Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi Page 9

  He bought a bottle of Ferrarela from a grocery shop and walked on, looking for a place to sit down. There were lots of places to sit, but he kept going until, utterly exhausted, he sat down by any old canal, not even a particularly scenic one. A tennis ball was bobbing in the water. He took out his expensive, lovely glass, filled it with sparkling water and glugged it down. He did this repeatedly until both bottle and glass were empty. Then he just sat there, legs crossed, like a yacht-owner turned mendicant who had lost everything except for this exquisite blue and orange reminder of his former life of luxury. All very well to think, as he had the day before, or two days ago, or whenever it was – he felt like he'd been in Venice forever – that those wonderful, high moments made all the other moments worthwhile. Easy to think like that while you were in the midst of those moments, when it was all but impossible to remember the other moments, moments like this, when it was – already! so soon! – becoming difficult to remember those great, all-redeeming moments.

  A pigeon gawked by. He watched as it pecked and twitched its way across the ground. It looked incredibly stupid, as if it were barely capable of carrying out its species-specific duty of being a pigeon. Just being a pigeon exhausted everything of which it was capable. It didn't even know how to fly, it just hopped. To that extent it wasn't even a bird, just a pigeon, a non-bird.

  A boat went past, loaded with broken chairs and logs. Water lapped up the steps. An Italian family came towards him, mother, father and a dark-haired girl of five or six, bouncing along on something like a space hopper in the form of a kangaroo. She sat on its haunches and hung onto its front paws. Evidently this unusual mode of transport delighted the parents every bit as much as it did the child riding it. Holding hands, laughing, they greeted Atman warmly, happy that a stranger could enjoy the sight of their daughter bouncing along on her kangaroo-hopper, could share their happiness. Atman grinned back. It was completely adorable. There was even a pouch, with a little baby kangaroo peeking out. If it had been possible, he would have climbed right in there, into the pouch, and gone bouncing along with them.

  After the family and their kangaroo had passed from view, he didn't know what to do so he picked up his glass and started walking again. He passed through the Campo Santa Margherita, at pains to ignore the irritating mimes, painted silver, doing their motionless statue thing.

  Eventually he came to a small piazza – not even a piazza, really – hemmed in by three churches, cheek by jowl. Two of them were bright white, and one of these – one of the white ones – was the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Feeling as worn out and used up as he did, the prospect of paying just five euros to get out of the heat and into the cool darkness of a church – with a massive helping of Tintoretto thrown in – was a welcome substitute for a drink in the Manchester Pavilion.

  After the blaze of daylight, stepping into the interior was like blacking out. He had a quick scan around the ground floor and trudged up the stairs. Too bad the idea of the church tended to go hand in hand with a not inconsiderable thrust of verticality, that the notion of the bungalow had never really taken root in ecclesiastical design. He plodded onwards, climbing a stairway to chiaroscuro heaven. It was all happening up here. There was a lot to take in. Way too much. Walls, ceilings: every inch was crammed with prophets, angels and tough-guy saints. Everywhere you looked, figures came looming out of the muscle-bound darkness. Everything loomed out of the darkness. Wow, Tintoretto really painted up a storm in this place. Jeff's knowledge of the sources was a little sketchy; beyond the fact that these were biblical scenes, he was completely in the dark. As far as he could make out, Tintoretto had compressed the best bits of both Testaments into one building. In a way, though, it was an easy book to compress, the Bible. Basically, things were always getting hurled – out of the light and into the darkness – or were ascending – out of the darkness and into the light, of which there was not a vast amount. Bearded prophets, swirling drapery and billowing clouds – it was all go up there. In marketing terms, though, the pitch seemed fundamentally and horribly flawed: the idea that we could be bullied into paradise.

  Looking up at the ceiling was making Atman's neck ache. Then he noticed a few people walking around holding little wood-framed mirrors the size of portable TVs. He picked one up from the stack on the other side of the hall, the other side of the world in a sense. The first thing he saw was his own face looming out of the biblical swirl in the background. The mirror was like a square halo. Cubist. The halo, the mirror, the ceiling – the background – all loomed darkly. Everything blazed with light, but only because, in such a dark place, any bit of light, however scarce, was somehow sacred. As far as the weather was concerned, a devastating flood or torrential storm seemed a distinct possibility. He scanned the room. Apart from a couple of quiet Japanese, he was now the only person here. He flopped down into a chair, put down his glass, and emptied the remains of Laura's wrap onto the mirror. Using the leaflet explaining how Tintoretto had done all this knockout painting, he tapped the coke into a rough line. Surrounded by the mirrored darkness, the powder seemed whiter than ever, white as a cloud. He took another quick look around, dipped his head to the mirror and snorted it up. Partially blocked with dried blood, his nose made a sound like a pig snoring. Ha! He saw his pupils – already large from the darkness – dilate further. This made the art of the past really come alive. Now everything really loomed and reeled. It was like staring up from the bottom of a well. There was nothing but dark and light, and everything was reeling. Swirling, looming and reeling. Everything loomed and everything swirled, and the swirling and the looming were one. And the paintings, he saw now, were explicitly – in the sense of allegorically – about getting high. Guests at the Passover looked like they were crowding round a table wanting to snaffle up more than their fair share of whatever was on offer. The halos of illumination around the saints' heads were like comic-book signifiers, signifying that of all these holy men were getting loaded.

  With renewed energy Atman passed into the adjoining room, one whole wall of which was devoted to the crucifixion. Quite an epic. Everything reeled, still, but now, as well as looming and reeling, it converged. What appeared to have loomed could now be seen to converge, and it all converged here. This was the point of it all. A bit confusing, though. Ah, but now he understood: what he'd thought was a guy pointing an incredibly long spear at one arm of the cross was actually a rope – one of two, in fact – pulling up the cross with one of the thieves nailed to it. The weather, which had been unsettled in the other paintings, was catastrophically bad in this one. Giorgione's tempest was just a shower in a teacup compared with what was happening here. No rain was falling, but everything was drenched. Light was drenched in darkness.

  He was still holding the mirror. He looked at his own face – old, excited, crumpled. He sat back on one of the chairs and gazed at this huge helping of art. It really was a mad painting, great if your idea of great painting was maximum action and maximum atmospherics on a maximum scale, which, at that moment, seemed a pretty good definition of maximum greatness. This was high concept art, all right, and there was no doubting who was the star of the show, the focus of everyone's attention. Everybody in the painting he was looking at was looking at the crucified Christ, even the two thieves who were getting crucified alongside him, even people like the guy on the horse, who was looking at something else. Atman didn't know how long he sat there, staring at this painting, not having any thoughts about it, willing on an epiphany that never came, never happened, just seeing it, looking at it. Perhaps thatwas the epiphany, surrendering himself to what he was seeing.

  Then, as happens, he'd had enough seeing and got up to go.

  It wasn't just a shock, stepping outside, it was like getting resurrected. Bright daylight still. The world hadn't ended, the sky was the same deep blue. The eat was otter than ever. How quickly these little jokes took up residence – and how quickly they became sad, how sad they quickly became. He started walking again, past a woman in b
lack, on her knees, begging. He dropped a couple of euros into the squat Pringles tube she was using as a begging bowl. When he came to a half-decent canal, he sat down beside it and didn't weep. Nothing was moving. Leaked oil had left a few threads of rainbow in the water. The air was stifling, he was drenched in sweat. He took off his damp shirt and sat there, bare-chested and skinny, trousers rolled up above the knees. Having done that, he was tempted to strip down to his underwear and walk straight into the canal, as if it were a long and stagnant paddling pool.

  A gull swooped low over a passing water-taxi, a dead pigeon in its beak: an ill and not terribly hygienic omen. Maybe it was the pigeon he'd seen earlier. He lay back uncomfortably and looked up at the nothing sky. An aeroplane passed overhead, leaving a fine vapour trail in its wake. Slowly it expanded, becoming a line of powdered whiteness against the empty blue.

  On an afternoon in June 2003, when, for a brief moment, it looked as if the invasion of Iraq had not been such a bad idea after all, Jeffrey Atman set out from his flat to take a walk. He had to get out of the flat because now that the initial relief about the big picture had worn off – relief that Saddam had not turned his non-existent WMD on London, that the whole world had not been plunged into a conflagration – the myriad irritations and frustrations of the little picture were back with a vengeance. The morning's work had bored the crap out of him. He was supposed to be writing a twelve-hundred-word so-called ‘think piece’ (intended to require zero thought on the part of the reader and scarcely more from the writer but still, somehow, beyond him) that had reached such a pitch of tedium that he'd spent half an hour staring at the one-line email to the editor who'd commissioned it:

  ‘I just can't do this shit any more. Yrs J.A.’

  The screen offered a stark choice:Send orDelete. Simple as that. ClickSend and it was all over with. ClickDelete and he was back where he started. If taking your own life were this easy, there'd be thousands of suicides every day. Stub your toe on the way to the bathroom. Click. Get marmalade on your cuff while eating toast. Click. It starts raining as soon as you leave the house and your brolly's upstairs. What to do? Go back up and get it, leave without it and get soaked, or … Click. Even as he stared at the message, as he sat there on the very brink of sending it, he knew that he would not. The thought of sending it was enough to deter him from doing so. So instead of sending the message or getting on with this article about a ‘controversial’ new art installation at the Serpentine he sat there, paralysed, doing neither.

  To break the spell he clickedDelete and left the house as if fleeing the scene of some dreary, as yet uncommitted crime. Hopefully fresh air (if you could call it that) and movement would revive him, enable him to spend the evening finishing this stupid article and getting ready to fly to Venice the following afternoon. And when he got to Venice? More shit to set up and churn out. He was meant to be covering the opening of the Biennale – that was fine, that was a doddle – but then this interview with Julia Berman had come up (or at least a probable interview with Julia Berman) and now, in addition to writing about the Biennale, he was supposed to persuade her – to beg, plead and generally demean himself – to do an interview that would guarantee even more publicity for her daughter's forthcoming album and further inflate the bloated reputation of Steven Morison, the dad, the famously overrated artist. On top of that he was supposed to make sure – at the very least – that she agreed to grantKulchur exclusive rights to reproduce a drawing Morison had made of her, a drawing never previously published, and not even seen by anyone atKulchur , but which, due to the fear that a rival publication might get hold of it, had acquired the status of a rare and valuable artefact. The value of any individual part of this arrangement was irrelevant. What mattered was that in marketing and publicity terms (or, from an editorial point of view, circulation and advertising) the planets were all in alignment. He had to interview her, had to come away with the picture and the right to reproduce it. Christ Almighty … A woman pushing an all-terrain pram glanced quickly at him and looked away even more quickly. He must have been doing that thing, not talking aloud to himself but forming words with his mouth, unconsciously lip-synching the torrent of grievances that tumbled constantly through his head. He held his mouth firmly shut. He had to stop doing that. Of all the things he had to stop doing or start doing, that was right at the top of the list. But how do you stop doing something when you are completely unaware that you're doing it? Charlotte was the one who pointed it out to him, when they were still together, but he'd probably been doing it for years before that. Towards the end that's how she would refer to this habit of muted karaoke. ‘That thing,’ she would say. ‘You're doing that thing again.’ At first it had been a joke between them. Then, like everything else in a marriage, it stopped being a joke and became a bone of contention, an issue, a source of resentment, one of the many things that rendered life on Planet Jeff – as she termed the uninhabitable wasteland of their marriage – intolerable. What she never understood, he claimed, was that life on Planet Jeff was intolerable for him too, more so, in fact, than for anyone else. That, she claimed, was precisely her point.

  These days he had no one to alert him to the fact that he was walking down the street mouthing out his thoughts. It was a very bad habit. He had to stop doing it. But it was possible that, as he was walking down the street, he was forming the words, ‘This is a very bad habit, I must stop doing it, it's even possible that as I walk down the street I am forming these words …’ He glued his mouth closed again as a way of closing off this line of thought. The only way to stop this habit of forming the words with his lips was to stop forming the wordsin his brain , to stop having the thoughts that formed the words. How to do that? It was a major undertaking, the kind of thing you got sorted out at an ashram, not cosmetically at a beautician's. Eventually everything that is going on inside will manifest itself externally. The interior will be exteriorized … He made an effort to smile. If he could get into the habit of doing this constantly, so that his face looked cheerful in repose, then the exterior might be interiorized, he might start to beam internally. Except it was so tiring, keeping smiling like that. The moment he stopped concentrating on smiling his face lapsed back into its unbeaming norm. ‘Norm’ was certainly the operative word. Most of the people passing by looked miserable as a disappointing sin. Many of them, if their faces were anything to go by, looked like their souls were scowling. Maybe Alex Ferguson was right, maybe chewing gum ferociously was the only answer. If so, the solution was at hand in the form of a newsagent's.

  Behind the counter was a young Indian girl. How old? Seventeen? Eighteen? Gorgeous, though, and with a bright smile, unusual in her line of work. Maybe she was just starting out, taking time off from her A-levels or whatever they were called these days, filling in for her surly father, who, though he spoke little English, had so thoroughly adjusted to British life that he looked every bit as pissed off as someone whose ancestors had come over with the Normans. Atman was always taken aback by his exchanges with this guy, by the way that, brief though they were, they managed to sap any sense of well-being he'd had on entering the premises. It was difficult to repress the habit of saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ but, as a reprisal, a protest, at the guy's refusal to abide by the basic courtesies, Jeff always picked up whatever he was buying – the paper, a bar of chocolate – and handed over the money silently. Not at all like that today, though. Jeff gave her a pound coin. She handed him his change, met his eyes with her own, smiled. Give her a few years and she would scarcely pay any attention to whoever she was serving, would just look up, grab the money and not try to make of the exchange anything other than the low-level financial transaction it was. But for now it was quite magical. It was so easy to make people (i.e., Jeff) feel a bit better about life (i.e., himself), so easy to make the world a slightly better place. The mystery was why so many people – and there were plenty of occasions when he could be counted among their number – opted to make it a worse one. He went
away feeling happier than when he'd come in, charmed by her, even sort of aroused. Not aroused exactly, but curious. Curious about what kind of underwear she might have been wearing beneath her T-shirt and low-waisted jeans, exactly the kind of thinking, presumably, that many in the Muslim community – theso-called Muslim community – used as justification for the full-face veil. He had read, a few days earlier, that British Muslims were the most embittered, disgruntled and generally fed up of any in Europe. So why was there all this talk about the need for Muslims to integrate into British life? The fact that they were so pissed off was a sign of profound assimilation. What better proof could there be?

  Chewing over this important Topic – at the last moment he'd opted for chocolate rather than gum – Jeff walked on to Regent's Park. The fact that he should, at this point, have returned home and got back to work meant that he kept going, walked through the park under the cloud-swollen sky and crossed Marylebone Road.

  A creature of deep habit, Atman was programmed, the moment he set foot on Marylebone High Street, to go to Patisserie Valerie's and order a black coffee with a side-order of hot milk and an almond croissant – even though he didn't want either. Normally he came here in the mornings but now, in the post-lunch doldrums, it was too late for coffee, too early for tea (it was that time of the day, in fact, when no one wanted anything) and far too late to read the paper – which he'd read extra thoroughly, hours earlier, as a way of putting off writing his stupid think piece. Fortunately he had a book for company, Mary McCarthy'sVenice Observed. He'd first read it four years ago, after getting back from the 1999 Biennale, and had started rereading it now – along with the other standard books on Venice – as preparation for the return trip. His almond croissant was the size and complexion of a small roast turkey and in the time it took to chomp through it he was able to read the entire section on Giorgione'sThe Tempest.