A year ago, my partner and I suffered a personal tragedy. The bad times had started a long 5 years before that. At first, we had difficulty in getting pregnant. We kept trying, perfecting our precision calibrated copulation, there’s no other word for it, measuring vaginal temperature, milky egg-white consistency of genital fluids and number of days after menstruation, until finally, one day, Margarida got pregnant. Then the rollercoaster of nausea, vomiting, mood swings, insomnia, started, accompanied by the see-sawing of bad news and good news. The first piece of bad news was barked out by Olga from Odessa, the brutally insensitive sonogram specialist, repeatedly declaring ‘This is very bad!’ in hammering consonants, as she observed an oversized gap in the fetus’ nuchal fold. Margarida crumpled into inconsolable tears. The sonogram was followed by a barrage of tests over months, doctors saying everything was fine, and finally an emergency C-section that, due to COVID, found me relegated to the waiting room, cramming obliviously by furiously swiping through ‘The Birth Partner’ on my iPad.

In the first months we wanted to believe everything was alright, and Margarida did too, but she said she always knew that something was wrong. Then came the phase of denial, of great anxiety, of doctors telling us we were just imagining things, through innumerous ups and downs. Of course, our mothers and fathers were an endless source of wisdom and empathy. Every time I expressed my anxieties to my dad, he would bellow back in his thick Portuguese accent, ‘Relax’, stretching out the word, seemingly convinced that if he made it last as long as possible, I would have a higher probability of relaxing. I knew that his long ‘‘relax’ was much deeper than a simple soothing sonic balm, it contained multitudes of meaning, abysses of suggestion, insinuating in one smooth two syllable yaw of the jaw how overbearing, overdemanding, anxious and generally annoying millennial I was.

All of this led up to the inevitable, cold, diagnosis. Our doctor, months before had gleefully made us feel like idiots, clarifying that she thought we were inventing problems where none existed, and being so kind to suggest, ‘What I see… from MILES away,’ emphasis on ‘miles’, ‘is a VERY anxious mother’, emphasis on ‘very’. The same doctor, a mere two months later, flipped her script, and was now parroting what Olga from Odessa already knew more than a year before, when Noah was the size of a plum in Margarida’s belly… ‘It’s bad,’ she said.

A year later, the month after the funeral, Margarida, I, and three friends went to Italy. Ben had come from Paris, Daniel from New York, and Alex from Boise, all convening, for the opposite reason the three wise men got together: to be present with parents after their baby had died. We decided to go on this trip in the hopes of distancing ourselves from the locus of grief, planning a road trip from Rome to Florence, through Tuscany, which is something Margarida had always dreamed of doing. We had done this in the blindness of earth altering shock, convinced catching a two-hour EasyJet flight from Lisbon to Rome, slurping some gelato, eating Cacio e Pepe, and looking at Michelangelo could somehow fill the universe sized hole crushing our chests from the inside. We thought ‘Oh seeing some beautiful art will distract us. Drinking some Tuscan wine is just what we need.’ Friends, helpless and at a loss of what to suggest, confirmed ‘Oh that’s great, it’s really great that you are going on this trip… it’s just gonna do you and Margarida so much good’. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to anyone that 75% of the paintings in Italy are pictures of a mother holding her newborn (Jesus), breastfeeding, holding him up as he holds up a golden orb symbolizing his gift to earth, and the other 25% are of a mother holding her dead child after he’s descended from the cross, already a grown man, but, as you can imagine, still packing a punch for us. But its hard to predict these things. I certainly didn’t predict it.

As could be expected Margarida and I immediately got into a fight less than 30 minutes into the first day. She had been in a heated screaming match with the Roman budget Rent-a-car salesman who was trying to overcharge her, while pretending he didn’t speak English, and pretending to not understand her fluent Italian. When she turned her spiteful ire towards me, I, shocked, could not imagine what I had done wrong, I had been innocently playing chess on my iPhone the whole time.

Like a mature adult, I took the moral high road, and walked away from my grieving partner, silently. ‘Scream all you want!’ I told myself proudly, sure of the solid ethical and moral peak I stood on, ‘I’m going to walk away… real cool, not a peep outta me.’

We had a few hours in Rome before we left for our Tuscan road trip, and I wanted to see the free Caravaggio’s. The churches, unlike museums, were free, but there was a secret charge. To see the painting, you had to turn on a light, and to turn on the light for the painting you needed to pay one euro for a minute of lit painting time.

The previous times I had been in Rome, like most people , I had been a light mooch. Everyone would stand around the paintings waiting for someone else to feed a coin into the light meter. But, under the circumstances, since I was grieving, I considered I should splurge and buy my own light time, and others could mooch off my magnanimous grief splurging. I went into the Tabacchi, exchanged a twenty euro note for twenty one euro coins, scanned the QR code on an Electric scooter with my phone, and jackhammered over cobblestone alleyways, high pitched electric motor wheezing as I leaned into the Via Apia, swerved around the litter of tourists that obliviously licked gelatos, hoping the pound of coins wouldn’t eat through my pant pockets and spill down my legs in a trail in front of the Pantheon.

First stop was at Santa Maria del Popolo to see my favorite, Caravaggio’s ‘Conversion on the Way to Damascus’. Supposedly it’s a painting of Saul, an anti-Christian Pharisee, hearing the voice of God as he was on his way to persecute some Christians in Damascus. I wasn’t familiar with Saul, and vague on Damascus, so it had always seen it as a gory picture of a horse trampling on a pink clad jester, which I liked. Alas, both interpretations are misrepresentations, focusing on pictorial ‘marginalia’ if you’ll allow me. The true heart of this painting was not Saul, the ‘Way’, Damascus, or any other thing mentioned in the title. That’s because this was the most important and beautiful painting of a horse’s ass ever made. There are very few paintings that use this level of detail, careful modeling, intense chiaroscuro to picture the sumptuous, inviting mounds and crevices of a horse’s ass. It’s what makes this painting stand out, at least to me, among other baroque work, and most other Caravaggio’s paintings. Much like the rest of his work, it can be read biographically and politically as queer coded subliminally provoking and questioning Christian heteronormativity. Michelangelo did the same thing on the Sistine Chapel in the fresco of God creating the Sun, Moon, and the Plants. One of the finest asses in art history. And what a place to put it. I spent seven of my allotted twenty coins lighting up the Caravaggio, every minute worth it. As I left, I had forgotten the earlier screaming match with Margarida. This trip was a good idea, the horse’s ass seemed to whisper.

The light turned off again, and I scooted over to San Luigi dei Francessi, where I spent another eight light coins on the niche of three Caravaggio masterpieces. Masterpieces, but no asses.

Back on my electric scooter, Roman wind in my hair, I whizzed to the Basilica of Saint Augustine, ready to spend my remaining five light coins. I went to the apse and far niches looking for my last Roman Caravaggio. None found. Ah. It was by the door, to the left, unassuming, and recently restored. I stood in front of it, confronted with the first of many pictures of a mom holding her baby – Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loretto, and it became clear that this trip might be harder than I thought.

I met up with Margarida, hugged her, told her I was sorry and the five of us set out through Tuscany over three days, visiting Piero de la Francesca’s birthplace and his Madonna, no baby in sight, before reaching Florence. Margarida was in a deep depression, a catatonic ghost, sleepwalking her way to the end of each day. I was grateful to be with my three friends and, as always, clung to art like a security blanket. Despite all the mother-son imagery, which, like in real life, reinforces that dads are secondary characters, it felt good to look at paintings and sculptures.

In Florence we climbed up the 700 steps to the top of Brunelleschi’s Dome. Margarida felt claustrophobic in the stairwell that curves in the hollow space between the double dome, and then had vertigo at the top. The wine and the pasta, things she loves dearly, seemed tasteless. We had organized the trip in the hopes it might be good for us, but all the art registered as offensive to her, and appreciating it made her feel like she was betraying of the memory of our child. ‘Art is bullshit. It helps no one,’ she kept saying.

Sometimes she would stay crumpled up in in bed, and I’d go visit museums with the boys. In between looking at art they would make me laugh as they always do.

I spent a lot of time looking at the Bronzino Medici portraits at the Uffizi. I took detail pictures of how he painted the velvet, fur, silk, lace, and gold trim, getting ideas for how I would replicate some of these materials and textures in virtual models that I would then paint. Looking at these paintings was helping me, either by distracting me, and making me focus on work, on work I could make in the coming year, on how to move on beyond my grief by obsessing over another project. I had loved these painters since I was a little boy. They inspired me to think about new paintings I would make. Margarida felt the opposite.

I started painting ghosts in 2022, after Noah was diagnosed. When my friend saw the paintings for the first time she asked, kindly, ‘So now you paint ghosts in wheelchairs?’, and when I tried to figure out what she means by ‘now’, all I could come up with is she was very sensitively using a euphemism to refer to my handicapped child with low life expectancy. I can understand where she is coming from, I have always suspected people peddling their victimhood when deep down all they have is a voracious narcissistic craving for fame. We all do it a little. I hate it even more when people say that an artwork is about ‘processing grief’, or about ‘archiving historical memory’. It just sounds icky. But I do care about painting, I do love it, it has always been my refuge throughout my life. All throughout my childhood, when I was bullied and ostracized, I hid myself at home, painting, or went to the National Gallery in Washington D.C. to sketch Rembrandt’s self-portrait. But as photography did in the previous century, social media and the digital world has changed our perspective on painting. It seems absurd to produce hyperreal oil paint versions of digital renders, but that absurdity, in some way, underlines that I really value the act of painting.

These most recent paintings I made in Noah’s room. In part it was because we had rented out my studio after Noah passed away. Another reason was because it bothered me to have his room empty with his crib and all his toys, a sterile altar to his memory. So, I painted next to his crib, thinking of him, asking him for permission in a way, listening to Eno’s Music for Airports, that I played for us so many times when lulling him to sleep.

I don’t think that art is palliative or homeopathic. That’s never how it worked for me. Margarida was right in Rome, as she so often is – Art doesn’t cure or fix anything – it certainly did nothing for Noah and does very little for the millions of people in life threatening dire situations in the world today. It’s not going to right the wrongs of colonial and racist legacies, inequality, the patriarchy. Looking at Caravaggio and Brozino didn’t take Margarida’s grief away. It didn’t take my grief away.

But painting gives me hope, because it has always made me feel safe in some way, made me feel connected to the long arc of history, made me laugh, and because I love it, as I love my friends that came with me to Italy, as I love Margarida, and as I love the memory of Noah.

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Gabriel AbrantesTHE GHOSTS I LOVEBOOTH 9A26A

Gabriel Abrantes
THE GHOSTS I LOVE

BOOTH 9A26A