Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  Donny snatched it from my hand and put it back on the tray. ‘Everything but,’ he said. ‘We don’t eat the fucking bananas. Trust me,’ he added as I went to object, ‘if you are ever once known to eat a banana in public, the next thing will be a picture, and then there will be bananas everywhere and all those skin-headed pricks will be laughing at you your whole life, even when they give you a prize for art and you live in a mansion, that fucking picture will crop up everywhere for ever more.’

  Well, I told Michael, these days you could cook with any damn thing you pleased, and if the rump of the National Front still went to football matches and threw bananas at African players, well, it earned them the disdain of their neighbours and their heroes, and sometimes even prison. I had suffered its stupider days, not Michael, and I would judge whether the salvation of my country from occupation in 1941 made up for the unconsidered prejudice of Britain decades later, and in my judgement it did. Friends could be unfeeling and stupid and still be friends when you needed them, and that did not make them the Derg. The world was imperfect and Britain was better than most anywhere else. That was how it was, and Michael should grow up and understand it.

  That bad night, we drew back from the brink. Michael thanked me for proving his point. I thanked him for accepting mine. Then he said he was ashamed of me, and I told him young hotheads are always ashamed of their parents, and he said most young hotheads didn’t have reason, but he was saddled with a father who was a collaborator. Well, he was right and I was right and we both knew it, I think, but were too alike to find the common ground. There we froze, thank God, held between wounding spite and deep mutual need. I could no more tell him to get out than he could tell me he was leaving. We had friends, both of us, and girlfriends, but in all the world we really had only one another, and we knew it.

  The fight was forgiven, but never unsaid and never forgotten. For a while, I was proud to have spoken my mind, and then I thought I had been trying to protect him, and finally I admitted that I had just been upset because he seemed to have no idea who he was in a generational sense, and if that was anyone’s fault it was mine. If we could not have gone to Ethiopia, we could have talked about it. We could have been part of a community here, Tewahedo and afternoon tea. Burned by his mother and afraid, I think now, that our shared old friends would be kind to me, I had never made the attempt.

  The day left a hole in both of us that couldn’t be filled. We waited for the lip of the crater to erode and fade into the overgrowth, and it did, but we knew where it was and we stepped around it, until I came down off the set of that ridiculous chat show, with the audience murmuring in the commercial break and the host’s eyes round as a cat’s. We were still hugging when my phone rang, and to my surprise it wasn’t Annie but Colson.

  ‘You’re a dangerous lunatic,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose I may be.’ I was a little surprised myself, now that the rage had blown out of me into the world.

  ‘It’s a very interesting idea, your app. I don’t imagine you’ve got the slightest idea how to make it happen?’

  ‘None at all,’ I said.

  ‘I could build a test version by next week, then, if you like,’ Colson suggested, and I heard Annie laughing in the background. ‘You’re pretty much public enemy number one for arseholes tonight, by the way.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe don’t go online. I’m looking at your inbox right now. It’s not entirely charming. But you’ve taken some of the heat off Annie, if that’s what you wanted.’

  I cackled. I didn’t have to imagine. I knew about the frenzy of hate. In the grand tradition of old men, I had seen it all before.

  *

  You wouldn’t have thought it possible, meeting me in my high days in Addis Ababa, that a few years later the art world would forget me entirely except for the occasional desperate critic scraping together some obscure thesis. I had acquired or unleashed a full measure of talent and I have to acknowledge it went to my head at least as much as it seemed to affect the thinking of those around me. My self-image decreed that I hold in my desire to paint for weeks and then stab and slash the canvas with every evidence of fury. It wasn’t entirely natural to me, so often I had to engage in furtive night-time creation when the mood took me, and hide the consequences away until my next scheduled ejaculation. This was all needless nonsense, but it satisfied my sense of who I wished to be.

  I was young and famous. I had produced most recently a fivefold image of the moon in which a black man and an Asian woman, their spacesuits discarded, copulated upon a ragged American flag, while behind them in the dark a nuclear war made the earth into a final, fatal jewel. This sort of thing generates comment if you do it right, and I had. In art, comment is fame and fame is money – and of course, money entails comment. Guided only by my artistic sense, I followed The World in Flames with a completely incomprehensible mixed media offering – a shark hanging in an ocean of numbers – and realised almost immediately by the resounding silence that although it had come from the same unadulterated transcription of my inner vision that I did not understand, in career terms it was a misstep. I quickly made an image – heavily disguised, for reasons of social prudence – of the daughter of the Minister of Infrastructure, in which she emerged like Athena from the bursting skull of her father to reach in almost Soviet modern style for a passing aeroplane. Her naked torso was not the conventionally European image of an African woman walking to a well, nor yet the cabaret girl of French erotic shows. Four spectral figures in the background sought to judge her, their eyes lit from within by nuclear fire, but she ignored them. She was a woman – in the discourse of the time, and as I had cause to know – in fullest possession of her own sexuality, because she existed not for the viewer but for herself. It was in the strictest sense a pastiche – I was copying my own style, not executing it – but if I didn’t say that, certainly no one else was going to suggest it. I had only to title the painting Progress, and the whisper of comment became a storm. The shark was politely forgotten, and I flew as a guest and a poster boy between Addis Ababa, London, Paris and New York – the latter, most especially, because Warhol was there and because the Emperor of Ethiopia had made a special friendship with the then President of the United States. So I went, on Haile Selassie’s coat-tails, and drank martinis at Warhol’s Factory, and made sure to point out that I was in my own informed opinion a far greater artist than Ibrahim El-Salahi from Sudan.

  El-Salahi, by the way, seems to have been devoid of such bizarre notions of competition. He strikes me from this remove as a very serious fellow – I suppose what I am saying is that he was not obviously disposed to be an idiot. I don’t imagine that in reality I ever featured in his thoughts, beyond perhaps a brief flicker of curiosity about where a good Ethiopian boy would get such an obsession with flying saucers, or with the neon colours of a corporate-industrial city at night. I will tell you honestly, also, that even in that imagined competition where we were honourable equals contesting for the joy of it and for the applause of the crowd, he won. He had a sense of self rooted in his craft and his religion and no doubt a dozen other things I hadn’t got to grips with, while I, meanwhile, had determined that I was a citizen of the world, for which I blame Humphrey Bogart. When I saw Casablanca for the first time, in a street near my home, the images projected from the back of a truck on to a great sheet of bedlinen stitched and bleached for the occasion, it had a powerful effect upon me, and from then on I took the line that drinking whisky and wearing a white tuxedo made me part of the global brotherhood of rebel males.

  Thank God there was yet no Internet and no Instagram to record my excesses. A few photographs survive, but they are the better ones that could be described as iconic rather than merely historical: in one, I am pictured with the beautiful television star Joanna Cameron, and it’s quite clear that I have fallen in love. In another I’m part of a group including Ursula Andress, fresh from the set of L’Infermiera, and the estimable West Indian cricketer G
arry Sobers. I met thieves and singers, diplomats and princesses, and we talked of such high matters as post-figurative sculpture, the Second Indochina War and the transformative power of LSD. For the most part I am forgiven, as we all should be, those awkward years of pose and posture as I struggled to work out who I was and missed the mark. The art I made was good enough that I was also excused some of the nonsense that came out of my mouth, and if, as I say, El-Salahi was just more talented than I – well. Being a little less good than someone who is brilliant is a failure to be cherished.

  My wide, wild ride culminated in a return to my small apartment in Addis Ababa from an endless round of American parties, to find an imperial footman awaiting me with an actual silver tray. The object on the tray was a supremely redundant grace note: a thick white business card printed by Stevens of Edinburgh, bearing the imperial arms and the name Haile Selassie I. Underneath, where an ordinary man might put ‘Attorney at Law’ or ‘Chief Financial Officer’ it read: ‘King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, The Elect of God, Emperor of Ethiopia.’

  It struck me in that moment that one might as well print labels for the moon and the sky.

  I must have asked some sort of question, for the footman told me I was to paint a portrait. I was so boggled that I asked: ‘Of whom?’ at which the man rolled his eyes to indicate his red livery and presence, the tray and the card, and managed not to say ‘Who do you think, you ignorant mingelouse?’ or whatsoever variant thereof was his inner thought.

  I stared at him while the obvious reality took hold in my mind: I was to paint a portrait of Haile Selassie.

  I said: ‘When?’ and the footman gave me to understand, once again by his suffused silence, that I shouldn’t hang about. It was no better than six in the morning and I had slept hardly at all in the last day. The lulling scent of eucalyptus, the perfume of the place still definitive though mixed now with the fumes of automobiles and aircraft rather than the scent of grazing goats in the streets, was calling me to my bed. Well, that would have to wait, because the Emperor simply did not. I took as much time as I dared to make myself presentable, which was not much, and the footman drove me to the palace.

  I should have realised that our timetable would be suitably padded at every turn. My fumbling had made us late by ten minutes for the superior footman, and therefore he had to rush me through the back corridors – where there was no possibility of accidentally meeting the Emperor in advance of our appointment, again unthinkable – so that we were on time for the Master of the Household, who in turn took me to the Imperial Secretary, for whom I was twenty minutes early. The walls were white, the drapes red, the inlays all gold leaf. Carved lions rambled over the furniture, and a huge mural on one wall depicted the Solomonic dynasty from which our Emperor drew his descent. The place echoed whenever you moved, and smelled of a modern cleaning product with a most artificial scent.

  ‘What time is my appointment?’ I asked.

  ‘Nine thirty,’ the Secretary replied. ‘You should kneel once and call him “Your Imperial Majesty” when he greets you, after which he will instruct you to remain standing for your bows and call him “sir”. Can you remember that?’

  ‘Nine thirty?’ It was not yet eight. I wondered if I could remain awake, and whether it would be an insufferable insult to go to sleep on the couch.

  ‘I will have food brought to you. The Emperor will already have breakfasted. He wakes early and has other appointments before you.’

  I was no longer used to waiting, and the question came out of me, curious rather than aggressive, before I could remember where I was. ‘With whom?’

  A whisper of a smile flicked across the lined face. ‘Immediately before you, he is meeting with an anteater.’

  I suggested shyly that I had misheard.

  ‘Not at all. The anteater was a gift from Apollo Milton Obote of Uganda. It is an important appointment.’ I thought for a moment he was making a joke, but his face seemed to warn me against asking, and I realised that here, more than anywhere else, our conversation must be overheard and recorded. After a moment longer, he smiled. ‘To meet with the Emperor in person – in private – is a remarkable thing, Berihun Bekele. There are men in the palace this very morning who would give everything for a chance encounter with our Emperor, merely long enough to share a joke with him and assure him of their loyalty. For you, he has twenty minutes after the anteater. Would it ease your heart to know who comes before the anteater?’

  I said it would, realising immediately as I did that it would not.

  The Secretary saw this in my face, and told me anyway. ‘Solomon Kedir is first’ – the head of palace security, chief spy of the empire – ‘and then with the Minister of Business’ – who had the largest unofficial spy network in Addis Ababa – ‘and then with the Minister of Political Stability’ – the master of the secret police. The three most powerful men in Ethiopia, after the Emperor himself. ‘Then the anteater, and then you. I do not imagine you will have many days like this one.’

  And he left. A little while later, a woman arrived with pastries, which I ate even though I was too nervous to be hungry. I dozed upright, and was grateful when another servant came in, a quarter after nine, and woke me with hot mint tea and a towel scented with pandanus and lemon. A little while after that, I went in to meet my imperial master.

  *

  I say that we met, but even in the most formal construction, that implies a loose familiarity which was entirely absent. We were in the same room. We saw one another. He focused upon me, and I upon him – and yet there was no discourse between us. He sat and I sat and he said nothing, so nor did I. Physically he was quite small, quite old, and yet here was the man who had defied Mussolini, who shamed the League of Nations and reconquered Ethiopia. Here was the man who ruled my country, and who held my life unmentioned in his hand.

  He turned his head a little: wide brow, deep eyes, a face of age and intelligence; a face that some called the visage of a living god – because a king descended of a line of kings who has more than once fought wars to hold his throne is not daunting enough.

  He sat, and the clock ticked. The man called the Emperor’s Cuckoo – who bowed on the hour, every waking hour of the day – waited for his moment.

  Haile Selassie shifted in his seat. Leaned down towards me. I thought he would speak.

  He did not speak.

  I looked at his face, his body – the stiffness he hid around his hips, the waning nervous fire in the man. I looked at the energy that hid in his eyes. He twisted slightly so that I could see him in profile. I realised he was not going to speak to me, and therefore I was not going to speak to him. This was the extent of our communication, the absolute distillation of our relationship: he was the one being painted, and I the painter. Any other man in that context would be called a subject, but this man could never be subject to anyone. For the moment he was showing me his face, how he moved and held himself: a man on a throne in a white cloak, master of everything. Then he moved again.

  By turns, he gave me the different surfaces of his body to look at, the different moods and poses that made the exteriority of the man, and I laboured to commit them to memory.

  In the silence I became self-conscious, self-doubting. I had never actually painted a portrait before, and I had only the vaguest notion how it was done. I wondered if I should take photographs, but I had left my camera at home. I wondered if I should sketch. My bag was by my feet. I could get a pad and a pencil. I didn’t. I was locked in contemplation of the Lion, and here and to this limited extent he was noticing and responding to my eyes. It was an indulgence of extraordinary magnitude. If I got the pad the moment would break, and I could not stand for it to be over.

  This was what I would paint, this encounter. I must paint this, exactly. Not literally, not figuratively, but this feeling, this impossible sense of presence, this man and his whole life and what he meant.

  He lifted one eyebrow. Did he want me to paint that? But no. He
was reacting.

  Slowly, without fuss, the anteater walked between us. It looked at the Elect of God, then at his portraitist. If it saw anything to choose between us, I could not tell. Perhaps it distinguished only between men and ants. Perhaps even less than that.

  It wandered away.

  Nine minutes later, my silent audience was at an end.

  *

  For the next while, I came when the Emperor set time aside for me. Quite often he had none when I wished to see his face, to return to my mind the precise angle of his cheek; then on other occasions he seemed to have nothing to do, and we spent hours in silence, always with him pantomiming fatherly concern or spiritual contemplation, masculine power or regal pride. Never, in six months, did he say one word to me. I think it was meant as a sort of kindness.

  The anteater grew accustomed to me. I dared offer it nothing, no treats or bribes, and indeed I would have had no idea what it might enjoy through that long, arched muzzle with its absurdly tiny mouth. Sometimes it paused in its peregrinations and observed me, opaque and strange, and then went on its way with the same dissatisfied head shake I had first observed. If I had operated on my own artistic terms entirely, I think I might have combined them, those two: the silent man who held my life in his palm and thought to drag an ancient empire to the altar of history in the span of his own; and the timeless beast, alien eyes so full of incomprehensible frustration.

  But there were constraints upon me, not the least of which was survival. It went without saying that my portrait must be respectful and must appear to be respectful, but in addition to this the Secretary had issued three outright diktats I must obey. First: the portrait should be emphatically in my own style and I should project the King of Kings into such phantasmagoria as I wished. This was a great project of Ethiopia, a challenge to the artists of America and Europe: Africa, too, can produce the wild, the strange, the new. In Africa is being born a civilisation that will challenge your way of doing things. We shall begin with the best of you and of us, and there shall be a reborn power in the world, a new conception of humanity. Warhol must quake, Lichtenstein must shudder, and Henry Kissinger and his Soviet counterpart Eduard Shevardnadze must take note that the old continent was rising. At the least, they should know that they were well met.