The Museum of Modern Love (21 page)

‘Healayas,' a voice said. It was Octavia, the MoMA media person they'd assigned to her. ‘Are you alright?'

‘Yes, yes, of course,' Healayas, said, standing.

‘We're about to open. It's ten twenty-five.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘It's very moving. Don't worry. Lots of people cry.'

MARINA HAS A MONTH TO
go. On the radio they're playing Antony and the Johnsons. It's ‘Hope There's Someone' and Antony sounds like a sixteenth-century castrato. At least one person listening through headphones in the queue is feeling as if she wants to drink petrol and set herself on fire for the sheer beauty of vivid, searing extinguishment. The city has slipped through a misty dawn and is now poised beneath neatly arranged Pixar clouds. Alice Levin is arriving sixty seconds early to a lecture. Healayas Breen is drinking Gatorade after swimming fifteen hundred metres at the pool.

Marco Anelli, the official photographer, is carefully repositioning his Canon EOS-1D Mark IV. Every evening, after he has reviewed the photographs from the day and made his recommendations to Marina, who checks them all before he uploads them, Marco has time to sleep. He can live on six hours, although he sleeps until midday on Tuesday, the one day of the week MoMA is closed and they all get a twenty-four hour reprieve to recover a little normality. Sometimes on Tuesday night he cannot imagine how he will resume the schedule for another week and another.

There is no time for friends. No energy for friends. All day he is surrounded by people. All day he spends observing faces.
His dreams have become strange police line-ups. Sometimes he is weeding faces in a giant garden, other times he is scooping them up as if they have fallen like moonbeams onto the river's surface. Last night he dreamed of a party where he went from room to room looking for someone in particular, but never found them, and everyone was dressed as iridescent blue birds with dark masked eyes and beaks of sparkling beads.

He passed the clipboard with the permission slip to the next person in the queue, and they filled it out, signed it and asked him, as they all asked him, ‘Will it be long?'

He smiled, and said to each person who asked, ‘It is impossible to tell.'

He tried not to engage in conversation in the atrium. He was not a spokesperson. He was the photographer. When he and Marina had discussed this show, they had imagined the chair opposite Marina would often be empty. They had never imagined people would be so compelled to sit that they would queue for hours and hours.

He checked his watch, a gift from Marina. How perfect that she should have given him time. It was the thing they shared. While ever she was here he was also here. For seventy-five days he was her constant witness.

They had met in Rome when he had asked to photograph her and she offered him ten minutes the next day. It was all the time she could give him, she said. She had greeted him at the appointed time and he had surprised her because it was not her face he wanted. It was her scars.

The scars told her real stories. The scars that came from knives and ice, fire and scalpel; years of work on the tightrope between art and spirituality. Years of trying to create a philosophical bridge between east and west. He did not pretend to understand her, so he admired her. She was
squisita
the way older
women could be
squisita
. They knew their own voice, the way they moved, the way to dress. They knew their curves and their own face and if they had lived, really lived, there was something like a well in them that, as a younger man, he wanted to drink from. It wasn't entirely sexual but it was entirely sensual. That was what he felt. The sensuality of
devozione
for Marina. Her strength, her humour, her solitude, her impromptu meals—
pollo arrosto
,
melanzane ripiene
,
risotto ai funghi
. She had a way of making him feel like family. Making them all feel like family.
La famiglia di Marina
.

He looked at her through the lens of his camera and saw in her dark eyes generations of Slavs and Arabs, Greeks and Persians who had migrated on foot, on donkey, taking with them the possessions that would see them through the next winter. Into that crumpled landscape they had gone, at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. Being Italian he understood the sense of country people had. He imagined it wasn't easy for your country to change names, have different masters, be a pawn in the games of monsters. Italy had known all that. Even now, Italian soldiers were dying in Iraq for Bush's war that was now Obama's war. The war Berlusconi,
il buffone
, had signed them up for. Italians understood how people who were once your neighbours could become your enemy. Italy had not united as a nation until after the First World War. But in Yugoslavia the fighting had been long and bitter and of a different order. There was a particular voltage of hatred between Serbians and Bosnians, Croatians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Slovenians. Between Muslims and Christians—
una vecchia guerra
.

People had picked up axes and killed women and children who lived in the same street. That was Yugoslavia. A no-longer country. A fairy story place of madmen and musicians, lovers and killers on a stretch of peninsula between Austria and Macedonia.
Marina came from the once-Yugoslavia, a place that had been squeezing and twisting and folding itself up longer than places had names. A peninsula of steep-sided valleys, rushing rivers, blue lakes, winding villages, snow-capped mountains. An origami landscape with endless
segreti
.

After the first ten minutes of the photographic shoot, Marina Abramović had given Marco her whole day.

She had said later, when the day was done and they were on the terrazzo drinking limoncello, that if you dipped your fingers in the pockets of Yugoslavia, you could pull out stories of warm bread, onions and mincemeat, vine leaves and plum brandy, cornbread and strudel. You could unravel myths of the sun drawn from a palace by white horses, a young God dropping corn in spring, summer as a woman newly in love but abandoned each autumn. You could cut yourself on ancient mountain ranges and skin your knees on lost valleys, yet there were fields of red poppies and homemade wine and someone singing ballads of virgins wandering in the moonlight and old women who carried the bones of animals to stave off disease.

There were other myths Marina had told him: of large black cats that barked like dogs to protect the cows in the barn through the slow white winter; spirits in the bathhouse, by the front door, by the fireplace; rat-catchers and shepherds, soldiers and priests, the world swathed in black, green, gold, red, magenta.

When she planned this show, he said, ‘I will photograph everyone who comes to sit with you.'

‘Seventy-five days,' she said. ‘Are you sure? Can you do it? È un periodo lungo.'

‘
Sì
,' he had said, not understanding then how long seventy-five days could be. Perhaps Marina hadn't either.

They conversed always in Italian. He spoke English badly. His Serbian was hello, goodbye, thank you, tomorrow, hungry,
delicious, one, two, three, love. She spoke German and French too, and Dutch, and in every language she was funny, intense, and her accent rumbled with Balkan vowels and consonants.

‘I will stay with you for the entire show,' he said. Even then he felt his devotion to her. ‘Every day, so that nothing, no one is missed. Every face. We will capture every face.'

So here he was, and spring was gracing the city outside. The children in the strollers who came into the atrium had bare legs and were no longer swathed and booted. He smelled rain on trench coats and wind in the wraps and scarves.

For seventy-five days he was an archivist. Every day he took the clipboard and moved along the queue of people and had them sign the permission form to be photographed, making their images available to Marina for any future works, books, films, performances. Nearly everyone signed. Then he returned to his camera and photographed face after face. Every face. He captured the moment when they first sat and their eyes connected with Marina. Then he waited until their emotions began to surface, and he captured them again and again.

A sitting could last two minutes or two hours. Or an entire day. He hadn't expected people to do that. Nor had any of
la famiglia di Marina.
So many expressions crossed the faces of those who sat. He looked for intensity. He looked for the moment when the person sitting was consumed by the indecipherable. He felt as if he was inside a world of raw truth. Who would have imagined there would be such faces? He had photographed architecture, history, musicians. Now, day after day, he looked into the human face, painted with curiosity, and he saw the abyss of history within a human heart. Every one was its own beaten, salvaged, polished, engraved, carved, luminous form.

He captured this ephemeral thing, a communion between an artist and her audience. The chair opposite her was an invitation.
Come sit if you wish
.

Here in New York, where time was everyone's currency, and to gaze deeply into the face of another was possibly a sign of madness, people were flocking to sit with Marina Abramović. She wasn't so much stealing hearts, he thought, as awakening them. The light that came into their eyes. Their intelligence, their sadness, all of it tumbled out as people sat. Marco, with his long lens and archivist's eye, captured them all.
Il devoto ed i devoti.

WHEN BRITTIKA VAN DER SAR
returned to New York for the third time, she went straight to MoMA, ignoring her desire for a shower after the overnight flight from Amsterdam. Marco, the photographer, recognised her and nodded when he saw her. Carlos, who must have sat fifteen times by now, was sitting again. Carlos had a social media following. On Twitter there was an IsatwithMarina hashtag. She saw the silver-haired film composer on the sidelines too, the one Jane had introduced her to. He was in his usual position, seated on a red pillow. He was entirely absorbed in the two people at the table, as if he was watching a movie. She wondered what was going on in his life that this was what took up his time. She must interview him.

Today she was lucky and the queue moved fast. By mid-afternoon it was finally her turn. She strode to the table. She wanted to get it right this time. She gazed into Abramović's brown eyes, sure there was a flicker of recognition, a warming. Brittika smiled and hoped Marco had got just that moment.

She was aware of the noise of the crowd milling and staring. She hoped she looked confident but she felt only nervousness. Why didn't other people seem to be afraid of the crowd when
they sat? It was the hardest thing to pretend confidence when you didn't feel it.

Her heart was beating hard in her chest and her hands were shaking. There was a sort of tremor running down her spine. Did people on TV get nervous? Did Marina get nervous? Was she nervous right now?

When I get my PhD, I'll stop feeling like this, thought Brittika. Six more months. Then I won't feel like a fake any more.

Marco had told her that Marina's team had taken bets, before the show started, on how many people would sit. Marina's assistant, Davide Balliano, had predicted more than half a million visitors and fifteen hundred sitters. They had all thought he was way too ambitious. But
The Artist is Present
was over halfway through and Davide had already won the bet on the visitor numbers and more than a thousand people had sat in the chair opposite Marina.

Brittika readjusted herself. She took a breath and let it out slowly. She maintained the gaze with Abramović but her heart wouldn't settle. She thought of stories about Marina to distract her. She wanted to get to twenty minutes. Let the record show she had made it to twenty minutes.

She thought about the time Marina had brought a friend home from school and they had taken one of her father's revolvers from the glass display cabinet. Marina had loaded a single bullet into the chamber of the gun and spun the cylinder. Then she held the muzzle to her head and pulled the trigger. Click. No shot. Then her friend spun the cylinder and held the gun to his head. He pressed the trigger. Click. No shot. They had both fallen about laughing.