Island of Demons (4 page)

“Would you like Mr Bonnet to write it on the reverse for you?”

“Lovely,” she cooed. Jacob relaxed and smirked. I went and took down the painting, pulled a pencil from my inside pocket. I hesitated at what I knew was another defining moment. I could jot down something obscene and insulting, draw a vicious caricature of Mrs van Damm, sketch my own face with extended tongue. Instead, I looked at my happy parents, Vorderman chestswelling and relaxed, sighed and wrote “Doggie in Pastiche”. Yet in some strange way, I was enjoying this, biting down on my own pain and humiliation in a toothache-sucking fashion. Dr Freud was teaching us to call that “masochism”.

Over by the drinks table, knocking it back without dissimulation, was a bunch of my contemporaries at the art school. As I approached, they turned to face me and greeted me with undisguised sniggers.

“At least the food and wine is the real stuff,” smirked Bakker, a skinny, stooped figure in a threadbare jacket, who passed for something of a radical in student circles.

“Meaning the art isn't?”

He fluttered fingers of protesting innocence. “Did I say that? People come for different things.” He poured another glass to show what he had come for. At least they were using glasses, not swigging directly from the bottle. “The last public event that was sure enough of an audience to go uncatered was probably the crucifixion. But what happened to constructivism, expressionism, surrealism … even impressionism, for God's sake?

“This stuff …” he swung the glass unsteadily round the room “… isn't what you'd call directly destructive of late capitalism is it, old man?” He smiled with false sweetness and slipped a condescending arm around my shoulder. I shook myself free.

“Is that what art is to be measured by, its power of destruction? What about the giving of innocent pleasure, the struggle for form and mastery of technique – the purely aesthetic?”

They fell about in simulated humorous collapse, slapped each other on the back, gasped for air, clutched at the table. The silent films, with their exaggerated gestures, were upon us.

“True art,” he smirked as one imparting a sad lesson to a slow child, “is the expression of the will of the proletariat.”

“But, but …” I thought of my firm-chested peasants, my noble horny-handed sons of toil “… does not every line here speak of the dignity of labour, the integrity of the peasant?”

His eyes blazed with anger. “Bourgeois false consciousness,” he snarled. Red spots of sale appeared in his cheeks. “The rural masses collaborating in their own exploitation?”

I pointed to my own red spots. “Does it count for nothing that so many have been sold? You lot would give your right arm – arms – to sell like that.”

Bakker, suddenly calm, regarded me with genuine pity. “Dear boy. The fact that so many people buy you is the clearest proof of all that, either you are no good, or you are being tragically misunderstood.” He pursed his lips to deliver oracular judgement. “My own view is that they understand you only too well.” He sneered. “Go on. Go back to your …” he camply lisped the word and did something showgirly with his legs “public”, making it obscene.

I turned abruptly, eyes full of tears, only to cannon into something small and hard – a diminutive person, all in black with prominent teeth and hand outstretched, a sort of bucktoothed Toulouse Lautrec.

“Tidmans,” he sucked inspiration from the teeth, “
Telegraf
.”

Tidmans, the famous art-critic whose articles were like little polished jewels, collected to be published every year in book form. He was justly famous for his insight, his uncanny ability to go beyond the particular in an artist's work to seize some point of more general validity. He sandwiched my single hand warmly in both of his and nodded at the students.

“The adulation of one's coevals,” he ducked his head modestly to show he had had his share of it. “This must be a wonderful moment for you,” he chuckled. “A young artist's first exhibition! But it won't be all like this, you know.” He twinkled avuncular wisdom. “There will be bad times too, when it seems you are not getting the recognition you deserve and it is as if the whole world is conspiring to bring you down. That's when you must think back to the rare moments of unalloyed triumph like this!”

After that, there were other trips to Italy, other exhibitions, in the course of which I established a small but faithful clientèle or, to use Bakker's word, public, still interested in the classic depiction of the human form. But these suffered from a law of diminishing returns and, little by little, I felt my art drying out and withering beneath my fingers. I knew I was treading out a final pressing. I sought other Italian valleys and mountains, served my artistic apprenticeship in Florence at the feet of Michelangelo's Luigi – I mean David. I hunted out new suns. By a drunkard's logic, if heat-soaked Italy had been good for me, perhaps blazing North Africa would be even better. All I found was unromantic dust, tedium, pilfering and unwashed, disobliging youths. I toured the cathedral cities of Italy, lit candles in a dozen basilicas, bathed my blank Protestant soul in the light of stained glass, prayed for a new path, a sign. Then, on a journey to Rome, in my twenty-eighth year, inspiration abruptly came to me, not as an angel, a visually transformed altarpiece or a message from God but in the form of a small, podgy Dutchman in shorts and high, laced-up boots.

“Nieuwenkamp.” He had the limp, boneless grip of all Dutchmen who have worked in the Indies where the natives touch, but do not squeeze, white hands. “Wijnand Nieuwenkamp.”

I was – we were – staying in a small
pensione
near the Spanish steps run by another widow – this time Dutch – who kept canaries dotted about the terrace in small cages. It was the year of 1923 and there were three of us at the table, the last being MC Escher, an artist with a huge though diseased graphic talent, that condemned him to an obsession with the transformation of geometric forms. As we spoke, he was bent over the tabletop of pierced metal, his dark hat held underneath, his head cocked sideways in an attempt to transform the floral swirls that made up its solid surface into the empty ground of the dark shapes thus created with the hat. As I say, he was obsessed. His gift was mathematical rather than purely artistic and mathematicians are often more than a little strange. Escher looked at the whole world through a mop of dark hair with the innocent gaze of a child staring at a turning tin angel above its cot and Nieuwenkamp talked about him as though he weren't there. He poured red wine into our glasses from the carafe and I could see Escher juggling his eyeballs, mentally converting half-empty into half-f and back again.

“Come up to my room,” said Nieuwenkamp, “and see my etchings, as the actress said to the bishop.” Then he saw Escher's swimming eyes. “Wait, no. Better you stay here and I'll bring them down. It's the hall, the stairs you see – they're all covered in square, black and white tiles and up on the first floor, someone has set two mirrors on the walls at forty-five degrees to each other. Once he sees them, he gets frozen in the perspective, can't move, the sorry bugger. Are they going up, are they coming down, approaching us, receding? He's there for hours every day staring at those bloody tiles. The second floor's worse. There they've got a convex mirror.”

Escher had started sketching, dribbling, turning pages, unaware that we were even there, threading his pencil in and out of his beard. It was the window now that had him. The ratio of height to breadth of the individual panes of glass, it seemed, was the same as that of the whole casement to the frame. The sun, shifting round the patio, hit the canaries and they burst into sudden song.

“Nested structures,” sighed Nieuwenkamp ambiguously. “Recursive something-or-others. He's always on about it.” He shrugged and clattered off upstairs in the boots, reappearing, several minutes later, with a large, elegant book. “My Balinese pictures!” He glowed with authorial pride, lay the book down with a comforting thump, pushed it across at me. “You say you've sucked Italy dry. Bali, latest jewel of our eastern empire, a whole new world just waiting to be captured! Privately published of course.”

As usual I noticed the style before the form, rather crude drawings, weak use of shadow and colour, clumsy figures – the work of a book illustrator, not an artist. Escher was now on his knees under the table looking up at the cover with wonder through the pierced tabletop. It occurred to me that both had lived lives softened by family money, no need to compromise, to earn a living. Neither would have cut his teeth on the ladies of the corsetry trade. I turned the pages, scarcely able to breathe. It was all there – ancient temples and palaces, dances, markets, towering volcanoes, trees so old and twisted they were rooted in time itself. Money for old rope. One picture showed rice terraces cascading down a hill, each sinuous mudbank in counterpoint to the next. Escher, now peering at it through his fingers, danced on the spot and whimpered, like a dog watching a squirrel up a tree. If you imagined the image in two dimensions, it was as if a giant had flung a rock into a lake and sent out rippling reverberations from a hidden centre.

“I was there when the troops went in in 1906,” said Nieuwenkamp. “Cycled all over the island, drawing. Been back since, of course. Oh, yes, it's changed. We have brought them the blessings of corrugated iron and syphilis but it's still special. Friendliest people on earth. Best of all …” he turned another page and pointed, “… tits! Lots of 'em. Only the harlots and Dutch women wear blouses. No point in giving away what you can sell, eh?” He had painted a chubby woman doing her hair, with elbows up, in an awkward pose better calculated to exhibit her breasts. “Brazen!” His epiglottis was working away. “Blazing!” With an effort he calmed himself. “Actually, of course, it's a form of innocence. Eve not knowing she's naked and all that. I seem to remember from your last show you're a tits man, Bonnet? Thought so.”

All that came to mind was corsets. But I could see myself reworking that picture, making it better, shifting the torso more to one side, cocking the sinews of the thighs, catching the tone of the muscles moving under the skin, the play of shadow, the delicate planes and contours of the face that Nieuwenkamp had turned into a featureless blob. From somewhere came a whiff of coconut oil and patchouli, the authentic smell of the East. It was Escher's hairoil, he standing close behind me, working away at a sketch. He held it out to us smiling, a savant child wanting his parents' praise. By a series of slow transformations across the page, a volcano – belching flame and smoke – had become a bare-breasted maid with elaborate plumed headdress had become a smiling, muscular youth with a suitcase marked “Bonnet” on his head, the whole quite beautifully drawn.

“Well would you look at that,” said Nieuwenkamp, wonderingly. “Not so daft, then.”

2

You might reasonably expect, at this point, that I would return to the subject of Walter, allowed to drop in the previous digression, but the moment is not yet right. You left me in Rome. I have to get to Java and that getting was no small matter.

My mother, her mind haunted by images of colonial heat, insects – possibly even Komodo dragons – was convinced that I would die.

“Why is it we worry more about you than all our six other children put together?” she sobbed.

“The Indies is not Africa, mother. Our people live long, healthy lives there, given the proper precautions. Anyway,” I added with the heartlessness of youth, “everyone has to die somewhere.”

Proper precautions were much on the mind of my father, certain that I would fall foul of the exotic women he knew to roam abroad not just singly, as in Amsterdam, but in great wild herds. His parting gift to me, slipped into my pocket on the harbour jetty, was a large, flat tin embossed with the names of Goodyear and Hancock. In my innocence, I had assumed it was a puncture repair kit for the bicycle I had declared I would buy in emulation of Nieuwenkamp. Only later, when stowing my gear in the tiny cabin, did I open it to find a confusing sausage of sturdy rubber with instructions for scrubbing in hot water after use and regular airing to prevent the growth of mould.

The little boat,
Bintoehan
, of the KPM line was a smart tin toy. Nearly new and brightly painted she was somewhat too frisky for many of the passengers in the slow swell that set in immediately we left Rotterdam. Deft Javanese stewards roamed the corridors with tinkling dinner gongs and hips that swayed to the memory of other gongs in childhood
gamelan
orchestras, trying in vain to tempt the passengers off their sickbeds. My own stomach withstood the pounding, indeed the sea air had lent me fierce appetite. I dined virtually alone in the dining room, sumptuously over-served, under a poster that sang the charms of Bali. At that time it seemed to me wonderfully evocative. It showed a beautiful slant-eyed maid sitting erect and cross-legged and holding a lotus flower as a Madonna her child. The older eyes of memory reveal it as nothing but – to use Mrs van Damm's word – a hopeless and embarrassing pastiche – an obviously Javanese girl with Javanese covered breasts, sitting awkwardly in a male pose, Balinese headdress slapped on her head and holding a Buddhist icon. It was the sort of thing that nowadays Professor Grits would write humourlessly about in grim erudition – “Colonial Photography – no Photgraphies – and the Framing of the Cultural Negative”, or some such nonsense. Never mind. It fired my imagination as I chewed my way through endless dishes spiced with chilli and turmeric – the Dutch
rijstafel –
a meal for the indecisive that allows you to taste everything without finishing anything, served on a bed of steaming rice. It was still the jazz age, a fact confirmed by a list of cocktails illustrated by a sophisticated sketch of a dancing glass. Embarking cautiously on the path of adventure, I worked down daily one spot from the Americano to the Zanzibar, judging that I would reach the Singapore Sling at the same time as the eponymous port. Few other concessions to modernity had been made. Syncopated rhythms had not seduced the ship's band, a bunch of gnarled old tooters and scrapers with shiny jacket collars, dusted with dandruff, who ground out endless arthritic foxtrots under the ticking ceiling fans.