The Man in the Tree

"If you mean the convent school, it was purgatory for me. I tried twice to commit suicide before I was sixteen. I was educated by force. You must educate yourself. Read, learn, think."

She made him speak French and corrected his mistakes; she also criticized his table manners. "A polite person does not use his fork like a shovel, to scoop food into his mouth, nor use his fingers to push food onto his fork."

They spent three mornings together before the circus left for Orléans, and after that Anderson saw her nearly every year. She seldom spoke of her husband, and Anderson met him only once, in the summer of 1968: a dark-haired man with pomaded hair, whose manners were almost too exquisite. She took him to the Louvre, which he disliked, and to the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie, where he found all the Impressionists whose work was still excluded from the Louvre. He discovered, however, that very good postcard reproductions of Monet and van Gogh were for sale in the gift shop of the Louvre; he bought stacks of these and carried them with him for years.

They went to Notre Dame de Paris, in whose vast shadowy vault the rose windows stared down like celestial mandalas. Anderson was moved beyond speech. A woman near them was talking loudly and angrily in German.

"Everyone hates the Germans," Claudina remarked afterward, when they were sitting in the sunlight at a brasserie across the street from the cathedral.

"Because they invaded France?"

"No, just because they are Germans."

Once when she protested that he was paying too much at a restaurant, he said, "Don't worry about the money; I have plenty."

"More than they pay you in the circus?"

"Yes."

"Then why do you stay?"

"It's a community," he told her. "I'm accepted there; it's almost like having a family."

"There are other families." She introduced him to artists and writers, to Dubuffet, Genet, Arenas. Some of them became his friends, and gave him notes to people in other places. He bought paintings and sculptures, because he liked them and because he wanted to help the artists; he bought books, more than he could carry with him. He put them in storage, in Paris, Rome, Athens, Berlin. He was spending much more than he earned, and he disliked counterfeiting currency. In Turkey he bought cut diamonds at wholesale, thirty carats in all. He copied them, distributed the copies into bags, copied them again. Three months later, when he was in Amsterdam, he took his diamonds to a dealer.

"And where did you obtain these diamonds, Mr. Gordon?" the manager asked politely.

"In Ankara."

"And do you have an import license for them?"

"No."

The manager, a young man, rosy-checked, very well dressed, folded his hands on the table. "In that case, I could not offer you a very good price, I'm afraid."

"It doesn't matter. I want to sell them."

The manager stirred the pile of stones with his finger. "One hundred forty thousand guilders."

After that, he came back at least once a year and sold larger and larger quantities of diamonds. He put his money in numbered accounts in Switzerland. Later he began to invest in stocks and bonds, real estate, precious metals. There were many pleasures in the world for a young man with money; but even as he took them, he thought, 'Is this all?'

For a few years after Avila's death he had continued to make occasional small wood carvings; then even that had stopped, and he knew now that he had never had a real vocation. He had left everyone he had loved behind him. Although he had many friends, he knew he could get along without any one of them; he was proud of this self-reliance, this invulnerability, and he despised himself for it.

During the late sixties and early seventies he spent a good deal of time in museums. One of his favorite places was the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, where they had Rubens' huge 'Fall of the Damned' -- all those plump pink bellies and buttocks tumbling through the air like clotted leaves on the wind. Another was the Musée Unterlinden, in Colmar. He kept going back there to see Grünewald's 'Isenheim Altarpiece,' the only Crucifixion that he thought was worth a damn: Christ's body, not afloat in Disneyland like the one in El Greco, with its silly spigot of blood and its loincloth slipping coyly down like the tresses of the Botticelli Venus, and not like van der Weyden's Oriental monarch, lily in one hand, girdle in the other, robe flapping open across his muscular midriff, about to flap further -- God the Great Flasher -- but hanging under the weight of its pain, mouth open in a rictus and the sweat of death on its skin. It was not so much that he wanted to see it but that he could not stay away.

At a party given by a non-objective painter in London, he met a scruffy man named Hamilton who was drawing diagrams on the back of an envelope. "You see, here's the human population in the Middle Ages," he said. "See how it rises very gradually until you get to about seventeen fifty. Now it goes up more steeply. The population in nineteen fifty was about two and a half billion. By the year two thousand, it will be more like six billion."