My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

by Russell Hoban

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘I hang out with more ghosts than I do with live people,’ said Grace.

  ‘That’s part of getting old, I guess,’ said Brian.

  ‘It sure is,’ said Grace. ‘Do you believe in vampires?’

  ‘Metaphorically or literally?’ said Brian.

  ‘The kind that actually suck blood,’ said Grace.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Brian.

  ‘Likewise,’ I said.

  ‘Just asking,’ said Grace.

  ‘Do you?’ I said.

  ‘Takes all kinds,’ said Grace. ‘What do you do?’ she asked me.

  ‘I paint eyeballs for artificial eyes,’ I said.

  ‘And you?’ she said to Brian.

  ‘I’m a painter,’ he said. ‘Pictures on canvas. Are you retired?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Grace. ‘I make jewellery and I sell it in my shop, All That Glisters, just up the street.’

  I said, ‘I pass it every day on my way to work.’

  ‘Small world,’ said Grace. ‘No unknown places any more. Except perhaps in people.’

  ‘I’d like to do a portrait of you,’ said Brian. ‘Will you pose for me?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Grace. ‘But I don’t do nudity unless it’s essential to the plot.’

  ‘Sometimes a plot can take you unawares,’ said Brian, and raised his glass to her. He’ll flirt with whatever female comes into his field of vision. He and Grace exchanged phone numbers and Brian and I said goodbye and got up to leave.

  ‘See you,’ said Grace. ‘Have a good whatever.’

  It was twilight when we came out into Berwick Street. ‘Where to?’ said Brian.

  ‘Cheyne Walk?’ I said.

  ‘Bertha, you read my mind,’ he said. He hailed a cab and off we went. Hearing him call me Bertha made me think of Phil with a little twinge of guilt. Not a big twinge, just a little one. Phil and I still didn’t really know where we were with each other, but with Brian I knew exactly where we were and I was comfortable with it. No commitment, no problems, just a good time in bed in a beautiful house. Was I being amoral? Well, you know what they say: there are parts of the human body that have no conscience.

  But the part of my body that has got a conscience is my brain. And lying there beside Brian I was feeling guilty about what I’d done and hadn’t done with my life so far. Here I was, thirty-seven years old and painting artificial eyes. Back when Brian was my teacher he’d told me to loosen up and I’d done that, but not on canvas. Then my attempts to develop as an artist had gradually faded away while my talents as a mistress improved all the time. Was it too late to find out if I could be any kind of a painter other than an eyeball one? On the other hand, if I’d had any real talent I’d have done something with it by now. It’s not just a matter of talent – you’ve got to have the drive and the character to do something with it, whether it’s painting, snooker, or tennis. Brian was asleep and snoring. ‘Cheryl,’ he mumbled. That wasn’t his wife’s name.

  After a while I fell asleep and dreamt that Grace Kowalski offered to lend me her bat. ‘He ain’t heavy,’ she said. ‘He’s my Irving.’ But it was heavy, I could hardly lift it. I woke up and the room wasn’t as dark as it had been. There were framed sketches on the wall. Me, nude. No clothes but I hadn’t felt as naked when I posed as I did now.

  5

  Phil Ockerman

  She was with another man; that was a certainty. It was as if I could feel his weight on her as he enjoyed what was now denied to me. I ground my teeth and tried to move my mind elsewhere. Without much success.

  I could see a space without Barbara stretching out in front of me for miles and miles: a desert. And I was two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the middle of it with my shattered visage, half-sunk, lying nearby. Well, that’s how it is sometimes: boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. Deal with it.

  Ordinarily I get through each day by finding things to look forward to, like a mountain climber moving from one handhold to the next: breakfast; The Times; the post; scanning the TV schedule and setting the timer to record films that look promising; sending and answering e-mails; lunch and the first beer of the day; a few pages of Elizabeth Gaskell with my sandwich; then a nap. In between I put in some time staring at The Scent of Water, my lonesome title with no first line under it. That part of the day I haven’t really been looking forward to, and I do it again in the evening. And there are the classes I teach at Morley and the private workshops that use up three afternoons and two evenings every week.

  If I could follow the advice I give my students I might possibly achieve even a whole first paragraph. I draw on haiku heavily for this. A common complaint is, ‘When I have a blank sheet of paper in front of me I feel lost.’ For this I have committed to memory lines by Ryusui:

  Mayoigo no

  naku naku tsukamu

  hotaru kana

  The lost child,

  crying, crying, but still

  catching the fireflies.

  A blank sheet of paper is a very dark night in which we lost children can’t help crying, I tell them. The thing is to keep catching fireflies. I constantly remind myself of that but this seems not to be a firefly season.

  I listened to the first track of the Enigma Variations; the theme came out of a distant silence, veiled and mysterious, then it grew and unfolded, always in the light and shadow of the larger unplayed theme. OK, I have no right to expect anything but the unfolding. Maybe there’s nothing in it for me. That’s life, yes?

  I cursed myself for being so dependent on Barbara. Lots of men get through life without a woman; why couldn’t I? Also, this might not be a permanent condition – she might be back. But I didn’t like being kept dangling like this. It was cold, it was grey, it was raining. Good. I went to the National Gallery. I stood on the porch for a few minutes looking down on Trafalgar Square. Spray from the fountains drifting in the rain. Red sightseeing buses. Nelson on his column, secure in his place above it all. That’s the way to do it, I thought, and went inside.

  I’m a heavy user of the National Gallery. Depending on what condition my condition is in I usually know what I need for my fix. Sometimes it’s Claude, other times de Hooch or maybe van Hoogstraten’s peepshow or the van de Veldes marine paintings. But today I didn’t know what would do it for me.

  I was drifting from one room to another when I paused in Room 41 at the Daumier that shows Don Quixote on Rosinante charging a flock of sheep while Sancho on Dapple quenches his thirst from a gourd. Daumier didn’t do any large paintings – they’re all medium-sized to small. This one was 40 x 64 centimetres and it was a sketch, not a finished picture. But the thing about Daumier is that all of his pictures, regardless of size, are big. And his sketches are usually the biggest of all because they’re the freeest and the quickly done chiaroscuro is nothing short of metaphysical.

  I was thinking about Don Quixote and Sancho when a tall young woman took up a position a foot or two away. Her close attention to the Daumier already marked her as someone to be reckoned with and her looks did nothing to dispel that impression. She stood there shaking her head a little and moving her lips, then she took a pad of music paper from her rucksack, sat down on the floor, and began to fill the staves with notes and words.

  ‘Does this happen often with you?’ I said.

  She held up a finger to pause me while she finished a bar. ‘All the time,’ she said.

  ‘Not only with Don Quixote or Daumier, then?’

  ‘I like Cervantes and Daumier both – this painting is what got me going just now but it’s not specifically a Don Quixote song.’ A slight South African accent.

  ‘Can you say what it’s about?’

  ‘Yes, it’s about being true to your craziness.’

  ‘Will you have a coffee with me when you’re ready to stand up?’

  She got up from her cross-legged position without using her hands. ‘I’m ready now, but it’ll have
to be a fast coffee because I’m due in Soho in three quarters of an hour.’

  ‘The cafeteria won’t be crowded now, so we can get one there quickly. Are you here for a visit?’ I said as we walked towards the Sainsbury Wing.

  ‘Three weeks,’ she said, ‘mostly talking to record company execs. Then I go back to Cape Town.’

  ‘Have you got a contract?’

  ‘My agent’s working on it. Are you American?’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve been living here for the last twelve years.’ By this time we were sitting at a table having our coffee and I was able to study her closely. Brown hair which she wore long and straight; blue eyes; large nose; wide mouth; high forehead. Not exactly a beauty but the overall effect was impressive. She reminded me of champion athletes I’d seen on TV. She had the look of a winner and that made her face add up to more than the sum of its parts.

  ‘What are you?’ she said. ‘A hypnotist?’

  ‘Please forgive my staring. I’m a writer. What’s your name?’

  ‘Constanze Webber. What’s yours?’

  ‘Phil Ockerman. I doubt that you’ve heard of me.’

  ‘Oh, but I have. I was watching The Culture Show the other night and Germaine Greer said that Hope of a Tree was a shallow male fantasy that didn’t add up to a novel.’

  ‘An opinion shared by one or two others,’ I said.

  ‘Still, the title from Job intrigued me. Does your man feel like a tree that’s been cut down?’

  ‘Are you an Old Testament user?’

  ‘Now and then. Job is one of my favourite books. He bears his afflictions with style. Does your man feel like a tree that’s been cut down?’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘There’s a copy of Hope of a Tree at the house where I’m staying. I’ll read it and I’ll probably like it.’

  ‘And you so young and apparently unafflicted. How old are you – twenty-four, twenty-five?’

  ‘Twenty-five. There are all kinds of afflictions, Phil. They don’t always show. How old are you?’

  ‘I’m forty.’

  ‘Forty seems very far away from where I am now. I can’t imagine where I’ll be at that age.’

  ‘The years have a way of sneaking up on you,’ She looked at her watch. ‘I must go.’

  ‘Can I see you again?’ I said.

  ‘All right – I’ll be with friends in Wimbledon for the rest of this week; you can phone me there.’ She wrote the number on a napkin. ‘Then I’m going back to Cape Town for a couple of weeks. Don’t get up, stay and finish your coffee. See you.’ And off she went. I’d have liked to walk her to Soho, all five foot ten of her, but she’d clearly told me not to so I finished my coffee and had another, this time with a cheese Danish.

  When I got home there was a card saying that Royal Mail had tried to deliver a parcel. I went round to the sorting office to pick it up: a bat-shaped box from Louisville, Kentucky. I carried it back to the house as if it were a loaded gun. I took it out of the box and there it was, my GENUINE Barbara Strozzi LOUISVILLE SLUGGER. Blonde wood. Ash? Thirty-four inches long. I weighed it on the kitchen scale: one kilo. Long, heavy, dangerous. I got a good grip on it, took up my stance, looked towards the mound, knocked the dirt off my spikes. Pitcher looks in for the sign, nods, goes into his windup, and here comes Troy Wallis, right over the plate. No, no – only kidding. I leaned the Louisville Slugger in a corner and sat down at the word machine and thought about Job for a while, how one day Satan showed up with the sons of God and when the Lord asked him where he was coming from he said, ‘From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.’ That’s the heart of the matter right there – he’s always around ready to lead the unwary into mischief with the first available Constanze or whatever else offers. And of course idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, everybody knows that. ‘So let’s get cracking, Phil,’ I said. ‘OK,’ I answered, ‘just warming up in the bullpen.’ I put the Enigma Variations in the player, picked up the phone, ordered a pizza from Domino’s, opened a bottle of The Wine Society’s French Full Red and poured myself a glass. Put The Rainmaker in the video, and when the pizza arrived I ate it, drank about two thirds of the red, fell asleep in my chair halfway through the film, and dreamed that Constanze Webber was walking far ahead of me through a dim and narrow space. ‘Wait!’ I shouted, ‘I can explain!’ She looked back once, then turned and walked on. I woke up and dialled Barbara’s number. ‘Barbara?’ I said when the phone was picked up at the other end.

  ‘You have a wrong number,’ said a tight voice.

  ‘I meant to say Bertha,’ I said. ‘You must be Hilary.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Phil Ockerman, I’m a friend of Bertha’s.’

  ‘Odd that you couldn’t remember her name.’

  ‘Anyhow, is she available?’

  ‘No, she isn’t. Goodbye.’

  ‘Thanks so much,’ I said to the silence.

  I was sitting in my TV chair then with my hand on the round part at the end of the bat handle. I moved the handle around as if it were the control stick of an aeroplane. Then I wrote down the telephone number of Jimmy Maloney’s, put on a jacket and went out to the Fulham Road.

  I stationed myself near the bus stop diagonally opposite the club and looked at the big man standing in the doorway. Dark suit, dark polo neck. Did he have a plaster on his head? Couldn’t see one. Took my mobile out of my pocket and dialled the number. ‘Jimmy Maloney’s,’ said a growly voice over a lot of background noise.

  ‘Is Troy Wallis on the door tonight?’ I said.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Nobody he knows. Somebody gave me a message to give him. Is he there?’

  The bartender or whoever it was hung up. I kept my eyes on the door and saw a man who looked like a bartender come to where the bouncer was and talk briefly with him. So that was Troy Wallis. About six four, fourteen or fifteen stone. Right, thanks very much.

  I’d read in the paper that Mercury would be low in the west and Venus out of sight. Not too comfortable with that. The moon was in its first quarter, the vernal equinox only three days away. I looked up at the sky and made out Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Polaris, Cassiopeia, and Draco. Draco looked aggressive. I was too ignorant to identify the other constellations. I felt uneasy with the forces affecting me and longed for some guidance from Catriona.

  I thought of the Louisville Slugger leaning in its corner, saw the name Barbara Strozzi engraved on it. I hadn’t listened to her music for what seemed a long time and now I hungered for it. I walked home through the Friday-night noise in the Fulham Road, then through the quiet of the path between the common and the District Line. An Upminster train rumbled and clattered past, people printed on the windows as on a tin toy. Crowded but lonely, that train. Maybe all the passengers were headed for a pleasant evening or even a good time; but the train was a lonely tin toy.

  At home I put on the Arie, Cantate & Lamenti disc. The voice of Mona Spagele came out of the silence with ‘L’Eraclito Amoroso’. Up and up it circled, obedient to Venus and the moon, to the planetary spring tides and neap tides of love and the death of love. The song was a lament but the beauty of it was Strozzi’s thank-offering for being alive. One doesn’t beg for constant guidance, I thought; one gives oneself and takes what comes.

  Well, yes. That had a good sound to it but what did it mean exactly? Getting up from my chair to pour myself a drink I knocked the top book off the nearest stack: Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems. As it hit the floor it fell open to pages 462 and 463. I picked it up and read:

  A Noiseless, Patient Spider

  A noiseless, patient spider,

  I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

  Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

  It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

  Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

  And you, O my soul where you stand,

  In
measureless oceans of space,

  Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

  Till the bridge you need will be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

  Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my Soul.

  ‘You’re the man, Walt,’ I said, and as a change from Glenfiddich pour’d myself a large Laphroaig. While getting myself around the smoky peat-bog flavour I considered where next to fling my gossamer. Constanze had written a song about being true to your craziness. OK, I thought, and rang the Wimbledon number. A young South African male answered.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘this is Phil Ockerman. Is Constanze available?’

  ‘Hang on,’ he said, and put the phone down to shout, ‘ ’Stanze! It’s for you.’

  Constanze appeared presently. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Phil Ockerman.’

  ‘Oh, Hope of a Tree.’

  ‘Actually, it’s hope of seeing you before you leave for Cape Town. Is that possible?’

  ‘I’m kind of pressed for time. What did you want to see me about?’

  ‘I wanted to hear more about your music.’

  ‘Oh. What for?’

  ‘I’m a writer – I get interested in all kinds of things.’

  ‘Ah, professional interest.’

  ‘That, but mainly I just want to see more of you – I’m being true to my craziness.’

  ‘That’s all very well, Phil, but it takes two to tango.’

  ‘It also takes two to have a conversation and a coffee but never mind. I’ll see you around. Or not.’ I rang off.

  ‘I’m embarrassed for you,’ I said to myself.

  ‘Twenty-five-year olds!’ I replied. ‘What do you expect?’

  The phone rang. ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘It’s me, Constanze. I don’t have to be anywhere tomorrow until late afternoon. Can you meet me at Putney Bridge tube station at eleven?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘See you then.’

  I listened to Barbara Strozzi for a while before going to sleep and dreaming of a foreign city with very wide streets and cold northern sunlight.

  The next morning was sunny and mild. Constanze was right on time. ‘I’ve brought some music with me,’ she said. ‘Let’s sit by the river while you listen.’ We went into Bishop’s Park, and from a bench near the bridge watched an eight stroking past towards Barnes, bright droplets falling from the oars on each return and the coxswain’s voice coming to us small and urgent over the water.