It would be pointless to gather more details about S.’s general appearance. The two portraits are there and they reveal as much as is necessary for what matters least of all. In other words, they do not tell me enough but satisfy those who care only about appearances. My task is now something else: to discover everything I can about S.’s life and put it in writing, to differentiate between inner truth and outer skin, between substance and shell, between the manicured nail and the clippings from the same nail, between the pale blue pupil and the dry matter which that glance in the mirror each morning reveals in the corner of my eye. To separate, divide, confront and understand. To perceive. Precisely what I could never attain while painting.
IF REVEALING A man’s profession tells us something we ought to know about him, and if running a business empire is a job in addition to all the advantages such a role implies, then I hereby affirm that S. is managing director of the Senatus Populusque Romanus. What is the Senatus Populusque Romanus? As used here, it is a disguise and another example of my penchant for anachronisms (the best history of mankind would be the one which gathers up all the ears of grain from the ground in one fell swoop and then raises the different phases of time to the heavens or to our eyes, ripe grains all of them, yet still far from being bread). I am not, however, disguising everything, because SPQR are the actual initials of the firm where S. is in control. I am associating the Senate and the Roman people with capitalism and confirm that, at heart, there is only one senate and few differences in the people. I have another reason, a somewhat muddled reason, perhaps simply a tortuous expedient for not writing out the names in full: in my profession (which is that of painting) we start by applying the colors just as they come in the tubes and which bear names that appear to have been established forever and ever. But once mixed on the palette or canvas, the slightest overlapping modifies them, or the light, and a color is still what it was as well as being the color next to it and a combination of the two, and any new color or colors that result enter into the permanently unstable spectrum in order to repeat the process, at once multiplier and multiplying.
While alive, the same is true of man (once dead, it is no longer possible to know who he was): to give him a name is to capture him at a given moment in his earthly journey, to immobilize him, perhaps off-balance, to present him disfigured. A simple initial leaves him indeterminate, but determining himself in movement. I concede that I am being whimsical here, the fantasy perhaps of someone who has learned to play chess and thinks he can suddenly exhaust all the possible combinations (writing, or the calligraphy which precedes it, is my new form of chess), or it could be nothing more than the nearsighted man’s bad habit of peering at things, whereby he comes to discover, and for no other reason, what can only be seen up close. S. is an empty initial which I alone can fill out with what I shall know and invent, just as I invented the Senate and the Roman people, but in the case of S. the line will not be drawn that separates the known from the invented. Any name that starts with that initial could be S.’s name. They are all known and invented, but no name will be given to S.: the fact that all of them are possible makes it impossible to choose any one of them. I know what I am talking about and can prove it. One need only play on the sounds of the following names in order to appreciate the emptiness of a name once completed. Can I choose any of these for S(es)?: Sá Saavedra Sabino Sacadura Salazar Saldanha Salema Solomon Salust Sampaio Sancho Santo Saraiva Saramago Saul Seabra Sebastian Secundus Seleucus Sempronius Sena Seneca Sepúlveda Serafim Sergius Serzedelo Sidonius Sigismund Silvério Silvino Silva Sílvio Sisenando Sisyphus Soares Sobral Socrates Soeiro Sophocles Soliman Soropita Sousa Souto Suetonius Suleiman Sulpicius. Of course I can, but in choosing a name I would already be classifying and putting him into a specific category. If I were to say Solomon, he immediately becomes a man; if I were to say Saul, he becomes another man; I kill him at birth if I should opt for Seleucus or Seneca. No Seneca is capable of administering the SPQR today (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus Seneca [4 B.C.–A.D. 65], born in Cordova, Latin philosopher, was one of Nero’s preceptors; later he fell into disgrace and was ordered to commit suicide by opening his veins. Treatises: De tranquillitate animi, De brevitate vitae, Naturales quaestiones, Epistulae morales). The name is important yet is of no importance whatsoever when I read off once more, without pausing, all the names I have written: by the second line I lose my patience, and by the third I am completely satisfied with the initial. This is another reason why I myself intend to be a simple H. and nothing more. A blank space, were it possible to differentiate it from the margins, would suffice to say all that can be said about me. I shall be the most secretive of all and therefore the one who will say most about himself (give most of himself). (Give of himself: take from himself, waver.) Other people here will have a name; they are not important. Adelina, for example, I shall name. I only sleep with her. I neither know nor desire (to know) her. But I shall strip her of that name, just as I strip her of her clothes or ask her to strip, the day I find that name becoming the color of the paint inside the tube or a bubble on the windowpane. Then I shall call her A.
Had S. not been managing director of the Senatus Populusque Romanus, he would not have sought me out to paint his portrait. He had the ironic courtesy to tell me this, with the negligent air of someone who excuses himself of some little foible, attributing it to alien motives which one only respects or tolerates out of disdainful forbearance. But in telling me he was also confessing to the first crack in his shell, before I had even considered a second portrait. In the boardroom of the SPQR there are three portraits of former directors, and it was the board which decided (to avoid the absurdity of commissioning once again a portrait taken from a photograph, as happened when S.’s father died and the painter was called Henrique Medina) that the present managing director should have his portrait painted while still alive and that it be put in the fourth frame hanging to the right as one entered. S. agreed to having his funeral pyramid erected, and I was chosen (now that Medina had retired) to open and seal the secret chambers. Using different words, S. told me these things (except for those I discovered later) in case I should hear about them in some other manner, and I charitably began mixing the colors on my palette as I listened. I could see the absurdity, but absurdity cannot bear being watched, nor is it necessary in order to feel greater hatred and contempt. S. showed himself to be detestable: one more turn of the screw. As for me, next day I mounted a fresh canvas on the easel in the storeroom and made a start on the second portrait.
Were it not for my meticulous craftsmanship, which substitutes minute detail for talent and close observation for rapid intuition, I should be unable to describe this exterior of the SPQR which extends inside like a thermos flask, concealing the machinery, chemistry, or who knows what which constitutes the core of any large business concern. Let me try to explain. When I went to the SPQR to study the chamber, the light, the ambience where I would hang my painting (and I could have spared myself the time and effort had it not been for my professional scruples), I first looked at the façade of the building, which I barely remembered, and once inside I felt as if I were moving around an inner façade which extended into walls, furniture, the faces of employees, carpets, black telephones, clear varnish, an even temperature, the clean smell of polished wood, a surface as opaque as a tiled façade rising on three floors in a square which looks almost provincial. It was also like entering the mouth of a sleeping giant, sliding along the walls of his gullet, passing through his stomach and reemerging simply through the orifice of a body, through mucous membranes successively transformed, as remote from the circulation of blood vessels and the functioning of glands as something about to be rejected through the elasticity of the epidermis. I should therefore add that being able to speak of what I saw, I do not know what I saw, I have not transformed it into knowledge. Not yet.
I hate saying azulejo, not to mention having to write the word here. As far as I can see (I am not referring to what I have achieved, for
I am merely an academic painter), there are no more colors to be invented. Combining two, I produce a thousand, combining three a million, combining seven the infinite, and if I were to mix the infinite, I should regain the primordial color in order to make a fresh start. No matter that these colors have no name and cannot be given a name; they exist and multiply. But I detest this word (shall I learn to detest others?) glued to things which do not correspond: azulejo suggests blue, made of blue, bluish, blueness, bearing no resemblance to these tiles which have no blue, these squares of painted clay which form an overlay in gold, orange, red and ocher, with an imponderable silver dust which might be in the glaze, on the façade of the SPQR. At certain times of the day this façade is visible and invisible, the sun beating down at a certain angle transforms the multiplied flower into a single mirror; an hour later the outlines are restored, the colors regain their purity as if the glaze had caught and retained only as much light as was needed for human eyes that do not want to see less but must not see too much, at the risk of no longer seeing what they wanted but only seeing what they preferred not to see. There is a friendly rapport between the eye and the skin which the eye sees. And perhaps blindness would be preferable to the keen vision of the falcon lodged in human orbs? How does Juliet’s skin appear to the falcon’s eyes? What did Oedipus see when he blinded himself with his own nails?
SPQR also has one of those revolving doors which I regard as the bourgeois version of that boulder covering the entrance to the Cave of the Forty Thieves. It is not called sesame (a plant yielding gingili oil), and it represents the supreme contradiction of a door that is simultaneously always open and always closed. It is the giant’s glottis, swallowing and spitting out, ingesting and vomiting. One enters in fear and emerges with relief. And there is a moment of anguish when, in the middle of a movement, we find we are no longer outside yet still not inside: we are traveling in a cylinder as though penetrating a wall of air, as viscous as slime in a well or as solid and compressed as the base of an obelisk. I can recall moments of suffocation in my childhood, certain monstrous or simply black images (a black man would describe them as white) seated in my heart, and this shining drum brings back those primitive terrors. To leave, in this instance, is truly to issue forth, to emerge, to erupt from this dense atmosphere into fresh air one can breathe.
But I am now inside and crossing the vast foyer with its long, ornate counter from behind which employees raise their heads and start turning them slowly as if their faces, too, were a revolving door with larvae and cobwebs inside. No one recognizes me. Through an opening at the far end there is a broad stairway (“Go straight up to the first floor and ask for me”), with wooden banisters in the Ionic style (explanation: a cross-section would reveal the two lateral volutes of the Ionic capital) and a functional runner made of coarse fiber, held in position with brass stair rods. I am surprised by these old-fashioned surroundings. The stairwell ends up in a rectangular gallery confined on three sides by a balustrade formed by an extension of the handrail. A porter in a blue uniform gets to his feet as I approach. “I’d like to speak” (I use the discreet conditional tense instead of the more forceful present indicative, “I wish”) “to Mr. S.” “Whom should I announce?” I give my name. For this man I am no more than a name when he shows me into the waiting room, yet he did open the door for me and leave me alone with the upholstered chairs, the carpet, English engravings of hunting scenes, the heavy crystal ashtray. To get this far any name will do. From now on only another name will get me any further: the name or the person? Or neither the name nor the person, but S.’s secretary, for example, a privileged entity like S.’s glove or the knot in his tie? I remain standing. I hate sitting down in waiting rooms when there is not much waiting to be done. No sooner has one settled on the sofa or perhaps not even settled because still trying to find a comfortable position for one’s shoulders or to steady one leg before crossing the other one, naturally with that false air of self-assurance which is soon belied when the crossed leg uncrosses itself and takes the place of the other one, which, in its turn, attempts the same abortive movement if the waiting drags on—no sooner has one settled or started to settle than the door opens abruptly, if it is S. himself arriving, or tentatively if it is some subordinate, whereupon we have to jump from the sofa, hampered by the crossed leg, almost trapped inside the springs which maliciously detain us. And if it is S. himself who enters with outstretched hand, we have no hand to extend, occupied as we are in trying to recover some sort of balance so that everything should seem natural and betray no hint of absurdity or anguish in this first scene of the first act. These things never happen to me. I went up to the only window in the room, which looked onto an inner patio with grayish walls, and on the floor below I could see another window which, I assumed from the layout, must look onto the large foyer I had crossed earlier. All I could make out was a man seated at a desk with a pile of green papers before him (I said a pile of papers, but let me correct myself: a neat pile), and to the left, forming an angle of forty-five degrees with the edge of the desk, stood a filing cabinet which the man was rifling through (not the edge) with his left hand while holding a rubber stamp, seal or signet, bearing who knows what characters, in his right hand. And just as the man was in this position with outstretched arms, it looked as if he were embracing the emptiness before him, empty simply because I could see nothing beyond him. Then his left hand extracted a yellow filing card while his right hand, armed with some mysterious instrument, landed on the green paper and, coming down brusquely, left a black mark which from a distance was simply a blot. The same hand then grabbed a pencil, with which he wrote something on the filing card, then his left hand returned to the cabinet to replace one card and remove another at the same time as his right hand put down the pencil and secured the black handle of the stamp only to go back to the beginning and repeat the same broad gesture of someone embracing emptiness. Seventeen times this operation was repeated, and it was only when I heard the door open behind me that I focused my eyes on the image of the man who was working like this: he looked tall and bent, and he suddenly reminded me of a photograph someone once took of me in which I have my back turned, firmly turned, as remote from me as that man in the moon carrying a bundle of wood on his shoulders whom my grandmother used to point out to me and in whom I devoutly believed for a time. It is a photograph I often glance at (I have it hanging in my studio), filled with curiosity as if I were looking at a stranger. I never recognize myself at that height, with that curved back and those protruding ears, at least in the photograph. Which is the real me?
On turning around I catch the secretary, Olga (this is how I shall refer to her from now on), coming toward me. I am finally seated because I trip over another ashtray on a tall stand and find myself obliged to make some futile but unavoidable gestures in order to meet up with the secretary Olga by raising my hand to hers as she begins to speak. I listen to what she is telling me as I dance on the tightrope of the unexpected, that Mr. S. is not available, that he had to leave on urgent business, that he naturally sends his apologies and that she, Olga, his secretary, will accompany me to the boardroom and try to answer any queries. I shake her hand, which as one would expect is soft and perfumed, and assure her “that is fine and any questions will only take a minute.” Although looking straight at me, Olga the secretary makes no attempt to conceal her curiosity. Neither does she hide or presume to hide her disappointment. I suppose she had another image of painters. She does not realize that I am simply an academic painter (will she have heard of such painters?) who dresses quite normally and that he/I could just as easily be sitting there with arms outstretched embracing emptiness, looking up a filing card with the left hand while clutching an ashtray in the right hand, just to be that little bit different. Like a couple of magpies we both try imitating the human voice as we leave the waiting room and walk along the wide corridor on the other side, where three huge, varnished doors on the left lead into the directors’ boardroom, as I soon disc
over when Olga the secretary, with a graceful turn of the wrist and swaying of her shoulders, turns the handle of the second door and goes in. I pause for a fraction of a second in the doorway, as we all do to prove that we are not ill-bred (good breeding is often simply a question of a fraction of a second, sometimes even less), and I enter discreetly while Olga the secretary switches on all the lights as if she were doing the honors in her own home. I approve. Strictly speaking, nothing is our property, but it is fitting that we should be seen to be self-confident and relaxed when we use something which belongs more to others than to ourselves, for there is always someone who owns even less. If I go to the cinema, the theater or a concert, I know that the seat in which I am sitting does not belong to me but I behave as if it were my rightful place in this world, a place for which I have fought and worked so hard.
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy Page 3
