Pictures of Fidelman Read online

  “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.

  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’l
l 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.

  4

  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 MASO
NRY.

  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?”