Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi Read online

  A few minutes later, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted some colour photographs of tanned naked flesh. Porn! That was the great thing about the art world these days – you were never far away from Adults Only, sexually explicit, hardcore, triple-X material. Except, as he moved closer, they turned out to be the opposite of porn. These were full-colour pictures of a woman giving birth. Blood everywhere, the intestinal-looking umbilical cord and, finally, the fluid-smeared, crumpled little alien baby. Ugh! That stuff should be banned. It was deeply offensive. It could put you off sex for life. And not just sex. It could put you offlife for life.

  Needless to say, these pictures – like all the other photographs on offer – were the size ofThe Raft of the Medusa. So what if they were just snaps of someone jerking off in a leather armchair in an apartment in Zurich? So what if it was just a half-eaten, pre-packaged egg-and-cress sandwich abandoned on the seat of a bus shelter in Stockholm? So what if it was a portrait of the artist's sour-faced grandmother pushing her shopping trolley round a poorly stocked supermarket in Barnsley? Blow 'em up big enough and they looked … Well, they looked like shit, frankly, but they looked like art too.

  As at the Giardini, there was a constant flow of people to greet and compare notes with: what they'd seen this morning, what they'd got up to the previous night. Never one to kiss and tell, Jeff would have liked nothing more than to boast and brag and generally yell from the rooftops about his adventures of the night before but he managed, somehow, to restrain himself. Everyone he met was more hungover than they had been yesterday and some had got their hands on free T-shirts as well as free bags and catalogues. The most resolute were even getting stuck into the free bottles of Asahi that were already being handed out from ice-crammed bins, strategically located.

  Stretched out on cushions and orange and red rugs under a blazing jungle of neon, Scott Thomson waved to him to come on over. Since everyone else was respectfully walking round or briskly through the installation, Jeff expected him to get thrown out by security but Scott called out, ‘C'mon dude, it's allowed.’

  Jeff walked over and joined him on a pile of comfy cushions, gazing up into this mad tangle of neon allsorts and illuminated chillis and plastic bananas and God knows what else.

  ‘This is more like it, isn't it? This is abit like Burning Man,’ said Scott.

  ‘They have this kind of stuff there?’

  ‘Loads of it. But more far out. You'd probably get some kind of performance thrown in as well. Or at least a bunch of people making out or serving cocktails.’

  ‘Who's the artist?’

  ‘Jason Rhoades. And all these signs—’

  ‘Yes, what are they? Mexican beers or something?’

  ‘No, man. Synonyms of pussy.’

  Jeff looked again, tried to decipher and isolate the red, blue and purple letters: House Under the Hill, La Tortilla, Hombre (what was that all about?), Rinkly Stinkly, Bank, Birdy, Filthy Hatchet Wound (jeez, what sort of sick fuck had come up with that?), Lovely Meal, Pink Panther … There must have been a hundred more of them, but he got the point.

  ‘And what's the piece called?’ Scott shrugged, handed him the guide and pointed to the title:Tijuanatanjierchandelier.

  ‘Quite a mouthful.’

  ‘There you go: you've come up with another synonym.’

  Funnily enough, last night…Jeff didn't say the words, but his face must have been beaming some kind of message of gleeful well-being.

  Scott said, ‘You know that expression “a shit-eating grin”?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That's exactly how I'd describe your face now. Haven't seen you look this happy in years.’

  ‘I haven'tbeen this happy in years,’ said Jeff, liking Scott more than he had for years. He would gladly have continued the conversation, but it was almost time to see if the source of his happiness had turned up for the first of their possible rendezvous. He got up to go, smiled goodbye to Scott. Now that the ice had been broken, quite a lot of other people were sitting and chatting in the midst of the installation.

  Jeff waited for Laura at the ticket desk till ten past two, hoping they'd be able to relax together in the neon lair ofTijuanatanjierchandelier. Then he waited ten minutes more. She was not going to come. He was about to plunge back into the Arsenale when, some way off, he saw a bunch of Africans selling their knock-off bags in the bright heat. Even here, they were at it, hustling their wares! They really were irrepressible – and optimistic. What were the chances ofselling bags when they were being given away free all over the place? But people were buying them, or at least showing an interest, entering into negotiations about price, quality and the possibility of discounts for bulk purchases. And a surprising number of people were filming or taking photographs of these happy Africans and their prospective customers. That's what caused the penny, eventually, to drop. The Africans were a work of art, a real-life installation, simulating the outside world the way their bags simulated the Prada and Louis Vuitton originals, thereby raising questions about authenticity, value, commodification, exploitation and several other things, probably, that didn't spring immediately to mind. Porn that was childbirth; a football that was a skull; commerce that was art: nothing today was quite what it seemed. And though it may have seemed as if Jeff was absorbed completely by the conceptual implications of the Africans and their bags, this was itself a form of dissimulation and disguise, camouflaging the fact – from himself as much as anyone observing him – that he was contriving a way of waiting a little longer for Laura. Eventually, though, he had to accept that she was not coming and, with a final look behind, headed back inside.

  He soon spotted something he'd missed first time around: photographs of celebrity academics and intellectuals, lecturing, hosting seminars and generally making the life of the mind look, if not glamorous, then certainly lucrative. There was Linda Nochlin contemplating ‘The Glory and Misery of Pornography’ in a colloquium in Paris; there was Eric Hobsbawm explaining how history means never having to say you're sorry; and there was Edward Said – so handsome, cuff-linked and dapper it seemed Richard Gere had already signed up for the biopic – guiding a group of adoring students through the minefields of orientalism, late style and why the Oslo Accord sucked the big one.

  Under normal circumstances he wouldn't have had the patience to sit through videos, but today, feeling tired, he was glad to flop down in darkened rooms and let them take their course, even though many of them, of course, had no course to take. One showed a woman, filmed from behind and slightly above, silhouetted against a river. She did not move, but her coat and hair moved in the breeze. In front of her a grey blur of water moved slowly from left to right, filling the entire screen. Every now and then bits of garbage drifted by: bottles, clumps of branches, plastic bags. At one point a large lump floated past. It was impossible to tell what it was, but it looked like some kind of animal, a dog or a cat perhaps. The river kept flowing, hazy, trash-strewn, endless. Bird shadows darted over the water. Atman watched for a long time, continued to do so even after the tape had looped back, returning the river to the place where it had begun.

  Another video showed a shaven-headed boxer shadow-boxing, ducking and diving, throwing punches at a woman who stood absolutely still. He never quite hit her, but his fists came within inches of her impassive face. She never flinched but, like the laundry woman, a few strands of her hair moved in the draught left by his blows. At one point, when he missed her only by millimetres, her nostrils flared slightly. He bobbed and weaved, protecting himself at all times, probing with jabs, making that boxerly snorting sound through his nose, looking for openings and then unleashing a brutal combination of blows, a flurry of lefts and rights, uppercuts and hooks, shots to the body, the face, the head. And all the time she stood there impassively, unharmed and lovely.

  From the vaporetto he saw Laura in the middle of the Accademia bridge, talking to a man he did not recognise. By the time he got off the boat, the guy she'd been speaking to was now
here to be seen. He walked up and stood in the place her companion had been standing. She was wearing a white dress. She raised her parasol a few inches. More of her face came into the sun. Her hair was pinned up, making her neck seem longer, her cheekbones more pronounced. She raised the parasol still further. Her eyes were lit up by the sun.

  ‘Come into my shade,’ she said. He moved towards her and she lowered the parasol again so that their faces were in the shade. He kissed her on the mouth. She smelled slightly, and tasted, of cherries.

  ‘It's nice in here,’ he said. It was like being in a capsule, insulated slightly from the world.

  ‘Yes. The eat is otter than ever. But it's fractionally cooler under here.’

  From her Freitag bag she produced another bag – polythene – of cherries. ‘Have one.’ She held a cherry by its stalk in front of his mouth. He closed his lips around it, like Tess in the Polanski film. She tugged the stalk free. Then she took one for herself so that she was left holding two stalks while they chewed. His hand was on her hip, near her tattoo. Beneath the fabric of her dress he could feel the slight ridge of her underwear. She turned him towards the canal. They gazed out together, at the terrace of the Guggenheim, the nameless palazzos, the idle gondolas, the hitching posts like barbers' poles. He said, ‘Did you get to the Arsenale?’

  ‘My lunch was put back till two, so I went straight over there after changing. I was sure I'd see you there. Then, at one-thirty, I had to leave.’

  They compared the things they'd seen. There must have been so many near-misses when they'd almost bumped into each other: she'd spent ten minutes in the vaginal neon ofTijuanatanjierchandelier , had seen the shadow-boxing and the river videos … It was a shame, but it didn't matter because they were here now.

  ‘What about now?’ Laura said. ‘Is there anything you have to do?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘So, shall we stroll?’ Without waiting for his reply, she began walking. He fell in step beside her.

  They walked through the Campo Santo Stefano and into a tighter network of shopping streets, where it was too crowded to hold hands. A very small shop specialized in gloves, displaying them in such a way that it looked as if they were praying to be purchased. They crossed a bridge spanning a small canal, in which there was a log jam of gondolas. One of them had a single occupant, sitting in his throne-like seat as if he were Genghis Khan, belatedly coming to terms with the futility of a life devoted to conquest. The passengers in the other boats all shared a diluted version of the same expression, one that reluctantly acknowledged that, in agreeing to travel by gondola, they had been sold one of the oldest pups in existence.

  They came to a shop selling glasses, vases and lights made of glass, all decorated with dots, swirls and streaks of bright colour: the most beautiful glasses in the world, surely, and probably the most expensive as well. A small glass – the size a very small orange juice would come in – was eighty euros. There was a moment of shocked disbelief and then, almost immediately, the idea of a glass costing eighty euros began to be assimilated. Dostoevsky might have had these glasses, these prices, in mind when he defined man as a creature who got used to things.

  ‘It seems a lot for a glass,’ said Jeff, ‘but I guess there are plenty of people in Venice this week who can afford them.’

  ‘It's not about being able to afford them,’ Laura said. ‘It's about being able to not worry about breaking them. Besides, what does it mean to be able to afford something? It's a way of externalizing and gauging how much you desire something.’

  They stood staring at these inessential, very desirable glasses.

  ‘D'you know,’ she said, ‘I'm going to buy one for you.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. And not only that. You're going to buy one for me.’

  ‘Am I? Ouch!’

  ‘Yes. But the condition of doing so is that we don't care at all about breaking them. Obviously we'll wrap them in paper on the plane, and we won't put toothbrushes in them, but we'll use them whenever we feel like it. And you know how that will make us feel?’

  ‘I'm tempted to say poor, but I think the correct answer is rich. Mainly, though, I'm relieved that you're not going to steal them.’

  She led him into the shop. It was a wonderful shop, but just being in it made him feel clumsy, bullish. A careless gesture could prove extremely expensive. Anxious that even staring too hard at the glasses might cause cracks to appear, Jeff tried to look at themgently.

  The glasses were all different, but they were so uniformly beautiful that choosing became somewhat arbitrary. For Laura he picked one that had a swirl of red and white, as if a scoop of raspberry ripple had been imprisoned in the glass. For him she chose one that was pale blue with tiny bobbles of orange. They paid. The sales assistant wrapped their glasses in pink tissue paper, handling them as if they had just been plucked from the tomb of Tutankhamen and might shatter on contact with the coarse air of not-the-afterlife.

  Outside, Jeff noticed that they were right next door to Prada. For a moment he worried that a precedent had been set, that having bought each other an amazingly expensive glass, they were now going to up the stakes still further, splashing out on even more expensive clothes.

  ‘So,’ said Laura, ‘let's go and use our new glasses.’ Jeff's instinct was to squeak out ‘Where?,’ but he forced himself, instead, to say ‘Sure’ and, once again, to fall into step beside her.

  ‘Are we allowed to put them in a dishwasher?’ he said, as they walked.

  ‘Of course. They get no special privileges. They're just glasses, not shrines to be worshipped.’

  ‘I suppose there is another problem,’ he said. ‘Are all other glasses going to seem inferior to these? Will drinking out of a normal champagne flute seem like drinking out of, I don't know, a jam jar or something?’

  ‘If everyone felt like that,’ she said, ‘we would never even have evolved to the point where we drank out of jam jars.’

  They walked on, through a reassuring part of town where the shops were selling normal things at normal prices.

  Laura said, ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Do you know where we're going?’

  ‘No. But I'm certainly interested in finding out.’

  Five minutes later he did. At the end of an alley was a small but grandly-named hotel, the Excelsior. Laura picked up her key from the woman at reception, who greeted her with a big smile and took no interest in her new friend. In the tiny lift – a squeeze even for two – Laura pointed to a sign, covered in plastic and taped neatly beneath the maintenance certificate and said, ‘Check out this piece of conceptual art.’

  ‘PLEASE BE SO KIND AND DO NOT SCRATCH THE PLASTIC COVER. WE LIKE TO BE AS ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY AS POSSIBLE, BUT IF YOU SCRATCH THE COVER WE HAVE TO REPLACE IT.’

  ‘You're right,’ said Jeff. ‘It should be in the Arsenale.’

  Her room was small, dominated by a white double bed it was impossible to evade or ignore. She washed out the new glasses, crushed the pink tissue paper and threw it into the bin.

  ‘What would you like for the inaugural drink? There's all the usual mini-bar stuff, plus I bought some pomegranate juice and soda because of the heat.’

  ‘That would be great.’ It was a relief, in the afternoon, to be free of the obligation to consume alcohol.

  ‘If we break these glasses now we can think, “Wow, that was an expensive pomegranate juice.” That way the pressure's off. Chin chin.’

  They clinked glasses carefully, kissed. Delighted, evidently, at finding themselves in such luxurious vessels, the pomegranate and soda fizzed enthusiastically.

  ‘You taste of pomegranate.’

  ‘So do you.’ She bit his lower lip. Her mouth opened. They were kissing again. He had never loved kissing anyone as much. Then – it was impossible to tell who instigated this – they manoeuvred in such a way that he was kissing her thighs while she licked his stomach. He lifted up his h
ips so that she could tug his trousers down. She pulled his prick from his underpants, began licking along its length. He pulled her knickers – white again – over her hips and off. He was unsure what to do about her dress, bunched around her middle. She sat up and pulled it off. Her smell – and his desire for her – was stronger than the night before. He breathed in that smell and pressed his face between her legs. She moved over on top of him. Drips fell from her, into his mouth. She sat back, twisting his nipples, rubbing herself in his face. His face gleamed with her smell. He reached up so that he could pull gently on her nipple ring. She disengaged herself from him, lay back on the bed, her legs raised.