The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  ‘Right,’ I say blandly. This avenue of conversation does not seem promising, romantically speaking.

  ‘So there is still money to fuck them, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose there is.’

  ‘It’s so horrible what is happening there,’ she says, suddenly passionate. ‘There are people starving everywhere you go. People starving! On the streets of the city where I grew up! And the world acts like we deserve it! We didn’t drop cluster bombs on Baghdad! We didn’t blow up hospitals in Gaza! Now, because we don’ pay back some loans, we are the worst in the world?’

  Trying to be optimistic, I tell myself that our misfiring encounter can’t possibly get any worse. But now we arrive at our destination and I realize I am wrong.

  A straggling line of men stretches along the pavement. Some are slouched against the corroded wall, others slumped on the kerb, still others sprawled across the footpath, apparently asleep, so we have to steer the trolley around them. They are young and old, bald and hirsute, corpulent and lean as junkyard dogs. There are Roma men with tragic moustaches and pork-pie hats, gaunt Slavs with chilly eyes, a couple of burly Africans murmuring to each other in French; the majority, though, from their features and accents, appear to be Irish: men with wild sailor beards and bulbous, capillaried noses, cans of beer in toxic colours; skeletal, shiftless men with pinhead-pupils; sheepish men, better-dressed than the others, who chew their gum, clear their throats and study their phones, as though it were a connecting flight they were waiting for.

  A palpable quickening runs through the line as Ariadne passes along it; some of the men leer, a few of them address her – not by name, more in the spirit of, ‘There she is now,’ ‘Howya gorgeous,’ as well as a less articulate array of grunts and gurns. We make it around the corner without incident, but then in the narrow lane one particularly sordid specimen lurches up and grabs her by the arm. Feverishly I try to remember the tiger-throw Marco taught us in the Transaction House gym – then realize the creature just wants to show her an abscess on his leg, which Ariadne tuts over sympathetically before going through a door.

  We have entered a low, poorly lit hall. Men and the occasional woman sit eating at rickety trestle tables, or queue with their trays at the far end, where food sweats unappetizingly under heat-lamps. A dour fellow in a hairnet comes out from behind the counter and greets Ariadne. ‘Thanks,’ he says curtly, taking the trolley from her and parking it by the hatch.

  ‘How are things, Brendan?’ Ariadne asks.

  ‘How are they ever?’ this Brendan responds. He pauses, directing an unabashedly hostile look at me. ‘You’ve a new helper?’

  ‘His name is Claude,’ Ariadne says. ‘I have kidnapped him to show him how the other half live.’

  ‘This is the Crawley Street shelter,’ I say, realizing where I am. ‘My bank has done some fund-raisers for you. Raffles, fun runs, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Of course!’ Brendan exclaims. ‘It’s thanks to you we’ve been able to open our East Wing!’ He points behind him, though all I can see is a blank wall.

  ‘Ay, Brendan,’ Ariadne scolds.

  ‘No offence,’ he says, the choleric blaze in his eyes belying the words, ‘but you people have a lot to answer for. When there was money everywhere no one wanted to know about this place because we didn’t fit the big success story. Now the country’s broke they tell us there’s nothing left for us. Then next thing you hear they’re giving billions to the banks?’

  He is trembling now; Ariadne lays a soft hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Calm down,’ she says. ‘What’s the use to get angry?’

  ‘Sorry,’ the hairnetted man says bluntly. Then, turning on his heel, he mumbles, ‘I’ll go and get yesterday’s vat for you.’ He stumps back to the kitchen, leaving Ariadne and me in a slightly strained silence, broken sporadically by bloodthirsty cries from the surrounding tables.

  ‘He is not normally like this,’ Ariadne says.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘As I said, my bank is an investment bank, not a retail bank. So we are not the ones who receive these handouts he’s talking about.’

  ‘I meant, I hope he is all right.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course.’

  A noise comes from outside: a chorus of angry voices and a series of thuds. Brendan, who is wheeling out the scrubbed-clean double of the vat we just delivered, thrusts it aside and runs to the door, where a large black SUV has pulled up. Its appearance seems to have enraged the men waiting in line: they have surrounded the vehicle and are rocking it on its wheels, thumping the doors and windows while yelling abuse at the driver, a frightened-looking woman, who has a small child in the back seat. Brendan wades into the crowd, tugging bodies away and shoving them back. ‘Lads, lads,’ he shouts. With a screech of its wheels, the SUV promptly reverses, and manages to make it back out through the crowd, though not without more kicks and a few gobbets of spittle adorning the shining bodywork.

  ‘What’s she doin’, comin’ here?’ a small outraged man demands of Brendan. ‘What’s she doin’ in a fuckin’ yoke like that?’

  ‘Go in and have your food and stop annoying people,’ Brendan tells him. Then to us he says, ‘Her husband went bust. He’s done a legger. Bank’s kicked her out of the house, she and the kid have been living in that car for two weeks.’ He gazes bleakly into the cloud-mobbed sky a moment. ‘This place is fucked,’ he says, and without further comment returns inside.

  We turn back towards the river; I tilt the umbrella against the newly pugnacious wind. Ariadne has fallen silent, although the nature of her thoughts do not remain a mystery for long. ‘These fucking banks,’ she exclaims, and then, ‘Sorry, you work in one, I keep forgetting.’

  ‘No, you’re right, some banks acted very badly,’ I concur. ‘But…’

  ‘I know, I know, your bank is an investment bank, not a retail bank.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that.’ In fact I was going to say it, but I also wanted to steer her around to the idea that bankers are capable of doing good. ‘Many corporates, as well as creating employment and contributing to GDP, do have significant charity programmes.’

  ‘Right, with the fun runs.’

  ‘Yes, but also we donate a percentage of profits to charity every year.’

  ‘As a tax write-off?’

  ‘Well, that’s not the primary reason –’

  ‘Pff, the only reason you do anything is money. Cheap tax, that’s why all of you are here.’

  ‘That’s a bit –’

  But she cuts me off. ‘You think if the Irish government turns around and says, “We are putting up the tax, but we guarantee every penny can go directly to the people who need it the most, to schools and hospitals and homeless shelters,” do you think any of these companies would stay?’

  ‘Well, you see, a business has a legal obligation to its shareholders –’

  ‘Oh yes, just following orders, where do I hear that before?’

  Is she serious? Is she genuinely comparing investment banks to Nazi war criminals?

  ‘I’m not saying they are the same –’ Ariadne’s cheeks are pink, and as she speaks she gesticulates vigorously with both hands, so that the trolley is unpiloted and is stopped from crashing off the kerb only by my shins. ‘I’m saying that once they have an excuse, people will do anything. They do what they are told, and they take their money, and they think it’s all okay because it’s just their job, while their real self is what happens after work, when they’re bouncing a baby on the knee, or writing poems about snowflakes or whatever.’

  The trolley heads for my shins again; I am too despondent to get out of the way. Here I am with the woman of my dreams, and I feel more like I’m having a shouting match with my father.

  We push on, silent again save for the metallic yammer of the trolley. There is no food left to deliver, meaning we are on our way back to the Ark. A part of me is glad: Cyrano himself might have trouble reviving this scene. For the sake of closure, however, I say, ‘Let’s
talk about your work.’ Ariadne scowls, as if I have proposed we go to the dentist and have all her teeth extracted. Pretending I haven’t seen, I go on, ‘I must tell you, I admire your paintings very much. I think they are very beautiful. And that they deserve a wider audience. I would like to help you, if I can.’ She doesn’t respond; the trolley, which I suspect she is deliberately pushing over the bumpiest sections of the pavement, clatters unencouragingly. ‘Firstly, I want to exhibit them, in a proper gallery,’ I persist. ‘Perhaps hire a space that exists, perhaps find somewhere entirely new. Also, I would like to offer you financial assistance, so you can concentrate on painting full-time without having to do menial work.’

  ‘Menial work?’

  ‘The café. Waitressing.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  For a long time it looks like this is the full extent of her thoughts. ‘That’s very interesting,’ she says at last. ‘I am happy you like my paintings.’

  ‘And…?’

  ‘What you are saying, you want to be my patron.’

  ‘Is it a bad thing? The greatest artists had patrons. Leonardo, Velázquez. Today the big banks sponsor a lot of the major art fairs, as well as buying a great deal of the work.’

  ‘Yes, “alternative assets”, that’s what you call art, isn’t it? It’s a good source of tax relief?’

  I don’t reply; what is there to say?

  ‘Did you always want to be a banker?’ she asks sadly.

  ‘Not particularly,’ I say. ‘In college, I studied philosophy. Nietzsche, Foucault, Texier…’

  As if I have pronounced a secret code-word, her head whips round and she comes to an abrupt stop.

  ‘Texier? You mean François Texier?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I say. ‘From Paris, he died a couple of years ago –’

  ‘So, now we can talk,’ she says. ‘Because you know Texier is my great hero.’

  Now it’s my turn to come to a halt. Can it be true? Was Paul right all along? ‘You have read his philosophy?’

  ‘A little bit. I read what he wrote about financial capitalism. He’s very critical, how did you manage to go from Texier to banking?’

  ‘It wasn’t something I planned.’

  ‘Anyway, you know he became a painter, late in his life?’ Seeing my confusion, she explains, ‘When he is quite old, he becomes disillusioned with philosophy. Philosophy, science, religion, they all start by saying they will tell you the truth, and from there they lead only to bigger and bigger lies. But art is different, because art tells you right at the start, “Okay, I’m going to tell you a whole lot of bullshit here…” Texier says that in modern times the only one we can still believe is the man who tells us he’s lying. And so he gives up philosophy and he starts to paint.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of his paintings.’

  ‘Oh, Claude, they’re so beautiful!’ She seizes my arm; her countenance has quite changed, become rapturous and light-filled. ‘Strange, you know? And dark? But when I see them, I feel like my heart is gonna explode. One little canvas, this big, makes you remember just how huge and weird the world is, and how fucking amazing it is to be here in it.’

  I smile: it has been a long time since I felt like that.

  ‘And he has all these interesting ideas – for example, he wouldn’t ever sell his paintings, he only gives them to friends, because he thinks that when you sell them, the meaning changes? They start to become the false truth that he is trying to escape? But he can’t control it: eventually the friends sell them, or they die and their children sell them – anyway, they finish up with the price tag. And in the end he gives up painting too, because he thinks that art is only making things worse.’

  ‘But you?’ I say. ‘You don’t feel like that – do you?’

  She frowns, sighs, stops with her trolley in the middle of the path. ‘It’s very interesting. When I come here first, is because I want to be a painter. I hear there’s a boom, Celtic Tiger, and when I get here it’s so exciting, so much energy in the air, everyone talking about the future and progress and all that – very different from Greece where, you know, everyone has a name from a myth of three thousand years ago. And the best thing, the art market is so crazy back then, even someone like me can sell paintings. But after a little while, I start to realize the people who come to the galleries, they are not even looking at the paintings. They just in a race with each other to buy it. Paying all this money – you know the most expensive piece always sell the first – so they can belong in this special club.

  ‘An’ at the same time, I’m working in the café, I’m coming down here every day, this fucking street –’ She waves her hand; I look around at the litter-strewn gutters, the weed-split paving stones, the tenements doomed for the wrecking ball. ‘Every time I come here, is a little bit worse. Even with all this money, no one sees it, no one does nothing to change it. And it takes me a time to realize, No one wants to see it. That’s what this whole boom is about, it’s so people don’ have to see things. All the fucked-up stuff that is happening, or has happened in the past, they cover it up with money, with talk about the future, with new buildings, with drinking, whatever.’

  ‘But the boom is over,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, and now the very same thing is happening again, everybody tries to forget what they did during the boom. Everybody acts instead like they are the victim. You know the Greek word for truth is aletheia? Lethe, this is the river of forgetting, so the truth, aletheia, is that which you don’ forget. But here, it’s like the total opposite. The truth is what you don’t remember.’

  ‘Liffey or Lethe,’ I say, recalling the old argument about the Radiohead song.

  ‘It’s like this whole country is trying to crawl out of its own skin,’ she says. ‘And I start to feel that me, with my art, I am helping them.’

  ‘But you can paint whatever you want to paint,’ I tell her. ‘You can paint nothing but these streets, if you want. I’ll make sure the whole world sees them.’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly the kind of fucking thing art would do,’ she laughs, ‘and show it in a gallery far away from here, where you can’t smell the smell and no one going to stab you with a HIV needle, and people can say, “Oh, how sad, yet how beautiful,” then it get bought by some yuppie with a polka-dot tie. Or look at this one.’

  We have arrived back on the quays; directly in front of us stands a tall sculpture, depicting, in blackened bronze, six emaciated humanoids and a little bronze dog. ‘It’s a Famine memorial – you know a million people died, in this tiny little country? And millions more left, on ships that went from right here, and they never come back. So from a terrible thing that really happened, on this spot, we get, a hundred and how many years later, a piece of art, very beautiful, that people can look at as they hurry by with their takeaway lattes…’

  I don’t think I have ever looked at it before, with or without latte. I step up to the sculpture, run my finger down the tortured cheek of one of the gaunt, inconsolable forms. ‘It is beautiful,’ I say, not knowing whether I am contradicting her or not.

  ‘Now look down,’ she says.

  I do as she says, and see that although the figures themselves are anonymous, names have been printed on the stylized bronze cobblestones beneath their bare feet – names of companies, names of banks, names of individuals: the corporate and private sponsors who paid for the work. Billionaires, businessmen, a disgraced prime minister, a society hostess; others I recognize from newspaper accounts of deals and court cases, corruption charges that were never proved.

  ‘So ask yourself, who does this artwork want you to remember?’

  I step back with a chill. The wind pulls and chafes at the surface of the river; on the far side, the night sky is reflected and intensified in the louring windows of the corporate towers, as though they were mining darkness from the air, storing it within them. ‘Maybe in a hundred years, some artist will make a sculpture of the old women in Athens looking through the garbage for somet
hing to eat,’ Ariadne says, resting her cheek against the cold metal shoulder of a peasant. ‘And passers-by will stop their rocketpacks to film it with their magic future phones, and they’ll think how beautiful, how sad.’

  ‘So you’ve given up on art,’ I say in summary. ‘You’re turning down my offer.’

  ‘I haven’t given up on anything,’ she says. ‘And you are very kind to make me this offer. But I like working in the café. Making a space where people can come together and feel safe and good, for me it’s not menial work. Even if they’re bankers, maybe if they eat the nice home-cooked food that’s made with love, it can change how they think a little bit. And afterwards I can bring the leftovers to the shelter, and at night-time I can paint my paintings, and if anyone wants to buy them they can, they’re not very expensive. What does it mean to become a famous artist, anyway? That your paintings cost more money, right? That’s all it means, deep down. But why should rich people have all the beauty?’

  ‘Not all the beauty,’ I qualify, wistfully taking in her dark radiance, the twin lights in her eyes.

  She holds my gaze a moment, then looks away. ‘I have made enough escaping. Now I am here, I want to be here.’

  ‘Though you are going back to Greece,’ I remind her.

  ‘My father is very sick,’ she says. ‘And everything is so fucked up over there right now that in the hospital there’s no food or medicine, so your family has to bring them for you. If you have a family.’ She hoists her shoulders, as if shrugging off a cold and sodden cloak. ‘Do you go back home often? Are they still in Paris, your parents?’

  ‘No, they died.’

  ‘Ah, I’m sorry.’ She has separated herself from the statue and come towards me; she rubs the black cloth of my suit between her finger and thumb. ‘It was recent?’

  I shrug.

  Her hand remains on my arm. In the dusk her green eyes are dark pools in which the reflected street lights swim like lilies. ‘So you are alone,’ she says.

  The wind swirls down the river, the quayside traffic judders like a heavier, earthbound wind; everything seems to liquefy, as if something had broken open.