DIVE INTO TEXT /
	the artist‘s studio
	by Lawrence Chua
	It seemed as if he might enter the room. He stood quietly among the crowd, waiting for an invitation that was never articulated clearly enough, was never warm enough or inviting enough. That morning he woke to the sound of a man pleading into a phone outside his door in the hostel on the Calle Zorilla. I’m not interested in blackmailing you, Ahmed. I’m sorry I couldn’t come down to South Africa sooner but I’m doing my best. I don’t know what these guys will do but I’ve never ever gone in for blackmail. He had listened and risen and washed and looked in the small mirror above the sink but he did not recognise the body he saw there. So he dressed and when he opened the door to his room, he saw Ahmed’s friend sitting by the phone in the lobby and scribbling on a piece of paper. The pencil made a furious sound on the page. The sounds around him now were less urgent. Americans were talking about other paintings in other galleries. Their voices were less steady, their flesh more gelatinous than that of the other visitors, or of the figures in most of the paintings. They were closest to the Rubens, the meat of their bodies corpulent and bruised. Goya wasn’t crazy when he painted these, a guide told a group of young people. He was just depressed. He wondered what the difference was. The crowds thinned. He alone stood before the painting of the room and its inhabitants. He stepped forward and the figures collapsed into smears of oil and pigment. The artist had been stingy in most places and the weft of the canvas was clearly visible to him beneath the short brush strokes. He stepped back and the materials coalesced again into an image. The longer he looked at it, the more the image frayed. The things in the painting seemed at once tangible and out of grasp. It was not just the figures. They were more like sentries or bad conversationalists, obstacles he would have to surmount to get to the richness of the room, the wealth of its emptiness, its space. Immediately before him were a young girl and her retinue. The girl was doll-like and macabre and he was not certain whether she was a girl at all. There was a weariness to her face he rarely saw in the faces of children. There were two other figures who were about her size at the edge of the painting and he recognised them as adults, deformed and wise. One of them pushed his foot against the hindquarters of a dog. The figure had long hair and a smooth face and he was not certain whether the little figure was a man or a woman. The uncertainty made him uneasy. The blonde infanta was attended by two nearly identical young women. They looked like brittle meringues in their fussy dresses. Other figures lurked in the shadows: a woman in a nun’s habit, a man in formal dress standing in a doorway. An artist stood before a large canvas. What was on the canvas only the artist seemed to know. The colours on his palette were not the same colours as the rest of the room. Was the artist a part of the child’s retinue? A red cross burned on the man’s breast. What did it mean? Was he a proponent or a sworn enemy of the prevailing historical tendency? Behind the artist were paintings, obscured by the vastness of the room. Only one of the frames was luminous. He looked closer, trying to keep the object from disappearing into paint. With one foot raised off the ground and his neck pitched forward, he could see that it was a mirror. It was directed towards the front of the room, where it should have reflected his own image but instead there were two figures looking back. One was a man and the other a woman. A common greyness silvered their skin. The room was filled with the mysterious dialogue between the artist and the figures that were before him, reflected in the mirror. It was happening in a secret language of looks and mirrors and the more he stood there, the deeper the mystery became. The painting had once been exhibited in a room with a mirror behind the viewer so that they were all trapped: the painting and the observer and the mirror locked in an endless reproduction of one another. The common ground between the observer and the observed was where the dialogue happened. It was a dialogue of light, emanating from several places. One came from the light streaming through the window in the front, another from a window further back, and yet another from a door that opened in the back of the studio. The light seemed to spill out of the room and into the place where he was standing. Between him and the painting time and space had been annihilated. It was a part of the way that empires were built. Locations collapsed into one another with the speed of the locomotive, the automobile, the telephone and the Internet. Every place shed its isolation and its local flavour. Everything became reproducible. Malevolent forces gathered in the painting’s corners. The infanta would die at the age of 21, exhausted by seven pregnancies. He read that somewhere. The painter’s studio was a sad room full of sad news. The empire was coming apart at the seams. In the far corners, pirates were chipping away at its wealth. Younger, more ambitious nations were competing for its trade. Disease threatened the capital. The room had been a shelter from the burning world and yet the light from its fires still penetrated the depths. Some tourists came in then. One of them asked a guard in a Scottish brogue whether there were any modern paintings. Aqui? the guard said. Yes, the Scot replied. No, the guard said. He was hungry and found a bar across the street from the museum. It looked clean and modern and the tables in the sun were empty. He sat at one and when the waitress cameto take his order he asked for un tapa de jamon y un beso d’agua. The waitress had a soft face with expressive eyes and she repeated his order thoughtfully but did not correct him. All the same, it was a glass of water she brought to him, not a kiss of water. As he drank it, he had the distinct impression that he was outside of himself, watching another foreigner sitting there in the shadow of the great museum. When he finished the ham and the water he paid the bill and went for a walk in the city. It was summer and the streets were noisy and alive. He walked on hard paving stones that ricocheted with the sounds of neighbourhood football games. Billboards glistened from the sides of the boulevards. It felt as if he were walking through a computer game. The streets were filled with the different faces of an empire that had long ago dissolved into poverty. He tried to imagine the routes of the empire on the faces of these darkened subjects, returning to its fading heart. As he neared the Puerta del Sol, the streets quieted for the afternoon siesta. The buildings closed their faces to him and flattened out into a montage of façades. They might as well have been photographs. He could not enter them anywhere. Then, a red door opened in a narrow mall and he walked through it. The room inside was thin and connected two parallel streets. The place was filled with men keeping peep-show distances from one another and as he stood there, he had that sensation again that he was watching himself standing in the room as if he were someone else. What he meant by himself: a thing not pure but already corrupt. A wall of cabins beckoned at the side of the room. The films in the cabin were running faster than his heartbeat. He could change them by pushing a red button in a panel on the wall. He watched the films and changed them distractedly. The acts on the small screen in the cabin flew by so quickly that there was nothing to separate them. It was all flesh and it was difficult to tell where one began and another ended or even where his own body began and ended. He pushed the red button faster and faster. He was no longer certain what he was watching, whether it was a sex act or a train wreck, but it was no longer a matter of observation anyway. It was now a matter of habit, the young man in the peep show who pushed the bodies on the screen into one another without much thought until his money ran out. He opened the door to his cabin and entered the room again. He exchanged a few uncomfortable glances with other men and then wandered out into the street where he collided with a running woman. He was surprised that a woman could push him so violently off balance. She looked at him with open, bursting eyes, and then sprinted up the street. Sirens cut the sleepy air. The police were chasing some people through the streets. These people were dark and quick but they ran with blankets full of merchandise. The police carried nothing but their truncheons. It did not seem like a fair game. One of the counterfeiters dropped a handbag that bounced at his feet. He recognised the label. He stopped at another bar and ordered a small cup of strong coffee but when he went to pay for it his wallet was gone. As he tried to assemble the words to explain this to the cashier, he could not remember whether it was Degas who had described an accomplished painting as a perfect crime.