For Magdalena Herrera and Andrés Boersner:
this veiled portrait of the artist we so admire.
1.
The dean sent an email convening an emergency meeting. The professors all wrote straight back: “Something has to be done”; “Things can’t go on like this”; “We should take a stand”; and other messages to that effect.
The previous day, the paramilitaries had attacked a group of students who were protesting outside the university entrance on Plaza Venezuela. They had plucked a young man from the crowd, restrained him, and stripped off all his clothes. The image went viral. It showed the young man, naked, with the armed men surrounding him looking off in different directions.
Whereas the young man only looked at the ground.
He had the same look in his eye as my nephew Diego had. It was the town guard in Caricuao who got Diego, who was there to visit my mother. In the patrol wagon, on the way to headquarters, they beat him with a helmet. He arrived with a broken wrist from the handcuffs being too tight. During the interrogation, they broke one of his legs and made him drag himself in agony around the chamber, like a fly with its wing torn off. Then came the cattle prod. At the end, once they’d grown tired of all that, or just bored, one of the guards decided it was time for marching drills. They laid Diego down on the floor, and the guard proceeded to goose-step back and forth on top of his body.
I wrote an article in condemnation of all of this. It struck a nerve with people. A few days later, the university rector called me on the telephone to express his support. I took some comfort from the conversation. Before we hung up we both agreed that “this shitbag government won’t last much longer.”
My phone conversation with the rector then got played on television, on the government network. They put it out in the evening, and talked about it as proof of “the Central University rector’s conspiratorial plan to topple the government.” The only reference to me was as “an unknown interlocutor.” That was enough to stop me getting any sleep for a week. It was at the end of that insomniac week that the student protestor was stripped naked in the square. All of this is by way of an explanation of my less-than-steady mental state, which was why when I saw the photo, I was in tears for the whole of that afternoon and evening.
I went to the meeting not because, as some of my colleagues suggested, I thought I had to do something, but because I didn’t know what else to do. Nor did I know what an arts department is supposed to do to tackle a dictatorship. Should it, in fact, tackle a dictatorship?
When I got to the postgrad function room, I could feel everybody’s eyes on me; doubtless, everything about me screamed victim. It troubled me to see Professor Velásquez there, who was head of the Pre-Colombian Art Department. It was an open secret that Velásquez was pro-government. And yet, seeing that none other than Thomas Von Hertrich was also present, sitting at a desk in the front row, I thought there was a chance the meeting might actually be worthwhile.
After a round of introductory remarks, it was decided that the School of Arts should put out a statement denouncing the violation of the university’s autonomy. Professor Gómez said that the message ought to be “clear and unequivocal,” that we ought now to be talking in terms of a “dictatorship.” Professor Blanco took the floor and said that perhaps the term “authoritarian populism” would be better, more in accordance with the reality; what was happening in Venezuela didn’t after all fit the known models of Latin American dictatorships. At this, Professor Puig jumped to her feet and, virtually shouting, pointed out that human rights are universal and that “a dictatorship is a dictatorship” —whether it was here, in Sri Lanka or Brussels. Professor Castillo tried to bring the temperature down, saying that, yes, Professor Gómez was quite right to call it a dictatorship, but that the smartest thing would be to name it indirectly—with the sinuousness of a René Char, which would resound down the ages.
I felt like I was going to faint. As I listened to this absurd debate, I saw that Professor Velásquez was writing everything down.
He’s a spy, I thought. He’s working for the intelligence services.
I looked at him in his traditional indigenous attire, the handwoven shirt, his henequen moccasins, the necklaces. Professor Velásquez was a white-collar man of indigenous stock working for the political police.
My contemplations were interrupted when he raised his hand to take the floor. Professor Soutiño added him to the list of speakers.
As he waited his turn, Velásquez began to arm himself. He put on a necklace with green and yellow feathers. Then, getting the mapire basket he used as a bag, he took out a ceremonial cap which had two horns on top. And he took what looked to me like a small wooden dagger out of his shirt pocket.
A sacrifice, I thought. The son of a bitch is going to sacrifice us on his altar.
I felt the function room starting to shrink, to close around my neck like a fist. In an attempt not to lose it completely, I got up and left. I went half running down the hallway as far as the elevator, and then felt able to breathe normally again.
“What a load of crap, right?”
It was a cavernous male voice. When I saw whose it was, I froze.
“Not feeling too good?”
It was Thomas Von Hertrich.
“I haven’t been feeling great for a little while,” I said.
“Of course, after what happened to your nephew.”
“Yes. I’ve been having panic attacks. I suddenly feel like I’m inside a prison. That we all are.”
Von Hertrich stood watching me, an intrigued look in his eyes.
“Let’s go get something to eat.”
2.
Not long after he won the National Visual Arts Prize, in 1992, Thomas Von Hertrich quit his university post. I had just enrolled as a student.
“He’s a complicated guy,” my supervisor said when I finally came to submit my thesis. “He never liked teaching.”
Von Hertrich kept up links with the university and the School of Arts throughout the nineties. He would often show up in moments of crisis, during strikes and marches against the government, like a slightly shy superhero whose superpower we never managed to ascertain.
On each of those occasions, I’d watched him without saying a word, intimidated by his presence. Teutonic, tall, bald, and heavy-set—in those days he looked like a soccer player out of the German national team. In about 2000 or 2001, when the revolution began to gain traction, he disappeared. Nobody saw him around the corridors of CU anymore, and he stopped exhibiting. Now, more than a decade on, he still looked much the same, only with an incipient gut which gave him an even more menacing air. Thomas Von Hertrich looked a lot like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.
“That kind of bullshit was the reason I left the university,” he said.
He didn’t elucidate further. In any case, I was busy watching the goings-on in the bar. He’d brought us to a place called La Múcura, and it resembled the dance hall of a sunken ship. Away in the semidarkness, the drunkards had three-hundred-year-old beards, scraggly and coral incrusted. La Múcura was at the Petare end of Avenida Francisco de Miranda, the stretch where Caracas’s main thoroughfare finds itself eaten away at by the biggest, most dangerous slum area in all of Latin America.
“And exactly why I dropped out of high school as well,” he added. “I found that like a prison.”
Von Hertrich was born in 1946 in Bayreuth, a small city in Germany. In 1950, his father Michael Von Hertrich, a Polish aristocrat and by profession a zoologist, emigrated with the family to Caracas, answering the call of Carlos Delgado Chalbaud’s government; he took a job at the National Museum of Natural Sciences preserving the pelts of jaguars and other animals.
The family took up residence in a house in El Dorado, in Petare, a place Thomas Von Hertrich was never to move from thereafter. They sent him to the German-language school, Humboldt. And in the fifties, Petare was rather looked down upon by his classmates’ families. When he got to sixteen, a few months before he was due to graduate, he became so fed up with that world and all the snobbery that he dropped out. He decided to become a taxidermist.
It was around that same time that his parents ended up divorcing. Baron Von Hertrich left and never came back. Thomas inherited a number of things from the fantastical creature that was his father. Among them, a patrician taciturnity, the shape of his hands, a liking for manipulating dead bodies, and a large bag of tin soldiers his father sent from Vienna a few days before he died.
He also told me about the Cristóbal Rojas Arts Academy, where he had enrolled with the idea of learning to make sculptures. Fine Arts was oversubscribed, and he had to take a place on the Decorative Arts side, though he only lasted two years; again, he made his getaway before the end.
“Another prison,” he said.
It was then that he met legendary Petare artist Bárbaro Rivas, already notorious among the Caracas bourgeoisie of the seventies as a hard-drinking outsider who left a trail of destruction everywhere he went. Like Rivas, he decided his home would be his workshop and his prison, his self-appointed space of punishment and redemption—or appointed by God through him, merely here on earth to do His work.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“Where to?” I said.
“Back to mine.”
The house was exactly as it had been described by the small number of journalists who had succeeded in getting an interview with Von Hertrich. Narrow, tumbledown and quite lovely, with a hallway running the whole length of the left-hand side, while the rooms, with the tall wooden doors, were along the right. A pair of macaws in an enormous cage halfway along the hall commentated raucously on the arrival of any visitors. The kitchen, which I didn’t see, was all the way in back; and upstairs was the terrace, overflowing with plants, bits of junk and old furniture, as well as Von Hertrich’s works—in various stages of completion or abandonment.
I’d heard so much about the place that it was hard to believe I was actually there. Von Hertrich showed me various of his pieces that lived in the bedrooms. They gave the house the air of a besieged gallery; they were its hidden protection against the aerial bombardments. I saw The Spirit of the Times, his first and most controversial sculpture, for which he had crucified a dead dog. It was actually less horrific than legend had it, or less than it seemed from the photos taken at the time of the Padre Huairén scandal.
It had been exhibited in 1972 as part of the ninth annual Summit of Psychoanalysis at the Palace of the Academies. Padre Huairén, Archdeacon of Caracas Cathedral, was incensed. Screaming blasphemy, he started hitting the sculpture with his walking stick, before throwing it out of a high window of the hall where the summit was being held.
I was also able to see my favorite work from Von Hertrich’s early, “crucifixions” period. It’s called Between You and the Machine, it’s from 1968, and it features an old typewriter mounted on a stool, forming a kind of tumulus. On the typewriter, resting on the hard metal keys and draped over the rusted typebar—festooning it like an ominous climbing plant—are three embalmed, resin-covered animals: a cat, a rat, and a snake.
Though he told me a number of things I hadn’t known before (the stool had belonged to his mother, who had worked as a seamstress), I was more interested in finding out about a later period, when he’d done reinterpretations of some of Goya’s paintings as a way of exploring the only theme he ever dealt with in his work: the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
I tried to lead the conversation in that direction, making points as though they’d only just occurred to me, when in reality they formed the central thrust of my thesis, which had been on bullfighting and the notion of sacrifice in both Goya and Von Hertrich.
“Yes, yes,” said Von Hertrich, cutting me off. “I read what you wrote about all of that.”
I felt completely ridiculous.
Von Hertrich lit a cigarette, wiped the sweat from his bald head with his cigarette hand, and said nothing for a moment. A contemptuous half smile on his face, he shook his head.
“Those imbeciles don’t have a clue what’s really happening,” he said, taking a few drags. “They speak of fascism, of public humiliations under Mussolini and Hitler, people being stripped naked in the streets, but they don’t have a fucking clue. Let me tell you a story, then you’ll see. And, as it happens, Goya comes into it.”
3.
1992 was a good year for Thomas Von Hertrich. He won both the National Visual Arts Prize and a prize at the Venice Biennale that came with a $50,000 check. People thought this made him a millionaire and that he wouldn’t stick around in Petare for long. In fact, he kept very little of the money for himself. The rest he gave to Sara, his daughter, so that she could go and set herself up in Berlin.
“There’s something beautiful about the apocalypse. Painful and beautiful. And some good will come of it, but it’s made for people like me. For some women too, but only a few; the ones needed to help bring about our rebirth. But my Sara isn’t one of them.”
The money soon ran out, and when he became so broke he didn’t even have enough for cigarettes, he put his mind to coming up with a solution. Selling handicrafts, something he’d done to get himself through sticky moments in the past, no longer interested him. He had neither the money nor the inclination for another trip to the Amazon.
There was a great pile of newspapers on his worktop. He took the one from the top and turned to the classifieds. One of the bigger ads caught his attention: Petroleum of Venezuela, the state-owned oil and natural gas company, was looking for a secretary for one of its chief executives. They needed to be bilingual in German and Spanish. Von Hertrich checked when the paper was from: it was two months old. The post would most likely have been filled.
The company’s offices were on the fifteenth floor of a new building near the main drag of Sabana Grande. The young lady in reception, seeing the yellowing newspaper between the nicotine-yellow fingers of Thomas Von Hertrich, looked him up and down.
“Yes, well, the position’s already been filled,” she said. “In any case, they wanted a female secretary.”
“I can promise you that my German’s far better than whoever they gave the job to,” said Von Hertrich.
The receptionist stood up, and was about to tell him to get out, when a cry cut through the office air-conditioning:
“Tomás!”
A man more or less the same age as him, tanned, hair gelled back, impeccably turned out in suit and tie, was gazing at him in ecstasy.
Von Hertrich knew who it was the second he heard the Latin take on his name. That was what people had called him at Humboldt. And yet it took several minutes before he could get his teenage memories to match up with the man he found before him.
Karl Lander had been a classmate. And their paths had crossed again in later years at the Cristóbal Rojas Arts Academy. Though he’d gone on to become a mogul in the oil industry, Lander was an art connoisseur and had followed Von Hertrich’s career every step of the way.
“Is it true you’re still living in Petare?”
“Yes.”
“Wow, that’s insane.”
Lander saw that his friend was still just as meek as he’d always been.
“What brings you here? What can I do for you? Let’s go into my office.”
Von Hertrich waited for Lander’s door to be shut and for the two of them to be sitting down. He then held out the yellowing newspaper.
“Your daughter! Samanta, wasn’t it?”
“Sara.”
“Right, Sara. You looking for a job for her? That position’s been filled, but I’m sure we could find a spot for her somewhere in the company.”
“It’s me who needs a job, Karl.”
“You’re fucking with me. Do you need money?”
“I’m not fucking with you but, yes, I do need money.”
Karl Lander sat saying nothing, glancing around, moving his hands and shifting in his ergonomic chair—trying to understand what was going on. Until, eventually, his eyes lit up again.
“The girl we hired is certainly hot,” he said, “but she can’t speak German for shit. You can start next week if you want.”
So it was that Von Hertrich started working for Karl Lander.
To begin with, it involved sitting in on long executive meetings. Lander got a kick out of the surprised looks on the faces of government officials and German company reps alike every time he showed up with a secretary like Von Hertrich at his side. For Von Hertrich’s part, he diligently took notes in a small pad that only served to reinforce the strangeness of the picture. Then came the most tiresome part, the having to translate innumerable letters from Spanish to German, and vice versa.
Lander paid him an inflated wage. He found the work progressively more boring, but at least he was able to pay the bills. After three months, when he was on the verge of quitting, Lander called asking that he accompany him to a meeting. Unlike all the previous ones, this was going to be at night, in somebody’s home in Prados del Este.
“Wear a suit jacket,” said Lander.
Von Hertrich could sense Lander smiling at the other end of the line.
“It’s a dinner, then.”
“Exactly. A work dinner. Meet me at the office, we’ll go from here.”
“I’ve had it up to here with playing secretary, Karl.”
“That’s all done now, Tomás. Today, you’re going to be playing Thomas Von Hertrich himself. That much I promise you—just don’t forget the jacket.”
He didn’t. In fact, he couldn’t stop thinking about it during the dinner. It was part of an old three-piece suit—the only suit he owned, which naturally no longer fit. He felt extremely uncomfortable and embarrassed throughout the evening, in the presence of these strangers who were only too happy to sit down in suits and ties to veal and chickpeas at nine o’clock at night.
He had no idea why Karl had asked him along. Only one of the gentlemen knew his work, and he showed no intention of buying any of it. Karl and his chums talked business, while he toyed with the veal but barely ate.
It wasn’t until they went through into a lounge overlooking the immense gardens that he was included in the conversation. Aperitifs and cigars were handed out, and they drank a toast. The alcohol burned in his stomach.
He should have eaten something, he thought. It depressed him to think of that veal being tossed out.
Lighting his cigar, and puffing hard on those pressed tobacco leaves, he started to feel light-headed.
One of Lander’s friends, the one who’d mentioned that he knew Von Hertrich’s work, got up, went out of the room, and came back a short while later carrying a roll of something. The man whose home it was quickly made space on the table in the middle where all the drinks were. The man with the roll knelt down and spread it out: it was a canvas.
Now all eyes were on Von Hertrich. Everyone looked at him in silence and expectation.
“Don’t you see it, Tomás?” said Lander.
“See what?” he said.
“Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Pants. We’ve got it.”
Von Hertrich studied the painting.
“This isn’t it,” he said. “Matisse’s Odalisque is ugly enough to begin with, but this forgery—it’s even worse.”
“How can you tell it’s forged?” asked the man who had brought it in.
“Seven green stripes in the background, instead of eight. The inexplicable shadow, here. The colors are too garish. And, look, she’s got one eye closed, for God’s sake.”
The men, Lander included, all burst out laughing.
“Told you it wasn’t any good,” Lander said to the host. Then, turning to Von Hertrich: “Tony wants to play a trick on a colleague for his birthday. We’ve got a bet that he won’t be able to tell a fake from the real thing.”
Von Hertrich couldn’t believe it. He was so annoyed that he didn’t say a word the whole journey back. Lander, for the first and last time, dropped him at his front door, in spite of the hour. Von Hertrich got out without saying goodbye. The next day, when he went to take some cash out at the ATM, Von Hertrich saw that a large sum of money had been deposited in his account. He called Lander to find out what was going on.
“That’s your payoff. I won’t bother you again. I hope you aren’t still angry.”
At that, Von Hertrich hung up.
4.
Lander called him up a few months later, as though nothing had happened. It was August, and Hurricane Andrew had just made its way along the East Coast of the US, toppling buildings across the state of Florida like a great, wet dishrag.
“I’ve got a favor to ask. The last one. A real job.”
“What is it?”
Lander had answered his call for help, after all.
“Have you got an American visa?”
“No, but I’ve got a German passport.”
“Perfect. I need you to go to Miami for me and stop by my apartment on Ocean Drive. Firstly to see if I’ve still got an apartment. Then I need you to rescue a Goya I’ve got there. It’s a print. A certified copy. Really, no jokes this time.”
Von Hertrich listened, but said nothing.
“I’ll explain it all over lunch. So you can see I’m being serious.”
“It was Goya’s Capricho No. 55 he was talking about,” Von Hertrich told me. “One called “Until Death.”
“I know it,” I said. “A scathing caricature of Queen María Luisa. It was so biting that Leandro de Moratín told him not to publish it. Goya then destroyed the plate, and the only proof that it existed showed up in Paris, halfway through the following century.”
Von Hertrich listened, with a look like he was struggling to understand a word I was saying.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s going to be a big exhibition of Goya’s prints at the Museum of Fine Arts in a few weeks. The Capricho series is complete. It’s the fifth printing and it’s from 1881. And I can tell you this because I’m friends with the curator, and she gave me a private tour while the show was still being mounted. In any case, Goya didn’t need to watch his back, he didn’t need to hide from anyone. He was named First Chamber Painter around the same time he made that print. Do you know what that is? It’s the royal family’s personal painter. If you look at The Family of Carlos IV, you’ll see that Goya’s laughing in their faces with that picture, and the family doesn’t even realize. Fernando VII, always such a sour bastard, might have twigged, but he was only very young at the time. Do you know the painting I mean?”
“Yes, yes,” I stammered. “Of course.”
“Right, so it features the queen, flirty María Luisa of Parma, still persevering with those audacious dresses even though they don’t fit anymore. And she’s piled on the pounds by now—twenty-four pregnancies later—but she’s still showing it off, flabby arms and all, still the same self-importance, the same come-hither eyes. That’s an official painting, the royal family commissioned it themselves, and it’s far more caustic than Capricho No. 55. It’s in that oil, not the print, where the great tragedy of failing to die young is on full display.”
At midmorning on the final Friday of September 1992, Von Hertrich touched down in Miami. He had a small overnight bag, as he was only going to be staying until Sunday night. The keys to the apartment were in one pocket, and a folder containing the receipt of sale and proof of the print’s provenance under his arm.
Lander had booked him a room in a hotel near the airport.
“That way, you won’t have to move around too much,” he’d said. “The city’s still a mess.”
Sun Ray Apartments were at 728 Ocean Drive, where it met Seventh Street. The building was only two stories high. Lander had bought into one of the few apartments still available at the time.
“They filmed the chainsaw scene in Scarface there,” Lander said the day they had lunch. A childlike look came over him. “So, as you can see, the operation is more interesting than it appears.”
Von Hertrich didn’t like it being called an operation. As he crossed the bridge between the city and Miami Beach, he once more felt like he’d had a dirty trick played on him.
After three hours, he arrived at 728 Ocean Drive. The hurricane damage all around meant he knew there was little hope. He’d pictured a big police cordon and the faces of the disbelieving neighbors when he explained what he was doing there.
He found nothing of the kind. There was nobody around.
The main door of the building was leaning against the frame. He only had to stoop a little and he was inside. As described by Lander, he found an inner courtyard and the stairs up to the second floor ahead of him. It looked like an abandoned movie set: lounge chairs, awnings, palm trees, broken glass, mattresses, and the contents of the rooms were all scattered everywhere.
He took the stairs, went to the end of the walkway and found the apartment.
The bathroom window, which opened onto the walkway, had been blown off its hinges. You could see through to the shower, which was minus its curtain, the washstand minus its mirror, and, through what had been the restroom door, a slice of the apartment beyond. It indeed looked like a hurricane had been through it.
He only had to push slightly on the door. Von Hertrich stopped on the threshold. He was afraid of meeting some thief rummaging around in the wreckage. After standing for a minute or two in silence, he went in.
The place had been trashed. Sunlight was pouring in from the balcony side. It was slightly disorienting, being in the darkness on such a bright day. It was a few moments before his eyes adjusted. He saw a badly damaged copy of the second edition of Hauser’s Social History of Art. He saw a black and white Scarface poster, Al Pacino’s silhouette crunching around in the shattered glass and broken remains of the frame. He found an album which instead of photos had press clippings stuck inside.
Looking around at the debris brought home to Von Hertrich the fact that he didn’t know Lander at all.
He started looking at the press clippings—not reading them in detail, just scanning the headlines. The album was a kind of compendium of certain crimes and public scandals from 1980s Venezuela. There were also some clippings from articles to do with Chávez’s attempted coups in 1992. Closing the album, turning towards where the bed was, he saw it.
The framed print was hanging on the wall. It was tilted, only slightly, to the right. Von Hertrich straightened it up and went back to where he’d been standing.
From that distance, it looked like an old press clipping. One more to add to those in the album. Then, as you went closer, the lines and shading etched with aquatint began to emerge. There was the woman, doing her makeup in a dresser mirror. On the left-hand side, a maidservant whispering false praise. And in the background, two young bourgeois gentlemen, sniggering at the ridiculous old woman getting all dressed up.
“Old age had ravaged that face in much the same way the hurricane had the apartment,” Von Hertrich said. “And yet she, like me—like everyone—was doing what she could to salvage something.”
He took the frame down, removed the print, put it in the folder, and left.
At the end of the afternoon, back at the hotel, he sat down by the telephone.
“You can see my dilemma,” he said. “I took a whiskey miniature from the minibar and poured myself a drink. Once I’d drunk it, I dialed Karl’s number and decided to tell him the truth: that the apartment had been completely smashed up, and that I’d got the print.”
5.
In 1995 the National Art Gallery published a book paying homage to Thomas Von Hertrich’s work. It was called Von Hertrich, The Child, and it was written by Verónica Dennis on the basis of three long interviews she held with him at the beginning of that year.
“Not once in those meetings did I see her take out a Dictaphone or make any notes,” Von Hertrich said. “Nothing. I was very surprised by what I found when I came to read the book.”
A couple of years later, Verónica Dennis’s fifth novel, The March, came out, gaining her recognition both within Venezuela and abroad. But in 1995, she was a virtual unknown who had done some teaching in the CU Art and Philosophy Departments.
Towards the end of the third conversation, at the point in the story when Von Hertrich had dropped out of Humboldt to become a taxidermist, Verónica Dennis asked him if there was anyone he knew from that time whom she might talk to.
“Only one person. His name’s Karl Lander, but I don’t recommend you talk to him.”
“I know him,” she said, blanching.
Lander had been her student in 1979, in a class on aesthetics she’d taught in the Philosophy Department.
She described him as a fickle presence. He’d go off for weeks at a time, but when he reappeared, always in suit and tie and with not a hair out of place, he’d often put his hand up to speak, and did so with great confidence, as though he hadn’t missed a single class.
There was something too mainstream about him; that was partly why he stuck in her memory.
“I would’ve sworn that he was an engineer or lawyer,” said Verónica Dennis. “I could hardly believe it when I found out what he actually did in life.”
Though he was barely halfway through his time at university, he already had his thesis mapped out.
“He always addressed me as ‘Professor,’ though he and I were more or less the same age. I liked that, and at the same time it gave me pause. When he talked about his thesis, his eyes would light up. He wanted to write a kind of history of, and apologia for, works of art as the spoils of war, with Helen of Troy’s abduction as his start point. A ludicrous idea. Pretty beyond the pale, in any case. Sometimes I think it was just a line.”
After class, Lander would walk with her to the Central Library parking lot, where she left her car.
“Every time, he was the perfect gentleman. He never tried anything with me, and that, as you know, always attracts a woman. I felt like I could trust him, is what I mean. And that trust drew me to him. So much so that I did something I’d never done with anyone before, and never have since: I let him read the manuscript of the novel I’d just finished.”
The novel in question was Life, Verónica Dennis’s least well-known work.
“He didn’t show up to class the following week. I was worried he’d gone for good, and that I wouldn’t get my manuscript back. If I’m honest, I also didn’t like the idea of never seeing him again. But then, the following week, there he was. He showed up late to class carrying the manuscript and, as he looked for an empty desk at the back, he waved it at me like a flag. Afterwards, walking me to my car, he gave it back, along with his verdict.”
“The novel’s great,” Lander said. “But that isn’t the end. There’s something missing.”
“What’s missing?” she asked, trying to hide her discomfort.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think I should add another chapter? Develop the thing with the taxi delivery?”
“No. It isn’t about more information. It’s like you need to add some kind of empty space, like a void or a gap in the story. Like in life, you know? The character needs to be aware he’s missing something, though he himself doesn’t know what. Although even you couldn’t say what it is.”
“That was the only time he addressed me informally, as tú,” she said. “And it was the last time he came to university. The next year, I read about him in the paper. His name was among the people implicated in the jewelry theft from the La Francia building. Can you believe it? The strangest thing is that, after I found that out, something drove me to go back to the manuscript. I sat down and read it from beginning to end. And it was then that I found the gap Karl had talked about. I found what it was, as well as a way to bring it into the story.”
Von Hertrich found this a disturbing revelation. Where had he been while all of that was going on? And afterwards, too, when he was in the presence of Karl Lander, the thief and contrabandist, at those work meetings. He’d been in his house—his workshop, his prison—painting, reading, and anticipating the inferno.
“Seeing everything that’s going on now,” said Von Hertrich, “it’s a consolation to know I wasn’t mistaken. It’s terrible for the country, but being mad would be worse. I grasped the general outline, let’s say. I was right about the symbols, too. But the finer details, the thin threads that move the little soldiers, I couldn’t quite get a hold of them.” Then: “Come this way, there’s something I want to show you.”
We got up from the table. My legs felt stiff. It was dark outside now, and we hadn’t heard a peep from the macaws for a while. We walked past their cage and went up the short cement staircase that led to the terrace.
At the top of the stairs, Von Hertrich took a flashlight from beside a plant pot and used it to cut a path for us through the darkness. As we moved forward, sculptures reared up around us in the beam. I felt slightly unsettled, and as he excused the state of the pieces, I tried to pay attention, but I was also worried about hitting my head on the zinc roof, or falling through some unseen hole in the floor.
We came to the part of the terrace that was covered by the roof. Von Hertrich turned a light on. He asked me to go closer to a very large, dark painting covering one of the walls.
“Touch it,” he said.
I didn’t move a muscle.
“Touch it,” he said. This time he grabbed me by the wrist and brought my hand up to the painting.
My hand was met by neither feathers nor pieces of stuffed animal. Instead the surface was cold, with a profusion of tiny pricking edges; it was like I was running my fingers over the tips of a lot of needles or sharpened sticks. The lightbulb was immediately behind us, and our shadows fell across the piece. Von Hertrich turned the flashlight on again, and then I could see.
It’s difficult to reconstruct what I remember of the picture. The surface might have reflected a flattened map of the world, and at the same time a large desert dune, the final redoubt of that small group of soldiers. Because that was what I’d touched: the helmets, arms, and rifle tips of dozens of plastic toy soldiers. Among them there was the occasional larger soldier, in faded uniforms and with lead skin. They were like the battalion leaders.
There was something about the arrangement of the different parts that darkened the spirit. A sort of irreducible pessimism to the painstaking care Von Hertrich had taken in laying the scene out, and to the beauty it possessed, like that which emanates from a swamp orchid. I thought about the time I saw Picasso’s Guernica at the Reina Sofía in Madrid. I’d approached it like a child; that is, I’d been excited by the prospect of seeing the masterpiece, I’d found the whole thing fun. When I was finally standing in front of Guernica, it pierced me to the core. In spite of all the people, in spite of the panic—not dissimilar to that of a city under aerial attack—that went up every time somebody strayed too near.
“This is the Caracazo riots,” said Von Hertrich, pointing at the left hand side of the picture. Then, pointing at the right hand side: “This is the Puente Llaguno massacre. This, here, is a swamp, and so’s this; they represent February 4 and November 27, 1992: Chávez’s attempted coups. I started working on this piece in 1983. When Puente Llaguno happened, nineteen years later, I decided to stop. I even thought about throwing it out with the trash. But I couldn’t bring myself to. Although I haven’t added a single thing since then, I sometimes come and look at it in the night. And I don’t actually need to add anything new—I see new things every time. Here, for example, just below the center, that’s us. We’re all here.”
6.
When we came back downstairs I had the strange sensation of surfacing. It was late. I had no idea how I was going to get home. Nonetheless, we went back to where we’d been sitting at the table.
After the revelatory conversation with Verónica Dennis, Von Hertrich made some inquiries. And indeed, Karl had been the leader of the band of thieves who robbed the La Francia building. He did a year in Retén de Catia. In fact, that hadn’t been his only crime.
“The album I’d found at his apartment in Miami came to mind,” said Von Hertrich, “and a lot of things suddenly started to add up.”
It meant he wasn’t at all surprised to find Lander’s name among the group of “intellectuals” (as they were called when their letter was circulated in the press) who came out in support of Hugo Chávez ahead of the December 1998 elections.
And the same went for when he found out about the theft of Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Pants, during the 2002 general strike, from the Museum of Contemporary Art. Or when Chávez went on national television to order the expropriation of the La Francia building, supposedly as part of a drive to restore the city’s historic center. He now saw clearly, behind all the subterfuge, the elegant silhouette of Karl Lander.
“Have you ever talked to him again?” I asked.
“Yes. He got in touch with me when each of those things happened, almost exactly as they were happening. In 1998, in 2002, in 2010. As though he wanted to confirm my suspicions. As though, in any case, he wanted to make sure I didn’t forget about him. At the end of the day, Karl’s very vain. As vain as only an artist can be. He called me again a couple of days ago.”
Von Hertrich reached for his pack of cigarettes and took out the last remaining one. He crumpled the pack in his hand, making a small, tight ball of it. He threw it onto the tabletop between us, like a die.
It had been a farewell call. Von Hertrich felt awkward, almost unwilling to listen to what Lander had to say, which was that, though he’d known that everything was going to unravel when the Comandante died, he hadn’t thought it would be as bad as this, or that it would happen at such a pace.
“I didn’t even try to answer,” said Von Hertrich. “For Lander, these horrific years have been like one big party. And now the party’s over. His is a pretty sad case, as well as being the best example of everything I’ve just been talking about. It’s as if Scarface, instead of dying young, body riddled with bullets—the death of a great narco—became an elderly operative in the Cuban intelligence agency, constantly harking back to the good old days.”
Lander said nothing about where he was planning to take off to. Really that call was a way of warning him that things were only going to get worse.
“Did you see the young guy they stripped naked outside CU?” Lander had asked. He sounded like a worried father. “That kind of stunt is new. At least in public; they usually keep that stuff behind closed doors, in the prisons.”
In prison, Lander explained, if you don’t have a godfather, that’s exactly what happens when you arrive. They give you a beating, strip you naked, and generally humiliate you. They lead you before the other prisoners like a calf. And if you haven’t got any money, either you’ll be killed there and then, or you become the prison bitch, until the next poor sap shows up.
“What happened at the university is only the beginning. The Ministry of Interior, Justice and Peace said it a few months back: they’ve rehabilitated almost four thousand prisoners for the Revolution. It’s as though Fidel had let all the scum go free, not from Miami, but from Puerto Mariel itself.”
Then he repeated his advice for Von Hertrich to leave the country.
“And go where?” Von Hertrich had said.
“To Germany, with Sara.”
“It’s the apocalypse, Karl, but I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Nonetheless, putting aside the misgivings he had about everything to do with Karl Lander, he knew that his friend was right this time.
“I could have skipped this whole story and just showed you the picture. But you wouldn’t have believed me. It’s clear you’ve been feeling very nervous. What that does is make you trust in your nerves even less. I’m not trying to make you anxious with all of this, quite the opposite. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Your panic attacks are real. The country has become a prison. A prison years in the making. The fences, the cells, the different wings, the guards, the thug inmates, the gangs. It’s all come about at the behest of the warden. But now the warden’s dead, and he left the door onto the street wide open. Soon it will be impossible to distinguish, even in broad daylight, the executioners from the inmates, and the inmates from the calves. Especially the calves. Do you know who the calves are?”
Von Hertrich seemed tired. One of his hands, the one holding the cigarette, was resting on his leg. In the other he had the cigarette pack-die once more, and he was turning it over in his fingers. I sat looking at his hands—his father’s hands. Then the toy soldiers came to mind, the plastic and lead ones. Those soldiers, were they attacking, or were they on the defensive?
I felt the space inside that ancestral home turn malleable, like a river in the night.
“The student they stripped?” I said.
Von Hertrich shook his head.
“Have you ever had to kill an animal? No? I thought not. Then you have no idea of the terror that enters their eyes once they realize what’s about to happen. It’s this fear, a deep dread like something hidden in their blood, which makes them the docile animals they are. The only liberation they can hope for is via the sacrifice. The worst thing those pieces of shit could’ve done to that kid at university was to not kill him. They took him, naked, to the slaughterhouse, and then they let him go. They put fear inside him, in his eyes, in his chest, and it’ll never go away. They stole his calf-like purity and turned him into a slave.”
I thought about my nephew Diego, terrified, refusing to go out in the street.
The night river which had begun pouring in through the high ceilings continued to swell, it was on the verge of drowning me.
“Now do you see the real meaning of my work?” said Von Hertrich. “Do you see why sacrifice is necessary?”
The dark water was up as high as my neck, I had to stand up.
“I’m going to the restroom,” I said.
I pissed for a long time. Then, splashing my face, I looked at myself in the mirror, trying to calm down. The restroom was at the back of a kind of long, narrow lobby with high walls. Like the entrance to a canteen with the swing doors gone. I tucked in my shirt. To my left was the first room Von Hertrich had shown me. I went in and took another look at the crucified dog, against the back wall. I pictured the young student, or my nephew, in the dog’s place. I tried to locate the beauty contained in that image, or at least to intuit some kind of relief from it; but I couldn’t. I half turned around. There, semi-hidden behind the open door, was the Goya print.
“Until Death,” I said, out loud. The voice came from inside me, but it wasn’t my own, it was like something unknown.
Going back out to the lobby-like space, between the gaps left by the nonexistent swing doors, I saw Thomas Von Hertrich and knew that he’d been watching me the whole time, as if through the walls of the building and the walls of my brain.
He ran his hands over his bald head, turned his back and went away in the direction of the kitchen.
For a few seconds, I didn’t know what to do. Von Hertrich had set out to show me that my panic, any panic, is real, at root. Had he really said all that, or was the whole story of that night nothing more than another stolen Capricho?
I pictured Karl Lander pointing to the perfect gap.
I looked at the time on my cellphone; I was done for, I knew it now. I chose the greater fear and went out into the street without saying goodbye.