Fidelman cut out night work and spent the time with Beppo in the city. The glass blower asked no questions and made no comments. He was once again very tender and after a while Fidelman’s heart stopped being a brick and began breathing. They drank with the gondoliers on the Calle degli Assassini and stayed away from painters and sculptors.
One day when they met by accident on the Rialto, Margherita, her large eyes vague, hair plaited in circles
over her ears, her arms around a grocery bundle, stopped Fidelman and begged him to leave Venice.
“Listen, Fidelman, we’ve been friends, let’s stay friends. All I ask is that you leave Beppo and go some place else. After all, in the eyes of God he’s my husband. Now, because of you he’s rarely around and my family is a mess. The boys are always in trouble, his mother complains all day, and I’m at the end of my strength. Beppo may be a homo but he’s a good provider and not a bad father when there are no men friends around to divert him from domestic life. The boys listen to his voice when they hear it. We have our little pleasures. He knows life and keeps me informed. Sometimes we visit friends, sometimes we go to a movie together and stop at a bar on our way home. In other words, things are better when he’s around even though the sex is short. Occasionally he will throw me a lay if I suck him up good beforehand. It isn’t a perfect life but I’ve learned to be satisfied, and was, more or less, before you came around. Since then, though there was some pleasure with you —I don’t deny it—it ended quickly, and to tell the truth I’m worse off than I was before, so that’s why I ask you to go.”
In despair Fidelman rowed back to the factory and blew a huge glass bubble, larger and thicker than any he had blown before. He got it off the blowpipe with the help of an apprentice he had persuaded to stay over, and worked on its mouth in fear and doubtful confidence
with tongs and a wet opening tool of smoking wood. Heating and reheating for several nights, he dipped, swung, lengthened, shaped, until the glass on his blowpipe turned out to be a capacious heavy red bowl, iron become ice. When he had cooled it without cracking he considered etching on it some scenes of Venice but decided no. The bowl was severe and graceful and sat solid, upright. It held the clear light and even seemed to listen. Fidelman polished it carefully, and when it was done, filled it with cold water and with a sigh dipped in his hands. He showed the bowl to Beppo, who said it was a good job, beautifully proportioned and reminding him of something the old Greeks had done. I kept my finger in art, Fidelman wept when he was alone. The next day, though they searched high and low with a crowd of apprentices, the bowl was missing and could not be found. Beppo suspected the assistant manager.
Before leaving Venice, Fidelman blew a slightly humpbacked green horse for Beppo, the color of his eyes. “Up yours,” said the glass blower, grieving at the gray in Fidelman’s hair. He sold the horse for a decent sum and gave Fidelman the lire. They kissed and parted.
Fidelman sailed from Venice on a Portuguese freighter.
In America he worked as a craftsman in glass and loved men and women.
Copyright @ 1958, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1969 by Bernard Malamud
Parts of this book appeared in
Partisan Review,
The Atlantic
and
Playboy.
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously in Canada
by Doubleday Canada Ltd., Toronto
eISBN 9781466807044
First eBook Edition : December 2011