Affairs of Art Read Online Free PDF Page A

needed, she learned to like it, she forgot about Mentana Street. She sometimes convinces herself that her father built my house, and forgets that I rent out the ground floor so lean keep up the payments.
    All that, I’ve already told you. Now I’m bringing you to the point where I came close to never knowing you.
    By the time we left Mentana Street, I was almost resigned to my square of grass — a mongrel park diagonally across from the municipal incinerator. Twenty minutes from there was the normal school I attended, which was starting to admit girls, most of them poor and dreary. Like all of us. Don’t believe those stories you hear from the hucksters of the sixties, Vitalie. Look at all the curtains in all the windows in the neighbourhood; today, as then, you won’t see one of them flapping with the rage we were all assumed to have in our twenties. We filled amphitheatres with our silence and our diligence, while males with scarcely more education paraded past us. My rebellion aspired at most to replace them. I saw myself as livelier, less gloomy. Strange, since my way of expressing myself was neither nimble nor diverse. Words belonged to books.
    All the same, there was a little man in a wig, a Frenchman responsible for literature, who asked us one day if we went to the Museum of Fine Arts. Only one student, a former brother, had ever been there, and he held up his hand apologetically. The little man choked with indignation. “But that’s inconceivable! It’s next door! Just a few steps for you strapping big fellows! Where have you been all this time?” Nowhere. We come from places with neither an entrance nor an exit, just mailboxes for phone bills and oil bills. He calmed down a little as he muttered about the English who were appropriating the Museum, obviously, and who did not invite us there. In bad faith, I agreed with him. It was my own people who had taught me nothing, who had consigned images, like words, to books.
    I didn’t speak to the little man about it, I disliked his accent. He was small, I know that. He could have had us read the Refus Global, spattered our age with the already distant revulsions of Borduas and with his recent death in Paris, far from the dullness of home. He pursed his lips, he wore his hairpiece cautiously, he assigned reading, corrected exams, and was content to despise us. I did not yet understand the terrible despondency of teachers.
    And so, one Saturday I went to the Museum. It was dominated by quantities of porcelain and silver teapots, under lights of the kind one might have imagined the thrifty English would have at home. One day you’ll go to see the Portrait of Mrs. George Drummond, by Thomas Gainsborough, which was bequeathed to the Museum in 1951 by one Mr. Tempest. The first swelling of the breasts, white beneath her veil, a neck straight as a pin, a mouth like a cat’s, and eyes that held nothing. I liked girls, and art struck me as a way of killing them and disguising them beneath the trees, before they went on to a lifetime of serving tea.
    There was a kind of dampness in the air and ladies whose blue hairdos stayed perfectly in place. I had started reading Rimbaud, as ordered by the little man, and the walls and the stairs and the guards all drove me away. Yet it was a guard who told me about the Stable Gallery, a modest annex that sheltered contemporary art. I remember walls hung with grey, a silent young woman at the entrance, and splashes that burst through the paintings. No figures, no messages. I was alone with scraps of colour that delivered me from I know not what. He moves me and I miss him, that young man who encounters the automatistes without having known he was about to see them, who transforms streaks of paint into feelings even though they’d been flung onto the canvas as a refusal of emotion. Black hell, red life, white despair. A passing desire for drama that was forbidden me.
    Afterwards, in the street,