2
The succubus laughs from the bedhead, and its laugh sounds feeble, asthmatic. The man sits up in bed as if that simple gesture were enough to stop the chatter. He says, “Enough,” and the word elbows its way through his mind. He says “enough” again and drinks down the glass of water that sits covered in bubbles. He holds the tepid, soft water in his mouth and gets out of bed, ready to spit it out in the bathroom. The succubus stifles its laughter and adopts the pose of a sentimental harlequin. It sheds a fake tear while watching the man head off in the direction of the bathroom, his cheeks full of water.
Two slippers trailing along the hallway, a raucous piss in the toilet bowl, the water cascading down the drainpipe behind the kitchen wall, the forked hiss of the water tank . . . The house awakes with a sudden, vulgar succession of noises, and the anonymous observer slowly turns away from the photographs, leaves the entryway, and moves noiselessly across the living room to the back of the blue sofa at the foot of the stairs. Meanwhile, in the garden, the movement of the cat’s ears indicates it is uncertain whether to remain at its observation post, waiting for the mole to make up its mind to leave its tunnel, or to return to the porch and mew at the window, since the man, like every afternoon at this time, will exit the bathroom, come down to the kitchen, and open the door to the refrigerator, that olfactory paradise that promises first-rate slices of boiled ham to which, if the cat is lucky, its owner will add a gelatinous ration of braised chicken and vegetables. The man descends the stairs with a rhythmical clacking and reaches the first landing. He looks much older than in the photograph, an impression that is heightened by a set of clothes the observer would judge more suitable for a tramp were it not for the fact that the house discredits this hypothesis—a frayed bathrobe knotted loosely beneath his belly, coffee stains on the sleeves, prison underwear, the ampleness of which reveals the wearer has lived through less meager moments, pea-green socks that stylize the anorexic thinness of his calves even more, and warped slippers. The man crosses the living room and opens the window to the garden. Driven by the certainty of a snack offered in the form of a wafer-thin slice of ham that banishes the mole and the remote possibilities it represents as a hunting trophy to the depths of an inhospitable gallery, the cat abandons the deckchair and, with feline cynicism, deploys all the signs that indicate familiarity and welcome. It rubs itself against his calves, swishes its tail. “Hello, fucking Polanski,” says the man, patting it on the head, while the cat ignores this offensive greeting and effectuates a frail mew, slightly shriller than normal. Man and cat zigzag, getting in each other’s way, toward the kitchen. The animal gives the anonymous observer a mineral, transparent look. It is far too busy weighing up the possibilities of slices wrapped in silver foil to devote its attention to the intruder, who is, anyhow, as insipid and odorless as the figures its owner gazes at for hours while lying in front of the television. He may vacillate between going up to the second and third floors of the house, to where the attic is, and collapsing on the sofa, or between remaining at the bottom of the stairs and molding himself to the white cavity of the sculpture in the form of an ostrich egg, but in the end, the anonymous observer slips into the shadow of the entryway closet, into the smell of the elements exuded by the black coat on a hanger, a remnant of dampness clinging to the cloth that retains the suggestion of an overcast afternoon and the footsteps of the man out on the street one Friday a year before, sweating despite the cold, his temples soaked, on his way back home after a week of intense work that had borne its fruit—two reviews for the paper’s art supplement; a foreword he’d agreed to write for the catalog of a sculptor; and the promise of a series of conferences as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s next season. What’s more, that Friday evening, having imparted his final class at the university, he’d dropped in at a cocktail party given by an artist presenting his latest video installation. In the natural habitat of critics—a diverse group of well-dressed, elegant people—he felt uncomfortable, but the maintenance of this distance, real or imaginary, safeguarded his reputation as a severe, somewhat anachronistic man. He arched his eyebrows into the distance by way of greeting and made his way over to a tray of champagne flutes in order to focus on the cones of bubbles in their interiors, which freed him from the obligation of having to undertake a conversation of uncertain trajectory, zigzagging between courtesy, preventive flattery, and dissimulation, in particular after the second or third glass, when the bubbles rising to the surface converged in the very center of the glass and the voices and laughter also seemed to mount toward the ceiling. Engrossed in the prodigy of the bubbles, he avoided all commitments, though he could hear the tinkling of the artists as they bumped into each other like the ice cubes in their whiskey glasses. Far from lessening his tiredness, the fourth champagne cocktail convinced him that social marathons left him feeling exhausted, so he grabbed another glass of champagne as it made its way past—it may have been the fifth, or the sixth at this point—and downed it at lightning speed while blindly nodding and shaking his head at a video artist’s observations. He then winked an eye at a journalist—or she may have winked a breast at him, he couldn’t be sure—and took French leave, slipping off toward the exit. From a distance, his progress through the city resembles an escape more than a walk, a kind of aimless evasion, since his current preoccupations were already a vague premonition announced by slight failings—fatigue in the middle of the afternoon, confusion and doubt, resentment—or with transparent, physical clarity—palpitations, cramping in his calves, dryness in his mouth—unequivocal signs that something wasn’t working as it was supposed to, which was something he refused to accept, out of fear, pride, or both, despite the fact that in some region of his more primitive brain, a warning light had been flashing for quite some time. He was overcome by the impression that his body was an added volume, restrained by a weight that had refused to keep up with the ever more pressing rhythm of his mind. He dragged his own reflection along past shop windows, but never achieved unity between his body and his reflection. The most trivial activity—a phone call, a task at the university, the routine preparation of a class—constituted an effort that made this bilocation even more obvious; he looked and saw himself without being able to observe himself completely. This is how he remembered himself in his final class, standing up on the platform, the place from which he measured himself against the slide of a painting by J. M. W. Turner—a man seated behind a wooden table, sometimes standing up or taking a few short steps, glancing from time to time at the script for the day’s lesson and the heads of students raised toward him, looking at him without seeing him and listening without hearing him, a man who lengthens his sentences, moving around concepts that vanish in the air like spirals of smoke, while the whitewashed wall at the far end of the classroom bounces his words back at him, like in a game of pelota, and the words return to that professor who is explaining the basics of Turner’s painting and pointing on the screen to the sky’s hesitant line, because “in that fog pierced by light, in that cleverly anarchic disposition of the misty, weightless atmosphere—please pay attention,” he says emphatically, heavily,“can be appreciated the ability of a painter to reflect worlds never seen before,” he insists, though he knows he is not in a position to offer the excess of dramatic energy required to communicate amazement, even though this also means accepting his own defeat from the outset, entering the classroom with smugness and without hope, because amazement in art is an incommunicable event and there are no synonyms for such a revelation. Clinging to this decalogue that disguises as sublime affectation what is nothing more than pure physical and intellectual decadence, he attempts to prevent his voice from trailing away in a gasp, although he cannot help a drop of sweat sliding down his side from his armpit to his hip, because he needs a breath of fresh air and would run away were it not for the fact that, sheltered in the darkness, he has asked his students to observe the painting, so that half a minute later he is able to control his breathing and improvise
a few words in praise of the spirit of the twentieth-century avant-garde movements, followed by a eulogy on knowledge as the only way to attain personal autonomy, but his enthusiasm wanes little by little, and his explanation is confused and disappointing, even for the unconditional female student blinking in the first row, blinking just as the little, voluptuous, clear-eyed girl who gazes at him with her small hands under her chin because she possibly understands, or possibly doesn’t, it’s impossible to tell, blinks; and in the first row, the ugly, shrill-voiced girl whose predictable questions provoke contemptuous remarks from her classmates and who seems to look at the blackboard as if he were made of clear glass, blinks; and the pupil occupying the far end of the classroom, ensconced in one corner, tall, with hair dyed platinum blond, disdainful, who never takes notes and only listens, or perhaps doesn’t, but always smiles, because the girl sitting next to him may be taking notes on his behalf, blinks; and the slim girl who wears stretch garments and violet eye shadow and sits next to the obese boy with glistening skin, slow and efficacious, who bites his nails down to the quick and at the end of class will come to ask him for bibliographical references on the topic, blinks; and the mature woman who is permanently circumscribed within her own atmosphere of silence, blinks. Most, he thinks, are faces without much history, without knots, faces of terse and possibly untamed ingenuity, but he is still perturbed by the fact there are also sad faces that foretoken a shadow of distrust, or a kind of very ancient melancholy, and he wonders where such a premature imbalance comes from; perhaps it should be sought in prenatal experience, in the amniotic sac, or even further back, in the DNA chain, and it pleases and disturbs him to notice these signs of some very young but already ephemeral energy. Then the impression that it was really somebody else who had spoken and gesticulated for ninety minutes would persist, something he realized every time he finished class and gathered his notes, his keys, and his wallet, and there at the back of the classroom was the whitewashed wall, which kept him up in the air, as if his words and movements remained there, floating in the uncertainty of the shadows.
Having reached the limit of a certain critical mass, he felt his insides were experiencing minute deflagrations, cellular displacements, molecular storms that became more obvious at night. He felt he was a syncopated man, because the impression came and went, and when it left, without warning, he would forget his body and regain his natural lightness. But that evening, after the cocktail party, he again felt his body was not indifferent to the law of gravity but rather could be said to be the very object of gravitational attraction itself. That may have been why he walked more quickly than usual, his eyes fixed on the pavement, though still unable to avoid the dog shit and dirty puddles. He heard it from his brother, Óscar, who was trying out a new zoom on his resplendent Nikon camera that day and after a Sunday outing had forced him to pose next to his wife and daughter on the outdoor dining patio of a restaurant and say cheese in unison. They returned to the city, and the two of them spontaneously decided to leave his family at home and go off on their own, unexpectedly united by a kind of brotherly complicity they rarely succumbed to, perhaps as a result of a lack of habit due to the strange and radical suspicion every family relationship seems to require. Having knocked back several drinks in a bar chosen at random and lost his composure and the ability to see straight, Óscar, glassy-eyed, said,“You have to realize, Gabriel, maturity doesn’t exist; it’s tiredness. That’s all.” To which he didn’t know what to reply. He smiled drunkenly, clinging to his stool, allowing himself to be carried along by his natural inclination toward consensus and therefore accepting, with his customary false meekness, Óscar’s abusive, existential, and clearly alcoholic statement. He felt, however, that his brother’s words were an absolution. He’d awkwardly explained his apprehensions, the insurmountable distance with Ana, the intimate dislocation of one who feels out of place at the age of fifty because he seems unable to find a comfortable fit at work, at home, or anywhere else. That impression of foreignness and intimate duplicity. But all of this, according to Óscar, was just tiredness, sheer tiredness, and nothing else.
He continued walking, the champagne and cigarette smoke banging against the insides of his eyelids, and the symptoms of his intimate dysfunction took on the appearance of an irresistible need to escape, which is why he walked quickly, stepping in dog doo and puddles. Driven by a traveler’s urgency, he obeyed the childish lure of the green, neon sign of a diner—the Chipre 97—and entered for no good reason and ordered an incoherent cup of linden blossom tea served to him by a waiter in a naval officer’s uniform. He burned his tongue, lit a cigarette, and stared at two women with violet hair who were silently wolfing down pancakes with syrup. On a television with no sound, the weatherman was pointing to some isobars looped like geological folds over the city. He stayed like this for a good while—the waiter facing him, standing at attention against a background of a photograph of a sunset in Cyprus, the violet-haired women enclosed in an atmosphere of noisy deglutition—until the tea had cooled down a bit. He was grateful to have finished work—the classes, the newspaper reviews, the text for a catalog. He imagined the reactions his reviews would have the following week, the suspicions and wounded pride of the artists, most of whom, he thought, were functional illiterates incapable of threading together a coherent discourse. Artists babbled, that was all they could do, and with that false modesty they displayed their works, masquerades, conceptual rags, sophisticated technological monstrosities, puerile games no more interesting than the newspaper crossword. He knew he stood outside current thinking, and this pleased him. Someone had to occupy the place of incorruptible academic, although at times, it was only fair to admit, he had to make exceptions. To tell the truth, he had written the review quite quickly, after a phone call from the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The director had asked him as a personal favor, as a way of promoting his nephew, an artist whose sculptures had the curious tendency of adopting forms that were very similar to the remains of planes after a crash. He drew up a text whose vacuity remained hidden beneath a series of rhetorical flourishes that served to increase the emotional heat of the analysis, as if these pieces of metal that appeared to have been pulled from the guts of a tractor really did speak of fear and weren’t just simulacra, fragments, pedantic claptrap. That said, the text would guarantee his participation in the major roundtables the Museum of Contemporary Art was organizing for the following season.
He could have written:
The author’s sculptures preserve something of the old eclecticism of the 1980s—the kitsch, the irony, the appropriation of traditional icons, and a certain theatrical and hence postmodern baroque appearance in the lines, but the way they have been put together—and the final result, therefore—comes across as an imposture. Yes, the works were executed very carefully, but in the end, the collection on view suffers from the absence of any firm base of support and descends into a mass of aesthetic contradictions. Something similar occurs, ma non troppo, with positioning of the sculptures in the hall. Here is another salient point that does not resolve but heightens the preceding chaos. Some of the works seem to hearken back to a different period, on account of both the technique employed and the proposal put forth. There is a stripping down that is much to be appreciated, as if the author did not know how to unite the iconoclastic breath of his sculptures with a more reflective, mature process or without vain, stylistic displays. In this emptying of forms, there is a tension that could shelter a new expressive space where the Logos could really appear. It’s just a shame that the author was unable to unite the two ideas and that everything gave way to an aesthetic cocktail of no interest beyond that of its own expressive stammering. In any case, we will not despair and shall await his next exhibition with curiosity. G. A.
But he wrote:
The author’s extensive career is backed by a solid commitment to the most transgressive of projects. And yet his work cannot be ascribed to any of those ephemeral
currents nurtured by the cultural industry; rather his work is a successor to modernity’s riskiest adventures. There is no frivolity here, therefore, or concessions, because his sculptures demonstrate that the artist is conscious that creative work has its roots in personal determination, separate from aesthetic sects, fashions, and calculations of probability. It is delightful to walk past these pieces of iron covered in rust, twisted and arranged with consummate success and effectiveness to extract the maximum degree of openness and significance from the works themselves. These pieces of engines, these sheets wrinkled like aluminum foil, acquire before the spectator the muteness of a meaning that refuses to be revealed. They are unknown quantities, objects that in their almost metaphysical quietude appear to be waiting, driven away from their surroundings and uses, like aerolites or fragments of satellites. The works’ titles admit of no conceptual whims, they are centripetal, self-referential titles, but they are borrowed from a semantic field that hovers on the border between the purest form of nihilism and provocation. And so we offer our most devoted admiration to this collection of iron pieces that serves to confirm something we have suspected for quite a long time—art is not in crisis when there is genius. G. A.
The Plimsoll Line Page 3
