Portrait of a Man (12 page)

I took eight days off; I spent five in the laboratory and three in Paris, at the Louvre and in the Archives, for no precise reason; checking details, reassuring myself about the accuracy of my collar and tunic, looking at countless books for hours on end in the search for pointless confirmation. I went back. I worked on for another two months. At the time of Jérôme's death I allowed myself another week's break; I went to London and Antwerp. Then straight to Geneva, because of Jérôme. I came back. I still had the eyes, the mouth and the neck. And the pleats in the tunic around the shoulder. I took a whole month to get them done, I'd never painted so slowly in my life. I spent hours looking at the panel. It was already a month overdue. Madera would come down more and more frequently, hovering over me, saying nothing, then he'd go out, slamming the door behind him, angry at having come upon me sitting still in my armchair with the elbow support untied and a brush hanging idly in my hand, staring for hours on end at a detail and going over in my mind the hundred or so possible strokes it would take, trying to extract a finished image from a still shapeless painted panel. Hour
after hour after hour, from sunrise to nightfall, I would forget to eat, forget to drink, forget to smoke, so fascinated was I by a possible shading, obsessed by a line that was too precise, haunted by almost invisible speckling … At the end of the year I took another two days' off. On January 1, I began the mouth. On February 1, I started on the shading of the neck. I think I was too tired and too nervous and too edgy to do anything worthwhile. On February 20, I stopped almost completely. I looked at the Condottiere for five days running. He was still missing his eyes and all the muscle-lines in his neck … It was possible he could be completed … It was still possible he would be completed … I pushed away the armchair, the side-tables and the elbow-crutch. The easel stood on its own in the middle of the room. Like a gallows. In the morning of February 25, I started painting standing up, without a visor and without a magnifying eye-piece, with a dozen different brushes and a palette. Within the day, almost without a break, I finished the neck and the eyes. By the evening it was almost entirely done, there were just some tiny details left. After that I would just have to put on the glaze and then bake it to make the craquelure appear. I thought I had carried it off. I wasn't particularly proud. I wasn't particularly happy. I was exhausted, shattered. Buggered. Something I couldn't resist, the feeling that it wasn't right, that I'd lost the thread, that the Condottiere wasn't what he should have been. As if I'd made a complete mess that I hadn't been able to see, and it was too late now. I went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night. I switched on a single spotlight. I looked at my Condottiere …

“And then?”

“Then nothing … It wasn't right … Not right at all …”

“Why?”

“I don't know … it was the converse, or the inverse … just a guy with a pale face, a miserable chap …”

“You'd never noticed before?”

“No … I'd never seen him before … A rat … A rat with resentful eyes … it was anything … anyone … a convict released after fifteen years inside …”

“But didn't you believe just a few hours before that you'd succeeded?”

“A few hours before, yes I did … But that didn't mean anything! It was a high! I'd done my homework … it was the satisfaction at having got it off my back …”

“Did Madera see the Condottiere?”

“Yes … the next morning.”

“What did he say to you about it?”

“Nothing … He said nothing … I was lying on the bed fully dressed, with my tie nearly strangling me, dead drunk, surrounded by empty bottles, stubbed cigarettes and puke … I was dead drunk … He called Otto who made me take a dozen showers and down a litre of coffee …”

“Why did you get drunk?”

“To celebrate my great victory … To celebrate my admirable triumph … The sensational end-piece of twelve years' sterling service …”

“Why did you get drunk?”

“What else did I have to do? I'd been sleeping next to those awful guys for eighteen months … For eighteen months I'd been frantically trying to get the last one of all … It hadn't worked, it was a complete mess … What else would you have had me do? You think I should have slept like a log? And had a lovely dream? I was finished. Washed up. Done for. Done in. Down and out.”

“How do you know the Condottiere was a mess?”

“I saw it …”

“You saw it twice … The first time you thought it was a success, then you wake up in the middle of the night and realise it's a failure …”

“If it had been right why would I not have seen that twice in a row?”

“Because you wanted it to be a failure …”

“That's too easy, Streten … I can see what you're getting at … But I'd spent eighteen months struggling with it …”

“What does that prove?”

“It proves I wanted to get it right … Hindsight makes it tempting to say I must have done it on purpose … But all I put into it was only done because I needed it to be a success … And my failure is only proof of the fact that what I was after was unreachable …”

“I don't understand you …”

“So what? To be or not to be a forger, that was the problem, that was the solution, that was the question … Maybe it had to kill me, but the only work I could henceforth try to produce had to be my own. I dropped the jigsaw idea, I set out to paint on my own account. I tried, yes, I tried to be the equal of Antonello. Not to employ meticulous and patient care to equal his accuracy and genius, but to set off with no guides apart from his paintings serving as beacons, as distant targets, and to fly towards him, to experience his labour and his triumph. Antonello da Messina and not anybody else. Antonello and not Cranach, Antonello and not Chardin. Because all ambiguity had to be eliminated, because I had to rise to his limitless triumph, his gigantic lucidity, his phenomenal certainty, his inhuman strength. His controlling genius. Because what I'd been striving towards for years and years was nothing other than ascension … Because that's where the solutions I'd been looking for were to be found … Because at the end of the road I'd have found my own face, which is my sincerest ambition … Because I needed my own face, my own force, my own light … Because the proof and the trial were the only things that would allow me to stop being a forger thereafter. Because if I'd managed it, then by the same token I would have uncovered something beyond specialist knowledge and craft – I'd have found my own sensibility, my own lucidity, my own puzzle and my own solution …”

“Why didn't you manage it?”

“Because it was too difficult … I wanted my own face and
I wanted the light … I wanted my face and I wanted the Condottiere … Victory without combat, certainty without mediation, strength … I was cheating again … How could I know I would be that strength? I struggled to prove it … But I was frightened. Yes. But I already knew I was setting out on an impossible adventure … I knew, but I went on nonetheless … What did I have to lose? As good a way as any of coming a cropper? What did I have to lose in the game? But time went by … It really was my own face that I was putting on the canvas, drop by drop of sweat, but it wasn't the Condottiere … I corrected, began again, paused, backtracked … But it could not be … There was not a chance it was going to work …”

“Why did you go on?”

“Because I wanted to know …”

“Why did you need to come a cropper?”

“No reason … Had to get it over …”

“Is that why you started drinking?”

“Yes, that's why, and why not? I looked at myself in the mirror in the middle of the night. That was me. That was my face, and my year of struggle and sleepless nights, that oak board and that steel easel, that was my face too, and so were those pots and those hundreds of brushes and the rags and the spotlights. My story. My fate. A fine caricature of a fate. That was me: anxious and greedy, cruel and mean, with the eyes of a rat. Looking like I thought I was a warlord. Like I thought I was a master of the world at the crossroads of the universe. Like I thought I was untouchable, free and strong. That was me. Anxiety, bitterness, panic. You can keep up the illusion
for a minute, but then it all falls down, in one go, everything goes haywire, under the impossible gaze of other people who come roaring over the walls, and they're definitely the winners. So I started to drink, like an animal, like I'd never drunk before, not even two years ago when I was here, because I was in a panic at the mere idea of having to answer Geneviève. I started drinking and pacing up and down in the room. Drinking from the bottle. I broke my brushes, I tore up all the prints I could reach. I drank till I collapsed …”

“And Madera didn't say anything?”

“No … He called Rufus. Rufus got there that evening. I was asleep. Next morning I left with him for Gstaad, where he was on holiday, for a week's rest.”

“Had they seen the Condottiere?”

“Yes.”

“Did they say anything?'

“No.”

“How so?”

“At first sight it didn't matter if it was a mess or not …”

“I don't understand.”

“There weren't any mistakes of technique. I had strictly painted an Antonello. All the characteristics were present: only they were crude signs. It worked for a little while; then you could see you'd been duped. It was too facile. Too instantaneous. Hey, look at me, I'm the fearless Condottiere! Ha, I'm a tough guy, have you seen the muscles in my neck? Or else distant in a way that was too artificial. If you just looked at the panel with the idea in your mind that it was not an
Antonello, then the trick was easy to see. The rest of it came by itself. Do you see? That's what a poor forgery is. If I'd done it right, you'd have been able to look at the panel every which way to try to prove it was a fake and not been able to do so. It was logical. It was the most logical thing in the world …”

“Do you think you can be a competent judge of that, all by yourself?”

“There's not the slightest doubt. I painted that panel. I believed in it for a long time. I did my utmost with it for as long as I could.”

“But during your stay in Gstaad, didn't Madera often look at the painting?”

“No. The panel wasn't quite finished. The background needed another coat and it hadn't yet been varnished so as to produce the craquelure. Before leaving I covered it with a canvas frame because some parts weren't completely dry and I had to prevent dust from getting to them.”

“If you'd had to have it authenticated by a specialist, do you think it would have passed?”

“Certainly not. No art critic or expert would have taken more than thirty minutes to see through it …”

“What did you plan to do?”

“I don't know … I don't remember … Lots of things went through my mind. I wanted to have a rest and clear out …”

“Did you expect to go back to Dampierre?”

“Yes and no … I don't know … I wasn't planning on doing anything … Oh, I wasn't even thinking about the disastrous thing
at all … I didn't give a damn … I slept, I went skiing, I read detective stories by the fire …”

“Why did you go back?”

“It's too complicated to tell you … A bad memory … I got fed up with skiing …”

“Was that a sufficient reason?”

“As good as any other … When I left for Gstaad I was almost contented. I wanted to see the snow and go skiing. The snow wasn't very good and there wasn't enough sunshine … I was getting bored … I went back to Paris.”

“Just like that? In the middle of the night on a private plane? Just because the snow wasn't good?”

“Yes … All because the snow wasn't good … It sounds ridiculous, but that was just about the only reason … Gstaad had nothing to do with it … It was a different issue. The memory of Altenberg, a small town in Switzerland where I spent a few years at the start of the war … That's where I acquired my passion for snow, odd though it may seem … I'm putting it badly … I mean that, in a certain way and in certain circumstances, I was perfectly happy … but in Gstaad I got bored … That's all …”

“It doesn't make sense.”

“Of course it doesn't make sense, but did the desire for the Condottiere make sense? None of it made any sense … But all the same that's what I was living in …”

“What did you want to do in Paris?”

“Call Madera, to tell him I wasn't coming back to Dampierre,
that the Condottiere was hopeless and I didn't give a shit about it, and that he could go jump in a lake …”

“Did you?”

“No…”

“Why not?”

“I called Geneviève …”

“Why Geneviève?'

“The same reason I left Gstaad … the same reason that spurred me to paint the Condottiere … No obvious reason … They were just things I wanted to do …”

“To provoke a disaster?”

“Probably, but so what? What do you know about it? Why a disaster? It could have worked …”

“Could Geneviève have responded?”

“Why not? Since I was able to call her. What's so special about picking up the phone? What's so miraculous about answering?”

“Would it have been a miracle if she had answered?”

“Yes … yes and no … it wouldn't have made any sense either … She didn't answer because she understood that I was the person calling her …”

“Maybe she was out?”

“At three a.m.? No … She was there … She'd understood …”

“How long was it since you'd seen her?”

“A year and a half … At Rufus's party …”

“How did you know she'd be at home?”

“It was February, and it was three a.m…. There was no reason
for her to have changed her job or her apartment, so she was there …”