Portrait of a Man (6 page)

Night is falling. Rufus has not come. You're in with a chance. You just have to keep out of Otto's way. Otto is an idiot. Your arm hurts. Doesn't matter, keep going, the blocks are more than halfway to coming loose. You've had enough. I know. Who cares. Tell yourself it's exercise. Some kind of a match. A time-trial. Tell yourself you're carving a bas-relief. Tell yourself you'd be better off anywhere except this cellar. You're not convinced. Who cares. One more time who cares. You mustn't say who cares. Never look a gift-horse. It takes two Constables to catch a Whistler. Remember, that's your motto. Don't give up now. You're too close to the finish. Even so: you could carry on, or you could wait. Right? You try to overcome your own opposition. Of course you won't. Sure you will. I know you. You know yourself. Nonetheless. How many times have you hit the chisel with the hammer? A hundred thousand times? A million? Two hundred and fifty? You don't know? That's a good sign … Listen here: you and me pal, we're gonna do a bunk, right? Jump the fence? That'll give Rufus a nasty surprise …

To die not to die. What did that mean, free or not free, guilty or not guilty? What would that so strictly, so definitively disastrous arc look like such that he would end up being able to describe it? Madera was dead. Why? What was the more important? Where had it all started? The party at Rufus's place? The night at the studio
in Belgrade? The sudden return from Gstaad? Meeting Jérôme? Meeting Mila? Meeting Geneviève? Or was it the night he had spent drinking in this very basement? What was left of his whole life? Where had it begun? What was the logic?

Gaspard Winckler, trained at the École du Louvre, holding a diploma in Painting Conservation from New York University and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, Honorary Technical Consultant at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Geneva, restoration expert at the Koenig Gallery, Geneva. So what? A notorious counterfeiter in his spare time. A forger more than he should have been. So what? He had been born, grown up and become a forger. How can you be a forger? You are the forger … Why become a forger? Did he need money? No. Had he been blackmailed? Hardly. Did he like it? So-so.

So hard to explain. At the time, could he have imagined anything else? He was walking the streets of Berne. It was wartime. He was seventeen. Idle and wealthy. And Jérôme arose. The attraction of mystery. An adventure. A clever and elegant Arsène Lupin. On his endless vacation, surrounded by extremely wealthy old ladies from England, canny hotel-keepers and retired diplomats, amidst postcard-pretty scenery – snow, mountain peaks, fine chocolate and high-class cigarettes – what could be better than that infallible painter? I'm a painter too but that's very good my lad. And then? The sudden discovery of something difficult. The sudden awareness that he had never known anything, that he had never understood what the act of painting meant, that he had only been making desultory use of a fairly good “hand” to keep boredom at bay, and the
certainty that he could learn and become knowledgeable, one day. By immersing himself entirely in study and research, under Jérôme's patient but firm supervision. And then? Then by copying, pastiching, copying, imitating, reproducing, tracing, dissecting, five times, ten times a hundred times, every detail of Metsys's
Banker and his Wife
: mirror, books, coins, scales, box, hats, faces, hands. And then …

Too good to be true, too easy. When did the whole business start to wobble? When did your story come unstuck? So, so irresponsible … I was seventeen, of course. But when I was twenty-five, twentyseven, thirty, thirty-three? Could he get his mind round it? What is the point of having a conscience? What's awareness for? It's a word. A word like any other. Conscious of what? The walls of the prison closed in on him at speed. Nothing more to say. One fake. Another fake. Gaspard the forger …

Then came Mila. First bedazzlement. First slight, small and harmless. Simulated remorse. A tiny misunderstanding. For the first time in his life he had a sudden urge, just like that, to stop playing a game. To be himself. What did that mean? A rut is a rut. Gaspard the forger. Gaspard Winckler, supplier of a full range of forgeries. Anything by anybody of any period …

Loving a woman, was that being himself? Did he love her? For many years love had meant using confidential visiting cards that Rufus gave him (he got them from Madera, but he only knew about that much later on). Anonymous encounters. And that was that. A need for slightly more spontaneous affection, for something rather less mechanical, a little less sordid. It was of no consequence. That
was the way it was. He had met Mila at Nicolas's place. She'd become his mistress. Because of the colour of the dress she was wearing that day, or else because she had begun to smile. He could not remember. What did it matter? It was something like an interval. A few nights that were different from the others. The morning after, with pitiless logic, with pitiless idiocy, there he was at the Louvre, at the same time as always, in the Roman Antiquities section, with Nicolas, preparing the Hoard of Split. It spoke for itself. It had not even occurred to him that, without it making the slightest difference to anything, he could perfectly easily have given himself a week off. Was that natural? Guilty or not guilty …

When he had come into the room she was already there, seated on the arm of an enormous armchair close up to the fireplace, leaning slightly forward, talking to Jérôme. It was fairly odd. It had never occurred to him that she might know Jérôme. She turned to look at him, said nothing, didn't even smile or nod. He went a little closer. She stood up very naturally, and went to the other end of the room, where the bar was. A neutral attitude? Or was her indifference carefully calculated? What difference could it make? Doesn't matter. Things like that happen to everyone. You didn't love her, that's all. Or she didn't love you. But that's not the issue. Why did you feel guilty for a few seconds or minutes or days? You were indifferent. You didn't make the slightest effort. You would have liked to make an effort …

Strange. You think you're free. Then, at a stroke … No. Where did freedom begin? Where did it end? Free to fake? What an oddity.
A little Giottino. The Adoration of the Magi. Melchior, Balthazar. Gaspard. Have another go. And so it goes on. And it soon becomes essential, and there's nothing in the world besides that persistence and that patience, that obsession with exactness in respect of anything. Cézanne. Gauguin. The world recedes … And there he is already pinned up on the wall: Gaspard Winckler the Forger. Pinned down like a butterfly. Gasparus Wincklerianus. Wholly, fundamentally, explicitly, absolutely and completely defined. Sometimes I feel I understand you, completely, inside out … A forger, and what else besides? Just a forger. Joni Icilio the Forger, Jérôme Quentin the Forger, Gaspard Winckler the Forger. The forger with his auger. The drill of death, and passing time.

Time goes on and the masonry wobbles. In a few minutes this block – and the whole world around it, the world attached to it – will pivot and open the way. What about Rufus? Can you see him at the wheel of his Porsche screaming down the road, piercing the sky with his headlamps, the needle hovering around 120? Rufus worried, agitated, devastated …

One more try. And then? Your future written in stone. You'll never be a forger again. The one sure thing you require. You may live happily or unhappily, you may be rich or poor. Who cares. The world on your plate tomorrow? Just that one promise, never to lose yourself again, never to be taken in by your own game. Will you be able to keep the promise? Are you keeping it right now?

You've no idea. You don't yet have an idea. You've never been alive. Your hands and your eyes. The slave-smith, the Kyrgyz or
Visigoth coppersmith in his cowherd's apron. Your hands summon forth a forgotten caravan. You are dying in the midst of sightless corpses – the empty, bulging eyes of Roman statues – amidst masterpieces and trinkets, masked shamans waving painted fetishes and the resurrected enigmas of medieval sculpture. Look at them, they're all there, they're crowding in on you: El Greco, Caravaggio, Memling, Antonello. Silently, untouchably, inaccessibly, they are dancing all around you …

Yes. Jérôme as well, long ago. Alone and forgotten in his little house outside Annemasse. Died of hunger or loneliness among his art books and canvases. Died on a November day. He had not seen him for more than six months. He had paid him only one brief and shameful visit, not knowing what to say, scared and in a panic at the sight of his rapid decline, his foreseeable decline, at the suddenly intolerable sight of his trembling hands and the atrocious punishment of poor sight. Jérôme was unable to work anymore. He took slow steps around his untended garden, he wandered around his stillempty living room, twiddling his thick metal-framed glasses, which in his time of glory he would only wear to inspect a detail, claiming with a degree of pride that he only used them as a magnifying glass, and which made him look like Chardin but which he now had to wear almost permanently, changing their position on his nose to glance at a book he obviously knew already, and which like all his books dealt exclusively with the aesthetics or the techniques of painting, and he would then shut it again immediately, as if such subjects had become taboo, as if everything that by force of habit had been his whole life
no longer existed, and could only set off a bout of searing nostalgia that he constantly denied and yet just as constantly rekindled with fear and trembling in the awful, futile illusion of recovery.

His wrinkled and calloused hands lay on the arm of the chair and sometimes shook a little. He would tense them abruptly, digging his nails into the upholstery. “I am very glad to see you, Gaspard. It's been quite a time, hasn't it?” The banality of the expression, its indifference, the mechanical way it was said. It was in Paris, the night of the party, his last time in Paris. And also the last time he'd spoken to him. Rufus was leaving next morning for Geneva and would drop him off at Annemasse …

Now he loitered on the streets and in the empty rooms of his villa. He was sixty-two. He looked eighty. He had been a pupil of Joni Icilio. He had had a truly distinguished career. One da Vinci, seven Van Goghs, two Rubens, two Goyas, two Rembrandts and two Bellinis. Fifty-odd Corots, a dozen Renoirs, thirty or more Degas, exported in bulk to South America and Australia in 1930 and 1940, a number of Metsys and Memlings and whole cartloads of Sisleys and Jongkinds, done between 1920 and 1925 at the start of his association with Rufus and Madera. Until 1955 he had worked twelve hours a day and often more, accumulating knowledge, techniques and tricks of the trade, and with every artist achieving indisputable perfection, often with startling speed. Then he had stopped and hung around Place du Cirque, giving advice, setting things up, making bibliographies, collecting documentation, as if he were still trying at whatever cost to make himself useful, and gradually, without
saying anything at first, stopping completely, and as if he could not envisage carrying on living in idleness while remaining in the very place where he had spent his working life, confessing to Rufus (who had not dared bring up the subject himself) that he wished “to end his days” in peace and quiet, and so settled with obviously simulated delight and a sad little smile on his face in the detached house that Rufus had bought him at Annemasse, only a few hundred metres from the gates of Geneva, and there, with a sour housekeeper, a decent pension and a precious library, begun to experience the appallingly slow agony of living a life that was no longer any use. Two years. Seven hundred and thirty days. Seven hundred and thirty days of boredom only too rarely relieved by a visitor or a trip. A few days in Paris, Venice or Florence, and then he was on his own once again, alone with his oddly gentle pain, a kind of vaguely nostalgic, vaguely anaesthetising comprehension of the self, among his books and paintings, alone in his sparsely furnished living room and, beyond that, a small street lined with identical houses, a silent and empty little street. All his life he had lived in the ceaseless jostle of Rue Rousseau and Place du Cirque or else in Paris, in Rue Cadet, in a small studio on the seventh floor of a block of apartments. A livid, scrawny little street. A clean little suburban street? A cramped living room that he had not summoned up the courage to organise, as if he had been convinced that it was not worth the trouble, as if he had wanted to prove every minute of the day that he was already dead and living in his grave, in these alien and altogether unknown and indifferent surroundings where he was obliged nonetheless
to walk and look and see every day …

On 17 November 1958, Rufus had called Dampierre: Jérôme was dying. That same evening, Otto drove him to Orly and he landed in Geneva. There was a chilly drizzle. When they reached Annemasse Jérôme was already dead. A doctor and the housekeeper were standing by his bed. An extraordinary jumble of open books, reproductions and unfolded lithographs was strewn around the bedroom, surrounding him like battle colours …

Do you recall? You bent down and picked up a book that had fallen close by Jérôme. Do you recall?
Let four captains bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;… and, for his passage, the soldiers' music and the rites of war speak loudly for him …

The funeral march echoes for a long time in the burdened memory. Jérôme had wandered around the corridors of his house, going from room to room like a shadow, resting his head against the windows, staring at the narrow street. That was in November. A fine drizzle was falling. He paced back and forth, went up to his bookcase, opened his portfolios, took out thousands of sketches, removed the protective tissue paper from the prints, remembering, resuscitating each story, each detail, each one of the difficulties he'd faced and overcome. Then what?

He must have walked for a long time in the stunted little garden. Dusk had fallen. It was cold. He had gone back up to his room. He had gone back down to the living room. The housekeeper had served his dinner. He had not touched it. He had pushed his plate away with a gesture of great weariness …