Eduard Márquez
Brandes's Decision
To Montse Ingla
That which is not taken, but remains, is the best of us.
BRANDES'S DECISION
“You decide,” he told me. At that point I hardly knew anything about him. All I knew was that his name was Hofer, Walter Andreas Hofer, that he went around Paris looking for art for Göring’s private collection and that, when he put his mind to it, he could be quite persuasive. “You decide.” His was a confident voice, used to setting the terms; used to wielding fear and shattering people’s ability to choose.“If you want your paintings back, all you have to do is give me the Cranach.” The Cranach. I know it like the back of my hand. I close my eyes and I see it. Without shadows. With the clarity of dreams: the three figures, the steeply sloping landscape, the threatening clouds.“You decide. But don’t think it over too long, I haven’t got all the time in the world.” Words that smother the last slits that allowed in breathable air, words that weigh like a slab of slate. Then he closed the door carefully, as if he didn’t need to employ noise to intimidate me yet. Not when his glance was enough to send chills down my spine. Even now, twenty-two years later, when I come across a photograph of Hofer, I feel his gaze wandering around my studio and piercing my eyes. Incisive. Angular as an idol sculpted by hatchet blows.
At first I didn’t understand his offer. I knew they’d emptied out my dealer’s gallery with the excuse that he was a Jew, and that they’d taken every last one of my paintings, but I never imagined that, on some crazy whim of Göring’s, they’d be willing to swap them all for my Cranach. “He owns many, but he adds to his collection whenever he gets the chance,” he added. I still have the list with the titles and sizes of my paintings, a copy made with carbon paper on the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg letterhead. All very official and seemingly aboveboard. Even the pillaging and theft. “Maybe this will help you decide,” Hofer said. Not a single word more. And he put a couple of pages on one of my easels. Through the window, I saw him get into the backseat of a car stopped at the entrance to the alley. I remember the lump in my throat, the rain-damp grass between the paving stones, the beating in my chest, neck, temples. As if all the silence of the afternoon had transformed into a heart stunned by dread. Or by rage.
I didn’t know what to do for quite some time. I just paced up and down with the list in my hand. Sixty-eight numbered paintings. Titles and measurements. I even read some of them out loud. Maybe to share my discomfiture with the mute figures of the easels: “Seated Nude, 53 x 47.5; Still Life With Dice, 46.5 x 36; Forest, 94 x 113; Red House, 98 x 76; Woman By The Water, 53.2 x 48.3.” Up and down, with the floorboards creaking under my feet and my eyes fogged by tears. I had never before felt so trapped between these four walls.
My studio hasn’t changed much. I like to remain loyal to the objects that have been my companions for so many years. But only the necessary ones, because I’m not interested in accumulating layers, just maintaining essential links to my past: Grandma Johanna’s rocking chair; Mom’s sewing box where I keep my brushes; the Giotto, Vermeer, Velázquez, Van Gogh, and Matisse reproductions pinned to the wall; the old, paint-smeared easels; the zoetrope my father gave me as a boy, where the same sheep from my childhood still jumps, tirelessly, over the same wooden fence; the books; the photographs; the illustration, taken from a medieval bestiary, of a dragon clinging to an elephant’s neck. . During the occupation, I lived here as well. It seemed like a good way, without just leaving the city, to avoid running into soldiers and swastikas everywhere and having to act like that was normal. That way I didn’t have to be out on the street as much. It probably wasn’t the bravest or most committed choice, especially when there was talk of acts of sabotage by the Resistance, but I’d always believed that my only homeland was painting, with the loyalty that entails. Until Hofer’s visit. Even though I was slow to realize the importance of his extortion. “You decide.” Just two words, but enough to transform any certainty into a nightmare. Nothing was reasonable or convincing enough to help me decide. And the curfew and the darkness, the solitude and the silence made it more difficult, especially over never-ending nights, my eyes piercing the void. Despondently.
Like now. Since death began hovering over me, exhaustion gnaws away at the few moments of peace this uneasy situation allows me. I give myself over to the passing hours, aware of the clock hands, of the murmur that still connects me to a routine I’ve moved beyond, of the traces of fragility that, day after day, are added to the furrows in my body. I often wonder about the moment that, like an arch’s keystone, gives meaning to my life. Maybe not the happiest or the most intense, but at least the one that will keep me from being bitter over everything I could have done, over all the wrong turns, over all the unspoken words. And I search through my past, I rummage through my memory to retake the path that brought me here and find that moment. Unmistakable and definitive. Luminous like the eyes on Cranach’s Madonna. Or like the green of the damp, shiny grass between the alley’s paving stones after Hofer’s visit.
My father often talked about the soul of colors, about their ability to influence our feelings. He was a chemist, but his fondness for painting compelled him to study pigments. And he could turn dry terms like lazurite, aluminum silicate, or sulfur into fascinating stories, like Marco Polo’s trip to the lapis lazuli quarries in Badakhshan at the mouth of the Amu Darya River, or magical tales, like the legend of the dragon blood that transformed into cinnabar. I heard them so many times — evening after evening over weeks, stretched out on the bed in my dusky room — that I can still remember Marco Polo’s words: “In the earth there are veins of the stones used to make this blue, and mountains with mines of silver, copper and lead. And the plain is very cold.” Other nights, thanks to my father’s skill as a storyteller, I had no trouble imagining the dragon patiently waiting up in a tree to leap on its eternal enemy; then its fierce battle with the elephant, especially when its eyes got plucked out; the agonizing dragon trapped beneath the dying elephant, and the sand dyed red. I guess I paint to recreate my childhood. Ever since I was very little, sitting in my father’s study among the illustrations by Laugel and Blanc of chromatic stars that hung on the walls, I would play with the colors while I repeated his stories to myself. And maybe it’s always been like that. In fact, one of the paintings on Hofer’s list, Blue Landscape, is inspired in the cold of the Afghan plain that Marco Polo visited. If I close my eyes and think of it, I can bring back the welcoming, almost hypnotic cadence of my father’s voice reading the Travels of Marco Polo as I drifted off to sleep: “In the earth there are veins of the stones used to make this blue, and mountains with mines of silver, copper and lead. And the plain is very cold.”
I’m cold too. Always. It’s as if the tumor absorbed my warmth and turned it into a thin layer of frost that covers the inside of my body. Sometimes, when I shiver from head to toe, I imagine that I’m Marco Polo walking through the quarries of Badakhshan and I’m consoled by the intense blue of the river, by the flying falcons, by the shrieks of the riders on shoeless horses, by the musky scent of the women dressed in silks. And I would give anything to scale the mountains that surround the frozen plain, where the air is so pure and revitalizing that it cures all illnesses. But death won’t give me that opportunity. According to the doctor, there’s nothing for me to worry about. Even though he doesn’t dare to tell me, I know I don’t have much time. His eyes, his gestures, his voice betray him. It’s odd, because people talk to the dying, just like they do kids, in a special way. As if death’s proximity can only be confronted with vague words, with words that, unintentionally, mix affection and fear, fake sincerity and sadness, commiseration and distancing.