The Ballet of Dr Caligari

by Reggie Oliver

  After lunch the Prince sent Massimo to the bank with a cheque to fetch me some cash. Once I had received it, I was told to return at nine the following morning and dismissed. I had a feeling that the Prince was in something of a hurry.

  On my way back to Trastevere I decided to call on the Contessa to thank her, or leave a note if she was absent. I found her with her mother whom I had met only briefly before, but had not cared for. She was a small, sharp-eyed woman, somehow shrivelled, always ready to take offence. When she heard I had been to see her brother she pressed me for details. We spoke in Italian for her English was poor, and this allowed me to be vaguer than I might otherwise have allowed myself to be. I gathered that Vittoria, as the Contessa’s mother was called, seldom saw her brother. A severe rift was hinted at.

  ‘Why he does not have a telephone, or will not tell me his number, I cannot imagine,’ said Vittoria.

  ‘Mother, you know why,’ said the Contessa giving her a look of reproach. Not in front of strangers, it seemed to say.

  ‘So, young man, you are to paint my brother’s portrait?’

  ‘And Massimo’s perhaps.’

  ‘That man! I do not understand. A worthless painter. What is my brother doing with him? The Prince is not omosessuale. He has been married many times. He was a great lover of beautiful women.’

  ‘Mother!’ But parents rarely seem to notice that their children are embarrassed by them. Vittoria kept her eyes on me.

  ‘And did he show you our Leonardo?’

  ‘Mother! It is a Titian.’

  ‘Titian, Leonardo, pouf! What does it matter? It is an ancient masterpiece, and no-one sees it. So why does he not sell it? I tell you why. Because, by the terms of the will, he would have to share the millions of lire with his poor sister whom he hates. I, who have done nothing but kindness to him. And he will leave everything to that canaglia Massimo. He should be rid of it. That Lady with a Rose has the mal’occhio, I tell you. It always has. The rose! The rose! Did my brother show it to you?’

  I replied that I had not known that the Prince possessed a Titian, an equivocation worthy of a Jesuit. Soon afterwards when I took my leave the Contessa gave me a look which suggested that she, at least, had noticed it.

  It was the strangest commission of my life, and I tackled it with youthful energy and seriousness. I read all I could about Titian and his methods. I went to see as many of his works as possible, even travelling as far as Florence to do so. I squared off a photograph of the painting and transferred it to the canvas to do a detailed under-drawing. The canvas I had already primed with gesso in the traditional manner. When it came to applying pigments and glazes, I had to work at the Palazzo, but I insisted that I should not work in the room where it was displayed. I needed natural light. After much trouble, a small attic room with a good northern light was found at the top of the Palazzo, and there I spent my days.

  I found my task at the beginning rather dull, oppressed by the knowledge that not the smallest personal deviation from the original would be permitted. Gradually, however, I became absorbed, almost obsessive about the work, so that I began to spend increasingly long hours working on the picture, arriving at the Palazzo at dawn so that I could make the most of the daylight. I became determined to match every variation in tone, every brush stroke with the original, and my increasing success in this endeavour began to excite me.

  At the same time, something prevented complete contentment with my work. It was not so much the restrictiveness of maintaining absolute fidelity to the painting, as the painting itself. There was something wrong with it: and it was all to do with the rose. That was my feeling, at any rate.

  These days we believe that great art should ‘challenge’ the viewer: there must be mystery, ambiguity in order for there to be greatness. On the whole, I agree, but some challenges, some mysteries may be too much. The disturbance should not amount to confusion, let alone chaos, and the more minutely I studied this canvas, the more troubling it became.

  The artist had portrayed a woman, perhaps in her mid to late twenties, at the zenith of her charms. Titian’s celebrated passion for beautiful women was evident in every brush stroke, but the sensuality was not of the straightforward kind that you see in his Venuses or Danaës. The lips, though pearly and pink, were almost thin, and the smile mocking rather than sensuous. But it was the look that really puzzled me.

  At first glance she appears, as the catalogue entry states, to be looking at the rose which she holds in her left hand. (Incidentally why the left? But let that pass.) Yet the more I studied the painting, the more I became convinced that she was not looking at the rose, but deliberately past the rose and, out of the corner of her eye, at the viewer. I tried many times without success to convey this impression, and countless times, in my conscientiousness, I started again.

  Then there was the rose itself. I have left the rose till last, because it gave me the most acute problems. There was the colour to begin with. Titian is known for his vibrant colouring, but this was intense even for him, and it did not blend with the exquisite pinks and yellows and flesh tones of the figure as a whole. The rose was a deep, dark red colour, a bud just beginning to open into a flower, still black as night in its inner folds and recesses. The thorns on its stem were prominent and highlighted with tiny streaks of lead white. There was something savage about it. I cannot go along with the catalogue’s suggestion that the rose might have been painted or added later by another artist: a close examination of the canvas surface and the brush strokes ruled this out. On the other hand it does seem to have been painted differently, more minutely, almost in an earlier Titian style, than the rest of the canvas. It stood out of the composition in a way that to me didn’t quite ‘work’. And yet, it was deliberate, I was sure of that. The great Master knew what he was doing; but what was he doing?

  At first, presumptuously, I considered improving on Titian by endeavouring, very subtly, to integrate the rose more with the rest of the picture. In fact I believe that I had succeeded, but I was prevented.

  For the first ten days of my work at the Palazzo, I was uninterrupted. No-one came to check up on me, and I was glad of it. If I wanted a break, I would make my way down to the kitchens where the housekeeper, the only other denizen of the Palazzo apart from Massimo and the Prince, would supply me with excellent coffee, sometimes even a dish of pasta. If I met Massimo or the Prince in the corridors, we would acknowledge each other’s presence by gesture alone and pass on. I was not one to initiate conversation, and I dreaded the question how is it going? or its equivalent, even though I was not ashamed of my efforts so far. I had and still have a superstitious dread of showing or even discussing unfinished work.

  Then on the tenth day, at about three in the afternoon, I heard a heavy tread in the passage outside my attic room. Without knocking the Prince entered.

  For some reason I did not look round—I think I may have been engrossed in some tiny detail—but I heard heavy breathing behind me. Evidently the effort of climbing to the top floor had been a considerable and unaccustomed one for the seventy year old Prince. Only when I heard him sit down behind me on the one chair in the room apart from my own did I turn round. He was mopping his brow with a large white handkerchief, but he smiled and indicated that I should continue with my work. I did so and a silence of about a minute ensued until I heard the Prince say: ‘The rose is not right.’

  It was as if I had been expecting him to say just that, even though I had not fully formed the thought in my mind. The tension and unease of that silence had alerted me to it.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It is not right.’ I had left my words ambiguous, so as to give the Prince the opportunity of commending my ‘improvement’, but he would not take it.

  ‘You must paint the rose exactly as it is in the original.’

  I nodded and immediately began to make adjustments. The Prince sat on. He asked me about my methods and seemed genuinely interested in the various glazes, thin semi-transparent layers of paint,
that I employed, how I mixed my pigments with the linseed oil that Titian almost invariably used, how I had studied the evolution of his brush work from the smooth sfumato of his early paintings to the free, almost impressionistic technique of the last years in his long life. He asked me what I planned to do when I had finished working for him. I told him that I was going back to England.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That is as it should be, as you will have completed your greatest work.’ I doubt if he was aware of having insulted me. Soon after, he left. I had only to repaint the rose and my work was almost done.

  The following day at the same hour as before I heard the Prince’s heavy tread in the passage outside my door. He sat himself down and watched me as I applied the last glazes to the canvas mixing some with a small sprinkling of soot to give an impression of age. I did not feel nervous about him watching me, because I knew that the work I had done was good. It was becoming hard to tell the difference between the two canvases.

  I think that we were both relaxed because the Prince began to talk about his life. In particular he talked about his wives, of which there had been four, and his mistresses of which there had been a considerably larger number. He discussed them kindly, appreciatively, but more as if they had been prized possessions or pets rather than people. He praised their beauty; he laughed gently at their absurdities and extravagances; he became philosophical:

  ‘We Valerio-Grandonis have always been lovers of beautiful women. It has been our delight and our curse. Does not your poet Byron say:

  Alas, the love of women! It is known

  To be a lovely and a fearful thing . . .’

  I wondered what he was trying to prove to me. Was he attempting to demonstrate that he was not omosessuale? But why bother? What did I care?

  He began to talk about his ancestors in the same detached but slightly romanticising way in which he talked about himself. It was as if his own identity was bound up with them. He spoke of their acts without approval or disapproval: they were beyond moral judgement. They were what they were, and, to a certain extent, they were what he was.

  This curious collective self-absorption of his emboldened me to ask about the subject of my painting. I could tell he was put out by my enquiry because there was a long silence before he answered me, but I felt I had a right to ask. I think he too recognised this.

  He told me that the lady portrayed had been born Julia Valerio, of an old and noble family which could trace its origins back to the Valerii, a Patrician clan in ancient Roman times. She fell in love with a Prince Grandoni. It would have been a most suitable match had it not been for the fact that the Prince’s father had lost his castle and estates to a usurper in one of Renaissance Italy’s many local wars, and the Grandoni family was all but destitute. But Julia was a determined woman. She married three men in succession, merchants of no breeding but of great wealth. All three died within a year of marrying her, so Julia, having become an heiress and widow with a considerable fortune married her Prince, insisting, however that the family name became henceforth Valerio-Grandoni and that her family emblem, the red rose, be quartered with his, the Triton, on their coat of arms. Naturally the relatives of the rich merchants she had married were suspicious and brought a case against the Princess, but it came to nothing. In the first place, the Princess was now a person of power and consequence, and, secondly, it could be proved beyond doubt that Julia had been absent from her husbands’ dwellings at the time of their deaths. The servants of the households were interrogated under torture, as was the custom of that time, but yielded nothing beyond the fact that when Julia had last parted from her husbands they were on the best and most loving of terms and that she had left with each of them a red rose to remind them of her.

  And so the Prince and Princess lived happily ever after—for a while—and were blessed by six children, two sons and four daughters. The Prince died first, in a duel apparently, defending the reputation of his beloved wife. The Princess lived on in splendour until her eighties.

  I told the Prince that I thought it was a pretty story, like a fairy tale with its three rich husbands, and asked him if he believed that Julia had actually killed them in some way. The Prince smiled.

  ‘Oh, yes, Signor Cartaret, I know it to be so,’ he said unabashed, proud almost. ‘It was only on the Principessa’s deathbed that she asked for pen and paper and dictated a confession. The confession was witnessed by the priest who, somewhat reluctantly, gave her absolution. He died shortly afterwards I believe. In it she declared that on the nights before her departure from her first three husbands she had made love to them most passionately and skilfully, for she was an adept in the rites of Eros, having been schooled by the buona robas, the harlots, as you say, of her city. On the morning of her departure she had given them each a deep red rose, the emblem of the Valerii, and bade them, if their longing for the delights of her body became unbearable, to clutch the rose until the thorns of its stem pierced their flesh. In that way, she told them, the exquisite pain of the rose would alleviate the agony of their unfulfilled desire. She had coated the thorns with a deadly poison and, when each of her wealthy husbands clutched their rose in an ecstasy of frustrated passion, they succumbed to the venom and died. That was my ancestress’s confession.

  ‘After the Principessa had finally given up her penitent spirit to God, the testament of her crimes was buried with her, together with a single red rose, but the confession was later retrieved by a member of my family. It has since been mislaid or destroyed, but the legend, and the painting live on.’

  I still could not quite believe it. It was all too bad to be true, but there was the picture, and Titian was nobody’s fool. I said nothing and soon after he had finished his story the Prince abruptly left me.

  So there I was with a couple of hours of daylight left, alone in a room with two portraits of a murderess. I looked from one canvas to the other, and I can honestly say that though over four hundred years separated them I could not tell them apart. They were frighteningly identical; I had twinned her by making Titian’s vision my own.

  It was then that I thought I caught a glimpse of the meaning of the rose. The Master, Titian, had meant it to be both beautiful and offensive, for it contained the soul of Julia of the house of the Valerii: an ancient name, an ancient pride, an ancient viciousness. They lived on in her and her descendants, and now I had done something towards perpetuating it. I covered both pictures with a cloth and left. I would finish with it the following morning.

  When I came the next day, I saw that there was more left to do than I thought. The rose was still not quite right. I worked on it minutely, noticing for the first time a detail that had hitherto passed me by. On the stem of the rose just above where Julia’s hand grasped it, the old master had painted a tiny drop of liquid which he had highlighted in white lead. But the drop was not water, it was red. Blood was on the stem: I added it to my own copy.

  That afternoon, as I was putting on the last glaze, the Prince came again. I showed him the finished product and, after a long and thorough examination, he pronounced himself satisfied. He then asked me when I was going to London. I told him that I had booked my flight for the following week.

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you can perform an errand for me. And I will pay you in addition for it.’

  He admitted to me that his intention all along had been to sell the painting, but that the Italian authorities cannot allow an Old Master like the Titian out of the country. If he sold it in Italy he would never get as good a price for it as he would in London or the States. Besides, his grasping relations would all be clamouring for a share of the profits. If the Titian could be got to London then he could sell it through a dealer, or even at auction, while my replica would remain at the Palazzo to allay suspicions. Besides, he could always say that he had brought the Titian with him to London before the war and that it had been at his apartment in The Boltons all that time.

  It would be too dangerous for the Prince himself to smu
ggle the painting into England, so he needed a reliable courier to do so, one who would not arouse suspicion, namely myself.

  I protested that I did not want to be locked up in an Italian prison for smuggling a priceless work of art through customs, but the prince only smiled. He said he had thought of that. We would cover the Titian canvas with another, one of Massimo’s abstracts, and, thus disguised, and accompanied by some of my own work, it would attract no attention from the customs officials. He would follow me to London a few days later with the relevant documents of provenance and pick up the Titian from me.

  I asked him why Massimo could not perform this task. Surely he was the obvious choice for such an errand. The Prince looked away from me, smiling, and in his smile I suddenly caught an echo of his ancestress Julia.

  ‘Massimo amused me for a while; he is a pleasure to look at, but he is not altogether to be trusted and I am beginning to find him a bore. I am afraid that his time with me is almost over, and I may have to change my will yet again.’ He said this in a dreamy voice, as if planning a party of pleasure to Tivoli. When he saw I was still reluctant he offered me a sum of money that I could not refuse.

  At a quarter to midnight on the day before I was to take a plane back to London I rang the bell at the Palazzo Valerio-Grandoni. I waited a long while before the door was opened by the Prince himself. Without a word he led me up to his saloon where he presented me with a canvas wrapped in a blanket and a bundle of thousand lire notes. Then he kissed me on both cheeks and said: ‘Now go. I will see you in London, my friend.’ It was all a little melodramatic and conspiratorial for my taste, but the Prince seemed to be enjoying it.