Affairs of Art Read online

  My mother will vouch for it. She will assemble them at my house after the funeral, they will drink wine, a young voice will read to them my letter to Vitalie, they will know you only through me. Forgive me for this roundabout way of proceeding, for the pages already read and slightly crumpled that you are holding now. I myself have prepared the big envelope that is for you alone, inside it I’ve put the trinkets of the dead: the butterfly book, the photo of your knees, my bill from the Sea Lord. I’m not one of those generous souls who bid their wives to find another companion. Only I can love you. I imprison you.

  They will be your jail and they will fear you, you will know their woes and mine will no longer matter. You will speak if you wish or remain silent, somewhere in the city, they will sense your presence behind their backs, precisely where I knew how to flatter them. Time will weigh heavily on them. As it did on me.

  I could have chosen others. I wanted them intelligent above all else. Denis and Jean-Pierre, who are consoling one another for their dependence on me. Their work is too much for them, I’ve seen them trying to guess who will be their next protector, I want them to be uncertain, troubled, soon separated so they can continue to vibrate. Jérémie, I taught him how to read creation, he repeats it to me, even the adverbs, now I want to teach him how to hate me. Paul-Marie and Gérald have the best minds in the mediocre herd that grazes at the university. But what they offer has no substance, it’s time to burn it. And Hélène? She signs as Bérangère, like a child who signs with flowers, her forty years are a haze, she is fresh, upright, and alone. She could have been your friend had you not shunned them all. I want her as a witness. In March, she spoke three sentences of regret. In them I set down all my words of farewell.

  What I am writing here is my story, which leads to yours. None of them knows it. They see Marianne in all her elegance with her stylish coil of hair and they think she is the widow of some financier whose heart generously failed and left us well-off. Marianne was born on Mentana Street, she was raised on Mentana Street, and she had me on Mentana Street, at the corner of Saint-Grégoire. The only Monsieur Dubeau was her father, and I don’t think the guy who fucked her was even sordid. A neighbour who slipped away, whom she’d have had enough of after two months. Nothing dramatic, she was a secretary at the Volkswagen dealership next door, the one that sells those convertibles you’d love to have. I became less of a burden after she’d met a lawyer there, he had cancer and he was choosing his last car with tremendous care. He moved her into lower Outremont, where she learned to have higher aspirations, and it was I who did the rest, after the death and the inheritance. She had a talent for playing the astonishing mother I needed, she learned to like it, she forgot about Mentana Street. She sometimes convinces herself that her father built my house, and forgets that I rent out the ground floor so lean keep up the payments.

  All that, I’ve already told you. Now I’m bringing you to the point where I came close to never knowing you.

  By the time we left Mentana Street, I was almost resigned to my square of grass — a mongrel park diagonally across from the municipal incinerator. Twenty minutes from there was the normal school I attended, which was starting to admit girls, most of them poor and dreary. Like all of us. Don’t believe those stories you hear from the hucksters of the sixties, Vitalie. Look at all the curtains in all the windows in the neighbourhood; today, as then, you won’t see one of them flapping with the rage we were all assumed to have in our twenties. We filled amphitheatres with our silence and our diligence, while males with scarcely more education paraded past us. My rebellion aspired at most to replace them. I saw myself as livelier, less gloomy. Strange, since my way of expressing myself was neither nimble nor diverse. Words belonged to books.

  All the same, there was a little man in a wig, a Frenchman responsible for literature, who asked us one day if we went to the Museum of Fine Arts. Only one student, a former brother, had ever been there, and he held up his hand apologetically. The little man choked with indignation. “But that’s inconceivable! It’s next door! Just a few steps for you strapping big fellows! Where have you been all this time?” Nowhere. We come from places with neither an entrance nor an exit, just mailboxes for phone bills and oil bills. He calmed down a little as he muttered about the English who were appropriating the Museum, obviously, and who did not invite us there. In bad faith, I agreed with him. It was my own people who had taught me nothing, who had consigned images, like words, to books.

  I didn’t speak to the little man about it, I disliked his accent. He was small, I know that. He could have had us read the Refus Global, spattered our age with the already distant revulsions of Borduas and with his recent death in Paris, far from the dullness of home. He pursed his lips, he wore his hairpiece cautiously, he assigned reading, corrected exams, and was content to despise us. I did not yet understand the terrible despondency of teachers.

  And so, one Saturday I went to the Museum. It was dominated by quantities of porcelain and silver teapots, under lights of the kind one might have imagined the thrifty English would have at home. One day you’ll go to see the Portrait of Mrs. George Drummond, by Thomas Gainsborough, which was bequeathed to the Museum in 1951 by one Mr. Tempest. The first swelling of the breasts, white beneath her veil, a neck straight as a pin, a mouth like a cat’s, and eyes that held nothing. I liked girls, and art struck me as a way of killing them and disguising them beneath the trees, before they went on to a lifetime of serving tea.

  There was a kind of dampness in the air and ladies whose blue hairdos stayed perfectly in place. I had started reading Rimbaud, as ordered by the little man, and the walls and the stairs and the guards all drove me away. Yet it was a guard who told me about the Stable Gallery, a modest annex that sheltered contemporary art. I remember walls hung with grey, a silent young woman at the entrance, and splashes that burst through the paintings. No figures, no messages. I was alone with scraps of colour that delivered me from I know not what. He moves me and I miss him, that young man who encounters the automatistes without having known he was about to see them, who transforms streaks of paint into feelings even though they’d been flung onto the canvas as a refusal of emotion. Black hell, red life, white despair. A passing desire for drama that was forbidden me.

  Afterwards, in the street, I saw the bitter sun, the idiotic passersby, the pygmy world. I set out to look for a young woman who could break my heart.

  You’ll laugh, but what I knew about girls could be summed up as gropings in the alleys and the shows put on by dancers up and down the Main. A neighbour who was my adolescent girlfriend had offered me her breasts every night of one sweltering summer, in a corner of the back shed. After the shed was torn down as a fire hazard, we had to wait till winter brought us darkness at five o’clock, and then she complained of the cold. I was awkward with her breasts, I would make handfuls of them rather than caress them till she shuddered, as lords do to princesses, but the neighbour women resigned themselves early to being wives to ordinary mortals. In any case, it was in the nightclubs that I was aroused. There’s nothing simpler than knocking back a lukewarm beer while you watch buttocks part, imagining yourself delivered in three strokes, and having a stomach ache from laughing so hard. On the way home we’d jerk off behind the houses that soon were as cold as my girlfriend’s breasts. My cousin Gerry taught me not to leave traces and he used to say that his own mother was a virgin, or so his father maintained.

  Now I had to find my own virgin from my new rank, one who could shudder at Rimbaud-like assonance and meditate at the Stable Gallery before tears of blood on a background of ivory and crisscrossed zebra stripes, dripping with misfortune. I did not think right away of undressing this dark companion, but I’d have to if we were to live through a painful separation some day.

  Eagerly, I chose the brown-haired girl who always sat at the end of my row during the little man’s lectures. She took copious notes. She was timid, they all were. I helped her find a cont
act lens under a chair and the first time she smiled at me, we were already practically horizontal. I wanted a lengthy courtship, wanted to be furtive and then explicit, perhaps slip her a note. But she lived with her already liberated sister, and barely one week later I was lying on top of the tiny tender body that had been used just enough to teach me enough. Men don’t describe their first time, the fifteen seconds that the first time lasts, the girl who rubs the napes of their necks instead of panting, the girl who hasn’t had time to be hungry. Her name was Solange, we had merged our brown myopic eyes during two seasons — the springtime of the final session and the summer before university — her vessel was as intelligent as her mind, I spilled in torrents.

  While finally learning the words, and a few images. Solange had had a lover — only one, she declared — who was more educated and had taught her the basis of existentialism. We would listen to Juliette Greco before making love, but we also had to include a few jazz clubs. I remember a trumpet that tore me apart, on Peel Street, upstairs, and recordings by Cannonball Adderley, the acoustic piano that drives your solar plexus up between your ears. I felt myself to be a superior intellect, before dusk. At night, to pay for my education, I carted crates of fruits and vegetables in Steinberg warehouses, I met a fifty-year-old poet there who recited the dull greyness of Quebec amid the potatoes, and I would go home at dawn paralyzed by all the uncertainties.

  Solange was becoming beautiful; I thought I loved her. We ventured inside some of the Sherbrooke Street galleries on Saturday afternoons, and whispered further facts to information gleaned from the newspapers. She was easygoing, I felt that I oozed the east end and the warehouse, I spent a good many days measuring the dis­tance. While I waited for her to break my heart, I stood a head taller and was proud of it. In store windows I saw a young couple, better informed than the complacent crowd, who slept together and who transgressed.

  The first piece of art, the yellow seething on paper — you always laughed at its gilt frame — I bought on the ninth floor at Eaton’s, in the gallery-corridor where works by modern painters were sometimes slipped in, disguised as friends of the old ones. There, at least, the prices were displayed. The yellow seething resembled an abstraction, but it could also be a twenty-dollar haystack. It’s all in my eye, I thought, before I’d discovered the rules of art.

  I hung it, alone and arrogant, on the wall of the double living room that was my first apartment, a mezzanine on Querbes Avenue, around the corner from the house Marianne had just moved to with her lawyer and his cancer. At my place the days were as dark as the nights, cockroaches haunted the two closets, but my life was more luminous than a Greek sky, or what I imagined a Greek sky to be, judging from the janitor’s accent. There was Solange and wine at two dollars a bottle — Spanish Iago that set us apart from the beer-drinkers — candles, pates, and the positions of love, all preparations for the enormous pain promised by all of Greco’s songs. There was my change of direction, the decision to enroll in art history at the university rather than education, I had to do battle with some sec­retaries, voices were raised, and I realized I could do it even though I’d been born on Mentana Street.

  Don’t believe those who tell stories about the sixties, Vitalie, who didn’t live through them here. The city was in a ferment only in two seedy cafés where three poets rambled and raved. I ignored them. One could drink Iago and learn ten ways to cook pasta without taking the route of being and nothingness. One could rebel at being greeted in English at the Stable Gallery which for us, of course, was the Galerie de l’Étable, without longing for Quebec’s independence. Demolition crews levelled the most classic Sherbrooke Street mansions and the future art historian didn’t see a thing: the world began with Borduas.

  I was studious. I ate crêpes bretonnes across from the Bibliothèque Nationale where I dragged Solange at the end of the afternoon, it was probably there that the first thread snapped. She sometimes found very little to read, whereas I was initiating myself, I had to, into the art of centuries past. She would sigh as if she were in church, oppressed by the oak and the stained glass, or by the whispers meticulously dispensed by pale clerks with weary tread. She was bored, while I was discovering a fleeting glimmer scarcely grasped — the vein to be mined, the fault, as the prospectors say up where you come from.

  About the art being created here, there was nothing one could learn in a library. Even the extravagant praise for our sculptors who copied the Europeans had to be extirpated from a literature that was first of all religious. There weren’t ten books on secular art, a smattering, I did not yet know how to search the newspapers. No, I didn’t resolve then and there to become the great interpreter of contemporary art, there was nothing of the conqueror about me. I made my guesses at random, moving from question to question. While Solange sighed. I remember her long straight hair, the bangs that gave her a sombre look, in the fall she was going to teach in a high school for girls on the Plateau Mont-Royal, she had bought a sundress and thrown out all her notes, she read novels now. Came September and henceforth we would meet at six p.m., a teacher of English as a second language and a university student, our notebooks separated, but the Iago still helped me to forget.

  At the time, I found genius in Picasso. It was at the museum, before the recently acquired Blind Minotaur, that Solange announced the purchase of a red car, a huge used Plymouth. We could explore the Laurentians on weekends. I was getting ready to explain to her the part man, part horse standing against the shadow of the night and the darkness of his life. In the angle formed by his arm that called down curses and his cripple’s cane was framed a bird-woman I wanted to present as the ultimate subversion, the feather bed where all those who rebel will end up. I sacrificed my first knowledge and, in the flat light, Solange radiated too. I told her, but feebly, that I’d have preferred a Renault.

  But Solange was paying and it was in a red Plymouth that I learned how to drive, even though I’d have preferred that she drive. She was an Amazon, I was rather proud to step out of a car that braked hard and red when she dropped me off at the faculty. You’ll find it difficult to believe, Vitalie, if I tell you I don’t know how Solange ended up. There’s a veil over everything at the end of that autumn when I became absorbed in writing my first article to submit to the cultural section of Quartier Latin and when my mezzanine apartment became distinctly damp. She left me in December, just in time for me to parade my despair through other people’s festivities, to drink Iago as if it were hemlock — Proustian memory of a body I thought I could never replace. Solange was just cruel enough, she phoned me now and then to lavish on me what she saw as the consolation of friendship. In March or April, when I was still shivering, I received a handsomely embossed invitation. To her wedding. She was marrying the former brother, our normal school classmate, the only one who had visited the museum. I don’t know if they were happy. As was the case with the red car, I hoped not. Absurd suffering breeds malice.

  In the faculty, the bourgeois students chattered and the others tried to write, all dreams fastened on the sole publication devoted to art published in Quebec, which served as a belated and subsidized pedestal for the plastic revolts of the fifties. I was humble. It was right that I be excluded from the very fringes of such a first circle, since I was not yet sure of anything except that I loathed landscapes and adored pure abstraction, which is too vague for judging the moderns. I echoed my pro­fessors and articles from the French magazines that I greedily consumed.

  After Solange, I had time. I found it every evening, in my pain that I wanted to be enduring and disciplined. Alone, I drank, neat but in moderation, cheap cognac, I was just dazed enough to think I was grasping the meaning of the texts I would annotate quite coolly. I imagined I had found a secret garden, an angle: rather than speak out on colour, on balance, on the transcendence of form, I would work inside the contemporary artist’s head, I would observe there the death of inspiration. I had studied a little psychology at normal school, an
d during this post-Solange period, I was in fact doing battle with my own feelings. I would write a thesis on the sterilization of the emotions — the painful but obligatory passage towards pure creation. On a brandnew Olivetti, a gift from Marianne who had chosen asparagus green with beige keys, I tested my future thesis against Borduas’s suicide — the ultimate weakness of a being who had refused the calvary of the disap­pearance of the self.

  I dared not submit it anywhere but to the Quartier Latin, where the political science students left the literary types a few pages every week for culture. A pale, bearded redhead led the fight there for the nouveau roman, he waged war on adjectives, and he used ellipses even in subtitles. He received me as a brother and published me in full, while reproducing the Borduas upside down. I became the art critic for Quartier Latin, a position that was free, and free of the requirement that I make myself understood, as my texts appeared only in case of a shortage.

  I was doing battle with feelings, Vitalie, but I overflowed with them. I was grateful. I was proud. I was moved. I thought sentences, I lined them up late at night and corrected them early in the morning, they were my mirror and my speech. Then the presses swallowed them and I would rediscover them, printed in ten thousand copies. Someone could read them. They were immortal, stored in the university archives. I deserved to remain humble but I knew the trembling light of the white space between the lines, beneath my name. I was a signifier.

  I couldn’t keep repeating the death of inspiration, take refuge inside artists’ heads. Now I needed to be decisive, to decree that a red was too heavy or a line exhausted. Take a stand. I couldn’t. So then I followed the framework of French criticism, I imitated, I tacked on to our local artists judgments that had been conceived over there, but that got lost in the objective elegance of theories of form, which I reformed.