They moved from room to room, house to house, Debora and Mingolla silent, the cameraman tracking them, and Spurlow carrying on an inane lecture. Of course,’ he said, every tour of the complex has a different starting point, a different finish. But we think the artist intended this house and this particular wall to be the focal point.’
The wall indicated by Spurlow depicted a bed where lay a man, his face to the wall, only his black hair and tanned shoulders visible, and a young woman who greatly resembled Debora in the East Indian cast of her features. The sheet had ridden down to expose her breasts, and her brown left arm hung off the side of the mattress. There was an energyless abandon to the attitude of the bodies that communicated the fact that they were dead, that they had succumbed to the evil processes embodied by the cables and gears of the bloody human remnants that could be seen in the shadows beneath the bed.
‘End of story,’ said Spurlow. ‘Painting as narrative redefined for our age. And redefined with thrilling power.’
Perhaps it was the woman’s resemblance to Debora that ignited Mingolla’s rage, but it seemed to him then that his passage through the labyrinth of painted rooms had been like the progress of a flame along a coil of fuse, and that he was essentially carrying out the wishes of the artist, obeying the angry impulse that had created the work and designed its destruction, and that the match that had lit him was Spurlow’s adenoidal voice. He lifted his rifle and opened fire, ignoring Spurlow’s panic-stricken shouts. He tracked fire across the wall top to bottom, chips of painted stucco flying, the bursts echoing, and when the clip had at last been emptied, all that remained of the painting was the woman’s brown arm hanging off the edge of the mattress.… Seeing it that way, isolated, Mingolla remembered that he had seen it before, the brief hallucination in Izaguirre’s office; the glimpse of a delicately rendered arm that had preceded the more detailed hallucination of the night street; and he became unnerved on realizing what that meant, how it ratified the sense of finality, of long years wound down into the future that had been implicit in the hallucination of pornographic America. With Spurlow still shouting at him, he went out of the room, out through a door and back into the street, where he breathed deeply of the clean sunlit air. Tully and a couple of the soldiers from the checkpoint came running through the pines. ‘What goin’ on?’ Tully yelled. ‘You all right?’
‘It’s okay… I just shot up the fucking painting!’
‘Didja, no shit?’ said one of the soldiers.
‘Yeah!’
The soldiers laughed. ‘Awright, man! Awright!’ They ran back up the slope to spread the news.
Debora moved up to stand beside him, to put a hand on his arm, as if accepting complicity, and behind him Spurlow was talking to the cameraman, saying, ‘Did you get it all?’ and then, ‘Well, at least that’s something.’
He walked over to Mingolla and confronted him. ‘Mind explaining why you did that?’ There was bitterness in his tone, along with a tired sarcasm. ‘Did you feel that was something you just had to do, did it satisfy some barbarous impulse? God!’
Mingolla could hear the camera whirring. It felt right… what can I tell ya?’
‘Do you know,’ said Spurlow, his voice tightening, ‘do you know what we’ve gone through to preserve it? Do you…’ He waved in disgust. ‘Of course you don’t.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mingolla said. ‘I mean you’ve got the statement down.’ He gestured at the camera. ‘This is better’n art, right?’
‘The loss…’ began Spurlow with pompous solemnity, but Mingolla—experiencing a surge of anger—cut him off by grabbing Decora’s rifle and training it on him.
‘You getting this?’ Mingolla asked the cameraman, and then said to Spurlow, ‘This is your big moment, guy. Any pronouncements on death as art, any last words on the creative process?’
Debora pulled at him, but he shook her off.
‘Don’t be actin’ dis way,’ Tully said. ‘De mon ain’t worth it.’
‘There’s no reason to get upset,’ said Spurlow. ‘We…’
‘There’s plenty of reason,’ said Mingolla. ‘All the reason in the world.’ He hadn’t been this angry for a long time, not since the Barrio, and although he didn’t quite understand the anger—something to do with the painting, with its validation of the sorry future—he liked the feeling, liked its sharpness, its unrepentant exuberance. He switched off the safety, and Spurlow blanched, backed away.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please.’
‘Wish I could help ya,’ said Mingolla. ‘But just now I’m so caught up in the coils of creativity, I’m afraid mercy’s not in the cards. Don’t you see the inevitability of this moment? I mean we’re talking serious process here, man. The perfect critic stepping forth from the demimonde of the war and blowing the heart of the painting to rubble, and then turning his weapon on the man whose actions have been the pure contrary of the work’s formal imperative.’
‘I’m outta film,’ said the mestizo cameraman. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and Mingolla told him to go ahead, load up. Both Debora and Tully began pleading with him to stop, and he told them to shut up.
‘For God’s sake!’ Spurlow looked left and right for help, found none. ‘You’re going to kill me… you can’t!’
‘Me?’ Mingolla tapped his chest. ‘That’s not the way you should see it, man. I’m merely the shaped inspiration of the work, the…’
‘Ready,’ said the cameraman.
‘Great!’ Mingolla’s thoughts were singing, whining with the pitch of the sunlight, the droning of insects, and he said to himself, I’m really going to waste this chump, why, just because he irritates me, because he’s so goddamn stupid he believes…
‘Stop it, David.’ Debora pushed the barrel aside, pressed close to him. ‘Stop it,’ she said softly. Calm seemed to flow from her, and though Mingolla wanted to reject it, he couldn’t. He lowered the gun, looked over her head at Spurlow, who was frozen, stifflegged. ‘Fuck,’ he said, realizing how close he had come to losing it, to reverting to his old insanity.
Spurlow scuttled behind the cameraman and, using him for a shield, made for a doorway. Once inside, he poked out his head and said, ‘You’re out of your mind, you know that? You better get him some help, lady! You better get him some help!’ It looked as if his head had been added to the frieze of figures on the wall beside him: a young couple arm in arm, and two old men who were apparently whispering about them. Mingolla had the urge to make his own movie. Hound Spurlow through the ruins day after day, filming his fearful decline, taping his increasingly incoherent rants on the state of art, rants that made more and more sense in relation to both the project of the film and the artifact of its setting. Call it The Curator. But he supposed there must be better things to do… though at the moment he couldn’t think of any.
‘Let’s go,’ said Debora, taking his hand.
They started off up the slope toward the Bronco, where a group of soldiers had gathered.
‘That’s right!’ Spurlow screamed. ‘Walk away! You’ve desecrated a work of art, and now you just walk away.’ He came a few steps out of the doorway, encouraged by their distance. ‘Don’t come back! You do, and I’ll be ready! I’ll get a gun! It doesn’t take intelligence to fire a gun!’ He came farther toward them, shaking his fist, the last defender of his little painted fortress. He said something to the cameraman, then continued his shouting, his voice growing faint, almost lost in the crush of their footsteps on the carpet of pine needles. ‘You laugh!’ he called out to them. You laugh at me, you think I’m a fool to care about beauty, about the power of these walls! You think I’m crazy!’