Prologue
Joaquin Westfallen. For thirty-five years he was famous. Then he was dying and nobody gave a shit. For those three and a half decades though, he was god. His face in black and white and later colour, plastered in newspapers, magazine, billboards and on television. His thoughts and ideas scrawled in two autobiographies and splayed upon a dozen canvasses a month. The labels assigned to him were endless and contradictory, painter, artist, author, alcoholic and drug addict, roué and womanizer, bastard, con and gentleman. Perpetually wasted and to some, boundlessly talented, he moved with grace through social sects of the high and mighty in their playgrounds, Paris his favourite, Monaco a drag.
By the spring of 1987 though he sat alone, hair growing grey, hands shaking from the daemon drink and cut cocaine, carpet slippers on his feet and thick dressing gown wrapped tight around his very frail and thinning body, emaciation not far way. He sat alone in a wicker chair on a balcony outside a crumbling monastery on the coast of Spain, a thin cigarillo gradually burning down to embers in one hand, a half finished gin and tonic floating languidly in its glass as still as the waters in the bay far below his vantage point. He sat looking at it with tired eyes, fingers tapping steadily on the armrest of his chair, thinking deeply.
Beside him, resting on a side table was a picture, a portrait of two young men in their twenties, one dressed in a tweed suit, the other in linen, both with hats perched low on their heads and arms holding each others shoulders. Behind them were palm trees and the corner of a church, blurry and out of focus, the photo tropical and old. Joaquin sat looking at the picture, throwing the cigar on the ground as if it were poisoned, picking the photo up and feeling its age in the weight of the thing, staring close at the faded faces of the two subjects, remembering taking the shot himself so long ago and laughing at the effort of forcing poses from the awkward and modest. As he put the picture back on the table, his mind began to roam.
Joaquin Westfallen. For thirty-five years he was famous. Then he was dying and nobody gave a shit. For those three and a half decades though, he was god. His face in black and white and later colour, plastered in newspapers, magazine, billboards and on television. His thoughts and ideas scrawled in two autobiographies and splayed upon a dozen canvasses a month. The labels assigned to him were endless and contradictory, painter, artist, author, alcoholic and drug addict, roué and womanizer, bastard, con and gentleman. Perpetually wasted and to some, boundlessly talented, he moved with grace through social sects of the high and mighty in their playgrounds, Paris his favourite, Monaco a drag.
By the spring of 1987 though he sat alone, hair growing grey, hands shaking from the daemon drink and cut cocaine, carpet slippers on his feet and thick dressing gown wrapped tight around his very frail and thinning body, emaciation not far way. He sat alone in a wicker chair on a balcony outside a crumbling monastery on the coast of Spain, a thin cigarillo gradually burning down to embers in one hand, a half finished gin and tonic floating languidly in its glass as still as the waters in the bay far below his vantage point. He sat looking at it with tired eyes, fingers tapping steadily on the armrest of his chair, thinking deeply.
Beside him, resting on a side table was a picture, a portrait of two young men in their twenties, one dressed in a tweed suit, the other in linen, both with hats perched low on their heads and arms holding each others shoulders. Behind them were palm trees and the corner of a church, blurry and out of focus, the photo tropical and old. Joaquin sat looking at the picture, throwing the cigar on the ground as if it were poisoned, picking the photo up and feeling its age in the weight of the thing, staring close at the faded faces of the two subjects, remembering taking the shot himself so long ago and laughing at the effort of forcing poses from the awkward and modest. As he put the picture back on the table, his mind began to roam.
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