And the other thing was I really liked being Velázquez. I remembered vividly what it was like to paint like him, I’d actually done that portrait, and I thought if they could put that experience into powder form, no one would ever look at crack cocaine.
I spent the next morning staring at the cleaned canvas on the easel. Baldassare had changed the size a little, a couple of inches off each dimension, but I didn’t bother to ask him why. Nor did I touch a brush; I just stared at the white. I’d been studying the radiographs published in Brown and Garrido and in various mono-graphs to get some idea of what his underpainting was like. The problem with Velázquez in his mature period was that he was so good he barely did any preliminary work. Aside from a few question-able sketches of the Pope’s portrait, there are no Velázquez sketches at all. None. The bastard just painted. He laid in the ground with a big brush or a palette knife in flake white and grays made with ochre and azurite, varying it according to the composition of the painting. When he had that right he drew in the figures directly, what they call alla prima painting, and then used diluted pigments to color them, so that the light ground and sometimes even the grain of the canvas showed through, a totally bravura technique, which is why nobody but an idiot tries to forge Velázquez.
All the confidence I’d felt briefly at the Doria in front of Innocent X had vanished with Lotte, as did my pleasure in my new wealth. Because in order to get that wealth, of course, I had to put paint on canvas, which just now I seemed disinclined to do. And as the good light faded I had plenty of time to consider the cowardice of Charles Wilmot, Jr., the Chaz of all my memories, the real reason why he wasn’t really a million-dollars-a-painting guy, not the market, not the art appreciation business at all, just the pure funk, because now, when it really counted, the big leagues, an actual million-dollar commission, Chaz doesn’t show up.
I blew a couple of days like that, just looking at the damned canvas. Baldassare came in once and told me he’d sized the old canvas with a secret water-soluble compound. The point of this was to fill the cracks in the seventeenth-century ground I’d be painting on, so that the new paint wouldn’t sink into it. After the forgery was done and dried, he’d dip the whole thing in water and the sizing would dissolve out; with a little bending and shaking the surface would conform to the old cracks, and bingo! Instant craqueleur.
I asked him to give me a couple of new stretched canvases in the same dimensions and texture, because I figured I’d be better off easing into it, do a test run, as it were, get comfortable with the paint and the style. And the model. So I started looking at Sophia and she started looking at me, you know, a little discreet flirting around dinnertime, smiles, increasingly warmer, little jokes. It turned out Franco wasn’t that interested, not that he would’ve kicked her out of bed-nor would I have-but not interested. That was all I needed now, given the thing with Lotte. I’d called her cell phone half a dozen times but she never called back.
Which pissed me off, and so I asked Sophia out for a drink after dinner, and she took me to a bar, Guido’s, over by Santa Maria, full of local people now in winter with most of the tourists gone. She was known there, she chatted with friends in the Roman dialect that I could barely follow. We spoke to each other in English, mainly, and I got her story. She’d done art at La Sapienza; there was a guy, an Australian she’d gotten involved with; then she became pregnant and he split, and there she was with little Enrico, dropped out of school with no degree and no prospects for a job. She was working as a madonnaro, drawing holy pictures on the sidewalk in front of churches for tips. Then her mother had called Baldassare, a cugine, it turned out, and he’d brought her into the family business.
She did mainly seventeenth-century drawings-Cortona, the Caracci, Domenichino-and helped out with paintings on fake Italian provincial antiques. I asked her whether it bothered her, the faking, and she said no, why should it? Romans had been faking art for bàbbioni tourists since BC. She was good at it, used only the best materials, genuine paper from old books and the right inks, and she had the style down. She’d done a Cortona Christ on the Cross that’d fetched thirty thousand euros at a German auction, and that kind of wage certainly beat some low-end curatorial job at a provincial museum.
A little defensive there, I thought, but it turned out that she wasn’t abashed at all, but envious. I was the big-time gunslinger brought in for this gigantic coup. Baldassare had told her all about it, but, she said, he doesn’t think you can do it. I asked her if he’d actually told her that, and she said yeah, he said you don’t have le palle sfaccettate. That’s what you need in this business. You know what that means? I didn’t. It means balls with hard edges, like a crystal.
I said, we’ll see, and then I asked her if she ever modeled, and she said not really, but Baldassare thought that she’d be right for this picture and asked her if she’d do it, and of course, what could she say? And the boy too, he said they’d need a child. I said that was right and asked her why she thought she’d do for the figure, and she said, you want someone like the Rokeby Venus, don’t you? With which she got up and walked slowly away and then back again and into her chair, grinning like a cat. Bellesponde, as they say. A narrow waist and a pear-shaped bottom, longish legs. Her face was what they call “interesting,” the features a little over-large for real beauty, nose too long, chin a little small, but she had a mass of thick, dark hair with coppery highlights, and in any case I was going to make up the face, for obvious reasons.
We drank some more and then some friends of hers came by and started in with the Romano chatter, and I got my pad out and started futzing around, and then as usual they saw what I was doing and I made drawings of each of them. Everyone was impressed, as usual. If this didn’t work out, I thought, I could always become a madonnaro myself.
We stayed late and got pretty oiled, and we walked back home through sleeping Trastevere in a light rain. When we got to the house it was clear that she was available, but I begged off, and that raised her eyebrow and produced a shrug. Whatever, signor. In fact, it was not Lotte mainly, but that whole thing seemed a little too planned, another way to inveigle me deeper into the circle of Krebs.
I told her I wanted to start in the morning; she said okay and went off to bed, and I did too. I woke up at first light. Or someone woke up, but it wasn’t in the bed I’d gone to sleep in and it wasn’t me.
I awaken in a different bed, a huge thing with four posts and heavy velvet hangings. I smell cooking and a kind of incense, and underneath a sweet, unpleasant smell, maybe sewage-that’s what the world smells like. I have to piss, and I use the chamber pot I pull out of a little box by the bedside. I’m wearing a white embroidered night-shirt and a cap. I push the curtains aside.
A huge room with high, coffered ceilings and wall paintings, Zucchis mainly, the usual Roman unclothed nymphs; they make me irritable every time I see them. I have not slept well. I’ve dreamed again of being in hell, vast cliffs with eyes, iron streets populated with gargoyles, half-dressed harpies, and in the streets chariots going of themselves, spitting the stench of pitch and sulphur.