Pictures of Fidelman Read online

  The painting, 51 x 38, was encrusted in places (her hands and feet) (his face) almost a quarter of an inch thick with paint, layer on layer giving it history, another word for thick past in the paint itself. The mystery was why in the five years he had been at it, on and off because he had to hide it away when it got to be too much for him, he hadn’t been able to finish it though most of it was done already, except Momma’s face. Five years’ work here, mostly as he had first painted it, though he often added dibs and dabs, touches of brush or palette knife on the dry forms. He had tried it every which way, with Momma alone, sitting or standing, with or without him; and with Bessie in or out, but never Poppa, that living ghost; and I’ve made her old and young, and sometimes resembling Annamaria Oliovino, or Teresa, the chambermaid in Milan; even a little like Susskind, when my memory gets mixed up, who was a man I met when I first came to Rome. Momma apart and him apart, and then trying to bring them together in the tightly woven paint so they would be eternally mother and son as well as unique forms on canvas. So beautifully complete the idea of them together that the viewer couldn’t help but think no one has to do it again because it’s been done by F and can’t be done better; in truth, a masterwork. He had painted her sad and happy, tall, short, realistic, expressionistic, cubistic, surrealistic, even in action splotches of violet and brown. Also in black and white, stark like Kline or Motherwell. Once he had molded a figure in clay from the old photo and tried to copy it, but that didn’t work either.

  The faces were changed almost every day he painted, his as a young boy, hers as herself (long since departed); but now though for a year he had let the boy be, his face and all, he was still never satisfied with hers—something always missing—for very long after he had put it down; and he daily or nightly scraped it off (another lost face) with his rusty palette knife, and tried once again the next day; then scraped that face the same night or the day after; or let it harden in hope for two days and then frantically, before the paint stiffened, scraped that face off, too. All in all he had destroyed more than a thousand faces and conceived another thousand for a woman who could barely afford one; yet couldn’t settle on her true face—at least true for art. What was true for Bessie’s old photo was true enough—you can’t beat Kodak, but reduced on canvas, too much omitted. He sometimes thought of tearing up the old snapshot so he would have only memory (of it?) to go by, but couldn’t bring himself to destroy this last image of her. He was afraid to tear up the snap and went on painting the face on the dumpy body on the chair on the stoop, little F standing blandly by her side knowing she had died though pretending, at least in paint, that he didn’t; then scraping it off as the rest of the painting slowly thickened into a frieze.

  I’ve caught the boy, more or less, and sometimes I seem to have her for a few minutes, though not when I look at them together. I don’t paint her face so that it holds him in her presence. It comes out at best like two portraits in space and time. Should I stand him on the left instead of right? I tried it once and it didn’t work; now I have this hard-as-rock-quarter-of-an-inch investment in the way they are now, and if I scrap either of them (chisel? dynamite?), I might as well throw out the canvas. I might as well scrap what’s left of my life if I have to start over again.

  How do you invent whoever she was? I remember so little, her death, not even the dying, just the end mostly, after a sickness they easily cure nowadays with penicillin. I was about six or seven, or maybe ten, and as I remember, didn’t cry at the funeral. For years that never bothered me much, but when Bessie sent me the snap and I began painting Momma’s pictures, I guess it did. Maybe I held it against her, I mean dying; either that or I am by nature a non-mourner, born that way whether one wants it or not. The truth is I am afraid to paint, like I might find out something about myself.

  I have not said Kaddish, though I could have looked up the words.

  What if she were still a wandering figure among the stars, unable to find the Pearly Gates?

  He hid the canvas and turned then to the statuette of the Madonna without child. Esmeralda liked to see the chips fly as the Holy Mother rose out of wood.

  The girl had coffee with milk in the morning, slept on a borrowed cot in the kitchen alcove and stayed out of his way while he was painting. The back of the canvas was what she saw when she came into the studio each morning for a few lire to shop with. It was understood she was not to try to look as he painted. “Malocchio,” he said, and she nodded and withdrew on tiptoe. Because he found it uncomfortable to work with someone around, after a few days he had thought of asking her to leave, but when he considered how young she was, hardly grown up, like a young child’s big sister, he changed his mind. Only once she indirectly referred to the painting, asking what was the snapshot he pored over so much. “Mind your business,” F said; she shrugged and withdrew. In the kitchen she was slowly reading a love serial in a movie magazine. She shopped, cooked, kept the studio clean, although she did not bathe as often as he. In the kitchen, as he painted, she mended his socks and underwear, and altered her dresses. She had not much clothing, a sweater and skirt and two trollop’s dresses, from one of which she removed two silver roses, from the other some rows of purple sequins. She sewed up the necklines and lowered the hems. She owned a tight black sweater that looked good on her because of her healthy bosom, long neck, dark eyes; also a few pieces of patched underwear, nothing enticing but a red chemise, not bad but too red, some baubles of jewelry she had bought on the Ponte Vecchio, and a modest pair of house shoes. Her gold high heels she had wrapped in newspaper and put away. How long for does she think? F thought. And the girl was a talented cook. She fed him well, mostly on macaroni, green vegetables cooked in olive oil, and now and then some tripe or rabbit. She did very well with a few lire, and all in all two lived cheaper than one. She made no complaints, though she could be sullen when, lost in his work or worry, he paid scant attention to her for days. She obliged in bed when he wanted her, could be tender, and generally made herself useful. Esmeralda once suggested she would pose for him in the nude but F wouldn’t hear of it. Heavy-armed and long-footed, at times she reminded him of Bessie as a girl, though they weren’t really much alike.

  One October morning F sprang out of bed, terribly inspired. Before breakfast he got the painting out of its hiding place to finish off once and for all, only to discover that Bessie’s snapshot was gone from the easel ledge. He shook Esmeralda awake but she hadn’t seen it. F rushed downstairs, dumped the garbage bag on the sidewalk and frantically searched amid the hard spaghetti strings and mushy melon rinds, as the landlord waving both arms threatened suit. No luck. Upstairs, he hunted through the studio from top to bottom, Esmeralda diligently assisting, but they found nothing. He spent a terrible morning, not a stroke painted.

  “But why do you need a picture to paint from, it’s all so ridiculous.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t take it?”

  “Why would I take it? It’s not a picture of me.”

  “To teach me a lesson or something?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said.

  He trembled in rage and misery.

  In his presence she searched through his chest of drawers—he had been through them a dozen times—and on top, under a book on Uccello he had been reading, discovered the lost snap.

  F blushed.

  “I forgive your dirty suspicions,” she said, her eyes clouding.

  “Not that I deserve it,” he admitted.

  After lunch she tried on the floppy hat she had worn when he met her, to see how she could alter it.

  The sight of the velvet hat on her excited his eye. F had another inspiration.

  “I’ll paint you in it—at least a drawing.”

  “What for? You said it’s ugly on me.”

  “It’s unique is why. Many a master in the past was enticed by a hat to do a portrait of the face beneath. Rembrandt, for instance.”

  “Oh, all right,” Esmeralda said. “It’s immaterial to me. I thought y
ou’d want to be getting back to your painting.”

  “The day’s shot for that.”

  She agreed to pose. He did a quick charcoal for a warm-up that came out entrancing, especially the hat. He began then to sketch her in pencil, possibly for a painting.

  As he was drawing, F asked, “How did you happen to fall into prosti—your former profession? What I mean is, was it Ludovico’s doing?”

  “Prosti—profession,” she mimicked. “Once you’ve cackled, lay the egg.”

  “I was trying to be considerate.”

  “Try again. Keeping your mouth shut about certain things is a better consideration; still, if it’s only your curiosity you’re out to satisfy, I’ll tell you why. Ludovico had nothing to do with it, at least then, although he was one of my earliest customers and still owes me money for services rendered, not to mention certain sums he stole outright. He’s the only pure bastard I know, all the others have strains of decency, not that it makes much difference. Anyway, it was my own idea, if you want to know. Maybe I was working up to be an artist’s mistress.”

  F, letting the sarcasm pass, continued to sketch her.

  “One thing I’ll tell you, it wasn’t because of any starving father, if that’s what he’s told you. My father has a tiny farm in Fiesole, he stinks of manure and is incredibly stingy. All he’s ever parted with is his virginity. He’s got my mother and sister drudging for him and is sore as a castrated bull that I escaped. I ran away because I was sick to my teeth of being a slave. What’s more, he wasn’t above giving me a feel now and then when he had nothing better to do. Thanks to him I can barely read and write. I turned to whoring because I don’t want to be a maid and I don’t know anything else. A truck driver on the autostrada gave me the idea. But in spite of my profession I’m incredibly shy, that’s why I let Ludovico pimp for me.”

  She asked if she could see the drawing of herself, and when she had, said, “What are you going to call it?”

  He had thought, “Portrait of a Young Whore,” but answered, “‘Portrait of a Young Woman.’ I might do an oil from it.”

  “It’s immaterial to me,” Esmeralda said, but she was pleased.

  “The reason I stayed here is I thought you’d be kind to me. Besides, if a man is an artist I figured he must know about life. If he does maybe he can teach me something. So far all I’ve learned is you’re like everybody else, shivering in your drawers. That’s how it goes, when you think you have nothing there’s somebody with less.”

  F made three more drawings on paper, with and without the hat, and one with the black hat and Esmeralda holding marigolds.

  The next morning he carved half a wooden Madonna in a few hours, and to celebrate, took Esmeralda to the Uffizi in the afternoon and explained some of the great works of art to her.

  She didn’t always understand his allusions but was grateful. “You’re not so dumb,” she said.

  “One picks up things.”

  That evening they went to a movie and afterward stopped for a gelato in a café off the Piazza della Signoria. Men looked her over. F stared them down. She smiled at him tenderly. “You’re a lot more relaxed when you’re working on the Madonnas. When you’re painting with that snapshot in front of you, you haven’t the civility of a dog.”

  He admitted the truth of it.

  She confessed she had stolen a long look at his painting when he was downstairs going through the garbage bag for the snap.

  To his surprise he did not condemn her.

  “What did you think of it?”

  “Who is she, the one without the face?”

  “My mother, she died young.”

  “What’s the matter with the boy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He looks kind of sad.”

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. But I don’t want to talk about it. That can ruin the painting.”

  “To me it’s as though you were trying to paint yourself into your mother’s arms.”

  He was momentarily stunned. “Do you think so?”

  “It’s obvious to me. A mother’s a mother, a son’s a son.”

  “True, but it might be like an attempt on my part to release her from the arms of death. But that sort of stuff doesn’t matter much. It’s first and foremost a painting, potentially a first-class work if I ever get it done. If I could complete it the way I sometimes see it in my mind’s eye, I bet it could be something extraordinary. If a man does only one such painting in his lifetime, he can call himself a success. I sometimes think that if I could paint such a picture, much that was wrong in my life would rearrange itself and add up to more, if you know what I mean.”

  “In what way?”

  “I could forgive myself for past errors.”

  “Not me,” Esmeralda said. “I’d have to paint ten great pictures.” She laughed at the thought.

  As they were crossing the bridge, Esmeralda said, “You’re really nutty. I don’t see why a man would give up five years of his life just to paint one picture. If it was me I’d put it aside and do something I could sell.”

  “I do once in a while, like this portrait of you I’m working on now, but I always go back to ‘Mother and Son.’”

  “Why does everybody talk about art so much?” she asked. “Even Ludovico, when he’s not adding up his accounts, he’s talking about art.”

  “Art’s what it must be, which is beauty, and more, which is mostly mystery. That’s what people talk about.”

  “In this picture you’re painting of me, what’s the mystery?”

  “The mystery is you’ve been captured, yet there’s more—you’ve become art.”

  “You mean it’s not me any more?”

  “It never was. Art isn’t life.”

  “Then the hell with it. If I have my choice I’ll take life. If there’s not that there’s no art.”

  “Without art there’s no life to speak of, at least for me. If I’m not an artist, then I’m nothing.”

  “My God, aren’t you a man?”

  “Not really, without art.”

  “Personally, I think you have a lot to learn.”

  “I’m learning,” F sighed.

  “What’s so great about mystery?” she asked. “I don’t like it. There’s enough around without making more.”

  “Being involved in it.”

  “Explain that to me.”

  “It’s complicated, but one thing would be that a man like me—you understand—is actually working in art. The idea came to me late, I wasted most of my youth. The mystery of art is that more is there than you put down and every stroke adds to it. You look at your painting and see this bull’s eye staring at you though all you’ve painted is an old tree. It’s also a mystery to me why I haven’t been able to finish my best painting though I am dying to.”

  “If you ask me,” Esmeralda said, “my idea of a mystery is why I am in love with you, though it’s clear to me you don’t see me for dirt.”

  She burst into tears.

  A week later Ludovico, come for a morning visit wearing new yellow gloves, saw the completed portrait of Esmeralda, 48 x 30, with black hat, long neck, and marigolds. He was bowled over.

  “Fantastic. If you pay me half, I can get you a million lire for this work of art.”

  F agreed, so the pimp, crossing himself, left with the painting.

  One afternoon when Esmeralda was out, Ludovico, breathing badly after four flights of stairs, appeared in the studio lugging a tape recorder he had borrowed for an interview with F.

  “What for?”

  “To keep a record for the future. I’ll get it printed in International Arts. My cousin is assistant to the business manager. It will help you get a gallery for your first one-man show.”

  “Who needs a gallery if all I can show is unfinished canvases?”

  “You’d better increase your output. Sit down here and talk into the microphone. I’ve turned it on. Don’t worry about the machine, it won’t crawl up your leg. Just
relax and answer my questions candidly. Also don’t waste time justifying yourself. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  LUD: Very well. Ludovico Belvedere speaking, interviewing the painter Fidelman. Tell me, Arturo, as an American what does painting mean to you?

  F: It’s my whole life.

  LUD: What kind of person do you think an artist is when he’s painting? Do you think he’s a king or an emperor, or a seer or prophet?

  F: I don’t know for sure. I often feel like a constipated witch doctor.

  LUD: Please talk with good sense. If you’re going to be scatological I’ll stop the machine.

  F: I didn’t mean anything bad.

  LUD: As an American painter, what do you think of Jackson Pollock? Do you agree that he is a liberating influence?

  F: I guess so. The truth is you have to liberate yourself.

  LUD: We’re talking about painting, not your personal psychology. Jackson Pollock, as any cultured person will tell you, has changed the course of modern painting. Don’t think we don’t know about him in this country, we’re not exactly backward. We can all learn from him, including you. Do you agree that anyone who works in the modes of the past has only leavings to work with?

  F: Only partly, the past is pretty rich.

  LUD: I go now to the next question. Who is your favorite painter?

  F: Ah—well, I don’t think I have one, I have many.

  LUD: If you think that’s an advantage, you’re wrong. There’s no need of hubris. If an interviewer asked me that question, I would reply “Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo,” or someone else but not the entire pantheon of painters.

  F: I answered honestly.

  LUD: Anyway, to go on, what is your avowed purpose in art?

  F: To do the best I can. To do more than that. My momentary purpose is to create my uncreated masterpiece.

  LUD: The one of your mother?

  F: That’s right, “Mother and Son.”