Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  ‘I’m getting out,’ Tarik announced. He snapped open his belt.

  Morris was astonished.

  The young Arab turned to him. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he said. He started to open the door.

  ‘Don’t,’ Morris told him. ‘You’ll be killed.’

  The car rocked as a truck slammed by. To their right, beyond the crash barrier, was only a heavy whiteness.

  Tarik turned and glared, eyes smouldering with righteous anger.

  ‘That’s how the East is always presented here, isn’t it? Decadent, cruel. A cheap horror movie, so you Westerners can feel superior. A Jewish woman puts an Arab head in a basket and you applaud.’

  Morris was a little concerned that this unscheduled halt might make him late. Not so much for Brescia and Mauro, but the appointment with his contractor in Caprino Veronese that he had arranged to follow. At the same time he was fascinated.

  ‘Go on. Tell me more.’

  ‘You project your own sick perversions on to an Arab nobleman and then enjoy imagining him defeated, suicidal and morally disgraced. To remind yourselves,’ the boy was sneering now, ‘why you don’t have the courage to live out your own filthy fantasies.’

  ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ Morris said sincerely.

  ‘I’m getting out,’ Tarik repeated. The car continued to rock in the rush of traffic. Morris had always felt they cheated on the emergency lanes in Italy; they were too narrow by far.

  ‘Did you ever hear about Marco Donat Cattin?’ he asked.

  An off-the-wall question to reset the conversation.

  Tarik stared. His eyes were magnificent. Liquid tar. More beautiful than his sister’s perhaps. His hair stood up like a cat’s hackles.

  ‘Donat Cattin was a terrorist in the seventies. Actually the son of a Christian Democrat minister. Well, he served his time in gaol, then, when they released him after God knows how many years, he stopped his car on the hard shoulder in the fog to help a driver who had broken down. On this very stretch of road, as I recall. A passing truck killed him. Ironia della sorte.’

  ‘I hate everything you stand for,’ the boy said.

  ‘Hmmm,’ Morris reflected. ‘So why don’t you drive on to some point where it’s safe to stop. I quite understand you might have issues with me. All the same there’s no reason you should risk your life to make the point. Not to mention a long walk in freezing fog without a proper coat.’

  Tarik sighed, drew a deep breath, then turned to the road again.

  ‘Do up your safety belt,’ Morris reminded him. After a few minutes back in the traffic, he tried a new tack: ‘I’ve been thinking. There’s a way you could really help me, Tarik, you know.’

  ‘I don’t want to help you.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like a chance to tell the world the things you’ve just told me?’

  Tarik didn’t reply.

  ‘Next autumn,’ Morris said, ‘I shall be curating an art exhibition about murder and assassination—a word of Arabic origin I believe.’

  The boy was pretending not to be interested.

  ‘And as you rightly point out, many of the Bible-inspired paintings have some unpleasantly prejudiced content. The Massacre of the Innocents. David and Goliath. Sardanapalus. As you say, the bad guys are always Arabs. And it still goes on today, we lick sheik arse to attract foreign investment and won’t even give the local Moroccans and Libyans a mosque to worship in.’

  Tarik’s jaw was working, as if he might be planning to spit. They were in the fast lane again, dangerously close to the lights ahead. With a flash of nostalgia, Morris remembered the times when Kwame had chauffeured him around the countryside, absolutely careless of any traffic rules or precautions. Tarik on the other hand was focused and angry, wound up rather than laid-back. But Morris’s excitement was equally intense.

  ‘My own position,’ he said, watching the boy carefully, ‘is that the paintings are very beautiful, I mean beautifully made, even when their content and implications are scandalous. What do you think about that? I mean, can you have a beautiful work of art that conveys an ugly or unacceptable message?’

  It wasn’t clear whether Tarik was listening or had withdrawn into a world of private bitterness. Morris was aware of waves of negative energy.

  ‘The next exit is ours,’ Morris said calmly.

  If anything the muscles round Tarik’s jaw hardened. He was holding his head unnaturally high, his neck rigid.

  ‘Anyway, my plan is to surprise people with some captions that really open up this can of worms, have you got me? I want people to walk into that show and think, hey, wait a minute, these paintings are beautiful but completely beyond the pale. I want people to face that issue. Our culture is built on disgraceful ideas.’

  Tarik was working his way across the lanes to the exit, quite sensibly this time.

  ‘It just occurred to me, what if someone like you were to write a few of the captions? Sign them in your name. You know? The Arab point of view. “Handsome Jew boy David slays ugly Arab Goliath.” Force people out of that mindless bourgeois assent to art they always have.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Tarik said. ‘I’ll never do anything for you.’

  ‘Right at the roundabout,’ Morris told him.

  As they drove toward the centre, he turned the radio on. It was important to give people the impression you respected their refusals.

  Opinionated listeners were phoning in about Berlusconi’s trial for abetting underage prostitution. The dominant view was that what a man did in the privacy of his own home should not be an object of public interest. Ruby looked at least eighteen and was clearly asking for it. A woman called from Cagliari to say she wouldn’t have minded a bit of bunga-bunga herself.

  Suddenly Morris found himself bursting into laughter. ‘At least Sardanapalus immolated himself ! No such luck with Berlusca.’

  Looking at Tarik, he saw the same half-smile that had played on his lips when the autostrada barrier lifted. He would come round. Morris felt thrilled. In the space of a few days, no a few hours, life had become exciting again.

  ‘Herod was Jewish,’ Tarik said a few moments later.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Herod was Jewish. It was a Jew who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Morris acknowledged. ‘How careless of me.’

  Mauro Duckworth had a head of curly red hair over a chubby cherub face. Exactly where those tight gingery curls had come from, Morris had no idea. There was no history of curls or red hair in either his or the Trevisan families. On occasion he had allowed himself to imagine that he was the victim of a terrible betrayal: at their time of greatest intimacy Antonella had opened her womb to someone else. But this was so out of character as to seem barely credible. And the boy definitely had Morris’s slate blue eyes and inwardly curving little fingers. An alternative might be that he himself was not his father’s son, that his own blonde mother had betrayed the monstrously swarthy Leonard Duckworth with some more aristocratic redhead; hence he himself was the unwitting carrier of curly, carroty genes that had then been passed on to Mauro. That would explain all kinds of things and it had occasionally given Morris much satisfaction to fantasise that he was not his father’s son, was free as it were from that contamination, and what’s more bearer of the no doubt nobler genes required to make an adulteress of a woman as pious as his mother. On the other hand, this version of events implied a complete revision of Morris’s faith in Mother’s purity, while his father became more sympathetic: a man with a grievance tricked into bringing up a cuckoo in the nest. This didn’t suit at all. A less troubling explanation might be that Antonella was not the daughter of the Latin-dark man who featured in all Trevisan family photos, Christian Democrat mayor of the godforsaken outpost of Sanguinetto and dead some years before Morris’s arrival in the Bel Paese. Yes, Antonella’s mother, whom Morris had always disliked for her unwarranted suspicion of everything he said, had betrayed her powerful husband with a mysterious red-
headed conte, or even Monsignor, why not? and it was thus Antonella, not Morris, who carried the red genes, so to speak, in background. This, to Morris, seemed more credible. He had always felt that Italians were terribly lax about sexual matters and his time with Paola had amply confirmed the suspicion. What it made you wonder, though, was how many other lamentable or even dangerous traits one might innocently be carrying around as a result of other people’s intemperance. How could you ever feel safe with your loved ones, or even yourself? There had been any number of occasions when Morris’s own two children just did not seem to be flesh of his flesh at all, as Morris had never felt he was flesh of his father’s flesh and often felt alienated even in his own skin. It was tempting, in such circumstances, to imagine that life was such a lottery you couldn’t really be held responsible for anything; but Morris knew that that way madness lay. Genes or no genes, for example, his son had definitely committed a severe error of judgement getting himself involved in a brawl with a bunch of football fans. He deserved to be punished for it.

  As it turned out, Mauro had a black eye and a bandaged ear. One wrist was in plaster. Morris felt a surge of pity for the boy; he remembered all too well what it meant to wake up after a violent encounter and find one’s good looks radically compromised.

  But the first thing his son said was calculated to repel any nascent sympathy.

  ‘I’m not going back to school, Papà.’

  The police had told Morris five minutes and no more. It was a special favour. So the mayor had called.

  ‘You won’t be able to go back to school, if they put you in gaol.’

  Mauro spoke to his father in Veronese dialect, which Morris hated; it was the idiom of thugs and peasants. Morris replied in proper English, using the accent he had made his own at Cambridge, which was also the language they drilled the boys in at Tonbridge School. Rightly so.

  ‘I sent you to one of the world’s best schools, Mauro, to give you a better chance in life. It doesn’t come cheap.’

  ‘I’m a fish out of water there, dio bon.’

  ‘Water?’ Morris grimaced. ‘I thought you preferred sewage.’

  Mauro sucked a swollen lip. He must have taken some kind of blow where jaw met neck. There was a bruise he kept touching with the fingers that peeped from the plaster.

  ‘Where’s Mamma?’ the boy asked. ‘Oddio, I hope she’s not too upset.’

  ‘Too upset to come today, for sure. But not as upset as she’ll be when she hears you don’t have the courage to finish school.’

  ‘Ma porco dio, Papà, it’s pointless wasting money on something that doesn’t suit me.’

  ‘Until you’re eighteen, I’ll be the judge of what suits you. And I’d prefer it if you spared me the blasphemies. They’re ugly and infantile.’

  There was a long pause. The five minutes were being frittered away in an argument they could have had any time.

  ‘By the way,’ Morris added, ‘this was supposed to be the day when your father received honorary citizenship of your home town.’

  ‘They didn’t give it to you?’

  ‘Of course they did.’

  ‘So why did you say, supposed to be?’

  Morris took a deep breath. ‘I meant, given that it was the day, etc., etc., it should have been a day of unsullied family pride.’

  Mauro grimaced. Morris wasn’t sure he had understood the word ‘unsullied.’ Evidently it was painful for the lad to move his features. ‘Dio povero, my teeth are killing me.’ He seemed to reflect for a moment. ‘If you want to talk about courage, though, Papà, I can promise you we gave as good as we got.’

  Morris said: ‘Tell me the story and I’ll get a lawyer.’

  The police had started it, Mauro explained. Forced to file between two lines of riot shields as they left the stadium, he and his friends had been systematically beaten. ‘With truncheons, dio boia! Like it was a production line and we were the pieces on the conveyor. They hit every one of us, dio can.’

  Morris watched as his son spoke. The seventeen-year-old was relishing the story. His one open eye flashed. On the table, his good hand clenched as he recalled a punch. It was strange to realise that one’s offspring had become a menacing physical presence. Meatily built, trained on the rugby field, without his civilising Tonbridge uniform Mauro was the classic English cherub turned lout.

  ‘So we waited for them outside,’ he said with grim satisfaction.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Morris sat up in surprise. ‘You waited for them, for the police?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘To assault them? Deliberately?’

  ‘They started it, porco dio!’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘We jumped them at a corner.’

  Morris was incredulous. ‘And you didn’t cover your faces with balaclavas or hoods, stockings, whatever you rabble do?’

  ‘We decided to take them face to face. We knew they wouldn’t be expecting that.’

  ‘I bet they weren’t.’

  ‘It would have been OK too, if a busload of reinforcements hadn’t arrived at the crucial moment. We were doing fine.’

  Morris sighed. ‘Mauro, you realise they’re probably recording this conversation.’

  ‘Then the judges will hear that it was them started it, won’t they?’

  ‘That’s not the part of the recording that will get played in court. Grow up, kid.’

  The boy touched his plastered hand to his cheek again. ‘This tooth, dio bon.’ For the first time he appeared to be struck by the idea: ‘You really think they’ll put me in gaol?’

  ‘Certainly an institution of some kind. You’re still a minor. But what else can they do, if you admit to assaulting a policeman?’

  Most surprising of all, though, Morris thought, was that despite the unhappy prospect of imprisonment, not to mention all the physical pain he must be in, his son was evidently pleased with himself; as if being spared a return to Tonbridge School was all he cared about.

  ‘Is there anything particular worrying you about going back to school?’ Morris asked. ‘It would be crazy to drop out just because a teacher’s picking on you or something.’

  This time Mauro tried to smile, but again his features froze. ‘The only thing that worries me is that I might kill my maths teacher.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘He’s so sarcastic. I get this urge to grab his neck. A sort of wave of angry heat.’

  ‘Mauro, for heaven’s sake, you’re not going to resolve anything by killing people.’

  ‘That’s why I’m not going back,’ the boy said.

  For a moment Morris tried to set aside his disappointment and concentrate; his son’s life was at a turning point, and a child’s destiny reflects on the father; this would affect Morris’s reputation. Meantime, Mauro was describing the beating they had taken, even after the fighting was over and they were handcuffed face down on the pavement. ‘They still kept kicking us, dio boia, they’re animals!’

  ‘If I can get you out of this,’ Morris interrupted, ‘will you do what I tell you? I mean obey unconditionally?’

  Mauro was pouting. ‘Is there any chance I could get off ?’

  How much more attractive Tarik was, Morris suddenly thought. How much more cultured. His spiritual children were Samira and Tarik, not Massimina and Mauro.

  ‘The first thing is to stop telling the truth. They assaulted you, not you them. You did not jump them at a corner. You—’

  ‘But Papà—’

  ‘And in future you never take on another person face to face.’

  At this point a policeman put his head round the door. Time was up. Without another word Morris got to his feet and left.

  Chapter Three

  MORRIS WAS ASLEEP AND he was awake. He felt many hands lifting him in his winter pyjamas, carrying him from his bed, laying him down on a table. Where? The only big table on the first floor was the one in The Art Room. They laid him down clumsily and his head took a knock. He felt he co
uld have woken at this point, if he made an effort. He could have opened his eyes and contemplated the beautiful renderings of violent death that hung on the walls. Perhaps I collect these paintings so as not to kill again; that thought flashed through his mind. Or perhaps because I’d love to kill again but don’t have the nerve.

  A cannibal who wants to have his corpse and eat it.

  Morris smiled, then heard the sound of steel on steel, a harsh, rhythmical rasping. Now he was alert. There was a muttering and a whispering. Hands gripped his wrists. Open your eyes, Morris! He couldn’t. He struggled, but strong fingers were pressing on his face. The blade penetrated his neck. It sliced across his windpipe and sank straight through the flesh till it met the bone, and began to saw. Morris felt every movement very precisely. They were twisting his head this way and that while the blade sawed at the spine. I’m dead! he yelled. Oh, I’m dead! Mimi, why didn’t you warn me? Why have you forsaken me? His head was turning from side to side with the blade in his neck sawing and sawing, until at last the bone gave.

  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

  ‘Madonna-mia-madre-di-Dio!’ Antonella cried.

  Morris lay in a sweat.

  ‘I thought you’d never wake up. I’ve been shaking you like mad.’

  He moved his head carefully; it had not fallen in a basket.

  ‘You were shouting, “I’m dead, I’m dead.”’

  ‘God.’

  ‘And all kind of other things besides.’

  Morris was still savouring the pleasure of being in one piece.

  ‘Other things?’

  ‘Lots of other things.’

  Morris hesitated; best not to enquire, he decided.

  ‘It must have been seeing Mauro in such a bad way.’

  There was a pause. Their bed was the same carved old four-poster that had once been out in the family villa in Quinzano. Trevisan DNA seemed to require that all furniture be massive, dark and at least one hundred years old. The only objects like it that Morris had known as a child were the oak pews in St Bartholomew’s, or perhaps the polished coffins when he sang at funerals for half a crown. But he enjoyed the waxy atmosphere of sepulchral wealth in the Trevisan household, and he loved too to think that Massimina had slept on this same hard wool mattress beside her widowed mother right up to the fateful day when she had run away with him. It made him feel close to his first love even as he slept beside her more sensible elder sister.