Chapter Twenty-Four
TWENTY-FOUR
His name was Christian. He was twenty years old, he had a tender heart and a broad smile. He had only gotten the job because his mother knew the principal, and the principal had only agreed on the condition that Christian promised to wear long-sleeved shirts that hid all his tattoos. On his first day at work, Christian was told to paint a wall behind the gymnasium white, but unfortunately that was impossible, because Christian hated white walls. So he came around the corner with his arms full of colored paints, and at that moment a crazy fourteen-year-old came rushing straight into his chest from the other direction. They collided like they were in a cartoon, with the cans of paint hanging in the air for half an eternity before the fourteen-year-old got up from the ground with so much paint on his face that it covered the tears on his cheeks. When the janitor got to his feet his sleeves had slid up, revealing his tattoos: skulls.
The boy had never seen anything so beautiful in his whole life. They both laughed, and it was like standing on the prow of a ship and seeing the outline of your homeland on the horizon.
“Sorry, you’re covered in paint!” the janitor said when he saw the stains on the boy’s shirt.
“Don’t worry, it was already dirty,” the boy said shyly, picking up his backpack from the ground and accidentally dropping his sketch pad.
The janitor smiled, like someone waving through fog.
“Oh! You draw?”
The boy nodded in horror.
“Come with me!” the janitor said.
The boy followed him around the corner behind the gymnasium, squeezing between the wall and a fence, to a space so hidden away that not even the school’s smokers had found it. The janitor was talking so fast that his eyes were darting about and his jaw carried on moving after he spoke, as if his voice were dubbed.
“My mom got this job for me. I promised to behave. But the principal told me to paint this wall white! What sort of monster does that? Is there anything worse than white walls?”
“No!” the boy replied at once.
Then he smiled shyly, overwhelmed by the smell of paint and a stranger’s breath, and leaned against the wall as if he might be able to fall right through it. White? It was anything but white. The janitor had painted angels and birds and butterflies and dragons. Then he told the boy who would one day become a world-famous artist what his mother had said about wings, and about all children being born with them.
“If you feel strange, like you don’t belong anywhere, that’s because you still have your wings. They’re rubbing beneath your skin,” the janitor smiled. He patted one of the dragons on the wall and added: “I’m going to paint over them, the principal will go crazy if I don’t…”
“NO!” the boy shouted, then added, “Don’t do it. I’ve never seen anyone paint like this.”
“Pah,” the janitor grinned. “I bet you can paint better!”
“I’m really bad,” the boy mumbled, and looked like he was about to run off.
So the janitor put a brush in his hand, without touching his skin, and said:
“You know what Mom always says? You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”
The boy didn’t reply, but he painted a dragon.
“I’ve never… seen anything like that,” the janitor gasped when he saw it.
The boy misunderstood, of course.
“Sorry, it’s childish,” he whispered, and tried to paint over it.
“No, no, don’t you dare! You’re amazing!” the janitor said.
“You don’t have to lie,” the boy said, so upset that the janitor laughed.
“Picasso said it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a whole lifetime to learn to paint like a child.”
“I don’t know who those people are,” the boy admitted.
The janitor smiled and said it didn’t matter. Then he pulled out some cans of spray paint and pointed to an empty white area. The boy filled it tenderly with naked men with wings. The janitor looked at them and thought of his mother, because when she saw a beautiful painting she used to say that her heart leapt in her chest so that she could see her blouse move. Great art is a small break from human despair, she explained to her son. It took him twenty years to understand what she meant.
“One of my mom’s favorite painters was a man called Ragnar Sandberg,” he told the boy gently without taking his eyes off the wall. “Sandberg once said that art should be without purpose, and irresistible. You have to paint like the birds sing.”
That was how the wall felt, he tried to explain. Then the boy asked him to paint skulls again, and the janitor did, and as he was doing so he quoted Georgia O’Keeffe: “It never occurs to me that skulls have anything to do with death.”
Then he laughed and explained how his mom had been so angry when he got his first tattoos. He had suggested that perhaps she should get some herself, to which his mom had retorted angrily, quoting Marina Abramovi?: “I don’t have tattoos, I have scars.”
The janitor scratched his arms.
“She’s tough, my mom, but damn, she really knows how to love things. She loves them with her whole body. She used to drag me to art galleries when I was little. I hated it, I hated having to stand in line, I hated not being allowed to run and play. But now all my best memories are from those places.”
“Was it your mom who taught you to paint like this?” the boy asked with an envy that you have to have grown up in a home full of blank walls to understand.
“No. No one teaches anyone to paint, all we learn are rules and limitations, what we aren’t supposed to do. I went to art school, but I was lucky, I got thrown out before they had time to teach me anything.”
“Why did you get thrown out?” the boy asked.
“They didn’t like what I was painting on.”
“What were you painting on?”
“Drugs.”
Their smiles were rather brittle then, both of them, the janitor instantly regretting being so honest and the boy not knowing how to respond. He was still wearing his backpack, every time he moved, the pills he had stolen from Ted’s dad’s bathroom cabinet rattled, a sound like stones rolling down a cliff. Perhaps the janitor heard them, perhaps he just saw something in the boy’s eyes, or the red marks on his lower arms, because he suddenly whispered:
“Don’t hurt yourself.”
It was such a nice thing to say that there was hardly any space for all the words inside the boy who would become world-famous, so he was forced to grow several inches instead. They carried on painting in silence, falling for each other’s talent the way you fall through a hole in reality. They were both in pain, but just then they were no longer held captive on Earth. For the janitor it was a blessing, for the boy who would become an artist it was a miracle. Because all that spring the boy had wanted to die.