by Unknown
When my father fell into a coma, Mr Bernard Marmonier sought me out immediately. We met for almost two hours, time enough for me to sell him the shampoo labs my father had invented fifty years prior. Thus Marmonier became the emperor of smoothing, straightening and anti-frizz shampoos. I didn’t have the least interest in managing my father’s monster. The Marmoniers had been in the hair business for over a century. Mr Bernard was the great-nephew of Dr Marmonier of Marseilles, member emeritus of the Royal Society of Dermatology and Syphilography, author of the first European manual on capillary hygiene, Soins de propreté et hygiène de la chevelure. I commemorated the sale with Nick, my neighbour across the hall, who lived alone with a female poodle. Whenever there was something important to celebrate or mourn, I sought out his company. At the end of the night, Nick’s dog had an epileptic attack. I went home but couldn’t sleep. I turned on the TV in hopes of dispelling the image of that fluffy animal frothing at the mouth and dragging itself along the carpet, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible or unexpected was about to occur.
I changed my name, turned into an artist, became famous as Philip Honeysuckle. Under that stolen name, I created works of which I am now a little ashamed. The name belonged to one of the five members of the Generative Art Group, a collective created by Paul Neagu in 1972 that included Neagu himself as well as the fictitious members Husney Belmood, Anton Paidola, Edward Larsocchi and Philip Honeysuckle. Some critics believed that those fictional signatures gave Neagu a margin of creative freedom; thus, after he was established, he managed to delve into new languages without having to confront the wild resistance and provincial mistrust of English critics.
‘My’ Honeysuckle made objects from folded paper – ‘povero origamis from an industrious povero guy’, Nick used to say – that floated continuously thanks to the work of some super-powerful fans (modified microturbines). After a few years of trips and prizes, I decided to put an end to Honeysuckle’s career. Around then, I ran into a childhood friend who had just been hired by Tate Modern, even though his true passion was sixteenth-century Caucasian tapestries and whose greatest desire was to poison the director of the tapestry section at the Victoria and Albert Museum and settle in there with his cigars until the end of time. The only thing I knew about the Caucasus, besides the genocides, came from a Loreena McKennitt song that talked about a nocturnal cavalcade amid lightning, silent trees and the moon. He explained that in Russian, the Caucasus was called Kavkaz, in Turkish it was Kafkas, and that in the place where Zeus chained Prometheus, today there is a huge deposit of precious metals. He thought that the ancients knew or suspected the existence of some powerful material there. ‘Kafka mentions a verse of the legend in which Prometheus, after the intense agony of being pecked at by eagles, held himself so stiff that he turned into a rock.’ My friend also had theories about the art market. He said that money was going to move, as a matter of fact it had already moved to sports, that he himself had two millionaire friends who now preferred to invest their fortunes signing up contracts for Latin American players. Around eleven, he got sentimental, telling me about his contentious divorce, his daughter’s psychiatric treatment, far-fetched stories about his ex-wife who, from time to time, threatened to commit suicide Puccini-style. His speech getting all the more slurred and impenetrable, he finished the night with an exaltation of the public collections of contemporary art. Finally, we toasted to the health of men and children and we said goodbye.
One week later, I received a phone call from this same friend, who wanted to know if I would be interested in working for the Tate’s new collections. ‘We need people with discretion who can travel on a budget and who know the framework for buying and selling in postcommunist countries.’ I didn’t know the framework, but the idea of travelling to the East at a moment when nothing tied me to anything or anyone seemed grand. The terms were reasonable. I signed the contract and they arranged for me to go to Bucharest to buy Paul Neagu’s censored works. ‘Next year we’ll do an exhibit, The Unknown East. Trustworthy sources guarantee that in Bucharest there are still many works produced by Neagu in the 1950s and 60s. They’re in the hands of ex-colleagues, ex-lovers and relatives. They’re probably simple people who have little or nothing to do with the art world.’ They suggested that, before I leave, I meet with Paul Overy, the author of a minor study about Neagu’s artistic trajectory. Overy gave me contact information for a man named Stefan Ptyx. ‘Mention my name, he should remember.’
The man would be waiting for me at nine in the morning at the entrance to Bucharest’s National Theatre, a squat and charmless building, built over the ruins of the old theatre bombed by the Germans in ’44. While I was waiting, a young girl with a head full of wine-coloured hair appeared. I immediately liked her pixie ears. She held out her hand to me and said she had come at the request of Mr Paul Overy. She introduced herself as Martina Ptyx and, in rather proper English, said that her father, Stefan Ptyx, was unfortunately too sick and weak to leave the small village in which they lived, about fifty kilometres from Bucharest. She also said that, if I would like, we could go out there together. I would spend the night at the home of a neighbour or, if I preferred, I would return on the last train. We boarded a carriage full of old, wrinkled peasants. It took us more than two hours to get to the small village. During the journey, I asked if she was interested in art. She answered yes, but that she didn’t have anything intelligent or interesting to say about the matter, that her father did, her father had many opinions, what a shame that he was now sick and couldn’t express himself very well. I decided not to ask any more questions. The train stopped suddenly, and we got off in the middle of a field and continued down a path that ran alongside a garden of beets.
There was something weird about that girl. It was as if at any moment she would start dancing amid the beets, the farmers would make a chorus circle around her and reality would turn into a bad film. By the devotion with which neighbours greeted her, I understood that it wasn’t just me, the village was under the same strange spell. How had that hair survived Ceau6escu’s shampoos? What did she do in her free time? Did she have any free time at all? From the impression she had given me, she spent night and day protecting her father from domestic accidents, because he had a rare syndrome with a name she couldn’t pronounce. As far as everything else was concerned, her story was simple. Her mother had died several years before and since then she preferred watching her father to watching the garden grow. I asked if she wouldn’t have more options in Bucharest, but ‘the capital stinks’ was a difficult argument to refute, even though I didn’t know what stink she was referring to. After almost half an hour of walking, we stopped before a wooden house, identical to the eight wooden houses we had passed. The heat, my exhaustion and thirst, and the scent coming off Martina’s locks had left me with a mix of euphoria and nausea. I could no longer remember why I had come to that backwater town.
The Ptyx house stank of cats. A swarm of flies buzzed around a milk saucer. At the back of the living room was a figure hunched over a desk piled with books. He looked dead, but he was alive. Our arrival had disturbed the old man, and he began to stir and growl in harmless agitation. Martina tried to calm him down, explaining who I was and where I came from. Either he had not been aware that I was coming or he had forgotten. Suddenly, he straightened up and walked towards me. He held out his hand to greet me, but then continued to walk around the room greeting everything he found before him, ‘Good afternoon, wooden table, good afternoon, candlestick, good afternoon, candelabra, good afternoon, flies on the milk saucer, good afternoon, milk saucer, good afternoon, sewing machine, good afternoon, window, good afternoon, Neagu’s little boxes’. There on a sideboard was a collection of small paper and plaster boxes, The Cake Man and Anthropocosmos (23-Storey Man). Neagu’s works didn’t have much of a visual impact; their value was in their metaphoric power. In any event, they were the material remains of a time period, of a way of understanding and making art.
&n
bsp; Though I had only seen Paul Neagu once in my life, and even then from far away, old Stefan Ptyx’s face made me wonder if the two were related. Martina brought some tea and we settled in before the window that overlooked the beet garden. Stefan Ptyx had gone back to his original position at his desk. I asked Martina what he was doing. ‘Papa is passionate about Balzac. It’s an obsession, ever since he was an adolescent, no, before. He inherited those books from a Mr Barthes who directed the French Institute of Culture of Bucharest, back before the arrival of communism. Papa did the cleaning at the institute’s library. He said that my mother was Henriette de Mortsauf de Turnu Severin.’ Martina let out a shrill laugh. ‘So what is he writing?’ ‘He’s rewriting.’ ‘Translating?’ ‘He wakes up, sits down in that corner and spends the day copying Balzac’s books.’ ‘He writes down quotes?’ ‘No, he rewrites line by line, page by page, every page of each book. He intends to get to the last one, but I’m afraid, I don’t want it to end, do you understand?’ I looked at Stefan Ptyx, he seemed happy, entirely swept up by the ecstasy of writing, as if there were no one else in the room, or as if a dangerous ghost were forcing him to carry out the drawing of each letter of each word of each phrase.
A Canadian artist once locked himself in a gallery for several months before the public to transcribe every book of the last century that featured a character who writes. A Brazilian artist once spent a year lying on a hammock reading In Search of Lost Time with a camera on him. The filmed images were projected in their entirety on the front of Proust’s old home, in Illiers-Combray. But that old man Ptyx, who had no apparent ambitions besides the alienating pleasure of manually copying the printed words of his favourite author, seemed to me a far more powerful sight. ‘What are you writing today, Papa?’ ‘Gobseck, Martina. Gobseck.’ Martina let out another little laugh and I felt that the two were exchanging a secret.
Perhaps this was an elaborate drama put on especially for idiot visitors like me. Perhaps those boxes weren’t even Neagu’s, perhaps the old man wasn’t hurt or sick, perhaps that wasn’t the house where they lived, perhaps they weren’t even father and daughter, perhaps they weren’t even named Martina and Stefan. What kind of name was Ptyx? It was too poetic a surname to be real.
I tried to find out a little more about the old man’s obsession. Martina didn’t want to or didn’t know how to go into detail. She said only that he did it every day, ever since before he was diagnosed, and that his doctors encouraged it, because they thought it was a good way for him to keep busy. Someone knocked at the door and a female voice whispered something inaudible. The flies had gone from the edge of the milk saucer to the head of The Cake Man. Martina closed the door and came back with two containers of papanasi. ‘I don’t know very much, but I know it has to do with the names of people he met many years ago in Piteşti. You have probably never heard of that place, it’s a city to the north-east of here, where the Arge6 and the Doamnei meet. Whoever goes to Pite6ti likes to visit the Vidraru Dam in the mountains nearby; it’s a pretty place, you should go. At the very top of the dam is a sculpture by Constantin Popovici, it’s a monument to electricity, a Prometheus with his arms raised up, you would like it.’ It felt like a good time to start the negotiation. ‘Sadly, my time here is very short,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it would be good to talk to your father about the Paul Neagu works he keeps here.’ I looked at the sideboard, and suddenly the boxes didn’t have the same appeal. Wasn’t the pursuit of the last specimens of the avant-garde in dirty little houses in Eastern Europe the height of fetishism? But this Stefan Ptyx, the way he leaned over the table, his Benedictine monk script, the smiles every time he reached the end of a page, it was hypnotic and simple and I didn’t want him to finish. I decided to spend the night in the small village.
The girl who brought over the papanasi was named Dimitra and lived with an aunt and her mongoloid brother, Emeric. The two women received me without much friendliness. The kid was playing a game with a cup and ball, and every once in a while he looked at me and smiled as if we had always known each other. I slept in a small, windowless room with a hole in the ceiling covered by dirty plastic. I spent a night of dreamless sleep and woke up to the plocploc of the cup and ball. Dimitra led me back to the Ptyx house. Martina was in the kitchen wearing a white dress with lace cuffs, old Stefan was spilling milk on the saucers, the spirited flies were circling again. I noticed that Neagu’s works were no longer on the sideboard; in their place were Chinese zodiac figures. Martina gave me a plastic bag with all of the Neagu objects they had in the house. She charged the equivalent of three hundred pounds sterling. I paid four hundred and left my contact information, so that she could find me if she should come to London one day. She asked me not to, in any hypothetical situation, ever tell her father about the sale of those ‘things’. I asked if I could send the exhibition catalogue that would include photos of those boxes. She preferred not to receive it, but she said that if I wanted to thank her, and if I had time, she would love to receive a book by Paulo Coelho. ‘Anything except Brida’, which she had read enthusiatically during the spring. I tried to say goodbye to old Stefan, but he had withdrawn to his room. Martina accompanied me to the road and pointed out the place where the train would stop.
The return train seemed newer than the one from the previous day. I settled into my seat and let myself be mesmerized by the landscape in motion. I felt my oily hair on the back of my neck, thought of Bernard Marmonier and my father’s infallible formulas. I thought about the strange fertility of dwarves, I thought of Nick cleaning his carpet before going to sleep. I remembered my father’s last days, deliriously seeing butterflies on the hospital ceiling, I remembered the eulogy and the priest who couldn’t stop coughing. I remembered the flies at the Ptyx house and the story of Prometheus turning inward. And, for a second, everything made so little sense that I felt relieved. Not art, not travel, not Pythia at Delphi, not the constancy of mourning, not scandalous visions, not divine manifestations, not mobile wealth or heavy metals, not true genius, not the calculation of pleasure, not the mortal child sucking a lollipop next to me, none of it made up a web of significance. Nothing guaranteed that life was more than a collection of fake men and copied novels. I thought of Paul Neagu making palpable objects for friends he would never again meet. It would be good to see Martina again and know if Stefan Ptyx suffered or smiled upon reaching the last page of La Comédie humaine. It would be good to see Martina again without any motive. Even if Martina Ptyx were not Martina Ptyx. Even if Martina Ptyx were a harpie, a barren bandit, a heartless Amelia Sach. ‘Must we wait until autumn to make love?’ Which character said that?
I got out at Gara de Nord where a group of gypsies competed to read my future. A bluish dust tinted the city. I crossed Unirii Square as if I were climbing Mount Fitz Roy. The bag was about to break, there was so much wind that it was impossible to keep my eyes open.
GRANTA
* * *
THE COUNT
Leandro Sarmatz
TRANSLATED BY PETER BUSH
* * *
LEANDRO SARMATZ
1973
Leandro Sarmatz was born in Porto Alegre and has lived in São Paulo since 2001. He is currently an editor at the publishing house Companhia das Letras. Sarmatz is the author of the play Mães e sogras (2000), the collection of poetry Logocausto (2009) and the short-story collection Uma fome (2010). ‘The Count’ (‘O Conde’) is taken from Uma fome.
When Emil Fleischer, the Yiddish actor, left the Lager after a two-year period in which he suffered privations nobody can ever anticipate, his first thought was to find a decent bed to sleep in. Despite the real blessing it was to be alive, his second thought was to travel back to see a place he dearly loved before it was swallowed up by the death machine: Czernowitz, the city in Bucovina where he was born with the new century. He would go to America only after he had done that.
Did the decision of a man who felt annihilated make any sense? It was, no doubt, absurd. To make internment in the
Lager tolerable, Fleischer – a mediocre actor who had grasped the opportunity to earn his living by playing the part of Count Dracula in a series of roadshows of dubious artistic merit – started to fantasize about a new life in America. At night, on his bunk, writhing from hunger, the actor elaborated truly Hollywood-style idylls.
Sometimes he voiced his thoughts out loud, in the black-hole dark of the hut. Some people thought he was boasting, like Berman, the butcher, who’d never ever seen an artist before. Others swore the actor was simply one more lunatic among so many others dumped there prior to being turned into a shapeless pile of twisted bones, like Aronis, the tailor, who usually spoke French but broke into Yiddish in his nightmares.
As for a bed, Fleischer was happy, in those first few days of freedom, with a handful of sawdust laid out for him by a sturdy Polish woman who was working – rather reluctantly – for the Russians. After spending several nights next to a heater and eating countless decent meals, his body was invigorated and the actor felt like a real prince. Besides, he seemed to have an iron constitution. There was a touch of magic in surviving all that.
Now, he needed to get on the road to Czernowitz.
A fluent German speaker – his city of birth boasted a vast, affluent German population – Fleischer also spoke Yiddish, Romanian and a smattering of Polish and Russian thanks to tours in the remotest corners of the East. It was in towns and villages that knew next to nothing about the outside world, unless there happened to be an epidemic or even a pogrom, that the actor was given the name he would be recognized by whenever there were Jewish fans of theatre about. The Count. That tiny scrap of information (‘the Count’s performing’) broadcast along the streets, spread through gossip by women going to the market and whispered in synagogue doorways and yeshivot, ensured that a large, attentive crowd would gather around the small, famished troupe: Fleischer, Gabi – a pretty young thing who said she was Viennese but had come into the world in the shtetl in Lakhva – and old Maltchik, who had been the sexton of a synagogue burned to the ground by Cossacks many years ago. Extras were recruited there and then from the audience. And obviously they weren’t paid a cent.