Tonino Benacquista, born in France of Italian immigrants, dropped out of film studies to finance his writing career. After being, in turn, museum night-watchman, train guard on the Paris–Rome line and professional parasite on the Paris cocktail circuit, he is now a highly successful author of novels and film scripts. Bitter Lemon Press introduced him to English-speaking readers with the critically acclaimed Holy Smoke.
Other books by the author published by Bitter Lemon Books
Holy Smoke
Someone Else
FRAMED
Tonino Benacquista
Translated from the French
by Adriana Hunter
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2006 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW
www.bitterlemonpress.com
First published in French as Trois carrés rouges sur fond noir by
Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1990, revised 2004
This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess programme administered by the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni on behalf of the French Embassy in London and by the French Ministry of Culture (Centre National du Livre); publié avec le concours du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (Programme Burgess) et du Ministère de La Culture (Centre National du Livre)
Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of England
© Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1990, 2004
English translation © Adriana Hunter, 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher
The moral rights of Tonino Benacquista and Adriana Hunter have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-908524-14-0
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Broad Street, Bungay, Suffolk
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
To Mosko, the painter.
“Juan Gris, the Spanish cubist, had convinced Alice Toklas to pose for a still life and, with his typical abstract conception of objects, began to break her face and body down to its basic geometrical forms until the police came and pulled him off.”
Woody Allen, “A Twenties Memory”
“These are just my painter friends who killed themselves, all with considerable artistic successes behind them or soon to come: Arshile Gorky hanged himself in 1948. Jackson Pollock, while drunk, drove his car into a tree along a deserted road in 1956. That was right before my first wife and kids walked out on me. Three weeks later, Terry Kitchen shot himself through the roof of his mouth with a pistol. . . Yes, and Mark Rothko, with enough sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet to kill an elephant, slashed himself to death with a knife in 1970.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard
1
Thirty-five paintings, practically all the same: indescribable black scribblings on a black background. Obsessive, sick.
The day they arrived at the gallery I unpacked them one by one, going faster and faster, wanting to see the surprise and the splash of colour. At first glance everyone thought they were sinister. Even Jacques, my colleague. He’s the master picture-hanger, I’m just his apprentice.
“We’re pushed for time, young ’un. Doors open in twenty five minutes!”
The director of the gallery only gave us four days to set up the exhibition, all the paintings and three monumental sculptures which nearly did Jacques’s back in. Strips of torn steel soldered together, piled up to twelve feet high. Two whole days getting them in position, with two of us at it. I can remember the look on the movers’ faces when they delivered them. “Can’t they do stuff which fits in a lorry, these useless artists?” Removal men often have trouble, with contemporary works of art. Jacques and I do too, even though we’re used to it. We don’t always know how to take them, these pieces. Literally and figuratively. We may think we’re ready for anything, but we never know quite what’s going to appear from the back of the articulated lorry.
Twenty to six, and the private view officially starts at six o’clock. The champagne is chilling, the waiters are all done up in their ties, and the cleaner has just finished vacuuming the five thousand square feet of carpeting. And we always have a last-minute problem; it never fails. But it takes more than that to panic my colleague.
“Where are we putting it?” I ask.
That’s the problem. Hanging thirty-five homogenous paintings all in the same family is easy. But there’s one little lost orphan amongst them. When I unwrapped it I thought at first that it had got in there by mistake, and that I’d already seen it somewhere else, in another collection. Unlike the others, this one is very colourful with lots of bright yellow and something dazzling about it, an academic portrayal of a church spire emerging from surrounding colour. It’s lighter, more cheerful, you could say. Joyful even . . . but I don’t think that’s a term approved by the upper echelons of the art world.
We kept it till last. The gallery director, the eminent Madame Coste who specializes in the 1960s, has breezed through without helping us out.
“That painting’s a problem, I know, it doesn’t sit well with the others. Find it a discreet corner where it can breathe a bit. Go on, I trust to you, see you later.”
A discreet corner . . . How would this little yellow thing show up amongst all these big black ones? They were quite nice, actually, but terribly aggressive.
Jean-Yves, the restorer, can’t stop laughing at the sight of us going round in circles. He’s lying on the ground with his white gloves on, touching up the corner of a painting that was damaged during the setting up. He’s almost finished.
“Only a quarter of an hour left!” he yells to wind us up a bit more.
Visitors are pressing their foreheads against the glass door, invitation in hand, and already drooling at the thought of the canapés.
“Try over by the window,” Jacques says.
I hold the painting up at arm’s length. He stands back a bit to see if it works.
“Hmph . . .”
“We’ve only got ten minutes,” I tell him.
“It’s still hmph.”
He’s right. There’s an unfortunate contrast between the spotlights and the daylight. The Minister may be coming to the private view, and if we’re found here like a couple of idiots with a painting still in our hands Mother Coste will have a fit. It reminds me of the time we got a piece from Australia two hours before the opening. It was in a wooden trunk, fifteen bottles filled with varying amounts of water; it was called “Shark”. No photo, no instructions, and the artist was at the Biennale in Sao Paulo. The visitors were starting to scratch at the door. In a terrible effort of concentration, Jacques tried to get inside the artist’s head. Click: if they were arranged in a particular order, the water level in the bottles created the outline of a shark, jaw, dorsal fin and tail. We finished just in time. Everyone admired that particular piece – and I admired Jacques.
He’s walking in circles, furious and calm at the same time. Jean-Yves has finished his touching up and is sniggering again.
“Hey, you’re quite a double act, you could entertain the gallery . . .”
“Shut it,” Jacques says serenely.
He draws a hammer from his tool belt and takes a hook from the pocket of his overalls.
“I’ve got it, young ’un.”
He hares off and, carrying the painting, I follow him as best I can
into a room where there are already four paintings. He takes two down, puts one back up, paces round, takes the others off . . . they’re all on the floor, I can tell this is heading for disaster, he swaps two over then feverishly reverses the decision. Liliane, the attendant, comes by, key in hand, and warns us that she can’t delay the opening. Jacques doesn’t listen to her; he carries on waltzing to a rhythm even he doesn’t understand. An expanse of wall has just appeared, he plants the nail without even measuring the height.
“Go on, hang it there,” he tells me.
I hang the painting and look all round the room. Everything is on the wall; the black ones are lined up at the top end and the yellow one is on a “reverse” wall, you don’t see it as you come in, but only as you leave. Isolated, but there all the same. I don’t even have to check it with the spirit level.
Coste comes in, all fidgety and dolled up in her evening dress.
“That’s great, boys, you deserve a glass of champagne. But go and get changed first.”
With our overalls and our hammers, we look pretty untidy. Jean-Yves comes over to the yellow painting and looks at it very closely.
“It’s a real problem, this picture,” he says.
“We’re well aware of that.”
“No, no, there’s something else . . . I don’t know what it is . . . A mixture of oils and acrylics . . . it’ll never last. And there’s something weird about the spire, don’t know what but . . .”
“People can paint with whatever they like, can’t they?”
The first visitors are coming slowly into the room.
“Does this picture have a title?” Jean-Yves asked me.
“I have no idea.”
“Odd . . .”
With her firm smile, Coste asks us if we could leave. We do as we’re told.
Ten minutes later, all fresh and clean, we meet up again – Jean-Yves, Jacques and myself – by the reception desk where Liliane is frenetically handing out catalogues to journalists. The words “Etienne Morand Retrospective” are written in white on a black background. A waiter offers us a glass each. I decline.
“Why do you never drink?” Jacques asks.
The hall is filling with the usual hubbub, and people are gathering round the enormous sculpture in the foyer.
“I don’t like champagne.”
And that’s not true: I love it, but after six o’clock I have to have an absolutely clear head. It’s going to be a long evening, not here but not far away, just up the road. It would be too complicated to explain all that to them.
Jean-Yves looks up from the catalogue and closes it.
“The yellow painting’s called Attempt 30, and it was Morand’s last piece of work.”
“Why his last?”
“He died not long afterwards, of cancer. And there are no others called Attempt. It’s odd to paint nothing but black and then to finish with yellow.”
“Oh, that’s all part of the impenetrable mystery of the creative process,” I say. “God knows what goes on in a painter’s mind. Especially if he knew he had cancer. It didn’t stop him making sculptures with a blowtorch, so why not use a bit of yellow . . .?”
But Jean-Yves is right: the painting is odd. What intrigues me more than the colour is the image. All the rest of Morand’s output is completely abstract, and then there’s this extraordinarily precise church spire . . . I really feel I’ve seen that combination of colour and subject before. It’s funny, it’s as if the painter wanted to conclude his work with a denial of everything he had done before, with a hint of . . . a hint of life. . . But I don’t have time to ponder this: it’s time.
“Aren’t you going to stay?” asks Jacques.
“I can’t.”
“You never stay. After six o’clock you whisk out of here like a whippet! We don’t see you for dust! One day will you tell me what you do after six o’clock? Are you in love?”
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
I start my life, that’s all. My life happens somewhere else: it starts after six pm and ends late into the night.
I take my coat and give a general wave. I’m always bored at private views, anyway. Liliane asks me to come by tomorrow to fill in a form with my hours and get my pay. A fond wave to the whole team and a long goodbye to contemporary art. Now I’m concentrating on my own art.
Monsieur Perez, the concierge, sees me leave.
“So, youngster, off to find your friends!”
“Yup! See you tomorrow!” I say to cut any conversation short, as usual.
And it’s over . . .
I come out of the gallery and head quickly towards the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. The days are getting longer, the streetlights are not yet lit. Good old February, especially the end of the month. A bus passes and I cross the street on a green light. I cut across the Avenue Hoche and pull up the collar of my coat; it’s a stubbornly cold winter. In the Place des Ternes the flower market is getting prettier by the day, and the staff at the brasserie throw out binfuls of oyster shells, it’s still the season. I’m in a good mood this evening, and I’m going to bring the house down.
On the Avenue Mac-Mahon a Renault 5 beeps at me; I never use the crossings – never mind.
I’m there.
I look up before going in, just to see the huge sign to the temple. My temple.
ACADEMIE DE L’ETOILE
I take the stairs up to the second floor to get to the room. I take a deep breath, wipe my hands on the front of my coat and go in.
The lights, the sound, the smell, the coming and going. . . I’m at home. Benoît and Angelo give me a welcoming squeal, the players perched on the mezzanine look down at me, and I raise my hand high. René, the manager, pats me on the back, and the waitress Mathilde takes my coat. People are playing, smoking, having a good time. I need this, all this explosive life, after hours of concentrating on nails and picture hooks. The audience are not the same brand of people you get at private views. Here, they don’t think about anything, they even forget the game, they cheer and heckle or they can even stay silent for hours. And I’m like an addict who becomes himself again after the first fix, at nightfall. And happy with it too. The neon lights are on over every billiards table except for No. 2: it’s reserved. I spot a boy getting up from his chair shyly and coming over towards me. I don’t know why I think of him as a boy when he’s at least my age – early thirties. He barely opens his mouth, but I cut him short straightaway, still staying as polite as possible, though.
“We were meant to meet at six, weren’t we? Listen. . . I’m really sorry but this evening there’s a game with the second-ranked French player. I’m not playing, but I really don’t want to miss it. I’ve got you here for nothing . . .”
“Uh . . . it doesn’t matter, we can put the lesson off till tomorrow,” he says.
“Tomorrow . . . ? Yes, tomorrow, and, in return, I won’t charge you for it. At about six, like today.”
“That’s fine . . . but this evening, can I stay? I mean . . . can I watch?”
“Of course! You should really make the most of the opportunity and book a table to get some practice, to do a series of ‘breaks’.”
To make this clearer, I starting positioning the balls that René has just brought over.
“No more than eight inches between the whites, and – with the red one – vary the distance: start off with it a hand’s width from the one you want to strike. Don’t worry about playing for position for now.”
“What is ‘playing for position’? You’ve already told me but I’ve . . .”
“It’s when you play a point and try to get all the balls as close to each other as possible, to prepare for the next point. But we can do that a bit later, can’t we?”
I play the stroke as slowly as I can and hold my position so that he can memorize the movement.
“The most important thing is to stay absolutely parallel to the baize, I can’t stress that enough: the slightest angle, and you’ve had it, oka
y? You strike the upper part of the ball with a tiny bit of sidespin to the left and you’re rolling.”
I don’t feel like going back over all the different phenomena hiding behind that one word “rolling”. Not again, it took me a good hour in the last lesson. And you can get to the point where the expression doesn’t mean anything any more, they either feel it or they don’t, and it comes to them gradually. The boy doesn’t look very sure of himself as he picks up his brand new cue, runs a line of blue chalk over the tip and puts the balls back in position. I turn away so as not to put him off.
Everything looks ready at No. 2. René has just taken the cover off and is brushing the baize. Langloff, the champion, is screwing his mahogany cue together over in a corner. He lives in a far-flung suburb and hardly every comes to Paris, just for the national championships or exhibition matches, and sometimes, like this evening, to visit his old friends. His game is a bit austere with no flourishes, but his technique won him the title three times. He was thirty-six back then. Every time I see him play I steal something from him: a mannerism, a gesture, a shot. It will take me years’ more work to get to that level, that’s what René tells me. But he can tell it’s coming.
In fact, I haven’t come just to watch: I know that Langloff likes playing three-way games, and René has promised to suggest me for this evening’s match. I’ve been thinking about it all week, that’s why I was in such a hurry when I left the gallery.
René is talking to Langloff. I can see what he’s up to; he’s talking to him about me. I cross my arms and stay sitting on my seat, looking up at the ceiling. It isn’t easy playing with a much younger player. I would completely understand if he refused.
“Hey, Antoine! Come over here . . .”
I jump to my feet. René does the introductions, and Langloff shakes my hand.
“So, are you the child prodigy? René tells me you’re pretty tough for a youngster.”
“He’s exaggerating.”
“We’ll see about that. How would you like a three-way game?”