“The king loves me,” I said again. “He has said he will make me a knight of Santiago when I return.”
I had not meant to say this, for to boast to a woman of such things is not my way, but she vexed me, and I thought about how I had spoken with Rubens on the same subject and how he had slighted my king.
“Ribbons are cheap,” she said. “It is like giving a sweetmeat to a fool or a scrap to a dog.”
I grew angry then, for she was not Rubens, and I said, “You know nothing of such matters, you, the daughter of a merchant and a stranger to honor.”
“Am I so?” she said in a loud voice, so that the crowd turned and stared. “Do you think that? Yes, my mother married a merchant to keep from starving, but she descended from the Colonnas and before that from the Aurelii. We were great in Rome when Madrid was a mud village. And what of your blood, Sr. Sevilliano, you from a city swarming with half-Jews and quasi-Moors and every sort of mongrel cur!”
And she strode away back to her house and I was laughed at in the street.
We fought like that many times. She had no idea of how a woman should behave. Many times I stayed away and many times she did too, but always her witchcraft drew me back, this madness, destroying all honor and duty as an oiled rag wipes through the paint and makes all dull mud.
I painted her once more, toward the end of my stay in Rome. The king had commanded me back to Spain, each letter more importunate, and yet I could not leave. She was with child, she said, mine, and I believed her. Her husband barred her from his house and cut her off entirely, and she took a mean apartment near the river by the Pope’s bridge. I said I would acknowledge the child and see it bred, but this did not seem to please her as it should. She knew I was going; of course I was going! What did she imagine, that I would stay with her there or drag a concubine back to the Alcázar? She drank. She had always drunk deeply of wine, but now she began to take brandy and Holland spirits. It made her madder and even more abandoned in lust. And dragged me down with her.
So, upon an afternoon in spring, we had exhausted ourselves upon the couch in my studio, and as it happened that same mirror was propped up upon a high chest, and as we lay there our reflections shone out from the dusty glass and she said, “That would be a painting, Velázquez, a Venus as the world has not yet seen her, fucked into insensibility by her Adonis. But you would never do a thing like that. Your Holy Office and your Spanish court would never approve. Or no, I believe that such a painting is beyond even your art, to capture us as we are now and perhaps will never be again. No, not even you.”
“I can paint anything,” I said, “even this.”
“Then do it! There are the paints, here am I. You can paint our little kitchen-boy Cupid in later.”
I got up from the couch and placed a primed canvas on my easel and painted her as she was. I worked all afternoon, and when the figure was done I turned it to the wall and would not let her look, though she snarled at me like a vixen. Later I found the boy we’d used in the first painting, the one of her back, and painted him in, and then the rest, the draperies and so on, and when I was done I hid it in my closet where I keep my funds and my accounts and where no one goes but me.
I showed it to her later, the last time we were together. I was packed, with my casts and paintings all sent ahead; we were to leave for the ship at Genoa within the week.
She laughed like a crow when she saw it. “Oh, Velázquez, we would burn for this if anyone saw it, you and I, our smokes would mingle above the Campo dei Fiori; it is the worst thing ever painted. Give it to the Pope as a parting gift, I beg you, and let us die together.”
“No one burns for a painting anymore,” I said.
“You are quite right, nor have I taught you wit in all these long months or to know when I speak in jest. But, my love, it is still enough to ruin you. Whatever possessed you to put your face and my face in it?”
“I was drunk,” I said.
“That will not do when they drag you before the Inquisition. There are only two things to be done with it. You can sell it to Heliche. He will value it and keep it close.”
“I do not sell paintings,” I said. “I am not in trade.”
“Oh, pardon me, Don Diego de Silva y Velázquez, I had forgotten,” she said, “but in that case a brushload of flake white will do.”
“I had thought you could take it. I had planned to give it to you.”
“Oh, did you!” she cried. “What generosity! So that in my misery I could be daily reminded of the great passion of my whole life? Velázquez, my dear love, you are an ass. I will paint it over this minute. I will paint over it and paint something else on top of it, a religious subject in the Venetian manner, and give it to a church. Then may God forgive me.”
So I left her and returned to my apartments, and I was busy with my leaving and thought of her not at all. Until that night, in my bed, when I considered that never again would she share it, nor would I ever again experience those pleasures she knew how to draw from me. Then I felt bereft and sleep would not come, and I called for hot wine and so achieved the oblivion I sought.
And awoke in terror of the light that shone from a glass with no flame and the noises from the street outside and sounds from a small box as if a demon were captive inside, and my first thought was, I have died in the night and I have awakened in hell, this is my punishment. A sound of roaring, like a torrent, and a gurgling noise from a room nearby, and then to my extreme horror through the door walked a naked woman I had never seen before, and I screamed and slid from the bed and crouched in a corner, covering myself and crying prayers, begging forgiveness. And the woman came closer with a look of consternation on her face, trying to embrace me and speaking a language like the Romans speak, but I could not make out one word in five. When she saw I would not be tempted into lust she wrapped herself in a robe and left, and I pulled the blanket over my head and wept for my damnation.
So this must be like trying to describe sex to a child or religious exaltation to an atheist; it’s something you have to experience to know about. I was having those thoughts and feelings, Velázquez in torment, and at the same time, like a carrot in a boiling stewpot, there floated into my consciousness bit by bit the pattern of memories and learned behaviors that constituted the personality of Charles Wilmot, Jr. That’s not a box of demons, that’s a clock radio playing. Those noises are early automobile traffic through the piazza. That’s a lightbulb.
Then the enormity of what had just happened to me struck me in the vitals. I was lucky I now recalled where the bathroom was and what it was for, because I barely reached the toilet in time. They found me that way, all retched out and shivering, and Franco got me into the shower and cleaned off and Sophia put me to bed and stayed, trying to find out what was wrong with me, and the odd thing now was she was speaking Roman dialect and expecting me to understand, and finally I asked her to speak English and, with a puzzled look on her face, she switched languages.
She wanted to know what was up with me, naturally, and I made something up. I said that something must have gone wrong with my brain during the night, maybe a tiny stroke, because when I woke up I didn’t know who I was or where I was. And there was something wrong with my memory, some kind of amnesia.
This alarmed her. She squeezed my hand and put her other hand to the hollow of her throat. “Yes, but you remember us.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “My last memory is us going to that little bar and talking with your friends and me drawing a bunch of people.”
“Chaz! That first time at Guido’s was months ago! How could you not remember?”
“What’s the date, Sophia? Today’s date.”
“It’s the third of March.”
“Okay, then everything from mid-December onward is a complete blank.”
“But, you will see doctors…it will come back, yes?”
“It could,” I said, carefully, not believing it at all. “You could help me if you sort of told me what I was like, wh
at I’ve been like, how we got together and all, what I’ve been doing.”
It took some prodding, because amnesia is so terribly threatening. Our lives are constructed so much of shared memories that we tend to panic when our partners in these refuse to confirm our own. But in a little while, when she saw I wasn’t going to suddenly remember, she began to tell me her tale. She’d started to pose the day after we’d gone out to Guido’s. It was pleasant enough. We’d talked as I worked, just chat at first, but later I’d told her something about my life and she’d told me something about hers, her family, her lovers, her ambitions for herself and the boy. We worked in the morning and then had lunch with the ménage. She related anecdotes: Baldassare and his liver, and the home remedies he’d marshaled in its support; about Franco and his vanity and his women and his dark past; about little Enrico and his teachers and friends. A domestic life in all its Italianate richness. It had apparently been a happy time.
And I’d told her about my family in the States, how I was still more or less carrying a torch for my wife. She knew it was a long shot, but she’d liked me. She thought I was gentle, a decent man, a genius with paint. She admired me. She didn’t care that I was hung up on another woman. Any man worth having had other women in his life, but I was here now and she had a feeling for me, one she hadn’t felt in a long time. And so it happened. One day, when the light had gone, she’d risen naked from the couch and embraced me, and I was hesitant, like a young girl, which she found charming, but in the end I’d fallen back on the couch with her, and we’d made love and it was wonderful. And so on, for the next months, and she liked how I was with Enrico, he’d opened up so much, was always asking if Chaz was to be his new babbo.
At that point she was crying, searching my face for some sign that I’d shared this life, but there was none. I mean, I wasn’t being callous, there was just nothing there-she was a nice woman with whom I’d had one date, and so I steered the conversation as gently as I could to the painting.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “you did your painting. You don’t remember that either?”
“No. But I’d like to see it now. Maybe it would snap me back or something.”
“It’s not here,” she said. “Baldassare has taken it to the laboratory on Via Portina, an industrial area, you understand? He needs high vacuums and ovens, special equipments for this work, the aging.”
“What’s the painting like?”
“What is it like? It is like Velázquez. It is Velázquez, the most astonishing thing I have ever seen. Baldassare says it is a miracle.”
And she told me what I had painted, and I recalled it well, having just finished it a few weeks ago in subjective time, in Rome, in 1650. Painting’s not just in the eye and the head, it’s in the body too, like a dance-the hand, the arm, the back, the way you lean forward and sideways to check out a passage, the standing away and moving close. So when you look at something you’ve done, you have all the intimate body memory, and in this case I had a whole other set of memories, the feel and scent of this particular woman’s skin, the density of Leonora’s living flesh in my hand and under me and on top of me, the squirming damp reality of it. And more than that-this is even harder to explain or even to think about-I had the sense memories of somebody else, somebody else doing the painting. The brain fucks with your head, but the body never lies, or so I’d thought.
For the next week I was a complete wreck, afraid to go to sleep, afraid I might wake up again not me. I spent most of these first days after my return wandering along the river, up to Castel Sant’Angelo and down to Ponte Testaccio, exhausting myself, drinking in a bar before returning home. Most of me was still in 1650: I could recall dozens, hundreds of details, more than I could recollect of the last year of my so-called real life. Maybe the seventeenth century made for a denser, more vivid existence: I mean street scenes, talking to cardinals, servants, what I ate at banquets, the talk at diplomatic receptions, being with Leonora.
Yeah, her. My body, my mind, my heart, if you want to call it that, was burdened with a relationship that I never had, with a woman who died over three hundred years ago. So what was the real story? Obviously, an unprecedented reaction to salvinorin, combined with amnesia, also drug related. My brain was damaged, we already knew that, and since the only deep emotional attachment I’ve ever had was to Lotte, somehow I conflated all that with thinking about Velázquez and came up with this imagined life, and there you had it, an explanation that Shelly Zubkoff would swallow without gagging.
Another reason for staying out of the house was that Sophia started crying nearly every time she looked at me, and it freaked me out, because she’d had a love affair with a ghost, a demon lover, while I’d been making love to Leonora three centuries ago.
One day she wasn’t there and her mother told me she’d gone with the kid to visit friends in Bologna. The signora had been crying too, I could see, and through the barrier of language she let me know that I had been a complete shitbag.
You have to understand that part of the problem here was my complete isolation. I’d checked my cell phone after coming out of the past and learned that there were no messages at all on it. Not one. Jackie Moreau was dead; Mark was, well, Mark, not a sympathetic ear; Charlie was God knew where in Africa, and Lotte was incommunicado. It was like I’d been jailed by the secret police.
So I called my ex-wife one evening, and as soon as she heard my voice she said, “The only thing I want to hear from you is that you’re getting psychiatric help.”
I said, “Hey, I’m planning to, honestly, but look-I’ve, um, been painting like mad and Krebs is coming tomorrow to check out the work and if he likes it, that’s a million bucks to me. Lotte, imagine what we’re going to do with-”
But she wouldn’t listen. She said, “You know, it makes no sense to talk to a maniac, and it hurts me to hear you rave like this. Call me when you are getting the medical help you need.”
And she hung up. Isolation complete, then. Yes, good thing I didn’t tell her about what I’d been doing, or imagining I was doing, for the last three months. She might’ve really been annoyed. So, okay, I was crazy, but you know, just then I didn’t feel crazy. I mean, I was functional as an artist, because apparently I had pulled off this huge coup of a forgery. I felt crazy in New York, but now I didn’t. And frankly I was dazzled by the money and the promise of more. It’s the rule that if you’re rich enough you can’t be that crazy. So I really looked forward to Krebs coming for that reason, and also because, now that I thought about it, he was my only remaining friend.
Now came the big day. That morning Baldassare went out and brought my picture back from the secret forgery lab. He set it up on a display easel in the parlor, covered with a black velvet cloth, and he was guarding it like a dragon, wouldn’t let anyone have a peek before Krebs arrived. Franco drove to the airport to meet him, and while he did that I got fed up with the tension in the house and went out to take a long walk, east to the Tiber and along the Ripa and back through the Porta Portese in the ruins of the old walls. It wasn’t quite warm yet but spring was happening in Rome; you could smell the river and the trees on the boulevards were greening up and blossoming, if they were that kind of tree.
When I returned to the house on Santini I saw that the Mercedes was already parked outside and I hurried in. Krebs was there, in the parlor, with Franco and Baldassare and a man I didn’t recognize, a small, stout, olive-skinned guy with dark-rimmed glasses and the air of an academic. They were all standing around drinking Prosecco, and I saw that the drape was still on the painting.
Krebs hailed me as I came in, embraced me warmly, and said that he’d insisted they wait until I came back for the unveiling. He introduced the stranger as Dr. Vicencio de Salinas, a curator from the Palacio de Livia, the private collection of the duchess of Alba, which kind of puzzled me at the time, because I thought, Hey, isn’t this a little premature, showing the thing to an expert before the boss even had a look?
Then Baldassare
pulled the drape off with a flourish and there were gasps all around. All three of us-Krebs, Salinas, and me-surged forward to look at it more closely and bumped shoulders, and I kind of pulled back and let them get the best look. They were the customers. But I’d seen enough to understand that Baldassare had worked a wonder. Oil paint takes years to really cure up and dry, and it changes its appearance during that time; even the things I’d done as a kid still looked like the contemporary objects they in fact were. But this son of a bitch looked old, and it had the palpable authority that old things have. It looked cracked and heavy with age, like every painting from the seventeenth century you see in museums, and I had a brief moment of temporal vertigo, as if I’d painted it in the seventeenth century for real.
The Spaniard inspected the painting at various distances for what seemed a long time. At last he turned to Krebs with a small smile, nodding his head-reluctantly, it seemed to me.
“Well? You said it couldn’t be done,” said Krebs. “What do you think now?”
Salinas shrugged and answered, “Frankly, I admit to being astounded. The brushwork, the colors, that glow on the skin are all entirely true to the Rokeby Venus. And the…the preparation is also very fine; the craqueleur seems flawless on initial inspection.”
Krebs clapped Baldassare heartily on the back. “Yes! Bravo Signor Baldassare!”
And Salinas went on, “Subject, as I say, to technical examination, the pigments and so forth, I would have no trouble in passing this as genuine.”
I stood there amid the smiles, and no one looked at me or patted me on the back, and I figured it was something like what went down with Castelli’s faked Tiepolo-they were practicing pretending that it was real. I couldn’t study it closely myself. When I tried to a pain started across my eyes and my vision blurred a little and I had to sit down.
The Forgery of Venus Page 22
