Angustia
“Go have a look over there! It’s so fucking crazy!” When someone tells you that as a ten-year-old you listen, so I went.
I can’t remember who it was that actually said that to me, and I certainly cannot fathom why, because what was ‘over there’ was the worst thing in the world.
***
It must have just happened.
There were no police in attendance and certainly no ambulance, in truth the need for an ambulance had passed. A small crowd was gathering just to stare, what else was there to do?
The broken body of a tiny boy was lying next to the gutter, the only mark on his crisp white school shirt were two devastatingly neat tyre marks, beside him was the bus that caused them- the bus driver nowhere to be found.
He was lying face down, his skin still pink but fading. One leg broken and lying at an impossible angle to the rest of his body. His blood was thick like molasses and velvet red. He would have been younger than me, no older than six years old, seven at a stretch.
Someone in the crowd lit a candle and placed it next to the tiny body seeping velvety blood, splayed on the road in non-viable angles. Another found a tin and placed it nearby so that the gawking crowd could contribute to his funeral at least. No one thought to cover the child with a blanket or a sheet or a sweater or anything at all. It’s not that death isn’t honoured in El Salvador, it’s just that it’s plentiful.
As if by an invisible force the crowd parted and without warning came the worst sound in the world.
The sound caused an earthquake while also blacking out the sun in the heavens. The moon turned blood red; the stars fell to the earth. The sky itself receded, and every mountain and island was moved from its place. Time stood still.
The crowd had parted for the boy’s mother.
I will never forget the intensity of her scream, the baritone of her pain, the unmitigated anguish of her cry. And that twisted look on her face. The unthinkable was meeting the impossible.
The sound filled every space and then it filled the space in between all of the spaces until there was nothing, nothing at all, but her scream.
There is one particular section of the National Gallery of Victoria that I can’t go into.
On Level 2 in the 19th Century European Paintings Gallery hangs a painting that I can hear, it makes a sound that causes mountains to move and blacks out the heavens. The painting makes a sound that shifts islands and turns the moon a velvety red while causing stars to rain down on earth like unripe figs being shaken from a tree.
***
August Friedrich Schenck, c. 1878. Oil on canvas. 151 cm × 251.2 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Schenck was born in Glückstadt in Holstein, now in Germany but then in Denmark, and lived and worked for most of his life in France. The painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1878, under its French title Angoisses (Anguish), and then in London the following year.
Schenck reversed the scene in his c.1885 painting, L'Orphelin, souvenir d'Auvergne (The Orphan, memory of Auvergne), now held by the Musée d'Orsay, in which a lamb stands above the body of its dead mother, before a line of black crows waiting on a wooden fence.
August Friedrich Schenck, c. 1885. Oil on canvas. 176 cm × 250 cm. Musées d'Orsay et de L'Orangerie.
