And the priest would grip my hand and guide it. He would position himself behind me—I would be seated at the high desk and he would stand immediately behind me, his cassock grazing my shirt—and the fug of his breathing would invade my air from behind, his face close to my shoulder, his bitter smell enveloping me. Even now, when I smell cheap tobacco I recall Father Franco’s hand on mine, his firm hand, with the hair on the back, clasping my own. I liked it. Of course, I admired the way he was able to make a few unassuming strokes become the thing we were drawing: the long hair appearing, the lines of the extended arms, the two feet appearing, held by the spike, the drawn cheeks. But most of all I liked the firmness of his hand guiding mine across the sheet, making all decisions for me, propelling me along.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I don’t know. What about you?”
“I don’t know. My grandmother says if I’m lucky I might get to be a priest.”
“A priest? You, a priest?”
“Yeah. She says that your whole life is set, everybody needs them, and they get the best wine.”
“But priests can’t have any girls.”
“Why do you want to have girls?”
“I don’t know. Father Franco says that they can ruin a man. They must be important.”
“Hey, don’t change the subject: what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I don’t want to grow up.”
“What an idiot, you don’t have a choice.”
“Oh no?”
Seven boys surround him in the cloister of the school: “Juanita María, little Guinea pansy.” The seven boys chant and dance slowly around him. “Juanita María, little Guinea pansy.” The boy tells himself it’s not even worth responding, that in their sin they’ll find their penitence, that they’re just a bunch of poor farm brutes, that he is so different from them, that they do it out of jealousy. That’s what Father Franco would have told him. Pure jealousy—because he’s so different, and Father Franco helps him and not them; he is the chosen one. Pure jealousy, he tells himself, because he’s different and does the best drawings and sometimes Father Franco will make him a present of an apple or an orange, depending on the season, for after dinner. But not them, and the seven of them keep dancing around him and chanting “little Guinea pansy,” keep on like that for days, perhaps weeks. They are like ghosts, chanting and dancing slowly, on the edge of silence. No one sees them. The Father in charge of supervising their break does not see, and the boy knows that if he were to tell anyone his life would become a complete hell. Then again afterwards, the chanting in the dormitory, when the Father on duty extinguishes the lamps and tells them that it’s bedtime. Pure jealousy. An old, rotting apple left in his bed: pure jealousy.
“You mentioned that you were smaller because your mother had forged—”
“No, I was smaller because I was younger.”
“That’s what I meant—the other boys were twelve or thirteen and you were just ten.”
“It was because my mother wanted to get me into that damned school and the priests had told her that they wouldn’t take me before I was ten, so she managed to get someone to fake some papers of mine so that they said that I’d been born two years earlier. I gained two years with the stroke of a pen.”
“Do you know who did that, how it was done?”
“I have no idea. I think it’s strange that my mother managed to do something like that.”
“It wasn’t her style?”
“It’s not that. I don’t know where she would have found someone to do the forging.”
“Perhaps she did it.”
“Maybe. I hadn’t thought of that.”
Pure jealousy, and the anguish of nights: not knowing what he was going to find in his bed, one of thirty in that silent dormitory; of the daybreak; and of the days: being always on the edge, the silences, the feeling of an overall helplessness while he tried to think of a way he could escape. Beginning to ask himself what he had done so wrong and finding too many possible answers. Until one afternoon, as Father Franco grips his hand in his own—with his tobacco breath, his cassock brushing him, his other hand resting on his shoulder or neck—to draw the serene curves of a Virgin in a heavenly shawl, the boy discovers that it’s not him, that neither he nor his classmates have understood. Suddenly, the boy discovers that it’s not true that Father Franco has been holding his hand to lead it here and there—that he hasn’t been doing it to him but that he would do it to anyone, to any eleven-year-old boy with down on his legs and a skipping voice and skin still soft. That it isn’t him; it could be anyone.
It’s something the boy doesn’t yet know to call a revelation—or in lay terms: intuition. He understands without knowing—he simply understands. He understands—without knowing how, without words, without the showiness of ideas. In a flash he understands, without having to go through nouns, verbs, prepositions, words of time and place. He doesn’t like the way this happens; he’s disconcerted by the idea that this understanding happens to him, that he has not really played a part in it. He doesn’t like the feeling that he’s not in control, but now that he’s learned in this uncontrolled way, he tells himself he must control the priest; he thinks he can. If the priest isn’t doing what he does to him—if it is not to him specifically but to anyone—then it won’t be him who will be using the priest, and as a result, he need not fear punishment, for he will have done nothing wrong. He has an enormous power and he vows to use it: he has discovered that he is not who he is, and that is power.
“Son, you’re big now, all grown up. Now I can tell you the truth about your father.”
“The truth, Mother? What about what you told me already?”
“I’ve told you what you could hear.”
“Then don’t tell me any more, Mother. Now I’ll be the one to say what the truth is.”
That his father was a gentleman like Diego and Mariana’s father who lowered himself to marry his mother because he wanted to join his life to the life of the poor. A son of a bitch who got his mother pregnant and then ran back to the comfort of his rich family. An artist so exquisite that he decided that nothing was worth it and gave himself up to the cause, to meet his death however it should come. A naïf duped by that bastard Garibaldi. An idealist, who gave his life so that his son could one day be proud of him. An agent of the Pope, whose lie he lived out to its ultimate conclusion. Who says you have to have a father, anyway?
He considers all of this, and promises himself that one day when he’s ready—or perhaps when he has no choice—he’ll decide which is the true story of his father, even though his mother keeps insisting:
That his father was a hero. His mother insists on telling him the story of his father and she tells him over and over that he was a hero, that he died for what he believed, and that a con man left them—him and her—high and dry, out in the world without help or food or a future, with nothing. That his father abandoned them but didn’t want to—he wanted the world to be a different place, dreamer that he was. And that it’s easy to be a hero, a dreamer, a valiant knight like his father, dead like his father, gone like his father. That what is difficult is not being a hero but putting food on the table every day, and that poor Antonio was no hero or dreamer or anything like that but at least he kills himself working every day so that she—and of course him, too: the boy, not Antonio’s boy either, not really poor Antonio’s responsibility, as she won’t stop pointing out—kills himself working just like her so that the three of them can live, can eat every day, can just stay alive in this world, which is the way it is, even though to your father it was all fantasy. And Juan María refuses to listen as his mother keeps repeating the same thing over and over and Antonio is never there when his mother tells him these things, or rather his mother never talks about his father when Antonio’s around.
This happens many times: she talks while his stepfather is out, then he returns drunk, and some nights he hits her and the boy hides behind the
curtain that divides their room in two and thinks, huddled behind the curtain, that one day he’s going to bust that swine’s head open. Then, still huddling, he hears Antonio crumble and start to cry and ask Juan María’s mother to forgive him, sniffling, and he hears him promise her that he won’t drink again, she’ll see, and please to forgive him, and then that boy behind the curtain thinks that in spite of everything he’s really a good man, just as well his real father is dead; that he’s a happy boy, or at least a lucky boy.
2
“SO HE WAS THE ONE who gave you my name?”
“I don’t know if I can tell you that.”
“Then I can’t really tell you anything, can I?”
“I understand.”
He had a point. If I withheld this piece of information then there was no reason for him to tell me what I’d come to find out. This was an exchange, after all, and he at least wasn’t going to pretend to give me any more than I was prepared to give him; he was not playing any games.
“Yes, it was him.”
“That son of a bitch! It’s been a long time; hard to believe he’s still the same son of a bitch,” he said, and he looked me in the face, defiant. I guessed that Yves Chaudron didn’t normally look very defiant, but that afternoon he was trying it out. He didn’t look like he used this kind of language regularly, either.
“Still a real son of a bitch!”
I realized then that he didn’t know. I didn’t think it was time to tell him yet.
“Yes, he was the one who told me about you,” I told him, and it was true, even though it had been some time ago. Yves Chaudron leaned back in his flowered armchair. He had just turned sixty but he looked older, his thin body too thin, no meat on him, deeply wrinkled, his features too sharply drawn.
“And you really want me to tell you the story?”
“No. Well, yes, but actually I’d prefer it if you would first tell me a little about yourself.”
“About me? Why would you want to know anything about me?”
“It’s important. If I’m going to tell the whole story I’ll need to know as much as possible about all the main characters.”
“Sure, the main characters. But I’m only a minor character. I was always just one of the minor characters.”
“You were quite a forger in your time.”
“I was no forger,” he said, and he looked toward the kitchen door. It was as if he were practicing—no doubt he practiced every day of his life; that’s what they call marriage.
The door opened and his wife appeared with a wooden tray: two cafés au lait and a plate of pastries.
“Don’t even look at the pastries, Yves. They’re for the gentleman,” she said. I took her accent to be Polish or Russian. It matched her round face and her round and watery eyes. She was a good ten years younger than he was and had just begun to go grey. Later Chaudron would tell me that they had married more than ten years earlier, when Ivanka—he called her Ivanka—had arrived in Paris on the run from the Soviets and without a penny, willing to give herself to the first man who could provide food and shelter. He was nudging fifty then, and he thought this might be his last chance to secure himself an old age in which he might actually be well cared for.
“And you know what? To my big surprise she turned out to be the perfect wife. She doesn’t bother me, she knows her place, and I don’t bother her too much. In the beginning I did want certain things, but later I learned to adjust,” he would tell me, much later. For the moment, he continued stirring his café au lait; staring at it as if nothing else existed.
“I was never a forger.”
“Monsieur Chaudron, please excuse me if I offended you somehow, but…”
“But nothing. If you can’t call things by their proper name, then we’re not going to have anything to talk about.”
My punishment was another five minutes of silence in which he sipped his café au lait and showed me who was boss. But I was used to this kind of situation. I know from experience that someone without much excitement in his life—a nobody—can rarely resist the temptation of an interview, of having a real reporter focus all his attention on listening to him.
“You were telling me you knew Valfierno in Buenos Aires.”
“I didn’t tell you that!”
“I think you did. What were you doing in Buenos Aires? You were born quite close to here, weren’t you?”
“Close depending on how you look at it.”
Chaudron seemed capable of qualifying every single point. He was a man used to weighing pros and cons, to considering every possible nuance for as long as necessary—sometimes, it seemed, his entire life.
“But yes, it’s not far—a few kilometers northeast of Lyon. I grew up in a family of glaziers. My father, when he saw that I could draw, decided that if I learned a little more I could help him on the job, so he sent me to school in Lyon.”
I’d like to be able to say that the start of Chaudron’s painting career was exciting and full of hope, and even successful, or at least promising, and that but for his rejection at the hands of stuffy, tradition-bound art institutes, or a personal disgrace, or the demands of a rapacious woman—but I can’t. From the very beginning, Chaudron told me, he knew that he would be a copyist. He used that word, “copyist,” and he accompanied it with a faint smile.
“You know that I had a stammer then,” he told me, as if that explained a great many things. Upon starting school—as soon as he had his first brush in his hand, he said—he discovered that he was quite incapable of reproducing anything in three dimensions: a room, a body, a face, two apples, the Ródano hills. If, on the other hand, he wanted to reproduce a drawing, a painting, a tapestry, then there wasn’t a single shape or color or texture that he couldn’t master.
“Some people can copy certain things, other people other things. Some things have more prestige and some have less,” he told me. And that anyway the world had one too many dimensions.
“And too many people who believe they’ve invented something new. Not me, thank God.”
Chaudron referred to himself in the past tense; some people think of themselves that way. Chaudron had trouble in school. His attempts at drawing models failed time after time, and his adviser threatened him with expulsion. Professor Falaise was an old alcoholic who somehow still managed to pass himself off as a painter with a future, one of those fools, Chaudron told me, who still think the world owes them something when it’s quite clear that in fact they are the ones with all the debts.
The young Yves Chaudron dedicated himself to studying his professor in detail. He watched him paint and asked him questions, learned to imitate his walk and gestures, drank the same Pernods that the old professor drank and all the while painted pleasant fields full of cows and cowlike peasants for the annual show. When he was finally able to conjure up the old professor’s memories without meaning to, he began to paint one of his landscapes. It didn’t imitate any one painting in particular, but it had something of all of them.
Chaudron finished the painting, and one afternoon in March he crept into Falaise’s studio and left the painting tucked in amongst the others. The effect was remarkable. The fake Falaise was hard to distinguish from the real ones except that it was in some undefinable way better. As Chaudron told it, Falaise must have noticed this, for that year he submitted the fake Falaise to the annual show.
For the first time in his life, after more than thirty tries, Falaise won first prize.
“Sir, what you have done is criminal.”
“What I have done?”
“Yes, Professor: to pass off someone else’s work as your own.”
“What are you talking about? The impertinence!”
“I’m talking about the landscape that I painted and that just won first prize in the show.”
Chaudron told me that Falaise denied everything right up until Chaudron produced an irrefutable proof. He didn’t want to tell me what the proof was, but he did say that the Professor immediately changed
his argument:
“You’re the criminal, Chaudron, to forge a painting!”
“I forged nothing, Professor. I simply painted as if I were you, that is all. And you gained by it. That is the crime.”
“Don’t be a fool, Chaudron, the crime is yours for what you’ve done and because I am your professor and I say so!”
“If this comes out, Professor, you’re finished.”
“You as well, Chaudron.”
They had reached that point in chess when neither player can make a move without forfeiting the game—the danger of every con. A few days later Falaise told him that he could put him in touch with a copyist in Paris who could give him work. It was a good offer—if he didn’t accept, Falaise said, he would turn Chaudron’s life into a hell.
“You don’t know what it was like for a timid kid like me to think about going to Paris. I was nervous, terrified. But I couldn’t see any other way out.”
Falaise gave him the money for the train, and Chaudron left one morning without saying good-bye to anyone. In spite of everything, he now dreamed of conquering the city. But Falaise’s friend the copyist wouldn’t give him the time of day.
“I went hungry. Do you know what it is to go hungry, really hungry?”
I was about to tell him that yes, I did, but thought at the last minute that this might earn me another rebuff. I’ve learned to be careful, especially in interviews. An interview is a contrived situation—both sides pretend to be having an amiable conversation when in fact their real interests are quite different, and often at odds.
“No, the truth is I don’t. What happened next?”
“What happened next was that for months I didn’t know what to do. You see, I couldn’t go back to my village because my father would have been furious.”
The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa Page 4