by Quim Monzó
“Can I start right away?”
“Naturally. We’ll be glad to give you a tour of the club.”
He has trouble losing his guide. He goes through all the rooms twice, no longer trying to go unnoticed. He goes into the gym, sees people vaulting the horse, flipping on the bars, stretching their arms on the rings. He makes his way through the steam of the sauna. Pretending to be lost, he goes into the women’s dressing rooms, eliciting shrieks and giggles. At the pool, he watches as a man dives off the board, twisting his body on its axis like a corkscrew. He wanders through the halls, checking all the tables of the small bar-restaurant on the top floor. He finally finds her in front of a mirror, one of the many women lined up at the wall, lifting one leg delicately behind them and thrusting it forward suddenly, as they double their trunks over . . . When he sees her face up close, the few doubts he is still harboring are immediately erased: this is Hildegarda, it is unquestionably she. This was the face that had filled all the canvases of Heribert Julià’s final period like an obsession, until he had started drawing himself, getting more and more lost in a maze of self-portraits and men seen from behind, exhausted and leaning on any surface they could find.
How should he approach her? With self-assurance, he could approach her any old way and make a success of it. But he wants his method to be so perfect that, for the first time, he decides to reflect on it. One by one, he discovers the defects in each of the plans he comes up with. His imagination is prolific, though, and he continually conjures up new ones. He imagines and, applying his fine critical faculties, rejects so many that, before he knows it, she is on her way out. Defenseless, he can’t find the wherewithal to follow her and launch right in without further ado. He decides to think about it some more, and more calmly, and puts off any action until the following day.
•
Humbert tells Helena that he roams around the city from one place to another, looking at buildings he has looked at a thousand times and discovering new facets to them. He follows people and watches where they go, how they sit on a bench, how they grab the handle to get onto the bus, how they open the newspaper, how they put their handkerchiefs away after blowing their noses, how they put one foot before the other, time and again, when they walk. Habitual behavior seems more and more strange to him every day, with careful observation.
“And what will come of it all?”
“All what?”
“All this observation?”
Following people will enable him to learn things he will then make use of to advance even farther, to break with what he has created thus far, to take the leap that will put even more distance between him and the crowd, turning meters of separation into kilometers, atop all the tops, an aerostatic balloon soaring over the cupolas of all cathedrals. He realizes that, unthinkingly, he is taking the excuse he invented for Helena for the truth, and even elaborating a theory based on it. He takes out the little notebook and writes: “Tell a lie. Believe it. Elaborate a thought based on the lie, a thought which, brilliant though it might be, is of no use, based as it is on a falsehood.” He is about to add one more detail when he realizes that Helena is sound asleep and he turns out the light.
•
Bright and early the next morning Humbert is on his way to the club. He spends the morning doing simple exercises and checking out the dance studio from time to time, to see if Hildegarda is there. In the afternoon he does laps, drinks soft drinks at the bar, reads the newspaper, and fills a few pages of the notebook with notes.
Around 9:00 p.m. he gives up on waiting. He goes home, has coffee and donuts for supper, gets right into bed, and when Helena gets in at 3:30, he turns over and gives her a hug.
In the morning, at the club, he has a sauna and plays tennis with a fat man with glasses who has asked him to play. Not only does he defeat him soundly, but with his final stroke he smashes the ball and leaves the lenses of his opponent’s eyeglasses in pieces. Once in a while, he goes to the dance studio, hoping to find her there. In vain. That afternoon, at a table in the bar of the club, he fills up his little notebook with a list of possible sports-related paintings. What if he based his January show on the topic? Would it be enough of a novelty, or was it better to pursue the idea of working out the dream series in iron? He makes a note: “January exhibit based on sports? Include allusions to George Bellows?”
At 8:30, he goes home. He has a chicken sandwich and orange juice for dinner. He goes to bed early. Helena is there, reading an Art and Artists from many years before. Scattered about the sheets are issues of Artforum, Arts, two months of ArtNews, one Arts Magazine, and the previous week’s Arts Weekly. For a moment he tries to suss out which articles Helena is interested in, but sleep quickly overcomes him and he falls asleep.
In the morning Humbert lifts weights and, from time to time, stops by the dance studio. Around noon he finally sees her, on the floor, twisted into a knot, spreading her arms and lifting her head. He goes wild with joy, his heart beating like a cuckoo clock.
When Hildegarda gets out of the shower (an hour and a half later, her dance session over for the day), she runs into Humbert (who, meanwhile, had also showered and dressed), who introduces himself straight off. Hildegarda says she has heard of him and, since she, too, is very interested in painting, she’s pleased to meet him. Humbert confesses that he has wanted to paint her since the very first time he saw her on the dance studio floor. Hildegarda asks him if he’s been going to the club for very long, because she’s never seen him before. Humbert says a couple of years, but he doesn’t go very often: work and all . . . Humbert thinks of a painting in which Hildegarda appears, languid and pallid, surrounded by trees and plants . . . What an effect that painting would have in January’s big show! Forget sports. Now he decides it will revolve around a single person: fifty, sixty, eighty, a hundred paintings of Hildegarda. How mediocre Heribert’s paintings of her would seem in comparison with the ones he, inflamed with a consuming passion, would do! He can already see the titles in the art reviews: “Toward a new romanticism?” To escape such labeling, he thinks, he could do each painting in a different style, forgotten or a bit out of vogue, which could be regarded as new: new cubism, new op (or new figurative perceptual abstraction), new Dadaism (Hildegarda dressed as the Mona Lisa with a landscape of factories in the background, with a mustache like the one Duchamp affixed to Leonardo’s), new neo-classicism (Hildegarda as a Homeric Helen out of a painting by Poussin), new pop (Hildegarda as Wonder Woman, destroying the face of the bad guy with a single blow, in a three meter by three meter comic strip), new baroque (Caravaggio’s Virgin with Hildegarda’s face), new romanticism (Hildegarda as one of the women at Delacroix’s death of Sardanapalus). Hildegarda says she doesn’t know what to say.
“Say yes.”
“Yes.”
“When can we meet?”
“I’ll come to your studio.”
“No, not to the studio. I’ll do studies of you on the street. I see this as something alive, completely spontaneous . . .”
Hildegarda tells him that another painter had asked her to pose for him, a long time ago.
“But he must not have done anything with the paintings in the end, because I’ve been waiting for him to do a show, to see if I had been an inspiration to him, but he’s never done another exhibition. You don’t hear anything about him these days. We were good friends. Maybe you know him . . .”
Humbert looks at her: she is wearing a black wool pullover with a deep V-neckline front and back, a straight gray skirt, big earrings, a wide, shiny leather belt, black gloves, gray stockings with seams, shoes with five-inch heels, with a great big black bag under her arm.
•
“I have to go. How could you start sketching me now? Call me at home tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was too late, Humbert thought. They are sitting on a bench in a park, and Humbert is surprised that there are still pigeons around at that time in the afternoon. Over by another bench a pigeon and a squirrel are staring each
other down, motionless.
Humbert asks her if she’d like to go to Chicago with him, to a show he’s doing there, which he hadn’t planned to go to, and wouldn’t, he had just decided, unless she came along. Hildegarda keeps laughing, saying over and over that he’s crazy. He takes her hand, looking at her lips, which are so dark red it almost hurts. As he moves in to kiss her, she asks him (without backing off so much as an inch) if he doesn’t think he’s moving a bit fast. Humbert doesn’t know whether to continue along the road leading to those lips, or to turn back. He sees her floating in the air, soaring over the buildings.
She agrees to go to Chicago, though. But they won’t be able to leave together, she says, since her husband, who is an opera singer, is in the city now, and he will definitely want to take her to the airport to say goodbye, particularly since the following Wednesday he will be starting his European tour. It would be easy for her to find an excuse for going off suddenly to Chicago: so many years of marriage have created a network of tacit ellipses and accepted ploys that amply justified sudden leave-takings. Humbert confesses that he, too, is married. She kisses him hard, not just closing her eyes, but squeezing them shut, with such ardor that Humbert feels weak and aroused at the same time, seeking closer contact, which she does not want. As they walk toward the place where the car is parked, they set the date. She will go by plane, he will go by car. When they say goodbye, besides kissing, they feverishly caress each other’s backs.
•
The problem is how to explain this sudden change in plans to Helena, how to justify his repeatedly having refused to go over the past few weeks, only to change his mind so unexpectedly. He pushes open the door to the house, vaguely certain, though, that it won’t be all that hard for him to find a way. There is a surprise awaiting him at home: the whole room is full of people he knows, and some he doesn’t, drinking, laughing, and talking at the top of their lungs, inaudible under the waves of music. When he isn’t able to locate Helena at first glance, he tries to cross the room discreetly, to the corner where the drinks are set up. Along the way, though, he greets four painters with mustaches who are chatting with one another, a couple of critics, an Ethiopian sculptor whose show has just opened, three women he has never met before (two of whom are twins), and two expressionless men, who are leaning against the wall and contemplating the goings-on, seriously, with drinks in their hands. Finally, he finds Helena, behind a ficus, arguing with an illustrator; they’ve both pierced the same canapé. He gives her (Helena) a kiss and takes her aside. What are they celebrating?
“Xano. He was supposed to be back today with the latest news, live, about the Japan show, but he hasn’t gotten in yet.”
Humbert struggles, successfully, to avoid being included in a discussion of art deco, rationalism, and the Nazi aesthetic. At one point, trying to catch a rest from the din in one of the bedrooms, he encounters a luxuriant couple. In the kitchen he finds traces of jam in the mustard pot. Someone must have stuck a knife in without cleaning it. He finds a woman’s shoe in the freezer. In the hall, having taken out his notebook to jot down a few impressions, he runs into the double giggle of the twins, who carry him off into one the bedrooms, undress him, and subject him to all manner of abuses. On his return to the living room, dressed only in a Japanese kimono (too short and too tight for him), he finds a cardboard rocking horse in the hall, a whiskey bottle among the potted plants, a turbot in the fruit bowl. They were playing the lying game. The person who seems to have proposed the game is a short guy who is so drunk he can only keep his balance by holding on to the curtains. For a while everyone tells lies that give them away, lies that seem like the truth, boring lies, brilliant lies, pointless lies. Then a critic, who was sitting on top of the television set and nudging a peach someone must have stepped on after it had fallen on the floor with his foot, tells him that his work is extraordinary, that the utilization of diverse methods, styles, and media is neither impoverishing, tacky, nor the greatest farce in the history of art, but rather an enrichment; what’s more, it wasn’t full of contradictions, as some said; on the contrary: it was one of the most solid oeuvres of the century, probably the body of work that was destined to link this century with the next, to make that leap for contemporary art which the great creators of other times had made for their own. The people laughed; Humbert, annoyed, gets up from his chair, and slams his fist into the critic’s face without missing a beat. Short, and quite astonished, the guy loses his balance and, trying to clutch on to something, encounters the curtains, which he brings down with him in his fall. Then there is a mass of arms trying to keep Humbert and the critic apart, one or two shrieks, the giggling of the twins, Helena telling him that what he has done is deranged, and Humbert alleging that the critic was out for blood, and even a child would have been offended if someone telling a lie had gone on about how good he was. Helena tells him that maybe he should develop a little humility and self-control and get used to tough criticism. Humbert tells her that, by the way, he has decided to go to Chicago the next day.
Humbert is driving down the highway. He has been at the wheel for more than twelve hours, and he has only stopped once. To compensate, he decides that from that point on he will stop at every bar he comes across.
At the first, he orders a scotch. At the second, a bourbon. At the third, a vodka. At the fourth, a gin. At the fifth, a rye. At the sixth, a glass of wine. At the seventh, a tequila. At the eighth, a rum. At the ninth, an anisette. At the tenth, a cognac. At the eleventh, a martini.
At the thirteenth he sees, right next to the jukebox, a woman who starts out by singing the song that’s playing on the machine, then dances to it by herself, and, as it ends, dances to it with another one of the women sitting there. At the fourteenth, he sees an American flag placed symmetrically across from an Irish flag on either side of the mirror between the shelves of drinks, centered on the shiny cash register. At the fifteenth, a drunk is so happy to hear that Humbert has ordered his brand of beer that he turns his own bottle around to show him the label and demonstrate that he, too, is drinking that brand. At the sixteenth, he finds a backed-up toilet that has left puddles of piss all over the floor, which is composed of tiny tiles. He has to slosh through it to get to the bowl. At the seventeenth, he finds a bar with no bar, only tables. Indignant, he turns and leaves. At the eighteenth, he finds the waiter asleep at one end of the bar, and when he raises his voice to wake him, the other customers give him a dirty look. At the nineteenth, they don’t let him in because they’re closing. At the twentieth, he goes over to the pool table and watches as the player rips a hole in the green felt, and everyone, both the player who made the hole, the other players, and the other customers in the bar, stares at him in silence until he leaves. In the twenty-first he finds a little boy at the bar, drinking sarsaparilla, looking into the eyes of a man who must be his father, who is drinking Curaçao. At the twenty-second, he orders giant clams with horseradish sauce to go with his drink. At the twenty-third, he orders cheese with onions and mustard on wheat bread. At the twenty-fourth, he orders oysters with lemon, but they don’t have any: they’ve run out.
The twenty-fifth is the bar of a roadside hotel. After having a drink at the bar, he orders an abundant supper, followed by coffee and a glass of whiskey. He looks at his watch: 1:15. He decides to spend the night there. He asks if there are any rooms.
A receptionist (dark, tall, with thick lips, a little under twenty years old, who walks in front of him gently swaying her hips) takes him up to his room, showing little surprise at his having no luggage. She takes her tip with a smile and closes the door softly. Humbert urinates, washes his face, and lies on the bed to rest for five minutes. Since it seems clear to him that he isn’t drowsy, and is not likely to fall asleep, he goes back down to the bar.
The bartender asks what he’ll have. Humbert would like to see the whole length of the bar full of glasses and more glasses of different sizes and shapes. For starters he orders gin and then, in succession, a whole serie
s of different kinds of drinks. A half hour later that stretch of bar looks like a glassware showcase, until a woman comes out of the kitchen and picks up all the empty glasses, leaving him just the one that is half-full of maraschino. Humbert takes out the little notebook and writes: “Still life of different types of glasses and mugs.”
Humbert turns his head. A woman with long curly brown hair, dressed in black and staring at the surface of the liquid in her glass, is sitting two stools down. When she also turns her head to look at him, they both smile. Humbert thinks of initiating an approach, but when he feels his eyelids heavy with sleep, he picks up what money is left, puts it in his pocket, and leaves the bar without looking back.
Once in bed he hears a couple arguing in the next room. Humbert positions his ear closer to the wall. The woman is saying (so loud the whole building could probably hear her) that, although he is indeed a good politician, capable perhaps of being the best—by his standards as well as by hers—he would never really be the best, because what he was after was to be the only one, to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue, every member of the human race, forever after, in every remaining moment of history, and that, the woman said, was impossible. There has never been anyone, no matter how important his or her contribution to the course of history, who isn’t a stranger to many. Neither popes, nor emperors, nor film stars, nor pop music idols (when pop music was still producing idols) have ever managed to do it, and neither would he. Humbert takes out the little notebook and takes it all down. The woman is running down a list of great celebrities and asking him how many times a year he thinks of each of them. Without waiting for an answer, she herself responds, hardly ever. He tells her to shut up, and his rebuttal is so garbled that Humbert has trouble understanding any of it. She then says not to take it like that, that she loves him, but that loving him hasn’t left her so blind as not to see clearly what was happening to him. He seems to be sobbing. Humbert hears how she starts consoling him, in a lower voice, and how they kiss. He hears whispering, brief laughter. He can even imagine how they are touching each other. Humbert is immediately aroused. He hears the woman moan. He hears some obscenities being whispered by the man that intensify the woman’s cries. Humbert begins to stroke himself. The bedsprings in the room next door creak obsessively until the woman breaks out in a long cry, almost at the same moment in which Humbert abundantly stains the sheets and, as he dries himself, hears the cavernous groan of the man.