Comemadre

by Roque Larraquy

  This, sweet happiness, is my monster. In the middle of a media frenzy. I call the father and say I’m going to dedicate my first show to the three of them. I don’t offer money. I use the terms “art” and “social acceptance” in the same sentence, and the good man remembers me from my days on television. He and the child are at my disposal.

  Parents, Lynda, tend to burden their children with such weighty expectations. This man wanted his to be two people. As I’m sure you know, his dream came true a few years ago, when the lone mouth began to speak with unexpected intelligence. It’s strange that you didn’t include this detail in your study. I’ll send you the transcript.

  I find an exhibition space before attention shifts to other monsters. The gallerist makes room for the television cameras. The audience consists partially of members of the working class who want to see the two-headed baby in person and partially of the same old crowd, charmed by the novelty of attending a show with the first group. Grade-school teachers, prime-time heartthrobs, the wives of entrepreneurs, and artisans from the Plaza Francia, united to bring me a measure of worldly success, crowd together in front of the glass that separates them from my piece.

  On the far side of the room, the father lies facedown on a bed. His son sleeps beside him. Their heads are joined exactly where the baby’s second head should be, as if it had been removed and replaced with the father’s. The bed splits in two, and the father’s body slips down into the divide until only his head, attached to his son’s, remains.

  It’s a simple trick: the baby is knocked out with cooking gas and its second head is covered by a silicone reproduction of the father’s face and body. Lynda Carter either forgets to mention this or doesn’t know how it was done, but she does point out, brandishing her discovery, that original tapes from the event recently fetched an interesting sum at Sotheby’s. She also says that “in this displacement of the senses, the cephalic union of father and son can be read as a gesture toward the umbilical cord.”

  The photographer stands me between the father and the baby. The father and the baby look straight ahead; I’m looking to the left of the frame, at an argument between journalists and the public about inappropriate use of the baby, crossing lines, and compassion or the lack thereof. The argument quickly turns personal: someone wants to kick my ass. This shoots me from a single column in the culture section to a half-page spread in lifestyle.

  I study their faces one by one, calculating the scandal. Until I see my own. Silence. Several people think Lucio Lavat’s entrance is part of the piece. We’re the same: same height, same nose, same teeth. Our heads are even the same shape, and we don’t have a single drop of blood in common.

  Lucio has been talking since we first caught sight of each other, but I only just started listening to him: he’s making a clever remark about failure. I’m confused. Maybe I was the one who brought it up. Simultaneously, or perhaps a moment earlier, a woman in the audience wearing green gloves clenches her jaw and looks me in the eye when Lucio says “failure” in that crystalline voice of his.

  Lucio said in a recent interview that seeing his reflection in me stirred no new feelings because my face isn’t novel to him. This was said for effect; I don’t believe him. You should tell him so, Lynda.

  The idea of sleeping with Lucio drives me wild. I can’t tell what he thinks; I have a hard time reading him. I see him as an action figure of me with better legs and an out-of-sync voice. Maybe he’s uncomfortable. After the show, he invites me to his place. I skip the obligatory dinner with the baby’s father and the gallerist to go with him.

  He lives in a building from the fifties with semicircular balconies. We end up in the same elevator as the woman with the green gloves from the gallery. She congratulates me on the show. Lucio, silent, bows his head.

  He opens the door onto a generous, square living room; there’s a three-foot mound of something that at first glance looks like fat or brown gelatin. “We’re in the same line of work,” he says. I don’t understand right away. He’s telling me that he is, or wants to be, an artist. It seems unreal. Do we have the same fingerprints, too? The same morning breath?

  There’s a bad smell, a pile of bones with bits of flesh still on them, and two pots brimming with more bones. He says he boils them for the gelatin, to use in soft sculptures, but that he hasn’t hit on the right consistency yet. His pieces melt in the living room. I make my own clever remark about failure. Then I bring up the topic of our physical resemblance. How strange it is that our paths never crossed before. Lucio says he’s known me for years.

  I demand proof. He points to a framed copy, in charcoal, of Mantegna’s Christ.

  His mother compares him to me, stands him next to the television screen. Lucio is eight, two years older than me, but besides that, we’re the same. During my brief childhood stardom, he is an attraction among his neighbors and classmates.

  Hoping to take a photo of the two of us, his mother brings him to see me square off against the autistic Canadian. Lucio hides in the crowd. The idea of meeting me terrifies him.

  The man in the Lacoste shirt picks him up (Lucio doesn’t remember, but it must have been him), scolds him for his carelessness, and hands him my copy of the Mantegna. Lucio doesn’t clear up the misunderstanding. He watches me leave with my parents.

  He thinks of us as two points connected by a line of solid matter. He doesn’t know how long this line is, but he believes the moment will come when it can’t stretch any further and one of us will drop to the ground.

  He gives his mother the drawing as an apology for ruining the encounter she’d planned, but she doesn’t speak to him for a week. Eventually she gives in and signs him up for art classes.

  It only takes him a few months to become an expert. He copies my copy of the Mantegna with incredible accuracy. He shows it to no one. He’s at a disadvantage: he’s competing with a six-year-old. His talent blossoms under this repression, and it gets him a grant to continue his studies in Italy by the time he’s twelve.

  Having several museums a stone’s throw from the classroom doesn’t save him from being taught with slides and textbook reproductions. As a student, he worships Velázquez and adores Hogarth. Midsemester, after a particularly blurry week in the thick of things, he runs away to London. They find him two months later, trying to steal an Aubrey Beardsley (and almost succeeding).

  He becomes hot news in England. A big-time journalist writes a column on the case in which he laments the many childhoods destroyed by the war in the “Falklands,” wonders whether public education receives sufficient funding, makes a joke about the queen, talks about peace, and concludes with a plea on behalf of Lucio, “a twelve-year-old boy who crosses international lines for real art.”

  The museum, in all its paternalism (it is an English museum), publicly pardons Lucio for his attempted robbery. An arts institute in Oslo goes one step further, offering him a fellowship to study there for two years. Lucio and his mother move to Oslo with housing and a stipend courtesy of the state.

  Against a backdrop of Norwegians, Lucio’s mother calls his father’s architecture firm in Buenos Aires and informs him that he can start divorce proceedings, then moves herself and her son in with a guy named Dag.

  Dag introduces Lucio to Norway’s formidable language. He teaches history at the university five months of the year and is just settling into his seven months of self-satisfaction and marijuana. He finds Lucio’s attempted theft of the Beardsley admirable and complains about what he describes as the “indecisive nature” of his countrymen.

  Lucio’s father travels to Norway and serves as the witness at his ex-wife’s wedding to Dag. While the couple is off on their honeymoon, father and son make up for lost time watching VHS tapes of hours and hours of Argentinean television. Lucio searches for news about me. My absence makes him uncomfortable.

  When he turns eighteen, he goes back to Buenos Aires to formalize his studies abroad. If his father buys him an apartment and promises him the funds to v
isit his mother once a year, Lucio is inclined not to do anything of significance until he’s twenty-three. To his father, this seems like a good deal.

  Lucio travels a lot. He is perpetually lovely and thin, and amasses a collection of accessories stolen from the Virgin Mary in churches around the world.

  One month before we meet, he wins a competition and is invited to participate in the International Biennale in Norway with his soft-sculpture project. While he struggles to get the consistency right, his mother sends him an email to let him know about my show with the baby, and he comes to find me.

  I ask Lucio if he framed his copy or mine. He asks me what I’ve been doing all this time. The question decimates me. I lay out a sampler of easy answers, bridges to elsewhere. Then I look him in the eye and manage to make an opportune joke.

  He brings out a bottle of wine and makes one last remark about Norway. This leads him into an explanation, his voice thicker now, of his gelatin project. He wants to use it to record whatever movements his hand makes as it travels through the air for fifteen to twenty seconds. Attached to his fingers, the gelatin will accompany the movement and render it solid to a maximum height of three feet. Any higher and the filament gets progressively thinner and could break, causing it to shrink back and deform the figure.

  Lucio rests his fingers on the mound. He pulls out five diagonal lines with his arm outstretched and guides them downward in a curve. The figure dissolves.

  The sound of a key in the lock is added to the scene. His mother walks in and greets us. She’s traded her green gloves for a T-shirt that says Denmark. Lucio tells her she’s picked the wrong country. His mother explains that she’s trying out a system invented by Dag that involves announcing one’s mood with T-shirts. Denmark is, logically, bad news.

  We’re constantly together. He makes nervous calculations to avoid my touch, abandoning a comfortable spot on the sofa or bending like a reed (I’ve never seen a reed) to find his twelve inches of personal space. I tell him I want to sleep with him, to see the expressions that pleasure puts on my face through his. This is not a subject he’s willing to discuss. He doesn’t do much talking.

  We have dinner with Lucio’s mother and Dag in the apartment next door. She waves around the half-page spread with the photo of me, the baby, his father, and Lucio. She thinks it’s marvelous that the passage of time and my brief incursion into obesity haven’t affected our resemblance. According to Dag, the key is a shared ancestor from some distant time and place, completely impossible to verify; he cites Genghis Khan, who fathered two thousand children and whose genetic imprint is currently traceable in more than fifteen million, as a case in point. A pause, forks suspended in the air. Dag throws in a positive remark about my piece and the baby. Lucio’s mother sets her jaw and reaches across the table, saying “a shining example” as she tweaks my nose. Lucio is suddenly made of glass, or has been emptied out.

  She asks me what the baby’s malformation is called. I don’t remember. Dag hypothesizes that the presence of two heads on a single body is the result of an unresolved struggle between the DNA of two equally strong ancestral lines, and that with just a movement of his neck, the baby could be either Jekyll or Hyde. The cutting response he gets from Lucio’s mother has Dag ending the day in a shirt that says Chile.

  As a pretext for spending more time with him, I offer to help Lucio solve his gelatin problem. I contend that his soft sculpture runs the risk of becoming the “charming” piece in the Biennale, the sort of interactive object that offers momentary respite and is always surrounded by women with children. Plus, getting the gelatin from boiled cow bones is awkward. I propose working with materials derived from petroleum. The deadline to submit the piece is three weeks away. Like a curtain falling on our search, a chemical engineer tells us that if someone were to find a way to defy gravity using petroleum products, the art world would be the last to know about it.

  Lucio lets the gelatin go but insists that the object should be soft, so it conforms, if only partially, to the project he proposed for the Biennale. I tell him that I respect his scruples, but that we should set them aside just this once and start working, together, on a more effective piece.

  We have the relics he stole from the Virgin. We should include an account of their theft, to give them an air of impropriety. There’s an eighteenth-century rosary with sapphire beads long enough to fit around at least three necks. Lucio remembers the minuscule hands on the Virgin it came from. I remember his mother’s gloves. We add the idea of a hand holding the rosary. Lucio still insists on movement. I describe the living hell of a last-minute consultation with an expert in animatronics; anyway, a hand holding a rosary and moving around in the middle of an empty room doesn’t justify the expense. But fifty hands do. They should move and be soft. The least expensive movement is vibration. Lucio wants to make fifty child-sized hands out of silicone and run a copper wire through them, send a current through every ten seconds to make them quiver, and hang the whole thing at least five feet in the air. Like the beads of a rosary. A rosary made of praying hands. Dag says a Norwegian audience will hate the obvious symbolism of the piece and argues with Lucio about Norwegianness. An undesired outcome of their conversation is that my mind turns to Argentineanness. I recall the theft of Perón’s hands. Evita’s body became a relic the day she died; Perón’s hands become a relic as a result of their theft. In this new symbolic pun, we have Christian relics obtained by theft and a theft that produces its relic. Lucio draws a circle in the air with his finger. He says that the installation has no theoretical foundation whatsoever, but that no one will be the wiser if we call it Perón. Dag likes it because he’s been obsessed with Evita since he arrived in Buenos Aires. I suggest taking his opinion into account as a barometer for a hypothetical audience comprised exclusively of Norwegians. For those who don’t know about the theft of Perón’s hands, I suggest projecting an informational text in white letters at ankle height. It could rotate, making it harder to read. The suggestion, which implies having people bend or fall over as part of the piece, is immediately approved.

  We discard the format of the rosary: Lucio finds it pedantic, and I don’t think it’s justifiable. The Virgin’s accoutrements—no more than three—should be on the floor. The hands should hang in pairs at different heights, with each pair suspended from its own electrical cord; they should move at regular intervals and be real hands, taken from the dead or amputees. The public should be informed of this before entering.

  The only legal avenue open to us is to visit the morgue in search of unclaimed hands, with fake paperwork certifying our scientific research. Lucio bribes an older gentleman from the medical school with Dag’s money. He gets the money back five minutes later when he steals it out of the gentleman’s pocket as they say good-bye. Though I suppose a real theft would have required more effort.

  In the morgue, an orderly places the remains on a counter with a drain. There are four loose heads, a fifth one with its mouth open still attached to the torso, and a few arms. There are no legs. The hands have deep creases, small fingers marked with ink, stains like drops of wine. Once removed from the formaldehyde, they will keep for up to four hours: this is how long the installation should last. We obtain the hands of a mother and a rural schoolteacher, illiterate and lettered hands.

  Dag is Norwegian, which is uncommon in South America, and has a knack for bribery. In a single week, he manages to sidestep all the legal hurdles put in place to keep Argentinean hands from crossing the ocean to summer in Oslo. In contrast, the paperwork to get my name added to the catalog of the Biennale alongside Lucio’s is an object lesson in the incorruptibility of the Norwegian people. At the airport in Oslo, Lucio’s mother says we should think of the episode as a contradiction.

  Lynda Carter describes the installation’s success through a series of incidents unrelated to the piece itself: the story on the local news emphasizing the “reality” of the hands, which boosts the Biennale’s attendance by 40 percent; the fainti
ng, anachronistic; the tussle between the event director and our assistant, both remarkably tall women, over a request to extend the show’s hours that risked compromising the hands’ state of conservation; the Argentinean media’s response to the “disrespectful” use of the memory of General Perón; the outcry at our being awarded second prize though we were the crowd favorite. I sense Lucio’s involvement in the selection of details.

  Two days before the Biennale ends, its organizers decide to combat overcrowding by adding several square feet from our neighbor’s exhibition space to our own. This leads to a diplomatic chat with a Swiss artist who’s just lost half his space to us. His work is a series of eight counterfeit Van Eycks, painted on canvases from the fifteenth century. They could have generated resplendent profits on the black market, had they not been legalized and devalued by the introduction of a single contemporary element in each. The man in The Arnolfini Portrait, for example, is holding a ballpoint pen. In the Ghent altarpiece The Adoration of the Lamb, the lamb has Churchill’s face. Lucio makes a clever remark about first-world art and saunters through the space as if he’s carrying a parasol, proprietary shade encircling his feet.

  At the closing ceremony, Lucio translates “second place” for me in a whisper, his lips grazing my neck as if he were too weary to make it all the way to my ear. To my right, at the same time or maybe a moment earlier, Lucio’s mother and Dag’s incredulous wail of “second place” washes over the judges and all of Norway. The uproar spreads outward in a circle of heads shaking in disapproval as one.

  The Peronists and Silvio Soldán, who has just reminded the media of my prodigious childhood, are waiting for us at the airport back in Buenos Aires. The rational choice would be to pass through without giving a statement and maintain absolute silence until the strategy, a classic, sparks the public’s interest. During the month we spend installing the piece in the Palais de Glace, we get legal clearance and a police escort for the hands, courtesy of a judge who followed our experience in Norway with the concern of someone who believes in moral victories. Easy as that.