The burly artist, Nisa Michelangelo, hoists his hands into the air in abject surrender. It seems for a second that he is supporting the lintel, and by association, the whole rathouse.
“Don’t shoot, Mr Harvey, it’s just me from upstairs.”
Harvey keeps the pistol right where it is, aimed at Nisa’s exposed hairy belly; this is the arsehole that blabbed his mouth off to Hermes, setting off God knows what train of events. Telling her he was a baby in the womb. A child of terror. Spiking her with stuff she could use against him. And where is she? The Spring Maiden?
She’s gone, and his system is lit with glow, but where did he get the gun? Didn’t he have a plastic one like this when he was a kid?
Nisa goggles at the huge and very ancient Colt .45 with the long barrel and revolving chamber. “Is that a real gun or are you just trying to excite me?” For all his bulk, Nisa has a high, light voice.
“It’s a genuine facsimile. A toy,” Harvey says, not knowing if that was true. “The original could punch a whole in you the size of a fist.”
Nisa’s hands clutch his heart. “Don’t say things like that! Don’t even think it. Who would finish David if I got the big hole in my heart? David is the most important thing in the world, maybe the one authentic object in Travesty. And I am assured that you are a kind man. A kind of a man.”
Harvey is not so sure. He doesn’t even know if the gun he’s holding works or not. Somehow he knows about guns. He knows the calibre of the holes punched in his wall, and can accurately guess the weapons that delivered them. Guns are the politics of desperation – when did he hear that?
Nisa is smiling at him benignly. “Are you hiding something in there, perhaps my friend?” He speaks with a feigned politeness, turning one of his raised hands into an eyebrow gesture. “A young lady, perhaps?” He puts his nose in the air. His eyebrows rise and fall conspiratorially. “I interrupt at a bad time, eh? I smell a young woman. Such perfume will linger for hours in the stinking air of this – ah – rodent-abode.” He sniffs in apparent appreciation. His Italian accent has become noticeably broader. “When the signorina dance, her skirts flare up to her waist.” With arms still hoisted to show he is unarmed, he dances in a vaguely Mediterranean fashion. “Dancing, dancing over the marble floor she draws you after her, out onto the balcony where she sucks you into her web and envelops you.” He shudders delicately. All that sucking and enveloping!
Harvey looks out into the gloom of the rathouse halls, thinking about duffle-coated Hermes and the loose-robed Flower Maiden, the two having become identified with each other in his mind. From the depths of the corridor comes a mumbling tide of syllables, the voice of Drunk Len who is not after them but on a mission to the tiny bathroom across the hall. His voice comes in waves of abuse and imprecations, the usual stuff; cursing his sister to hell and back, and the rest of humanity deserving of no better fate. Harvey doesn’t want another encounter with the derelict, nor does he want to turn back to a room grown alien by the sudden absence of Hermes. Where did she go? And why? In the blurred intensity of the alcoholic, Harvey hears the siren call of the rathouse itself; angry, accusatory, wheedling, bitching, washed over by the insane tide of history – left to rot in some dingy backwater of Travesty, reeking of cheap Sunshine, curiously timeless and doomed. It is a petty, squabbling sound, like rats in the walls or the urgent shushing of the luminous moths that scatter through the halls at night like confetti on fire; a sneering gabble, internalised and locked away in shabby bathrooms with their brown stained enamel bowls – the gathering and release of hours from a leaky tap. To be caught in that long slow tide of waiting is to hear the rathouse walls whisper the voices they have collected and rolled into a chorus descant, weary and repetitive, circling, like Drunk Len himself, through the shadow-driven corridors: anger and retribution, fear and huddling. Mind numbing terror. Bleached of their histories, just as his own heart has been skinned of its past, these voices argue themselves from hall to hall, room to room, prisoners of their particularities, washed into the collective murmur of to-ing and fro-ing, muttering and gesturing, poking holes in the dark with a finger. Sometimes phrases are thrown up like, Get out of my fucken way! or, Go fuck your face! These latest additions thread themselves through the collective murmuring of the rathouse. A sound which never quite goes away, like the microwave background hum of the universe.
Entering that sonorous sound Harvey receives a shock, for behind the recollective, cluttered quiet of a half empty building, a familiar quiet built on the dying echo of shattered, shouted phrases, there is the sheer, absolute silence of all things. One touch from that vastness might see him quivering back into the opacity of his room and throwing the door-bolt with a practised gesture, glow or no glow. In this emptying of sound there is but the anticipation of footfalls; heads without faces, bodies without forms; in that general dissolution he has to wait without hope or flattery. If there is reincarnation, he vows, and I fervently trust there is not, let me be reborn as a wisp of moss high on the inside of some vast, undiscovered cavern.
Nisa coughs discreetly. He has seen Harvey lost in the momentary poetry of glow before. “Please, Per favore! I just want you to help me shift my David. A couple a minutes; the young lady can wait, no?” He points upstairs and winks.
Harvey follows the broad-hipped, clumsy artist up several flights of stairs, for the ancient Schindler’s Lift has long since given out. Nothing on the staircase but graffiti echoes as they rise up through the levels of the rathouse. Many rooms, even whole floors, are unoccupied or closed off. Some, he is dimly aware, belong to Lily, who has whole floors stacked with soft toys and funeral items; others have been long since abandoned to dust and rats and memories.
Nisa Michelangelo’s attic studio is the opposite – large and airy, one wall taken up by a panelled window twenty feet in height and twice as long. The room has the impression of a long loft lit with rafters. Many small flats have been demolished to make this one grand room, the centrepiece of which, and the reason for its being, is a full sized Michelangelo’s David, slightly unfinished – the artist’s life work.
This David is an exact replica of one the artist did many hundreds of years ago, at the height of the Renaissance – with one crucial difference. Gone is the modest, almost preadolescent penis sitting quiescent on the generalized bulge of a marble scrotum. In its place rises Nisa’s triumphant addition: a proud tumescence, as disproportionately large as the left hand that falls, apparently casually, at the youth’s side.
As Harvey approaches through the mess of stone chips and paper sketchings, squinting against the grey luminescence of the room, he is drawn by the precise verisimilitude of the statue’s genitals.
Eschewing all stylisation, except for its exaggerated size, Nisa has captured exactly the erect penis complete with veins, rigid and lumpy, the taut skin beneath the glans and the ring where the circumciser’s knife has passed. The wrinkled scrotum beneath is carved with as much loving care and attention to detail as Dutch painters once lavished on embroidered hangings, spreading frocks and bedspreads. In this same spirit, the knotted, tendonous muscle under the scrotum is outlined, rooting the male sex into the backbone and forming a harmonious line with the erect member. This line is slightly off centre from that of the body, the penis curving a little to his right side, supplementing the sense of adolescent awkwardness in the youth’s posture. Sensuous yet restrained, the youth’s head turns towards his left shoulder, just as the penis curves towards the right leg which is taking the weight of the body. And, as a final salacious detail, there is a delicate, pearly extrusion from the tip of the penis, suggesting that all the lumped tension of the bunched musculature is about to erupt; each element, the stone and passion, held in a precarious, fevered balance.
Harvey glances at the statue’s face. The Renaissance youth gazes with a brooding, puzzled intensity, fixed on something in the far distance, the lower lip curling sensually, forehead furrowed.
“You would like to climb up and touch him perhaps, my friend,” the sculptor says in soft, dripping sibilants, gesturing to a stepladder nearby. He sighs when Harvey shakes his head. “I have almost finished him now, is he not beautiful?” He walks softly around his creation speaking in deep reverential tones, brushing his hair back off his face with quick, determined gestures, his Italian accent waxing and waning.
“You know when I first made him from that magnificent marble block quarried for Agnostino di Ducci I did not have the courage to carve him thus. It took four donkeys and twelve slaves to haul that block across the mountain pass to Tuscany, but still I did not comprehend what to do, what God wanted me to do. It is hard to listen to God. Always the human ear unwilling.”
He holds out his hand, palm up, as if delivering the finished statue to Harvey on a platter. “The milieu, you understand, the artistic sensibility of the time would never have allowed it. Too politically incorrect. The purple-robed popes would have had a heart attack. And yet, standing in that terrible heat, gazing into the stone, so mute and translucent, I saw him thus, as the legend has it, trapped inside a shapeless lump of marble, but just as you see him now, full in his manhood. I have had to wait for shabbier, looser times like these in the half life of this abode of rodents.” Nisa wipes his brow as if the sweat of that day were gathering on his forehead once more. “I almost passed out right there. I nearly had heat attack. I opened and closed my eyes to make this apparition vanish. Remember, my friend, that I’m talking about 1501, a mere two years after the martyrdom of that great iconoclast, Savonarola, whose bands of fervent youths stormed the streets of Florence looking for decadent works of art to destruct.” He winks, as if he and Harvey share some intimate secret. “My own piety was beyond question, you comprehend, I was chasing commissions from the Pope, the very suppository of piety, and such visions as I had in the heat of the Florentine sun had to be quickly buried before they annulled me. But the dream, the dream never goes away. It is the dream that reincarnates us. Nothing more.”
Harvey agrees, but is not reassured. Even across incarnations the hunt goes on, which is why it doesn’t pay to live in memories. And which is why the veil might not be such an evil thing after all. Hermes wants him to remember, but why should he? Now, under the benevolent umbrella of glow, he sees the Veil in a different light; perhaps, some comfort there – a refuge.
Nisa Michelangelo passes his hand over his forehead, apparently to brush aside his dreams as he peers back through the centuries.“As I worked, bringing him out of the stone, he pleaded with me to be given his true form, to bless his gawky boy’s body with full manhood, just as I first saw him. I refused – and prayed with no release. David, half born out of marble, wheedled and cajoled, but alas, I couldn’t satisfy him, even though I would lie awake at nights in a frenzy to do as he asked. I turned to God but God was no relief. My frenzy came from God. So I made a solemn oath that I would return one day to honour him fully. The best I could do at the time, in compensation, was to give him a man’s hands with rigid veins, full of strength, symbolizing the latent power I could not otherwise express, if you follow me.”
Harvey follows him. The tumescence of the left hand speaks for itself. The message was codified in the original. Now, given Nisa’s triumphant addition, it is, Harvey thinks, superfluous.
Nisa proceeds to prove him wrong.
Importantly, the artist points to the attitude of the statue’s limbs. “You will notice his pose is easy, so casual with the cloth thrown over his shoulder just so, but even then secret tensions creep in. I couldn’t throw out these tensions without making a foolish cherub of him, some cheap pretty boy from the back streets of Roma.” He sniffs contemptuously. “Observe the stretched muscles of the neck and throat, the firm ripple of the torso, the bunched muscles of the thigh. These small signs reveal his most-inner dreams. It is always this way with the artist and his work, my poor friend – a pact is made that not even death can dissolve.” He turns his hand fondly over the statue’s feet.
“I think you’ve made it too big,” Harvey interrupts, gesturing to Nisa’s Addition. He is going to say more when Nisa interrupts him.
“A deception of perspective, my friend, and I know that foolish and inattentive critics will accuse me of creating a grotesque. I deny this charge. Let us think about it in terms of proportion – and what else is sculpture about? You must see that this whole figure stands as it originally stood, fourteen feet three inches high including the base. Have you ever heard of a person that tall, my friend? Proportionately, then, everything else is bigger, larger than life, ha ha. You must also see that his magnificent cock stretches to just above the navel, which is not unrealistic, indeed,” the quick, pink lizard of his tongue slips across his lips, “almost on the conservative side. What I have done is to thicken it subtly to match the symbolic power of that enlarged hand which points to it and has concourse with it. That’s why I need the left hand. Hand and cock, cock and hand; one’s virtue is the other’s vice, ha ha. You see when I first made him, I made that hand out of proportion, veined and turbid, in preparation for this moment.”
His voice has lowered to confidential hoarseness and he has come close enough for Harvey to be able to smell garlic and Sunshine. “Finally, my friend, my intention I must confess is not simple realism. I am hunting other quarry here. This wonderful youth is the very image of heroic manhood. Julius, that’s Pope Julius, commissioned me to fashion him after the Biblical youth who stood for the triumph of skill over strength, intelligence over pride.” He permits himself the indulgence of an ironical grin and strokes his short, curly beard. “But of course I saw more than good old Julius, who had his whores to think about. I saw the image of the upright male virility of our young culture, and, of course, the possibility of its corruption. Remember, my friend, we are talking about the dawn of the modern era. Let it Rest in Peace.
My original David stands thus at the beginning of our age, a symbol of its youth and potential strength – and I had to emasculate him!”
Harvey steps back as spittle flies from the artist’s lips. “People are fools, my friend, fools! They will identify me with those idiots who come along and paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa and call themselves artists. Blind they are to the true spiritual depths of my work.” His voice grows bleak. “But I will suffer this ridicule and incomprehension and suffer it gladly for the chance to complete the Great Work.”
“How did you find the marble?”
“I had to fall back on fibrostone.” The artist looks out the window away from both his guest and his creation. An amorphous, grey light fills the window and the room. “From this distance it is indistinguishable from marble, but,” he spreads his hands, “when I look into it I see no heroic youth trapped in milky stone. I see nothing. I see blankness. That was the cruelest blow. I had to imitate myself, my friend – the most terrible thing an artist can do. I had to reconstruct my own work from diagrams and photographs as if it were the work of a stranger.” His eyes grow moist. “It is like doing penance for my sin of omission many years ago, under the august eye of Pope Julius. Then the vision was strong in the stone, but now I must work without vision, and it has taken ten years or more for me to complete what I once did in one year. I did it in one year!” He shakes his bearlike mane. “It is a sad commentary, my friend, a very sad commentary.”
He falls silent, apparently overwhelmed by the melancholic profundity of his work. Like that of his creation, which he momentarily resembles, his gaze is fixed frowningly on something in the far distance. The youthful, noble face of young David set beside the crumbling, heavily jowled travesty of his creator.
Nisa stands with his head bowed, his face to the window, his head turned a little to one shoulder, the light pouring in on him. A tear forms on the trembling lower eyelid, swells to ripeness and trickles onto his cheek where it stays, upright and glazed, on the hollow plain below the temple.
Beyond the tear, through the miraculously unscathed plate glass, Harvey thinks he sees figures darting about on the roof of the opposite building. They are too far away to make out any features. They could be Ganders, Woodchucks – anything. All of a sudden these vast windows expose him to everything, all the life that thrives on the topsy-turvy world of Travesty. To the roiling sky.
Nisa is gently insistent. “We must-a turn him this way, no? Turn him so this right shoulder is a little more in the light, if you can call it light, I have some work to do on that shoulder. Always it is a struggle to get the right light, any light.”
Harvey gets ready to push the base.
“It’s not too heavy, this fibro-crap.”
Together they pull the statue around; David’s gaze sweeps across Travesty, the tall, silent buildings on the other side of the street.
“Is it as durable as marble?” Harvey asks, feeling the curious density of the material, following the easterly direction of the statue’s rotated gaze.
“More. This statue will still be around long after my first one has crumbled away. That is a nice-a irony. Fibrostone will have the last say.”
Harvey follows the statue’s gaze to the opposite roof and finally identifies figures with balaclavas and rifles. And some other bulky stuff. Gladstones! Walt’s official anti-terrorist squad.
The Gladstones have outflanked the Lion King and Hermes has abandoned him.