Portrait of a Man (Le Condottière)

by Georges Perec

  “Enough to go under?”

  “Enough to be dead. I was guaranteed to get away with it provided no-one guessed that I existed. It went on for twelve years. Why twelve, I’ve no idea. Why twelve years instead of a whole life, like Jérôme’s, I don’t know. But after twelve years I’d had my fill. I couldn’t go on, you see. I could not keep going. I needed actions that were mine alone, I needed a life that belonged to me and to nobody else. But that was baloney; I’d set things up so that it could never come about, so that there was no exit. Do you see: caught in my own trap! There was no method for starting again, no way of saying no, of going back to square one.”

  “Why not? You could easily have refused to work for Rufus and Madera …”

  “No. I couldn’t refuse. I wanted to say no. At times I made up my mind to say no. But I couldn’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “When did you make up your mind to say no more?”

  “The first time was in September two years ago, straight after leaving your studio. I remember, I was in the plane en route for Paris. I was late going back, I hadn’t warned anyone, not even Geneviève, and I hadn’t even answered her when she’d asked me ten days earlier to come back as quickly as I could. The plane made a stop in Geneva and I sent a telegram to Geneviève and another one to Rufus. Geneviève wasn’t at the aerodrome. I went with Rufus. I should have told him that I’d just decided not to work anymore, but I didn’t. There was a party at Rufus’s place. He introduced me to Madera. It was the first time I’d met the man. I hadn’t even known of his existence, yet I later found out that he was in fact the prime mover of the entire business and that Rufus was only the implementer and the front man. Madera proposed a deal. I didn’t say anything. Rufus came over to me and asked me to accept. I nearly told him that I didn’t want to, but I wanted to talk to Geneviève first. She came, I still don’t know why. She didn’t look at me. Nor I her. I couldn’t say anything to her. She went off after a few seconds. Next day I went to see Madera. He took a little Christ by Bernadino dei Conti out of his desk and asked me to produce any Renaissance work that I liked. I said yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. What else was I supposed to do?”

  “Why did you decide to drop it?”

  “To please Geneviève, I think. But it wasn’t a very firm decision …”

  “Did accepting Madera’s deal bother you?”

  “No. It didn’t bother me. It didn’t cheer me up either. I think at the time I couldn’t care less. I think that in those days I didn’t give a damn about anything …”

  “Because of Geneviève?”

  “Probably … I don’t know … Probably because of her … or because of me …”

  “Why because of you?”

  “No reason … because I took things seriously … because of the ease with which I broke a commitment, a promise which, when I’d made it, on the plane, had seemed binding …”

  “You had no respect for yourself?”

  “But I did! To have lost self-respect I would have had to make a judgement about myself to begin with, and I don’t think I intended or was able to do that. No, it was simpler than that, I just didn’t give a damn. I stayed at home, I looked at the dei Conti, I thought vaguely about what work I would invent to stand in its stead, and that was all. I spent a week or so in that state. Now and again I leafed through Benezit’s Dictionary of Artists searching for a painter who would fit, I made a shortlist of half a dozen, fairly obscure and uninteresting ones like d’Oggiono, Bembo, Morocini. That was when Madera phoned me and asked me first to come and work at Dampierre, and then to cook up something that could fetch a hundred and fifty million. I agreed and promised to come up with an answer a few days later …”

  “Didn’t working at Dampierre bother you?”

  “No. Not especially …”

  “Why did he insist on it?”

  “I don’t know … I suspect he was wary of Rufus because this was a bigger deal. That must have been why he had himself introduced instead of staying in the background as he usually did.”

  “Had he told you at that first meeting that it would be a bigger deal than the others?”

  “No, he didn’t specify anything at all. He was supposed to know about the rest of the business …”

  “When he asked you for a canvas worth one hundred and fifty million, did he hint at any particular artist?”

  “No. It was my choice to do an Antonello da Messina.”

  “Why?”

  “No particular reason to start with. It was just about the only thing that could fetch the required price for that period – between 1450 and 1500 – without running the risk of making a mistake with the wood for the panel or the traces of gesso duro that can’t be erased or with the pigments – taking into account that it had to be a painter with a high contemporary profile whose actual life was mysterious in a number of ways and whose work was easily identifiable, and so on, and finally, with a style that was accessible. It was a better choice than da Vinci, Ghirlandaio, Bellini or Veneziano. There was another advantage: there are no Antonellos in Paris, except the Portrait of a Man known as Le Condottiere, but there are other Antonellos all over Europe. I called Madera, who accepted an Antonello, and I asked him to fund a European tour. He said yes and I cleared off for two months.”

  “You wanted to clear off?”

  “It made a good start. On two or three occasions I felt like sending them a telegram saying I wasn’t coming back. But I didn’t do it. I studied all the Antonellos diligently and then settled down in Dampierre. For a year and a half …”

  “Why did you agree to all that so easily?”

  “All what?”

  “Another deal, when you’d decided to quit, settling in Dampierre when your own studio is in Geneva, and a one-hundred-and-fifty-million project when you’d chosen much less expensive guys …”

  “I’d said yes to the new deal, so I had no reason to quibble over the rest of it. Once I’ve agreed to do a forgery, I don’t see why I would have preferred to fake a d’Oggiono instead of an Antonello …”

  “It takes more work …”

  “Maybe that’s what I wanted … Since I was saying O.K., why not go the whole hog?”

  “You were going the whole hog?”

  “In my own way, yes …”

  “By deciding to do an Antonello?”

  “More precisely, by deciding to do a Condottiere … As good a way as any of coming a cropper …”

  “Why?”

  “When I got back to Paris I decided to change the way I worked. Up till that time I’d always worked like any other forger, like van Meegeren, Icilio or Jérôme. I’d take three or four works by whomever, pick out various bits and pieces from them all, juggle them around and make a jigsaw puzzle out of them. But that didn’t work for an Antonello. At the start, let’s say, I had a few preconceived notions, the ones you get from a basic acquaintance with Antonello’s work: his stiffness, his almost obsessive precision, the sparseness of his settings, a more Flemish than Italian distribution of mannerisms and, so to speak, an admirable command of the subject or, more exactly, a way of portraying command itself. There’s nothing ambiguous or hesitant in the eyes or the gestures, only a constant assertion of poise and strength. The format of the dei Conti obliged me to do a portrait and the only one in my mind was the Condottiere. But the Condottiere is the only portrait Antonello did that is so powerful. His other portraits always fall a bit short, they’re slightly more neutral, slightly more sentimental; I had no departure point for constructing my puzzle; I had just one single portrait besides which the others seemed barely more than sketches or drafts. They pointed towards the Condottiere, but that’s all. I couldn’t make a jigsaw …”

  “I don’t understand you … Couldn’t you have made a puzzleportrait out of those same drafts, as you call them, to produce something that would look like another draft of the Condottiere?” />
  “I wasn’t interested in doing that …”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know … I had this idea … to start from the Condottiere in order to paint another Condottiere, a different one, but of the same quality.”

  “That’s what you called as good a way as any of coming a cropper …”

  “Yes, of course … To set off on your own in search of something that only existed once and for all time …”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Why not? I had nothing to lose. I thought I had nothing to lose … If I’d managed, it would have been an incredible coup.”

  “It was a flop?”

  “It was a flop …”

  “Why?”

  “For all the reasons in the world … I wasn’t ready … I wasn’t good enough. Was looking for something that didn’t match anything inside me, that didn’t exist in me … What I call stiffness I can also call sincerity … Could I understand that face, could I understand that mastery? It didn’t mean anything to me. I was just playing around, pretending to be a painter. But Antonello wasn’t joking. As long as I added two and two, of course I got four … But I should have guessed that there was no point at all in doing sums on my own …”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Of course you don’t! Nobody can understand, not even I can … If I’d understood, I wouldn’t have tried, but if I’d understood I would have gone back as soon as Geneviève asked me to. If I’d understood I would never have followed Jérôme. If I’d understood I would have avoided Madera like the plague. If I’d understood, I would never have killed him … But I never understood. I had to make my own way, on my own, to the end of the road, I had to make one mistake after another, I had to pay for every action, every word, every brushstroke on every canvas, every tap of the mallet on the Hoard of Split … Up to the last I fought my own shadow, up to the last I tried to believe I was on the right road, I accumulated arguments, experiments, escapes and returns. I went back on my tracks. I carried on painting even when it had lost all meaning … I knew, but I carried on regardless. It was going wrong, but I told myself I would find out how to put it right. But what if there was no way to put it right? It was rotten to the core; if I shored things up on one side, I hit the rocks on the other, I was hitting the rocks again and again, and again, and again … Then one day it was all over, there was nothing that could be done about it, the house had gone up in flames and me too. There was nothing left, not a scrap to salvage. I tried to understand, I tried to understand everything, down to my most trivial actions. But the tally was easy. Zero plus zero. That’s all. Twelve years of nothing. Twelve years of living as a zombie, living as Fantômas. Nihil ex nihilo – except that, at the end of the road, instead of a Renaissance masterpiece, instead of the portrait I thought I could perfect after twelve years’ striving, instead of the only portrait I ever really wanted to paint – an image of serenity, strength, poise and command – there was a clown in a mask, a buffoon in his prime, a tense, nervous, lost, defeated, yes, utterly defeated man. That’s all. It’s enough. I felt as if someone had given me a gigantic slap in the face. So I responded.”

  Under the spotlights the Condottiere rose from his ashes: a face decomposed and disfigured, a man demolished, an absurd lunatic who had long ceased to be a conqueror. The clear gaze and luminous scar had given way to the harsh anxiety of illegitimate leadership. No longer a man. A tyrant.

  What were you after? What did you want? To extract your own image from past ages? On the back of twelve years’ cumulative experience in painterly technique you wanted to pull off the authentic creation of a masterpiece? Didn’t you know it was impossible, that it was a meaningless aspiration? So what. You clung on to that paltry ambition. To be at long last, in your own right, the captain of your soul and the world in an irrefutable ascent, a single movement towards unity. Just as in the past Holbein and Memling, Cranach and Chardin, Antonello and Leonardo had each launched out on his own different but identical experiment, using the same procedures and, by transcending their own creation, had managed to restore coherence and necessity. What next? Bemused by the glance that was not yours and never could be … To paint a Condottiere you have to be able to look where he is looking … You were trying to find that sense of direct conquest, the distinguishing marks of omnipotence, the look of triumph. You were trying to find that rapier-sharp look and disregarded the fact that someone had found it before you, had given an account of it, had explained it by going beyond it, had gone beyond it by explaining it. In one and the same sweep. A triumph of painting, or the painting of triumph? You were taken in by that oxlike mug, that admirably oafish face, that spectacularly thuggish snout. But what you had to recover was the strong and simple relationship (a peculiarly simplified relationship, moreover) that this personage – who was in the last analysis little more than a tarted-up barbarian – was able to afford to have with the world. Were you able to understand it? Were you able to understand why or how it occurred to this mere soldier of fortune to have his portrait painted by one of the greatest artists of his day? Could you grant that in place of unbuttoned gaudiness (with loosened doublet and aiguillettes fixed on any old how) he wore only an admirably neutral tunic with no decoration apart from a barely visible mother-of-pearl button? Could you understand the absence of a necklace, medals, or fur, the barely visible collar, the lack of pleats in the tunic, the exceptional strictness of the skull-cap? Did you grasp that the almost impossible sobriety and severity of dress had the direct consequence of leaving the face alone to define the Condottiere? Because that’s what it was about. The eyes, the mouth, the tiny scar, the tensing of the muscles in the jaw were the exclusive means of giving consummate and utterly unambiguous expression to the social status, history, principles and methods of your character …

  You had no way out. You were up against this luminous, bright face, up against just this face and no other. You, the world’s greatest forger, had to reinvent it. Without cheating, without any tricks. You had to achieve the same sparseness in the clothing, the same clarity in the face. You might well have been scared. It would be no problem to get the balance and the internal logic of your painting right. No technical problems either, not even the supremely bothersome business of gesso duro. But the glance, the lips, the muscles? The complexion? The serenity? The look of quiet triumph and unthreatening power? The sense of presence? You had to invent. But what did you have to invent with?

  Was the whole world looking at your striving? To make it work. Make what work? The unavoidable flow of time. The leap nobody had ever dared make, the step nobody had ever dared take. A monumental ambition. A monumental mistake. A vast recycling scheme. Trying to gather the central elements of your life in that face. Harmonious conclusion. Necessary conclusion. The universe of potential broached at last, beyond masks, beyond play-acting. The ambition of seeing his face emerge slowly from the wood panel, with its strength, power, and certainty. His part. You wanted to engage in combat unmasked? But you were playing a hand you’d already fixed, didn’t you know that? You were trying to win but not prepared to fight … And who did you think you were, to go after such a win?

  You accumulated reproductions, enlargements, X-rays. The Antwerp Crucifixion, the Saint Jerome from the National Gallery, the Head of a Man from Vienna, the Head of a Man from Genoa, the Munich Virgin Annunciate, the Florence portrait known as The Humanist or The Poet, the Berlin Portrait of a Man, the Old Man from Milan, the Portrait of Man (the one with the red cap) in the Baring Collection at the National. They went round and round in your head, they weighed on your sleep, they went with you wherever you went. But at the end of the road you found nothing … Could you resuscitate a ghost?

  You didn’t know, you still don’t know. You tried to cling on to your technical knowledge, but something – in you, in front of you or behind you – stopped you in your tracks. You were on your own in the studio at Dampierre. There was no Van Eyck to point the way forward …

/>   “Why did you become a forger?”

  “It just happened … I was seventeen. It was wartime. I was in Switzerland. On holiday. I’d just left the boarding school where I’d spent most of my school years and was wandering around. I met Jérôme in Berne; we became chums, more or less. He was a painter, at least that’s what I thought. I was vaguely intending to enrol at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. We spent a few days together; I was alone and I was bored; he had a car and took me on loads of trips. We talked art; he knew heaps of things and I knew nothing at all … that’s what swung it … After a week or so he offered to train me and I said yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I found it interesting …”

  “What did you find interesting?”

  “Anything I could learn … I was guaranteed better training than I would have got in any school or college.”

  “Did Jérôme tell you he forged paintings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it bother you?”

  “No … Why should it have bothered me? I think it amused me, more likely.”

  “Why did it amuse you?”

  “The allure of mystery, that sort of thing …”

  “Do you still find it alluring?”