JORGE LANDICHO HESITATES AT THE DOOR. IT IS HIS FIRST VISIT TO the art dealer’s flat, and already he feels strange, in a place so calm and quietly removed, twenty-four floors up. He wonders to himself why he never thought about living in a condominium. At home his dog has the run of his small yard. He picks up scents and barks even before visitors knock, his paws make sounds like sparks across the pavement, and growling low, he pounces on the gate with his full weight and muscle.
Jorge bends toward the door, trying to pick up any noise, and is startled by a shadow behind the eyehole. The door opens and behind it is James Fojas, a man whose age is difficult to guess. He is wearing wire-rimmed glasses and behind them his eyes are quick and bright.
The flat is wide and white. From the door there is a short hallway that, on its left, opens into a large, open room. The wall on the right is covered with paintings, the chaos interrupted only by three white doors. When James shows him in he sees that the large room is lit with a natural brightness, opening through French doors into a wide balcony.
It is morning and the skies are light brown and the light from the balcony is hard and crystalline. James points out that such bright light, only slightly polarized by the cloud cover and the tropical atmosphere, is perfect for viewing paintings. Jorge’s indoctrination begins with a tour of his collection, which, James apologetically adds, is a mishmash, a montage, a crude pile.
There are small pieces by the young and unknown, in unframed canvases, on board, and on freshly unrolled paper. There are enormous flowers, ripe and unripe fruit, young boys playing in rivers. There are monkey-eating eagles, fighting dogs and nudes in various settings and poses. James points out the differences between glossy acrylic, gentle watercolor and dark, complex oil.
Then James shows him the cream, hanging high on the wall in identical frames. In a pieta by Kiukok the man is a bent, desperate skeleton, and the woman, muscled and defiant, both figures joined in colors of flesh, earth and hardened blood. In a sketch by Ocampo, three spare lines are all it takes to fill the flesh-colored space, blurring into a woman’s shape, form and skin. A Manansala nude is made full and slow-moving by strokes of thick black charcoal.
Jorge randomly picks a painting from those leaning against the wall—an oil-on-wood of a fish vendor signed “Ballardo 1980.” Out of curiosity, he asks James how much he wants for it.
James clears his throat and murmurs the first of many lessons in his ear: that sometimes color can be a shape and shape can be a color. That in the hands of someone truly gifted, line, color, shape, frame, all are interconnected and interchangeable. Soon, lines are bent, color is removed from color, shape is shrugged off, the frame disappears and meaning appears. No longer do we see coherent structure, individual characters, but powerful themes, spiritual movement. Suddenly, we feel the impulses we cannot experience, the passion we can’t afford to have. “And that, my friend, makes a really good painting almost priceless.”
JAMES INVITES JORGE TO AN EXHIBIT OPENING. JORGE GETS THERE early, but the party is already in full swing. He finds James by the bar, in a red shirt, leather pants and a cowboy hat, talking to a young girl with green hair and a nose ring. Jorge is in his mall clothes. He doesn’t recognize the painter, by work or by name. There are fifteen of his works, large and complicated, in mixed media, spread out along one side of the gallery.
They take the tour and Jorge stops before a Madonna and Child, done in cut-up newspaper and stained in shades of red and sepia.
Under James’ guidance Jorge studiously marks the golden mean, seeks out the source of light, follows the path of the eye. The lines of the mother’s arm and jaw lead him to a sun that hangs low and dim over her shoulder, where the child perches, small and faceless.
James cocks his hat and smiles at Jorge. “I have some of his old stuff. You’ll find them to be better than any of these. Don’t be foolish enough to fall for the gallery price.”
BRUNO IS A ROTTWEILER IN BLACK AND DULL BROWN, FOUR-FOOT high at the shoulder. He consumes a sack of chow in two weeks. He is beautiful and expensive, a concession to the rising crime rate. When Jorge comes home Bruno growls and rattles on the gate with his weight, but is quick, heavy and lavish with instinctive affection.
Jorge Landicho lives in a townhouse off Tomas Morato Avenue and manages the money his parents left him two years ago. He is heavily into stocks—oils, second stringers, some blue chips. His modest inheritance, along with the current swell of interest in equity investments, give him the freedom to remain unemployed and unencumbered by routine, molded expectation, and the prefabrications and trappings of career and ambition.
He sees his father’s death as a renaissance. He sees himself to be part of that young generation, overqualified and under forty, with the rare ability to make markets move and form lush mountains out of the rocky business landscape.
Jorge puts rice in the cooker and dumps a packet of instant noodles in simmering water. He rips open a fresh sack of dog food, pouring the meaty chunks into one shallow bowl and filling another with fresh water. For himself he retrieves a pot of adobo from the refrigerator and sets it on the stove. He sprinkles water on a plate of rice and puts the plate in the microwave.
The light from outside is fading fast. As Bruno grunts and slobbers over his bowl, Jorge looks intently, earnestly at his lot, hanging on his living room walls. The paintings refract and swell under the color, and inside him he feels something swirling, rising like the tide.
This is how he felt when he saw his first Amorsolo, his first Luna, his first Hidalgo. He was in Malacañang Palace on a group tour. They had a great collection of large canvases, but eroded by seasons of dust and years of neglect, oblivious to the routine rounds of the security guards and common clerks. The tour guide made the dramatic suggestion that these were once overshadowed by even greater works, lost over the years to presidential plunder.
Jorge looks at the opacity of fruits, the thick strokes of sunsets and landscapes glowing in the afternoon light. But his living room is peopled most of all by faces, in smudged oil, in silky gouache, in silver pencil, with eyes everywhere looking at him as he sits in his chair and crosses his legs.
The business news is on. Jorge remembers the Madonna and Child and imagines it hanging in his home, a mosaic of headlines frozen in red: murder, rape and scandal among the sports scores, weather forecasts and financial warnings about the stock market finally reaching the inevitable downside of its cycle.
With each hesitation Jorge forgoes, with each check he writes, the floors and the walls of James Fojas’ apartment shrink a little more and he feels bigger, stronger. What seemed to be a white space filled with squares of mysterious shape and color has become, in a matter of months, a tiny flat, laid out like a cramped, almost oppressive inverted letter L, closed in by layers of canvases new and long unsold, like rows of prodigious, multicolored teeth. Jorge looks around and sees birdcages, cockfights, cathedrals, vortices of color, vague shapes and mottled forms that recall to him old terrors and childhood images.
James shows him a Florian of a young couple, naked, their flesh tinted fluorescent blue. 1962, 24 x 36. The man is covered by the woman’s embrace, and looks at Jorge Landicho with the knowing, indifferent gaze of immortal boredom. Or perhaps, he thinks, it is the half-lidded look of the lust-consumed. The pose is sexual, but their features asexual. The bodies are pressed together, not for warmth, perhaps, but in anatomical prayer, or in a cold, otherworldly affinity.
“It’s called ‘Young Venus,’ Jorge, and I can tell you, oh boy, that this is something totally different. The folks at Singapore went nuts over this. But you know, honestly, I couldn’t bear to see it leave this country. For whatever it’s worth, I still have that feeling sometimes, you know? Did you know that I was an activist when I was younger? But this is different, I tell you. This time I really mean what I say when I say this is different. Somebody hid this beauty under a fucking rock, in a fucking cave, and I was lucky enough to have the key.”
“Done very well,” James adds. “Reminds me of early Francis Bacon. Now that was a mathematician.” Jorge smiles, nods, and squints. James retrieves a book from a shelf and shows him page after page of Francis Bacon. He points out the measured planes, the intersecting lines, the flesh folded and pressed into grotesque shapes.
The antique table in the middle of James’ apartment is a table for negotiations, discussions and dinner. James is quick to point out the inescapable logic of using the same substrate for business, pleasure and reward.
“Sit here so you can see it better.” Jorge sits with his back to the balcony light, facing the artwork. He sits across the table in front of him.
His eyes remove themselves from “Young Venus,” travel across the wall, and settle on another vortex, the dark navel of a reclining nude, her face concealed by a mask in the form of an owl’s face, with blank round eyes and a hooked beak, crowned with feathers of green and yellow ochre.
James quickly follows his eyes. “Munying Maskiar’s ‘Masked Odalisque,’” he whispers. “It’s where all men’s eyeballs drown. You will see that Munying has made a paradox of her. She is naked, but her face will never be known. It’s a seduction. But a seduction without emotion, without the human face. She seduces us only with shape and with color.”
Jorge shifts his gaze to the owl-like features. “Behind the mask, she knows you want her. But she wants you, too, and tells you so, with the way she arranges her arms, her hips, her legs, her very navel. All without giving you the pleasure of her eyes or her expression.”
Jorge Landicho looks away and affords himself a secret grimace at James’ sales talk. Still, he feels himself drawn to her outstretched arm, the sharp, flesh-colored border of her body, the face he will never see. The mask reminds him of ostrich feathers, incense sticks, Arabic writing. And in the shadows behind her, he imagines other women, bound in the oily darkness.
To restore his calm Jorge reminds himself that he is speaking to a middleman, a mercenary, someone who can easily read quick excitement and naïve contemplation, and convert such muddled feelings into passion, even obsession. Jorge looks at his watch and recognizes a comfortable hour, long after the mesmerizing heat of noon and the urgency of approaching dinnertime.
Jorge goes to the balcony and sees the green of the golf course beneath him. He sees the strings of kites snarled on the electric lines. It’s January again. The year promises to be small and nondescript, with nothing but more news of failing markets and a tired government in the middle of its term.
He returns to his chair, sits back, swings a leg and bides his time.
“You’re absolutely right,” James says, voice grave and low. “You’re being smart about it. This piece is not for the impulsive. It’s not for the brute. It’s for the patient. It’s for the intelligent. The meanings creep in strong and slow. Only the most uncivilized rely on gut feel. Take your time, Jorge. It sure did. It took more than thirty years to show itself to you, but it might have been painted yesterday, visualized today, imagined and dreamt of tomorrow. It fools time and it fools the mind.”
Jorge suddenly hears random sounds form behind the wall of canvases: dull footsteps, a television switching channels, the churn of airconditioning, the twist of the tap and the rustle of water.
He glances at James, and there are no signs he is married. He never thought to ask. Though he is possibly in his middle forties, and he has lines on his forehead and a grey fringe of hair near his temples, he wears no ring. He looks quiet and relaxed, dressed this afternoon in a yellow plaid shirt, stiff jeans and expensive-looking leather sandals. His hobbies betray the carefree, extravagant joys of the affluent and unattached: he spoke once of a diving trip with friends, on another time an evening at the Casino, or a particularly energetic and relaxing session at the massage parlor, or, more recently, watching visiting amateur Russian ballerinas at the Cultural Center.
He remembers him speaking once of women. That was over port and cigars in celebration of Jorge’s purchase of a 4 by 8-foot oil on board by Hermes Alonzo. It took a month of needling and haggling, and ended triumphantly for both sides. Jorge confessed it took a huge chunk out of his savings, and James revealed to Jorge how sad he was to let the Alonzo go, because the artist did not make such ambitious pieces anymore. The purchase finally deserved him a heart-to-heart talk, a personal account of one of James’ extraordinary pursuits. This one was of a well-known actress whom the dealer had kept in a hotel suite for a month, living on nothing but drugs, food and sex. Those were in his younger days, when he was still painting. He could sell out three consecutive one-man shows in six months and drove a top-down Benz. He performed stills, social commentaries, portraits. He painted everyone, even the president, who summoned him to do a mural of the first family—his biggest, and last, work. In ‘87 he went surreal and had a nervous breakdown.
Behind James, one of the white doors opens, for the first time in all of Jorge Landicho’s visits. A young girl appears. She is in a sport shirt and jeans and carries a small wooden tray with coffee cups and a plate of biscuits. The softness of her form draws in the afternoon light, and her hair, wet from a bath, gathers a liquid yellow glow.
James states a ridiculous, multisyllabic price. Before Jorge can say anything he brings it down, by a margin that is meant to be proportional to the magnitude of their friendship, first as friends of friends, and now as cultivated, accomplished, attuned lovers of fine art.
“I don’t think I’ve introduced you to my daughter, Margarita” the dealer says.
Margarita gives Jorge a brief look, and sets the tray on the table.
Jorge feigns fullness, fighting the urge to append his mild protestation with a rub of the tummy.
“She takes tennis lessons—”
James blinks behind his glasses as Jorge Landicho interrupts to produce a checkbook. He scrawls an amount, signs the check and tears it out.
“Bring out some sherry,” he says to Margarita. “Why don’t you have dinner here, Jorge. My daughter’s only nineteen but she can cook anything mean and quick. What kind of food do you like?”
“I’m going out tonight, Dad,” Margarita announces.
“Never mind. We’ll go out to eat,” the dealer says.
“Don’t worry about me,” Jorge says, managing a quick look at his watch. “I have a dinner appointment.”
As usual, the dealer arranges for a time to make the delivery of the painting and the certificate of provenance at Jorge’s home. He shows him to the door, making a last offer for dinner. Margarita comes out of the bedroom, smelling of perfume. She is carrying a duffel bag and a tennis racket. She nods to her father and walks out, past the men, to the elevator bay.
Jorge Landicho emerges into the driveway, where the night is warm and all is quiet, save for the soft, muffled sounds of the street beyond the hedges that surround the condominium. Margarita is there, waiting on the pavement, a tall figure in jeans and a sport shirt, looking out toward the empty street.
She glances at Jorge and offers a vague look of recognition.
Jorge trembles, blinks, thinks to act suave, utters his name in a reflex formed out of cocktail parties and conventions. He offers a hand to shake, and recalls his first meeting with his art dealer, her father. He remembers the story and wonders if Margarita’s mother was that actress, that woman who was, he recalls, so beautiful on television and in the movies.
Margarita smiles shyly, a curve of light appearing on her cheek, then swiftly disappearing as she turns toward the sound of a car crunching gravel and going up the driveway. She opens the passenger door, swings her duffel bag and tennis racket inside, enters the car, and pulls the door shut. In the darkness of the driver’s side Jorge sees the shape of a man’s face, lit faintly by the glow of a cigarette. He watches as she takes the cigarette from him and sticks it in her mouth. He imagines that he sees her face a split second before it turns, looking at him with an expression that hides, in its infinite colors, shades of helplessness, sadness, pity and utter disdain.
Jorge Landicho returns home to a hungry dog and the smell of stale food and unwashed plates in the kitchen. He turns on the living room lights and imagines where his new painting might be, replacing perhaps the Ballardo fish vendor, which to him has always seemed too folksy, too ordinary, or the perhaps the Ambrosio portrait, now too light and flat. The Ambrosio was the first major piece he purchased, not off his dealer but from the artist himself. James brought him along to the studio. There was an unfinished canvas on the easel, a background in dark and complex layers, upon which the artist had penciled vague figures. “Are you selling this?” he asked the artist, then pressured him for a friendly price, as James himself had taught him.
In this manner, he sees his collection taking shape, through the long and difficult months, beginning from a bright moment of inspiration, then a period of darkness, of a muddled confusion, before finally coming through. He sits in his living room, mesmerized and nauseated by the colors and the faint smell of rotting food.
In the morning, the phone rings while Jorge is in the middle of preparing the dog’s meal. Bruno hasn’t been fed all day.
He is unfamiliar with the voice on the other end. “Mr. Landicho, you wrote out a check last week?” Yes, I remember the date, Jorge answers, seeing Margarita holding a tray full of porcelain in the slant of the afternoon sun. I even remember the time. He remembers writing out the check, laughing privately at the amount and wondering how he would cover it. He remembers calling his broker to unload the last batch of blue chips. PLDT, Metrobank, I don’t care, what’s the difference, sell the lot.
The march of events, a series of patterns, broken images and reflections swiftly gathers order. Yes, I know the date I wrote on the check. No. Was it the other week? The other day?
He remembers the bar of light across her cheek, the sound of her voice, so different from this woman talking to him, correcting him: the check was dated yesterday and clears today, and unfortunately, you have no funds to cover it.
Bruno growls. He is a black and brown blur in slow motion as he scampers toward the door, a split second before Jorge hears the knocking on the gate outside. He tells the woman to hold, stands up and scans his living room. In the afternoon light the paintings look rich and heavy, their clumps of hardened paint like clotted soup. He looks out through the blinds and sees black leather sandals under the gate, the bottom part of a wooden frame resting on them.
Outside, the sunlight is bright and prismatic. Jorge notices for the first time the flaking layer of green paint on the metal gate, the metal latch catching a spectrum of color from the morning sun. He feels the white flare on his scalp and nape as he grips Bruno by the collar, feeling a slow, deep growl build in his body as he gathers strength for an attack.
Now, as the knocking continues, “Masked Odalisque” takes precedence over his vision. The woman with an owl’s face, her flesh cast in dark light: a picture of love and desire. He remembers it as though it were a wild night of passion, a vivid scene from an old movie, or an unforgettable meal. Jorge realizes he can recall it stroke for stroke, color for color, this painting, along with all the other images in his gallery, even without needing to see any of them, the faces, the bodies and the places, coming in cruel and tender in the middle of the morning. •