The last time Marcel and I played chess he commented with aplomb on the absurdity of biking without shoes but that didn't stop him from losing the game and as we finished our Buds it was evident that poor Marcel didn't know shit about art all he did was talk about how terrible Monet's brushwork was how great fingerpainting is how the beer was the perfect temperature suddenly he began to explain The Large Glass I can only remember a few fragments of what he said things like "light as light not painted" and "only a dog can hear what I" and "the cracks were deliberate a god" and "of course art can't" later we went back to his place ate ham and cheese sandwiches and he expressed his belief that love is really a nonsexual concatenation of unpredictable incidents leading to sabotage however he did believe in children then suddenly he started to discuss his last piece cloven hairless nature as a tomb backlighted frontlighted technicolor porno sadness a frozen dance of inaccessible fantasy and silence and how it forces you to peep Tom peep at it so that you become the definition of the work I told him I have refused to look all these years fearful and that the greasy stain caused by thousands of faces pressed up against the holes in the door Cadaques Cadaques is disgusting no Jew would place his eye against that kind of thing let alone stare at a complete stranger stretched out publicly for anyone so that was that we watched Jeopardy drank snifters of cognac then abruptly he whirled his beaklike face around and said about his own work what seems to me definitive: "I have made the most public art of the century. All other artists are esoteric fakes. Only mine needs no interpretation. Like the average man, my work articulates nothing but itself and is happy, pointless, without malice or love, neither good nor bad and has as its purpose the destruction of the idea of Adam and Eve as models of strict freedom." There was nothing I could say to that but I remember feeling I was in the presence of a rare man who seemed no different from a bicycle a painter a dog a god a Peeping Tom a Jew Adam or Eve