Memory is a sea of floods and shallows whose tide carries our fortunes and miseries, the gleaming waves of pleasure and the stinking weeds of knotted regret. Sometimes it washes up the strand of a story to the place where our feet rest. In Basel I dream well and sleep badly after four days in Florence.
Surrealism in Paris
It is an early-November Friday and Bruno has the day off work. We became friends in Melbourne years ago when, at the invitation of a mutual friend, we made a dinner party for six people: aperitifs of strawberry bruschetta and cream sage omelette, asparagus gratin, seafood pie, blood orange sorbet with pink peppercorns, kangaroo fillet with poached peaches, and some other things I cannot remember; wine, for instance. Another friend made trifle.
Bruno is about sixty and in trim, with short white hair and a mischievous grin. The only time I have not seen him not smoke Camel filters is when he smoked a Cohiba cigar I brought from Havana. He is a complete epicurean and a moderate hedonist. In his cupboard is half a bottle of green-walnut liqueur which he made in 1991. He has consumed less than a nip each year. It is dark and smells old now.
In Basel we continue our Melbourne gluttony and after three nights of aperitifs and wine and three-course home kitchen fare we eat a late breakfast of strong black coffee and white-truffle rumbled eggs and take the tram to Riehen on the German border, where the Beyeler Foundation Museum is showing Surrealism in Paris. Behind the museum is a hillside of German grape vines whose yellowing leaves are tip-curling brown.
It is a big, big exhibition of paintings and sculptures and photographs of surrealists, their antecedents and the artists they influenced. There is de Chirico, Miro, Ernst, Breton, Ray, Dali, Giacometti, Picasso and others.
Giacometti’s bronze Woman with her Throat Cut captures me. It is a memory relic of exhibitions past. The only other time I saw it was in 1991 when the New South Wales Art Gallery showed many great works of the Guggenheim collections from Venice and New York. Basel is why I didn’t see it in Venice in October.
It is a small sculpture of an ambiguously skeletal and flesh-like reclining woman. Her legs are spread and her hips raised; one foot morphs into ribs which sit under her spine. Her back and neck are arched, her head shriveled and tilted back and her gaping mouth has just finished gasping for air.
Her throat is a long bronze hose with ribbed bands for vertebrae. There is a wedge cut out, leaving only a thin flap of metallic skin connecting her head and body. The wedge follows the neck’s arch and is almost imperceptible, but once seen, the violent horror of the moment – of flesh and bone being cut out so precisely with force – is revealed.
My fingers curl as if needles slide into the quick of my short-bitten nails.
We don’t talk much about the exhibition but after two hours go to the café in the Foundation’s gardens and order the soft and buttery smooth white wine of the hillside grapes, through which we walk, half an hour later, along a path to a church at the top. Half way up we pass by an abandoned border gate – ‘Your papers, please!’ Bruno demands of a time long ago – and just after the gate on the underhill side of the road we take a few fresh red apples from underneath some lichen-dappled trees.
There is no fence but the trees are planted thoughtfully. Bruno says it is not stealing if you take them Mundraub (literally mouth-robbery) – from the tree directly to the mouth. We eat them ten minutes later at the church, overlooking Riehen’s yellowing trees with Basel and the mountains in the distance, and I feel like a gleaner in an Agnes Varda documentary.
That evening at a restaurant overlooking the Rhein we have a three-hour three-course dinner of fish and steak and dessert and a five-course degustation of Italian prosecco, French sauvignon blanc, Portuguese cabernet and vin santo, and Italian grappa. It is late when we finally come home, sated, to sleep.I would only be a saint in spite of myself
A few hours later I wake with a dream from my miserable first few years in Melbourne, when I knew no-one and lived monastically and frugally doing a PhD I hated by the end. Altogether it was a depleting experience.
The dream follows on from four days in Florence, and the ten days I spent there a decade ago when I spent too many hours wondering why I was involved with a woman who was making me feel terrible. I spent so many hours on the steps of the Basilica di San Lorenzo that I did not go in.
This time I did, reluctantly, on my second attempt.
The first time I try I am empty handed and the compact, statuesque doorman holds out his hand – “Ticket?” – and then points around an obscure corner to where I should buy one. I come back with my four Euro ticket – “No photo”. I half stop and scowl as I enter without thanking him for his uniformed hospitality.
Four Euros is not much to see a church by Brunelleschi, some works by Donatello and Lippi and a sacristy with Michelangelo sculptures. Still, I feel I have bled so much money for museums and churches since I left Melbourne I should be bleeding from the stigmata. But I do not because first, I do not self-mutilate and second, each time I get annoyed about giving money to Jesus I swear either at him or about him.
My ambivalence started one Christmas at a simple church in Aberdeen, New South Wales, when I was very young and Jesus wasn’t two thousand years old. My parents gave me money for the collection plate, which I refused to hand over.
‘Put it on the plate,’ my father told me.
I shook my head. No way.
‘Put it on the plate.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s for baby Jesus.’
We never had reserve seating at church and I had to peer through many people to the altar where everyone was talking about this boy – ‘Well where is he?’ I asked, like I should give money to a kid who hasn’t turned up for his own birthday. On went the three silver coins.
My anger in Florence comes when I step inside the church. There is a box in front of a sign that tells me the church is definitely not an art gallery, not a bit like one, but a real church in fact, and I could keep its good work going with a donation actually.
Farrk’n Geezus. Either I’ve got the white-gripped ticket in my fingers which tells me it is an art gallery, or I’ve just donated at the cashier. When I get down to the altar I find I can't get in to see Michelangelo with my ticket. I have to go out again, and then around the back, and then pay a half-dozen more pieces at the entrance to the Medici Chapel which is connected to the church. God Al-bluddy-mighty.
I would only ever be a saint in spite of myself I reckon; but who wants to be one anyway? If you are any good at it your bones are dug up, and then hacked to pieces, and then stored in cold church treasuries rather than fertilizing everyone's daily bread. And how are you then going to get yourself back together when the last trumpet sounds if you’re all splintered up like that? I suppose every Saint has their own Houdini act.
... continues to Autumn leaves.
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