Episode 06 | The hospital and the mail box

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As I sat there listening to my father, I kept adjusting my glasses. On the fourth or fifth time I did it, I finally realized why. Perfectly fancy, fitting Armani eye-wear, it occurred to me I was having trouble trying to adjust how I regarded my father.

And had to conclude how little did I know about him.

He had been not only distant, absent all those years. He had been a stranger to me. 

His peasant past was no surprise. I had visited the D'Allegro ancestral lands myself. I could recall my own humble childhood, and how he had tried to sustain our family on part-time jobs, hardly achieving it. But that he had starved in Paris? We had been close only during part of my childhood, when my mother had stepped aside. And my early teens. But all the rest of what I knew about him had come from my mother, filtered with resentment and prejudice -- that I could right now recognize rising inside me, maybe as my own.

I tried wholeheartedly to get rid of them, as I listened to Carlo.

Looking at him, grown old, with a saddened expression, I felt my heart softening. Would it have been less shocking, had I seen it happen gradually? He was slim, and had a vigorous, very fit body to be desired and envied. Muscles only, and nearly no fat, with a remarkably tanned and firm skin. I had inherited those features from him, that had me looking healthy even when I caught influenza. Twenty years ago, when he had left home, he had been an Italian hunk. There was an informal fan club constituted of teachers, mothers and even some of their teenage daughters, who had sighed for Carlo when he would pick me up at school, in his fast sports car. 

And that's how I still remembered him. I was trying to adjust to his graying hair and mustache. It had once been thick, coal black -- while I, instead, had my mother's fine blonde hair. A web of wrinkles wore his face down. His shoulders were bent as if under an invisible burden. Were the recollections of a tough past making his hands tremble, too? Or was it another sad sign of ageing?

The lenses of his glasses were much thicker than I remembered them. Had his sight been damaged by the years -- because, like Carlo had just mentioned, he preferred the night time to paint? In our house in rural France, I could recall saying good night to him, before going to bed, knowing he would go on painting. I had seen him in our garden in Punaouilo, painting under the starlight with a flickering, borrowed gas lamp. But all that had started at the abandoned factory, it seemed. Only later, would I learn he had been drawing in the dark as a child, already, by candlelight. Hiding behind his bed, fearing his grandfather would catch and punish him. 

Maybe it would take longer to forgive my father. But it wasn't that hard to feel compassionate towards the person in front of me, who had suffered so much chasing his ideal, trying to fulfill his heart's wishes to make a living as a painter.

*****

"One day I vomited so much--" Carlo had continued with his story without me having to ask for it, "Or not that much actually, since I had had just stale bread for breakfast. And canned soup, probably two evenings ago, for dinner... It was the force with which I expelled the food, not its amount--" Carlo closed his eyes for a moment, maybe recalling his agony, "I fainted."

I woke up many hours later. Enveloped by the wildest of winds,one that forecasted a storm, maybe snow. I was still leaning over the toilet, shivering with cold, and coughing. 

Asphyxiating with the bad smell of my own vomit, I felt I had to throw up again. But there was nothing left in my stomach. Nor on the shelves.

I understood I had to go to the hospital. While I still had the strength to walk.

My days of tranquil hermitage were over. Venturing into the world did not simply mean leaving the outskirts of Paris, to be again engulfed by the boisterous city center. That I had once adored, don't get me wrong, having experienced it in the company of my roommate. But it terrified me, once I was to brave it all on my own. In my mind, leaving the retreat I had built for myself at the abandoned factory meant the contrary in terms of my personal life, and mostly of my art career. I would be abandoning the tranquil center where I dwell in my ideals, to again face the outskirts of a material civilization I dreaded.

In a trance, I roamed through Paris in search of a public hospital. A crisscross route I'll never recall. Factories, houses, shops, all looked like pieces in a civilizatory puzzle I could no longer assemble. Confounded, after having crossed many squares and bridges, I forgot what I was searching for. At the sight of the frozen remains of a dead dog, I again threw up. But also recalled that I was seeking for help. My clothes barely protected me from the severe cold, so I jumped like a madman as I walked, trying to warm myself. Finally, both shoelaces broke, and I had to drag my shoes along for several blocks. Their soles were so thin that the pavement was irreversibly tearing them. But my feet couldn't be wetter nor colder than they had already been, for weeks. As I walked into the hospital, I fainted. A high fever ensued, and sucked me into a limbo that lasted for days. It took nurses and doctors long to realize I could speak French. Semi-conscious, I would babble in Italian, only.

Naively, I thought that at the hospital they would give me some kind of medicine and send me back home straight away. And what was home? But due to food poisoning, and a pneumonia that had not quite developed yet, they kept me in the infirmary for over a week. Even two, or perhaps more, since I completely lost track of time. I can only recall someone from another bed mentioning it had snowed.

All the time I stayed at the infirmary, I worried about the factory. Had it been invaded? What had happened to my easel, and especially to my paintings? I had locked it before leaving, but the windows were so wrecked that a single push would throw them to the floor. And there was even a hole in the ceiling. It wouldn't have been hard to break into my atelier... the factory.

When I was liberated from the hospital, again accustomed to being with other people, I decided to bravely venture the several neighborhoods that separated me from the post office. I wanted to check my postal box, hoping to find a letter from Tarso, my grandfather, who would once in a while send me money in Paris.

There was a letter from him, indeed. With a very modest sum of money in it. And even less words. Writing, he was more laconic than speaking. 'The crops haven't been good', he justified -- and I knew that was his way of asking 'when are you going to come back to help me?'. But I did not consider, ever, going back. Nevertheless, after I exchanged the money, he had sent more than enough to allow me to buy meat, and some fresh bread. And fix new glasses, too, with the updated prescription they had handed me at the hospital. 

It was my first proper meal in perhaps six months!

And there was a letter from my dear ex-roommate from the times at the École des Beaux-Arts,the noblest person I've ever met, Armand de Montbelle. 

I did not open it straight away because I knew it would be long lines of a poetical, intoxicating account of his travelling around the globe. And I wanted to savor it calmly, as my dessert.

He wrote at length about his many adventures in Asia. He spent Spring living in an improvised houseboat, that took him through the backwaters of Southern India. In Summer he had been trekking a valley covered with millions of colorful flowers in the Himalayas. He had survived the monsoon season and constant floods and blackouts in Nepal. He had been chased and had his food stolen by monkeys. Almost run over by a mad elephant, once, that destroyed his hut in Sri Lanka. He had meditated with the forest monks in Thailand, sleeping like them for weeks under a tree. To me, his words tasted to mangoes ripened under the sun. He could have been an accomplished writer, if he hadn't chosen to study Architecture.

But the astonishing news was that he was acquiring an island in the Indian Ocean.

"And I need your help to fix this place! Please say you can come! Will you?" 

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Episode 05 | Enslaved by freedom

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"For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfill it in its true potential - the imagination."

Lawrence Durrell in Justine, 1957

Hunger? 

There is a difference -- when you want, need to eat, and you can't, that's painful. But once you volunteer to abstain from eating, the dizziness, the cramps, the shaking hands, the stomach ache, that same weakness becomes a trance. I felt I was made more alert, my senses heightened and refined, my ideal of becoming a professional artist strengthened -- because fasting is a depuration, and together with meditation, as my mind became clearer, I felt my spirit starting to rule over my body.

As I was becoming thinner and thinner, my private joke was that in the end I could always make money posing for Giacometti. Ha-ha! But there was no one but me to laugh at my jokes.

Every once in a while I would startle to some noise -- I was afraid of invasions, for there used to be a few homeless people in the neighborhood, some of them violent and dangerous and more desperate than me -- but usually it were only rats or bats or cats in their errands. Only people who needed to hide would venture all the way from Paris downtown to such a faraway district, and it was not very attractive for the homeless, since the chances of survival were rather limited there. I wasn't a burglar, I wasn't a drug dealer, but just the same I wanted to hide from the world. 

And so I painted, day and night, night and day, as if my life depended on that, and not on food.

Actually, painting was more nourishing to me than the canned soup and the stale bread.

Painting was like a prayer. It was similar to my meditation, where I was praying for the well being of all forms of life.

That was so beautifully nourishing, too. I felt thoroughly at peace and fulfilled,

even when my pockets and my stomach were empty.

Sleeping seemed to me like a waste of time, a waste of the precious and fragile freedom I had just acquired -- and in time it became a problem too, as Summer gave way to Autumn.

A cold and rainy season started, and I could not go outdoors daily anymore.

Of course, it rained inside the factory. Rain leaked from the ceiling. I had to move my bed away from the walls, where mold -- and even some lichens that I recall being very pretty -- had started growing. I walked avoiding the puddles. On the way to the toilet some of them were so big that I had to place boards to cross them. Like if I were flying, or sitting on top of a high mountain, I could imagine them being lakes on a prairie. Poetical. But the fact is my feet were always wet. A chilly wind hissed through the room, so that there was no shelter from it indoors anymore. Through the broken windows came a vicious smell of old burned wood and wet tires.

I could be hungry, but on top of that, being cold started to weaken me.

Food poisoning became constant, and I realized I was getting seriously sick. 

I had eaten too often from rusted cans. I kept saying to myself there wasn't any real problem. Not to mention the moldy bread that had been my sole starter for so many months. I had been careless. And now I had to face the effects of my self-neglect.

Not just thinning, I was debilitated.

The romantic days of breathing and eating Painting were over. 

But I still just didn't want to give them up! Returning to my former peasantry in the Apennines did not seem only like defeat -- abandoning my Art had seemed like death to me.

But I was facing real death.

In my meditation sessions, that I had to bring indoors, I started praying not only for the happiness of all beings, but for a miracle that would change my situation.

Even if I calmed my mind and heart, my head and stomach were constantly aching. And so were my lungs. Concentrating on my in-breaths and out-breaths was not pleasant anymore, because it meant paying attention to the gasping, coarse sounds that my breathing had become. It was the sound of my own agony.

I started seeing bellow the calm waters of my still life, seeing that it hadn't remained still at all. The muck had surfaced.

You can't imagine the things I did to remain free, Laurent. 

To stick to my idea of freedom. 

Because I didn't want to work in the atelier of some famous painter as a helper -- that might have diverted me from my own expressive ways, which I had just started exploring. I had had enough of teachers and academic, formal training -- once I was all on my own, anything but sticking to my independence seemed like I'd retrogress. And I did not consider looking for a job in a factory, nor in a shop. Nor did I want to go back to painting walls of cafés and shops, like I had often done during the École to earn some money.

I didn't realize it then, but I had been enslaved by my freedom.

Trying to attain a way of living that had never been sustainable.

That was the terrible truth I had to face.

In bed, before I dozed into sleep, I secretly indulged in fantasies where a marchand would get lost in town, wander all the way to the suburbs and bump into the factory and discover my work...

I did not want nor long for the contact with other human beings, but I did fantasize about the art dealers. I wished they'd visit the atelier. You know, over time that abandoned factory had become my atelier... But how could they? Apart from rats, cats and bats, nobody knew where I was. I hadn't seen another person in months.

With winter approaching, I knew it was more than time to face the world outside. 

Better not wait until the streets are covered with snow, I pondered, to get a life -- a job, a home, whatever -- and my health back. Or even a train, back to Italy.

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Author's note: having been imported from a former version of the story, some of the comments below are dated previous to this post. Once the plot has not been altered, just the pagination, I am keeping them since they are very dear and precious to me.

Episode 04 | The abandoned factory

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nudity

"At your age--"  Carlo had hesitated, and silenced. He was remarkable when it came to being inexact with time, numbers, dates. He probably doesn't know my age, I thought. Does he even know we haven't seen one another for twenty years -- plus three months? My father wouldn't have been counting, like me, year after year remembering he had left on a June morning -- and I was instantly dragged back to my teenager years in rural France. But just before I succumbed to my memories, I again surfaced, blinking as I heard him amending,  "No. Much younger. I was a penniless painter, then." 

"And homeless too," He continued, leaning against the back of his chair, making himself comfortable, and I relaxed too, understanding I was being taken on a ride to his past, "since I had to leave the room I had been sharing in an apartment in the 6e arrondissement, after I graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. My ex-roommate, who had left on a one year trip around the globe, being wealthy, and utmost generous, paid my rent for another couple of months -- 'to give you time to figure out what you want to do', he had suggested. He actually wanted to have the room paid for me for another year, but I had decided it was time to conquer Paris on my own." Smiling, Carlo retreated into his Parisian memories.


*****

"I did not have to figure it out. I knew what I wanted to do.

"I wanted to paint. But I guess my ex-roommate referred to getting a job, or going back to the Apennines, where my grandfather still waited for my return, to help him with the crops.

"I decided to spend all my money on a new easel, plenty of canvases and painting supplies. And so, I could not afford paying the rent after that courteous period ended.

"But sleeping rough did not concern me. What I wanted most was to have a small studio, an atelier for myself.

"I found shelter in an abandoned factory, located in a decaying industrial district, on the outskirts of Paris. I imagine it used to be a tires manufacture, but I never even learned its name. It was a vast room with high walls, left totally empty after the machinery, the furniture, and even the doors inside the building had all been removed -- or stolen. I occupied the corner located farthest from the street, just a few rooms which might have been the administrative quarters, from which the partitions had vanished, too. The rest of the building I left for the noisy population of bats and rats, and the cats that chase them. In the beginning, I would startle at the screeches of their bloody battles of survival, to later grow thankful that they could resolve it among themselves, and not come after me.

"I wasn't exactly hungered when I moved in, but from then on my diet consisted mostly of the leftovers from a neighboring food packing factory -- lots of canned soup. And stale bread, too."

"Are you telling me... you were that poor? That you didn't have enough food, Carlo?" I was in shock. There had never been one single word about this period of my father's life. Had Catherine known about any of this, I wondered. Knowing her, she could have hidden it because she might have been ashamed of her partner's poorness. 

Carlo had studied in Paris, and as far as I knew, he had never returned to the city since then. I did some quick calculations -- he must have been talking about the beginning of the seventies, prior to meeting Catherine in Punaouilo. He was in his early twenties then, and not 'my age'. Had he been in the town during the revolution of May 1968? I wanted to ask, but had no chance, for Carlo was no longer before me, but dwelling in his own past.

"I would say I had just enough food to survive, Laurent... I was eating only once a day, or every other day, depending on what I found to eat..."

But don't get me wrong! I couldn't be any happier!

I was free!

I had no teacher, no boss, no one to follow nor obey! No marching orders! 

And I was allowed to paint all day and night long, day after day...

I had found a narrow, squeaking iron bed someone had dumped because it was rusty. It sat just beside the easel, and I would alternate periods of resting, usually during the day, with longer periods of painting. The glasses on most windows in the factory were broken, and there was always a lovely breeze roaming the room.

There was even running water -- though it would frequently smell to rust, sewage and dead rats -- and if the days had been warm and sunny, in the evenings the water in the pipes would not be so cold and I could shower. When it was too cold, I could still use it to wash my clothes, as few as they were, and the bed sheets I had inherited from my roommate.

I loved the night time for painting, because the district was calmer then. 

The whole world seemed at peace, with people silenced and lost to their sleep and dreams, keeping their agonies and wrongdoings all to themselves, in another realm. The only sound I heard in the evenings, apart from the animals, were distinctive thumps against the other side of the wall, coming from the vaster room I had left unoccupied, where the production lines used to be. Scariest of all, it was a muffled sound that sometimes came from the floor level, but other times right from the top of the wall, close to the beamed ceiling. It sounded like someone was coming in the evenings to dump corpses at the abandoned factory. Or as if a person had jumped from the beams to hang up himself, his lifeless body left twisting on the rope's end bumping against the wall. But there were evenings when the sound seemed to originate from a dozen corpses, like in a mass murder, or from a collective suicide, with a dozen hanged, one after the other. Ghosts? One night, I finally decided to venture into the darkness, to observe bundles of dried up brambles and garbage suddenly spring to life, carried by the wind, storming along the empty room and often gaining so much speed as to become fluorescent under the moonlight and try a brief flight, tortuous ascending curves that ended in dry thumps against the walls. Sometimes against the ceiling, even, to then descend and land heavily, losing bits and pieces and yet, finding the motion to start rolling around again. Not as scary as in my imagination, it was nevertheless a mesmerizing, phantasmagorical spectacle to watch in the unlit, deserted rooms.

There was very little light in the factory, too. Just a couple of lamps still worked in my quarters. And the effect on my art of such dark surroundings was that my paintings gained in contrast, in vibrancy and intensity of lines and textures.

They were never gloomier. 

I was depicting cracked walls, burnt tires, broken windows, all the beautiful decadence of weathering and damage I found around me.

And in retrospect, I was never again as satisfied with my paintings.

I guess you could very appropriately call them 'still life'. My own life was still like a calm lake, and I was painting the images I saw reflected on its surface.

I never left the factory unless to gather food, the first couple of months, and never met another person.

What a privilege to be completely silent! For weeks in a row. Have you ever experienced that, Laurent?

No small talk, no deep conversations, nothing! The sound of my breath and my heartbeat, these only were keeping me company.

My whole world consisted of the patio next to the factory. I had neatly rearranged the piles of old tires left behind to dry and disintegrate, so that it somehow resembled a forest of calcined trunks. That's where I spent a few hours outdoors every day, reading, sunbathing, doing push-ups.

And meditating.

My ex-roommate from the École had visited India on one of his holidays and brought with him some techniques I was so lucky to learn.

At the end of each sitting session, I would daily pray for the happiness of all beings, and I felt utterly at peace, Laurent.

"I had no idea, Carlo!" I exclaimed. But only after my father's silence had lasted long enough, indicating that he did not want to talk any further. "I've never heard none of this before, nor saw it published anywhere. How come?" It would only fill the gaps in his catalogs' biographies, that I confess I had been reading along the years to keep up with my father's story. "It would add up so much to your reputation of being a reclusive master!" I had decided to tease him a bit, to bring him out of his mutism. "I think you know you are often compared to Balthus."

"Balthus once declared painting is a form of prayer." Carlo retorted. "I wish I had said that first. Or maybe I have, but no one heard it... since I had been talking only to myself, ha-ha! But I guess that's the only thing we have in common! As for being a master, that only means I'm getting old, and soon I'll have to teach the young. If there are any volunteers. And that my artistic identity is frozen, because art critics have come to respect or fear me! I feel like a mummy, when they call me 'master'!"

"I was thinking more on your seclusion than on your 'mastery', Carlo." I teased him further. "I'm sorry if I mentioned Balthus. But like him, you now have a painting that was bought for over a million dollars during your life time, still. And you are often compared to Morandi, too. How about that?"

"That's the greatest compliment ever made to me. Being compared to Morandi, ha! Might be because we are both Italian? Apart from that, I hate comparisons! And I'm happy to hear you've taken interest in my career, Laurent." Carlo seemed touched. "As for the million dollar painting, that has happened just once yet, and believe me, I didn't get all that money."

"I hate comparisons too, Carlo. I know how that feels. But in my case it's not Balthus nor Morandi." I sighed. "I'm often being compared to you! I'm always the son of the great painter. It sucks! And the day I publish my first book, I know I'll be compared to Catherine, and turned into the son of the best-selling author." After I finished my ranting, that Carlo had listened with raised eyebrows, I felt ashamed and changed the subject. "But let's return to your story, Carlo... I'm fascinated!"

"If it feels so bad, you're still young enough to try to become a chef, or a surgeon. How about those, Laurent?" Carlo confronted me. "Nothing has been imposed on you, I think. You've always been the handsome prince roaming freely through life. Your remark sounded arrogant and spoiled... and I hope you are not!" There was no anger in his voice, just some concern that I had become a different person from the kid he had been raising until 13 years old. "As for my story... fascinated, are you son? How fascinating do you think a clogged toilet is? Or having to dig through trash for food? I'm pretty sure you've never had those experiences, Laurent..." And we veered into his past.

I did not have food to eat more than once daily, but instead I had to unclog the toilet every time I used it -- again, not so often, because I did not eat much, ha-ha! And nevertheless I was happy, so happy to be free, to be on my own, to be left alone!

You have no idea how my solitude was -- and still is -- so very important to me, Laurent.

I knew I could not live like that for long, but I was just trying to live day by day, and not worry about the rest of my life. 

Nor the rest of the year. 

Not about the next day, even.

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