Monument Maker, page 33
There was an open courtyard in the jail, surrounded by high stone walls and with the smell of the sea, where the prisoners would congregate once a day and where new arrivals were fumigated and deloused and where people would exchange rumours and trade contraband. Even then there was talk of the camps. They’re shipping people off, some prisoners maintained, they’re running mass exterminations. Ask The Oddity, someone said, he can see the future because of his wounds. What happens with the camps? they asked me. A holocaust, I told them. They stared at me in disbelief.
I stood with the boy in the shadow of the wall. He was trying to remember. His one good eye squinted in the sun. He swept his dark hair up and over his forehead. Perhaps I tell you something remarkable, he said to me. Perhaps that’s it. But I didn’t paint you, I wanted to say. It wasn’t me. Instead I said nothing. But I’m only nineteen years old, he continued, I’ve nothing remarkable to say. What could I have done so you would remember me? He took a couple of bent cigarette butts out of his pocket and lit one for me and put it in my mouth. My lips burned and my eyes watered. My lungs stood to attention.
He wiped my chin with his shirt. I ran away from home to join the army, he said. Perhaps that’s remarkable. My mother died when I was only five from kidney failure. That’s something too. My twin brother died when he was only a year old. Wait a minute, he said. What if it’s my twin in the painting, what if he still looks exactly like me? I wanted to tell him that when children die they do not grow. What if we’re going backwards as well as forwards? What if in the future, in your future, my twin is communicating to me in the past, which is now? I spat the remains of the cigarette onto the ground. That would be remarkable, wouldn’t it? the boy said. I nodded. I was beginning to understand the nature of my calling.
One day the boy took me aside in the cell. There was a card game going on. One of the men had procured a set of playing cards, the rumour was that he had “given sex,” that was the phrase that had been used, to a fat Italian guard and now the whole cell was prospering. Of course the man denied it, the man who looked a little bit like Mussolini himself, it had to be said, like a deflated Mussolini, saying that he had merely been taken under his wing, an unfortunate euphemism that seemed to imply something much worse than simply giving sex. Listen, the boy said, I’ve had an idea. What if I ask you a series of questions and then, in the future, but in front of me right now, you ask the same questions to the graceful woman who has taken you in, Miss Visconti, if I remember correctly, and we can then find out, the two of us, exactly what is going on with me and my twin captured on the canvas in this strange conservatory in a backstreet in Athens? I looked at him and said nothing. I made a wretched sound back where my nose would be. Come on, the boy said, how can you not ask her now? I mean, when you do meet her in the future and you turn over this picture you will of course remember this conversation and how could you not think, to hell with it, what do I have to lose, let’s give it a shot, let’s ask the questions that the boy brought up in the cell during the war all those years ago. You said yourself that I was implicated, that we all were. To be honest I couldn’t recall saying that and for a terrible moment I wondered if I was giving up the past, if I was draining it like a fetid abscess, in exchange for greater access to the future. I made that noise again back of where my nose should be, and I nodded. He was right. How could I refuse? We settled in the corner of the cell. I crouched down on my knees and for some reason the boy mirrored me, crouching on his knees in front of me. They’ll think we’re praying, the boy said, let’s keep the future to ourselves. Okay, he said, okay, say hi to the woman for me. I looked at him in silence. Go on, he said, say hi.
I rose early, showered, and walked through to the kitchen wearing the clothes that Mariella had bought me (can’t we just jump right into it? the boy sighed), clothes that were suited to a much older man and that were an ill fit, a blazer whose shoulders hung down over my arms, a striped shirt that puffed out of the waist of my trousers, blue slacks with outrageous turn-ups and a hat too, a hat that of course I didn’t wear indoors but that hid some of the horror of my face in the sun.
I have someone who wants to say hello to you, I announced. Of course, she was startled. Had I smuggled another deformed refugee into her house? Was I about to present my partner in crime and fleece her, finally reveal the dastardly plan that she had unwittingly played along with? No, I said. It’s nothing to worry about. The boy in the painting says hello. Where is he? she asked. Tell her I’m here with you, the boy said. He is here with me now, I told her. Okay, she said, okay. In that case can I ask him something? I looked at the boy, his face which by now had become beautiful in the light of the future, the cell too, which felt illuminated, the circle of men playing cards like a classical painting not of the Last Supper but the last bacchanal, a Rembrandt where the suffering flesh itself lights up in the darkness in celebration of who knows what secret destiny, a Rembrandt, I said to myself, a Rembrandt, as I saw my tortured face from the outside, emerging from the shadows, and I looked to the boy and I mouthed the words “there is transport both ways” and he beamed back at me, his face beamed and I fancied I saw a tear in the corner of his eye as we kneeled there in the darkness, please, I said to the woman, please, ask us anything, and I referred to the two of us as one for the first time.
After a moment she asked us the question. Why did you appear? she asked us, a question that sent us back to our own origins, that sent us spiralling, quite frankly, and that threw us, quite honestly, in that we had looked to the future for our answers, for the revelation of our circumstances, for the word of magic, truth told, and here was the future, in search of the same revelation, still, in the past.
Then the boy spoke up. I appeared for you, he said, as a sign. But she couldn’t hear him. I saw that there was only traffic in threes. He appeared for you as a sign, I told her, translating his words into the currency of the future. A sign of what? she asked me. The boy paused, then he looked at me and he smiled. Of the word that was spoken, he said.
You can see into the future, the woman marvelled, and she leaped from the table and embraced me. You are the one that has appeared to me as a sign! At last! I stood rigidly with my arms at my sides. I was still the same monument she had found in the square. I could have explained that in the past I could see into the future but in the future I could only see into the past, but what was the point. The future has no future, but the past has the past has the past. Yes, I said, yes, I can tell the future. This is the moment that my future career reveals itself.
The woman designs me a mask, a leather mask that covers my features completely and that blocks out the light with only a small opening for my mouth and a hidden eye slit. She sets me up as an oracle. At first we perform our tricks in the conservatory to an invited audience. Mariella spoke in grand terms. Her English was extravagant. My powers were omnipotent, she informed our audience, mostly made up of ex-members of her spiritualist circle. My knowledge of the future was titillating. I sat behind a curtain ready for the great reveal. The mask amplified the sound of my own blood and I began to hear voices, cries, protestations from inside my own body. Perhaps I could do this after all.
More words came from beyond the curtain; redundant, philistine, ectoplasm. As my breathing fell into a particular rhythm, I felt something rise from the base of my spine. Good news, I said, and I spoke the words out loud against my will. I heard the voices outside die down and the sound of footsteps moving towards the curtains. At last I stood revealed, dressed in my dark-blue robe and with a black leather mask and leather gloves. Good news, I repeated, and there were gasps throughout the room.
Come, ladies, Mariella chastised them, this is not a cheap sideshow. He’s vibrating, one of them said, he is moving in and out of time. I’m getting a blue triangle, another said, a blue triangle on a plain white background. We have our first question, Mariella said, and I heard a movement of chairs as if one of the women had stood to make her request. My name is Bonnie Ventura, she told me. My husband Frank was lost to me in the liberation of Greece. Do you have any idea of his whereabouts and how I might get a message to him? I turned my mind to the blood and to the bone. He is in the castle of heaven, I told her, and I felt the tears run down her cheek. Is he in pain? she enquired of me. He is held up as though by an ocean, I informed her. With what does he pass his time? she asked me. He is cured of time, I reassured her. Does he think of me dearly? she asked, pathetically. You are his beating heart, I reassured her. What does he look like in heaven? she asked me, and with this she wept once more. He looks like his eternal self, I told her. Can
I come to him, when I have to, when I must? Yes, you can come to him, I told her, then I raised my hand as if for the next speaker. There were more questions, questions of lesser and of greater consequence, questions about questions, how they should be asked and why and of whom, questions about animals, animals that were lost and that were ailing, questions about the spread of disease and the accuracy of diagnoses, about ill fate and good fortune, but it was the disappeared of the war that came to occupy our seances, who we looked for in the past and in the future. Where can they be?
In our prison, in the final years of the war, it would sometimes rain for days. The rain would fall into the ocean, where it would rise only to fall back down again. How many times had we escaped across it, imagined ourselves freed and returning home? I don’t speak for myself, you understand, but for my cellmates. For me the future was fixed. I saw myself as a great comfort and as a great terror. But for the boys around me I wished them safe passage and I remember them now, so young, as impossible, as a great conundrum, the Irishman with the harp, the Scot with the single functional bollock, the young man with the eyepatch and the tanned chest who one day becomes a painting turned to the wall.
After our seances were over Mariella would lead me back to my room, where I would sit in the silence of my mask and imagine myself as having no head or more properly imagine my head as being like the high branches of a tree, open to everything and with the wind and the air, or like a cup or a chalice, the Holy Grail, I told myself, filled with blood. Once the guests had gone Mariella would enter the room, where she would take off my mask and wash my face in a bowl of hot water. She would wipe my face with one hand while she took slow draws on a cigarette with the other. Everything she did, her movements, the attention of her eyes, the way she would step back as if to examine her work from a distance, had the aspect of a painter. Then she would tuck me into bed in my robe, where she would sit with me for a while, by the light of a candle, me wearing my eye mask, and we would say nothing, but I know that in those moments we both came to doubt ourselves, the validity of what we were doing, the justification for our spurious set-up, the theatricality of our lies. All I can say is that we were compelled to do it, that the dead, who I have already demonstrated were a lie in themselves, who were not truly the dead, conspired with us in order to find a place for themselves in the future, a future that up until the moment of my revelation had never existed.
One day she set up a projector in the living room and showed me the first of several films her husband had made before the war. I didn’t realise you had a husband, I told her. I don’t any more, she said. I asked her what happened. He died, she said, he died of a broken heart. I didn’t press her any further. I had the terrifying idea that she might ask me to forge a contact with him. It says something that I believed we were capable of fooling even ourselves.
The first of the films was a static shot of the ocean coming in and coming out. From the angle and aspect—high up and endless—it could almost have been filmed from the window of my jail cell. I was startled but I kept my composure. This is almost the same view from my jail cell during the war, I told her. It’s all the same ocean, she shrugged (tell her we’re looking at it right now, the young boy with the eyepatch said to me, tell her there’s no doubt), even as I insisted, I would know that view anywhere, I told her, I stared at it day and night for years, but she said, well, this film only lasts three hours, she said, it’s slightly sped up, however you do get night and day views, and then I thought, what about the stars, I had a crazy idea that I could place it by the position of the stars, like a sea captain would and I said, okay, where’s Orion’s Belt, and Orion’s Belt, from the window of my cell, was on the horizon, more like a crucifix that had toppled to the ground or a ship that had capsized and that was slowly taking on water, there it is, I said, and I stood up and moved close to the projector, which was a black-and-white projector in those days but which made the stars stand out even more, which illuminated them further and made it possible to pick out Orion’s Belt, bobbing on the horizon, being clawed at by the water, and slowly submerging, just as it had looked from our cell, but Mariella made a good point, she said, well, don’t you realise that the world keeps turning, don’t you realise that people all over the world see the stars fall into the ocean at different times and places, unless what you are trying to say is that my late husband was somehow filming over your shoulder during the war, in the midst of your incarceration, which I think the authorities might have frowned on, I think that they would have legislated against the arrival of a camera crew, because of course my husband didn’t work alone, he led a team of experts, of early pioneers in experimental film techniques, and while I admit if he had practised his art in Germany he may well have ended up behind bars, in Italy, which is where he came from, and therefore in Greece, which is where he lived in the years running up to the war and his premature death, there was a more permissive atmosphere, less of a fear of innovation, which thanks to nutcakes like the Futurists had come to be seen not quite as comforting but as something that could be healthily embraced, and of course I stopped her right there and asked her directly, was your late husband a Futurist, and of course as soon as I said that I imagined him, too, living on in some time far up ahead, taking his place, boldly, in what was to come, and inevitably I imagined his disappearance as having something to do with an escape to the future, perhaps, though of course she had already said that he died of a broken heart, which I had to admit did not seem like a typical malady that would affect a Futurist, whose hearts were said to be like cold hard steel, like titanium, I believe, but she brought it back to the stars and ridiculed my attempt to establish a fixed point in my past with a fixed point in the sky and then to presume that everything else could be deduced from there and of course she said, well, think about it, that’s what astrology does, so in one sense you are barking up the right tree (“nutcake” and “barking up the right or the wrong tree” were, of course, phrases taught to her by me in order to add to her armoury of delightfully convoluted and satisfyingly archaic English phrases), but truly, to read the moment, to understand the singularity of its powers you must also track the planets and their relationship with the constellations, so unless you could see the planets from your window, unless you could convincingly map for me the exact state of the heavens at that moment and then somehow overlay it onto the film of my late husband, the melancholy film of my late husband, it seems to me now, your idea that it could possibly be the same view that you yourself internalised, as it were, is impossible to prove, but of course I told her that I didn’t insist that it was filmed at the same moment or even during the same years, but that simply the Futurist husband had been there, in that exact same spot as myself sometime in the past, and I asked her when he had died, died is the wrong word, she corrected me, but then she said, 1941, it happened in 1941, and I said, okay, that is the time that I was taken prisoner, so what if he had visited the jail just before then, what if he had been captured, but Mariella insisted, he wasn’t captured, she said, he remained at liberty, so okay, I said, what if during peacetime he had visited that same jail cell with a view to shooting precisely that scene, what if he had contacted the authorities, who as you say looked favourably on his experiments with the future, and they had allowed him access to film from precisely the same cell that I ended up in myself, and of course she protested, how would he know precisely what that view was like, she said, he would have to have been in jail before that and to have looked out that same window and said one day I will return here and film this view, this view which had to have been seared onto his mind by a past trauma or a previous visit, a short jail sentence, let’s say, or, let’s whisper it, he would have to have been a guard who every day visited that same cell and who looked out onto the ocean and thought one day I will come back and I will take this view with me once and for all and of course, as far as I know, he was never in jail, whether as an inmate or as a guard, but I confess that now you have me spooked a little bit (“spooked” I also taught her), exactly, I said, exactly, there are gaps in everyone’s lives where they do things that can never be seen or verified and that are never spoken of again, but here’s the proof, I said, here’s a gap, here is the moment that your late husband the Futurist returned to the scene of some kind of epiphany, and I think it’s reasonable to call it that, and of course although you maintain that every ocean is the same ocean, of course every time we encounter the ocean we see it somehow differently and there is so much variation between the form of the waves, the precise combination of sea creatures far beneath, the infinite permutations of sand upon sand, of broken shells and crockery washed up in the tide and, of course, everything that is inside you and that you bring to bear on the ocean, whether you stare out into it as an adult who has lost everything and who longs to be swept away, a suicide who walks out into it and who is rescued by the authorities, a child who wades into it with a bucket and spade for play, a young woman who paints it, two lovers who see it as endlessly romantic, a couple walking a dog who barely notice it at all, we can safely say, I insisted, that this view, this ocean, was significant to your late husband, although it seems a curiously romantic scene for an avowed Futurist, who I would imagine filming in a great factory or during a tank battle or at the very least alongside a motorway as the traffic sped past, and then Mariella corrected me, I didn’t say he was a fully paid-up orthodox Futurist, she said, I didn’t say that at all, I say, yes, his work paralleled the Futurists (at this I pictured a dual carriageway running all the way into space), his work was partially inspired by the Futurists, his work was co-opted by the Futurists, in some cases, but to say he was a Futurist, plain and simple, although of course really they were extravagant and complicated, would be to simplify things to an intolerable degree (“intolerable degree” is another one of mine, thank you), in fact you have much in common, she said, and I wonder now if that is what I recognised in you in those days when I would pass you by, on those days I was drawn to you in the square as you stood there with your old face held out in front of you, by the way, what happened to that, to the picture of your old face, was it lost or stolen, it was stolen, I told her, it was taken from me, swiped, I see, she said, and what face did you watch the waves with, was that your old face or your new face, my new face, I told her, the face that I have now, were you in terrible pain, she asked me, yes, I said, yes, I was, and still there are issues, repercussions, like what, she asked me, and I told her about my eyes, they are covered by a film, I told her, they are like an old pond in the autumn or in the winter, even, and what else, she asked me, the sound of my blood, I told her, the sound of my blood is very loud inside me, like the sea, she asked me, and her own eyes sparkled, and I said, yes, and I almost laughed, like the sea, I said, and she shrugged, so the film of your eyes matches the sound inside of you, I was confused, do you mean the film of the sea, I said, and then she asked me, do you know the Roman god that January is named after, it was the beginning of the year, we had just spent our first Christmas together, no, I confessed, I’m more up on the Greeks, it’s Janus, she told me, it’s Janus with the two faces, one that looks back to the past and the other that looks forward to the future and in his head is a door, a gateway, a bridge, a passageway, my husband wasn’t a Futurist, she revealed, my dear husband was in a fact a Januist, what’s a Januist, I asked her, a follower of Janus, she said, an offshoot of Futurism, she said, that both pre-dates and supersedes it, listen, she said, while the Futurists dreamed of dual carriageways running all the way into space (I had already imagined that, I recalled, with a shudder), the Januists imagined them in time, tunnels, sleek passageways, transports, from here to there, in the firing of a neuron, in the blink, she said, of an eye. I stared at the film, at the sea, and I felt myself just as the women at the seance had seen me, flitting in and out of existence, flickering, slightly, like a projector, I thought.
