‘But the boom is over,’ I say.
‘Yes, and now the very same thing is happening again, everybody tries to forget what they did during the boom. Everybody acts instead like they are the victim. You know the Greek word for truth is aletheia? Lethe, this is the river of forgetting, so the truth, aletheia, is that which you don’ forget. But here, it’s like the total opposite. The truth is what you don’t remember.’
‘Liffey or Lethe,’ I say, recalling the old argument about the Radiohead song.
‘It’s like this whole country is trying to crawl out of its own skin,’ she says. ‘And I start to feel that me, with my art, I am helping them.’
‘But you can paint whatever you want to paint,’ I tell her. ‘You can paint nothing but these streets, if you want. I’ll make sure the whole world sees them.’
‘Yes, that’s exactly the kind of fucking thing art would do,’ she laughs, ‘and show it in a gallery far away from here, where you can’t smell the smell and no one going to stab you with a HIV needle, and people can say, “Oh, how sad, yet how beautiful,” then it get bought by some yuppie with a polka-dot tie. Or look at this one.’
We have arrived back on the quays; directly in front of us stands a tall sculpture, depicting, in blackened bronze, six emaciated humanoids and a little bronze dog. ‘It’s a Famine memorial — you know a million people died, in this tiny little country? And millions more left, on ships that went from right here, and they never come back. So from a terrible thing that really happened, on this spot, we get, a hundred and how many years later, a piece of art, very beautiful, that people can look at as they hurry by with their takeaway lattes …’
I don’t think I have ever looked at it before, with or without latte. I step up to the sculpture, run my finger down the tortured cheek of one of the gaunt, inconsolable forms. ‘It is beautiful,’ I say, not knowing whether I am contradicting her or not.
‘Now look down,’ she says.
I do as she says, and see that although the figures themselves are anonymous, names have been printed on the stylized bronze cobblestones beneath their bare feet — names of companies, names of banks, names of individuals: the corporate and private sponsors who paid for the work. Billionaires, businessmen, a disgraced prime minister, a society hostess; others I recognize from newspaper accounts of deals and court cases, corruption charges that were never proved.
‘So ask yourself, who does this artwork want you to remember?’
I step back with a chill. The wind pulls and chafes at the surface of the river; on the far side, the night sky is reflected and intensified in the louring windows of the corporate towers, as though they were mining darkness from the air, storing it within them. ‘Maybe in a hundred years, some artist will make a sculpture of the old women in Athens looking through the garbage for something to eat,’ Ariadne says, resting her cheek against the cold metal shoulder of a peasant. ‘And passers-by will stop their rocketpacks to film it with their magic future phones, and they’ll think how beautiful, how sad.’
‘So you’ve given up on art,’ I say in summary. ‘You’re turning down my offer.’
‘I haven’t given up on anything,’ she says. ‘And you are very kind to make me this offer. But I like working in the café. Making a space where people can come together and feel safe and good, for me it’s not menial work. Even if they’re bankers, maybe if they eat the nice home-cooked food that’s made with love, it can change how they think a little bit. And afterwards I can bring the leftovers to the shelter, and at night-time I can paint my paintings, and if anyone wants to buy them they can, they’re not very expensive. What does it mean to become a famous artist, anyway? That your paintings cost more money, right? That’s all it means, deep down. But why should rich people have all the beauty?’
‘Not all the beauty,’ I qualify, wistfully taking in her dark radiance, the twin lights in her eyes.
She holds my gaze a moment, then looks away. ‘I have made enough escaping. Now I am here, I want to be here.’
‘Though you are going back to Greece,’ I remind her.
‘My father is very sick,’ she says. ‘And everything is so fucked up over there right now that in the hospital there’s no food or medicine, so your family has to bring them for you. If you have a family.’ She hoists her shoulders, as if shrugging off a cold and sodden cloak. ‘Do you go back home often? Are they still in Paris, your parents?’
‘No, they died.’
‘Ah, I’m sorry.’ She has separated herself from the statue and come towards me; she rubs the black cloth of my suit between her finger and thumb. ‘It was recent?’
I shrug.
Her hand remains on my arm. In the dusk her green eyes are dark pools in which the reflected street lights swim like lilies. ‘So you are alone,’ she says.
The wind swirls down the river, the quayside traffic judders like a heavier, earthbound wind; everything seems to liquefy, as if something had broken open.
I realize my story is at a turning point.
The subterfuge, the plotting, the misdirection, all of that falls away, and the dull details of my life here too, the whole maze tumbling into itself like panels of scenery. The lie has brought me, as promised, to the truth. ‘Look,’ I begin.
But that is as far as I get. Ariadne’s phone has started to ring. ‘Sorry, one second,’ she says, holding up a finger to suspend our conversation, like a fairy bringing time to a halt with a twitch of her wand, then unleashes into the phone a torrent of accelerated Greek.
Sequestered within the alien noise, my mind is racing. Am I actually going to do this? Should I talk to Paul first? But the time for Cyranos and surveillance equipment has passed. I have been in a story long enough, trapped on a flat page, delivering lines written by others. Now is the time to step out into the world. How else could this end, but with the hero speaking in his own voice? Ariadne gives me a wrapping-up sign. I take a deep breath, I gird my loins; then into the phone I hear her say, ‘S’agapo, Oscar, s’agapo … I love you, baby, I’ll be home soon.’
And around me it seems that a hundred doors and windows have been flung open, as in some stuffy room; and all of the potential, the dreams, the imagined futures borne away in an instant, like banknotes thrown to the wind.
‘And what did you say?’
‘What could I say?’
‘Didn’t you ask her who it was?’
‘No, I simply ignored it, and then continued my pretence that I had approached her only out of an interest in her work.’
‘And that was it? Then you just went back to the office?’
‘First I bought a painting. Simulacrum 103. There it is, by the mantelpiece.’ I point to the painting, still in a cardboard box, like a cold, avant-garde pizza. Paul opens the lid, winces, closes it again. At the breakfast bar Igor, who arrived uninvited with Paul, tosses pistachio nuts into his mouth and flips the shells on the ground.
‘Let me get this straight,’ Paul says. ‘The two of you are getting on fine, everything’s going according to plan, then she gets this phone call, during which she says —’
‘ “I love you, Oscar. I’ll be home soon.” ’
‘That’s all?’
‘The rest was in Greek.’
‘Well then!’ Paul spreads his hands expansively. ‘She could have been talking to anybody. Her uncle, her brother. The guy who comes to fix the fridge. You know these Mediterraneans, they’re very demonstrative.’