Russell Hoban - My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

After a while I fell asleep and dreamt that Grace Kowalski offered to lend me her bat. ‘He ain’t heavy,’ she said. ‘He’s my Irving.’ But it was heavy, I could hardly lift it. I woke up and the room wasn’t as dark as it had been. There were framed sketches on the wall. Me, nude. No clothes but I hadn’t felt as naked when I posed as I did now.

She was with another man; that was a certainty. It was as if I could feel his weight on her as he enjoyed what was now denied to me. I ground my teeth and tried to move my mind elsewhere. Without much success.

I could see a space without Barbara stretching out in front of me for miles and miles: a desert. And I was two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the middle of it with my shattered visage, half-sunk, lying nearby. Well, that’s how it is sometimes: boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. Deal with it.

Ordinarily I get through each day by finding things to look forward to, like a mountain climber moving from one handhold to the next: breakfast; The Times ; the post; scanning the TV schedule and setting the timer to record films that look promising; sending and answering e-mails; lunch and the first beer of the day; a few pages of Elizabeth Gaskell with my sandwich; then a nap. In between I put in some time staring at The Scent of Water , my lonesome title with no first line under it. That part of the day I haven’t really been looking forward to, and I do it again in the evening. And there are the classes I teach at Morley and the private workshops that use up three afternoons and two evenings every week.

If I could follow the advice I give my students I might possibly achieve even a whole first paragraph. I draw on haiku heavily for this. A common complaint is, ‘When I have a blank sheet of paper in front of me I feel lost.’ For this I have committed to memory lines by Ryusui:

Mayoigo no

naku naku tsukamu

hotaru kana

The lost child,

crying, crying, but still

catching the fireflies.

A blank sheet of paper is a very dark night in which we lost children can’t help crying, I tell them. The thing is to keep catching fireflies. I constantly remind myself of that but this seems not to be a firefly season.

I listened to the first track of the Enigma Variations; the theme came out of a distant silence, veiled and mysterious, then it grew and unfolded, always in the light and shadow of the larger unplayed theme. OK, I have no right to expect anything but the unfolding. Maybe there’s nothing in it for me. That’s life, yes?

I cursed myself for being so dependent on Barbara. Lots of men get through life without a woman; why couldn’t I? Also, this might not be a permanent condition — she might be back. But I didn’t like being kept dangling like this. It was cold, it was grey, it was raining. Good. I went to the National Gallery. I stood on the porch for a few minutes looking down on Trafalgar Square. Spray from the fountains drifting in the rain. Red sightseeing buses. Nelson on his column, secure in his place above it all. That’s the way to do it, I thought, and went inside.

I’m a heavy user of the National Gallery. Depending on what condition my condition is in I usually know what I need for my fix. Sometimes it’s Claude, other times de Hooch or maybe van Hoogstraten’s peepshow or the van de Veldes marine paintings. But today I didn’t know what would do it for me.

I was drifting from one room to another when I paused in Room 41 at the Daumier that shows Don Quixote on Rosinante charging a flock of sheep while Sancho on Dapple quenches his thirst from a gourd. Daumier didn’t do any large paintings — they’re all medium-sized to small. This one was 40 x 64 centimetres and it was a sketch, not a finished picture. But the thing about Daumier is that all of his pictures, regardless of size, are big . And his sketches are usually the biggest of all because they’re the freeest and the quickly done chiaroscuro is nothing short of metaphysical.

I was thinking about Don Quixote and Sancho when a tall young woman took up a position a foot or two away. Her close attention to the Daumier already marked her as someone to be reckoned with and her looks did nothing to dispel that impression. She stood there shaking her head a little and moving her lips, then she took a pad of music paper from her rucksack, sat down on the floor, and began to fill the staves with notes and words.

‘Does this happen often with you?’ I said.

She held up a finger to pause me while she finished a bar. ‘All the time,’ she said.

‘Not only with Don Quixote or Daumier, then?’

‘I like Cervantes and Daumier both — this painting is what got me going just now but it’s not specifically a Don Quixote song.’ A slight South African accent.

‘Can you say what it’s about?’

‘Yes, it’s about being true to your craziness.’

‘Will you have a coffee with me when you’re ready to stand up?’

She got up from her cross-legged position without using her hands. ‘I’m ready now, but it’ll have to be a fast coffee because I’m due in Soho in three quarters of an hour.’

‘The cafeteria won’t be crowded now, so we can get one there quickly. Are you here for a visit?’ I said as we walked towards the Sainsbury Wing.

‘Three weeks,’ she said, ‘mostly talking to record company execs. Then I go back to Cape Town.’

‘Have you got a contract?’

‘My agent’s working on it. Are you American?’

‘Yes, but I’ve been living here for the last twelve years.’ By this time we were sitting at a table having our coffee and I was able to study her closely. Brown hair which she wore long and straight; blue eyes; large nose; wide mouth; high forehead. Not exactly a beauty but the overall effect was impressive. She reminded me of champion athletes I’d seen on TV. She had the look of a winner and that made her face add up to more than the sum of its parts.

‘What are you?’ she said. ‘A hypnotist?’

‘Please forgive my staring. I’m a writer. What’s your name?’

‘Constanze Webber. What’s yours?’

‘Phil Ockerman. I doubt that you’ve heard of me.’

‘Oh, but I have. I was watching The Culture Show the other night and Germaine Greer said that Hope of a Tree was a shallow male fantasy that didn’t add up to a novel.’

‘An opinion shared by one or two others,’ I said.

‘Still, the title from Job intrigued me. Does your man feel like a tree that’s been cut down?’

‘Are you an Old Testament user?’

‘Now and then. Job is one of my favourite books. He bears his afflictions with style. Does your man feel like a tree that’s been cut down?’

‘Yes, he does.’

‘There’s a copy of Hope of a Tree at the house where I’m staying. I’ll read it and I’ll probably like it.’

‘And you so young and apparently unafflicted. How old are you — twenty-four, twenty-five?’

‘Twenty-five. There are all kinds of afflictions, Phil. They don’t always show. How old are you?’

‘I’m forty.’

‘Forty seems very far away from where I am now. I can’t imagine where I’ll be at that age.’

‘The years have a way of sneaking up on you,’ She looked at her watch. ‘I must go.’

‘Can I see you again?’ I said.

‘All right — I’ll be with friends in Wimbledon for the rest of this week; you can phone me there.’ She wrote the number on a napkin. ‘Then I’m going back to Cape Town for a couple of weeks. Don’t get up, stay and finish your coffee. See you.’ And off she went. I’d have liked to walk her to Soho, all five foot ten of her, but she’d clearly told me not to so I finished my coffee and had another, this time with a cheese Danish.