These rock paintings were made where they were, so that they might exist in the dark. They were for the dark. They were hidden in the dark so that what they embodied would outlast everything visible, and promise, perhaps, survival.
What they painted is like a map, Anne says.
Of what?
The company in the dark.
Who are where?
Here, come from elsewhere. .
7 Madrid
I am waiting for my friend Juan who will, I think, be late. His statues are never late; they are always already there, enigmatically waiting at the rendezvous. Juan works like a mechanic in a small garage, lying on his back as if underneath a car; he looks at his watch only when he crawls out and gets to his feet. We have agreed to meet in the lounge of the Ritz Hotel, Madrid.
There are tall palms and, leading off this lounge, a bar named after Velásquez. (I doubt whether he drank much.) The walls, the columns, the conservatory ceiling, are painted a whitish-yellow, not what the paint manufacturers call ivory, but the true colour of elephant’s tusks — much closer to the colour of old teeth. The ceiling of the lounge is as high as three elephants standing on each other’s backs.
As soon as one comes off the street and the double glass doors swing shut, one is aware here of the deafness of money, which, like the depth of an ocean, is perceived not as an empty silence, but as a seclusion.
The wide, carpeted staircase and, upstairs, the suites and bedrooms with their shaving mirrors which enlarge many times and yet nevertheless flatter — an optical laboratory must have worked for months to meet that challenge — are palpably quiet. In the lounge, although a number of people are talking, their voices are muted, just as the hands of the two waiters, carrying tinkling trays of glasses full of champagne, are gloved. They wear white gloves.
The first guests for an evening reception are arriving. The reception is being held to launch the new Venezuelan economy, which, supposedly, now depends on Spanish investors.
The seclusion prompts me to remember the Cma of shanty towns and the everlasting racket in prisons.
The reception guests, mostly in their thirties, have surf-riding smiles, controlled eyes and a way of tilting themselves forward like the figureheads once carved on ships. In the muted quiet, cameramen and journalists, with their microphones at the ready, are waiting for the stars who have promised to attend.
Not far from where I’m sitting, three hotel guests, who apparently have nothing to do with the reception, have installed themselves on two sofas and a deep armchair, as if they were at home. Perhaps they never leave their home but carry it with them like snails: snails who have lived a long while and have ancient names.
Both waiters and cameramen are respecting their claimed territory. On the floor between the two sofas is a large Chinese carpet, and the man of the trio, who is also the youngest, paces slowly round this Chinese carpet, smoking a Cuban cigar.
Those invited to launch the new economy are all, women and men, agents of promotion, and perhaps it is the imaginative effort of promotion that obliges them to lean forward in the way they do.
It may happen, at the end of a long day, that one of them catches a glimpse of himself reflected in a glass, and that then this leaning forward provokes a kind of paralysing panic — a fear of falling forwards, flat on one’s face! (A similar panic is sometimes visible on the faces of those suffering from Parkinson’s.) This evening, however, they are confident as they lean forward to take the glasses of champagne from the tray offered them by the waiters with white gloves.
For the man with the Cuban cigar, smoking is a way of slowing down the process — or at least his awareness of the process — of things getting steadily worse.
A young woman, seated on an upright chair opposite me, is reading a book. Like me, she is waiting for somebody who is late, though she looks towards the door more frequently than I do. I suspect she is waiting for somebody she’s in love with, and whom she doubts will turn up this evening. The crescendo of her disappointment is expressed by the ever briefer glances she accords to the book. Suddenly she slaps it shut, gets to her feet, and walks out between the camera-lights, set up for the stars.
I see him coming down the wide staircase, a room key dangling from his lightly clenched fist. The way he holds the key, it could be a bird he has in his hand. He is wearing a checked cap, tweed jacket, plus fours with heavy woollen socks and brogue shoes. His name is Tyler. His first name escapes me — probably because I remember that it signified a lot. His first name — whatever it was — evoked the mystery that surrounded him, above all, the mystery of the defeat he had suffered. I always addressed him as Sir.
Tyler is now at the bottom of the staircase and has taken off his cap and is coming into the lounge. As I follow him with my eyes, he looks away. He had a great gift for looking away and avoiding questions. He chooses the chair vacated by the woman who decided she would wait no longer for her lover. There he picks up a menu for drinks and sandwiches and studies it through his thick glasses, bringing it close up to his forehead. Often when he dropped some small object — the stub of a pencil, or a rubber — it was I who would look for it on the floor, because he could not see without bending down. Once the frame of his glasses broke — it was a very cold winter — and I mended them for him with some sticking plaster which we bought at a chemist shop. This was in 1932 or 1933. I was six years old. Now he turns the chair he has chosen so that he is not facing me, and gives his order to a waiter.
On one of the trio’s sofas, with skeletal legs crossed, and a shoe dangling from an arched foot, reclines a woman of over eighty with platinum hair. She might be the cigar-smoker’ s mother. She too is smoking — her cigarette in a long holder — to slow down the process of things getting steadily worse. Being, however, older than he — and possibly his mother — she is more confident that she herself won’t live to see the worst.
The skin of her face and neck, after numerous operations, is like crêpe de Chine paper. Her head — chin up as she exhales the cigarette smoke — reposes on a cushion. Her left arm is draped along the long back of the sofa and the flesh of her arm is draped from its three bones. She is wearing half a dozen golden bracelets and a pearl necklace.
Hard to know whether the pearls are real, as hard as it is to guess whether she comes from a circus or a château. Both would allow her her special effrontery, which is full of disdain and pride in all the appetites she has not lost and is determined to satisfy.
Maybe Circe on her island of Aeaea was more like this than the way she is usually depicted, centuries later, in Renaissance paintings.
The third member of the trio is the confidante, at least for this evening and, who knows? perhaps for life, of Circe. Maybe she is her sister, Pasiphae, the one who had an affair with the Bull of Crete and gave birth to the Minotaur. It is impossible to guess the age of this person, tumbled into the massive armchair beside the sofa, because of her size. Her immensity seems like that of time itself. She wears rings on seven fingers. Her neck is as wide as a slender woman’s waist. From time to time she glances protectively at Circe. In her expression there is less disdain than in her sister’s, since other people impinge on her less. She notices only those who approach close to her, and so she is spared the gaping curiosity which must be her lot as soon as she appears anywhere in public.
She has learnt to answer the question that used to haunt her: Where am I? She now knows the answer by heart: I’m here, I am here in the centre of myself. And this is her effrontery.
The waiter brings Tyler a bottle of white wine in an ice bucket and a silver stand of sandwiches decorated with parsley.