Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘When he is quite old, he becomes disillusioned with philosophy. Philosophy, science, religion, they all start by saying they will tell you the truth, and from there they lead only to bigger and bigger lies. But art is different, because art tells you right at the start, “Okay, I’m going to tell you a whole lot of bullshit here …” Texier says that in modern times the only one we can still believe is the man who tells us he’s lying. And so he gives up philosophy and he starts to paint.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of his paintings.’

‘Oh, Claude, they’re so beautiful!’ She seizes my arm; her countenance has quite changed, become rapturous and light-filled. ‘Strange, you know? And dark? But when I see them, I feel like my heart is gonna explode. One little canvas, this big, makes you remember just how huge and weird the world is, and how fucking amazing it is to be here in it.’

I smile: it has been a long time since I felt like that.

‘And he has all these interesting ideas — for example, he wouldn’t ever sell his paintings, he only gives them to friends, because he thinks that when you sell them, the meaning changes? They start to become the false truth that he is trying to escape? But he can’t control it: eventually the friends sell them, or they die and their children sell them — anyway, they finish up with the price tag.

And in the end he gives up painting too, because he thinks that art is only making things worse.’

‘But you?’ I say. ‘You don’t feel like that — do you?’

She frowns, sighs, stops with her trolley in the middle of the path. ‘It’s very interesting. When I come here first, is because I want to be a painter. I hear there’s a boom, Celtic Tiger, and when I get here it’s so exciting, so much energy in the air, everyone talking about the future and progress and all that — very different from Greece where, you know, everyone has a name from a myth of three thousand years ago. And the best thing, the art market is so crazy back then, even someone like me can sell paintings. But after a little while, I start to realize the people who come to the galleries, they are not even looking at the paintings. They just in a race with each other to buy it. Paying all this money — you know the most expensive piece always sell the first — so they can belong in this special club.

‘An’ at the same time, I’m working in the café, I’m coming down here every day, this fucking street —’ She waves her hand; I look around at the litter-strewn gutters, the weed-split paving stones, the tenements doomed for the wrecking ball. ‘Every time I come here, is a little bit worse. Even with all this money, no one sees it, no one does nothing to change it. And it takes me a time to realize, No one wants to see it. That’s what this whole boom is about, it’s so people don’ have to see things. All the fucked-up stuff that is happening, or has happened in the past, they cover it up with money, with talk about the future, with new buildings, with drinking, whatever.’

‘But the boom is over,’ I say.

‘Yes, and now the very same thing is happening again, everybody tries to forget what they did during the boom. Everybody acts instead like they are the victim. You know the Greek word for truth is aletheia? Lethe , this is the river of forgetting, so the truth, aletheia , is that which you don’ forget. But here, it’s like the total opposite. The truth is what you don’t remember.’

‘Liffey or Lethe,’ I say, recalling the old argument about the Radiohead song.

‘It’s like this whole country is trying to crawl out of its own skin,’ she says. ‘And I start to feel that me, with my art, I am helping them.’

‘But you can paint whatever you want to paint,’ I tell her. ‘You can paint nothing but these streets, if you want. I’ll make sure the whole world sees them.’

‘Yes, that’s exactly the kind of fucking thing art would do,’ she laughs, ‘and show it in a gallery far away from here, where you can’t smell the smell and no one going to stab you with a HIV needle, and people can say, “Oh, how sad, yet how beautiful,” then it get bought by some yuppie with a polka-dot tie. Or look at this one.’

We have arrived back on the quays; directly in front of us stands a tall sculpture, depicting, in blackened bronze, six emaciated humanoids and a little bronze dog. ‘It’s a Famine memorial — you know a million people died, in this tiny little country? And millions more left, on ships that went from right here, and they never come back. So from a terrible thing that really happened, on this spot, we get, a hundred and how many years later, a piece of art, very beautiful, that people can look at as they hurry by with their takeaway lattes …’

I don’t think I have ever looked at it before, with or without latte. I step up to the sculpture, run my finger down the tortured cheek of one of the gaunt, inconsolable forms. ‘It is beautiful,’ I say, not knowing whether I am contradicting her or not.

‘Now look down,’ she says.

I do as she says, and see that although the figures themselves are anonymous, names have been printed on the stylized bronze cobblestones beneath their bare feet — names of companies, names of banks, names of individuals: the corporate and private sponsors who paid for the work. Billionaires, businessmen, a disgraced prime minister, a society hostess; others I recognize from newspaper accounts of deals and court cases, corruption charges that were never proved.

‘So ask yourself, who does this artwork want you to remember?’

I step back with a chill. The wind pulls and chafes at the surface of the river; on the far side, the night sky is reflected and intensified in the louring windows of the corporate towers, as though they were mining darkness from the air, storing it within them. ‘Maybe in a hundred years, some artist will make a sculpture of the old women in Athens looking through the garbage for something to eat,’ Ariadne says, resting her cheek against the cold metal shoulder of a peasant. ‘And passers-by will stop their rocketpacks to film it with their magic future phones, and they’ll think how beautiful, how sad.’

‘So you’ve given up on art,’ I say in summary. ‘You’re turning down my offer.’

‘I haven’t given up on anything,’ she says. ‘And you are very kind to make me this offer. But I like working in the café. Making a space where people can come together and feel safe and good, for me it’s not menial work. Even if they’re bankers, maybe if they eat the nice home-cooked food that’s made with love, it can change how they think a little bit. And afterwards I can bring the leftovers to the shelter, and at night-time I can paint my paintings, and if anyone wants to buy them they can, they’re not very expensive. What does it mean to become a famous artist, anyway? That your paintings cost more money, right? That’s all it means, deep down. But why should rich people have all the beauty?’

‘Not all the beauty,’ I qualify, wistfully taking in her dark radiance, the twin lights in her eyes.

She holds my gaze a moment, then looks away. ‘I have made enough escaping. Now I am here, I want to be here.’

‘Though you are going back to Greece,’ I remind her.

‘My father is very sick,’ she says. ‘And everything is so fucked up over there right now that in the hospital there’s no food or medicine, so your family has to bring them for you. If you have a family.’ She hoists her shoulders, as if shrugging off a cold and sodden cloak. ‘Do you go back home often? Are they still in Paris, your parents?’

‘No, they died.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry.’ She has separated herself from the statue and come towards me; she rubs the black cloth of my suit between her finger and thumb. ‘It was recent?’