And I did step onto a pier, but it was the Danieli Hotel’s, and I staggered like a drunk and would’ve fallen if Mark hadn’t grabbed my arm. He said, “Christ, man, you should’ve told me you got seasick. I would’ve slipped you a Dramamine patch.”
“I never get seasick,” I said.
“Then it’s something. You’re white as a sheet. Are you okay to do this?”
I lied that I was fine. I was the last thing from fine; I was thinking, It’s been weeks since I had any salvinorin and now I have a salvinorin trip, and maybe I’ll wake up in the Gorgeous Loft of Terror again and this whole Venice thing will have proved to be another psychotic break, and it was only with difficulty that I was able to put one foot in front of the other and walk with Mark into the lobby of the hotel.
Krebs had taken the Dogaressa suite. Pale, overstuffed furniture, Oriental carpets on the floor, a view through high, narrow windows of the tower of the Doge’s Palace in St. Mark’s. I’ve heard about this place, probably the most expensive room in Venice, three grand a night in euros or something like that, and here was the man himself, trim, dark suit, handmade shoes, five-hundred-dollar tie, a big cigar. He’s got that tanned, slick, plastic skin you only see on really rich men, like a Kewpie doll, smooth, all the blemishes and sags of old age expertly removed-he was over seventy, I knew, but he looked fifteen years younger. Short, silvery hair in a fringe around a bald dome-he must’ve passed on the hair implants. Gave me a look, like a man buying a dog, up and down.
I looked at him the same way: the impression of power, ruthlessness, something you don’t see in your average bond trader, and which I recognized well, having just been in conversation with Captain-General Spinola, back in the seventeenth century. Our eyes met, and a smile formed on his face. A little shock now-he was genuinely glad to see me.
Introductions by Mark, a gentle, dry handshake, not a macho gripper, doesn’t need to, obviously. I saw my old pal Franco was there; I thought he worked for Castelli, but no, unless it’s a loan, like regular people lend tools: here’s my muscle guy and driver, enjoy! We sat deep into the soft couch, he plopped into the armchair opposite, cigars offered, Mark takes one, a Cuban Cohiba, of course; I choose a glass of Dom P. served by Franco, a man of many skills, it seems. Mark starts a little chatter, pleasantries, how was the trip, what a nice room, etc., silenced by a look. He just wants to talk to me.
So-compliments on the Tiepolo, intelligent questions about how we did it, then the talk moves to art, the old masters, who do I like, their virtues and faults. What have I seen in Venice? Not much except Tiepolos, I’ve been busy. A shame, he says, and tells me what’s worth seeing: the Veroneses in the palace, some things at the Franchetti Gallery in the Ca’ D’oro, Titian’s Venus at Her Mirror, don’t miss the paintings in San Sebastiano, a good place to get away from the tourists. We talk about there being no major museums in Venice, because Venice is a museum, the old Venetians didn’t buy pictures from anyone but the local boys, as a rule, and they kept them in their palazzi. He talked about this for a while and seemed to approve of my responses.
I was still a little rocky from my boat ride as Velázquez, but I was feeling the influence of the wine and the flattery. I don’t have much experience with wealthy collectors praising my work and being interested in my views on art, so I was yakking away. The guy knew traditional painting up the ying-yang, just like Maurice described; he seemed to have seen practically every important painting in the world at least once, not only in museums but in all the major private collections too. Encyclopedic, really; he makes even Slotsky look like he just got out of Art History 101.
After a while he raised the subject of Velázquez. He said no one painted like Velázquez, incomparable, not the images so much, but the technique. So I talked about the technique, the palette, the brushwork. I said I thought it was because he didn’t care, he didn’t care about the painting, it wasn’t work to him, his self-worth wasn’t derived from it.
“How do you know that?” Krebs asked.
I said, “It’s obvious. Look at his life: he spent all his real energy climbing the greasy pole, collecting offices, shouldering his way into the aristocracy. He had a great gift and he used it, but it was like he found a box of treasure somewhere, it flowed through him, but it wasn’t him. And he wasn’t driven, he had a sinecure for life, which was why he did fewer paintings than any artist of comparable stature besides Vermeer.”
I saw something interesting then: his focus on me seemed to increase, his blue eyes got sharper and hotter, and I found I wasn’t just spouting art history stuff, or even my own opinions, I was talking from direct knowledge, like I’d actually felt those feelings about Velázquez’s art. Which, of course, I had, in the drug mania, but it was weird all the same that it came through and that he could spot it.
After I ran down on this theme a little, he stood up and said he’d like to show me something. I got up and so did Mark, but Krebs made it clear by a gesture that only I was invited. I followed him into the bedroom of the suite. There was a display easel set up there with a small painting on it, maybe thirty inches by a little less, and he asked me to take a look at it.
I looked: it was a portrait of a man in black velvet with a small ruff, fleshy face, mustache, and spade beard, his hand playing with a gold chain around his neck, a look of comfortable sensuality. The paint was thin, the fine canvas almost showing through, the brushwork free as a swallow in the skies, the palette simple, not more than five pigments. I’d never seen a Velázquez outside a museum. Nor had I ever seen a reproduction of this painting. It was a fucking unknown Velázquez, propped up on an easel in a guy’s hotel room. Sweat popped out all over me.
So after a while he said, “What do you think?”
I said, “What do I think? I think it’s a Velázquez, it looks contemporary with the ones of Cardinal Pamphili and the Pope, probably from the 1649 trip to Rome.” He seemed to be waiting for something else, so I said, “I never saw it before.”
He nodded and said, “That’s because it’s one of his lost paintings. It’s a portrait of Don Gaspar Méndes de Haro, Marqués de Heliche. An interesting face, wouldn’t you say? A man who gets what he wants.”
I agreed and asked him how he’d gotten the painting. He didn’t answer directly. Instead he asked me, did I like museums? I said I liked them fine, I’d spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours in museums, that’s how you got to look at originals.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s one way, but do you like them, do you enjoy that they’re only open at certain hours, really for the convenience of the bureaucrats and the little stuffed men in their uniforms, do you enjoy the packs of whey-faced tourists shuffling endlessly through the halls, being exposed to art so they can say they saw something they can’t possibly comprehend? Wouldn’t you like to have all day to contemplate a painting, this painting perhaps, at any hour of the day, all by yourself? Like Don Gaspar did with this one, or as he did with Velázquez’s Venus, or as Phillip the Fourth did with the other paintings this man did for him? Wouldn’t that be fine?”