Painting has always influenced my building, particularly those great vast ones of battles or the big processionals where it seems the whole world has gathered to welcome Christ, a King, or a Pope. I love the idea of the painter scrunched down close to his ten-foot-by-ten-foot canvas for months painting individual faces and uniforms on the soldiers, blood on the mouths of horses, skies erupting with the most dramatic clouds and light. These paintings work to capture the whole of life and humanity in one glance. It’s the totality of those moments, the distillation of light and emotion, life and death, God and possibility that should be the goal of any artist.
I sat down in front of one by Jens Juel. It depicted the building of the Cathedral of Maastricht. Hundreds of little workers swarmed over and around the building like ants over a half-eaten chocolate bar. Hod carriers, stonemasons, fat priests, women selling food from baskets, scampering kids, and barking dogs covered the canvas and made the scene look like the center of the universe, or at least like the building of this cathedral was the most important and vital event man has ever known. What struck me most deeply was the order and gladness of the chaos. At first glimpse people appear to be moving in all directions at once, accomplishing nothing. But look closer—the stonemasons carefully check their plans, the women sell beautiful brown breads to workers with hungry, appreciative eyes. The children and dogs play under the watchful tender eyes of adults. This is a great event because it is their lives. The kids will grow up and take their parents’ place and that is as it should be. Men will work until they grow too old to handle the tools. Then they’ll sit on the edge of the grass like those old-timers there, on the small hill, and watch the slow progress of this building until they die.
Compared to what was going on a few hundred miles to the west, the building of the Maastricht Cathedral, however many hundreds of years it took to complete, was bliss.
I began to talk to myself. “It’s language. The difference is there they understand what the others are saying.” An old Oriental man sitting nearby looked at me and nodded. I asked if he understood English. He shook his head and pointed at one ear. Whether that meant he was deaf or didn’t speak wasn’t important. I continued. “They work together so well because they have a common goal. They want that church to be built, so they all do their separate parts. In fucking Zell am See … .” I looked at my neighbor to see if he was listening. His eyes were closed. That seemed a good idea, so I closed mine too.
WHEN I GOT BACK to fucking Zell am See who should be waiting there for me but Claire. She couldn’t have come at a better time. God bless women. Spinners of countless webs, the world’s best company, the only rabbits out of a hat, point-blank range, dreams-become-flesh most of us will ever know in this life.
Similar to my first days in the town with Palm, Claire and I walked around and ate and talked. Unlike me, she was full of energy and confidence. Things were going well with her store, her new hand, which she wasn’t embarrassed to show, was a wonder to see and use. Her enthusiasm wasn’t infectious but, more important, her presence was. Three days into her stay I realized I’d gotten so dispirited and mired in the work that I’d forgotten there were good small things around that could balance, take the edge off, smooth out my life. She made me laugh. She laughed at me. She asked odd, telling questions that made me think and feel exhilarated with the answers when they came. The people on the project liked her and sought her out. They wanted to talk and be in her presence a while.
One night we walked by the lake when it was windy and cold. The thought of hopping into a warm bed and snuggling kept us outside as long as we could bear, just to put off and appreciate that treat a bit longer. I told her about the paintings in Vienna.
She was silent a while and then asked, “Did you see the Brueghels? No? I thought you would. I was sure you’d go see his Tower of Babel. It’s just as you described that other one. The whole world milling around, everyone industrious and getting their job done. When I was in the hospital I read the entire Old Testament because I’d never done it and always wanted to. Do you know the story of the Tower of Babel? What surprised me was how short it is. No more than a few paragraphs.”
“The Tower of Babel? Sure. ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’”
“How’d you know that word for word?”
“Impressed? My father read to me from the Bible every night when I was a boy. It was one of the few times I got to have him alone with me so I pretended to be fascinated. All those ‘begats’ put me right to sleep usually. Doctors have to take the Hippocratic oath before they begin their practice. Architects should use ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city …’ as theirs.”
There was very little light out there but enough so that I could see a look of firm disapproval on her face.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t think that’s funny. The whole point of the story seems to be Man got too big for his britches and decided to challenge God with this building. To see if he was capable of making something as magnificent as God’s Work. The Hippocratic oath says a doctor will serve Mankind. I don’t think architects should pledge to confront God with their work.”
“True, but what interests me about the story is that God stopped them because they used what He gave them to the best of their abilities! He said, ‘Behold, they are one people … and this is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.’ And he went down and scattered them. The same as if I were to give you a Ferrari, but when you drive it two hundred miles an hour, I get mad at you for flooring it like that and fix it so it doesn’t run anymore. That makes no sense. Those people spoke one language and could understand each other perfectly. God gave them that gift. That’s why they could even conceive of building something like the Tower. So far, so good. But then, quite logically, one of them got the absolutely valid idea to use this wonderful ability to build something extraordinary—”
“To show off how wonderful they were. Pride comes before a fall.”
I slapped my head in frustration. “But then why’d God give us a Ferrari if he doesn’t want us to use it to its full potential?”
“Maybe Ferraris aren’t supposed to be driven a thousand miles an hour. Wyatt Leonard told me something interesting at that dinner we went to. Someone he knew was studying karate with a sixth-level black belt. The man was a real master. One of the pupils asked him what he’d do if a bunch of tough guys came up to him on the street and tried to pick a fight. Know what he said, Harry? ‘I’d run away.’ Isn’t that great? The whole point of that self-defense stuff is once you reach a certain level, you know you can kill anyone with one punch, but you’ve got such inner confidence and self-esteem that you don’t have to. You run away.”
“How does that apply?”
“Look at you. Everyone knows you’re the best. You’ve won all the awards. You’ve built great buildings.”
“Venasque didn’t think so.”
“Venasque was your karate master. I think he was telling you the next step is not trying to make a name for yourself anymore. Isn’t that why you had your breakdown—because somewhere inside you knew that was true but couldn’t accept it? Remember saying one of the reasons you stopped designing was because you couldn’t see people inside your buildings anymore? Because it had reached the point where you only worked for yourself? Just you, your buildings, and your ego? I can understand why you couldn’t see people in them. You’d filled every room with yourself.”
“You sound like a new-age guru.”
“Oh knock it off, Harry. You resent me because I’m essentially content with my life. That doesn’t mean I don’t want things or … I don’t know, wouldn’t want a better hand if it were available. But yes, I like my life and … You say you’re happiest when you’re working. Okay, but it isn’t true—you’re the itchiest person I
know. Even when you’re working you can never sit still. That’s happiness? That’s contentment? What good does it do you if you live every day as if you were standing barefoot on a burning floor? Aren’t we here to find some kind of peace?”
“No, to struggle. I think you’re lucky if you’re at peace, but I wouldn’t be at peace with your peace. If I’d lost a hand I’d try to design another that was the best ever made. Is that bad? Is it wrong to struggle to be the best?”
“It’s wrong if you never find it, sweetheart. You keep picking up things and saying, ‘I think I found it!’ You get excited, but when you hold it up to the light it’s the same as you had before. That’s so depressing.
“You said this was the first time in your career you ever had a real inspiration for a building. It came by magic. But shit, Harry, you’re taking that magic and working with it the same way you’ve always worked. And you’re feeling the same tightness and frustration you did with the other work. Shouldn’t we use magic differently? Look at the people who built the Tower of Babel and how they misused their magic: Maybe if they’d built it as an homage to God, or simply for the joy of building, the joy of being able to work together with perfect understanding, then God wouldn’t have stopped it. Language is there to help us understand better, not to make us competitive.”
THE FIRST DEATH BROUGHT the first magic, although I didn’t realize it until much later. A welder from Saru named Mahmoud turned on a defective acetylene tank and, exploding like a bomb, it blew the man ten feet back. When I got to the scene, Hasenhüttl, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time, was on his knees over the body doing something frantically with his hands. People stood around with strange looks on their faces, staring like spectators at a car crash—not moving, not talking. Palm came up behind and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Dead?”
“From what I saw, there’s not much left of him to be alive with.”
“What’s Hasenhüttl doing?”
“No idea.”
“I didn’t know he was a doctor.”
Turning to Morton, I was about to say something to the effect I didn’t know what Hasenhüttl was, period, but kept my mouth closed. More and more people crowded in to look and after a while the silence that comes after sudden, violent death passed and they began talking quietly among themselves. Three languages were going at once but a few moments after I’d heard it, I realized someone nearby had said the English word “quidnunc” in an unmistakably hoarse bass voice. I’d used that show-off word for busybody more than once to describe any number of people I knew. The exact sentence it had been used in this time went something like, “Who cares? He was a quidnunc anyway.” Unaccented English. Native American.
Assuming whoever spoke was referring to the blasted dead man in front of us, I turned to see what insensitive bastard had such a nice vocabulary. In the spot where the sentence had come from stood a rather infamous member of the Saruvian crew—Sharam. Infamous because he weighed about three hundred pounds and looked like Bluto, Popeye’s nemesis. Another thing about this cartoon scary was he spoke no English and, from what I heard, rarely opened his mouth in Arabic. But I knew his voice because we’d had a disagreement once—through an interpreter. Quidnunc had definitely come from that voice.
“Did you just speak English?”
Looking at me like I was a dead fish, he said something in his language that made his companions snicker and avert their glances. Palm translated my question into Arabic and Bluto shook his head.
“Why’d you ask, Harry?”
“Because he said the word ‘quidnunc.’ It means busybody in English. I know it was him.”
“I don’t think so. The man doesn’t talk much. I doubt if he has been studying English. He sleeps when he is not working.”
The company helicopter came fluttering in and the moment passed, but it stuck in my mind and I thought about it often later.
The body was put on a stretcher and lifted aboard. We watched the machine take off again. Palm patted me on the back and walked away. Hasenhüttl came over looking notably distraught.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen. I don’t understand it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The agreement. When you made the agreement these things were not supposed to happen.”
“What were you doing to him over there?”
“I can’t tell you, other than looking at him to see if there was any indication of why it happened. There wasn’t. I’m very confused.”
The words chilled me more than the man’s death. If this special Invigilator didn’t know what was going on, where did that leave the rest of us?
“Do you mean the project was blessed, or whatever?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t allowed to tell you that. Now, there’s no telling.” He licked his lips nervously. “It’s a whole new ballgame, Radcliffe.”
“I thought you’d been sent to help me!”
“I was, when I knew the rules. Now I don’t.”
“Anything’s possible?”
“I’m as much in the dark as you.”
PARDON ME, BUT I like horror films. Some of my best childhood memories are of sitting in a dingy movie theater with a bathtub-size popcorn, alternately stuffing my face with those greasy snaps, or letting my mouth hang open, eyes squinted almost shut, waiting for the girl to open the wrong door or for baaaaad noises to come out of the laboratory. My father likes professional wrestling, I like screams and scaly creatures.
The latest Midnight movie came to the Zell am See theater at the end of a good week. Contrary to Hasenhüttl’s fears, the death of the Saruvian welder marked the beginning of a calm productive period that allowed us to move forward at surprisingly good speed. There were problems but nothing that couldn’t be handled quickly and effectively. The different nationalities got along better and slowly appeared to be adapting to each other’s work habits, if not cultural differences. When an Austrian steelworker had a birthday, he was given a surprise party by his American and Saruvian co-workers.
The weather was friendly; the sun blazed Tuscan light over the mountains, lake, and spring snow as if approved of what was going on. It contributed to the kind of weather that makes you stop what you’re doing several times a day and lift your head, smile, look around. Grateful, you return to work replenished and refreshed.
Claire’s lecture had an effect on the way I saw and did things. The more I thought about what she’d said, the more I realized she was right. Telling yourself to go to hell and/or get a new lifestyle is easy, but the follow-up is a different kind of hell. Like New Year’s resolutions, they sound good and sincere until you have to start living them. Who knows where to begin? I chose the slow route—adjust the temper, be kinder and more patient, remember my standards and hopes weren’t the same as others’. It worked half the time but I was proud of that half and it gave me hope I might tip the scale in my own favor if I kept at it. An unexpected reward came the day one of the contractors walked in and said it was impossible to do something I’d considered crucial to the look of the building. Instead of going into warp factor five, I closed my eyes, managed a smile, and asked what he suggested. His answer was ingenious and a real improvement over my plan. I congratulated him and from that day others were much more willing to share their ideas as well as hesitations and it made things work better. Palm was at the meeting and afterward said he was proud of me. Normally I’d have growled at that, but Morton was proving himself invaluable and his compliment made me puff my feathers. He was the perfect person to go to when you were stuck. Although he didn’t know much about building, he was so reasonable and broad-minded in his perceptions that his ideas, insightful and compassionate, invariably had a grain of something in them that helped plow snow off the mental runway. After I’d gone on and on about him to Claire, I introduced them and the three of us spent a warm evening together. Later she said he was open and forgiving. A bell went off in my head and I realized out loud, “I like him because he’s like you!�
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It had been a productive, interesting week at work. Claire was coming over again to visit in a few days, and Morton and I had downed a good meal before going to the film. Walking to the theater, I told him I knew Philip Strayhorn, the man who wrote the Midnight series and played the villain. To my surprise, Palm asked many questions about Strayhorn. Besides wanting to know what kind of man he was, he seemed most interested in why an intelligent human being would spend so much time working on a product the sole purpose of which was to scare people. I gave the Radcliffe theory on horror films, which was, Society is so jaded that nothing normal entertains people anymore so we’ve moved to the next level down, which is to choke, maim, and electrocute.
“Do you think that’s the best way to entertain people?”
Feeling expansive, I jammed my hands into my pockets and decreed, “Shoot five thousand volts through a beautiful blonde and you’ve got a guaranteed interested audience. It’s the same with my field. There are three principles basic to architecture—order, logic, and beauty. I don’t care how many eggheads refute that, it’s really the essence of what we should work for in any design. Fuck the theorists. But now there are some very successful architects who do things like dig a hole and drop the house inside it. We’re not talking about bomb shelters here either, we’re talking home sweet home. It’s like a clever, wiseguy idea; an intellectual joke you think up the first year of graduate school. But because it’s new and has never been done before, there are actually people flocking to these idiots now to have them design their homes. Home, Morton. ‘Hi, welcome to my home. Just climb down the ladder and put on this miner’s lamp.’ To me these charlatans are the equivalent of Midnight movies—a real conscious attempt at finding and heralding everything ugly, unfriendly, and disordered in life. One guy even calls it ‘making visible what exists between stability and instability.’ Bullshit. It’s the land of the wiseguy and cynic and death of the soul.”
Outside the Dog Museum Page 20
