Design of the non

by David Odell

  "Do you have any refills for this pen?"

  That was what I asked her, taking out of my pocket a German pen I'd bought in Brussels and which I very much like for its matt black nib.

  "Let me have a look," she said, opening up the pen and studying the nearly empty cartridge. "I don't think so, but if you wait just a moment I'll have a look in the boxes up above."

  I knew that she wouldn't have the right cartridges and I thought that probably she knew that too. Nevertheless, she dragged the old stepladder over, placed it to my left on her side of the counter and clambered wearily up, as if she were twenty years older than she actually was ( years spent going up and down the ladder), until she was on the fifth rung and then she rummaged in various cardboard boxes none of which would be of any use to us. I watched her from behind, in her low-heeled shoes and her check skirt like some antiquated schoolgirl, her spreading hips and the slightly loose strap of her bra showing through beneath her blouse, and the back of her neck, still charming, the one thing that had remained unchanged. She was looking in the boxes and holding my open pen in her hand in order to see the cartridge and be able to compare it, she was holding it with great care. If I'd been at the same height as her at that moment I would have placed a hand on her shoulder or stroked the back of her neck, affectionately.

  It's hard to imagine me spending my days there since I've always had money and curiosity, curiosity and money, even when I don't have large amounts of it and I have to work to earn it, like now and ever since I left Ranz's house, some time ago, even though I only work six months of the year. Anyone who knows they're going to have money already has it in a way, people lend it to you, I know that I'll have a lot of money when my father dies and that then, if I want to, I'll hardly have to work at all, I had money when I was a child in order to buy all those pencils and I inherited a part of it when my mother died, and a smaller amount before that, from my grandmother, even if they didn't actually earn it, deaths enrich those who weren't rich and never could have become rich on their own, widows and daughters, or sometimes perhaps all that's left is a stationer's shop that simply imprisons the daughter and solves nothing.

  Ranz always lived well and, as his son, so did I, never extravagantly or only as extravagantly as permitted, or indeed prompted, by his profession. My father's one extravagance, and indeed the basis of his fortune, has always been the acquisition of paintings and the occasional sculpture, but more especially paintings and drawings. He's retired now, but for many years (during the Franco years and beyond) he was one of the in-house experts at the Prado, he was never director or deputy director, never anyone very visible, apparently just another civil servant who spent every morning at the office, so much so that, at least as a little boy, his son never had a very clear idea of how his father spent those mornings. I found out gradually afterwards. My father did, in fact, spend his days shut up in an office next door to the great and not so great works of art in his beloved field of painting. He spent whole mornings in the vicinity of extraordinary pictures, blindly, unable to peer out and see them, or to see how other visitors saw them. He examined, catalogued, described, uncatalogued, researched, passed judgement, compiled inventories, made phone calls, bought and sold. But he wasn't always there, he also travelled widely on behalf of both institutions and individuals who gradually came to hear of his talents and employed him to give opinions and draw up condition reports (a rather ugly term but that's the one used by the experts themselves) or appraisals. He ended up as advisor to several American museums, amongst them the Getty Museum in Malibu, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and the Gardner Museum in Boston, as well as being advisor to several foundations or fraudulent South American banks and to private collectors, people too rich to come to Madrid and to his house, and so he was the one who travelled to London or Zurich, Chicago or Montevideo or The Hague, gave his opinion, recommended or advised against sale or purchase, took a percentage or bonus, and came back. He earned more and more money over the years, not only from the percentages and from his salary as an expert at the Prado (which wasn't that large), but also from his gradual, benign corruption: not that he's ever made any bones about his semi-fraudulent practices to me, indeed, he's even boasted about them in so far as any sly deceit practised on the cautious and the powerful is in part worthy of applause as long as it remains unpunished and undiscovered, that is, if not only the perpetrator but also the deceit itself remains unnoticed. Corruption in this field isn't a particularly serious matter anyway, it consists simply in changing sides, without anyone noticing or knowing, and representing the interests of the vendor rather than those of the buyer, who's normally the person who employs the expert (and who, one day, may well be a vendor himself). The Getty Museum or the Walters Art Gallery, who paid my father, would be informed about the authorship, condition and state of preservation of a painting they were considering acquiring. My father would report to them honestly at first, but keep back some fact which, had it been taken into account, would have considerably diminished its value and its price, for example, the fact that the canvas in question was lacking several centimetres which someone, during the course of centuries, had cut off in order to make it fit the office of one its owners, or the fact that a couple of minor figures in the background had been retouched, if not repainted. Reaching an agreement with a vendor to keep quiet about such details could mean doubling his percentage on a much higher sale price, earning a lot of money for the person who kept silent and even more for the vendor; and if, later on, his mistake is discovered, the expert can always say that it was exactly that, a mistake, no expert is infallible, on the contrary, it's inevitable that at some point he'll be mistaken about something, all he has to do to preserve his reputation is to be right about a lot of other things, and in this way mistakes can be managed. I'm sure that my father has a good eye and an even surer hand (you have to touch a painting to know about it, it's absolutely essential, sometimes you even have to lick the surface, though not enough to cause any damage), and over the years this has proved invaluable in countries like Spain, during the time when they didn't know about or couldn't afford chemical analyses (which, it should be said, aren't infallible either) and the reputation of experts depended solely on the emphasis and conviction with which they gave their verdicts. Private collections in Spain are full of counterfeits (so are public collections but to a lesser extent), and their owners get very upset when they decide to sell them and take them to a serious auctioneer's. Ladies have been known to faint on the spot when they've found out that the small, divine El Greco they've always had in the family was a small, divine, fake El Greco. Venerable gentlemen have threatened to slash their wrists when they heard the news, which left no possible room for doubt, that the much-loved Flemish panel they've always had in the family was a much-loved fake Flemish panel. In the offices of auctioneers real pearls have rolled to the floor and fine wooden walking sticks have been broken. Sharp objects are now kept under glass ever since an employee was stabbed and no one is surprised by the occasional presence of straitjackets and ambulances. The men in white coats are always welcome visitors.

  For decades, appraisals in Spain have been made by anyone with the necessary vanity, impudence or audacity: an antiquarian, a bookseller, an art critic, a guide in the Prado (the sort who walk around with a placard), a museum guard, a seller of postcards or even one of the cleaning ladies, everyone had an opinion and was prepared to deliver a judgement, all judgments were taken as gospel and all given equal weight. Anyone who really did know about these things proved invaluable, as is still the case all over the world, but especially in the Spain of that time. And my father did know about them, he still knows more than most people. However, I've always had a nagging doubt that amongst his minor corruptions there wasn't something more serious about which he never boasted. Apart from those already mentioned, the expert has another two or three ways of growing rich. The first is legal and consists in buying a painting for oneself from someone who knows no better or
who's in difficulties (for example, during and after a war, at rimes like that, masterpieces are handed over for a passport or a slice of bacon). For years and years Ranz has been buying things for his own home, not only for the people who hired him: from antiquarians, booksellers, art critics, guides in the Prado (the sort who walk around with placards), from museum guards, sellers of postcards and even from cleaning ladies, from all kinds of people. He's bought marvellous things from them for next to nothing: with the money paid to him by Malibu, Boston and Baltimore he invested in art for himself, or rather, he didn't invest or, if he did, it was for the benefit of his descendants, for he's never wanted to sell anything he owned and it'll fall to me to sell them. My father owns a few real gems that cost him nothing and about which nothing is known. In the Kunsthalle in Bremen, in Germany, a painting and sixteen drawings by Dürer disappeared in 1945, and, so the story goes, they were either destroyed during the bombing raids or carried off by the Russians (most people favour the latter theory). Amongst those drawings there was one entitled "Head of a Woman with Her Eyes Closed", another called "Portrait of Caterina Cornaro" and a third, known as 'Three Linden Trees". I neither confirm nor deny anything, but in the collection of drawings owned by Ranz there are three that I would swear were by Dürer (but I'm in no position to say so, and he just laughs when I ask him and won't answer me), one of them is of the head of a woman with her eyes closed, another I feel certain is the exact likeness of Caterina Cornaro and the last appears to show three linden trees, not that I know much about trees. This is just one example. Bearing in mind the volatile nature of prices on the art market, 1've no idea what the whole of his collection would be worth (my father also laughs when I ask him that, and replies: "You'll find out soon enough, when you have to. That kind of thing changes every day, like the price of gold"), but it's possible that I'd only have to sell one or two pieces when he dies, and it's up to me whether I sell or not, in order, if I were so minded, to stop working as a translator and stop travelling.

  When asked about the best paintings on permanent display in his apartment (not that many), Ranz has always told friends and visitors that they were merely copies (with the occasional reasonable exception: Boudin, Martin Rico and other similar works), excellent copies made by Custardoy the Elder and the occasional more recent one by Custardoy the Younger.

  The second way an expert has of becoming rich is by placing his knowledge not at the service of interpretation, but of action, that is, by advising and guiding a forger so that his work can be as perfect as possible. One assumes that any expert acting in that capacity for a forger would abstain from informing anyone else about those forgeries, the ones carried out under his supervision and advice. But, on the other hand, it's likely that the forger would give him a percentage of what he earns from the sale of one of those paintings to some private person or museum or bank once they've been given the OK by another expert, just as it's likely that the first expert would be more than ready to report on the forgeries overseen by the latter. One of Ranz's best friends was Custardoy the Elder, just as Custardoy the Younger now is, both of them magnificent copyists of almost any painting from almost any period, although their best copies, those in which original and copy could easily be confused, were of French painters of the eighteenth century, who for a long time were undervalued (and so no one took the trouble to forge them) and are nowadays overvalued, partly because of a reassessment made in recent decades by the experts themselves. In Ranz's house there are two extraordinary copies, one of a small Watteau and the other of a tiny Chardin, the first by Custardoy the Elder and the second by Custardoy the Younger, which Ranz commissioned only three years ago, or so he says. Shortly before his death, now more than ten years ago, Custardoy the Elder ran into some problems and had a few nasty shocks: he was even arrested only to be released shortly afterwards without going to trial; doubtless my father made a few phone calls from his office in the Prado to people who, despite Franco's death, had still not entirely lost their influence.