Portrait of a Man

by Georges Perec

  Sometimes, in spite of himself, his hands, his neck, shoulders and ankles shook, seized up, got cramp. He pressed on with clenched teeth, sometimes making a rough whistling sound, absorbed in his struggle, as if he were no longer capable of stopping, as if all his life had migrated to the flat, shiny blade of the chisel with which he was pummelling the mortar like a machine, had migrated into his painful, overdone, ever more tense movements and which with every second, with every minute, were loosening, unfixing the stone that would become a new door open onto the night.

  The bedazzlement of life. From deep down in his consciousness rise the snows of Altenberg, the banners floating over the Olympic piste, the huzzahs of the crowd. And then the same fatigue and that feeling of peace. How beautiful he found those first steps towards conquest, the horizon suddenly coming into view after a long night’s march. A small party of four or five men, barely a rope. Sunrise near the top of the Jungfrau. The suddenly revealed view of the Alps, on the other side of the mountain. The watershed. As if it had all hung on the suddenly friendly and familiar presence of the sun. Near. Because it was cold or because they’d had to walk a long way to see it? Because his climb had been nothing more than the desperate call of that radiance …

  Why not understand? And why should he have forgotten? Then one by one the masks had come: meeting Jérôme, getting settled in Geneva. An absurd memory. Altenberg and its too fresh snow, a thousand slivers of light, the proud accumulation of layers beneath the apparent protection of the iced-over surface that glinted in the sunlight. Altenberg, whose traces lay in him like ski-tracks: parallel headlong lines accompanied by a quincunx pattern of roundels, slightly inclined towards the direction of travel, made by ski-sticks scraping their steel tips visibly if minutely, and more or less deeply, on the snow.

  Those vanishing, intertwining tracks, still sharp or else half rubbed out, each of which compacted the snow, solidified the ground, made it less and less fragile, less and less deceptive, just as – in the present – memories rose up in him, intertwined and vanished, strengthening his approach, and, like those pistes that were too hard for him to tackle, leaving immaculate, hostile landscapes of virgin snow on the north slope, offering wide open spaces that were waiting for him. Every instant, now, beyond the snow, beyond his memories, the paltry image of his own death rose up, the image of his fate, of his ridiculous saga, and the sickening grimaces of the masks. Twenty years had gone by. A hundred forged paintings, or more …

  And here you are, at the present time, with your life in your hands, wallowing neck-high in your own story, and more lost in your memories than you ever were before. A tear wells up, you’re so touched by your own weakness. But you know very well that things did not happen like that. What’s the use of complaining? You wanted to be what you were. You were what you wanted to be. You accepted your fate, whole and entire, not because you were obliged to accept something, not as a victim, but definitely because the way you structured your life, your work, your entertainment, remained the most likely way to provide you with satisfaction. It was you who followed Jérôme, it wasn’t Jérôme who led you astray …

  But what difference did that make today? Yes, it had all been messed up. Yes, he had messed it all up. He had accepted the world in its easiest manifestation. He had intended to lie. He had lied. He had made lying his business. And then? He had wanted to run away and it was too late …

  At an altitude of three thousand metres between Belgrade and Paris, maybe over Basel or Zurich, perhaps above Altenberg, the salutary decision he had mulled over for too long had at last been made to have done with forgeries and go away with Geneviève. They would have gone to the Balearics first, then to the United States. He would have earned a living as a restorer. But he had not alerted Geneviève … He had not answered her last letter, which he had had for ten days. When the plane made a stop at Geneva, he had sent a telegram. But when he reached Orly, only Rufus and Juliette were waiting for him, and they took him back to their place where there was a cocktail party going on, where he had hooked up with Jérôme. Then with Anna, Mila and Nicolas. Then Madera. Then Geneviève …

  She had left straight away. He hadn’t spoken to her. Had Gaspard been nailed or screwed to the floor? He had not seen her since. Sixteen or eighteen months later, that telephone call, in the middle of the night …

  She had not answered. She must have woken up with a start. Then understood. Who could be calling her at that hour? Then waited. Then decided quite quickly that she would not get up, that she would not pick up, and then she must have listened, maybe counting the rings, and got up all the same, then hesitated, switched the lights on, edged closer to the telephone, hesitated again, mesmerised by the ringing, hesitated yet again, then put out her arm, brought her hand towards the receiver, unable to decide whether to pick up or cut the caller off … Perhaps he had not waited long enough, perhaps he’d let himself get swallowed up by the regular sequence of rings, as if each of them merely emphasised the futility of this final attempt. Ring. Silence. Those tinny crackles on the line, over there, on the other side of Paris, here, right in his ear. How his patience and pointless obstinacy must have reassured her … Sometimes I feel I understand you, completely, inside out … What would have happened if she had picked up, if she had answered, if she had agreed to see him again? How long would it have been until he went back to Dampierre? Was he free? Was he a prisoner?

  Sixteen or eighteen months later, at night, that telephone call. That crazy call. That automatic, almost automatic gesture, like so many others after all, following on from those dozens and dozens of numbers, dozens and dozens of letters on the dial. Counted out one by one. Always with that same anxiety. And the same impatient desire for a dialogue wrested from space, recreating, in a bizarre coherence, that universe of wires and networked lines, those thousands of faithful and impassive operators in headsets, those kilometres of cable weaving all round the globe, not so much in his mind the eternal muttering of time and history as the soothing web of a potential release, simply connected to the refusal or the acceptance of one’s self, of one’s fate, of one’s destiny, the last bastion of one’s freedom, those simple movements taken on board one by one, corresponding, beyond the electronic precision of the combined circuitry, to what could have been his definitive, immediate, indisputable victory over the world … B–A–B–1–5–6–3 – Everything became possible again, for the second time, one more time, beyond the clumsiness of the action, simply because at Rue d’Assas Geneviève had woken up, Geneviève had heard. But she was not the person he should have called.

  He had driven from Gstaad to Lausanne then flew in a taxi-plane from Lausanne to Paris, and another taxi from Orly to Avenue de Lamballe. He had arrived at three in the morning. He had put his case in the hall. He had taken off his coat. He had gone up to the telephone. He had wanted to call Rufus first to explain why he’d left. Then Madera, to say that he was not going to go on, that he didn’t want to be a forger anymore. But the number he had dialled – why? – was Geneviève’s …

  Was it really for her sake that you left Gstaad? Answer, no lying now: what were you after? You waited a long time. At each unanswered ring the world collapsed anew. Whole continents smashed to smithereens. Torrents of lava. Tidal waves. What was left? She had not answered. You hung up. You took off your jacket. You loosened your necktie. You looked at the time. You went to the kitchen. You drank a glass of water … You lay down, you woke up, you called Rufus in Gstaad. You got dressed …

  He had taken a taxi to Gare Montparnasse. Another taxi from Dreux to Dampierre. Otto had opened the door, and he had not looked surprised. Madera had seen him in his study. He had told the older man that he’d had enough rest and had come back to finish the Portrait of a Man, and that he would have it completed in a week. He had gone down to the laboratory. He had taken off the piece of canvas that protected the panel. He had looked at the Condottiere …

  You did all of those things, you lived all of those moments. Do you re
member? That was three days ago. Everything was possible, you remember, you wanted it. You were waiting and at each ring you swore you would hang up after the next one, and still you waited, and you promised yourself that she only had to pick up, even if she cut you off straight away without saying anything to you, for you to call Madera. But she kept you hanging on to the end. She didn’t lift a finger. Nor did you. It was so simple. A mere telephone call …

  Hello, I want Dampierre 15, in the Eure-et-Loire. Hello. You can talk now. This is Winckler. Good morning, sir. Good morning, Otto, can I speak to Madera, please. Certainly, sir, one moment, sir. Those kilometres of wires weaving all around the globe their soothing web of a potential release. Madera I’m not coming back I’ll never come back. You can all get stuffed, you and your clique. Click. Clunk.

  Was there nothing? Nothing but his admitted weakness. The counter-truth of a dead end. What to do? Where to go? Carry on. Why carry on? Carry on for whom? Why accept? What difference could it possibly make whether she picked up the phone or not? What difference could it possibly make that he had decided to complete the Condottiere? What difference could it possibly make if the Dampierre studio, after the studio at Place du Cirque, after the one in Gstaad and the one in Split and the one before that in Paris, had become a prison, the vicious circle of his contradictions, the eloquent symbol of his pointless life?

  Pointless. Now he had said it. In Geneva, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Paris, London, Tangier, Belgrade, Lucerne, Split, Dampierre, Trieste, Berlin, Rio, The Hague, Athens, Algiers, Naples, Cremona, Zurich, Brussels – what had he done? What image would he leave in the whole wide world?

  Which framework would he walk out on? None. The void. And yet at all times a way out had been available. And yet at all times he had thought he could say no …

  That was wrong, wasn’t it? You could not say no. You never did say no. All you could say was yes. They had you on a leash and you were free to follow them. You couldn’t make any demands. You couldn’t do anything except what you were doing – making coins, faking reliquaries and statuettes, turning urns and pastiches of shams …

  Twelve years. Twelve times three hundred and sixty-five days. Twelve years in the course of which he had been shut in basements, attics, strongrooms, empty workshops, abandoned houses, barns, caves, disused mineshafts and set up, thought up, worked out and carried off alone and on his own one hundred and twenty or thirty fake paintings, A whole gallery. From Giotto to Modigliani. From Fra Angelico to Braque. A gallery without any soul or guts …

  Gaspard the forger. Gaspard Theotokópoulos alias El Greco. Gaspard da Messina. Gaspard Solario, Gaspard Bellini, Gaspard Ghirlandaio. Gaspard de Goya y Lucientes. Gaspard Botticelli. Gaspard Chardin, Gaspard Cranach the Elder. Gaspard Holbein, Gaspard Memling, Gaspard Metsys, Gaspard Master of Flemalle. Gaspard Vivarini, Gaspard Anonymous French School, Gaspard Corot, Gaspard Van Gogh, Gaspard Raphael Sanzio, Gaspard de Toulouse-Lautrec, Gaspard de Puccio alias Pisanello …

  Gaspard the forger. The smith-slave. Gaspard the forger. Why a forger? How a forger? Since when a forger? He hadn’t always been a forger …

  Becalmed. Day in day out. Then the hours that started ticking away, putting their full weight on him. And then those deeds, those events, that adventure, story, fate – a caricature of a fate. A useless gesture, or a step in the right direction? In its unspeakable spontaneity, Madera’s death was perhaps the first action of the demiurge emerging from chaos.

  Night is falling. Rufus has not come. You’re in with a chance. You just have to keep out of Otto’s way. Otto is an idiot. Your arm hurts. Doesn’t matter, keep going, the blocks are more than halfway to coming loose. You’ve had enough. I know. Who cares. Tell yourself it’s exercise. Some kind of a match. A time-trial. Tell yourself you’re carving a bas-relief. Tell yourself you’d be better off anywhere except this cellar. You’re not convinced. Who cares. One more time who cares. You mustn’t say who cares. Never look a gift-horse. It takes two Constables to catch a Whistler. Remember, that’s your motto. Don’t give up now. You’re too close to the finish. Even so: you could carry on, or you could wait. Right? You try to overcome your own opposition. Of course you won’t. Sure you will. I know you. You know yourself. Nonetheless. How many times have you hit the chisel with the hammer? A hundred thousand times? A million? Two hundred and fifty? You don’t know? That’s a good sign … Listen here: you and me pal, we’re gonna do a bunk, right? Jump the fence? That’ll give Rufus a nasty surprise …

  To die not to die. What did that mean, free or not free, guilty or not guilty? What would that so strictly, so definitively disastrous arc look like such that he would end up being able to describe it? Madera was dead. Why? What was the more important? Where had it all started? The party at Rufus’s place? The night at the studio in Belgrade? The sudden return from Gstaad? Meeting Jérôme? Meeting Mila? Meeting Geneviève? Or was it the night he had spent drinking in this very basement? What was left of his whole life? Where had it begun? What was the logic?

  Gaspard Winckler, trained at the École du Louvre, holding a diploma in Painting Conservation from New York University and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, Honorary Technical Consultant at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Geneva, restoration expert at the Koenig Gallery, Geneva. So what? A notorious counterfeiter in his spare time. A forger more than he should have been. So what? He had been born, grown up and become a forger. How can you be a forger? You are the forger … Why become a forger? Did he need money? No. Had he been blackmailed? Hardly. Did he like it? So-so.

  So hard to explain. At the time, could he have imagined anything else? He was walking the streets of Berne. It was wartime. He was seventeen. Idle and wealthy. And Jérôme arose. The attraction of mystery. An adventure. A clever and elegant Arsène Lupin. On his endless vacation, surrounded by extremely wealthy old ladies from England, canny hotel-keepers and retired diplomats, amidst postcard-pretty scenery – snow, mountain peaks, fine chocolate and high-class cigarettes – what could be better than that infallible painter? I’m a painter too but that’s very good my lad. And then? The sudden discovery of something difficult. The sudden awareness that he had never known anything, that he had never understood what the act of painting meant, that he had only been making desultory use of a fairly good “hand” to keep boredom at bay, and the certainty that he could learn and become knowledgeable, one day. By immersing himself entirely in study and research, under Jérôme’s patient but firm supervision. And then? Then by copying, pastiching, copying, imitating, reproducing, tracing, dissecting, five times, ten times a hundred times, every detail of Metsys’s Banker and his Wife: mirror, books, coins, scales, box, hats, faces, hands. And then …

  Too good to be true, too easy. When did the whole business start to wobble? When did your story come unstuck? So, so irresponsible … I was seventeen, of course. But when I was twenty-five, twentyseven, thirty, thirty-three? Could he get his mind round it? What is the point of having a conscience? What’s awareness for? It’s a word. A word like any other. Conscious of what? The walls of the prison closed in on him at speed. Nothing more to say. One fake. Another fake. Gaspard the forger …

  Then came Mila. First bedazzlement. First slight, small and harmless. Simulated remorse. A tiny misunderstanding. For the first time in his life he had a sudden urge, just like that, to stop playing a game. To be himself. What did that mean? A rut is a rut. Gaspard the forger. Gaspard Winckler, supplier of a full range of forgeries. Anything by anybody of any period …

  Loving a woman, was that being himself? Did he love her? For many years love had meant using confidential visiting cards that Rufus gave him (he got them from Madera, but he only knew about that much later on). Anonymous encounters. And that was that. A need for slightly more spontaneous affection, for something rather less mechanical, a little less sordid. It was of no consequence. That was the way it was. He had met Mila at Nicolas’s place. She’d become his mistress. Because of the colour of the dress she was wearing that day, or else because sh
e had begun to smile. He could not remember. What did it matter? It was something like an interval. A few nights that were different from the others. The morning after, with pitiless logic, with pitiless idiocy, there he was at the Louvre, at the same time as always, in the Roman Antiquities section, with Nicolas, preparing the Hoard of Split. It spoke for itself. It had not even occurred to him that, without it making the slightest difference to anything, he could perfectly easily have given himself a week off. Was that natural? Guilty or not guilty …

  When he had come into the room she was already there, seated on the arm of an enormous armchair close up to the fireplace, leaning slightly forward, talking to Jérôme. It was fairly odd. It had never occurred to him that she might know Jérôme. She turned to look at him, said nothing, didn’t even smile or nod. He went a little closer. She stood up very naturally, and went to the other end of the room, where the bar was. A neutral attitude? Or was her indifference carefully calculated? What difference could it make? Doesn’t matter. Things like that happen to everyone. You didn’t love her, that’s all. Or she didn’t love you. But that’s not the issue. Why did you feel guilty for a few seconds or minutes or days? You were indifferent. You didn’t make the slightest effort. You would have liked to make an effort …

  Strange. You think you’re free. Then, at a stroke … No. Where did freedom begin? Where did it end? Free to fake? What an oddity. A little Giottino. The Adoration of the Magi. Melchior, Balthazar. Gaspard. Have another go. And so it goes on. And it soon becomes essential, and there’s nothing in the world besides that persistence and that patience, that obsession with exactness in respect of anything. Cézanne. Gauguin. The world recedes … And there he is already pinned up on the wall: Gaspard Winckler the Forger. Pinned down like a butterfly. Gasparus Wincklerianus. Wholly, fundamentally, explicitly, absolutely and completely defined. Sometimes I feel I understand you, completely, inside out … A forger, and what else besides? Just a forger. Joni Icilio the Forger, Jérôme Quentin the Forger, Gaspard Winckler the Forger. The forger with his auger. The drill of death, and passing time.