Idiots First Read online

  “What you doin’ with this white son of a bitch?” he said to Ornita.

  “I’m minding my own business,” she answered him, “and I wish you would too.”

  “Boys,” I said, “we’re all brothers. I’m a reliable merchant in the neighborhood. This young lady is my dear friend. We don’t want any trouble. Please let us pass.”

  “You talk like a Jew landlord,” said the green hat. “Fifty a week for a single room.”

  “No charge fo’ the rats,” said the half-inch brim.

  “Believe me, I’m no landlord. My store is ‘Nathan’s Liquors’ between Hundred Tenth and Eleventh. I also have two colored clerks, Mason and Jimmy, and they will tell you I pay good wages as well as I give discounts to certain customers.”

  “Shut your mouth, Jewboy,” said the leather cap, and he moved the knife back and forth in front of my coat button. “No more black pussy for you.”

  “Speak with respect about this lady, please.”

  I got slapped on my mouth.

  “That ain’t no lady,” said the long face in the half-inch brim, “that’s black pussy. She deserve to have ewy bit of her hair shave off. How you like to have evvy bit of your hair shave off, black pussy?”

  “Please leave me and this gentleman alone or I’m gonna scream long and loud. That’s my house three doors down.”

  They slapped her. I never heard such a scream. Like her husband was falling fifteen stories.

  I hit the one that slapped her and the next I knew I was laying in the gutter with a pain in my head. I thought, goodbye, Nat, they’ll stab me for sure, but all they did was take my wallet and run in three different directions.

  Ornita walked back with me to the subway and she wouldn’t let me go home with her again.

  “Just get home safely.”

  She looked terrible. Her face was gray and I still remembered her scream. It was a terrible winter night, very cold February, and it took me an hour and ten minutes to get home. I felt bad for leaving her but what could I do?

  We had a date downtown the next night but she didn’t show up, the first time.

  In the morning I called her in her place of business.

  “For God’s sake, Ornita, if we got married and moved away we wouldn’t have that kind of trouble that we had. We wouldn’t come in that neighborhood any more.

  “Yes, we would. I have family there and don’t want to move anyplace else. The truth of it is I can’t marry you, Nat. I got troubles enough of my own.”

  “I coulda sworn you love me.”

  “Maybe I do but I can’t marry you.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “I got enough trouble of my own.”

  I went that night in a cab to her brother’s house to see her. He was a quiet man with a thin mustache. “She gone,” he said, “left for a long visit to some close relatives in the South. She said to tell you she appreciate your intentions but didn’t think it will work out.”

  “Thank you kindly,” I said.

  Don’t ask me how I got home.

  Once on Eighth Avenue, a couple of blocks from my store, I saw a blind man with a white cane tapping on the sidewalk. I figured we were going in the same direction so I took his arm.

  “I can tell you’re white,” he said.

  A heavy colored woman with a full shopping bag rushed after us.

  “Never mind,” she said, “I know where he live.”

  She pushed me with her shoulder and I hurt my leg on the fire hydrant.

  That’s how it is. I give my heart and they kick me in my teeth.

  “Charity Sweetness—you hear me?—come out of that goddamn toilet!”

  STILL LIFE

  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 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, the art student, 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 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 Aglii”). 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 in all directions, these built on, entwined with, and ultimately concealing a small black religious cross, her first two brush strokes on every abstract 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.

  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, bowing.

  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 answered 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 knows 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 crosseyed 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 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 told him 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 tightly clasping her hands, whispering passionately, his nose empurpled with emotion, Annamaria’s white face averted. When the art student checked an hour afterward, 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.

  2.

  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 should want 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, fifteen 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 coat-tailed “Figure of a Jew Fleeing” and quickly hid it away. After that, ideas, prefigured or not, were scarce. “Astonish me,” he muttered to himself, wondering whether to return to surrealism. He also considered a series of “Relations to Place and Space,” 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 asked himself, if painting shows who you are, why should not painting?

  After the incident with the priest Annamaria was despondent for a week, stayed in her roo
m sometimes bitterly crying, Fidelman often standing helplessly by her door. However this was a prelude to a burst of creativity by the pittrice. Works by the dozens leaped from her brush and stylus. She continued 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-up sea shells, she blew the dust on mucilaged paper (“Velo nella Nebbia”). She composed collages of rags and toilet tissue. After a dozen linear studies (“Linee Discendenti”), she experimented with gold leaf sprayed with umber, the whole while wet combed 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 nature morte with bunches of bananas; then self-portraits.

  The pittrice occasionally took time out to see what Fidelman was up to, although not much, and then editing his efforts. She changed lines and altered figures, or swabbed paint over whole compositions that didn’t appeal to her. There was not much that did, but Fidelman was grateful for any attention she gave his work, and even kept at it to incite her criticism. He could feel his heart beat in his teeth whenever she stood close to him modifying his work, he deeply breathing her intimate smell of sweating flowers. She used perfume only when Augusto came and it disappointed Fidelman that the old man should evoke the use of bottled fragrance; yet he was cheered that her natural odor which he, so to say, got for free, was so much more exciting than the stuff she doused herself with for her decrepit Romeo. He had noticed she had a bit of soft belly but he loved the pliant roundness and often daydreamed of it. Thinking it might please her, for he pleased her rarely (he reveried how it would be once she understood the true depth of his love for her), the art student experimented with some of the things Annamaria had done—the spontaneous holes, for instance, several studies of “Lines Ascending,” and two lyrical abstract expressionistic pieces based on, interwoven with, and ultimately concealing a Star of David, although for these attempts he soon discovered he had earned, instead of her good will, an increased measure of scorn.