Three thousand dollars! Duni had paid me for the work with cooking pots. ‘DUNI EMPIRE’, I had written on his instruction, ‘POTS, TOOLS, SEEDS, BICYCLES AT FAVOURABLE PRICES. TOILET SUPPLIES’. I pray for the people of Chicago.
WORD HAS spread that Americans are buying up shop fronts. Enterprising businessmen have purchased them and are storing them for museums and universities abroad. Old ladies have been digging in their treasure trunks for old marriage certificates marked in gold by my brush. Embassies have placed guards on their gate-plates. The cinema manager is cursing his lack of foresight. Back-street charlatans have turned their energies from pimping and fortune-telling to forgery. The market is full of false shop fronts: fake greengrocers, tinkered tailors.
Visitors from America and Europe can buy mass-produced pillow-prayers in warped and clumsy Siddilic. In the marketplace, as in Chicago, the ancient characters of Siddilic have lost their meaning. The only care the forgers take is with my signature and, because their hands are young, these signatures are now better than my own.
Sabino is growing rich on the pickings from my waste-basket. Dollars cannot tell doodles from the name of God.
THERE HAS been some excitement in my small street. A government minister has come expressly to see me. First of his entourage to arrive was his head of protocol, a young gum-chewing aide-de-camp. He was a stickler for procedure. First, he distributed with a sweep of his arm a handful of coins to the beggars and children of our quarter. He shook some hands. He kicked some backsides. Nothing was too much trouble for him. He would be back in twenty minutes, he explained, with the Minister and with more handfuls of cash. Ministerial protocol demanded an eager crowd.
I was taking my siesta. ‘Do not wake your employer,’ he instructed Sabino. ‘The Minister likes surprises. But tidy the house.’ He placed one of his men outside the front gate to my house and another in the back yard. Then he radioed from his army jeep that the street was now ready for the Minister’s casual arrival. I slept peacefully and dreamt of my booth.
Sabino conducted the Minister into my room. I woke to their whisperings and shufflings and the scrape of the proffered chairs. But I kept still and listened. The Minister sat, chewing some of his aide’s gum, and waited for me to stir. My gecko backed furtively up my chest towards my throat. The Minister was a patient man. He enjoyed the advantage of arriving unannounced and being kept waiting.
I tired quickly of dissembling. I opened an eye — quite an effort for an old man long past winking — and focused first on my gecko, then my toes with their fossilized toenails and finally the Minister. Our smiles were hollow.
‘No, no, please don’t get up,’ he said. ‘We can talk here.’ He watched my white lizard, now shuffling squat-legged down my stomach towards the dark safety of the bed sheet which draped my legs and loins.
‘You live modestly for such a wealthy man,’ he said at last.
‘Wealthy?’
‘A millionaire by now, I should say.’
I said nothing. The Minister was talking monkey-shine.
‘You have been selling your work abroad at great profit.’ He took from the inner pocket of his handmade suit a thick wad of paper and tossed it onto the bed.
‘Evidence,’ he said. ‘There is an article about you in the New York Times by a man who spent many thousands of dollars on your shop signs and pillow-prayers. There is a list there of over a hundred foreigners who have paid great sums for your works in the market and have taken them out of the country.’
‘I have sold nothing for nearly ten years,’ I said. ‘I live on my savings. If any of my works are for sale then they are being offered by their owners, the people I worked for many years ago. Not me. Not guilty. I’m too old and lazy to be interested in trade.’
The Minister was convinced. Nothing about me or my house suggested wealth or dishonesty.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘It has to stop. It is illegal. The country’s resources are being illegally exported under our noses. We are being exploited. You too are being exploited. Collectors in New York are growing rich while your own people are scratching for termites. So … it has to stop.’
I shrugged. I had nothing to say. Export control was his affair.
‘Tell your friends in the marketplace,’ he said, ‘that the next one caught selling your work to a foreigner will be in contravention of our trade and export laws. We’ll have to find a place for them in the penal village. Anyone who has works of art to sell must sell them to the government. It is a matter of principle.’
He stood up sharply and towered above me as I reclined beneath the sheet and lizard. ‘A travelling exhibition is to be arranged of your work. And an auction sale is to take place…’
He sat at the end of my bed and mentioned Paris and Vienna and Toronto and Sydney and, of course, Chicago. He looked pleased on my behalf. ‘Naturally, this is a partnership,’ he explained. ‘You gain, we gain. We gain foreign currency from the sale of your work. Your government will have some … discreet money. We will pay it into a safe bank account. In Europe. In Switzerland. That’s by far the best. So, you see, if there is an emergency — some medicines are required, for example — then we have the money to buy them. Everybody gains. For you, there is security in your old age. A government house.’ I shook my head. ‘A car, then, whenever you need it, with a driver. Good food. Comfortable clothes. Fame. We will provide it all.’
‘I like good food,’ I said. ‘I like comfortable clothes. A driver and a car would be most useful. Don’t imagine that I am ungrateful or unpatriotic. But there is nothing to exhibit. All my work has gone. It has either been burned with the dead or eaten by parchment lice or shipped off to America by export racketeers. There are a few ornamental gate-plates outside embassies and that is all.’
‘What we want,’ insisted the Minister, with the single-mindedness of a deaf man, ‘are canvases decorated in Siddilic script. Ornamental pieces, works of art, not shop signs and the like.’
‘But there are none.’
‘Make some. You are a craftsman. It should be simple.’
‘If it were that simple,’ I said, ‘then you would not need to come to me. You could buy what you wanted at every booth in the market. It would be like shopping for potatoes.’
‘Well, make an effort then. Meet the grand challenge.’
‘I’ve outgrown challenges.’
‘Try,’ said the Minister’s head of protocol.
ON FRIDAY I visited my uncles’ village in some comfort. I now have a ministerial car at my disposal. And a driver. We swept across the scrub at the end of the Italian road and bumped on the saloon’s hydraulic suspension over the last few kilometres to the village. Never before had I been so cool. It is cold at night, of course, in the house. But here in the car I was cool and dry in sunlight. Outside, the sun blistered the paintwork. Goats were too parched to lift their bodies and scurry away.
‘Air-conditioning,’ said the driver. He peeked in his mirror to enjoy my response. I nodded. I looked impressed.
‘Electric windows,’ he added. The windows on either side of me hummed down like melting sheets of ice and the daytime heat curled into the car.
‘Stereo cassette,’ he said and pushed more buttons. A woman sang to me in English. ‘Electric windscreen wipers.’ A soapy spurt of liquid ejaculated from under the car bonnet onto the windscreen, turned the dust there into mud, and was whisked away by the silent twin-armed wipers. I am an old man and my problems are multiplying. I had never been so hot and cold, so cosseted and so bothered.