Asunder

by Aridjis, Chloe

  Days after the art restorer’s visit those three syllables—cra-que-lure—continued to rumble in my head. The allure of the crack, the lure of the crackle, the lair of the kraken. The crack of dawn, the crack of doom.

  Little by little, I began to notice small changes in mood. At home, I felt ever more susceptible to things around me, above all to the abundance of creams, oils, facial masques and body lotions that Jane kept in our bathroom, combatants against the passage of time. Ever since I’d known her she’d been spending a small fortune on this mission to keep her skin supple and smooth, tender and silky for the one, and now each time I entered I felt the jars and bottles mocking me with their sweet pungent scents. In the past she’d been drawn to unavailable characters—men paralysed by depression, addicts or alcoholics, urban hermits or living overseas; there was always something safely in the way, an expiry date stamped on the package. And once one man was out of the picture, it took a while to erase the rough Braille he’d left on her looks and perfect herself for the next. But now, perhaps, if she had met the one she could relax the campaign.

  Meanwhile, in our flat, the moths continued to gather thickly. Jane laid out more traps, now in all the rooms, strips on the tops of cabinets, dressers and wardrobes. Yet the ones on my landscapes weren’t decomposing rapidly enough, stubbornly resisting disintegration as if aware they would be replaced the moment they showed so much as a tear. Morning and night I would check for developments but no, these little brown torsos and wings remained intact, holding fast, in one final stance, to their makeshift landscapes.

  At work I found myself challenged by ever greater feats of self-control. My patience was tested in new ways. For instance, I was both startled and not a little annoyed to note the presence of a new painting in Room 86 and the absence of one that’d hung there for as long as I had been working at the National Gallery. It was typical of curators not to let guards know about changes—overnight, paintings would be switched around or taken down and the next day you would send someone to the wrong room to see a painting that was no longer there.

  In the Sainsbury Wing, one of the first things our new director had done was move the location of the Battle of San Romano; he decided the Italian paintings should be shown chronologically and that this Uccello should come earlier, so one day we arrived at work and saw it had been moved from Room 55 to 54. Ever since, people have walked past it. Had we been asked our opinion we would have told him that its original place on a wall that could be seen as one approached from several rooms away was more powerful than its current peripheral location. But no one takes our views into account.

  During my tea break I went down to Human Resources and complained about the change in Room 86, struggling to contain myself as I explained that in order to do our job well we needed to be kept up to date on every alteration in the Gallery, that they ran the risk of making their guards look like fools by keeping us in the dark, and that if it were ever repeated I would resign, a lie naturally but I wanted to throw in some drama to make more of an impression. The woman nodded from behind her desk, glancing over at her colleagues to see their reaction, everyone was absorbed in a task, and she said note taken without taking much note, and before I knew it, it was time to get back to work.

  Thursday was especially relentless. From room to room, post to post, a weary transference of grey as my colleagues and I released ourselves from one position and slipped into the next, rooms chairs thresholds, thresholds chairs rooms, as we carried out our silent musical-chairs rotation.

  At half past four, time seemed to decelerate to an unbearable pace. Rotation didn’t solve anything. In each room the minutes got caught in the same thick transparent gel. Searching for signs of movement, I studied the visitors. A hunched man in his seventies wearing trainers and a plastic rose ring—a retired actor perhaps, or a famous painter, or a tourist from Miami. A woman with cropped black hair and bright red glasses who kept checking her watch as if about to run off. A fat man with his shirt hanging out of his trousers, who seemed perpetually short of breath, stopping to pant in front of every painting. It was often tempting, and all too easy, to transfer a bad mood on to others—all I had to do was go up and scold someone for standing too close to a painting when they’d been keeping a respectful distance and then ignore their protests. I considered approaching the woman in red glasses just for some variety but she left before I had the chance.

  A couple walked in and went to stand in front of paintings at opposite ends of the room. They moved counterclockwise, overlapping only once at a painting in the centre, and finished at the same time, then floated silently into the next room. Not long afterwards another couple, far less silent, the man pontificating without breaks, entered and exited the room, leaving behind a different kind of mood.

  Two young Italians, one in a wheelchair, appeared, speaking loudly. One could tell they were brothers, they had the same forehead, the same curly dark hair, the same pitchy eyes, but the one in the wheelchair had a larger, more distinctive nose and was therefore more handsome. Each time his brother wheeled him before a painting he would crane his neck and try to make himself higher, a casualty, along with children and small people, of the established dictates of museum height. Yet his brother kept pointing at things from an angle that ignored the constraints by which his sibling was bound. Each time he pointed, the other one strained to see, and I fought the urge to walk over and gently intervene by perhaps suggesting one brother hold the other up to what he wanted to show him rather than futilely point it out, but instead I kept still, tapping my foot once or twice.

  A large group entered next, a flock of tourists straggling behind one of our so-called educators in a tour organised by the Gallery. I stood up from my chair, straightened my tie and aimed at total verticality, feet parallel and back columned with wall, and waited to see whether my efforts would be acknowledged. But not once, as the guide began waxing on and on about the ‘unequivocal musicality’ of a certain painting, did he so much as glance in my direction. I knew he had seen me—after years of working at the same place, the wiles of others were familiar—and that afternoon he went as far as to comment on the female gallery assistants, so drab amidst the mythological women around them. A few visitors looked timidly in my direction but most were kind enough to ignore his attempt at humour.

  Guy Mount had been tour guide for nearly as long as I’d worked there but we only occasionally, luckily, crossed paths. He drew a clear and unconcealed distinction within the staff and looked upon us security folk with disdain, his rust-coloured eyes peering down from his educated heights, oblivious to the sophisticated thoughts that might, just might, be flowing through even our minds every now and then. He was the sort of person who said nasty things with a smile.

  Every institution has its visible side and its invisible one, and our Gallery was no different. We guards inhabited both realms, occupying backstage and front, though more the front, and the Gallery’s image depended on us. Curators and directors meanwhile remained behind the scenes, dispatching important decisions from somewhere below. Guides were a third category in between. They felt superior to us yet inferior to the curators, and moved freely between above and below, deferential towards those who knew more, terse with those they assumed knew less. Most of them were cordial. Except for Guy Mount.

  And each time we overlapped in a room, my ears were forced to listen as he raised and lowered his voice, especially loud when he sensed the visitors’ excitement, then down once he had their attention, then up again the moment he caught sight of someone drifting, then down once he had them back. That day his voice seemed to issue from somewhere beyond, as if he were speaking through many characters at once, a deck of worn, greasy cards in which the top one acted as mouthpiece for those stacked beneath.

  I sensed a current travelling up my right arm, electricity waiting to short-circuit and run amok, and I struggled to contain my anger, forcing a smile when two completely disoriented teens came up to ask after the room with the Hogarth
s. Something like heartburn flared up at the centre of my chest. An animal was awakening, cracking its joints and flexing its claws. Yet by some magical force, or perhaps simply through channelling Ted, for he would’ve resisted confrontation and accepted his position within the hierarchy, I managed to contain myself.

  What they failed to ask at my job interview nine years ago was whether I ever entertained violent thoughts, to which I would reply, today, Yes, all the time, and more so with every passing hour. How not to occasionally envision the Gallery as a great locus of violent acts, a potential arena of destruction at both the paint layer and the human?

  When I went to stand in front of Venus my eyes could only focus on the network of cracks, a shawl of time draped over her shoulders and running down her back, the paint thinned under so many gazes, especially male, the heaviest gaze of all.

  As if to prove my point, a middle-aged man entered the room and came to stand in front of her, his oily pink face full of rapture. I withdrew to my post, a vanishing act in my grey uniform. After a few minutes of gaping he extricated himself from the spell and moved on, falling captive, before long, to another two-dimensional figure; even the most beautiful things, I loved to remind myself, carry out a limited conquest of space.

  During my final shift I experienced yet more pulses of anger, the kind I have for the first day or two each time I quit smoking, when two girls entered the room laughing. One of them was punching things into her phone as she walked. If there was one thing I hated it was gadgetry, especially in the museum, and though the tiny plastic keys hardly made noise they always seemed loud to me. I bit my bottom lip as the girl stopped in front of me, ignoring my presence to the point that her right foot was nearly stepping on mine, and pressed a few keys. I was taller so could look straight down at the phone in her hand and see what she was typing. As far as I could tell, she’d composed one message, sent it off, and was now starting another. She ran through her list of contacts, her little fingers impatiently kneading the pad, and started yet another text. Grab the object and toss it across the room, I thought to myself, watch the screen crack into lightning bolts.

  And then, like some kind of biblical release, a wonderfully familiar tune at a quarter to six: the jangling of keys. Just as on every other afternoon at a quarter to six, my colleague Henry came ambling through the rooms, hinting to visitors that soon our tiny kingdom would close. He jangled them loudly as he walked, indulging in his favourite moment of the day, when the sun set on our museum and everyone, native and from overseas, was ushered towards the door. There were always one or two individuals who hung back until the last possible minute, to buy the final postcard or see that final painting, and Henry would remind them they could return tomorrow but the reply never varied: they had an early plane or train to catch, this was their very last evening in London, they couldn’t leave until, until, until . . .

  At closing time, key jangling aside, I often thought back on old Dietrich, a former colleague. Dietrich had worked at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, home to one of the finest painting collections in Europe, people say, for fourteen years before coming to the Gallery. He was with us for only ten months and then left under mysterious circumstances. He missed his old job too much and suffered from a ‘devastating nostalgia’, he confessed, for the paintings in the other collection. Everything, in fact, was about the other collection. At the other collection, there were many more Dürers. At the other collection, there were also more Cranachs (twenty-two to our eleven). At the other collection, the frames were less conspicuous. At the other collection, there were fewer tourists. At the other collection, people didn’t talk so loudly in front of the paintings. At the other collection, they had a nicer way of announcing that the museum was closing. This last reminiscence was, in fact, what wouldn’t free him.

  I can’t remember when it started—it must have been the day someone in the canteen inquired into how visitors at the Gemäldegalerie were asked to leave at closing time. Upon hearing this question, Dietrich’s face lit up and he wiped his mouth with a napkin before explaining to all at the table that each afternoon at exactly 5.45 the museum would play the opening bars of Ode to Joy followed by a recording that would say ‘The Museum will be closing in fifteen minutes’ in German, French, English and Spanish. Between each language the same tune from Ode to Joy would ring out. After a decade and a half of listening to this morsel of Beethoven—without ever, he admitted, buying the recording and hearing the rest—it was etched in his mind like his own name.

  It wasn’t long after this conversation in the canteen that Dietrich started to look greatly disturbed whenever closing time approached. His face would cloud over and he’d grow distant and not reply when spoken to. Something was wrong, there’d been a shift in the Teutonic plates, and one day he stopped coming to work. Later, we were told a cousin had come to take him back to Berlin. That was years ago, when I first started working at the Gallery, but I’d still think of him at closing time.

  After the pushout, museum-guard parlance for kindly requesting all visitors to leave, would come a quick sweep of the rooms to make sure no one had escaped our notice. The paintings fell out of focus; we searched for movement instead. After the halls were cleared, we would congregate in the vestibule for a final tally, some of us spent and still, others twitchy and impatient. Once everyone had been counted we would descend by the main staircase to our changing rooms and branch off into male and female. In a low end-of-day buzz, my colleagues and I would start to unzip, undo and unbutton, removing our grey and returning to civilians like a deflated army on reserve, no uniforms ever allowed to be worn outside the museum, and together with our male colleagues finally rejoin the city.

  After going through the motions that evening for the 3,000th time, I exited into Trafalgar Square, reminded of the weather and whatever else had been taking place outside. The square’s lack of coherence bothered me whenever I stopped to give it thought and in a perverse desire to prolong my bad mood I did just that, reiterating my dislike at having to contemplate anyone’s back, from that of Admiral Nelson to Charles I and his horse, not to mention the back of whatever unsightly thing had taken up residence on the plinth. Everything faced Westminster instead of the Gallery and that day just to add offence the two fountains in the square had been stilled, decapitated sea monsters on which pigeons and tourists came to roost in even greater flocks than usual.

  Daniel and I had agreed to meet in Piccadilly Circus to go to the Indian restaurant his Colombian friend had recommended. I walked up Haymarket and arrived a few minutes early, struck for the first time by how the layers of the fountain there, also stilled, could easily depict a few circles of hell. Towards the top was a ring of miserable carbonised pigeons, heads tucked in breasts. Below the pigeons, a ring of tourists breathing in city fumes. Below the tourists, a ring of steps coated with the muck of countless shoes from countless countries. Over these three rings, in a failed gesture towards transcendence, towered the statue of Eros with a snapped bow. I caught sight of Daniel about to cross the junction and rushed to meet him before he came to me.

  After so many years in London, I still didn’t have a grasp on Soho’s geography. The streets slipped through my fingers the moment I’d walked them regathering behind me like water, and I always had the sense that its residents and prowlers had a secret knowledge of the city’s chambers, held up a mirror to places no one else bothered to look.

  That evening the streets became a blaring blinking tangle of neon. Each turn felt like, and indeed was, the wrong one. At first I simply followed Daniel and his limp, assuming he’d looked up directions, but all he could remember, he eventually confessed, as Wardour turned into Frith and Frith to Greek, Brewer and Lexington, was something about a porn shop in an alleyway.

  After following several false leads, his instinct proving no better than mine, we came upon an alley with rows of shops with blackened windows. Large, crimson XXXs blinked above the doorways and huge light boxes with pictures of naked women with st
ars on their nipples cast an erotic glow on to the pavement. In one upstairs window I spotted a woman’s face looking down although she sat so quietly, I wasn’t sure whether it was a woman or a mannequin. Her lips, candy-apple red, seemed poised to indulge every wish, yet there was something, perhaps her vacant stare, that didn’t seem real. It looked strangely familiar and I wondered whether I’d seen it before, behind another window.

  Below in the alleyway, large bald men in suits, seedy doormen of fulfilment, hovered in shop entrances. They stopped talking when we appeared, probably eyeing us as potential customers, and lit fresh cigarettes as they stood guard over the red velvety curtains that they alone had the authority to sweep aside, a parting of the curtains, a parting of the legs.

  I glanced up at the window but the woman with the deadened gaze was no longer there. As we stood searching for the Indian restaurant amidst the flickering erotica, two peculiar men turned the corner and came ghosting down the alleyway like bodysnatchers on a mission. One was much taller than the other, he could have used his companion as a cane, and they both wore caps angled over their eyes. They passed uncomfortably close to us, I could hear the scraping of their leather jackets and smell the cigarettes they’d just stamped out, but their faces remained hidden and all I saw were their mouths, a dash and a smirk.