Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi

by Home

  One of whom was walking aimlessly but with great purpose, looking for a café where he could get exactly the breakfast he wanted and to which he could return every day.It needed to have fresh orange juice, good coffee (easy enough in Italy), half-decent croissant or cornetti (almost impossible), and he needed to be able to consume all of this while seated in the shade with a view of some kind of piazza (but not one of the really big ones, where the price of a coffee could leave you clutching the bill and saying two words –‘How much?’ – to yourself over and over, in a state of uncomprehending shock).

  He found such a place quickly, on a tiny square, with a view, at the end of a long, tree-ornamented street, of the Giudecca Canal. The coffee was sensational and by hooking out the honey – which he hated – he was able to turn the cornetto into a tolerable croissant. Someone had left a copy ofLa Repubblica , which he sort of read. The big news, understandably, was the eat.Che caldissimo! Only nine-thirty and already it was as hot as noon.

  It was a mistake ordering coffeeand orange juice. Returning to the hotel to pick up everything he needed for the day, he had to trot the last hundred yards and sprint up the stairs to make extravagant use of his en suite bathroom. Considerable though it was, the relief at having made it – just! – was shortlived. The phone began ringing while he was still sitting on the toilet.

  ‘Pronto.’

  ‘What is this “pronto” shit?’

  ‘Oh, hi, Max. I was trying to go native.’

  ‘Well, I've been trying to ring you for ages.’

  ‘I've been out. For breakfast. What time is it there? I didn't think you got into the office so early’

  ‘I'm on my mobile. Why don'tyou get a mobile? You're the only person in the world who doesn't have a mobile. And you're supposed to be a journalist.’

  ‘I don't know. I find the prospect of choosing one rather daunting. The phrase “call plan” makes me anxious.’

  ‘I'll tell you what's making me anxious. This interview. Have you spoken with her yet?’

  ‘I only got here last night.’

  ‘So youhaven't spoken to her yet?’

  ‘I left a message,’ Jeff lied.

  ‘And how is she meant to respond to that message, if you don't have a phone?’

  ‘I do have a phone. In fact, unless I'm very much mistaken, I'm talking on one now. Let's see. It's got a mouthpiece you speak into and—’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I'm even hearing a voice in my ear, the voice of someone from another country who I'd rather not be speaking to. That clinches it. It's definitely a phone.’

  ‘We've got to get this interview. Understood?’

  ‘Roger that.’

  ‘And the picture.’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘You really are a wanker,’ said Max. Then he hung up. How pleasant it was, dealing with someone with whom you had a working relationship going back almost fifteen years. Such a relief to be able to dispense with distracting pleasantries and irrelevant chit-chat. As a belated but symbolic riposte, Jeff flushed the toilet.

  It was too early to go to the Giardini – but the perfect time to walk to the Accademia and see Giorgione'sTempest ahead of the crowds. Like everywhere else in Venice the museum was undergoing renovation but it was open – and there was no queue. A sign at the ticket desk announced SORRY WE HAVE NO AIR CONDITIONED. Another sign, smaller, in Italian, said something about Giorgione'sLa Tempesta. Bollocks … There was a simple rule of museum-going: if you had only one day free in a city, that would be the day the museum was closed. And if itwas open, then the one piece you wanted to see would be out on loan or removed for restoration. But no, the sign simply explained that, due to renovation,La Tempesta had been moved, temporarily, to Room XIII. Jeff headed straight there.

  No one else was around. He had the room and the painting to himself.

  To one side of the picture a young mother is breast-feeding an infant, gazing out of the painting, meeting the eye of whoever is looking at it. Presumably she has just bathed in the river separating her from the elegantly dressed young man wedged into the bottom left-hand corner, leaning on a staff, gazing at her. He looks at her; she looks at us, looking at them. Whatever is going on, we are implicated in it. Behind them, in the background – though it isn't really background – a bridge spans the aquamarine river. Beyond the bridge a landscape-city crouches under the gathered clouds. A white bird, perhaps a stork, perches on the roof of one of the buildings. The sky is a wash of billowing, inky blue. A single line of white lightning crackles through the storm.

  ‘The stoppage of time in Giorgione has a partly idyllic character. But the idyll is charged with presentiment,’ McCarthy had written. ‘Something frightening is about to happen.’ This, Atman saw now, was slightly misleading. It was not only impossible to say what that ‘something’ was – let alone whether that something might be ‘frightening’ – it was impossible to tell whether it had happened in the past or would happen in the future, or would not happen at all. There was no before and no after, or at least they were indistinguishable from each other, interchangeable. Apart from that, what he saw now confirmed how precisely she had fixed the painting in words. It was, as she insisted, the stillness that produced the sense of unrest.

  The museum may have had no ‘air conditioned,’ but it was cool compared with the heat lying in wait outside. Jeff bought a litre bottle of water from a kiosk and a three-day pass at the Accademia vaporetto stop. The vaporetto, when it arrived a few minutes later, was jam-packed – with artists. Handsome and well-mannered Wolfgang Tillmans was talking to old blood head, Marc Quinn, whose latest work – a giant metal orchid – could be seen as the boat passed the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. As Jeff made his way to the front of the boat he passed Richard Wentworth, wearing a panama hat and a striped blue shirt, looking like he was starring in a TV adaptation of a novel about an artist who was also one of the Cambridge spies.

  ‘Thought for the week,’ he said as Jeff squeezed by. ‘Artworld , musicbusiness. What does that tell us?’

  The distinction was somewhat lost on Atman: a seat at the front had become vacant and he was determined to occupy it. Someone else was even more determined and Atman was left standing but at least here, at the front, the motion of the boat generated a parched breeze. As they chugged past San Marco, several vaporetti passed by, heading the other way. On one of these he spotted Laura, leaning on the rail, wearing a white dress. Yes, surely it was her. She was holding what he guessed was an umbrella, yellow, rolled tight as a stick. He couldn't make out the number of the vaporetto, didn't know where she was going, only that it was in the opposite direction to him. He looked at his map, tried to calculate quickly where she might be heading, but it was impossible. She could have been going anywhere. He stared at the wake spreading out in a V behind the vaporetto. How to regard this failed sighting? Either as a good sign because it suggested that it could turn out to be a frequent occurrence. Or maybe – like those occasions in London when you come out of a party late at night, see a cab immediately, just fail to attract the attention of the driver and then find yourself marooned for hours – this was his one and only chance. A chance that was also a non-chance.

  People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what youthink happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something youthought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories, case histories; what happened – what actually happened and what you thought happened – would be enough.

  All that remained of the other boat's wake was a slight swell passing under the wake of his own vaporetto. It was like a double annulment. They had passed each other like ships in the day.

  Jeff disembarked at San Zaccaria, where he had to pick up his accreditation from the Biennale press office. He'd been warned to expect huge queues and a wait of sev
eral hours in the blistering sun, but there were only a few people ahead of him. One of whom was Dan Fairbank, turning away from the desk, press pass in hand. This was somewhat unexpected since, last Jeff had heard (two weeks previously), Dan was working as a director of commercials. Spotting Jeff, anxious to avoid any public exclamations of surprise, he came over and explained,sotto voce , that he had contrived some kind of eligibility for a press pass, ‘to gain ingress to things I might otherwise not have the patience to wait to see.’ Moments later Jeff was called forward to the accreditation desk and Dan made his egress.

  Smiling, wearing red, aspirational glasses, the young woman dealing with Jeff's application was full of enthusiasm for her job, eager to make sure that this important journalist had all the information he could possibly need, even though he was only interested in whatever it was that would get him in – grant him ingress – to as many things as easily as possible. Biennale society was completely hierarchical. At the bottom were the members of the public, who, at this stage, had access to nothing and, for these few days at least, were conspicuous by their absence. At the top were the artists and the curators from the big institutions and the famous commercial galleries, then the collectors, then the journalists and critics, then an army of liggers. To keep track of and help maintain this admittedly flexible caste system – a journalist like Jeff was really just a successful ligger, a ligger with accreditation; come to think of it, many of the artists were liggers with paintbrushes or cameras, and the curators were liggers with power – a wide variety of passes was available, only the very highest of which granted you access everywhere, at any time, to anything. Beyond that, at the very peak of the celebriarchy, was the super-VIP level, where to be in possession of any kind of pass except that bestowed on you by your wealth or fame – by a self-evident entitlement to go exactly where you pleased – was itself a token of exclusion.

  As Jeff was issued with his basic, no-frills press pass he had a sudden and brilliant idea.

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me,’ he asked, ‘if my colleague Laura Freeman has picked up her accreditation yet.’ She was not a journalist, but, like Dan, she may have signed up as one to reap the benefits of a press pass. And if shehad signed in, then it might be possible to discover her hotel and, possibly, her cellphone number. While the assistant happily went through the computer to check the name, Jeff stood anxiously by, the excitement of adding significantly to his hoard of information about Laura supplemented by the thrill of his own cunning, the private-eye sleuthiness of it all. Such animation was short-lived, however. No one called Laura Freeman had registered.

  ‘Ah. Well, thank you anyway,’ he said. The assistant had been more than simply helpful. She'd added that extra bit of charm to which a man of Atman's age was uniquely susceptible: the suggestion that she was doing this not because it was in her nature or in her job description, not even because she was well-disposed towards him, but because she found him attractive. Whether she really did was as irrelevant as it was unlikely; what mattered was that her manner – flirtatious simply because it was so abundantly pleasant – made it possible to entertain the idea. Had he not been so preoccupied with thoughts of Laura, he might have tried to put this lightly to the test – a drink later, perhaps? – a test which would, almost certainly, have yielded a negative result. As it was he thanked her for her help, wished her a nice day and the whole exchange concluded with big smiles on both sides. It was like a version of the scene at the newsagent's in London, re-written and relocated to Venice.

  All-important press pass in hand, Jeff stepped out into the sci-fi heat. Perhaps it was this new press pass that provoked a surge of professionalism: he went straight to thetabaccheria nearby and bought a phone card so that he could call Julia Berman about the interview. The temperature appeared to have soared another ten degrees while he'd been inside the press office. Under the perspex canopy of the pay phone it was hotter still. The phone rang for a long while. He waited for a human or a machine to answer, then hung up and dialled again. Same thing. He felt enormously relieved. He had done his best to secure this much-needed scoop. He had rung and rung – twice! – and still there was no answer. He had tried everything to track her down, with no luck, so he was free now to get on with the dozens of other things he had to do, the most important of which was going to the Biennale – while all the time keeping an eye out for Laura.

  Near the leafy entrance to the Giardini students and young artists handed out flyers for exhibitions of their own, alternative, semi-underground versions of the Biennale with music, DJs. The Giardini was already crowded by the time Jeff got inside, less than an hour after it had officially opened.

  Patriotically, his first stop was the British pavilion, given over to Gilbert & George. In the 1980s, the critic Peter Fuller had conducted a vituperative crusade against Gilbert & George, seeing in them a threat to everything he held dear. By the time Fuller was killed, in a car crash, he must have realized it had all been in vain, for Gilbert & George were poised to become godfathers to several generations of YBA hustlers – and now they had been honoured by having the British pavilion to themselves. The work, needless to say, was as weary as some harmless sin, the same old brightly-coloured, stained-glass-looking nonsense they'd been doing for years, but the way Jeff looked at it (the only way one could look at it): who gave a shit? They were never going to do anything new, but so what? There was no point kicking against this affable pair of pricks.

  From there he should have gone about things in a systematic fashion, ticking off each of the national pavilions in an orderly sequence, but there were already queues of art immigrants waiting to get into Canada and France – whose pavilions were next to Britain's – so he skipped them and started dropping into places in a completely haphazard fashion. From G & G he went to the Norwegian pavilion, which featured a wall of yellow and black Op Art circles. Except they weren't circles, they were targets, dartboards, an entire wall of them. Some distance away there were large cardboard boxes of green and red darts, which you could aim at the wall, gradually altering the overall pattern and distribution of colour. Jeff had just aimed the last of a handful of red darts when someone called his name and threw a dart in his eyes. Shit! It was Ben Jennings – doing that old trick of unscrewing the dart so that the flight fluttered harmlessly and frighteningly against Jeff's face.

  ‘Wanker!’

  ‘Excellent, isn't it?’ said Ben, reassembling the dart. ‘Jackson Pollock meets Jocky Wilson.’ He was wearing a pale blue shirt, already navy with sweat under the arms. Years ago he had been something of a man about Soho, a wit, a Kenneth Tynan in the process of formation. Now, fifteen years down the line, he was regarded – even by a hack like Jeff – as a hack who had never had the discipline or application or talent to fulfil whatever promise he had shown. Not that he seemed to mind. He was happy attending the various art fairs of the world – Art Basel in Miami, Basel itself, the Armory in New York, Frieze in London, Berlin – and banging out gossipy stories about them. Jeff tended to assume that he disliked him but, in his company, always found himself warming to him, partly because he suspected that, behind the charm and bonhomie, Ben might be desperately unhappy with the lot he was ostensibly happy with. Still, he always managed to have a good time. Last night, for example, he had been ‘disco-dancing until four in the morning.’ It was pathetic, it was unbelievably immature, but even now, aged forty-five and counting, Jeff felt his heart sink when he heard that someone had been out later than him, had been having more fun than him, even when he'd been having fun himself and had decided, of his own free will, to call it a night. Other people's ideas of a good time underwent well-established changes as they got older. They ended up raising children, buying sheds or playing golf. Jeff had proved remarkably constant in his preferences. He'd liked drinking, taking drugs, going to parties and chasing after women who – another sign of constancy – ideally, were not too much older, now, than when he'd first started doing so. In recent years a bit more time was spent at h
ome, zonked out in front of the TV, but that wasn't something hewanted to do, that was just recovery time. On occasions he was bored rigid by his idea of a good time, but nothing had come near to displacing or replacing it. And he'd never got to the stage or gone through the phase of being passionate about his work except in so far as he had always felt passionately averse to it. No wonder he had such ambiguous feelings about Ben: he was like a ruddier, portlier version of Atman himself. It was quite possible, he reasoned, to like someone you disliked and vice-versa.

  ‘I thought I might have seen you at the Iceland party last night,’ Jeff said. They both picked up more darts and stood side by side, chucking them, aimlessly, at the wall of unmissable targets.

  ‘I was at a dinner for Ed Ruscha.’

  ‘That was last night? I thought it was tomorrow.’

  ‘There's one tomorrow as well.’

  ‘So, every night there's an Ed Ruscha dinner?’

  ‘And – one hundred and eighty! – probably a breakfast every morning.’

  They threw the last of their arrows. Ben said he had it on good authority that later this afternoon, at the Venezuelan pavilion, chocolate-covered cockroaches would be served. With that they went their separate ways, Ben to the Swiss pavilion and Jeff to an installation by a Finnish artist whose name – Maaria Wirkkala – meant nothing to him.