I was happy to get this information, because I am still building up my knowledge of the History of Art, but I must say it spoilt my appreciation of Art for a while. After that, whenever I saw a landscape I had to look under the trees and behind the boulders for someone lurking. I couldn’t get lost in the paintings any more. It was like that book Where’s Wally? (If you’ve got children — or grandchildren — you’ll know what I mean.) Luckily I’m past that phase now. But I can’t help thinking that those Americans of yesteryear were wrong. When I find a human being in these pictures, some little wayfarer going along a path through the woods, it’s no comfort at all. A terror comes over me that I haven’t felt since I was a boy and my heart aches for him, for us.
locked-room mystery
The square outside the window was empty. Along the avenue, the snow lay crisp and even. Scanning that blank sheet for signs of life, Hans Günther Basch remembered the dog-eared Ellery Queen on his bedside table, and thought about the enduring appeal of the locked-room mystery. How often the riddle turned on a footprint or its absence. There were no footprints beneath the window, a single set of footprints led away from the ledge, only two sets of footprints were visible in the snow. A locked-room murder did not always happen behind closed doors, of course. More often than not, it was out in the open and in full sight of the world.
striptease
The flight attendant brought me a packet of Supersnacks, which were tiny salted crackers in the shape of stars, boats and clouds, and also miniature pretzels, and mixed in with them a few sweet biscuits decorated with the face of a boy who may have been Tintin, and these childlike bar snacks made me think of the woman and her boots.
What a strange striptease we have to perform in airports these days, taking off our jackets and belts, emptying out our pockets, allowing strangers to frisk and fondle us. At the security check in Mauritius they made a woman put her boots through the X-ray machine. A women’s-magazine type, I thought, precise and pointed, in a short black skirt and black stockings, a belt with silver studs low on her hips, a modernist haircut, angular and sculptural. Her stiletto heels gave her that pony-and-trap gait of the fashion models. She unzipped the boots and stepped out of them, and was suddenly small. The stockings turned out to be leggings that ended in mid-calf just below the top of the boots. On her feet she had a pair of low-cut gym socks covered with pink motifs, smiley faces or Pac-Men. Between the leggings and the socks, her pale and naked calves. She padded through the metal detector in the silly socks, while the boots, the leather jacket and everything else went along the conveyor, and of course she looked like a girl who’d been dressing up in her mother’s clothes.
stuck in the lift
Her application for a higher office had got no response. A week passed without so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. She was on the point of writing again when she got stuck in the lift with four of her colleagues. The compartment had no sooner risen from the 11th floor than it shuddered to a halt and went dark.
Irritated groans and nervous giggles. Then a booming voice asked if everyone was all right.
In those first uneasy moments, she thought about the uses of stories in emergency situations and the storyteller’s role as first responder and counsellor. She was familiar with the procedures for securing the area and stabilising the listener, and applying stories in the aftermath of car crashes, suicide bombings and tsunamis, but she had never been on the front line herself and had no ready-made material in her notebook.
This notebook happened to be in her hand. She had taken to carrying it around at work as a sign of her status, much as a medical intern carries a stethoscope. It was a small gesture of rebellion too, a rejection of the paperless-office requirement, a measurable objective in the Environmental Accounting section of the Corporate Balanced Scorecard from which she thought she should be exempt. The notebook held a selection of her best stories, handwritten on unlined paper, the current favourite bookmarked with a silk ribbon. She straightened her spine against the brushed aluminium wall of the compartment and pressed the notebook to her stomach.
After a flurry of phone calls to find out what the problem was and how long it would take to fix, the others began to cancel appointments and rearrange schedules. They had to share three cellphones among four people, and as the devices passed from hand to hand, illuminating one face after another, she tried to place them. The man with the loud voice was the Chief Risk Officer. He was accompanied by two departmental heads, a man and a woman. And then there was an anxious young man in a checked shirt with a red tie plunging through it like an arrow on a graph. A junior knowledge strategist.
It was beautiful, she thought, the play of cellphone light on furrowed brows and pursed lips, every bit as dramatic as a Caravaggio. If only the shrill young man would press the phone to his right ear like the others instead of holding it up to his mouth on his palm like a slice of pizza.
When the first of the cellphones faded out, the Chief Risk Officer spoke again to Maintenance and raised his voice. A mechanical failure, he said after the call. Roll on the day when mechanics is done away with entirely. The words were hardly out of his mouth when the second phone went down. They rationed the last one for twenty minutes, switching it on only to see how much, or rather how little, time had passed, and the knowledge strategist tolled the minutes in a tremulous voice.
Now might be a good time for a story. It took the storyteller a moment to realise that the suggestion was directed at her. The Chief Risk Officer, anticipating the panic when the last light failed, had called for a distraction.
Her stories were neither corporate fictions nor emergency tales, they were simply things she had made up for her own amusement, but there was no time to explain. She opened the notebook at the ribbon. There was a breathless pause. She could not see in the dark, of course, and no one could see that she could not see. She asked for light. The knowledge strategist protested, but the departmental head switched on her cellphone and held the screen over the page.
It was the story of Lamberto Violante, a double-entry bookkeeper in the city of Buenos Aires, who would have led a happy life had he not become terrified of vanishing without trace. For thirty years, he’d devoted every spare moment to avoiding this fate. It was hard work at first, signalling his continued existence and manufacturing evidence that would make him easy to find: he was always jotting down notes, getting himself photographed, leaving messages, scraping and sampling, checking in and touching base. But as the years passed, he became aware that complete strangers were taking care of things, keeping tabs on him and monitoring his every move, and the burden eased. He was able to live a normal life again.
The corporate storyteller began to read.
As the story unwound, the circle drew closer. The arm of the departmental head holding the phone coiled about her waist, the hip of the Chief Risk Officer pressed against her own. She saw the little band of them, huddled around the page like the last people of their tribe at a dying fire. Another tableau from Caravaggio, spoilt only by the red pulse of the low-battery light.