So I went and looked at it. Sideways. And there, obscured by the putative blackout curtain, on the windowsill, if you squinted at it in a certain light, was a darker, keyhole-shaped patch, and when you looked at it with the Virgin Mary in mind it looked like one of those statues, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, as if the kneeling Lady Lavery is praying to the Madonna in the hour of danger. Or mirrors Her. I remembered the Litany of Our Lady from childhood. Tower of David, House of Gold, Mirror of Justice, Gate of Heaven, Mystical Rose, Morning Star. So what’s the story? I asked Conn. And I’m trying to remember what he told me, through the fog of all those years, the bombings, the drinking in pubs that were liable to be bombed at any minute, the blanks in memory, the obliterated buildings, the people who had died or disappeared, or who had been disappeared. I’d like to quiz him about it now, but he’s been dead for years. I know the painting was one of a number Lavery gave to the Belfast Municipal Art Gallery, as it was then, in 1929. Like practically all public institutions in Northern Ireland, the gallery was run by unionists, some of whom, not to put too fine a point on it, were anti-Catholic. Did Lavery black out the Madonna himself? He was known as a painter of royalty, knighted in 1918. But then he had painted Michael Collins and Roger Casement. And the blackout curtain was a slapdash piece of work, not like Lavery at all, it was one of the things that had drawn Conn’s attention to it. Was it the work of another hand? Whatever the case, a murky story lay behind this detail invisible to all but those who had been told what to look for, or to those who had, like Conn, looked carefully enough, without being told. There was no mention of it in the art histories. I’d never heard anyone speak of it again, until now.
So how come you knew about the Lavery? I asked Jo. Oh, I was in Paris, said Jo, can’t remember what year, I met this guy in a bar, English accent, bit of a dandy, said he used to live in Belfast, John Bourne, that was the name, I remembered it, you know, because of The Bourne Identity, he told me about the Lavery. And there was something dodgy about him, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, as if he’d been spinning me a yarn, but when I got back to Belfast I checked it out, and he was right, the Lavery was dodgy.
A Yellow Beam
So what brings you to Paris? said Gordon. Kilpatrick told him his story. As for Gordon, he was with the Irish Diplomatic Service, First Secretary to the Ambassador, with a special brief for Culture. Had been in Paris for two years. Before that, in many places: Colombia, Baghdad, El Salvador, to name some. In Beirut he had been involved in the negotiations to free the hostage Brian Keenan, who had travelled to Lebanon under two passports, British and Irish – a dual nationality that might well have been instrumental in his release, though there was no way of knowing for sure. Kilpatrick thought of Brian Keenan, and the other one, what was his name, McCarthy, John McCarthy, an Irish name, though he was English, the pair of them chained to a radiator telling each other stories to keep their spirits up. Singing songs. What’s that song of Dylan’s, said Gordon, we used to sing in the old days, back in Sixth Form? The keeper of the prison, he asked it of me, how good, how good, does it feel to be free? And Kilpatrick replied, And I answered him most mysteriously, are the birds free in the chains of their skyways? He thought of the vast flocks of starlings that wheeled over the Seine at dusk, moment by moment changing from wisp of smoke to tumbling cloud, bewildering the eye with the speed of their movements. The same starlings over Belfast, over Manchester. Similar yet everchanging patterns.
But what brings you here, specifically, said Gordon, Hôtel Nevers? I don’t think you got that far in your story. Yesterday in the James Joyce, said Kilpatrick, I met a man with a black briefcase. Before Kilpatrick could name the man in question, Gordon said, Freddy Gabriel, and he asked you along to the Modiano do. Of course you know Freddy Gabriel’s a spy, said Gordon. Nice Oxford don-type spy, but still a spy, at least in a manner of speaking. Everyone knows he’s a spy. For all we know he might be letting us know. Part of his game. That briefcase of his, for instance, hidden camera, mike. You can buy them online, for Chrissake. Everyone can be their own James Bond these days. Or think it. But as we know, it’s not about the information. It’s how you use it. Or what you think it is. What you think it’s worth. It’s about the deal. There’s always something under the table. You have to ask yourself how well you know who’s sitting on the other side. If they are who they say they are, or who they represent. There’s always doubletalk. You watch the body language. They hide their hands under the table, usually they’re hiding something. But then they might want you to think that. And then we have to ask ourselves who we are, and who or what we represent. Funny the way I took you for John Bourne. Some say his real name is Harland, but somehow I can’t see him as a Harland. Much too practical, if you think of Harland & Wolff. And he laughed. Kilpatrick thought of asking if this Bourne might be the Bourne he knew, and as Gordon talked Kilpatrick was beginning to rehearse the story he might tell Gordon, but he thought better of it, and bade his time.
I guess I took you for him because of the clothes, said Gordon. Did you know that in the diplomatic service they train you to look at clothes? Le style, c’est l’homme, that sort of thing. Part of the cultural discourse. No, Bourne dresses like you. Or you like him. Dapper. The sort of man who thinks about textures and colours. And John Bourne has an uncanny feeling for such things, considering he’s blind. Blind? said Kilpatrick. He tried to see the Bourne he knew gone blind. Yes, what is it, diabetic retinopathy? said Gordon. One of those things they diagnose when it’s too late. You have diabetes, the blood vessels at the back of the eye start to leak. Anyway, Bourne can take a piece of material between finger and thumb, gauge the weight, the fabric, the colour even. Says his sense of touch has improved dramatically since he lost his sight. And he’s become more intimately acquainted with the cut of clothes, he says. He can run his hand over a suit and tell to within a fraction whether it will fit. And then there’s his painting. Painting? said Kilpatrick. Yes, said Gordon, Bourne paints. He was a painter before he went blind, and when he went blind he was in despair, I believe, but something made him get back into it again. Honestly, if you saw his work you wouldn’t believe it was done by a blind man. I met him through Freddy Gabriel, of course, Freddy has a way of finding these characters, all part of his network. I think he thinks Bourne has some kind of extrasensory perception, sees things the normal person can’t see, which makes him a good candidate for spy-work. You should talk to Freddy about him. Un autre Ricard? Kilpatrick nodded.
As Gordon went up to the bar Kilpatrick remembered Bourne talking about portraiture. What do we know of ourselves? he would say. Or of anything? Conscious perception is only a fraction of what we know through our senses. By far the greater part we get through subliminal perception. When I paint a face, am I painting the person I see before me, or the person I have in mind from all those times of seeing him before? Am I painting a figment of a figment? What do we remember of ourselves? A few fleeting fragments, which we make into shifting histories of ourselves. A kind of interior monologue. Sometimes we dramatize ourselves in the third-person. You know George Orwell’s essay, ‘Why I Write’? He describes how from early adolescence he made up a continuous story about himself, a kind of diary existing only in his mind. For minutes at a time, says Orwell, this kind of thing would be running through his head: He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half-open, lay beside the ink-pot. He moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf … and so on and so forth. I like the detail about the tortoiseshell cat, said Bourne. But anyway, the point is, through language we make up a fictive self, we project it back into the past, and forward into the future, and even beyond the grave. But the self we imagine surviving death is a phantom even in life. A ghost in the brain. As for painting what’s before my eyes, said Bourne, sometimes I like to shut my eyes and let the brush take over.
Kilp
atrick knew the Orwell essay, an apologia for his political writing. In a peaceful age, said Orwell, he might have written ornate or merely descriptive books; as it was, after five years serving in Burma as an officer of the Indian Imperial Police, a profession to which he was entirely unsuited, he was moved to write out of a sense of political injustice. Then came the Spanish Civil War. And yet, said Orwell, he never wanted to abandon the world-view he acquired in childhood. So long as he remained alive and well, he would continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.
Gordon came back with the drinks. Kilpatrick and Gordon poured the water into the Ricard and watched it go cloudy.
Locus Suspectus
I’d forgotten my drugs. Medication that is. Some years ago, not too long after Harland disappeared, I had been diagnosed with high blood pressure. Subsequently I underwent an echocardiogram, familiarly referred to as an ECHO among the medical profession. In this procedure the patient is asked to undress to the waist and lie on the couch. An ultrasound probe is placed on the chest; lubricating jelly is placed on the chest so that the probe makes good contact with the skin. The probe is connected by a wire to the ultrasound machine and monitor. Pulses of ultrasound are sent from the probe through the skin towards the heart. The ultrasound waves then echo from the heart and various structures in the heart. I sat in the waiting area until the nurse called my name, John Kilfeather, and I went into the ECHO room.
As I lay on the couch I could see the sonogram of my heart on the monitor. It looked like a video of an alien planet, fuzzy with static, its chambers like continents expanding and contracting in time-lapse tectonic shifts; I could hear its movements, a coarse-grained rhythmic swash and back-swash as if of surf purling and collapsing on those alien shores, gathering itself for onslaught after exhausted onslaught; and I thought of how little we know of what goes on within ourselves, what phantoms wander the uncharted regions of the brain, unknown to ourselves. The ECHO showed I had stenosis, or narrowing, of the mitral valve which connects the left atrium and the left ventricle of the heart. I was prescribed a regime of drugs to lower blood pressure and increase blood flow. These included clopidogrel, atoravastatin, bisoprolol, amlopodine and perindopril, words that I have difficulty remembering. But I have the packets bearing the names before me now, having retrieved them from my home.
Home is where the heart is, they say. When I got off the bus at Elsinore Gardens the street was still sealed by white security tape and manned by a police officer. I explained my case to him; after pondering it, he held up the tape to let me through. Five minutes, sir, he said. As I stooped under the tape I heard the tap of a cane and out of the corner of my eye I saw the blind man coming down the Antrim Road, dressed in his familiar nondescript anorak, his long white cane swinging metronomically from side to side like the antenna of a mine-detector, and I thought how the white security tape had made a blind alley of the street where I lived. I walked towards my house, my home, feeling like one who has been away for so long a time that he has become a stranger. It was an eerie feeling to turn the key in the lock and enter the hallway, knowing that I had but a brief temporary access to the house where I had lived all my life, that soon I would be homeless again. Though I was in the house, it seemed haunted by my absence.
In retrospect I am reminded of Sigmund Freud’s essay on the Uncanny, and his teasing out the meaning of the German word unheimlich, literally ‘unhomely’, but translated into English as ‘uncanny’; into Greek as xenos, ‘alien’; into French as sinistre; and into Latin as suspectus, as in the expression locus suspectus, ‘an eerie place’. Heimlich is ‘homely’; yet, as Freud observes, there are contexts in which the word becomes increasingly ambivalent, moving from meaning homely, comfortable, tame, familiar, intimate, to secret, privy, inscrutable, hidden, locked away, removed from the eyes of strangers, until it finally merges with its antonym, unheimlich.
At the heart of Freud’s essay is an analysis of E.T.A. Hoffman’s story ‘The Sandman’, which revolves around the fear of blindness. Freud reads this as fear of castration. As a child, the protagonist Nathaniel is told in the evenings that he must get to bed because the sandman is coming, and on occasions he hears something clumping up the stairs with a slow, heavy tread. When he asks his mother about the sandman, she tells him of course there is no sandman, it’s only a figure of speech, a way of saying that you’re sleepy and can’t keep your eyes open, as if someone had thrown sand in them. But when he asks his sister’s old nurse, she has a different story. The sandman is a wicked old man who comes after children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that their eyes jump out of their head all bloody, and then he throws them into his sack and flies off with them to the crescent moon as food for his little children, who have their nest up there and have beaks like owls and peck up the eyes of the naughty children. Nathaniel becomes increasingly obsessed with this figure, identifying it with a frequent visitor to the family home, the lawyer Coppelius, a loathsome fellow who might or might not be the doppelganger of an Italian optician called Coppola, or of a Professor Spalanzani, who has made a female automaton with which Nathaniel falls in love, neglecting his sweetheart Clara. At one point he is assured by her that his obsession with the sandman is just that: perhaps there does exist a dark power, she says, which fastens to us and leads us off on a dangerous and ruinous path which we would otherwise not have trodden; but if so, this power must have assumed within us the form of our self, indeed have become our self, for otherwise we would not listen to it, otherwise there would be no space within us in which it could perform its secret work. This power can assume other forms from the outer world; but they are only phantoms of our own ego.
I was interested to learn that Hoffman was a Jekyll and Hyde figure: by day a respectable lawyer in the Prussian civil service, by night a user of laudanum, debauchee, and author of bizarre tales and satires. In 1819 he was appointed to the Commission for the Investigation of Treasonable Organizations and Other Dangerous Activities. Within two years he had written a satire on the commission that employed him; it came to the attention of the authorities, but proceedings against him were halted when it was discovered he was dying from a combination of syphilis and years of alcohol and drug abuse. On his gravestone are carved the words, ‘Died on June 25th, 1822, in Berlin, Councillor of the Court of Justice, excellent in his office, as a poet, as a musician, as a painter. Dedicated by his friends.’ He was forty-seven. The formal cause of death was given as locomotor ataxia, inability to control the limbs, or paralysis.
I take my medication: a tablet each of clopidogrel, atoravastatin, bisoprolol, amlopodine, and perindopril, and it strikes me that I do not know what these words mean. For the first time I read the accompanying leaflets, and learn that among the possible side effects of these drugs are dizziness, constipation, diarrhoea, anorexia, muscle spasms, nausea, nightmares, insomnia, hearing loss, fever, liver failure, blistering of the genitals, impotence, loss of memory, hallucinations, paralysis, and blindness.
Une Falsification
The room on the first floor of 57 Rue du Bac was crowded when Kilpatrick and Gordon arrived. They stood on the threshold of the double doors. There was a dull thud, then another, and the buzz of conversation died down. Peering over shoulders, Kilpatrick saw Freddy Gabriel standing at a microphone, dressed in a navy-blue flannel suit, white shirt and burgundy silk knitted tie. He had a white carnation in his buttonhole. Beside him, on the closed lid of a grand piano, was the black briefcase and a half-filled glass of champagne. Gabriel tapped the microphone. Another dull thud. Silence. Messieurs et Mesdames, began Freddy Gabriel, and he launched into a speech alternately in French and English. The English, Kilpatrick noted, was sometimes a more or less direct translation of the French, but sometimes not, more an addendum or sidetrack. It transpired that Patrick Modiano was indisposed that evening, having been overcome by a bout of gastric fl
u. Monsieur Modiano vous prie d’excuser son absence. Il est désolé. However, said Gabriel, in his absence Monsieur Modiano has very generously granted his permission for me to read an extract from his current work in progress, provisionally titled Rue Daguerre. But first some words about the author.
Jean Patrick Modiano was born on 30 July 1945 at Boulogne-Billancourt on the outskirts of Paris. I cannot say why he chose to be known as Patrick, or whether it was chosen for him. But for the writer Modiano, whose work is engaged with a search for identity and its embodiment in language, the names are not without significance. Jean, or John, is the author of the eponymous Gospel, which begins, In the beginning was the Word; John the Divine is the author of Revelation; as for Patrick, the apostle of Ireland – and I am glad to welcome our Irish friends here tonight – many of the salient details of his life, such as his birthplace, are a matter of conjecture. By his own account he was born of Roman parents somewhere on the island of Britain, and taken as a slave into Ireland. He is an exile, and one could say that the protagonists of Modiano’s novel are in a state of internal exile, forever searching for a home. Or searching for an absent father; we note that the name Patrick has its roots in the Latin pater, father. Modiano’s own father is a mysterious figure …
Here Freddy Gabriel embarked on a digression on Albert Modiano, originally Alberto, but known as Aldo. The Modianos were a family of Sephardic Jews from Modena, who had emigrated to Trieste, Alexandria and Salonika before settling in Paris, where Modiano’s father was born in 1912. He discovered an early vocation for entrepreneurship – très jeune, il se livre à des affaires et trafics divers. Just before the Second World War he managed a shop selling stockings and perfumes. During the Occupation he evaded the 1940 Nazi census of Jews, living secretly under a series of assumed identities and involving himself in various ‘business deals’ – escroqueries. Among his associates was the writer Maurice Sachs …
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