“Is that so?” With Switzerland so close freedom swells in Fidelman’s heart but he does nothing about it. Scarpio clings to him as to a virgin cousin, and sixty kilometers is a long swim with a knife in your back.
“That’s the castello over there,” the major-domo says. “It looks like a joint.”
The castello is pink on a high terraced hill amid tall trees in formal gardens. It is full of tourists and bad paintings. But in the last gallery, “infinite riches in a little room,” hangs the “Venus of Urbino” alone.
What a miracle, Fidelman thinks.
The golden brown-haired Venus, a woman of the real world, lies on her couch in serene beauty, her hand lightly touching her intimate mystery, the other holding red flowers, her nude body her truest accomplishment.
“I’d have painted somebody in bed with her,” Scarpio says.
“Shut up,” says Fidelman.
Scarpio, hurt, leaves the gallery.
Fidelman, alone with Venus, worships the painting. What magnificent tones, what extraordinary flesh that turns the body into spirit.
While Scarpio is out talking to the guard, the copyist hastily sketches the Venus, and with a Leica Angelo has given him for the purpose, takes several new color shots.
Afterwards he approaches the picture and kisses the lady’s hands, thighs, and breasts, but as he murmurs, “I
love you,” a guard strikes him hard on the head with both fists.
That night as they are returning on the rapido to Milano, Scarpio falls asleep, snoring. He awakens in a hurry, tugging at his dagger, but Fidelman hasn’t moved.
The copyist throws himself into his work with passion. He has swallowed lightning and hopes it will strike whatever he touches. Yet he has nagging doubts he can do the job right and fears he will never escape alive from the Hotel du Ville. He tries at once to paint the Titian directly on canvas but hurriedly scrapes it clean when he sees what a garish mess he has made. The Venus is insanely disproportionate and the maids in the background foreshortened into dwarfs. He then takes Angelo’s advice and makes several drawings on paper to master the composition before committing it again to canvas.
Angelo and Scarpio come up every night and shake their heads over the drawings.
“Not even close,” says the padrone.
“Far from it,” says Scarpio.
“I’m trying,” Fidelman says, anguished.
“Try harder,” Angelo answers grimly.
Fidelman has a sudden insight. “What happened to the last guy who tried?”
“He’s still floating,” Scarpio says.
“I’ll need some practice,” the copyist coughs. “My
vision seems tight and the arm tires easily. I’d better go back to exercises to loosen up.”
“What kind of exercises?” Scarpio inquires.
“Nothing physical, just some warm-up nudes to get me going.”
“Don’t overdo it,” Angelo says. “You’ve got about a month, not much more. There’s an advantage to making the exchange of pictures during the tourist season.”
“Only a month?”
The padrone nods.
“Maybe you’d better trace it,” Scarpio suggests.
“No.”
“I’ll tell you what,” says Angelo. “I could find you an old reclining nude you can paint over. You might get the form of this one by altering the form of another.”
“It’s not honest, I mean to myself.”
Everyone titters.
“Well, it’s your headache,” says Angelo.
Fidelman, unwilling to ask what happens if he fails, after they leave, feverishly draws faster.
Things go badly for the copyist. Working all day and often into the very early morning hours, he tries everything he can think of. Since he always distorts the figure of Venus, though he carries it perfect in his mind, he goes back to a study of Greek statuary with ruler and compass to compute the mathematical proportions of the ideal nude. Scarpio accompanies him to one or two museums. Fidelman also works with the Vetruvian square in the circle, experiments with Dürer’s intersecting
circles and triangles, and studies Leonardo’s schematic heads and bodies. Nothing doing. He draws paper dolls, not women, certainly not Venus. He draws girls who will not grow up. He then tries sketching every nude he can lay eyes on in the art books Scarpio brings him from the library; from the Esquiline goddess to “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Fidelman copies not badly many figures from classical statuary and modern painting; but when he returns to his Venus, with something of a laugh she eludes him. What am I, bewitched, the copyist asks himself, and if so by whom? It’s only a copy job so what’s taking so long? He can’t even guess, until he happens to see a naked whore cross the hall to enter a friend’s room. Maybe the ideal is cold and I like it hot? Nature over art? Inspiration—the live model? Fidelman knocks on the door and tries to persuade the girl to pose for him but she can’t for economic reasons. Neither will any of the others—there are four girls in the room.
A red-head among them calls out to Fidelman, “Shame on you, Arturo, are you too good to bring up pizzas and coffee any more?”
“I’m busy on a job for Angelo. Painting a picture, that is. A business proposition.”
Their laughter further depresses his spirits. No inspiration from whores. Maybe too many naked women around make it impossible to draw a nude. Still he’d better try a live model, having tried everything else and failed.
In desperation, on the verge of panic because time is going so fast, he thinks of Teresa, the chambermaid. She is a poor specimen of feminine beauty but the imagination can enhance anything. Fidelman asks her to pose for him, and Teresa, after a shy laugh, consents.
“I will if you promise not to tell anybody.”
Fidelman promises.
She undresses, a meager, bony girl, breathing heavily, and he draws her with flat chest, distended belly, thin hips and hairy legs, unable to alter a single detail. Van Eyck would have loved her. When Teresa sees the drawing she weeps profusely.
“I thought you would make me beautiful.”
“I had that in mind.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“It’s hard to say,” says Fidelman.
“I’m not in the least bit sexy,” Teresa weeps.
Considering her body with half-closed eyes, Fidelman tells her to go borrow a long slip.
“Get one from one of the girls and I’ll draw you sexy.
She returns in a frilly white slip and looks so attractive that instead of painting her, Fidelman, with a lump in his throat, gets her to lie down with him on a dusty mattress in the room. Clasping her slip-encased form, the copyist shuts both eyes and concentrates on his elusive Venus. He feels about to recapture a rapturous experience and is looking forward to it but at the last minute it turns into a limerick he didn’t know he knew:
“Whilst Titian was mixing rose madder,
His model was crouched on a ladder;
Her position to Titian suggested coition,
So he stopped mixing madder and had’er.”
Angelo, entering the storeroom just then, lets out a bellow. He fires Teresa on her naked knees pleading with him not to, and Fidelman has to go back to latrine duty the rest of the day.
“You might as well keep me doing this permanently,” Fidelman, disheartened, tells the padrone in his office afterward. “I’ll never finish that cursed picture.”
“Why not? What’s eating you? I’ve treated you like a son.”
“I’m blocked, that’s what.”
“Get to work, you’ll feel better.”
“I just can’t paint.”
“For what reason?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because you’ve had it too good here.” Angelo angrily strikes Fidelman across the face. When the copyist sobs, he boots him hard in the rear.
That night Fidelman goes on a hunger strike but the padrone, hearing of it, threatens force-feeding.
After midnight Fidelman steals some clothes from a sleeping whore, dresses quickly, ties on a kerchief, makes up his eyes and lips, and walks out the door past Scarpio sitting on a bar stool, enjoying the night breeze. Having gone a block, fearing he will be chased,
Fidelman breaks into a high-heeled run but it’s too late. Scarpio has recognized him in afterthought and yells for the portiere. Fidelman kicks off his slippers and runs furiously but the skirt impedes him. The major-domo and portiere catch up with him and drag him, kicking and struggling, back to the hotel. A carabiniere, hearing the commotion, appears on the scene, but seeing how Fidelman is dressed, will do nothing for him. In the cellar Angelo hits him with a short rubber hose until he collapses.
Fidelman lies in bed three days, refusing to eat or get up.
“What’ll we do now?” Angelo, worried, whispers. “How about a fortune teller? Either that or let’s bury him.”
“Astrology is better,” Scarpio says. “I’ll check his planets. If that doesn’t work we’ll try psychology. He’s a suggestible type.”
“Well, make it fast.”
Scarpio tries astrology but it doesn’t work: a mix-up of Venus with Mars he can’t explain; so the next morning he tries psychology. He comes into Fidelman’s room with a thick book under his arm. The art copyist is still in bed, smoking a butt.
“Do you believe in psychoanalysis?”
“Sort of.”
“Maybe we’d better try that. I’m here to help you. Don’t get up.”
Scarpio opens the book to its first chapter. “The thing to do is associate freely.”
“What’s the point of this?”
“It might loosen you up. Do you have any memories of your mother? For instance, did you ever see her naked?”
“She died young,” Fidelman says, on the verge of tears. “I was raised by my sister Bessie.”
“Go on, I’m listening,” says Scarpio.
“I can’t. My mind goes blank.”
Scarpio turns to the next chapter, flips through several pages, then rises with a sigh.
“It might be a medical matter. Take a physic tonight.”
“I already have.”
The major-domo shrugs. “Life is complicated. Anyway, keep track of your dreams. Write them down as soon as you have them.”
Fidelman puffs his butt.
That night he dreams of Bessie about to bathe. He is peeking at her through the bathroom keyhole as she prepares her bath. Openmouthed he watches her remove her robe and step into the tub. Her hefty well-proportioned body then is young and full in the right places; and in the dream Fidelman, then fourteen, looks at her with longing that amounts to anguish. The older Fidelman, the dreamer, considers doing a “La Baigneuse” right then and there, but when Bessie begins to soap herself with Ivory soap, the boy slips into
her room, opens her poor purse, filches fifty cents for the movies, and goes on tiptoes down the stairs.
He is shutting the vestibule door with great relief when Arturo Fidelman awakes with a headache in Milano. As he scribbles down his dream he suddenly remembers what Angelo had said: “Everybody steals. We’re all human.”
A stupendous thought occurs to him: Suppose he personally steals the picture?
A marvelous idea all around. Fidelman heartily eats that morning’s breakfast.
To steal the picture he had to paint one. Within another day the copyist successfully sketches Titian’s painting and then begins to work in oils on an old piece of Flemish linen that Angelo had hastily supplied him with after seeing the successful drawing. Fidelman underpaints the canvas and after it is dry begins the figure of Venus as the conspirators look on sucking their breaths.
“Stay relaxed,” begs Angelo, sweating. “Don’t spoil it now. Remember you’re painting the appearance of a picture. The original has already been done. Give us a decent copy and we’ll do the rest with chemistry.”
“I’m worried about the brush strokes.”
“Nobody will notice them. Just keep in your mind that Tiziano painted resolutely with few strokes, his brush loaded with color. In the end he would paint
with his fingers. We don’t ask for perfection, just a good copy.”
He rubs his fat hands nervously.
But Fidelman paints as though he were painting the original. He works alone late at night, when the conspirators are snoring, and he paints with what is left of his heart. He has caught the figure of the Venus but when it comes to her flesh, her thighs and breasts, he thinks he will never make it. As he paints he seems to remember every nude that has ever been done, Fidelman satyr, with Silenus beard and goatlegs, piping and peeking at backside, frontside, or both, at the “Rokeby Venus,” “Bathsheba,” “Suzanna,” “Venus Anadyomene,” “Olympia”; at picnickers in dress or undress, bathers ditto, Vanitas or Truth, Niobe or Leda, in chase or embrace, hausfrau or whore, amorous ladies modest or brazen, single or in crowds at the Turkish bath, in every conceivable shape or position, while he sports and disports until a trio of maenads pull his tail and he gallops after them through the dusky woods. He is at the same time choked by remembered lust for all the women he had ever desired, from Bessie to Annamaria Oliovino, and for their garters, underpants, slips or half-slips, brassieres and stockings. Although thus tormented, Fidelman feels himself falling in love with the one he is painting, every inch of her, including the ring on her pinky, bracelet on arm, the flowers she touches with her fingers, and the bright green earring that dangles from her eatable ear. He would have
prayed her alive if he weren’t certain she would fall in love, not with her famished creator, but surely the first Apollo Belvedere she lays eyes on. Is there, Fidelman asks himself, a world where love endures and is always satisfying? He answers in the negative. Still she is his as he paints, so he goes on, planning never to finish, to be happy in loving her, thus forever happy.