In the city of pigs, p.7
In the City of Pigs, page 7
“There’s a simple answer to that question. Once the project got off the ground, Fera found that there are actually quite a few people interested in paying for these concerts, not least the concertgoers themselves. You do know that outside your rarefied bubble of classical music, there is an actual music industry, right? That makes money by selling a product people want, rather than by browbeating them into going to the opera or the symphony by telling them it’s an ennobling cultural experience? Every time I’ve gone to a Fera show, I’ve paid for my ticket. And like any other concert, refreshments are sold. It’s a little more complicated, of course, because none of this is happening in regular spaces, but you’d be surprised to find out how much money you can bring in by performing music in a way that’s stimulating and arousing and dangerous, rather than just educational.
“The other part, which I’m sure you’ve figured out on your own by now, is that there’s not a lot of overhead. All equipment is owned by Fera — the instruments belong to the performers. They don’t have to rent space. No venue is trying to get its cut. That definitely comes with its own risks, but wouldn’t you know it, the risk is part of the appeal! I swear to God there were people at ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ who were there because they wanted it to get busted. It would have been exciting. Obviously care has to be taken in setting up the concerts, and care has to be taken to make sure that no one who isn’t supposed to be there is sent the password. But I think people intuitively understand that it’s a very pure thing. Especially in this city, where everything interesting is being bulldozed or turned into a condo, and people don’t even know these bizarre little theatres exist.”
“You’re making a lot of compelling points.”
“Am I?” she said, smiling sarcastically. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“But what about the collateral damage? There was a bit of fallout from that last concert, if I’m not mistaken. Overdoses, arson. The grocer had to sell the building. I mean, this is all technically illegal — I assume that’s why no one’s written about this before?”
“Lots of things are illegal. Cocaine, for example. But breaking the law is part of the fun! Sure, yeah, things got a bit carried away, and I know the Fera people feel bad about what happened to the Chinese Vegetable Stand, or whatever it was. But it’s not like they were robbed. They got the fair market price.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“And about the overdoses, you should know — everything turned out okay, it was at the end of the night, an ambulance was called, no one died. That kind of thing happens all the time. If someone ODs at a club, do you hold the DJ responsible? The whole point of what Fera is doing is that there’s risk involved. People know that going in. You can’t do this kind of thing if you need to worry about permits and liquor licensing and safe capacity guidelines. It would fundamentally violate the spirit of the thing.”
The candle between us had guttered out, the cheap paraffin wax hardening into opacity. I relit it, thinking about Lionel Standish and the nineteen-sixties. He was right: it had been a very long time since art was in the anarchy business. Veins harden, sclerosis sets in, ideas fall out of fashion or live a half-life as dogma. Fera Civitatem would follow the same course. Everything has already happened. But even if you know the story, it’s still more interesting to watch from the front row.
“I do want to write about this,” I said, catching Theresa’s eye. “I don’t know who for, yet — obviously I’m still building my relationships here — but would it be fair to say that you’re willing to help me get in touch with the, uh, Fera people, if the pitch is accepted? I imagine they’ll want to stay anonymous, but if there’s a way of arranging an interview …”
“You want me to be your go-between?”
“Or you could just give me an email I could reach them at.”
“I think it’s better if I serve as your go-between. Certainly more fun for me!”
“Whatever you prefer. Do you have an idea when the next show might be?”
“Yes, but I’m not going to tell you. Why don’t we continue the conversation?” she said, as I started to get up. “Conversation can be fun, you know. It doesn’t just need to be an exchange of information. Here you are, having a drink with a beautiful woman, talking about music in a bar that once appeared in a Sheila Heti novel. You could be enjoying the moment! Instead you’re talking about getting someone’s email like you’ve got somewhere to be tomorrow. Do you have somewhere to be tomorrow?”
“Strictly speaking, no.”
“That’s what I thought. It’s only just past nine o’clock. By the time you’ve finished that beer, maybe you’ll even start flirting with me again.”
“You’re very eccentric, Theresa.”
“I’m so flattered! No one’s said that about me in weeks.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but it might take more than a couple of drinks to get there. First, I need to ask if you’ve spent much time in Montreal …”
I don’t know if it was after either the third drink or the fourth, but eventually we found ourselves standing on the corner, Theresa drawing her wool coat close around her body. In my not-quite-drunken mind, she appeared as a long, dark aleph against the salt-white city, and the bell of desire began to ring insistently inside my chest.
XI
I Understand that for some people, sex is a matter of arithmetic. Lists are kept in notebooks tabulating the raw data of one’s erotic life: twenty-two conquests in vaginal intercourse, twenty-six in cunnilingus, forty in fellatio, thirteen in anal sex, one threesome, some overlap in partners between categories. Traditionally, the keeping of these accounts has been considered a masculine activity, Don Giovanni’s carefully compiled list of 2,065 sexual encounters across Europe and the Mediterranean being perhaps the most famous. Women must keep lists of their own, although perhaps less neurotically. Or more neurotically — I don’t know. I’ve never asked. Regardless, these lists serve a variety of functions: bolstering the ego, commemorating the progress of sexual maturity, serving as a sort of aide-memoire to bring to mind obscure or uniquely pleasurable encounters. On a more unconscious level, they prove that sex is not (at least, not for the people who keep lists) a biological process as straightforward as blowing one’s nose.
I had my own list, although it was not long enough to have ever bothered writing down. The list that mattered to me was more personal, less tangible than a series of names, dates, erotic specifics. It was a list of the times I had watched a woman decide to sleep with me. These moments were far more important than the sex itself, which was usually just a blur of body parts and odd bits of scenery: what never lost its vividness was the singular, almost religious experience of watching a woman give a little shake of her shoulders, of seeing a certain resolution drift across her eyes. These moments were especially precious when things never progressed any further, when a woman changed her mind, or events intervened, or there simply wasn’t time. The fragile understanding was all the more erotic for having gone unfulfilled.
With Theresa, the moment came under a street lamp at the corner of Argyle. Small pellets of ice were blowing in with the storm clouds off the lake, and the frozen city around us was covered in a brittle, silvery skin. My hands dug into the pockets of my overcoat. When I leaned down to kiss her, she held back, smiling, and cupped my cheek in her palm.
“That’s more like it,” she said. “You’d better come up.”
She apologized for the state of her apartment and poured us both a glass of bourbon. She lived alone on the second floor of a house owned by an old Portuguese widow who was, Theresa assured me, deaf. I drank the bourbon obediently. I couldn’t stop staring at her neck, at its gently creased skin the colour of honey, at the architectural harmony of her shoulders and collarbone, at the sweeping, modernist line of her jaw.
“Do you miss Montreal?” she asked me.
“No,” I said.
“I sometimes wish I’d moved there. I’ve lived in Toronto my whole life. The biggest change I made was leaving Greektown.”
“I haven’t met very many people who were born here.”
“Now you can say you’ve met one more.”
“I guess that explains why you’re so aggressive.”
“There are nicer ways to say that.”
“It’s good that you’re aggressive.”
“Would you be here if I wasn’t?”
She had finished her bourbon, and was leaning back against the kitchen counter with her hips thrust forward. I deposited my glass in the sink and stood in front of her. Even then, I might have said good night and made my way home, had I not seen a shuddering of fast blood in the large vein in her neck, and noticed the shallowness of her breathing, and seen that she, too, had not been entirely sure what would come next.
I took her cheek in my hand like she had taken mine and tasted the last of the bourbon on her lips. She lifted her hands to my chest and slid them up to my collarbone, holding me there for a moment. I lifted her onto the counter. Her mouth was small and active, nipping and biting, the muscular little tongue penetrating my lips and darting away. Beneath her shirt I felt every knob of her spine, the ripple of ribs under her skin. The heat between her legs was radiant, humid, aestival. She ran her fingers through my hair, and grabbed hold, and pulled me back, and her lips crept down. With her other hand she opened my belt. I was hard and constrained against the lip of the counter, and I gasped as she pulled me free and took me in the warmth of her palm. But when she slid the skin back and exposed me completely, she did so with great tenderness.
Still, involuntarily, I stepped back. She laughed at my confusion. I pinned her gently to the cabinet with my hand, feeling each breath she sucked in. Her eyes were ecstatic. Her nipples twitched alive when they met the cool air, but I could not look away from the crease of skin where her jeans met the flesh of her stomach. I unbuttoned them slowly, and slowly I drew them from her legs. She lifted her bum off the counter to make it easier. I was shaking, sick with the particular kind of desire that rises from the stomach before the animal part of sex begins. There they were, her delicate little lips wearing their mysterious smile. She watched me, her back arched against the cabinets.
The kitchen floor hadn’t been swept. I could feel the grit through my pants as I knelt, kissing my way up her leg. I breathed in deeply the scent of soap and sweat and cunt, and ran my tongue down her prickly mound. When I finally placed my mouth against the softest part of her body, I felt her shudder. She grabbed my hair and held me still. I could see the angry red blush where a razor had recently passed.
“It’s sensitive,” she said. “It’s okay, it’s just sensitive.”
Her words settled something inside me, and my cock grew harder as I watched a bead of moisture roll down her stomach.
“It’s okay,” she said, relaxing her fingers against my scalp and gently pulling me forward. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
XII
The Next Morning, the city was covered in frost, and I walked home through unshovelled sidewalks and wet, clumping snow. As I removed my shoes at the top of the stairs, Sasha lowered her magazine and grinned at me from the chaise longue.
“Did you get lucky?”
“Who knows,” I said, and went to bed.
I woke hours later, in the red light of a March afternoon. Snow had built up on the window ledge, and cars crept uneasily through the streets below. The smell of sex rose from my unwashed body. As sometimes happens when waking from daytime sleep, I was filled with a strange calm. I made myself a cup of coffee and opened my email. There was one new message, from Theresa Lykaios. It had no subject, and when I opened it there was but a single line of text followed by a link.
And you said you had a bad imagination. Thanks for the drinks.
The link took me to the Fera Civitatem website. Blood flushed beneath my scalp as I realized what I was looking at. Across the top of the page, in clear black letters, was spelled out a title and date:
The City of Pigs
11/04/15
What will be their way of life? Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means; having an eye to poverty or war.
But, said Glaucon, you have not given them a relish to their meal.
— Plato, The Republic, Book II
Let us imagine a city. An unrecognizable city, free from wealth or want, where the citizens are noble enough to love simplicity. In this city, the wind blows in from the lake and stirs the gardens of the people, spreading the perfume of apple blossoms and lilac over those who sleep long in the heat of the day. Winter nights are spent intoxicated with smoke and spiced wine, chanting the deep mysteries.
It is only in this city that love is possible. Without avarice, free from kings and bishops and their bloody nightmares of hierarchy and domination, its streets are filled with a true eroticism. Care and respect for the entwining of bodies is the only religion, and it is worshipped with a true liturgy. A liturgy of music and dance so perfect it transcends the union of two souls that is the foundation of all other cities — the dyad of master and slave — to unite every worshipper in a climax of becoming.
Some have called this a city of pigs, a bestial city. They say its citizens feed and rut like swine, cut off from divine images and laws, following only the dictates of nature. Where, the priests and economists and government ministers say, are the finer things in life? Where are the featherbeds and rich sauces, the slave’s deference and the peasant’s groan? They have bulldozed and paved over this ancient city, and buried it to sleep beneath churches and courthouses.
Have you had enough relish yet? Are you ready to descend into the City of Pigs?
There was a video embedded underneath. A shaky, darkened image came to life when I clicked “play.” From a background of electronic static, a high, thin tone emerged, a violin that began to play a repetitive motif. The camera moved through a darkened space. Flashes of red and blue illuminated a hunched-over figure moving in a circle around some large dark mass in the centre of the room. The violin was joined by an echoing viola and cello, and the camera spun around the circling bodies and then went black. A figure appeared, bathed in red light, holding a whip, and when the whip cracked, the strings and electronic fuzz cut out altogether and a chorus of voices began to sing, sustaining what sounded like a C Minor 7th chord, but corrupted and dark; stacked thirds organized in a way that I couldn’t quite place. A pulsing dance began to play, and staccato purple light revealed a pile of writhing naked limbs. The pace grew faster, the light matching the beat, until the screen finally cut to black and a card with the title and date appeared.
I sat back in my chair and played it again. The music was fairly ordinary, up until the big reveal, but the camerawork and editing were highly professional. It was not immediately clear to me how any of this connected directly with the curious text. But in its own way, it answered any remaining questions I had. It was all too impressive. There was no way DIY art punks were responsible for this. The production was too slick, the audio too good. And after the legal risk they’d already exposed themselves to, advertising the date seemed reckless.
I opened the Classical Modern website. The landing page looked as though it had been designed in 2009, and was dominated by a highly professional shot of Itzhak Perlman playing violin and looking extremely constipated. There was a horizontal slider below the main story containing the headline Celeste Andrews Wows Winnipeg With Concert at Centennial Hall. I was about to click the Submissions tab when the next ad in the slider glided across the screen. It was an advertisement for a job at the magazine. A full-time position with a “competitive” salary.
I clicked through. Applicants with experience in classical music were encouraged to send in a CV and writing portfolio, before the deadline at the end of the month. I wasn’t sure what “competitive” meant, and my conversation with Zimmermann had left me with a distinct impression of the magazine’s philosophy — one that was confirmed as I began reading through the main stories from its last issue. There wouldn’t be much room for digressions about Plato, and nor would there be much interest in the more politically charged ideas Theresa had put forward.
I started the painful process of cobbling together a pitch, which culminated in an anxious smoke break. When I returned, the words I had written made me slightly uneasy. I could imagine exactly how Theresa’s mouth would twitch up in derision as she read them. There was nothing in what I’d said about the necessity of exploding the old forms or moving beyond the static audience-musician-composer relationship that had become engrained over the past two hundred years. If anything, the pitch I had prepared was a step in the opposite direction, a digestible take that domesticated Fera Civitatem’s experiment, asserting that however radical they seemed, these concerts actually belonged alongside the comfortably genteel productions that ran mechanically each passing season. It was an apology for the excess, not a celebration of it.
But iconoclasm is easy when you have everything or nothing, and I was neither desperate nor comfortable enough to fantasize about burning it all down. The only thing standing between me and never having to clear another table again was my willingness to adopt a slightly different angle in my coverage of a concert that, in the grand scheme of things, meant less than nothing. The decision was quite easy in the end, given that there was no way to monetize Theresa’s approval.
