The Bat Tattoo (12 page)

This bat tattoo, that’s a laugh. Did I think it was going to get me off the ground, make me fly? And now I feel as if the bat is expecting something from me along with Delarue.

I looked at the china nutcracker on my work-bench;
he
wouldn’t let expectations get him down, he’d crunch them: chomp, chomp. Of course he has the jaws for it. I mostly have music going when I’m working and I thought it might help to get me started now. I went through my CDs and selected a compilation of Argentine tango bands, and when it reached Carlos Gardel doing
‘El Carretero
’ I began to feel a little more comfortable. I understood only a few of the words but I thought a
carretero
might be a man with a cart and a donkey. The song has an evening sound; I saw the carter making his way through dimly lit streets past low houses and I had the feeling of having already done a day’s work. It was still morning, however, and I hadn’t done anything at all, hadn’t earned the evening feeling, so I stopped the music and went out. ‘Take me somewhere,’ I said to my feet, and they headed for the North End Road.

In a few minutes I found myself at the Church of St John, standing in front of the fibreglass Jesus and thinking about wood and Tilman Riemenschneider. He did crucifixions and lamentations, he did annunciations and assumptions and he was never extravagant with facial expressions; he only went so far and he let the wood do the rest: Mary’s face when she
receives the news of the Immaculate Conception and her face when she looks at the dead Christ, the face of Jesus living and dead and the faces of the mourning women — all of these listen with the ghosts of trees and now there is fibreglass. ‘Surf’s up,’ I said.

‘You talking to Jesus?’ said a deep voice behind me.

I turned. It was a member of the low-budget drinking community. I’d seen him the last time I was at the church: a black man, tall and burly, wearing jeans and a red T-shirt and holding a can of John Smith. He had the face of the black policeman in one of those buddy movies where the partner is white. His manner was discursive rather than aggressive. ‘Fibreglass is OK for surfboards,’ I said, ‘but Jesus deserves wood.’

He sipped his beer and thought about this for a while. I wondered where he stood on aesthetics.

‘Did you come here to pray?’ he said.

‘No. Did you?’

‘Prayers are for children.’ He pointed to the brass plaque in memory of the Fulham and Chelsea Battalion of the Church Lads’ Brigade. ‘Were their prayers answered?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘So you’re not praying. What do you want from Jesus?’

‘Nothing as far as I know.’

‘You wouldn’t be standing here,’ he said like a patient tutor, ‘if you weren’t looking for something from him.’

‘I don’t know. Messages, maybe.’

‘“By the rivers of Babylon,’” he said, ‘“there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’”

‘Is that a message?’

‘It’s a psalm, Number 137.’

‘I know that. Do you remember Zion?’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

My mother had said that Zion was where it was a whole lot better than now and it was where you never get back to. The smell of oil and metal, cigarette smoke and Jack Daniel’s came back to me with the lamplight and shadows of my father’s workshop. Whatever he handled, whether a hammer or saw or a piece of wood, he handled in a way that made you feel good. He showed me how to use a screwdriver and a hammer and I tried to hold them the way he did. With an empty cotton spool, what they call a reel here, a washer, a rubber band and a wooden match he made me a spool tractor that crept along the basement floor until it was stopped by the skirting board. ‘I guess everybody does,’ I said. ‘There are all kinds of Zions.’ Thinking, as I said that, that the Zion I remembered had been Babylon to my mother.

‘There’s a lot of Babylon around here,’ he said, and went back to his colleagues. I made my way home slowly, seeing the spool tractor crash slowly into the skirting board.

Every month Burnside Auctioneers in Ealing send me a catalogue; I make a pot of Earl Grey and start circling the lot numbers that look promising. It’s a three- or four-cup job to get through it and budget my fantasies, cosy reading all the way. The viewings are on Tuesdays, the auctions on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Burnside is nothing grand like Sotheby’s or Christie’s; it’s small and cramped and not comfortably laid out. The viewings are always a hurly-burly with people jostling one another and idly curious non-buyers taking up space and standing in front of things I want to see. Last Tuesday I found nothing terribly exciting in my price range. There was Lot 186, ‘A GERMAN .800 ART NOUVEAU 13-PIECE FRUIT SET by P & S Bruckman, the handles decorated with figures from mythology, cased £120-£180’. I was willing to go to one-thirty-five on that. With commission I’d be paying one-sixty so I’d try to resell it at one-ninety and would take one-eighty if I had to. It was nothing that made my heart beat faster and obviously I wasn’t going to get rich on it.

There were various other lots I was prepared to bid on,
mostly silver or silver plate which I’d been having some luck with. I’m always hoping for treasures that others have passed by and a cardboard box caught my eye: Lot 339 was ‘A collection of treen’. No estimate. It was a jumble of unimpressive wooden artefacts: carvings of Krishna, Lakshmi, and Ganesha from the duty-free at Bombay, some boxes that might have been Tunbridge ware but weren’t, a miniature shoe, and a higgledy-piggledy of other bits and pieces not likely to set the world on fire.

Among the bits and pieces, all the way at the bottom of the box, was a painted wooden hand pierced by a wooden spike that nailed it to a fragment of a cross. The hand had been broken off a little way up the wrist and the whole thing was, by my tape measure, three and seven-eighths inches long. The painted blood was almost worn away as was the flesh colour. Shocking, that hand — the authority of it. It was a right hand; the index and middle fingers were curved reflexively around the spike in an effort to support the weight of the sagging body. Death by crucifixion, I remembered having read, was caused by the collapse of the diaphragm, and all of that pain and sorrow were in those two fingers. The carving was remarkable in the delicacy of its realistic detail, the beauty of the fingers and fingernails and wounded palm and veins of the wrist of that man whose symbolic blood was still drunk by his worshippers.

I know some hallmarks and some of the provenances of the things I buy and sell but I have vast areas of ignorance and this was from one of those. It was obviously very old, but although it probably came from something valuable it wouldn’t be worth much as a fragment. I wasn’t thinking of resale; I wanted it because it had spoken to me and couldn’t be ignored. I put it back in the bottom of the box and covered
it with the higgledy-piggledy as well as I could, hoping to make Lot 339 as uninteresting as possible.

The next day at the auction I got the German art nouveau fruit set for one-thirty-five and I did all right with my other selections but although this is something I do for a living I was in a completely non-commercial state of arousal when Max Burgess, the auctioneer, called out, ‘Lot three thirty-nine, a collection of treen, possibly treasures for the discerning.’ Max is a gingery man, large and broad; he was a Petticoat Lane barrow boy before becoming an auctioneer and his style has nothing of the introvert. ‘Do I hear thirty-five?’ he enquired. ‘You don’t want to pass this by and later think: If only!’

Nobody responded. I’ve learned to avoid early foot and I kept my hand down. I saw Stephen Faulkes there, a spiteful little man who loves to bid things up and always knows when to jump off and leave me to pay over the odds. It was a grey day, threatening rain, and I’m prone to acts of desperation on grey days.

‘All right,’ said Max. ‘It’s that kind of day — caution is uppermost. Will someone say twenty-five and help me to move on?’

Faces of stone met this heartfelt request.

‘I have no shame,’ said Max. ‘My mind isn’t strong. I feel rejected. Is there a kind soul here to say ten pounds?’

Stephen Faulkes’s hand went up.

‘Ship ahoy!’ cried Max. ‘Rescue is at hand! Where ten appears surely twelve cannot be far behind?’

Myra Kaufmann went to twelve. By two-pound increments Max got us up to thirty-seven. True to form, Stephen took us to forty and I upped it to forty-five and got Lot 339, breathing hard. I would have gone higher; when I stop feeling that way about things I’ll know I’m dead.

I have no wish to push myself forward in these pages. I have been invited to set down some of my thoughts so I do it as well as I can. Today I am thinking of two visits I have made to Autun, an old walled town in Burgundy founded by the Romans.

In my head — is this not so with everyone? — there live images of scenes I remember, places I have been, objects of significance. Sometimes one of these images pulls me back to the time of its first appearance; then there comes to me the place, the scene with its reality heightened, its colour and detail by the force of memory made vivid.

One such image is that of the figure of Christ on the tympanum of the west portal of the Cathedral of St Lazare at Autun. In the eleventh century St Lazare was the patron of lepers; the tomb at Autun was said to contain all or at least part of him, so for the lepers it was a place of pilgrimage. For me too it is such a place although no part of me has yet visibly rotted away.

That the unclean might worship apart from the clean, the bishop and chapter of Saint-Nazaire caused a new church to be built for the lepers at Autun. It is in this church, the
Cathedral of St Lazare, that Gislebertus, that genius of the Romanesque, with chisel and mallet wrought his marvels from 1125 to 1135.

The first time I went there I was not alone. I was young and my companion was a beautiful girl called Solange Tessier. She was studying art at the Sorbonne and she wished to see what Gislebertus had done at St Lazare.

Solange’s interest was purely artistic; she was Jewish but did not practise that religion. ‘It takes no practice to be a Jew,’ she said. ‘Either you are or you aren’t; two sets of dishes mean nothing.’ Myself, I had been educated by Jesuits under the governance of a Father Toussaint. He laid great stress on obedience and enforced it with a flexible black paddle on the hands: the sinner was permitted to choose the time of punishment within a twenty-four-hour span. This method of instruction naturally encouraged atheism in those pupils who were that way leaning. Between God and me the divergence widened until I wholly rejected the deity served by Father Toussaint and his black paddle. So the carvings of Gislebertus at St Lazare, however profoundly pious, would be for me nothing more than pictures in stone.

At that time I had not yet come into my inheritance. I was on a student allowance, Solange also; therefore we travelled by train and bus. It was a Saturday evening in October, already dark when we arrived. We registered at the Hôtel de la Tête Noir in the rue de l’Arquebuse. Our key for Room 309 was on a ring attached to a miniature wine bottle with the name of the hotel on the label. Such key-rings were sold as souvenirs at the reception desk; I have one before me as I write this. I cannot say it is empty because it has no inside to be filled — it is only a solid piece of wood in the shape of a bottle.

A middle-aged German couple came in as we stood at the reception desk. The man spoke French with an accent that pushed the words ahead of him like hostages. He explained that he and his wife were touring Burgundy and enjoying the food and the wines. I pitied them that they were not us.

We bought a half-bottle of the local Chardonnay and one of the Pinot Noir and took them up to our room. It was a pleasant little room; the flowered bedspread and the cosy lamps welcomed us; the slanting ceiling embraced us as we embraced each other. The wine was round and juicy; we drank it by the window from where we viewed the Champ de Mars and the Maine, illuminated and as full of detail as buildings in a model railway. Then we went out to see the cathedral for the first time.

Past dim cafés and ancient houses we walked uphill on narrow pavements. Many of the houses were dark and seemed empty; the streets were very quiet, with sometimes the sound and lights of cars, sometimes the single white eye and whine of a moped. Up the rue aux Cordiers we went, the Grande and Petite rues Chauchien and the rue des Bancs where we continued past the Musée Rolin to the Place du Terreau. There we saw the cathedral with its spire black against the dark sky.

Now there is a restaurant, Le Petit Rolin, just opposite the steps at the west portal of the cathedral. It was not there when Solange and I came to Autun; there were no sounds of diners and drinkers to distract us as we stood at the base of the steps and looked up at the tympanum. Spotlights pushed away the darkness from it and showed us the stone with a hard brightness not seen in the evenings of the twelfth century. This tympanum is a half-circle over the two great doors, the lintel supported by capitals at each
end and a trumeau in the centre. The trumeau, with the figures of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, is a reconstruction, the original one having been thrown away.

On the tympanum Christ, in high relief, presides over the Last Judgement. He is shown in an elliptical enclosure called a mandorla. His pose is fully frontal; his elbows are at his sides, his forearms extended, palms upturned; his knees are bent, his legs turned out. His face looks straight ahead; his mouth is slightly open; he seems without anger, seems entranced. He has become not so much a judge as a medium: through him like lightning pass divine mercy or implacable wrath. I was a hardened atheist, yes, but I cowered before this Christ, this living stone, when I saw him that first time. On the mandorla are carved the words: OMNIA DISPONO SOLUS MERITOSQUE CORONO QUOS SCELUS EXERCET ME JUDICE POENA COERCET [I alone dispose of all things and crown the just. Those who follow crime I judge and punish.]

‘The one who was the victim is now the judge,’ said Solange.