Caravaggio's Angel (7 page)

‘Why not?’

‘No reason,’ I assured her, feeling foolish. How old would she have been then? Eighteen, at the very most. But why should an eighteen-year-old not mastermind an art robbery? ‘It’s just that your name was never mentioned in connection with it, as far as I know.’

‘Mentioned by whom?’

‘The press. The literature. What I mean is, I’ve never seen it mentioned.’

‘Probably not. The Surrealists were strange about women. They liked to fuck them, of course,’ (how strange that word sounded, coming from those fissured lips) ‘but that was about it. That and typing. If some act took place, and two men were involved, it was inconceivable a girl could have thought of it.’

‘What made you think of it?’

She looked at the tape recorder. ‘It’s a long story. But why not? I’d rather think about the past than the present, any day.’

7

La Jaubertie, July

All that morning I listened while Juliette told her story. How outraged she felt when her parents forbade her to see any more of Arnaud Peytoureau (‘Peytoureau?’ I interrupted. ‘I’m staying with a family called Peytoureau at Les Pruniers – would they be related?’

‘Les Pruniers?’ Juliette thought a minute. ‘That must be Olivier. Arnaud would have been, let’s see, his great-uncle.’)

Would have been
. So Arnaud was dead.

Juliette resumed her tale. After the break with Arnaud, she felt she could never live the life her parents had mapped out for her. When they drove her to Libourne to catch the train, as usual, to the convent school in Bordeaux after the 1936 Christmas holidays, she noticed the Paris train waiting on the next platform. Her mother had a dentist’s appointment, so her parents, having put her on the Bordeaux train, did not wait to see her off. As soon as they were safely departed, she jumped off and boarded the one for Paris, as she was in her school uniform and wrapped up in her mother’s old beaver coat, which she used as a coverlet in the icy convent dormitory. She would join her brother Robert who was supposedly studying law but in fact (as she knew) spent his life among the Surrealists, devising puns and producing trance-writings. His horror when she arrived at the little house his godfather had left him, his fury when she refused to leave, even when her parents came to Paris especially to fetch her, her beloved father taking her part against her outraged
dévote
mother. By then Robert’s friend and fellow Surrealist Emmanuel Rigaut had fallen in love with her – convent girls, after all, being the embodiment of every Surrealist fantasy – and had persuaded her to let him share her bed. Robert, mean-while, was sunk in misery because André Breton, the charismatic Surrealist leader, was no longer interested in him, but had moved on, as he always did, to new favourites and obsessions. Juliette, mazed in the enchantment of first love, had felt for him – had wanted to help him, to devise a way of reawakening Breton’s interest. And had devised a plan: they would steal Caravaggio’s St Cecilia from the Louvre.

Why that particular plan, I asked her.

She explained that she had found a job as secretary to a relative – one of the ubiquitous Beaupré cousinhood – who was Head of Pictures at the Louvre, had seen and of course recognized the St Cecilia and at once felt the Surrealist push of chance and coincidence. She remembered, from a book of Robert’s that she’d read at La Jaubertie, a trick of the great Houdini’s: when he wanted to vanish onstage from behind some piece of apparatus, he would slip on a stagehand’s white overall and become instantly, to all intents, invisible. In the same way, if Emmanuel and Robert became brown-coated porters, they could (she reasoned) remove any picture unquestioned. If anyone asked, it was off to be cleaned, or on loan. She identified a time when the guard was invariably absent from the Caravaggio room, stood by, looking official, while Robert and Emmanuel, in their brown coats, took the picture down and replaced it with the
On Loan
sign, then ran back up to her office while they hurried down to the basement to remove it from its frame and stretcher in an unfrequented storeroom.

Could it really be that simple, I asked, remembering the layers upon layers of security at the Gallery. It really could, she replied: things were more haphazard then, pictures weren’t quite the compact lumps of money they are now. And of course no electronics. Just humans, and humans can’t be everywhere all at once.

All the photographs were taken that day and the next, before anyone noticed the picture’s absence. But when Robert turned up with the picture at the Surrealists’ café gathering (the Cyrano, place Blanche, each evening), Breton ignored him and Dali, Breton’s current idol, made fun of him. Even when they produced the pamphlet, Breton remained indifferent.

That summer she and Emmanuel were invited to spend a week with Picasso, near Cannes (I remembered Rigaut’s famous photographs of that interlude, of topless beauties and their laughing lovers picnicking on the sand). Juliette had worried about leaving Robert alone in his despair, but let herself be persuaded – it was just a week, how could she resist, why should she resist?

When they got back she’d found unwashed dishes in the sink, old food on the table. She ran upstairs to Robert’s studio, and tripped over a chair that for some reason was lying on the floor. As she got up something tapped her on the shoulder: the body of her brother, suspended from a hook in the ceiling, and swaying gently in the breeze from the open window. On the table, the pamphlet. And upon it a note that read:
Partir, c’est mourir un peu.

She stopped talking and leaned forward in her chair, clutching the arms. Veins seamed her hands. It was well past midday. We sat for some minutes in a silence broken only by the hearing aid’s soft whistle. Then she said, ‘It was a love story. Can you understand that? My brother loved Breton, who no longer loved him. I loved my brother and hoped the picture might change that. Emmanuel loved me, so he wanted to be part of it. And I loved him. The whole thing was a dance of love. But then, of course, it didn’t work.’ She sighed. ‘Breton was pitiless. He moved on, and that was that. Art before persons, always.’

‘Is that really why your brother killed himself? Because of Breton?’

‘I’ve always assumed so. Suicide was the ultimate Surrealist act. His final act of love. And it worked – Breton was caught, he wrote a famous essay about his death, about all the Surrealist suicides. But by then of course it was too late for my poor brother.’

The clouds were parting in earnest now, the sky almost wholly blue. Juliette said, ‘I wonder if you would open the window? I only shut it because of the rain.’

I opened it, filling the room with a chorus of birds tri-umphantly celebrating the return of the sun.

‘Children should die after you, not before,’ the old woman said, thoughts of her brother perhaps bringing her dead son to mind – as indeed most things must these days. Perhaps that was why she had been happy to make this excursion back into the past – because it got her away from the present. ‘It’s not natural. Even when they’re middle-aged, even when you never see them. Even when you don’t much like them. They’re still your children.’

That must have been a reference to the Minister. If the scene I’d witnessed was anything to go by, there was little love lost there, on either side. I wondered if she’d always disliked him – always preferred his brother.

‘Are you all alone here?’

‘There’s Babette.’

Babette, who must be making lunch – that immovable French institution. I wondered if it would be possible bring the conversation round to the topic of the picture before I had to go. I didn’t want to upset Juliette, and to mention it suddenly, at the point we had reached, would seem intrusive – almost rude. ‘My grandmother must have been living in Paris when you first went there,’ I said. ‘She was about your age. Her family lived near the Etoile. She came to London to visit a cousin and married an English businessman she met there. Her parents were furious.’

‘Our parents always seemed to be furious. I don’t remember ever being furious with my children, not in that way. But of course they were boys so they had more freedom. When I ran off to Paris I felt I was living for the first time in my life, and when we took the picture it was like a wonderful dream. So vivid. Nothing I’ve done since has been as vivid as that. Later, of course, it became a night-mare. But it was still vivid. That was the important thing. Perhaps that was what your grandmother felt.’

‘We never talked about it – she died when I was twelve.’

‘And your grandfather?’

‘I never knew him. My grandparents got divorced when my mother was quite young, and she moved back to France. He was quite a lot older than her, and he died before I was born.’

Somewhere, far off, a bell tinkled. Juliette said, ‘That means lunch is ready. I’m afraid I can’t invite you. But you must come and talk to me another time.’

‘I’d love to.’ I stowed the tape recorder back in my bag. ‘It was kind of you to see me.’

‘Not at all. It does me good to remember a time when I was still alive.’

As I stood to leave, the sun reached the back wall where the picture hung, and the Angel’s torso and the saint’s face and shoulders suddenly shone out. This version was far better than the one at the Louvre – more fluidly painted, more alive. Caught in the double beam of natural sunlight and Caravaggio’s ineffable incandescence, the Angel seemed on the very point of movement. Most angels are androgynous creatures, but this one was unmistakably male and unequivocally sexy, with his beautiful black wings, shining brown curls, bruised lips and hooded brown eyes. ‘What a beautiful young man,’ I said. ‘You know the painting of Bacchus? The one with the boy hold-ing the glass of wine? I think this may be the same boy, a few years further on.’

Juliette levered herself out of her chair and, leaning on her stick, limped across the floor towards the picture. She barely came up to my shoulder, so insubstantial you’d have thought that at any moment she might break. Of course people shrink as they get older, but she must always have been slender: her wrists and ankles were tiny, her legs still elegant in their sensible shoes. Standing beside her I felt overgrown and fleshbound, my cheeks too red, my nose too shiny, my hair too springily thick. We studied the picture. ‘Perhaps it was his lover,’ she said.

‘Perhaps they both were. Wasn’t he involved in some brawl over a fashionable whore?’

‘Probably.’ Somewhat to my surprise – I’d been expecting her to move to wherever lunch was served – she turned and limped back effortfully in the direction of her chair. The temptation to scoop her up and deposit her in it was almost overwhelming, but that of course was out of the question. Finally achieving her goal, she sat back with obvious relief. ‘At one time I tried to find out about his life, though it’s years ago now. But I seem to remember a great many brawls.’

Trying to sound as casual as I could, as though the words had not been hovering in my throat for the past two hours, I said, ‘The reason I was so interested in the picture is that I’m organizing an exhibition around it. There are several versions – well, of course you know two of them, and there’s another in America. That’s why I wanted to find out about your brother – because of the pamphlet, the Surrealist connection. Do you think it might be possible for us to borrow this one for our exhibition? We’d deal with everything – the insurance, the travel.’

‘You mean you didn’t know it was here?’

‘How could I?’

She shrugged imperceptibly. ‘Boh – it’s possible Manu might have mentioned it, I suppose.’ She gave a small, dry laugh. ‘No wonder you were surprised.’

‘So, do you think it might be possible?’ I persisted.

She didn’t reply at once, but looked at me consideringly, as though she was weighing something up, conducting an argument inside her head. With herself? Or if not herself, whom? The Minister?
They
had certainly been having an argument. Was that what they’d been quarrelling about?

No, that was ridiculous. At a time like this, a loan request from an obscure curator was not likely to be at the fore-front of either of their minds. Not the Interior Minister’s, and not his bereaved mother’s.

Eventually she made up her mind. ‘Yes, why not? I can’t see any reason why not.’

I felt exultant – indeed, could barely restrain myself from kissing her. ‘But that’s wonderful! Of course we’ll need a written agreement. Here, let me give you my card. ‘

‘Let’s do it now,’ she said firmly, taking the card. ‘Then it’s done. At my age, I prefer to do things at once.’ She rose, moved over to the writing table, adjusted the spectacles that hung on a chain around her neck, pulled some headed paper out of a drawer, and began to write, peering now and then at my card. The letters formed slowly and effort-fully under her stiff fingers, but eventually she put down her pen. With an air of finality she handed me the result: the argument was over. I read:
I hereby authorize the loan of
my picture ‘St Cecilia and the Angel’ by Caravaggio, to Dr
Regina Lee and the National Gallery in London for the purposes
of an exhibition
. It was carefully signed and dated.

I folded it and stowed it in my bag, in the zip pocket alongside my passport. ‘I’ll write to you to confirm this, as soon as I get back.’

‘As you wish.’ She held out her hand. ‘Goodbye, madame. Excuse me if I don’t show you out.’

Making my way back through the grand enfilade, which I was now able to observe more calmly and in greater detail, I saw that the Caravaggio was by no means the only valuable picture in Juliette’s collection. The others, how-ever, reflected a very different sensibility – her husband’s, perhaps. In the salon, above an ornate gilded commode, an early Chirico – much like the one at the rue d’Assas – sounded a disquieting note. In another corner, a tiny Vuillard interior hung above a Second Empire oval-backed canapé in yellow silk. I made a mental note of them and thought of all the lost gems scattered around Europe in places like this.

As I approached the staircase there was a burst of bark-ing, and the alsatian Amos bounded towards me. I jumped backwards: the dog, sensing my fear, growled and snapped. At length, from some distant place, Babette shouted: ‘
Amos, arrète!
’ The dog paused, and finally Babette herself appeared, carrying a cloth-covered tray.

‘No need to be frightened, madame,’ she said. ‘He won’t do anything to you, he’s a big softy really, all voice and no teeth.
Amos! Couché!
’ She nodded severely towards the ground at her feet; reluctantly, the dog padded over and sat down. ‘So. You’re off? You’ve been talking a long time, I hope Madame’s not too tired. Did you get what you wanted?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Lucky I came back in time,’ she said, but she did not sound as though she thought it lucky.

Driving towards Bergerac through steamy trees almost blindingly green in the sunlight, I thought about those two exchanges. Had Juliette really forgotten our meeting? Once or twice, when she had thought me occupied elsewhere – with the tape recorder, with the picture – I’d caught her looking at me, a cool, detached glance in which elderly vagueness and memory loss had no place. And what about Babette? Was Amos’s appearance on the staircase really a mistake? Or had there been some intention to intimidate? And why had she decided to go so extensively shopping just this morning? She had known I was coming, and that no one would answer the door if she was absent. Market day, when most people laid in their supplies, had been only yesterday. Perhaps she’d calculated that by the time she got back I’d have given up and left. But if she was playing games, whose games were they? Her own? That seemed unlikely. Juliette’s? That, too, was hard to believe. So someone else’s? Something was going on – and I guessed it was connected with the dilemma Juliette had so clearly been confronting before she agreed to lend the picture. That was why she’d insisted on writing the letter then and there – so that no second thoughts could intervene.