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…continued from the previous post.
Was there anything, or anybody, that more than
anything else helped you get to where you are?
Yes. When I was supposed to be in school for the
last few months of my life as a high school pupil, I spent a lot of time at a
bar by the train station instead, wasting away my chances of ever becoming a model
student.
I remember that, around that time, the bar’s
jukebox would constantly be playing the Beatles’ Let it Be, even though John, Paul, George, and Ringo
had already gone their separate ways. Maybe it was listening to that posthumous
album, or maybe it was realising that my chances of succeeding in school were
fast disappearing. I don’t know what it was exactly, but something gave me the
heart-wrenching feeling that it was the end of an era.
Wasting my days like that was definitely not edifying;
it was nothing I’d recommend. However, doing it in good company, smoking
cigarettes, and drinking myself into a stupor felt, at the time, epic.
Sometimes I wonder how it would have ended had I
not heard that a young, successful comic book author was looking for
apprentices. I didn’t think I was in any way talented enough, but, somehow, squandering
my life away gave me enough self-destructive courage to throw myself into
impossible tasks.
On a rainy day, I climbed up the stairs to the top
floor and rang the doorbell.
A beautiful girl with long black hair and a short
miniskirt greeted me at the door. I must have looked like an idiot, because as
soon as she saw me, instead of letting me in, she just burst out laughing. Inside,
the floor was as shiny as a mirror. All the way at the back, seated against large
glass penthouse windows, the Successful Author sat at a drawing desk brimming
with multicolour markers, an elegant desktop lamp, a mandatory red Brionvega
radio cube, and a bottle of vodka. An opulent, shiny tropical plant completed
the picture.
The Successful Author, a very handsome man with
bottle-blonde hair, wanted to see my portfolio, which consisted entirely of
drawings I had hastily penned down the night before. The air was thick with
embarrassment. He wasn’t impressed by my work and didn’t even pretend to be. He
did, however, immediately proceed to ask me to run an errand; some task that he
had no intention of carrying out and was happy to delegate to just about
anyone.
I was to draw a bathtub, or a fountain, something
like that. The fountain, or bathtub, had to be very big. It was meant for some
anniversary event of the town’s Military Academy. It was to be drawn in the
Successful Author’s own style, which he illustrated to me very briefly.
I still remember it as one of the worst tasks I have
ever been handed during my entire career; worse than kidney stones. I couldn’t
eat, I couldn’t sleep, as I tried day and night to trace the oval shape of that
damned tub, the spraying water, the small ripples, the tiny concentric waves…
The result? Something ugly. A black scribble that
nobody could ever mistake for the work of a young man freshly out of high
school art classes, with the ambition of becoming a comic book star.
And so it happened. The Academy rejected my bathtub
with disdain, handing back the horrible artefact to the Successful Author.
I was dismayed. The Successful Author slapped me
hard on the shoulder and burst into an irrepressible laugh.
The Successful Author was Bonvi, and I had already
become his friend.
***
The interview
with Silver will continue in next Friday’s post.
Watch out for new posts every Tuesday and
Friday.
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