Elementals - A. S. Byatt [13]
She ordered breakfast in her room. She slipped out early: even so, the air was like a hot bath as soon as she was beyond the shadow of the Impérator Concorde. She went to the Carré d’Art. It is a beautiful building, discreet, ghostly, absent, a space of grey glass cubes on fine matt steely pillars, taller than the Maison Carrée but deferring to it, with a kind of magnified geometrical repetition and transformation of the proportions of its elegant solidity. Inside, up the wide, steep staircase, in the calm muted light was an exhibition of the work of a German, Sigmar Polke. Patricia’s attention was churning, like water boiling in a jug, a stream of rising currents, a troubled, jagged surface, a downdraught, a bubbling up. She floated from room to room, her sandalled feet soundless, her lavender muslin skirt wafting round her cool knees. Sigmar Polke is strong and witty and various. The old Patricia would have been delighted. There was a wall of images of watch-towers at the corner of barbed-wire fences. There was a room full of gay, charming images of the French Revolution. A pile of parcels, a triangle, two cubes, a diagonal, brightly spattered with tri-coloured motifs, a flower, a Gallic cock, which resolved itself into the blade, ladder and basket of the guillotine. Two eighteenth-century mannikins playing in an Arcadian field with a ball which turns out to be a severed head. In another room, a blown-up drawing of Mother Holle shaking out snow from her feather-bed in the clouds. A high room full of huge, romantic, stained sheets of colour, labelled Apparizione. Gilded puddles, seas of cobalt and lapis, floating milky and creamy clouds and vapours, forked mountains, blue promontories, crevasses and fjords of swirling indigo, pendent rocks hanging over crimson and russet lakes with dragonish jaws or long fingers of purple and bleached bone clutching froth, veiled norns and mocking ghouls, drowning white birds and crumbling citadels. The text beside these visionary expanses emphasised vanishing and danger. Polke paints with currently discarded pigments that are poisons, orpiment, Schweinfurt green, lapis. He mixes unstable chemicals: aluminium, iron, potassium, manganese, zinc, barium, turpentine, alcohol, methanol, smoke black, sealing wax and corrosive lacquers. His surfaces shift and dislimn, the stains change, become indistinct, no shapes hold, no colours are constant. The world of these apparitions is ghastly and lovely. Patricia stared. Here were beauty and danger, flat on a wall. She said in her head, ‘What shall I do? What can I do?’ She stared at the falling veils of melting snow, of curdled cream. How do you decide when to stop looking at something? It is not like a book, page after page, page after page, end. How do you decide?
On the top floor of the Carré d’Art, behind the stair, is a balcony. You can step out there, and suddenly there is no smoky glass between you and the heat and the light, you can look over the city, the intricate circling of red-tiled roofs, like flattish cones. You can see the Tour Magne on the skyline. Patricia went out. The hot air was as solid as the glass. You could touch it with your finger. She floated over to the balustrade, and looked out and down at Nîmes. She leaned back in a corner, she leaned back, and stared at the dark bright blue. She was light, she was insubstantial, in her shadowy lavender dress. She leaned out. Out. The heat fizzed in her eyes and ears. Her feet left the ground, she balanced, she leaned. A hand took her wrist and dragged. Nils Isaksen grasped her other wrist for good measure. His face loomed craggy in the shadow of his Van Gogh hat. It was a very angry face. His feet were planted like lead and his knees pressed against hers as he dragged her back into the box of the balcony.
‘Leave me alone.’
‘How can I?’
‘Very easily. Go away.’
‘I