Paris Still Life

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  “It’s still here, waiting for you,” she said. “Are you coming to get it?”

  “All right. When’s a good time?”

  “Any time. I’ll tell you what I’ve found out. The painter was Spanish. But it was probably in Holland because in the sixteenth century, the Spanish ruled the Netherlands under Philip II, so some Spaniards probably still lived there. Including, maybe, the man who painted the walnuts. These little paintings of still life objects were called bodegones. Originally that meant paintings done in bars or wine shops. They showed the existence of the transcendental in ordinary objects, ordinary life.”

  I said, “I remember, that was the name of the exhibition. Yes, the painting we saw was an exhibition with El Grecos and Picassos. Why did we think it was Dutch?”

  “Because the Dutch took up the still life theme in the seventeenth century and particularly liked still lifes of very ordinary things. But it was probably the Spanish who took their bodegones with them when they conquered the Netherlands, and after William of Orange liberated the country, the style of painting lived on. Yet I think the symbolism changed. If you look at the objects lying around in say, a Vermeer, you see that they nearly all represent something. They are everyday life, and they are more. They are not religious, though. You can’t say they are purely symbolic, the way you can with medieval paintings, nor can you say they are simply the things that happened to be lying around. These walnuts—do walnut trees grow in Holland, by the way? I was looking at them closely, and what they look most like to me is the two halves of the human brain. Do you think that is too far-fetched?”

  “No. In fact, it was something that had occurred to me too.” I was in the street, walking home down the Gobelins, and it seemed strange to be having this conversation while traffic passed, kids came out of school and were shepherded home, and a large van stopped right on a crossing and started disgorging furniture wrapped in plastic. A hoist was being set up, going vertically up to the top floor of a building, to take the furniture in through a window. I stopped to watch, fascinated at the accuracy of the whole operation.

  “So. What shall we do about it?”

  “Everybody has been telling me to do nothing, it seems. But I’m not sure that I have to obey them.”

  “Well, I’ve put out some feelers with somebody I know who is very good on forgeries, fakes and copies. He’s coming to look at the painting the day after tomorrow, so if you want to come and meet him, do. His name is Fabrice Corte, and I have known him for years. He will tell us at least something, probably whether or not it’s a good fake, or the real thing.”

  “Okay, what time?”

  “I’ve asked him for a drink, at seven. See you then?”

  “See you then. Ciao, Françoise. And thank you.”

  “There’s just one thing. I thought I should warn you. He does have a certain resemblance to your father.”

  I walked up the steep street toward Sacré-Coeur, pressed in Françoise’s code, came through the art nouveau doors, and started up the winding polished staircase, one worn tread at a time, thinking of all the thousands of feet that had come this way, up and down for centuries, before me. As Yves had said, the present is piled upon the past in Paris: stairs, steps, streets. New furniture being shot up into the air, to inhabit ancient buildings. Hidden rivers beneath pavements. Marble and ancient brick beneath concrete. We walked on our modern streets high above the medieval walkways, and even higher above the Roman roads; we turned corners and passed the sliced sides of buildings that gave way into Roman amphitheatres; we confronted history itself. Bears and lions in the arenas, people being torn to pieces. You could always ignore these things, of course, and go down streets simply looking at shops. Now I went up Françoise’s oak stairs thinking of the recent past, my father on these very steps, about to reach her door, myself walking in his footprint. I wasn’t thinking about the man I was about to meet.

  “Gaby! Come in. Fabrice is here already.” She stood aside to let me pass, and I went in to the sitting room with its windows above the street, and a man stood up to shake hands with me. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Fabrice Corte had white hair, a tanned face, a slightly Roman nose, and he was wearing a black jacket above a white collarless shirt. I took his outstretched hand and stared. “Bonjour, monsieur.”

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle. I am so happy to meet you.”

  “Yes,” Françoise said. “There is quite a resemblance, isn’t there? People used to think that Fabrice and Peter were brothers.”

  I let go of his hand. “You knew my father?”

  “Of course. We were in the same business. I respected and liked him, even when we argued over the interpretation of a painting. He used to bring things to me to verify and then insist on his own version. I used to say, Peter, I don’t know why you bother coming to see me, because you already know what you want to think. You look very like him, by the way.”

  I said, “So do you.” I heard my voice shake.

  “Yes, I know, sometimes people used to mistake us for each other. Not Françoise, unfortunately.” He smiled at her.

  She was carrying a tray with a bottle of Ricard on it and glasses. “Fabrice likes pastis, I hope you don’t mind? I have some wine in the fridge, if you prefer. But he comes from Corsica, you see, so I have to indulge him.”

  So could that have been Fabrice Corte on rue Mouffetard and coming out of the Closerie des Lilas? Could I possibly have looked at this man and seen my father? Looking at him now, I couldn’t even remember what my father had looked like. Features I had known seemed to be here in front of me, but played in another key. My father’s nose had not had quite that Roman bump. Nor were his eyes that deep, dark brown, more hazel, like my own. But the white hair, the build, the searching look, the set of the shoulders under the jacket, and the craggy neck in the collarless shirt all seemed familiar. Or, nearly familiar. A shade off, a touch different. My father was English; this man’s gestures were not his, nor did his sharp glance upward at a listener have my father’s amused and speculative air.

  Fabrice took the offered glass and topped it up with water, and I took mine. Françoise handed out olives in a little bowl and asked him, “Now, so you want to see the painting?”

  “Of course. That’s what we are all here for. Except, of course, I am trying hard to get used to being in the same room with Peter Greenwood’s daughter, who looks so like him, a feminine version, of course.”

  I didn’t say that I, too, was trying hard to get used to being in the same room with him. The most disquieting aspect of him was that he was annihilating my memory of my father; because he was here, alive and real before me, my father was fading. As I’d noticed with Yves, memory fades in the presence of new information, even as it is evoked.

  Françoise went into her bedroom and came back with the little painting, which looked smaller than ever in her hands. Fabrice took it and turned it, looked at it closely. He turned it around again. Then he looked up. “I think it’s just as well you didn’t show it to anybody at the Louvre, because it’s very good. It may well be the real thing, not a copy, and in that case, it belongs to somebody, and we don’t know who. That person might be very upset to have lost it. That person might almost think that it was stolen.”

  I said, “You mean, my father might have stolen it?”

  “Well, I don’t want to insult him, and dealers very rarely steal things; it isn’t in their interest. But could he have bought it? Could someone have left it with him for safekeeping, or to be valued? We don’t know. We do know one thing, though, or I do. It does have a twin; there is another one by the same painter, and it was the one exhibited at the Guggenheim in that exhibition a few years ago. So at least that is clear. As in Shakespeare, twins are tricky, you never know which one you are dealing with.”

  Shakespeare again. Does everyone in France grow up reading him, while everyone in England has taken him for granted? Is he the hidden genius who lies beneath French civilization, after all, and are Corneille, Racine,
Molière, Victor Hugo, all of them, only second-rate influences? Twins, ghosts, storms, gravediggers, mortality; in the end, everyone had to go back to Shakespeare.

  Fabrice handed me the painting, and I felt impossibly moved once again by the way those nuts had been painted. I was back in the Guggenheim beside my father, listening to his slightly lecturing voice. “Walnuts are symbolic, of course, but who cares about symbols when you have the thing itself in all its essentials? The smallest thing on this earth, a nut, a seed, and here it is for us, just the way it was four hundred years ago. Most of the nuts still closed, just one cracked open.”

  The one cracked nut lay open like a little boat, its edges turned smoothly. Somebody had just cracked it and was perhaps about to start on the others. I looked up at Fabrice Corte and said, “He took me to the exhibition; it was the last time we really spent time together. He told me about the painting. We both just stood there in front of it and were amazed by it together.”

  “In that case,” Fabrice said, “he must have meant this one for you. He found it—somehow, somewhere—and he left it here for you. Don’t you think so, Françoise?”

  She nodded, looking at me intently. It was like having parents again. It was like being the child between two adults, all at once being allowed to understand. The world was falling into a coherence it had not had since I was young, when something had fractured that I had not had the time or opportunity or maturity to appreciate. I was being shown another way of seeing things, and yet it was not unfamiliar, only distant. I saw my parents together in that messy kitchen in England where I had grown up between them, the child of all his children who looked most like my father. I saw the massive farmhouse table, always covered with pots and bowls and half-sliced vegetables, those still lifes my mother needed, those sacred things. I saw the two of them stand together in a doorway, his arm around her, a farewell kiss, and then goodbye. I had watched, and known, without knowing it, that my father had somewhere else to go, and that it was not just the world of work. I had received all these messages at that time, as I was growing up, but I had not been able to interpret them. They had been in me, because I had observed, watched, meditated; it is what children do. I had had to wait until I was forty, and had lived for years in another country, and was married and even separated myself, to see what his message was. You can love people and leave them, as he did. You can have more than one life. We are multiple beings, each of us, and we can come and go in the world, appear and vanish, be there among crowds on a street and then gone again, love more than one person, do more than one thing with our lives.

  “The only problem is,” Corte was saying, “that somebody else may want it too.”

  Françoise said, “It’s been here for a year, and I never heard of it going missing anywhere.”

  “So, I’ll take it with me, have a look at it under X-ray? I’ll get it back to you by the end of the week. We might do a test on the actual paint too. You know, a forgery is often easy to detect because paint that has not had centuries to dry will flake off. Recent forgers have used plastic, and before that they even used Bakelite. But it’s easy to discover. Don’t worry, we’ll be very careful.”

  We watched while Fabrice wrapped it in bubble wrap, scotch-taped the ends, and placed it in his briefcase. I could see that the act of stealing a painting this small would not be hard. What would not be easy would be deciding what to do with it afterward. Like a person in a witness protection program, it would have to stay permanently out of sight. If I accepted it, would I be trafficking in stolen goods, or simply inheriting something my father wanted me to have? I would have to rely on Fabrice to tell me what to do. For some reason, this made me uneasy. I thought of my own brief career as a thief in London when I was a teenager. It was called shoplifting, not stealing, and we had all done it, making it a kind of competition. It was to make myself feel better: to feel that power, that intense secrecy, the fear of being discovered, and the glow of success in getting away with it. What the objects had been, I could hardly remember; they had not been the point.

  “So. I must go. I have a dinner appointment. Thank you so much, Françoise. This has been most enlightening. A real pleasure.” He took my hand, with a very small inclination of his head, his eyes on mine.

  “Well, thank you for coming, Fabrice, I appreciate it,” Françoise said. Again, I thought, how can she not be amazed and moved, even silenced by the likeness? Perhaps she had become used to it, and that might mean she saw him often.

  I felt my question grow in me; I had to ask him: “Before you go, monsieur, can I ask you something? Were you by any chance on rue Mouffetard on a Monday in late May, when they were making a film about Paris in the fifties?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “I thought I saw you. I’m sure I have seen you before.”

  “Ah, but isn’t it because I look rather like Peter? A lot of people have remarked on it. We used to joke that we could stand in for each other and no one would notice. Anyway, I rarely go to the Left Bank.”

  “Did you, ever? Stand in for each other, I mean?”

  “I don’t think so.” He laughed, a little uneasily. I had overstepped some line with my question. I had been too inquisitive, too soon. Goodbyes had been said already. This man had a formality about him, I saw too late. Françoise sucked in her breath.

  “Well, I’ll contact you at the end of the week, Gaby, if I may call you Gaby. Do you have a mobile number? I’ll give you a call.”

  We saw him out. I knew I should leave too, but I had to ask Françoise: “He is astonishingly like my father. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, but being French not English makes him very different. They are not at all alike in character. And his eyes are much darker, and he isn’t so tall.” She would know. She saw me looking at her and said, “Since you asked, he hasn’t stood in for your father, nobody could do that, but yes, we have become friends, over the years. And I think you can trust him with your painting.”

  My painting? I thought, How can it be mine? I can’t take it anywhere. Unless I live with it here in Paris. Or carry it around with me in a shopping bag, the way Fabrice Corte had just tucked it in his briefcase. The way I used to walk nonchalantly around with a bag of stolen goods from John Lewis or Selfridges, my head in the air.

  I wanted to ask Françoise, Was it because he reminded you of my father, was that the attraction? Or, How could you, after my father died? But I said neither of these things. People did what they did. I knew the surge of physical attraction, the way it came up and grabbed you, with a smell, a memory, a certain movement, a certain light, even a mistaken identity, like the boy I had seen kissing a girl all those years ago on a bridge over the Cam. But I did want to know: Was that Fabrice in the street that time, and on the Right Bank when the bus nearly stopped, and outside the Closerie des Lilas? (“I hardly ever go to the Left Bank.” Why?) The only way I could know was through recovering my own visual memory of my father, and since I had seen Fabrice, that had faltered and been changed. I doubted that I would ever get it back.

  At the end of the week, Fabrice called me. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Greenwood. How are you?”

  “Fine. You can call me Gaby.”

  “We did some tests, the X-rays and the paint test. There’s nothing underneath it. It’s the real thing, just as I thought. Seventeenth-century Spanish but probably painted in Holland. The canvas is seventeenth-century Dutch. You can tell from the density of it, the rust marks too. The white paint is lead, on the meat of the open nut. You know the painter Francisco de Zurbarán? Well, he painted some marvelous still lifes, with symbolic meanings to the objects in them, religious ideas, some people think, lemons meaning purity and so forth. I must admit that allegory bores me, but the painting is wonderful. He was a friend of Velázquez, and he had several younger followers. This is one of them, a painter called Guido Ferrer. The best known de Zurbarán are from the 1630s, ’40s. This one’s a little later. The fact that he signed it with initials rather than
with his full name could mean that it was not entirely his. It sometimes means, school of, or pupil of, as you probably know. It’s not incredibly valuable, because he never became that well known, but there you are. It’s real, not a fake, although it may well be a copy or another version. Quite often, an artist would paint several versions of the same subject. If you were to sell it, you could probably raise about eighty thousand euros.”

  I listened hard, my phone to my ear. I hadn’t expected a lecture, and I was reminded of being back at the Courtauld, taking notes for a final exam. “But whose is it? Where did he get it?”

  “I’m afraid that is something I haven’t been able to find out.”

  “Then I couldn’t sell it even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”

  “No, I suppose you couldn’t, or not easily, anyway.”

  “So are you giving it back to me, or Françoise?”

  “Françoise says your father left it with her for safekeeping, but as far as she is concerned, it’s yours, you should have it. So, where do we meet? Can I come to your place? Where are you?”

  I gave him my address and the code. Then I sat down to wait. I thought of Matt and his dead ringer theory. Was Fabrice the original, the real man I had mistaken for my dead father, so that the talk of ghosts and revenants had been sheer superstition? The fact of such likeness was so disconcerting because it undermined the whole idea of uniqueness. Two paintings, so alike as to be hardly distinguishable from each other, that was one thing. Two men who resembled each other this way, quite another.

  He came up the stairs once I had pressed the buzzer to let him in; I heard his footsteps slower on the last flight, and then he arrived at my open door. “Come in.”

  He was checking something on his cell phone. Then he clicked it shut, held out a hand. “Nice place.”

  “You haven’t been here before?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “I just thought my father might have invited you.”