YVES CHAUDRON WAS A LOST soul, someone who never knew what to do with that extraordinary ability fate had given him. He didn’t deserve it. In his entire life he’d had just one idea. Odd to think that that idea was me.
He feels distant, old. Like a man who has happened but not been, he sometimes thinks. The bitter taste of having been without having been something; the relief of not having to be anything special. The peace of just accepting what one was. The relief. The despair. The humiliation, even.
“Please excuse me, but I really don’t understand how you ended up in that place.”
“It doesn’t surprise me, Becker; I’ll try to explain—it wasn’t really a place. For me, being there wasn’t going somewhere, it was not killing myself. In just a couple of days I’d lost my entire future—again, just like when they blamed my mother for the necklace I stole, I lost everything. This time it wasn’t my fault, or at least whether it was or wasn’t didn’t change anything. I thought seriously about killing myself, but in the end, it seemed excessive.”
“Did it frighten you?”
“Perhaps. But mostly I thought that it was just excessive, that it was too much, that I hadn’t yet done anything to merit an important death. So I buried myself in that brothel. Old Anunciación offered and I was happy not to think, not to plan anymore.”
Later, I was to confirm that there really wasn’t any reason for them ever to have spoken to each other. That years and years could have gone by without them ever meeting. They could have spent their lives in different cities, or passed each other on the street without a glance, or even shared a table without exchanging a word. But that night at Doña Anunciación’s, the French portraitist suffered a mishap—an excess of alcohol, most likely, though Yves Chaudron didn’t seem like the type of person to have any kind of excesses—and the madam had the good grace not to throw him out into the street as soon as he regained consciousness. The situation was tricky—Chaudron was no longer really a client, and it would not have been appropriate for him to return to the lounge in that disheveled state, his thinning hair a mess, a suspicious stain on his shirt, the way he smelled. The madam led him to the one place in that establishment where on a Saturday night in full swing he would not be in the way: the combination office and apartment of Bonaglia, the bookkeeper.
He is working feverishly on the ledgers—one of which keeps track of the sex; it was hard in the beginning to get used to thinking of it as just another unit of measurement—in order to fill out a chart showing, beneath each girl’s name or nickname, how much they’ve earned at the end of each week, after deducting the costs for food, lodging, laundry, medical services, and salaries, his own included, of course.
He barely lifts his head when his boss tells him that Señor Chaudron is going to rest there awhile in the armchair, if that’s not inconvenient. It isn’t, or at least his position doesn’t allow him to say if it is. In the distance, he can hear unusual music, a playful combination of violins and guitars. As soon as she leaves them, Bonaglia returns to working on his charts.
“This looks like great work for a man,” says Chaudron.
Bonaglia doesn’t respond.
“Yes,” presses Chaudron, “a job where a man could have some fun.”
“Sure, if you say so,” replies Bonaglia, to shut him up, but Chaudron keeps on:
“Yes, sir, all these women around!”
Bonaglia feels it necessary to tell him that the women are only for the clients.
“Surely you don’t mean to tell me…”
“No,” replies Bonaglia, and pointedly resumes working on his accounts. Business is getting better all the time, he thinks. He is responsible for that. He likes the feeling of efficiently dispatching a job that is of no real importance. All the rest is for idiots.
I happened to be there but I could have been anywhere. I wouldn’t have cared whether they were selling meat or funerals; it was all the same to me. I didn’t care about anything, and Doña Anunciación protected me. One day I made a mistake and confused two accounts, and she told me that I should know that my job there was a gesture of goodwill on the part of a woman who was, above all, always good to others. I remembered then what my mentor in the prison, the Frenchman Daván, had said: that there were two kinds of people, those who like to think of themselves as good and those who choose to believe that they are by nature bad. And that neither group is better than the other, though the people who choose to believe they are good usually hold goodness in higher esteem than evil, since no one would define themselves by what they despise. No one would define themselves as a bad person if they didn’t value or admire or envy wickedness even a little. And those who call themselves good probably aren’t, though they at least prefer goodness, consider it better for some reason. To me, of course, none of that mattered.
Those were peaceful months. Very peaceful. Time in the present, that’s the secret.
“So that’s what happened. Who knows what my life would have been like if I hadn’t had a couple of drinks that night.”
“Probably not that different, Chaudron.”
“Now there’s a lack of imagination, Mr. Becker. But I would also venture to say, what would his life have been like?”
“Whose?”
“Please, Mr. Becker!”
As soon as I had finished doing the accounts I started over again—revised them, let’s say—so that it wouldn’t look as if I was doing nothing and so my guest, or refugee, wouldn’t pester me. People seem to feel that they’re supposed to say all kinds of stupid things out of some misguided notion of good manners. What was strange was that in the end I was the one who started talking to him. I suppose I suffered a moment of vanity, and also, I wanted to see if reading Conan Doyle had served me at all—as I said before, I read a lot.
“You wouldn’t by any chance be a painter, would you?”
“Me?”
My silence obliged him to answer the question.
“Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”
I didn’t tell him that between the paint stains on his fingers, which he hadn’t been able to get rid of completely, and the smell of turpentine that still came through over all the other smells—the undigested alcohol, sweat, cheap perfume, and what might have been vomit—it was fairly clear.
Stranger still, he then began to tell me that he indeed painted portraits, but only from photographs or other portraits, and that if I wanted he could do mine for a reasonable price, and strangest of all, I didn’t mind his offer, it piqued my curiosity and we both agreed to meet again. I never did things like that. But I suspect that it was more vanity, and that surprised me—I’d sworn to myself then that I had no vanity. That I, Bonaglia, had none.
“I had never seen myself. It’s hard to believe, but I had never had a photograph taken, much less a portrait painted.”
“Never, really?”
“I don’t think you understand what my life had been like up until then, Newspaperman.”
“Believe me, I’m trying.”
“I had never really seen myself; it was quite a shock. The face I saw in the painting seemed to be part of a world that was completely different from my own. I wondered, when I saw myself, just how much I didn’t know.”
He tells him that he doesn’t understand why, with that incredible talent for copying, he hasn’t put it to better use. He says “better use” so he won’t sound too crude. Chaudron just smiles and says, “Who knows?” He learns later that in fact Chaudron has been using his talent for years, but now all he gets is that ambiguous response and the smile, both of which seem to be intended to put him off. But without knowing why, without thinking about it, Bonaglia presses him.
Did he ever think, say, of copying any famous paintings, he asks, and for a moment Chaudron is interested and replies yes, why not, that he’s thought of selling reproductions of some paintings before, and he stops talking so Valfierno will reply. And Valfierno looks for a way to say no, I wasn’t really talking about reproductions exactly. For a while he searches for a way, hesitating, afraid to cross that line of convention and wondering how it occurred to him to cross it in the first place, and not crossing it until finally Chaudron seems to take pity on him and says, “You know, Bonaglia, that forgery carries some dangers.”
It’s another invitation. He doesn’t use the normal phrase and say that it carries many dangers, which would close off that avenue. No—he says that it carries some dangers, forgery carries some dangers, as if inviting him to weigh these, to take each of them into account in order to think of ways to avoid them. “What dangers, for example, if I might ask?” And Chaudron explains to him that the main danger is in picking the wrong clients. They have to be cultured enough to be able to appreciate and want to own certain paintings. They also have to be harmless enough not to be dangerous if they find out they’ve been tricked; conceited enough not to want to see anything untoward; and just dishonest enough, he says, smiling, to think that in buying the painting for such a low price they, the buyers, are the ones putting one over on the sellers, and not the other way around. It’s important, Bonaglia, for the client to think that he is getting the better of you, even if only a little, says Chaudron, and he seems for a moment like a different person: firm, confident, able to do anything. Not a guy who looks like he’s already old and who can’t paint anything that hasn’t been painted already. Not this Frenchman with the shifting gaze who’s all skin and bones, for whom he now pours a glass of wine and looks at in the light from the one bulb that illuminates his office.
Who says to him, “Don’t you believe it, don’t believe it for a second: no matter what anyone will tell you, it’s the seller who makes the rules.” Who tells him that he could paint almost anything, but that he could never sell it, that to be able to sell you have to seem as if you don’t want to, that you don’t need to. That the seller has to be doing the buyer a favor by selling to him—a favor, he repeats, just to sell him the painting; he’ll deign to sell it if the buyer insists. He tells him that he couldn’t do this, that he wanted to but he couldn’t, because he’s the sort of person people forget, he leaves no memory. But if he were to find someone who was willing, then he, Chaudron, would also be very willing to set up an arrangement that could be quite fruitful. “Don’t you think Bonaglia? What do you say? Just for argument’s sake, what do you think?”
“Imagine what I felt. Here I was, in my forties, having decided or at least resigned myself to what I had, little as it was, and to not seek anything more.”
“It’s a little difficult for me, Valfierno, to recognize you in that sad description.”
“No, try to understand, at least this once. I’m not saying this for sympathy; on the contrary, I’m telling you so you can see how far I traveled afterward. So you can understand just how a man can create himself. So you can see the path.”
“You mean me?”
“Yes, of course. I mean you. You could do it.”
“But tell me, who’s going to buy a painting from someone who works for Doña Anunciación?”
“No one. Not from that person, that’s what I mean. You’d have to be the kind of person who people would want to buy things from. An amiable fool, easily cheated. A rich man who’s come from somewhere else, a wealthy but distant province, something like that. You could be that, Bonaglia, I know you could.”
As if that were his mission in life. I took another look at this man, so ardent, so sure. As if he’d been born to create me.
My life was so peaceful. A life in the present.
“No, Chaudron, I’m fine the way I am. If you want to do that, go ahead, but do it yourself. As I said, I’m fine like this.”