Pictures of Fidelman Read online

  LUD: But where is your originality? Why are you so concerned with subject matter?

  F: I reject originality.

  LUD: What’s that? Please explain yourself.

  F: Maybe I’m not ready, not just yet.

  LUD: Mother of God! How old are you?

  F: About forty. A little more.

  LUD: But why are you so cautious and conservative? I’m fifty-two and have the mind of a youth. Tell me, what’s your opinion of pop art? Think before you speak.

  F: If it stays away from me, I’ll stay away from it.

  LUD: (garbled)

  F: What did you say?

  LUD: Please attend to the question at hand. I wish you would explain to me clearly why you paint.

  F: With my paintings I try to stop the flow of time.

  LUD: That’s a ridiculous statement, but go on anyway.

  F: I’ve said it.

  LUD: Say it more comprehensibly. The public will read this.

  F: Well, art is my means for understanding life and trying out certain assumptions I have. I make art, it makes me.

  LUD: We have a proverb: “The bray of an ass can’t be heard in heaven.”

  F: Frankly, I don’t care for some of your remarks.

  LUD: Are you saying the canvas is the alter ego of the artist’s miserable self?

  F: That’s not what I said and I don’t like what you’re saying.

  LUD: I’ll try to be more respectful. Maestro, once you spoke to me of your art as moral. What did you mean by that?

  F: It’s just a thought I had, I guess. I suppose I mean that maybe a painting sort of gives value to a human being as he responds to it. You might say it enlarges his consciousness. If he feels beauty it makes him more than he was, it adds, you might say, to his humanity.

  LUD: What do you mean “responds”? A man responds in rape, doesn’t he? Doesn’t that enlarge the consciousness, as you put it?

  F: It’s a different response. Rape isn’t art.

  LUD: An emotion is an emotion, no matter how it arises. In itself it is not moral or immoral. Suppose someone responds to the sunset on the Arno? Is that better or more moral than the response to the smell of a drowned corpse? What about bad art? suppose the response is with more feeling than to a great painting—does that prove bad art is moral, as you call it?

  F: I guess not. All right, maybe the painting itself doesn’t have it, but putting it another way, maybe the artist does; that is he does when he’s painting—creating form, order. Order protects us all, doesn’t it?

  LUD: Yes, the way a prison does. Remember, some of the biggest pricks, if you will excuse the use of this word, have been great painters. Does that necessarily make them moral men? Of course not. What if a painter kills his father and then paints a beautiful Ascension?

  F: Maybe I’m not putting it exactly right. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I feel most moral when I’m painting, like being engaged with truth.

  LUD: So now it’s what you feel. I speak with respect, maestro, but you do nothing but assault me with garbage.

  F: Look, Ludovico, I don’t understand, if you don’t mind my saying so, why you brought this machine up here if all you want to do is insult me. Now take it away, it’s using up work-time.

  LUD: I am not a servant, maestro. I may have been forced into menial work through circumstance, but Ludovico Belvedere has kept his dignity. Don’t think that because you are an American you can go on trampling on the rights of Europeans. You have caused me unnecessary personal discomfort and sorrow by interfering in a business relationship between this unfortunate girl and myself, and the lives of four people have been seriously affected. You don’t seem to realize the harm you are doing—

  END OF INTERVIEW.

  F had assaulted the tape recorder.

  Each morning he awoke earlier to paint, waiting for dawn though the light from the streaked sky was, of course, impossible. He had lately been capable of very little patience with the necessities of daily life; to wash, dress, eat, even go to the toilet; and the matter became most inconvenient when his nervous impatience seeped into painting itself. It was a burdensome business to take the canvas out of its hiding place behind the armadio and arrange it on the easel, select and mix his paints, tack up the old snapshot (most unbearable) and begin work. He could have covered the canvas on the easel at night and left the snapshot tacked on permanently, but was obsessed to remove it each time after he put the paints away, soaked his brushes in turpentine, cleaned up. Formerly, just picking up a brush and standing in thought, or reverie, or sometimes blankly, before painting, would ease interior constrictions to the point where he could relax sufficiently to enjoy the work; and once he had painted for an hour, which sometimes came to no more than a stroke or two, he felt well enough to permit himself to eat half a roll and swallow an espresso Esmeralda had prepared, and afterward go with lit butt and magazine to the gabinetto. But now there were days he stood in terror before “Mother and Son” and shivered with every stroke he put down.

  He painted out of anguish, a dark color. The canvas remained much the same, the boy as he had been, the fickle mother’s face daily changing; daily he scraped it off as Esmeralda moaned in the kitchen; she knew the sound of palette knife on canvas. It was then it occurred to F to use the girl as a model for his mother. Though she was only eighteen, it might help to have a living model for Momma as a young woman though she was touching middle age when Bessie took the photo, and was of course another sort of person; still, such were the paradoxes of art. Esmeralda agreed and stripped herself to the skin, but the painter sternly ordered her to dress; it was her face he was painting. She did as he demanded and patiently posed, sweetly, absently, uncomplaining, for hours, as he, fighting against his need for privacy in the creative act, tried anew to invent the mother’s face. I’ve done all I can with imagination, I mean on top of the snapshot. And though at the end of the day he scraped her face off as the model wept, F urged her to be calm because he now had a brand-new idea: to paint himself not with Momma anymore but Bessie instead, “Brother and Sister.” Esmeralda’s face lit up because “then you’ll stop using the snapshot.” But F replied, “Not exactly,” he still needed it to get the true relationship of them “in space as well as psychology.”

  As they were into the spaghetti at supper, the girl wanted to know if all artists had it so hard.

  “How hard?”

  “So that it takes them years to paint a picture?”

  “Some do and some don’t. What’s on your mind?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.

  He slammed down his fork. “Are you doubting my talent, you whore?”

  She got up and went into the gabinetto.

  F lay on his bed, his face engulfed in a pillowful of black thoughts.

  After a while Esmeralda came out and kissed his ear.

  “I forgive you, tesoro, I want you to succeed.”

  “I will,” he cried, springing up from the bed.

  The next day he rigged up a young boy’s costume —blouse and knee pants, and painted in it to get to the heart of bygone days, but that didn’t work either so he went back to putting Esmeralda into the painting and scraping her face off each night.

  To live, to paint, to live to paint he had to continue carving Madonnas; being impatient he made them more reluctantly. When Esmeralda pointed out they had some sauce but no spaghetti, in three days he hurried out a statuette then hurried it over to Panenero’s shop. The woodworker unfortunately couldn’t use it. “My apprentices,” he shrugged, “are turning them out by the barrelful. Frankly, they model each stroke on yours and work fast. Eh, that’s what happens to craft in these times. So the stuff piles up and the tourists won’t be here till spring. It’s a long time till the hackensacks and lederhosen come over the Alps, maestro. Still, because it’s you and I admire your skill, I’ll offer you two thousand lire, take it or leave it. This is my busy day.”

  F left without a word, in afterthought wonderin
g whose yellow gloves he had seen lying on the counter. On his way along the riverbank he flung the Madonna into the Arno. She struck the green water with a golden splash, sank, then rose to the surface, and turning on her back, floated downstream, eyes to the blue sky.

  He later carved two more Madonnas, finely wrought pieces, and peddled them himself to shops on the Vie Tornabuoni and della Vigna Nuova. No luck. The shelves were crammed full of religious figures, though one of the merchants offered him six thousand lire for a Marilyn Monroe, nude if possible.

  “I have no skill for that sort of thing.”

  “What about John the Baptist in shaggy skins?”

  “What about him?”

  “I offer five thousand.”

  “I find him an uninteresting figure.”

  Esmeralda then tried selling the statuettes. F wouldn’t let her offer them to Panenero, so the girl, holding a Holy Mother in each arm, stood in the Piazza del Duomo and finally sold one to a huge German priest for twelve hundred; and the other she gave to a widow in weeds at Santa Maria Novella for eight hundred lire. F, when he heard, ground his teeth, and though she pleaded with him to be reasonable, swore he would carve no more.

  He worked at odd jobs, one in a laundry, that tired him so he couldn’t paint at night. One morning he tried chalking blue-robed Madonnas with Child, after Raphael, on the sidewalks before the Baptistery, Santa Chiara, the Stazione Centrale, where he was almost arrested. Passers-by stopped to watch him work but moved on quickly when he passed the hat. A few tossed small coins upon the image of the Holy Mother and F collected them and went to the next spot. A brown-robed monk in sandals followed him.

  “Why don’t you look for productive work?”

  “Advice is cheap.”

  “So is your art.”

  He went to the Cappella Brancacci and sat the rest of the day staring in the half dark at the Masaccio frescoes. Geniuses made masterworks. If you weren’t greatly gifted the way was hard, a masterwork was a miracle. Still, somehow or other art abounded in miracles.

  He borrowed a fishing pole from an artist neighbor and fished, amid a line of men with bent rods, off the Ponte Trinita. F tied the rod to a nail on the railing and paced back and forth, returning every few minutes to check his line as the float bobbed in the Arno. He caught nothing, but the old fisherman next to him, who had pulled in eight fish, gave him a one-eyed crippled eel. It was a cloudy November day, then rainy, patches of damp appearing on the studio ceiling. The cornucopia leaked. The house was cold, Fabio wouldn’t turn on the heat till December. It was hard to get warm. But Esmeralda made a tasty crippled-eel soup. The next night she cooked a handful of borrowed polenta that popped in the pot as it boiled. For lunch the following day there was stale bread and half an onion apiece. But for Sunday supper she served boiled meat, green beans and a salad of beet leaves. He suspiciously asked how come, and she admitted she had borrowed a few hundred lire from Ludovico.

  “How are we supposed to pay him back?”

  “We won’t, he owes me plenty.”

  “Don’t borrow from him any more.”

  “I’m not afraid of him, he’s afraid of me.”

  “I don’t like him coming around. I’m at my most dishonest among dishonest men.”

  “Don’t trust him, Arturo,” she said, frightened. “He’d knife you if he could.”

  “He won’t get the chance.”

  Afterward she asked, “Why don’t you carve a Madonna or two? Two thousand lire now and then is nothing to spit at. Besides you do beautiful work in wood.”

  “Not for the price, it’s not worth my time.”

  The landlord, wearing a woman’s black shawl, entered without knocking, shouting for his rent.

  “I’ll get the municipality to throw you both out, the puttana and you. You’re fouling up this house with your illicit activities. Your friend told me what goes on here. I have all the necessary information.”

  “You know where you can stick it,” said F. “If we weren’t here the flat would go to ruin. It was empty six years before I moved in, you’ll never rent it if I move out.”

  “You’re no Florentine,” Fabio shouted. “You’re not even an Italian.”

  F got himself a badly paid job as journeyman in a woodworking establishment, not Panenero’s. He worked long hours turning out delicate tapered legs for antique tables and did no painting. In the street, going back and forth from work, he looked for coins people might have dropped. He switched off the light after Esmeralda had washed the supper dishes, watched carefully what she cooked, and ate, and doled out shopping money sparsely. Once she sold six inches of her hair to a man with a sack who had knocked on the door, so she could buy herself some warm underwear.

  Finally she could stand it no longer. “What are you going to do?”

  “What can I do that I haven’t?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want me to go back to my work?”

  “I never said so.”

  “If I don’t you’ll be like this forever. It’s what you’re like when you’re not painting.”

  He remained mute.

  “Why don’t you speak?”

  “What can I say?”

  “You can say no.”

  “No,” he said.

  “It sounds like yes.”

  He went out for a long walk and for a while hung around the palazzo where Dostoevsky had written the last pages of The Idiot. It did no good. When he returned he said nothing to Esmeralda. In fact he did not feel too bad though he knew he ought to. In fact he had been thinking of asking her to go to work, whatever she might do. It’s circumstances, he thought.

  Esmeralda had got out her black hat, the two dresses, and her gold shoes. On the velvet hat she sewed the silver roses. She raised the hems of the dresses above her knees and unstitched the necklines to expose the rounded tops of her hard breasts. The purple sequins she threw into the garbage.

  “Anyway, I’ll need protection,” she said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. I don’t want those bastards hurting me or not paying in full. It’s blood money.”

  “I’ll protect you,” F said.

  He wore dark glasses, a black velour hat pulled low over one eye and a brown overcoat with a ratty fur collar buttoned tight under the chin and extending to his ankles; he walked in white sneakers. He thought of growing a beard but gave that up. His bristly reddish mustache was thicker than it had ever been. And he carried a snappy cane with a slender sword inside.

  They went together to the Piazza della Repubblica, almost merrily. “For art,” she said, then after a moment, bitterly, “art, my ass.”

  She cursed him from the depth of her heart and then forgave him. “It’s my nature,” she said. “I can’t bear a grudge.”

  He promised to marry her once he had finished the painting.

  F paints all morning after Esmeralda has posed; she bathes, does her nails and toes and makes herself up with mascara. After a leisurely lunch they leave the house and go across the bridge to the Piazza della Repubblica. She sits on a bench with her legs crossed high, smoking; and F is at a bench nearby, sketching in a pad in which he sometimes finds himself drawing dirty pictures: men and women, women and women, men and men. But he doesn’t consort with the other pimps who sit together playing cards; nor does Esmeralda talk with the other whores, they call her hoity-toity. When a man approaches to ask whether she happens to be free she nods, or looking at him through her short veil, says yes as though she could just as well have said no. She gets up, the other whores watching her with their eyes and mouths, and wanders with her client into one of the crooked side streets, to a tiny room they have rented close by so there’s no waste of man-hours getting back to the piazza. The room has a bed, water bowl, chamber pot.

  When Esmeralda rises from the bench, F slips his drawing pad into his coat pocket and leisurely follows them. Sometimes it is a beautiful late-fall afternoon and he takes deep breaths as he walks. On occasion h
e stops to pick up a pack of Nazionale, and if he’s a little hungry, gulps an espresso and a bit of pastry. He then goes up the smelly stairs and waits outside the door, sketching little pictures in the dim electric glow, as Esmeralda performs; or files his fingernails. It takes fifteen or twenty minutes for the customer to come out. Some would like to stay longer but can’t if they won’t pay for it. As a rule there are no arguments. The man dresses and sometimes leaves a tip if it has been most enjoyable. Esmeralda is still dressing, bored with getting in and out of her clothes. Only once thus far has she had to call F in to deal with a runt who said it hadn’t been any good so no sense paying.

  F enters with the sword drawn out of his cane and points it at the man’s hairy throat. “Pay,” he says, “and beat it.” The runt, gone two shades white, hurriedly leaves assisted by a boot in the pants. Esmeralda watches without expression. She hands F the money—usually two thousand lire, sometimes three; and if she can get it from a wealthy-type client, or an older man especially fond of eighteen-year-old girls, seven or eight thousand. That sum is rare. F counts the money —often in small bills—and slips it into his wallet, wrapping a fat rubber band around it. In the evening they go home together, Esmeralda doing her shopping on the way. They try not to work at night unless it’s been a bad day. In that case they go out after supper, when the piazza is lit in neon signs and the bars and cafés are doing business; the competition is stiff—some very beautiful women in extraordinary clothes. F goes into the bars and seeks out men who seem to be alone. He asks them if they want a pretty girl, and if one shows interest, leads him to Esmeralda. When it’s rainy or freezing cold, they stay in and play cards or listen to the radio. F has opened an account in the Banco di Santo Spirito so they can draw from it in the winter if Esmeralda is sick and can’t work. They go to bed after midnight. The next morning F gets up early and paints. Esmeralda sleeps late.

  One morning F paints with his dark glasses on, until she wakes up and screams at him.

  Later, when she is out buying material for a dress, Ludovico strides into the studio, incensed. His usually pallid face is flushed. He shakes his malacca at F.