I CALLED PAUL, but he had given me a wrong number. The people who answered were strange, ill at ease, as if they knew and didn’t want to say anything. I felt I had been deliberately misled, until a mutual friend gave me the right number. I spoke with Paul and Lidia, who suggested I write a letter to her father. She would take it to him, but she told me straight off that she could guarantee me nothing. Then she asked me kindly:
“Would you like to have lunch with Paul and me tomorrow?”
I accepted because I felt like spending time with them and because I wanted to get a better idea of who Julian Sax really was. But then Lidia called me again late that evening:
“I’m sorry, but it won’t be possible to meet up because I have to go to Brighton with my son. We’ll do it another time. I’ll let you know if my father replies, but as I told you I wouldn’t get your hopes up. He avoids interviews and in any case he never has the time.”
One evening, in the home of some English friends, I met a gentleman who was a splendidly ironic, inexhaustible conversationalist. On learning that I was Italian and worked in the art field, he asked:
“Do you know Matteo Esse, by any chance?”
“Yes, we’re friends.”
“I haven’t seen him in ages. We met in Venice years ago; he was very young, extraordinary. He took us to see splendid things that aren’t very well known and he had a fascinating way of talking about art. What happened to him?”
“He’s fine, still the same, always engaged in thousands of battles! He wanted Charles Bloom to direct the Biennale and organise an exhibition of Julian Sax’s work, but it didn’t come off.”
“Of course, Sax is a very special artist and an exhibition in Venice would have been marvellous, but with that character of his goodness knows if he would have agreed.”
“Do you know him?”
“Yes, very well.”
“I’d like to meet him, interview him. I tried through his daughter Lidia, but it doesn’t seem easy.”
“I don’t know how much influence Lidia has. I think you should look him up, take him a bottle of fine French red wine. Very expensive wine.”
“But I don’t even know his address!”
“Go to Tony’s, it’s a tea shop near Notting Hill Gate. He’s there every morning at nine.”
“What’s he like?”
“You can’t say he’s an easy man. He has an ambiguous relationship with money and with women. He is very reserved and arrogant too, in a certain sense. But he is undoubtedly an extraordinary artist. He is very capricious and moody, but remember, if you wish to speak with him, the best thing is to take him a bottle of the finest French wine. You’ll see, it’s the only way.”
“But if I don’t know him, it’ll strike him as odd when I show up with a bottle of wine in a café first thing in the morning!”
“Don’t try to be logical, follow my advice. You’ve nothing to lose, and you’ll see that I’m right.”
I called Damian Oxfordshire, whom I’ve known for years, because I knew that in the past he had shown Sax’s work in his gallery and that they were close friends. I wanted to know if he thought it might be possible to interview Sax. He gave me an evasive reply, saying that he would speak to him but that it wasn’t the best time to do so. Then he asked me to drop in at his gallery and I went with Rossa, who had arrived in London in the meantime. Damian has long, white, rather tousled hair and he was wearing a dark blue cashmere jacket with leather buttons, light grey flannels, and a bright blue shirt that highlighted the colour of his eyes. He greeted us in his affected, ironic way, then, as if shaking off his natural indifference, he enthusiastically showed us a Van Gogh from his Saint-Rémy period, sitting on an easel.
“I’ve just sold it to an American museum. It’s very fine, don’t you think?”
“Yes, it’s wonderful! And that portrait of a woman on the other easel?” I asked him curiously.
“It’s a painting by Julian Sax. Oh, I know that you want to interview him, but I’m not sure if that will be possible. He is very tired and I haven’t seen him for a bit. The next time you come to London we’ll organise a meeting.”
“Who is the woman in the portrait?”
“A model who used to live with him and gave him a lot of problems. Julian left her and fell for a fat, imposing black woman, whose portrait he is doing. I know that they have an excessively active sexual relationship, unwise for a man of his age. It’s odd, because he’s a hypochondriac. But to justify himself to me he says that theirs is first and foremost an intellectual relationship.”
“I’d like to interview him because I don’t think he is sufficiently well known in Italy.”
Damian’s attention had wandered from the conversation, he wasn’t interested in knowing whether Sax was well known or not in Italy. For him it was merely a boring detail. He said goodbye politely but impatiently, as if he had suddenly felt an urgent need to be on his own:
“So, let me know when you’re coming back to London and we can meet up with Julian.”