my house, in silence, resting.
In the joy of night,
in secret so none saw me,
no object in my sight
no other light to guide me,
but what burned here inside me.lxxviii
Having finished its daily routines, the military band was marching back to the barracks along Via Regina Elena while carrying their mute instruments under their arms.
lxxvii French: ‘put on his Sunday best’.
lxxviii Opening lines of ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ or ‘La noche oscura del alma’ by San Juan de la Cruz, or Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591) a Spanish mystic and poet. Translated by A. S. Kline.
19
IMAGES
He had greatly profited from his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts on the historic Via Brera, where he had so distinguished himself by dint of his technical expertise that it had allowed him, once he’d graduated, to scrape a living making copies of various famous paintings at the museum, which kind of took after the Florentine school, and which turned out better than the ones the Venetians produced, owing to his natural predisposition towards clean straight lines in his drawings.
In cahoots with some coevals of his who were annoyed by the innovative ferment of their times, as soon as the horridness of war had evaporated, he had tried to create his own original paintings. Yet even when he creates his own paintings, a friend of his mockingly put it, Amilcare looks like he’s copying someone else’s, and someone’s ugly painting to boot!
Another comrade said that while technical skill was uncommon, it allowed a patina of coldness to extend over everything, and not in the way Ingres reworked Raphael’s paintings injecting them with even more elegance and sensuality – in fact, he pedantically added – his paintings look as if someone was imitating Ingres’s reworkings of Raphael; to put it bluntly, Amilcare is as bad at copying as Ingres was good at teaching.lxxix
As soon as he’d left the academy, he had been quickly forgotten by his coevals, as though he’d taken up a new profession entirely.
Thus, he had wound up in the colony, the well-established refuge for those seeking a fresh start.
He quickly built up a bourgeois clientele who gave him photographs from which he was expected to extract prestigious-looking oil portraits. Almost against his own will, he had become a consummate master of the form. His use of colour (which he couldn’t inject with the luminous spark of life, as the director of the municipal marching band put it, who painted Orientalist scenes in his spare time, and who only had a few mean customers from the lowest rungs of society and who therefore envied his rival’s more distinguished customers) was deemed of secondary importance. What really mattered was that the painting was an exact replica of the photograph, and that its perfect resemblance with the subject was emphasised. To put it briefly, one had to merely replace a photograph’s shiny, yellowish back with the nobility of a large piece of canvas and shiny oil-based paints. The backdrop was always generic and the objects, if any were depicted at all, were usually reduced to the back of a chair, or a book, or a walking cane with an ivory knob.
As one would expect, the paintings were always of dead people.
‘He paints the heirs of wealthy people,’ the pastry-maker on Piazza Ammiraglio Cagni said; the young man was one of his usual customers, who always came in alone and at odd hours, while everyone else was busy slaving away in their offices and shops. Just like at the Academy, the unhappy painter seemed like he was always being chased around by a shadow which concealed a mocking demon within it. ‘I am the one who projects it,’ he had said in an aggravated, bitter tone in front of a Captain who never said anything about his paintings. He occasionally exhibited his work in a photographer’s studio, not far from the Piazza. The officer’s silence – he lived right in front of the photographer – wound up thrilling the painter, so much so that one day, after seeing him standing still in front of the studio’s window, he told him that he would not charge him anything should the officer ever find himself in need of his services.
Captain Valentini pulled a grimace, almost as if it was a nervous tick. Perhaps the mention of money hadn’t found any place in that reserved man’s plans. The painter was so disheartened by the outcome that he avoided the Captain from that day on. Even though he had invited him into his studio only a week earlier to show him some work in progress.
Why – aside from those portraits, to which he occasionally added a shiny brass plaque bearing the deceased’s name and titles at the bottom – wasn’t there anyone who wasn’t a cavaliere?lxxx There wasn’t a single gallery in the colony, and so he was forced to work from photographs even when copying very famous paintings. The most requested image was that of the Virgin Mary (in the style of Carlo Dolci, Guido Reni or Bartolomé Esteban Murillo…lxxxi), which would be hung above one’s bed to keep the evil spirits away. His Virgin Marys were always young and modestly dressed, although they would have easily looked like ladies of the court were it not for the priggish veils over their heads, which added a touch of peasant grace to their expressions.
Those portraits renounced all claims to drama and psychology: they don’t keep me company, he would say, annoyed.
He often worked from black and white reproduction, leaving him to be inventive with his use of colour (he would use blue instead of the original’s pink, or white instead of yellow); easily satisfied, his clientele never even suspected that taking such liberties was so blasphemous, in primislxxxii from an artistic point of view (the bearded professor of Classics at the local secondary school who had edited an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with a verse translation en face commented). Our painter would sometimes think of the visitors who came to Via Brera to look over his shoulders to see whether he was copying out his work diligently; he didn’t even know whom he liked best: that new colonial aristocracy or the old couples whose final stages of the journey would only be accompanied by boredom.
Despite the modesty of the way he practiced his art, his preferences were for the great masters of the past, a predilection that was occasionally exclusive and almost paralyzed amidst the subjects of tradition, until in the end he began to take to his work reluctantly, producing poor results especially when his preferences weren’t taken into account. Aside from his portraits, where he appeared to be remoulding himself in his dreams (he was a short, fat, ugly little man with bewildered features, and if in his paintings he tended towards oleography, his face was the complete negation of that style, being shabby and slovenly, ‘a wreck’ as someone put it) and the paintings of the Virgin Mary which he considered himself a virtuoso of, he loved Mary herself, but only during the most solemn moments of her pure life: from the Annunciation, with the angel bowing before her, to The Entombment of Christlxxxiii (another name for the moment more commonly and traditionally known as the Pietà, where the Virgin Mary cradles Christ’s dead body).
The city’s bourgeois ladies looked at him astonished whenever he explained to them that those were the only moments that inspired him. ‘The rest all belonged to Jesus,’ he would add, enigmatically.
One of the ladies would usually cross herself, either out of suspiciousness or worry.
As for his favourite artists, his taste had settled on the great Sebastiano del Piombo. Perhaps because the latter employed dull colours, Amilcare’s copies of del Piombo’s canvases usually turned out very well. In any case, this was the explanation volunteered by some busybody. ‘Everything speaks in the dark,’ he’d concluded.
He had never laid eyes on the gigantic Pietà of Viterbo (which he stubbornly insisted on calling the ‘Pietà of Orvieto Cathedral,’ although god knows why that was) with its perfectly limpid sky, where the departing sun has left a reddish afterglow in the background while the moon rises into sight; the Mother, whose pain seems to lack all meaning, is sat with an empty lap. Christ has been left naked on the floor next to her. A photograph he had treacherously ripped out of a book from the Municipal Library, he had settled on copying out the a
ltarpiece behind the Virgin Mary, keeping true to its impressive original dimensions, only to decide shortly afterwards that he would keep the painting for himself. He therefore had a vast piece of canvas shipped to him from the motherland, and once he’d nailed it to the frame, he took to his work. His customers were irked, the photographs of those cavalieri, those respected and well-to-do ancestors, were lying dormant in his drawers. Whenever questioned over the delays, the painter would distractedly excuse himself. On one occasion, one of these clients had slammed the door on their way out. ‘He really does fancy himself an artist, doesn’t he?!’ a construction wholesaler exclaimed.
A few had already jealously reclaimed the photographs of their fathers or grandfathers (female subjects were rare: it seemed that families, like Nations, only consigned the image of their rulers to history, and not their consorts).
Nobody appeared to pay any attention to the large canvas on which the man had been working, as though it had been confused with the wall.
The photographic reproduction was ridiculously small, it looked like a fly in comparison to the vastness of the canvas, and it was incredibly difficult to discern its secrets. Yet the sky had already been painted and the Mother stood out tragically against that void, which is as deep as the abyss itself (or so its maker thought).
All that was left to do was to paint the figure of the dead Christ, but the painter was hesitating.
One day he was overcome by the wretched idea to share the difficulties he’d had with a dressmaker who worked on Corso Italia, who had asked him why nobody had seen him around in a while. By the following day, everyone in town knew that Christ had refused to appear before that second-rate house painter. The rumour eventually made its way to him and it wounded him, making his artist’s block even more difficult to bear. He no longer felt like staying shut in his studio all the time, but neither did he feel like going into the city: this explained why the odd wayfarer would occasionally spot a short man walking along the boundless plain with no particular aim in sight.
Sure, he also owned a reproduction of that painting, but it was indecipherable, not the kind of blueprint he utilised for his portraits of the dead cavalieri.
One day when he’d gone out to buy some paints, he bumped into the Captain, who greeted him with a nod of the head. The painter went up to him, and talking about this and the other, he gave in to his weakness and explained his hesitation. ‘Of course, the way the subject has been positioned,’ the painter elaborated, ‘is altogether indecipherable, and that much is clear even when looking at a poor reproduction like this,’ and since he was carrying it in his pocket, he showed it to him, ‘there are a thousand details to this body… forgive me, to this soul, that I simply can’t see them all and don’t know how to capture them with my paints. How could I then possibly reproduce these paintings? Could you explain to me how I could do that? Please forgive me, I don’t have much of a way with words, but if I had a model like Sebastiano did then at least I could copy…’
All of a sudden, he yelled:
‘And by copying I will finally be able to understand!’
He shook his head, atop which lay a threadbare cap, and then he went on his way.
One would see him frequently out in town after that, sullenly idling about, even uglier than before, looking like he didn’t know what do with his talent now that it had been definitively defeated – or with himself for that matter.
He dwelled in a modest house along the lagoon, on the outskirts of the colonial city, where the sun seemed to beat more ardently and where the dust, whenever the desert’s furious winds picked up, was blinding. He always kept the door open on the off-chance the sea breeze would reach him there.
One day, Captain Valentini appeared on his threshold.
He headed straight towards the large canvas, which he stood observing for a long while, as though searching for his place in it. The black and blue sky had been painted, as had the aggrieved Mother who was clenching her hands together in agony, twisting her torso as she cast her glassy gaze into the distance.
The painter observed his strange visitor, as though he hadn’t recognised him. So it went for a few minutes. Then more minutes went by and then some more after that. Until one lost count. It seemed as though the Captain had encountered the same difficulties that the painter had faced, something didn’t quite add up. In the end, he hung his head. Just as the painter had told him in a moment of confessional catharsis, only by copying would he be able to understand.
But what? he asked himself.
But he was only talking to himself.
Then he overcame every reserve.
Slowly and meticulously, as though carrying out a duty, the Captain undressed himself until he was naked and then lay flat upon the ground, lying perfectly still, looking forlorn and abandoned, his head leaning against a cardboard box.
Lo and behold, the painter now had his model.
He threw a rag soaked in various colours at the model’s hips, according to an old painterly tradition. He picked up his palette and began to prepare his brushes.
His Pietà would finally be completed.
lxxix Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867): French Neoclassical painter.
lxxx Italian for ‘knight’; similar to OBE.
lxxxi Painters.
lxxxii Latin: ‘first of all’.
lxxxiii Names of paintings by Caravaggio.
20
THE DIARY
The story was well known and it fuelled a great deal of curiosity: a respected industrialist had kept a diary while in the colony. The interest was fed by indiscretions: there were those who said the diary was as long as the Nile, and that the police, who were aware of its existence, were greatly alarmed by it. What would its revelations give rise to? Thanks to his good fortune and versatile profession, which had placed him in contact with every rung of society, what information had the industrialist collected that might – even theoretically – jeopardise the security of the state? What had he written about in particular? If nothing appeared menacing about the present – the city was peaceful and beaming with optimism – could its past be considered as such? Had he slandered the good name of Fascism? In any case, that man had tried to capture time, in other words he had left behind an account. It thus posed no danger to the security of the State, but rather it jeopardised the Regime’s image in the annals of History, it operated in the realm of the future, which it bent to its will.
The industrialist had lived in an isolated villa on the outskirts of the city, which had lent greater mystery to the entire affair; in his forties, the industrialist was still a bachelor, which contributed to people’s inability to categorise him.
Not many had shown themselves willing to read the entirety of the long diary, but there were a great many who were eagerly waiting for the story to take a dramatic turn: for instance the police bursting their way into the man’s isolated villa to reveal his hidden face, or learning that the man had run away with some kind of treasure, perhaps absconding in a ship, sailing away under cover of night. They were even prepared to ask the police to intervene and together to let the man go in his way – in other words, they were anxious for the affair to turn into a novel so it could break the sleepy monotony of their everyday lives.
‘Diaries are made to be written in, and not to be read,’ an aspiring writer declared one day. He was at a café with his friends, the industrious city ground to a halt at seven o’clock in the evening, at which time everyone treated themselves to a stroll along the Corso, or to a cup of coffee at a café, where a little orchestra playfully missed a few notes here and there. A breeze rose from the sea, making everything feel light and removing all meaning from conversations, acting like an agent of time, which swallows everything up. He was explaining that the diary’s value lay in the here and now, for the road it covered in the present, for the desire for clarifications that it expressed, for its escape from all that was already known, as well as reflections, games…’ whatever you
like, but they become real the moment you write them down. Re-reading them is a dangerous adventure even for the author himself. Where once there was life, now there’s pointless minutiae. It’s a mistake to think that someone writes in order to keep the memory of the present alive – we write in order to give the present a face; but I burn all my stuff right away.’
There was a functionary from the police department with his regulation stiff, black moustache. Having picked up a bit of the conversation, he was irked by the way he felt they had undervalued the police’s raid on the gnome’s hiding hole: there was nothing but ash – the writing had magically vanished when it had been brought into the light, or rather the present. Yet what value could that manuscript have, which the author had destroyed as if the present and the past, or the present and the future were irreconcilable, and devoid of a common language? Why should the police be frightened by the solitary grimaces of a man staring into a mirror, even if they did occasionally mock the State?
Tarenzi, the industrialist, who had at one time confessed (this was all written down in the file bearing his name at police headquarters) that he loved abstract conversations, and had urged his friends to avoid him, out of laziness perhaps – now he was exalting his memoirs, a literary genre which presumes that the text will be read, whereas diaries do not care for their readers. The diligent functionary felt like he was being mocked: first he claimed in public that he’d written a social diary, outside of anyone’s control; then he said that the police raid would be too late because the diary was designed to fall apart before anyone could lay their eyes on it. However, then he also added that in the act of vanishing, the diary generates a river of words – and memories – some of which were destined for posterity, while others, the mocking ones, were destined to be confiscated by the police. But will they be reliable memories? the functionary asked himself, or will they have been written especially for us, in order to pervert the course of justice? Not only had the diary been destroyed, but a text was being put together to act as a trap, to throw the authorities off their tracks. The functionary looked as though he was already writing his arrest report, as though he was about to set off to find the fugitive with a spring in his step.
The Fourth Shore Page 33