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6
IN MY STUDIO, far from the crowd and its fashions, my spirit is free to wander. The cares of the day fall away and the essentials re-emerge. My thoughts track the moving images. I hardly notice the passing of time. The ashtray fills up, my extinguished pipes form an hourglass of ash. I classify my images and compare them with the paintings they most resemble. Given over to memory, I reconstruct the world as if it were an exposition of the imagination.
I barely glance at my real paintings. They are simply empty capsules of domesticated images, foreign to the workings of my mind. My daydreaming calls forth other pictures in turn. This strange process has stopped haunting me; the sequences meet in muffled interaction, as if filmed in slow-motion. With the passage of time the images have become less hostile to language. I can make them appear, accompanied by myths, archetypes or characters I’ve encountered in my reading. I can use a skein of ideas to capture an image that was once too impatient, too unstable. I make no attempt to understand what I’m doing, nor to understand myself. The process is beyond me; it contains ambiguity, chance, even horror. Much of it escapes me still, wedged deep in the chasm of memory.
Memory, after all, is the goddess of painting. Consciousness is not a field, not a place. Like light, its topology is fluid, it obeys a dynamic of interdependent illumination and obscurity. By lending it literary meaning, I can sometimes take it by surprise. Like a fisherman, I’ve learned to cast my nets wide — the snares of reason. Poetry and myth are my bait; images, by their feminine nature, are charmed by them. Happy with these disguises and new names, they surrender to my collector’s lust.
To the most restless among them I offer a Prometheus, and from the depths of a filthy jail cell I rescue a prisoner, body inert and eyes burning. With the Hiroshima theme I capture, with one stroke, a legion of dead bodies, the nameless corpses lying in the streets of my youth. To them I add the patients of the public health clinic and the drought refugee families waiting patiently to sell their daughters. With the Sisyphus myth, I transform the hordes bearing sacks on their backs into so many migrating ants. With the statues of the Pietà I capture the piercing stare of the abandoned children, standing in judgement of the passers-by. One single Job lets me capture hundreds of deformations and wounds exposed to the glare of noon. Jeremiah becomes a wild-eyed beggar who has long haunted my mind, and whom I could never have confronted otherwise. The Virgin Mary, too, who becomes one with Venus, Veronica and the woman of the Apocalypse, helps me intuit the form of that beautiful prostitute who taught me the ways of love. Out of Lazarus I shape the painful awakening of a beggar stirring in the corner of the garbage dump where I hunted rats as a boy. Danae as a mulatto whore; moonstruck Pierrot howling like a homeless dog; Leda and her Carnival swan embracing in the bushes of the city park. Marsyas the satyr as torture victim, Suzanna and the beggarly elders. Death helps me capture Carnival, and with it the masks and painful grimaces of a battalion of indigents dancing until exhaustion. An army of clowns from laughter to tears, their drooling mouths gaping open like a madwoman singing opera. Orpheus summons up the image of a black guitar player with a toothless smile who sang tales of razor fights. Everything has its use in this imaginary round of blindman’s buff: Theresa of Avila, the Madwoman of Spain, Abel and Jacob, Marsyas and the Scythian slave, the art critic and the middle manager, Lot’s daughters, Mother Courage and Putiphar’s wife. And of course the Pope, engaged in solitary masturbation or surrounded by the faithful thirsting after happiness. Then come the Baby Jesus, St. Anthony and Ganymede, Galileo and Hamlet, Queen Victoria, Margaret Thatcher and Sappho de Beauvoir.
I know it’s not proper, art isn’t made that way. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Ever since I became a hunter of images, I use whatever weapon falls to hand. Once captured, they become vain, docile, proud at last to step into a world of culture and civilization. I come from a faraway place where constructions of the intellect don’t exist. My pictures remain naive and wild, with none of the worldly refinements and make-up. Whenever they attack me or try to escape my efforts to paint them, I call on more sophisticated weaponry, like priests hunting down Indians with crucifixes. Painting is nothing but disguise, deceit and artifice. My Greek heroes, my poems and saints may look like beggars, refugees, whores and starving children. Too bad. That’s the fate of the immigrant. He has only a borrowed language to show things that cannot be shown. Who will speak of the man who holds the body of his dead child in his arms? Where are the Laocoons caught up in the tentacles of hunger, the Sisyphuses carrying their watercans up the steep slopes of the favelas? The lexicon and grammar come from foreign places. There is nothing we can do about it.
What’s the difference? My goal is to silence these images. To give them order, to disguise them as foreigners if necessary. Then I turn them face to the wall and move on to the next. With the passage of time and my own failures, the illusion that I’m painting real pictures has faded. All that remains is this lonely occupation, for in matters of the heart, Zarathustra saw more clearly than the Great Helmsman. I’ve stopped raging against art and criticizing the things that go on in galleries. That’s the business of the people native to this place. That way, I avoid the dilemma of the painter who is asked whether he sells many paintings. Which is like asking someone whose eldest daughter is just beginning her career as a whore whether she has many customers.
There are times of discouragement, when I’m overcome with doubt, when I long for a few certainties to give me confidence. I circle aimlessly, bitter about things I cannot properly define, waiting for something that will never come. The completion of a painting is like the mailman’s visit: a non-event. Even if I succeed perfectly and capture the essence of an image, I have nothing to show for it. Its silent cries and icy blows join the other canvases in my storeroom. If I wanted other results, I could have chosen a more effective way of changing reality, such as the hand grenade or the machine gun. But that’s not my nature. Working in a group, with teams and meetings, is a poor fit with my solitary, taciturn temperament. I am on intimate terms with the clamour of revolt rising from these imprisoned images, from these charnelhouses full of foreign faces, from the dislocated bodies left behind by flood and landslide, desiccated by a leaden sun. Or the fearful eyes of a child etched inside me with a strait-jacket’s grip. I continue to paint, without illusion, for the sole pleasure of seeing these things outside of my head.
7
I’M VERY HAPPY AT SCHOOL. It’s much better than I imagined. No one knows me, and the teacher hasn’t noticed me among all the others. Of course, she loses her temper as often as my mother does, but with the whole class, when we start to get out of hand. She hits my fingers with her wooden ruler only if I do something really bad. What I like best about school are the kids. For the first time I have friends my own age. There are so many of them and they’re all so different that sometimes the teacher catches me watching them. She thinks I’m half asleep, my head in the clouds, but she doesn’t mind. She laughs at my absent-mindedness, and I realize that in her eyes I’m not so bad. She even makes fun of me when she sees me watching the girls. I’m in love, she says. They’re all so pretty, like dolls in a toy shop: well-behaved, hair nicely combed, and the way they move slowly and glance out the corner of their eyes makes me jumpy. I’ve never seen girls like that before. I’m so attracted to them that I get caught staring, and everybody bursts out laughing. But at recess I don’t dare go near them. I stick with the boys instead, to play or fight. The girls don’t play. They stand around in tight-knit groups, dancing and giggling at us from a safe distance. My friends don’t go near them either, except to push them out of the way during a race. They must be just as scared of them as I am, and if they don’t stare quite so intently it’s because they’re used to girls, because they have sisters.
The day passes so quickly that before we know it, it’s time to line up for the schoolbus. It’s a long trip, since the bus drops the kids off one at a time across the city. We have the longest journey, first to get on in the morning, and last off at night. It’s a great ride, full of small-talk and shouting and neighbourhoods I’ve never seen before. The clean, neat streets where my schoolmates live are fascinating, full of trees, and they look better maintained than where we are. Then there’s the beach, with its handsome buildings, gardens and swings. My friends wait for the bus accompanied by immaculately uniformed maids who are almost white, or with their mothers who are as pretty as the ladies in romance magazines, and just