Athena by John Banville Page B

vanishing-point.
    At heart I am a hopeless romantic: I wished to believe in Josiah Marbot, that staid adventurer and beady-eyed snapper-up of unconsidered treasures. As I got to know the pictures I was convinced I was coming to know him, too (perhaps it was with him my phantom dialogues were conducted?), his bitter sense of humour, his taste for the grotesque, the diffident manner masking the ruthlessness of thededicated collector. I could almost see him, a thin old tall figure in frock-coat and stock making his slow way up through the house at nightfall, leaning on a pearl-handled cane, one arm behind him with fist pressed to the small of his bent back, the arthritic fingers curled. His rheumed eyes are still sharp, the corners of his mouth turn down (the teeth are long gone); his nose is thin and pointed and bloodlessly white, dry white, like these desiccated walls. He pauses at a window, his man with candle going on ahead capered about by shadows, and looks down into the narrow street; drizzle greases the cobbles; a carriage clops and creaks past, the nag’s head hanging; he is remembering an alleyway on the Ile de la Cité thirty years before, the darkness coming on as now, and a half-drunk fat dealer under a low, smoke-blackened ceiling bringing out a package wrapped in dirty rags and crooning and kissing bunched fingers as if it were one of his daughters he was offering the rich milord:
Vaublin, m’sieur – un vrai Vaublin!
I thought of his passion for pictures, or at least for collecting them, as somehow indecent, a secret vice. I imagined him haunting the showrooms, as he might have the great brothels of the time, in a subdued fever of longing and shame, stammering out his desire for something different, something special … Certainly his taste was for the louche and the deformed, yet the sports he possessed himself of looked perfectly proper – I mean, insofar as technique was concerned – like so many humpbacked, three-breasted whores tricked out in silks and crinolines.
    But what exactly did I make of these paintings, what exactly did I feel for them? (I am sitting here, by the way, with a pitying half smile on my face, like a magistrate listening to a doltish accused stumbling through his earnest and self-condemning testimony.) How can I say for certain what I felt or did not feel? The present modifies the past, it is a continuing, insidious process. That time, though it is only a little while ago, seems to me now impossibly distant, aprelapsarian era bathed in a tawny light and filled with the slow music of solitude. Did I give myself to the pictures with that sensation of inward falling that great art is supposed to provoke? Probably I did. True, I found them uncanny; they stared at me from across the room, remote and motionless, like a row of propped-up catatonics. But you see, I had never before been in such proximity to works of art, had never been allowed such freedoms, had never been permitted to take such liberties. It was like suddenly breaking through to a different version of reality, a new and hitherto undreamed-of dimension of a familiar world. It was like – yes, it was like what they seem to mean when they talk of love. To place one of these extraordinary artefacts before me on the little table in the white room and go to work on it with my tweezers and my magnifying glass was to be given licence to enter the innermost secret places of a sacred object. This was the surface the painter had worked in, I kept telling myself, these were the brushstrokes he had set down; still lodged in the paint would be a few stray atoms the creator had breathed out as he leaned rapt before his canvas three and a half centuries ago in a leaky garret on some back street of Antwerp or Utrecht under a sky piled high with gigantic clouds. That was how it seemed to me, that was how I thought; no wonder when I stood back and rubbed my eyes I could not focus on what was before me. I was like a lover who gazes in