TE22 Potpourri

Manuel Baixauli

UNKNOWN

painter or a writer, they almost inevitably made a name for themselves. Climbed the ladder of success, as they say. The Master, who had no talent for any sort of artistic practice, could nonetheless sniff it out in others. His was a unique ability to detect talent, and he had exercised it with passion. Mateu hesitated between turning around and looking for another café, or heading over to the Master. The only time they’d ever spoken was twenty years earlier, and the Master had told him that if he’d never be anybody if he didn’t make a shift in his work, that painting from your head and ignoring the world—ignoring the rich, complex forms of nature as a stimulus—was a dead-end. “And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,” theMaster had said, quoting Walt Whitman, when Mateu was young, when Mateu was so sure of himself and his future that he was unwilling to follow anyone’s advice. Now Mateu was forty years old, he hadn’t managed to become somebody, he had nothing, and maybe now he would’ve humbly absorbed those words. As Mateu hesitated, the Master looked up with a face furrowed by eighty years of experiences, particularly inner experiences, with a thin-lipped tight mouth, through lead-gray eyes. Does he remember me? Mateu thinks. The Master stared at him, bringing his eyebrows together, in his standard incisive, stubborn gaze. He had a maniacal air, and his body was tiny and feeble. “Painter!” he shouted, raising an arm, his voice cracking. “How 78

are you?”

So he did remember him. Not his name, but his face and his profession. Mateu felt deeply buoyed; theMaster, themanwho had launched some of the finest writers and painters of recent decades, remembered him, even though it had been twenty years. Perhaps Mateu hadn’t changed much over those decades, he was a man who took care of himself. He hadn’t gained weight, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink much—the occasional beer before dinner, sometimes a glass of red wine. He hadn’t lost his— short, profuse—hair like so many of his friends had, and now its gray accentuated his intellectual look, which was only reinforced by round tortoise-shell glasses; all in all he gave off the appearance of a wise, tentative, man who would be unable to hurt a fly. The Master invited him to take a seat. Mateu, after too much hesitation, ordered a tea and a piece of toast with oil and salt, and asked the Master what he was doing, there in the city. “Wasting my time,” he said, gesturing dramatically. “In the stupidest possible way.” Gazing out at the street without focusing on anything in particular, hewearily added, “You devote yourself to art as well, pray tell me: why do we, who burn with a thirst for beauty, we who are obsessed with beauty, so much so that we lose sleep 79