The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “The fact that the notebooks are in English might slow the Colonel down, but not by much. Somewhere across town, at this very minute, he and the Maresciallo are probably sitting together at a table, reading through the photocopies and discovering what I discovered last night. We need to keep a step ahead.”

  Blume brought coffee to Caterina, which he had saturated with sugar. He sat in the chair opposite, rapped the marbled cover of the top notebook, and then started leafing through the pages.

  “After you left today, I read out a related passage to Nightingale. I wanted to see if what Treacy was talking about made any sense to him, and I am sure it did not.”

  He gulped back his coffee.

  “. . . But of course, my works were never found out. Not once. It is not just that I am good, and I see no point in false modesty here, I am also self-critical and without illusions. If one of my works was not good enough, we never made a play with it. I would study it, see where I went wrong, and then either re-cover the canvas, if it was an antique one, or destroy the work. At any one time, I am not afraid to say, I would have fifteen, twenty unsuccessful works lying about my house . . .”

  Blume stopped. “Sorry, I started a bit early. Though that’s interesting there, isn’t it? It implies the works we found in his house, the ones I am supposedly trying to sell with the Colonel, aren’t worth much.”

  She watched him leaf forward a few more pages and wondered if reading those few lines had really been a mistake, or he felt she needed more persuading of his honesty. His big foot hit the coffee cup on the floor and sent it spinning away, but he did not notice.

  “Right. Here’s the bit. He’s talking about how he and Nightingale worked together, about how he sourced his materials, especially old canvases, and about the workings of Galleria Orpiment. The year is 1996.

  “Sometimes there would be a genuine bidder in the room, and that was always to be welcomed. If they went over a certain price, enough to cover the expenses incurred by John and enough to reward my labors, then we would let it go.

  “It so happened one day that I was present at the auction, which was unusual. The bidding was taking place in Christies of Rome, and it was a tedious affair. We were not interested in most of the merchandise, mainly silverware and marble busts of God knows who fashioned by an artist justly forgotten. All legitimate, all very dull.

  “Then an interesting item came up for sale. I had examined this work in the catalogue before the auction. It was listed as a painting by an ‘unknown Spanish artist’ c. 1680–81. Of course, only an academic would dare place such a precise, and wrong, date on a work that he has just admitted he cannot identify. The painting was a blurred mess. The layers of varnish applied to it over the years had darkened it so much that when the auctioneers placed it on the display easel, all we could see was a shiny black square. Listed in the catalogue as Portrait of a Lady, it might as well have been titled ‘A Study in Bitumen Cracks’.

  “I do not believe in a sixth sense, nor fate nor God, come to that. But I do believe the unconscious mind has enormous processing power and that sometimes it sends a clear signal to our conscious mind. There was something in that painting that I wanted.

  “The starting price was low, so I raised my finger, which caught John by surprise. ‘We want that?’ he asked.

  “ ‘Yes. It’s interesting. And I like the old frame.’

  “ ‘Very well. I’ll bid for it,’ said John.

  “After three or four bids, the price had risen to around three million lire or thereabouts, but it was already beyond the price John thought the painting was worth.

  “ ‘Someone’s bidding against us,’ he said, nodding at a broker across the room. ‘Let them have it.’

  “ ‘No. Keep going.’

  “The price rose to five million lire, then six. John was getting agitated. It was not the sum itself, which translated into about three thousand pounds, but the fact it was unplanned bidding and he did not feel in control.

  “ ‘Keep going,’ I whispered.

  “The room, sensing that something might be going on, became tenser and a new bidder joined in. The price, moving in increments of 250 thousand, climbed up to seven million, and the new bidder dropped out. At seven and a half million, the price of a secondhand Fiat, the painting was mine.

  “I brought it directly home, placed it in my lean-to greenhouse, which, with the permission of my kind Pamphili landlords, I had added to the side of my house. It has just enough wood in its frame to be counted as a temporary structure, and thus no planning permission was needed. The conservatory is full of natural sunlight, which is far more powerful and penetrating than any artificial light in an auction room. I stood and stared at my acquisition for some time. It was like trying to see the bottom of a barrel of tar. I took out a bottle of acetone and wetted some cotton balls, allowing it to drip down between my fingers and evaporate leaving the unmistakable scent of pear drops in the air, which I inhaled greedily as I tried to calm the manic energy I felt coursing through my muscles and nerves. With my hand trembling, I took a second wad of cotton and soaked it in turpentine (to act as a restrainer, if the acetone was too destructive), which gives off the best smell in the world. It had a good calming effect.

  “Beginning in the bottom left, where mildew and damp had attacked the canvas, I applied the solvent, and watched as the black turned green. I worked at the painting for the entire day until the evening sun became too orange for me to be able to judge what I was doing. I went to bed, slept fitfully for a few hours, and was back at work at first light which being weak and gray tends to make one err on the side of caution, which is precisely how you want to be when working first thing in the early morning surrounded by the fumes of turpentine and acetone. At the end of the day I had a painting that was covered in green. Now, rather than frowning into a barrel of oil, I was smiling into a pond of slime.

  “By evening, the green had turned to gray, and I was beginning to be sure of what I had here. I was nervous and had to force myself to eat. But I was focused and my hand no longer trembled.

  “Another full day passed between swabbing and restraining. The closer I got the more frequently I changed the cotton balls so as not to confuse the colors, dropping one after the other on the floor, where they lay like dark-stained field dressings in a war hospital. Still I kept going, realizing on the third morning that I had not had a drink for two days.

  “I could see the face that was emerging, and it made my heart beat and the blood in my chest sparkle with recognition and love in the way that no real person has ever done. The last time I had seen this beautiful young woman, she was pulling aside a curtain and peering down at a spinning wheel in the Prado Museum of Madrid. Even in the painting in the Prado, she is painted with indistinct, almost impressionistic strokes that convey movement and energy, and here the touch was even lighter. She was also poised in a slightly different position. It was a study for a later work, of that there could be no doubt, but it was a study done by the hand of Signor Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez. There is no mistaking the touch of that hand.”

  They sat in their separate silences for a few moments. Caterina had eased off her shoes and swung her legs up onto the sofa, and buried one foot beneath a cushion.

  “He found a Velázquez,” said Caterina, allowing a note of doubt to creep into her voice. “Do you believe him?”

  “Do I believe the story of how he found it? Possibly. Nightingale might remember the auction, but then again he might not if he never knew the significance of the find. Do I believe the story at all? I don’t know. It might all be made up.”

  “Even if everything is true,” said Caterina, “can we trust Treacy’s identification of the Velázquez? He might have forged one. All these writings might be a long and elaborate hoax. Or he might be mistaken.”

  “Another thing,” said Blume. “He doesn’t say where it is. I need to reread the notebooks, or at least the second one. It’s full of hints and allusions, and toward th
e end it reads more like a letter than an autobiography. He didn’t date all the entries, but the latest ones were written last year. It reads like he knew he was dying. Stuff about each heartbeat is the bleeding away of his life, the soul’s dark cottage.”

  “The painting is probably in his house. If it is, the Colonel will find it.”

  “I don’t think it’s in his house,” said Blume, turning over pages. “I don’t think he left it there. Later on—here we are—he seems to be telling Angela where it is. It’s more like a letter of repentance. I think Nightingale’s stories about how nasty Treacy was to her must be true.

  “I have stored that Velázquez where it belongs, Angela, and I want you to have it. It is legitimately come by, and I want you to use these notes and my story as part of the process of establishing provenance because, unfortunately, it will take some time before you are believed. I have not seen the painting these past years, but that has not been nearly as difficult as not seeing you.

  “Do you remember meeting Francis Bacon? You might not, since at the time you did not know who he was. In Italy, nobody did in those days, and even now, he’s regarded with that wearied tolerance that Italians maintain for experimental northerners. I saw him in London in 1972. I would like to say we met, but that would be overstating the case. But John introduced us in 1976.

  “He was interested in me for a while. To begin with, we were Irish. Well, as he himself added, ‘sort of Irish.’ He was Irish in the way Mrs. Heath was Irish, which is to say English with a house in Ireland. People still think it’s a shame so many big houses were razed by the IRA in the 1920s, but I find it hard not to sympathize with all that burning, even if it involved the loss of artworks.

  “Although I was the younger man, as our conversation and acquaintanceship progressed, my deference began to falter. The man had so many things wrong with him, and I am not talking about his sexual proclivities, though they disgusted me. Him with his big round head and his knobbly nose. No, that was not the problem. The problem is, was, that he could not draw.

  “He could not draw. And he saw nothing wrong with admitting it. He wore it as a badge of honour. Like his sexual proclivities. Francis Bacon and his sausage.

  “Nor could he prepare a canvas properly. He knew nothing about priming and then, once again making a ‘virtue’ of necessity, took to painting on unprimed canvas. He produced these ropy thread-encrusted bumpy works, all of which seemed to be based on Munch’s Scream. He seemed to have no respect for the Old Masters, yet felt he had something new to say, which, in the end, are the two things I dislike most in contemporary art.

  “But, I need to be fair to the man, because he allowed me, an unknown, aggressive, younger man, to criticize him. He said he was not imitating Munch, and pointed out that the man in Munch’s painting was not screaming, but blocking his ears against a world that was screaming at him. He also reassured me that he did respect the Old Masters, one in particular, Velázquez, and, specifically, Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, the famously irascible Giambattista Pamphili, ancestor to the very family that had treated me so kindly over the years, allowing me to live on their property, now, sadly, owned and mismanaged by the Comune di Roma. Velázquez’s work, he said, was the perfect portrait. He had been painting variations on the theme of that one work for years, and expected to continue for more years to come.

  “I told him I knew the Doria Pamphilis, my benefactors, friends, and landlords, and promised I could arrange, next time he was in Rome, a private viewing of the Velázquez work, but—and this is how I know his respect for the Old Masters was less genuine than mine—he said he did not want to see the actual painting. He preferred to work from photographs.

  “In being so bloody-minded and strange and annoying, Bacon, who wasn’t a bad drinker either, was, in fact, sort of Irish after all. And he inspired me to look at that Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X until I, too, became obsessed with it and the painter. In 1982, the year Spain went into the European Community (and out of its own World Cup, thanks to Northern Ireland), I spent three months in Madrid, going every day to the Prado to look at Las Meninas, the Forge of Vulcan, and the portrait of Philip IV, especially the last. I immersed myself in the life of Velázquez. I even learned Spanish, though this is not very hard to do if you already speak Italian. I made a point of seeing the rest of his work in New York, London, Vienna, and, God help us, that bloody awful swamp city Washington. What fascinated me, I suppose, was that I knew from the very start that I could not do Velázquez. I made a go at Los Borrachos, just to see. Ironically, I used photographs. The result was unpresentable. I could not do Velázquez, but I think it’s safe to say no one alive could know him better than me. Although I failed to capture his style, I knew precisely how it should be. It’s like when you fail to speak a language or mimic a voice properly. You can hear the accent, intonation, and characteristics of the voice in your head, but can’t get your own voice to make the right sounds.

  “All it took was the hint of a form of a woman peering in from the left in an unknown painting for me to get a fluttering of excitement followed by a jolt of recognition that almost stopped my heart. I swear, seeing the unmistakable line and chromatic touch of the artist in the painting on my easel almost killed me, even though I was the one who had sensed something in the canvas and had uncovered it. I had sought him out, but was shocked to find him.

  “The next half page,” said Blume, “has a diagonal line drawn through it. Just one line, which suggests to me he was not convinced that he wanted to cancel these thoughts:

  “Angela, I began these memoirs and my handbook on how to emulate the Old Masters with the intention of getting them published, and I would appreciate it if you could get someone to finish and correct them for me if I don’t finish in time, which seems likely. Don’t ever give the only copy to John. In fact, keep that bastard away from this.

  “A year at most, the doctor told me the other day. My doctor is a man who likes to hedge his bets. Like all doctors, he knows nothing. The Men Who Guess. All these years, they get away with guessing and then prescribing. Like economists, art critics, but worse. When the patient dies, they shrug. He gave me a year, as if the earth’s circuit of the sun had anything to do with the pace of my body’s self-destruction. I am writing this in the spring. One year later it will be spring again, so I hope he’s wrong. I don’t want to die when everything else is coming into life. I don’t want to die before then either, of course. I really don’t want to die. I need to resolve so many things first. And then, I want to have time to enjoy living with things resolved. Does anyone get to enjoy all that?

  “Angela, I’m sorry. I know it sounds self-serving but you need to accept this. You need to forgive people before they die, because being angry with the dead is the most frustrating and useless thing you will ever experience, and I know what I am talking about. Once they are gone, you can’t get at them, you can’t ask, you can’t do anything except rage inside yourself. I’ll tell you something: if there is an afterlife, it’ll be full of the recently deceased picking fights with the earlier dead.

  “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.

  “Everything I have I leave to you. But I have already given you the most valuable thing I ever had. It is there before you, it is in these words, it is in our hearts and our memories. Remember the parties with Gustav the self-effacing Swedish archaeologist, who also happened to be a king? Remember the day we sat on the bench looking at the fighting putti in the open-air theatre convinced we had the whole garden to ourselves? And you kissed me, and one thing led to another, in there among the yew trees, after I played that trick and suddenly this mad Englishwoman was there, looking at us, asking what we thought we were doing. She would not accept that I lived in the garden, a guest of and friend of Pogson and his wife, Princess Pamphili. ‘Babs’ Johnson. Mad auld bat in a big straw hat. She set her dogs on me. She wrote under a penname. Georgina Masson and wrote the best guide to Rome there ever has been. Reme
mber that?

  “Look at that painting. Use your artist’s eye and your lover’s heart. Then you’ll understand. Maybe you’ll want to edit this bit out of the published work.

  “There’s a blank page here, which he sized with gesso, as if he was planning to draw on it. The next few pages are blank, too, and then another bit, which I was thinking of reading out to Nightingale this afternoon, because it would have been interesting to see how he reacted.

  “The doubters will be legion, A. Trust me.

  “John Nightingale and I were successful because we were indirect and invisible. Over the years, the works I did gathered more credibility and provenance, acquiring value and legitimacy like so many snowballs rolling downhill, always building momentum and growing larger the farther they got from us. I have seen my own paintings on display in some of the leading museums of the world. I shall give a list of the museums and the works in the appendix, but do not expect the museums to accept my claims.

  “The time lapse between our sending a work out to seek its fortunes in the big bad world of art and its appearance as a completely provenanced and documented Old Master’s work in a top museum is around 20 years. Meanwhile, I have refined my techniques even further, so if you are reading this 20 years hence and a museum has just announced the purchase of a long-lost Italian Old Master, pause to consider and perhaps to smile.

  “The prices fetched by some of my own works made us green with envy sometimes, but that is how it worked. The nearer a work was to us, the less it was worth, and the more suspicion attached to it. For, yes, of course, we were suspect. Many dealers knew, the Carabinieri knew, the auction houses, art historians, and museums knew. But they never knew enough, and most of our dealings were in authentic works.