Woes of the True Policeman

“Yes,” said Amalfitano, “that’s where they told me how to get here. I guess it took me a while to find you. At first I got lost.”

“Yes, yes, the same thing always happens. Even our theatergoers get lost on their way to our plays. Maybe I should put up signs pointing the way.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Amalfitano.

They continued their conversation about theater, although Guerra avoided asking Amalfitano what he thought about the repertory he had planned. The only authors Amalfitano had heard of were Salvador Novo and Rodolfo Usigli. The others sounded either like discoveries or yawning pits. All the while Guerra talked about his project as if he were planning a delicate repast that only a few would really attack with relish. Not a word was spoken about Amalfitano’s job. When they parted, an hour later, Guerra asked whether he’d been to the Botanic Garden. Not yet, answered Amalfitano. Later, as he was waiting for a taxi to take him home, he wondered why Guerra had sent a gardener rather than an office boy to summon him. It seems a good sign, he thought.

6

The Texan; the people who bought the fake Larry Rivers paintings from the Texan; Castillo, who sincerely believed he was doing good work; the art market in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas: all of them, thought Amalfitano, were ultimately like characters from an eighteenth-century philosophical novel, exiled on a continent like the moon, the dark side of the moon, the perfect spot for them to grow and be formed, innocent and greedy, singular and brave, dreamers and utterly naïve. How else to explain, he thought, that not only are these paintings commissioned and painted but even sold, that there are people who buy them, and no one exposes them and turns them in? The art spreads across Texas, thought Amalfitano, like a revelation, like a lesson in humility that bypasses the dealers, like a kind of goodness that redeems everything, even bad forgeries, and he immediately pictured those fake Berdies, those fake camels, and those extremely fake Primo Levis (some of the faces undeniably Mexican) in the private salons and galleries, the living rooms and libraries of modestly prosperous citizens, owners of nothing but their well-appointed houses and their cars and maybe a few oil stocks, but not many, just enough, he imagined them strolling through rooms cluttered with trophies and photographs of cowboys, casting sidelong glances at the canvases on the walls at each pass. Certified Larry Rivers. And then he imagined himself strolling around Castillo’s nearly empty studio, naked like Frank O’Hara, a cup of coffee in his right hand and a whiskey in his left, his heart untroubled, at peace with himself, moving trustingly into the arms of his new lover. And superimposed on this image again were the fake Larry Rivers paintings scattered across a flat expanse, with big houses set far from one another, and in the middle, in the geometric and artificial yards, art, shaky and fragile as a forgery; Larry Rivers’s Chinese horsemen riding across a field of roiling white horsemen. Fuck, thought Amalfitano in excitement, this is the center of the world. The place where things really happen.

But then he came back down to earth and cast a skeptical eye over Castillo’s paintings and was assailed by doubt: either he had forgotten how Larry Rivers painted or the Texas art buyers were a bunch of blind raving lunatics. He thought, too, about the loathsome Tom Castro and said to himself that yes, maybe the authenticity of the canvases resided precisely in their failure to exactly replicate the Larry Rivers paintings, allowing them, paradoxically, to pass for originals. Through an act of faith. Because those Texans needed paintings and because faith is comforting.

Then he imagined Castillo painting — with such effort, such dedication — a beautiful boy blithely asleep on the university campus or wherever, dreaming about mixed-race exhibitions in which the authentic and the fake, the serious and the playful, the real work and the shadow, embraced and marched together toward destruction. And he thought about Castillo’s smiling eyes, his laugh, his big white teeth, about his hands showing him the strange city, and despite everything he felt happy, lucky, and he even managed to appreciate the camels.

7