Dolores has a concern, almost an obsession, that keeps her awake at night, and that is that her name be cleared. She doesn’t want anyone to link her to an attempted fraud, let alone a robbery. What really matters to her is that no one in Peru thinks she wanted to steal a Picasso.
“I found the package leaning against the door. I thought it was from Amazon or something, but I don’t get involved in that. I brought it to the concierge’s office and put it here,” she says, pointing to a table with four stacked cardboard boxes where she stored a Picasso painting, the size of a sheet of paper, considered one of the first examples of the Cubist movement. The concierge’s office on Avenida Pío XII (in Madrid’s Chamartín district), where Dolores, 69, and Armando, 71, have worked for more than 20 years, is a two-square-meter entrance to a simple dwelling located at the back of an elegant and discreet complex of five doorways with a small garden and a simple swimming pool now covered against the rain.
In that small space, there are a dozen more boxes containing newspapers and magazines to be returned to the kiosk — the newsstand that supports them. There is also a table with delivery slips, notebooks, and residents’ keys. Further away, almost within arm’s reach, is a shelf with a soccer ball and their grandson’s stroller. On the walls, there is an oriental painting that looks like it came from a Chinese restaurant, a photo of John Paul II, an image of Mary, Help of Christians, and another of Saint Rose of Lima.
In short, it is a tiny place with an air of chaos where any package would go unnoticed. When Dolores talks and thinks back to the stressful days she has been through, she alternates between tears and proverbs: “He who owes nothing fears nothing,” she says, recalling the 10 days that have passed since three police officers showed up at her house on October 22.
Her husband, Armando, is also a tormented soul with dark circles under his eyes: “How were we supposed to know?”
The bizarre story of the loss of Still Life with Guitar, painted by Pablo Picasso in 1919, began on Monday, October 6, in the Spanish city of Granada. That day, everything was ready for the CajaGranada Cultural Center to display the 57 pieces that make up the exhibition Still Life: The Eternity of the Inert, which was to open to the public three days later. In fact, the shipment had arrived on Friday, October 3, but since not all the packages were properly numbered, it was not possible to carry out a thorough check, and as such the Cultural Center planned to unpack each piece carefully on Monday, October 6, as it itself has admitted.
The surprise came when, instead of 57 pieces, only 56 were opened that day. The police then began a two-week investigation, from the filing of the report until October 24, when the painting’s location was confirmed. During this time, investigators questioned the two transporters, traced the van’s route from the moment it left the warehouse in Madrid, reviewed the camera footage, and made inquiries at the Hostal de Deifontes, 16 miles from Granada, where the drivers spent the night, taking turns to watch over the vehicle to make sure nothing was stolen. The painting, however, was only a few meters from where it had been hanging all along.
Armando had gone out to take out the trash like any other day when he ran into a neighbor. “What a shame that a package was lost,” she said. Armando didn’t think much of it, went home, and mentioned it to Dolores. The concierge then remembered the package, about four-by-five inches, which didn’t weigh much and was wrapped in bubble wrap, lying by the entrance. “Ahhh, it must be this one,” she thought. She notified the neighbor her husband had spoken to, who said she would go pick it up. Sure enough, shortly afterward, the niece of the painting’s owner and three police officers knocked on her door.
“They separated my husband so we couldn’t talk. Then they took him to the Canillas police station [in the north of Madrid],” says Dolores. The plainclothes officers were later joined by agents from the Scientific and Heritage brigades. So, without leaving the house, a dozen police officers considered the operation resolved. Three of them questioned Dolores for hours while another team, wearing masks and protective suits like those used in the darkest hours of the COVID-19 pandemic, took a thousand photos of the package in the garden.
“The police sat me down at the table and for three hours they asked me how the painting had come to be in my house, how I found it, what I did with it, about my job. And I repeated the same thing over and over again: I was coming in from the street when I saw a package leaning against the fence. I thought it was from a neighbor and took it to the concierge’s office. There was no name on it, so I put it there. I thought it was a mirror,“ she says, pointing to the space next to the entrance. ”I had completely forgotten about the package; I didn’t even know what was inside.”
Armando was also questioned for an hour at Canillas police station: “When did you see the package? What did the neighbor say to you? Where did it come from? What have you been doing these past few days? How did you tell your wife…?” What Armando remembers most about the interrogation at the police station is the good cop/bad cop routine. “Every now and then they would ask me, ‘Do you like soccer?’ And I would say, ‘Listen, sir… I’m a Real Madrid fan.’”
Two coincidences complicated the situation. During those days, international police forces were more nervous than usual. On October 19, valuable jewels were stolen from the Louvre in a spectacular heist. This led the police to believe that the alleged Picasso thieves belonged to an international gang that carried out stealthy art heists without firing a shot. So the police asked them over and over again what they knew about the Louvre, the jewels, and Paris. The second coincidence was much closer to home. During the search, Dolores’ mother died. “My head was elsewhere and I didn’t even know where I was,” she recalls, “and I certainly didn’t remember that package,” she says, pointing to the empty space.
Dolores and Armando combine concierge work with running a nearby newsstand, which brings in less and less each year. However, it allows them time to read nearly every newspaper published each day. Since the painting went missing, they followed the story closely, unaware they were central characters. The situation changed once the police concluded it had all been a mistake, and the headlines were no longer as worrying. “The missing Picasso reappears,” “Painting valued at €600,000 [$692,000] recovered,” or the one in EL PAÍS: “The missing Picasso, now recovered in Madrid, never left the building: a neighbor picked it up thinking it was a package,” which prompted Dolores to give this interview. Dolores, who wakes up every day at 5:30 a.m. to open the newsstand and remembers headlines perfectly, says the one that hurt the most called her “the neighbor who accidentally stole a Picasso.” She recalls it and is moved to the brink of tears.
“I don’t pick up anyone’s packages anymore, even if they’re going to explode,” they both say anxiously. In fact, they still have the keys to many homes in the apartment block, but when a resident asked Dolores to let in the heating technician on Monday, she had to tell the owner it was better not to. “Once bitten, twice shy.” The couple likes using proverbs to sum up life.
The painting that nearly all of Spain was looking for is a small gouache and graphite on paper, measuring 12.7 by 9.8 centimeters, framed and insured for €600,000. Though small, it is important as it is one of the earliest examples of cubism, a movement that depicted nature through geometric forms, simplifying reality while giving it expression. Still Life with Guitar shows a guitar on a table in front of an open window, where the planes of the table and the sky are reflected in the instrument.
When Dolores talks about it, tears well up in her eyes again after several days in the eye of the storm. She is embarrassed that a neighbor might think something of them, or that, as emigrants, they’s considered suspicious — or that people in Peru might form an opinion.
“We are honest people who have done nothing but work. My blood pressure is through the roof,“ says Dolores. ”We missed having someone ask us how we were doing. I’m not saying they should give us anything, but at least a hug from the king [of Spain, Felipe VI] to acknowledge that we are good people would be enough,” she says.
In the Peruvian countryside where Dolores comes from, honesty and proverbs are equally important.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition