“SO HE WAS THE ONE who gave you my name?”
“I don’t know if I can tell you that.”
“Then I can’t really tell you anything, can I?”
“I understand.”
He had a point. If I withheld this piece of information then there was no reason for him to tell me what I’d come to find out. This was an exchange, after all, and he at least wasn’t going to pretend to give me any more than I was prepared to give him; he was not playing any games.
“Yes, it was him.”
“That son of a bitch! It’s been a long time; hard to believe he’s still the same son of a bitch,” he said, and he looked me in the face, defiant. I guessed that Yves Chaudron didn’t normally look very defiant, but that afternoon he was trying it out. He didn’t look like he used this kind of language regularly, either.
“Still a real son of a bitch!”
I realized then that he didn’t know. I didn’t think it was time to tell him yet.
“Yes, he was the one who told me about you,” I told him, and it was true, even though it had been some time ago. Yves Chaudron leaned back in his flowered armchair. He had just turned sixty but he looked older, his thin body too thin, no meat on him, deeply wrinkled, his features too sharply drawn.
“And you really want me to tell you the story?”
“No. Well, yes, but actually I’d prefer it if you would first tell me a little about yourself.”
“About me? Why would you want to know anything about me?”
“It’s important. If I’m going to tell the whole story I’ll need to know as much as possible about all the main characters.”
“Sure, the main characters. But I’m only a minor character. I was always just one of the minor characters.”
“You were quite a forger in your time.”
“I was no forger,” he said, and he looked toward the kitchen door. It was as if he were practicing—no doubt he practiced every day of his life; that’s what they call marriage.
The door opened and his wife appeared with a wooden tray: two cafés au lait and a plate of pastries.
“Don’t even look at the pastries, Yves. They’re for the gentleman,” she said. I took her accent to be Polish or Russian. It matched her round face and her round and watery eyes. She was a good ten years younger than he was and had just begun to go grey. Later Chaudron would tell me that they had married more than ten years earlier, when Ivanka—he called her Ivanka—had arrived in Paris on the run from the Soviets and without a penny, willing to give herself to the first man who could provide food and shelter. He was nudging fifty then, and he thought this might be his last chance to secure himself an old age in which he might actually be well cared for.
“And you know what? To my big surprise she turned out to be the perfect wife. She doesn’t bother me, she knows her place, and I don’t bother her too much. In the beginning I did want certain things, but later I learned to adjust,” he would tell me, much later. For the moment, he continued stirring his café au lait; staring at it as if nothing else existed.
“I was never a forger.”
“Monsieur Chaudron, please excuse me if I offended you somehow, but…”
“But nothing. If you can’t call things by their proper name, then we’re not going to have anything to talk about.”
My punishment was another five minutes of silence in which he sipped his café au lait and showed me who was boss. But I was used to this kind of situation. I know from experience that someone without much excitement in his life—a nobody—can rarely resist the temptation of an interview, of having a real reporter focus all his attention on listening to him.
“You were telling me you knew Valfierno in Buenos Aires.”
“I didn’t tell you that!”
“I think you did. What were you doing in Buenos Aires? You were born quite close to here, weren’t you?”
“Close depending on how you look at it.”
Chaudron seemed capable of qualifying every single point. He was a man used to weighing pros and cons, to considering every possible nuance for as long as necessary—sometimes, it seemed, his entire life.
“But yes, it’s not far—a few kilometers northeast of Lyon. I grew up in a family of glaziers. My father, when he saw that I could draw, decided that if I learned a little more I could help him on the job, so he sent me to school in Lyon.”
I’d like to be able to say that the start of Chaudron’s painting career was exciting and full of hope, and even successful, or at least promising, and that but for his rejection at the hands of stuffy, tradition-bound art institutes, or a personal disgrace, or the demands of a rapacious woman—but I can’t. From the very beginning, Chaudron told me, he knew that he would be a copyist. He used that word, “copyist,” and he accompanied it with a faint smile.
“You know that I had a stammer then,” he told me, as if that explained a great many things. Upon starting school—as soon as he had his first brush in his hand, he said—he discovered that he was quite incapable of reproducing anything in three dimensions: a room, a body, a face, two apples, the Ródano hills. If, on the other hand, he wanted to reproduce a drawing, a painting, a tapestry, then there wasn’t a single shape or color or texture that he couldn’t master.
“Some people can copy certain things, other people other things. Some things have more prestige and some have less,” he told me. And that anyway the world had one too many dimensions.
“And too many people who believe they’ve invented something new. Not me, thank God.”
Chaudron referred to himself in the past tense; some people think of themselves that way. Chaudron had trouble in school. His attempts at drawing models failed time after time, and his adviser threatened him with expulsion. Professor Falaise was an old alcoholic who somehow still managed to pass himself off as a painter with a future, one of those fools, Chaudron told me, who still think the world owes them something when it’s quite clear that in fact they are the ones with all the debts.
The young Yves Chaudron dedicated himself to studying his professor in detail. He watched him paint and asked him questions, learned to imitate his walk and gestures, drank the same Pernods that the old professor drank and all the while painted pleasant fields full of cows and cowlike peasants for the annual show. When he was finally able to conjure up the old professor’s memories without meaning to, he began to paint one of his landscapes. It didn’t imitate any one painting in particular, but it had something of all of them.
Chaudron finished the painting, and one afternoon in March he crept into Falaise’s studio and left the painting tucked in amongst the others. The effect was remarkable. The fake Falaise was hard to distinguish from the real ones except that it was in some undefinable way better. As Chaudron told it, Falaise must have noticed this, for that year he submitted the fake Falaise to the annual show.
For the first time in his life, after more than thirty tries, Falaise won first prize.
“Sir, what you have done is criminal.”
“What I have done?”
“Yes, Professor: to pass off someone else’s work as your own.”
“What are you talking about? The impertinence!”
“I’m talking about the landscape that I painted and that just won first prize in the show.”
Chaudron told me that Falaise denied everything right up until Chaudron produced an irrefutable proof. He didn’t want to tell me what the proof was, but he did say that the Professor immediately changed his argument:
“You’re the criminal, Chaudron, to forge a painting!”
“I forged nothing, Professor. I simply painted as if I were you, that is all. And you gained by it. That is the crime.”
“Don’t be a fool, Chaudron, the crime is yours for what you’ve done and because I am your professor and I say so!”
“If this comes out, Professor, you’re finished.”
“You as well, Chaudron.”
They had reached that point in chess when neither player can make a move without forfeiting the game—the danger of every con. A few days later Falaise told him that he could put him in touch with a copyist in Paris who could give him work. It was a good offer—if he didn’t accept, Falaise said, he would turn Chaudron’s life into a hell.
“You don’t know what it was like for a timid kid like me to think about going to Paris. I was nervous, terrified. But I couldn’t see any other way out.”
Falaise gave him the money for the train, and Chaudron left one morning without saying good-bye to anyone. In spite of everything, he now dreamed of conquering the city. But Falaise’s friend the copyist wouldn’t give him the time of day.
“I went hungry. Do you know what it is to go hungry, really hungry?”
I was about to tell him that yes, I did, but thought at the last minute that this might earn me another rebuff. I’ve learned to be careful, especially in interviews. An interview is a contrived situation—both sides pretend to be having an amiable conversation when in fact their real interests are quite different, and often at odds.
“No, the truth is I don’t. What happened next?”
“What happened next was that for months I didn’t know what to do. You see, I couldn’t go back to my village because my father would have been furious.”
“Furious?”
“Well, I don’t know; that’s what I thought then. And I couldn’t stay in Paris. I couldn’t find any work. Paris was full of good copyists; there was nothing for me in that terrible place. I decided to emigrate.”
Ivanka was running a duster across the shop window and appeared engrossed in her work. But I had the impression that she wanted to hear the story that her husband had never told her. Chaudron didn’t look at her. Or me. His eyes were fixed on a distant point, as if he needed to look far, very far, to see what he was telling me.
“Why Argentina?”
“What do you mean, why? Have you ever emigrated? You know how these things happen, Mr. Reporter? It’s not like you sit down and think and figure out where you’re going to go. Or like you read about different places in guides and magazines and then, after careful consideration, choose one over another. How do I know why? Because I saw a picture in a magazine. Because someone you meet in a café tells you about this place where their cousin is doing real well.”
“But—if you don’t mind my asking again—why Argentina in particular?”
“Don’t you know anything? Lots of people were going there then. Or do you think the place just appeared now? Even then, almost forty years ago, you could see it was going to be big.”
Chaudron arrived at the port of Buenos Aires in 1898. He was twenty-five.
Ivanka had stopped pretending. She stared at us now, the duster idle in her hand, her eyes as big as saucers. I realized that Chaudron was using me to talk to her. Maybe he wanted to comfort her: telling the story of his emigration was a way of telling her that he had also been through humiliation like hers.
“And it was there that you met him?”
“No, not then. Years went by.”
“What happened in those years?”
“That I’m not going to tell you.”
“Go ahead, tell me. We have plenty of time.”
“I don’t think I will.”
Now Chaudron was looking at her, too. He had stopped looking at me and spoke directly to her, although in a very quiet voice, causing her to lean toward him to hear what he was saying. When he’d stopped talking, he directed his gaze at the ceiling for a bit. Then he turned again to me.
“You’re not going to remember me.”
“What do you mean? How can you say—?”
“Listen to me; I know how it is—I’ve been learning my whole life. You won’t remember me. No one ever remembers me. Maybe you’ll remember this house, or my wife, or this chair, but not me. No one ever remembers me. Maybe you’ll even remember these words I’m saying. We can prove it: remember this now, and in a few days, maybe next week—whenever it is—try to remember my face, or one of my gestures. I’m telling you, no one ever remembers me. That’s how I could be so many others: Falaise, Ribera, Zurbarán. That’s how I could even be Leonardo.”
Having said this, Chaudron fell silent. I fell silent, too: it was a stupid duel of silences. He won—I asked him again if that was when he met Valfierno. But I suspected that he was right, that I would need to write down all my impressions of him as soon as I left that house.
“So. You want me to tell you how I met him.”
“Please.”
“I can’t tell you. But I’d like to explain who Valfierno was then: he was a panderer. What do you call it?—he was a pimp.”
Chaudron looked at me with the hint of a smile on his face: the player who launches an attack from an unexpected corner of the board. I didn’t know whether to believe him, or rather, I didn’t believe him at the time. Valfierno had not told me this—and I still believed his version of the story. Moreover, Chaudron had every reason to be angry, to resent him.
“But I don’t want to say bad things about that son of a bitch. When all is said and done I owe this house to him. If it hadn’t been for the whole business of the Mona Lisa, I could never have bought it. Really in the end I owe him everything,” he said, and then fell silent. It was clear that he didn’t know. If they hadn’t seen each other in all these years, he had no reason to know that Valfierno was dead.