The Forgery of Venus (20 page)

S
o after that I checked out of the hotel and returned to the forger’s nest. Sophia greeted me cheerfully when I passed her in the hall, as if I’d never left, but I suspected they knew pretty much what had gone down. I’m not paranoid or anything, but I do a lot of people-watching myself and I know that when you concentrate your attention on people they sooner or later get hip to it. I had been conscious of eyes on me for the past couple of days.

The odd thing was that I didn’t sink into an orgy of self-contempt
the way I would have previously when something like that happened. It was like my real life—Lotte and the kids and New York—had become just another alternative life, one of several now available, and so the rejection didn’t sting the way it once had. Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about, as the Beatles used to say. And the money, that universal balm. People also used to say love will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no love, but that’s only partially true. Money’s not everything, sure, but neither is it nothing.

And the other thing was I really
liked
being Velázquez. I remembered vividly what it was like to paint like him, I’d actually
done
that portrait, and I thought if they could put
that
experience into powder form, no one would ever look at crack cocaine.

I
spent the next morning staring at the cleaned canvas on the easel. Baldassare had changed the size a little, a couple of inches off each dimension, but I didn’t bother to ask him why. Nor did I touch a brush; I just stared at the white. I’d been studying the radiographs published in Brown and Garrido and in various mono-graphs to get some idea of what his underpainting was like. The problem with Velázquez in his mature period was that he was so good he barely did any preliminary work. Aside from a few question-able sketches of the Pope’s portrait, there are no Velázquez sketches at all. None. The bastard just painted. He laid in the ground with a big brush or a palette knife in flake white and grays made with ochre and azurite, varying it according to the composition of the painting. When he had that right he drew in the figures directly, what they call alla prima painting, and then used diluted pigments to color them, so that the light ground and sometimes even the grain of the canvas showed through, a totally bravura technique, which is why nobody but an idiot tries to forge Velázquez.

All the confidence I’d felt briefly at the Doria in front of Innocent X had vanished with Lotte, as did my pleasure in my new wealth. Because in order to get that wealth, of course, I had to put paint on canvas, which just now I seemed disinclined to do. And as the good light faded I had plenty of time to consider the cowardice of Charles Wilmot, Jr., the Chaz of all my memories, the real reason why he wasn’t really a million-dollars-a-painting guy, not the market, not the
art appreciation business at all, just the pure funk, because now, when it really counted, the big leagues, an actual million-dollar commission, Chaz doesn’t show up.

I blew a couple of days like that, just looking at the damned canvas. Baldassare came in once and told me he’d sized the old canvas with a secret water-soluble compound. The point of this was to fill the cracks in the seventeenth-century ground I’d be painting on, so that the new paint wouldn’t sink into it. After the forgery was done and dried, he’d dip the whole thing in water and the sizing would dissolve out; with a little bending and shaking the surface would conform to the old cracks, and bingo! Instant craqueleur.

I asked him to give me a couple of new stretched canvases in the same dimensions and texture, because I figured I’d be better off easing into it, do a test run, as it were, get comfortable with the paint and the style. And the model. So I started looking at Sophia and she started looking at me, you know, a little discreet flirting around dinnertime, smiles, increasingly warmer, little jokes. It turned out Franco wasn’t that interested, not that he would’ve kicked her out of bed—nor would I have—but not interested. That was all I needed now, given the thing with Lotte. I’d called her cell phone half a dozen times but she never called back.

Which pissed me off, and so I asked Sophia out for a drink after dinner, and she took me to a bar, Guido’s, over by Santa Maria, full of local people now in winter with most of the tourists gone. She was known there, she chatted with friends in the Roman dialect that I could barely follow. We spoke to each other in English, mainly, and I got her story. She’d done art at La Sapienza; there was a guy, an Australian she’d gotten involved with; then she became pregnant and he split, and there she was with little Enrico, dropped out of school with no degree and no prospects for a job. She was working as a
madonnaro,
drawing holy pictures on the sidewalk in front of churches for
tips. Then her mother had called Baldassare, a
cugine,
it turned out, and he’d brought her into the family business.

She did mainly seventeenth-century drawings—Cortona, the Caracci, Domenichino—and helped out with paintings on fake Italian provincial antiques. I asked her whether it bothered her, the faking, and she said no, why should it? Romans had been faking art for
bàbbioni
tourists since
BC
. She was good at it, used only the best materials, genuine paper from old books and the right inks, and she had the style down. She’d done a Cortona
Christ on the Cross
that’d fetched thirty thousand euros at a German auction, and that kind of wage certainly beat some low-end curatorial job at a provincial museum.

A little defensive there, I thought, but it turned out that she wasn’t abashed at all, but envious. I was the big-time gunslinger brought in for this gigantic coup. Baldassare had told her all about it, but, she said, he doesn’t think you can do it. I asked her if he’d actually told her that, and she said yeah, he said you don’t have
le palle sfaccettate.
That’s what you need in this business. You know what that means? I didn’t. It means balls with hard edges, like a crystal.

I said, we’ll see, and then I asked her if she ever modeled, and she said not really, but Baldassare thought that she’d be right for this picture and asked her if she’d do it, and of course, what could she say? And the boy too, he said they’d need a child. I said that was right and asked her why she thought she’d do for the figure, and she said, you want someone like the
Rokeby Venus,
don’t you? With which she got up and walked slowly away and then back again and into her chair, grinning like a cat.
Bellesponde,
as they say. A narrow waist and a pear-shaped bottom, longish legs. Her face was what they call “interesting,” the features a little over-large for real beauty, nose too long, chin a little small, but she had a mass of thick, dark hair with coppery highlights, and in any case I was going to make up the face, for obvious reasons.

We drank some more and then some friends of hers came by and started in with the Romano chatter, and I got my pad out and started futzing around, and then as usual they saw what I was doing and I made drawings of each of them. Everyone was impressed, as usual. If this didn’t work out, I thought, I could always become a
madonnaro
myself.

We stayed late and got pretty oiled, and we walked back home through sleeping Trastevere in a light rain. When we got to the house it was clear that she was available, but I begged off, and that raised her eyebrow and produced a shrug. Whatever,
signor
. In fact, it was not Lotte mainly, but that whole thing seemed a little too planned, another way to inveigle me deeper into the circle of Krebs.

I told her I wanted to start in the morning; she said okay and went off to bed, and I did too. I woke up at first light. Or someone woke up, but it wasn’t in the bed I’d gone to sleep in and it wasn’t me.

I
awaken in a different bed, a huge thing with four posts and heavy velvet hangings. I smell cooking and a kind of incense, and underneath a sweet, unpleasant smell, maybe sewage—that’s what the world smells like. I have to piss, and I use the chamber pot I pull out of a little box by the bedside. I’m wearing a white embroidered night-shirt and a cap. I push the curtains aside.

A huge room with high, coffered ceilings and wall paintings, Zucchis mainly, the usual Roman unclothed nymphs; they make me irritable every time I see them. I have not slept well. I’ve dreamed again of being in hell, vast cliffs with eyes, iron streets populated with gargoyles, half-dressed harpies, and in the streets chariots going of themselves, spitting the stench of pitch and sulphur.

Servants attend me while I wash and dress. Pareja is sullen as usual, although I have permitted him to paint, in contravention to
the codes, and why not? This is Rome, where everything is permitted, especially that which is prohibited.

I eat something—I forget what—in a large room overlooking the famous gardens. This is the Villa Medici. The duke allows me to stay here, as he did during my first visit, although as an honorary ambassador to His Holiness I should be lodged at the Vatican. I cannot bear to stay there, however; the food does not suit me—far too rich—and the meals formal and at set times. Here I can eat what I want, when I want, and I can work.

After my meal, I go down to the Trinitá to hear Mass, then return to my studio and work on a view I have made of a gate to the gardens. It is a small thing, but it gives me a particular pleasure, as it has no connection with a patron but is for myself alone, a landscape in the French manner, or the Dutch. I have never done such a thing before, and it makes a kind of cleansing after the Pope’s portrait.

At noon I eat again, this time at a table with some of the other guests, all people of rank, and none of them think it disgraceful to dine with a painter.

Now I command Juan Pareja to call for a carriage, and we leave the villa for our appointment at the house of my lord Don Gaspar de Haro, Marqués de Heliche, a great man among the Spanish in Rome, who favors me above all others of my profession. During the journey I am much engaged with my pocket book, where I list all the worrying arrangements I must make to fulfill His Majesty’s commission: gaining permission to make casts of famous sculptures, supervising the artisans making the casts, making sure they are properly crated, paying for the shipment, making sure the carters do not steal everything, viewing paintings for sale, making appointments for portraits of the notables who favor me and whose friendship is desired by His Majesty—never enough time and never, never enough money, the Titians alone cost over a thousand ducats and the majordomo at the
embassy says there is no money. There is no money in all of Spain, it seems, or so I am told. Although it is the king’s will that these treasures be bought, every petty clerk defies me. As they say, too much meat on to roast and some will be burnt.

At the palazzo I am announced and led to a hall full of paintings. The paintings are very fine, but I have no chance to study them, for here is my lord of Heliche and his train. They are merry and an odor of wine and perfume floats above them. They are Romans in the main, and of a type that my lord’s father, far less his uncle the count-duke, would never have thought to entertain. I am introduced, I bow, they bow, the marqués takes my arm, and we go off privily to tour his gallery. We talk of paintings: he is passing knowledgeable, for one so young, and avid for more treasures; he condemns me for driving up the market by my visit and my gold from Madrid, although there is hardly any. We stop before a
Venus with a Mirror,
a copy after the Titian that hangs in the Alcázar. He says, I want one like that. A copy, my lord? No, a painting, a new painting. But we will speak of this further. First I wish to show you a prodigy. You will hardly believe this, Don Diego, there is nothing like it in Spain.

We move up a stair and down a hallway. There is a room from which issues a familiar odor. He signs to the footman to open the door without sound, and we stand in the doorway. Inside there is an easel and a man in a long smock and turban painting at it, and a model, a woman, sits holding a swaddled plaster baby. The man is painting rapidly, placing a blue glaze. A Venetian, I think, or one trained in their style.

My lord speaks low: “What do you think, Don Diego?”

I answer: “It is well enough done. The forms have some strength at least; the colors are clear and harmonious. A young man, I think, with little experience. The composition is not all it could be.”

In the same low voice he says, slyly now, “You are entirely mistaken in this, I fear.”

I say, “Then I bow to your superior knowledge of the painter’s art, my lord.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” he says. “I meant it is not a young man. It is not a man at all!”

With that he cries out, “Leonora!” And the painter turns around, and I see it is a young woman. She stands frozen a moment, startled, brush in hand. The marqués strides into the room and embraces the woman in a most lascivious way, although he is married, and recently too, to a girl reputed to be the beauty of Italy, and rich. Still holding her to his body, he calls to me, “Is this not a prodigy, Don Diego, a woman who paints! Can you imagine what they would say in Spain? My treasure, this is Don Diego de Velázquez, the king’s painter, come to Rome to buy every painting that can be bought and impoverish all us poor collectors. Don Diego, it is said that you allow your slave to paint, but I think I have you bested in this one: I have the honor to present to you Leonora di Cortona di Fortunati.”

The woman smiles indulgently. The marqués bends to kiss her neck, and his hand slips between the buttons of her smock. The model looks away and blushes. I am thunderstruck myself.

The woman pushes him away; he resists, laughing; she taps him on the nose with her brush tip and his nose becomes bright lapis blue. He touches his nose, goggles at his hand. A look of anger starts on his face, but he turns it into a toothed grin like a carter’s and lets free a bellow of laughter.

“Clean me!” he orders, and she does, with a rag dipped in turpentine.

“Pah!” he cries. “I will stink like a damned painter all day. Look here, Don Diego, this is what I want you to paint.” He pointed at the woman.

“A Madonna and child, my lord?”

“No, of course not, God blast you! What would I do with yet another Madonna and child? No, her, Leonora, I want you to paint her as Venus with her mirror.”

I look at the woman with the paint rag still in her hand, and she looks back at me. Her eyes are sea-gray; the wisp of hair that has escaped from her turban is auburn. She has a blunt, oval face with a high forehead, snub nose, and strong chin, the face of a sharp market woman, not a beauty; but there is the disturbing way she’s staring into my eyes, slightly mocking, but also with a deeper complicity, as if we alone in that room understood some important secret. I have never been looked at like that by a woman, not my wife, not the women of the court. It unnerves me and even makes my voice shake a little when I say, “A Venus, my lord; do you mean unclothed?”

“Of course, unclothed! Nude. Naked, whatever you call it. There’s a woman under that tent, you’ll see. And, my man—you’ll make haste, will you? I have other things I want you to do as well.” With that he claps me on the shoulder and departs the room.

As soon as the door closes she dismisses the model, who takes her plaster baby and rushes out, and then my lady removes her smock right before me, not bothering to retire. Beneath is a dress of fine russet silk with a falling collar, good lace; a stomacher strung with gold cords; lace at the sleeves, but not much, and not cut as low at the bosom as some Roman ladies wear. They do not wear the
guardinfante
in Rome, preferring to round out their hips with petticoats. A remarkably thin waist. Off comes the turban and she shakes her ringlets out, they have red lights in them. Some bracelets of amber, some of gilt, no jewels that I can see. I think of what the marqués said of her body; I have never heard a woman spoken to so, except a whore, and this is no whore. These Romans are blind to honor. In this city I have heard men use words and make gestures to one another that would have earned a fight in Seville, perhaps a coffin too.