The Forgery of Venus (10 page)

A
fter I dropped the kids off in Brooklyn I took the subway up to the med school. When I checked in the secretary said Dr. Zubkoff would like to see you before you go in for your session, and pointed the way. Shelly was in his office; he motioned me to a seat and brought out a file. The usual small talk, and then he said, “Let’s talk about these past-life hallucinations you’re having.”

I said, “Yeah, if you want to call them that.”

He said, “What would you call them?” in that patient doc tone of voice.

“I relive the past,” I said. “It’s not me, as I am now, having hallucinations. I’m really
in
my former self, reliving a moment, whether I can recall the incident now or not. It’s a real experience.”

“I see. How is that different from a vivid dream, or a waking hallucination?”

I said, “You tell me, you’re the doctor. How do I know
you’re
not a hallucination? How do I know I’m not locked in a rubber room somewhere, fantasizing all this? You remember what Hume said about the limits of empirical observation.”

The doctor was not amused. He said, “Let’s just take it as given that the world is real, and external to us, and that we’re both sitting here. And I understand the vividness of the salvinorin experience. It’s been reported extensively in the literature. What I’m a little concerned about is this most recent run, where according to your report you experienced what seemed to be someone
else’s
past.”

It turned out this was not a normal reaction to the drug and he
was hot to pump me about it. I told him what I went through last time and what Slotsky had said about the probable identity of Gito de Silva, and added that I was in the middle of the lushest creative run of my entire life.

This got him all excited and he gave me a lot of neurological information that I couldn’t follow, but the main point was that he thought that it was all a matter of various brain regions responding to the chemical stimulus and that I was constructing the past experiences as a result. It was like dreams, he said, the actual stimulus for dreaming is just random brain noise, and we interpret this noise as imagery and events.

“Yeah, that might explain me reliving my own past,” I said, “but it doesn’t deal with me reliving the past of Diego Velázquez.”

He gave me what I thought was a strange look and said, “We don’t know a lot about the subjective effects of the drug. That’s the point of the study.”

“Not much of an answer,” I said, and he sort of withdrew a little behind the professional Kevlar and said, “Well, you’re a painter, and you’re having a kind of fantasy about being a famous painter. It’s merely an enhancement of what we see every week on
American Idol.
”

“You think it’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy?”

“What else could it be?” he said, and he had me there. “But let’s lower the dosage, shall we? You seem to be particularly sensitive to the drug.”

Then he had to go do something and he handed me over to Harris, who ushered me into one of the little rooms.

I lay down on the couch. She arranged her tray of little beakers, selected one, and said, “Would you mind if we put you in some light restraints? It’s for your own safety.”

I said I didn’t mind at all, and after I had chewed my wad, she placed Velcro bands around my wrists and across my chest. Then
the usual floating sensation, and then I’m standing at a table grinding massicot into a fine powder using a stone mortar and pestle. The four casement windows of the room were lately barred with shutters, but now the fighting in the city has died away and there is light again to do this work. I feel the grit of the bright yellow powder with my fingers. It isn’t fine enough, so I keep grinding. The old man will not beat me if I don’t do it right, but that doesn’t matter. I must do it right, I must please him, because it’s my duty, and the honor of my family demands it. Honor is like a constant pressure, sometimes between my eyes, sometimes in my gut, like a live thing, like life itself.

The fighting was about the Immaculate Conception, which means the Blessed Virgin was born without original sin. I believe this, and it gives me an almost physical comfort even though I don’t really understand the theology. I know that some in the city deny the Immaculate Conception, and that’s why there was a small war here. I saw beaten and dead people on the street, and I wished that I was a man so that I could fight for the Blessed Virgin too and kill the bad people who deny her glory in this way. Mary’s honor and my family’s honor and my own honor are all tied together into that solid feeling in my center.

I am a hidalgo, a son of someone, I am noble on both sides of my family, of pure Christian blood, and this thought is a constant undercurrent of all my thoughts, like my name, or my family’s history, or the positions of my limbs.

I finish the grinding and place the pigment carefully in a stoppered jar. I go into another room, where there is an elderly man staring at an uncompleted painting: my master, Old Herrera. I tell him I have finished grinding and say that if he has nothing else for me to do I would beg his leave to go out drawing in the plaza. He waves me away. He is no longer interested in me, because he knows I can already draw and paint better than he can himself and that I will not ever work for him so that he can profit from my skill.

I put on my hat and cloak and call out for my servant, Pablo. In a minute or so he comes out from the kitchen, smelling of smoke and grease. He is a boy a little older than me, dark skin, greasy black hair, wearing my cast-off clothes, which are too small for him. I feel a kind of affection for him, but also I feel that he is not really a person like I am, more like a superior kind of dog, or a donkey. I understand also that there are those, the grandees, who feel the same way about me, and this thought is like an intolerable itch. I wish to rise in the world.

I order Pablo to pick up the box and portfolio I use for drawing, and we go out, him following behind me at a suitable distance. We go to the plaza. It’s a market day and the stalls are full of tradesmen and women selling vegetables, fish, meat, leather, and household goods. I sit down on a keg of salted fish in the shade of a fishmonger’s awning. I open my box, set up my inkhorn, and point a reed pen with my pen-knife. I draw piles of fish, cockles, oysters, an octopus, the fishwife. Later I tell Pablo to adopt different postures and make faces, and I draw these too. The local people are used to me doing this, but often a stranger will pass and look at what I have drawn, and sometimes there will sound a soft oath from behind me. Sometimes a woman will cross herself. Many people find what I can do disturbing, it is too much like God, they think, to make things that look like life itself. But it is from God and the Virgin that I have this gift.

A
nd I am painting the Virgin now, the first large painting I have been allowed to do, and I stop, my brush stutters, and I am struck with a memory from my days with Herrera, of grinding paint and then going out to draw in the market. It is very strange; I have not thought of him for two minutes since I became Don Pacheco’s student, and suddenly this burst of fresh memory. It has been nearly five years I’ve been with him, and this painting will be my master
piece for entry into the painter’s guild of Seville. Of course it has to be a religious painting for that. The memory vanishes in a flash, like a street magician making a bowl of fruit disappear with a flourish of his cloth, and I shiver as if someone has walked on my grave.

I resume painting. The thing is not bad, better than anyone else in Seville can do, but not entirely satisfying. There is a stiffness in the figure that I don’t care for, but this is how it is done with Virgins, and she stands on a globe, which is unnatural to begin with, so perhaps the stiffness is part of what the good sisters at the Shod Carmelites expect. I’ve made her hair like that of Don Pacheco’s daughter. There have been hints this year that she would not be adverse to a proposal. I think it will happen. It’s important to have friends, and my master knows everyone who paints in Seville and even in Madrid, and he has connections with powerful people. A man he knows, Don Juan de Fonseca, has been chaplain to His Majesty. What could be more wonderful and full of honor than to wait upon the king himself!

I step back from the painting to examine the balance of the masses. More clouds on the left, I think. The face does not look
too
much like Juana de Miranda de Pacheco, that would be impious, but it is the same kind of face, and a real woman’s face too, not the doll face you see painted by the religious artists of Seville.

I load my brush with lead and lay in more clouds, blending the white into the ochre of the background. Already I am thinking of my next piece, a John the Evangelist for the same convent. Don Pacheco has written that John should be an old man, but I am going to paint him as a young fellow. I will use as a model a market porter of my own age, a man I’ve used before in my
bodegones
. I think the nuns will like to look at a young man. In any case in a short time I will be my own master and can paint what I like.

And now I have a strange feeling, the room is somehow too small, there is a tightness across my chest, I have to escape from my clothes,
and a woman’s voice is calling out, “Relax, relax, it’s all right!” and I was struggling against my restraints as the room and the couch I was on seemed to toss around like a boat in a gale.

“It’s all right,” said Harris repeatedly, and after a while, “Are you okay now?”

“Drink,” I croaked. My throat was clawky with the taste of the drug and an intolerable dryness. I asked for water and she unwrapped my hand and gave me a plastic pint bottle, which I drank dry.

“How long was I out?”

She checked an electronic stopwatch. “Eighteen minutes. What happened?”

“Nothing. I was painting something.”

She untied me, gave me the usual clipboarded form, and asked,

“What were you painting?”

But now I found myself unwilling to share the details of my experience with these people. I mean really, they were trying to determine the effects of the drug on creativity, and I was perfectly willing to go on about that and fill out their tests and forms, but this stuff was really none of their business.

“It was just a painting, Harris,” I snapped. “What the fuck does it matter what it was? You can’t buy and sell it—it’s all in my head.”

“You’re feeling aggressive,” she said in that clinical tone.

“No, aggressive would be if I broke this goddamn clipboard over your head. And yeah, I’m being a pain in the ass because we artists are often a pain in the ass. If you wanted docile you should’ve brought in a bunch of kindergarten teachers. Now get out of here and let me finish this shit so I can go home!”

She flushed bright pink, started to say something, but turned and left the room. I finished the form and then I noticed that she’d left the tray full of little beakers with the gauze sponges in them, and there was a large covered jar on the tray with some code numbers on
it. I opened it, and for some reason I pulled out a couple of the damp sponges and stripped out a latex glove from a dispenser and shoved them inside it. I don’t know why I did this; maybe it was Shelly saying he was going to cut my dosage. I didn’t like that. Something about being Velázquez was—I won’t say
addictive,
but compelling. I wanted more of it, not less.

I left the lab with the kitten-licking feeling under my skull more intense than before—maddening not to be able to scratch it—also hyped, energetic, like speed coming on, but without that jaw-grinding thing; I felt fine, spring in my step and all that. For a while after I got off the subway I wandered through Chinatown, drawing the markets, the piles of fish and fruits. I was trying to recapture the feeling I’d just had as the boy Velázquez and it was great, and when I got back to my loft I stretched a big canvas, over five by seven feet. I sized it with glue mixed with carbon black, and when it was dry I put on a thin layer of iron oxide, red lake, and carbon black, mixed with powdered limestone. Paint like Velázquez, prep like Velázquez. This took all day and into the evening. I was hungry, so I went out and got something in Chinatown and then came back and put on my lamps and stared at the vast thing for a while. I looked through my recent sketchbooks, but the ideas I thought I’d had seemed to have vanished. I kept feeling Lotte peering over my shoulder, expectant, ready to offer love again if I would just be true to the real Chaz. That or make a lot of money, I thought, hiding behind the cynicism.

I paced, I filled an ashtray with butts, a couple of times I picked up a charcoal and stood in front of the thing, waiting for the power to kick in, and after a while I got impatient and took one of the sponges from my rubber glove.

I lay down on my daybed and chewed it, and no out-of-body experience this time, nothing freaky, except the colors seemed to get a little sharper and brighter, the edges between patches of color sort of
glowing, and that kitten-licking thing in my head, and I was sitting in psych class, late spring in my sophomore year in a classroom in Schermerhorn Hall, warm breezes in through the windows and the professor gabbing on about how human existence was just a lot of operant conditioning, the mind was an illusion, and the rest of that tedious and fallacious story, and I was ignoring him and concentrating on drawing a girl sitting across the aisle from me, terrific neck, like Nefertiti, and her hair piled up on her head, streaky blond, with bright little pennants from it tossing in the breeze from the open windows, a slight overbite to the mouth, very nice, pale eyes, she knows I’m drawing her and she’s holding the pose. I’m working with a soft pencil on cartridge paper, using my thumb to blend it in; the chin’s a bit weak, but I’m correcting that, the magic of drawing, it’s what she wishes she looked like, but still a fair likeness, as the professor drones on, though now his voice slips into a lower register and he’s reading from the lives of the saints, St. Cecilia, whose day it is, and I’m drawing the king of Spain.