The Museum of Modern Love(51)
Ahead there was a bottleneck at the doorway with the first of the nude performers. To get a better view, Alice moved away from Levin to the side of the room. A young woman with golden skin and small, awkward breasts stood opposite a lean, immobile man who was also naked. The nude couple held each other’s gaze unflinchingly. The crowd was hesitant. Some people clutched their bags and darted between the two nudes. Others took their time, but rarely did anyone look into the eyes of the performers. Almost every visitor, male and female, turned towards the woman as they stepped through the opening into the next room. Only one person, a man, turned towards the man, but he did not make eye contact. There was a brusque passing, no consideration of buttons or belt clasps against soft flesh.
Alice chose to face the man and felt the heat of his naked body. It was over before she had remembered to look into his eyes. She turned to see Levin looking down at the floor, moving through facing the woman. Alice did not want to think about her father as a sexual being.
Ahead there were two people pointing at one another in a small alcove, their fingers almost touching. Further in, a man and a woman were entwined by their hair, back to back, in a recess of white wall. They also showed no sign of movement other than the blink of their eyes.
In a darkened room a light shone on a huge pile of white plaster cow bones. A large screen showed Abramovi? in a lab coat and glasses. She appeared to be giving a lecture. Then she took off her coat and began dancing wearing nothing but a black slip, stockings and high black shoes.
Alice wasn’t sure what it was about, but she liked it. It was sort of funny. She moved towards a man lying beneath a skeleton. She became aware, once she was beside him, that he too was also quite naked, and she felt a little embarrassed that she was so close to him. As he breathed, the skeleton appeared to breathe with him.
Alice gazed briefly at the glass cabinets that held letters, photographs and medals. Then she sat on a leather bench and listened under headphones.
Marina was saying in her distinctive accented English: ‘I went to monastery in Ladakh because I wanted to see preparation for lama dancing . . . we are just normal human beings then when I put the mask on my head I become a god and a god can do anything.
‘How to catch the moment of here and now? It’s all about present. A performer can still be distracted—the body performs but the mind is everywhere . . .’
The fat woman beside Alice took off her headphones. ‘It’s breaking up so badly,’ she said loudly. ‘They should fix that. I can’t understand what she’s saying.’
Alice nodded and returned her attention to the voice.
‘Rhythm five. I construct a five-pointed star—construction is made in wood shavings soaked in one hundred litres of petrol . . . communist star, Tito time. On my birth certificate . . . somehow a curse for me. I make a ritual to exorcise the star—cut all my hair and put into the star, cut toenails, cut fingernails . . . big mistake . . . then lie in the centre of the star . . . didn’t know no oxygen in the middle of the star . . . lost consciousness. A doctor saw something wrong. I was being burned and not reacting . . . took me out of the piece and revived me.’
What did her father see in Abramovi?? Alice frowned. He liked solitude. She remembered the nights when her mother was away on business and Yolanda had left, and she’d hoped he’d come and talk to her, but he just played music. He could go for weeks without ever having a conversation with her, other than telling her about a new film he was working on, the next bit of music he was trying to solve.
When she had begun to learn cello, she thought it might be something they could do together, or maybe that had been Lydia’s plan. But it wasn’t until Alice got back from Paris and he heard her play in her band that he asked her to come play with him in Healayas’s band. She realised before then he simply hadn’t rated her as a musician.
Abramovi?’s voice in the crackly headphones was saying: ‘Failure is so important. You have to experiment. Failure is part of the process.’
New York attracted extreme things, Alice thought. The French guy who tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers when they were still standing. Abramovi? sitting for seventy-five days in silence. To fall, to fail, the possibility of disaster was so close.
Alice didn’t like to fail. She had worked hard not to fail. She thought she may be failing her mother but she didn’t know how to solve it. She rose and moved on through the retrospective. In the next room a girl about her own age was naked high on a wall. Alice observed a tiny seat between her legs, a little clear plastic bicycle seat almost invisible in the girl’s pubic hair. Her arms were outstretched. People were standing at the back of the room watching. Alice walked forward and the young woman met her eyes. Alice did not look away. The girl’s arms moved infinitesimally. Her feet were on tiny supports and as Alice watched she saw that the girl was moving incrementally to keep herself pinned to the wall. Alice worried for her so high up and exposed to the concrete floor, people staring at her nudity.
Alice visited her mother every weekend she could. It took three trains, but she read and studied, and it was a new pattern. To dress your mother was a strange thing. It had about it a sense of continuum. Her mother did not make eye contact. Her expression was entirely passive, as if she was daydreaming. She didn’t speak, although sometimes she sighed. Her mother was taken to shower in a wheelchair. The nurses spoke to her, the poem of the health worker recited to reassure the patient of the small and essential tasks of day and night: there we go, sliding you into the chair, now lifting your feet, one, two, that’s it, and now off we go into the bathroom, here we are, that’s right, now off with your nightdress, and shower on, oh lovely, not too hot, not too hot, that’s right, nice and warm, let’s wash your hair, that’s right, let’s close your eyes . . .