One late-autumn
afternoon, many years later, I am back in Francis’s old studio on the rue
de Birague. All the furniture, including the brass-bound sea chest, the big
easel and the trestle table with its paraphernalia of paint tubes, brushes and rags,
has long disappeared. The walls and the heavily beamed ceiling have been repainted
in the exact matt white that Francis originally chose. The room stands
totally empty but
nothing else has changed: the same, even northern light coming through the
tall, elegant windows, the same carved wooden shutters, the same Versailles
parquet on the floor. The nostalgia I feel looking round this immaculate,
vacant room turns to melancholy as I reflect on how brimming with life this
space once was and how neutral and banal it is now, emptied of all traces of
Francis’s presence and creativity. I can still see him here, laughing,
full of vitality, eager to get back into the pleasures of Paris. I start
thinking too of the various canvases painted here, from the intimate evocations
of George, whose suicide still weighed on him, to the astonishingly vivid
portraits of Michel Leiris and the starkly concentrated, translucent images of
his last years.
I turn to leave, hoping
to get away from the powerful feelings of loss and sadness that are
enveloping me, but just before I go I pull open the built-in wardrobe where
Francis always left a few clothes. It is completely bare inside now but the
haunting, pungent smell of his asthma inhaler, which always pervaded the places
where he lived, wafts up. The moment I breathe it in it sets off a series
of images sliding through my brain that I cannot stop. Francis’s face close up
laughing, the spin of a roulette wheel, Nada, Nada, a glass of
wine spilling like blood
over a tablecloth. I push the wardrobe doors to right away but the inhaler’s
corrosive smell is already settling in my lungs, releasing a chaotic flow
of memories.
Outside it is already
dusk and a fine rain has begun to fall. The ancient lamps cast a faint
glow over the large, empty courtyard. Once it would have been filled with
horses and carriages, with people going intently about their lives. They have
gone, and coming after them others immortalized in early photographs taken here
with their confident expressions and stiff clothes have gone. Generations have gone, and
the courtyard is silent now. Emotional and confused, I think of people I
have been close to and who are now dead. I think of you, Danielle, and you,
Zoran, and I think fleetingly, awkwardly, of my own dead father. As I make my
way over the courtyard towards the street I picture each of the
glistening, yellowish cobblestones as marking a grave, uneven little
memorials to the dead whom
I knew and who are now beyond recall and whom we will rejoin, whatever and
wherever they may be. And standing under the lamplight, although I know it
is no more than a rush of fantasy, I find a headstone for you, Sonia, and for
you, George and John Deakin, for Michel Leiris and Isabel Rawsthorne and all the
others I have known through those hundreds of hours in clubs and
restaurants, with the champagne pouring and the conversation rising as if
neither would ever end. I think back to that mass of time bright with the hopes
and illusions I once had, the unbearable excitement entwined with the blackest
despair, now all gone, all past, all lost. I think of the horror of life and the
beauty of life, standing there in this graveyard of my own imagining, its
fleeting grandeur and its
certain decay. And I can no longer hold back the tears. Emotions that have
been held in check for years well up, and I cry as I haven’t cried since I
was a child sobbing myself to sleep, but I also cry as an adult in the awareness
and acceptance of death. I cry for myself and I cry for all the dead and I
cry for Francis, through whom I came to know them and who, like a light gone
out, is himself dead. And slowly it comes home that this powerful surge
of feelings that he has
left in me can be unleashed at any moment, out of the blue, when I come
across a torn photo, glimpse a familiar face or hear a half-forgotten song. Once
Francis Bacon is in your blood, he will be there for ever.
Gradually the tears
subside, leaving a huge void of relief behind. The light coat I’m wearing
is wet from the rain. I shake myself like a dog, then I move on, crossing
the formal gardens of the Place des Vosges and into the old, dark streets
beyond.
