by Peter Carey
Carpenter should have known to drink his shandy and start again. When they teased me I TOOK IT IN GOOD PART even if I might have murdered them. Like that. I was a GENTLE GIANT. Our father was Blue Bones on account of he had red hair when young so they called him Blue meaning red. That is a general rule to go by if you come from OVERSEAS. In Australia everything is the opposite of what it seems to mean. E.G. I was SLOW BONES because I moved so rapid, it was my way of moving they referred to. I was Slow Bones some days, Slow Poke others, this last was SMUTTY. Those blokes were ROUGH DIAMONDS from the milk factory or the Darley Brickworks AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS always referring to the bull putting its pizzle in the cow like it was the strangest thing in life.
Look at that Poke, he is poking her. But I could take a JOKE and get a POKE fast slow anyway you like you might be surprised.
The Bones were butchers. We had our own slaughter yards at the former DRAYBONE INN. In the gold-rush days this was where they would change the coach horses for COBB & CO but now it was where we brought the beasts to end their days. Never did a Bones take life lightly. If it was a fish or an ant, then possibly. But a beast’s heart tips the scales at five pounds and no matter how many you slaughter you cannot do it without a thought. There was a sort of prayer YOU POOR OLD BUGGER or other stuff more serious I’m sure, and then they cut its throat and caught the blood in the tin bucket to save for sausage. It is a big responsibility to cut up a beast but when it is done it is done and afterwards you go to the Royal and then you come home THE WORSE FOR WEAR I do admit. After that you rest. It is in the Bible’re Sunday: you must not work, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. Poor Mum.
I was not to be a butcher, bee-boh bless me. My brother was three inches shorter still he took my true and rightful name. It’s a doggie dog world.
Butcher Bones had the opportunity to keep up the family business in Bacchus Marsh but by the time Dad had his stroke Butch had met the GERMAN BACHELOR who gave him postcards to stick on the wall above his bunk. Those cards turned his head. The German Bachelor was permitted to be a teacher at Bacchus Marsh High School where he instructed the children of men who had lost their lives fighting Germans in the war. I don’t know why he was not in gaol but my brother came home and said his teacher was a MODERN artist and had attended the so-called BOWER HOUSE. If Dad had known the effect of that Bower House on his oldest son he would have gone up to the school and dropped the German Bachelor like he dropped Mr. Cox after he strapped me for answering incorrectly. Blue Bones took Coxy out of the room and across the street behind his van. Coxy’s feet lifted six inches off the ground. That is all we saw, but knew much more.
It was my brother who inherited the nickname Butcher and that is a joke that anyone can see for it was he who refused the knife and scabbard. From the German Bachelor he got the habit of shaving his skull the DICKHEAD also the postcards of MARK ROTHKO and the idea that ART IS FOR BUTCHERS NOW. He learned from the German Bachelor that art had previously been restricted to palaces where it was viewed behind high gates by Kings and Queens, Dukes, Counts, Barons. In any case he refused the apron when our poor mother begged him put it on. His father could not speak nor move but it was obvious he would like to clout Butcher across the ear hole one last time. Auld Lang Sine. After Dad had his stroke there was no more SLAUGHTER.
It is hard work to slaughter a beast but when it is done it is done. If you are MAKING ART the labour never ends, no peace, no Sabbath, just eternal churning and cursing and worrying and fretting and there is nothing else to think of but the idiots who buy it or the insects destroying TWO DIMENSIONAL SPACE.
There is nothing sure or certain it would seem no matter how you shave your skull or boast about your position in AUSTRALIAN ART. One minute you are a NATIONAL TREASURE with a house in Ryde and then you are a has-been buying Dulux with your brother’s DISABILITY PENSION. You are a CONVICTED CRIMINAL a servant living on a Tick and Thistle farm.
The puppy was a cattle dog but there were no beasts for him to work with so he never learned his purpose on the earth. Bless him. I wrestled with him before he passed. Ascended, poor tyke. He was a licky dog. He liked a toss, a good fall over in the grass. By dint of playing he got ticks all lined up, dug into the edges of his floppy ears like cars parked outside a Kmart or a Sydney Leagues Club. The day I met him I removed each tick, one by one, God Bless him. My brother heard him barking at the Duck but he was making art and never spared a thought.
Your dog is DEAD Hugh. Butcher Bones gave not a FLYING FUCK about the puppy. He said your dog is dead and then he went off with the woman on the tractor and left me listening to a river the colour of a yellow cur, fucksuck flood, tugging, pulling stones out of the bank, beneath our feet, everything we stand on will be washed away.
4
The phone call I got that night from Dozy Boylan would make me laugh for days to come. “Mate,” he said, and I knew that he was hiding in his bathroom because I could hear the echo. “Mate, she’s hitting on me.”
He was full of shit, I told him so, although not without affection.
“Shut up,” he said. “I’m bringing her back to your place now.”
I expressed loud amusement and that was rude and stupid and I have no excuse except—my overactive friend was a sixty-year-old farmer with soup in his moustache and trousers curling above his cinched-in belt. She was hitting on him? I snorted into the phone, and when he turned on me soon after, I never doubted why.
In an astoundingly short time he came roaring across my cattle grid. I’d had a drink or two already and this was perhaps why it seemed so wildly funny the audible panic of his off-road lugs rippling across the wooden bridge. By the time I had changed into a clean shirt, the old man had already performed a high-speed Y-turn and when I emerged on the front porch the taillights of his All Terrain Invention were disappearing into the night. I was still smiling as my visitor entered. Her hair was drenched again, flat on her head, dripping down her cheeks, collecting in the lovely well of her clavicle, but she was also smiling and—for a moment anyway—I thought she was about to laugh.
“How was the crossing?” I asked. “Were you scared?”
“Never by the crossing.” She sat heavily in my chair and exhaled—a different person now, messier, less brisk. She produced from the folds of her borrowed poncho, a magnum of 1972 Virgin Hills which she held like a trophy in the air.
Later she told me that I had cocked my head, looking at the wine like a sulky dog, but that was a misunderstanding. This was a prize bottle from Dozy’s cellar. There was nothing to explain it and the mystery was made deeper by her manner—she was suddenly so full of energy, kicking off her gum boots, opening up a drawer—did she wait to ask permission? She located a corkscrew, ripped out the cork, brushed down her skirt, sat cross-legged on the kitchen chair and, while she watched me pour the Virgin Hills, she just plain grinned at me.
“O.K.,” I said. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” she said, her eyes sparkling to the point of carbonation. “Where’s your brother? Is he O.K.?”
“Asleep.”
Whatever dark visions she then conjured—probably the drowning dog—she could not stay with long. “The good thing,” she said, raising her glass, “is that Mr. Boylan knows his Leibovitz is real.”
“Jacques Leibovitz?”
“That’s the one.”
“Dozy owns a painting by Jacques Leibovitz?!”
I know now that my astonishment seemed put-on to her, but the secretive bugger Dozy had never breathed a word about his treasure. Also, you do not go to northern New South Wales to look at great paintings. And again: Leibovitz was one of the reasons I became an artist. I had first seen Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois at Bacchus Marsh High School, or at least a black-and-white reproduction in Foundation of the Modern. None of this I was prepared to confess to an American in Manolo Blahniks but I was really offended by Dozy, my so-called mate. “We neve
r even talk about art,” I said. “We sit in his miserable kitchen, that’s where he lives, amongst all those piles of The Melbourne Age. And he showed it to you?”
She raised an eyebrow as if to say, Why not? All I could think was that I had given him lovely drawings of the Wombat Fly and Narrow-waisted Mud Wasp and he had stuck them to his fridge with fucking magnets. It was hard to believe he had an eye at all.
“Are you insuring it?”
She laughed through her nose. “Is that what I look like?”
I shrugged.
She returned a clear appraising gaze. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
I fetched her a saucer and she blew some dungy-smelling fumes across the table. “My husband,” she said finally, “is the son of Leibovitz’s second wife.”
If I did not like her, I liked the husband way, way less. But I was startled and impressed to understand whose son he was. “Dominique Broussard is his mother?”
“Yes,” she said. “You know the photograph?”
Even I knew that—the tawny blonde studio assistant lying on an unmade bed, her new baby at her breast.
“My husband, Olivier, he’s the baby. He inherited the Leibovitz droit moral” she said, as though having to explain a story she was weary of.
But I was not weary, not at all. I was from Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. I hadn’t seen an original painting before I turned sixteen.
“You understand how that works?”
“What?”
“Droit moral.”
“Of course,” I said. “More or less.”
“Olivier is the one who gets to say if the work is real or fake. He signed the certificate of authentication for Boylan’s painting. That is his legal right, but there have been people making mischief, and we have to protect ourselves.”
“You work together, you and your husband?”
But she was not being drawn into that. “I’ve known Mr. Boylan’s painting for a very long time,” she said, “and it is authentic right down to the zinc tacks on the stretcher but the point has to be proven again and again. It’s a little boring.”
“And you know that much about Leibovitz?”
“That much,” she said dryly, and I watched as she butted out her cigarette, grinding it fiercely into the saucer. “But when someone like Boylan is told that his investment is at risk, he is bound to get upset. In this case he showed the canvas to Honoré Le Noël who persuaded him he’d bought, not quite a fake, but close enough. May I have more wine? I’m sorry. It’s been a hell of a day.”
I poured the wine without comment, not revealing that I was completely gobsmacked to hear Le Noël’s name spoken as if he were the local publican or the owner of a hardware store. I knew who he was. I had two of his books beside my bed. “Honoré Le Noël has become a joke,” she said. “He was Dominique Leibovitz’s lover, as you probably know.”
This sort of talk upset me in ways I can hardly bring myself to name. At the heart of it was the notion that I was a hick and she was from the center of the fucking universe. What I knew you could read in Time magazine—Dominique had begun as Leibovitz’s studio assistant; Le Noël was Leibovitz’s chronicler and critic.
Now that my visitor was halfway through her second glass, she was talkative as hell. She revealed that Dominique and Honoré had spent almost eight years, from just after the war until 1954, waiting for Leibovitz to die. (I recalled that the artist’s strength was very acutely sketched in Le Noël’s monograph—a force of life, short, thick legs, huge square hands.)
It was not until his baby son was five, his daughter-in-law now told me, when Leibovitz himself was eighty-one, that the grim reaper came sneaking up on the old goat, pushing him forward as he stood at the dinner table with a wineglass brimming in his hand. He pitched forward and slammed his broad nose and tortoiseshell spectacles into the Picasso cheese plate. That is how my visitor told it, fluently a little breathlessly She finished the second glass without remarking on its character and for this, of course, I judged her quite severely.
The plate cracked in half, she said.
I thought, How would you fucking know? Were you even born? But I was a stranger to the notion that one might know famous people and of course she was married to the witness, the child—an olive-skinned boy with very large watchful eyes and protruding ears which could not even begin to spoil his beauty When his father had fallen dead he apparently had been about to ask if he might be excused, but now he looked to his mother and waited. Dominique did not embrace him but stroked his cheek with the back of her hand.
“Papa est mort.”
“Oui, Maman.”
“You understand. No-one must know yet.”
“Oui, Maman.”
“Maman must move some canvases, do you understand? It is difficult because of the snow.”
I have recently observed French children, how they sit, so neat with their big dark eyes, and their clean fingernails collected in their laps. What miracles they are. I suppose Olivier sat like that, watching his dead father, but holding a dreadful secret of his own—he had been, at the very moment when his father fell, about to go and make pee-pee.
“Don’t move, you understand?”
Of course there was no need for him to be tortured in the chair. But his mother was about to commit a major crime, that is remove paintings from the estate before the police were notified. “Stay there,” she said. “Then I’ll know where you are.” Then she was on the telephone, persuading her posh lover to leave his fireside at Neuilly, explaining that they could not afford to wait for the snow to melt, that he must go all the way to Bastille, collect a truck, and drive it to the rue de Rennes.
Somewhere in the confusion and terror of the night the little boy peed his pants, although this misadventure was not discovered until much later, when Honoré finally noticed him sleeping with his forehead on the table, and then Dominique took a bloody photograph. Imagine! Later, for whatever reason—perhaps the missing Le Golem Électrique was in the shot—she tore half of it away. It might have provided the only forensic evidence of that long night when Dominique Broussard and Honoré Le Noël stole some fifty Leibovitzes, many of them abandoned or incomplete, works that would later, with the signature added and some careful revision, become very valuable indeed. They removed them to a garage near the Canal Saint-Martin, the source of that frequently reported “watermark” on a whole array of doubtful Leibovitzes from widely different periods. From this day no-one ever saw the painting that Leo Stein and the fiercer (and therefore more reliable) Picasso both described as a masterwork. Stein referred to it as Le Golem Électrique, Picasso as Le Monstre.
It was not until lunch the following day that Dominique reported her husband’s death to the gendarmes, and then, of course, the studio was—as is the law in France—sealed off and a full accounting made of the paintings remaining there. No Le Golem Électrique. Oh, never mind.
Dominique, the daughter of a tax accountant from Marseilles, now had sufficient Leibovitzes, almost-Leibovitzes and unborn-Leibovitzes to live very well for the next fifty years. Also, of course, she inherited the droit moral. That gave her the right to authenticate, which is, incredible as it may seem, the law, but now she chose to give her rather louche reputation a more reliable character and so she set up Le Comité Leibovitz, and installed the esteemed Honoré Le Noël as chair. It must have seemed perfect from her point of view: they could back up their false assertions with those of greedy dealers and collectors on the Comité. The pair of them could spend the rest of their lives signing unsigned canvases and revising abandoned works.
The storyteller was pretty filled with talk, thirsty for more wine. I poured her a third glass of Virgin Hills and began to permit myself a few ideas.
“Now,” she said, brushing ash from her lovely ankle, “Dominique discovered Honoré in bed with Roger Martin.”
“The English poet.”
“Exactly. Him. You know him?”
“No.”
“Thank God for that.”
She raised an eyebrow. If I did not know exactly what she meant, I enjoyed the sense of complicity.
“So they divorced, of course. But no-one knows exactly how their hoard of paintings was finally divided,” she said.
But Dominique, it seems, knew a lot of “partisans,” tough guys, and she almost certainly got the lion’s share. So by the time Honoré had been robbed, circled, outnumbered, and defeated on the Comité, he had become a very dangerous man. Certainly he hated Dominique. Towards her innocent son he displayed an even greater antipathy.
When, in 1969, one of her lovely partisan pals strangled Dominique in a Nice hotel, Olivier was already in London, losing the last of his French accent at St. Paul’s. Knowing less than nothing about his father’s work, he inherited the droit moral.
“You meet my husband,” Marlene said, “you think he is so gentle, and he is, but when Honoré began a legal action to take away the droit moral, Olivier fought like a tiger. You have seen the photographs? He was a child, so pretty, with lovely eyelashes, seventeen years old, but he loathed Honoré. I cannot tell you to what degree. When you think about the court case, this was really the only point for Olivier.”