Framed

by Tonino Benacquista

  Five thousand bits and pieces no one wants, not even the lowliest mayor in the smallest village, for fear of scaring off his electorate of three. Five thousand little abandoned works of art, unloved and unlovely. Paintings, sculptures, engravings, rolled up drawings, “Art Deco” objects and quantities of mysterious gizmos that can’t be classified. The paintings and sculptures are kept in different storerooms, but I loved getting lost among the latter: the mixture of periods and styles turned it into a dusty, Baroque sort of jungle. For the first few days I spent hours wandering along those rows of metal shelving several feet tall, overfilled with statuettes; strolling through that amalgam of shapes and colours. A life-size statue of an infantryman in patinated bronze standing facing a giant hand with fingers of red resin, not far from a toaster encrusted with pebbles. Dozens of busts and motionless faces gazing from every corner, following you everywhere. Cardboard boxes filled with things and trailing electric cables, copper snakes, octopuses with blue suckers, and empty chassis. In one corner, a motorbike mounted on a tripod and ridden by a woman in varnished wood. A table set with assorted cutlery and crockery as if the guests had just fled. Hybrid creatures, half man half machine, wearing strips of brightly coloured cloth. A bored Hussar sitting facing something green.

  There are five thousand of them. Incomprehensible and oddly touching. And it was somewhere in the middle of the cruel abundance, this glory hole of art history, that I started to understand a thing or two about the sublime and the ridiculous. What lasts and what people prefer to forget. What stands the test of time and what becomes outdated within a decade.

  The living number no more than two: Véro and Nicolas, lost in a huge room converted into an office, right next to the hangars. For years now Véro has spent most of her time listing what is in there and particularly what is “on the outside”, which is her way of describing the fifty-five thousand works dispersed around the planet. In theory, everything should be inventoried on registers, but every time she opens one that dates to before 1914 it crumbles into dust. The Ministry has created a processing system to put it all on computer but, in the meantime, you just have to use the archives and, as Véro says, “there are gaps”. For now the computer is Nicolas. In the ten years he has worked there he has become the depot’s memory, its soul. He can recognize a print from more than ten paces and can tell you where to find the bust of Victor Hugo which was bought in 1934 (usually stuck between a nineteenth-century bronze and a 1955 “kinetic” painting). What I liked about him immediately was the subtle blend of respect for the material and utter contempt for the work.

  Véro has her back to me, pouring herself a coffee.

  “Where’s the Matisse bought in ’53?” I throw out.

  She turns round, startled, sees me and heaves a sigh.

  “At the Algerian Embassy . . . God, you gave me a fright!”

  She smiles, then stops smiling, then starts smiling again differently.

  “You okay, Antoine?”

  “Yup.”

  “We heard about what happened at the gallery and . . . do you want a coffee?”

  “No thanks. Is Nicolas here?”

  “Yes, he’s showing someone round the hangars, a local official or something like that . . . he wants to decorate the foyer of his offices. He’s asked for a Dufy, can you believe it? A Dufy! Here! He’ll go home with a cauliflower in gouache, I can feel it coming.”

  There’s a good stock of cauliflowers in gouache, as she says. It was all the rage in the 1920s. Impossible to fob them off on anyone, even the most kitsch-minded underling.

  I slump down into an armchair next to her desk that is strewn with paper.

  “Have you had any good stuff recently?”

  “Pfff . . . they’ve bought some engravings which are quite fun and a series of seven steel containers each holding forty-four gallons of water, taken from the seven seas. And it’s true.”

  “Do you know where to put them?”

  “We’ve got room for them, you know the place as well as I do. But what about you . . . are you going to carry on working at the gallery?”

  “We’ll see . . . and you? How’s your inventory coming along?”

  “I’ve been asking for a work placement girl for years. Apart from Nico and me, no one can find their way around here. You could say we’re indispensable in this ocean of shit.”

  Nicolas arrives, moaning.

  “Bloody pain . . . he asked me if I had a Braque . . . oh yes, and what else can we help you with?”

  He sees me and carries on moaning: “Oh, hello, are you here?”

  Over the years he and Véro have become amazingly alike. They adore each other. They drive each other up the wall. They never give each other the tiniest little kiss to say hello in the morning or goodbye in the evening. They adore each other.

  “So what did he go away with, our official?”

  “Bugger all . . . except a cold. And what do you want, my friend?”

  “I’d like to have a little wander round the stock. Will you give me the guided tour?”

  Without really understanding, he follows me into the hangar full of sculptures.

  “What I really need is some information. Well . . . it’s going to be more like a bottle thrown into this ocean of shit. And I’d rather talk to you about this alone.”

  I trust Véro but I’d rather not get her involved in all this. He watches rather anxiously as I walk round and round a Polystyrene Venus de Milo.

  “Go on, explain. . . I don’t like mysteries.”

  “Have you ever had stuff by Morand in the depot, I mean, apart from the things in the retrospective?”

  “Don’t understand.”

  “Did the Ministry ever buy anything by Morand before he bequeathed his work?”

  “Nothing. The first I heard of him was when the retrospective came up.”

  It’s what I expected: if there had been anything else by Morand, Coste would have mentioned it straightaway.

  I take out my page from the catalogue.

  “You see, I wondered whether you had anything here that looks a bit like this. I know this might seem strange, but I’ve got a feeling there’s a picture very like this somewhere here. There’s such a hotchpotch, you never know.”

  In amongst that hotchpotch, for example, there’s a dangerous sculpture that it’s best not to leave bits of yourself on.

  “We’ve never had anything by him before.”

  “I don’t know if it’s really another painting by Morand that I’m looking for. I just made a connection with the painting that was stolen. It’s just a visual similarity, maybe the colour, or a movement.”

  “A movement?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you taking the piss? A movement? With all the stuff I’ve got here? That’s like going to the flea market in Saint-Ouen and asking if they happen to have seen a crackled vase.”

  I realize that’s pretty much the problem so I come at it from another angle.

  “Yes, but you’re not like that, you could even date a picture from the layers of dust on it, you could define the rate of yellowing of a litho print, you’re the only person who can see the difference between a Caillavet sculpture and a stalagmite.”

  He smiles in spite of himself.

  “Yeah, yeah, and you’re the only person who can talk bollocks like that. I’ll have a think about this thing of yours. Are you still at the same phone number?”

  “Yes. And I also wanted to tell you . . . this whole thing is my business . . . what I mean is . . . it’s personal . . . and the less you know about it, the better.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You don’t want me to talk about it, is that it? Not even to Véro? You poor thing, who the hell do you think is going to be interested in this piece of yellow shit . . .?”

  *

  Attempt 30 and its growing spire. I feel as if I’m experiencing the effort along with it. When I unwrapped it I looked at it more closely than the others, those hopelessly black ones, and then
I went on to the next without wasting any time, and the pieces as a whole just swelled the ranks of the dusty, anonymous reserves in my memory. The depot I have in my head, my own useless collection. I didn’t suspect anything at the time, but I now know that that spire is being born, you just have to look at it for a while. And it gives you a funny feeling if you think it’s never stopped piercing upwards since the day Morand conceived it with a few dashes of his brush. How much time did it take to suggest that pressure? I would say very little. A spit in the ocean. But I may be wrong, to a specialist who can gauge the true work that went into it, it could have taken weeks on end. At the same time, over and above all these questions, I refuse to believe that so many things could have passed me by at the gallery, that I wasted all those hours setting pieces up to look their best without ever realizing that their best was already part of them, intrinsic and meaningful.

  I preferred concentrating on what my real life was going to be, the one that started after six o’clock. In that world I was in charge of everything: the hours I worked and the hundred different ways of making the point. Usually there are only two or three for every thousand ways of blowing it. And between those two there is often a choice between beauty and technique, and you choose according to your mood, the score and whether or not there is an audience. And I was very keen on the cheers and the bravos.

  The letter to the parents.

  How to tell the people who gave you two hands that you are now one short. I can’t even picture my mother’s face reading those lines. She was reassured when I told her I had regular work at the gallery; she didn’t like seeing me leaving with her older brother to hang around some café where people played billiards. My father couldn’t give a damn, always lost in great works of literature, he spent his whole career trying to pass on his love of the language to students who showed varying degrees of enthusiasm.

  When I write this letter I’d like to avoid complicated words. I’d like to avoid words altogether. To say it without writing it. The word “amputated” feels like the thrust of a dagger to me. Invalid, amputee, severed completely . . . and there are plenty more that are off limits. In fact, what I should be doing with this letter is painting it, if I had the talent and the equipment. Painting is about the only way to represent things that can’t be expressed in words. A simple drawing could spare me a great saga that is bound to end up lying to itself.

  I would have to paint an uncompromising picture, with no hope, in harsh colours, showing how everything around me is now damaged. No prospects. Nothing optimistic or pastoral. The inner violence. Expressionism.

  Dear you two,

  I won’t be playing billiards any more now and that should please you, mum, because you always said you can’t make a living in the backrooms of cafés. I want to scream at you about my hand. You were worried about Paris, dad, you said it was full of trouble. This afternoon I went into a shop near Bastille to buy a cleaver. A proper butcher’s cleaver, I took the biggest one that would fit in my pocket. At the moment no one knows I’ve got the thing in my possession. In the hopes that my useless hand doesn’t betray me when I do come to use it, I send you all my love . . .

  Someone’s knocking at the door. I peer up from my typewriter and wait for a while before opening the door.

  Fist raised, he is preparing to knock again. I should have guessed that Doctor Briançon would come sooner or later to see the extent of my distress with his own eyes.

  “Um . . . good evening. Could I come in?”

  He got my address from the files at Boucicaut.

  “If you want.”

  He runs his eye over my little dugout. A psychologist’s eye? A prying eye? I don’t know.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I ask, indicating a chair over by the kitchen area. “I haven’t got anything to offer you. Oh yes I have, a glass of wine or a coffee.”

  He hesitates for a moment.

  “A coffee, but I can do it, if you don’t feel like it . . .”

  “No, that’s okay, but I want some wine. We’ll do a swap, I’ll make the coffee and you can uncork the bottle.”

  He smiles, as if I’ve made a real effort to prove willing. He’s barking up the wrong tree. Why me? He must have loads of people in a much worse state or much more vulnerable than me. Family breadwinners, children, hemiplegics, paraplegics, every kind of trauma case. Why me? Does he want to tell me about Valenton?

  “I like this part of Paris. When I first came to the city I looked for something round here, but the Marais’s so expensive.”

  I don’t say anything in reply. He may be good at listening to answers; he’s still the one doing the asking. And I’m definitely not opening the debate for him. I pour the ground coffee carefully into the filter and press the button, like a proper little left-hander.

  “Have you played billiards?”

  What?

  I snap my head round.

  He points to the cue standing against the bed.

  “Is it yours? I don’t know anything about it but it’s magnificent. Is it maple?”

  He’s found it, his opening. I take a deep breath before answering.

  “Maple and mahogany.”

  “That must be worth a bit.”

  I don’t understand his methods: a mixture of genuine curiosity and provocation. It’s odd, the minute I stop being aggressive, he starts.

  “Yes, quite a bit. But that’s the charm with a lot of works of art. Beautiful and expensive.”

  “And useless.”

  For a split second I can see myself snatching the bottle and smashing it across his forehead. And he has just picked it up to plant the corkscrew into it.

  “In the end, I’m regretting my decision,” he says looking at the label. “If I’d known you had some Margaux . . .”

  I switch off the coffee machine and take out another glass. He pours the wine.

  “You’re right. If you’re going to drink, you might as well have the best.”

  “Listen to you, Doctor Briançon, you sound like a man crossing a desert of resentment. Shall we cut to the chase?”

  Silence.

  “Okay, you’re right, we can’t prowl around the subject for hours. My job is to rehabilitate people with psychomotor disabilities, and in your case there are thousands of things you can do instead of hiding away in your shell. Simple things but they need working at. If you put in the effort, every opportunity would be open to you, you could live normally again, you would become left-handed.”

  Silence. I let him finish. He’ll be out of the door all the sooner.

  “There are compensatory phenomena in all forms of disability, and you should concentrate all your work on your left hand in order to recover all your abilities. In the subconscious we all have the same body image, that’s why you will continue to appear whole in your dreams for many years . . .”

  “Piss off.”

  “No, let me speak, you shouldn’t let this opportunity go, the longer you leave it, the . . .”

  “Why me? Tell me why for Christ’s sake!”

  I have raised my voice. That’s probably what he wanted.

  “Because there’s something about you that I find intriguing.”

  “Really . . .”

  “I get the feeling the trauma is more profound than with any other subject. There’s something . . . something violent.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  After a momentary feeling of surprise I burst out laughing. But the laugh dies a strangled death in my throat.

  “The accident itself, for example. . . Losing a hand under a piece of sculpture . . .”

  “An industrial accident like any other,” I say.

  “Oh no, and you know that better than I do. It’s the first case they’ve ever had at Boucicaut. Then there’s your stay in hospital, your unexpected reactions like the day I took the stitches out. Your face had already changed but what surprised me was how calm you were, almost serene. It was as if nothing had happ
ened, no pain, no gasp when we drew out the staples, no rejection when you saw the stump you would have to live with, no questions about the future, no distress, no rebellion. Nothing, an absent expression, a mask, a peculiar passivity concerning whatever was asked of you. Except for physiotherapy and rehabilitation. You’re going to think this is strange but you’re behaving more like someone with third-degree burns . . . there’s an attempt to stay motionless, I don’t know how to put it . . .”

  Mustn’t answer. Mustn’t help him.

  “There is one thing I’m sure of, at least: you’re taking the loss of your hand much harder than anyone else I’ve cared for. And I want to know why. That’s actually why I came to see where you live.”

  He gets up, as if he can feel the surge of hate rising in me.

  “Be careful, Antoine. You’re on the borderline between two worlds . . . how shall I put this? . . . it’s the occupied zone on one side and the free territories on the other. And at the moment you’re hesitating . . .”

  That seems to be his last point. What could he possibly add to that?

  “Is that it?”

  He nods, as if to calm things down. As he headed for the door I could see he was assessing my bed-sit again. Like an idiot, I realized I had left the spanking new cleaver lying around, for all to see, sitting on the paper it had been wrapped in. He didn’t miss it, that’s for sure, I could tell just from the way he said goodbye, with his eyes, letting them linger on mine.

  Never mind.

  My stubble is beginning to itch. I can’t go more than three days without shaving, otherwise. . . Before going to bed I look at myself in the mirror, with my clown’s clothes and my neglected face. I see myself as one of those stupid creatures, always looking right at you, so you can’t get away from them, the ones that populate the paintings by a young artist whose name I can never remember.