By Simina Neagu.
1
A plaster cornice stopped over their heads as abruptly as their conversation. A followed its straight lines and found that they lead nowhere, suspended in the mid-thought of a distracted builder. Her wary finger pointed towards it.
‘Badly fitted coving. Typical.’ M observed, while tugging on his ill-fitting jumper.
Am I coving masquerading as a cornice? A’s muddled knowledge of cornices remained secret, while M was free to expand on his brief comment as he pleased. He had found his golden ticket to unbridled, one-sided conversational flow in imposing himself on every facet of the building. No more awkward silences to thwart his plans, no more planning and plotting a conversation, like a dinner seating chart. Perhaps that topic is a nuisance, perhaps that mention would bring down the mood, perhaps B shouldn’t be invited this time. M’s gargantuan vocabulary was gradually conquering the space around them, every corner, every crevice, every novice decoration executed by underpaid hands. M was merely cataloguing his environment. the corbel shelf was framed by a sloppy painted panel: It was vulgar. The ceiling rose combined a leaf design with a swag and drop one: It was gaudy. Only the dado rail was correctly fitted and M walked past it with the paternal aura of a traveler returning to a familiar place. A found it ironic that the only motif he accepted in his Panama hat book of taste-making was the ridiculous dado rail. M was indeed, a big bird, on his way to extinction.
A was happy to leave behind the clumsy aspirational plasterwork of the university building and move towards the flattened, democratic forms of anybarintheworld. She felt responsible for the burps and gulps of architectures past but no inch of guilt towards contemporary farts cast in concrete. The bar typified universal bad taste and M agreed, with the most benevolent smile.
‘A glass and neon womb for the global babies of junkitecture.’ M had a long rant on anybarsintheworld, globalbloodycapitalism, nonplacesandthedeathofawareness, but he was thirsty.
A ordered a Margarita. M ordered a Martini. M liked A’s tiny, breathy voice and round face. A liked Margaritas.
An hour previously, immediately after the conference had ended, M had walked up to her and said:
‘I really enjoyed your paper. I’m very interested in the untranslatability of architectural forms. I’m currently writing a paper on Benjamin’s concept of translatability.’
A said:
‘I’m not defending Spivak.’
M said:
‘Do you want to go for a drink?’
M’s jumper slouched like a little belly over his trousers and he couldn’t think of something more embarrassing. Coming back from the loos, A found him rolling his hem, like a scared snail retreating into its shell.
2
‘You know, Buñuel had his own recipe for a dry Martini.’ M said, having rehearsed the line for the past five minutes. He was reciting a poem, performing a speech, delivering a final blow before closing the deal. He blinked slowly, waiting for a response.
The fearful snail was bobbing its head and his carefully rolled hem reverted back to its own place with a sigh of relief when A smiled. She smiled like a foreign woman smiles to a man in a foreign country. The curious snail had shot a chitinous love dart towards his mate. But just like in the animal world, there was no organ to receive the dart.
‘Buñuel would put everything in the fridge, including the glasses. The ice should be exactly twenty degrees below zero. The secret is the Noilly Prat vermouth, poured slowly over the ice, plus Angostura bitters. You then remove the contents and just keep the ice.’ M was breathless, agitated. Will the next few lines be enough? ‘Then you pour straight gin over everything and carefully stir the mixture. I know what you’re going to say but shaking it simply isn’t enough.’ Did I give myself away?
Unlike M’s steely ordering of the understands and understandnots, of the linguisticallynimbles and chronicallyilliterates, A wanted to find the cracks and corners of the world, where there was room for murkiness, for grey areas, for half-truths. She wallowed in the unspeakable, in the silent agreements of nods and sideways glances. In the no-man’s land where everybody assumes but never asks, the demi-monde of keeping mum. A’s eyes were searching for an escape route around the room, a loophole where she could safely deposit her ignorance. Perhaps a subtle cornice I could point at? The bar was all opaque glass and thumping noise. Anybarintheworld was becoming less democratic and more claustrophobic.
‘Imagine yourself in the villa designed by Gae Aulenti in Prato. Austere, but warm, reconfiguring the minimal vocabulary of architecture. In a scale that is approachable, human…’
A felt like an understudy whose lines got wedged between the floorboards of the stage. ‘But what is approachable in architecture today?’
M’s eyes glittered with the promise of five minutes of uninterrupted speech. But after a few Martinis, he felt overcome by a sudden largesse of feeling, letting A take over the conversation. ‘Well, vernacular architecture is approachable by definition. It’s impolite and guided by necessity. What do you think of the local vernacular?’
‘I don’t want to repeat my argument.’
‘Of course.’ M had lost his golden ticket and there was no way out. The snail’s dart sac was heaving anxiously. Could I ask the dreaded question, could I dare aim for my prize?
‘Should I call us a taxi?’
3
A’s eyes went round and round the room, along the fake terrazzo bar, past the spilt cocktail in the corner, past the girl with the obnoxious tic. She would purse her lips every time she was asked a question . A wondered what happened in the space of those two seconds of lip-pursing. Was the impending terror of the delayed reply a flirting technique? Were the pursed lips mocking, sexy, exasperating?
The snail was fumbling with the hem, one hand in his pocket, caressing the edges of his phone. Ah, Carlo Scarpa! Ah, poetry in architecture! Ah, neo-rococo! Ah, Castelvecchio! Ah, too soon to start a new conversation!
A pursed her lips and the snail jubilated. The dart sac was ready to burst. M unlocked his phone as if he was touching her thigh and A’s imported tic froze in the same grimace toddlers make when they taste a lemon for the first time. His crooked smile, rehearsed and re-rehearsed in front of hotel mirrors across the continent, badly framed his chubby face: It was vulgar. The sound of unlocking his phone was complemented by a click of the tongue: It was gaudy.
They dragged their bulbous bags across the beer-stained hallways, down the washed out linoleum floor and through the sandblasted glass doors with flowery handles, out in the harsh morning air. M awkwardly offered to carry her bags while tripping over a carpet curl. Everything was so rounded, angelic and cheap. A wrinkled her nose and M knew there was no room for etiquette.
‘Galanteries!’ M. noted. ‘They are the non-essential moves that can be inserted into a minuet. Or a gavotte! Or passepied! Gallantry was already dead in the seventeenth century!’
A wrinkled her nose again. A taxi was waiting in front of the bar and M knew his moves had become completely non-essential. G, the taxi driver, in his mid-thirties and with a subtly rounded belly not unlike an annoying carpet curl, immediately took A’s bags and insinuated himself perfectly into the situation. Third World macho bullshit. G turned on the radio.
Like all seaside towns, F carried the gaping sadness of the sea through its crooked streets, south-facing porticos and malibubarbievillas. As if a pastel-coloured tupperware had melted on the coastline. Blobs of molten plastic clumping together, fighting for space on the rocky shoreline. There was no sense of entitlement or self-importance in town, only haphazard lines and resilient shapes. Like perennial grey-green weeds or plastic detritus washed ashore. A washed-out growth of a town transplanted on a Biedermeier landscape, a collection of F&B paint samples splattered on top of a pile of rubbish. Cinder Rose, Dead Salmon and Blush rooftops. Citron, Pale Hound and Tallow walls. And Dix blue, Vardo and Skylight sea. But A couldn’t tell the difference between Crayola and F&B. Was yellow not the same everywhere in the world? M’s civilising glow had not extended further into the pitch black recesses of A’s education. Was not Gargoyle Gas the same as Babouche?
4
G‘s radio played a selection of hits. The first bars of “Without You” started and A was woken up by M’s humming and slapping his thigh.
‘Remember that woman who sung it phonetically? Ken Lee. Tulibu Dibu Douchoo. Ken Lee meju more.’
A remembered very well. Her peach-coloured satin dress, her thick curls, laden with holding spray, sticky and inflexible, singing defiantly in front of the jeering judges. A talent show gone wrong, where mimicry and mockery intermingled. The worst kind of transgression, it seemed, was that of singing phonetically, revealing a complete lack of linguistic knack. Not only a lack of talent, but the particular gaffe of non-natives meddling with language. Roaring laughter at this woman on the outside, the doofus in a dress. She had to go back on the same show and sing again, in better English.
‘My song was “Ashopiso”. “Ashopisolaky”.’ ‘ A mumbled, fumbling with the loose ends of the nylon seat covers.
What’s that?’
‘”I Should Be So Lucky” by Kylie Minogue.”
‘You’re here.’ G announced and A suddenly felt the dread of having to sleep with M for the first time.
Names and card numbers were exchanged, keys and instructions were given. A stood like an awkward pillar in the middle of the lobby. She stood beside herself, her repulsion, her sudden paralysis: half-smiling, half-looking for escape routes. Fire exit 1. Lift. Main entrance. Kitchen doors.
‘Ready?’
In the lift, down the hallway, all the way to door 102. Maybe the key doesn’t work.
Maybe I forgot something in the lobby.
‘Shall we?’
Whatwhatwhatwhat?
Room 102, inside. The dread was settling in nicely. Unlikeother hotel rooms, designed to conceal their quality of hotelroomness, 102 was a plain concrete cell, a constant reminder of the transitory nature of one’s visit. No pomp to trick your brain into nesting mode. A sunbleached map of Mexico, the only afterthought of interior design in the room, like a mole on a bland face, was a flaccid wink to the world outside. The bed sheets – cream with red flowers – spelt depression, itchy pyjamas and foreign films with no subtitles.
M was oblivious. Minute aberrations such as tasteless bed sheets and ill-fitting jumpers were classed as necessary drifts in order to focus on whatreallymattered. One needed these empty loopholes, these anonymous non-places, in order to function as a prophet of pertinence and contemporaneity.
5
Embedded in the irrelevance of the now and in the relevance of the past and of the future – like a dog doing an impossible split – M’s snail-eyes blinked cautiously, almost taking in the impossible mental gymnastics of it all. But A’s entire world was verging on irrelevance, on mistranslation. Hers were the little red flowers, the sun-bleached maps of Mexico, the jumper-bellies and the undecided coving. Resigned to her own insignificance, A started to undress.
Some snails can circle each other for up to six hours, just about enough for a post-conference talk and three drinks. They start touching their tentacles, biting their lips. Then the dart sac (bursa telae) swells, building pressure around the dart. One of them drives his body towards the other’s genital pore and releases the contents of the sac. Only then can the actual mating begin however, because of the snails’ poor vision, only a third of the darts actually hit their target. Sometimes, the dart penetrates the internal organs or the body of the snail, poking out on the other side. A felt like it had somehow pierced her brain. It lodged itself between the lobe of self-deprecation and the limbic system. A pre/post-ejaculatory epiphany
‘I copied my entire paper and nobody noticed.’
M blinked slowly, trying to find a cornice, a crevice to point at.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Simina Neagu is a curator and writer living in London and Bucharest. She recently
curated an exhibition based on Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style and she’s
currently working on an artist publication, a collection of bad art reviews in the form
of quotes, transcripts and reproductions of previously published material, co-edited
by Aleksandra Mir and The Kitchen NY.
ABOUT THE ART WORK
Ioana Stanca is an artist who works in a variety of media. Her work includes various techniques involving textiles and painting. She studied at the National University of Arts Bucharest and Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. Latest exhibitions include: Objects of Desire at Sabot Galley, Cluj, Cartoon Law #IV at Nicodim Gallery Bucharest and Zest at Art Encounters Timisoara. She lives and works in Bucharest.
