‘Where do you live?’
‘Around.’
‘Have you exhibited anywhere?’
‘No. Are you going to look at the painting?’
‘OK, mystery man, unveil it.’
He tore off the brown paper and threw it on the floor. As he did so I caught a glimpse of a naked woman tattooed on his right wrist. Not the usual full-frontal thing but with the body slightly turned and the left arm raised. He removed a Michnik from a nearby easel and put up his painting.
Olivia and I stepped back to viewing distance. ‘Has it got a title?’ I said.
‘Tiny, Tiny Dancing Giants in the Dim Red Caverns of Sleep,’ he answered.
Olivia and I stood there taking it in. The thing was unsettling but hypnotic and difficult to turn away from. You wouldn’t call it figurative but it wasn’t abstract either. There was a lot of dimness and redness and the idea of the tiny, tiny dancing giants was perfectly clear but not spelled out. Looking at it made me woozy and I had to lean against a wall to keep from falling over. We mostly have music in the gallery and this afternoon it was the Emma Kirkby recording that had lifted Volatore to my window. ‘ “Voglio, voglio,” ’ she sang to Anthony Rooley’s lute. ‘ “Voglio morire,” ’ she sang, and the tiny, tiny dancing giants danced silently in the dim red caverns of the wide canvas.
‘Opera?’ said the man who called himself Volatore.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s “Olimpia’s Lament” when Bireno sails away and she’s left on the beach.’
He gave me a measured leer.
‘You ever get left on the beach?’
‘Don’t get smart with me,’ I said, ‘I’ve dealt with better leerers than you.’
‘Sorry!’
‘You know Orlando Furioso? Vivaldi did an opera with that title, based on Ariosto’s epic poem.’
‘It’s got plenty of operatic situations, like Orlando’s fury because he’s got the hots for Angelica but she wants no part of him. Happened because they drank from different fountains, kind of thing goes on every day in opera land.’
‘So you’ve read it.’
‘Guess I must have, since it’s in my head.’
I almost said that he didn’t look like a reader of sixteenth-century epic poetry, but decided not to.
Pause.
‘Well?’ he said, watching me with a condescending smile on his face.
‘Where’s this painting coming from?’ I said. ‘I mean the idea.’
‘A dream.’
‘Can you say a little more about it?’
‘Everything I had to say is up there on the canvas.’
‘What else have you painted?’ said Olivia.
‘Nothing.’
‘Can you leave it with us and come back tomorrow?’ I said. ‘We’d like to give this some thought.’
‘OK.’
‘There’s a shower here that you can use,’ said Olivia, ‘if you want to freshen up.’
‘I always smell like this,’ he said. ‘See you.’ He walked over the brown paper on the floor and out of the door.
The painting was still doing its thing on the easel but neither of us wanted to look at it. His smell lingered awhile.
About five minutes after he left I said to him, ‘Wait!’
‘What?’ said Olivia.
‘Never mind. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be.’
‘What were you going to say to him?’ said Olivia.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘His visit seems to have hit you kind of hard.’
‘It has.’
‘How come?’
I shook my head.
‘I’ll let you know when I find out.’
Chapter 35. Animals with Men’s Eyes
I couldn’t stop thinking about the man who called himself Volatore and the weirdness of his visit. He wasn’t my Volatore; who was he and what was he? Was the idea of Volatore like a garment to be worn by random strangers?
I was hanging on to sanity like a fallen climber clutching an unreliable tuft of grass on the face of a cliff. What about the painting? He’d said that the idea of it had come to him in a dream. What did that mean? Was the dream of tiny, tiny dancing giants waiting around for whoever might fall into it? Was the dream permanent while the dreamers came and went? Was the dream reality? And what we called reality, what was that? Our eyes give us visual data and our brains choose what pictures to make.
My mind was freewheeling through words and images. My hand went to the bookshelves and came back with Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Slips of paper marking pages here and there. I opened the book to ‘On an Old Horn’, read:
The bird kept saying that birds had once been men,
Or were to be, animals with men’s eyes …
I closed the book and watched my hand replace it on the shelf. Animals with men’s eyes.
I slept badly that night. Bad dreams. A blackness that kept swooping and opening in front of me. With the smell of the man who called himself Volatore and whose feet had walked him to where I was.
Next day he did not show up. The painting stood there doing its thing as before.
‘You think he’s coming back?’ said Olivia.
‘No.’
‘What about this thing with the tiny, tiny dancing whatnots? What do you think we can get for it?’
‘Maybe seventy-five thousand.’
‘From?’
‘Mrs Goldfarb.’
‘Should we phone her?’
‘No. She’s about due for a visit. Let her discover it for herself.’
While we and the tiny, tiny dancing giants waited I decided to see if I could track down Volatore Two. From the brown paper of the painting’s wrapping there remained a bit of plastic tape. Cosmo’s Art Supply printed on it. I knew the store because it was near the Green Apple on Clement Street in the Richmond, where I had bought my Orlando Furioso.
Cosmo’s is one of those specialist places where the proprietor seems inseparable from his stock, as though the shelves and their contents had generated a keeper to look after them. Cosmo knows where everything is and remembers infallibly who has bought what and when. He’s a tall man, jowly, bags under his eyes, hair in his ears, walks with a stoop and chain-smokes Golden Virginia roll-ups. There were a few other people examining brushes, tubes of paint and paintbox-easels and taking in the satisfying smell of a place that has what you’re looking for. Cosmo ignored them and came to me.
‘I need a reducing glass,’ I said in order to buy something.
‘Things getting too big for you?’
‘It happens.’
He fetched it, I paid for it.
‘Anything else?’ he said.
‘Do you recall a customer with a rather strong smell?’ I asked him.
‘Is he wanted for something?’
‘Why? Did he look like a criminal to you?’
‘Certainly smelled unlawful.’
‘As far as I know, he’s done nothing he could be arrested for. What did he buy?’
‘Best linen canvas, stretchers, palette, palette cups, palette knife, brushes, turps, Venice turps, stand oil, damar varnish, linseed oil, Windsor Newton cadmium yellow light, cadmium yellow deep, yellow ochre …’
‘Outfitted himself from scratch, did he? How’d he pay? Cash, cheque, credit card?’
‘Cheque: Lenore Goldfarb. Pacific National Bank, four hundred twenty-three dollars and seventy-two cents.’
‘Lenore Goldfarb!’
‘You know her?’
‘She’s one of our best customers at the Eidolon Gallery.’
Cosmo pursed his lips, blew out his breath, and made a hand gesture that signified the smallness of the world.
Mrs Goldfarb is a piece of work. By experts. She’s a statuesque blonde who looks thirty-five and is two or three decades older. Her husband has a chain of shops called Bling It On. The main store is on Post Street and there are others in Los Angeles and Carmel. Lenore wears Prada but mostly she’s a walking display of her husband’s merchandise and the overall effect is that of a chandelier. Some women like her are into tennis and golf pros. With Mrs G it’s artists, whatever kind is available.