The Forgery

The Forgery, now translated into English by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers, is Mexican writer Ave Barrera’s first novel, originally published in 2013. The novel opens with the painter Jose Federico Burgos, who specialises in copying, and occasionally forging, Renaissance paintings, perched atop a six-metre-high wall and poised to jump because “going back to that house would be worse than plunging to my death.” Of course, at this point ‘that house’ means nothing to us, but whatever it contains, it motivates Jose to jump from the wall to the ground below, injuring himself to the point of unconsciousness. It’s a high adrenalin opening, but one which, over the pages that follow, Barrera fully justifies.

Jose’s problems begin, as they so often do, with money: we flash back to before he had ever entered ‘that house’ and find him hiding from his landlady, but the twenty-four hours he has to pay the rent he owes feels like a deadline he might meet especially when his truck, with the triptych he is taking to a client, is towed. All of a sudden, the offer from Horacio Romero to forge a sixteenth century panel which he has just turned down seems more attractive:

“There’s good money in it. If it turns out well I’ll pay you handsomely.”

Not for the last time, the temptation to take the job is not simply a result of Jose’s desperate need for cash, but also the luxurious lifestyle which Romero offers him – the food and drink, and the “cushions and silky sheets” he wakes up to the next morning. Immediately he encounters an unexpected problem, however – the painting is too large to be removed from the building where it is housed which has obviously been built around it:

“…there was no way to forge the painting, impounded as it was within these stone walls. Unless… unless I copied it from memory.”

The idea of being trapped like the painting runs throughout the novel, from Jose hiding in the toilet from his landlady to a memory which resurfaces the first time he is in Romero’s house of locking himself in a trunk as a child. Later, Jose will be arrested and briefly imprisoned, ironically for trying to get back into Romero’s home, before the events which lead up to the escape we have already witnessed. (Jose is also subjected to the gnomic prophecy “He who finds the door also finds the key” when he is collecting the materials he needs for his painting). The focus on rooms and buildings is, perhaps, unsurprising as Barrera has spoken of her interest in architecture and of structuring the novel like a bridge:

“I visualize it as a bridge, those colonial “m”-shaped bridges, like a piece of an aqueduct, with a pillar in the middle and another on either side. Those three points frame the entire narrative arc.”

The first pillar is when Jose throws himself from the wall; the other two are the events that follow that, with the rest of the novel taking place as a flashback.

Romero leaves and Jose seems to be progressing in his attempts to copy the painting, but it is difficult to escape the feeling that there is something unusual about Romero’s house, not least the presence of his mother, Isabel, who rarely leaves her room. The maid hints that the house is haunted by her dead husband (“…the problem is he’s still there”). Jose, perhaps because he too feels trapped, is sympathetic towards Isabel, and takes her to see the original painting, noting her anxiety:

“I don’t want them to see me out there. I don’t want them to know I’m here, with you.”

Romero’s controlling behaviour, suggested by this comment, is more evident when he returns and is unhappy with what Jose has produced:

“‘What’s this?’ Horacio spat through gritted teeth. ‘Please tell me this is some kind of joke.’”

If Jose is the perfect hapless hero, well-meaning but prone to complicating his life the more he seeks to simplify it, Romero has both the bonhomie and outrage of the gangster, his unpredictable reaction an echo of his obscure motives. To say more would be to reveal too much, but Barrera’s sustains the novel’s pace and tension to the end.

Tags: Ave Barrera, the forgery