The Man in the Tree

Chapter Nine

"Hello." A deep, impatient voice.

"Can I speak to Mr. Avila, please?"

"This is Avila."

"Mr. Avila, my name is John Davis. I bought your Hierophant at the Otis Gallery yesterday."

"Oh, yeah. I heard about that."

"I was wondering, could I come and see your studio? Maybe look at some of your other work?"

"Sure, why not. You know where it is? Come down about five o'clock. Listen, the bell doesn't work. Walk up the stairs, fourth floor. What's your name again?"

"John Davis."

"Okay. See you then."

The address was in a row of dingy, seemingly abandoned commercial buildings on the Lower East Side. The plate-glass window beside the entrance was lettered, "BELLER RESTAURANT SUPPLY," but the interior was dark and empty, and there were cobwebs on the windows.

Gene climbed three flights of uncarpeted echoing stairs and found himself on a landing with a single door painted dark green. A card on the door was neatly lettered, "AVILA." He rang the bell.

"Come in!" called a distant voice.

Gene opened the door and found himself looking down the length of an enormous room, in the middle of which three people sat near an oil heater with a stovepipe that rose, supported by guy wires, through the ceiling high above. Dust motes swam in the gray light from the window wall. "Mr. Davis?" called the voice. The men's faces were in shadow; he could not see which one had spoken.

"Yes."

One of the men stood up and beckoned. "Come in, sit down." Gene walked toward them, trying not to trip over the electrical wires that lay haphazardly on the bare floor. The man who had spoken was stocky, powerfully built, with a seamed brown face. "I'm Avila," he said, putting out his hand. "Sit here. Put your coat on the floor, wherever you want. This is Darío Hernandez" -- a young man who put down his guitar to rise and shake Gene's hand; he was as brown as Avila, handsome and bright-eyed. "And this is Gus Vilsmas -- Vilis -- how the hell you say it?"

"Vlismas," said the third man. He was paler than the others, middle-aged and plump, with a gold tooth that flashed when he smiled. "Glad to know you."

Gene sat in a wooden rocker that creaked under his weight. The others were staring at him. "You're tall, but you're only a kid," said Avila abruptly. "You want some wine? Maybe you're not old enough to drink it."

"No, that's all right," Gene said, flushing. "I just wanted -- Could I look around your studio?"

"Sure." Avila stood up. "Come on, I give you the grand tour."

Under the windows there were big bins for clay, sacks of plaster spilling their white dust on the floor, and a cluttered bench that ran half the length of the room.

"I never saw any place as big as this before," Gene said.

"It's a loft," Avila told him. His voice was deep and resonant. "Before, they use them for manufacturing -- some places you can still see where the machines were."

Farther down the room there was a large wooden platform on wheels; between it and the windows stood three modeling stands, one of them draped in moist cloth. "Is this something you're working on?" Gene asked.

"Sure. You like to see it?" Avila lifted the bottom of the cloth and carefully pulled it free of the damp clay. Gene saw a blocky figure, contorted, half kneeling. Parts of the surface were lumps of clay carelessly mashed together; other parts showed the marks of tools. "Not finished yet," said Avila, and draped the cloth over it again.

The end of the room was a warren of head-high racks on which stood plaster casts, plaster of paris molds, some of them three or four feet tall, and armatures made of wood, pipe, and wire.

The two men in the middle of the room looked up as they passed going the other way, then resumed their low-voiced conversation. This end of the room evidently was Avila's living quarters. There was a kitchen area with a hot plate and a coffee pot, some cabinets, a sink and a clawfooted bathtub. Under the windows, a small area had been partitioned off with plywood painted bright yellow; through the doorway Gene could see a bed with a red-and-white coverlet. "I had a guest room," Avila said, "but I tore it down. Some bum was always sleeping in there, or some guy making out with his girl. You want coffee?"

Avila poured from the coffee pot into a blue ceramic mug. They joined the others and sat down.

"So, Mr. Davis," said Vlismas, "you are an art collector? Your parents must be rich."

"They died in a plane crash. I have a trust fund."

"Oh, too bad. So you spend your money on art?"

"Sometimes."

Avila was sitting in an upholstered chair with a glass of wine in his hand, one leg draped over the arm of the chair. He looked at Gene steadily. "Is that all you do?" he asked.

"No -- I want to be an artist. A sculptor like you, Mr. Avila. I was wondering, do you think -- would it be possible for you to take me as a student? I could pay you whatever -- "

"So, you could pay," Avila said. "Mr. Davis, I am not a teacher. There are plenty of good schools where you could study."

"I can't go there," said Gene with embarrassment. "I have a kind of problem, with places where there are a lot of people."

Avila looked at him in silence for a moment. "Where have you studied already?"

"At the Porgorny Institute, in San Francisco."

"Porgorny? I know her!" said Avila. "Ten years ago I met her there. How is she?"

"All right, I guess. I haven't talked to her since I left. Mr. Avila, I brought some sketches -- " He picked up his coat from the floor, drew out a sketchbook.

"Let me see." Avila took the book and began to turn the pages. Presently he showed one page to Hernandez, who leaned over to look at it but said nothing. Avila leafed through the rest of the book and handed it back. "żQue piensas?" he said to Hernandez.

The young man shrugged. "No sé."

"One thing I like," said Avila after a moment. "Some of these drawings, I think you are seeing solid forms when you make them. That is not so common. What have you done in sculpture?"

"Some clay. Piece molds. A few wood carvings."

"I tell you what. We try it for a month. You come here every day, whatever time you want, but not before nine o'clock and not after five, and you work here at least four hours every day. You pay me one hundred dollars for the month. If I ask you to do something, you do it. After the first month, if I like it, if you like it, we continue. If not -- goodbye. All right?"

"Yes, that's wonderful. When can I start -- tomorrow?"

"Sure, tomorrow."

When he came the next day, precisely at nine o'clock, Avila gave him a modeling stand at the far end of the room near the windows, showed him the clay bins, the shelves of armatures, the racks of tools. Gene chose a wooden armature and began to build up a simple bust, the head of a bald old man. The piece went slowly, because it was hard to keep from watching Avila at work. He moved like a dancer, weight on the balls of his feet, forward and backward in a hypnotic rhythm -- adding clay with one hand, cutting it away again with a metal tool in the other; and as he worked, the clay figure evolved through a sequence of organic changes, all different and all beautiful.

When the phone rang Avila would answer it briefly; if it rang too often he would take the receiver off the hook. At noon he brought out bread and cheese, sliced yellow onions, hot peppers, milk for Gene and wine for himself. While he ate, he looked at what Gene had been doing, but made no comment.

In late afternoon people began dropping in, and when Gene got up to go at five, Avila said, "Stick around. After while we all go out to dinner."

Avila's friends and hangers-on were numerous: there was a cigar-smoking half-Korean silversmith and his father, a white-bearded painter and calligrapher; a plump, short-haired woman ceramicist who was interested in kundalini yoga; several jazz musicians, a poet, a man who owned a sandal shop. The most frequent visitor was Darío Hernandez, who was from Uruguay. He was an expert in building large armatures and in scaling up figures; Avila had no work for him now, but gave him small sums of money when he asked for it. Darío had a girl-friend, Peggy Wood, a ripe young woman with a sullen mouth and a mane of dark-blond hair; they were married or living together, Gene was not sure which. Often in the evening they came together to the loft, but other times Darío came alone, and when Gene left he was still there.

Peggy Wood's clothing surrounded her like a loose cocoon: she wore heavy sweaters and skirts within which her body moved with slow grace. In her silences there was something that was all the heavier for being unspoken. Sometimes Gene glanced up and found her looking at him with an expression that made him uneasy.

It was not clear what Gus Vlismas' principal occupation was. He had various things for sale, which he carried around in his pockets: sometimes gold rings and pendants, sometimes small Japanese carvings in wood or ivory. He was a silent partner in various business enterprises. He knew where to buy almost anything at a discount; he could fix traffic tickets.

One evening he unfolded a little packet of white paper and showed Gene the heap of tiny stones it contained. "You should buy diamonds," he said. "Diamonds are the world's best investment. They always go up, never down."

"I don't like diamonds."

"You don't like diamonds?" The gold tooth showed in an incredulous smile. "What do you like?"

"Opals. Star sapphires, things like that. I like some of the semiprecious stones -- agates, jasper."

"Do you know, my young friend, how much a flawless one-carat diamond is worth today?"

"I don't care how much it's worth."

One morning Gene saw an envelope on the table; it had a foreign stamp, and was addressed to "Sr. Manuel Avila O." "What's the O for?" he asked.

"O-eenz," said Avila, and spelled it: "0, apostrophe, h, i, g, i, n, s. That is my name, Manuel Avila O-eenz, but if I use it here, they call me Mister O'Higgins." Avila's father, he said, had emigrated to Colombia from Mexico; his mother belonged to an old Colombian family, descended from Irish settlers. "On my father's side, too, there is Irish blood. So I am maybe one-quarter Spanish, one-half indio, one-quarter Irish. Here they call me a mick-spick."

He had studied at the National University in Bogota, and later in Mexico City, where he had known Orozco and Rivera. He had also worked as a stone-cutter in Yucatán for a sculptor named Obregón. He had lived in many places; he talked with nostalgia of Rome, London, Paris.

"If you liked it there so much, why did you come to New York?"

He shrugged. "The money is here, and besides, I like New York because it is crazy. Other places crazy too, but not like this. Everything is sex, the toothpaste is sex, but there is no sex, only frustration. To me is like a big machine making energy that goes in the air. I am here now seven years, and still I get excited when I walk on the street."

Avila and Darío spoke together sometimes in English, more often in rapid soft Spanish. After a while Gene began to pick up the sense of what they were saying. Darío, who had a streak of malice, never used Gene's name when he was talking to Avila: he called him el pollito, "the little chicken."

One afternoon when he heard Darío use this phrase, Gene turned from his modeling and said, "No soy pollito."

The two looked at himjn astonishment. Avila said, "Asi, żhablas espańol?"

"Un poco."

"Bueno." Avila turned to Darío and said something Gene did not quite catch, and they both laughed; but there was a glint of anger in Darío's eye when he looked at Gene. After that he began to use other nicknames: polla, which was like pollito, only more insulting because it was feminine; maricón, which Gene understood to be more insulting still, although he could not make out what it meant even after he had looked it up in Avila's Spanish-English dictionary. When Darío spoke to Gene directly, he was polite, even friendly, but always with an edge of mockery in his voice.

Presently Avila began correcting Gene's grammar when he spoke Spanish. Gene read the books Avila gave him, and discovered in himself an appetite for words. He began to realize that a language was not just a set of arbitrary symbols but a way of looking at the world; there were things that could be said in Spanish very easily and simply that could be said in English only with difficulty, or not at all; and it was the same the other way around. It took six words in Spanish to say "flush the toilet," but there was a single word that meant "to dig around the roots of vines."

When Gene's clay figure was done, Avila came over and looked at it, turned the stand to see the other side, turned it back. The head was simple and stylized; Gene had made it a bald old man in order to emphasize the domed shape of the skull, and also to avoid the problems of hair. He had built up the head with bits of clay, then smoothed them with his fingers until all the curves flowed into one another: the arched nose, the cheekbones, the brow.

Avila said, "This your idea of an old man? Jesus Christ!" He dug his strong fingers into the clay, pulled it off in great lumps, threw it back in the bin. "Take your sketchbook, go over to Washington Square, for God's sake, draw some old men."

Gene dutifully went out with the sketchbook, came back with many drawings, and started afresh. When the second piece was done, Avila said, "Better? A little, maybe." He threw the clay in the bin.

Gradually he came to understand what Avila meant by art: it was a flowering of form that could only come about by working and reworking the material until the original shape had been transformed through many deaths and rebirths into something that had never existed before and could not have come into being except by this torment. A sculpture by Avila was a multidimensional object, shimmering with self-references, containing in itself the vanished forms of previous conceptions, and at the same time it was integral, itself and nothing more, as self-explanatory as a flower or a shell.

One morning he found Avila at his bench playing with some little brass shims, tilting them against each other to make tent-shapes, stacking others on top until they fell down. His eyes were vacant; he did not seem to be watching what his fingers were doing.

Later Gene saw him cutting the shims with a pair of tinsnips, making narrow rectangles of various sizes. After lunch he began cementing the pieces together to make curving shapes like staircases, or like fanned-out playing cards. At the end of the day he had assembled these into a standing hawk-headed figure, a bird-man or man-bird whose arms seemed in the process of turning into wings, or the wings into arms. The next day he took it apart and started over.

"That was beautiful," Gene said. "Why didn't you keep it?"

"Not what I want," Avila grunted. He spent the next two days building up another figure, larger and more complex than the other, and took it apart. The third version occupied him for a week. It had horns now, ending in little brass balls, and it stood in a haif-crouching position as if prepared for flight.

The next day, while Gene watched in fascination, he made a two-piece rubber mold around the figure, then a plaster shell to cover the mold. When the plaster was dry, he took the shell and the mold apart, carefully inspected them, and put them back together. He melted beeswax in a pot, upended the mold in its shell, supporting it in a bucket of sand, and poured the hot wax in. After a few moments he poured it out again, leaving a thin coating on the inside of the mold. When he took the mold apart, he had a hollow wax image of the figure, but the tips of the horns were missing.

"No good," he said. "I worry about that." He broke up the wax, dropped it back into the pot and melted it again. This time, before he put the mold together, he brushed hot wax into the pieces that would make the horns. The wax image came out complete and perfect. Then for two days he worked with the wax, smoothing irregularities, sharpening edges with a knife, adding bits here and there.

"Couldn't you work in wax to begin with?" Gene asked.

"Sure, but the wax has to be hollow or there will be too much bronze, too heavy. Watch what I do now." He dipped his fingers into the cooling wax-pot, formed the soft wax into little bails, rolled them into cylinders. He carefully attached these to the figure to make vents and pipes. Two narrow ones went from the head to the tips of the horns. "If I don't do this," he explained, "the same thing will happen with the bronze. Better to make your mistakes in wax."

The pipes were to carry the molten bronze to various parts of the figure, and the vents were to allow air to escape. "Otherwise you get bubbles. The first time I cast in bronze, there was a. big bubble right in the belly. And a big pain in my belly, too. If you make a mistake, it's your fault, not the foundry, and you pay them just the same."

Avila made him build a clay figurine, then copy it in wood. The wood carving was a botch, because he had tried to follow the shape of the clay too faithfully. Avila smiled when he saw it. "Now you have learned something."

Another time Avila had him construct a wooden armature of soft pine, into which he had to drive curving rows of little brads until the armature bristled with them like the body of St. Sebastian. The heads of the brads, Avila explained, had to represent the surface of the clay figure he was to make; he would be allowed to cover them with a sixteenth of an inch of clay, no more; and for three days Gene turned the armature around and around while he stared at it, trying to visualize the clay volume which did not yet exist. Again and again he tapped some of the brads a fraction of an inch deeper, pulled others out and started over. When at last he added the clay, the figure was stiff, mechanical; he tore it apart himself, without waiting for Avila to do it, and threw the clay back in the bin. But from this, too, he learned something.