The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [76]
“But art is never safe. All of this is only one small room in a life.” For a man who supposedly loved art, I felt he was scorning it.
“Come with me.” And he took my elbow carefully, precisely, as if this was one place on the anatomy which was socially acceptable to touch and therefore take part ownership of. He walked me down the hall until we were in the Grand Rotunda, where a sixty-foot tapestry hung. He lifted a corner and held it up so I could look at the underside, where the colours were suddenly brilliant and forceful.
“This is where the power is, you see. Always. The underneath.”
He walked away from the tapestry to the centre of the circular hall, knowing his voice would carry to the perimeter as well as up towards the distant ceiling.
“Probably more than a hundred women worked on this for a year. They fought for the chance to work on it. This thing fed them. This kept them alive in the year 1530, during a Flanders winter. That is what gives truth, depth, to this sentimental tableau.”
He waited in silence until I joined him.
“So tell me, Perinetta—it is Perinetta, yes?—who made this? One hundred women with their cold and chapped hands? The man who conceived the scene? What made this was simply a year and a place. It was a time when the only way to identify an artist was by where he came from or where he ended up working. Towns claim half the great art of Europe. Look here—you can see the city mark of Oudenaarde. But of course, one also must consider which of the Medicis bought it for a small nation’s fortune, and transported it to Italy, protected by guards and thugs, a thousand miles….”
When he talked like that I could have slid with ease into his assured pocket. I was very young the first time he spoke to me. The thing is that men, with the kind of power that comes with money and knowledge, assume the universe. It allows them an easy wisdom. But such people close doors on you. Within such a universe there are codes, rooms you must not enter. In their daily life there is always a cup of blood somewhere. He was aware of that. Horace Johnson knew the kind of animal he was riding. There’s a brutality that comes with such knowledge. I didn’t know it then. Not that afternoon when he steered me into the Grand Rotunda holding just my elbow and with that same hand lifted the corner of the tapestry, as if it was a servant’s skirt, to reveal the bright underside.
I continued living in that world for three seasons, and eventually discovered I did not control any of the paths I thought I had freely chosen. I was unaware of the trapdoors and moats among the rich. I was unaware that a man like Horace treated even those he loved, and those he desired to have in his presence, in the same way that he must have treated his enemies, placing them where there was no chance of retaliation.
In Siena, if you go to the corner of the via del Moro and via Sallustio Bandini and look up, you can read Dante’s lines from the Purgatorio—
“That one is” he replied “Provenzan Salvani;
and he is here because he had the ambition
to carry all of Siena in his hands.”
And at the top of the via Vallerozzi where it meets the via Montanini, you discover, cut into the yellow stone—
Wise Savia I was not, even though Sapìa
I was called, and about the misfortunes of others
I was much happier than about my own good luck.
In the great centres of power, you see, competition is based not so much on winning but on stopping your enemy from achieving what he or she really wants.
One Christmas there was a fancy-dress party for the staff, and during it I became suddenly conscious of him circling me, on the half-empty patio. I had arrived as Marcel Proust, my blonde hair hidden and with a slim moustache pasted on, and wearing a cape. Was this what interested him? Did this somehow allow a disguise for his intentions?
He asked if he could get me anything. “Nothing,” I replied.
“Do you wish to dance across the great