The Forgery of Venus (27 page)

After dinner, he invited me to his end of the house for a cigar, a cognac. More comfortable there, he said, and yes it was, a large room that looked like a museum of modern design. The walls were oyster; the furniture was all leather, brushed steel, glass, marble, and rare woods, beautiful designs, the best studio stuff, all handmade and ferociously expensive: a desk, a comfortable-looking sling chair, an elegant couch, of the type a wealthy psychiatric patient might be expected to lie in and tell Herr Dr. Krebs about early trauma. The ceiling was high and one wall was entirely glass, looking out into the night, a moonlit meadow, black woodlands beyond. There was a wall of books, mostly gigantic treatises on various artists, and sev
eral shelves of medical tomes in many different European languages, plus a tropical marine fish tank built into the wall and swimming with clownfish and a variety of other colorful creatures. An elaborate sound system in dull gray steel looked custom-made and was softly playing a Mozart violin concerto. Above the sound system, rank on rank, were framed awards and diplomas. Their language was Latin but I could make out on each the name of Werner Krebs.

Three paintings hung on the remaining pale wall: a Cézanne view of Mt. St. Victoire, a Matisse odalisque in a pink room, and in the center, a large gilt-framed altarpiece, a Virgin with child and donors by some Flemish master.

Krebs handed me a balloon glass charged with cognac and asked me if I could identify the altarpiece.

I sipped cognac and said, “It looks like a van der Goes.”

“Yes. An early work, but already he shows the sympathy for the ordinary man for which he was famous. Obviously the Virgin and the angel are at the center, but observe the servants staring longingly in at the window, their care-worn faces. A very van der Goes touch. He was a member of the Brethren of the Common Life, you know, almost a monk. He went mad from the conflict between his growing fame as a painter and the demands he made on himself to be humble. A sad case.”

“Is it real?”

“Does it matter? The technique is there, the iconography is correct, the religious fervor shines from every corner of the panel. You feel it, I feel it. If a spectrograph showed titanium white in it, would those qualities, those feelings vanish?”

“A nice point, but I also think you wouldn’t hang a fake in your study. Where did you get it? Nazi swag?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said agreeably. “As are the others. I couldn’t bear to part with them. A vice of all art dealers, I’m afraid.”

“So your old dad really did get away with the Schloss paintings.”

He gave me a strange look, surprise, a brief irritation, then amusement. “Alas, no, he did not.”

“What about those two vans out of Munich?”

He smiled now. “Excellent, you have been studying my history. Very commendable. As it happens, however, we were only able to move one of the vans into Switzerland; the other was caught in the Dresden bombing, and this contained the Schloss material. A great pity that so much beauty should be permanently lost to the world. But would you like to see something of more particular interest?”

Now I was drunk; the wine and the cognac had loosened me up. The craziness was still boiling underneath, but the supposed real me had recovered a little nerve. I said, “Does that mean pornography, Doctor?”

“Of a type,” he said, and walked to the far end of the room. He opened a door and motioned me through. It was his bedroom, a lot larger than mine and furnished like a television starship. There were several small paintings on the walls but I had eyes only for one.

“Where the hell did you get
that
?” I said.

“It turned up in London some years ago, an auction at Christie’s. Remarkable, isn’t it?”

Yeah, it was. A small oil, maybe twenty-five by thirty inches; in the left foreground a couple of teenage marines were standing, one lighting a cigarette, the other looking out at us with the usual thousand-yard stare. In the center of the picture lay a Japanese soldier writhing in flames, ignored, his crisped hand reaching up to uncaring heaven, and behind him was a marine with a flamethrower, the obvious cause of this event, and in the same plane a group of other marines hanging around, smoking, talking to each other, taking a break. Above, a dirty early-evening sky; behind, a scorched and pocked hillside and the mouth of a cave smoking like the gates to hell. The thing had been painted with the authority and bravura brushwork of
The Surrender of Breda
by
Velázquez. It seemed to me to be a historical painting of similar quality, and you could tell that the artist was thinking of that earlier painting when he did it: this is what war’s like now, folks: gormless, brutalized farm boys having a human barbeque, and note the absence of courtly gentlemen bowing to one another on the field of honor. Signed with my dad’s familiar monogram and the date, 1945.

Krebs studied my face as I looked at the painting and asked, “You find it depressing?”

“Not the subject matter so much as the waste. How he could do this and then have the life he had.”

“You might ask yourself the very same question.”

“I might and I do. Is this part of my therapy, Doctor?”

“If you want it to be.”

“What I want is for you to tell me why you’re doing this, the fake psychiatrist routine.”

“Is it a fake? You seem to be particularly interested in fakes, Wilmot. I wonder why. Come with me, I want to show you something else.”

We left the bedroom and went back to the study. Krebs reached up to a bookshelf and took down a large-format art book. He motioned me to sit down on one of his delicious leather chairs and laid it on my lap. It had a realistic painting of a beautiful red-haired woman on the cover. She was reclining in a plush purple chair and holding to her crotch a wooden hand mirror, in which was reflected a penis. In large block letters a title: WILMOT. Soft covers, but expensively printed. My eyes blurred; I blinked. Pressure began in my temples and the dense German dinner began to stir in my belly.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“It’s a catalog raisonée of your show at the Whitney, a few years ago,” said Krebs.

I ignored the text and paged through the plates. I recognized some
of the work from my first and only gallery show, and the others were just like the paintings in the Enso Gallery and the thing on the easel in the Hudson Street loft. I didn’t know what to say, couldn’t really have said anything, my mouth so dry, my speech centers shut down for the night.

“Take it,” said Krebs. “Study it. Maybe it will bring some memory—”

I shot to my feet, flinging the book away from me like some loathsome insect that had crawled unseen onto my lap, and dashed out of the room without another word. I walked through the house, not knowing where I was going, my brain frozen.

I ended up in the studio. All dark, of course; I scrabbled at the walls until I found a light switch. Why here? Good place for a suicide, lots of toxic solvents in a studio. There was a balcony too, throw a rope around the rail up there, stand on a stool, jump off.

An immense canvas set up on the easel. Smell of turpentine became stronger, someone’s been painting pictures. Not me, though.

Sound of steps coming closer, and the light’s changed too, not the harsh glare of fluorescents, but gray daylight filtering through a tall window. High ceilings in a large room with its walls covered in paintings, a mirror on one wall, coffered doors.

She says, “Are you ready for me now, sir?”

I see that I am, my palette set with colors; she’s wearing the dark blue velvet dress I asked for, the one with the silver trim.

“Yes, I am. If you please, stand over by the window, in the light. Chin up. Hold your hand so. Higher. Good.”

The underpainting is already done, and this is the final layer. I’m using smalt with calcite on the dress, touches of lapis on the collar and in the folds. I want transparency and speed; I’m working with the paint thinned to a milky liquid, a few back-and-forth swashes of the large brush lays in her face. His Majesty has asked for a group por
trait of himself with his family for his private rooms, and I have been thinking about this and working on it for many weeks. He asks me often when it will be finished, and I say, soon, Majesty, and he smiles; I am well known as a phlegmatic, it is a joke of the court.

I paint in the highlights and features of her hideous face, her lank brown hair. I will have another dwarf there and a dog as well. The cuffs, the surface glitter of the gown. That is enough. I put my palette on the table.

“May I see the painting, Don Diego?”

“If you like.”

Maribárbola waddles around the easel and looks up at the canvas. After some minutes, she says, “I have never seen anything like this picture.”

I say, “There
is
nothing like this picture.”

“No. You have made my face as it might be seen through a misted glass. Why is that?”

“A fancy. I wish to direct the eye toward the center of the painting, and so the figures on the edges are indistinct.”

“Yes, toward the infanta and the
meninas.
And for another reason too: when we see something ugly we squint our eyes so as to make it blur. Yet you have made Their Majesties the most indistinct of all, there in that dusty mirror. They are ugly as well. Perhaps you have grown tired of painting them. But you know, the true center of the picture is not at all the infanta. It is you, the painter. That’s very clever. It is a clever painting. Do you think His Majesty will like it?”

“He likes all my paintings.”

“Yes. It is unusual that such a stupid man as our king should allow such cleverness in a servant, and him not a freak of nature. Cleverness is suspect in Spain, don’t you think? It suggests Jewish blood.”

“There is no Jew in my line back to the remotest antiquity.”

“Yes, so you are always saying, always, and His Majesty pretends to believe it, and therefore so must we all. You will get your knight’s cross, Don Diego, never fear. You paint the truth cleverly, as we fools speak it, and as I say, our king prizes the truth, but only from such as we.”

“I am not a freak of nature.”

“Oh, but you are, Don Diego, you are; there is no one like you in the world. I am common as bread compared to you. I am the twin sister of the infanta compared to you. However, our masters, being the greater fools, don’t comprehend it, for you have the figure of a man and not a dwarf. I assure you that if you looked like El Primo you might paint just as you do, but you would not be a chamberlain. In fact, El Primo is the cleverest man at court, or near to it, but because his head is only a yard above his feet, no one bothers about what is inside it. If I have your leave, sir, I must go now and entertain the infanta. I will somersault and play tunes upon my whistle, and hope the stupid child, whom may God bless, has not been naughty again, and if she has, that someone other than me will have the whipping. I bid you good day, sir.”

She leaves. I call for my servant, who comes to clean my painting things. I return to my apartments and change my clothes. I meet this morning with contractors and decorators to plan the celebrations for the queen’s name day. It is a weakness of mine to converse seriously with fools. And yet who else is there? One cannot speak to servants of anything consequential, my equals are all rivals, and those above me have nothing to say. If I had a son…but I do not, and my son-in-law, while a perfectly worthy fellow, has neither cultivation nor much talent with the brush. Such is my fate, to be alone in the world.

B
ut I
have
a son. This was my first thought when I awoke. I have a son. Or do I? Maybe Milo is another fantasy. And Rose, and Lotte. I’ve been painting
Las Meninas
and talking to Maribárbola, the dwarf in the lower right. That’s as real to me as any memory of my supposed family. And now…there’s always a moment when you wake up, usually brief, when you don’t quite know who you are or where you are, accentuated when you’re traveling, awaking in a strange room and so on, and then whatever brain system brings you up out of unconsciousness reboots and there you are, yourself again.

But not this morning. Or night, because it was dark in the room. I had no idea who I was. There were possibilities, I had those, and I ran through the Rolodex, flipping through. I might be Chaz Wilmot, hack artist, forger of a painting now hailed as one of the great works of Velázquez, hiding out from criminals. I might be Chaz Wilmot, successful New York painter, now insane and under treatment, with a load of false memories, just as false as that conversation with a baroque dwarf. Or I might be Diego Velázquez, caught in a nightmare. Or some combination. Or someone else entirely. Or maybe this was hell itself. How would I tell?

So I just lay there, breathing, trying to control my pounding heart. No point in getting up, no point in any action at all. There are people in mental hospitals with perfectly intact brains and bodies who haven’t made a volitional movement in decades. Now I could see why.

After a while my bladder informed me that it wanted to be emptied. I knew I should get up and find either a seventeenth-century chamber pot or a toilet, but that would mean moving, and that was hard to contemplate. I could see why the people in the locked wards preferred to lie in their own filth all day. You could get used to lying in filth but never to the terror involved in deciding to move in a world that was implacably hostile and alien. Your feet could break off. Why not? Or if you moved, the Eaters could get you, if such monsters fea
tured in your particular madness. Or you could turn into someone else. Best to stay still. I pissed in the bed.

I could see something now, grayness and shapes, a light source very faint. I was in the room in Krebs’s house. Maybe. I could be in China, or in Dr. Zubkoff’s laboratory. It looked like my bedroom at Krebs’s, but looks are deceiving, oh yes. Painters deceive you all the time, or used to.

I didn’t sleep as the daylight penetrated the room. I tried not to think, but thoughts came. Time passed. People came into the room and out again, I was cleaned and put back into a fresh bed. A woman tried to spoon food into my mouth, but I kept my jaws clenched and struck out at her and screamed until some men came in and tied my hands to the bed frame. That was fine with me. I wasn’t going anywhere.