ZADIE SMITH

ZADIE SMITH

She walked toward the big white building, playing childishly with the Italian: “the revolting museum.” Actually, it was in the best taste: simple lines, a clean, classical facade. That was what was so revolting about it. All the provocations inside had been tamed. Now the tourists came to see the ripped canvases and the blunt perspectives, the de Chiricos, the Fontanas. It was what you did before getting an ice cream. She also wanted an ice cream — the sun was brutal. She kept walking. Crossing the square felt like being in a de Chirico, the shadow of her new body stretched so far. But no one found her strange; no one blocked her way. Perhaps everybody drags their body through the world with the same painful effort.

At the entrance she left $5 in the box and walked the great stone stairs. Again she had the sense of something flattened out: all these individual artists constrained to live together now under one roof, sharing rooms, sharing walls, gathered by Anderson’s whims or by the dull rules of chronology and influence. Like a graveyard! Buried forever next to whomever.

“Can I help you?” asked a guard, rising from his chair. Marla turned and saw how close she was standing to him. Being in Ryan seemed to mess with her spatial awareness. Her peripheral vision was shot. She stepped back and worked hard to make Ryan smile.

“I’m looking for the Lucio Fontana?”

“Room six.”

And it was wonderful to approach that room, finally. To see, first, the slashes and the black shimmer behind, and then, on the central bench, Anderson and Francis, waiting for her. Waiting for him. She knew she had been brought here for Francis, but as she crossed the threshold it really seemed any combination was possible, anything might penetrate anybody, and the result would be the same. She watched them stand and begin clapping. She felt like a triumphant soprano. Both men came and took her hands. His hands. They faced each other. Then they turned toward the greatest of the Fontanas: one huge slash down a canvas of pure arterial red, leading to that shimmering black beneath. It was large enough that a man might enter it. A woman, too.

“Shall we?” asked Marla, inside Ryan. And they did.