“What’s the date, Sophia? Today’s date.”
“It’s the third of March.”
“Okay, then everything from mid-December onward is a complete blank.”
“But, you will see doctors…it will come back, yes?”
“It could,” I said, carefully, not believing it at all. “You could help me if you sort of told me what I was like, what I’ve been like, how we got together and all, what I’ve been doing.”
It took some prodding, because amnesia is so terribly threatening. Our lives are constructed so much of shared memories that we tend to panic when our partners in these refuse to confirm our own. But in a little while, when she saw I wasn’t going to suddenly remember, she began to tell me her tale. She’d started to pose the day after we’d gone out to Guido’s. It was pleasant enough. We’d talked as I worked, just chat at first, but later I’d told her something about my life and she’d told me something about hers, her family, her lovers, her ambitions for herself and the boy. We worked in the morning and then had lunch with the ménage. She related anecdotes: Baldassare and his liver, and the home remedies he’d marshaled in its support; about Franco and his vanity and his women and his dark past; about little Enrico and his teachers and friends. A domestic life in all its Italianate richness. It had apparently been a happy time.
And I’d told her about my family in the States, how I was still more or less carrying a torch for my wife. She knew it was a long shot, but she’d liked me. She thought I was gentle, a decent man, a genius with paint. She admired me. She didn’t care that I was hung up on another woman. Any man worth having had other women in his life, but I was here now and she had a feeling for me, one she hadn’t felt in a long time. And so it happened. One day, when the light had gone, she’d risen naked from the couch and embraced me, and I was hesitant, like a young girl, which she found charming, but in the end I’d fallen back on the couch with her, and we’d made love and it was wonderful. And so on, for the next months, and she liked how I was with Enrico, he’d opened up so much, was always asking if Chaz was to be his new babbo.
At that point she was crying, searching my face for some sign that I’d shared this life, but there was none. I mean, I wasn’t being callous, there was just nothing there-she was a nice woman with whom I’d had one date, and so I steered the conversation as gently as I could to the painting.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “you did your painting. You don’t remember that either?”
“No. But I’d like to see it now. Maybe it would snap me back or something.”
“It’s not here,” she said. “Baldassare has taken it to the laboratory on Via Portina, an industrial area, you understand? He needs high vacuums and ovens, special equipments for this work, the aging.”
“What’s the painting like?”
“What is it like? It is like Velázquez. It is Velázquez, the most astonishing thing I have ever seen. Baldassare says it is a miracle.”
And she told me what I had painted, and I recalled it well, having just finished it a few weeks ago in subjective time, in Rome, in 1650. Painting’s not just in the eye and the head, it’s in the body too, like a dance-the hand, the arm, the back, the way you lean forward and sideways to check out a passage, the standing away and moving close. So when you look at something you’ve done, you have all the intimate body memory, and in this case I had a whole other set of memories, the feel and scent of this particular woman’s skin, the density of Leonora’s living flesh in my hand and under me and on top of me, the squirming damp reality of it. And more than that-this is even harder to explain or even to think about-I had the sense memories of somebody else, somebody else doing the painting. The brain fucks with your head, but the body never lies, or so I’d thought.
For the next week I was a complete wreck, afraid to go to sleep, afraid I might wake up again not me. I spent most of these first days after my return wandering along the river, up to Castel Sant’Angelo and down to Ponte Testaccio, exhausting myself, drinking in a bar before returning home. Most of me was still in 1650: I could recall dozens, hundreds of details, more than I could recollect of the last year of my so-called real life. Maybe the seventeenth century made for a denser, more vivid existence: I mean street scenes, talking to cardinals, servants, what I ate at banquets, the talk at diplomatic receptions, being with Leonora.
Yeah, her. My body, my mind, my heart, if you want to call it that, was burdened with a relationship that I never had, with a woman who died over three hundred years ago. So what was the real story? Obviously, an unprecedented reaction to salvinorin, combined with amnesia, also drug related. My brain was damaged, we already knew that, and since the only deep emotional attachment I’ve ever had was to Lotte, somehow I conflated all that with thinking about Velázquez and came up with this imagined life, and there you had it, an explanation that Shelly Zubkoff would swallow without gagging.
Another reason for staying out of the house was that Sophia started crying nearly every time she looked at me, and it freaked me out, because she’d had a love affair with a ghost, a demon lover, while I’d been making love to Leonora three centuries ago.
One day she wasn’t there and her mother told me she’d gone with the kid to visit friends in Bologna. The signora had been crying too, I could see, and through the barrier of language she let me know that I had been a complete shitbag.
You have to understand that part of the problem here was my complete isolation. I’d checked my cell phone after coming out of the past and learned that there were no messages at all on it. Not one. Jackie Moreau was dead; Mark was, well, Mark, not a sympathetic ear; Charlie was God knew where in Africa, and Lotte was incommunicado. It was like I’d been jailed by the secret police.
So I called my ex-wife one evening, and as soon as she heard my voice she said, “The only thing I want to hear from you is that you’re getting psychiatric help.”
I said, “Hey, I’m planning to, honestly, but look-I’ve, um, been painting like mad and Krebs is coming tomorrow to check out the work and if he likes it, that’s a million bucks to me. Lotte, imagine what we’re going to do with-”
But she wouldn’t listen. She said, “You know, it makes no sense to talk to a maniac, and it hurts me to hear you rave like this. Call me when you are getting the medical help you need.”
And she hung up. Isolation complete, then. Yes, good thing I didn’t tell her about what I’d been doing, or imagining I was doing, for the last three months. She might’ve really been annoyed. So, okay, I was crazy, but you know, just then I didn’t feel crazy. I mean, I was functional as an artist, because apparently I had pulled off this huge coup of a forgery. I felt crazy in New York, but now I didn’t. And frankly I was dazzled by the money and the promise of more. It’s the rule that if you’re rich enough you can’t be that crazy. So I really looked forward to Krebs coming for that reason, and also because, now that I thought about it, he was my only remaining friend.
Now came the big day. That morning Baldassare went out and brought my picture back from the secret forgery lab. He set it up on a display easel in the parlor, covered with a black velvet cloth, and he was guarding it like a dragon, wouldn’t let anyone have a peek before Krebs arrived. Franco drove to the airport to meet him, and while he did that I got fed up with the tension in the house and went out to take a long walk, east to the Tiber and along the Ripa and back through the Porta Portese in the ruins of the old walls. It wasn’t quite warm yet but spring was happening in Rome; you could smell the river and the trees on the boulevards were greening up and blossoming, if they were that kind of tree.