SYLVIE'S RIDDLE

by WALL, ALAN

  Picasso had been to the corrida thousands of times. He had seen how the bull's horns heave away at the picadors' horses, thrusting, goring, penetrating, even while the spears slice in to his bloody back. He cannot cease from this; this is what he does. Stopping is not an option. This tragic pressure was what held and fascinated Picasso. He simply couldn't leave the subject alone.

  In some of the engravings and etchings, the creature wasn't far-off urbane, drinking his wine, caressing his sweetheart. In others the pressure of his physicality was urgent and baffling. In pressing against the body of the woman, he was pressing against his own body too, while youths with wreathed foreheads played their flutes. In one, astonishingly - what an artist Picasso was - the woman sat and watched him in his sleep, a curly tangle of unfathomability, veiled by a curtain. In another he was crouched on top of her, his bull-belly drumming away at the delta where his fluids might finally flow. In some of them he was the bull crouching in submission to his own final sword, except that there was no sword. There was a human presence, which was enough to quell him. Perhaps Theseus hadn't wielded his magic sword at all, merely spoken. The words themselves had made him realise that his miserable kingdom was at an end. And that was the other thing about the minotaur's death: it was so clearly desired. Not resisted but accepted. And the women looked on. Rows upon rows of women's faces looked on as the minotaur lay dying, his bellow now an aria. He had become beautiful at last.

  Henry's favourite was the drypoint of 1933, Minotaur Kneeling Over Sleeping Girl. He was entranced. There was no hint of violence, present or to come. It was only too evident that this was an act of adoration. If she had spoken in her sleep and demanded it, he would have accepted self-annihilation as his fate.

  The bell rang and Henry rose from his reverie. In the gallery, smiling and be-ribboned, stood Marie Coleforth, owner of the Heights Gallery.

  'Hello Henry. I've brought you a present. Two presents, actually.' From the Marks and Spencer bag she produced a bottle of chianti, and the vegetarian pizza which he had made for Miriam French. 'There's only one catch: I'm hungry and I wouldn't mind a glass of wine.'

  So they sat in the Picasso Room and ate and drank.

  'I'm beginning to think my beloved Pablo must have been Italian.'

  'How's that?'

  'The amount of pizza and chianti that's consumed in here.'

  'I'll bring you paella next time. But looking at these pictures, I suppose we could check if there's a Spanish speciality involving bull's testicles.'

  'I'm sure there must be, but I'd rather not find out. I've grown too fond of my minotaur friend in here to want to eat his balls.'

  'Why are you fond of him?' He had only dealt with Marie on business matters before; it intrigued him how coquettish she seemed to have become suddenly. He wondered, was she normally like that with all men, or was it especially for him? Look at the way she's dressed. But then it couldn't be especially for him; they'd both been around far too long for that. She was certainly taller than Henry, though the hair she'd had spiked added a few more inches. And she wore heels too, so it was possible that in her stocking feet they'd come out evens. Brown eyes warm with amusement. Why are you so fond of the minotaur, Henry? The lady asked you a question.

  'I wondered if we might have shared an address for a while inside the labyrinth.'

  'You've prepared this really nicely, Henry.'

  'I switched the oven on, yes. Odd how women always compliment you for heating things up. It's like being given a certificate for finding your way to the bathroom. What do you think? That the Meals on Wheels lady normally does my dinner? You must have a look at my shirts later. The way I wash and iron them, you'll probably have me crowned King of Hungary.' Marie carried on smiling. For a woman who'd just been ditched by her husband of fifteen years, she looked remarkably cheerful about things. Maybe it is my presence, he thought. Women did seem to smile at him a lot. Minotaurs and women: they both trusted him.

  'Miriam really enjoyed her evening here, you know.'

  'Evidently. She went back and made you write down my secret recipe for buying pizzas. Thank God I didn't do the minotaur's testicles with rice'

  'Said you were better company than any man she could remember for a long time.'

  'Did she really say that?'

  'You were very articulate on the subject of Picasso, she said, but then I could have told her that. She found it such a relief from the butch prattlers in London these days talking about their cars or football or property prices.' Here Marie winked. Henry, you are being winked at. What's going on here? 'She said if she'd not been gay, she'd have given you one.'

  'I could have dressed up as a woman for the night; I'm very adaptable. '

  'You don't have to dress up as a woman for me, Henry.'

  The Fade on the Greatcoat

  When Owen walked into the room and saw the camera on its tripod, with John hovering over it, and then the chair with the greatcoat draped over it, he almost turned and walked out again.

  'Nearly ready, Owen.' John Tamworth had become aware that in taking Owen in and out of focus he was sliding him in and out of existence. He didn't pretend to himself that there wasn't a certain amount of pleasure here. Owen had sometimes made his life seriously unpleasant. The affairs, the unpredictability, the recurrent amnesia, the insouciant come-as-you-may lordliness; all this had grated with John, an old-style socialist who believed that human beings should try to sink their egos into the greater community. He had always believed that, and he still believed it. No amount of talk about markets and freedom would stop him believing it. At some impenetrable level, he suspected that Owen believed it too, but it didn't affect his behaviour much. Owen had managed to layer John with resentments over the years, and it was only now for the first time that they were all being given the chance of a decent airing. Owen made his way over to the chair and sat down.

  'Put the greatcoat on.'

  'I'm not cold.'

  'The temperature has nothing to do with it. We're making a film, remember? Alex was cold, very cold, but that didn't stop us filming, did it? Put the greatcoat on, Owen.' And Owen did as he was told. John was feeling more authoritative with every take. 'What do you do when you have the greatcoat on?'

  'I go to see Alfred.'

  'And what happens with Alfred?'

  'Alfred always wants to find out what's in my mind.'

  'Why?'

  'Ask Alfred. '

  'He's not here.'

  'He's not far from here. Ask me questions I can answer.'

  'Does Alfred have his own images to live in too?'

  'Yes. Most of them come from the Book of Revelation. For Alfred the world is filled with beasts and redeemers, with angels of light and servants of Babylon, whoring after strange gods, and fornicating in the temple. Every inch of reality is contested by the forces of good and the forces of evil. He lives in the scriptural equivalent of a Fellini film.'

  'Why did you make us do that rape scene at the last minute, Owen?'

  'I'd been trying to think about it from the other way around.

  Abu Ghraib, Undy England, giving her victory sign over a pile of male bodies. History usually arranged it otherwise. But that's progress for you. And a digital image too, instantly transmittable. What a difference democracy makes. Even women can sexually taunt the enemy, given sufficient military resources behind them. I was trying to work out how we form those images we recognised when we see ourselves coming the other way, out of mirrors, out of photographs.'

  'The costumes were anonymous, John, in case you've forgotten, because the plot was transposable. Chester, Bosnia, Rome, Iraq. We didn't spend too long in Iraq after that contractor was kidnapped though, did we? Decided most of our necessary effects could probably be achieved back home in the studio after all. So the studio was the world then, John. It was the Globe and the globe. That's what we decided. The passion happened anywhere and everywhere. One warehouse with a concrete floor was reality, and I was trying to make it real
. Wasn't that our job?

  'What does military occupation mean except that order is to be brought from disorder, and that can only mean that the agents of disorder are the native inhabitants. Some force will need to be applied to get them to see sense. The sense of the impenum. Force has a tendency to generate more of itself, and appetites are universal. So bodies get used for what they normally get used for in war: the accommodation of someone else's need, or a lot of people's needs - a lot of soldiers' needs. A certain amount of humiliation might as well be thrown in, just to show that no apologies are required when you have the power. Men have always humiliated women and boasted about it. I was trying to convey that, not glorify it. '

  John remembered reading once how, during the recording of In A Silent Way, Miles Davis had told the guitarist John McLaughlin: 'Play the guitar as though you don't know how to play the guitar.' That was what John was learning to do with his camera. He focused finally not on Owen's face, but on the greying greatcoat. Then he pressed the fade button.

  Back at the Signum

  Sylvie had switched on the overhead projector and slid the image into place on the glass.

  'What are we looking at. Any guesses? Lionel?' Lionel looked at the image on the screen for a moment.

  'Microbes?'

  'That's a very good guess, Lionel. It's totally wrong, but it's a very good guess. And the reason it's a good guess is that you realised you are looking through a lens. The image is circular. There are little blooms in it, little pink squirms among the green. Little blobs of something. Microbes, molecules, viruses. Actually they're little blobs of light. This is a picture from the Hubble Telescope, and what we're seeing is the Large Magellanic Cloud. It's 160,000 light years away. The light left home to travel in our direction not during the time of the last Ice Age, but the one before that. This light has been doing some serious travelling, before we made this image out of it. Because we did have to make the image; this isn't just a snapshot in space. This image has been constructed. And there are times with the Hubble images when aesthetics seems to play as large a part as scientific enquiry. We have that on Dr Helsey's authority.' Fucking Tom.

  'Lionel thought he was looking through a microscope, but in fact he was looking through a telescope. You have to be aware of both the lenses and the constellations they're pointing at, otherwise you can't make sense of reality. Now, I've spoken to you before about the seventeenth century. Let's remember Swift.

  Here's that passage from Gulliver's Travels I've already read to you. This is Brobdingnag:

  The Kingdom is much pestered with Flies in Summer; and these odious Insects, each of them as big as a Dunstable Lark, hardly gave me any Rest while I sat at Dinner, with their continual Humming and Buzzing about mine Ears. They would sometimes alight upon my Victuals, and leave their loathsome Excrement or Spawn behind, which to me was very visible, although not to the Natives of that Country, whose large Optics were not so acute as mine in viewing smaller Objects.

  'This passage simply could not have been written without the publication of Micrographia, with its illustrations of the large grey drone-fly and the flea. We can actually point to a publication and announce that this one book has changed the way we see reality. We're looking at existence through different lenses. And what's interesting about the passage from Swift is his awareness of different optical realms; our optics are appropriate to our functions, and in a sense both the telescope and the microscope have started to confuse the issue, to the evident distress of Pope. Remember what he wrote:

  Why has not man a miscroscopic eye?

  For this plain reason: man is not a fly.

  'The fact is that Gulliver's eye in Brobdingnag is a microscope, and much pain it causes him as he gazes on human lice upon the human body. The most famous of the illustrations in Micrographia had been a sixteen-inch fold-out of a louse. The genius of Gulliver's Travels was to understand that perception had been altered for ever by the introduction of both the telescope and the microscope.

  'And the vast space of the Baroque entered had entered Milton’s mind through a telescope, though by the time he came to portray that vastness, he was himself already blind. He'd had a look through one though; remember he describes his visit to Galileo in Areopagitica. Though the words of Paradise Lost were written by a blind man, they seem to see the vast spaces more vividly than even the most apocalyptic of its illustrators, John Martin. And what they see is the demolition of boundaries. The reality had been so powerfully lensed that its reality didn't fade, even in blindness.

  'What does all this teach us? That we live with lenses, we live before lenses and we live behind them. We can't imagine what life would be like without them.'

  As Sylvie walked down the corridor she saw Alison coming the other way, a large smile on her face.

  'Next week. Wednesday at 11 o'clock in 1101. If we all vote together, we can get him out.'

  This was the long-expected vote of no confidence which, if carried, would go all the way to Senate, and result either in Hamish's dismissal or diplomatic re-deployment. No sooner had she stepped into her room than the phone rang. It was Hamish.

  'I was wondering if we might have a little chat at some point.

  Some point in the very near future, I mean.'

  Inquisitorial Lens

  Owen looked again at the chair with the greatcoat draped over it, and john adjusting his lens. He felt sick.

  'Could we skip one day, John?'

  'No. I said if you wanted to stay here, you'd have to let me work.

  This is my work at the moment, and you're a part of it. Anyway, you're going to have to do this sooner or later, and you might as well do it with me. Remember, I don't charge. Regard it as a form of therapy. Put the coat on, Owen.'

  John noticed that Owen no longer met his gaze while the camera was running. Nor did he look into the lens. He simply stared before him. The continuing interrogation had induced a kind of autism in his physiognomy. But John was going to produce an expression from his old friend today. Just see if he didn't.

  'When you write, are you trying to describe reality or re-create it?'

  'I don't think those things are incompatible.'

  'But in Loving Every Minute, the woman was not an actual woman, was she? This woman, a victim of violence who had ended up conniving in her own entrapment, she came out of your head.'

  'But I could only put her together from observation. I didn't make her out of nothing. I made her out of something.'

  'In Dawn in the Cave, it was simpler, I think. You were making connections. Connections between the paintings on the walls of the caves and Picasso's images of bulls and minotaurs. Corridas and labyrinths. The mazes at Knossos and the riddling way that art and ritual complicate things to finally make them simpler, to take us through a necessary passage of darkness back out to the light.'

  'That was simpler, yes.'

  'But in Deva, you took the facts of war as you saw them, and you collated them. You shaped a universal template of the reality of war, a template which had never existed in any actual war.'

  'War is a moveable feast.'

  'Or a moveable sacrifice. And then you tested that reality against a number of characters who were fictional. The bereaved old lady, the ruined man, the brutal commander and the girl ... what was her name, Owen?'

  'You know what her name was.'

  'But I want you to tell me.' For the first time he said it. That name. Very slowly.

  'Alex. Alex Gregory.'

  And you did something I've seen you do before. To help you find the reality you were searching for, you used her mind. You explored fictional realities through an actual mind and body.'

  'It's not unknown.'

  'Maybe not. But I've never known anyone else do it to the same extent. To find out how she'd act on a bed, you fucked her first. That shows great commitment to your work, Owen. Your pursuit of the perfect image involved her becoming one.' Owen had now put his head in his hands; John let the lens come slowly into fo
cus.

  And to see how she would react to being raped you set the scene up so that she almost was. With the local louts who'd been drinking, and weren't really acting much at all. If the rest of us hadn't been there, then they would have raped her, wouldn't they?'

  'Bresson didn't like using professional actors. He preferred people from the shops and the street. '

  'You must have known how it would cut into her mind, Owen.

  You'd been having an affair with her for a year. Everyone could see she was vulnerable, but you'd got to see her at much closer quarters than the rest of us. Why couldn't you trust me to fake it?' Owen's face now swung up out of his hands.

  'Because I wanted it real. I didn't want it faked. I wanted the actual terror in her eyes. That's what we're trying to do, isn't it? Convey some reality in a world so filled with images that no one bothers to look at them any more.'

  'Well, you succeeded, all right. Take the newspaper out of your greatcoat pocket. '

  'I don't want to.'

  And Alex didn't want those boys tearing away her clothes and sticking their hands up her thighs while you held her hand and told her to stay there. You must remember the things we do in search of our truthful image, Owen. Take the newspaper out and turn to the middle pages.'

  There was a photograph of Alex, a picture from the family album, with her smiling, her full cheeks bright with sun and nourishment. And then there was a photograph of the bothie on the headland, the bleak sea beyond, and the headline: Why Did This Girl Starve To Death Alone? For the first time in all the hours of footage, John started to zoom very slowly towards Owen's face. Which had frozen. No tears. No expression. Nothing. He held the shot for a full minute before switching the camera off.