Two days later, still dwelling on the defendant’s secrets, Luis Gerardo Esquilín watched the prosecutor present the first of his three pieces of central evidence. It was a news item that, according to the prosecution, the defendant had managed to insinuate into a small Sevillian paper, intending for it to spread, stealthily, through the mass media. He claimed the defendant’s strategy was always the same: first, find some small provincial paper, preferably one with external contributors, where she could place the fake news item, then watch as the story disseminated like a hushed rumor.
According to the prosecution, in the early nineties, Virginia McCallister—hiding behind the name Maribel Martínez—had managed to sneak in an article that associated a new medicine with a pharmaceutical product that had been used in the detention and torture of hundreds of prisoners during the Vietnam War. The article cited a very long list of renowned academics. The defendant’s strategy, as the prosecutor explained, was to place her false news items within a network of possible truths that would make it circulate without garnering too much attention. Then, when the news picked up speed, the defendant would send a short note signed with her alias to the first newspaper, apologizing for a series of small mistakes that invalidated her article. The newspaper would publish the letter and issue its own apology, not realizing that the news was already circulating independently.
For the next half hour, both the audience in the courtroom and the one watching on TV observed the absurd voyage of Virginia McCallister’s false news through the international press. They saw the article that was initially published by the small Sevillian paper reproduced two days later by a tabloid in Madrid, not without the exaggeration typical of the Spanish press, then in Barcelona, Valencia, Olot, and Bilbao. From Basque country the news leapt to North America, appearing nine days after its initial publication in a small Mexican paper. From there it exploded: in under three days, it appeared in twenty outlets, including three major papers, and it was also reproduced during those days in Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Colombia. Only then, with the news circulating widely, did a short note appear in the Sevillian paper, clarifying that it was all a mix-up, and actually, the medicine had no relationship to military torture. This time the note was signed by a Jaime Melendi, who assured readers that his employee, Maribel Martínez, had been fired for her carelessness. As the prosecutor explained, this was all part of the plan. With that note, the defendant finally set the news free from the laws of truth and kept subsequent investigations from discovering the farce. What the defendant understood very well was that by then, the news had gathered enough momentum that it would oblige readers to look at the pharmaceutical industry through different eyes. The story then crossed the borders to the north and was reproduced by several U.S. papers that seemed to care little that in Seville, the initial paper had printed a second item apologizing for its mistake. Once the U.S. press had been infiltrated, the story seemed omnipresent. It was printed in Croatian and Romanian papers, Asian magazines, and even in a small informative pamphlet produced by a medical association in Mozambique. The damage was done.
Tancredo thought again of the old man with the metal detector in the beach town. He told himself that soon, history would be nothing but a great landfill of informational garbage. Two days later, at Gaspar’s barbershop, he said: “Someday there’ll be more information junk than world, more garbage than dumps.” Gaspar just laughed and told him he was going crazy from that trial. He got up and handed a broom to Tancredo, saying: “If you’re so worried about garbage, go on and sweep.”
That week, the witnesses were called one by one to the stand, where they tried to reframe the prosecutor’s examples as art. Guillermo Porras, trembling and timid, invoked before the jury the works of Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, which he said were an attempt to reclaim the “sociological poetic of the rumor.” He cited Alÿs’s 1997 piece The Rumor, in which the artist spread a false story about a man who left his hotel one day and didn’t come back, and made it real. With the help of three members of the Tlayacapan community, Alÿs managed to disseminate the story in such a way that local imagination took care of the rest: inventing the man’s face, his age, his story. Three days later, as possible explanations for his mysterious disappearance made the rounds, the police even issued a poster with a tentative sketch of the individual. As Porras explained, the piece was all about exploring the methods by which a public truth is constructed.
As we all listened, we couldn’t help but think of the game called “telephone.” Children line up and pass a secret down the line, each whispering into the ear of the next until it reaches the last child, who has the responsibility of proclaiming the secret—inevitably distorted—aloud. The logic of Alÿs’s work was something we knew very well—we’d discovered it as children. The young lawyer held up one of the 247 notebooks the defendant had supposedly compiled and read a short excerpt she’d cited from Alÿs: “If somebody were to say something to someone, and that someone were to repeat it to someone else, and that someone were to repeat it to someone else … then, at the end of the day, something is being talked about, but the source will have been lost forever.” More than one laugh came from the audience. If that was art, then the kid’s game was as well. The absurdity of the trial was made clear: this woman was on trial for trying to play a child’s game at the age of seventy. I think it was at that moment when, for the first time, many people started to see the defendant with compassionate eyes.
She, however, didn’t seem to be after any compassion. She seemed determined not to show any emotion. From time to time, when one of her witnesses was questioned, she made notes in a small notebook. It became clear that her study was a continual process and that the artwork hadn’t ended the day of her arrest. I looked at her and told myself it would take just one call from me to put an end to that whole absurd theater, but something told me that would be a betrayal of Giovanna’s memory. I turned off the TV, started to read a random novel, and waited for sleep, sure that the next morning I’d have an email from Tancredo that would do me the favor of imagining all possible endings.
Over the course of that week, the prosecutor posed the same question to each of the witnesses for the defense.
He began with a historical anecdote. On October 23, 2002, a group of Chechen terrorists stormed the Dubrovka Theater, taking as prisoner the more than 850 spectators who’d filled the place that night to watch the musical comedy Nord-Ost. In exchange for setting them free, the terrorists were asking for Russian withdrawal from Chechnya and an end to the war. Three days later, on October 26, when Russian military forces filled the theater with toxic gas and entered the theater, they found 138 cadavers: 39 of them terrorists, the rest civilians. Then the prosecutor brought up a short and little-known Russian novel written almost a century earlier, in 1905, by a Bolshevik named Boris Stolypin. The Theater told a fictional story that was virtually identical to the one the Russian people would experience a century later: one night, in the middle of a production of Othello put on by Konstantin Stanislavsky’s company, hundreds of Bolshevik soldiers took over the theater. In Stolypin’s novel the events were an allegory of the opening of art to the political realm, a sort of “historical awakening” that had to be understood through the lens of Marxism.
“Who,” the prosecutor asked, “can assure us that the horrible events of October 23, 2002, were not influenced by this novel? And, assuming they indeed were, does that tragedy become—as the defense’s doubtful argument seems to suggest—an artwork, merely because of its inspiration?” The entire courtroom fell silent as Marcelo Collado searched desperately for a way out. He stammered indecisively before citing three French philosophers on the subject of intention. According to Collado, even if one of the terrorists had read that book, which was unlikely, given how little-known it was, the attack could not be considered in artistic terms; it lacked what the Venezuelan, after one of his philosophers, called “artistic intention.”
“Who,” the prosecutor countered, “could assure us that the defendant’s so-called artistic intention was real, and not a mask behind which to hide her criminal intentions?”
Collado, breathing nervously, went back to babbling about incomprehensible theories that did nothing but betray his own confusion to the jury.
Later, Guillermo Porras and Gregory Agins tripped over the same question. Porras, sweating profusely, sought to draw dubious distinctions between the two cases, arguing that the prosecutor’s scenario violated the absolute boundary of art by enacting violence against one’s neighbor. After the Costa Rican’s noble and Christian reply, Agins tried to return to Collado’s intuition by suggesting that the more than two hundred notebooks that the defendant had written over the course of her project were irrefutable proof that, in her case, the project had been conceived of as art from the beginning. He closed by saying that for conceptual art, the category under which he said the defendant’s project fell, documentation was the fundamental evidence of artistic intention. As examples, one could look at the manifestos of Costa, Escari, and Jacoby, and also the writings of Hélio Oiticica, Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Baldwin, Lee Lozano, Kynaston McShine, Cildo Meireles, Sigmund Bode, Lucy Lippard, Rolf Wedewer, Victor Burgin, and Robert Smithson. The list only further confused the jury. Then, in his hoarse, sonorous voice, he said that he had looked through the photocopies of the notebooks and was convinced that the work belonged within the conceptual tradition he’d just evoked, and was equally sure that in the Chechen case there was no such artistic conception. Art, he declared, was a matter of history and documentation.
When María José Pinillos failed to arrive in time for her testimony, Luis Gerardo Esquilín became desperate and restless. He decided that he had no other option but to move up the presentation of one of his secret weapons.
After an hour’s recess, everyone returned to the courtroom to find a long collapsible table had been set up, and on it were arranged some twenty-odd numbered boxes. Solemn and silent, two court employees were removing from the boxes the defendant’s famous notebooks.
“Two hundred forty-seven,” thundered Esquilín as soon as the final notebook was placed on the table. Two hundred forty-seven reasons to believe that his client had thought through the project’s artistic logic from beginning to end. Then, with a conviction he seemed to have only recently gained, he invited the jury to page through the notebooks, and he returned to his seat beside the defendant.
The scene was marked by a certain anachronistic charm: the twelve members of the jury walked deliberately around the table, wearing white gloves as they inspected those notebooks the defendant had accumulated over two decades. Perhaps she had always known that this moment would come someday. Perhaps the newly baptized Viviana Luxembourg had foreseen the inevitable arrival of the digital age and had understood that soon the handwritten archive would come to embody a vanishing form of experience and authority. Certainly, when we saw the pile of notebooks on the table, we were impressed above all by the sheer amount of material. Those notebooks could well have been empty. The important thing was that they were there, they took up space, had a presence.
Tancredo remembered the intuition he’d had some days earlier, that the world was filling up with junk and that someday there would be no more room for it all. The future was a garbage world, an information world, he thought as he listened to the lawyer start speaking again. Esquilín asked whether anyone present found it credible that the defendant had undertaken so many years of theoretical work in pursuit of vulgar, criminal ends. Spending so many years pondering the framework from which to understand her project could only be the work of an artistic imagination.
Then he approached the table, picked up a notebook, and began to read aloud. In the passage, the defendant suggested that all art led to judgment, that all art was, at the end of the day, the staging ground for the discrepancy between the law of the present and the law of the future, between legal language and artistic language.
To Tancredo, the quotation seemed arbitrary and unnecessary. He had the strange sense that the defendant was starting to control the nervous young man’s speech and logic. Then he thought about Burgos, about Miguel Rivera, the small drawings of Karl Wallenda that the defendant drew on napkins from La Esperanza. This woman’s intention, he thought, is to make them all into her little puppets, to reach the end of the story listening only to the echoes of her own voice.
After leaving the courthouse, the lawyer met María José Pinillos at the entrance to his house. Drunk and weepy, the Guatemalan apologized for not having shown up in court. Then she said that all the witnesses had been wrong: the truly brave thing would have been to admit that the terrorist attack, too, was art. Ethics didn’t matter. Luis Gerardo Esquilín just looked at her with a mixture of compassion and contempt, the way we all look at the monster we’re afraid of becoming.