“Rome holds you?”
“Rome,” faltered the student, “—the air.” He breathed deep and exhaled with emotion.
Noticing the refugee was not truly attentive, his eyes roving upon potential customers, Fidelman, girding himself, remarked, “By the way, Susskind, you didn’t happen to notice—did you?—the brief case I was carrying with me around the time we met in September?”
“Brief case—what kind?” This he said absently, his eyes on the church doors.
“Pigskin. I had in it—” here Fidelman’s voice could be heard cracking, “—a chapter of a critical work on Giotto I was writing. You know, I’m sure, the Trecento painter?”
“Who doesn’t know Giotto?”
“Do you happen to recall whether you saw, if, that is—” He stopped, at a loss for words other than accusatory.
“Excuse me—business.” Susskind broke away and bounced up the steps two at a time. A man he approached shied away. He had beads, didn’t need others.
Fidelman. had followed the refugee. “Reward,” he muttered up close to his ear. “Fifteen thousand for
the chapter, and who has it can keep the brand-new brief case. That’s his business, no questions asked. Fair enough?”
Susskind spied a lady tourist, including camera and guide book. “Beads—holy beads.” He held up both handsful, but she was just a Lutheran passing through.
“Slow today,” Susskind complained as they walked down the stairs, “but maybe it’s the items. Everybody has the same. If I had some big ceramics of the Holy Mother, they go like hot cakes—a good investment for somebody with a little cash.”
“Use the reward for that,” Fidelman cagily whispered, “buy Holy Mothers.”
If he heard, Susskind gave no sign. At the sight of a family of nine emerging from the main portal above, the refugee, calling addio over his shoulder, fairly flew up the steps. But Fidelman uttered no response. I’ll get the rat yet. He went off to hide behind a high fountain in the square. But the flying spume raised by the wind wet him, so he retreated behind a massive column and peeked out at short intervals to keep the peddler in sight.
At two o’clock, when St. Peter’s closed to visitors, Susskind dumped his goods into his raincoat pockets and locked up shop. Fidelman followed him all the way home, indeed the ghetto, although along a street he had not consciously been on before, which led into an alley where the refugee pulled open a left-handed door, and without transition, was “home.” Fidelman,
sneaking up close, caught a dim glimpse of an overgrown closet containing bed and table. He found no address on wall or door, nor, to his surprise, any door lock. This for a moment depressed him. It meant Susskind had nothing worth stealing. Of his own, that is. The student promised himself to return tomorrow, when the occupant was elsewhere.
Return he did, in the morning, while the entrepreneur was out selling religious articles, glanced around once and was quickly inside. He shivered—a pitch-black freezing cave. Fidelman scratched up a thick match and confirmed bed and table, also a rickety chair, but no heat or light except a drippy candle stub in a saucer on the table. He lit the yellow candle and searched all over the place. In the table drawer a few eating implements plus safety razor, though where he shaved was a mystery, probably a public toilet. On a shelf above the thin-blanketed bed stood half a flask of red wine, part of a package of spaghetti, and a hard panino. Also an unexpected little fish bowl with a bony goldfish swimming around in Arctic seas. The fish, reflecting the candle flame, gulped repeatedly, threshing its frigid tail as Fidelman watched. He loves pets, thought the student. Under the bed he found a chamber pot, but nowhere a brief case with a fine critical chapter in it. The place was not more than an ice-box someone probably had lent the refugee to come in out of the rain. Alas, Fidelman sighed. Back in the pensione,
it took a hot water bottle two hours to thaw him out; but from the visit he never fully recovered.
In this latest dream of Fidelman’s he was spending the day in a cemetery all crowded with tombstones, when up out of an empty grave rose this long-nosed brown shade, Virgilio Susskind, beckoning.
Fidelman hurried over.
“Have you read Tolstoy?”
“Sparingly.”
“Why is art?” asked the shade, drifting off.
Fidelman, willy-nilly, followed, and the ghost, as it vanished, led him up steps going through the ghetto and into a marble synagogue.
The student, left alone, because he could not resist the impulse, lay down upon the stone floor, his shoulders keeping strangely warm as he stared at the sunlit vault above. The fresco therein revealed this saint in fading blue, the sky flowing from his head, handing an old knight in a thin red robe his gold cloak. Nearby stood a humble horse and two stone hills.
Giotto. San Francesco dona le vesti al cavaliere povero.
Fidelman awoke running. He stuffed his blue gabardine into a paper bag, caught a bus, and knocked early on Susskind’s heavy portal.
“Avanti.” The refugee, already garbed in beret and raincoat (probably his pajamas), was standing at the table, lighting the candle with a flaming sheet of paper.
To Fidelman the paper looked the underside of a typewritten page. Despite himself the student recalled in letters of fire his entire chapter.
“Here, Susskind,” he said in a trembling voice, offering the bundle, “I bring you my suit. Wear it in good health.”
The refugee glanced at it without expression. “What do you wish for it?”
“Nothing at all.” Fidelman laid the bag on the table, called goodbye and left.
He soon heard footsteps clattering after him across the cobblestones.
“Excuse me, I kept this under my mattress for you.” Susskind thrust at him the pigskin brief case.
Fidelman savagely opened it, searching frantically in each compartment, but the bag was empty. The refugee was already in flight. With a bellow the student started after him. “You bastard, you burned my chapter!”
“Have mercy,” cried Susskind, “I did you a favor.”
“I’ll do you one and cut your throat.”
“The words were there but the spirit was missing.”
In a towering rage Fidelman forced a burst of speed, but the refugee, light as the wind in his marvelous knickers, green coattails flying, rapidly gained ground.
The ghetto Jews, framed in amazement in their medieval windows, stared at the wild pursuit. But in the middle of it, Fidelman, stout and short of breath,
moved by all he had lately learned, had a triumphant insight.
“Susskind, come back,” he shouted, half sobbing. “The suit is yours. All is forgiven.”
He came to a dead halt but the refugee ran on. When last seen he was still running.
Months after vainly seeking a studio on the Vie Margutta, del Babuino, della Croce, and elsewhere in that neighborhood, Arthur Fidelman settled for part of a crowded, windowy, attic-like atelier on a cobblestone street in the Trastevere, strung high with sheets and underwear. He had, a week before, in “personal notices” in the American language newspaper in Rome, read: “Studio to share, cheap, many advantages, etc., A. Oliovino,” and after much serious anguish (the curt advertisement having recalled dreams he had dreamed were dead), many indecisions, enunciations and renunciations, Fidelman had, one very cold late-December morning, hurried to the address given, a
worn four-story building with a yellowish façade stained brown along the edges. On the top floor, in a thickly cluttered artist’s studio smelling aromatically of turpentine and oil paints, the inspiring sight of an easel lit in unwavering light from the three large windows setting the former art student on fire once more to paint, he had dealt not with a pittore, as expected, but with a pittrice, Annamaria Oliovino.
The pittrice, a thin, almost gaunt, high-voiced restless type, with short black uncombed hair, violet mouth, distracted eyes and a tense neck, a woman with narrow buttocks and piercing breasts, was in her way attractive if not in truth beautiful. She had on a thick black woolen sweater, eroded black velveteen culottes, black socks, and leather sandals spotted with drops of paint. Fidelman and she eyed each other stealthily and he realized at once she was, as a woman, indifferent to him or his type, who or which made no difference. But after ten minutes, despite the turmoil she exuded even as she dispassionately answered his hesitant questions, Fidelman, ever a sucker for strange beauty and all sorts of experiences, felt himself involved with and falling for her. Not my deep dish, he warned himself, aware of all the dangers to him and his renewed desire to create art; yet he was already half in love with her. It can’t be, he thought in desperation; but it could. It had happened to him before. In her presence he tightly shut both eyes and wholeheartedly wished against what might be. Really he trembled, and though he
labored to extricate his fate from hers, he was already a plucked bird, greased, and ready for frying. Fidelman loudly protested within—cried out severely against the weak self, called himself ferocious names but could do not much, a victim of his familiar response, a too passionate fondness for strangers. So Annamaria, who had advertised a twenty thousand lire monthly rental, in the end doubled the sum, and Fidelman paid through both nostrils, cash for first and last months (should he attempt to fly by night) plus a deposit of ten thousand for possible damages. An hour later he moved in with his imitation-leather suitcase. This happened in the dead of winter. Below the cold sunlit windows stood two frozen umbrella pines and beyond, in the near distance, sparkled the icy Tiber.
The studio was well heated, Annamaria had insisted, but the cold leaked in through the wide windows. It was more a blast; the art student shivered but was kept warm by his hidden love for the pittrice. It took him most of a day to clear himself a space to work, about a third of the studio was as much as he could manage. He stacked her canvases five deep against her portion of the walls, curious to examine them, but Annamaria watched his every move (he noticed several self-portraits) although she was at the same time painting a monumental natura morta of a loaf of bread with two garlic bulbs (“Pane ed Agli”). He moved stacks of
Oggi
, piles of postcards and yellowed letters, and a bundle of calendars going back to many years ago;
also a Perugina candy box full of broken pieces of Etruscan pottery, one of small sea shells, and a third of medallions of various saints and of the Virgin, which she warned him to handle with care. He had uncovered a sagging cot by a dripping stone sink in his corner of the studio and there he slept. She furnished an old chafing dish and a broken table, and he bought a few household things he needed. Annamaria rented the art student an easel for a thousand lire a month. Her quarters were private, a room at the other end of the studio whose door she kept locked, handing him the key when he had to use the toilet. The wall was thin and the instrument noisy. He could hear the whistle and rush of her water, and though he tried to be quiet, because of the plumbing the bowl was always brimful and the pour of his stream embarrassed him. At night, if there was need, although he was tempted to use the sink, he fished out the yellowed, sedimented pot under his bed; once or twice, as he was using it in the thick of night, he had the impression she was awake and listening.
They painted in their overcoats, Annamaria wearing a black babushka, Fidelman a green wool hat pulled down over his frozen ears. She kept a pan of hot coals at her feet and every so often lifted a sandaled foot to toast it. The marble floor of the studio was sheer thick ice; Fidelman wore two pairs of tennis socks his sister Bessie had recently sent him from the States. Annamaria,
a leftie, painted with a smeared leather glove on her hand, and theoretically his easel had been arranged so that he couldn’t see what she was doing but he often sneaked looks at her work. The pittrice, to his surprise, painted with flicks of her fingers and wrists, peering at her performance with almost shut eyes. He noticed she alternated still lifes with huge lyric abstractions—massive whorls of red and gold exploding, these built on, entwined with, and ultimately concealing a small religious cross, her first two brush strokes on every canvas. Once when Fidelman gathered the nerve to ask her why the cross, she answered it was the symbol that gave the painting its meaning.
“What meaning?”
“The meaning I want it to have.”
He was eager to know more but she was impatient. “Eh,” she shrugged, “who can explain art.”
Though her response to his various attempts to become better acquainted were as a rule curt, and her voluntary attention to him, shorter still—she was able, apparently, to pretend he wasn’t there—Fidelman’s feeling for Annamaria grew, and he was as unhappy in love as he had ever been.
But he was patient, a persistent virtue, served her often in various capacities, for instance carrying down four flights of stairs her two bags of garbage shortly after supper—the portinaia was crippled and the portiere never around—sweeping the studio clean each morning, even running to retrieve a brush or paint
tube when she happened to drop one—offering any service any time, you name it. She accepted these small favors without giving them notice.
One morning after reading a many-paged letter she had just got in the mail, Annamaria was sad, sullen, unable to work; she paced around restlessly, it troubled him. But after feverishly painting a widening purple spiral that continued off the canvas, she regained a measure of repose. This heightened her beauty, lent it somehow a youthful quality it didn’t ordinarily have —he guessed her to be no older than twenty-seven or -eight; so Fidelman, inspired by the change in her, hoping it might foretoken better luck for him, approached Annamaria, removed his hat and suggested since she went out infrequently why not lunch for a change at the trattoria at the corner, Guido’s, where workmen assembled and the veal and white wine were delicious? She, to his surprise, after darting an uneasy glance out of the window at the tops of the motionless umbrella pines, abruptly assented. They ate well and conversed like human beings, although she mostly limited herself to answering his modest questions. She informed Fidelman she had come from Naples to Rome two years ago, although it seemed much longer, and he told her he was from the United States. Being so physically close to her, able to inhale the odor of her body—like salted flowers—and intimately eating together, excited Fidelman, and he sat very still, not to rock the boat and spill a drop of what
was so precious to him. Annamaria ate hungrily, her eyes usually lowered. Once she looked at him with a shade of a smile and he felt beatitude; the art student contemplated many such meals though he could ill afford them, every cent he spent, saved and sent by Bessie.
After zuppa inglese and a peeled apple she patted her lips with a napkin, and still in good humor, suggested they take the bus to the Piazza del Popolo and visit some painter friends of hers.
“I’ll introduce you to Alberto Moravia.”
“With pleasure,” Fidelman said.
But when they stepped into the street and were walking to the bus stop near the river a cold wind blew up and Annamaria turned pale.
“Something wrong?” Fidelman inquired.
“The East Wind.” She spoke testily.
“What wind?”
“The Evil Eye,” she said with irritation. “Malocchio.”
He had heard something of the sort. They returned quickly to the studio, their heads lowered against the noisy wind, the pittrice from time to time furtively crossing herself. A black-habited old nun passed them at the trattoria corner, from whom Annamaria turned in torment, muttering “Jettatura! Porca miseria!” When they were upstairs in the studio she insisted Fidelman touch his testicles three times to undo or dispel who knew what witchcraft, and he modestly obliged. Her request had inflamed him, although he cautioned himself
to remember, it was in purpose and essence theological.
Later she received a visitor, a man who came to see her on Monday and Friday afternoons after his work in a government bureau. Her visitors, always men, whispered with her a minute, then left restlessly; most of them, excepting also Giancarlo Balducci, a cross-eyed illustrator—Fidelman never saw again. But the one who came oftenest stayed longest, a solemn gray-haired gent, Augusto Ottogalli, with watery blue eyes and missing side teeth, old enough to be her father for sure. He wore a slanted black fedora and a shabby gray overcoat too large for him, greeted Fidelman vacantly and made him inordinately jealous. When Augusto arrived in the afternoon the pittrice usually dropped anything she was doing and they retired to her room, at once noisily locked and bolted. The art student wandered alone in the studio for dreadful hours. When Augusto ultimately emerged, looking disheveled, and if successful, defeated, Fidelman turned his back on him and the old man hastily let himself out of the door. After his visits, and only his, Annamaria did not appear in the studio for the rest of the day. Once when Fidelman knocked on her door to invite her out to supper, she said to use the pot because she had a headache and was sound asleep. On another occasion when Augusto was locked long in her room with her, after a tormenting two hours Fidelman tiptoed over and put his jealous ear to the door. All he could hear was
the buzz and sigh of their whispering. Peeking through the keyhole he saw them both in their overcoats, sitting on her bed, Augusto clasping her hands, whispering passionately, his nose empurpled with emotion, Annamaria’s white face averted. When the art student checked an hour later, they were still at it, the old man imploring, the pittrice weeping. The next time, Augusto came with a priest, a portly, heavy-breathing man with a doubtful face. But as soon as they appeared in the studio Annamaria, enraged to fury, despite the impassioned entreatments of Augusto, began to throw at them anything of hers or Fidelman’s she could lay hands on.
“Bloodsuckers!” she shouted, “scorpions! parasites!” until they had hastily retreated. Yet when Augusto, worn and harried, returned alone, without complaint she retired to her room with him.
Fidelman’s work, despite the effort and despair he gave it, was going poorly. Every time he looked at unpainted canvas he saw harlequins, whores, tragic kings, fragmented musicians, the sick and the dread. Still, tradition was tradition and what if he wanted to make more? Since he had always loved art history he considered embarking on a “Mother and Child,” but was afraid her image would come out too much Bessie—after all, a dozen years between them. Or maybe a moving “Pietà,” the dead son’s body held like a broken wave in mama’s frail arms? A curse on art
history—he fought the fully prefigured picture though some of his former best paintings had jumped in every detail to the mind. Yet if so where’s true engagement? Sometimes I’d like to forget every picture I’ve seen, Fidelman thought. Almost in panic he sketched in charcoal a coattailed “Figure of a Jew Fleeing” and quickly hid it away. After that, ideas, prefigured or not, were scarce. “Astonish me,” he muttered, wondering whether to return to surrealism. He also considered a series of “Relations to Places and Space,” hard-edge constructions in squares and circles, the pleasures of tri-dimensional geometry of linear abstraction, only he had little heart for it. The furthest abstraction, Fidelman thought, is the blank canvas. A moment later he said to himself, if painting shows who you are why should not painting? I mean I oughtn’t to worry about that.
After the incident with the priest Annamaria was despondent for a week, stayed in her room sometimes bitterly crying, Fidelman often standing helplessly by her door. However, her unhappy mood was prelude to a burst of creativity by the pittrice. Works by the dozens leaped from her brush and stylus. She went on with her lyric abstractions based on the theme of a hidden cross and spent hours with a long black candle, burning holes in heavy white paper (“Buchi Spontanei”). Having mixed coffee grounds, sparkling bits of crushed mirror and ground sea shells, she blew the dust on mucilaged paper (“Velo nella Nebbia”). She composed
collages of rags and toilet paper. After a dozen linear studies (“Linee Discendenti”), she experimented with gold leaf sprayed with umber, the whole while wet drawn in long undulations with a fine comb. She framed this in a black frame and hung it on end like a diamond (“Luce di Candela”). Annamaria worked intently, her brow furrowed, violet mouth tightly pursed, eyes lit, nostrils palpitating in creative excitement; and when she had temporarily run out of new ideas she did a mythological bull in red clay (“La Donna Toro”), afterwards returning to natura morta with bunches of bananas; then self-portraits.