The most interesting part, however, was what came next.
When asked if she pleaded guilty, the accused replied that she didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty, precisely because she considered it all part of her artistic oeuvre, and art, as has been known since the Greeks, is a sovereign realm beyond good and evil, beyond moral and legal judgment. She emphasized that she had not received any monetary benefit from her little interventions. To support that preliminary defense, she decided to cite, as precedent, the piece Happening para un jabalí difunto (Happening for a Dead Boar), produced in 1966 by the Argentine artists Raúl Escari, Roberto Jacoby, and Eduardo Costa. The artists had managed to get the popular media to report on an event that never occurred, something that could have been but wasn’t. If that was art, McCallister argued, then so was her project.
* * *
I spent that afternoon reading about the lunacies of Escari, Jacoby, and Costa. I tried to avoid, at all costs, thinking of Giovanna, of Virginia McCallister, of the story that an old man in a mining town had recently told me. I found a manifesto online in which the three artists issued an appeal to imagine a new form of art, one based on the way mass society produced meaning through the circulation of information. An event, they said, was no longer merely the event itself, but rather the images the media produced of the event. They wanted to show the world that a nonexistent occurrence could easily exist if the media wanted it to. I liked the idea. I remembered the old woman who used to sit in a Manhattan bar at nightfall to read obsolete newspapers, and it seemed beautiful: inundating reality with small fictions, interrupting the world with little lies that, days later, an insomniac would read about in a Lebanese bar. It occurred to me that maybe universal history was similar: a great lie in which historians had conspired against us. A great lie we would only wise up to once it was too late.
* * *
Two days later Tancredo called me. The initial article that he’d given me, which the journalist may have written in reckless enthusiasm, had left out a fundamental detail. The writer had forgotten to mention where the events had taken place, a piece of information that, though irrelevant for many, held special importance for me. Authorities had apprehended Virginia McCallister in an enormous abandoned high-rise on the outskirts of San Juan, Puerto Rico. She lived there alongside five hundred poor families who, after builders had abandoned the structure at the start of the decade, had decided to take it upon themselves to convert the tower into housing. According to Tancredo, the story of the tower was just as crazy as the artist’s crimes. A Russian billionaire had ordered construction to start in the early 1990s, but it was halted when the billionaire’s network of fraud was exposed, and the building had ended up in the hands of a series of foreign bankers and investors. By then the tower already had more than twenty-five floors. Unable to decide what to do with that immense, half-finished structure, the investors had decided to abandon the project until they came up with a plan. A year later, when they received the first letter complaining of the initial illegal invasions, there was little they could do: for months, more than a hundred poor families had occupied the place, building impressive apartments complete with bathrooms and dividing walls, kitchens and living rooms. Lacking elevators, they had even started a ramp system for motorcycles that carried them to different floors. The investors preferred, then, to let time pass. The right moment would come. Two years later, when the government tried to mediate in the matter, their agents couldn’t even get in. By then, the place was a true city: shops, barbers, dentists, day care, general stores, drug corners, and even a brothel. A small city built into the ruins of that immense tower.
* * *
When they caught her, Virginia McCallister had been living in the building for almost a decade, among hundreds of families who surely looked at her with suspicion. According to the second article Tancredo showed me, published in a local paper three days after McCallister’s arrest, it had been one of those neighbors who turned her in. She’d knocked on the door one day to discuss a community matter, and, finding her neighbor away, she’d gone in and found herself looking at a bulletin board covered with newspaper articles, which reminded her of the detective series she’d watched as a child. Her first thought was that her neighbor was a mole, an undercover agent sent by the government to gather information on the tower’s inhabitants. Looking at the clippings, she realized this was something else: these weren’t notes about the community, or even local articles. Dozens of heavily underlined columns about matters of global reach, which the woman had linked by arrows that seemed to trace a worldwide conspiracy. She grew convinced that this strange woman, with her black clothes and arrogant airs, couldn’t be a spy. Too obvious, too glaring: spies weren’t gringos and they didn’t wear luxury clothes. So a week later she marched into the station and blew the whistle. When they asked her under what suspicion she was filing a complaint, the neighbor merely said she didn’t know, but that the woman was up to something strange. When she heard the officer’s laughter, she threw out a final warning: “You laugh, sir, but that gringa has bulletin boards covered with articles in her room, and hundreds of notebooks everywhere. You laugh, but something fishy’s going on there.” Then she left. Later, when boredom brought the scene back to his mind, the policeman decided it would be worthwhile to take the clue as an excuse to venture into the tower’s labyrinthine world. Five hours later, when he and his partner entered the building, he found himself blown away by a macrocosm that seemed to obey its own rules: a world drawn to a scale, as if some painter—bohemian, drugged, and poor—had dreamed it up one magnificent afternoon. Like in a futuristic dream, everything fit there, even poverty itself, sketched on the face of a bum he met near the entrance. They were welcomed by a small guard, a man with a salt-and-pepper mustache. When he saw them, he turned off an old TV that was showing a horse race and asked them for the necessary documents. They mollified him by mentioning the suspicions they’d heard about one of the neighbors.
“Yeah, that old lady is something strange. She arrived one New Year’s, settled in with dozens of computers, and since then barely any of us have talked to her. I think she’s crazier than a loon.” Ten minutes later, after a motorcycle ride that carried them through the strange tower’s mazelike twists and turns, they came upon a door painted entirely black. At the third knock, Virginia McCallister opened it without betraying an ounce of fear.
* * *
They called her “la gringa.” She’d arrived on January 15, 2001, when the tower’s inhabitants consisted of a hundred vagrants, a few dozen heroin addicts, and fifteen families living in extreme poverty. She’d turned up one day along with two men, and after two weeks they had built a private home; then the two men left and she stayed put, living in the tower but enclosed in a carapace that no one had breached until the day those two policemen knocked at her door three times and she opened up, ready to tell them everything. All it took, once inside, was for one of them to ask about the articles adorning the wall, and she started to spill: she said she was an artist and that her works were about the media. When she realized the cops were looking at her like she was crazy, she elaborated. She told them, always with her eyes fixed on a little cup of tea she had poured but didn’t drink, that her art was political and it followed the tradition of Escari, Jacoby, and Costa, three Argentine artists who had conjured up a happening where there’d been none. She told them she invented false news items and inserted them among the true ones. She mentioned three news stories that neither policeman had heard of, and when she saw from their lost looks that they still didn’t understand, she repeated the Argentines’ names, then mentioned, very much in passing, the only detail that managed to resonate: her interventions had cost the stock market over a hundred million dollars. She finished with an example: she told a strange story of a mountain in the middle of a jungle, and how on the mountain a boy said he had seen strange things, sacred images. She mentioned some names, including the boy’s, and explained that on that mountain, hundreds
of foreigners paid homage to that child. She told them how it was enough to say, for example, that among the pilgrims present on that mountain in the last month of 1976 was the current vice president of a powerful company, and the market’s course changed. She told it all with utter elegance, with a grace that seemed innate, and the two cops could only think that this was a very sophisticated, yes, but crazy old lady, crazy as could be. She told her story quickly and without pause, as if each word relieved her of a very old weight, as if she’d been waiting a long time for someone to come and ask her what she was up to. And then, on finishing, she said goodbye to them with the excuse that she had to get back to work. It was around two in the afternoon when the policemen left the tower laughing about the absurdity of what they’d just heard.
* * *
Tancredo took care to fill in the details of her capture. He had called the journalist who’d written that second article and found out the rest of the story.
That same night, one of the cops, unable to sleep, had lain there thinking about the strange scene he’d witnessed that afternoon, and in particular about a book he’d seen as he was leaving: a voluminous tome whose cover showed an old photograph of a model with the same sharp, refined face as the woman who had just told them a bunch of nonsense. He remembered the title: Virginia McCallister, 1955–1975. Puzzled, he thought about the name she had given when she said goodbye: Viviana Luxembourg. Something didn’t fit. More out of boredom and insomnia than real interest, he got out of bed, sat down at the computer, and searched for the name online: Virginia McCallister. And then he saw dozens of photographs that were unmistakably of the same person he and his partner had spoken to hours earlier, photographs in every pose, in bathing suits and ball gowns, beside celebrities and politicians. A beautiful woman, with long legs and a finely chiseled face—the same face, no doubt about it, that he’d seen that very day, giving a delirious speech.
* * *
Then he looked up Viviana Luxembourg. He found very little. He went back to his previous search, to the images of Virginia McCallister. Then he looked at the news. That was where he found the detail that would keep him awake until well into morning: a series of articles that documented the 1976 disappearance of Virginia McCallister.
* * *
From two until five in the morning, possessed by a curiosity that exacerbated his insomnia, Sergeant Alexis Burgos read everything he could find about the disappearance. On November 23 of that year, the family—Virginia McCallister; her husband, the Israeli photographer Yoav Toledano; and their young daughter, Carolyn—took a flight from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to San José, Costa Rica. Their return was set for December 2. When Virginia’s agent called ten days later, he was surprised when no one answered. He tried again the next day, and again no answer. He decided to visit. He found the door open, the house empty, the dog fierce and hungry. Then he figured the family had decided to extend their stay, but would surely return soon. He went back every day that week. Every day it was the same: he rang the bell, waited for the reply that never came, and then went in, and every day he saw that no one had returned. On the tenth day of his vigil, as had become routine, he fed the dog. Then, tired of waiting, he picked up the phone and called the police. Two days later, still without a word from family or the police, the papers published the first article: “Virginia McCallister and Family, Missing.” It was accompanied by a family photo showing the three of them—mother, father, daughter—at some New York gala. Wrapped in the dense wee morning hours, the sergeant looked at that photo and thought that, without a doubt, this was a model family: beautiful, warm, successful. He, on the other hand, had no one. He deflected the thought by searching for more information.
What he found helped complete the story. After that first article, published in a New York paper, the following months saw dozens of follow-up articles in all the major media. They talked about the couple’s ties to the Latin American left, about the esoteric tendencies that had started to mark the model’s life in recent years; the photos of the couple alongside political figures resurfaced. The press invented horrible hypotheses: a suicide, Toledano’s spiraling drug addiction, the possibility that the couple had been, all along, spies for the Castro regime. That last possibility struck the press as particularly attractive, given that Virginia McCallister, though descended on her father’s side from the Scottish McCallisters, carried illustrious Yankee blood in her veins. Her mother, Catherine Sherman, was the granddaughter of the infamous general William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general whose legendary and merciless March to the Sea had handed victory to Abraham Lincoln. The idea that a descendant of old Sherman’s could be a Cuban spy sounded so exotic that one old Republican senator, still resentful about the Bay of Pigs, came to blame the Cuban government for the family’s disappearance. A Cuban vice-minister dressed in an impeccable guayabera expressed his sympathies but said the allegation was totally false. Over time, the thing became diluted, like everything in the news: sporadic false sightings; people who claimed to have seen the family in Peru, Brazil, wherever. Alexis Burgos read all of this, and he was left with a frail image not of the woman he’d seen that afternoon, but of the little girl in the first photo: a fragile child, pale and timid, who seemed to hide behind her mother’s long legs. A girl like any other, who on one winter afternoon had started off on a trip with no idea of what awaited her. He spent hours thinking about that girl, until the image of the mother emerged as he’d seen her that morning: haughty, decisive, beautiful in spite of the years. He felt a strange pride when he thought that of all the possible places, Virginia McCallister had decided to hide out on his little island. At six in the morning, he fell asleep.
The next day, wrapped in the confused whirlwind of emotions that so much information produced in him, he felt a strange immobility. He didn’t know how to proceed. For the first time in years, he felt that the case he had before him was something different, not a police case, but something else. He thought about returning to the tower and confronting the old woman but ruled out the possibility. She might flee without saying a word. Defeated, unable to specify what it was that so confused him, he picked up the phone and called the only person who seemed appropriate: Danny Limes, a gringo working for the FBI, whom he’d met playing pool in a San Juan dive. Five days later, five agents went into the tower, ready to capture the woman who called herself Viviana Luxembourg. They found her sitting in front of the bulletin board, her face placid and congenial, as if she’d been waiting for them for years.
* * *
The first thing that surprised them was the total order that ruled the room. Everything in the place seemed designed to be recorded and archived; it all seemed arranged for the exacting eyes of the police. The corkboard where dozens of newspaper articles hung in perfect disorder; the bed, flawlessly made; and then, on a dozen perfectly tended shelves, the notebooks. Over 200 notebooks—247, to be exact, all identical, all numbered—full of notes that the agents looked through without understanding much, but that a specialist would identify, after two days of examination, as two different projects.
The first, composed of 174 notebooks, was called Art on Trial. In delicate but haughty handwriting, the project detailed more than five hundred cases in which artists had been brought to court, from the Renaissance judgment against Paolo Veronese to the case against Constantin Brancusi, from the trial of Benjamin Vandergucht to the famous Whistler vs. Ruskin trial. Still, it wasn’t a book, per se—more like a great archive of cases where the author had written, in the margins, some theoretical notes. The second project, written in red ink in the remaining seventy-three notebooks, was called The Great South, and it laid out an eschatological theory around the history of millenarian anarchism. According to the specialist, this one also centered on a series of specific cases, around which the author built a fierce yet arbitrary conclusion: that the apocalypse would come from the south, and its sign would be a great wave of fires. Along with the notebooks, the police seized hundreds of press cl
ippings, two empty diaries, and half a dozen computers. They found little there; apparently, someone had definitively erased the hard drives just hours before. Nor did they find the fashion book that Sergeant Burgos had mentioned, or any other reference to Virginia McCallister. Each of the 247 notebooks, Profile brand, was signed on the first page with the name Viviana Luxembourg.
2
That same day, the defendant, dressed in an impeccable black suit, was taken to a correctional facility on the outskirts of San Juan. There, a policeman handed her a cream-colored jumpsuit and asked her to change. When she came out of the bathroom, for the first time in years, her usual all black had given way to even simpler attire, closer still to that anonymity she seemed to have been seeking for ages. Against the background murmur from the receptionists and a few inmates, they took her information, her fingerprints, mug shots, her first statements. She replied with a minimum of words in the monotone of calculated indifference, alleging her innocence just as she had at first, with the argument that it was all part of a great artistic project whose logic she would explain if necessary.
Then she asked to speak to her lawyer in private. Little is known of that singular meeting. What is known is that they spoke for hours, at the end of which the lawyer, a young and nervous man in thick-rimmed glasses, asked for access to the 247 notebooks that the police had found in her apartment. He spent that afternoon there, immersed in the notebooks, looking for the secret key that the defendant claimed to have written, trying to understand why it was his bad luck to be assigned to a crazy gringa in his third case ever. In one notebook, he found a note in the margin that convinced him of her madness. The fragment, written in red ink and dated two weeks earlier, said:
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