So that was Mark’s tale, and after he’d delivered it, he dropped me in favor of a couple of guys in suits and spade beards who looked like sons of the desert, and I went to sit down. The auction started with half a dozen teaser items, which went quickly, and then the boys in white gloves rolled out the Velázquez, and there was a stir. The auctioneer said this is the Venus with Self-Portrait by Diego Velázquez, also called the Alba Venus, and he said a little about its history and then announced that the bidding would start at one hundred million. There were four serious bidders as the bids raced up the ladder in half-million-dollar jumps, and after each round the auctioneer looked to the back of the room and got a nod from the lady of Spain, and then one by one the others dropped out and the Prado had it for 210 million, the highest price ever recorded for a single painting. Thus the barons of our age learned the lesson that the kings of the age of Velázquez had taught their own barons-it doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t compete with the sovereign, and what we were seeing here was Spain herself bringing back her purloined treasure. No one else had ever had a chance.
What was that, two, two and a half years ago? During that time Chaz Wilmot dropped completely out of sight. I’d always thought it would’ve taken a nuclear detonation to get him out of that loft, but apparently he’d cleaned out whatever he wanted and walked away from the rest. This I got from the girl at Lotte Rothschild’s gallery. Lotte was still in business, doing rather better than before, to judge from her prices. I didn’t stick around to see her. Well, I thought then, bye-bye Chaz, not that he was ever a very important part of my life. I figured he was being maintained in some Swiss clinic.
But it happened that I was called to Barcelona for a meeting with a European consortium building a gigantic amusement park near that city. I had one meeting that lasted all day, and the one scheduled for the next day was moved to the following day in Madrid, so I got a free day in the town, which is one of my favorite cities, as lovely as Paris, but without the attitude. The Catalans even like Americans, probably because the Spaniards don’t very much nowadays. It was a pretty day, warm but not hot, with a breeze that blew away the usual smog, so I took a cab up to Parc Güell to wander through the mosaics, sit on the terrace, and ogle the tourists ogling Gaudí.
And there, on the middle path, among the line of Africans selling cheap sunglasses, crafts, and souvenirs, was a fellow with an easel doing aquarelle portraits of tourists at ten euros a pop. I thought that was a pretty good deal, so I waited my turn and sat down on the little chair provided. The artist, in a straw hat and sunglasses, was darkly tanned and wore a bushy gray-flecked beard. He got right to work without a word. It took about ten or twelve minutes and then he snapped it off his easel and handed it to me.
There I was in all my stony glory. He’d put me in the clothing of a Spanish grandee of the seventeenth century, just like Velázquez used to do, and just as good as the one he’d done of me twenty-five years before.
I said, “Let’s get a drink, Chaz,” and he grinned at me, a little sheepishly, I thought, and asked one of the Africans to watch his stuff. We went over to that little café they have there and sat under a beer-company umbrella.
He said, “You weren’t looking for me, by any chance?”
I said, “No, it was just luck. Why, are you in hiding?”
We ordered claras, and when the waiter left he said, “Not really. It’s just I like to stay kind of private.”
“Well, you’ve succeeded,” I said. “So what’ve you been doing all this time? Sidewalk portraits for ten euros?”
“Among other things. What do you think of your portrait?”
I studied it again. “It’s terrific. Full of life. More of me than I like to see revealed, frankly. And incredible that you can work in watercolors instead of pastels like the other sidewalk guys. Do your customers appreciate this kind of work?”
“Some do. Some really do. And a small percentage think they’re crap, not pretty enough.”
“Just like real life,” I said. “But you can’t possibly make a living from this.”
“No. I have other sources of income.” Our drinks came, and Chaz engaged in some rapid-fire repartee in Spanish with the waiter that I didn’t get. The man laughed and went away.
“Then why do it?” I asked.
“I enjoy it. It’s perfectly non-commoditized art, anonymous, and a pure gift of pleasure to those who can see, and even those who can’t see might come to appreciate their portraits after a while. Artists used to live like that in Europe all the time, back in the Middle Ages. Besides that, I have a studio. I paint a lot.”
“What do you paint?”
He grinned a sly grin. “Oh, you know, slick, witty nudes, just like before. It’s amusing. And I do other stuff too.”
The tone here was purposely vague, and I rose to the bait.
“You’re working for Krebs,” I said. “You’re putting together that collection that got burned in Dresden.”
“I might be. Although you can’t really trust anything I say. I mean, I’m a crazy person doing sidewalk portraits for small change.”
“But you’re not crazy. You proved that. The whole thing was a scam.”
“Was it? Maybe I made that up too.”
“Yeah, but come on, Chaz. Hundreds of people knew you, there are records, tax returns…I mean, you may have had some issues with memory, but you also had a verifiable life.”
“No!” he said with some heat. “No one has a verifiable life. A little lump in your brain growing in the wrong place and you’re not you anymore, and all the records in the world won’t change that. If you can’t trust your memory-and I can’t-then the record of your life, the witness of others, is meaningless. If I presented you with a shitload of records and the testimony of dozens of people telling you that you were, I don’t know, a plumber from Arkansas, would you believe it? If your supposed wife Lulubelle and your five kids swore on a stack of Bibles that you were Elmer Gudge of Texarkana, would you say, gosh, well, I had a fantasy that I was an insurance guy from Connecticut, but that’s all over now, hand me my pipe wrench? Of course you wouldn’t, because your memory’s intact. But what if your memory became unreliable, and what if your actual wife, say, looked at you and went, who’s he?”
This line of talk was making me uncomfortable, so I said, “That must’ve been tough, Lotte shafting you like that. I assume you don’t see her anymore.”
“Why would you assume that?”
“Well, she betrayed you, didn’t she? She must have been involved in the scam from the beginning, supplying photos and whatnot, and she betrayed you to your face, just before you went berserk. Unless you’ve forgiven her.”
“There was nothing to forgive, and she didn’t betray me. I betrayed myself. She just made me see it. I’m sort of grateful to her for that. And if I don’t see much of her, it’s not because of what she did-it’s the shame.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how you look through a kaleidoscope and you tap it, and the same little pieces of glass snap into a completely different pattern? That’s what happened. I left Mark’s party that night and took a cab to my loft. And when I went in it was like an alien place, and full of horrible vibes, like an ancient tomb with evil spirits inhabiting it, and even though I’d lived there and worked there for years, it was like I was there for the first time. I couldn’t find stuff, I didn’t recognize the things that were there, as if another me had been there all those years. And I started to freak out bad, and then this revelation-the kaleidoscope clicked, and I saw it. I saw that there was really no difference at all between me and Suzanne.”