Bowl of Fruit

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

  I slept badly that night, but how I felt in my uneasy wakefulness was not altogether unpleasant. The past had resurfaced, and as it spread itself out in a jumble as though in an immense field of fragments, some at my feet and others at an almost invisible distance, some tangible and others insubstantial, chimerical, almost unearthly, that too was not altogether unpleasant. But it was the future that contained the end of my story, for my story had not yet run its course. Anna Tor, whoever and whatever she was, had strengthened my belief that beyond that vast archaeological field lay a future that encapsulated more.

  My story had the vagueness of a dream. There were aspects of it that had been deliberately hidden. Aspects that others had judged might have made it seem mundane: just another instance of extraordinary skill, less prodigious, less mysterious, less exalted than an instance of extraordinary gift. There were aspects of my story that Mary had concocted, aspects I had unforgivably failed to correct but had later rearranged in my head, and there were aspects of it too that I had kept to myself.

  4

  Beautiful Stories

  Skeleton

  Ever since I can remember, every night Mary would come into my room and tell me a story. Then she would go downstairs again.

  Mary told such beautiful stories.

  My father worked hard, I hardly ever saw him, but all the same I have a faithful recollection of him. He was a handsome man, tall and strong, with black eyes like mine: big dead eyes, carved deep into his face.

  ‘You're killing me, George. You're killing us both.’

  I could hear them fighting late into the night.

  ‘You promised me you’d end it.’

  Something would break, and then Mary would scream.

  ‘What about Jack, what about our son?’

  ‘He’s not your son.’

  ‘Don’t ever let him hear you say that.’

  Sometimes I heard my father dragging Mary up the stairs. Muffled cries, grunts, breathing that seemed unnatural. Heavy footsteps, then the back door would slam, and I could still hear Mary crying.

  I always called her Mary.

  One time - I remember it like it was yesterday - the fighting wouldn't stop. It just went on and on, Mary screaming like I'd never heard her scream before. Then all went deadly quiet, until again I heard my father’s effort. He must have carried her upstairs, her body like a dead weight, almost unconscious. A few minutes later I heard him on the telephone downstairs, then all was deadly quiet again.

  I knew he was still in the house - I hadn't heard him slam the kitchen door. I tiptoed out of bed and opened my door just a crack. I sat in the dark at the end of my bed, and I peeped through the silver line of light that came in from the landing. I saw my father wiping the wall, working his way down the stairs until he was out of sight.

  I sat there and waited, to see what happened next.

  The doorbell rang, and then a man with a black leather case followed my father up the stairs.

  It struck me how shiny the black leather case was.

  ‘She’s in there,’ said my father, and he opened the door and gestured to the man to go in. The man nodded and went inside. My father shut the door after the man and went downstairs to wait.

  When the man came out again he made a coughing sound, and my father made his way back upstairs to meet him.

  ‘You can’t carry on like this, George,’ the man said to my father.

  They walked downstairs together. I could hear them whispering, and then I must have fallen asleep.

  There was too much light in the house that night. Time had slipped out of its rhythm, and things seemed to happen at a different speed to what was normal. It was like watching an old movie, although as a child I wouldn’t have known that.

  For three days Mary stayed in the room; it was three days before I saw her again. In those three days the house was hushed. My father stayed home and made the meals, and he took them upstairs to Mary. Then he sat with me at the kitchen table and we ate.

  That’s the only time I can remember spending time with him alone. He was sober, but he never spoke a word to me. I tried to catch his eye, I think, but he just carried on staring at his plate.

  We hardly ever saw him after that.

  Then Mary started drinking, and there were no more stories.

  She yelled at me for everything and nothing. She yelled at me for looking at her. She yelled at me for making too much noise, and then she yelled at me for being too quiet. It wasn’t long before she started to beat me. She beat me hard, for no reason at all.

  ‘It's like I've got the devil staring back at me!’ she said.

  It was an odd thing for sure, my father's eyes on my face. They didn't sit right, just didn't fit. Way too big for it, I know that.

  After she beat me she would put her arms around me - I was the scrawniest boy, all skin and bones, nothing like my father in that respect - and she would squeeze me hard, her face collapsed on mine, all wet, smelling that stale revolting smell, breathing it out.

  When the nightmares started I had just turned fourteen.

  That’s what everyone called them back then, young Jack’s nightmares. I wouldn't have known what to call them. One way or another I'd lost my childhood, what did it matter what anyone called them?

  The first time it happened, it happened in my sleep, and I suppose that's why they called them nightmares. I woke up in a terror so unspeakable I reckon now it could have killed me. As suddenly as it had seized me it let go of me, and I came to in Mary's arms, drenched in her tears. And I felt comforted.

  She held me like that forever, not loosening her grip, like if she did, the slightest way, I'd sink forever away from her, out of her reach, into that darkness.

  ‘Don't leave me, Jack. Don't leave me, Jack.’ She said it over and over.

  It’s the hardest thing to describe, that darkest feeling that stole my soul. Whenever it took hold of me, they said it was as if I had forgotten who I was, but it wasn't that. I felt like I was nothing, like something had scooped out of me everything that made me Jack, and left behind an empty shell. And I was conscious of it: fully conscious of the nothingness of Jack.

  It kept happening, day or night. Just as I sat there I would sink again, out of the blue, and just as suddenly I would come back. Each time my fear would grow. It was the fear that I would lose my mind. I don't suppose I understood that then. What child can fathom madness?

  I stayed at home and Mary had to fight to keep me. She was my Mary again, and she was there for me. I thought the evil had been shaken out of her.

  Her stories snowballed, and they became more beautiful than they had ever been before, more beautiful as I became more frightened. It was as if she hoped their light would dazzle me, and I would leave the darkness for the safety of a place that she'd imagined for me.

  ‘Jack, you can be anything you want to be, always remember that,’ she used to say. ‘You'll soon be back, just hold on tight. One day you'll beat this thing.’

  At first I couldn't hear her, but somehow in the end her voice got through and I would know that she was always there. Mary had truly shone a torch for me, and I had sensed its path and followed it, to crawl my way to freedom.

  Imagine you could write yourself into a book of fiction. You hate the way the story goes so you just walk right into it and do your best to change the plotline. That's what I tried to do. Change my story and take control of it. And for a while it worked. The curse became a gift. Or so it seemed.

  I guess it was a kind of light that dazzled me. It sounds crazy but it happened. I asked Mary for something to paint with. She brought me charcoal and paints and a couple of ready-made canvases, cheap things she’d found in the market. And before I turned sixteen, I painted my first Picasso. I remember it like it was right in front of me. It was a bowl of fruit, a still life, an early example of Picasso's work, and not a copy of any painting I had seen; not a copy at all. It was an original Picasso, not painted by Picasso but by me - by me as Picasso.


  I even signed and dated it.

  We didn't get it then, when it first happened. How could we have? What did we know about Picasso?

  It was a brilliant painting I had painted, that much at least was clear to us. And from the moment I had painted it my episodes had stopped. Or had at least become something completely different, benign and voluntary. The darkness that had blighted me had lifted.

  I carried on painting. It wasn't that I wanted to. It wasn't that I enjoyed it. It wasn't that I wanted to be Picasso, or to paint Picasso paintings. At first it's true I was excited, but later I was just afraid: afraid that if I didn't paint, the nightmares would come back, and with them all the nothingness of darkness.

  Effortlessly I produced another masterpiece; then another; then one more. I churned them out like an automaton. In the end I hated it. All those paintings, they meant nothing to me.

  But they did mean a lot to Mary. And she kept pushing me. I should have known what to expect. That's when I should have left.

  An expert came to the house, called another expert. It was the time of experts.

  ‘They must be copies,’ they said. ‘There can’t be any other explanation for these paintings. They must be copies of original Picassos.’

  But there were no originals. They finally conceded that. My paintings were the originals - and they were worthy of Picasso. Had they been genuine, the experts said they could have placed them in a precise location within the history of Picasso's work. Which fitted perfectly with how I had been dating them myself. As for my titles, the experts all agreed they corresponded to the French or Spanish titles Picasso was most likely to have chosen had he painted the paintings himself.

  That was the experts' work done. It was for others now to find an explanation.

  ‘You mustn't sign them!’ they said. ‘That's forgery.’

  They hadn't really understood. I was beginning to.

  Mary scraped the signatures away and made me touch the paintings up. I painted more, with better paints, on canvases I stretched myself. I made some sculptures too; out of junk I collected from markets and junkyards and skips - objets trouvés as they’re called. Mary was drinking heavily again, and she was greedy. I couldn’t paint the paintings fast enough. Everyone wanted them. The sculptures were a waste of time, she said. She couldn’t see the point of wandering the streets to look for broken furniture and bits of rusted metal when I could stay at home and paint another painting.

  I painted Picassos for years. But then the day came when I knew I could control the darkness. And I wanted to stop and be myself again. I longed to be Jack Faro. But after all that time, I hadn’t any notion of Jack Faro.

  Mary said Jack Faro was no one, good at nothing except painting more Picassos. And that was good enough. I should be grateful for it.

  I said I’d take my chances; my mind was made up.

  Mary was livid. She bared her teeth and snarled at me obscenities. She clawed her hands and went to dig into my neck. I gripped her tightly by the wrists and held her back. Her powdered face was soaked with sweat, and from the violence of her grimacing it cracked. Streaks of her mascara swelled into its furrows, like a grim foreshadowing of her death.

  ‘I've given you my life, you ungrateful son of your father. You have to stay and make it up to me, you hear?’

  There was again the smell of fear and greed; that same filth I remembered from my childhood.

  I took half the money and left. Jack Faro changed his name and disappeared.

  Cupboard

  There were never any nightmares; the darkness was invented. My indifference for Picasso was feigned; my eventual indifference, on the other hand, for painting “invented” Picassos was real, as real as my revelling for years in the tangible reality of the mystery of my gift - and it was, undoubtedly, an extraordinary gift, albeit not a gift spontaneously wrought out of darkness.

  I had filled my head with Picasso. My obsession with his work – and already it had become an obsession on the day that for the first time I had run my little fingers up and down the fold-out illustration of Three Musicians (1921) in Part I of the two volume monograph I had managed to lift off the second-highest shelf in my father’s study, where it had stood in a corner gathering dust next to a small hardback edition of Kafka’s The Castle – this wunderkind obsession had been painstakingly nurtured by Mary ever since the doodled pastel sketches she discovered in my bedroom had prefigured in her eerily prognosticating mind the talent, or facility, or gift, that would one day make both of us rich.

  Even in those early days I knew, because already in my mind I could see, the true Picasso colours that the inadequate methods of printing invariably distort. I had not yet seen a single original Picasso in the flesh, and yet I knew. By some random alchemical process, or more likely by an optical freak unaccountable by rational means, my vision transformed what I saw in those poor illustrations into what Picasso had actually rendered directly onto canvas. But my talent would later extend far beyond that.

  When I had seen every Picasso in London, Mary took me to Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, and then she took me to New York. I studied every single book about Picasso I was able to get hold of. Mary had foresight. My talent was remarkable already, but it was still mechanical; it went no further than just perfect reproduction. At fourteen, I could have faked any Picasso, but I could not yet have painted one of my own. At fifteen, I had begun to make tentative attempts. I soon became exhausted. Whenever I painted, my concentration was so intense that I would lapse ever deeper into a semi-conscious state that resembled a trance, and the idea of the nightmares and the darkness struck Mary not only as the perfect excuse to remove me from school, but also as a neat extra touch of mystique.

  I was assessed and reassessed, scrutinized, anatomized and deeply psychoanalyzed. I played my part with admirable flair, and without the slightest trace of self-restraint. It worked, and my schooling days continued at home.

  The rest is history, as they say.

  The leap to painting fully-fledged Picassos turned out to be exponential rather than piecemeal. Glazed in a translucent white, the almost paper-thin ceramic bowl was a family heirloom: an elongated stem that opened out into an oval geometrical absence. The fruit was also already in the house: two pears with long tapered necks, two variegated apples and one orange. I placed the bowl at the end of a long rectangular table, over a scarlet piece of cloth diagonally folded in half, and with a corner of its triangle smoothed down over the edge of the table. Like conspirators, the pears stood side by side on the bowl’s shallow basin, one leaning as though in an obsequious bow, its stem reaching out with the length of its curve, almost touching the flesh of the other. An apple sat at the opposite end of the length of the oval, and at the edge of the scarlet piece of cloth the orange sat below it, across the other apple at a non-equidistance either side of the elegant cylindrical stem that held just above them the basin of the bowl.

  When this theatrical still life had been set up, which had taken me hours, I moved my easel around from one spot to another in the room until intuitively my vantage point behind it felt right, and at last I began with some rough charcoal sketches. All bore a striking non-likeness to the arrangement at the end of the table. While I was setting it up I had used my own eyes to judge its aesthetic, but now I was seeing it with the eyes of Picasso, and that extraneous intervention enabled me to anticipate Picasso, or rather to give shape to his vision. Once I had understood that, and really it’s more accurate to say that I had grasped its significance in a ready surrender of reason, I had no further need for faux Picasso props: I had discovered, in effect, that my optical freak – a kind of visual schizophrenia - could tap directly into the man’s imagination.

  With its bold curvature, an intensity of contrast more profound than one would generally find in Picassos with a similar subject, and with the play of light and shadow on the creases of the scarlet piece of cloth suggesting very strikingly the outline of an African mask, Bowl of Fruit (1907) gave a h
aunting, primitive impression that characterized many of his works of that period – it resonated with Picasso’s superstition, someone wrote. And if I had to speculate, as others did so earnestly, I would say that Bowl of Fruit (1907), which I painted in 1989, had been a recent precursor to Nude with Raised Arms, which Picasso painted in 1907.

  The sculptures did require a greater degree of effort; to that extent Mary was right. But really the process was the same, save that the optical freak kicked in at two different stages. While I foraged for the appropriate junk, it was as if the found objects found me: I was drawn to them by some mysteriously magnetic quality that would make them jump out at me, often from the bottom of a heap. And once I had collected the materials, the putting together of them almost took care of itself: I was the agent by whose hands they assembled themselves. But that didn’t stop me from occasionally feeling proud of the outcome, on those rare occasions when I was convinced that Picasso himself would have been particularly proud.

  When my father left us – when he finally physically left us - I became a monomaniacal recluse increasingly averse to the outdoors, a condition I was totally unconcerned with at the time, and it was part of my affliction to be so. At the core of the “nothingness” we had invented as a ruse was an insidious self-fulfilling prophecy that was inexorably being fulfilled. If Picasso was the shell, then what was inside it? I had occupied myself with the fulfilment of the physical and mental demands of acting out my part single-mindedly, but my enthusiasm flagged as the novelty of our enterprise began to wear off. I must have needed to conceal this as much from myself as from Mary, and so I stayed confined indoors and painted more.

  I painted paintings that to a knowing outsider would have seemed more ambitious, that in the course of Picasso’s career had been (or would have been) more ambitious, but to me they now embodied abjection: a total abnegation of self. Who was I? Who had I ever been? Had I not, by the weight of my inner lack, brought upon myself the burden of this poisoned chalice? I had had it drummed into me that I was not “a normal child” long before my acclamation as a prodigy, which I knew I had earned by virtue of a gift that was purely vicarious; it also just so happened to be a tap for golden eggs.