by Peter Stamm
I’m busy, said Arno, crumpling up a form and tossing it in the trash. Just have a look around and help yourself. If there’s a problem, you know where to find me.
Hubert asked when the other artists would be arriving. Arno looked up from his work and shrugged. There’s a young German woman who takes pictures of swimming pools. She’s due soon, he said, but I don’t know exactly when. Oh, yes, and someone from the local paper is coming to interview you. I hope four o’clock’s okay with you?
Hubert walked through the building. Most of the other doors going off the corridor on either side were to rooms Arno had already showed him. One small room contained the toilets and three shower stalls. At the far end of the corridor was a kitchen with a long wooden table and an array of chairs of which no two were identical. The cupboards harbored pots and pans, dishes, and other gear. On one shelf were opened packets of dry goods, pasta, rice, lentils, chickpeas, and lots of jars and tins of all sorts of spices and condiments. Everything was coated with a sticky layer of grease, some of the dried herbs were years past their sell-by date.
That afternoon he sketched a rough layout of the entrance hall, which doubled as exhibition space, marking the position of outlets and measuring the height of the ceiling. He tried to remember his first exhibition here, but he had the impression he had never seen this room in his life. Finally he went for a walk to look at the locality. He crossed the old bridge beside the cultural center, which crossed the Inn. On the opposite side there was another, smaller building. Over the door he read SPA WATERS, and a scrap of paper taped to the glass door told him that the hall was closed, and no trespassing. Through the dirty windowpanes, Hubert saw evidence of former luxury, lofty pillars and three niches with polished stone facings, and the names of the respective sources over them: Lucius, Bonifacius, and Emerita.
The old road wound its way up the wooded slope. It was off-limits on account of building work, but there was no one to be seen, just a few machines had been left standing around. Hubert scrambled over the barrier and climbed on up the mountain. As he climbed, he kept checking his cell phone, but there was still no reception. He remembered that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and he turned back. He decided to get something to eat in the hotel next door.
The sun outside was so dazzling that Hubert could see nothing at all when he walked into the lobby. The large room was full of old armchairs, in the middle was a bar, but there was no one around at all. At a desk behind reception, he finally saw a woman sitting at a computer. Hubert cleared his throat, and she got up. She walked up to the desk, parroting a greeting. She called Hubert “du” and explained that that was normal here, even before he could say what he had come for. The restaurant would open at six, she said, at the moment all the guests were out. But he could get coffee and cake here. Hubert thanked her and sat down in a leather armchair in a corner. After a while a young man dressed as a pirate came out and took his order. When the waiter brought his coffee, Hubert asked him about the costume and learned that there was a pirate-themed dinner tonight.
It’s all in your weekly program, said the waiter.
I’m not staying at the hotel, said Hubert, and the waiter laughed as though he’d made a joke.
When Hubert returned to the cultural center a little before four, he saw a large heavyset man waiting in front of the building, with a camera and an enormous telephoto lens. He put out his hand and said he was from the local paper. He was a little early, but perhaps they could get the photos out of the way. While he took his pictures, he asked a few questions, from which Hubert guessed that the man had no idea who he was or what he was doing here. The answers seemed not to interest him either, presumably he just wanted Hubert’s face to be in motion.
My colleague will be here in a minute to interview you, he said, after shooting off two dozen pictures.
Hubert sat down on one of the stone benches in the arcade, and the photographer sat opposite him. They sat there and waited in silence. After about a quarter of an hour, a tiny car drove up, and a black-haired young woman got out. Even as she approached the two men, she was apologizing for being late.
Tamara, she said and held out her hand to Hubert. Then she hugged the photographer. Hubert couldn’t say if she’d kissed him on the mouth or not. The photographer went away. Tamara unpacked a small recording device and set it in front of her on the table. Then she winked at Hubert.
What may we expect from you? Are you still painting naked ladies?
Hubert hesitated.
Tamara said Arno had told her he wanted to develop his new show here in situ, but if he thought he would find models in the village he had another think coming. Because here everyone knew everyone else, and nobody was about to get her kit off for him. Suddenly her voice had an aggressive undertone. Hubert imagined her naked, with that expression on her face. He said he didn’t yet know what the exhibition was going to contain. Tamara said he hadn’t left himself very much time.
I know that, he said, irritated.
Then he remembered what she was there for and said he hoped to find inspiration here. The only driver for his work was desire, a kind of hunger for reality, for presence, and also for intimacy, as opposed to publicity. In a very wide sense, he was interested in transcendence.
Tamara looked as though she didn’t believe a word of it. Do I have to warn the local women about you, or not? she asked.
He shook his head. I haven’t painted any nudes for years.
She asked him a couple more standard questions about his life, his work at the college, and his plans for the future, then she got up, and so did Hubert.
Well, see you at the opening, if not before, she said, gave him her card, and got into her car.
The entrance to the cultural center was north facing and already in shade. The air was cold. Hubert went in to get a jacket and then he drove into the village and took a look around. The center of the village looked impressively unspoiled, there were many old buildings decorated with artful graffiti, some were festooned with Romansh proverbs, one had a sundial. The whole area must have been prosperous once, he thought, the boxy concrete hotels you found in other touristy places were completely absent.
After Hubert had wandered around for a while, he took a seat on a bench in a big square and watched the passersby. He thought about the exhibition. The village was lovely, the landscape was lovely, even the weather was lovely. He had grown up in a village himself, what was there to say about it? He should have known there was just as little for him here as there was at home.
The shadows had gotten longer, and when they stretched to cover the bench he was sitting on, Hubert felt the cold. He walked into the nearest restaurant, ordered a cup of tea, and checked his e-mails. Astrid had written, and so had Nina and a couple of the other students. The college invited him to a meeting and sent him the minutes for another. His gallerist asked him how he was getting on in the mountains and wrote to say he was looking forward to the opening. He asked Hubert to book him a room for the time.
Hubert answered evasively. By the time he was finished it was seven o’clock, and he ordered something to eat. The restaurant was almost empty, a few men were sitting at a round table drinking beer and arguing noisily about local politics. Shortly before nine, Hubert left the restaurant. He had drunk too much to drive, really.
The hotel was brightly lit. When Hubert parked his car, he heard voices and laughter from the grounds, and music. There were no lights on in the cultural center, the door was locked, and the building looked discouraging. Hubert groped for a light switch. In the kitchen he found half a bottle of grappa. He took it up to his room, set up the slide projector, and looked at the photographs of women he had taken back in the day. He didn’t mean to work with the slides, presumably he had just brought them with him because they were part of the last sensible thing he had done. He projected the photos on a wall. He hadn’t looked at them for years, in his memory they had been more interesting than they were. He was surprised at the impertinence w
ith which he had proceeded, he must have been completely convinced by his work. Almost more surprising was that his self-assuredness and enthusiasm had been so contagious that he had found women who agreed to take part. In one of the photographs there was a small black-haired woman, a postwoman, whom he had run into at the end of her shift. She wedged a bottle of Prosecco between her thighs and fiddled with the cork. In the next picture she was reaching for glasses on a high shelf, in the third she was pouring wine into one of them and laughing because the bubbles overflowed the glass. Then there were two out-of-focus shots of her walking down the corridor, and one of her turning back the corner of her bed. That was the one and only time that Hubert had slept with one of his models. He had never used the photographs.
In the next slide tray there were photos of a woman of sixty or so, knitting, in a third a young woman breast-feeding her naked baby. She had struck an attitude and after the session asked him for copies of the pictures, which he had never sent her. These pictures had been useless as well. Hubert went through all his trays, pictures of more than forty women. Most of them he could just about remember, but in some of the latter trays he had the sense that he had never seen the pictures before. One sequence was taken in dim light, the pictures were slightly out of focus, and the face of the woman was never completely visible, sometimes she hid it behind her long hair, most of the time she was trying to avoid the camera anyway. Hubert couldn’t quite remember her story, she was leaning across a table and seemed to be tidying up or looking at something. The room she was in seemed anonymous, other than the table there were no pieces of furniture or other objects to be seen. The pictures radiated a deep quiet, as though the model had been all alone in the room.
When he stood in the kitchen the next morning making coffee, Arno walked in. He said he had to go ahead and print up some exhibition posters, perhaps Hubert could let him have an image.
No, said Hubert.
A rough sketch? Anything at all? Is there a title for the show?
Hubert shook his head. Arno grimaced.
I suppose we can just print “Carte Blanche” on a white background, he said, what about that? Or better, white on black. Get it? He laughed. Have you seen the article?
He went off and reappeared a little later with a newspaper, which he laid on the table. Hubert took it back with him into his room. On the front page was a small photograph of him, with just his name, the word “painter,” and the number of the page where the article could be found. There was another picture of him, and a reproduction of the poster for his previous exhibition. The article wasn’t exactly hostile, but it had an ironic undertone. Tamara had gotten hold of biographical information (and misinformation) from Wikipedia. She referred briefly to the first exhibition in the cultural center, which had provoked a minor scandal, and wrote about Hubert’s way of working. A few of the quotations must have been lifted from other interviews.
Hubert Amrhein’s interest in naked ladies has worn off, wrote Tamara, he has matured, or perhaps simply got older, and he no longer scouts out naked bodies. There was a time when women had to go in fear of him, nowadays he is a spiritual seeker. It’s not impossible that he will find what he is looking for here in our area.
Hubert had no idea what that was based on. He took the newspaper back to the office.
Arno looked up at him questioningly. Do you like the article?
The stuff about spirituality is nonsense, said Hubert, I have no idea what that’s about.
Arno told him there were a lot of power places in the area, most artists who came here were interested in those.
Well, I’m not, said Hubert and he went back to his room.
That afternoon he went for a walk. He called Tamara and asked if she had time for coffee, he thought she had played pretty fast and loose with things he’d told her in her article.
Do you want right of reply?
Coffee would probably take care of it, he said, but I’ve got some things I want to ask you.
Okay, she said, come and meet me at my office at six.
Oh, the power places, snorted Tamara. That’s a complicated story.
She jabbed at her salad, and Hubert wondered if that was everything, then she put down her fork and said she didn’t believe in any of that stuff herself. But of course she couldn’t print anything negative about it in the paper, there were lots of people who came here for precisely that.
There are a few standing stones and cup marks from the Bronze Age, sure enough, but the dowsers, the guys who run around here with pendulums, measuring Bovis units, and claiming the radio vitality here is as strong as Chartres Cathedral, I think they’re bonkers.
She talked about an ethnologist who called himself a geobiologist and saw traces of a landscape deity called Ana everywhere around. The hills were her breasts, the valleys and sources her loins. Hubert recalled the landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe, where the hills looked like the bodies of naked women.
Tamara called the waitress and asked for the bill. She said she was on her way to a meeting of the commune. Hubert insisted on paying. After she was gone, he stayed for a long time alone. He got a copy of the paper, reread the article about himself, and listened to the conversation of the men at the next table.
In the hotel, there again seemed to be plenty of activity when Hubert went over there for a nightcap. At the circular bar in the lobby there were only couples and a group of young men, talking and laughing loudly. Opposite Hubert stood a woman between two men, who were talking over her head. She had blond hair and very pale skin, in the dark room it looked like she had been picked out by a spotlight. She seemed unconcerned, as though she had fallen into a kind of rigidity. Even when his eyes briefly met hers, Hubert saw no reaction in them. He drew her face on the back of a coaster. That made him think of a series of tourist portraits on coasters, but he was sure he would reject the idea when he was sober.
The next morning Hubert breakfasted in the hotel. It was already quite late, the few guests were mostly young couples. Hubert wondered what they were doing here and imagined spending a few days here with Nina. When the staff began clearing away the buffet, he went to reception, asked what a room cost, and also if he could pay to use the pool. You mean the spa and recreation area, said the receptionist, and quoted a rather steep price. Hubert thanked her and strolled through the hotel. The building looked a little faded and dim, although lights were on all over the place. From a second-story window he surveyed the grounds, where a few children sat in a circle with a young woman, tossing a ball around. A few elderly visitors read or snoozed in deck chairs, even though it was ten in the morning.
Hubert went back downstairs and scanned the hotel notice board, the week’s program, the day’s menu, looked at a poster of protected Alpine flowers that was familiar to him from boyhood, and studied what to do in the event of a forest fire. Then there was an organizational chart of the hotel, with the first names and functions of every employee. Over each name was a small photograph, almost all of them showed smiling young people in red polo shirts, most of the women had long hair, many of them were blond. One face was familiar to Hubert: JILL, HEAD OF ENTERTAINMENT, it said under the picture. Gillian’s face looked a little different from before, but that might just be the photo. He looked around, as though he’d been doing something forbidden, and quickly left the hotel.
He walked down a narrow footpath along the river and thought of his last meeting with Gillian, and how he had thrown her out of his studio.
At the end of his walk, he went briefly into the cultural center to fetch his swimming trunks. He had no plan to get in touch with Gillian, but he was drawn back to the hotel. In the pool there were a few people copying exercises demonstrated by a young man on the poolside. Hubert went into the sauna, but the heat was soon too much for him. When he returned to the pool, it was full of shouting children. He watched them for a while, then went to the changing room. All the time he was thinking of Gillian, and preparing an account for what had happened then. As
he walked past reception, he stopped on impulse and asked about her. The woman at the desk asked him for his name and made a quick phone call.
She’s just on her way, she said.
Hubert sat down in his old leather armchair in the lobby.
Five minutes later, Gillian was standing in front of him. He pushed himself up with both hands, and for a moment they stood uncertainly facing each other. Gillian’s face looked somehow incoherent, she had slight scarring, like someone with bad acne in childhood, and her nose looked different, it seemed cruder, a little puffy.
She smiled, kissed Hubert on the cheek, and asked him if he wanted to have a drink.
Do you have time? he asked.
She nodded and said the preseason was pretty quiet. Come on, let’s go outside.
She led him across the hall. She was wearing a red polo shirt with the hotel logo on it, and tight white pants.
The terrace was at the back of the hotel and gave onto the grounds. Only one of the tables was occupied, by two old couples sitting together over beer and cards. Gillian sat down and waved to the waiter. She ordered a white wine spritzer. Hubert followed suit. While waiting for their drinks, neither of them spoke.
Gillian raised her glass, smiled, and said I go by Jill here, it’s easier for people to say.
Again, neither of them spoke.
It seems to me I have every reason to be angry, she then said, smiling again.
Hubert nodded and was a little surprised at his willingness to accept the blame.
How did you find me? Did Arno say something?
Hubert said it had been pure chance, he had seen her picture on the hotel notice board. I’m doing another exhibition at the cultural center.
I know, said Jill. I saw the article in the paper, though it didn’t tell me much.