City

by Alessandro Baricco

  Finally he could paint them.

  Here, customarily, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy paused somewhat theatrically, returned to his desk and sat down, and allowed his audience a few minutes of silence that were filled in various ways, though for the most part politely. This was the moment when, generally, his colleagues left the room, displaying a web of facial micro-expressions that were meant to signify lively approval, along with sincere regret for the myriad tasks that, as one could understand, prevented them from staying longer. Prof. Mondrian Kilroy never gave any sign of noticing them.

  Not that to Monet it was important, exactly, to paint nothingness. His idea was not a sort of weary-artist affectation, or even an empty ambition to create a virtuosic tour de force. What he had in mind was something more subtle. Prof. Mondrian Kilroy stopped for a second at this point, stared at the audience, and, lowering his voice, as if he were about to let out a secret, said: Monet needed nothingness so that his painting could be free to portray, in the absence of a subject, itself. Contrary to what a naive observer might suggest, the Waterlilies represents not waterlilies but the gaze that gazes at them. It is the mold of a determinate perceptual system. To be precise: of a wildly anomalous perceptual system. Other colleagues, surely more authoritative than I—Prof. Mondrian Kilroy noted with nauseating false modesty—have already pointed out that Waterlilies has no coordinates, that is, the waterlilies appear to be floating in a space without hierarchies, in which closeness and distance do not exist, nor up and down, nor before and after. Technically speaking, Waterlilies represents the gaze of an impossible eye. The point of view that looks at the waterlilies is not at the edge of the pond, not in the air, not on the surface of the water, not at a distance, not close up. It is everywhere. Perhaps an astigmatic god would be able to see this way— Prof. Mondrian Kilroy was fond of commenting, ironically. He said: The Waterlilies is nothingness, seen by the eye of no one.

  Therefore to view the Waterlilies means to gaze at a gaze—he said—and furthermore a gaze that does not refer to some former experience of ours but is unique and unrepeatable, a view that could never be our own. To put it another way: to look at the Waterlilies is an outer limit of experience, a nearly impossible undertaking. This did not escape Monet, who for a long time was occupied, and preoccupied, in searching, with maniacal fastidiousness, for a particular arrangement of the Waterlilies that would reduce as much as possible its non-visibility. What he managed to find was an elementary device, in itself simple, which even today demonstrates a solid effectiveness and which, as an irrelevant corollary, was the means by which those waterlilies slipped into the radius of Prof. Mondrian Kilroy’s research. Monet wanted the Waterlilies to be arranged, according to a precise sequence, on eight curved walls.

  Curves, ladies and gentlemen—announced Prof. Mondrian Kilroy, with transparent satisfaction.

  For a scholar who had devoted extensive essays to rainbows, hard-boiled eggs, the houses of Gaudì, cannonballs, highway interchanges and river bends—for a scholar who had consecrated to surface curves years of reflection and analysis—for Prof. Mondrian Kilroy, in short, it must have been a poignant epiphany to discover how that painter of old, impelled to balance on the edge of the impossible, had found salvation in the company of mercifully curved walls—walls that had escaped the condemnation of any corner. Thus it was with a thrill of satisfaction that Prof. Mondrian Kilroy felt he had the right to project slide No. 421, which was a view of the two rooms of the Orangerie, in Paris, where Monet’s Waterlilies was installed in January of 1927, and where the public would still, today, be able to see it, if only seeing it were not a term utterly inadequate to the impossible action of looking at it.

  (Slide No. 421)

  There is not a single inch of the Waterlilies that is not a curved surface, ladies and gentlemen. And with this Prof. Mondrian Kilroy came to the true heart of Lecture No. 11, of all his lectures the most brilliantly lucid. He moved closer to his audience, and from here to the end it unrolled with a floodlike, yet methodical, passion.

  I have seen the men and women there, with the Waterlilies upon them. They come through the door and immediately feel lost, as if HURLED from the habitual act of seeing, EJECTED from their dwelling place in a specific point of view and diffuuuused in a space where they search in vain for the beginning. A beginning. In a certain sense the Waterlilies, although immovable, revolves around them, set in motion by the curvature that arrays the panels like shells around the empty spaces of the rooms in such a way that they seem to be the walls, fatally suggesting a sort of panorama to which the visitors yield, attempting to turn in a circle as their eyes orbit 360 degrees, in childish wonderment: not infrequently tinged by a smile. Perhaps for a moment they have the illusion that they have seen, adjusting to a mode of perception related to that of the cinema, but as they try, mechanically, to find the right distance and the proper sequence the disappointment is immediate, for it is precisely distance and sequence which the cinema dictates at every step, and so they have become unused to looking freely, have unlearned how to choose, cinema being a continuously forced looking—so to speak vicarious, despotic, tyrannical: whereas these waterlilies seem to suggest the vertigo of a liberated perception—an impossible task, as everyone knows. And so men—they feel lost. At this point they allow some time. They wander, they take another turn around, they stroll, stand still again, line up, back up, sometimes they sit down—on the floor or on convenient, compassionate benches—conscious of seeing something they love, yet anything but certain of seeing it, truly seeing it. Many begin to wonder how. How long it must have taken, how high it is, how many pounds of paint he used, how many feet long it is, how. They’re escaping, obviously; they like to think that knowing what you have before you makes it possible, finally, to have it, in effect, before you, and not above, under, on, beside; that is, where the Waterlilies resides, heedless of any quantification —simply everywhere. Sooner or later, they dare, and they move in. They are going to see. But only from close up. They would touch if they could—their eyes rest there, since their fingers can’t. And ultimately they stop seeing, unable to grasp anything, perceiving only thick anarchic brushstrokes, like the bottoms of dirty plates, blue mustard and mayonnaise, or chromatic commas on the walls of impressionist toilets. They laugh. And immediately they go back to regain the point at which they knew at least what they were not seeing: some waterlilies. As they step back they do not fail to wonder how that man could see from a distance and paint close up, a subtle trick that charms them, leaving them, at the end of their little journey backwards to the center of the room, as hopeless as before, and also bewitched: and at this exact moment the consciousness of not knowing how to see acquires a painful streak, coupled, as it now is, with the subterranean certainty that what escaped their gaze would have been a piercing pleasure, an unforgettable memory of beauty. Then they give up. And place their hand on the supreme surrogate of experience, on the seal of every failure to see. They liberate from the warmth of a gray felt case their undoing: the camera.

  They photograph the Waterlilies.

  How touching. A crutch hurled at the enemy’s cannons. Fifty-millimeter lenses launched in a nosedive, kamikaze retinas against flotillas of fleeing waterlilies. No flash is permitted by the pitiless dictates of the regulations: they take pictures, searching for human shots—impossible—and making adjustments with humiliating kneebends, contortions of the upper body, oscillations past the center of gravity. They are supplicants for any glimpse, trusting perhaps in the miraculous chemical aid of the darkroom. The most poignant—of all, the most poignant—announce their defeat by interposing between lens and waterlilies the mortifying bodily presence of a relative, who is generally placed—as in a symbolic gesture of surrender—with his back to the waterlilies. For years afterwards, he will greet guests and friends, from the wall above a chest of drawers, with the tired smile of a cousin shipwrecked, years ago, in a pond of nymphéas, hélas, hélas. Thus the wily old painter carries them off, lost in the
ir impossible task of gazing at a non-existent gaze, overwhelmed and vanquished, simply devastated by his skill, by him, his waterlilies, colors, damn brushes, the view that he sees, never to be seen again, water, waterliliiiiiieeeeees. I would still hate him today, for that reason. Prophets are not forgiven for obscure prophecies, and for a long time I thought he was of that breed, the worst of all, evil masters, I was convinced that the view he imagined was worthless, being inaccessible to others and reserved for him—that he had been unable to make it visible. That was why he was despicable, for if you took away the optical acrobatics—that mad excursion beyond point of view, in search of the infinite—if you took away that pioneering adventure in sensibility, what remained was a sea of out-of-focus waterlilies, an overextended essay on impressionism, this noxious pimp’s technique, in which the average bourgeois intelligence looooooves to recognize the irruption of the modern, electrified by the idea that here was a revolution, and moved by the idea of being able to love it, even though it’s a revolution, noting that it hasn’t hurt anyone—new for you, at last a revolution conceived expressly for young ladies of good family, free sample of the emotion of modernity in every box—ugh. You couldn’t help hating him, for what he had done, and I hated him every single time I went into the two rooms of the Orangerie, in Paris, emerging defeated, every single time, for twenty years. And I would hate him still today—that vain desecrater of curved surfaces—if, on the afternoon of June 14, 1983, I hadn’t happened to see someone—a woman—enter Room 2, the larger room, and, right before my eyes, see the Waterlilies—see the Waterlilies—thus revealing to me that to do so was possible, not for me, perhaps, but in principle, for someone in this world: that view existed, and there was a where that was the beginning of it, the parabola, and the end. For years, in fact, I had watched women there, suspecting instinctively that if there was a solution a woman would discover it, if for no other reason than the objective complicity between enigmas. Naturally I observed beautiful women—above all, beautiful women. This woman separated herself from her group, Oriental woman, big hat partly hiding her face, strange shoes, she left the group and headed towards a wall in Room 2—she had been in the middle of the room, at first, with her group of Oriental tourists, all women—and she separated herself from them, as if she had lost the tie that bound her to them, as if a singular force of gravity were now drawing her towards the waterlilies, the ones displayed on the eastern wall, where the curvature is greatest—she let herself drift towards the waterlilies, suddenly assuming the motion of an autumn leaf—she fell pendulumlike, swaying with opposing and harmonically contorted movements—I like to say: curves— two wooden crutches pressed under her armpits—her feet soft black clappers broken inside playing phocomelic steps—a shawl over her shoulders—invalid’s shawl—the arms badly shriveled— she seemed a splendid-exhausted moth, and I watched her—as if she had arrived after a long migration, exhausted, splendid. She gained every inch with immense difficulty, yet did not seem to know the hypothesis of stopping. Every movement spiraled around the axis of her deformity, and yet she proceeded, rolling out tremors interpretable as steps, and so she advanced, a patient snail, inseparable from the illness that was her abode—a strip of spittle, behind her, marking the trajectory of that grotesque walk—the embarrassment of the others crossing over it, grinding out shame and irritation, in search of escape routes for their eyes, but it was hard to stop looking at her—you couldn’t look anywhere else—there were a lot of people, there was me, and at a certain point there was only her. She got just close enough to graze the waterlilies, then she began to slide along beside them, replicating the curve of the wall, enriching it with kinetic vocalizations, the curved line crumpled into a scribble that at every jolt became wearier, as, at every instant, the distance, no less indefinite than the waterlilies, adjusted itself, because dispersed by that movement in a thousand directions, exploded in that body without a center. She went around the entire room like that, getting closer and moving away, jerked by the drunken pendulum that marked time within the tempo of her illness, while people moved aside, careful not to disturb even the most unexpected evolutions of her progress. And I, who for years had tried to look at those waterlilies, who had never succeeded in seeing anything but rather kitschy and, above all, deplorable waterlilies, let her pass by me and suddenly I understood, without even observing what she was doing with her eyes, with total clarity I understood that she was seeing—she was the gaze that those waterlilies were portraying— the gaze that had forever seen them—she was the exact angulation, the precise point of view, the impossible eye—her stumpy black shoes were it, her illness was it, her patience, the horror of her movements, the wooden crutches, the invalid’s shawl, the rattle of arms and legs, the pain, the force, and that singular drooled trajectory in space—lost forever when she reached the end, stopped, and smiled.

  From June 14, 1983, the life of Prof. Mondrian Kilroy inclined to melancholy, consistent with his theoretical principles that, based on an analysis of Monet’s Waterlilies, had determined the objective superiority of the state of pain as the conditio sine qua non of a superior perception of the world. He was convinced that suffering was the only way to get beyond the surface of the real. It was the curved line that evaded the angular structure of the in-authentic. Moreover, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy had a happy life, without serious troubles, sheltered from the caprices of misfortune. Thus things were problematic for him, given the theoretical premises set out above, and made him feel inexorably inadequate: in the end his only cause for suffering was the pain of not having pain. The victim of a banal theoretical-sentimental short circuit, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy slid little by little into a nervous depression that at irregular intervals brought on memory loss, attacks of vertigo, and random mood swings. It happened that he surprised himself crying sometimes, without definite reasons or justifications. For a certain period he enjoyed that indulgence, but he wasn’t such a slave to his own theories as not to feel, every time, a little ashamed. One day, while he was weeping—completely gratuitously—in Classroom 6, he saw the door open, and a boy came in. It was a student of his, named Gould. He was famous at the college because he had graduated at the age of eleven. He was a prodigy. For a while he had even lived there, at the college, right after that unfortunate business about his mother. She was a beautiful woman, a blonde, very nice. But she wasn’t well. One day her husband had taken her to a clinic, a psychiatric clinic. He said that there was nothing else he could do. It was then that the boy had ended up at the college. No one really knew what he had understood, of the whole affair. No one ever dared to ask him. He was a well-behaved boy, no one wanted to frighten him. Every so often Prof. Mondrian Kilroy looked at him and thought he would like to do something for him. But he didn’t know what.

  The boy asked if he wanted a tissue, or something to drink. Prof. Mondrian Kilroy said no, he was fine. They stayed there awhile. The boy was studying. There was a nice light, which came from the windows. Prof. Mondrian Kilroy stood up, took his jacket, and started for the door. When he passed the boy, he touched his head with his hand, and murmured something like You’re a good boy, Gould.

  The boy said nothing.

  14

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” said Shatzy.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Two cheeseburgers and two orange juices.”

  “Fries?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “It costs the same with fries.”

  “It doesn’t matter, thanks.”

  “Cheeseburger, drink, and fries, that’s Combination No. 3,” she said, pointing to a photograph behind her.

  “Nice photo, but we don’t like fries.”

  “You could have a double cheeseburger without fries, Combination No. 5, which costs the same.”

  “Same as what?”

  “A cheeseburger and an orange juice.”

  “A double cheeseburger costs the same as a single cheeseburger?”

  “Yes, if you take
Combination No. 5.”

  “Incredible.”

  “Combination No. 5?”

  “No. We want single cheeseburgers. One each. No double cheeseburgers.”

  “Whatever you say. But you’re throwing away money.”

  “That’s all right, thank you.”

  “Two cheeseburgers and two orange juices, then.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Dessert?”

  “Do you want cake, Gould?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then add one piece of cake.”

  “This week, for every dessert you order you get a second one free.”

  “Splendid.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  “But you have to take it, they’re giving it away.”

  “I don’t like desserts, I don’t want it.”

  “But I have to give it to you.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the special of the week.”

  “I see.”

  “So I have to give it to you.”

  “What do you mean you have to give it to me, I don’t want it, I don’t like it, I don’t want to get big and fat like Tina Turner, I don’t want to wear XXL underpants, do I have to wait until next week to get a cheeseburger?”

  “You can always not eat it. Take the free dessert and just don’t eat it.”

  “Then what do I do with it?”

  “You can throw it away.”

  “THROW IT AWAY? I don’t throw away anything, you throw it away. Hey, go ahead, you throw it away, OK?”

  “I can’t, they’d fire me.”