I wasn’t in the room for more than a few minutes before Mark pulled himself away from a group of prosperous-looking gentlemen and steered me to a corner. He was full of himself that day, and full of the prospect of the killing he was going to make. The billionaire boys’ club was there in strength apparently, from Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, because this was a unique chance to snag a Velázquez. The last painting by the artist to go on sale had been the Juan de Pareja portrait that the Met had bought at Christie’s in 1970 for four and a half million, and there would not be another in the foreseeable future. I asked him whether the Met would get this one too, and he said not a chance, it’s way out of their range now. Who then? He pointed to a woman wearing a severe gray suit standing in the rear of the room by the phones that off-site bidders used to communicate with their agents at the auction. She had black hair parted in the middle and done up in a bun, scarlet lipstick, and nail polish the same color. Olive skin. Green eyes. That’s Spain, Mark said.
“You mean the Prado?”
“No, I mean the fucking kingdom of Spain. You should watch her on the phone.”
And then he turned the conversation to Chaz and asked me again if I’d spoken to him at the party, and I said I had, and he asked me right out if Chaz had claimed to have painted the Velázquez, and I said yeah, he had. I didn’t mention the CD. Mark said he was afraid of that, poor bastard. You know he had a nervous breakdown? I said I hadn’t heard but that he had seemed a little flaky. A little! Mark said, the guy’s a refugee from the funny farm, I wonder why they let him walk around, and he went on to tell me the story of how he had gotten Chaz this commission in Europe and how he’d gone off the rails there and started accusing people of drugging him, and how he thought he could travel back through time and be Velázquez and paint his works, including this one, and that he’d blanked out big chunks of his real life. I said that was awful, and he said, yeah, but it’s going to do wonders for his sales, if he’d produce something; people love crazy artist stories, look at Pollock, look at Munch, look at van Gogh.
So that was Mark’s tale, and after he’d delivered it, he dropped me in favor of a couple of guys in suits and spade beards who looked like sons of the desert, and I went to sit down. The auction started with half a dozen teaser items, which went quickly, and then the boys in white gloves rolled out the Velázquez, and there was a stir. The auctioneer said this is the Venus with Self-Portrait by Diego Velázquez, also called the Alba Venus, and he said a little about its history and then announced that the bidding would start at one hundred million. There were four serious bidders as the bids raced up the ladder in half-million-dollar jumps, and after each round the auctioneer looked to the back of the room and got a nod from the lady of Spain, and then one by one the others dropped out and the Prado had it for 210 million, the highest price ever recorded for a single painting. Thus the barons of our age learned the lesson that the kings of the age of Velázquez had taught their own barons-it doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t compete with the sovereign, and what we were seeing here was Spain herself bringing back her purloined treasure. No one else had ever had a chance.
What was that, two, two and a half years ago? During that time Chaz Wilmot dropped completely out of sight. I’d always thought it would’ve taken a nuclear detonation to get him out of that loft, but apparently he’d cleaned out whatever he wanted and walked away from the rest. This I got from the girl at Lotte Rothschild’s gallery. Lotte was still in business, doing rather better than before, to judge from her prices. I didn’t stick around to see her. Well, I thought then, bye-bye Chaz, not that he was ever a very important part of my life. I figured he was being maintained in some Swiss clinic.
But it happened that I was called to Barcelona for a meeting with a European consortium building a gigantic amusement park near that city. I had one meeting that lasted all day, and the one scheduled for the next day was moved to the following day in Madrid, so I got a free day in the town, which is one of my favorite cities, as lovely as Paris, but without the attitude. The Catalans even like Americans, probably because the Spaniards don’t very much nowadays. It was a pretty day, warm but not hot, with a breeze that blew away the usual smog, so I took a cab up to Parc Güell to wander through the mosaics, sit on the terrace, and ogle the tourists ogling Gaudí.
And there, on the middle path, among the line of Africans selling cheap sunglasses, crafts, and souvenirs, was a fellow with an easel doing aquarelle portraits of tourists at ten euros a pop. I thought that was a pretty good deal, so I waited my turn and sat down on the little chair provided. The artist, in a straw hat and sunglasses, was darkly tanned and wore a bushy gray-flecked beard. He got right to work without a word. It took about ten or twelve minutes and then he snapped it off his easel and handed it to me.
There I was in all my stony glory. He’d put me in the clothing of a Spanish grandee of the seventeenth century, just like Velázquez used to do, and just as good as the one he’d done of me twenty-five years before.
I said, “Let’s get a drink, Chaz,” and he grinned at me, a little sheepishly, I thought, and asked one of the Africans to watch his stuff. We went over to that little café they have there and sat under a beer-company umbrella.
He said, “You weren’t looking for me, by any chance?”
I said, “No, it was just luck. Why, are you in hiding?”
We ordered claras, and when the waiter left he said, “Not really. It’s just I like to stay kind of private.”
“Well, you’ve succeeded,” I said. “So what’ve you been doing all this time? Sidewalk portraits for ten euros?”
“Among other things. What do you think of your portrait?”
I studied it again. “It’s terrific. Full of life. More of me than I like to see revealed, frankly. And incredible that you can work in watercolors instead of pastels like the other sidewalk guys. Do your customers appreciate this kind of work?”
“Some do. Some really do. And a small percentage think they’re crap, not pretty enough.”
“Just like real life,” I said. “But you can’t possibly make a living from this.”
“No. I have other sources of income.” Our drinks came, and Chaz engaged in some rapid-fire repartee in Spanish with the waiter that I didn’t get. The man laughed and went away.
“Then why do it?” I asked.
“I enjoy it. It’s perfectly non-commoditized art, anonymous, and a pure gift of pleasure to those who can see, and even those who can’t see might come to appreciate their portraits after a while. Artists used to live like that in Europe all the time, back in the Middle Ages. Besides that, I have a studio. I paint a lot.”
“What do you paint?”
He grinned a sly grin. “Oh, you know, slick, witty nudes, just like before. It’s amusing. And I do other stuff too.”
The tone here was purposely vague, and I rose to the bait.
“You’re working for Krebs,” I said. “You’re putting together that collection that got burned in Dresden.”
“I might be. Although you can’t really trust anything I say. I mean, I’m a crazy person doing sidewalk portraits for small change.”
“But you’re not crazy. You proved that. The whole thing was a scam.”
“Was it? Maybe I made that up too.”
“Yeah, but come on, Chaz. Hundreds of people knew you, there are records, tax returns…I mean, you may have had some issues with memory, but you also had a verifiable life.”
“No!” he said with some heat. “No one has a verifiable life. A little lump in your brain growing in the wrong place and you’re not you anymore, and all the records in the world won’t change that. If you can’t trust your memory-and I can’t-then the record of your life, the witness of others, is meaningless. If I presented you with a shitload of records and the testimony of dozens of people telling you that you were, I don’t know, a plumber from Arkansas, would you believe it? If your supposed wife Lulubelle and your five kids swore on
a stack of Bibles that you were Elmer Gudge of Texarkana, would you say, gosh, well, I had a fantasy that I was an insurance guy from Connecticut, but that’s all over now, hand me my pipe wrench? Of course you wouldn’t, because your memory’s intact. But what if your memory became unreliable, and what if your actual wife, say, looked at you and went, who’s he?”
This line of talk was making me uncomfortable, so I said, “That must’ve been tough, Lotte shafting you like that. I assume you don’t see her anymore.”
“Why would you assume that?”
“Well, she betrayed you, didn’t she? She must have been involved in the scam from the beginning, supplying photos and whatnot, and she betrayed you to your face, just before you went berserk. Unless you’ve forgiven her.”
“There was nothing to forgive, and she didn’t betray me. I betrayed myself. She just made me see it. I’m sort of grateful to her for that. And if I don’t see much of her, it’s not because of what she did-it’s the shame.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how you look through a kaleidoscope and you tap it, and the same little pieces of glass snap into a completely different pattern? That’s what happened. I left Mark’s party that night and took a cab to my loft. And when I went in it was like an alien place, and full of horrible vibes, like an ancient tomb with evil spirits inhabiting it, and even though I’d lived there and worked there for years, it was like I was there for the first time. I couldn’t find stuff, I didn’t recognize the things that were there, as if another me had been there all those years. And I started to freak out bad, and then this revelation-the kaleidoscope clicked, and I saw it. I saw that there was really no difference at all between me and Suzanne.”
He stared at me in a way that seemed to require a response, so I said, “That’s ridiculous. Her problem is she has no talent and wants to be recognized. You have a lot of talent.”
He said, “Yeah, you don’t get it either. It’s the same fucking thing! Having talent and not putting it on the line is just like not having it and desperately wanting to be recognized. It’s the same kind of pathetic. It’s not noble. It’s not elevated to use the techniques of Velázquez on a perfume ad and laugh secretly at the customer for not catching the nuances. It’s a life made of shit, and I’m positively grateful to Lotte and Krebs for getting me out of it.”
“By making you crazy.”
“No, just crazy in a different way,” he said, and smiled the smile of a contented man.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“I don’t buy it,” I said after a bit. “I can’t understand why you didn’t just call your sister. Surely she would’ve blown the whole plot to pieces.”
“Oh, right, Charlie. Yes, sure, but Charlie was nowhere to be found during the period in question. Some anonymous donor gave her a bunch of money to set up a field hospital in Chad, immediate departure a requirement, and you’ll recall I didn’t have a phone. She was incommunicado for six weeks, and so when I called her the night I went berserk I got a no-such-number message, although there should have been people at her organization. For a while I thought I’d made her up too.”
“You were using Krebs’s phone. Maybe they messed with it somehow.”
“Yes, and they arranged for Charlie to be gone, and everything else that drove me nuts. A secretive international organization with tentacles everywhere. Don’t you realize how crazy that sounds?”
It did sound crazy, so I changed the subject. “So Charlie’s back from there?”
“Oh, yeah. In fact she lives with me in…wherever I live. She’s in and out on missions of mercy, but we have a nice setup.”
“Just like your boyhood dream.”
“Just.” Again, that annoying smile.
“And Milo? I presume he survived.”
“Yeah. He had his transplant, he’s flourishing. A teenager, which we never thought we’d see. The fruits of my wickedness.”
“Speaking of which, did you ever figure out if you did that Velázquez Venus?”
“Does it matter? You’ve got all the information. What do you think?”
“What I think is that you’re a terrific painter, but you’re not Velázquez.”
This was a little cruel, I admit, but something about how this had all turned out irritated me. It was like when someone accosts you on the street with a problem and you start to respond in a civilized way, to be of service, let’s say, and after a few minutes you pick up that the fellow is crazy and you feel like you’ve wasted your time and your concern.
“You’re right, I’m not,” he said. “But did you ever get a chance to take a close look at it? The real thing, I mean, not the poster.”
“No, but I’ll be in Madrid tomorrow. I intend to see it then. And I assume you haven’t had anymore whatever you call them-visions. Where you think you’re him.”
“No,” he said, with a tone of regret in his voice, “not since I saw him die. I seem to have enough trouble keeping up with me.”
“And you have no interest in finding out the truth?”
“‘What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.’ You must remember that from Humanities 102. Bacon’s On Truth? Look around you, my friend. Truth has left the building. Everything is manipulable now, even photography, and art is a lie to begin with. Picasso said so, and so say I. We all tell lies, even the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, even in the intimate depths of our private thoughts. But somehow, I don’t know how, maybe through what my sister calls grace, these lies occasionally produce something we all recognize as true. And when I paint I wait for those miracles.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and the conversation subsequently ran down a little. We talked about other things, the cities of Europe and what was going on in the world, and we parted amicably enough.
The next day I was in Madrid and spent the morning in a meeting discussing how to assess the risks of terrorism and sabotage on the proposed amusement venue, which is a growth area among the actuarial set, and I had lunch with my colleagues, then walked over to the Prado. They’d placed it in Room Twelve on the wall to the right of Las Meninas, which was quite the compliment, I thought; not many paintings can stand the comparison.
A little throng had gathered around the Most Expensive Painting in the World, the irresistible tugs of sex and money working together there, and a guard was standing by to make sure people didn’t stay too long and hog the view. I waited until it was my turn, and as I got to the front I was conscious of the little sighs people were making, as if to say, ah, if only love could be like that, sex could be like that, always. There she lay, obviously the same model who had posed for the Rokeby Venus, except now she lay on her back, with her hand covering her crotch, not palm-down, modestly, but palm-up, a joke, offering it, not to us, but to the sweat-soaked man reflected in the black-framed mirror, the same fellow you could see with his palette in hand in the center of the great painting to the left.
You know, I think every man with some experience at love has in his heart the image of the girl who got away, the one who pops into your mind at idle moments, about whom the inevitable longing centers, no matter how content you are with spouse and home. That was the appeal of this painting, I thought; he’d painted, in some wonderful and mysterious way, That Girl. But in my own case, literally, because when I finally got a chance to see the Alba Venus close up I saw that the body the artist had painted was one I’d known intimately, but too fleetingly, some decades ago. I remember in particular a small black beauty mark just below the navel, to the right of the midline. I only got to see it on two occasions, unfortunately, before my old pal Chaz Wilmot swept into that reunion party and yanked Lotte Rothschild out of my life.
Probably for the best, actually; Diana is a much more suitable wife for someone like me. And maybe I am confabulating this too in my mind, a mere black dot-who could recall its exact placement after all these years? Although it’s the kind of thing Chaz would do, the sly
bastard.
And then I had to move on, and I circled around behind the crowd and stood for a moment in front of the greatest painting in the world, The Maids of Honor by Velázquez, and thought about what it would be like to be him, really be him, and I couldn’t deal with it, and I left and reentered the long, gray sanity of my life.
A NOTE TO THE READER
This is a work of fiction, but Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was, of course, a real painter. The details of his life as provided here are consistent with the historical record, as far as that goes; he was a very private man. Scholars differ on where Velázquez did the painting known as the Rokeby Venus, now in London ’s National Gallery. Some say Madrid, some say during his second trip to Rome, in 1650. I’ve opted for the latter, to increase the fun. The identity of the woman who posed for it is lost to history. Velázquez may have painted it for the Marqués de Heliche, who was, in fact, a notorious libertine, and there is some evidence that Velázquez painted other nudes at that time, which have vanished.
The Palacio Livia is a real museum in Madrid, and as far as I know it is of sterling reputation and would never try to pass off a doubtful painting on an American.
Salvinorin A is a real drug and is derived from the plant known as Salvia divinorum, which is used in shamanic rituals by the Mazotec Indians of Mexico. The time-traveling effects described here have been recorded in the extensive literature on the drug by some of its aficionados. It remains a legal drug but has never become a popular recreational substance, for obvious reasons.
About the Author
MICHAEL GRUBER is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Book of Air and Shadows. He and his wife, painter Elizabeth Winder Noyes, live in Seattle, Washington.
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