Island of Demons Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œNieuwenkamp.” 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-full and back again.
    â€œCome 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