Envy

by Alain Elkann

  Frankly, I don’t know why I feel so attracted to another man’s life. I don’t know why I prefer others to myself and find their destinies so extraordinary. I don’t realise what I have. I look at life as if it were a show, a space of time in which what matters is not what you really think, but what you do, what you express, the places you go to, the things you leave behind. My life is like an obstacle course and I am always afraid of making a mistake, of losing, of being excluded. Sax has understood this perfectly, I think; that’s why he works so obsessively on his pictures and drawings, and perhaps that’s why he has had so many illegitimate children. He felt the need to disseminate himself excessively, the need to seduce women of all kinds and not to love any of them.

  PART FIVE

  THE GENESIS OF A NOVEL

  1

  LONDON

  I HAVE COME TO THE CONCLUSION that if I am to begin my novel, Sax must leave reality and become a character. He is the linchpin around which the plot will be constructed. Where to begin? In his studio in London? At Tony’s? The interview with the journalist from The Sunday Times? No, Rossa would be the journalist in my novel, she would ask him the questions while he tried to seduce her. Rossa would ignore his seductive ploys, he would lose patience and suggest that they go to his studio to see the painting he is finishing off. She would reply: “Maybe another time,” accompanying her refusal with a catlike smile. Then he would get annoyed and take his leave. Afterwards he would call her, but she would not reply, obliging him to leave a message.

  I don’t know why, but as I thought of these things I was seized by nostalgia for some of the streets in Paris where I had lived many years ago. But above all I thought of a painter friend who has now disappeared from my life. I lived for a year in his house, in his studio. Come to think of it, while I have seen many of his paintings, and even owned one, I never saw him paint. He drank too much and when he was drunk he became melancholy. He was crazy for really young women, mad about them. He followed them all over the world, spent a lot of money and sold few pictures. He wished he was a great artist, but he didn’t really believe it. He wasted too much time and there was no market for his work. I don’t know what he thought of Sax; we used to talk of other things, women, books … Then, for no particular reason, we lost touch.

  What do I want from Sax? Do I want him to become my friend, find me amusing, intelligent, interesting, special? Rather, do I want him to find my books special and then ask me to write one with him about his life, his art? To write a book with him would be a pretext to spend a lot of time together, to get to know each other really well. I would finally understand if he is a genius or a sham. I would like to devote some pages to his childhood in Germany and then the first years of his exile in England. I wonder if the Saxes had always spoken German in the family or if they spoke to their children in English with a German accent. But what do I care? It makes me think of how my grandmother spoke French. It is the fate of many Jews to speak with a foreign accent. Was Sax ashamed of coming from a German family? And what does this have to do with his painting, his art? It has a whole lot to do with it. His portraits of his aged, white-haired mother tell us many things about the artist and his feelings. In Sax’s portraits of his mother a famous French art historian sees a tenderness, a humanity otherwise absent from his work.

  So what will I write about Julian Sax? I don’t know, I am deeply interested in him and every time I come across an article dealing with him I cut it out. I’d like to know everything about his life, but for no reason, almost like a reader of the glossies who follows the doings of the British royal family. It’s a bit like that, but there’s something else, especially a sense of guilt because I lack his courage. Giving up on life to be a great artist. He works while others talk about him. He must carry on painting, defying his age; he doesn’t know how many more pictures he will be able to paint. What’s more, old age makes him more fragile, he is unwell every so often and has to be admitted to hospital. He is arrogant but his dedication to work amends for that. But I, with the excuse that a writer must have many experiences, waste time on travel, inconsequential little jobs, and social engagements. I have never had the strength of character to be only a novelist, and to stop looking for other things. I have never been able to take chances, to go all the way, to measure myself against myself, my books. I am shy, I am afraid of suffering and I need to feel more secure about my talent, sell myself better.

  Perhaps I’ll never write Sax’s biography, but if I did I would disagree with the idea that he is an English painter. He is a painter who uses English people, clothes, places and gardens, but at heart he has the feelings of a German Romantic. His is the spirit of Immensee, even though he won’t hear of that and does his utmost to be remembered as a debauchee and a playboy. His model is Byron, but unlike his hero he cannot leave England because as a child he had to leave Germany. This is why he won’t even live in Paris, because he’s afraid of getting lost, of betraying his talent. He is an orderly, industrious man, something he needs on the one hand because it is his strength and on the other because it is the object of his scorn. That’s why when he was still poor and less well known he gambled and drank like a madman. His work and his talent enabled him to love impossible or improbable women so he could prove to himself that he was no bourgeois, but transgressive, an artist and a rebel. An insolent man who doesn’t believe in God and lives according to his moods. He wanted to become a great artist because he understood that this gave him the power he was looking for, the power to create and destroy his paintings, his friends and his women as he pleased. He knows he is not a likeable man, but he couldn’t care less about that.

  2

  VENICE

  IN VENICE THE TALK was all about the Sax exhibition. The Biennale was showing three paintings and one triptych by Bacon. Who was the greater: Bacon or Sax? A gallery owner said:

  “One is a great artist, the other is a good painter.”

  I asked, “And Velázquez?”

  “He was a great artist.”

  “So isn’t Sax a great artist?”

  “He’s a good painter.”

  I went to see the Sax exhibition with Rossa and a friend of ours. He criticised Sax’s technique, pointing out the flaws, the mistaken shadows; he spared only a very few portraits, he was ruthless. I was not very interested in his judgement. I knew the history of many of the paintings and had already seen them elsewhere. Rossa paid attention to his criticisms, but did not agree with them wholeheartedly. I let myself be carried away by the atmosphere of the entire work. In the first paintings you can still sense the influence of the German world, then you see that Sax had wanted to become English, a Londoner. The last picture on show was a portrait of a girl—Matteo Esse is sure to maintain that there are compositional errors, made up for by an extraordinary sense of youth. Esse is really enthusiastic about the exhibition, which he takes as an act of revenge that did justice to the world of contemporary art. Portraits of unknowns were mixed with those of other artists, of powerful men, animals and children. Sax was not in Venice but his dealer gave a dinner in his honour and the tables were enlivened by superb pink peonies, Rossa’s favourite flower. But what was left for me to do? By now Sax had been consecrated in Italy too and the event that had prompted me to take an interest in him had come to pass. I knew that for a long time he had been misunderstood because his painting had been considered bourgeois, anti-revolutionary. Figurative painters were beyond the pale, and this had always aroused the indignation of Matteo Esse and Charles Bloom. In those difficult years Sax continued to paint with perseverance. It took a long time before his family began to consider him a true artist. It was odd how Sax, on getting old, had grown like his works: he dressed in beige, white and ivory, the same colours as his portraits. For this reason the last self-portraits were ever more lifelike and you could see how the artist, who at seventy had painted himself nude, still vigorous, now preferred to appear dressed and almost diaphanous. His obsessive relationship with work was captu
red well by Bloom in an interview published in La Stampa, in which he said that Sax had not gone to Venice because he had no time to spare, because all his time, night and day, was devoted to work. Sax no longer went against the flow because he had won his battle. He had become like a great court painter of former times, like van Dyck, or Velázquez.

  What I still don’t know about him is his relationship with Judaism, of which virtually nothing is ever said. Maybe it’s because he has flouted all the rules in this sense. Religious Jews are forbidden to reproduce human images, whereas he devotes himself chiefly to doing that. In Venice I talked with Sidney Wallace, his dealer, who asked me:

  “Did you finally meet Sax?”

  “Yes, with my daughter, last week, at Tony’s. He told us he wasn’t coming to Venice because he had no time to waste. He was in a good mood, he had just finished the portrait of the girl that is on show here at the exhibition.”

  I was lying, but I knew Wallace would not check up.

  “He didn’t come because he was unwell, he has been in hospital.”

  “When?”

  “A month ago.”

  “But we saw him after that.”

  “Yes, perhaps he had just been discharged.”

  It was amusing to see how jealous Wallace was of his client. No one could know better than he what happened day by day in Sax’s life. He attached enormous importance to being the best informed, the one who knew most.

  3

  NEW YORK

  I WENT BACK TO NEW YORK on business and I chanced to bump into a very intelligent German publisher I have known for years because he was a friend of my father’s. A man with an adventurous past, which he had always combined with the world of culture and business. He was said to be a great seducer.

  Outwardly, he looks like a gentleman, or a fictional hero. He speaks English with a slight accent that makes his conversation even more attractive. He looks like a very wealthy man, although he isn’t. But he has friends all over the world: politicians, bankers, great journalists, artists. His home is a beautiful house in Paris, and he is an enthusiastic opera lover. Fond of wearing flamboyant double-breasted pinstripe suits, he is considered an amusing man, a true cosmopolitan and is invited for weekends to the most exclusive country houses.

  We had a drink in the hotel bar. He talked to me about literature and music. I told him that I had seen Julian Sax’s exhibition in Venice and that maybe I was going to start writing a novel about him.

  “But why? It’s not worth the effort! He’s not very interesting. He doesn’t warrant a novel. There are plenty of other subjects. Write a thriller, write a book about the people you have met, on your relationship with Judaism! At most you can write a short story about Sax, but believe me, not even that is worth the effort.”

  “But he is a great artist!”

  “So they say, but he is a person of little interest, very little indeed.”

  I realised that it was time to change the subject and that he wasn’t going to be the publisher of my book.

  I must say that the German publisher’s remarks about Sax puzzled me. Probably his judgement was subjective, motivated by old affairs with women or by jealousy over such an explosive and unexpected success. Many say that Sax pretends to be an ascetic, that he only thinks of painting, whereas in reality he is a worldly, superficial man. But what does that matter? I continue to meet people who talk about him to me, but I can’t get my novel started because I don’t have a plot. I thought of having Rossa take a fancy for Sax, which would lead to my jealousy. She could become his model and something might grow up between them, but it’s a banal storyline; by now he has had many models, too many.

  Do I envy his freedom in love? His success? His money? No, I envy his strength of character, his perseverance, his arrogance, his talent. His constant desire to paint another portrait. I find it extraordinary that his paintings are snapped up at astronomical prices by great collectors and by the world’s most important museums. Sax devotes all his time to painting, trying to interpret a face, a body, a place. His work reveals a great tenderness for animals and a meticulous, almost excessive attention for his human models. No destiny seems to me more enviable than that of an artist who can permit himself to observe the world around him and to reproduce it in his own way.

  4

  ROSSA

  AT THE END OF JULY I TOOK ROSSA to Paris, where we had not been for a long time. We stayed in a little hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I wanted to feel free in a place where writers are respected, where many important books have been written. The list of artists who lived and worked in Paris during the twentieth century is endless and even though that world has now disappeared completely, you still breathe in an atmosphere that, every so often, I feel a need for. It’s still possible to sit down in a café, order a drink and write for hours without being disturbed. The truth is that I went there because, as I obsessed over the possibility or not of writing a book about Sax, I had the feeling I had lost my way. I was confused. So I decided first of all to recover possession of my identity as a writer.

  As soon as we arrived we went out for a stroll. I told Rossa that I consider rue Visconti the most beautiful street in the world. She seemed puzzled. I pointed out a small two-story house where Racine died in 1675. Then I took her to rue des Grands-Augustins, where Picasso used to live.

  The next day, we had lunch at Benoît’s, an old restaurant, with two French friends. We were talking about literature and one of them, a refined intellectual who teaches in the United States, came out with a violent tirade against Sartre:

  “If French literature has gone stale, it’s partly his fault. He left a blot of black ink. His pupils are intelligent, but who gives a damn for intelligence? You have to be much more than that. Kundera is a novelist, but he’s not French. There aren’t any writers like Gide any more!”

  Rossa had fun, but she is worried by other things, she is afraid of fanatical Islamic fundamentalism that, according to her, could trigger a total war.

  On our way back to the hotel, in rue de Seine she asked me:

  “Where can you live in peace?”

  “In Patagonia,” I replied without hesitation.

  And she:

  “My sister always wanted to send our brother Massimo to Patagonia!”

  A bomb could destroy the museums, the paintings, the monuments. I knew this well because years before I had been in Afghanistan and I had seen the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

  Walking along the Quai Voltaire, I showed Rossa Sennelier, an old shop that sells canvases, colours, pencils, brushes and turpentine. It was very hot and Rossa was walking idly, a little indolent. I found her more and more beautiful. We had been making love for many years and ours was like a long amorous conversation, without interruptions.

  She has really beautiful long legs, and a wonderful little mouth. She still smelled like a child and had an attractive, good smile. She was a woman who loved to laugh and have fun and she never talked of her sorrows. If need be, she would keep her distance, and she was never indiscreet. Without a doubt she was vain and liked to look at herself naked in the mirror, to see that her body was still young, enviable. A solitary person, she detested social life. But she loved to dance; it was as if she had a drop of African or Brazilian blood, which sometimes made her uncontrollable, wild. We would talk a lot but we could be silent too. In the early days of our relationship we used to argue, but then the fights grew fewer and we learnt to understand each other. We didn’t want anyone to interfere with our life.

  We felt so good in Paris that I would have liked to stop time, so that summer would never end. The thought of the short, cold winter days made me feel terribly sad.

  During those days I would have liked to be able to paint Rossa’s portrait, but the truth was that I had another vice, that of giving my pen free rein and inventing stories. To capture on paper a state of mind, a place, a thought. Perhaps I could have portrayed Rossa better with a pen than with brushes. She could beco
me my model for a book. It would have been much better to drop Sax and get inside the head of the woman I loved. She was elusive when I asked her about past affairs. All I got was sketchy allusions. Sometimes, if she told me of certain things in her life before we met, I would be amused; at other times I grew jealous because I couldn’t bear the idea that she had had other men, other experiences before me. Life as a couple is like that. What counts is your partner’s story, because you already know the truth about yourself. We all recount our past in our own way. I remember that Rossa attached great importance to her photographs, which she guarded jealously. One day, as we were watching a scene from a film by Truffaut, in which the leading lady was cutting up some photographs with scissors, she had said to me: