Читать книгу The Shadow of Memory - Bernard Comment - Страница 9

Chapter III

When we’d parted, Robert had explained to me how to get to his house. It was near the city, but looked like the country. To get there from the riverbanks you had to head into a real labyrinth of twisting alleys, so you had to do it right, but at the end of it all you’d come out onto half-cultivated fields. After that it was very simple, I couldn’t miss it. He’d even called that same morning, very early, to be sure I’d be coming and be on time, exactly five P.M. he said; he couldn’t stand people being late, because the way he organized his time meant there wasn’t a single minute left for improvisation. When he’d called, Mattilda was still asleep, and, as for myself, I didn’t know what to do with myself in those blue-green minutes of dawn. I’d never gotten up so early. Hardly a morning person, that’s the least you can say. But on this occasion I felt impelled by a new energy. I’d watched Mattilda, the way she had of being all wrapped up in sleep, taking great pleasure in it, yes, precisely, enjoying it, you could see on her face that she liked sleeping.

The neighborhood the old man lived in was amazing, a kind of enclave of greenery in the city, vast, with a public park down below, which was empty except for a couple of stray adolescents in love who were out in the cold; there were linden trees there too, and a cedar. Steps went up from there to the observatory and ran alongside Robert’s house, a third of the way up.

I hardly recognized him in his loose blue jacket and eyeglasses, which he hadn’t been wearing when we first met, probably he’d caught sight of me and wanted to meet me on the steps, so, right away, having only just arrived, I told him how enthusiastic I was about where he lived before we were even inside. All the advantages of the city plus peace and quiet; and what I could imagine of the yard surrounding his house was a pleasant, relaxed breathing space with a vegetable garden and fruit trees—how beautiful they must be in the fall, and especially in the spring, with the flowers . . . “Yes, you’re right, it’s magnificent. And I’ve really gotten used to it, just think, it’s been twenty years! At my age what makes it invaluable is how close it is to the city center. But don’t be fooled, things are changing, have changed, even here. Summer has become absolute hell.” The little park had turned into a veritable sluiceway into which the city vomited its excess of visitors. And by no means the cream of the crop! Drifting beer-soused youth. The nauseating foam of a horde of tourists, ever more cacophonous and invasive. And other parts of the city were no better off, especially the historical district with its gray-haired tourists and their sunburned faces. “Maybe the solution to this modern scourge is for you to hold it back, you with your data processing . . . Instead of entering literature and paintings into computers, why not put cities, with tourist routes described from every angle, into them? Images galore! Everybody could have the whole world via fiber optic, everybody comfortably settled in front of his little screen . . . Finally, a benefit of technology! Cities could be returned to their inhabitants, their workers, and that way they might recover their particular charm.” Like how it had been when he first traveled, but things were very different then. You could land anywhere at all that wasn’t your own region, somewhere that wasn’t necessarily very distant or exotic, no, simply elsewhere, and the contrast would jump out at you; you had the impression that you were discovering a new world. Today, all countries are just the same; international travel provides a uniform scenery: with identical products, identical cuisine, identical polite smiles. Only jet lag still managed to provide the thrill of being somewhere else, the notion of foreignness. Under such conditions, he was happily satisfied with his corner of this territory, a little island preserved in the urban tide. It was true that it was a good life, except sometimes for the isolation—in winter because of ice or snow, and in summer the dreadful way it became deserted in August. “But come in! You must be frozen just standing there listening to me. Once I get started . . . I all but forgot you were there!”

What had struck me right from the outset, enough almost to make me feel sick, was a terrible smell of mustiness, greasy cooking, and, on top of that, stifling smoke all over everything—furniture, knickknacks, people—which had to come from a chimney that wasn’t drawing well. From the outside, the house had seemed enormous to me—a first impression confirmed by the huge living room where, in the part of it softly lit by two squat lamps, Robert had asked me to settle in. A space far too vast for him, which could explain the smelly, filthy neglect in the place. My sense of smell has always been very sensitive. Really, just my luck. Later, thinking of the old man and myself, I often wondered if olfactory powers were not inversely proportional to those of memory.

He was already in a low, apricot-colored armchair that stood in piles of books lying every which way. That was his armchair, and it was no longer possible to tell if the springs had broken as a result of his weight, or if, on the contrary, they had gradually deformed the vulnerable, malleable body of the old man. In any event, the result was a perfect symbiosis. Robert stuffed himself into it, head slightly bent forward, with an expression on his face that invited me to sit down as well. Then, without a word, he’d looked me up and down at length, methodically, his piercing eyes sparing not one detail, not one morsel. Silence in someone’s presence very quickly makes me anxious. I lowered my eyes, fixing them on a pile of fat, oblong folders that lay on a low table, right next to the armchair, ones he’d probably been consulting before, pleased with my being on time, he’d interrupted his reading to come welcome me, and after a few minutes, he simply said, in his strong, steady voice: “Jacopo Pontormo,” before returning to his watchful silence. But it didn’t take long for him to get started, slowly, dreamily. Still on the subject of the vanished series, the last frescoes at San Lorenzo: “Vertiginous painting, and his crazed obsession with the body at the end, death in action, and the artist becoming lost, buried in a mass grave of colors. There’s no reference point anymore; the flood, the resurrection, the ascension, a few other scenes, they all seem to have been swept away in one lavish convulsion. What sense does it all make? Poor historians, poor interpreters, something to rack their brains over for centuries! Even today, there’s plenty of work there for those who never tire of digging up sources . . . But the sole source, the only one that’s really real, is the pit where Jacopo piled his corpses, plus the eyes to examine them, fiddle with them! That one source alone! Even Vasari is speechless as a result, claiming to understand nothing about a composition like this.” Then, with no warning, cool as could be, the old man started quoting what the famous biographer said, entire pages, in their original language. Then he sarcastically compared the troubled, perplexed remarks about Pontormo with other passages in The Lives, which were merciless. “What a joke! Vasari, who spent his time judging others, now suddenly abstaining humbly and simply expressing a certain lack of pleasure. That’s because Pontormo is beyond him! Beyond the scope of his biographical undertaking, or haunting it, a sort of shadow cast by Thanatos. Because, precisely, the question, the real question, is to be found in the body absolute, the body that’s been finished off, dead, in the minutely attentive observation made of it; this is the question asked by and forming the content of certain paintings—Leonardo and Rosso Fiorentino as well, dug up corpses in the cemetery at Borgo Sansepolcro so they could study them. Later there are Géricault’s paintings, when he collects scraps from the guillotine, uses those ghastly scenes to make all those anatomical sketches, among them an unforgettable little drawing in wash, quick, definitive, The Struggle with Death—an unbearable lucidity! But in Pontormo, starting from that mass grave Vasari so carefully avoids mentioning, it’s a living death—one even more alive because it concerns the odorous, aggressive truth of putrescence. So people didn’t want to open their eyes and confront their imminent death, the way he, no coward, had unremittingly done. People preferred to destroy that inescapable sight, less than two centuries later. All the frescos, demolished! Officially, on account of restorative measures . . . But, to be more precise, on account of indigestion. Fragile little bellies, incapable of stomaching any major upsets, any frontal attacks. Because no one trembles with blind fear when faced with death like the living-dead. When you’re truly alive, you live with death, right up to the end, and not against it. You challenge it. Turning on the charm in order to deal with it irreverently, skillfully, to try and see it coming, to pin it down.”

Robert went on and on about intolerance. How many works—and often the greatest—had been thrown away, destroyed. He had a whole list of them! Giotto in Naples, in Rome, in Florence. As well as Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca, and a multitude of others. The plundering of Rome, various backwashes of bad taste and misunderstanding, an excruciating plea against the stupidity of the world. “The most beautiful things have always been the ones attacked, they suppress one here, distort one there, laughing at it if they can’t tear it up, smash it, or spit on it. When I see a beautiful work from the past, I can’t help but think what a miracle it is for it to have held out so long, surviving until now through the flood of contempt or just slipping between the drops of their mundane sweat. And so, my ambition is to bring these works back to life, these texts, all the treasures that ignorant or jealous fools have hoped to doom to oblivion once and for all. I say no to all you fine censors! No oblivion! No loss! We have to stand firm, against that insatiable barbarism, always ready to recommence. Even Michelangelo’s Last Judgment barely escaped, under Paul IV I think it was. The young El Greco was preparing to paint over it when Titian used all his authority to intervene!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Not only was he reciting Vasari by heart, but he knew, moreover, what had vanished, things he’d never been able to see! He somehow had added forgotten memory to his own, annexing it thanks to a flood of descriptions, the superimposition of so many gazes. No limit to how far he could go back in time, paring away the world’s amnesia. So that he had come to feel a particular predilection for those works that were indeed destroyed, the ones leaving only a few indirect traces. “There’s something really great about reconstructing a painting, an image existing only in accounts, vague specks! What could be more exciting? And then you have the sketches as a reinforcement, either preparatory or working ones. They represent the peak of art; they turn loose a superior sort of madness and the boldest innovation—things the academy and the public can never know, never share!” This interest in lost works, however, by no means excluded the ones that still remained. Therefore, Robert proposed that, together, we go see them, a few of them. “Mannerists, something by Pontormo, just to illustrate our discussion. Except I hardly dare go out in the winter because of the slippery roads, and my car doesn’t like the cold; it needs good weather to run—even more fragile than I. But it will be different with you along.” My schedule didn’t permit running around to art galleries, I’d fall too far behind, but already Robert was setting a date. “Not tomorrow, there’s something I’d like to finish reading, but day after tomorrow, Friday, fine. We need to leave early so as not to take more than the morning—let’s say ten o’clock at the latest!”

And once again I’d consented, docile and defeated. He asked me if I had a problem with getting up at dawn. I replied no, on the contrary, you had to make good use of your days, along with a few other hypocritical phrases. The old man interrupted me abruptly. His work was calling him, his schedule, things he had on his mind. And maybe he’d brought up this project, the one he’d said he wanted to talk to me about, too quickly. We could think it over. “It wouldn’t be a bother to get back together again, would it?”