Portrait of a Man (13 page)

“It doesn't matter anyway … Why did you call her?”

“To provoke a disaster, like you said … To have her start hovering over me, being present and imminent and reassuring, with all the spells and tyranny she would bring with her …”

“Did you want to kill Madera?”

“No … I didn't want to murder anybody …”

“What sort of thing was it, the disaster?”

“It wasn't anything … Things going on like they had, as if nothing had changed, as if nothing had happened … The eternal return, the same action done over and over again a thousand times, the same pointless patience, the same useless effort … My own story written down once and for all, in a closed circle, with no way out other than dying ten or twenty or thirty years on. Needing to go on to the end without meaning, without necessity …”

“Is that what you were thinking?”

“I wasn't thinking anything at all … I knew, as if I'd always known, as if I'd been trying to forget … that it wasn't possible … I'd tried everything. But I'd been caught. Trapped liked a rat. I would go on piling up Grecos and Clouets and Goyas and Baldovinettis until death did us part, without believing in them, without wanting to do it, I would produce a heap of canvases and panels like my own shit, I would go on living off the dead. Until I was dead too …”

“Why did you kill Madera?”

“I don't know … If I knew I wouldn't be here … If I'd known, I
suppose I wouldn't have done it … You think it's easy … You commit an act … You don't know … you can't know … you don't want to know … But after a while it's behind you … You know you did it … and then …”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing.”

“Why do you say ‘you'?”

“No reason … It doesn't matter … I killed Madera … And then? It doesn't make things any simpler … A last act, the least act of all …”

“Just to see …”

“As you say … Just to see what would happen …”

“And what did happen?”

“You can see that for yourself … Nothing yet … Perhaps one day something will happen … Something worthwhile …”

“Are you sorry you killed Madera?”

“No … I don't give a damn … It's hardly any business of mine … I'm not interested …”

“What would have happened if you hadn't killed him?”

“I don't know …”

“Try to use your imagination.”

“I haven't got any imagination … Nothing at all would have happened. He would have noticed – if not himself, then Rufus or Nicolas or somebody, or else I'd have told them – that the Condottiere wasn't worth anything … They'd have given me something else to do … or else they'd have tried to get rid of it as it was …”

“As an Antonello?'”

“No … They'd have made a convenient discovery of a Master of This or That … The Man in Red or something of the sort …”

“Would you have carried on after that?”

“I don't know … Maybe, maybe not …”

“Why did you kill Madera?”

“Because I was sick to the back teeth. Because it was as good a way as any of being shot of it all …”

“Being shot of what?”

“Of the crazy life I'd lived for twelve years …”

“Did you want to give yourself up to the police?”

“No.”

“What did you plan to do, straight afterwards?”

“Hide the body, clean up the blood a bit, and clear off …”

“Here?”

“Here or somewhere else … It wasn't enormously important …”

“How come Otto came back?”

“I've no idea … In principle he spends every Monday afternoon in Dreux … He must have forgotten something …”

“Had you been thinking about killing him for a long time?”

“No … Not for long … Half an hour, three-quarters of an hour … I've no idea …”

“Why not?”

“It came to me suddenly, like a cramp … Almost like an idea out of the air … An image … to begin with … Something started hovering over me, something possible, something that started speaking
all by itself … It was meaningless, it was babble, but I listened to it nonetheless … In the state I was in, one action more or less didn't matter a damn …”

“Were you out of your mind?”

“You could say that … You could … Marginally insane … or rather, it was as if I had lost all will and all memory … Unwilled, that's what it was. Anything was O.K., anything that came to me was O.K. … But then that's what I'd been like for years …”

“What was in your mind?”

“I don't know … it doesn't matter … I picked up a razor, folded it in my palm, I started up the stairs, I went into his office …”

“Didn't you hesitate?”

“No … It came all by itself … With no apparent effort … With no difficulty … Why not? It was Madera. He was alive. He was going to be dead. I was dead, I was going to be alive …”

“Why?”

“I don't know, it's obvious …”

“He had to die for you to live?”

“Yes …”

“Weren't you alive?”

“Yes, it would seem that I was alive … You're wearing me out with your stupid questions … Of course I was alive … So what? He was alive as well. Now he's dead and I'm still alive. That's it.”

“Did he have to die?”

“Yes, sooner or later, like anybody else …”

“But it was you who had to kill him …”

“You worked that out all by yourself, did you? Very clever, you are … No, it did not have to be ‘you who had to kill him' … But since I did it, heigh ho, it's just as well …”

“You're not mounting a good defence …”

“I don't want to defend myself …”

“What were you after? What were you trying to do? What have you got to lose now by giving an explanation? You know full well that you can't turn the clock back. You're standing there stock still, like a statue. You don't even realise …”

“What's it got to do with you? You want to understand. I've told you a hundred times already that there was nothing to understand. I was the one who ought to have died. That's what would have been logical. It would have been normal. I should have committed suicide. I had every reason to do so. I was dishonoured. I was a forger who hadn't managed to make a forgery. Fakers breakers. How about that? Couldn't come up with my own Condottiere, so I should have committed hara-kiri. I should have taken my razor between thumb and index finger and run it oh so delicately over my throat. Lost. Done in. Done for. That's what you won't grasp. That everything had hit the rocks, was smashed to smithereens, dead. My hope to live, my hope to be me, my face. Gstaad wasn't what I wanted. Geneviève wouldn't answer. The Condottiere was a mess. Jérôme was dead. I thought I was free but I was being exploited. I thought I was in disguise but my disguise was another face, one that was more true and even more pathetic than the other one. I thought I was in a place
of safety but everything was falling on top of me. I had nothing to hang on to. I was alone in the middle of the night in the middle of my prison in front of my own face that I did not want to recognise. You must understand it. Understand that. What was I supposed to do? Run away, right? Run away where? What planet would have me? Tell me that! The only thing I could do was get rid of myself, throw myself out with the rubbish. What difference did it make if I made a bit more wreckage? What difference would it make to me if I blew everything up? He was in his office, the fool, he had no idea. He should have. He should known there was a barrel of high explosive in his basement … He did nothing about it. He let me come in. He didn't turn around. He didn't hear me come closer. It was his fault. It was his fault … He'd never helped me … He'd lumbered me with a Condottiere … He'd shut me away … He'd taken advantage of me for twelve years, fifteen years … He'd turned me into a docile instrument … Do you understand him? Do you understand that? As for me I'd been taken in, hook, line and sinker. I didn't exist, I didn't have the right to exist … So all of that was rushing around and jostling and exploding somewhere inside my head, like overloud music it was all bursting and disappearing and coming back … I was the one who should have died … It was me who'd done it all … who'd ruined it all … But I wasn't alone. He'd looked at me, he'd toyed with me. I didn't give a damn about dying … It hadn't occurred to me … It didn't matter any more. What I was could never matter anymore. But first, before dying, before dying from it, before it was all over, the ineffable Anatole Madera would be repaid to the last cent for everything
he has helped make happen to me. It was cowardly. It was intentional. So what?”

“But you're still alive …”

Questa arte condusse poi in Italia Antonello da Messina, che molti anni consumò in Fiandra; e nel tornarsi di qua da'monti, fermatosi ad abitare in Venezia, la insegnò quivi ad alcuni sui amici …

Antonello da Messina was the son of the painter Salvatore d'Antonio, who was his first teacher. He left for Rome when still very young to complete his education, then went back to Palermo and finally to Naples, where he made the acquaintance of Antonio Solario, known as Lo Zingaro, “The Gypsy”, who like him was an apprentice in the studio of Colantonio del Fiore. From then on, Antonello and Lo Zingaro were great admirers of the Flemish and Dutch Schools and tried to imitate their manner, but didn't know what procedures they used and obtained only unsatisfactory results. The sight of a Van Eyck canvas belonging to Prince Alfonso of Aragon made up the young Sicilian's mind. He abandoned all his work in progress and, despite the length and cost of the journey, set off straight away for Flanders to seek out the Master of Bruges, declared his passionate admiration for his work with such convincing enthusiasm that Van Eyck, though initially rather cool, was soon won over by the fiery Mediterranean youth and took Antonello on as a disciple. Antonello's respectful affection and good faith as an artist, allied to his exceptional abilities, soon made him Van Eyck's most favoured pupil, and the master came to have fatherly feelings for the young
man who had come from Italy to learn from him the secret of an art that he felt unable to rival. So he revealed the technique of painting in oils, or rather, the practical means of applying it …

Questa maniera di colorire accende più i colori, né altro bisogna che diligenza et amore, perché l'olio in sé si reca il colorito più morbido, più dolce, e delicato e di unione e sfumata maniera più facile che li altri …

Antonellus Messaneus me pinxit …
From his eternally frozen haughtiness the Condottiere gazes on the world. His mouth is slightly curved: it's not a smile nor a pout, but perhaps the expression of an unconscious or self-accepting fierceness. Footnote. The Condottiere is not moving: you cannot guess what he might do next, you cannot imagine anything more, or add anything to his sheer presence. Cranach's Philipp Melanchthon is alternately an intelligent gaze, a cunning smile, and firm hands: he is a proper politician. Memling's subject is a praying bull, a mop of hair, a thick neck. Holbein's Robert Cheseman only has the nobleman's superciliousness, the luminous splendour of his costume, and the alertness of a huntsman. The Condottiere is always more than that. He is gazing at all three of them. He could look down on them, secretly or openly. Some day any one of them might have need of him. He does not despise them, that would be beneath him, he is in a stronger position than that: he deals on equal terms with princes, kinglets, bishops and ministers. He goes from town to town with his troopers in tow. He has nothing to lose: no friends, no enemies. He is brute force.

But brute force can be anything. Serenity is not enough.
Certainty is something they all have. Any portrait, any man is always the achievement of some kind of certainty. The Condottiere is beyond that: he has no need to reach towards anything; he's not trying to understand the world, he does not need to understand it. He is not trying to master the world, he already does. He already did. He is The Condottiere. Where is his stance to be found? Nowhere. But it is there, signalled by a look in the eye, by a jaw, by a scar. I am that I am. He is bare. And that is enough. Goya's Don Ramón Satué, in the Rijksmuseum, needs a broad and open shirt collar and a proud yet vaguely approachable posture with his arched back. Chardin needs his spectacles, eye-shade, turban and scarf, with a sharp turn of his head and a cheeky, ironical and penetrating gaze to challenge the fops who stare at his work and provide him with a living. Never will the Condottiere make the slightest movement of that kind. He has understood. He knows. He is in charge. In charge of a world that is collapsing and falling apart, a world of minute size. But that does not matter. He travels the land on horseback. He only stops in princely courts.

Such instant victory is a myth. Yet nobody can resist it. The ineffable Baldassare Castiglione, apparently the greatest Humanist of the Renaissance, has come down to us only in the conventional garb of the wise man: fur bonnet, a fine beard, a brooch and lace doublet. His hands are crossed in a way that suggests understanding. What brings you here, my good man? Cupped hands, one thumb resting on the other. Not yet a Jesuit, but already two-faced; he knows the arts and sciences, mathematics and philosophy. He is on the verge of
winking at you. The Condottiere's eyes blaze at him. All he knows of the world is his little scar: see how well I fight …

No question that he is what he wants to be – a bad boy. Beside him Botticelli's young man looks almost sickly: a metaphysician tortured by being a virgin. The sole result of immersion in a mystical brine. The Condottiere has no passion, not even for power: that is a game at which he wins every hand. It is not even worth cheating. Not even worth pushing yourself. It is all set up. He is only barely a warlord. Certainly not a madman. Nothing like Saint-Just or Aleksandr Nevsky or Tamerlane. He is neither a Napoleon or a Machiavelli. Nor all in one, because he has no need to define himself. Unity or contradiction. His fate is perfectly laid out. His freedom is entire. He hesitates not at all. His life is an arrow. No ambiguity, no two sides to it. Has he ever had to wonder about anything? No. No trickery. His place was laid down in advance, in a society where the conduct of all men of substance, be they bankers, princes, bishops, patrons, tyrants, or traders, requires the direct intervention of such a man, an independent but obedient instrument who can settle problems for other people, problems that are not and cannot be his own, and who therefore lives his life with a conscience that is entirely adequate to his utter neutrality and completely inaccessible, acknowledging only the law and rights of the one who pays him best … Political clashes, economic contradictions, religious tensions and struggles all converge on him, end up with him, and are resolved by him. He is paid to be the scapegoat. He pockets the money. But he has nothing at stake. Why go into battle for business that is not his? Halfway
between Venice and Florence, at a meeting that is more comradely than hostile with the chief of another band of marauders who happens to be an old friend, a handshake abolishes the centuries-old stand-off between the Medicis and the grandees of the Signoria. Why should there be a fight? A faked skirmish allowed the two mercenaries to decide, in the light of the politics of the day and their personal interests, which side would be the winner and which would be instantly granted the benefit of a heroic defeat, so as not to damage his career prospects …