RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare
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Название: RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR
Автор: Philip Hoare
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780008133696
isbn:
From one of her studio shelves, low down where the cats prowl, Pat pulls a brown envelope, and from it a photograph of herself and Charlie.
It’s 1961. There’s no wind. The five-hundred-pound tuna dangles between them, suspended by a rope around its tail, so huge and bug-eyed, so stuck over and spiny it’s hard to believe it’s not cut out and glued on. They each hold a fin, these two anglers, smiling for the camera, proud of their catch.
Pat has a huge rod and reel. As slight and chic as she seems, in her rolled-up jeans, checked shirt and suntan, it was Pat, not Charlie, who did all the work; Pat who struggled to hoick the bluefin out of the sea and onto the deck; Pat who was given the trophy by the state governor for her prize catch, seen in another press photograph, dressed in a dark silk shirt-waister, as shiny as a fish, her glossy hair in curls. She looks like Hepburn or Bacall, gamine and self-assured, with Charlie as her Bogart.
It was Nanno and Charlie and Pat, out fishing, part of the sea. In 1962, Nanno and Pat built this big house, created to enable thin slivers of art. They bought the land for six thousand dollars. Pat drew up the plans and the house grew up from the shore. It didn’t so much look out to the sea as the sea looked into it.
‘It wasn’t conceptual,’ Pat says. ‘It rose up out of the mud.’ Locals thought it was impractical. It seemed built out of belief alone. A factory of the imagination.
That same year came Nanno’s diagnosis, ‘and everything that goes with that’. Photographs show him bundled up to the neck, sitting on the deck, while the house rises pristine behind him, full of light and space. Living with lung cancer, he painted his last painting, of the sea, the large canvas laid flat, supported on stools. It showed the harbour flats drained at low tide. For the first time, he painted no horizon.
‘It was,’ said Pat, ‘his last word on the subject of painting.’ They moved into the house at Thanksgiving, 1962. They were there together barely a year. The following Thanksgiving – just days after President Kennedy was shot – there was a terrible storm which worked its havoc through three high tides. ‘It took the bulkhead, the deck, and almost undermined the house,’ Pat recalls. A month later, that Christmas, Nanno died.
Pat had his coffin constructed from red cedar left over from the building of their house; as if he were being launched out to sea, like Ishmael. Nanno’s tempestuous scenes of the Atlantic shores still hang on these walls: Ballston Beach bursts with energy, as if it were just a window on the wall looking over to the ocean side of the Cape. Every cupboard, every drawer, every eave of this house is filled with art. Art seeps out through the knots in the wood, like the sea under the floorboards.
There were parties here back in the sixties and seventies, recorded in flaring home movies and remembered in the stories of those who attended them and spent a night in gaol for disturbing the peace. There were psychedelic drugs, and when Pat invited jazz musicians, like her lover, Elvin Jones, she’d find rotting fish on her doorstep, left by folk who took offence at her having brought black people to town. Nina Simone visited; I imagine coming downstairs and finding her sipping tea at Pat’s long table, talking in her rich voice. A faded photograph pinned to the wall shows Pat and her friends playing congas out on the deck. The drums still stand in her living room, but they haven’t been played in a while.
Pat had other visitors to attend to. In 1982, a lone orca appeared in the bay. It was a female, apparently habituated to humans; some thought it was an escapee from a military marine mammal programme, a dolphin draft-dodger. It was the biggest animal she would meet. Pat would kayak out to meet it and drew it over and again, this time using her black marker on flat stones. With the fin rising next to her boat, Pat held out a flounder to her friend.
Others were less considerate when the whale came in close to the pier. ‘Someone poured bourbon in her blowhole,’ Pat says. After that, the harbourmaster drove the whale back out to sea.
This house is rebuilt with every season, growing layer upon layer. Giant jade and ficus plants tower in the interior, tended by rainwater collected from the roof. Buddha sits in his lotus position in the garden. The outside comes inside. In the yard, self-seeded trees shade the graves of departed dogs; great strings of blue lights illuminate their branches as night falls. Robins and cardinals take refuge up there from the cats to whom this house really belongs, familiars to their mistress.
It is the very antithesis of the order her mother created in fashionable Manhattan. Books and catalogues rise in piles on every step of the stairs. Dusty drawers are filled with cormorants cawing and clamouring to get out. If Pat no longer paints, perhaps it is because she has said what she needed to say. Now she collects stones from the shore as she walks it in her light leaping stride, pocketing pieces of seaworn granite and quartz to be arranged on her tables outside with no purpose but every intention. Years ago, in 1954, when she was typing out Beckett’s Molloy for the Paris Review, she became fascinated with the ‘sucking stones’ section.
‘I spent some time at the seaside, without incident,’ says Molloy. ‘Personally I feel no worse there than anywhere else … And to feel that there was one direction at least in which I could go no further, without first getting wet, then drowned, was a blessing.’
He then performs a strange, obsessive rite.
‘I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about.’
‘For ten pages, in one paragraph,’ says Pat, ‘he moves these stones in and out of his pockets and his mouth, working on a complicated logistic with the order of sucking each stone and where to put it after it is sucked so it won’t get sucked again before all sixteen stones have, in turn, been sucked and put in the proper pocket. It took me a long time because I constantly got lost. I read and read this piece. Those stones stay with me …’
Stones and sea and sand. It’s the nothingness of what she does that drives Pat on. Her energy has become concentrated, as if everything was working to some Zen-like point of absolute and discard; the apparent nothingness of her paintings, the seeming emptiness of the beach; as if she has conjured it all up herself, and is content with what she has done. She needs to do no more. Pat rarely leaves Provincetown now; she is bound to this place. ‘I feel very cut off,’ she said in 1987, more than twenty years after Nanno died. ‘Come April, after a winter alone, I almost feel I don’t exist.’
Living behind her trees, looking out to sea, she might be a forgotten figure in this forgetting town, abandoned all over again. But when we get in a taxi, the young driver tells me, ‘Mrs de Groot rides for free.’
It lies there in the shadow of the wharf, as if it had sought shelter beneath the wooden struts. It has been dead for only twenty-four hours, but its distinctive markings – delicate grey and yellow swirls, merging as a graphic equaliser of its motion through the waves, as if they’d left their traces on its body – are already fading in the wind.
A common dolphin, exquisitely ill-named. Dennis writes the binomial down on his form, losing patience as his pen runs out: Delphinus delphis, a much more princely title, redolent of Cretan friezes and Greek vases. Two thousand years ago in his History of Animals, Aristotle attested to ‘the mildness and gentleness СКАЧАТЬ