“By making you crazy.”
“No, just crazy in a different way,” he said, and smiled the smile of a contented man.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“I don’t buy it,” I said after a bit. “I can’t understand why you didn’t just call your sister. Surely she would’ve blown the whole plot to pieces.”
“Oh, right, Charlie. Yes, sure, but Charlie was nowhere to be found during the period in question. Some anonymous donor gave her a bunch of money to set up a field hospital in Chad, immediate departure a requirement, and you’ll recall I didn’t have a phone. She was incommunicado for six weeks, and so when I called her the night I went berserk I got a no-such-number message, although there should have been people at her organization. For a while I thought I’d made her up too.”
“You were using Krebs’s phone. Maybe they messed with it somehow.”
“Yes, and they arranged for Charlie to be gone, and everything else that drove me nuts. A secretive international organization with tentacles everywhere. Don’t you realize how crazy that sounds?”
It did sound crazy, so I changed the subject. “So Charlie’s back from there?”
“Oh, yeah. In fact she lives with me in…wherever I live. She’s in and out on missions of mercy, but we have a nice setup.”
“Just like your boyhood dream.”
“Just.” Again, that annoying smile.
“And Milo? I presume he survived.”
“Yeah. He had his transplant, he’s flourishing. A teenager, which we never thought we’d see. The fruits of my wickedness.”
“Speaking of which, did you ever figure out if you did that Velázquez Venus?”
“Does it matter? You’ve got all the information. What do you think?”
“What I think is that you’re a terrific painter, but you’re not Velázquez.”
This was a little cruel, I admit, but something about how this had all turned out irritated me. It was like when someone accosts you on the street with a problem and you start to respond in a civilized way, to be of service, let’s say, and after a few minutes you pick up that the fellow is crazy and you feel like you’ve wasted your time and your concern.
“You’re right, I’m not,” he said. “But did you ever get a chance to take a close look at it? The real thing, I mean, not the poster.”
“No, but I’ll be in Madrid tomorrow. I intend to see it then. And I assume you haven’t had anymore whatever you call them-visions. Where you think you’re him.”
“No,” he said, with a tone of regret in his voice, “not since I saw him die. I seem to have enough trouble keeping up with me.”
“And you have no interest in finding out the truth?”
“‘What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.’ You must remember that from Humanities 102. Bacon’s On Truth? Look around you, my friend. Truth has left the building. Everything is manipulable now, even photography, and art is a lie to begin with. Picasso said so, and so say I. We all tell lies, even the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, even in the intimate depths of our private thoughts. But somehow, I don’t know how, maybe through what my sister calls grace, these lies occasionally produce something we all recognize as true. And when I paint I wait for those miracles.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and the conversation subsequently ran down a little. We talked about other things, the cities of Europe and what was going on in the world, and we parted amicably enough.
The next day I was in Madrid and spent the morning in a meeting discussing how to assess the risks of terrorism and sabotage on the proposed amusement venue, which is a growth area among the actuarial set, and I had lunch with my colleagues, then walked over to the Prado. They’d placed it in Room Twelve on the wall to the right of Las Meninas, which was quite the compliment, I thought; not many paintings can stand the comparison.
A little throng had gathered around the Most Expensive Painting in the World, the irresistible tugs of sex and money working together there, and a guard was standing by to make sure people didn’t stay too long and hog the view. I waited until it was my turn, and as I got to the front I was conscious of the little sighs people were making, as if to say, ah, if only love could be like that, sex could be like that, always. There she lay, obviously the same model who had posed for the Rokeby Venus, except now she lay on her back, with her hand covering her crotch, not palm-down, modestly, but palm-up, a joke, offering it, not to us, but to the sweat-soaked man reflected in the black-framed mirror, the same fellow you could see with his palette in hand in the center of the great painting to the left.
You know, I think every man with some experience at love has in his heart the image of the girl who got away, the one who pops into your mind at idle moments, about whom the inevitable longing centers, no matter how content you are with spouse and home. That was the appeal of this painting, I thought; he’d painted, in some wonderful and mysterious way, That Girl. But in my own case, literally, because when I finally got a chance to see the Alba Venus close up I saw that the body the artist had painted was one I’d known intimately, but too fleetingly, some decades ago. I remember in particular a small black beauty mark just below the navel, to the right of the midline. I only got to see it on two occasions, unfortunately, before my old pal Chaz Wilmot swept into that reunion party and yanked Lotte Rothschild out of my life.
Probably for the best, actually; Diana is a much more suitable wife for someone like me. And maybe I am confabulating this too in my mind, a mere black dot-who could recall its exact placement after all these years? Although it’s the kind of thing Chaz would do, the sly bastard.
And then I had to move on, and I circled around behind the crowd and stood for a moment in front of the greatest painting in the world, The Maids of Honor by Velázquez, and thought about what it would be like to be him, really be him, and I couldn’t deal with it, and I left and reentered the long, gray sanity of my life.
A NOTE TO THE READER
This is a work of fiction, but Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was, of course, a real painter. The details of his life as provided here are consistent with the historical record, as far as that goes; he was a very private man. Scholars differ on where Velázquez did the painting known as the Rokeby Venus, now in London ’s National Gallery. Some say Madrid, some say during his second trip to Rome, in 1650. I’ve opted for the latter, to increase the fun. The identity of the woman who posed for it is lost to history. Velázquez may have painted it for the Marqués de Heliche, who was, in fact, a notorious libertine, and there is some evidence that Velázquez painted other nudes at that time, which have vanished.
The Palacio Livia is a real museum in Madrid, and as far as I know it is of sterling reputation and would never try to pass off a doubtful painting on an American.
Salvinorin A is a real drug and is derived from the plant known as Salvia divinorum, which is used in shamanic rituals by the Mazotec Indians of Mexico. The time-traveling effects described here have been recorded in the extensive literature on the drug by some of its aficionados. It remains a legal drug but has never become a popular recreational substance, for obvious reasons.
About the Author
MICHAEL GRUBER is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Book of Air and Shadows. He and his wife, painter Elizabeth Winder Noyes, live in Seattle, Washington.
www.michaelgruberbooks.com
