The doorman opened the door, took the painting from him, Klein paid the driver, received the painting from the doorman, and went inside. At Reception he was met by Mr Duclos, a pleasant young man wearing a dark suit, a big smile, a look of lightning intelligence, and X-ray eyes.
Mr Duclos conducted him to a further Reception where two vigilant women watched the unwrapping of the painting and ascertained that it was undamaged. Thence to a little square crimson-walled conference room with two framed Christie’s posters, a print of a Cezanne self-portrait and another of a Raphael drawing of the Holy Family. There was a little square table covered in green leather on which stood a gooseneck lamp; there were two chairs.
Mr Duclos leant the painting against the wall, noting from the dust on frame and canvas that it had not been whoring around but had been honorably residential somewhere. He examined the back of the canvas, saw that it had not been lined and bore some decently yellowed labels from reputable dealers. Then he stepped back, regarded the painting with the look of a fond father ready, subject to a DNA check, to embrace a long-lost son, and said, ‘Ah! Dans son jus.’
‘It’s the real thing,’ said Klein. To him it looked strangely diminished, its colours dim. Mr Duclos picked up the phone and called for a catalogue raisonné, meanwhile finding the signature in its proper lower lefthand corner, noting the rusty nails, the period frame, and other signs of authenticity.
When the catalogue raisonné arrived Mr Duclos traced the provenance of the painting through two French galleries to the private collection in Zurich, followed by ‘Whereabouts unknown’. Klein produced the letter recording the transfer of ownership from the Swiss collector to him, which also showed the painting’s date of entry into the UK.
‘Since 1968, then, this painting has not been exhibited?’ said Duclos.
‘That’s right.’
‘Very good.’ The measurements of Pegase Noir were listed in the catalogue and with a tape measure Duclos verified that the dimensions of the painting matched. He then switched off the lamp, and with an ultra-violet hand lamp he scanned the canvas for pentimenti or other overpainting and found none. ‘So,’ he said, ‘the auguries are favourable and I believe we can do something with this horse; I think this horse is going to fly.’
‘How high, would you say?’
‘I think an estimate at five to seven hundred thousand pounds would be appropriate but I’d like to do further research and consult my colleagues on this if you can leave the painting with us.’
‘Of course. When would the auction be?’
‘Say ten weeks. Between now and then with your permission we’ll tour the painting and arouse some interest. Naturally it will be fully insured.’
‘Sounds a good idea.’
Mr Duclos explained the rate of commission and VAT, graciously waived the illustration fee, and a provisional contract was drawn up. They shook hands, smiled and nodded at each other, and Klein found himself in King Street walking away into the iron-hard sunlight. He felt, as an amputee might feel the tingling of a missing leg, the tingling of Pegase Noir.
34
‘El Choclo’
The Peacock Theatre was in Portugal Street, off Kingsway between Holborn tube station and the Aldwych. Walking down Kingsway Klein hummed ‘El Choclo’. He owned more than twenty tango CDs and enjoyed them all, from the earliest onward through Gardel to Piazzolla. When working at his desk he was very careful to provide himself with a musical background that was supportive but not intrusive; lately he’d been listening to tangos more often than not.
He was surprised at how good he felt. ‘Even now,’ he whispered into his hand, ‘burdened with infirmities as I am, I find myself experiencing joie de vivre every so often, especially when walking downhill.’ The lights were bright, the Christmas decorations insistent as always but he ignored them. The evening was cold and clear, there was a sparkle in the air.
Klein was a half-hour early – he always was – but even so the pavement outside the theatre and the lobby were both crowded. The audience, many of whom, young and old, looked like dancegoers, would be a lively one. He bought a programme and a coffee and had another look at an item he’d noticed in the last Observer, reported by Roger Tredre under the headline ‘Grim Reaper is “kind and patient”’:
Mark Chorvinsky, publisher of Strange Magazine, told Unconvention 98, the fifth annual Fortean conference, yesterday: ‘For centuries the Grim Reaper has been a cultural icon but it is not generally known that he exists.
Chorvinsky told the London meeting that he had collected reports of more than a hundred sightings, mostly in the United States, and appealed for British eye-witnesses.
Many of the reports were from nurses. ‘In many cases, the Reaper is far from threatening. He seems to be waiting rather than actively seeking deaths. The Reaper in real life is kind and patient.’
‘Death as a friend,’ whispered Klein, remembering a drawing by Rethel, ‘Death in pilgrim dress, with the scallop-shell badge of Santiago de Compostela, tugging on the bell-rope in a church tower high above the town, tolling the bell for the old sexton sitting dead in his chair. BONG! BONG! Probably the pigeons all scattering on the spreading sound-ripples, BONG! BONG!’
‘Were you speaking to me?’ said a woman who looked like Edna Everage.
‘Sorry, I talk to myself sometimes.’
‘I should get a cat if I were you. Or have you got one?’
Klein shook his head.
‘Of course you couldn’t bring a cat into a theatre. I suppose you must simply learn to think out loud more quietly.’
‘Yes,’ said Klein, ‘and if you’d stop talking I could carry on thinking. Sorry!’
‘Really! I suppose one mustn’t expect good manners from Americans!’
‘Or from women with harlequin glasses,’ said Klein, and moved to another part of the room. ‘Surely,’ he continued to himself, ‘he wouldn’t have come for Hannelore wearing black and carrying a scythe, that would have been so tactless. A cardigan and old corduroys, maybe, like someone working in his allotment.’ At this thought the tears started from his eyes and he didn’t know what to do with his face except cover it with his hands.
‘Are you all right?’ said a young woman standing near him.
Klein wiped his eyes. Her voice was warm, her face open and interesting. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘it’s just a little memory attack. Where were you when I was young? Sorry, that just slipped out.’
‘Not yet born, I should think,’ she said, and turned away.
‘We were talking about Death,’ Klein whispered into his hand.
Death as a friend, said Oannes.
‘Or as an editor,’ whispered Klein, ‘writing Delete? in the margin.’
Eventually he was able to go to his seat; the appointed time arrived, the house lights dimmed, the music began with ‘Milonga de Mis Amores’, the murmur of the audience ceased; the curtain went up to reveal shadowy musicians and the gleams of instruments in purplish light and smoke, and the first couple appeared, dancing to ‘La Cumparsita’. Tango followed tango; the couples changed, sometimes the stage was full of dancers, sometimes there was only a single figure obedient to the unremitting exactions of the music.
That music, breathed in and out by the bandoneon and augmented by double bass, violin, saxophone, flute, and piano, contained the dance, and the dance caught the dancers in a web of urgent and elegant evolutions: swivelling of hips and scissoring of legs, back kicks and caracoles and discontinuities of embrace. In their partnerships the heat of sexuality was refined into the negotiations of experience: sometimes the woman took charge; sometimes the man; the women like man-devourers ready to surrender utterly; the men as if they had been born with gold fillings and two-tone shoes.
In the second part of the programme, after Piazzolla’s ‘Libertango’, Roxana Fontan, beautiful and Goyaesque in black and glittering silver, took the stage alone to sing the Villoldo classic, ‘El Choclo’. Her silky mezzo was both delicate and powerful
, her delivery now reflective, now assertive, always seductive. ‘Con este tango nacio el tango,’ she sang, ‘y como un grito salio del sordido barrial buscando el cielo’ (With this tango the tango was born, and like a cry it left the squalid slum, seeking the sky). Sometimes as the song went on she leant back into the words and caressed them, sometimes she sent them out like calls to battle. Klein had no Spanish, didn’t know what the words meant, but they seemed vitally important to him, seemed the very flame of life in the darkness – he whispered this thought into his hand. ‘Luna en los charcos,’ she sang, ‘Canyengue en las caderas …’ (Moon in the puddles, canyengue [pronounced canjengay] in the hips …).’
‘I can’t actually put canyengue into English,’ said the Argentinian translator Klein found in the phone book the next day. ‘It’s a lunfardo word,’ she said. ‘Lunfardo is a local vocabulary in Buenos Aires and it’s used a lot in tango lyrics. Canyengue carries the idea of the suburbs and the common person of low social condition whose manner of dancing the tango is earthy and full-blooded with no added-on refinement; canyengue in the hips means dancing with the real feeling of the tango.’
‘Canyengue,’ said Klein to himself later. ‘Canyengue in the mind, from the outlying districts of the cerebral cortex and the limbic system. Either you have it or you don’t. Right, Oannes?’
No answer.
35
Deck The Halls
Being a Jewish atheist, Klein always half-expected a brick through his window in the Christmas season. No one chalked CHRISTKILLER on his door but child carollers menaced him with ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas’ and public-school boys politely intimidated him with holly wreaths which he bought several of. Christmas trees bloomed in windows all around him, and some houses sported external twinkling lights.
He withdrew into his video collection, surfacing intermittently to watch Yuletide films in which Germans spoke broken English before being blown up by Lee Marvin and Telly Savalas. Even when the TV was turned off, Christmas carols, seasonal piety, and adverts for computer games leaked out of it and spread in a greasy puddle on the floor. Walt Disney manifested his undead self in various ways, sometimes sliding under the door as a mist, sometimes like a bat at the window or a wolf howling in Fulham Broadway. On Christmas Day a grey sky squeezed out a thin snowfall on which fresh dog turds stood out sharply.
Klein phoned Melissa several times and got her answering machine; he left messages but she never phoned him back. Sometimes he imagined her writhing naked in steamy orgies; sometimes he imagined her in the bosom of her family somewhere in the provinces, eating and drinking and sleeping with whoever was handy without a thought for him.
When the partridges had left the pear trees and the lords had ceased to leap, Klein emerged blinking and unshaven into the Christmas-New Year interval. The ghost of New Year’s Past now came to visit with clanking chains of memory and action replays of champagne, soft words, and kisses. Sometimes it hunkered down beside his bed and improvised sad songs of happy times departed; sometimes it rocked back and forth and moaned.
36
Gynocracy
‘How am I going to get through the time between now and the auction?’ said Klein to himself. ‘I don’t want to call Melissa until I have something to tell her, some bargaining power.’
He went to his computer, put his last Klimt page up on the screen. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m no longer interested in Klimt.’ He went to his shelves and got The Drawings of Bruno Schulz, edited and with an introduction by Jerzy Ficowski. The first drawing he turned to was the cliché-verre engraving, Eunuch with Stallions. There was the naked woman prone on the tousled bed, indolently looking back over her shoulder as a white stallion, rampantly crouching, licked her bottom. Rearing up beside the white stallion was a black one. Little pariah-men watched from behind the bed, and in front of it the dwarfish eunuch, face black with lust and impotence, grovelled on the floor.
‘Is there anything new to be said about Schulz and sado-masochism?’ said Klein. ‘Is there in all men a secret desire to abase themselves at the feet of a woman who has contempt for them? Or is it simply that I’m naturally depraved and losing control of myself?’
Wild thing, said Oannes.
‘Are you taking the piss or what? You think I should lose control more than I already have? Speak, Oannes.’
No answer.
‘I’m getting tired of your one-liners,’ said Klein. ‘Why do you always chicken out of a real conversation?’
No answer.
Klein turned the pages, looking at drawing after drawing of the ghastly little wretch at the feet or under the feet of beauties naked and clothed who spurned him. He turned back to the introduction, in which Ficowski explained:
The mode of expression and the subject matter of this early cycle of engravings [The Book of Idolatry] are governed by the principal idea of ‘idolatry’ – veneration of a Woman-Idol by a totally submissive Man-Slave. That motif dominates all of Schulz’s graphic works – the proclamation and celebration of gynocracy, the rule of a woman over a man who finds the highest satisfaction in pain and humiliation at the hands of his female Ruler. Suffering does not kill but nourishes and intensifies love.
‘Of course,’ said Klein, ‘I’m not in love with Melissa: what I feel for her is nothing more than some kind of kinky impotent old-man thing that makes me replay that night with her over and over – what she did and what she said when I was face-down on the floor. The feel of her nakedness against my back! Her not-to-be-questioned authority, her physical strength, and her utter contempt!’
He put on a new CD, Garbage: ‘I’m only happy when it rains,’ sang Shirley Manson, sounding naked under her mac, ‘I’m only happy when it’s complicated.’
‘Me too,’ said Klein.
37
A Firm Hand
Days passed, each one with hundreds of hours in it, but Klein held to his resolution and did not phone Melissa. She phoned him one rainy evening, and at the sound of her clear academic voice all of his senses instantly replayed the unforgettable night. ‘Hello,’ he said, choking a little over the word.
‘Hello, Harold,’ she said, sliding a leg between his, tango-fashion. ‘I haven’t heard from you for a while.’
‘I know. I’ve had nothing to tell you yet and I know you don’t like me to waste your time.’
‘Ah! I think I may have been a little unkind when I saw you last. I’m not really a very nice person but I was nice to you that time I came to your place, wasn’t I?’
‘Are you playing with me?’
‘Yes, but you like it when I play with you, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were serious about funding my study, right?’
‘Absolutely. I told you I’d be working on it and I am.’
‘How?’ Her leg was around his waist, pressing him to her.
‘I’m not ready to tell you.’
‘But why make such a secret of it?’
‘I’m superstitious – I don’t want to jinx it by saying anything before it actually happens.’
She moved her leg so that her knee was in his crotch. ‘Before what happens?’
‘Can’t say yet.’
‘Harold,’ a slight pressure from the knee, ‘you’re not getting beyond yourself, are you?’
‘Oh dear, I hope not.’
With her thigh between his legs she lifted him a little. ‘Because it seems to me you’re being very naughty.’
‘I don’t mean to be but I can’t help it.’
Supporting him with one hand, she bent him back and brought her face close to his. ‘Some discipline might be in order at this point, eh?’
‘I know I need a firm hand to keep me in line.’
‘Yes, and the sooner we get you sorted, the better. When should I come over?’
‘Whenever you like – your time is scarcer than mine.’
Her hand was clamping the back of his neck. ‘How about right now?’
‘Wh
atever you say,’ said Klein.
When she rang off he felt giddy from the swiftness of the changes in the dance. It suddenly seemed terribly important to have the right music going when she arrived – tango wasn’t right for the occasion nor were rock, pop, jazz, or blues. He rejected various modern albums, at length chose Olympia’s Lament as sung by Emma Kirkby to the accompaniment of Anthony Rooley’s chittarone.
There were two versions of it on the CD, one by Monteverdi and the other by Sigismondo d’India. ‘Voglio, voglio morir, voglio morire,’ began the Monteverdi: ‘I want, I want to die, I want to die,’ sang Olympia, abandoned by Bireno on a rocky and pitiless shore. ‘Another one of Ariosto’s hard-done-by women,’ said Klein, listening briefly to the measured outpouring of her woe and deciding that it would go better with the evening’s activities than the more overt emotion of the d’India. ‘For our visiting feminist,’ he said.
He scanned the room, moved The Drawings of Bruno Schulz from the littered couch to the little table by the TV chair and left it open at the spread with Eunuch with Stallions on the left; on the right was The Feast of Idolaters, in which a whole grovel-group queued up on hands and knees to kiss the foot of a seated woman who was showing a lot of leg.
He was busy adjusting lamps and rearranging clutter when the doorbell rang. Melissa was wearing a long and baggy black pullover, her usual black stockings, thigh-high shiny black boots, and nothing else that he could see. Klein moved back from the door to let her in but when he moved towards her again in the hall she stopped him with an outthrust arm. ‘Don’t try to approach me as an equal, little man – it’s time for your spanking. Trousers down!’
Klein obeyed, first putting on the Monteverdi track. Melissa sat in the TV chair, exposing her thighs and suspenders, took him across her knees, and smacked his bare bottom hard, again and again while the golden voice of Emma Kirkby rose and fell on behalf of all hard-done-by women.
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