by Mok, Judith;
They thanked him but found his generosity strange.
They tolerated him because I was there to put things right when he put the bin bags out at the wrong time, or left the keys in the door so people could come and rob us.
The bell would ring and some self-righteous neighbour would stand there holding up the keys like a freshly caught fish. Did I realize how dangerous all this was?
He left the keys in the door once too often when I was away on a short concert trip. When I came back all my jewellery was gone. Ah sure, they’re only stuff, things, he said. That’s how I started distancing myself from material things. I sold most of my clothes; they were hardly going to be of any use in bohemian society. I needed pots and jars and pans and kitchen tools, for I had to learn to cook for my man. (I had skipped that bit of my education up till now.) There was no heating in the kitchen but I soon discovered that cooking kept me warm. Big steaming pots of food were comforting.
The only problem was it took time. My life in that small house shrank to a life divided.
The practising, the teaching, the performing were one thing. The secret drawing and painting, and the lovemaking, were outside time. And then there was a big, big bag, as I liked to see it, that had to be refilled daily with chores. Once they were done and the bag was filled, my real life could start.
The chores were shared once a week with a cleaner straight out of Proust who loved to explain life to me while polishing. My man did not participate in any housekeeping duties. The urge for hygiene and order was mine and he did not wish to share my concerns or be annoyed by me about them.
Soon the little hammers of duty tapped away from morning till night. They did not tap hard enough, though.
In between teaching painfully untalented people in the morning I would run to the toilet and check to make sure there was no shitcovered paper strewn about the place by my man. He rarely flushed. Then I would rush upstairs to check that no pillows had been left leaning against the stove (the fire brigade had already visited us once). On my way up and down I would collect glasses and tins before I made it back to my workroom and the next pupil.
At noon my lover would stroll in and I had the endless task of answering phone calls from his workplace wanting to know where the fuck he was. He did his work well and kept them all going with funny stories, so they forgave him a lot. I would be in the kitchen preparing a shopping list or searching for my mail, which he usually threw under our bed. Bills disappeared and the phone grew mute. I felt guilty because I was not familiar with this kind of life, while he seemed to take it all in his stride.
My chats with the grocer and the baker exhausted me, the carrying of heavy groceries even more. In the afternoons I tried to spell out difficult scores, only to interrupt myself to prepare a meal if I had a concert at night. My lover had to eat and so did I. I would clear out the kitchen and pick up a few books from the floor marked with banana skin or the entrails of an apple or pear. By this time the chore bag would be nearly full; all negative energy was stored in there, and once it was closed it could be ignored.
I had organized an immense storage room for those bags in my brain. They were full of prehistorically big maggots that began eating their way through the rubbish. The gnawing was bearable as long as my lover brought me warm toast and coffee in bed in the morning and late at night on our big bed again, and sometimes with colleagues after concerts there would be wine and fries, cheeses and patés on crunchy crackers. Fingers and feet touching, fragile sensualities building up to the every-day stormy sex, talking love back into me. Into my life.
A leak in one of those bags carefully stowed away in my brain occurred during the time I was preparing for my first big break: the Bruch violin concerto played in the main concert hall.
Nerves plagued me during the first full rehearsal with the orchestra in the concert hall. The conductor was good and I started to relax, until I heard the dry ticking of the conductor’s baton on his music stand. The silence full of interrupted notes was audible. I was standing beside the conductor with my face to the orchestra. The conductor beckoned me to turn around and there he stood. It took me a minute to realize who he was, what was he doing here. How did he get into our rehearsal room? Why disturb me? Something dreadful must have happened.
I jumped off the stage and walked towards him. He just stayed put. Had I some money, he wanted to know? They, a few friends and ‘himself’, as he said, had broken the window of my workroom back home. I was not to worry, he had had it repaired, called a glass service and all that, couldn’t leave my piano and stuff out in the open. Just ran out of cash to pay the repairmen. I stumbled in the direction of my purse. No cash. In the meantime about eighty people sat staring at us. The conductor was kind. Did he need cash, was that the problem? He sorted him out, we had work to do. I did not see him leave. He had stopped existing for me.
The music brought me back, back home. It always did.
We went to a shop where he had seen the perfect dress for me. Gael’s taste was impeccable and also beyond my imagination. The dress was what I wanted. He sat down in the shop and told me to try it on. It was expensive and perfect. I wanted it more now that I was wearing it. Had he saved up to buy me this? I told him that I wanted to buy it, but did not have the means. Well then, he said calmly, if you can’t pay for it you can’t have it. Pity you’re fiddle-playing doesn’t pay, he added with a slight smile. I didn’t understand why he had brought me to the shop. Surely he knew that he had no money and that neither did I? Trying it on and realizing it was ideal for me should have been enough of a pleasure for me. A new form of sadism had been born. Instead of wanting to kill him, I wanted to punish him sexually. And myself as well.
I decided not to pay the rent and buy the dress. And that was the beginning of an obsession well known in Italy as fare bella figura. I started avoiding bills in order to look the part of a successful artist. I started sacrificing what is called reality for real art.
My concert ended with a crowd of ecstatic friends in my dressing room. My dress was spread out on the floor beside a sofa so it wouldn’t crease. He was holding court with a glass of champagne in his hand, not that he cared for champagne, telling everybody how good I was and how glamorous I looked. I heard his dark voice separate from the rest. It made me look at him, observe the way he looked, his body language. I stared at his solid boots that were trampling around merrily on the delicate material of my dress. I said nothing, feeling empty and unable to act, but a friend shrieked and pulled him off it. It wasn’t that important, he said, laughing loudly, it was only a dress.
The next day, though, I was happy about the praise in the newspapers. I was tired from the enormous physical effort and felt empty. On the phone my violin teacher suggested a drastic reduction in pupils, but that just wasn’t possible.
I stood looking out aimlessly over the canal when the doorbell rang. My cleaner. Once a month she was allowed to penetrate my lover’s workroom. I was still standing in front of the window waiting for the light to fade, thinking of the taste in my mouth, being nothing, when I heard her shriek. Reluctantly I went downstairs.
The maggots were for real this time. There were enormous heaps of half-eaten food, leftovers wriggling with maggots. I proceeded to help, dressed in an apron and plastic yellow gloves. Thinking still, but differently now, thinking how bored I was, cultivating my disgust about all this. Something had to be there, some kind of feeling had to be expressed. I was still alive.
He was furious, of course, that his room had been touched, but his fury was short-lived because he was happy about the exhibition he was going to have in a month’s time. Happy because his friends were coming over from Ireland. About five of them would be staying with us.
I caught myself thinking about the food that I was going to cook, looking forward to seeing their happy, satisfied faces.
He worked hard, I said to my mother on the phone. He made me look at his work at all hours and if I didn’t say anything he got angry, and then he
got angrier because I bothered him with my presence.
I started screaming. I did admire his work but now it suddenly made me scream. Every brush stroke. I would wade out of his room dressed in his shapes and colours, forgetting to remember what I thought of it, only feeling the threat that I must, must realize he was great. I had always realized it; it had inspired my own work. I had never screamed at anyone before.
It took energy to calm down and return to my own business. I slammed the door of his workroom and came back with the small drawing I had been working on. His attitude immediately changed into genuine interest. Image on surface was his game, after all. He liked my attempt and even thought I should bring it out into the open. Try a small gallery, maybe. Plenty of those around. As long as I didn’t try to push myself into his exhibition space.
A blond young man rang the doorbell. He had a Dickensian-looking document in his hand. He introduced himself as the tax bailiff and asked for my lover. We were not registered as living together, so I could easily say that I had nothing to do with him and that I would inquire about the problem. I took him upstairs and made him drink coffee while I promised to pass on the papers. Tax papers, unpaid tax.
The bailiff left the house a warm and comforted man. I phoned a few friends to see if I could organize a loan to pay off the tax debts.
It took a lot of Bourgogne and a good meal before I mentioned the bailiff to my lover. The debt could be paid. Mrs O, a friend of my mother, was willing to loan it to us. We had to pay it back. He leaned back in his chair, satisfied with the meal and his work, his dark eyes shining with a flaming energy, and declared that he was tired and couldn’t be bothered at the moment. Sure enough he would take care of it in time. Lots of people had tax debts. I wanted to agree. He was perfectly right, it was all so pleasantly easy, the borrowing from people who were so stinking rich they didn’t need the money anyway, and then the huge group of people in the same boat as us, the people with debts.
So when the bailiff came to our door again, I greeted him warmly, complimented him on his new hairdo and set out with him to the post office to pay my lover’s debt.
The bailiff appreciated my concern for a friend.
At night we slept holding hands, with the dark shadow of the cats on the white eiderdown. Our bed had been nursing sleep for centuries, it was hidden in an alcove in the wall which used to have doors. The doors were gone when we moved in. But it was still a deep, dark womb that took us in for the night. The same dreams floated around for nights, pleasant and miraculous, soft and velvety, to be recounted in the late winter mornings like fairytales. Dreams that turned into recognizable shapes, like books with the right stories and a painting of the sea on the inner wall, a present for me from a Dutch landscape painter.
People talked in the street below, boats moved the water in the canal and cars slowly drove their humming engines up the steep bridges. Only the sound of the engines brought us back to the twentieth century. Our thoughts drifted between a seventeenth-century sleep and a modern awakening. Who could prove that the talking outside, unseen, was not a dialogue between a woman in a long dress, bonnet and shawl and a Jewish salesman? Her soapy voice and singsong accent, his answers thickly spoken, were not clear enough to be understood. His warm body was still floating in sleep. This was the body of a friend, a painter, a thief. This was the body that radiated warmth because it knew the Irish tale of the salmon. The salmon of wisdom had been tasted by this body and had acquired enough wisdom to exude its heat. The body had a voice, a strength of its own when it read out poems late at night. Poems that were still present in the morning. Words to travel with through the day. Through the centuries. No space for doubts.
Their names sounded poetic: Sean and Fingal, Diarmuid, Dave and Dara. Their work had quality, or so the press and the buyers thought. They all had a lot of hair and one set of clean underwear each. Barefoot, they insisted on showing me real Irish dancing on the night of their arrival. They lined up their hairy toes on the wooden floor and moved them around to the sound of a loud, scratchy tune. They were happy with their beers and the meal I had served. They all grabbed at the potatoes at the same time. I stood behind them with a serving spoon, helpless. Their voices were loud as they quoted their favourite lines in books, or discussed fellow artists. I noticed they were very respectful about my lover’s work although he was the youngest of them all. I listened quietly, taking in their stories and gossip about their inner circles. Irish art was their main concern. Continental art, as they called it, was more or less a blur. Not that they didn’t admire it; it just didn’t have much of a place in their world. They groaned their appreciation of my food, thanked me copiously, and left me with the dishes. It was time for them to visit the town. I didn’t mind not joining them that night, although I enjoyed their company. I cleaned up and went to bed, only to be woken at two in the morning by my lover who breathed over me that he loved me so much. There was a knock on the bedroom door from one of his friends. They demanded a tune from me. I liked this absurd notion that I could go straight from sleeping to playing, so I put on my shortest silk slip and went downstairs.
They cheered at whatever I played and started singing. I put my fiddle away but they kept going until the cold light of day. They fell down on the floor among the beacons of beer bottles and ashtrays, and clung to their coats for heat.
I attended their alcohol-fuelled lectures about their work in the arts centre with my parents and my friends. I was so proud of my lover that everybody laughed at me. Yes, they agreed he was good, good enough to live with a talented person like me. Meanwhile the talented person that I was went around the city with the painters to buy porn magazines. Their favourite was farm animal porn. That should be the right present for their neighbours, real farmers. Lovely pink pigs in suspender belts running around in the rain, splashing up tons of mud in the act once their farmer had caught them.
The magazines were later confiscated by Customs at Dublin Airport.
A minister and my father opened the exhibition. The right people came to admire and buy the paintings, while the artists flirted with the slender Nordic girls that served champagne. People dressed in designer rags spoke without a smile to my lover. Even if he was the one, they were the ones with the money; they were there to buy him. I enjoyed him roughing himself up, his voice booming about the hall telling them lies, telling them what they wanted to hear about Ireland. I don’t think they even understood his English or what he was talking about. There was this pale girl, all in black, wearing uncomfortable-looking shoes, pushing her thin hips forward while she stood talking to him and then she pointed in my direction. I could just about hear her saying how much she hated me and did he know me? He said no he’d never met me, but if he did he promised he would hate me too. I waved at him behind her back. Somebody tapped my shoulder. I turned around and looked at the face of a chubby man, his cheeks moving softly while he spoke. If I was the woman who had left some work at his gallery, he was willing to exhibit it together with another young painter.
There was blood on the wall beside the guest bed, long, bright streaks like the beginning of an abstract painting. We knew the one who had slept in it loved young boys, we knew he had disappeared into the night and hadn’t appeared at the breakfast table. He had left a note, saying he’d spent the money from the exhibition on Oriental kids. Now he was off to the East for more, thanks for everything and fuck Ireland. If he had fucked Ireland the night before, it had certainly bled a lot.
11
Rubies from Brazil, Burma emeralds, diamonds, she took to them as if they were being handed back to her, as if they had always belonged to her. Even her mother nodded when she saw the rings on her daughter’s hands; they were definitely in the right place. From Switzerland? She wanted to know if the Nazi vaults had been emptied and her family’s belongings returned. Loth told her he had had to pay for them and that her daughter was now writing to the Stern firm; she wanted them to design her wedding jewels to go with her dress. Good, her
mother nodded again with that vacant look in her eyes, never inquiring about the price of things.
Her father was suddenly a connoisseur of stones because he had manhandled a broom at the age of fourteen in a diamond-cutting workshop. He abruptly interrupted his boring monologue about the art of diamond cutting to rush off to his studio, muttering all the while that he should have thought of it before.
At dinner he told them he had ordered diamond dust with which to cover a new work. She wanted it as a wedding present. Of course the painting was hers if that was what she wanted. He looked at his future son-in-law as if he hardly remembered his name. Did he want the painting too? Loth’s effort to make himself visible was painful.
Loth suddenly announced that she had made her first recording from the score they had bought in Geneva. He had stolen her news and now wallowed in her parent’s pleasure and gratitude. She went upstairs and came back with one of her new concert posters showing her in her Stern jewels, airbrushed into unreal beauty, her violin a mere tool.
Her parents nearly cried when they saw it: what a terrible poster, so vulgar, what did all those jewels have to do with her music? Why had she not asked her father to design something? My god, my god, they sighed, and shook their silver heads, looking shrunken and shocked at such a lapse in taste. She just laughed and agreed, grabbed a bottle and suggested a toast to all things ugly and beautiful. Her father drank and muttered until he was drunk enough to think of himself as Marlene Dietrich and insist upon singing one of her songs for them. While he shook his imagined blond locks and hid his eyes under false lashes they watched through a haze of tears of laughter. Her mother sang later, raw folk tunes that brought their life back and took Loth’s bride-to-be with them.