Changing Heaven (5 page)

In the midst of all this adult chaos, Ann searches for the children whose portraits, if not comforting, are at least calm, and Ann has become familiar on previous visits with their small sober faces. How stiff they look in their bejewelled garments, holding a bird or a flower in one raised hand as if to say, “Look, this is what I am … destined to fade, destined to fly away.” Like the little white tombstones Ann has seen in country graveyards, the ones with a carved lamb or an etched rose, their eyes carry messages concerning removal. “We are gone,” they seem to say, “We are gone and we will never come again.”
Portrait of a Boy with a Green Coat, Boy with a Dove
.

Her mother thinks these children are cute. But Ann knows better. They are not cute at all; they are terrifyingly absent, as is everything connected to them.
Oh, little boy
, Ann thinks,
where are your curls now, your bird, your green coat?

Room after room, groaning step after groaning step. Ann and her mother walk and pause and walk and pause. Eventually they reach the end of the last room of the gallery and there, on the far wall, is a large photo mural that has been divided, by some painstaking hand, into thousands of one-inch squares. Hanging directly above this strange work of art, which depicts Christ washing the disciples’ feet in fuzzy black and white, is a fabric sign that states
OWN A SQUARE INCH OF TINTORETTO
! in bright block letters. Ann carries the ten dollars necessary to make the purchase in her little black purse, the one with the small brass clasp and the three pink flowers, because last Sunday she discovered, in the middle of the painted, then photographed, table, something from which all the disciples turned away, busy as they were removing their shoes and stockings for their master’s attention. It rests right in the middle of the painting on the white tablecloth and is so flat, so unobtrusive, that you might mistake it for something else altogether. But Ann
suspects, Ann knows. And Ann will buy the square inch of canvas that it rests upon as a sort of charm to ward off the possibility of having it foisted upon her when she’s old.

She approaches the woman at the desk beside the painting. Her mother hovers proudly behind her.

“I’d like,” she says, “to buy a square inch of Tintoretto. That part in the middle of the table. The hot plate.”

“The plate …?” asks the woman, surprised. “You are sure that you wouldn’t like Christ’s eye?”

“No, I mean yes, I’m sure.”

The woman smiles at Ann’s mother, and says to Ann, “Is this your first art purchase?”

“Yes.”

Patting Ann on the head, the woman murmurs, “Congratulations. You are now a patron of the arts.”

These glass shields that block the betrayed from contact with the child seem permanent, somehow, as if they have been cemented to her right shoulder. It is odd that in order to visit culture, Ann and her mother must travel into the dark heart of cities, past alleys filled with starving cats, past Indians lounging by liquor stores, past immigrant labourers returning from night shifts carrying black lunchpails. “They
earn
their groceries,” her mother says. Past brick walls covered with grime and manholes belching steam to the Art Gallery of Toronto, the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Massey Hall. Near these palaces of the arts there are steamy restaurants filled with tired waitresses and-not too far away-the Victory Burlesque planted, ironically, in the centre of the garment district, as if to advertise the clothing these women shed with such astonishing gestures. Gestures Ann will never see. Past Portuguese gardens that grow sunflowers, beans, and then – miraculously – a small enshrined Virgin. All this glides like a parade by the child’s pale face in the window when her mother drives downtown. And then
there is
Swan Lake
, Mozart, Tintoretto. Her own Tintoretto. Her own square inch of it.

Now, three years after the purchase, Ann gazes through glass at yet another city’s centre: Franco’s Madrid. Long boulevards leading to the architecture of Fascism and, snaking out from these, thin streets filled with the small lives into which Ann’s tour bus is too large to shoulder.

“There is no poverty in Madrid,” the tour guide announces in perfect English, with only a hint of the song of her native tongue. “There are no slums.”

As mother whispers, “That’s a bunch of nonsense,” Ann looks down from her elevated seat, through the window to the sidewalk where an old woman is selling lace to tourists. Does the tour guide mean there are no hot plates in Madrid?

They glide down the boulevard behind polished glass. They are well above the crowd, travelling as if on a low-flying magic carpet towards the Prado Museum.

Though the child doesn’t know it yet this is the world’s darkest collection. It inspires awe. It inspires terror. The first five crucifixes cause Ann’s knees to weaken; her heart to pound. Yellow skin, too many wounds, too much blood, too many women screaming sorrow. And the familiar parquet, platform of the world’s great art, sighing and groaning in sympathy under her feet.

Room after room after room of Rubens. Pink and yellow and lavender skin. Eyes and mouths. Then Bosch’s daydreams and nightmares. “Mummy,
look!
He has a flower growing
there!
And,
look!
Is that dog going to the bathroom?” The Goya horrors: assassinations, witches’ sabbaths, monsters, cripples, and hunchbacks. And then a memory in the making, one that Ann will never shake. Her mother standing, contemplatively, in front of Goya’s bloodstained Saturn who is frozen in the act of devouring
one of his children. “Mummy, that man has bitten the baby’s head off!”

“Goya’s vision,” says her mother, still gazing at the painting with admiration, “was remarkably dark.”

Ann discovers portraits of small people in the next room and senses that, after these statements of brutality, the absent children would be a relief. Entering, however, she is surprised by a collection of dwarfs, each more cynical, more knowing than the last. This is immediacy. They, unlike the frozen children, leap live from the canvas right into the territory of Ann’s childhood. Grotesque, accessible imps and elves, behind whom unfurl more and more rooms of chaotic injustices.

Ann feels safe with these lively deformations. “Velazquez dwarfs,” her mother whispers, having at last torn herself away from Saturn’s murderous activities.

Then, five rooms down, on a facing wall, Ann sees it: a familiar leg, from which is being pulled a familiar piece of clothing. Ann propels her mother straight through five doorways, past the El Grecos, past the Titians, past the Raphaels until the painting is there, directly in front of them. All the disciples, the pitcher, the bowl, the water, the tile floor, the table, the plate-all the details Ann has memorized at the Art Gallery of Toronto since the painting’s arrival three years before, after the money was raised.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” says her mother.

Ann knows now that what she purchased was a square inch of fraud, a square inch of betrayal. Judas, she notices, is a major figure in the painting.

In the hotel room at siesta time Ann takes off her skirt, leans back against the two large pillows she has placed behind her, and searches through her portable Penguin edition of
Wuthering Heights
for a suitable section concerning lies and betrayals: those particular lies, those particular betrayals that affect children. She settles for the part where
Hindley has locked the young Heathcliff in the garret (Ann can see the garret). Catherine tiptoes up the stairs away from the guests who are listening to the Gimmerton Band, and slips out onto the roof through one skylight and into the attic by another.

Ann imagines the roof. It is December. From the roof you would be able to see almost all the way to Gimmerton. Catherine, cat-like on top of Wuthering Heights, would not feel the wind that buffeted her. She would look for a moment towards the sky, see scudding clouds and a partial moon. The wind would force the fabric of her skirt up against her legs so that she would have to fight cloth and wind and slippery shale to get to him-the betrayed one-where he crouches in the dark. She would have to open the glass and drop lightly down to his side. There would be no colour there. The two children would be fumbling, murmuring, grey shadows. From the lower sections of the house they would hear what the pious old servant, Joseph, called the Devil’s psalmody; the songs of the Gimmerton Band. Ann can see the whole Gimmerton Band, “mustering fifteen strong: a trumpet, a trombone, clarionets, bassoons, French horns and a bass viol, besides singers.” The light of the lamps and candles flickering on all that brass.

Ann can see the whole house now, as if someone had removed a wall, or as if it were an architectural plan. She adds all the detail she can: the fire in the kitchen hearth, the crumbs on the table, the double flight of stairs, and the empty chambers on either side of them. The two children whispering in the attic, heads bent towards one another, their hands touching and separating, touching and separating. Beyond them the winter moors, the rapid clouds, the moon, the wind, the wind. “The Holly and the Ivy,” the French horn slightly off-key.

All of this in a Madrid hotel room while in a vast building, in another part of the city, groups of tourists take no notice of the hot plate, dead centre on the table in the real, the authentic, the actual Tintoretto.

A
RIANNA
E
THER
awoke into darkness dressed in her long white nightgown, or perhaps a garment even lighter, so easily did it move around her body. She was lying flat on her back in a place that was soft, yet strong with a strength of its own. She had no recent memories in her mind, only a feeling of being “lighter than air” and a sense of pure well-being.

Happy, happy, happy
wailed the wind around her.
Heartfelt hallelujahs
, it added and then,
Hallowed, hallowed, hollow
.

Arianna was perfectly still. Only her eyes moved. There were no familiar walls to tell her where she was. But she found, to her surprise, that she didn’t care much one way or the other. She discovered, as she gazed, only the same piercing stars she had seen the night before and a perfume that the wind blew towards her.

Hosanna, hosanna
, howled the wind, breathing more and more perfume into Arianna’s vicinity.
Heather
, it added, rather softly, nudging Arianna towards recognition of her whereabouts.

“Of course,” whispered Arianna, memory creeping back to her, the white wheels of memory creaking, working again with great effort as if throwing off years of rust.

What is memory, Arianna?

“Of course, I fell into the heather.”
And there
, she thought, turning her eyes slightly to the right,
is my balloon. How white and lovely it looks against the black, my balloon, and how it waits there for me to climb back into it and return it to him now that he loves me
.

Helium, helium
, snarled the wind as if unhappy with the direction that Arianna’s mind was taking her.
Hogwash!
it added.

Help!
thought Arianna, for it hadn’t occurred to her to use her voice. And then,
I wonder what part of the moors I’ve fallen into?

Hag, hag
, helped the wind.

Well
, thought Arianna,
you needn’t be nasty!
And then in enormous happiness she laughed at herself talking, if silently, to the wind. And it seemed as if the wind laughed as well in a breathy, sobbing sort of way.

Hello!
it suddenly said. Then, disposing of “h’s” for a while it made a definite statement, several in fact, in a clear, unbreathy, female voice.

“A hag,” it announced, “is not only an ugly old woman much like a witch, it is also a soft place in a moor, or a firm place in a bog. A respite of sorts one way or the other. You are, therefore, lying in a hag-a heathery hag, if you must know-lucky you. And at the right time of year, I might add. One week later! – had you fallen one week later the blossoms, the perfume would be gone. Until next August, of course, which may be sooner than you think.”

“What?” said Arianna, her voice rising happily. “This is mad.” Single words sighed by the wind she could accept but dictionary definitions were something else altogether. She sprang to her feet, or rather floated, so extraordinarily lighter-than-air did she feel. She whirled ecstatically around in the wind, searching for the source of its voice in much the same way that she had danced, earlier in the day, around and around the room with Jeremy, until she became quite dizzy. Stopping, she used the sight of her balloon for ballast until she had to admit that it was not her balloon at all but rather the full moon which, tonight, had not yet gone down. Turning away from it, but not with disappointment, she was confronted by the pale face and clear blue eyes of a young woman who was almost as thin as herself, but who was dark rather than fair.

“Nobody knows anything,” continued the woman, for it was she who had defined the hag. “You see that little knoll yonder?”