The Weight of Nothing

by Gillis, Steven;

  Again, “What are you saying?”

  Aziz grabbed Niles’ wrist and squeezed it hard. “What am I?” he spoke in measured bursts, nervous himself and unsure what he would do once they left the bus, he reached for the camera bag and unzipped the flap, digging around until he’d removed both the photograph of Osmah Said Almend and the knife. “A fine target,” Aziz leaned closer, already contemplating the consequence as he whispered, “a fine dagger.”

  CHAPTER 14

  SERENDIPITY

  What is there to do inside the dark except root about and wait for the light?

  With Niles gone, I went down to the lobby of the Sahel and sat in one of the large cushioned chairs. I was put off by his quick exit and the argument we just had, and while I knew he thought abandoning me meant I might reconsider and go searching for Timbal, or possibly fly to see Liz, I remained stubborn and settled back in my chair, looking lazily about the room. Men in dark slacks and long white shirts stood in the cool corners of the lobby while the sun poured through the front window and fell across the weave of two large Persian rugs.

  I had Cheever with me, my ticket to visit Liz tucked inside the middle pages for reasons unclear as I had no plans to use it. Just as I started reading, two women walked toward me from across the lobby. Dressed in traditional garments, a dark haik and several layers of equally dark cotton skirts, their faces halfway covered by veils, the younger woman seemed nonetheless lovely. The old mother, in contrast, was as plump as a pumpkin with a large black mole above her right eye, enormous feet, and skin creased like crumpled leather. She was holding the girl’s elbow for support, her gait an awkward waddle that caused her to rock from side to side in a state of terminal imbalance. As they drew near, I realized the old woman was not clinging to her daughter’s arm for assistance however, but was actually helping her along.

  I stared at what I could make of the blind girl’s face, and quite by chance, when she passed in front of my chair her veil slipped down, treating me to the handsomeness of her lips and cheeks beneath the dark geography of her eyes. I continued to gawk until the old mother noticed and clicking her tongue, quickened her stride and led her daughter from the hotel.

  After another minute I gave up reading and decided to leave as well. I began walking nowhere in particular, doing my best to keep track of my bearings, but I must have turned the wrong way for I soon found myself down a side street of unfamiliar shops, and following a succession of ill-fated maneuvers, became even more lost and with no idea how to get back to the Sahel. I walked on, descended a narrow stretch of road where all the building fronts were connected one to the next and the shops had shallow windows and unusually tall doors. A man in an old brown sports jacket, small white cap, and loose-fitting slacks stood in front of one of the doorways, and when I said, “Le Sahel?” he acknowledged me with a nod and stepped to the curb. I repeated my question, said, “Rue Drouillet?”, at which the man pointed through the door and I went inside.

  The shop was larger than I imagined from the street, with three separate workbenches covered by pieces of furniture, an electric radio, and black guitar in various stages of repair. Dozens of different tools hung from the walls on metal hooks, implements used for shaping and carving wood, for soldering wires, driving screws, and hammering nails. The proprietor of the shop was a man my age with olive skin covered by flakes of dust and ash, his eyes dark and cheeks unshaved, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up above his elbows and brown pants drooping over the points of his hips. He held a pair of thick glasses in his hands while listening to the music of an old man in a rumpled jacket and blue cap who sat on a stool behind the benches playing a newly repaired mandolin.

  Both men glanced at me as I moved inside and stood to the left of the door. The old musician had knotted hands, huge and swollen like my father’s, his shoulders sloped, his large dark head bent forward over the mandolin which rested in his lap like a magnificent cat. He played with surprising agility, the music both festive and hypnotic, the melody possessed of a unique sort of lyric, ancient and bucolic. Several other instruments, fiddles and more guitars, a cello, and handcrafted drums, were spread around the shop, and seeing them all set out as I listened to the old man play reminded me how much I missed my own music. I walked forward, swept up in the performance, and yet all at once my mind flashed back to the disaster of my recent recital as arranged by Dr. Kabermill and how disappointed Liz looked and how despairing and helpless I felt when she left me. Unable suddenly to listen, I covered my ears and rushed outside.

  What a strange reaction. (“What the fuck is going on?”) I turned and hurried up a hill in the direction I hoped was the Rue Drouillet. What I wanted then was simply the shelter of my room, and walking on I called out, “Le Sahel?” and “Rue Drouillet?” I asked directions from an old man sitting on a stoop, and a woman carrying a basket of vegetables, inquired in an English that elicited no response. Another man in a long brown shirt and beard went so far as to take hold of my sleeve and drag me to the end of the block, jabbing at the air with a half-crooked index finger, but each time I followed his lead, I wound up somehow back where I started, over and over and over again.

  Perfect. What could be more fitting? Given a chance to demonstrate the effectiveness of my ability to be on my own, the best I could manage was to get lost. Convinced my mistake was compounded by celerity, I slowed down, settled into a more deliberate stride. After another few minutes however, I realized I was more lost than ever—if such a state as being “more lost” was even possible—and hurried on. I followed another narrow side street where a large bird passed overhead, its black wings ablaze in the near noon sun, reminding me of a painting in Georges Braques series of Bird Works, A Tir d Aile, in which an enormous blackbird exploded into an equally black bank of clouds. Reviewers suggested Braques bird in flight was symbolic of the speed which all individuals rushed toward death, but as I was struggling for a more optimistic view, I refused to believe this was why the painting came to mind and redoubled my pace.

  I passed a stretch of unfamiliar shops, breathed deep and tried to convince myself I was no longer concerned about being lost. “What does it matter one way or the other?” Squinting against the sun, I rounded one corner and then the next, increased my pace, oblivious to where I was going, wanting only to wander without interruption, until quite by accident I wound up knocking shoulders with a man coming out of a shop, and stopping to apologize, found myself standing in front of the painter L.C. Timbal.

  What chance?

  The question can’t be answered.

  A queer coincidence?

  No doubt.

  And yet how is it coincidence if it happened?

  A short man, just a shade over five foot six, rounded in the middle with a slack chest, thin arms, and stout legs, age had redistributed the weight on Timbal’s frame. At sixty-three, his face was lined with furrows drawn at a dozen different angles, his head of yellow white hair wild, dry and waved, jutting out at all points like a bale of straw after a storm. Dressed in an old sports jacket that fit his shoulders and arms loosely, his shirt green, his slacks grey, and sandals brown, he seemed to know I recognized him and immediately walked on.

  Surprised as I was, I managed to give chase, and cautious against tipping my hand, asked if he might point me back in the direction of the Rue Drouillet. “It seems I’ve gotten myself turned around,” I said. “The streets wind a bit more than I’m used to back in the States.” My comment caused Timbal to glance at me suspiciously before pivoting on his heels and disappearing inside a small café.

  I hesitated a second or two, then followed him down into a room several steps below the street. The atmosphere was cool and dark with a series of small silver lamps glowing and shadows snaking their way up the walls. A waiter in black shirt and green pants stood behind a table on which several jars of olives and orange slices were arranged. Unlike the cafés where Niles and I ate, Timbal’s retreat appeared to serve liquor, and four other men sat in the back
smoking and drinking. “I apologize if I’m disturbing you, Mr. Timbal,” I said as I approached the table, admitting then, “I do know who you are, but I’m not a reporter. I’m a student and a teacher and a fan.”

  “The holy trinity,” his tone was cold, and afraid he was about to ask me to leave, I took another risk and made reference to his wife. “I doubt you remember,” I said, “but I sent you a letter of condolence.” Timbal’s expression changed at this, his eyes taking me in with a different sort of interest, penetrative and purposeful. He ordered rum in an Arabic less natural sounding than Niles’, and leaning back in his chair, asked my name.

  “Bailey Finne, sir.”

  “Well, Mr. Finne, if you sent me a letter I have no recollection of it. You understand?”

  “Under the circumstances, of course.”

  “Sally,” he said, then stopped and folded his hands on the table in front of him. “My wife handled all my correspondences,” he continued after a moment. “I’m sure your missive is in a box somewhere. In any event, thank you.” Timbal’s rum arrived and I ordered a whiskey, sitting down without being invited, overwhelmed still by the coincidence of our meeting and not quite knowing what to say, I stammered out a question. “So, how long have you been in North Africa?”

  “Is this where the interview begins?”

  “Not at all.”

  “You say you’re not a journalist?”

  “No, sir. I was just making conversation. I’m a bit nervous. I’m a great admirer of your work.”

  Timbal gave a look through the half-light and over the top of his glass. I noticed his hands were small, yet possessed of a firm sort of grace that made it easy to imagine the control he wielded when holding a brush. He took a sip from his drink, his wild hair alive in a style unchanged from the way he wore it in the early ‘60s when he was working in England with the Young Contemporaries, an American influenced by the Kitchen Sink painters and the Euston Road School. As his work gained a reputation among a select group of patrons and critics, he began fashioning a more independent style that took complex aspects of color and imagery and merged them into preexisting forms of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. His most famous works, Heart in a Hole and General Amnesia to name but two, were absent popular imagery and devoted instead to a sophisticated application of figure and shade. By the late 1970s—with successful showings in New York and Boston, London and Barcelona, Los Angeles, Chicago and Rome—a Timbal canvas commanded as much as $100,000, and in the 1990s he was universally regarded as one of the modern masters. Looking to add a new dimension to his art—a way of “diving into a diffuse, fluctuant, and fluid field of circumstance,” as Rothko said—he decided to alter his style toward a less representational and more primordial approach, experimenting with muted colors such that his figures slowly dissolved into vague and mysterious forms.

  In hindsight, he failed to see the ambush coming. Even before the first showing of his new works there were rumblings of dissent. Much as scholars attacked Gauguin, Bacon, and van Gogh in their time, L.C. Timbal’s years of achievement generated an atmosphere for backlash among young critics and academics looking to make a name for themselves reinterpreting the value of his art. The summer before last, Timbal exhibited his newest works in London. Nervous, he entered the evening in an otherwise positive frame of mind and was immediately surprised by the predisposition of critics who assailed his new creations in what seemed a perverse collusion. Reviewers insisted he was out of his element—a post-painterly pariah one such authority called him—who built a career stealing from the inventiveness of English artists. As his new work avoided any visceral connection to his past, he was exposed to a completely different level of scrutiny, one that was not only mean-spirited and divisive but called into doubt the whole of his career.

  The extent of such scathing reviews drove Timbal from his home in London back to New York, where he shunned all local media and sequestered himself in the home Sally picked out. Even as his wife’s health began to fail the malicious reviews did not give way, causing Timbal to retreat further from the public eye. After Sally died, left alone in the unfamiliar upstate house for which he had no affinity nor desire to remain, Timbal took to traveling, as I came to learn, first to France, then Italy, and Spain where he found little solitude or means of escape, and crossing over one morning on a whim through the Strait of Gibraltar, he wound up in North Africa, where the queer and restless indifference of Algiers suited him and he chose to remain.

  Timbal unfolded his hands, glanced back across the table and asked me to continue. I hadn’t actually been saying anything, but not wishing to let the opportunity pass, I replied, “I was wondering about your being in Algiers. How are you getting on?”

  “Day to day, Mr. Finne,” he looked away again, then back at me, and asked a question of his own. “And why are you here?”

  “I’m traveling with a friend.”

  “Another American journalist?”

  “But I’m not.”

  “Yes, yes, so you told me. You’re a student and a teacher and all that,” he drank again, motioning with his free hand for me to go on. I began with the simplest overview, explaining about Niles’ desire to travel, saying nothing more really but enough to satisfy Timbal, who shifted back in his chair, asked a few more questions, then let the subject drop. We finished our drinks, talked about art, with Timbal mentioning the recent deaths of Bacon, Diebenkorn, and Conrad Marca-Relli, “three irrepressible souls,” while I brought up the Royal College and paintings by Pete Philips, Boshier and Hockney and Allen Jones, all contemporaries and once coexhibitors with Timbal, which caused him to smile and say, “Such a time before any one of us knew what we were doing, and yet, looking back it seems the only time we knew anything at all.” I discovered Timbal had a brusque charm, his coarse demeanor intimidating at first but ultimately benign, and waiting until the moment seemed right, I asked again, “So why Algiers?”

  He answered here without hesitation, “I appreciate its absence of familiarity.”

  “You were looking for something new?”

  “No.”

  “A place to disappear then?”

  “I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, Mr. Finne. When a man flees into the woods he isn’t searching for the perfect tree but for whatever provides a place of refuge. I put myself in flight and this was where the hounds stopped barking.” He had a way of speaking in a crisp poetic cadence that mixed naturally with his gruff tone and earthy appearance. I let him know that I knew what happened in London, told him I’d read the reviews, that I saw the film made of the exhibit, and took a bus to New York to view the paintings he agreed to show in the States. I spoke as objectively as possible and said that I found his work unfairly attacked. There seemed little doubt the canvases were first-rate, the quality of artistry and inventiveness beyond most anything being offered at the time. (Nearly all American critics with an opportunity to see the works acknowledged as much in a belated rallying and restoration of Timbal’s reputation.) I got only a short way into my response however before he cut me off, no longer interested in my opinion, his thoughts elsewhere, he said, “And you know about Sally? That she didn’t just die? That the bastards killed her?”

  I made no attempt to answer and waited for Timbal to continue.

  “She was my spirit,” he said. “More than muse, beyond Aode, Melete and Mneme, Calliope and Clio, and all the rest, she was my love and watched over my progress, offering comment and encouragement, diverting me from periods of self-doubt with gentle and constructive observations. She was the guiding influence of my vision, the sustenance when all other resources failed. She alone provided a third eye for my last work, wondering if I shouldn’t try yellows instead of gold, orange instead of red, pointing out when my hand was steering certain forms too far or not far enough. I leaned on her more than was fair and beyond anything I ever understood at the time.

  “When the critics saw fit to attack my work, I weathered the assault as b
est I could and assured Sally everything would be forgotten soon enough, but she took the slight much harder and spent a great deal of energy defending my art, renouncing the reviewers as parochial and nationalistic and far worse when she had the chance. She cursed other artists we once regarded as friends who provided little support and treated me now as an outcast. Ultimately she insisted we move from London. Her health was never an issue before. She was always hardier than I, yet seeing the mistreatment I suffered quite literally exhausted her heart. She lost weight, seemed to age overnight,” he stared at the shadows flicking across the ceiling, then back down at his hands. “How these things happen,” he said.

  Once again, I struggled to come up with exactly the right thing to say. I resisted the impulse to extend further condolence, but was at a loss to offer anything more, and wrapping my fingers around my whiskey glass, the best I could do was note, “And so here you are.”

  This seemed to please him, that I was wise enough to know when less was more, and he replied in turn, “Here, yes.”

  “Are you planning to stay?”

  “I’m planning nothing.”

  Of course. “I understand.”

  The wrinkles around Timbal’s eyes appeared as small wounds, his words a declaration inspiring me to quickly add, “Nothing’s good.” My comment caused him to look at me curiously again, and sliding his empty glass across the table, he turned his hands over and said, “Nothing is simply that.” I was hoping he’d go on, but he fell quiet and I had to start him off with a new line of questions. “How do you spend your days here in Algiers?”

  “I do as little as possible.”

  “And your painting?”

  “What of it?”

  “Are you working on anything new?”

  Timbal observed me this time as he did when we first collided, no doubt wondering exactly who I was and what he should make of all my questions. “No,” he said.