop of pleasure had been squeezed from her corrupt thighs—yes, if Morris had caught his first wife in noisy coitus with his personal assistant of the time, an ungrateful immigrant rescued from the gutter in a spirit of purest Christian charity, then God knows who else she had been with. The good Lord only knew with how many men (and women?) of what social extraction, age or ethnic background, Morris had been sharing Paola’s sweet, tight, slippery sex. He could still shudder at the thought, when it suited. I might perfectly well have died of AIDS, he sometimes liked to say to himself.