Free Goya'S Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky

so as not to be evicted. He told himself Goya had washed dishes—in the oldest restaurant in Madrid—so there was nothing to be ashamed of. But Goya had been a boy then and Dacres was nothing of the sort. In cafés, he constantly heard that he’d just missed Signac or Vollard visiting one of his shabby acquaintances to magisterially dismiss their work—or worse, to trumpet it. The man who’d known Cézanne’s cousin was just in for vichyssoise, why didn’t you come and say hello. The models complained of pins and needles and were never quite slatternly enough, not with him. And always the feeling that he wasn’t really working, that he wasn’t really growing. With it the feeling that here he was in the capital of the world and still the action was always just around the next corner. Elsewhere. And the strange sense, which came over him late at night, when the clatter of the drunks kept him up (what had his life been but a succession of rooms with too-thin walls?), that he was fooling himself: that he didn’t even want to be where the main action was. That all he wanted was a dog to sit by the fire with; all he wanted was to rest his feet in a dog’s fur. In the mornings, he was fiery and lust-filled once more, and that feeling was gone, but sometimes he tasted it again, mid-afternoon.
    After two and a half hours of waiting—Dacres was considering the pro and contra of setting up as a shoeshine boy outside the man’s office—the girl had a message for him. She’d gone into back rooms to get it. He saw thin black lines of leaning ink through the thin paper, which trembled between her sausagey fingers. She read it out haltingly: “Mr. Tompkins says: Regards to Stanley Burner. If Mr. Tompkins wants his picture done, which he doesn’t, he’ll get it done properly, in London, like the last time. When the war is over.”
    She twisted to indicate with one hand the portrait behind her.
    Naturally I’ll do everything in my power to help you.
    Behind her, clouds swirled.
    I am sliding down a metal chute, thought Dacres. Feet first. My fingers are scrabbling against the sides but there is nowhere for me to get any purchase. I am starting to pick up speed.
    Around eleven that night he was down in the dining room, in a bleak mood, getting impatient with the pianist. A list appeared in the newspaper each day of Notable Guests staying in the hotel (he had not been mentioned), but he had no desire to meet a Dame or be met by one. No desire for much of anything, this evening. The tablecloths shone even in the low dark of the room, luminous lily pads. Only two or three tables were still occupied. Dacres watched himself smoke, rotate neck left, rotate neck right. He listened to the quiet chatter and the music and the porcelain language of his thoughts. A woman in a lilac dress knocked over a champagne glass and shrieked and the two men with her laughed good-humouredly. Dacres longed to be elsewhere but didn’t know where. The word rotogravure came into his head and lodged itself there. He pictured healthy Canadians politely fulfilling their marital vows hundreds of feet above him.
    There was a Rembrandt self-portrait he’d seen in Holland. One of a thousand but this one had stayed with him. It was placed in a room full of self-confident burghers painted by Dutch journeymen, their pristine, mean faces caught in narrow and perfect focus. Every wrinkle and the pink texture of the skin sharply preserved. In their black capes and hoods before empty backgrounds they were trying to say that they valued only God. But someone had to pay the artist to say it. (How long was it since he’d bought canvas?) And then van Rijn in the centre of all these householders: in a softer focus, the familiar pudgy features lit from the left. Painting the light on the folds of the skin. Dacres remembered that afternoon well: it had been burning hot in the museum, all the windows