“If you have many valuable paintings, as I have—I will show you two more upstairs later—you make a decision. You treat them as what they are—squares of painted canvas. Or you treat them as you would treat gold ingots. You put bars on your windows, you lie awake at night worrying. There.” He indicated the bronzes. “If you want, steal them. I shall tell the police, but you may get away with them. The only thing you will not do is make me worry.”
“They’re safe from me.”
“And on Greek islands, no thieves. But I do not like everyone to know they are here.”
“Of course.”
“This picture is interesting. It was omitted from the only catalogue raisonné of his work I have seen. You see also it is not signed. However—it would not be difficult to authenticate. I will show you. Take the corner.”
He moved the Rodin to one side and we lifted the frame down. He tilted it for me to see. On the back were the first few lines of a sketch for another painting, then scrawled across the lower half of the untreated canvas were some illegible words with numbers beside them, added up at the bottom, by the stretcher.
“Debts. That one there.” Toto. “Toto was the Algerian he bought his hashish from.” He pointed: Zbo. “Zborowski.”
I stared down at those careless, drunken scrawls; felt the immediacy of the man, and the terrible but necessary alienation of genius from ordinariness. A man who would touch you for ten francs; and go home and paint what would one day be worth ten million. Conchis watched me.
“This is the side the museums never show.”
“Poor devil.”
“He would say the same of us. With much more reason.”
I helped him put the frame back.
Then he made me look at the windows. They were rather small and narrow, arched, each one with a center pillar and a capital of carved marble.
“These come from Monemvasia. I found them built into a cottage. So I bought the cottage.”
“Like an American.”
He did not smile. “They are Venetian. Of the fifteenth century.” He turned to the bookshelves and pulled down an art book. “Here.” I looked over his shoulder and saw Fra Angelico’s famous Annunciation; and at once knew why the colonnade outside had seemed so familiar. There was even the same white-edged floor of red tiles.
“Now what else can I show you? My harpsichord is very rare. It is one of the original Pleyels. Not in fashion. But very beautiful.” He stroked its shining black top, as if it were a cat. There was a music stand on the far side, by the wall. It seemed an unnecessary thing to have with a harpsichord.
“You play some other instrument, Mr. Conchis?”
He looked at it, shook his head. “No. It has sentimental value.” But he sounded quite unsentimental.
He looked at his watch. “Now, I must leave you for some time. I have letters to write. You will find newspapers and magazines over there. Or books—take what you want. You will excuse me? Your room is upstairs… if you wish?”
“No, this is fine. Thank you.”
He went; and I stared again at the Modigliani, caressed the Rodin, surveyed the room. I felt rather like a man who has knocked on a cottage door and found himself in a palace; vaguely foolish. I took a pile of the French and American magazines that lay on a table in the corner and went out under the colonnade. After a while I did something else I hadn’t done for several months. I began to rough out a poem.
From this skull-rock strange golden roots throw
Ikons and incidents; the man in the mask
Manipulates. I am the fool that falls
And never learns to wait and watch,
Icarus eternally damned, the dupe of time…
He suggested we look over the rest of the house.
A door led into a bare, ugly hall. There was a dining room, which he said he never used, on the north side of the house, and another room which resembled nothing so much as a secondhand-book shop; a chaos of books—shelves of books, stacks of books, piles of magazines and newspapers, and one large and evidently newly arrived parcel that lay unopened on a desk by the window.
He turned to me with a pair of calipers in his hand.
“I am interested in anthropology. May I measure your skull?” He took my permission for granted, and I bent my head. As he gently pinched my head, he said, “You like books?”
He seemed to have forgotten, but perhaps he hadn’t, that I had read English at Oxford.
“Of course.”
“What do you read?” He wrote down my measurements in a little notebook.
“Oh… novels mainly. Poetry. And criticism.”
“I have not a single novel here.”
“No?”
“The novel is no longer an art form.”
I grinned.
“Why do you smile?”
“It was a sort of joke when I was at Oxford. If you didn’t know what to say at a party, you used to ask a question like that.”
“Like what?”
“’do you think the novel is exhausted as an art form?' No serious answer was expected.”
“I see. It was not serious.”
“Not at all.” I looked at the notebook. “Are my measurements interesting?”
“No.” He dismissed that. “Well—I am serious. The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy.” He cut out with his hands, with the calipers, dismissing that as well. “I realized that one day before the war. Do you know what I did? I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert. All the great and all the small. I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better. I burnt them out there. It took me all day. The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes. It was a fumigation. I have been happier and healthier ever since.” I remembered my own small destroying and thought, grand gestures are splendid—if you can afford them. He picked up a book and slapped the dust off it. “Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?”
“For fun?”
“Fun!” He pounced on the word. “Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.”
“I see.”
“For this.” A life of Franklin Roosevelt. “This.” A French paperback on astrophysics. “This. Look at this.” It was an old pamphlet—An Alarme for Sinners, Containing the Last Words of the Murderer Robert Foulkes, 1679. “There, take that and read it over the weekend. See if it is not more real than all the historical novels you have ever read.”
His bedroom extended almost the seaward width of the house, like the music room below. At one end was a bed—a double bed, I noticed—and a huge wardrobe; at the other, a closed door led through into what must have been a very small room, a dressing room perhaps. Near that door stood a strange-looking table, the top of which he lifted. It was (I had to be told) a clavichord. The center of the room was fitted out as a kind of sitting room and study. There was another tiled stove, and a desk littered with the papers he must have been working on, and two armchairs upholstered in pale brown to match a chaise longue. In one corner there was a triangular cabinet full of pale blue and green Isnik ware. Flooded with evening light, it was altogether a more homely room than the one downstairs, and by contrast pleasantly free of books.
But its tone was really set by its two paintings: both nudes, girls in sunlit interiors, pinks, reds, greens, honeys, ambers; all light, warmth, glowing like yellow fires with life, humanity, domesticity, sexuality, Mediterraneity.
“You know him?” I shook my head. “Bonnard. He painted them both five or six years before he died.” I stood in front of them. He said, behind me, “These, I paid for.”
“They were worth it.”
“Sunlight. A naked girl. A chair. A towel, a bidet. A tiled floor. A little dog. And he gives the whole of existence a reason.”
I stared at the one on the left, not the one he had inventoried. It showed a girl by a sunlit window with her back turned, apparently drying her loins and watching herself in the mirror at the same time. I was remembering Alison, Alison wandering about the flat naked, singing, like a child. It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.