Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

“Free and violent things. Did you hear me? It says so in the catalog, Lazkano, those exact words.”

  “I’m exhausted, Gloria…”

  “And one more thing I wanted to tell you: do you know the Bodegó amb sabata vella? The Still Life with Old Shoe? It’s a painting by Miró, from 1937, they called it “Miró’s Guernica”…he made a great mural for the Spanish Republic’s Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition that same year – El Segador, The Reaper, which is considered a lost work now…What do you think about that?”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “He might have drawn the logo for the Caixa Bank, but Miró wasn’t a sellout like you said.”

  “I never said anything of the sort.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I was mistaken then.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Good night, Gloria…”

  “Wait, wait…and what about the seventies? When Franco condemned Puig Antich to death by garrotte? Miró answered with L’esperança del condemnat a mort. The Hope of a Condemned Man. And do you know something else? Miró was a savage, he knew how to draw like a savage…”

  “You’ve persuaded me, Gloria…”

  “What time is it? It’s late, isn’t it?”

  “It finally dawned on you?”

  “What do you expect? It’s not my fault! Rauschenberg…he died!”

  “I know, you told me already. Your favorite artist of all time.”

  “Honor and reverence to Rauschenberg!”

  She downed what sounded like her last drink. That’s what Lazkano thought: he heard the sound of muted swallowing at the other end of the line.

  “You’d laugh if you saw me, Lazkano…”

  “Maybe I’d cry,” he thought. He thought it, but he didn’t say it.

  “You’d laugh. My living room floor is covered with open books, catalogs…opening these books is like spreading a woman’s thighs, isn’t that true? This is a bacchanal! What an orgy! Partouze! I’m going to sleep right here, nestled between the books…what do you think?”

  “I think that you’re going to wake up with a terrible backache. Promise me that you’ll try to sleep a little.”

  “Yes: having come this far there isn’t much else left to do, is there?”

  “Not much, truth be said.”

  “Besides, poor Rauschenberg…I emptied the last bottle…”

  “Listen to me, Gloria, for once: go to bed.”

  “It was a reserve. A federal reserve bottle, Lazkano.”

  “More the reason to go to bed.”

  “I could, like Miró did, lock myself up in a fortress in Normandy and draw stars and colors…free and violent things…plant staircases on the ground so that we climb them and reach the sky…Lazkano, have I told you how much I love you? I have Miró’s La masía in front of my eyes: don’t ask me why, but I can see two dogs and you and I fucking at the same time…”

  When he called her the following day she claimed she didn’t remember a thing.

  “A phone call? From me? Are you sure it wasn’t some other girl?”

  “Listen, Lazkano: Roman Ondák, in Venice, made an exact copy of the gardens outside inside the Slovakian Pavilion; he did it in such a way that the inside of the pavilion was also a replica of the outside…You see gardens outside, you go in, and you see the same gardens inside. More gardens and floral arrangements! Inside and outside! What did we come here for? To see art? What did we actually expect? What if we erased the differences between the inside and the outside of the museum, but not by turning the outside into art, but by turning the interior into something common? What if everything was garden, or everything was art, or museum, or city center, what if everything was everything at the same time? Why compartmentalize everything? It’d be a game of mirrors, an homage to empty spaces…”

  “Repetition ad infinitum…”

  “I’m thinking of doing something like that. Imitation is not new. Serialization, appropriation, is all the rage in art right now. Should we order some food? The grilled fish is fantastic here.”

  “How about we share a bream?”

  “For the fish…what do you think, a Sumarroca?”

  “That sounds better than an orange juice…”

  “Orange…funny you should mention that. It was the color of modernity at one point. Remember the late sixties and the whole seventies: furniture, big round lamps, patterned dresses and wallpaper. Orange was very present, but it got old, so to speak…For a while it was a color that spoke about the future, remember the uniforms in Star Trek…The color of the future has evolved: gold, silver, titanium, then white, green became popular with The Matrix, but it’s passé again…The key is to pay attention to the décor inside Hollywood spaceships, the colors of the letters and graphics that appear on the computers that are represented in fiction.”

  “You seem very up-to-date on all matters pertaining to color. Are you going to paint again?”

  “No, please. No one wants paintings here. That’s a thing of the past. If you don’t mind, later on, when you’re drinking your coffee, I have an errand to run…”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “As you please. I have to pick up a parcel from the post office.”

  After sucking the bones and the head of the bream and drinking two grappas each, they removed themselves from the lovely afternoon in the port of Barcelona and headed toward the central post office building. Gloria had to pick up a parcel sent from Germany for her father, apparently.

  Lazkano couldn’t help remembering his own missing father, “I came to the wrong place, Diego,” that time he went to the post office to return his library books, the bitter beginning of his mental confusion.

  “He always uses my address to buy things abroad, I don’t know why.”

  “He must want to give you a reason to visit him whenever you go back home.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What a strange parcel.”

  “My father is an incorrigible collector. Don’t even ask me what he collects, I don’t want to know. All I know is that he spends a fortune.”

  “You’ve never been tempted to open a parcel?”

  “I’m not a writer, I don’t derive as much pleasure as you do from sticking my nose everywhere.”

  Later that evening, Lazkano accompanied Gloria to the Mutt Art Gallery in Barcelona; when she’d mentioned it to Diego the previous night he thought she was pulling his leg.

  “What? A painter who’s a horse?”

  “You’ll see it with your own eyes.”

  At the entrance of the exhibition there was a photograph of the horse, whose name was Napoleon. There was also an explanatory video: his “trainer” – his agent? – would place a paintbrush between his teeth and the horse would paint the canvas with impetuous brushstrokes, until he completed a colorful, abstract sketch. His paintings were lined up next to his photograph: there were more than a dozen pieces by Napoleon, none of which cost less than three thousand euro.

  “And people buy this?”

  “Don’t start, Diego. A brilliant idea that the media find funny or compelling: that’s, whether we like it or not, modern art.”

  “Maybe we have just bored ourselves now, and there’s nothing left to do but delegate: to machines, to computers, and lacking that, to animals…”

  “Vargas Llosa wrote an article about that not long ago.”

  “I don’t understand anything…The story of the Spanish painter who burned the pieces he didn’t sell in the yearly San Juan summer solstice bonfires made some sense, but this…It’d be a very appropriate subject for an equine psychologist, should such a person exist.”

  “They’ve carried out similar tests before; for example, teaching monkeys in zoos to use cameras…it’s true that the results won’t make it to the annals of the history of art, but…”

  “I suddenly feel an overwhelming desire to get drunk.”

  “Wait: one must earn alcohol’s oblivion. First, I’ll
take you to see an exhibition that writers always like very much. If it displeases you, dinner is on me.”

  “You have no pity, Gloria.”

  It was a contemporary Portuguese art show, exclusively about Portuguese writers and artists. Thinking that the occasion merited it, Lazkano tried to impress Gloria with a quote in Portuguese:

  “Cheguei a Lisboa, mas não a uma conclusão.”

  I arrived in Lisboa, but not to a conclusion.

  “Fernando Pessoa: herewith your favorite author.”

  Gloria pointed out a game of foosball, an installation by the artist José João Brito. Two opposing teams. For one of them the goalie was João Gaspar Simões, and the team was made up of ten other Portuguese writers from across the ages. On the opposing team, the eleven wooden figurines were copies of just one, Fernando Pessoa. He remembered Soto and Zeberio, and of the match they played against some guys from Bordeaux at the beach in Bidart.

  “Pessoa against Portugal, I love it. Someone who was capable of creating so many heteronyms can certainly fight the whole world on his own.”

  “I knew you’d like it.”

  “You’ve been lucky. We can split the cost of dinner.”

  “Wasn’t the deal that if you enjoyed it, you’d pay for it?”

  Gloria was in Donostia after a long absence. Lazkano had made plans to have lunch with her, but using the excuse that she could bring the parcel she’d received in Barcelona to him and her father, had invited them both to lunch at his home.

  “You have to promise me that you won’t laugh.”

  “Laugh? Why would I laugh?”

  “This has to stay between us: my father is a fascist, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “I never laugh at fascists, you’ve nothing to worry about.”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  The living room was filled with expensive hardwood furniture, and the walls, with still lifes and hunting scenes; but, against all expectations, it wasn’t a dark space: thanks to the wide-open, high, south-facing windows, there was no lack of light in that room. A lawn of olive-green carpet provided an unhurried tranquility to the whole room, it even reached the ceiling, which was easily ten meters high. The ambience was cozy, nothing like the typically impractical, inherited aristocratic surroundings, so clumsy and in bad taste; this was a natural aristocracy, refined from generation to generation, layered with skill for the owner’s pleasure, following old tastes and motivations. Lazkano started to understand those parents who despair at their children when they reject their aristocratic privileges; to reject the scent of that ancient distillation was, in a way, a failure of respect. We judge the aristocracy too easily, Diego told himself.

  So that was the facha’s office. Come on in. Diego was particularly disturbed by an immense tapestry, about three meters wide and just as many high, behind the desk: whose were those unnaturally large eyes, those eyes staring at him with the stern look that dictators often exude in stamps, street statues and official portraits? Whose if not Generalísimo Franco’s? Gloria let out a sigh.

  “Okay, you’ve seen it now. Do you believe me?”

  Diego didn’t feel repugnance; in fact he felt the very opposite, such was the shock of the sudden apparition of the dictator on the tapestry, so out of context, so out of season. He decided that, undoubtedly, the man who kept such an obvious image of Franco in his private office surely harbored an inoffensive, almost tender kind of nostalgia for the dictator. He’d been curious to meet Gloria’s father before, but that detail increased his curiosity.

  “Do you mind if we wait by the entrance?”

  “Objects will survive us. We will be gone, but objects will remain. I’ll confess: I am an incorrigible collector.”

  “I noticed the tapestry in your office,” Lazkano told himself, but he was careful not to mention it. He remembered his visit to Kafka’s home in Prague, how moved he was when he saw himself reflected in the same mirror in which Kafka had looked at himself, and how for a moment he believed the impossible fantasy that he’d seen the writer’s semblance inside the mirror.

  “I like these old things: these little lead soldiers, for example, represent the battle of Verdun. I haven’t finished painting them all yet.”

  “My father likes reenacting famous battles.”

  “I don’t just like it, darling, it’s the joy of my life.”

  Theater once again, thought Lazkano, little toys, marionettes, lead soldiers, representations. But maybe it was only a symptom of the regression of old people: they substitute some toys for others. Gloria’s father stood straight as a rod, and although his hair had been black once, he kept all of it, white and wiry; he must have been seventy-five years old at least.

  “Gloria tells me you’re a writer.”

  “I try to write, when they let me.”

  “Don’t be so modest, Lazkano, I’ve looked you up online and I can see you do well with your writing.”

  “I’m not complaining, Señor Furmica.”

  “You even speak Russian.”

  “I’ve forgotten it somewhat, but yes, I do.”

  “Tell me, do you like Chekhov?”

  “I love Chekhov.”

  “I think I’m going to get on well with this friend of yours, Gloria…”

  Señor Furmica opened the parcel that Gloria had brought him from Barcelona. He brought an impeccably bound old book to his nose with obvious delight. It was a big, gorgeous volume, from 1923, written in Cyrillic characters.

  “His complete dramatic works, a whim.”

  “It must be worth a fortune.”

  “Money, of course. Money is important. In Chekhov’s works too: characters continuously going through dire straits, borrowing money from usurers, always on the brink of losing their mortgaged homes…Plus there is bribery, libertines who marry in exchange for supposedly juicy dowries…Very current subjects, come to think of it…

  “In any case, it’s not his theater that interests me the most. I much prefer his short stories.”

  “We’ve something to disagree on…You prefer his short narratives? The short stories, racconti brevi?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Think for a moment, do you know where Anton Chekhov’s short stories come from? Any idea?”

  “He was a doctor, he must have seen and experienced many of those stories while visiting patients…”

  “Yes and no…Theater was one of Chekhov’s interests when he was a teenager: he and his brother would stage brief comic plays at home, for the family. The characters of those little improvised theater plays later became the heroes of his better-known short stories. What do you reckon? There are many theater plays at the root of those short stories…”

  Diego choked on the sweet wine they’d been served as an aperitif.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You don’t like it? We’ll serve another one…Gisele, please…”

  “No, no, not at all, please…the wine is delicious.”

  “It’s true that when they premiered The Seagull people didn’t understand it…But he had a second chance, which is something we should all enjoy in life; and then, yes, his success was extraordinary…He even married Olga Knipper, an actress in the Moscow Art Theater…Nothing happens by chance…”

  “I’m liking your skeptical sense of humor.”

  “Actors and directors never knew if they were performing humorous tragedies or tragic comedies. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  “Both at the same time, probably.”

  “Both at the same time, that’s the way it is in life, usually. I’ve always thought that Gloria should direct a Chekhov play, like she used to back in the day.”

  “Papá, don’t start with that again…”

  “No, no, let me finish: I’m completely serious. You were good, you had a very good sense of staging…I’d finance you myself.”

  “Theater is artifice…”

  “Not if the actors are not too theatrical, darling. Chekhov
used to keep pretty quiet during rehearsals, but he would offer his opinion when they asked for it: ‘It’d be better if you were less theatrical…Keep it simpler…like life itself,’ he would say.”

  “That’s not the tendency of theater plays around here, as far as I know. But I am not the best person to judge, I haven’t set foot in a theater for more than twenty years.”

  “You too, Diego? Why is that?”

  “It traumatized me in my youth, who knows.”

  “In any case…If Gloria were to direct a Chekhov play…you’d be forced to break your theatrical fast, n’est-ce pas?”

  “In that case…”

  “When are you going to do it, Gloria?”

  “Some day, papá.”

  “Lunch is ready,” Gisele pointed out.

  A schnapps to start. Afterward, hake with almonds, paired with a harmonious white wine from the Rhine Valley. The food was good in that house. The cook, the servant…it seemed to Lazkano that everything was from a different era, even after he’d banished the Franco tapestry and the chandeliers from his mind. He felt like he was in Victorian London. Diego had harbored hopes of having fun with the old man, but the experience was proving to be a torment. Gloria wasn’t comfortable either. It was obvious that in the past few years she had lost the habit of eating in her father’s company and, above all, of having servers constantly around.

  “Change the music, please, Gisele. This aria doesn’t suit the hake at all.”

  “I’ll change it, papá; you can leave, Gisele, don’t worry.”

  If Gloria’s father’s manners hadn’t been so staid, Diego would have found the situation comical. Gloria had warned him again and again: “You know that my father is a facha, he’s going to try to provoke you, just go along with him. It’s easier that way.”

  A fascist? He really was one. He thought himself intelligent, but he lacked the tiniest speck of charm. And what was worse: he didn’t bother to hide his leanings.

  “It’s always Germany and France who pull Europe’s cart. Isn’t that shameful? It’s such a pity that we weren’t born a bit farther north.”

  You seem to be managing well, thought Diego to himself: wine from the Rhin, German opera, schnapps. We can chose where we are from despite the accident of our birth, even without leaving the comfort of our home. Diego remembered his time in Lille, where he used to sell canonical volumes of world literature for a pittance in order to buy alcohol. The Book of Disquiet, by Pessoa, in exchange for a bottle of port…