Читать книгу The Supreme Orchestra - David Turgeon - Страница 6

The morning was blizzarding, the gallery deserted. Alban Wouters, proprietor, attended to his ledgers, eye wandering from time to time toward the backdrop of plump grey snowflakes, when an unknown man in a fur-lined cloak of military cut pushed open the door and entered the gallery along with a cruel gust of arctic wind.

Inclement weather sometimes brought just such unknown quantities out of the cold and into his establishment. You could recognize them as the strangers they were by their polite, noncommittal way of sauntering into the gallery’s main room and their inquisitive looks as they dutifully eyed the gallery walls with at best an imperfect understanding. Now, Alban Wouters had nothing against unknown quantities per se; confronted with just the right piece, an unknown quantity might metamorphose into a paying client, like larva to butterfly. In such instances, after pondering the work in wonder and at length, the unknown person might turn to the gallery owner and speak.

‘How much is that one there?’

Alban Wouters looked up from his ledgers. It was a day for butterfly hunting.

‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, getting up from his chair, ‘that one’s sold.’

‘Really,’ said the man in the pelisse. ‘And that one to the left?’

‘That one too, I’m afraid,’ said the gallery owner, who in the meantime had drawn closer. ‘If only you’d been here yesterday.’

Not one to be deterred, the man in the pelisse wordlessly approached another work whose subdued colours had been applied with a studied carelessness, all rectangles and rounded corners, art made to measure for the living room wall of any good bourgeois home.

‘It’s not your day,’ said Alban Wouters. ‘The show went very well. There’s not much left. Perhaps this?’ he said, pointing out an underwhelming miniature.

‘I don’t know,’ answered the cloaked man who, after a moment’s hesitation, stuttered, ‘It feels like … it just doesn’t work as well, that small.’

‘You may be right,’ echoed the gallery owner, who had often made the very same remark himself, expressed in the same words and sequence.

The mouth of the man in the pelisse betrayed the onset of disappointment. He looked poised to climb back down the ladder, to the rung of unknown quantity. Time for Alban to make his move.

‘Have you, by chance, seen our backroom?’

‘No,’ said the man in the pelisse, apparently unaware the gallery had such an appendage.

I really must fix my signage, the gallery owner thought, an idea translated into audible speech with the remark that he’d heard this comment before.

‘The clients think it’s private,’ Alban Wouters said, putting the man in the pelisse, who had been labouring under the same misconception, at his ease and in the happy company of the gallery’s regular clientele.

The man in the pelisse was Fabrice Mansaré, who had that very morning been taken by a powerful urge to decorate his apartment, the kind of urge that percolates for days before bubbling over into action. Why now? Excellent question. One wonders what was on his mind the night before, to cause such a desire to bloom.

But perhaps there’s no need for such psychological profundities: perhaps Fabrice Mansaré simply woke up that morning and found his bachelor apartment too large, too beige, altogether too empty. It’s true that he received no visitors; wasn’t often home; took dinner, lunch, and breakfast out. The apartment offered little to distract him: six shrink-wrapped albums leaning against a high-end stereo; ten mismatched books, gifts in the main; a TV he by and large ignored. The only art to speak of was a drawing made by his niece, Eugénie, when she was four and a half. It was stuck with a magnet to a fridge 90 percent empty, an appliance as extraneous as everything else in the luxury kitchen of one disinclined to cook.

It was the home of someone who never stays in one place long, the domicile of a diplomat or hit man.

As if to whet his decorative ambitions, Fabrice Mansaré’s contact had failed to reach him that morning. With nothing on the agenda and a vague sense of concern, there was little to keep Fabrice Mansaré in an apartment that was, to say the least, ill-equipped to alleviate his boredom. He resolved to go out. And only once he was outside the lobby door did he notice the raging storm. The spectacle of blowing snow was tonic; Fabrice Mansaré, imperturbable. He began walking, batted to and fro by the north winds savagely howling between the skyscrapers of downtown Bruant.

First stop, espresso: he drank his short and piping hot, then headed out to face the elements. Along deserted sidewalks he made slow progress, enthralled by what was a novel experience for him. Second stop, a lighting shop whose wares caught his eye while he was waiting for the traffic lights to turn. Forty-five minutes later he re-emerged in a flurry of heartfelt thanks from a salesman reassuring him that his fixture would indeed be delivered and installed that very afternoon.

Fabrice Mansaré proceeded to visit a Chinese import store, a kitchen shop, a tailor’s, and finally Alban Wouters’s gallery, where he was eventually shepherded into a backroom that was in fact difficult to find for those not in the know.

In this second gallery he came upon a mosaic of medium-format drawings depicting people of both sexes in states of partial or complete undress, individually and in pairs and sometimes in small groups, in positions of abandon that left little doubt as to the tenor of the moment caught on paper. To be blunt, scenes of the most elegant debauchery. The artist’s pencil outlined flesh and faces in a manner that blurred certain areas and traced others in disconnected, vacillating glimpses simulating the effects of movement or unchecked transports of delight. The gallery owner scrupulously avoided any mention of the work’s content, focusing resolutely on its formal and commercial properties: oil pastel screen print in blue ink; a run of twenty, hand-numbered by the artist; framing at the client’s discretion.

Fabrice Mansaré slowly contemplated one of these, a woman with thick, kinky hair and lips set in an amused pout, slumped on an outline of a couch in nothing but a wrinkled tank top, hand oscillating between her legs, black pupils leaving not a trace of doubt as to her ability to provide for her own pleasure. Fabrice Mansaré intuited another presence, the gaze of the beholder swollen with desire not unmixed with pain. The gallery owner held his tongue, aware these drawings dredged up complex feelings in prospective buyers, from depths not always easy or advisable to plumb.

‘This drawing here,’ asked Fabrice Mansaré. ‘Is it for sale?’

‘It is,’ the gallery owner confirmed, at a price he specified.

Fabrice Mansaré pulled from the left pocket of his pelisse a little leather-bound notebook. An entry copied from the bottom of the drawing, Faya Sitting, 18/20, accompanied by the price, was appended to the list of the morning’s purchases, themselves part of an inventory constantly evolving with moves to antipodean cities where he more or less began his life anew. It wasn’t a sense of economy that led Fabrice Mansaré to track expenses: it was a game to him.

‘When can I pick it up?’

‘At the closing,’ Alban Wouters informed him. ‘In two weeks. You should come. We’ll serve drinks.’

‘Let me write you a cheque,’ Fabrice Mansaré said, and with these words removed from the right-hand pocket of his pelisse a chequebook, on the first page of which he wrote out the requested amount and signed, as per his recent habit, Charles Rose.

‘Mr. Rose,’ said Alban Wouters obsequiously, writing a receipt.

‘If you would be so kind as to tell me the date,’ said Fabrice Mansaré.

The gallery owner was so kind. The date was memorable: the birthday of Alice, the big sister Fabrice Mansaré had not seen, as he was reminded every time he thought of her, for at least twenty years. Putting this memory aside, he knotted his scarf, buttoned his pelisse, and, with a wave to the proprietor his silhouette disappeared into the last gasp of February.

The next day Fabrice Mansaré heard from his contact, whose vehicle had been put out of commission by the storm, hence the delay. An appointment was made. Work was back on. Two days later, Fabrice Mansaré turned up, with a single carry-on, no more than one hour early, at the Bruant International Airport where, after the usual check-in formalities, he walked right past a lengthy line of travellers and through a doorway marked Diplomatic Passports, where we could no longer lawfully follow him.