Gabriel's Moon, page 7
Yes, he thought, as he waited in the pale, oak-panelled room, but – the question nagged at him repeatedly – how did Faith Green know about the firing squad a month before the rest of the world? Maybe the answer was in his tapes of the interview—
Katerina Haas appeared at the door in her crisp lab coat, a rich, emerald-green Paisley-patterned silk scarf at her neck. Different lipstick, also, Gabriel noticed as he followed her into the white room. A lighter pink, bubblegum – was that the word? – or maybe fuchsia. Get a grip, man, he told himself. This is meant to be about your insomnia, not Katerina Haas’s fashion notes.
EXTRACTS FROM THE TRANSCRIPTION OF SESSION 3
DR HAAS: Tell me something about your mother. What you remember.
GABRIEL DAX: She was young, only thirty-six when she died. Very loving to me. She smoked a lot – always had a cigarette in her hand. I’ve seen photographs of her, naturally, but when you’re young you’re not storing away memories or impressions. Life just washes over you – it happens, uncommented-on. She was my mother, simple as that. To be honest, I can’t really bring her to mind today at all, however hard I try. And, of course, that upsets me. The concept is there – I had a mother, I knew her, I saw her dead body – but it’s very blurry, very indistinct. I don’t even know if the memories I have of her are real – or if I’ve made them up, in compensation.
DR HAAS: Was she more loving to you than your brother?
GABRIEL DAX: I can’t remember. I was at home and my brother was away at boarding school. Therefore all her attention was concentrated on me.
DR HAAS: Was it stifling? Cloying, in any way?
GABRIEL DAX: No.
DR HAAS: Was there anything overwrought about your mother’s attention to you?
GABRIEL DAX: I don’t think so. As far as I remember it was a normal mother–son relationship. I keep repeating this, I know, but I was only six years old – I wasn’t exactly analysing my experiences, storing them away.
DR HAAS: Do you think your relationship with your mother colours your sexuality in any way?
GABRIEL DAX: What? Ah. I’m not sure I fully understand what you’re asking me.
DR HAAS: I mean, are you attracted to a certain kind of person? Do you feel drawn to a ‘type’? Are you emotional? Warm? Carefree? Or are you more cold and self-possessed? More driven, focused?
GABRIEL DAX: I don’t think so. I’m attracted to attractive people. Like most people. I don’t think that there’s anything odd about my sex life, if that’s what you’re driving at. Certainly, there’s nothing perverse about it, I’d say. I’m a young man, I have needs that I—
DR HAAS: What excites you, sexually?
GABRIEL DAX: I don’t know. Beauty. Energy. Intellect. Humour.
DR HAAS: Do these epithets apply to your current sexual partner?
GABRIEL DAX: Ah . . . yes. Sort of. Except I should say that she’s not from my social class. She’s not a middle-class, educated person. She’s more ‘working class’. I have to say I find that sexually very stimulating – to be honest.
DR HAAS: Why do you think that is?
GABRIEL DAX: I’ve no idea. Maybe it’s a problem with Englishmen of my class. You have to understand, Dr Haas, this country is utterly class-ridden. Utterly. Maybe you don’t see it as I do but almost everything about this country, good and bad, large and small, can be explained and understood in terms of class. Including, I have to say, my feelings towards my girlfriend. In fact, I feel a little ashamed to have confessed that to you.
DR HAAS: There’s no shame in this room, Mr Dax. Only honesty.
GABRIEL DAX: Well, that’s very gratifying to know.
7.
Madrid To Cádiz
Gabriel liked Madrid – it was his favourite Spanish city – particularly in winter. Its boulevards and broad avenues seemed suited to the colder months of the year – a kind of agreeable melancholy suffusing the dark, brown, shabby streets. Part of him responded simply to the change of location. There were the grand squares and plazas, of course, proudly situated with their huge, palatial, ornamented buildings of state and commerce, with their ancillary fountains, statues and tended flower beds, but the real city, it always seemed to him, was more furtive, more knocked-about, less grandiose. Turn corners, go down side streets and alleyways – that was where you would encounter Madrid’s true soul.
He had hired a car at the airport, as instructed – a Simca Aronde – and had driven it to his hotel in central Madrid. It was the Hotel Florida on the Plaza del Callao, chosen for him by the Institute of Developmental Studies. A three-star, modest establishment, centrally positioned. He paid for an upgrade to their only suite. ‘Any fool can be uncomfortable,’ as Lord Cardigan had said on the eve of the Charge of the Light Brigade, waiting on his private yacht in Balaclava’s harbour for the next day’s battle. It was a sentiment that Gabriel often repeated to himself, particularly when he stretched his budget.
He settled himself into his suite and then wandered out into the night looking for food and drink. He found an art deco bar – Bar America – that offered cocktails and something to eat. He drank two dry martinis and ate several slices of tortilla as he contemplated the situation he found himself in. As ever, he took out his notebook and wrote in it. Writing stabilized thoughts; it allowed you to see connections that thoughts alone didn’t. He wrote:
Patrice Lumumba
Dr Katerina Haas
Faith Green
Blanco
Sefton Roscommon
But no. There was no new insight or enlightenment forthcoming. Katerina Haas was a different, unconnected engagement, he supposed, something that would be worked out progressively between him and her as the sessions continued. What was the connection between Lumumba, Faith and Blanco? Was there even a connection? He had no idea. Perhaps Lumumba’s name should be erased – he was only present on the list because of the fact that Faith Green had been on that plane from Léopoldville to Brussels. His brain felt fatigued, dull. He knew he was in possession of about two per cent of the facts he needed, if that. However, the thought nagged at him, uncomfortably, like a shard of gravel in his shoe. Faith Green had told him of Lumumba’s death – in some precise detail – almost a month before the news broke, globally, officially. She had been in Léopoldville, at least twice. And now Faith Green had paid him an extremely generous sum of money to do this fairly undemanding job, this Sefton-style favour. Was there any connection? Or should he simply stop expending brain energy trying to find one?
But the questions didn’t cease. Why had he said yes to her? He told himself it was because of the money but he knew it was something to do with the strange allure, the covert power and influence of Faith Green. He wanted to do it simply because she had asked him to do it. Had he wanted to please her, in some weak way? What would Katerina Haas have made of that? He began to despair of himself, caught in a puzzle of conflicted feelings. He should be back at home in Chelsea planning his book about the great rivers of the world.
He thought about a third martini but decided against. He had to make a very early start if he was to reach Cádiz by nightfall tomorrow. He had many hundreds of kilometres to go. He paid his bill and wandered out into the city at night.
Out on the dark streets, with the street lamps’ ineffectual puddles of custardy light barely illuminating the pavements ahead of him, he felt the familiar heart-thump, the pulse-beat of the travel drug. It was exciting – here he was alone in a big foreign city. This was what it was all about, surely? It was a familiar feeling to him: this liberation, this potential, this prospect of the new, the unfamiliar. This was why he travelled – this was why people travelled, he supposed, even if they didn’t know why. But the old adage was right: he travelled the furthest who travelled alone. If Lorraine had been with him, for example, his mood would have been entirely different, compromised . . .
He wandered back to the hotel, taking in the night-time sights, the smells, the hubbub of the traffic with its blaring klaxons, the incoherent chatter of passers-by conversing. A gaunt beggar offered him a bunch of sweet-smelling jasmine and he thrust a note in the toothless man’s hand and walked on. He held the scant bouquet to his nose, breathing in the sweet, farinaceous fragrance: a bunch of jasmine in Madrid. He had never bought jasmine before.
He left Madrid in the lacy light of dawn, taking Road Number IV, one of Spain’s six major asphalted highways, so his guidebook told him. Madrid, Aranjuez, Toledo, Córdoba, Sevilla, Cádiz. The celebrated towns and cities passed by. He only stopped for petrol. The road was quiet with very few cars or lorries. He parked by the side of the highway at midday – the sun obscured by a thin baggage of clouds, unusually high – and ate a dry cheese sandwich and drank a bottle of gassy Coca-Cola. He drove on – windows open to let the warm air flow by him – through vast plantations of olive trees, endless squat forests of olive trees. Beside Road IV there were many odd hamlets of conical thatched huts belonging to agricultural workers. Sometimes, he felt he was driving through Africa.
Cádiz. He entered the city at dusk through the Puerta de Tierra. It took him a while, negotiating the narrow, ill-lit streets of the old town to find his hotel, the El Loreto, on the Calle Sagasta, one block from the seafront. His room, like all the other rooms, looked inward, on to a central courtyard with a tall palm tree and a huge unpruned begonia creeper overwhelming a trellis above a terrace set out with a few tables and chairs. His room was shabby with a pervasive odour of mothballs and old blankets and the bathroom at the end of the corridor smelt candidly of shit. Thank you, the Institute of Developmental Studies, he thought. He would check out in the morning and find something more salubrious. The Hotel de France et Paris sounded ideal: ‘very fair’, according to his guidebook.
He wandered down to the seafront. It was a blustery evening and great waves crashed against the angled stone walls protecting the promenade. Within about two minutes five filthy barefoot children were gathered round him, hands held out. ‘Pesetas, pesetas,’ they whined at him. He had some change from his many purchases of petrol and he threw the coins on the pavement and let the urchins fight amongst themselves. He strode off, looking for a café. He found a large, well-lit bar with a terrace by the arcades of a market, ordered a beer and some tapas. Two stooped and ancient women tried to sell him lottery tickets. A man with a horrible goitre wobbling at his throat shook a tin cup at him. Gabriel gave him a five-peseta note. Another man in a cheap checked suit offered to take his photograph. He declined. Then the dirty children from the promenade found him again and gathered round his table, their hands held out, and he decided that this city of importuners was too exhausting for his first night. He sought the sanctuary of the Hotel El Loreto and slept very badly.
The next morning, he telephoned Blanco’s studio from the cabin in the foyer.
‘Hola, digame,’ a woman’s voice answered.
‘Buenas días. ¿Habla Inglés?’
‘Is this Mr Dax?’
‘Ah, yes. Yes, it is. How did you know?’
‘We were expecting your call.’
‘Really? May I ask how come?’
‘Your gallery advised us you were in Cádiz.’ She spoke good English, almost sounding American.
‘Right. My gallery. Did they . . .?’ Faith Green at work, he thought. ‘Good. I wonder if—’
‘Do you know how to find the studio?’
‘I have an address.’
‘It is on the road to Algeciras, about ten minutes outside of the city. There’s a sign on the road. Estudio de Blanco.’
‘When would be a convenient time?’
‘Shall we say noon?’
‘I’ll see you at noon.’
He checked out of the Loreto, threw his grip into the Simca’s boot and motored east out of the city. He passed a bullring and then drove along a dead straight road with densely green orange groves on one side and the silvered meshes of salt marshes on the other. He saw the sign on the right, ‘Estudio de Blanco’, and turned down a dirt track through large sand dunes to find, at the end, a blocky modernist house made of concrete. 1930s, he thought, the concrete patched and visibly crumbling here and there, unable to cope with the harsh, corrosive, saline winds of the Atlantic, he supposed. He parked his car beside a rusty Citroën van, stepped out and looked around. He could hear the sea – the near-booming crash of surf – but it was invisible from where he was standing. The house boasted many terraces and the top floor had a jutting balcony, like a deck, supported by scaffolding. Everything about the Estudio de Blanco was on the decrepit side, the consequences of a reputation on the wane, he assumed. He tightened the knot on his tie and smoothed the creases of his suit. It was navy blue linen – he looked a bit rumpled, he thought. Still, he was an ‘art dealer’, after all – suitably dressed to fit the subterfuge.
The main door opened and a young woman appeared wearing jeans and a suede jacket, her long dark hair stretched back in a ponytail. In her late thirties, Gabriel guessed. A strong, angular face with a prominent nose.
‘Mr Dax. Welcome to the studio. I am Inès Montano.’
Inside, the house was in better repair. Dark, wooden floors, and whitewashed walls carrying a freight of Blanco’s paintings. They were all to do with imbalance. Crazy buildings that looked about to topple. Headlands forming elongated cliffs teetering on the edge of collapse. Bridges with preposterously long arches. Giant trees with disproportionate branches. They were strangely affecting, Gabriel had to admit, the impossibility of the exaggerated disproportion almost making you feel unsteady yourself – vertiginous.
‘Are you Señor Blanco’s wife?’ Gabriel asked.
She laughed, as if the notion was absurd.
‘I’m his sister,’ she said. ‘Come and meet the maestro.’
They went upstairs to the top floor. Here was Blanco’s studio, though it resembled a sitting room with sofas and a coffee table with a vase of yellow flowers and a thick purple and black Moorish rug on the floor. Blanco was actually painting at an easel in the corner of the room when they entered. The painting looked like a man on a freakishly extended diving board, or a pirate walking an endlessly long plank – Gabriel couldn’t quite make it out.
Blanco was wearing a navy pinstriped suit and a shirt and tie, looking more like a banker or an accountant than an artist. He put his brush and palette down, wiped his hands on a towel, and crossed the room to greet them. He was of medium height, a slim, neat man, in his fifties, with thick hair greying at the temples. He had classic, even features: smooth olive skin, strong jaw, straight nose, luminous, searching brown eyes. He must have been a very handsome young man, Gabriel thought – Latin film-star material. Yet here he was in his sitting room in his crumbling, modern concrete house, in a suit and shirt and tie, painting – almost provocatively bourgeois and unpretentious.
Gabriel handed over his Aldous Dax Fine Art business card. Blanco studied it carefully.
‘The gallery is in West Kensington? I don’t associate that area of London with art.’ He spoke excellent English, also, Gabriel observed, but with a marked Spanish accent, unlike his mid-Atlantic sister.
‘It’s a temporary move,’ Gabriel improvised. ‘While we look for a bigger space.’
Inès offered a drink. Sherry? Whisky? Wine?
Gabriel asked for a glass of white wine and launched into his rehearsed spiel. A client of Aldous Dax Fine Art – an anonymous client – wanted to buy a Blanco drawing. Simple as that. Wanted to buy direct from the artist, not through a gallery in Spain. Hence Gabriel’s journey to Cádiz.
Blanco seemed unperturbed. Inès brought wine and a bowl of salted almonds. They sat down, drank and munched on nuts, talking about the art world and its unregulated skulduggeries. Blanco seemed particularly bitter. He had left his gallery in Madrid, he said with fervour, was thinking of suing his dealer. He was finished with the Spanish art world.
‘Perhaps your gallery could take me on in London?’ he said. ‘I showed in London in 1948 and 1951. Very successful.’
‘It’s certainly to be considered,’ Gabriel said. ‘We’d be honoured to represent you.’
This prospect cheered Blanco up and he took Gabriel over to the far end of the studio where there was a large table. Many small drawings had been laid out on it in preparation for his visit. Studies, Blanco explained, for the bigger paintings. Gabriel had been told the approximate dimensions required: the drawing should be no bigger than the size of the standard novel. Postcard size would do, at a pinch. Gabriel scanned the assembled sketches – all pen and ink, scribbled hastily, full of blotches and spills. He saw one – a building that grew wider as it grew taller, defying every rule of engineering and law of architecture.
‘I like that one,’ he said. ‘Very arresting.’
Blanco slid it towards him and signed it swiftly: ‘Blanco ’.
‘One hundred thousand pesetas,’ Blanco said.
‘Agreed.’
About £500 at the current rate of exchange, he calculated. He was saving the Institute a lot of money.
‘I can pay you in cash, travellers’ cheques or a banker’s draft,’ Gabriel said. Cash was preferable, he was told. Gabriel went back outside to his car and extracted the fat envelope from his grip. He had £1,000 worth of pesetas – great wodges of notes. He counted out 100,000 and returned to the studio. Blanco had disappeared – having his regular siesta, Inès explained. She accepted the money and handed over the drawing, now secured between two pieces of stiff cardboard.
