“Hurry up. They’re here to pick us up.”
As he put his clothes in two small carry-ons, an idea occurs to him: a woman wearing a raincoat and a skirt is going quickly down a flight of stairs, looking over her shoulder in distress. At the top of the stairs appear the shoes and cuffs of a man’s trousers. He takes the small pad from his pocket and makes a note of it.
Back in the bungalow he used as a studio, he sticks the notebooks into another tote bag.
“Tell them to be careful when they move the paintings.”
They get into the car. They shut the doors with a sharp click. They take off. Humbert is afraid that the painting of the woman going down the stairs will slip away from him. He should have stayed behind and painted it that same afternoon. Everything had its own precise moment of realization. .
•
Waiting for their luggage, all the passengers raised the collars of their overcoats and put on their woolen hats. A child is sleeping soundly in the arms of a man in a shirt and tie, with a small carry-on bag, his raincoat folded over his arm. Two Germans are looking at each other and complaining about the cold. A married couple and a twenty-year-old girl are trying their best to speak French to two French girls who don’t speak a word of English, even though they are getting in from a month in Toronto. A Santa Claus is picking up his suitcase.
As they go by the enormous cemetery that stretches out on either side of the highway, Humbert thinks he sees a figure draped in white wandering among the tombstones. He makes a note of it in his pocket notebook. He is quite pleased with the previous note he made as they approached the city: “The city, by night, as seen from the air: millions of tiny white, blue, and yellow dots.”
Back home, exhausted, they leave their suitcases unopened and get into bed. All at once they are very tired. They fall asleep in each others’ arms, and Humbert dreams that he slips from Helena’s embrace to go to the house where she had formerly lived with Heribert; this is a duty he has always avoided, though he knows he will have to face it some day. This is the moment, then, and (no longer able to put it off) he is finally on his way. There is something he has to look for (he doesn’t quite know what), and he rings the doorbell (not knowing if Heribert still lives there, or if someone else does, or if no one does). When Heribert himself finally opens the door, Humbert asks himself what he would have done if no one had lived there, as he certainly doesn’t have the keys. Heribert is a ghostly presence, almost immobile, who smiles at him from the threshold. Humbert is tense; he can’t stand Heribert looking at him that way, his mouth in a sarcastic curve, as he had always looked at him since their first meeting. He thinks: “I ought to get rid of him, once and for all.” But killing him seemed too awkward, though not half as awkward as he knew it must be in reality. Then he goes out into the inner courtyard of a country house with fig trees in the back, and then into a wheat field, where he runs around amid the tall wheat which is just about ready to be harvested, sticking his head out from time to time to see the bell tower of the town church, gloomy as a blockhouse.
•
“What I’m most interested in (and this is nothing new; what I mean is that it’s one of the mainstays of my discourse), what I’m most interested in, as I was saying, is the interrelationship between mediums. What I’d most like to do in this exhibition, you know, where I’m working, above all, in two different mediums (a photographic foundation and paint — and, in this regard, I’d like to stress that it’s been interesting for me to get back to oils, even if only to cast the contrast between such diverse techniques in starker relief) is to confront each work with total honesty, stripped of all prior notions, to discover that it is the work itself which has been carrying out its own process. I think this is important. Because what’s the point, unless the work itself is taking you where it wants to go, what’s the point, unless you are nothing more than the. . the. . high priest of. . well, the instrument of its creation. A play of opposing shades has taken place (I wouldn’t speak of light in this series: I would speak of shades, shades and color), opposed, but reconciled. Shades and textures. Think of the June exhibition, in São Paulo. Oh. That’s right, you weren’t able to go. Well, so, in that show what I was most interested in, what occupied my space, and my interest, was the background, and the backgrounds. They were the protagonists. Even unfinished, they were the center of my attention. I was interested in their being unfinished. Because even now, in the kind of painting we can say needs no justification, there is an excess of reality. Yes, yes; just think about it. This excess of reality, this reification of the excess of reality, holds no interest for me. No interest because it’s a step backwards and, at this stage in my artistic discourse, I can’t afford to take a step backward. I must go forward, continue forward however I can, because if I stop for a second, bam! the machinery of the discourse breaks down; and I find myself at an interesting juncture now. You know what? What I’m working on now. . Well, not working just yet, but considering working on, is iron plates, because what matters most to me is the support of the work: I’ve worked on paper, on canvas, on wood, on cardboard, on walls, on plastic, on photographic support (for the Chicago show), and now I’m interested in working on metaclass="underline" on iron, on steel. . Because I’m interested in the dialectic between one medium and another, between the media. Some time ago (before the trip to Jamaica), I thought of working out a dream sequence, on iron. Just imagine it: dreams, the most ephemeral thing in the world, worked out in such a hard medium. . This is why I take such an interest in recording my dreams on tape as soon as I wake up, so they won’t slip away from me. I’d like to be able to retain them all, written or on tape, filed away. Can you imagine being able to keep a record of all the dreams of your lifetime? It would be like a parallel life. A parallel life that would explain the other life to us. Since we always forget some of them, there’s no way to know whether we’d have the key to something if we could remember absolutely all of them. Want some jam?”
“No.”
“I also get holistic ideas from them, unconscious reflections on the work I’m doing.”
“What have you gathered from today’s?”
“Nothing, yet.”
“It’s not good to tell people your dreams. Then everything is out there. I never tell mine to anyone. Just like certain peoples of Africa, who think you are stealing their soul if you photograph them. .”
“More coffee?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s easy to tell when what you’re saying is revealing more than it appears to; I don’t know if I’m being clear. .”
“No it isn’t. I learned that Heribert was going out with another woman precisely because of a dream he told me, and he told it to me without realizing exactly what he was saying. And it’s not the first time this has happened to me.”
“He was seeing someone else?”
“He was going out with a woman I knew because she was the friend of a friend: Hildegarda, Marino DelNonno’s wife. I imagine he went out with other women, too. Before or after her, or before and after her. But I found out about this one from the dream; I think she must have been the one he was most involved with. Mmm. No sugar in the sugar bowl.”
“I’ll go get you some.”
“Not for me, for you. You poured yourself another cup of coffee. I don’t take sugar in my coffee, remember?”
“Of course I remember. I don’t know what made me think you might want some now. I’m going to get to work.”
“Give me a kiss.”