14
Harvey sits with Nisa Michelangelo at his long, cluttered workbench, Harvey tucked out of line of sight with the window, the artist pouring himself a shot of something out of a bottle. Behind, towers David in his glorified masculinity.
“It is always this way with the artist,” Nisa says expansively; “they must meet themselves in their own work, become a prisoner of their own creation, and only the completed creation can set them free. When I have finished him, David will set me free.” He takes a long, didactic swallow, and admits a modest melancholy. “For years now I have been imprisoned in the body of my David, imprisoned in fibro crap! It is not marble yet it looks like marble!” He rolls his eyes up towards the roof. “However, even in these base materials the same law of the artist prevails: to complete the work is the soul’s release. No more reincarnation. No more Travesty. Once the soul is dissolved from its object, it is free to wander across time and space, free to resist the temptation to take flesh again, no? Flesh and agony, my friend, these things belong together like air and water.” This observation is accompanied by a tragic, clown like smile.
He offers Harvey a shot from the bottle, shaking his head sadly as Harvey declines. Harvey wonders if he should hide if Hermes appears again; sometimes it pays not to be at home. On the roof across the street, furtive figures are moving, setting up some kind of equipment it seems.
“With the soul free to wander, the spirit may revisit its youth, follow itself to its source. That is what dreams are – the vapour trails left by the soul in flight across space and time.” He offers himself another drink and accepts, leans forward confidentially. “When I am freed from him, I will revisit myself when I was a young man in Tuscany.
I already have memories of these visits.” He tapped his forehead. “An old man with a horror struck face coming towards me, flying out of the clouds his arm outstretched. He’s reaching out to take my arm – like God with Adam in the Sistine Chapel – which I hold up in limp surrender,” he holds his wrist at a foppish angle, “and he is trying to tell me something he desperately wants me to hear. But there is a great-a noise, like all the years of the world jostling together and I hear nothing.” He grimaces and drinks. “Not the face of God, no one can see that face, no; the face taking form before me everyday in the glass was familiar in a deja vu way. And always older it grew, like the face of the moon. Shortly, I think, I will find out what I wanted to say to my youthful self. It was my own face, only much older, flying out of the sky at me, with arms of thunder – it was my own face, only much older. As old as I am now.”
Harvey’s fingers close around the packet in his pocket. Some label has rubbed off leaving a rough, glued patch he likes to stroke with his forefinger. There is an edginess to the sharp, grey light, and an overbearing, insidious quality to Nisa’s voice; signs of incipient glow withdrawal as the world settles out into its shithouse components. Travesty will once again exhibit that weirdness and darkness of spirit which is its hallmark, and which only glow can properly mitigate.
Not already, please! He’s only just patched up!
Nisa slugs back his sunshine and taps Harvey twice on the wrist. “Among the women of Florence there was this notion that each of us is, at some-a time in our youth, afforded a vision of our old age. It is said that on the night before her wedding a young woman, a beautiful signorina – was visited by an old crone. The signorina nearly fainted since all the doors had been locked against the possibility that the bridegroom, shameless and importunate as all bridegrooms must be, might try to steal a look at her, or worse, a kiss. Anyway, the crone warned against the marriage, saying her husband would turn out to be a drunken sot who would make her life a drudge and misery. The signorina was frightened and shouted for help.
“As her frantic brothers, five brawny ones according to legend, with muscles like the sides of hills, came running, the old crone came horribly close to the signorina and said, in a high-pitched, witchy cackle, ‘Don’t you recognise me my poor dear, my poor innocent, my rosebud,’ ravishing upon the young woman the most extravagant affections, ‘change place once with me and you will know who I am.’ The signorina refused, knowing that if she changed places with the old crone, who, once in possession of the youthful body would never willingly return to her bag of bones, she would be cheated of her life – for yes, my friend, she had recognised the old crone and fainted away just as her brothers burst into her room to find their dear sister prone before the mirror.”
There is a long, unresolved pause, during which Nisa contemplates his story with some satisfaction. How many youths ever get to meet their aged selves, back from the future to impart knowledge?
“I did see a face at the window once,” Harvey says, unsettled, looking through Nisa’s tall window to the roof across the street. “But it was too dark for me to see. It looked like, well …”
“Speak!” Nisa offers the bottle once more, a gesture of largesse he is confident Harvey will refuse.
“Well .… ah – it looked like Mickey Mouse.”
“Ah, my friend!” The sculptor’s voice cracks with compassion, “You glowworms. Take too many drugs. It is a scourge.”
Harvey gets up abruptly, sees his reflection in the window and ducks back behind his chair. His shadow crouches down beside him, huddling into his body; together they make a protective cowl. With great lucidity he thinks: I am on the cross hairs of the eye, and at the edge of the trigger.
Nisa is shaking his head; his curls shake along for the ride. “You see what I mean, my friend? You live a life of trepidation and trembling. A rat come along and he jumps up at you and you scream like a girl, no?” He makes an odd gesture towards the ceiling, and, by implication, the rodent infested roof of the rathouse. His Roman nose looks passingly ratlike, raised in feverish faith. They are up there all right; he can smell them.
Harvey retakes the chair, thinking ahead his moves for getting out of there; Sunshine drinkers are not to his taste. As long as he can keep moving, keep getting out of the places he’s in … he will keep one jump ahead of the posse. Someone used that expression. His father or maybe his grandfather or maybe a many times removed ancestor.
Softly, as if explaining something to a child, Nisa says, “By becoming his creation the artist cheats time. At least for a while.” Like an impresario heralding the next astonishing act, Nisa makes an elaborate gesture towards his David. “The artist, she lock themselves in their work and throw away the key … but of course,” he laughs, “they cannot escape history. This cold flame, it burns everything on the outside of the bone. Soon there is nothing left but memory, and memory becomes unstitched, my friend.” He looks into his glass, “Tell me,” moving his chair closer to Harvey, “when you look at my creation, a question occurs, no … ?” He waits expectantly. “Most are too polite to ask, of course, and I can see that you have been brought up politely also, but you may ask, since you are living in this rathouse with me, we starve together.”
Harvey looks at him blankly.
Delighted Nisa laughs again, taking the opportunity to swill generously from his glass. “You are indeed a babe in wood, Mr Harvey. A very babe in the wood. There is a delightful innocence in your corruption, or is it the other way around,” he clicks his tongue and coughs discreetly into a piece of rag, moving his chair still closer, close enough for Harvey to smell garlic, and cloves, and something noxious out of a bottle. “You mentioned the proportions of my David’s manhood, we had-a most interesting conversation on scales and values, but I’m sure it must’ve crossed your mind to wonder how I found my model, no?” He lowers his eyes bashfully. “Of course I Iive alone. I am not graced, like yourself, with young ladies. There is only me and my mirror.”
He is giggling now, his shoulders shaking. Harvey gets ready to move. He likes to vanish at this point in conversations. Besides, across the street the figures seem to have finished setting up their apparatus and it is pointing right through Nisa’s window, right at Harvey. There is a flash of something catching the sky. A lens perhaps. Telescopic sights. On the street below, a troop of Ganders rush past.
“And my mirror never lets me down,” Nisa goes on giggling. “Now there are two models, one of flesh and one of fibrostone – I know which will stand the longest?” He laughs so much his knees go soft and give way, his lungs wheezing like bellows; he falls onto his knees, his hands on his thighs to support him, head rolled back, eyes pale and swimming.
Harvey makes his getaway.
When Nisa stops laughing his audience has vanished. No wonder, since he made such an idiot of himself, making that stupid joke. This wretched Sunshine softens the brain and turns a person into a giggling ninny. He wanders to the window and looks out at Travesty.
The city he sees is a throw-together of styles and historical periods.
Bits of history poking through: mirror towers, slabs of suburbs, a manicured river, the odd turret and spire. Over everything, however, there lies the drabness of poverty, which, like dust, spreads every-where and reduces everything to its likeness, every building to a rathouse. If Julius were here, God rest his soul, Nisa would ask why he had to be reincarnated in such a mean-spirited shabby time, a time in which art went begging for a purpose. He! Michelangelo! the most boundless of artists! Perhaps God was, after all, a Philistine – Julius would have enjoyed that joke.
By standing with his head sideways to the statue, his profile now falls most nobly across the white expanse of the youth’s thighs, his lips set delectably in the direction of the youth’s genitals. The problem is he cannot see it properly for when he turns his head to look, the profile vanishes. He must swivel his eyes until his nerves ache to even glimpse the effect.
He tries not to think of poor Harvey, that ridiculous boy with eyes as pale as a golem. He fetches his mirror and places it where he can see his profile clearly in shadow against the milky thighs of David. He thinks of the ripple of muscle that lies beneath the flesh and the stone where his head bobs like a pale eclipse.
And why tell the poor boy about his dream of the Old One’s face when all the boy can dream of is Mickey Mouse? Are the sacred dreams of great artists held in such blasphemous contempt, such ridicule, that they have to be cast as pearls before swine, poor shallow rootless swine. Like Harvey.
Nisa has been watching that face take shape at him in the mirror for many years now, the very years he has lavished on David. Syllables are already starting to take shape in the old man’s mouth. Across the centuries, this old man has something to say. Nisa reaches up a shadow hand to take hold of the angular phallus.
Soon he will know what it is.