What are you saying? I can’t hear you!
Oh, I owe you a story. The one about art. From the Chinese feast. And you want to hear it. It can’t wait? Right now?
All right then.
Now, I can’t take any credit for this story, even though I did tell it at the time. I heard from it someone else, you see.
Yes. At the costume ball. Told by someone dressed up as the Devil. My husband had been asking something, I don’t remember what, or perhaps I didn’t hear. And the Devil began to speak. What he said is what I repeated over lunch, trying to get the words just right.
He spoke as if he truly were the Devil and had taken part in the events he was describing. It was the best disguise at the ball. Because a disguise isn’t a matter of what you’re wearing, it’s the story you tell.
And here’s what he and I said, as follows:
‘Do you know what art is? And the difference between art and the real world? I thought it up. Created it. No, I didn’t say “Let there be art” – that’s not the way I work. It was on the seventh day when he was resting. Resting from what? Really, I ask you, from what? For six days he spoke, let there be this, let there be that, tiring himself out. By the way, lest I forget: I was the first thing he spoke. Created. Because the first thing he said was “Let there be light”, and there I was. For I am Lucifer, the light-bearer. And, do you know, the other angels could never forgive me for that. Especially Michael.
‘So, it was the seventh day, and he was resting, and he called all the angels together and told us each to paint a picture, and once we’d finished he would choose the most beautiful one of all. And we set to work. I knew what I was going to make. True, at the very beginning it wasn’t quite clear in my mind, but as the work progressed I understood it more and more.
‘From time to time I’d look up from my work and steal a glance in his direction, at the ill-tempered old man with the glowering brow. He sat on his throne of granite, resting his chin in his hand, lost in thought, weary. Left eye blue, right eye brown. I wondered whether he regretted creating it all, whether he was having second thoughts and would he rather have everything the way it was before, as nothing? After being by himself for so long – only he knew how long – was he like any other old man who lives alone, losing his temper with noisy children, looking back wistfully on the peace and quiet he once knew? What was it he wanted to say to the rest of us? Let there not be any of you? Or, with a mocking smile, Oh, just let it be. I’m sure that afterwards, once the seventh day had ended, he was often sorry – although a bruised reed he would not break, as they say. Yes, that bearded old man we could never live up to – I’m sure he was sorry ever after.
‘He had said, “Paint the world for me”, and that’s what we were doing. And it wouldn’t be like me not to have a peek at what the other angels were doing. You should have seen the hamfisted nonsense Uriel was turning out. What a mess! Pure pandering to the audience. He’d depicted him as ostensibly happy upon his throne, a hundred times bigger than the rest of us. You men and women were the size of ants, while we angels with our wings could have passed for houseflies. There was no night in the picture, no seas.
‘I also saw what some of the others were painting. They were doing such a meticulous job. Everything was exactly as it really is, and you could hardly tell the image apart from the real thing. I considered this another form of pandering.
‘Unfortunately, Michael was too far away for me to see what he was up to. I thought and thought, trying to come up with an excuse to leave my work and casually saunter past. I couldn’t think of anything. I was probably too wrapped up in the task at hand.
‘The sweat ran as I worked. I put my head to one side. Liked what I saw. Or bit my lip. Retouched. Admired. Reconsidered. Rubbed out. I was creating from fog and darkness, feeling my way along. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me.
‘At the very bottom I put the seas …’
‘Were you using bamboo ink on silk?’ whispered Joan of Arc.
‘Was I what? On silk? And with bamboo ink no less.’ He chortled. ‘You haven’t understood. My materials … Well, you’ll see.
‘So, down at the bottom are the never-ending waves of the sea and the coasts above them. On the water there’s a ship, broken in two by the force of the waves. The sailors leap from the deck as it sinks. There are only a few rafts to cling to, but some reach the shore, and the shores are all different: from stretches of sand that slope gently down to the water’s edge to jagged cliffs that end like certain mortal lives, plunging into the raging foam at the bottom of the picture. I’ve thought of everything. I’ve put in palm trees and cypresses and bushes growing from the rocks, the sweet smell of vineyards and stunted olive trees. Goats and donkeys and human limbs browned by the sun, and women biding their time. The picture rises to hills with plum groves and herds of swine. Villages are dotted here and there, people whistle, night falls. The moon and the morning star keep watch and see eye to eye. In a fair valley, extending part-way up the hills, the first city can be seen. Its walls are high and thick, messengers knock at its gates. Inside the walls, all is movement: the barking of dogs can be heard and the hammering of blacksmiths. In the air, the fragrance of sweetmeats, the stench of slops and swill. The streets are paved with cobblestones, carriages creak past. Children are at their games behind the houses. And no one sees the army approaching from the south, marching swiftly to the sound of fife and drum. But the army is still far off, somewhere in the valley between the high mountains. In another city sits a woman, fanning herself in the heat of the day. On her fan I’ve drawn everything I’ve already drawn. Another world just like the first, but immeasurably smaller and utterly false. That’s the one I painted with bamboo ink on silk. A carriage passes a school where children are playing during breaktime. Stalks of wheat peer in as the carriage goes by. It’s summertime and the living is easy, the cotton is high in the fields. The fish are jumping in the streams, and the serpent wends its way among the tall grass, ready to strike at any treading heel. Its eyes are green as emeralds, its scales smooth and lustrous. Not far off, a city is under siege. The army encamped outside its gates is in disarray, its fair-haired hero refusing to fight – although he’ll change his mind when his comrade-at-arms and lover is killed. From there a man will make his way home, after a long journey, only to encounter his own wife’s suitors. She weaves the world the way I made it, but every morning she undoes her work and with it goes the world. That world is also false, because it is made of wool. And because it can be destroyed. Far from where she sits at her loom I send great numbers on a journey. I trace the way ahead of them, the royal road that yearns for the horizon. Others struggle over mountains and through valleys, far from the cities of men, their destination uncharted on any map.
‘Again I wanted to see what Michael was up to. I craned my neck, ambled about a bit, but I couldn’t get close enough to see his handiwork.
‘I turned my attention back to what I was doing. Solitude was standing beside the window; the woman came in to find it waiting for her. Not far from there a young man was making oil paintings – oil, you see, not bamboo ink – of Flemish masters, better than the ones in Europe. Never his own paintings, only the work of others. I sent a boy into Egypt to learn the tricks and illusions of sorcerers, to heal lepers in the marketplace with enchanted waters. He crossed the Sinai and came to Alexandria. There they taught him the secrets of the carpenter’s trade. I sent for him again, but he never came back. I gave the king a lyre, and he broke out in song. I taught him major and minor, halleluia, halleluia, halleluia. I put in men and women who meet and know each other and who also go their separate ways like strangers at the crossroads. I put in the crossroads, too. Next came the peaks. I adorned them with pines and firs and put in monks with shaven heads and told them to believe in yin and yang. I never drew good and evil, not ever. That was added later by someone else. I only gave them red robes or yellow robes and sweeping vistas from the mountaintops. Silk scrolls. Brush tips dipped in bamboo ink. On the most forbidding cliff faces I set impregnable cities. The watchmen were on the lookout night and day. Waiting. The invading armies never came. No one ever came. High above their helmeted heads flew eagles, their wings barely moving, carried aloft on currents of air. Winds blowing from the four corners of the world – I painted them, too, in transparent colours. At the windswept heights I made bare mountaintops. Crystal streams bathing the rocks and a path winding to the summit. Wide enough for only one traveller and paved with yellow bricks. It led directly to the sky, for above the mountains I put the sky – blue here, black there, with sparkling points of white. And I hung the sun and allowed the moon to wax and wane and made the morning star to be first and last.
‘Again I tried to see Michael’s work. But again without success. And then the tired old man rose slowly to his feet. It was time, he muttered. His mood was dark, and I had to hurry to finish. I started making mistakes. My hand was trembling. Nostrils pinched. Eyes watering. Mouth dry. If only there’d been no end to the time I had, I could have made a perfect picture.
‘I was adding details now. Strewing the scent of lavender across the open fields. Launching sailing ships across the grey oceans. The merchants aboard them travelled swiftly from land to land. In one village I put three brothers together, promising the fourth and youngest brother the very best of everything. In the end I put them in a courtroom, with judges dressed in black. I dug tunnels for water and put people in them. And princesses and dragons. Here and there I put stout-hearted heroes with finely tempered swords and poured them goblets of wine to quaff with their paramours. In other places I drew tracks on beds of crushed stone and sent locomotives chuffing down the undeviating parallel lines. As it arrives, its shrill whistle fills the winter air and the ears of the remaining passengers. And I made the grass gleam with frost and dew. I sowed tomatoes in tidy gardens.
‘He said, “Enough. I would see.”
‘We all turned our pictures towards him. That’s when I saw Michael’s. It was blank. There was nothing on it. I tried to catch his eye, but he didn’t deign to notice.
‘The old man went slowly, not because he was paying close attention but because he could move no faster, and as he went he looked, listened, sniffed, chewed, drank. When he reached Michael’s picture he stood for a long time. Saying nothing. Then he went around a bit more quickly, taking in the other angels and their creations along the way. From time to time he’d murmur something, nothing that made much sense, more like a word or two as he took a breath or cleared his throat. When he finally reached me, I stood poised between the most exalted satisfaction and the most profound despair. There was nothing more godlike than bringing something into existence, nothing more diabolical than casting it away. Aeons passed, the universe spinning and falling back in upon itself. When at last he raised his head, all the cosmos had contracted to the size of my fist.
‘“I find favour with Michael’s work.”
‘“What?” I hissed. “If it be thus, I go my way.”
‘And hurtling through the cloudless sky I went. When I landed, it was on the narrow road of yellow bricks. I made my way along the bare hilltops towards the first fortified cities. The monks in their yellow robes made no greeting as I passed. I looked around me, smelled the air. Listened. What’s that line about the angel being new to the world and not seeing it with the world’s eyes? And the poet tells the angel to sing the praises of the world, to speak of things the world knows not and to strike it dumb with amazement.
‘Down and down I made my way. All around me mortal creatures were breathing their last, their death rattles rising heavenwards along the royal road.’