Portrait of a Man (Le Condottière) Read online

  Wind up the phone. Dring dring dring. You have to trust that Otto is outside at the tunnel exit otherwise he will have heard the office telephone going click as you make the call … Good afternoon, operator, this is Dampierre 15 on the line. I don’t think my phone is working properly. One of my friends insists he called me three or four times this morning – he got here by car this afternoon – but I didn’t hear anything … Can you call me back in ten seconds’ time? Ten seconds, alright. Yes, operator, Dampierre 15. Madera is the name. Thank you, operator, speak to you soon.

  Ten seconds. You hang up. Your heart is beating. You look at your wristwatch. Nine. Heads or tails? Eight. What are you betting on it working? My kingdom for a. Seven. Six. If logic is in charge then it has to work. Four. But then. I killed. Three. Madera. Two. Now time speeds up. Go in a flash. Zero. It’s ringing. Far far far away. He’s heard it. He’s running. He’s sure it’s Rufus. Give him time to turn the corner. One. Two three. Take away the plank. Pick up your bag. Put your head out. There you are. There you are. There you are! Run! One two three four five metres. Thank you and goodbye. Ten eleven twelve. Slide under the fence. There you are. Don’t come a cropper in the grass. Run. Say hello to the Eiffel Tower for me. Don’t look round don’t look round don’t look round.

  But now everything was dropping and slipping away from him, perhaps as a rebound from a hope that had been nurtured for too long. The life that for a moment he had thought he held in his hands, that compact, dense sum of collected memories, his quest, had shattered into a million pieces, into self-directing meteorites, each with its own life from now on, maybe still connected to his own but ruled by mysterious laws whose constants he did not know. Once again memories sharpened and then suddenly exploded and split up into a myriad impressions, into fragments of life it would have been fruitless to try to make sense of, give direction to, or separate from each other. Splinters and shreds. As if the landscape of his past life had just suffered a cataclysm. As if he no longer had the world in his arms. Did not yet have the world in his arms. He had entered a new era.

  This deep chaos was like the chords played by an orchestra before the conductor mounts the podium, with each instrument practising the first bars of its own part, tuning strings, reeds, valves, trying out scales, testing chords as if to underscore the inorganic caterwaul out of which, very soon, because they will all be under the direction of a conductor who will assert his presence, because they will go back to and follow the coherence of the composer’s score, there will spring, in reimposed silence and with the house lights down, the living work itself, the voluntary burst of the trumpets and horns, the plenitude of the quartet and the rhythm that the timpani extract from time and turn into a tempo. If that were so, if that should turn out to be so, then, because he would finally have plumbed the lowest depth of his own madness, his acknowledgement of chaos would finally give birth to a firm grasp of himself and of the world in all its splendour and strength. Has he won? Not yet. He’s free and on an empty road. He’s walking on without knowing where he’s going. It’s dark. It’s just before eight o’clock. Madera is dead. In the laboratory, in a corner, the absurd, abandoned, already dusty Portrait of a Man is scowling. A useless gesture or a step in the right direction? He does not know. He nods his head. He is cold …

  You’re going to walk to Châteauneuf. You’ll get a taxi to take you on to Dreux. You won’t catch a train. Too big a risk that you’ll bump right into Otto waiting for you at the station. You’ll look for a lorry driver willing to give you a lift to Paris. You’ll be in Paris tonight. What then? You’ll see. You don’t know. Are you scared?

  For years on end the dead weight of days going by. A story as old as the hills? Your arm raised … Day after day, and then this business, this fate, this caricature of a destiny … The end. Avoidable, or unavoidable? Then what? Then nothing. Not enough time to think. Not enough time even to know. You wanted to live. You are living. You wanted to leave. You got out. Madera is dead and Rufus is miles away. So what? Now you’re on your own in the middle of the night. What’s the point of consciousness? Were you happy, Gaspard Winckler? Are you happy? Will you be happy? Night looks like nothing on earth. You’re walking by the side of the road. You’re flagging down the few cars that go past. They’re not stopping. How long will you go on walking? Are you going to die in the ditch? Are you going to lie down in the middle of the road in the hope that a grey Porsche, hunting you down at 120 kilometres per hour, will run you over without even noticing? Where is Rufus? Has he got back to his hotel? Mr Rufus Koenig likes to go to bed early. But he’s not going to get a lot of shut-eye tonight …

  You’re getting on my nerves, Gaspard Winckler. You weren’t much good except at forgeries. Now you’re free, what are you going to be able do? What kind of nonsense? It worries you. You’d like to understand. There’s nothing to understand. It’s too cold to think. You’ll think about it tomorrow. Or never. You’ll find out, one day …

  In the half-light, to begin with, he had used each hand to put the glove on the other. He had done all he had planned … He had gone up the stairs, step by step. He had pushed the door open in silence. The thick carpet had muffled the noise of his feet. With his left hand he had grabbed Madera by the neck and pulled his head back while his right hand, the one that had been gripping the razor for some time already – a little too tightly – thrust it forward and in an insanely rapid slash slit the neck that presented itself to him, a thick neck with fleshy folds overhanging the white silk shirt. And blood spurted out as if from an abscess that had burst. Open anthrax. Blood streaming out, covering everything in a thick pulsing stream, coating the desk, the calendar, the white telephone, the glass panel, the carpet, the armchair. Blood, black and warm, as alive as a snake or a squid, trickling between the chair legs. And a sudden burst of joy, like a cannon shot, a joy bursting out like a drumroll, like a trumpet encore. That total, radiant, crazy feeling of joy. Incomprehensible. So comprehensible.

  So comprehensible … Isn’t that right, Gaspard Winckler?

  Foundering brutally at full steam, as if the whole world or, if not the world, then the moderately sickening universe of the room were plunging into the void, the laboratory, that immense and empty studio, re-emerged as another kind of prison: a microcosm featuring contradictions drawn, quartered and individually displayed on a wall, as if, in fine, those evil, clunky reproductions of the Condottiere on the high, sheer walls, those reduplicated images of a face of triumph and control, were, on reflection, ill-matched by the living image of failure on the unfinished panel set on its special easel with its four corners protected by a triple sheath of cotton wool, rag cloth and metal angle-piece at the carefully contrived focal point of six small spotlights: it didn’t show unity restored, the mastery of the world or inalterable permanence, but instead, a mere frozen flash – as if catching sight of itself in a moment of clarity – portraying the fundamental anguish of blind force, the sourness of cruel might, and doubt. It made it seem that Antonello da Messina had wanted, in total disregard of the most obvious law of history and four hundred years before time, to express in their incomplete fullness all the anguished contradictions of consciousness. Every contradiction under the sun seemed to have settled into the mirror of the face portrayed, but they were just absurd, insignificant contradictions precisely because they were expressed through techniques that should have only ever been adequate to portray unambiguous certainties. The painting did not show a warlord looking beyond the portraitist towards the world with all the irony, cruelty and impassiveness of a mind at one with itself; it did not reveal a painter who had summoned up in palpable form and structure above and beyond his model the eternal, rational stability of a Renaissance: it was the double, triple, quadruple game of a fake artist pastiching his own pastiche, but by transcending pastiche and reaching out beyond his subject and beyond his own intellectual grasp and ambition, finding only the murky ambiguity of his own self. Impassiveness had turned into panic, the relaxed firmness of
the muscles had come out as lockjaw, the look of confidence had become arrogance and the firmness of the mouth now expressed revenge. Every detail was no longer an integral element of an irreducibly transcendent totality, but just a flimsy and fleeting trace of a man’s will strained to breaking point, a will that was itself rendered untrue by its development, wearing ever thinner as the superficial impression of completeness gave way to distorting elements which by virtue of their power and ambiguity undermined, point by point, the apparent harmony of the ensemble. This was not an artist grasping the world and his own self in a single glance; it was the somewhat haphazard and decidedly murky back-and-forth of a constructed ambiguity, of a hoax, of a crude piece of fakery, where the artist was just a minor demon of truth made uncertain, the clumsy demiurge of a structure so fragile that hardly had it emerged from chaos than it sank back into it with all the inhuman force of suffered defeats, half-intentional mistakes, and self-consciously broken bounds. All the meticulous hierarchy of the lighting, the admirable layout of the planes, the superb implementation of technique – the glues and plaster used for the gesso duro, the mixing dishes, the herbs and soils, the spatulas and brushes, the rags, preparatory drawings and trial canvases, the pencil sketches, charcoal sketches, pastel paints, caulks, oils, glazes, eyeshades, magnifying glasses, and arm-supports – were only symptoms of the project’s futility. From the centre of the painted panel shone forth sacrilegious self-satisfaction. In the now empty laboratory the failure had been entire.

  II

  “I’m lost, Streten. I’ve lost the thread. It was all a terrible mess, I feel I’ve lost everything, as if it’s all collapsed and I’ve got nothing left. I don’t know what I was trying to do, I don’t know where I am anymore. Things seemed to happen too fast, I couldn’t keep up, I had no time to take a different path, it all happened outside of me – do you see?”

  “What were you after? What were you looking for?”

  “I don’t know … To make a break … make a clean break. Smash everything. Leave nothing behind me …”

  “That’s what you did …”

  “Perhaps … But I don’t understand it, I don’t understand now why it was the only thing I could do … I should have burst out laughing, don’t you see, I should have felt relieved, released … But I didn’t … It had no meaning; it was completely gratuitous. It didn’t add up to anything. One move too many, a step too far. A feeling that I should have stopped beforehand … Madera’s death had to have a meaning, but wanting to make it meaningful just made the muddle worse … I was digging a hole in the wall of the laboratory, I didn’t know why; I told myself I was in mortal danger, but it wasn’t true. Otto would never have killed me, and if Rufus had turned up he would surely not have turned me over to the police. So everything I was doing was absurd. Everything I’d done. Not just killing Madera, but everything I’d done for years. I didn’t get it. I was in a complete panic; the only things I managed to tell myself were idiotic kinds of encouragement, or puns. Or dumb questions. I got lost in the details. I just sneered at myself and the next minute felt sorry for myself. One minute something would depress me, the next minute I thought it was all quite funny. Then I got out, started running, got to the road, and began to walk. All of a sudden on the road in the middle of the night I felt lonely. It didn’t make any sense. Something I didn’t feel, that I thought I would never feel. All of a sudden, utterly inexplicably, loneliness. Fear of being alone. And it went on all night, and the next day, and the days after. At home, on the train, on the boat that brought me to Split, and all the next night on the train, until I got here. Do you see? Not just any kind of loneliness. Loneliness like Jérôme’s at Annemasse: complete, unremitting aloneness, because there was nothing for me to hang on to, because I had no idea how I was going to live, what I was going to do, how I would fill my days, who I would see, where I would stay. Completely at a loss. In utter disarray …”

  “And now?”

  “Nothing’s changed, although I’m calmer … It’s easier, that’s all …”

  “Are you going to stay here?”

  “Maybe … If I can find work … It’s not very important, for the time being I’ve got enough money not to need to work for a few months.”

  “Are you going to go back to being a forger?”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know … Because everything is logical, after all … If I hadn’t been a forger none of this would have happened …”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know … It’s obvious …”

  “Obvious?”

  “Yes … more or less obvious. Forging isn’t a trade. It’s more like a rut. You get stuck in it. You get drowned. You think things are still possible … But you get tripped up by your own rope-trick. Things don’t exist anymore … It’s difficult to explain … How can I say … You always do the same thing, you explore the same paths over and over, you hit the same blocks again and again. You think you overcome some of them, but actually each time you just dig yourself in deeper. You never get to being yourself, you’re always someone else. Over and over again. For ever. With no hope of ever being anything more than a perfect duplicator. It had no purpose, it didn’t lead anywhere …”

  “It earned you a living …”

  “Sure … It also provided an income for Jérôme and Rufus and Madera. But that’s not a reason. It didn’t mean anything …”

  “You chose to live that way …”

  “Yes, I did choose it … How could I have known? I’ve been a forger for twelve years. I’ve been piling up falsities for twelve years …”

  “You killed Madera because you wanted to stop being a forger?”

  “Why not? For that reason, and for other reasons. For that reason amongst others, will that do? I really don’t know … I killed him, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “That’s too simple. You must have had something in your mind when you decided to kill him.”

  “Why should I have had anything in my mind? I wasn’t thinking about anything, I was thinking about everything and nothing … You have to understand … It wasn’t something normal … It wasn’t something I wanted to do, it was a thing I was doing. I didn’t think, I hadn’t ever thought about it … I don’t know how to put this … it was compulsory, I couldn’t say no to it, I couldn’t keep on saying no to it. It was a sort of final solution, do you see, the last possible act …”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was right there, because I couldn’t stand him, I was completely sick of him, because I couldn’t put up with anything … You think it’s easy … You think it’ll sort itself out … you think there are straightforward solutions, and happy endings … But there aren’t … Nothing just comes to you … You do something, anything … not knowing why … But after a while the thing is behind you, it’s altered you, and you have to take it into account. You have to justify it and claim it as your own. Accept it.”

  “What thing?”

  “Whatever. The Portrait of a Man, for instance. Coming back from Gstaad in the middle of the night. Or Madera’s death. Any one of the things I’ve done over the last twelve years … it was too easy. I had layers of protection wrapped around me. I didn’t have to answer to anybody. Always incognito. Always innocent. And then it went wrong. Now I have to start again and I have to explain, I have to explain every last act, every last choice, every last decision I make. For the first time in my life I’ve got no protection. Don’t have any more alibis. For twelve years I never asked myself any questions apart from questions about the fakes I had on my worksheet. Now I find I was guilty …”

  “Guilty of what?”

  “Of anything you like … Of Madera’s death and my own acts … Guilty of having slipped behind him with a razor in my hand, of having slit his throat. Guilty of not knowing the reason why and of not wanting to know the reason why. Guilty of letting myself get dragged into this barren adventure, of not having tr
ied to understand it sooner, of not having tried to change the course of events … How am I supposed to know? … It got to a point where everything collapsed in one go, a point where all I could see was Madera’s death, because everything had come crashing down, and I had to take my revenge!”

  “On him?”

  “On him. I had to take it out on someone. On him, because someone had to pay. Rufus and Madera had been propping me up for years and doing nothing to let me get away, quite the opposite, they had been doing all they could to ensure I had everything I needed and felt safe. And they were living off me, off my work and my illusions. They’d played along with me for years, cultivated my penchant for living incognito, the absurd wish I had only to live behind multiple masks, to make a life out of hiding behind the remains of dead men. They’d been trying for years not to help me but to get me to sink deeper, they’d been watching me go under …”

  “Why were you going under?”

  “I was living in a false world, Streten, I was living in a world without sense. I spent my time in galleries and studios. I spent my whole time making a precise study of acts that others had performed long before, and performed better, in the vain but well-paid belief that I could match them perfectly. Listen. I did not exist. Gaspard Winckler was a name without content. No police force was out to get me, nobody even knew who I was. I had no country, no friends, no aims. Once a year I did a genuine restoration job for the Art Museum in Geneva. I was supposed to be off sick for the rest of the time. Where my money came from nobody knew. I was allegedly on Rufus’s payroll as the picture restorer at his art gallery, but everyone knew that the Koenig Gallery hardly ever needed to do restoration work on its holdings. I was the world’s greatest forger because nobody knew I was a forger … That’s all. That’s enough …”