Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  There is a sudden rustle of activity in the vineyard below, on the other side of the road. Art looks down just in time to see the hind legs of a deer disappearing into the vines, the broad leaves turning yellow in the October sun. Deer, boar and birds of infinite variety inhabit these hills. And the villages and towns dotted throughout them have the unchanged look of places that have been here for a thousand years and more, and shine in the morning sun with the confident assumption that, on any morning, one of their number might easily set off for the New World and be suddenly distracted by deer, boar and birds on the way.

  Art has lived for thirty years in these hills and valleys. The old mill that he moved into when he first came here and which he later bought is his home now. Others may have emigrated from the Old World to the New, but Art left the New for the Old and never returned.

  That particular part of the New World that Art set sail from all those years before is Melbourne. He was born there and grew up there. But he’s never been back, partly because of the sheer effort required just to get there, and partly because by the time he left, he’d already had his fill of the place and that sense of satiety hasn’t diminished with the years.

  For he spent the war years bottled up in that city. Bursting to break free the whole time, unable to get out. All of them, all his artist friends, all they wanted to do was get out of the place. But they were stuck there, and throughout the war they fought and drank and had love affairs and made, almost without noticing, a particular kind of art full of dark, demonic trams that seem to have leapt free of their rails, amusement parks in hell and grimy city back streets where humans and animals, with little distinction between the two, scoured the gutters — a particular kind of art that is now synonymous with those days. Although they — Art and all those friends and enemies who formed the fixed circles they moved in — never really thought of it like that at the time. Somebody once called them penguins, Angry Penguins, and somewhere along the way the name stuck. They were, somebody of high importance had once announced (in that toffy way that such announcements were made back then), the last expression of a truly regional modernism. Something like that. Although Art never thought of them as a group or anything of the kind. These things only become fixed in people’s minds afterwards. At the time all they wanted to do was make art and shoot through the first chance they got.

  And so they did. And so he did. All to their separate elsewheres. And here he is. And every morning after watering his garden, he leaves the pots and hanging roses and shrubs behind and strolls out to the roadside to the same view of the village across the valley, on the opposite hill, from which Amerigo Vespucci set off one morning in 1491. And he is yet to tire of it. Or the thoughts it prompts. Of Old Worlds and New. Of green mornings. And of Vespucci setting out to discover what lay beyond the seas, beyond the imagined corners of the world that no one had ever seen but which were rumoured to contain monsters and sudden falls from which no traveller returned, but, at the same time, also being distracted — this Vespucci that Art imagines, in the green morning of his greatness — by the wildlife that inhabits these hills and valleys, along the way.

  When he first came here he had the dark hair and eager eyes of a young man. As well as the dark goatee beard that occasionally prompted people to liken him to a young Toulouse-Lautrec. The hair is still there, though grey, as is the beard, but nobody likens him to a young Lautrec any more. He strolls back to the house, the dripping watering can in his hand.

  His studio is the mill itself. And the mill wheel is still there. The old stone walls are cool in summer, damp in winter, and smell like a cave. Canvases, large and small, finished and unfinished, some possibly never to be finished, are stacked up all around him. Some go back decades. Others to just last week. And although Art has never gone back to the town that nurtured him (and he will always think of it as a town), he has never stopped painting it — that part of the city they lived in and fought in and created in all those years before. It returns to him in dreams, in sudden moments of remembrance, and he has never stopped painting it. It is his other world now. The one he left behind. And, street by street, building by building, brick by brick, he is building up a giant composite portrait of that city and its life, of a place and a time that once existed but doesn’t any more. This is his life’s work. He never intended it to be, not when he first came here. No, he came to escape all that, but in the end turned back to it and somewhere along the way it became his life’s work.

  And when he is finished it will be so comprehensive that those who wish to do so will be able to reconstruct a vanished place and time from his paintings alone, brick by brick, building by building, street by street. A whole vanished city, a lost domain — the café with the Russian name they were always forgetting, the hatter’s he lived above, the station with the yawning mouth from which the workers of the city emerged every morning and disappeared into every evening. That and all the lanes and street corners that had their moments — moments of happiness, anger, love or hate — that stuck like glue to his memory and whose clarity has never diminished over the years.

  A lifetime’s work. Most of which has never been seen. Not yet. And the question of how on earth you would exhibit such a portrait has not, for a long time, seemed of any great importance. In fact, there is something thrilling about the sheer impossibility of such an exhibition. A portrait so vast it may never be seen. Somehow it doesn’t matter. Why should it? He works anonymously, has for years. He has no fame. His name means nothing outside these hills and valleys. What does it matter? He has long since cared.

  Once he did. When he first started, stuck in that city he left and which he is now meticulously reconstructing — that city they all couldn’t wait to escape, but were stuck in because of the war. The war was everywhere and everyone was stuck in one place or another. That was when he cared. When they all did. The whole bunch of them. All stuck at the arse end of the earth together and longing to be on the other side of it. And it wasn’t so much fame they all craved. It was that feeling of being one of the chosen. One of the Elect.

  And all their exhibitions, in hired halls, galleries, mechanics’ institutes and pubs — anywhere they could get — were all a kind of shifting stage upon which the Secret Society of the Elect revealed themselves to one another. And you didn’t need to ask if you were one of them, because if you did, you weren’t. No, it wasn’t fame or money they all cared about — fame that comes and goes, indiscriminate fame that falls upon actors, footballers and murderers alike. It was election. The confirmation that the Secret Society of the Elect had recognised one of its own — in that mysterious way that never explains itself but which governs the decisions of all secret societies — and plucked you from the crowd, lifting you into the realm of the anointed.

  Saints (and Art is walking towards the large easel that dominates this cave of a studio as he ponders this), those saints on church walls all over this adopted country of his, must have felt like that; the saints who moved with the crowd, ate with the crowd and knelt with the crowd, but who, all along, in their heart of hearts, knew that they were not one of the crowd. And all the time while they ate, knelt and prayed with the crowd, they were secretly waiting, praying in their duplicitous hearts for that moment when they would be plucked from it — or knew full well in those same hearts that they already had been. So it was easy, he imagines, for the saints to weep, fast and pray with the crowd because they knew, all along, that Heaven was winking. And all their humility (and Art has always distrusted the humble, always seen humility as the first sign of duplicity)was bulldust.

  And it is Art, now laying out his paints and brushes to begin the morning’s work, who introduced the word ‘bulldust’ to the hills and valleys of the area. The word had never been spoken here before. Not in the land of Amerigo Vespucci, of wild boar and deer and infinite varieties of birdlife. But it has entered the language of the hills and valleys now. When locals, in the town and small communities around him, hear something questionable
, spoken by a politician, mayor or dignitary, that they know full well to be untrue, they, more often than not, pronounce it bulldust. They know exactly what it means and they like the sound of it. They like its bluntness and its lack of that very quality it decries. And Art, for his part, loves to hear this import spoken with such natural ease and conviction, as if it were always part of the language and as if the locals had all grown up with the concept of bulldust as much as they had with Heaven, Hell and honour. And it is now in these surrounding towns, as often as not, the word that marks the end of a topic of conversation, for upon being pronounced bulldust, the subject of the conversation, whatever it may have been, is self-evidently discredited and merits no more time or breath — for one’s time and breath are valuable and not to be wasted. And perhaps, Art wonders, drying his brushes, perhaps in a thousand years some variant of the word will puzzle the scholars.

  No, it wasn’t cheap fame they all craved back then; it was the duplicity of saints. But that was once. And somewhere along the way, from there to here, he lost the craving for all of that, like losing your religion, and one day he just didn’t care any more. And so of the canvases finished and unfinished, this portrait of a vanished place and time stacked all around him, only a few have been viewed and none have ever seen the light of day outside this cave of a studio.

  He is only going over all this again, the place he once called home and the thing they all once craved, because a letter arrived this morning (the postman, on a scooter, is always remarkably early) from one of those painters with whom he shared that war-time city of his birth. It was addressed to ‘Artie’; that was how he knew it was from the old days. Nobody ever called him Arthur. Always Art or Artie. Except here. Here it is Arturo. Which he likes.

  Sam, who sent the letter, was one of the few from those old days who did find fame. One of those who announced himself right from the start and who was plucked from the crowd by the gods of the day. And he slipped into the life of fame like one of those who always knew he was born for it. One of those who looked famous before he was. Art reads about him from time to time, for he is a regular reader of the English papers — England being where Sam went to live when fame called — and also gets news from the letters that Sam sometimes sends. Sam, it seems, is coming to the local town for a festival later in the year. It is, after all, that kind of town (Art takes the half-hour walk there most mornings after work) and always has been. And Art likes it that way. A postcard town that hosts exhibitions and is occasionally swept up by arts festivals. The kind of town that appears in travel guides and about which people write books. The kind of town in which the local café owners and shop owners speak English and French and German. For as much as Amerigo Vespucci may have set off from here in search of other lands, other lands have since come to this place.

  And so Sam will visit. He will exhibit his paintings, old and new (some of which Art may well remember from the early days, since Sam keeps a private collection), and they may well talk of old times. And when they have finished they will go their separate ways, until the next letter or the next time when their paths cross again.

  Art applies the paint, one part of his mind still on the lost religion of the Elect, another quieter, untouched part guiding the hand that applies the paint. Time will collapse now, from this moment when the work of the morning begins and he loses himself in it. Time will be no more, the outside world will not intrude; all will collapse and the morning will pass into infinity, until the tick-tock of everyday time eventually reasserts itself, and he will know that the morning is over. But not know just where he has been or how on earth to measure how long he was there. Only that he was there. And that something that didn’t exist when the morning started now does. And he will stand back from the easel, as always, puzzled by its appearance as though wondering where on earth it could have sprung from.

  And that, in the end, is how he lost his religion. The discovery that the three or four hours every morning, in which time collapsed and in which the world went away, was all he really craved; the realisation that he could win and lose fame, and win and lose it again, that he could be plucked from the crowd and thrown back into it, and not be diminished. But if he were to ever lose those three or four hours he would lose something as vital as the air that he is oblivious of breathing in and breathing out in those suspended hours that belong to another measure of time altogether and which constitute a kind of heaven.

  The way there is easier than the way back. The way down is the way up. The way up … He plays with it like one of those Buddhist sayings that all too easily find their way into calendars and diaries. The walk from the mill to the town is downhill, over dirt and bitumen, interrupted by the odd car of locals and tourists. The vineyards are all around. Hills and valleys, covered in vines. Row after row. An ordered landscape. This is his regular walk. Most mornings, after work, he follows this dirt road into the town. At one point he stops and looks back to the mill house on the hill behind him. Dark clouds fill the sky, their patterns constantly shifting. But he can’t stop long. It will rain. And he will have to shelter in the town until it passes. Which it will do, and quickly. Those black clouds will burst upon the hills and valleys, and soon afterwards the sky will be blue. Here clouds seem to fall out of the sky. Like a sudden burst of temper. Then disappear, almost as suddenly. He turns and continues, picking up his pace to beat the rain as a car passes. They wave, he waves back. They draw away.

  There are occasional visitors to the mill. Academics and scholars. For although he has long since ceased to care about fame or the society of the Elect, the fact remains he was once there. And the years themselves, and the place itself, have both achieved a kind of fame now. Angry Penguins. Bright young things in dinner suits. The last expression of a truly regional modernism. Something like that. One of those critics, English, one of those who anoints the chosen, said that — for it’s not Old Man Time who decides what lasts and what doesn’t, it’s people. People like that. Toffy types, more often than not. Of course, Art and the others never thought of themselves as a movement or a school, they were too busy getting on with things. At least, that’s how Art remembers it now. It’s one of those things said by someone who wasn’t there. An order imposed upon days that never seemed to have any order at the time.

  He passes a large villa, set back from the road behind a sweeping driveway and gardens. At first he imagined some mysterious recluse lived there. Withdrawn from the world behind stone walls and gardens. But the truth is less intriguing. A wine merchant owns the place. For the vines covering these hills and valleys are a sort of gold that re-creates itself every year and never runs out. And the older the vine, the more golden the grape. From here the road dips steeply and he braces his knees to accommodate the slope. The clouds above him are swirling in and out of each other. Heavy Van Gogh clouds. The rain is coming. He must hurry. The sound of the car containing the tourists fades away and the hills and valleys revert to silence. Silence is one of the area’s defining features, for, apart from the odd car or the ring of a hammer, the air always seems undisturbed. Perhaps silence isn’t the word, but it feels like silence. And never an imposing one. Rather, it is almost hypnotic. And to enter these hills and valleys, to enter the encompassing silence that falls upon them, to become the sole figure in the landscape, is to become just one more constituent part of its life — vines, wildlife and the occasional wanderer.

  Then his thoughts return to the place he once called home, and to the scholars and academics who occasionally visit. For the time and place they seem to have created is different from the one Art remembers. They have created a sort of fiction. A dramatic moment, an explosive one, like steam bursting from a pressure-cooker with a shrill, insistent whistle. A gush of art that had to happen because the steam in the cooker had built to that point. And he can tell when he talks to these scholars and young painters (travelling the world in a way that Art and the rest of them had been desperate to do but never could) that there is a longing contained in the
ir questions and they wish they’d been there too. But the fact is — like the villa set back from the road, which invites mystery and fiction — the truth was nothing like that. Not as Art recalls it. No, the truth was grimy and gritty. One day dragging into another. A sort of five-year war-time winter. At least, these are the memories that have lasted. There were springs and summers and autumns, of course, but he only remembers the winters. The five-year winter. You had nothing else to do but create other worlds. Oh, and yes, they were close. Tight. A big family, really. Laughter one minute, at one another’s throats the next. And they helped one another, more than they knew. And there was an intensity to those days that comes rarely. Perhaps even something in the air … perhaps. Be careful, Artie, he tells himself as the road evens out, or you’ll start thinking like them.

  Footpaths appear on the fringe of the town and the road curves round towards the central square. And as he follows a narrow street past the bus stop and the bus that connects the town to Florence, just a fifty-minute ride away, leaden drops of rain thud onto the rooftops and canvas awnings above the café tables and footpaths, and he reaches the square just in time to see its population scatter for cover.

  The rain is thrilling. A lunch-time show. A spectacle. And he stands under cover entranced by the drama of the storm. They sometimes ask him, these scholars and academics who visit from time to time, if Art and the rest of them didn’t all do their best work back there in that place they couldn’t wait to be shot of. An annoying question. It’s said very politely in the manner of speculative, academic inquiry — but you can tell that it’s exactly what they do think — and that’s when Art tells them, on the verge of pronouncing the question bulldust, that they’re talking to the wrong person, usually with a grunt and a tug of the goatee beard.