Angelica's Grotto (17 page)

Klein went to the HMV in the North End Road, said to the assistant, ‘Have you got a new Ultra Naté CD?’

‘Situation: Critical?’

‘No worse than usual. Do I look that bad?’

‘That’s the title of the album. Did you want it?’

‘Yes.’

When Klein got home he played the first track, listening for a message. He was not disappointed. The beat was steady, the words simple and homiletic, offering such nuggets as
‘Somehow things must change/and it’s got to be for the better
…’ The refrain was,
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t you give up.’

‘Songs for simple minds,’ said Klein. He went to where
Pegase Noir
hung and stood before it. ‘The strangeness of things,’ he said to Redon – ‘I know it was always in your mind and it’s always with me too; I used to think of it as a question that had no answer but now it seems to me that it’s an answer for which no one can imagine the question. The world is full of strange answers and missing questions; each of us is an answer to some unknown question that we have to guess at and get wrong as often as not. Right now I’m the answer to
the question, “Who will play Old Fool in a geriatric-sex farce?”’

He looked up Christie’s in the phone book, dialled the number, asked for the expert on nineteenth-century French art, was transferred to a Mr Duclos, and made an appointment to see him the next day. When he put down the telephone and looked across his desk at the painting the winged horse with its darkness and its ascendant colours seemed already to be moving away from him. ‘Going, going, going …’ he said, raising an imaginary hammer. ‘Where am I? The galleries of Angelica’s Grotto no longer interest me; those images seem fraudulent and empty now; what I want is more reality, and it’s not the reality of simple gratification that I’m looking for. When I recall my evening with Melissa it’s the intimacy more than the physical action that I crave more of – to hear her voice, to see her looking at me as if I actually exist, even if it wasn’t real. But I don’t intend to be the Professor-Rath kind of old fool, no indeed. To be a successful old fool you’ve got to play your cards right, you must keep your Lola in suspense sometimes; you must find other things to occupy your mind.’

He had Klimt to occupy him of course but he felt in need of some diversion. Scanning
The Times
and the
Guardian
he found an ad for Tango por Dos, a company performing at the Peacock Theatre. He’d seen a theatrical tango programme once before and liked it so he rang up First Call and booked a seat for two days later.

Next afternoon he took the Redon in its frame down from the wall. ‘Like our marriage,’ he said, recalling his dead wife’s words: ‘full of darkness but it flew. I’ve got no one to fly with now, Hannelore. It’s a whole new ballgame, played in the dark.’ He wrapped the painting in brown paper and rang up Dial-a-Cab.

In the taxi he steadied the painting with his left hand while his right hand covered his mouth. ‘I wrapped the painting, I called the cab,’ he whispered. ‘I told the driver to take us to Christie’s but I feel as if all this is being done
to
me, not
by
me.’

It goes,
said Oannes.

‘What?’ said Klein. ‘What goes?’

No answer.

Basking in the iron-hard December sunlight like a lizard on a rock, Piccadilly took no notice of Klein. St James’s Street was similarly indifferent as was King Street. ‘It may be nothing to you,’ said Klein, ‘but it’s quite a big thing for me.’

Christie’s with its curved and urned pediment, its crimson marquee and banner and its doorman with matching tie, though long familiar, presented itself to Klein as part of another world where everything was in good order and utterly incomprehensible.

The doorman opened the door, took the painting from him, Klein paid the driver, received the painting from the doorman, and went inside. At Reception he was met by Mr Duclos, a pleasant young man wearing a dark suit, a big smile, a look of lightning intelligence, and X-ray eyes.

Mr Duclos conducted him to a further Reception where two vigilant women watched the unwrapping of the painting and ascertained that it was undamaged. Thence to a little square crimson-walled conference room with two framed Christie’s posters, a print of a Cezanne self-portrait and another of a Raphael drawing of the Holy Family. There was a little square table covered in green leather on which stood a gooseneck lamp; there were two chairs.

Mr Duclos leant the painting against the wall, noting from the dust on frame and canvas that it had not been
whoring around but had been honorably residential somewhere. He examined the back of the canvas, saw that it had not been lined and bore some decently yellowed labels from reputable dealers. Then he stepped back, regarded the painting with the look of a fond father ready, subject to a DNA check, to embrace a long-lost son, and said, ‘
Ah! Dans son jus.’

‘It’s the real thing,’ said Klein. To him it looked strangely diminished, its colours dim. Mr Duclos picked up the phone and called for a
catalogue raisonné,
meanwhile finding the signature in its proper lower lefthand corner, noting the rusty nails, the period frame, and other signs of authenticity.

When the
catalogue raisonné
arrived Mr Duclos traced the provenance of the painting through two French galleries to the private collection in Zurich, followed by ‘Whereabouts unknown’. Klein produced the letter recording the transfer of ownership from the Swiss collector to him, which also showed the painting’s date of entry into the UK.

‘Since 1968, then, this painting has not been exhibited?’ said Duclos.

‘That’s right.’

‘Very good.’ The measurements of
Pegase Noir
were listed in the catalogue and with a tape measure Duclos verified that the dimensions of the painting matched. He then switched off the lamp, and with an ultra-violet hand lamp he scanned the canvas for
pentimenti
or other overpainting and found none. ‘So,’ he said, ‘the auguries are favourable and I believe we can do something with this horse; I think this horse is going to fly.’

‘How high, would you say?’

‘I think an estimate at five to seven hundred thousand pounds would be appropriate but I’d like to do further
research and consult my colleagues on this if you can leave the painting with us.’

‘Of course. When would the auction be?’

‘Say ten weeks. Between now and then with your permission we’ll tour the painting and arouse some interest. Naturally it will be fully insured.’

‘Sounds a good idea.’

Mr Duclos explained the rate of commission and VAT, graciously waived the illustration fee, and a provisional contract was drawn up. They shook hands, smiled and nodded at each other, and Klein found himself in King Street walking away into the iron-hard sunlight. He felt, as an amputee might feel the tingling of a missing leg, the tingling of
Pegase Noir.

The Peacock Theatre was in Portugal Street, off Kingsway between Holborn tube station and the Aldwych. Walking down Kingsway Klein hummed ‘
El Choclo’.
He owned more than twenty tango CDs and enjoyed them all, from the earliest onward through Gardel to Piazzolla. When working at his desk he was very careful to provide himself with a musical background that was supportive but not intrusive; lately he’d been listening to tangos more often than not.

He was surprised at how good he felt. ‘Even now,’ he whispered into his hand, ‘burdened with infirmities as I am, I find myself experiencing
joie de vivre
every so often, especially when walking downhill.’ The lights were bright, the Christmas decorations insistent as always but he ignored them. The evening was cold and clear, there was a sparkle in the air.

Klein was a half-hour early – he always was – but even so the pavement outside the theatre and the lobby were both crowded. The audience, many of whom, young and old, looked like dancegoers, would be a lively one. He bought a programme and a coffee and had another look at an item he’d noticed in the last
Observer,
reported by
Roger Tredre under the headline ‘Grim Reaper is “kind and patient”’:

Mark Chorvinsky, publisher of
Strange Magazine,
told Unconvention 98, the fifth annual Fortean conference, yesterday: ‘For centuries the Grim Reaper has been a cultural icon but it is not generally known that he exists.

Chorvinsky told the London meeting that he had collected reports of more than a hundred sightings, mostly in the United States, and appealed for British eye-witnesses.

Many of the reports were from nurses. ‘In many cases, the Reaper is far from threatening. He seems to be waiting rather than actively seeking deaths. The Reaper in real life is kind and patient.’

‘Death as a friend,’ whispered Klein, remembering a drawing by Rethel, ‘Death in pilgrim dress, with the scallop-shell badge of Santiago de Compostela, tugging on the bell-rope in a church tower high above the town, tolling the bell for the old sexton sitting dead in his chair. BONG! BONG! Probably the pigeons all scattering on the spreading sound-ripples, BONG! BONG!’

‘Were you speaking to me?’ said a woman who looked like Edna Everage.

‘Sorry, I talk to myself sometimes.’

‘I should get a cat if I were you. Or have you got one?’

Klein shook his head.

‘Of course you couldn’t bring a cat into a theatre. I suppose you must simply learn to think out loud more quietly.’

‘Yes,’ said Klein, ‘and if you’d stop talking I could carry on thinking. Sorry!’

‘Really! I suppose one mustn’t expect good manners from Americans!’

‘Or from women with harlequin glasses,’ said Klein, and moved to another part of the room. ‘Surely,’ he continued to himself, ‘he wouldn’t have come for Hannelore wearing black and carrying a scythe, that would have been so tactless. A cardigan and old corduroys, maybe, like someone working in his allotment.’ At this thought the tears started from his eyes and he didn’t know what to do with his face except cover it with his hands.

‘Are you all right?’ said a young woman standing near him.

Klein wiped his eyes. Her voice was warm, her face open and interesting. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘it’s just a little memory attack. Where were you when I was young? Sorry, that just slipped out.’

‘Not yet born, I should think,’ she said, and turned away.

‘We were talking about Death,’ Klein whispered into his hand.

Death as a friend,
said Oannes.

‘Or as an editor,’ whispered Klein, ‘writing
Delete?
in the margin.’

Eventually he was able to go to his seat; the appointed time arrived, the house lights dimmed, the music began with
‘Milonga de Mis Amores’,
the murmur of the audience ceased; the curtain went up to reveal shadowy musicians and the gleams of instruments in purplish light and smoke, and the first couple appeared, dancing to
‘La Cumparsita’.
Tango followed tango; the couples changed, sometimes the stage was full of dancers, sometimes there was only
a single figure obedient to the unremitting exactions of the music.

That music, breathed in and out by the bandoneon and augmented by double bass, violin, saxophone, flute, and piano, contained the dance, and the dance caught the dancers in a web of urgent and elegant evolutions: swivelling of hips and scissoring of legs, back kicks and caracoles and discontinuities of embrace. In their partnerships the heat of sexuality was refined into the negotiations of experience: sometimes the woman took charge; sometimes the man; the women like man-devourers ready to surrender utterly; the men as if they had been born with gold fillings and two-tone shoes.

In the second part of the programme, after Piazzolla’s
‘Libertango’,
Roxana Fontan, beautiful and Goyaesque in black and glittering silver, took the stage alone to sing the Villoldo classic,
‘El Choclo’.
Her silky mezzo was both delicate and powerful, her delivery now reflective, now assertive, always seductive.
‘Con este tango nacio el tango,’
she sang,
‘y como un grito salio del sordido barrial buscando el cielo’ (With this tango the tango was born, and like a cry it left the squalid slum, seeking the sky).
Sometimes as the song went on she leant back into the words and caressed them, sometimes she sent them out like calls to battle. Klein had no Spanish, didn’t know what the words meant, but they seemed vitally important to him, seemed the very flame of life in the darkness – he whispered this thought into his hand.
‘Luna en los charcos,’
she sang,
‘Canyengue en las caderas …’ (Moon in the puddles, canyengue
[pronounced
canjengay] in the hips …).’

‘I can’t actually put
canyengue
into English,’ said the Argentinian translator Klein found in the phone book the next day. ‘It’s a
lunfardo
word,’ she said.
‘Lunfardo
is a local
vocabulary in Buenos Aires and it’s used a lot in tango lyrics.
Canyengue
carries the idea of the suburbs and the common person of low social condition whose manner of dancing the tango is earthy and full-blooded with no added-on refinement;
canyengue
in the hips means dancing with the real feeling of the tango.’

‘Canyengue,’
said Klein to himself later.
‘Canyengue
in the mind, from the outlying districts of the cerebral cortex and the limbic system. Either you have it or you don’t. Right, Oannes?’

No answer.

Being a Jewish atheist, Klein always half-expected a brick through his window in the Christmas season. No one chalked CHRISTKILLER on his door but child carollers menaced him with ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas’ and public-school boys politely intimidated him with holly wreaths which he bought several of. Christmas trees bloomed in windows all around him, and some houses sported external twinkling lights.

He withdrew into his video collection, surfacing intermittently to watch Yuletide films in which Germans spoke broken English before being blown up by Lee Marvin and Telly Savalas. Even when the TV was turned off, Christmas carols, seasonal piety, and adverts for computer games leaked out of it and spread in a greasy puddle on the floor. Walt Disney manifested his undead self in various ways, sometimes sliding under the door as a mist, sometimes like a bat at the window or a wolf howling in Fulham Broadway. On Christmas Day a grey sky squeezed out a thin snowfall on which fresh dog turds stood out sharply.