all goes bad again. I stay at home. P. is nervous, especially at night, and the effects of the warm milk are not so calming. The Riffian woman now passes the warm milk through crushed almonds, which settles the stomach and eases the mind. It works. These people know things that we have forgotten.
26th October 1956, Tangier
It is done. The Statute of Tangier has been abrogated. The international regime is finished, but the existing financial, monetary, economic and commercial conditions of our business Utopia will remain in force until the Sultan can come up with his own ideas. R.’s contacts assure him these will not differ dramatically from the ancien regime. How money talks so much louder (even over the din of national pride and Islamic fervour), although they have banned the sale of alcohol within 50 metres of a Mosque, which has put an end to all my drinking holes in the Medina. R. has no plans to leave. I still see him in the Cafe de Paris, but he is now surrounded by men in robes, wearing fezes and thick-framed glasses.
26th October 1956, Tangier
I now know why M. has been so silent. An American writer (every other one is a writer these days) who claims to be a friend of de Kooning met M. at a dinner in NY. M. was with her new husband, a sixty- nine-year-old philanthropist and collector called Milton Gardener. The news leaves me stunned and blinking foolishly. My instinct is to feel betrayed, but then later I ask myself, what had I been expecting? I have no intention of leaving P.
15th June 1957, Tangier
M. arrived three days ago with her new husband whose full name is Milton Rorschach Gardener IV. We meet at a function in the El Minzah Hotel. I am delighted and at the first opportunity try to run M. upstairs into one of the spare rooms, but she quickly puts me in my place. She introduces me to M.G., who is not a doddery old fool but a very tall, imposing and impressive man. He has a cane and a knee which, when it bends, snaps with a metallic click. They ask to come to the studio.
They arrive the next day just as I’m explaining my new interlocking figurative landscapes to Javier, who has now had to be caged in a wooden pen. A worrying development is that in creating these patterned human landscapes I seem to be implying some wonderful network of human connection, which I don’t think I believe in. M. takes one look at Javier, picks him up and takes him away on to the verandah. It’s love at first sight from both sides. As M.G. and I talk we can’t help but glance over at the two of them, feeling like jilted lovers at a dance.
M.G. is taken with my new work but he has seen the drawing of P. in B.H.’s collection. He asks me if I’ve developed that idea into paint and says: ‘There’s your future, if you ask me.’
M. tells me later that M.G.’s ‘old money’ came from steel but his ‘new money’ came from playing the futures markets. Apparently in these markets you can bet on the future price of a product like wheat, sugar or even pork bellies (this doesn’t sound like work to me) and I realize how small my world has become. Because of my talent I think art important but now see that I rely on a small group of wealthy people to buy my work, who in turn can make a fortune by putting chips on bacon. It’s an epiphany of sorts, perhaps a reverse one, as I now see myself as one of M.G.’s futures markets. He’s looking at my pork bellies and wondering if they’re worth putting money on. I tell M. that he should buy Chaim Soutine’s Carcass of Beef, which she doesn’t find funny but I think the old Lithuanian Jew himself would have laughed. Come to think of it, even Chaim Soutine’s landscapes were like offal. I put this to M.G. who says: ‘Yeah, truly offal,’ which joke is spoilt because he has to explain it to me.
3rd September 1957, Tangier
R. is happy about Mohammed V’s Royal Charter, which came into effect a few days ago. The money market is still free and exports and imports unrestricted. The business community is euphoric. I am in a black depression. M. and M.G. have left. They bought one of my ‘peoplescapes’ so all was not lost. I gave M. a present of a (very) small painting of a line of carcasses hanging in a butcher’s cold store. Amongst the carcasses is a little self-portrait. I am hanging upside down, thorax and belly split, meat-hook through my Achilles heel. M. chides me for being a cynic but keeps it, ‘Because I know you will be famous one day.’ I call the piece Futures in Art. I am now reeling from my stupid joke because I have touched on the wretched truth. I am not operating in a sacred world. I am in a market. Here we all are aiming at some high truth, when in fact we are mired in the mud of commerce.
I leave the studio and on an impulse take out the drawings of P. (which I keep at home or I’d spend my day gawping at them). I pace up and down as if inspecting the troops until I find P. is in the room with me. I tell her that I’m trying to find a way to take this work forward. She says in a prophetic voice: ‘You won’t be able to take these forward until you can see beyond them.’ I ask her what she means. ‘You only see what is there,’ she says and leaves me no better off than I was.
28
Monday, 23rd April 2001, Plaza del Pan, Seville
At 8.30 a.m. Falcon was waiting outside the jeweller’s workshop. The old man turned up ten minutes later. Falcon followed him in to a room that had clocks all over the walls and, hanging from hooks on various shelves, hundreds of watches. On the work bench were the entrails of various timepieces.
‘Aren’t you a jeweller?’ asked Falcon.
‘I was,’ said the old man. ‘I retired. I think this is suitable work for a man of my age. It’s always good to keep an eye on the time when there’s so little of it left. What have you got for me?’
‘I want you to identify the quality of some silver in a ring,’ asked Falcon, producing his police ID.
The old man sat down, took out an eyeglass and emptied the plastic evidence sachet on to a piece of velvet on the work bench. He screwed the eyeglass into the socket of his eye and held up the ring.
‘It’s been enlarged,’ he said, instantly. ‘They’ve used a different grade of silver. The original is sterling silver, which is 92.5 per cent pure, minimum. This other silver is much less pure. You can tell from the greyer quality of the material. It’s maybe 20 per cent alloy instead of 7.5.’
‘Where would you find silver like that?’
‘It’s not of European origin. Nobody would accept it. If you told me you’d found it in Seville or Andalucia I’d say it had probably come from Morocco. They use this grade of silver there and a lot of it comes over here in the form of cheap jewellery. When you take off a ring like this it leaves a greenish, greyish mark on your finger. That’s the high copper-alloy content in the silver.’
‘What about the original ring?’ he asked. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘I wouldn’t be able to offer any proof on this in court because it’s not hallmarked, but in my opinion this is Spanish, from the thirties. There was a fashion then for parents giving their daughters silver rings on reaching womanhood. It didn’t last. You don’t see them any more.’
