I decided that the meeting would end there. Right as I was about to say goodbye and leave her office, when it was obvious that neither of us had managed to reassure the other, I asked the teacher about the art lessons the students were supposed to receive. Vicente Rojo’s name had clearly meant absolutely nothing to her. Relieved at finally being able to discuss a subject about which she thought she knew everything, she informed me that there would be no painting classes. There had been a setback with the individual who was to be in charge. When they spoke about Mario’s illness, they also used the word setback. The fact was, the supposed painter who had offered to give painting lessons had deceived them. He wasn’t an artist at all; he could barely hold a brush. Fortunately, one of the parents got wind of the sham before anything serious could happen. That was lucky, because the school already had enough problems. The parent who had put Vicente Rojo’s name forward for the classes had apologised, because he had been the first one duped. Vicente Rojo had met the parent in an art supply store in the neighbourhood and somehow made him believe he was an artist of certain distinction in Mexico. The story was hardly believable, and the art teacher had been wary from the beginning. Luckily, the whole grotesque episode had come to an end before anything bad could happen.
Prosopagnosia is an illness in which the sufferer can no longer identify faces, whether it be their own or the faces of others. In other words, the sufferer sees a face, but they are unable to associate its features with a particular individual. Some time ago, my daughter learned about this illness at school, in a class where she was taught some introductory psychological concepts. Because of this, and also because her teacher had told her that the brain perceives what the education system teaches it to perceive, my daughter and her friends had begun to play that strange game that became of such great concern to the faculty. To make certain that this illness truly existed, after my second visit to Berta’s teacher in a short period of time, and after a good snack in a bar near the school where I thought I saw the artist in the distance, I searched Google for a definition of prosopagnosia.The search produced over seven hundred thousand results, although that fact has little meaning beyond the number of times that thousands of people across the world have typed the same word at some point. Then I searched for Vicente Rojo and Google produced almost a million online instances in which those words appeared. This was another insignificant fact, because those two words by themselves were so common and had so many different uses that they could be combined for an infinite number of reasons that had nothing to do with the artist. So, the figure itself was as misleading as it was overwhelming. In taking a moment to talk about these search results here, my intention is to consider several indicators that in some circumstances might be of interest, and in others might be misleading. All of which is to say, paying attention to everything isn’t always useful.
The most relevant result was that, right there on my computer screen, a seemingly endless series of images appeared. On the one hand, there were reproductions of paintings that were undeniably related to those I had seen in the catalogues the artist had given to me, and on the other, an almost infinite sequence of images of a face, always the same one, but at different ages, in different poses and contexts. A man with very dark eyes, deep rather than sunken, with a gaze that seemed melancholy and unyielding at the same time. Altogether, his broad forehead, straight nose, and well-groomed beard give the effect of a great man, the kind of illustrious figure you might see in a sculpture. That was the first thought that occurred to me. The second was that this image had absolutely nothing to do with the man I had spent hours interviewing. There was a kind of forced resemblance, something like imitation: shirt collars poking out of the V-neck sweaters; a beard that was well-trimmed but a little wispier; hand movements that I now realised were affected, and concerned with replicating the careful postures of Vicente Rojo in the photos on the internet. In many of those images, the true artist’s hands were visible. It wasn’t for nothing that he had written about the vital importance of that part of his body.
Among the images that reproduced the artist’s work, I lingered over one, in which a series of pyramids in brown tones rested on what looked like a watery surface, as if the painting had captured that exact moment when it stops raining and the ground becomes like a mirror. Each of the pyramids had another symmetrical one joined at its base, which meant the landscape doubled and revealed another dimension. In paintings like these, my daughter searches for the new dimensions of reality, the perspective that will reveal the way everything truly functions: the answer to all the mysteries.
I also stopped to look, once more, at the legendary cover that Vicente Rojo had designed for One Hundred Years of Solitude. A professor in one of my literature classes had spoken about it. That’s probably the only thing I thought about, the first time I googled Vicente Rojo. Before the first interview, when I wanted to know who the Mexican artist was, I typed his name into the search engine. This was before embarking upon a series of interviews that led nowhere. Back then I had been overwhelmed by the quantity of material about the artist that already existed, and I had been dismayed at my own ignorance and my daring at the thought that I could possibly write something about him. This is why I hadn’t paid any attention to the face in the photos. I’d had no interest in the face of Vicente Rojo that was offered to me by the internet; I was satisfied with what I’d seen of the man who followed my daughter home one day because she had fainted at school, who gave her a painting and told me his name was Vicente Rojo. I had come down with a clear case of prosopagnosia.
I had to get in touch with Isabel and tell her that the man who thought he was Vicente Rojo was crazy. A fraud, an imposter. The idea that I wouldn’t have to write the article for the newspaper was a relief, but it also made me sad. The feeling of having been deceived was much more complicated, and as such, much more difficult to describe. I could fall into my habitual state of victimhood and arrive at the conclusion that human beings are toxic to one another, and that there are many ways to destroy the stage upon which other people are supposed to play out their lives. It was much more soothing to conclude that he was crazy, because then there would be no point wasting energy trying to understand his motives, or hoping for an explanation. However, all these days I had spent thinking I had to write the article about the artist had made my job in the communications department of the insurance company much more bearable. That had been because I thought I was finally learning important truths while I was immersed in Vicente Rojo’s world, where human beings are linked to the essential material of life. In Vicente Rojo’s world, colours, which are nothing more than reflections, can shake our souls and reveal things we don’t see at first glance. In his world, it is possible to live alongside intellectuals and geniuses who have different ways of explaining things and can offer us comfort because everything they have learned moves us closer to truth, harmony, and peace. All of this translated into a feeling like satisfaction, the tranquillity that comes from feeling like you are capable of giving shape to tiny events that little by little fill the void. It doesn’t matter if it’s a bottomless abyss, because the truly transcendental things are the tiny events we create ourselves.