- Art: Erik the Belgian dies, the art thief who became a star
"Tell me, buddy," he said to the phone in a low voice. In the background, an intermittent beep, long and warm, like that of a submarine that probes the ocean floor. It was the heart monitor of René Alphonse van den Bergue, Erik el Belga, a few days before his death, this June, at the Málaga Clinic.
Born in Nivelles (Belgium) in 1940, the famous thief of works of art was never caught, nor was he arrested for a flagrant crime, and he was never convicted of robberies with force on him in Spain. But this is the vital paradox of Erik, as responsible for subtracting and distracting artistic heritage as for his bizarre recoveries and, above all, his custody. In short, that Spain became aware of such a painful event, the neglect of Romanesque treasures.
"They operate on me tomorrow," he said on the other end of the thread, and began to remember. The Belgian's activities focused on the map of Spanish ecclesiastical art from Catalonia to Galicia.
A thousand kilometers dotted with temples with a huge and valuable heritage that, in the 1960s, were hardly guarded and looked alone. The theft of the enamels from the Aralar altarpiece (Navarra) took place in 1979 , late-medieval wonders recovered two years later in Rome with the intervention of the controversial Francoist policeman Billy el Niño.
"It is a very funny anecdote. The guard, who died, drank a lot of wine and fell asleep. He left the big door open, the dog was very big and he also drank; the guard put the wine that did not end in a barrel and the The dog got drunk. We finally entered through that big door, which was not closed, "Erik said.
There were darker times in his life. The learning of drawing up a plan and executing it cleanly marked his criminal activity: he said that he was a mercenary in Africa, although this point has not been verified. "I have never killed anyone," he said simply. But in his life there was almost as much lie as truth.
His modus operandi was that of the self-sufficient commandos, blow of hand, robbery and escape. However, none of the many versions he gave on the same matter coincides with the evidence of the robberies with which he is related and which he assumed.
After youth, he began a career "for the love of art", as reflected in his memoirs. Thefts that gave him a halo of romanticism : a man wanted by the Police throughout Europe, in 1982 Interpol managed to recover 300 artistic objects hidden by its network in various warehouses in Europe. Then Erik began to collaborate with the Police. He was interested in saving his skin.
Perhaps embodying the dream of a kind of contemporary Robin Hood , he agreed to negotiate with the Spanish authorities to recover what was stolen. To the point that the socialist Alfonso Guerra, at the time vice-president of the Government of Felipe González, collected in his memoirs: "By an intricate means, the existence of a prisoner came to the knowledge of the Government who, possessing great information on artistic objects of extraordinary value that had been stolen, he was in a position to return them in exchange for improved legal treatment . " Operation that ended in "extraordinary success", as the same War wrote.
'COLLECTOR'
There is a long chain of events in the 1980s picked up on time by the written press. In 1982 he was implicated in 22 summaries for crimes against the national artistic-historical heritage, the works were valued at 3,000 million pesetas and many were recovered after arrest and imprisonment. A robbery with which he put on "the boots", thus illustrating the volume of what was stolen and, also, an alleged activity by Erik as a "collector" buyer of priests hungry for money. In any case, the paradox of their criminal activities is summarized in that they put a media focus on the existence of forgotten sacred art jewels.
If, beyond the Pyrenees, the Belgian gang robbed museums, in Spain they only needed to enter temples without alarms or security cameras. Mikel Garciandia, current minister chaplain of the sanctuary of San Miguel de Aralar, pointed out that, until the years of Erik, the churches, hermitages and monasteries were open to parishioners and inside were unrecognized works of art. Or directly abandoned.
The numerous assaults by the Belgian led to the closing of the gates of the places of Christian worship and, collaterally, it deepened the social distance between the Church and the citizens. This was Erik's justification: "The recovery of much of what was stolen made it possible to value what was lost as art and living history and to seek its best preservation."
Along with Sarra Lahcini , the woman who accompanied him for the last two decades, he left this world with 81 years of age, in his esteemed Malaga. Dreamer and intelligent, seductive, interpreter of a character he himself made, he concluded on the other end of the phone, with a sweet half-frank half-Andalusian accent: "I'm a son of a bitch, I've done very bad things, although in Spain everyone speaks well from me, because I have collaborated to recover many works ".
Rest in peace.
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