Affairs of Art Read Online Free PDF

I saw the bitter sun, the idiotic passersby, the pygmy world. I set out to look for a young woman who could break my heart.
    You’ll laugh, but what I knew about girls could be summed up as gropings in the alleys and the shows put on by dancers up and down the Main. A neighbour who was my adolescent girlfriend had offered me her breasts every night of one sweltering summer, in a corner of the back shed. After the shed was torn down as a fire hazard, we had to wait till winter brought us darkness at five o’clock, and then she complained of the cold. I was awkward with her breasts, I would make handfuls of them rather than caress them till she shuddered, as lords do to princesses, but the neighbour women resigned themselves early to being wives to ordinary mortals. In any case, it was in the nightclubs that I was aroused. There’s nothing simpler than knocking back a lukewarm beer while you watch buttocks part, imagining yourself delivered in three strokes, and having a stomach ache from laughing so hard. On the way home we’d jerk off behind the houses that soon were as cold as my girlfriend’s breasts. My cousin Gerry taught me not to leave traces and he used to say that his own mother was a virgin, or so his father maintained.
    Now I had to find my own virgin from my new rank, one who could shudder at Rimbaud-like assonance and meditate at the Stable Gallery before tears of blood on a background of ivory and crisscrossed zebra stripes, dripping with misfortune. I did not think right away of undressing this dark companion, but I’d have to if we were to live through a painful separation some day.
    Eagerly, I chose the brown-haired girl who always sat at the end of my row during the little man’s lectures. She took copious notes. She was timid, they all were. I helped her find a contact lens under a chair and the first time she smiled at me, we were already practically horizontal. I wanted a lengthy courtship, wanted to be furtive and then explicit, perhaps slip her a note. But she lived with her already liberated sister, and barely one week later I was lying on top of the tiny tender body that had been used just enough to teach me enough. Men don’t describe their first time, the fifteen seconds that the first time lasts, the girl who rubs the napes of their necks instead of panting, the girl who hasn’t had time to be hungry. Her name was Solange, we had merged our brown myopic eyes during two seasons — the springtime of the final session and the summer before university — her vessel was as intelligent as her mind, I spilled in torrents.
    While finally learning the words, and a few images. Solange had had a lover — only one, she declared — who was more educated and had taught her the basis of existentialism. We would listen to Juliette Greco before making love, but we also had to include a few jazz clubs. I remember a trumpet that tore me apart, on Peel Street, upstairs, and recor d ings by Cannonball Adderley, the acoustic piano that drives your solar plexus up between your ears. I felt myself to be a superior intellect, before dusk. At night, to pay for my education, I carted crates of fruits and vegetables in Steinberg warehouses, I met a fifty-year-old poet there who recited the dull greyness of Quebec amid the potatoes, and I would go home at dawn paralyzed by all the uncertainties.
    Solange was becoming beautiful; I thought I loved her. We ventured inside some of the Sherbrooke Street galleries on Saturday afternoons, and whispered further facts to information gleaned from the newspapers. She was easygoing, I felt that I oozed the east end and the warehouse, I spent a good many days measuring the dis­tance. While I waited for her to break my heart, I stood a head taller and was proud of it. In store windows I saw a young couple, better informed than the complacent crowd, who slept together and who transgressed.
    The first piece of art, the yellow seething on