Human Pages

by John Elliott

  Agnes laughed, drawing the looks of the few remaining visitors. She watched Emmet stride purposefully past them to the exit. Before he pulled the door open, he raised the flat of his right hand behind his hat, then he was gone.

  Apart from the cautious tread and the occasional whispered comment of a couple still doing the rounds of the exhibits, silence dominated the gallery’s space. Its subdued lighting seemed imperceptibly to echo the dank cloudiness outside. Roberto Ayza in the flesh is proving to be as elusive as my father, Agnes thought, as she picked up the envelope and got to her feet. She wondered if, like herself and Emily Brown, there was someone other hiding behind his name. She passed the woman at the entrance, who was now deep in a thick paperback book, and went out unnoticed into the street.

  *

  Bunches of white heather, leather belts naïvely decorated with supposed Egyptian pictographs and small mirrors tilted to show his features, were thrust in front of Sonny Ayza as he jostled with the crowd waiting to cross Roosevelt Way into the pedestrianised expanse of Constitutional Square, colloquially known as Aphrodite Park.

  Young men and women with eager hands and eager tones wondered if he were interested in handyman services, minicab services, 24-hour dry-cleaning services, personal services, religious experiences, sharing a moment, if not now then perhaps later, if he would only agree to take their card.

  On the far side of the road, three further straggling lines of similar hucksters and beggars waited for the lights to change so that they, too, could harangue and net the fresh shoal borne their way by the WALK NOW sign.

  Sonny was in no particular hurry. He, therefore, let himself return the ingratiating eye contact of a random handful of his new importuners in order to hear at least the beginnings of their spiels in the vague hope of picking up something out of the ordinary, something that, however fanciful it might seem, could relate to the nebulous words he carried in his pocket. Nothing of the kind transpired, of course. Their patter and proffered cards merely confirmed the well-worn pitches he already knew.

  Beyond this stratum of modern enterprise in the square itself, more traditional activities attracted the ebb and flow of passing spectators. During the hours of daylight, fire-eaters, a sword swallower, several statues, a unicyclist, two drunken mimes and a mimer of drunks, plus an ageing escapologist, festooned with heavy chains and immersed in a water tank every twenty minutes, plied their arcane skills by licence and custom. When dusk fell they stopped, gratefully relinquishing their poses and massaging their weary limbs. They collected their equipment and became simply another citizen comparing the day’s takings with better times in the past, before departing, some to their cars and vans, others to the nearest tram stop, railway station or ferry terminal.

  Love held sway after dark. Each night, the confines of the square trembled with anticipated assignations. The air sighed with crushed hopes and abject despairs, only to be freshened in new liaisons and grow chill again amid further betrayals and farewells. Enfolded in this myriad of intimacies, couplings and blessed ecstasies, everyone in Greenlea, it was said, had been here at some time in their lives. They came usually to pay their respects to the goddess and humbly or proudly lay their tributes at her feet then go, whereas those lucky or benighted few who had truly felt her hot breath upon their cheek or glimpsed her rounded thigh, found themselves transformed into permanent acolytes, returning come what may, fair weather or foul, to her venerated shrine.

  Conscious of this erotic counterbalance, Sonny passed by the intent circles of gapers, dawdlers and pickpockets and reached the curve of the estuary embankment wall, which formed the square’s southern boundary. In its lee, a line of pavement artists were chalking industriously, adding the final considered touches to their work: a practice which was their sine qua non ever since market research had shown that more people stopped to watch live action, and, once engaged in seeing the finish of a picture, the likelier they were to part with a donation. When they judged themselves unobserved, therefore, they hurriedly deleted aspects of their portrait or landscape, which they restored vigorously when an onlooker drew near.

  A pitch displaying images of clowns holding balloons juxtaposed with matadors holding roses was the first on Sonny’s route. Their long, angular figures had been constructed by a series of crude black outlines, which presumably were intended to evoke a sense of melancholic ennui. The two archetypes, to Sonny’s eyes, appeared to be strikingly similar in pose and execution. The only difference being that the clowns were distinguished by their red, bulbous noses and exploded hats, whilst the matadors wore garish suits of light. The clowns held a purple balloon aloft in their right hands. The matadors brandished a red rose in theirs. In contrast to the overall technique, the balloons and roses had been depicted in meticulous detail.

  The incongruity of these tall knights of the bullring compared to the fired-up, lithe, stocky, little men of reality made Sonny smile. Stray bits of theme that Tian had been commissioned to write for Mirandan TV came into his head and, without thinking, he found himself humming a few bars. Before his eyes, the images that accompanied them gradually supplanted the artists’ inventions: the rolling terrains of the bull ranches intermingled with shots of empty stadia awaiting their public, moon-haunted nights over plains and cities, fighters praying in their hotel rooms giving way to festive crowds in procession, the first flutters of handkerchiefs in the arena spreading into an erupting snowstorm of white until the president signalled his permission for the band to play the triumphal march and two ears were held aloft while the slain, transfigured beast was dragged from the ring.

  He was back once more in the Café Goldsmith. This time it was late at night after supper. A television set blared from the shelf in the corner as loudly as any in the more disreputable bars of the town. Veri switched her excited gaze back and forward from it, keen to interrogate Tian’s impassive face. A thin column of smoke rose from the cigar, still glowing beneath its cone of ash, balanced on the ashtray in front of him. At last, he picked it up, patted her hand in encouragement, then leant over to kiss Rosario’s cheek and, in so doing, dislodged the jacket, which was draped across his shoulders. Smiling, Rosario straightened it, and turning to him said, while her fingers smoothed his hair . . . what? He saw her lips move, but her words were lost, lost amongst the unwanted, intrusive memories of the TV’s flickering images: Jimmy Bones poised between the bull’s horns, ready for the attempted kill, Little Michael’s dancing run as he planted his final banderillas, Frankie Street inching forward into the sunlight, his progress so breathtakingly slow that the crowd did not know how to react before he made them gasp with the grave opening pass of his capework. Funny how all this trivia returned, while his mother’s words remained obstinately and, it seemed, irretrievably lost in the domain of ghosts, leaving only a wounded sense that they had been important, that they had meant something heartfelt. He ran his fingers through his hair in a token of her gesture. She would not do it anymore, nor rest her eyes upon his face. Day one of my new life, he thought ruefully, where the chance things I look at guide me back into a past I cannot alter.

  The TV credits rolled. Music by Sebastian Marva. The whole company rose in sustained applause, ‘Man About Town’ probably amongst them. Cheers for the local composer. Cheers for the Mirandan way of life. Oblivion for ‘nothing for us’. Then, judging the moment, Tian got to his feet and bent his head in an ironic bow. Someone stretched up and switched off the set, returning the Goldsmith to an animated normalcy.

  It was time to move on, yet the fragment of the theme hung in his mind. He hummed a few more bars, realising it was a setting of a traditional threshing song, hardly fitting for the subject matter of the documentary. So, unknown at the time, the spirit of Antonio Escobar, Uncle Antonio, the country singer, had been there as well. The rest of the score, like Rosario’s words, was gone, escaped, as though one of the balloons in front of him, aided by a sudden gust of wind, had broken free from the clown’s grasp and was now hovering, somewhere
unseen, outside the perimeter of its picture.

  The first work of the second artist he came to exhibited a quietist domestic scene. In a brick-lined room, a young woman sat at a scrubbed pine table, holding a letter in her outstretched hand. A tear trickled down her right cheek. The title of the picture was Bad News. Behind her stood a kitchen dresser, stacked with blue delft storage jars. The last jar on the top shelf bore the inscription ‘Vermeer’.

  Next to it was a candlelit scene of a group of card players. Five men, dressed in workmen’s blues, hunched round a table, their faces illuminated by a yellowish candle set in a green sconce. Its flame was their only source of light. Gradual shadow plunging to impenetrable darkness in both the foreground and the background completed the picture. The cards they were using were of the cups, clubs, swords and rounds variety. Around the base of the candle holder, the artist had chalked the letters, ‘De La Tour’. The bathetic title he had given the piece was Power Cut.

  Seeing Sonny and another passer-by study his work, the artist, a bearded giant of a man, stopped his labours on his third offering, got up, stretched himself and said, ‘I’ve put in a black cat. See if you can spot it.’

  Both of them obeyed, but neither could discern any catlike shape in the pervading gloom. Good-naturedly, the artist pointed towards the leg and feet of one of the card players. The passer-by said tentatively that she thought she could make out an arched back but could see no eyes or tail. Sonny confessed he was at a loss.

  The artist, once they had dropped some change into his enamel mug, offered no further explanation, but instead returned to his final tableau, which showed the upper storeys of two large buildings. Framed in the window of one of them, a young man, dressed stiffly in a charcoal-grey suit, gazed across the divide to a window on the same level of the other building where, partially obscured by the swag of a red curtain, was the figure of a middle-aged woman. She stared downwards, as if her attention had been excited by something awful happening in the undepicted street below.

  Sonny lingered while the artist tinkered ineffectively with the already filled in cloudy skyscape, then moved on, wondering what the given title would prove to be and who would be named as the inspiration behind the subject matter. The adjacent pitch was empty, and the subsequent four so uniformly banal that he scarcely gave them a cursory glance.

  He was now at the top of the monumental cascade of the Port Steps, which had been repeatedly drawn, painted and reproduced over centuries. Their flights, landings and quay had provided the setting for a flotilla of regal and aristocratic embarkations and disembarkations. Banqueting suite walls in municipal buildings still gloried in the solemn gatherings of merchants tallying the cornucopia of their off-loaded cargos, which painters had so carelessly strewn across their expanse. They formed the foreground to cityscapes and the background to river scenes. Mobs raced down them, dodging in vain shot and shell. Orators at their summit proclaimed lustily the rebirth of national identity, while below demonstrators unfurled red and black flags. According to fashion, they had been suffused in light, half obliterated in rain, metamorphosed in fog and romanticised by moonbeam. Their gradients graced sentimental genre paintings and particularised melodramatic engravings and prints. Lovers kissed and parted in their shadows. Rivals duelled with swords or pistols in their opalescent dawns. Assassins dropped bloodstained knives into the water from their quay. Suicides knelt on their unforgiving stones in their last bereft moments of despair, only for the scene to change as poodles, attired in military bandsmen garb, struck up a lively polka and young women à la turque assumed decorative poses at the river’s edge.

  Sonny paused and looked over the balustrade. Immediately below him, concealed in a bay to the left of the steps’ first flight, a young man was bent over the last uncompleted panel of a large chalked triptych. A square piece of cardboard, wedged behind his collection pail and supported by the legs of a folding chair, informed the onlooker that the theme of his work was ‘The Founding of the City’ and that it was ‘An Original by Jacob Kemmer’.

  ‘Jacob Kemmer, at your service,’ the young man said, standing up and seeing Sonny observe him. ‘Please feel free to come down and have a closer look.’

  Sonny checked his watch. The next ferry to Panalquin did not leave for fifty minutes. Twelve minutes walk would get him to the terminal. He had plenty of time to kill.

  ‘I don’t think I recognise your sources,’ he said on joining Jacob Kemmer.

  ‘I change them virtually every day,’ Jacob replied, avoiding the implied question. ‘Am I right in thinking that like so many others who stop here you weren’t born and bred in Greenlea?’

  Sonny nodded.

  ‘Okay then, let me guide you through today’s myths,’ Jacob continued. ‘In this one for example,’ he pointed to the left of his triptych, ‘I show the pursuit and mating of the Nereid, Huicraor, by Anchamam, the spirit of the river we see below us. As you can see, he finds her first in the depths of the ocean where she slumbers in the guise of a smooth Venus Shell. Pressing a giant conch to his lips, he awakens her and she slowly attains her rightful form, but, at the same time, her ever-watchful father, the god Nereus, spying danger, redraws the boundary of the sea and leaves Anchamam stranded on a hilltop. Undismayed, our hero changes himself into a heron and takes flight. Gliding over our estuary, he dives and seizes the magic fish, Lanooan, who, as a price for his freedom to perpetuate his never-ending cycle of migration and return, tells him to fly to the northern skerries, where, on the third night, he will find Huicraor resting in the shallows in the form of a black seal. The skerries gained, Anchamam lies in wait, making his hair into a swathe of seaweed. He sings of the joys of his home, his river, its reaches, rapids, pools and banks. He praises beguilingly the known and the yet to be known, until Huicraor, accompanied by the safeguard of a hundred similar black seals provided by her father, hears his seductive song. Trembling, she understands her future weird is to leave Nereus’ kingdom forever. The seals submerge and rise, their heads sleek in the black water, blending into the darkness of the starless night. In order to see, Anchamam releases from his drifting hair tiny shoals of phosphorescent fish. They stick to Huicraor’s muzzle and flanks. With a sudden powerful lunge, Anchamam binds her in his tangle of weed and speeds her south, while Nereus, in revenge, lashes our shores with tempests and engulfs our forests and glades with a tidal wave. Yet none of his rage or protestation is able to penetrate the cave where, as you can finally see, Anchamam and Huicraor consort. This sacred place in time becomes a Christian saint’s cell, a pilgrimage for monks. Greenlea springs up on its site.’

  Sonny, try as he might, could not reconcile the images at his feet with Kemmer’s fanciful explanation. ‘I’m afraid these concepts are quite alien to me,’ he said, turning his attention to the larger centrepiece.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Kemmer, certain now that his audience would not walk away without leaving a reasonable contribution, ‘this one I’m sure will appeal to you more. It has wider connotations. It illustrates the story of Odysseus and meta-Odysseus.’

  ‘Like most of us I’ve heard of Odysseus but not, what did you call him, meta-Odysseus? Who was he?’

  Jacob Kemmer smiled. ‘As I’ve shown, one of them returns to Ithaca, the other is washed ashore on the very spot where we are standing. But forget the picture for a moment, and let me tell you the story. It’s purely apocryphal, of course. By the way, who do I have the honour of addressing?’

  ‘Roberto Ayza.’ Immediately he had answered, Sonny wondered if he should have chanced Fernando Cheto Simon, Conrad Terence or, for that matter, Ute Manoko, to see if it provoked any reaction. There was something about Kemmer, something in his eyes and the sardonic way he gave his overblown descriptions. Skerries he had said, instead of isles or rocks. Was there some arcane hint of Elizabeth Kerry and the Cresci Foundation in his tour-guide patter?

  ‘Smoke?’ Jacob proffered a cigarette from the packet he had pulled out of his anorak pocket.

  �
�No thanks.’ Sonny shook his head and watched as Kemmer’s fingers trembled slightly before tightening round the stem of a mauve throwaway lighter. Something was getting to him apart from the brisk wind he was trying to shield away from his cigarette. At his third attempt the light took. He inhaled sharply. The smoke drifted quickly across the images they had begun to discuss.

  ‘Names in this case were a matter of life and death,’ Jacob resumed. ‘During the long voyage Odysseus’ companions became increasingly uneasy about his intentions. Many of them harboured suspicions that he was deliberately and persistently avoiding setting a true course for home. In the beginning, his protestations about the malignity of the gods and the need to expatiate spilt blood by incurring a wandering fate had overridden any doubts, and, as time went by, he had deflected any criticism of his leadership by using his famed resourcefulness and cunning. So-and-so just happened unfortunately to have been crushed by the rock hurled by the enraged Polyphemus. Thingamajig hadn’t plugged his ears properly when the sirens sang. Bugger-lugs had disobeyed orders and had stayed goat-like on Calypso’s island. Jack-the-lad had lost his footing as they rolled and yawed between Scylla and Charybdis, his cries unheard by the straining helmsman.

  ‘This unhappy state of affairs, however, could not be indefinitely sustained. The meagre level of booty they seized came nowhere near compensating for the danger and hardship they suffered. To a man, they wanted nothing more than to put into their home port and be reunited with their hearths, their kin, their families and their animals. They salivated in anticipation of the goat slaughtered in their honour. In their imagination, they ate and drank the hero’s portion, while elders and children hung on their every word and their momentous exploits were declaimed in panegyrics. Yet here they were, denied those just rewards, buffeted by storms, half-starved, led hither and yon by a capricious commander, who, day by day, divested himself of Ithacan ties. The word never even passed his lips. Instead, he frowned and waved his fingers dismissively whenever someone mentioned it in reverent terms.