The Fugitivities, стр. 78
“Egon Schiele. There is a great painter of hands! I’m very fond of Austrian art, you know…Before I found this place, I thought about moving there. Had quite a few friends who left for Austria in ’83. But I haven’t kept in touch. I just want to paint. I just want to live quietly and enjoy the time that I have left. You’ll see, when you get to be my age, you see things differently. I’m more sensitive to time now, how little of it there truly is. And I’ve become greedy, in a way. I want to be surrounded by beauty. I want to paint the perfect hand, a hand so sublime that one day it will hang in the Museo Nacional!” Salvador laughed, so hard that it pitched him into a brutal fit of coughing. Then he was composed again. “I’ll be saved, you see,” he went on. “I’ll be saved by the curators. The critics. After you and I are long dead and gone, they will need careers and reputations, and then I will be rediscovered, celebrated—an overlooked, neglected master.”
“Maybe, but then again, maybe not. I don’t think my generation even believes in the idea of artistic greatness.”
“You’re a sharp little monkey, aren’t you?”
“What did you say?”
“Don’t think you impress me. You’re still just a boy. I, however, am a man. I have struggled. I have known what it is to believe in something, to do whatever it takes even to achieve small, pitiful victories. You haven’t struggled for anything in your life. It was all handed to you. And what have you done with it? Your entire generation…grown up with the whole thing handed to you. The war over, the dust settled. You’re decadent, flabby. You forget that you are living in the world we won for you. We fought the Communists! We were the ones who eliminated them, so that you could come of age with all the world at your fingertips, playing with your new gadgets, shopping, living it up. How old are you? What do you know about anything?”
Jonah got up to leave, but the old man surprised him, crying out for him to stay, pleading with him pathetically over a sudden coughing fit. As Jonah wavered, Salvador fished under his easel amid a pile of rags and produced a bottle of whiskey. He took a couple of jars over to a sink in the far corner of the room and rinsed them out. The studio was getting dark. Jonah felt paralyzed. He looked around for a light to switch on, or a lamp, but there was none. When Salvador returned, he poured them each a large glass and sat down again in silence. Jonah realized he could barely see the painter’s face now, just the deep bluish outline of his features, a glint of arctic sheen.
“Do you know what I like about painting?” Salvador began again, resuming his philosophical tone. Jonah put the glass of whiskey to his lips as Salvador continued.
“I like its faithfulness. All a good painting requires is faithfulness. Looking steadfastly at the abyss and accepting the world for what it is. Not just tolerating it. Weak men can do that. But taking it whole, as the greatest artists do. I have struggled my whole life to do it. But I have not yet succeeded. Now I have so few years left. One day, you will understand this. Or perhaps you won’t. I was born in a time of war. I lived the wars of my time. There is only one law of human life. The permanence of war. And I faced it. I didn’t grow up behind a screen.”
Salvador carefully lit the end of a cigarette. The hot eye drifted in the gloam as the old man took a deep drag. He offered one, and Jonah accepted. When his own smoke was lit, he was ready with a reply.
“Maybe there’s something more powerful,” Jonah said. “Something real in the world, that escapes your law of war. Always and everywhere. And maybe it’s just that you need to believe in war because the things you needed to figure out in your life, you’ve always left empty.”
“Ah, you think perhaps I am merely a doddering old man. You have the idealism of youth, and yet your life, just as mine was, will be dominated by power. Even more so, yes, even more so. Ha! Look at you! A Negro, or what do you prefer we call you now? Black? You know, I’ve always been curious…how does it feel to be a black? I have often wondered. It seems like it would be quite terrible, if you don’t mind me saying so. It seems like a cruel joke. One even feels sorry for you, up to a point. A people have to know when they are defeated. The Indios, the slaves. You can’t unwrite the history, can you? It isn’t my fault, is it? What has come to pass. You can’t fight the nature of men. The war between us is permanent. Look how your towers have fallen. Dirty wars. Who has the dirt on their hands now? We laugh at the pictures of Abu Ghraib because you Americans are stupid enough to take them. You know what has to be done but you have no maturity, no stomach, no seriousness of purpose. I see by the look on your face that you are shocked by my words. But it is you who is not living in the real world. The real world is the law of violence: directed, organized by the will of men. The strong take violence into their own