Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

“He was interested in me for a while. To begin with, we were Irish. Well, as he himself added, ‘sort of Irish.’ He was Irish in the way Mrs. Heath was Irish, which is to say English with a house in Ireland. People still think it’s a shame so many big houses were razed by the IRA in the 1920s, but I find it hard not to sympathize with all that burning, even if it involved the loss of artworks.

“Although I was the younger man, as our conversation and acquaintanceship progressed, my deference began to falter. The man had so many things wrong with him, and I am not talking about his sexual proclivities, though they disgusted me. Him with his big round head and his knobbly nose. No, that was not the problem. The problem is, was, that he could not draw.

“He could not draw. And he saw nothing wrong with admitting it. He wore it as a badge of honour. Like his sexual proclivities. Francis Bacon and his sausage.

“Nor could he prepare a canvas properly. He knew nothing about priming and then, once again making a ‘virtue’ of necessity, took to painting on unprimed canvas. He produced these ropy thread-encrusted bumpy works, all of which seemed to be based on Munch’s Scream. He seemed to have no respect for the Old Masters, yet felt he had something new to say, which, in the end, are the two things I dislike most in contemporary art.

“But, I need to be fair to the man, because he allowed me, an unknown, aggressive, younger man, to criticize him. He said he was not imitating Munch, and pointed out that the man in Munch’s painting was not screaming, but blocking his ears against a world that was screaming at him. He also reassured me that he did respect the Old Masters, one in particular, Velazquez, and, specifically, Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, the famously irascible Giambattista Pamphili, ancestor to the very family that had treated me so kindly over the years, allowing me to live on their property, now, sadly, owned and mismanaged by the Comune di Roma. Velazquez’s work, he said, was the perfect portrait. He had been painting variations on the theme of that one work for years, and expected to continue for more years to come.

“I told him I knew the Doria Pamphilis, my benefactors, friends, and landlords, and promised I could arrange, next time he was in Rome, a private viewing of the Velazquez work, but-and this is how I know his respect for the Old Masters was less genuine than mine-he said he did not want to see the actual painting. He preferred to work from photographs.

“In being so bloody-minded and strange and annoying, Bacon, who wasn’t a bad drinker either, was, in fact, sort of Irish after all. And he inspired me to look at that Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent X until I, too, became obsessed with it and the painter. In 1982, the year Spain went into the European Community (and out of its own World Cup, thanks to Northern Ireland), I spent three months in Madrid, going every day to the Prado to look at Las Meninas, the Forge of Vulcan, and the portrait of Philip IV, especially the last. I immersed myself in the life of Velazquez. I even learned Spanish, though this is not very hard to do if you already speak Italian. I made a point of seeing the rest of his work in New York, London, Vienna, and, God help us, that bloody awful swamp city Washington. What fascinated me, I suppose, was that I knew from the very start that I could not do Velazquez. I made a go at Los Borrachos, just to see. Ironically, I used photographs. The result was unpresentable. I could not do Velazquez, but I think it’s safe to say no one alive could know him better than me. Although I failed to capture his style, I knew precisely how it should be. It’s like when you fail to speak a language or mimic a voice properly. You can hear the accent, intonation, and characteristics of the voice in your head, but can’t get your own voice to make the right sounds.

“All it took was the hint of a form of a woman peering in from the left in an unknown painting for me to get a fluttering of excitement followed by a jolt of recognition that almost stopped my heart. I swear, seeing the unmistakable line and chromatic touch of the artist in the painting on my easel almost killed me, even though I was the one who had sensed something in the canvas and had uncovered it. I had sought him out, but was shocked to find him.

“The next half page,” said Blume, “has a diagonal line drawn through it. Just one line, which suggests to me he was not convinced that he wanted to cancel these thoughts:

“Angela, I began these memoirs and my handbook on how to emulate the Old Masters with the intention of getting them published, and I would appreciate it if you could get someone to finish and correct them for me if I don’t finish in time, which seems likely. Don’t ever give the only copy to John. In fact, keep that bastard away from this.

“A year at most, the doctor told me the other day. My doctor is a man who likes to hedge his bets. Like all doctors, he knows nothing. The Men Who Guess. All these years, they get away with guessing and then prescribing. Like economists, art critics, but worse. When the patient dies, they shrug. He gave me a year, as if the earth’s circuit of the sun had anything to do with the pace of my body’s self-destruction. I am writing this in the spring. One year later it will be spring again, so I hope he’s wrong. I don’t want to die when everything else is coming into life. I don’t want to die before then either, of course. I really don’t want to die. I need to resolve so many things first. And then, I want to have time to enjoy living with things resolved. Does anyone get to enjoy all that?

“Angela, I’m sorry. I know it sounds self-serving but you need to accept this. You need to forgive people before they die, because being angry with the dead is the most frustrating and useless thing you will ever experience, and I know what I am talking about. Once they are gone, you can’t get at them, you can’t ask, you can’t do anything except rage inside yourself. I’ll tell you something: if there is an afterlife, it’ll be full of the recently deceased picking fights with the earlier dead.

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.

“Everything I have I leave to you. But I have already given you the most valuable thing I ever had. It is there before you, it is in these words, it is in our hearts and our memories. Remember the parties with Gustav the self-effacing Swedish archaeologist, who also happened to be a king? Remember the day we sat on the bench looking at the fighting putti in the open-air theatre convinced we had the whole garden to ourselves? And you kissed me, and one thing led to another, in there among the yew trees, after I played that trick and suddenly this mad Englishwoman was there, looking at us, asking what we thought we were doing. She would not accept that I lived in the garden, a guest of and friend of Pogson and his wife, Princess Pamphili. ‘Babs’ Johnson. Mad auld bat in a big straw hat. She set her dogs on me. She wrote under a penname. Georgina Masson and wrote the best guide to Rome there ever has been. Remember that?

“Look at that painting. Use your artist’s eye and your lover’s heart. Then you’ll understand. Maybe you’ll want to edit this bit out of the published work.

“There’s a blank page here, which he sized with gesso, as if he was planning to draw on it. The next few pages are blank, too, and then another bit, which I was thinking of reading out to Nightingale this afternoon, because it would have been interesting to see how he reacted.

“The doubters will be legion, A. Trust me.

“John Nightingale and I were successful because we were indirect and invisible. Over the years, the works I did gathered more credibility and provenance, acquiring value and legitimacy like so many snowballs rolling downhill, always building momentum and growing larger the farther they got from us. I have seen my own paintings on display in some of the leading museums of the world. I shall give a list of the museums and the works in the appendix, but do not expect the museums to accept my claims.