‘49 Sentences for Santiago Rusiñol’ and other poems

(i)
We’re finally donating our Rusiñol. It shows a standing female nude, visible from the thighs up, her right leg bent as if in the process of stepping away from us. I unhooked it this morning from its corner on the landing. I looked for a long time into its world. I carefully wrapped it as instructed, in layers of crepe and bubble-wrap, made it ready for the museum people. It’s resting aslant in the hallway now, listening to the traffic on Granados Street, waiting to be institutionalised. Its canvass pores are scarcely breathing.

(ii)
We’re finally donating our Rusiñol. Her body is in profile, her face in quarter profile, her features angled away from us, impossible to parse. Her sable hair is cropped quite close, her taut neck just slightly inclined. Her skin is rendered in some weightless white: call it egg-shell, call it lace or ivory. It exists as seamless, luminous passages of paint, in which no single application of the brush can be discerned. The wall behind her, on the other hand, is built from meticulous smudges, loose and individual and percolating somehow, the blue of Saturday laughter echoing from the little playground on Granados Street. As a child I thought she was my Great Aunt Elisenda, in adolescence I looked at her quite differently.

(iii)
We’re finally donating our Rusiñol. Mother’s accountants insist that the tax environment will never again be so conducive to disposal. Last night we attended the donors’ banquet, a bustling, candle-lit affair hosted in the nave of the second-floor gallery. Mother, I believe, found the event to be rather a trying one; though I, for my part, enjoyed a perfectly pleasant conversation with the curator of antiquities. The chair of Caixa Bank was in attendance, some lesser members of the Ricomà family, the goalkeeper Ruud Hesp. But the catering! Oh dear: soggy artichokes with black honey, some over-fussy consommé, a needless deconstructed pig-cheek stew.

(iv)
We’re finally donating our Rusiñol. My father, by no means a lover of the plastic arts, couldn’t go by it without pausing. She hung outside the kitchen then, in the years before his passing. He’d stare into that room, that realm of light. After supper, say, on those nights he wasn’t working – a moment or two, but noticeable. He never said what he saw in her svelte, swelling belly, her breasts’ ingenious contours. He never told me about his illness, or the useless convoluted doctoring that he went through, or the fact that he was dying.

(v)
We’re finally donating our Rusiñol. It entered my patrimony in September 1902, mere months after its composition, when it was acquired by one Guillem Cenas from a long-gone dealer down on Portaferrissa Street. This Guillem, the uncle of my grandfather, was like so many in our lineage an exporter and importer, bringing coal from Glamorgan, steel from Düsseldorf, sending textiles to Lille and Pomerania. Blessed with impeccable taste, he gathered about him some very fine things: etchings, ceramics, first editions. He was, by all accounts, a fellow of exceeding cruelty. Moustachioed, forensic, indefatigable: he would spend one whole day caressing and assessing porcelain, the next enlisting needy, big-knuckled strike-breakers from the dive-bars of Parallel. The Rusiñol, I believe, is the only thing of his to have come down to me.

(vi)
We’re finally donating our Rusiñol. No more will it dwell in its perch upon the landing. No more will it preside over the staircase. No more will I consider each morning that nude in her stillness stitched loosely, carefully; stitched from brushstroke after brushstroke: cobalt, deft, repetitive. In her universe nothing stirs, but beyond her yellow door it’s 1902 and the city seethes with anarchists and policemen, with bombs and blades and machinations. Her shoulders, her shoulder blades accept the clear light, hold onto it; to caress her, one feels, would be akin to handling light. She’s been looking away from me so long she must have seen right into my heart.

(vii)
We’re finally donating our Rusiñol. Tomorrow she’ll be stared at by strangers. She’ll be prodded, ogled and evaluated. She’ll reside in tepid mutuality – the possession of everyone, of no one in particular. I’m staring at the oblong now, the oblong where mere hours ago she shimmered on the landing. How blank, unblemished and faraway it is. How square, how unspeakably clean.


The White Bed

My brother lay down in a bed of ice,
laundered, yielding as one might wish for.
I stole this image from Antoni Tàpies.

My brother handled balance sheets with such grace,
could trap a football like Romario.
But then he lay down on a bed of ice.

My brother on his silken skis
was crossing half the cold breadth of Andorra.
I steal another image from Tàpies
...