Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  Despite all the attention focused on our man during those first years of his Canadian incarnation—or, as he might put it, incarceration—and despite all the hopeful mothers calling to claim this Staufen as their runaway son, no one emerged with a credible shred of evidence about who he really might be. No one could make a match.

  When I later asked him whether the “Mr. Nobody” label ever bothered him, he said, “No, why should it have? There are two things about me. First, I am a very happy person, though I’ve lived an unhappy life. And second, I’m happy until I have to say my name, which carries a great deal of negativity for me. What troubles most people is that I want to be anonymous, without an identity. To them, this idea seems absolutely dangerous.”

  It was true: Our Mr. Skeid did seem dangerous. Even there in the lobby at the Ritz, he conveyed an air of passivity and menace, each by turns masking the other—and masking deeper still a presumption, a serrated sense of entitlement. In an e-mail before my arrival in Lisbon, he urged me to bring my bathing trunks because there was a quite nice spa at the hotel. “I might want a swim,” he wrote. His was a priggish kind of self-obsession. It was inconsequential whether I might have wanted to swim—or could swim at all. I would merely facilitate his desire.

  But arrogance alone didn’t constitute danger. And as far as I could tell, he wasn’t mingling with arms dealers or underworld figures. No, what was most unsettling about our Mr. Nobody was the idea of him, the affront he posed, the ghost he made moving among the rest of us corporeal beings, the cipher he presumed to be in the lobby at the Ritz. Here we were, creatures so weighted down by our own identities, trapped beneath our own monuments—the record of our every purchase, trip, and rented movie, the sum of our online aerobics—that we’d lost the strands of our freedom.

  Our predicament now narrowed to this possibility: We, as human beings, possessed less and less mystery. Who in this world could dream of being as light as air, as traceless as smoke, as unidentifiable and invisible as this man here? Who among us wouldn’t consider, at least for a moment, the potential joy of being released, in one swift blow, from all the back matter of one’s own life?

  Mr. Skeid’s story fulfilled a central escape fantasy for those who indulge such fantasies: that a life could be exited through a series of closing doors that might lead somewhere completely new and alien, without fear of past recriminations, debts, or crimes. That is, you might pass through a portal on one side of the world and arrive in a hospital bed in Toronto, Canada, with manicured fingernails and dyed blond hair, not knowing who you’d ever been—and perhaps not caring to remember.

  But even then, it wasn’t quite so easy to be Mr. Nobody. As the weeks passed after his hunger strike, the curiosities and suspicions began to accrue. Even if his memory loss was permanent—which would have been extremely rare—even if he couldn’t reach back to reclaim his family, there was still, despite massive publicity efforts, no one who came forward. Not a soul. And then this Mr. Nobody, who professed to want to find his family, who swore that his condition was driving him to the brink of suicide, refused all medical help and counseling. Even Detective Bone began to wonder why, when they spoke over the phone, Mr. Nobody failed to show much interest in the detective’s attempts to locate his identity or kin—and worse, soon ceased to cooperate at all with the authorities.

  When I asked Mr. Skeid about the souring of these prior relationships, he was succinct. “People only want to help you when they have power over you,” he said.

  Yes, he said, he had refused medical help, but only because he was offered electroshock therapy and hadn’t wanted it. And yes, he refused to accept a special minister’s permit, one that would have allowed him the right to live, work, and attend university in Canada, but only because he thought he deserved a birth certificate instead. He came to see the outpouring of help from Good Samaritans as an insult, and he didn’t hesitate to let people know. It became a repeating pattern: He would push until he’d reached a cul-de-sac, though he claimed he wanted only what was his “by right of law.”

  In the summer of 2001, a call came to Detective Bone from England. It wasn’t exactly the aristocratic connection some had expected but a publisher of pornography who claimed to have known Staufen. Further investigation turned up a photographer who claimed to have taken nude shots of him. They characterized Mr. Nobody as “the ultimate chameleon” with “a plan to get to America.” They told Detective Bone they knew that Philip Staufen went by a different name, the one on another passport he carried at that time: Georges Lecuit. It was alleged that this Georges Lecuit had made several gay pornographic movies—with titles like Exposed and Crush—posed for nude pictures, and worked as a masseur in a gay bathhouse in London called the Pleasuredrome.

  The photographer produced for Bone a waiver that this Georges Lecuit had signed by means of which he was paid $300 for test photographs. To cap it off, one of Britain’s leading forensic facial reconstruction experts said that there were striking similarities suggesting that Mr. Nobody and Lecuit were one and the same.

  These revelations came roughly a month before Mr. Nobody was to marry. In yet another twist, he’d proposed to his lawyer’s daughter. She was a thin, short-haired twenty-two-year-old named Nathalie Herve, who worked in her father’s office as a secretary. Mr. Skeid described her to me as “very innocent,” which may have been part of the attraction—as well as her shy beauty. But then, given that it’s much easier to obtain citizenship as the spouse of a Canadian citizen, was it love or convenience?

  “I didn’t choose to fall in love,” Nathalie told one reporter at the time. “It just happened.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was love,” Mr. Skeid told me later. “It made sense for us to live together. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could be a friend to someone, something I hadn’t been able to do before. There are so many opportunities to betray and so few to be loyal. But she never had the intellectual capability to understand me.”

  Mr. Skeid admitted that he was genuinely shocked when people questioned whether his marriage was a sham. He recalled a conversation he’d had with a customs officer assigned to his case who asked him point-blank if he was gay. “I told him to mind his own business,” he said.

  The British and Canadian tabloids made their usual tawdry hay about Mr. Nobody’s alleged pornographic past, but by then most Canadians had heard enough. For them, Staufen’s amnesia tale had become untenable and preposterous. “Oh, for the sweet, sweet taste of amnesia!” wrote one citizen to an online magazine. “To forget my huge complicated life, my husband, children, responsibilities, relatives, to banish them in a mugger’s blow!… Mr. Nobody wake up and do something with your life! You bitch like a medieval poet.… Live you fucking idiot!”

  Was it possible that the man in the movies, the one who had the physical attributes of Mr. Nobody, who had a profile that seemed to explain a part of Mr. Nobody’s murky past, wasn’t in fact Mr. Nobody at all? After reviewing the evidence, Nathalie Herve, one of those in the best position to compare, stated for the record that this porn star wasn’t her husband.

  As for her husband—the one who would have known for certain—he simply couldn’t remember.

  Before our meeting at the Ritz, Mr. Skeid had spoken one sentence to the media, though reporters had stalked him in the streets of Vancouver and Halifax, at his various places of residence, at the gyms where he worked out. On May 7, 2004, reporters jostled in a pack, shouting questions as he emerged from jail in Nova Scotia. Fresh from his ten-day hunger strike, with Nathalie by his side, Mr. Skeid wore his black suit, with his hair now dyed black. He wore fashionable dark sunglasses and a dark beard as he made his way quickly through the scrum. “Can’t you understand that I don’t want to have anything to do with you or anyone else?” he said to the cameras—and then disappeared into the bright sunlight.

  The detainment was a result of the work of Detective Bone—a man who, to this day, Mr. Skeid thinks of as “one of the best I met in Canada.” In hi
s investigation, the detective had come upon a police report filed in Paris by the real Georges Lecuit, claiming that his passport had been stolen during a break and entry on August 17, 1998. Had the thief been Mr. Nobody?

  Meanwhile, during 2003, Mr. Skeid and Nathalie Herve had made a series of moves—from Ottawa to Montreal to Halifax, where they had landed in September—in order to escape the increasingly “bad energy” of Vancouver. And it was here that they were called to the immigration office, and on the grounds of the French Lecuit’s six-year-old grievance Mr. Skeid was detained on suspicion of theft.

  The problem was that the real Georges Lecuit had no interest in pressing charges against the amnesiac, and despite the fact that Mr. Skeid had once allegedly been in possession of a stolen passport, there was no evidence that he’d done anything wrong. Eventually, the immigration board ruled that there was no basis for holding Mr. Skeid, and after those ten days in jail, he was released.

  Was he a fraud or a victim, a man of the world or one who had been irrevocably injured by it? Was it possible to be all at once? At the very least, Detective Bone pointed out, he’d traveled under false documents. But was he really the bogeyman—“the vegan Hannibal Lecter,” as Mr. Skeid later put it—that the media now made him out to be?

  Because Nathalie had dual Canadian and Portuguese citizenship, the couple decided to relocate to Lisbon, to escape the scrutiny of the media and to see if Mr. Skeid could lawfully establish citizenship there, again as the spouse of a national. Nathalie traveled ahead to prepare for her husband’s arrival; Mr. Skeid stayed behind to secure the proper papers for his own travel but ended up stranded. Finally, after a year, in March 2006, he left, as he said, “on a laissez-passer travel document with another name than Sywald Skeid.”

  And now here he stood before me, reflected and refracted, hung among the lights and blackly aglow in the lobby at the Ritz. I happened to be passing through Lisbon on business, so our meeting was really just to be a dinner, a mutual tryout. We sat for a drink in the lobby bar.

  His health was of utmost importance to him—“I want to look good someday in my coffin,” he said, grinning—and so he worked out at a local gym, ate well, and rarely consumed alcohol. He spoke in low guttural syllabics but swallowed every fifth or sixth word, as if he weren’t exactly sure of himself at first or, rather, was being intentionally obscure. Every once in a while, he got caught on a word, a near stutter that may have been nerves, because after this night it never appeared again.

  For the sake of rarity, he ordered sake, and when they didn’t have it, he called for a fresh juice, asking after the ice, whether it was made from tap water or spring water. He seemed adversarial, especially with waitstaff—or a bit bullying, a civil kind of bullying—sometimes directing them to the point of exasperation. “Would you pour common tap water into any drink of quality?” he asked rhetorically. His being a vegan complicated our dinner plans, but he had a place with a patio in mind. He called ahead and while speaking to the maître d’ gave a mock-disparaging look at my jeans and short-sleeve shirt—the disparity in our uniforms being something for which I’d already apologized—and asked if a dinner jacket was required.

  Later, on the dinner patio, he loosened a little. I listened closely to that low rumble, his voice in a timbre that found occasional disguise behind the clatter of silverware, the scrape of a chair across the patio. He was quoting from Shakespeare. “What’s in a name?” he said. “Hitler’s real last name was Schicklgruber. Names are not famous in and of themselves. They become famous by propaganda.”

  We paused to look at the menu. “There’s a bottle here,” he said, pointing to it on the wine list, “one that I shared once with a friend. It is a very good wine, and it would not disappoint you.” My eyes flitted to the price—over three hundred euros. Since I was buying, he wondered, how much did I have to spend?

  My employers, themselves partial to the odd bottle of fine wine, probably wouldn’t have batted an eye. At the very least, I could have justified the importance of watching an amnesiac drink a bottle that held such memories for him, which in and of itself raised a question about his memory. Nevertheless, I felt manipulated. He’d made it oddly personal, a referendum about his own worth. I tried to ignore the question, but he pressed, testing my power now. “Not more than a hundred euros,” I finally said, feeling every bit the discomfort he’d forced on me.

  In everything, I would soon find, he took control—wardrobe, restaurant choice, encounters with waiters, the ordering of food. “I’m a domineering personality,” he said. Knowing his history, though, I was paranoid about being played, in some complicated manner involving the potential emptying of my bank accounts by identity theft. He said he’d read everything he could find that I’d written, he’d found photographs of me online. “You’ve gone through three phases,” he said. “The shaggy you, the respectable author you, and the CNN you, in suit and tie.” He said he knew more about me “than you can imagine.” But he hardly hid one of his ulterior motives. He stated part of it bluntly in an e-mail. “You may help my cause,” he wrote, referring to his attempts now to become a Portuguese citizen, “as people here tend to be impressed by an American journalist.”

  At the table, when I asked about his memory—and whether it had returned—he was evasive. Yet when the subject of those “British chaps” came up, the ones who’d alleged his participation in pornography and possibly prostitution, instead of being defensive or forgetful, he seemed the opposite. “Everybody has a lot of sex,” he said, “unless you’re particularly ugly.” In his case, it apparently occurred in front of a camera, for which he had no regrets, sex being natural and nothing at all to be embarrassed about. “I’m a child of nature,” he said. “Those who watch it should be asked why they’re watching it—and why they’re embarrassed.” Anyway, he continued, pornography wasn’t a violation of the law. And when the tabloids got hold of the story, they turned it into theater: Can we embarrass the porn star? What will he do next?

  I sat listening. So was this an admission? I took it as one, but later he emphatically insisted he’d put the whole business to me hypothetically: that, without confirming his participation, he had no problem with the idea of someone being paid to have sex in front of a camera. And later still, he claimed: “I suppose I spent time with those who were not of my own intellectual level and became a Pygmalion to them. The kernel is this: The life I lived could justify acts much worse than the ones attributed to me.”

  But mistakenly or not, in the infrared of that moment I thought I picked something off of him, something that might sound naïve: Beneath his self-constructions, there was a flicker of bravery. And something else: Behind the bluster and the slightly absurd power plays, inside this human being skimming from country to country, “riding energies,” as he put it, there was another person—the oversensitive boy, the confused melancholic, the isolated dreamer—a figure I spotted out at sea, as the poem said, not waving but drowning.

  When I returned again to Lisbon and the Ritz—this time in late October—the lobby was still under occupation by the same thin-lapeled brokers of influence, but this time our Mr. Skeid greeted me much more casually, in cargo pants and a short-sleeve Polo shirt with a turned-up collar. Gone for the moment was any adversarial posturing, any reason to suspect his intentions. In fact, he had summoned me back to tell his story, no holds barred, to play to his audience of one, me, by chatting, lecturing, cajoling, and mining the dramatic moments.

  “The truth is my best disguise,” he said. “I can remember places, energies, pictures, smells, but I can’t sit at a table and say, ‘I remember this, I remember that.’ ”

  He was relaxed, smiling, welcoming me to the country of Skeid with notes he’d made on tablet pages, an agenda of his thoughts, of what he wanted me to know about him, of those figures with whom he most identified. He said this might be one of the best ways to understand him, by understanding these other people with whom he most intensely identified: the directors Ingmar Bergm
an and Lars von Trier, the billionaire reactionary writer Taki Theodoracopulos, the politicians Boris Johnson and Christoph Blocher, the exiled English poet Shelley, and the unnamed protagonist of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. (“One of my great accomplishments,” he said, “is that I’ve lived that protagonist’s life in a way only a few people in this world can understand.”)

  At one point, when he opened his date book, I saw that he had neatly written: the elsewhere.

  What did it mean?

  “I know who I am,” he declared. “I know the true color of my blood.”

  The story that followed came in a rush that seemed to last three very rainy days. He’d show up at the hotel in the morning, having walked I assumed, and his love of tea (“It has its own inner life, as opposed to the sadness of coffee”) was what then guided our path through the seven hills of the city, traveling by taxi from teahouse to vegan restaurant to the Ritz. He forbade me to tape our interviews, so I wrote everything in my own notebook until my hand cramped. Never once in the telling did he show an emotion—and at the end of every night, he walked out through the automatic doors, past the besuited men coming from meetings and dinners, some with women on their arms, and headed back to his spare studio apartment in downtown Lisbon.