A decade later, the last icon the artist seemed intent on breaking was her own body. She’d given herself over to alcohol like it was a furiously poetic act. She was seen on the streets of her university town, dressed as a clown or a bride, bottle in hand, stammering verses that verged on nonsense, usually surrounded by stray dogs she found on the streets. Then, when night fell, once she’d collected enough money to feed her vice, she would disappear into the bars. To say that this woman had been one of the nation’s great artists could seem, at times, like a joke in poor taste. A joke that Pinillos herself would have laughed at. A joke whose real punch line would come the day the poor woman opened an envelope at random and found herself involved in a trial whose components struck her as strangely beautiful. Minutes later, she looked around and said to herself, “Well, maybe this is how I finally get out of this pigsty.” Then, for the first time in almost a decade, she took out all the old papers, the manifestos that this Viviana Luxembourg cited with such erudition, and her hungover fury couldn’t obscure a certain pride. It took her three weeks to answer, because three weeks was how long it took to come out of the alcoholic maze she’d been wandering in for the past ten years, but when she did, the reply came with the intellectual precision that had always characterized her work. She cited Bataille and Nietzsche, she mentioned Cioran, she quoted all the furious philosophers she could remember, and then she closed the letter with a quote from Hegel that she’d always found memorable:
But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. […] Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.
A brief smile, impish and restless, appeared on her face as she finished writing the quote. A joyful and pleasant smile that made her remember the good times, when she could spend an entire day in the sun reading an incomprehensible book. Under her signature, she added a final note: “Be sure that the ticket is one way: Guatemala City–San Juan.” As soon as she mailed the letter, she called her colleagues and told them what had happened. No one believed her, not that it mattered to her much. She put on her clown clothes, went out for a walk, and when she found herself facing a little girl who stared at her in surprise, she recited the most beautiful poem she knew: a poem that spoke of a frog who frequented a dark pond and who one day decided to stay and discover the pleasures of the night. When the little girl laughed, she knew she was on the right track.
* * *
For each letter she mailed, the defendant also prepared a file for the lawyer that included the possible collaborator’s name, a copy of the letter they’d received, and an extensive theoretical discussion of their relevance to the case. Each week, when he was allowed to visit her, the lawyer picked up the file and, after discussing some details of the case, headed for the library at the university’s law school, where he spent long hours trying to decipher his client’s theoretical digressions. The first week he thought it was all simple madness; the second week he thought it was a great farce; by the third he thought it was an obsession. By the fourth week he understood that the project in his hands obeyed a strange logic, but one whose purpose still eluded him. It was during that fourth week, reviewing the file of the Guatemalan artist María José Pinillos, when he found, lost amid the thousands of words, a phrase that would help him understand the systems by which the defendant seemed to navigate. Written in the margins of the file, beside a paragraph on iconoclasm in medieval art, he found the solitary phrase: “This prison is my private Ustica.” Ever since he was a child, he’d been unable to skip over unfamiliar words, and that night was no exception. A simple search was enough to find a Wikipedia article that explained, in English, that Ustica was a small Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Unsatisfied, he searched for more. Then he came across an interesting detail: a small subsection that described how the island had served as a prison during the years of Benito Mussolini’s fascist government. Thousands of political prisoners had ended up there. Two of them deserved particular mention, in Wikipedia’s opinion: Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci. Thinking that he recognized the names, he decided to explore Bordiga first. When he didn’t find much that would link him to Virginia McCallister, he turned to Gramsci.
With his round glasses and slightly disheveled hair, the man reminded him of one of his high school teachers. Farther down the page he found a section titled “Prison Notebooks” that explained how, while imprisoned, Gramsci had filled thirty-two notebooks, 2,848 pages outlining one of the most relevant political theories since Marx. Beset by health problems that had afflicted him since he was a child, he died on April 27, 1937, just six days after he was let out of prison. After his death, his brother-in-law managed to get the notebooks out of the hands of the police, and after assigning them random numbers, he gave them to the banker Raffaele Mattioli, Gramsci’s secret patron. Mattioli then entrusted the writings to the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti. Eleven years later, between 1949 and 1951, the notebooks appeared in print, published in six volumes by Einaudi, a small Turin-based press. The lawyer noted the titles of the publications:
Historical Materialism and the Philosophy of Benedetto Croce (1949)
Intellectuals and the Organization of Culture (1949)
Il Risorgimento (1949)
Notes on Machiavelli, Politics, and the Modern State (1949)
Literature and National Life (1950)
Past and Present (1951)
He felt a strange relief on realizing that he was finally starting to make his way into the maze that McCallister seemed determined to build. He also felt a kind of inverse vertigo as it dawned on him that the systems his client seemed to operate by were driven by glorious failure. That night, he didn’t go back to reading about iconoclasm or the Guatemalan artist. He spent hours searching for information on that Italian intellectual, imagining him deep in the solitude of an island prison, sketching theories from his confinement that would come to describe the social mechanisms from which he’d been excluded. Strange, he thought, that a man in prison could imagine the laws of what’s happening outside. When the librarian turned off the lights, she caught the lawyer midsentence, reading a letter Gramsci had sent to his son from jail. He wondered then what had become of his client’s daughter, that little ten-year-old girl who had taken a plane to the tropics and never come back. The librarian interrupted his thoughts: “Esquilín, it’s time.” He nodded, worn out. It dawned on him that it was Friday.
* * *
His name was Luis Gerardo Esquilín, but from an early age his schoolmates had called him just Esquilín, and he liked it. When he was asked what had driven him to study law, he would answer, a little in jest, a little in earnest: I liked the sound of it, Esquilín, esquire. The answer hid, however, a void: Luis Gerardo Esquilín didn’t know why he’d studied law, or, at least, he was afraid he didn’t know. Like many people, he had entered law school a little reluctantly, driven by his parents’ admonitions. He felt that at a certain age one had to come down from the idealist clouds and give in to the real world. Studying law was just a way of saying that he agreed to enter adulthood, that he intended to be a model citizen. His three years as a student were therefore directed toward forgetting his humanist past and what could have been, and becoming, through study, an exemplary adult. He’d done it. His long hair had been replaced by a precise cut; the hippie clothes had been supplanted by suits with British labels; his playful, Caribbean diction had given way to a slightly forced verbal correctness. In order to feel comfortable with himself, as if his change weren’t a betrayal of his past, he bought some black-rimmed glasses that gave his look what he thought of as a postmodern twist. Law, for him, was the path to respectability and adulthood. He had imagined the law as black-and-white, but now a single case was demonstrating that the whisper of art was enough to destroy its respectable certainties.
After a month, his friends realized they were losing him. He stayed at the library late into the night, reading the cases his client suggested, searching for precedents, digging into monumental books of art history in search of the details that the defendant had forgotten to explain. More than once, during those first months, he feared that Luxembourg’s fictions would start to infiltrate his life just as they had, for years, infiltrated the media. In those moments, he tried to get back to the basics, to tell himself that, at the end of the day, this woman was not Viviana Luxembourg but Virginia McCallister. In the middle of the night he sat down to look at old photos of the model from the fifties, or watch the movies she starred in alongside the heartthrobs of the day, or pore over the photos of her alongside her vanished family. One photo in particular caught his attention: an image the press had distributed after her supposed disappearance, showing the three of them in front of an enormous Christmas tree. The child must have been around ten years old, and the parents around forty, though they looked younger, more beautiful, more perfect. That photo, terribly familiar and quotidian, gave him a strange feeling. It forced him to think that there was another story hidden behind this whole project. He had tried during many meetings with his client to elicit that other story, not Viviana Luxembourg’s but Virginia McCallister’s, heir of old William Sherman, wife of the Israeli photographer Yoav Toledano, mother of little Carolyn Toledano. He had tried many times to learn the whereabouts of husband and daughter, the circumstances that had led to their disappearance. But the defendant kept quiet. Showing no emotion, she just said that it all belonged to Virginia McCallister’s life, not hers. A person has the right to change her life, she said. Not wanting to contradict her, Esquilín still tried to convince her that the story would be crucial for the trial, that she could be accused of concealment, but he had no luck—the defendant went on with her monologue, and he was again caught up in its possibilities. However, the night he found the strange phrase—“This prison is my private Ustica.”—he thought that this woman, like Gramsci before her, surely spent nights thinking about the child she’d left behind. That night, unable to sleep, he decided to go out walking through the streets of Santurce. He felt confused at the realization that his strange obsession had little to do with what was happening outside. Obsessions are always private, he thought, as he moved deeper into the night.
* * *
The sixth and final letter was addressed to a married pair of artists, the Chilean Constanza Saavedra and the Brit Arthur Chamberlain, residents of London, where decades earlier they had been the center of attention in one of the most talked about art trials ever. As Esquilín understood from the file, the couple had been accused of reproducing—with remarkable accuracy—pound sterling banknotes. One morning at the beginning of the decade, while he was having a donut with coffee at a New York diner, Chamberlain, distracted, had started to draw a dollar. When she saw how perfectly the Englishman was copying the bill, the waitress had started up a conversation and tried to persuade him to sell her the drawing. Chamberlain decided, then, that it would be fair to pay for his breakfast with that false currency. When he gave her the drawing, the waitress said that the breakfast cost only ninety cents—would he please take ten cents as change? Back in London, Arthur laughingly told the story to Constanza, who was fascinated: it presented a solution not only to the conceptual problems of realism that so interested her in those days, but also to the financial issues that plagued them. The transaction had established a new relationship between art and currency, art and the market. From then on she set the pace of their little performances, accompanied by her husband’s prodigious hand: they’d go to a bar, talk for a bit, and then, pretending to be bored, Arthur would start drawing pound sterling notes on a napkin or whatever paper was handy. As soon as the waiter noticed his skill, the Chilean would interrupt and start the negotiation. From then on, life got easier. Art had become a mode of exchange that skipped over all the dreadful commercial logic.
However, it wasn’t just the waiters who noticed and admired Chamberlain’s skill. Rumors started to spread in the art world as well, and two years later the owner of a prestigious Parisian gallery contacted them to express interest in a solo show. The event was a success, and with success came visibility: articles in the major newspapers, mentions in art magazines, even a televised report. Predictably, the news didn’t take long to reach the Bank of London. Two months later, on the show’s opening night in London, two brawny members of Scotland Yard interrupted the party, accusing the couple of breaking British counterfeiting and forgery laws. Three months after that, London’s famous Old Bailey court became a gallery for the accused couple’s defense. Before a probably dumbfounded jury, dozens of curators and critics tried to convince the audience that the work was, without a doubt, art. Through the courtroom paraded the names of Duchamp and the Dadaists, theories on ready-mades and conceptual art, pop art, and representation. After six months, the couple was found innocent by a jury that was sick of a man in a wig telling them what to think.
* * *
Ironically, the accused woman’s letter caught the couple in a full-on economic crisis. For months, Arthur had been afflicted by strange pains that had proved impossible to diagnose. They jumped from one medical exam to another and watched their little savings vanish in pursuit of an undecipherable illness. The letter arrived like a happy memory of those days when they won their battle against the Bank of London. The first to take a stance, as always, was Constanza. Her words were blunt: “See, we’ve clearly gone down in art history.” Arthur, more humble and realistic, suffering from pain, merely replied, “If you say so, but make sure the old lady’s not a fraud.” That same night, by then a little drunk, he laughed at himself and said, “As if we aren’t a couple of old frauds ourselves.” He wasn’t far off. The couple had lost the media presence they’d won in the trial years before. It had been over three years, in fact, since they’d had a decent show. The letter, then, was like a belated miracle, arriving when no one expected it and only retirement and death were on the horizon. One glass later, the Englishman closed the discussion by speaking, as always, of the weather: “A little Caribbean vacation wouldn’t be so bad, especially with this bloody London climate.” Constanza didn’t even hear him, immersed as she was in thoughts of how this trial would indisputably establish them in art history. That night they laughed as they hadn’t in a long time: uproariously.
* * *
Two days later, Luis Gerardo Esquilín found the documents and notebooks related to the case scattered across his bed. He would have feared the worst, but then he saw his girlfriend, Mariana, a beautiful mixed-race girl with red curls, emerge from the bathroom. Confused by the strange distance she’d felt from her boyfriend in recent months, the girl had decided to go through his papers. She’d spent the afternoon in the role of jealous girlfriend, searching among the papers for reasons that would explain his aloofness. What she found only served to increase her unease. This, she thought, seemed less like a trial than a debate between pedants. That night, when she saw him, she drove home her observation: “And worst of all, Luisito, is that you’re buying it, you’re buying into a giant lie from a pretentious old woman.” Esquilín didn’t know what to say, perhaps because he himself hadn’t been able to figure out whether or not it was all a great stunt. In reply, he outlined some legal arguments that not even he understood well, and only managed to bore Mariana.
* * *
An hour later, when they were in each other’s arms, the girl said that to her, all that contemporary art stuff was just hot air. Two weeks ago, she told him, a friend had invited her to an event at a gallery in Santurce. She’d decided to go, mostly just to socialize, and she hadn’t known what to expect. What she’d seen had struck her as incomprehensible and stupid: a dozen dogs walking around an empty gallery. That was the piece. The strange thing, she said, was that people just took it for granted that the thing was worthwhile. “People eat that shit up,” she concluded, furiou
s. Then she added, “But you, Luisito, you can’t eat that shit, because the courtroom is the courtroom and the law isn’t a gallery. You’ll realize that soon enough.” Esquilín let the comment fall like a silent bomb. He confined himself to quick kisses, tender conversations, the sentimental routine. That night they had sex for the first time in two months, and then the girl fell asleep. He could not, thinking as he was about Mariana’s words and what they made patently obvious. For a long time he himself had thought, like her, that contemporary art was a terrible joke, a game for the pretentious. Now he wasn’t so sure. He was afraid that the abyss that was starting to separate him from his surroundings would become as conspicuous as it was for his client. He was afraid of getting up one day convinced of some incomprehensible and esoteric ideals. He was afraid, ultimately, of one day winding up among that vanguard of obsessive weirdos that his client seemed determined to recruit, one by one. He was afraid, above all, of becoming an honest but incomprehensible man, shut off in the prison of a private language no one understood. Then the image of an intellectual with round spectacles rose up before him. He pictured this Gramsci hidden away in his Italian prison, filling notebooks with theories that would go unread until much later, immersed in a series of obsessions that would nevertheless return him to that monstrous society from which he’d been expelled. He pictured that man and thought how there was something almost pleasant about the way private languages imposed their obsessive worlds. The truly mad thing, he thought, would be for two crazy people to have the same obsession. In the middle of the night, the idea struck him as mad, yes, but true. Fifteen minutes later, he was snoring.
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