Pictures of Fidelman Read online

  Margherita was urging him to go before her uncle returned.

  “I will if you say when I can see you.”

  She gazed at him hungrily, eating with mouth, eyes. “Do you really want to, caro? There are so many better-looking women around.”

  “Passionately. But it’s now or never, I’m frankly famished. Another day of dreaming and I’m a dead man. The ghost gives up.”

  “Oh my God, what do you mean?”

  “I mean living on dreams. Sleeping with them. I can’t any more though I’ve accomplished nothing.”

  “Mio caro,” she all but wept.

  “Couldn’t we go some place you know? I haven’t a lousy lira to rent a room. Do you happen to have a friend with an apartment we could borrow?”

  She reflected hopelessly. Though her eyes lit she shrugged her shoulders.

  “Maybe. I’ll have to ask. But stop shivering as though you were in heat and take your hand out of your pocket. It doesn’t look nice.”

  “I won’t apologize for my passion. I’m hard up, it’s now or never.”

  She finally agreed, asked him to meet her at the campanile after work. She would beg off around three.

  “The boys come home from school at six and I’ve got to be there or they’ll wreck the furniture. Beppo doesn’t control them well enough. Usually he’s not home before eight.”

  “All we need is a good hour.”

  “There’s no need to rush, caro.”

  They kissed in the street. A passing tourist snapped a picture. The uncle hurried towards them, nearsightedly seeing nothing. Margherita disappeared into the shop as Fidelman walked quickly away.

  This time is different, this one loves me.

  They met at the bell tower, a dozen clucking pigeons at their feet. Margherita was tired around the eyes, a smudge of darkness, but worked up a listless smile; he blamed it on her recent illness. On the walk across the neck of the city she became animated again, showed him where Tintoretto had lived, in a Moorish section with turbaned figures and kneeling camels sculptured on stone plaques on house walls. Her matchstick street, take a few steps you were out of it, led into Fondamenta Nuove. In fact from her door he could see the island cemetery, thick with graves, across the water. They entered an old building, scabby masonry showing thin orange bricks, four stories high, terrazzi at the top floor loaded with potted plants—this house separated from the one it leaned towards across the narrow way by two or three buttresses at rooftop. She walked up the stairs, Fidelman at her direction trailing by two flights. He heard her open three locks with a bunch of keys. She left the door ajar for him.

  “I’ll undress, you come in after I’m in bed,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t you want me to undress you?”

  “I’m a modest person. I can’t help it, don’t press me.”

  But Fidelman, after quickly counting to a hundred and fifty, walked in on her anyway. She was standing in the semi-dark, the blinds down, but he found the light and snapped it on.

  “You couldn’t wait,” she said bitterly.

  “Painters love nudes, also ex-painters.”

  She was patient as he looked her over: heavier in the haunch and breasts than he had imagined; these were strong binding garments she wore. Her shapely legs were veined, splotched purple here and there. Slim at the waist but the stomach streaked with lesions of her pregnancies. She was forty if she was a day.

  “Well, caro, are you disenchanted?”

  “No more than usual,” Fidelman confessed. “Still, you’re not bad-looking although you play yourself down.”

  “At my age there’s no pretending I’m in the first flush of youth.”

  She unbraided her hair. They sank into a deep bed with high head- and foot-board and at once embraced.

  “Why you’re not hard at all,” she said in surprise. He removed his member from her hand. “I’ll get there myself, it won’t take but a few minutes. Just act affectionate.”

  Her breasts were formless and he felt a roll of flesh above her hips. Fidelman snapped on the lamp. The same woman. He snapped it off.

  “Do you mind if I get on top?” she asked. “It’s hard to breathe since I had my illness.”

  “Be my guest.”

  They were tender to each other and both soon came, Margherita with vigor, making sounds of pleasure, Fidelman a while after in thoughtful silence. He fell asleep for a few minutes, had a quick dream which he couldn’t recall. When he woke the blinds were up, Margherita filing her nails in bed. An old woman in a padded chair at the window was reading a folded newspaper.

  The ex-painter sat up. “For Christ’s sake, who is she?”

  “Beppo’s mother. She likes to read at that window. Don’t worry, she won’t say a thing. She’s a deaf-mute in both ears.”

  “My God, she can write, can’t she?”

  “Don’t get excited, she’s not a suspicious type. I called a friend as you asked me to, but she couldn’t accommodate us. I don’t care for her sort anyway, she gives herself airs, so it’s just as well. That’s why I brought you here. Are you disappointed, amore mio?”

  Beppo Fassoli, when Fidelman arrived one night famished for supper—he now supported himself by hawking corn for pigeons on the Piazza San Marco—gave his guest a glass rose with six red petals. The radio was blaring Cavaradossi singing, “L’arte nel suo mistero/ Le diverse bellezze insiem confonde—” but Beppo snapped it off impatiently.

  “The red in this rose is Venetian red. It is made from twenty-four-carat gold mixed in the formula.”

  “Real gold? You don’t say.” The ex-painter, touched by the gift, was embarrassed at being given since he had already taken.

  “What do you make besides roses?”

  The glass blower shrugged. “Fish, flasks of all sorts, the sentimental animals of Disney. Our craft has fallen to the level of the taste of the tourists.”

  “Eh,” Fidelman agreed.

  Margherita sat at the head of the table, ladling out plates of steaming ravioli to Rodolfo and Riccardo, quiet only while eating: otherwise slapping, kicking, shoving, incessantly testing each other’s strength of arm, leg, lung. Beppo’s old mother sat at the other end of the table attending her son at her right hand, Fidelman opposite him feeling terribly exposed. The deaf woman was up and down to supply the glass blower with ravioli, cheese, bread, white wine; she counted spoonfuls of sugar into his espresso, stirred the cup and sipped a taste before he drank. Beppo ate slowly, paying little attention to his wife. He never once addressed her, except to throw her a look, with drawn thick brows—his eyes were green—when the boys were getting restless. She shut them up with a hiss and a glare. In that case, concluded Fidelman, nobody’s cuckolding anybody. Beppo moodily picked his teeth with a fork tine. Their eyes met across two empty ravioli plates and both gazed away.

  Though short of inches, the glass blower was a strong, muscular, handsome type, thick-shouldered, hairy. He appeared younger than his wife but Fidelman knew he wasn’t. Maybe she looked older because he looked younger, an easy way to slap her in the face. If he was slapping; Fidelman wasn’t sure. Did Beppo suspect him of usurping his rights as husband? Had the old deaf mother spelled it out on paper; she did not, after all, see with her ears, suspicious or not. He worried but Margherita assured him it was a waste of time.

  “He doesn’t know, just keep calm.”

  “He won’t find out? I’d hate to hurt him–or vice versa. Mightn’t he guess, do you think?”

  “It’s not his nature. His mind is usually occupied with other matters. There are men of that sort.”

  “What occupies his mind?”

  “Everything but me. On the other hand it’s full of facts and fantasy. He also likes to live life. His father was the same but died young.”

  Beppo seemed to like the ex-painter’s company. He liked, he said, the artistic viewpoint. Once he rowed Fidelman to Murano to see the glass factory where he worked, VETRERIE ARTISTICHE. While they were there he blew Fidehnan a small b
ird and set it in the cooling oven. The next night he presented it to him at supper to the applause of all at the table. He also invited the guest to go rowing in the lagoon Sunday with him and the boys. Beppo fished and caught nothing. The ex-painter, never having caught anything in his life, would not fish; he had vague thoughts of sketching but hadn’t brought along pad or pencil. Fidelman enjoyed watching the floating city from the water. Venice, sober, dark, sank in winter; rose, a magic island giving off light, in summer. They rowed behind the Giudecca, the boys diving naked off the boat, their young asses flashing in sunlight before they splashed into blue water.

  “Bravi, ragazzi,” Beppo cheered. “Bello! Bellissimo! Non è bello, Fidehnan?”

  “Beautiful,” murmured Fidelman, without innocence. He was spending more and more time with the glass blower, though it wasn’t exactly easy to be sleeping with a man’s wife and being friends with him. Still, somebody else might have made an effort to dislike him. Fidehnan now visited Margherita one or two afternoons a week, depending on circumstances and desire —mostly hers; he was experiencing the first long liaison of his life. And he stayed often for supper because Beppo made it a standing invitation.

  “I’m ashamed to leech on you.”

  “What’s an extra plate of macaroni?”

  He thought of Margherita’s sex as an extra plate of something.

  After supper they left the kids and dishes to the women. Beppo knew the cafés and liked the one the gondoliers frequented in Calle degli Assassini—away from the tourists, who had their own way of drowning the city. They drank grappa, played cards, sang and told each other the day’s adventures. When they were bored they watched television. The ex-painter, a butt in his mouth, liked to sketch the gondoliers in all poses and positions. When Beppo complimented him on one or two of the drawings, Fidelman confided to him the failures of his life in art. The glass blower listened at length with moody tender interest. It made Fidelman increasingly unhappy to be sleeping with Margherita and confessing irrelevancies to her husband; but the more he thought about it the more convinced he became that Beppo knew the situation and tolerated it. Is it because we’re friends and he likes me? he asked himself, but then figured the man had a girl of his own somewhere, possibly Murano.

  One day the glass blower confessed he slept with his wife on rare occasions, including her birthdays.

  “Doesn’t that make it hard all around?” the ex-painter asked thickly.

  “Some things are harder than others.”

  Relieved of guilt, Fidelman all but embraced him.

  That night, in a burst of inspiration and trust, he asked Beppo to come to his room on Sunday morning to look at his paintings—the few that remained. He had destroyed most but had kept a dozen perhaps justificatory pictures, and a few pieces of sculpture.

  “I’ll give you a private exhibition.” He did not ask himself why; he was afraid of the answer.

  “Do you like art, Beppo?”

  “I love art,” said the glass blower. “It comes to me naturally.”

  “What does?”

  “Love for art. I never studied it at school. My taste formed itself naturally.”

  “This isn’t classic stuff, if you know what I mean. It’s modernist and you mightn’t care for it.”

  Beppo answered that he had attended the last five Biennali. “My spirit is modern,” he said haughtily.

  “I was only kidding,” Fidelman answered lamely, but the truth of it was he was no longer eager to show the glass blower his work and didn’t know how to withdraw with grace, without insulting him more than he already might have.

  Sunday morning, in a panic at his folly, he ran to Beppo’s flat to tell him not to come, but Margherita, half-dressed, said he had already left. She invited Fidelman to stay for a half hour, the boys were in church; but the ex-painter was running with all his might and beat Beppo to his house. He seriously considered flight, hiding, not answering the bell; then Beppo knocked and entered, wincing at the disorder.

  Fidelman apologized: he had changed his mind. “If you didn’t like my paintings it’d make me feel bad, especially since you’re a dear friend.”

  “I understand, Arturo, but maybe it’s better to show me your work anyway. Who knows, I might be genuinely enthusiastic. Besides, if we’re friends, we’re friends for good or bad, better or worse.”

  Fidelman, touched, confused, not at all sure he knew what he was doing, or why, lifted a canvas and placed it on the kitchen table, against the wall, facing a small round window.

  “This, you’ll notice, has been influenced by Barney Newman, if you know who he is. The broad lavender band bisecting the black field at dead center is obviously the vital element organizing the picture. At the same time it achieves, partly through color, a quality of linear universality, in my case horizontal whereas Newman does it vertically. Lately I’ve been sort of thinking maybe I could paint something more original based on a series of crisscrossing abstract canals.”

  Beppo nodded gravely. Leaning forward in somewhat the pose of Rodin’s Thinker with a bit of belly, he sat on a half barrel Fidehnan had in his room for want of a chair, his broad feet placed apart, his pants hiked up his hairy shins and calves, an unlit long cigar in his mouth. He gazed at the picture as if he were seeing it forever, with a shade of puzzlement and annoyance Fidelman noted and feared: half-stunned if it weren’t concentration—and occasionally Beppo sighed. It occurred to the ex-painter that he looked in his handsome way much like his mother. Who is this man? he thought, and why am I breaking my heart for him: I mean do I have to show him my private work? Why the revelation? He had then and there an urge to paint Beppo to his core, so much like a seizure he thought of it as sexual, and to his surprise found himself desiring Margherita so strongly he had to restrain himself from rushing out to jump into bed with her.

  My life will end in calamity, Fidelman thought. Everything is out of joint again and I’m not helping by showing these pictures. You can pull up nails and let the past loose once too often.

  Reluctantly, as if he were lifting pure lead, he placed a framed painting on the table.

  “This is a spray job, an undercoating of apple-green acrylic resin, then a haphazard haze of indigo, creating a mood and a half before I applied a reconciling rose in varying values and intensities. Note how the base colors, invading without being totally visible, infect the rose so that it’s both present and you might say evanescing. It’s hard to explain a picture of this sort because it’s something more than merely a poem of color. We’re dealing with certain kinds of essences. In a way this and the other picture I just showed you are related, the other stating the masculine principle, this obviously feminine. Frankly, the inspiration is Rothko but I learned a trick or two from some of the things I’ve seen in Art News done by my contemporaries.”

  His voice at this point cracked, but Beppo’s expression was unchanged and he still said nothing.

  A scow passing by in the canal below agitated gem-like reflections of sunlit water on the ceiling. Fidelman waited till the rumble of the boat had disappeared into the distance.

  “This,” he said wearily, “is an old sculpture I did years ago, ‘Fragment of a Head’—marble.”

  Beppo, as though smiling, nodded.

  A broken head he responds to. Jesus God, whatever led me to do this? It’ll all end in disaster.

  In quick succession he showed a surrealistic landscape based on a frottage of tree bark, an old still life with rotting flowers, an old madonna with old child, and an old sentimental self-portrait.

  “These show me at various phases of development,” Fidelman said, barely able to speak. “You needn’t comment on each if you don’t want to, though I would be interested in your overall impression.”

  Beppo sat silent, lighting his cigar.

  “Here’s a piece of pop sculpture, ‘Soft Toilet Seat,’ made out of vinylite. It was exhibited for two weeks in New York City. Originally I had a triptych of seats nailed on beaverboard more or
less saying, ‘Fuck all art, one must be free of the artistic alibi,’ though I don’t wholly subscribe to that. I can take just so much dada, so I cut it down to the single seat you see before you.”

  “Can you shit through it?” the glass blower ultimately asked.

  “Art isn’t life,” Fidelman said. Then he said, “Don’t be a wise guy, Beppo.”

  “Not that these things can’t be done but you haven’t done them. Your work lacks authority and originality. It lacks more than that, but I won’t say what now. If you want my advice there’s one thing I’d do with this stuff.”

  “Such as what?” said the ex-painter, fearing the worst.

  “Burn them all.”

  “I thought you’d say that, you cruel fairy bastard.”

  Leaping up with Fidelman’s kitchen knife in his hand, Beppo slashed the toilet seat and two paintings.

  Fidelman interposed his body between the knife and the other canvases. “Have mercy!”

  “Let me finish these off,” the glass blower said hoarsely. “It’s for your own sake. Show who’s master of your fate—bad art or you.”

  Fidelman savagely struggled with him for the knife but at a crucial moment, as though a spinning color wheel had turned dead white, something failed in him and he relaxed his grip. Beppo quickly slashed up the other canvases. Afterwards they went downstairs and in a corner of the junk-filled vegetable patch next to the smelly back canal, burned everything, including the fragmented marble head, which Beppo had smashed against a rock.

  “Don’t waste your life doing what you can’t do.”

  “Why shouldn’t I keep trying?”

  “After twenty years if the rooster hasn’t crowed she should know she’s a hen. Your painting will never pay back the part of your life you’ve given up for it.”

  “What about Van Gogh? He never sold a single painting in his lifetime.”

  “You’re not Van Gogh. Besides he was crazy.”

  Fidelman left the garden in a stupor; he wandered a day, his eyes glazed in grief. On Tuesday, somewhat calmer through exhaustion, though the weight of his emptiness dragged like a dead dog chained around his neck, he presented himself to Margherita, who, with tears in her eyes, embraced him, knowing what had happened.