Framed

by Tonino Benacquista

  I thought of the pamphlet again.

  “ ‘He had a bad influence on the other three, it was a shame to see . . .’ Oh, really . . . the three of them were in love with him, more like. They chose him as their mentor, their guru. He must have been very charismatic, don’t you think?”

  “Would you have given him courgettes in cheese sauce?”

  “No, grilled steak.”

  Actually, now I’m no longer sure I will marry her. She is running her hand through her hair without taking her green eyes off me. Light green.

  “Linnel had a good chance of winning the Prix de Rome, but when Bettrancourt dumped the place, the other three followed. Linnel, the teachers’ pet; Morand, the lunatic; Reinhard the daddy’s boy; and Bettrancourt, the terrorist, a blank year in their biographies, from ’63 to ’65. Frank, ambitious, insolent. There are your Objectivists.”

  Yes. No doubt about it. College friends, 1963, every dream imaginable, a convertible, white shirts, afternoons at the Palette café, evenings at the Select, endless discussions about American painters. One day they decide to take the first step, to break away from the comforts of home and burn their false hopes. If they had been older or more patient they would have called it the ‘old world’. They came and went too soon. The Objectivists lasted only one summer. Morand flew off over the Atlantic, Reinhard stepped into line, and the young Alain Linnel became just Linnel.

  “At the ripe old age of thirty, do you think we really understand it all?”

  “Yes and no,” I say. “In those days I was climbing onto chairs to watch the people in the café opposite playing billiards. My only memory of 1968 is the Mexico Olympics.”

  “I won a chattering prize at nursery school in 1964. I’ll swear on my press card that that’s true.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven,” she says.

  “Congratulations . . . If you carry on at this rate, throwing yourself into your work, in three years’ time you’ll be working on a big daily paper, in five you will have taken the arts editor’s job, then you’ll be editor-in-chief and in ten years you’ll have the Pulitzer Prize.”

  “That’s right, and in twenty years I’ll be doing the obituaries in a crappy local paper. Stop making fun of me.”

  How long is it since I’ve seen a girl this close up? It must run into years, I think. At least a year. A woman who came to look round the gallery. She never got to see me in the evenings. I would go to her house after midnight, or at the weekend, before going off to play. She got fed up in the end.

  “I like your vocation as a whistle-blower.”

  “Well, life gets boring otherwise, doesn’t it?”

  I almost kissed her when she got up to put the tray away. Shame. I wanted to know if it would have any effect on me and whether, somewhere inside, something would have quivered a bit.

  “Is there no way of knowing what happened to the ringleader?” I asked. I still haven’t given up hope of recognizing that bastard gentleman in him.

  “No, the old woman didn’t know, and she certainly didn’t mind. When I really pushed her, she found his old address in the archives – I could give it to you. And I got Linnel’s through the paper. As for Delarge, not a chance, you can only get hold of him at the gallery. You’ll have to make do with that. That’s what I’ve managed to find today.”

  “And you had time to make a cheese sauce?” I said.

  “Do you want some or not?”

  I don’t answer. She kneels close to me and pulls at my right sleeve to draw the arm nearer to her. She is staring into my eyes as if trying to hypnotize a cobra, and I have no idea what she wants to do with my bad arm. All of a sudden I feel frightened.

  “Could we have supper . . . ?” I say.

  She pushes the tips of her fingers inside the sleeve. She strokes the rounded, bony end.

  “It’s smooth . . .”

  I didn’t understand, I wanted to pull my arm back, but she stopped me, gripping the stump with both her hands.

  “You . . . you really like what you can’t have,” I said.

  In reply she simply dropped her lips against mine for a second. Then the weight of her whole body onto my stomach.

  This is going too quickly.

  I’m not prepared for it.

  What’s this going to look like when we’re naked, a Rubens on a Mondrian? My primary colours and her classical curves. Why is she doing this? I can neither reject her nor take hold of her hips properly.

  Everything is jumbled together, her strange, crawling action against my chest, the twinkle of an eye and the matt surface of skin, my Surrealist amputation sliding against her armpit, and my third eye up above, watching the tableau. That is solid proof that I don’t want this. I would never have guessed that the dysfunction could be so far-reaching. She took her dress off in the few seconds when my eyes were closed, when I saw all sorts of other things, violent contrasts of darkness and purity, paradoxes of reality and illogical nonsense. Her nudity drew me out of that shapeless nightmare, she offered me the raw material of her flesh, ready to be re-sculpted from head to foot. When she took my hand and laid it on the sketched curve at the small of her back, I understood that the work was already done, that someone else was the author of this magnificent tactile landscape. But I didn’t resist the urge to take everything back to the beginning. A blind man and a trunk in clay. I now lay on top of her, so as not to miss anything, not the rough or the smooth, the curves or the angles. I quickly realized that my one hand was enough. Better than that, now that it was alone, it seemed to caress more tenderly, with more precision.

  “Wait . . . I like bed better,” she said.

  I followed her. We lay down. And that was when everything that had been missing came back. The smell of bodies, the breathing, the sighs, that hungering for someone else and the countless reflexes of desire. Of love. My third eye disappeared, along with every kind of abstraction. Now I was thinking only of her.

  *

  “Tomorrow?” she asked.

  “. . . What about tomorrow?”

  “Delarge.”

  “I don’t know. Surely . . .”

  We waited until the sun was really up before leaving her apartment. Out in the street, she whispered one last thing in my ear.

  “Written proof . . .”

  While I waited for her to disappear round the corner I tightly clenched my phantom fist.

  6

  What a waste of time. Huddled behind the staircase of entrance B at 59 Rue Barbette, all I saw was the secretary’s red hair leaving the office to disappear into the backroom. Delarge eventually emerged from his three brick columns at about ten pm, and they gathered up all their bits and pieces, together, before leaving. He switched on the electronic system that works the alarm and brings down the metal shutter. She locked up the gallery, and they walked right past me. I went back to the hotel, cursing the carrot-topped doorkeeper and her shed-load of overtime. I even set about trying to find a radical way of confining her to bed over the next few days.

  It seemed absurd to spend another night just up the road from home, but I still couldn’t make up my mind to go back to my studio. Delmas is going to have trouble getting hold of me, should he need to.

  The next day, instead of waiting till the evening like a good boy for a second attempt, I ventured into the southern suburbs, in Chevilly-Larue, to have a prowl around Bettrancourt’s former address. I found a Hélène Bettrancourt in the phonebook, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to announce my arrival or to make an anonymous phone call. It’s a small house squeezed between a hypermarket and a car wrecking yard with a black forecourt stinking of diesel. I wondered whether a gentleman could live there. I had to conclude that he couldn’t; given that, I went ahead and rang the bell without pacing and fretting around the house.

  A wrinkled face behind the curtain, an engine whining hoarsely in the scrap yard, an Alsatian called back by the old woman. The dog obeys her promptly.

  “I’m try
ing to find news of Julien!”

  I quickly grasped that it would have been incredibly easy – and incredibly shameful – to sweet-talk the old woman. Old mother Bettrancourt. But how else would I get in?

  She doesn’t seem surprised or frightened. She said I should follow her inside, because it would be easier, because there was too much noise from the cars, because she was bored, and because it’s always a pleasure seeing a friend of Julien’s. I was a friend, wasn’t I? Oh yes, Madame, very much so, since our days at the Beaux-Arts, that was right back in . . .”

  “’63,” she says tartly.

  The dog is sniffing my legs, the dining room can’t have changed in fifty years, and there can’t be anyone much but her around the place. She tells me to sit at the table and takes out a bottle of liqueur and two glasses, and it all feels like the most well rehearsed ritual. I start thinking about her implacable young son. Nothing I can see here really fits with the character Béatrice described. Another engine roars, and this time it sounds as if the mechanic thinks he’s on the start line for Le Mans.

  “I hate cars, but I can’t leave the house. All that I have left of Julien is here. So . . . Are you a real painter too?”

  What should I tell her? No, of course, I’m in imports and exports. I’m sure that when I leave the place she still won’t have seen I have an arm missing.

  “You’ve been here before, haven’t you? I think I recognize you. He had so many friends at college. And they would tramp through here and talk and talk, if his father could have seen it . . .”

  “I remember a few friends, Alain Linnel, Etienne Morand, and some others . . .”

  “Do you remember Alain? We could give him a ring if you like, oh yes, he’d be so happy to see an old friend from those days . . .”

  I have to get up when she picks up the telephone.

  “No, no, I can’t stay long.”

  “Well, come back tomorrow evening, then. Yes, it will actually be Friday. At about six o’clock, he never gets here before that . . .”

  “It’s nice of him to come and see you. Does he come often?”

  “Oh, too much even. He must have other things to do . . . he worries. He really wanted me to have Bobby to keep me company . . . He bought him for me. He wants to find me a house in the country, but I can’t leave all this. He’s so kind. It’s so difficult, painting, I mean . . . how many years does it take before it becomes a real job? And there’s Alain – I’m sure he’s a real painter and that he’ll sell his paintings one day. I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, Julien did beautiful work at college too.”

  She gave a little grunt, almost of amusement.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps . . . Mind you, I never said anything to stop him, he did what he liked. I respected everything, you know. Even if I didn’t understand it, I knew he really loved it, that he was sincere . . . He seemed so focused on what he was doing. As if it was something serious. But why were the things he did so . . . so gloomy . . .? He wasn’t a gloomy boy, you know . . . So why did he do those . . . those things? You see, I think artists should make sculptures that make you forget all the misery . . . it’s a sort of optimism . . . Paintings that do you good . . . I don’t know how to put it . . . But I’ve kept everything. It’s all I’ve got left since the accident. Would you like to see them?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s my own museum. Apart from Alain, there aren’t many visitors . . .”

  She said that to make me smile. I follow her into a ground-floor bedroom with a window overlooking the scrap yard.

  “It was his studio, he used to say.”

  A completely different smell, a hint of grease and lubricating oil which has persisted over the years, and it’s hardly surprising when you have a look at what’s in there. At least a hundredweight of old iron, mobiles hanging from the ceiling, little architectural creations of woven, soldered metal stuck onto wooden plaques. Those are what you notice straightaway. All the same format, rectangles of wood, eleven inches by twenty-four. The first thing that strikes you is a feeling of precision, the arrangement of those metallic pieces must surely obey some well defined system. Anything but random.

  “He called these his portraits. What on earth did they teach them at the Beaux-Arts . . .?”

  Portraits.

  I can’t resist my curiosity, the urge to hold one up in front of the wall. Then another, then all of them. That’s how you should look at them, if you go by the pencilled arrows on the back of the wood. And that’s not all. Each of them is accompanied by a name, still in pencil. My heart has started thumping, but this is neither fear nor distress.

  “Alain 62”. “Etienne 62”. “Claude 62”. And others that I don’t know.

  “Alain 62”. The features are taking shape, gradually, in this tiny jungle of metal. The left eye is a little spiral, part of a clock. A cocoa tin which has been cut open and hammered out suggests the forehead, and a meticulous and complicated tangle of bicycle chain, a rusty smile. In places there are touches of engine grease which make the features gleam. A feeling of fullness, a rounded cheek in cast iron, a nose immaculately carved out of a knife blade eaten away by rust.

  The more I look at him, the more . . .

  “Be careful . . . Especially with the things that are on the table.”

  The things have been put there carefully, posed. And it’s obvious why you have to be careful – they are hostile. An aluminium mould encrusted with razor blades. It would be impossible to pick it up without drawing blood. A telephone handset bristling with rusting spikes. A basket with a sharpened billhook as a handle.

  “The number of times he injured himself . . .”

  Through the window I can see the broken fence that once separated the garden from the scrap yard and, in the middle of it, the carcasses of two cars hanging vertically, one slotted against the other.

  Embracing.

  “The boss next door let him play with the wrecks. I was a bit ashamed with the neighbours but it made him so happy . . . Then last year the boss wanted to have a tidy up, and Alain bought this from him. What you can see down there. I hate cars.”

  She wants to get me back to the sitting room, which is a shame. I could have done with another hour getting to know all this, finding other faces, and risking my remaining hand on those impossible objects.

  “And have you seen Morand since the accident?”

  “Little Etienne . . . No, I think he went to America, and the other one never came back either, I’ve forgotten his name, the one with the beautiful red car. I hate cars. They were always holed up here, those three, talking, arguing even, sometimes.”

  She leaves a little pause. I bite my lip.

  “And that evening they went off in the little Renault. He didn’t have much luck, my Julien. The others came away unharmed. Come back on a Friday evening. Alain will be here, he would really like that.”

  The gallery looks shut, and I haven’t seen any signs of movement inside. The only thing that gives me hope is the fact that the metal shutter isn’t down, and this time I’ve changed my lookout post. Halfway up to the first floor on staircase B there’s a dressmaking workshop typical of this part of Paris, and so far I haven’t had to suffer any comings and goings . . . while I wait for someone to deign to turn up.

  Delarge, alone, keys in hand, appeared at about eleven pm. I have flown down the stairs intent on pouncing on him before he has a chance to react. I run as fast as I can across the empty little courtyard, he is bent forward, turning the key to the security system. His back is offered up to me, the shutter is a third of the way down, and I put my arm over his shoulder as if to surprise an old friend. Gently. The triangular tip of the Stanley knife just reaches his carotid artery.

  “Would you open it, please?” I ask calmly.

  He shrieks in surprise. Flabbergasted, he recognizes me, he stammers, everything happens very quickly, he stands back up and turns the key the other way.


  “Can you lower the shutter from the inside?” I ask, pressing the blade a little deeper against his throat.

  He puts up no resistance and gives a hysterical little “yes”. His face is distorted with fear, and he shakes as he handles the lock. My heart is hardly beating any faster, both my arms feel full of strength, the metal stays clamped under his chin without deviating a hair’s breadth. The fact that I have waited twenty-four hours has only intensified my loathing. Yesterday I hadn’t yet met that little woman living on the rusted altar of memories. I won’t take it any more, this assassination of gentleness and kindness. Yesterday I might have been hesitant and haphazard.

  He put the lights on in the gallery before I even expressed the wish.

  “Don’t . . . don’t hurt me!”

  I can feel him there, at the tip of my blade, paralysed with terror, and that makes my job easier. So long as he’s whimpering like a little kid, I can play it easy. Stuck between the blade and my chest, he walks, steady and straight, till he gets to the reception desk. Now at last I can enjoy total impunity, protected by the metal shutter.

  “Lie down on your front, on the floor!”

  He obeys. I put the slipknot at the end of the shoelace over the table leg, lifting the table with my shoulder. It takes a couple of attempts, and with my teeth I open up the second knot, at the other end of the lace.

  “Lift your head up . . . Come over to the table leg, fuck it!”

  I slip his head gently into the loop and pull it sharply. He doesn’t cry out. There is no more than four inches of string between the table leg and his neck. I watch him, cowering on the ground, held back by the painfully short lead, like a terrorized dog waiting to be kicked.

  “You see, I use the same weapons as your killer, a Stanley knife and string, and all with one hand.”

  “Don’t hurt me.”

  “I have you to thank for this stump, don’t I?”