I said, “Thank you.”
He said, “Let’s see what you can do, then. Draw me.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I want you to draw a portrait of me. Here, use this!”
He slid across the table a single sheet of 150-pound drawing paper, 10 x 14. He assumed, correctly, that I had a drawing implement on me.
I had a pencil, but I figured this guy would be impressed by bravura, and so I used my fountain pen. Interesting face anyway, maybe in his early fifties, that French kind of nose, a long downward-sloping bridge with a little blob on the end, wide mouth with full lips, small dark eyes with generous pouches, oval chin, thick neck, hair dark, coarse like horsehair, a little gray at the sides, the face of a corrupt cardinal in the reign of the Sun King.
So-pen held vertically out at arm’s length, a cliché, but you really use it to transfer the proportions from life to the paper: the general shape of the face, the triangle formed by the eyes, and the mouth has to be perfect or you won’t get a likeness; start with those three dots and then four more to mark the top of the head, the sides, the chin, then the tip of the nose, another dot, and then the edges of the eyes and the mouth. You grow the drawing on the page, the eyes, the mouth, then the shadows formed by the mass of the nose and the lips. I worked for about half an hour, using a wetted finger to smear in the gray tones, and when I reached the point where any further potching around would’ve wrecked it, I slid the paper across the table.
He looked, he showed it to his partners, there was the usual release of tension you get when a likeness works. Magic, a little scary. It looked like him, cool and brutal; I hadn’t made it pretty and I could see he liked it and was irritated by it at the same time. Yes, that’s me, but who are you, you little pisser, to see me?
He slid the sheet into a leather portfolio on the table without the pretense of asking for it, nor did I object. And that was the meeting. A few more minutes, mainly pleasantries of a sort, and we were out of there. Back in the car, I asked Krebs why he’d done that, made me draw.
“Because, as I have told you earlier, they wanted to see you. And they wished to be certain you were really this marvelous artist. If you were really Charles Wilmot.”
“They wouldn’t take your word for it?”
“No. These are men who survive by being sure. Suppose I had brought along an imposter?”
“Why would you’ve done that, for God’s sake?”
“Oh, perhaps to preserve the real Wilmot for my own purposes,” he said casually, “and therefore to identify a valueless person as the artist. A dummy. Now, however, in case they decide to get rid of you, they know who you are.”
Some days followed on this event-three, ten? I can’t recall how many; people who don’t have schedules have that problem. Where did the week go? The way we lived cut us off from the rhythms of daily life, plus in my particular case my time sense has been ripped out of my brain, trampled on the ground, and stuck back in my skull upside down and crossways. I had no cell phone anymore, so I was as isolated as a man living in the seventeenth century. I could theoretically have made a call from the hotel phone, but I had been told not to in the strongest terms, and of course they’d know if I did.
The larger conspiracy continued. According to Krebs, Mark had duly “discovered” the hidden Velázquez and quietly summoned experts from Yale, from Berkeley; learned heads were put together, and tests were made. As we’d expected, the forensic tests checked out, the thing was deemed of seventeenth-century origin. The provenance, of course, was flawless. The Palacio Liria cried foul, but what could they do? The painting was bought in good faith as a Bassano, the museum knew it was a fake Bassano, and the fact that there was a real Velázquez hiding under it meant that they’d been hoist by their own petard, the swindler swindled. And the learned heads had looked at the art itself, the brushwork and so on, and concluded that yes, it must be so, this was Velázquez indeed, hooray.
There were objectors, of course, there always are, but mainly because they couldn’t swallow the subject: the dour Don Diego could not have painted so naughty a picture. Such people, we understood, would be looking for any hint of scandal, any hint of forgery, and so now was the most vulnerable hour, both for the Venus and for me. Krebs seemed to want to preserve my life for reasons of his own, and I was more than willing to play along with that, although I was kind of curious why.
One morning Franco and I set out for the Prado, nice day, spring in Madrid, not too hot, flowers blooming in the boulevard planters, pleasant scents abroad in the air from the botanical garden nearby. Stood for a couple of minutes in contemplation by the big blackened bronze statue of my guy that sits in front of the museum, wanted him to get down off his chair, fling his arm over my shoulder, and give me some fatherly advice, and for a second my head got all wobbly, smeared vision, and the bulk of the museum became vague, and I was looking through the park to the palace of Buen Retiro as it’d been in the seventeenth century, just for a second there, and-something I never did before-I kind of put my foot on the brake and came back to now. A new skill? Useful.
I avoided Velázquez’s paintings that day and spent my time on the top floor with the Goyas. Okay, here’s a guy came up the hard way, hustling commissions from crappy little convents and provincial churches, spent years doing cartoons for a tapestry workshop, comes to Madrid, gets named painter to the king, studies Velázquez, figures, oh, this is perfection, the perfect realization of a baroque world still intact-honor, glory, nobility, all that-and so he says, screw it, he’s going to paint the shattered world we see in dreams and also the world in his time, the bleeding subject of the nightmares brought forth by the dreams of reason. Here’s his portrait of the royal family, the polar opposite of Las Meninas, silly marionettes in a glass case, no air, their feet barely touch the ground. And his majas, they’re dolls, no one ever painted a nude so badly: the arms are wrong, the tits are insane, the head’s skewed on the neck, and yet this doll made up of spare parts has an incredible erotic authority. The pubic hair helps, the first real crotch in the history of European art. A mystery, but it works.
Franco, discreetly accompanying me, stared long at this one; it’s his favorite, obviously, and why not?
What was I thinking here? Death and madness, my Goyesque period, utter loneliness; about Lotte, she’d save me if she could, if I let her, the realest thing I know, her and the kids; and also about my dad-always when I think about Goya-about what he could’ve been, how he saw the war, why he didn’t harness that rage and bitterness into art, an exact contemporary of Francis Bacon, that’s who he should’ve been. Instead he decided to be almost as famous as Norman Rockwell.
And there I was in front of Goya’s Cronus Eating One of His Sons, the mad glare, bulging eyeballs, as he bites his victim’s head off, nothing else like it in art, the putrid yellow flesh of the titan in a light cast from hell, and then a moment of disembodiment and I’m gone, out of the Prado and back to my father’s studio, age ten or so. I’m not supposed to be back in the racks where he keeps all his old stuff, but I’m at the curious age; I want to know who is this titan controlling my world. Smell of paper and canvas and glue, top note of his cigars and turps from the studio on the other side of the closed door.
On tiptoe I reach and pull down a set of sketchbooks tied with twine. They’re exciting, secret, they have a history, beat up, the covers scored and dirty, one’s been in the water, rippled and stained. I open the twine and there’s his war, Okinawa, planes, ships, tanks, all the beautiful death machines, faces of young marines caught in unmanly terror, landscapes with shell craters, dressing stations lit by battle lanterns, the masked surgeons looking like figures from Bosch as they probe the ruined youths. And page after page of the dead, American and Japanese, lovingly rendered in watercolor, all the wonderful ways that high explosive, fast-flying metal, and flame can turn mankind into garbage: eviscerated bodies; exposed coils of gut, impossibly long, stretched out on the earth; smashed faces, eyeballs hanging from bloody stalks; the peculiar arty black forms, hideously “modern,” created when human beings incinerate, things I’d never imagined. No one ever sees this stuff, it’s like feces, it can’t be shown in public; you have to be there.