She stopped abruptly, as if she regretted saying what she had said.
Five o’clock came round. We were the only customers. The man leaning against the wall was still asleep. The other one was slowly and laboriously filling the half-empty sugar bowls.
Out of the blue, Louise suddenly exclaimed: ‘Caravaggio! I’ve no idea why I just started thinking about him, and his furious outbursts and his life-threatening knives. Perhaps because if he’d lived in our time, he might well have painted this hamburger bar, and people like you and me.’
Caravaggio the artist? I couldn’t see any paintings in my mind’s eye, but I recognised the name. A vague impression of dark colours, always with dramatic motifs, edged its way into my tired brain.
‘I don’t know anything about art.’
‘Nor do I. But I once saw a painting of a man holding a decapitated head in his hand. When I realised that the artist had depicted his own head, I felt I really had to find out more about him. I made up my mind to visit every single place where his pictures were hung. It was not enough to look at reproductions in books. Instead of making a pilgrimage to monasteries or churches, I started following in Caravaggio’s tracks. As soon as I had managed to save up enough money, I set off for Madrid and other places where his paintings could be seen. I lived as cheaply as possible, sometimes even sleeping rough on park benches. But I have seen his pictures, I’ve got to know the people he painted and turned them into my companions. I have a long way to go yet though. You’re welcome to pay for the journeys I still have to make.’
‘I’m not a rich man.’
‘I thought doctors were paid pretty well?’
‘It’s many years since I worked as a doctor. I’m a pensioner.’
‘With no money in the bank?’
Didn’t she believe me? I decided that it was the time of day (or night) and the stuffy atmosphere making me suspicious. The neon tubes on the ceiling were not illuminating us, they were staring down at our heads, keeping watch over us.
She continued talking about Caravaggio, and eventually I began to understand some of the passion that filled her. She was a museum, slowly developing each room with her own interpretation of the great painter’s life’s work. As far as she was concerned, he wasn’t somebody who had lived more than four hundred years ago, but was ensconced in a deserted house in the forests surrounding her caravan.
The occasional early bird started drifting into the bar and stood at the counter, reading the menu. ‘Monster Meal, Mega-Monster, Mini-Monster, Night Owl’s Menu.’ It occurred to me that there were important stories to be told even in scruffy restaurants like this one. Just for a moment, this unpleasant, smelly place was transformed into an art gallery.
My daughter talked about Caravaggio as if he had been a close relative, a brother, or a man she was in love with and dreamed of living with.
He was born Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. His father, Fermi, had died when he was six years old. He barely remembered him; his father was just another of the shadows in his life, an unfinished portrait in one of his big inner galleries. His mother lived rather longer, until he was nineteen. But all she inspired was silence, a rancorous, soundless fury.
Louise talked about a portrait of Caravaggio made by an artist called Leoni using red and black chalk. It was like an ancient police ‘Wanted’ notice posted on a house wall. Red and black, charcoal and blood. He peers at us from out of the picture, attentive, evasive. Do we really exist, or are we merely figments of his imagination? He has dark hair, a beard, a powerful nose, eyes with highly arched brows — a handsome man, some would say. Others maintained that he was nothing remarkable, a criminal type, filled with violence and hatred, despite his enormous ability to depict people and movement.
As if reciting a verse of a hymn she had learned off by heart, she quoted a cardinal whose name might have been Borromeo — I’m not sure I heard it properly. He wrote that ‘I became aware of an artist in Rome who behaved badly, had disgusting habits, was always dressed in ragged and filthy clothes. This painter, who was notorious for his cantankerous ways and his brutality, produced no art of significance. He used his paintbrushes to produce only taverns, drunkards, sly prophetesses and actors. Hard though it may be to understand, he took pleasure in portraying these wretched people.’
Caravaggio was a supremely gifted artist, but also a very dangerous man. He had a violent temperament, and was always looking for trouble. He fought with his fists and sometimes with knives, and once murdered a man as a result of a quarrel over a point in a tennis game. But above all else, he was dangerous because in his paintings he confessed that he was afraid. The fact that he didn’t conceal his fear in the shadows made — and still makes — him dangerous.
Louise talked about Caravaggio, and she also talked about death. It is visible in all his paintings, in the hole made by a maggot in an apple on top of a basket of fruit, or in the eyes of someone who is about to be decapitated.
She said that Caravaggio never found what he was looking for. He always settled for something else. Such as the horses he painted, their frothing mouths an expression of the fury he had inside himself.
He painted everything. But he never painted the sea.
Louise said that she was so deeply moved by his work because it offered her proximity. There was always a space in his pictures where she could place herself. She could be one of the people in his canvases, and she didn’t need to be afraid that they might chase her away. She had often sought consolation in his paintings, in the lovingly drawn details, where his brushstrokes had become fingertips stroking the faces he conjured up in his dark colours.
Louise transformed the foul-smelling hamburger bar into a beach on the Italian coast on 16 July 1609. The heat is oppressive. Caravaggio is walking on the sands somewhere to the north of Rome, washed ashore in the form of human jetsam. A little felucca (whatever that might be — Louise never explained) has sailed away. On board the ship are his paintings and paintbrushes, his oils and a kitbag with his ragged and filthy clothes and shoes. He is alone on the sands, the Roman summer is stiflingly hot, perhaps a gentle breeze cools him out there at the water’s edge, but there are also mosquitoes swarming around, mosquitoes that bite him, injecting poison into his bloodstream. As he lies exhausted and curled up on the beach during the hot, humid nights, they bite him over and over again and the malaria parasites begin to multiply in his liver. The first attack of fever catches him unaware. He doesn’t know he’s going to die, but the paintings he hasn’t yet completed but that he carries inside him will soon become petrified in his brain. ‘Life is a dream impossible to pin down,’ he had once said. Or perhaps it was Louise who had invented this poetic truth.
I listened in astonished admiration. Only now had I seen who she really was. I had a daughter who knew something about what it means to be a human being.