But he finishes the picture on a Saturday night, Angelo’s gun pressed to his head. Then the Venus is taken from him and Scarpio and Angelo bake, smoke, stipple and varnish, stretch and frame Fidelman’s masterwork as the artist lies on his bed in his room in a state of collapse.
“The Venus of Urbino, c’est moi.”
“What about my three hundred and fifty?” Fidelman asks Angelo during a card game in the padrone’s stuffy office several days later. After finishing the painting the copyist is again back on janitorial duty.
“You’ll collect when we’ve got the Tiziano.”
“What about my passport?”
“Give it to him, Scarpio.”
Scarpio hands him the passport. Fidelman flips through the booklet and sees all the pages intact.
“If you skiddoo now,” Angelo warns him, “you’ll get spit.”
“Who’s skiddooing?”
“So the plan is this: You and Scarpio will row out to the castello after midnight. The caretaker is an old man
and half deaf. You hang our picture and breeze off with the other.”
“If you wish,” Fidelman suggests, “I’ll gladly do the job myself. Alone, that is.”
“Why alone?” Scarpio asks suspiciously.
“Don’t be foolish,” Angelo says. “With the frame it weighs half a ton. Now listen to directions and don’t give any. One reason I detest Americans is they never know their place.”
Fidelman apologizes.
“I’ll follow in the putt-putt and wait for you halfway between Isola Bella and Stresa in case we need a little extra speed at the last minute.”
“Do you expect trouble?”
“Not a bit. If there’s any trouble it’ll be your fault. In that case watch out.”
“Off with his head,” says Scarpio. He plays a deuce and takes the pot.
Fidelman laughs politely.
The next night, Scarpio rows a huge weatherbeaten boat, both oars muffled. It is a moonless night with touches of Alpine lightning in the distant sky. Fidelman sits on the stern, holding with both hands and balancing against his knees, the large framed painting, heavily wrapped in monk’s cloth and cellophane and tied around with rope.
At the island the major-domo docks the boat and secures it. Fidelman, peering around in the dark, tries to memorize where they are. They carry the picture
up two hundred steps, both puffing when they get to the formal gardens on top.
The castello is black except for a square of yellow light from the caretaker’s turret window high above. As Scarpio snaps the lock of an embossed heavy wooden door with a strip of celluloid, the yellow window slowly opens and an old man peers down. They freeze against the wall until the window is drawn shut.
“Fast,” Scarpio hisses. “If anyone sees us they’ll wake the whole island.”
Pushing open the creaking door, they quickly carry the painting, growing heavier as they hurry, through an enormous room cluttered with cheap statuary, and by the light of the major-domo’s flashlight, ascend a narrow flight of spiral stairs. They hasten in sneakers down a deep-shadowed, tapestried hall into the picture gallery, Fidelman stopping in his tracks when he beholds the Venus, the true and magnificent image of his counterfeit creation.
“Let’s get to work.” Scarpio quickly unknots the rope and they unwrap Fidelman’s painting and lean it against the wall. They are taking down the Titian when footsteps sound unmistakably in the hall. Scarpio’s flashlight goes out.
“Sh, it’s the caretaker. If he comes in I’ll have to conk him.”
“That’ll kill Angelo’s plan—deceit, not force.”
“I’ll think of that when we’re out of here.”
They press their backs to the wall, Fidelman’s
clammy, as the old man’s steps draw nearer. The copyist has anguished visions of losing the picture and makes helter-skelter plans somehow to reclaim it. Then the footsteps falter, come to a stop, and after a minute of intense hesitation, move in another direction. A door slams and the sound is gone.
It takes Fidelman several seconds to breathe. They wait in the dark without moving until Scarpio shines his light. Both Venuses are resting against the same wall. The major-domo closely inspects each canvas with one eye shut, then signals the painting on the left. “That’s the one, let’s wrap it up.”
Fidelman breaks into profuse sweat.
“Are you crazy? That’s mine. Don’t you know a work of art when you see it?” He points to the other picture.
“Art?” says Scarpio, removing his hat and turning pale. “Are you sure?” He peers at the painting.
“Without a doubt.”
“Don’t try to confuse me.” He taps the dagger under his coat.
“The lighter one is the Titian,” Fidelman says through a hoarse throat. “You smoked mine a shade darker.”
“I could have sworn yours was the lighter.”
“No, Titian’s. He used light varnishes. It’s a historical fact.”
“Of course.” Scarpio mops his brow with a dirty
handkerchief. “The trouble is with my eyes. One is in bad shape and I overuse the other.”
“That’s tough,” clucks Fidelman.
“Anyway, hurry up. Angelo’s waiting on the lake. Remember, if there’s any mistake he’ll cut your throat first.”
They hang the darker painting on the wall, quickly wrap the lighter and hastily carry it through the long hall and down the stairs, Fidelman leading the way with Scarpio’s light.
At the dock the major-domo nervously turns to Fidelman. “Are you absolutely sure we have the right one?”
“I give you my word.”
“I accept it but under the circumstances I’d better have another look. Shine the light through your fingers.”
Scarpio kneels to undo the wrapping once more, and Fidelman trembling, brings the flashlight down hard on his straw hat, the light shattering in his hand. The major-domo, pulling at his dagger, collapses.
Fidelman has trouble loading the painting into the rowboat but finally gets it in and settled, and quickly takes off. In ten minutes he had rowed out of sight of the dark castled island. Not long afterward he thinks he hears Angelo’s putt-putt behind him. His heart beats erratically but the padrone does not appear. He rows hard as the waves deepen.
Locarno, sixty kilometers.
A wavering flash of lightning pierces the broken sky, lighting the agitated lake all the way to the Alps, as a dreadful thought assails Fidelman: had he the right painting? After a minute he pulls in his oars, listens once more for Angelo, and hearing nothing, steps to the stern of the rowboat, letting it drift as he frantically unwraps the Venus.
In the pitch black, on the lake’s choppy waters, he sees she is indeed his, and by the light of numerous matches adores his handiwork.
F, ravaged Florentine, grieving, kicked apart a trial canvas, copy of one he had been working on for years, his foot through the poor mother’s mouth, destroyed the son’s insipid puss, age about ten. It deserved death for not coming to life. He stomped on them both, but not of course on the photograph still tacked to the easel ledge, sent years ago by sister Bessie, together with her last meager check. “I found this old photo of you and Momma when you were a little boy. Thought you might like to have it, she’s been dead these many years.” Inch by enraged inch he rent the canvas, though cheap linen he could ill afford, and would gladly have cremated the remains if there were a place to. He
swooped up the mess with both hands, grabbed some smeared drawings, ran down four rickety flights and dumped all in the bowels of a huge burlap rubbish bag in front of the scabby mustard-walled house on Via S. Agostino. Fabio, the embittered dropsical landlord, asleep on his feet, awoke and begged for a few lire back rent but F ignored him. Across the broad piazza, Santo Spirito, nobly proportioned, stared him in the bushy-mustached face, but he would not look back. His impulse was to take the nearest bridge and jump off into the Arno, flowing again in green full flood after a dry summer; instead, he slowly ascended the stairs, pelted by the landlord’s fruity curses. Upstairs in his desolate studio, he sat on his bed and wept. Then he lay with his head at the foot of the bed and wept.
The painter blew his nose at the open window and gazed for a reflective hour at the Tuscan hills in September haze. Otherwise, sunlight on the terraced silver-trunked olive trees, and San Miniato, sparkling, framed in the distance by black cypresses. Make an interesting impressionist oil, green and gold mosaics and those black trees of death, but that’s been done. Not to mention Van Gogh’s tormented cypresses. That’s my trouble, everything’s been done or is otherwise out of style—cubism, surrealism, action painting. If I could only guess what’s next. Below, a stunted umbrella pine with a headful of black and white chirping swallows grew in the landlord’s narrow yard, over a dilapidated henhouse that smelled to heaven, except that up here
the smell was sweetened by the odor of red roof tiles. A small dirty white rooster crowed shrilly, the shrimpy brown hens clucking as they ran in dusty circles around three lemon trees in tubs. F’s studio was a small room with a curtained kitchen alcove—several shelves, a stove and sink—the old-fashioned walls painted with faded rustic dancers, nymphs and shepherds, and on the ceiling a large scalloped cornucopia full of cracked and faded fruit.
He looked until the last of morning was gone, then briskly combed his thick mustache, sat at the table and ate a hard anise biscuit as his eyes roamed over some quotations he had stenciled on the wall.
Constable: “Painting is for me another word for feeling.”
Whistler: “A masterpiece is finished from the beginning.”
Pollock: “What is it that escapes me? The human? That humanity is greater than art?”
Nietzsche: “Art is not an imitation of nature but its metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it in order to overcome it.”
Picasso: “People seize on painting in order to cover up their nakedness.”
Ah, if I had his genius.
Still, he felt better, picked up a fourteen-inch Madonna he had carved and sanded it busily. Then he painted green eyes, black hair, pink lips and a sky-blue cloak, and waited around smoking until the statuette
had dried. He wrapped it in a sheet of newspaper, dropped the package into a string bag and went again downstairs, wearing sockless sandals, tight pants, and black beret. Sometimes he wore sunglasses.
At the corner he stepped into midstreet, repelled by the old crone’s door, the fortune teller, the eighth of seven sisters to hear her talk, six thick hairs sprouting from the wart on her chin; in order not to sneak in and ask, for one hundred lire, “Tell me, signora, will I ever make it? Will I finish my five years’ painting of Mother and Son? my sure masterpiece—I know it in my bones —if I ever get it done.”
Her shrill sibylic reply made sense. “A good cook doesn’t throw out yesterday’s soup.”
“But will it be as good, I mean? Very good, signora, maybe a masterwork?”
“Masters make masterworks.”
“And what about my luck, when will it change from the usual?”
“When you do. Art is long, inspiration, short. Luck is fine, but don’t stop breathing.”
“Will I avoid an unhappy fate?”
“It all depends.”
That or something like it for one hundred lire. No bargain.
F sighed. Still, it somehow encouraged.
A window shutter was drawn up with a clatter and a paper cone of garbage came flying out at him. He
ducked as the oily bag split on the cobblestones behind him.
BEWARE OF FALLING MASONRY.
He turned the corner, barely avoiding three roaring Vespas.
Vita pericolosa. It had been a suffocating summer slowly deflated to cool autumn. He hurried, not to worry his hunger, past the fruit and vegetable stalls in the piazza, zigzagging through the Oltrarno streets as he approached Ponte Vecchio. Ah, the painter’s eye! He enjoyed the narrow crowded noisy streets, the washing hung from windows. Tourists were all but gone, but the workshops were preparing for next year’s migration, mechanics assembling picture frames, cutting leather, plastering tile mosaics; women plaiting straw. He sneezed passing through a tannery reek followed by hot stink of stable. Above the din of traffic an old forge rumbling. F hastened by a minuscule gallery where one of his action paintings had been hanging downside up for more than a year. He had made no protest, art lives on accidents.
At a small square, thick with stone benches where before the war there had been houses, the old and lame of the quarter sat amid beggars and berouged elderly whores, one nearby combing her reddish-gray locks. Another fed pigeons with a crust of bread they approached and pecked at. One, not so old, in a homely floppy velvet hat, he gazed at twice; in fact no more than a girl with a slender youthful body. He could
stand a little sexual comfort but it cost too much. Holding the Madonna tightly to his chest, the painter hastened into the woodworker’s shop.
Alberto Panenero, the proprietor, in a brown smock smeared with wood dust and shavings, scattered three apprentices with a hiss and came forward, bowing.
“Ah, maestro, another of your charming Madonnas, let’s hope?”
F unwrapped the wooden statuette of the modest Madonna.
The proprietor held it up as he examined it. He called together the apprentices. “Look at the workmanship, you ignoramuses,” then dismissed them with a hiss.
“Beautiful?” F said.
“Of course. With that subject who can miss?”
“And the price?”
“Eh. What can one do? As usual.”
F’s face fell an inch. “Is it fair to pay only five thousand lire for a statuette that takes two weeks’ work and sells on Via Tornabuoni for fifteen thousand, even twenty if someone takes it to St. Peter’s and gets it blessed by the Pope?”
Panenero shrugged. “Ah, maestro, the world has changed since the time of true craftsmen. You and I we’re fighting a losing battle. As for the Madonnas, I now get most of the job turned out by machine. My apprentices cut in the face, add a few folds to the robe, daub on a bit of paint, and I swear to you it costs me
one third of what I pay you and goes for the same price to the shops. Of course, they don’t approach the quality of your product—I’m an honest man—but do you think the tourists care? What’s more the shopkeepers are stingier than ever, and believe me they’re stingy in Florence. If I ask for more they offer less. If they pay me seventy-five hundred for yours I’m in luck. With that price, how can I take care of rent and my other expenses? I pay the wages of two masters and a journeyman on my other products, the antique furniture and so forth. I also employ three apprentices who have to eat or they’re too weak to fart. My own family, including a clubfoot son and three useless daughters, comes to six people. Eh, I don’t have to tell you it’s no picnic earning a living nowadays. Still, if you’ll put a bambino in the poor Madonna’s arms, I’ll up you five hundred.”
“I’ll take the five thousand.”
The proprietor counted it out in worn fifty- and one hundred-lire notes.
“The trouble with you, maestro, is you’re a perfectionist. How many are there nowadays?”
“I guess that’s so,” F sighed. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of selling the Madonnas to the tourists myself, but if I have to do that as well as make them where’s my painting time coming from, I’d like to know?”
“I agree with you totally,” Panenero said, “still, for a bachelor you’re not doing too badly. I’m always surprised you look so skinny. It must be hereditary.”
“Most of my earnings go for supplies. Everything’s shot up so, oils, pigments, turpentine, everything. A tube of cadmium costs close to thirteen hundred lire, so I try to keep bright yellow, not to mention vermilion, out of my pictures. Last week I had to pass up a sable brush they ask three thousand for. A roll of cotton canvas costs over ten thousand. With such prices what’s left for meat?”
“Too much meat is bad for the digestion. My wife’s brother eats meat twice a day and has liver trouble. A dish of good spaghetti with cheese will fatten you up without interfering with your liver. Anyway how’s the painting coming?”
“Don’t ask me so I won’t lie.”
In the market close by, F pinched the tender parts of two Bosc pears and a Spanish melon. He looked into a basket of figs, examined some pumpkins on hooks, inspected a bleeding dead rabbit and told himself he must do a couple of still lifes. He settled for a long loaf of bread and two etti of tripe. He also bought a brown egg for breakfast, six Nazionale cigarettes and a quarter of a head of cabbage. In a fit of well-being he bought three wine-red dahlias, and the old woman who sold them to him out of her basket handed him a marigold, free. Shopping for food’s a blessing, he thought, you get down to brass tacks. It makes a lot in life seem less important, for instance painting a masterwork. He felt he needn’t paint for the rest of his life and nothing much lost; but then anxiety moved like a
current through his belly as the thought threatened and he had all he could do not to break into a sweat, run back to the studio, set up his canvas and start hitting it with paint. I’m a time-ravaged man, horrible curse on an artist.
The young whore with the baggy hat saw the flowers amid his bundles as he approached, and through her short veil smiled dimly up at him.
F, for no reason he could think of, gave her the marigold, and the girl—she was no more than eighteen —held the flower awkwardly.
“What’s your price, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“What are you, a painter or something?”
“That’s right, how did you know?”
“I think I guessed. Maybe it’s your clothes, or the flowers or something.” She smiled absently, her eyes roaming the benches, her hard mouth tight. “To answer your question, two thousand lire.”
He raised his beret and walked on.
“You can have me for five hundred,” called an old whore from her bench. “What she hasn’t heard of I’ve practiced all my life. I have no objection to odd requests.”
But F was running. Got to get back to work. He crossed the street through a flood of Fiats, carts, Vespas, and rushed back to his studio.
Afterward he sat on his bed, hands clasped between knees, looking at the canvas and thinking of the young whore. Maybe it’d relax me so I can paint.
He counted what was left of his money, then hid the paper lire in a knotted sock in his bureau drawer. He removed the sock and hid it in the armadio on the hat rack. Then he locked the armadio and hid the key in the bureau drawer. He dropped the drawer key into a jar of cloudy turpentine, figuring who would want to wet his hand fishing for it.
Maybe she’d let me charge it and I could pay when I have more money? I could do two Madonnas sometime and pay her out of the ten thousand lire.
Then he thought, She seemed interested in me as an artist. Maybe she’d trade for a drawing.
He riffled through a pile of charcoal drawings and came on one of a heavy-bellied nude cutting her toenails, one chunky foot on a backless chair. F trotted to the benches in the market piazza where the girl sat with a crushed marigold in her hand.
“Would you mind having a drawing instead? One of my own, that is?”
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of cash because I’m short. It’s just a thought I had.”
It took her a minute to run it through her head. “All right, if that’s what you want.”
He unrolled the drawing and showed it to her.
“Oh, all right.”
But then she flushed under her veil and gazed embarrassed at F.
“Anything wrong?”
Her eyes miserably searched the piazza.
“It’s nothing,” she said after a minute. “I’ll take your drawing.” Then seeing him studying her she laughed nervously and said, “I was looking for my cousin. He’s supposed to meet me here. Well, if he comes let him wait, he’s a pain in the ass anyway.”