Portrait of a Man (Le Condottière)

by Georges Perec

  He didn’t know much about real life. His fingers brought forth only ghosts. Maybe that was all he was good for. Age-old techniques that served no purpose, that referred only to themselves. Magic fingers. The relationship between the skills of a Roman jeweller, the knowledge of a Renaissance painter, the brush-stroke of an Impressionist and the patiently learned capacity to judge what substance to use, what preparation was required, what agility to develop – that relationship was merely a matter of technique. His fingers knew. His eyes took in the work, divined its fundamental dynamic, split it down to its tiniest elements, and translated them into what for him were internalised words such as a more or less liquid binding agent, a medium, a backing material. He worked like a well-oiled machine. He knew how to lead the eye astray. He had the art of combination. He had read da Vinci and Vasari and Ziloty and the Libro dell’Arte; he knew the rules of the Golden Ratio; he understood – and knew how to create – balance and internal coherence in a painting. He knew which brushes to use, which oils, which hues. He knew all the glazes, supports, additives, varnishes. So what? He was a first-class craftsman. Out of three paintings by Vermeer, van Meegeren could create a fourth. Dossena did the same with sculpture; Joni Icilio and Jérôme likewise. But that wasn’t what he’d been after. From the Antonellos in Antwerp, London, Venice, Munich, Vienna, Paris, Padua, Frankfurt, Bergamo. Genoa, Milan, Naples, Dresden, Florence and Berlin could have arisen with admirable obviousness a new Condottiere rescued from oblivion by an amazing find unearthed in some abandoned monastery or castle by Rufus, Nicolas, Madera or another one of their associates. But that wasn’t what he wanted, was it?

  What was the illusion he had cherished? That he would be able to cap an untarnished career by carrying off what no forger before him had dared attempt: to create an authentic masterwork of the past, to recover in palpable and tangible form, after a dozen years’ intense labour, something far above the technical tricks and devices of his trade such as mere mastery of gesso duro or monochrome painting – to recover the explosive triumph, the perpetual reconquista, the overwhelming dynamism that was the Renaissance. Why was that what he’d been after? Why had he failed?

  What remained was the feeling of an absurd undertaking. What remained was the bitterness of failure; what remained was a corpse. A life that had suddenly collapsed, and memories that were ghosts. What remained was a wrecked life, irreparable misunderstanding, a void, a desperate plea …

  Now you’re on your own and you’re rotting in your cellar. You’re cold. You can’t make sense of it anymore. You’ve no idea what happened. You’ve no idea how it happened. But the one who’s alive is you, here, in this same place, you at the end of twelve years of a featureless existence, an existence pregnant with nothing. Every month, every year you dumped your packet of masterpieces. And then? Then nothing … And then Madera died …

  Arm raised, the glint of the blade. All it took was a gesture. But first he had had to get the razor out of its sheath, check its condition, fold it in his palm so he could use it, leave the laboratory, climb the stairs one by one. One after another. Slowly. At each step the aim became more precise. What was he thinking about? Why was he thinking? He was perfectly aware: he was climbing the stairs to go and slit Anatole’s throat, the throat of the late Anatole Madera. The thick fat throat of Anatole Madera. His left hand would be wide open to provide a better grip as he applied it firmly and speedily to the forehead and pulled it backwards, and his right hand would slit the man’s throat with a single thrust. Blood would spurt. Madera would collapse. Madera would be dead.

  He had done all those things. First in the half-light each hand had put a glove on its partner, rubber gloves similar to medical ones, which he sometimes used when working clay. He had done all that. Step by step. One two three. Four. Five six. With frequent stops. To get his breath back. To wait. And all that while – what was the point? – a voice spoke to him from the back of his neck, from his head, from his big toe. It never stopped talking. Step by step. Seven eight nine ten. Let it go again. What was his conscience going on about? What was his guardian angel rattling on about? Gordian angel. Step by step. Come on lad don’t let it get you down. You’re right you’re wrong. Freedom or death. Tread by tread. Step by step. Rather be the slicer than the slice. Step by step. One step for Ma. One step for De. One step for Ra. One step for You. One step for Shall. One step for Kill one step for Ma one step for De one step for Ra. You Shall Kill Ma De Ra. You shall kill Madera. Ma De Ra. Almost as if neon signs were going on inside his head, flashing then vanishing, and, as if as he gradually drew nearer to his goal, the oak door, the padded door, the door ajar on whose other side everything would begin and end just as it had all begun and ended when a year and half before behind that same door the little Christ by Bernardino dei Conti had emerged from an unsuspected drawer, as if the entire set-up that he had glimpsed for a few seconds had now come back to him in its fear, anxiety, anger, despair, greed, boldness, courage, madness, and certainty, as if all of that had coalesced and was fleeing at phenomenal speed towards that thick, red neck with its fleshy folds touching the white silk shirt that like an irresistible magnet invited, demanded the unspeakable gesture, the incision of the glinting blade that would set off a pulsing cataract of blood and with it the chaos of a revolt that had been kept hidden for too long.

  No, there had been nothing to it. Just one dead man. Beyond a forced smile, an arbitrary tensing of the jaw, a hat out of kilter. Beyond a maybe poorly inspired brooch in the strict organisation of the painting: the inaccessible and terrifying Mr Condottiere had hovered over that paltry anxiety …

  Over there and far away, the recovered delirium is once again seething. Seething thickly on the terra firma of certainties. Dura mater, pia mater. Arachnoid. Did his conscience remember in order to protect itself? Gaspard the forger. What sense was there in his crazy desire to jump over the inevitable flowing river of time to recreate the radiant mug – yellow and translucent, like a good candle – of that ruffian? But it was all logical; it seemed that some particular event had intervened at every moment in his life to undermine the false calm he had thought he enjoyed day by day: meeting Mila had trained him for unhappiness; meeting Geneviève had built the walls of his prison; the death of Madera was the final conclusion, the obvious and necessary apotheosis. Where was the surprise? He had been trapped. To paint the look in the eyes of a condottiere, he would have had to look in the same direction as he had, if only for an instant. It was so obvious that what had attracted him had been this immediate image of triumph, the complete opposite of what he was himself! Even his most Herculean labours could not prevent what had to be from coming into being: in the shadow of the Condottiere, all he could attain was the image of his own failure.

  What did it matter, anyway? There’s nothing for you to face up to yet. Death, if you will, but death doesn’t mean much in the end. What you have behind you is this muddled story, your own story: the story of an idiot, to put it bluntly, not without a modicum of sensitivity, not devoid of a love of fine things, not entirely lacking in taste – but an idiot nonetheless. Behind you lies Madera’s corpse, an impressive number of more or less serious failures, a kind of disillusionment, and a few hundred successes you can’t claim as your own because you took great pains to ascribe them to other artists. Behind you are masks. In you there is nothing. A desire to carry on living. A wish to die. A feeling of emptiness and an arrant failure to understand. So what?

  Everything you do has a price, you should know that. You should have picked that up, to your own cost. Every word you utter, every thought you turn over in your mind has a necessary consequence. Nothing comes for free. Everything has to be paid for and the cost is often high. Laughter, mockery, messing up won’t get you anywhere. You still have to get up and look around and stop this stupid game. What have you got to lose? What’s at stake? Another hour will go by. Then twelve. The door will be knocked down. That’s what you’re pondering in your little head. The door will be knocke
d down. They’ll come and get you. They’ll take you to prison. You’re not scared. You can easily envisage a cell not so different from the one you’re in, only maybe a bit smaller. With a harder bed, darker walls. Some graffiti, to while away the time. Dates, or notches, or grids to mark the days? … Robinson Crusoe’s calendar. 34,089 in clink, or something of that kind. And then?

  Would you like to go on living? Say yes. Yes, and yes again. The pleasure of walking in the sun, the pleasure of walking in the rain, the pleasure of travelling, of eating. And swimming. Hearing the sound of a train? All you have to do is dig for a few metres. Earth and sod, brick and stone, cement and plaster. You’ll be able to unlodge a stone. Will you manage to avoid Otto, to slip noiselessly through the lawns in the grounds, to get through the electric fence? Will you manage to get back on the road? You can flee in life, you can flee in death. And then? You’re making a bet …

  He looks at his watch. Murky light seeps through the ivycluttered basement window. Millions and millions of kilometres weaving all around the planet. Heads or tails. He gets up. He strides around the laboratory. Where is the chink, the invisible pivot? Open Sesame? Which stone will swing open? He glances all round the room. There’ll be a narrow passage, dripping corridors, stairs, steel ladders, a whole underground route stretching out for miles, a labyrinth of dark passageways, a knot of abandoned cuttings, a long march strewn with obstacles and countless side-tracks marked by tiny signs, leading, beyond the mines and quarries, to the transfigured reality of a clearing in the woods, to the marvellous presence of a rain-drenched night, to the discovery of an intense and radiant sky.

  Scrap by scrap. His chisel grazes the mortar: a sharp, accurate blow from his hammer and a shard of cement flies off from the dense layer surrounding each block of masonry. At each effort, each blow, the way out begins to open, the route becomes clearer, an exit looms, still far away but nonetheless present …

  With every inch you dig out you question the world. Why and for whom are you fighting? What hope do you still have? You think you understand. You think you know. But what next? How will you live tomorrow? In a few hours you will be free and you know it; the mere repetition of the same movement will save you: you aim your chisel, raise your arm, bring it down, do it again. And then?

  Perhaps you will dig down into your life just as you are digging your way to salvation? Go back to square one and start again. Understand. Two or three times in the course of your life it was necessary for you to make a choice, and you probably made the wrong one, and now it is perhaps possible for you to avoid making mistakes about yourself, not to repent but to accept yourself, to concentrate on only the essential facts, to rub out … With stylet, scalpel, graving tool or indeed a chisel … Scrape, thrust, up-end … Get rid of and blank out what had been, what had been lousy, what had been wrecked and ruined. Shattered. Stitch by stitch, step by step, undo everything he had done, everything he had believed … And then repeat the movement for ever more, start over again and again: set the chisel in place, hit it with the hammer, even if it seemed pointless and absurd, even if he ended up not knowing what he was digging for.

  In a few hours he would be out. And then? He would avoid Otto, he would kill him if necessary, he would tidy himself up a bit, then go on to the road and stop a car or a lorry. He would get back to Paris. And then?

  This is where everything stops and everything begins. The swing of the arm is so simple. In two or three hours the loosened stones would swing round, crash onto your trestle, roll onto the cement floor. All you’ll have to deal with then is a layer of compacted soil. In four hours. In time and space your future is suddenly inscribed …

  That resistance. That peculiar resistance of the world and yourself. Like in Altenberg, long ago. That fresh snow that had frozen over. Like corrugated iron. He was walking on an empty slope with his skis on his shoulder; the snow seemed able to bear his weight, it stood up to him, then suddenly collapsed, and he sank into it up to his thighs. He’d barely been able to put on his skis and go back down, very fast. He slid along, barely touching the ground, he managed not to get lost and not to fall in. It was an odd memory. Wasn’t it the case that all he had done for years was to glide over the surface of things? That resistance, that simulacrum of resistance. He had never gone any further. Not for Rufus, not for Geneviève, not for Jérôme. Not for anybody. Not even for himself. Were they alive? Were they anything other than nameless, rootless, and unmoored beings? As if he had been living in a wandering world. A world of ghosts. And yet, on some occasions, on the evening of the party, which he felt all of a sudden like a fearsome threat, as if he’d been abruptly summoned to appear in court, taken apart and stripped bare without mercy and then pinned to the wall, he had felt splashed by the existence of other people, with fear and then an understanding that was immediate, intuitive, spontaneous and irrefutable. That sharp burst of their existence. Maybe that crust on the snow that was hard only on the surface was cracking and collapsing – beneath what weight? – and was dragging him down, invading him … That was such a long way from the well-guarded, closed world he had set about building, his citadel of stucco and imitation marble, his strictly limited empire of the ersatz, the home of useless alchemical tricks.

  His hands could bring Vermeer or Pisanello back to life, just as he could revive Greek craftsmen, Roman goldsmiths, Celtic coppersmiths, or Kyrgys silversmiths. But so what? People said bravo, they looked after him, paid him, congratulated him, treated him like a star. And then? What remained? What had he done? What you did at Split …

  In a cellar in the lower town a treasure hoard was born: earthenware and sandstone pots, vats and amphoras stuffed full of jewels and coins, sesterces, silver denarii, bracelets, pins, cameos, huge silver brooches, all higgledy-piggledy and deeply buried – a disparate, extravagant hoard that matched quite miraculously what might well have been the treasure-chest of a lord of the Late Empire, a high dignitary of the state stuck in this far-away province that was still Roman but already invaded by barbarians, if only in the mixed origins of the people in his entourage, who one day had been expelled with his followers from the palace by yet another invasion and pursued in an endless retreat towards Styria, or Illyria, or Gallia Cisalpina or else towards the east, up-river, towards Macedonia or the Carpathians, leaving people and goods where they were, and, in a constantly nurtured hope of returning, hiding in a cellar an impressive mound of gold, silver, and precious stones that formed the unambiguous insignia of a thousand years’ domination …

  And then? Had he been aware that what he had been seeking once again was his own image? Had he known that what he had summoned up, what he had snatched out of the past, what he had projected onto the four dripping, damp, dark walls of the cellar in Split was his own face, his own attitude, his own ambiguity? A treasure was hidden inside. A year of painstaking research, months of solitary labour. A few hundred metres from the bluest sea in the world, with his tiny forge, his gold and silver leaf, his unsorted precious stones, his wooden and brass mallets, working in an untanned leather apron just as, long before, a slave-smith had worked, a man who might have been a cowherd from Transylvania or a Greek shepherd, a tiny dot in a mile-long horde, driven by cold or hunger, or by wolves that had been attracted from their lairs in Latvia or Cappadocia by the Empire’s alleged garden of Eden, the great ship of peace reigning over the world and by the unbounded horizon of Mare Nostrum but which nonetheless was ineluctably peeling away and caving in under the sheer weight of its own coherence – this cowherd or shepherd, dragged against his will into a useless adventure, by sudden turns horseman, foot-soldier, prisoner of war, and slave, extracting from iron, bronze and gold not just the angry pride of freedom lost, but the unspoken longing for the glimpse he had had of peace.

  But what had come of his own effort, of his slow and blinkered striving, his indefatigable energy, the four months he had spent in a cellar working twelve to fifteen hours a day? What reassurance? What certainty? He had worked in torrid heat, alm
ost naked but for his apron, surrounded by a never-ending swarm of flies, leaving his workbench only when darkness fell, not seeing a soul apart from a vague acquaintance of Nicolas who brought him his food twice a day. Why and for whom had he slaved away? Geneviève had asked him not to leave, he had refused; later, she asked him to come back, and he had refused again. Was his love no stronger than that? He had obstinately tried to convince her, claiming in complete bad faith that it was just a question of a week or two, seeing all the work he’d put in, the paperwork that had been assembled, the money that had been put up, the negotiations that Nicolas and Rufus were conducting …

  And now you’re digging crumb by crumb. Unpredictable geometry of the rock being tackled. No order, no logic: just the continuity of the hammering you’re giving it. Your arm hurts. Your head is buzzing. Do you want to go on? Why do you ask? You mustn’t stop. You’ll collapse from fatigue, your chisel will slip from your hand, you won’t hit hard enough. You have to exhaust yourself. Like an animal. You must not pause to recover. Don’t ask any more questions. Or else don’t answer them. Why is that suddenly reassuring? The width of the chisel, the accuracy of your hammering, those shards cluttering up the plank and the trestle, those stones which are coming apart, millimetre by millimetre. In a few hours you’ll be sliding through the wet grass like a worm. Shirtless, shoeless, kneeling at the top of the scaffolding with your head almost touching the ceiling, bathed in sweat, you hammer away like a deaf man on the rough, off-white surface of the mortar and each blow echoes inside you with a longdrawn-out, strident intensity, with an obsessive rhythm …

  Months and months, all that pointless effort? As if he had such powerfully rooted habits, or rather, a stubborn wish to go on; whatever the cost, to go to the very limits of his own misery, his own weakness. A decision taken once and for all to be entirely and only that absence, that hollow, that mould, the duplicator, false creator and mechanical agent of works of the past. Those clever hands, that precise knowledge of what erosion means to paint, his skill and craft. What did he want? Guilty or not guilty …