Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 71. Passage to El Paso

The Chicano Collection is the current exhibition at the El Paso Museum of Art. Christian Gerstheimer, the curator, has been showing visitors through the galleries daily. This morning, in his office checking his messages, he finds himself thinking of where he is in the world. El Paso, the Pass, is on the Rio Bravo del Norte, the Rio Grande, facing Juarez across the river which flows through Texas to the sea. Beyond Juarez stand the mountains. Mountains beyond the river that flows to the sea. El Paso, the sound of horses is in the name, the whinnying and the hoofbeats, the creak of leather and the cries of riders riding to the sea. El Paso. Why these thoughts? No idea.

He passes through the galleries to where Ruggiero Saves Angelica, tempera on wood by Girolamo da Carpi, hangs, hearing his footsteps on the hardwood floor and thinking, as he has never thought before, how many millions, billions, countless trillions of footsteps there have been since the world began. Under the nocturnal daylight of the halogen lamps the silent faces in the paintings have no answers.

Michelle Villa, the Registrar of the El Paso Museum of Art, driving from her house in Kern Place three miles away, takes Mesa Street past the University of Texas at El Paso, and continues through the architectural reminiscings of Sunset Heights. The pale browns of the urban palette are picked up in painterly fashion by the distant-background brown ridges of the Franklin Mountains beyond Jaurez across the Rio Bravo. The air is dry, the day is windy and the wind shakes the stacked sombreros and flutters the rebozos of the street vendors. Michelle thinks of how the dry wind and the distant brown mountains will go with her little daughter Astrid wherever she goes as a grown-up Astrid with perhaps a childhood rebozo carefully folded in a drawer.

As often happens, the tide of her travelling thoughts has brought her to the beach of the working day and here she is in the museum.

Christian Gerstheimer pauses before the da Carpi. Something has caught his eye. What? He doesn’t know. With his right arm bent at the elbow, the forearm across his stomach, his left elbow resting on it and his left hand cradling his chin, he contemplates the painting in the classic stance of a man contemplating a painting. Minutes pass and so does Michelle Villa.

‘Have a look at this,’ he says.

She takes up a stance identical to his. Minutes pass.

‘Well?’ says Gerstheimer. ‘See anything different about the picture?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘You’ll think I’ve gone crazy.’

‘No, I won’t, I promise. Tell me what you see.’

‘OK,’ says Michelle. ‘Maybe I have gone crazy.’

‘Please, Michelle!’

‘All right then, it looks to me as if Angelica is smiling.’

‘Really! But she’s almost in profile, her features not all that distinct. How can you make out a smile?’

‘I’m telling you how it looks to me, Christian.’

Gerstheimer says, ‘To me something seems different but I couldn’t say what it is. Maybe the lighting is funny today.’

Nick Muñoz, Museum Preparator is passing. Beckoned by Gerstheimer, he too takes up the stance, and now the three of them are contemplating Ruggiero Saves Angelica.

‘Well,’ says Gerstheimer, ‘what do you think?’

‘It looks different,’ says Muñoz.

‘How?’ says Gerstheimer.

Muñoz begins to hum ‘Volare’.

‘What’s that tune you’re humming?’ says Gerstheimer.

‘Was I humming?’ says Muñoz. ‘I wasn’t aware of it. Maybe the colours seem deeper and more vibrant.’

‘I wonder if we should send it to New York to be examined by the Kress Foundation conservation labs at NYU,’ says Gerstheimer.

‘No need,’ says Muñoz with his nose very close to the painting. ‘I can smell if a painting’s been tampered with and I haven’t been wrong yet. Nothing’s been done to this one but to me the colour does seem different. Maybe it’s my eyes.’

‘We’re all tired from this Chicano show,’ says Gerstheimer. ‘Maybe tomorrow it’ll look the same as always.’

The two men depart while Michelle Villa continues to contemplate the painting.

‘That still looks like a smile to me,’ she says.