Two Forgers and a Small Crocodile Walk Into a Sauna - The New York Times
PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN LADY
By María Gainza
Translated by Thomas Bunstead
The unnamed narrator in "Portrait of an Unknown Lady," María Gainza's crepuscular but dreamy novel, looks back over a life led in the shadow of imposture. From the lonely cocoon of a hotel room, she sets down her memory of events — which, in Thomas Bunstead's elegant translation from the Spanish, suggests that, at least as far as the air of the art world is concerned, Buenos Aires is something of a misnomer.
Yet the written testimony of a seasoned purveyor of art forgeries could well be as untrustworthy as her valuations. She learns at the knee of the cynical Enriqueta Macedo, Argentina's "pre-eminent expert in art authentication," who uses her position at the Ciudad Bank to sell certificates of authenticity — and senses that her protégée has an inborn knack for fraud. The recruitment takes place through clouds of steam in a discreet sauna.
At length, Enriqueta dies a natural death, but not before telling our narrator tales of the mythic, shabby Hotel Switzerland, home to an international circle of bohemian hashish-smoking fringe-dwellers. These include the mysterious Renée, famed among forgers for being "able to enter the soul of another." The hotel's proprietor, Enriqueta recounts, owned a work by the fashionable society portraitist Mariette Lydis that Enriqueta instantly judged a brilliant fake. Displaying the intellectual vanity that is both the blessing and curse of the gifted forger, with "a look" Renée all but confirmed the diagnosis, thus beginning a cozy, longstanding and profitable business relationship.
Long after our narrator leaves the bank and turns to desultory art criticism, the Hotel Switzerland crowd unexpectedly beats a path to her door. Lozinski, an ex-Russian admiral on the old Vladivostok station, presents her with works of art, documents and ephemera that shed beams of penetrating light upon the enigmatic artist Lydis, whose Austro-Hungarian pedigree, though dubious, used to turn heads in the better estancias. This stash of documentation is for sale.
Our narrator becomes fascinated by finding the elusive Renée, whose career has waned along with Mariette Lydis's popularity. She, like her subject, has drifted into obscurity, and would appear to have rejoiced in its cold embrace. The increasingly feverish hunt for Renée is frustrated by gaps in memory, lack of detail, depressing lacunae, unreliable hearsay, dead ends. In the grim favela where she was once glimpsed, did Renée not keep under her bed a small crocodile called Abdul? There are those who say so. It also seems unlikely that Renée ever developed an unhelpful passion for Russian roulette in bars, but one or two others swear that she did. Her forgeries are all that remain of her, but few people can even recognize those.
Meanwhile, the artist Lydis (better known to high society as the Countess Govone) swims into preposterously vivid focus, every part and portion of her improbable life exhaustively documented, but wracked upon shores of incredulity. Did she share a house in the Cotswolds for a while with Karl Marx's granddaughter? When she arrived in Buenos Aires, were her erotica really sold at first by the florist out of a corner of the Hotel Plaza, along with creepy shunga by Utamaro and Hokusai?
As the bleak Enriqueta puts it early in the novel, apparently in no way softened by the sauna: "Can a forgery not give as much pleasure as an original?" Without doubt. "Isn't there a point when fakes become more authentic than originals?" Not, I think, unless they are people. "And isn't the real scandal the market itself?" To which one might answer, finally, and with feeling: Maybe. Though never when, otherwise behaving itself, that market falls victim to coldly calculating malfeasance. The naughty pleasure of this novel is bound up in our fascination with fakes, especially when executed in the cavalier mode of Robin Hood. Perhaps Buenos Aires is more forgiving, but I doubt it.
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