For The Record

More about For The Record

Zdzisław Beksiński went to Napoli because he had heard the darkness there was still made by hand.

He wanted the darkness Caravaggio used, and the Caravaggisti afterward: darkness with a thumbprint in it, darkness that had eaten supper with somebody who never came home. He also wanted sad violin music. He imagined buying it by the metre and wrapping his paintings in it for the journey back.

At the station a man sold him a map on which every street was named Yesterday.

It was remarkably accurate.

He rented a room above a woman who repaired saints. There were plaster fingers drying on her windowsill. In the mornings she counted them with the expression of somebody checking whether all her children had returned from a war.

Soon he began befriending lost tourists.

He carried their suitcases, found their hotels, admired photographs of their dogs. An American woman told him about her divorce beside a fountain that had been divorced from its water.

“You understand,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, although he had mostly been watching a pigeon eat something that looked like a small surrender.

He did this because he could bear almost anything except being mistaken for a tourist.

After his friends went home, letters arrived announcing that certain gangsters would do terrible things to dear Zdzisław unless money came immediately.

He wrote the letters himself.

He had originally called the imaginary criminals a Romani orchestra, but abandoned the idea when he realized he knew nothing about either their lives or their music. Eventually he named his gang The Committee for Tuesday.

Tuesday frightened everybody.

The money always arrived.

For a while he earned enough to stop painting, which frightened him more than poverty. He bought better paper for the threats and worse wine for himself. His landlady asked what he did.

“Correspondence.”

“Like Saint Paul.”

“Smaller circulation.”

One evening he met Caravaggio outside a shuttered butcher’s shop.

The dead painter was blind. He carried a white cane stained with a darkness that refused to dry.

“Is this purgatory?” Zdzisław asked.

“Naples,” Caravaggio said.

“Is there a difference?”

“The rent.”

They sat together while a violin played upstairs. Each note seemed to have been kept for years in somebody’s coat.

Caravaggio asked him to describe the sunset.

Zdzisław described a tourist counting foreign coins.

“That will do,” said Caravaggio.

Then he reached into his coat and produced a black record.

“There is a woman who needs somebody to turn this over.”

“Why me?”

“You still have hands that expect tomorrow.”

Zdzisław examined the label. There was no title, only a tiny mirror in which his face appeared to be waiting for him to leave.