I didn’t move to Malta for The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, but it factored in when I decided to make the move. I’m talking about the painting of course, not the actual decapitation of the man. Valetta didn’t even exist when they were lopping off John’s noggin and the severing of said head happened in what’s now Jordan I believe. I don’t care about all that stuff, the history, the faith, that can all sod off. It’s Caravaggio’s colours, light, sense of space, the still action in the painting. The beauty and the violence. The messages. The blood. The signing in John the Baptist’s blood right there, on the huge, five metre canvas, that’s what gets me. Every time I’ve been to the cathedral, and paid the extortionate 12 euros entrance fee, it has got me.
I know ‘gets me’ is a real cop out phrase, but it’s the best I’ve come up with. The vague, multi-purpose ‘get’ and the ego ‘me’ sort of contains it all really. The ‘get’ that synonymises with ‘arrest’, ‘capture’, ‘seize’, ‘imprison’ are the ones I mean. Definitely that last one. As for my own personal little ‘me’ it’s the full gamut I’m talking about here. My ‘me’ has the Freudian full house. That painting has managed to grab hold of ego, id, and superego. I could go on. I probably don’t have time to go on, so saying that Caravaggio’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist ‘gets me’ and has most certainly now ‘got me’ is the best I can give.
It’s not even the style of art I like. All his contemporaries leave me colder than a cucumber sandwich. All art prior to 1850, with the exception of the odd, wild Greco, and most of Turner’s smoky seascapes, I don’t bother with. I’m much more of a modern art devotee. Not the obvious modern art, which has its place of course, its place being bloody well everywhere. Picasso’s triangular heads, Monet and his other blurry pals, the Russian Supremacist’s chaos and inhuman geometry, Mondrian’s colouring-book spreadsheets, you can barely walk past a shop, pick up a mug, get on a bus, brush your teeth, buy a pair of socks, without one of them announcing themselves.
Anyway, back to how all this started. I moved to Malta two years ago after retiring. I’d been here on holiday, come to see the painting for the first time, and ended up sitting there for hours. I couldn’t move. My eyes went around the painting, taking in the shades, the light, the expressions, following the blood from John’s head, that strange, entrancing necklace of blood, the mysteriously clean sword on the floor. It goes on and on. I’m not even sure I blinked for the hours I spent there that first time. I obviously did blink, it being a human requirement to avoid blindness, but I never felt so unblinking as I did on that day. That experience changed me. Composing myself with a pastry and a glass of red afterwards I came to the conclusion I needed to move to Malta. I needed The Beheading of St. John the Baptist within regular reach.
I spent most of my savings on a small townhouse in Cospicua. A quite dingy little abode, which I spent a bit more on doing up. Painting, some better electrics, money for the basic furniture I need, and mostly room for my books. It’s got no outdoor space, which is also fine, and I didn’t really want a car, so having no parking wasn’t an issue either. It was ideal for me. It was also ideal, in the most unfortunate way possible, in bringing me to the point I’m at now, which I am coming to. In order to understand the mess I’m in, I need to explain how I got here. To help me understand as much as anything where I am now. To decide what to say when the imminent, the inevitable, walks around the corner, I have to run through the list of things that have happened, all starting with the hours I spent staring at The Beheading of St. John the Baptist on that day.
So, I came on holiday, saw the painting, went home, totted up my financial worth, worked out a loose plan, and within two months was turning the key to my new home. Since then, until what happened last week, my life has been a regime of living simply, local ingredients for every meal, long walks, bottles of cheap, but good wine drunk slowly, and a weekly trip to the cathedral. The weekly trip, my raison d’être, has been my most expensive treat. With the ferry, the entrance fee, a routine couple of pastizzi with a glass of red Savina in the nearby café afterwards, the ferry back, these Thursdays cost me 35 euros every week, 35% of my weekly expenditure. My largest and most essential spend. My weekly pilgrimage to the Caravaggio.
Caravaggio and his ilk, not my thing at all generally. I enjoy art that says more than it shows. The kind of art that keeps you fixed, has mysteries in it that you spend time unfolding, art that digs into feelings, philosophies, art that worms its way under your cranium and plants something there. Rothko’s colour fields, his fuzzy quadrilaterals chock full to the brim of whatever being human is, were the first to do it for me. Not to say others didn’t do similar before, but for me Rothko, now ruined by endless IKEA posters, kicked it off. And, the artists I enjoy now, the ones I follow, I wouldn’t say stemmed from him per se, but an origin is there. He’s the root, and the painters who grew from that, that have the most interesting branches from this seed, are the ones I have my passion for.
So, last Thursday, when I went for, what I now know was my penultimate weekly trip to the Caravaggio, something happened that drew my attention away. Someone rather than something actually. Filip Kieler. Most people can be forgiven for not even knowing who that is, but for me, it was the one and only Filip Kieler, the Neo-Expressionist who I’ve followed for years. Perhaps not as well-known as many of his German counterparts, but for my money, the best of them. No one portrays the weight of history, the past, the distortion of memory, the twists of perception, how we see the world through the distance of geography and time, as well as Filip Kieler does. There are a very few I reserve the word ‘sublime’ for, but Kieler’s work merits it. I’ve never been a collector, never had the cash for it, but if there were an artist I could have a piece of, Kieler was the one.
There he was, in the front pew, sitting precisely where I usually sit, doing exactly what I do every Thursday, absorbing Caravaggio’s masterpiece. I sat a few feet away and took occasional glances at him to my left. He didn’t move. I could see he was under the same transfixion I’d experienced the first time. This scene, the great artist of now viewing the great artist of then, encapsulated everything for me. It spoke of volumes of time, and of microscopic moments that pierce lives, sending us years ahead of where we were before that moment. Wordsworth called them ‘spots of time’. An event in life containing years inside minutes. The idea that you’re one age for years, because nothing occurs to increase your years, but then, a sensual gush swoops in, takes you from the age you’d been for years, and slings you to a later time in life in a matter of seconds. That’s what happened to me when I first sat down in front of The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, and now I was watching Filip Kieler bounce from a point he’d been resting in his past to a point somewhere in the future where the painting would plant him. Within the space of his twenty-minute ‘spot of time’, the seventy-year-old body of Filip Kieler, was being taken from its metaphorical sixty where, let’s say he’d been sitting for ten years, with Caravaggio booting him up to eighty, where his body would be playing catch up for the next ten years. The same had happened to me. In the same exact spot Kieler was just a couple of years before. I’d walked into the cathedral, aged fifty and came out aged seventy. Forget that my passport asserted I was sixty at the start and end of that day. I went in at one age and came out older.
This new moment, this new ‘spot of time’ that I saw set to work on Kieler, I sensed was working on me at the same time. For him the painting alone, and for me the painting and the German artist aging in front of painting was aging me in the same way. We were both on that pew, in the grasp of a spot of time each, waiting to stagger out of the other end, and recover together. When he rose from his seat and began his steps out of the cathedral, I rose from mine and followed behind him. He didn’t look behind him once, nor up, or side to side. The green and red closed balconies of Valetta’s sandstone buildings didn’t distract him. He headed his way up the hill to a bus stop. He got on the bus I presume he needed, and I got on it too. He sat in seat on the right, next to the middle of the road. I sat down next to him despite vacant seats elsewhere. He didn’t seem to notice another human was there, and, for me, the only other human on Earth at that moment was him.
In spite of it being not even a week ago, I’ve little memory of what I said to him. Probably something prosaic and predictable, such as ‘it’s nice to meet you’ or ‘I’m an admirer of your work’, but it equally could have been a more menacing ‘I know who you are’ or ‘I know what’s happened to you’. His reaction to me popping him from the state he was in, post-twenty-years of philosophical aging, suggested I sounded more like the latter. If there are any facts in my tattered memory of that day, I believe I may have said more about how I’d followed his career for many years, was a huge fan, and given some thoughts on my analysis of his work. By the time I’d completed my prattling he downright denied being Filip Kieler. My reply was that he had to be who I thought he was. I’m pretty sure I garbled something about him being the ‘spitting image’ and who else could possibly have experienced Caravaggio’s most famous work in the same way. Even in the face of his repeated denials the only lucid memory I have of what I said to him are the words ‘you are Filip Kieler. I know you are, and you’re coming with me.’
My memory of the rest of the day remains splintered. Moments snap back at me like jigsaw pieces from separate puzzles. I recall walking with my fingers pressed into his back but can’t say which street as no recollection of the architecture comes to me. Words come back to me, like in the fuzz of a wine-soaked dream, so I have zero assurance those words were ever uttered. I believe we ate together. I remember food. What we ate, if we drank, I couldn’t say, yet the shape of the table and a plate each between us is there. The oddest piece that keeps appearing is a memory, or at least sensation, of tucking him in to bed, of him smiling up at me, thanking me, and me saying sleep well. This particular recall is the strongest one from the rest of that brain-fogged day, but because of the stark clarity of the next morning, also the one I know to be furthest from the truth.
None of what I found in the light of day came back to me. I still have flashes of gently putting him to bed like a child the evening before, but the next morning, in the windowless spare bedroom, there was Filip Kieler, strapped to the single, metal framed bed, two of my belts used to hold him down like a violent mental patient, and masking tape across his mouth. No sheets or pillow on the bed. His jacket and trousers folded on the floor. Him, laid on his back, in the same shirt, socks still on and, of course, his underwear. As I entered the room, he shook his body in fear and anger, but clearly exhausted and frailer and older looking than his physical seventy years. He stopped moving, stared at me, and I could see water gathering in his eyelids. I’d never seen a being so afraid, and it was my doing.
I told him I was sorry. I said it as many times and in as many ways as I could with as much speed as possible. I was sorry, truly, and I wasn’t going to hurt him. We could just talk, and it’d be all fine. We’d been through something together, behaviour had got out of hand in the midst of our experience, and we could sort it out. He had no reason to be worried for his safety. What I’d done was completely out of character. Not me at all. We simply needed to repair the years that had passed during the single day before. By talking, agreeing, solving, we could make it all go away. After continued multitudes of assurance, about how I’d obviously let him go once we’d fixed all this, about how the Caravaggio painting had done this to us, that we were left ragged by its tyranny, how we were the victims of a shared ‘spot of time’, I then, with great care, peeled the masking tape from his lips.
‘Please let me go. Please.’
‘I will of course let you go, but we need to work this out first. I know I’ve seemingly committed a crime, but Caravaggio is as much to blame.’
‘I just want to go. I’ll do nothing, say nothing, but please, please let me go.’
‘Yes, that’s coming. Very soon, but can we please, talk about your art?’
‘I’m sorry, but I am not who you think I am. I can’t even speak German. I have never heard of this artist. My name is Paul Kimm and I simply want to leave. Please.’
‘I’m also sorry, but you have to be Filip Kieler. There isn’t a universe where you could be someone else. We have to work out a solution to what happened yesterday first and then you can go.’
‘I beg of you. I’m just a tourist. My wife is waiting for me at our hotel. I am not this artist. How can I prove that to you?’
‘Paint. You can paint for me. Then you can go.’
It was at that moment, as I sealed a fresh piece of masking tape across his mouth, that I knew there was no clean way out of this. Yet, I would have my own, even if unwillingly created, personal painting by Filip Kieler. A painting begotten out of a joint, shared madness, a portrayal of years contained within minutes, a depiction of perception lost in deeper perception, a canvas that could contain centuries of mysteries and be a new mystery of its own. A painting to rival that of Caravaggio’s. Until this great painting was done, what would undoubtedly be Kieler’s lifelong masterpiece, the both of us were in this slice of fate, this place the ’spot of time’ had delivered us, together.
In the back room I had paints, brushes, a couple of small canvases I’d never used, that I gathered up to bring back to his room. I put them all on the floor, explained that all I needed was a single work, one that depicted the shattered memories, the flood of time, the maelstrom we’d shared the previous day, and he could go. Before that, I’d make us some food, we’d eat, talk, or not talk if he preferred, and I’d let him get to his work. In a sense, ‘our’ work I added, as the day we’d met was the clear and only inspiration.
I made us plain omelettes, poured some orange juice, put it on a tray and went up again. I lay the breakfasts on the floor. I then removed the belts and masking tape and suggested he dressed. We sat on the bed, side by side, and ate in silence. I respected that he needed to gather his thoughts, regain lucidity, delve into his psyche, our psyches, in order to start. When we finished eating, I took the plates and glasses away and told him I’d allow him time to get to work. He agreed, with a feeble nod, that I’d left all he needed to start his painting. I went out, locked the door, and left him to his work.
It wasn’t until I was in my kitchen that first morning, washing the few dishes, that I considered my actions. Actions I’d followed, impassive to their urges, that had yanked me in the direction to where I was. Actions external to me, that presented themselves like a strip of photographic negatives. A single block of processes that meant Filip Kieler was in my house. Locked in the bedroom with no windows, where I’d strapped him to a bed in his underwear. Presumably I’d removed his trousers prior to that, then gone to a drawer in another room to get masking tape to close his mouth, to keep him quiet. I still couldn’t bring any of that to memory. I’d removed his trousers. I’d belted him to the bed. I’d taped his mouth. Nevertheless, the same sensation of giving him a motherly, cosy tucking in prevailed in my mind. It was this, whether a complete falsity or not, that soothed me, convinced me again. Within the horror of how the day before had unfolded, there was something deeply correct about where we were.
The first few days nothing happened. I provided food, a morning omelette, always plain with simple seasoning, a daily bag of fresh pastries for lunch, in the evening I’d have takeaway delivered, retaping his mouth before answering the door each time. We sat together, he didn’t plead to leave again, but he didn’t paint either. When I asked if he’d start soon, he just shook his head, looking down. I assured myself he was getting inspired, the mood and feeling were brewing, he needed a period of recovery from what Caravaggio’s painting had done to him, to us, and he’d produce soon.
On the fourth day, after the fourth omelettes we shared, my patience got the better of me. I insisted he do something. Just pick up the damn brushes and do something. I had no intention of keeping him longer than it took for him to give me the work. I genuinely believed his promise to say nothing to anyone once he left my house, and I believe he trusted I would release him. Just paint. Give me his work; a piece that came from our event in the cathedral. There was no monetary interest whatsoever for my part, my motive was pure, had none of sullies of the position we were now in. Give me the painting and he could go.
As I left the room, locking the door with its two-bolt mortis, I heard his shuffling around the artist’s tools. He was starting to work. Returning with the packets of buns and cakes at lunchtime I gave a tender knock with my fingertips to ensure I didn’t startle him from his concentration. I heard movement of objects and then his small voice bid me to enter. When I went in, he was sitting on the bed, paint strokes along his forearms and more on his hands. The canvas was turned with its back to me, leaning in the corner. I asked Kieler if I could turn it, see his progress. He assented with a meagre smile.
I picked the canvas, by its upper frame, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, feeling the silky wetness of the oil paint exude into the grains of my thumbprint. I stepped back, holding the painting at a distance from my outstretched arm, so that when turning it I didn’t catch any of his work on me, to ensure his mastery stayed intact. Once turned, not yet looking at it, I took the left lath of the backing, moved my right to the opposite lath to balance it, and then rested it in the corner. I took two paces backwards, wiped my oiled thumb on my right trouser leg, and looked.
I saw. It had immediate effect. A slap across the face. Across everything. I woke up from being awake, ejected from the upturned reality of the last five days. The daubing he’d planted on the canvas clumped in basic, unmixed colours, primary splodges seeming to show a face. Mine, or his, or the random face a child paints, I couldn’t tell. The primitive, basic shoddiness was an assault. Saliva rose in my throat. A stomach pain nipped at me. I sat down on the bed next to him, swallowing, doing my best to prevent a slew of vomit that wanted to exit from my body. The painting needed zero scrutiny. Everything it said it said immediately. Bending to my knees, drawing deep breaths to control my wooziness I sat up to give the painting another glance. Its message was devastating. Its message was clear and singular. The man in my windowless bedroom wasn’t Filip Kieler.
I let the man go. I couldn’t speak. I haven’t spoken since asking him if I could turn his painting. After staving off the need to puke, I waved my hand telling him to get out and he left in his socks. His shoes, I kicked under the bed. I put on an old suit, sat in my porch, tied my shoelaces, then also left. Getting off the Cospicua to Valetta ferry I marched uphill for ten minutes to St. John’s Cathedral. I bought my last ever 12 euro ticket, went to the front pew, sat in the exact same spot as he had, as I had, and lifted up my eyes to the painting. The same feeling came back to me, the same stomach pulsing that Kimm’s painting had given me earlier. Looking at it for more than a few seconds was unbearable. I got up, walked out, relieved to have The Beheading of St. John the Baptist by the great Caravaggio to my back.
I’m sitting at my usual table now. The glass of Savina and the two pastizzi in front of me are untouched. I can look at them, but I can’t eat them. I’ll wait here. I’ll compose myself again. They’ll come soon, and I’ll be happy to see them. As long as it takes to find me, come and get me, and take me away, I’m content to wait. I hope he’s with his wife again, that he’s been to the Pulizija. They should have been to my house by now. The cathedral is the next obvious place to find me. They’ll be coming round the corner any time now. That’s good. A small room. An empty room, with just a bed. No view. A room I can’t leave. A room with nothing on the walls. That sounds perfect to me.
Paul Kimm writes short stories. He has had publications in Literally Stories, Northern Gravy, Fictive Dream, Fiction on the Web, Impspired, Mono, Potato Soup Journal, and Bristol Noir.
Website: paulkimm7.wixsite.com/paul-kimm
Twitter: @kimm_paul
Idle Ink 