Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  This was what his art show would really be about, Morris realised: the moment of truth between two people, of awful truth, the rending of the veil that hides our unforgiveable selves from each other. And Morris would be making that statement, talking about that issue, which was supremely his issue, but without actually quite giving away his own personal truth.

  How brilliant! God!

  All at once Morris Duckworth felt so pleased with himself he squeezed his wife’s hand tight.

  ‘Oh Morris!’ she murmured.

  ‘Carissima,’ he sighed. Full of affection he pushed his face blindly through the dark and kissed her hair.

  ‘How sweet,’ she whispered. ‘What on earth was that for?’

  Chapter Four

  ‘IT’S ABOUT CHANGE,’ MORRIS said.

  The museum director was concerned that a show exclusively focused on killings and death might appear limited. The museum would be accused of morbid poor taste. The public would shy away. It would be hard to find sponsorship.

  ‘Not at all,’ Morris assured him. It would be innovative, political, psychological, anthropological, daring. ‘And I am providing the sponsorship.’

  It was as if an electric shock had galvanised a hitherto inert mass. Offensively sprawled in an executive swivel chair, countless kilos of flab shuddered and stiffened. The director almost pulled himself upright.

  ‘All of it, Signor Duckworth?’

  ‘If necessary, Dottor Volpi. Please do not underestimate my commitment to this town and to culture in general, or indeed my desire to be truly worthy of my, er, honorary citizenship.’

  Morris smiled through the scars that made him so interesting. Samira sat beside him. Portfolio in hand, she looked smart, glossy and very Arab, her jacket formal and her skirt tight.

  Volpi removed his spectacles which, rather than hooking over the ears, seemed to slot into wodges of flesh beside the eyes.

  Obesity is a crime, Morris reflected, an insult to the image of God in which we are all made.

  Volpi studied his lenses against the light from arched windows. Far too large for an office, the room contrived to be both cluttered and empty. Framed posters advertising previous exhibitions and stacks of old display panels did not make it more attractive. An ancient radiator ticked and bubbled.

  ‘Do you have the slightest idea, Signor Duckworth,’ the director sighed, his Neapolitan accent slow with gravelly irony, ‘how much these things cost: the transport and insurance of priceless works of art; the restoration of this or that masterpiece in return for its loan; the promotions required to reach any kind of serious national, never mind international public; do you?’

  He replaced his glasses, frowned at Samira, then reached toward her across his desk raising a peremptory eyebrow. Without a word or a smile, Samira handed him the portfolio.

  Morris kept calm. Do you have any idea, caro Dottor Gluttony, he could easily have replied, how much I am worth? A worldwide wine export business. Major construction contracts all over the Veneto. A fortune in real estate. Do you have even the slightest notion, he could have gone on, of the depth and extent of my reading and culture? Please do not treat as a crass Veronese entrepreneur a man who has studied English Literature at the best university in the world and whose thirty years in Italy have been spent visiting every art exhibition imaginable.

  Morris could have thus replied, with appropriate hauteur and icy conviction, and some years ago, no doubt, he would have done just that, in a fit of indignant pique, and with a certain acquired Veronese resentment towards slovenly southerners occupying important posts in the public administrations of the north. There were so many of them. But Massimina had been working hard of late to teach her earthly charge patience. Reaction is weakness, Morrees, hostility is defeat. You must come across as the director’s friend. You and he will be working together, you know. Don’t let them provoke you.

  Morris kept his mouth shut.

  Dottor Volpi opened the folder and began to leaf through the pages. As he did so his right knee started to jerk rhythmically on the ball of his foot so that the flesh on thighs and flanks quivered under his loose clothes. Looking at one image, he drew in his breath sharply, grunted and shook his head. His right hand scratched distractedly behind his left ear.

  Gross theatrics, Morris thought.

  Now the director began to lick his index finger to turn the pages faster and faster, almost as fast as his knee was jerking. This went on for some minutes, then the jerking stopped. Volpi drew a deep breath, closed the folder, rested both podgy hands on it, looked up at Samira again, stared at her for a moment as if at some exotic flower blossoming in a winter window box, then handed it back.

  ‘Grazie Signorina, er . . . ?’

  ‘Al Zuwaid. Samira Al Zuwaid.’

  ‘Ah, of course,’ the director smiled with avuncular benevolence, then gave a little push on the desk to swivel his bulk toward Morris.

  ‘Bizarre, Signor Duckworth. Quite bizarre, I have honestly never seen a proposal like it.’

  Morris smiled generously.

  ‘Bizarre and, alas, impossible.’

  Morris sustained his smile.

  ‘Giotto, Botticelli, Caravaggio’—the director rocked gently back and forth as he listed the names—‘Titian, Poussin, Delacroix’—each painter was accompanied by a little shake of the head—‘Bouguereau, Breugel, Cézanne.’ He sighed deeply. ‘Warhol, Koons, Hirst.’ He looked up: ‘Plus any number of minor artists.’

  ‘Artemisia Gentileschi,’ Morris pointed out.

  ‘Indeed, indeed, the delightful Gentileschi, so we have men and women.’

  ‘Men and woman.’

  ‘One is quite enough,’ Volpi opined. He frowned, then with belated graciousness added: ‘Especially if she is as charming as Signorina El Zaiwud.’

  ‘Al Zuwaid,’ Samira corrected.

  ‘Ah,’ Volpi coughed. ‘Of course. Chiedo scusa.’ His breasts quivered. ‘Where was I? Oils, etchings, sculptures. Wood, bronze, stone.’ Again he was shaking his head as if this helped his powers of recall: ‘Vases, tapestries, ivory inlays . . . Have I missed anything?’

  ‘Ebony bas-relief.’

  ‘Of course. Then: biblical legend, Greek myth, Roman myth, ancient history, modern history. The Renaissance, the baroque, Mannerism, Romanticism. Colonialism, tribalism, totemism. Impressionism, expressionism, modernism and postmodernism.’

  Volpi spoke in a rapid monotone, as if to underline with what wearisome ease he had taken in the mad scope of Morris’s proposal.

  ‘Jack the Ripper,’ Morris prompted. ‘Photography.’

  ‘Indeed. Nothing more murderous than photography. Regicide, parricide, matricide, fratricide, uxoricide, martyrdom, execution, murder with robbery, murder with rape . . .’

  ‘Infanticide,’ Morris chimed. ‘Pietro Testa’s Massacre of the Innocents is particularly powerful, don’t you think?’

  ‘A skewered newborn is bound to impress,’ Volpi conceded.

  ‘Going back to your list, though, Dottore,’ Morris asked, ‘how would you categorise Pentheus’ demise? Can we accuse the Bacchae of lynching?’

  ‘Idioticide?’

  ‘Excellent!’ Morris laughed. ‘The Paul Reid is a curious version, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘You’re a generous critic, Signor Duckworth. Paul Reid is not an artist we’ve ever shown at Castelvecchio. Or planned to show. So, what else?’ Poised to launch into another list the director stopped and frowned.

  ‘Daggers?’ Morris suggested. ‘Swords, guns, nails, hammers, stones, arrows, and, er, bare hands. Strangling.’

  Exactly as he said the word, a thought spoke very clearly in Morris’s mind: would I have the strength? Could I ever strangle ? Surely Dottor Volpi’s neck was far too thick. It would have to be the dagger.

  ‘Thank you Signor Duckworth. And when it comes to gathering in this, er, curious phantasmagoria, we have, let me see, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the National Gallery, the Metropolitan, the Rijksmuseum.’

&
nbsp; ‘The Prado, the Tate, the Frick,’ Morris added.

  ‘Quite.’

  The director blew out both huge cheeks then slowly and noisily expired between pursed lips.

  ‘It’s too much, Signor Duckworth.’

  ‘For one visit, no doubt,’ Morris smiled. ‘We’ll have them all coming back. Perhaps twice. What was the picture that made you chuckle, by the way?’

  ‘Did I?’

  With his elbows on the desk, Volpi was now rubbing his chin up and down against cradled fingertips, as if to test the roughness of his beard. The man couldn’t keep still.

  ‘Von Stuck,’ he acknowledged.

  ‘Ah. Yes. One of five Holofernes, I think.’

  ‘Rather more Judith in this case,’ Volpi remarked drily. ‘Stuck never missed a chance to paint the pudenda.’

  ‘It’s a bold image.’

  ‘For most visitors “unwholesome” would seem a more appropriate epithet.’

  ‘Needless to say, Professor Volpi’—Morris was determined to insist on his seriousness—‘we’d be looking at a section of the show that compares images of men killing women with others of women killing men, on opposite walls perhaps. Or in pairs. So much of human violence is about the sexes, don’t you think?’

  A pained expression had formed on Volpi’s face. It lingered a while in the creases around his eyes. Morris waited till it rippled away into the hinterlands of temples and jaw, then spoke up again.

  ‘Isn’t it curious, for example, Direttore—by the way I’m never sure if I should be calling you Direttore, Dottore or Professore—that whether the women are the victims or the killers, they do tend to be nude. You must have noticed. As if they killed with their . . .’

  ‘Charms,’ the director said, nodding graciously toward Samira who remained eloquently mute. ‘And there’s no need for you to call me anything at all, Signor Duckworth. Anything at all.’

  ‘Delilah, Salome.’ Morris was enthusing. He frowned: ‘Of course, if we imagine another section dedicated to political conflict, we find ourselves faced with the question: how should we classify the Stuck? What was a political, or even religiously inspired killing in Holy Scripture is now an emblem of women’s liberation.’

  ‘Misogyny rather,’ the director opined.

  ‘The two are not unrelated,’ Morris pointed out. He was still feeling pleased with himself for having said Holy Scripture rather than Bible. A flourish he owed to Antonella.

  Rather suddenly Volpi started to shake his huge head from side to side, the way dogs will suddenly stand up and shake themselves free from torpor, or river water, or just the dirt they’ve been rolling in. Cheeks and jowls slapped. Chest and paunch juddered. He stopped, drew a noisy breath, thrust his chair decisively back from his desk and looked straight at Morris.

  ‘Enough. This is all quite impossible. Castelvecchio is a serious museum, Signor Duckworth. It has, as you know, an international reputation, largely thanks to Carlo Scarpa’s restoration of the building in the sixties. People come from all over the world to study the avant-garde arrangement of space here. That said, there is no way a Verona-based institution could persuade so many important museums to relinquish works by major painters for a show that would largely be construed as frivolous, if not morbid or merely sensational.’

  Morris uncrossed and recrossed his legs. He seemed lost in thought. ‘I’m not sure,’ he eventually said, with great circumspection, as if determined not to offend, ‘whether the adverb “merely” is really appropriate before the adjective “sensational,” Dottor Volpi. What do you think? Surely, exactly what people are looking for when they come to a place like Castelvecchio and pay their twelve euros or so, is a sensational show.’ He hesitated, ‘Forgive my pedantry, Professore, I began my, er, career, we can call it that I hope, as a humble language teacher. So I have a certain attention to words. “Frivolous,” for example. Are we really sure that in an age that has given us the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, of Colonel Gaddafi, possibly of Lady Diana, and going a little further back of Mrs. Gandhi, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Aldo Moro, Giovanni Falcone, President Kennedy—an age, what’s more, obsessed by serial killers, sectarian slaughter and genocide, are we sure we can call the subject of murder frivolous? There is an important moral message in this show, as I see it: that when a stalled and conflicted society or even just a man–woman relationship fails to change by negotiation, then someone will pull out a knife or a gun, or worse still strap a bomb to his belly.’

  Pronouncing the word belly, Morris faltered, so present and grotesque was Volpi’s exemplum of the species. Imagine a bomb strapped to that! Then fearing he might start to smile, or be caught exchanging knowing glances with Samira, he hurried on:

  ‘Actually I was discussing this matter on the phone only yesterday with my old friend James Bradburne.’

  That should wake the fat slug up.

  ‘Director of the Strozzi museum, as I’m sure you know. James and I were at Cambridge together.’

  Over the years Morris had noticed how Italians seemed willing to believe that all English-speaking persons of any note or class had all been to the same school or university. No doubt there were historical reasons for this.

  ‘I’m a great admirer of the shows he’s been putting on since he took over there at Palazzo Strozzi, don’t you think, rather in the teeth of the traditional old Florentines, you know what a superiority complex they have, very brave man, I particularly enjoyed Money and Beauty, you know, the Botticelli, Bonfire of the Vanities thing, overambitious perhaps, and certainly overpraised, but always stimulating—you’ll have your own opinion of course. So naturally I discussed what I was planning with him.’

  There must be a very considerable rearrangement of mental furniture going on, Morris thought, in Mr. Snob Director’s prejudiced skull as he tried to process this new information: Morris’s friendship with Europe’s most adventurous museum director. Two years ago Trevisan Wines had managed to supply their Classico Superiore to a banquet at Palazzo Strozzi, Morris cadging an invitation to the event in return for a gift of a hundred bottles. Whether Bradburne had actually gone to Cambridge or not, he hadn’t the slightest idea, having never actually spoken to the man; all he’d learned was that he had a very powerful handshake and wore fussily fanciful waistcoats.

  ‘As I was saying, my friend James raised exactly the objection you’ve advanced. He thought it might be, what was the word he used, nobler, yes, and metaphysically more challenging, to have a show focusing on death in general rather than the particular category of murder. He was worried about questions of taste. To which I pointed out that people have a natural and understandable reluctance to contemplate the event of death, unless packaged in the, er, alibi of melodrama, of murder. Or even of political expediency. The recent spate of Arab terrorism almost demands a reflection on killing. Still, to cut a stimulating discussion short, he came on board in the end, in rather a big way actually, to the point of saying that if you and I couldn’t do the show here in Verona, which of course I’d much prefer, loving the town as I do, he’d very much like to have a shot at it himself, as it were, at Palazzo Strozzi.’

  Dottor Volpi was watching Morris carefully.

  ‘Signor Duckworth,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m aware of course that you have various members of our board of directors on your side over this, not to mention our, er, dynamic First Citizen, the mayor.’ He smiled. ‘You seem to have a long acquaintance with many people in positions of local power. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this meeting, would we?’

  ‘Presidente Carbone did ask,’ Morris acknowledged, ‘if I might contribute to the renovation of your East Wing.’

  This was not an out-and-out lie. Morris had simply reversed the direction of approach. He had personally offered to pay for it.

  ‘However,’ Volpi continued, ‘the last word on any shows at the museum I direct remains with me.’

  ‘As it should,’ Morris agreed. ‘Very much as it should.’

  ‘A s
erious museum can’t allow any Gaio or Tizio simply to pay to have their own show.’

  ‘No, of course, that wouldn’t be appropriate at all. And let me say, Dottor Volpi . . .’ Morris stopped. Finding the right word would be crucial.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Let me say I share your, er,’ he sighed, ‘reservations as to the, how shall I say, cultural credentials of representatives of the Northern League.’

  This was a serious bid for complicity. Two outsiders, one Neapolitan, one English, could join forces against Veronese provincialism. The museum director sat tight. He appeared to reflect, waited, as if to allow a brief indisposition or unpleasant smell to pass, then continued.

  ‘But let’s imagine that we did decide to go ahead with Painting Death. Just imagine, mind.’

  ‘I’m sure you won’t regret it.’

  ‘The first question would be, who would curate such a show? Frankly, given the range of styles and periods covered and the generally unorthodox approach, I can’t immediately think of anyone.’

  ‘I will,’ Morris said boldly. He hadn’t planned to say this. He hadn’t supposed the opportunity would come up. But the moment he said it he knew he wanted this more than anything else in the world: to curate his own art exhibition. Morris Duckworth! He wanted it more than his business empire, now run largely by others. More than sex with Samira. More than ownership of a palazzo on Via Oberdan. More than the rather silly title of honorary citizen. More than getting his son out of a police cell. Morris had to curate this show. If for no other reason than that this was his show. The show was him. Murder. Suddenly he knew something terribly important was at stake, even if he couldn’t quite have explained what.

  ‘Signor Duckworth, the curator of a museum show has to be an academic with years of experience in the field and a proven track record, which is precisely my problem, when it comes to such an unusual theme.’