City by Alessandro Baricco Page B

for an unspecified number of years, and decided, in 1918, to give them to his country, France, in homage to its victory in the First World War. He continued to work on them to the end of his life, and he died, on December 5, 1926, before being able to see them exhibited to the public. A curious tour de force, they received contradictory critical judgments, being at times described as prophetic masterpieces and at times as, at best, decorations for dressing up the walls of a brasserie. The public, however, continues even today to regard them with unconditional and rapt admiration.
    As Prof. Mondrian Kilroy himself was fond of pointing out, the
Waterlilies
presents an obviously paradoxical feature—disconcerting, he was fond of saying—and that is the despicable choice of subject: for three hundred feet of length and six of height, they immortalize solely a pond of waterlilies. Some trees, fleetingly, a bit of sky, perhaps, but essentially: water and waterlilies. It would be difficult to find a subject more insignificant, in effect kitsch, nor is it easy to grasp how a genius could have conceived of devoting years of work and hundreds of square feet of color to such nonsense. A single afternoon and the outside of a teapot would have been more than sufficient. And yet it is precisely in this absurdity that the genius of the
Waterlilies
begins. It is so evident—Prof. Mondrian Kilroy would say—what Monet intended to do. He intended to paint nothingness.
    To paint nothingness must have been such an obsession for him that the last thirty years of his life seem, in hindsight, to have been possessed—utterly consumed—by it. And from the exact day when, in November of 1893, he bought an extensive piece of land adjacent to his property at Giverny, and conceived the idea of constructing a large pool for aquatic flowers—in other words, a pond filled with waterlilies. A project that could, reductively, be interpreted as an old man’s taking up of an aesthetic hobby, and which, on the other hand, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy did not hesitate to define as the conscious, strategic first move of a man who knew perfectly well where he was going. In order to paint nothingness, he first had to find it. Monet did something more: he produced it. He surely understood that the solution to the problem was not to obtain nothingness by leaving out the real (ordinary abstract painting can do something like that) but, rather, to obtain nothingness by a process of progressive breakdown and dispersal of the real. He understood that the nothingness he was looking for was the whole, caught in an instant of momentaneous absence. He imagined it as a free zone between what existed and what no longer existed. He was not unaware that this would be a rather lengthy undertaking.
    â€œExcuse me, my prostate is calling”—Prof. Mondrian Kilroy customarily said when he reached this point in Lecture No. 11. He would go to the bathroom and return a few minutes later, visibly relieved.
    The record tells us that in those thirty years Monet spent much more time working in his garden than he did painting: ingenuously, the record splits in two an action that in fact was one, and that Monet performed with obsessive determination every moment of his last thirty years:
creating
the
Waterlilies.
Cultivating them and painting them were simply different names for the same adventure. We can imagine that what he had in mind was: waiting. He had had the wit to choose, as a starting point, a corner of the world in which reality was characterized by a high degree of evanescence and monotony, a muteness nearly without meaning. A pond of waterlilies. The problem then was to induce that portion of the world to unload any residual dross of meaning—to bleed it, empty it, dissipate it to the point of near-total disappearance. Its lamentable
existence
would then become little more than the simultaneous presence of various vanished absences. To achieve