A Carnivore's Inquiry

by Sabina Murray

  “How much did you get for it?”

  “That’s not the point, Boris. It’s in someone’s dining room.”

  “It must be nice to make a living as an artist,” I said. I was thinking this and stated it by accident.

  Ann’s eyes narrowed. “Does art interest you?”

  “Yes, I suppose it does.”

  “What artists do you like?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I like Goya.”

  “Goya,” said Ann. She shook her head.

  “How can you dismiss Goya?”

  “I’m not dismissing Goya,” she said. “What do you know about Goya?”

  “I didn’t say I knew Goya. I said I liked Goya.” I drained my glass of wine. “That picture of the donkeyman and the eagleman and they’re sitting on the shoulders of two bear-bodied donkey-headed things? I like that. It’s a good illustration of human nature.”

  “That ‘picture’ is The Caprices of the late seventeen-hundreds, and has nothing to do with human nature. ‘Fantasy without reason produces monsters; but together, they beget true artists and may give rise to wonderful things.’”

  “Bonus point for Ann,” I said. I poured myself more wine. “Lovely bullshit.”

  “It’s a quote from Goya.”

  “Well, I think he’s bullshitting. People did that, even in the late seventeen-hundreds.” I looked over at Boris, who was trying not to laugh. “I think he drew them in a moment of madness, then came up with some sort of discourse to cover his artistic ass.”

  “You have absolutely nothing to support that theory.”

  “No? Goya’s always depicting various forms of rage, madness. Don’t you think that implies that he had some sort of inside track?”

  “To insanity? No. Not at all.” Ann said, inclined to disagree with anything I had to say.

  “I think Goya drew his creatures in a moment of madness that frightened him, that his ability to draw such ugly creatures disturbed him. I think he felt possessed by his art. Who moved his hands if not he?” I rapped my fingers on the table. “Goya tries to make sense out of this accidental creation, the product of his madness. He still wonders whose picture it is.”

  Boris chuckled and Ann glared at him. “The half-creatures are allegorical, not madness wedded to reason,” she said, and then to prove this conclusively she added, “Disasters of War. 1810.”

  “Ah,” I said, “The Carnivorous Vulture.”

  “Girls,” said Boris, “this has been amusing, but my knowledge of Goya is now exhausted and the discussion has become dull.”

  Ann looked at me victoriously. “Forget the Carnivorous Vulture,” I said. “The only thing we have to deal with is the critical vulture, just as good at going after corpses. Goya’s dead and can’t speak for himself.” I got up from the table and went to sit by myself on the couch.

  “I seem to have touched a nerve,” said Ann.

  “Thank God for that,” I said. “I was beginning to wonder if I was still alive.”

  Boris cocked his head and looked at me. I smiled charmingly. My boredom was inconceivable. “But really, Ann,” he said, “how much did you get for Landscape?”

  Ann looked at me, then back at Boris. They had a lot to talk about, those two, and watching them made me want a friend, someone I could laugh with. Someone I could live this evening with over again on my terms—how annoying Boris was, what a lunatic Ann turned out to be. I closed my eyes and pretended to take a nap.

  Ann’s voice fell to a whisper, but I could still hear her. She said, “Really, Boris, you know nothing about her. You might catch something.”

  And Boris said something that I couldn’t make out.

  “Why isn’t she in school? Where are her parents?”

  And Boris said something else.

  “Some benefactor you are. I don’t care how old she says she is. She’s still a child. Look at her.”

  And then Boris said something that made Ann laugh.

  4

  That night I pulled out a book on Romanticism off Boris’s shelf. It was a huge, coffee-table book and, by the smell of the pages, had never been opened. On the front page was the inscription, For Boris on his birthday, affectionately, Ann. And then in cramped, insecure writing, a postscript, Don’t worry. Romanticism is not romantic. I opened the book to the section on Goya. I had grown up in a house filled with books like this. My mother had a particular love for Goya and I was familiar with all the faces of the family of Charles IV, their squishy noses and eyes sunk like currants in leavening dough. I loved Goya in my own way. While other children frightened themselves with Dracula comics, I’d been mesmerized by Los Caprichos and the Black Paintings of the Quinta del Sordo.

  I turned the pages eagerly, hoping that the editor was not too politically minded (massacres, civil war commentary) and had included my favorite painting, that of the god Saturn eating a child.

  Saturn Consuming His Offspring took up a whole page.

  I looked at the gaunt and long-limbed giant, his flowing hair. He emerged from the darkness of the canvas, his mad eyes wide, the whites arced impossibly around black pupils, as if he’d been caught in the headlights of a car. Saturn’s hands gripped the body of his headless child. A gash of red dripped slantwise down the child’s upturned arm and neck; it seemed to have been devoured head first, forearm second. The child was raising its cropped arm as if to feed its father, and Saturn chewed his way down to the armpit. The legs and buttocks of the child rose up from between the thighs of Saturn. They disappeared—feet entirely obscured—into shadow, the same shadow where the genitals of the god were hidden. I looked at the twin legs bound close, the rounded buttocks. The child was actually a monstrous penis, Saturn’s penis, and he was eating it.

  Was Goya painting the despair of the sexual urge, how copulation—beyond mere monster coupling—begets violence? Or was it just an autofellatic fantasy, and how had I never noticed it before?

  This was not what my mother had told me the painting was about. I got the standard story, that Saturn was consuming his child because an oracle had informed him that one of his children would kill him. Each time his wife, Rhea, gave birth, Saturn would eat the baby. Rhea finally managed to hide one child, Zeus. In his place, she gave Saturn a stone in swaddling clothes and Saturn swallowed it, blankets and all. Zeus would kill Saturn, but not before administering a powerful emetic that made him vomit up his other five children. I’d asked my mother about this.

  “If he ate them, wouldn’t they all be chewed up, like in the picture?”

  My mother shrugged this off. “The Titans were very big. Maybe he swallowed them whole.”

  “Then why doesn’t Goya paint it like that?”

  “Because that would be boring.”

  Zeus, it is interesting to note, continued the legacy of cannibalism. When he heard that his soon-to-be-born daughter would one day supplant him, he swallowed his pregnant wife. Afterward, Zeus was tortured by an intolerable headache. To ease his pain, he called on Hephaestus to split his head open with an ax. Athene jumped out, full-grown and vibrant. She dazzled her father and Zeus loved her more than any of his other children. Athene forgave Zeus for having eaten her and her mother, and Zeus pushed Athene’s possible ascendancy to the throne out of his mind. He loved his daughter, despite what she represented to him. And that she loved him back, the key to familial love, apparently, being the ability to forget.

  I took one last look at Saturn. Zeus had turned Lycaon into a wolf for offering him a stew of Mollosian hostage, but he ate his own wife and daughter. They were all cannibals, all of them.

  On the next page I saw Goya’s etching Disasters of War. The Carnivorous Vulture. Ann was wrong to think that this was a simple allegory. All vultures were carnivorous but Goya’s walked upright, like a man. Her shriveled wings were more like feathered arms and she stomped—an Iberian Godzilla—onto the landscape. A peasant came at her with his pitchfork and the horizon was crowded with people rising up in a solid bank, like woods or mountains in
other paintings. In this picture, surprisingly, the peasants appeared to have the upper hand. The bird’s wings were flung open, her eyes round with fear, her beak empty. This was the aftermath of the slaughter, what descended (vultures swinging in tightening circles) after the rampaging armies had returned to their homes, after the thunder of muskets had stilled and the last of the smoke dissipated.

  This was a painting of hunger.

  The last two pages in the Goya section were devoted to Scenes of Cannibalism, loose, vibrant sketches of the Jesuit martyrs Lallement and Brebeuf, who were slaughtered by the Iroquois in 1649. The first painting showed wild nudes preparing bodies. A corpse hung from the top of the painting, like bull carcass in a meat locker; another lay prone. The three cannibals were preparing the bodies: eviscerating, bleeding, skinning. These figures crowded the lower right-hand corner of the painting; the rest of the canvas was empty, an imposing intrusion of space. There was no actual eating in the painting, although one nude was hunched over in a very suspicious way. The other painting showed savages around a fire. A central figure (oddly bearded for an Indian) brandished a head in his left hand, a severed hand in his right and—due to the spread of his legs—his genitals. Cannibals seemed more of an opportunity for Goya to paint the nude, some in classical poses and some more natural. Cannibals offered more of an opportunity to paint the human figure than, say, the family of Charles IV. And Goya didn’t seem bothered that his Indians looked no more like the Iroquois than they did like Spain’s royal family.

  The Iroquois were not cannibals, despite the legend of Brebeuf. Brebeuf was a Jesuit priest, a missionary to the Indians in the Canadian wilderness, who were not interested in conversion. Brebeuf made friends with the Hurons but had less success with the Iroquois. After torturing Brebeuf for two days (pouring boiling water over his head, thrusting a hot iron down his throat, encircling his neck with burning stones) the Iroquois were impressed by his ability to withstand his trials. They continued, slashing him with knives, pulling off his nails, until they finally tied Brebeuf to a stake and lit him on fire. After the flames died down, the Iroquois warriors cut down Brebeuf’s body. He was a strong man, even if he was wrong-minded, even if he was an ally to the Hurons—the Iroquois’ hated enemy. The Iroquois, suitably impressed, thought they might ingest some of his might. They cut out the great man’s heart and, we are told, ate it.

  I traced my finger over the nude savage’s figure and was about to close the book when the phone startled me by ringing. I jumped, as if I’d been asleep, and picked up the receiver. I noticed the time. It was 4 A.M.

  “Hello?”

  “Katherine, is that you?”

  It was my mother.

  “Katherine, are you there?”

  “Yes. Where are you?”

  “I’m where you left me. I can’t talk for long.”

  “You sound well. Are you?”

  “As well as can be expected. They changed my medication.”

  “I’ll come see you.”

  “No. You should stay away. Your father’s very angry.”

  “He’s been angry for twenty years...”

  And then Boris called from the bedroom, “Katherine, who are you talking to?”

  “I’m on the phone,” I said.

  “I hope that’s not long distance,” he added.

  “I have to go,” said my mother.

  “How did you get this number?”

  But the line had gone dead.

  * * *

  Several weeks passed and I waited for my mother to call back, but she didn’t. I was beginning to wonder if I’d just dreamed it. I thought of calling her at the hospital, but I didn’t think she wanted me to. I thought she might be worried that my father would find out that she’d been making phone calls, or something like that, and I didn’t want to inadvertently get him on the phone. Also, my mother had sounded so good that I wanted to enjoy that. I didn’t want to call back and get my mother overdrugged, underanimated, somewhere in the pale.

  5

  Ann had a show so I took the train to Soho. Boris was working and said that we could go later, but I knew how he was and that the possibility of missing Ann’s show didn’t bother him. Honestly, I wanted to go. Boris had no friends so any contact with other people happened over these desperate conversations with shop folk at Zabar’s (What does that mean, hand-rubbed chicken? Is it sanitary?) or gushy “thank you”s at the Korean grocers (No. Thank you so much.) My going to the show may seem over solicitous to Ann, who still found me difficult to tolerate, but I was eager for time away from Boris. I thought I might have a conversation with someone.

  I pictured an event where legions of turtlenecked men and slickhaired women turned in tight circles before paintings, looking alternately through and then over the rims of their glasses, bending in to check price, stepping back to gauge value. And I was right about everything, except for the legions. There were five people in the whole gallery, and one of them was Ann, another the owner, who, while I stood on the sidewalk and wondered if I could nip down the block and get a real drink before entering, stepped out to have a cigarette. Ann was drinking from a large glass of wine. She accidentally met my eye, then looked away. I suppose she wanted to give me the chance to escape. But some generosity of spirit made me go in. I don’t know why, but I felt that I should.

  “Ann,” I said. “I’m early. Boris is coming by in about a half an hour. He had something to finish up.” I gestured at the something, which might have been just outside the door of the gallery.

  Ann looked at me, unsmiling. “You’re not early,” she said. She drained the last of her wine.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But some of these paintings are really wonderful.”

  “Really?” said Ann, not believing. “Which one do you like?”

  I saw a portrait of Boris in the corner. The picture must have been a few years old, because Boris was a bit thinner around the middle and a bit thicker on top. He was sitting naked in a chair, bored. Light from somewhere lit up half his body in bold purples, blues, and yellows. “I love that,” I said, pointing to it.

  Ann smiled finally. “I liked it when I first did it, but now . . .” We walked over to the picture together. “I don’t know. Doesn’t it look like Boris is decomposing?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s why I like it. You’ve somehow captured Boris’s spiritual decomposition.”

  Ann looked at me and smiled. She seemed grateful for my company and, though this didn’t feel altogether comfortable to me, I said nothing, scared that I would somehow wreck the mood.

  “I met Boris at a show, you know,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. At the Orbiting Spoon Art Gallery. It closed a year ago. I recognized him immediately from the picture on the back of his book. Boris walked over for a glass of wine and I caught him looking at me out of the corner of his eye.”

  There was a moment of silence. “He introduced himself?” I said.

  “No,” Ann said. “Well, sort of. He was looking at the paintings.” Ann rolled her eyes. “He starts gesturing around the room and he says, ‘Horrible, isn’t it?’”

  “No,” I said, and then higher, “no.”

  “Yes. And then he goes on. ‘No sense of depth, color juxtaposition is offensive, obviously a no-talent.’”

  “I’m assuming he didn’t know it was your show.”

  “No,” said Ann. “But I told him.”

  “Good for you.”

  Ann shrugged. “I was in assertiveness therapy at the time. I don’t know if I’d have the balls to do it now.”

  Ann and I looked at Boris, who looked unapologetically out from the canvas.

  “Was he at least embarrassed?”

  “No,” Ann said. “I actually liked that about him.” Ann paused to recall. “He said, ‘I really love the show. I’m tired of conventional depth. There’s something in your treatment of depth reminiscent of Manet in his Fallen Matador. I find your color juxtaposition innovative
and I like your work. The only reason I insulted the exhibition is it was the only way I knew to start a conversation. To insult a show is a common way of breaking the ice. If I’ve offended you, it wasn’t me, just the casualty of society’s stupid dictates.’”

  “And you bought it?”

  “Sort of.” Ann couldn’t seem to remember. “I told him I’d read The Soulless Man. I liked the first line, ‘Why would one choose to hold a hand so cold?’ and the last line,” here Ann paused dramatically, “‘In the final closing of those eyes was the end of a personal history important to no one, except for the executor of this action.’ I told him that I loved the last line so much that I read it over and over. Which is why I remember it. But I just kept reading it because it didn’t make any sense.”

  There was a moment of quiet. Ann was deep in thought.

  “And then you went out for a drink?”

  Ann shook her head. “Assertiveness therapy. We dispensed with any formalities.”

  She slept with him that night and did his laundry the next morning.

  Ann sold a painting to a wealthy couple from Oklahoma, but aside from that, the evening was pretty much a disaster. The two of us sat on the front step of the gallery with a bottle of wine, passing it back and forth. The gallery owner and Ann’s manager were involved in a discussion with an interior designer from Philadelphia, who thought Ann’s work would be popular with her clientele. Neither of us had said anything about it, but I knew that Ann was waiting for Boris and I hoped to God he’d show up.

  “How’s Moby-Dick?” asked Ann.

  “I’ve finished that,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said Ann wearily. Conversation was becoming difficult. “What’d you think?”

  “I read an essay by this guy at Columbia, Crain, I think. Anyway, I knew that Melville was a big queen, but Crain has this theory that, at the time, sex between men was the greatest taboo, so every time someone’s about to fuck someone else...”