by Irwin Shaw
“I was just leaving for my club. We need a fourth.”
“I haven’t any stuff with me …”
“We’ll find gear for you at the club. And I have an extra racquet. I’ll meet you in the bar. I have red hair. You can’t miss me.” He hung up abruptly.
The lanky man with red hair came into the bar, his stride loose and energetic. His hair was quite long, at least for a diplomat, his face craggy, with thick bushy eyebrows, also red, and a bold nose. As he had said, you couldn’t miss him. We shook hands. He seemed about my own age. “I found an old pair of sneakers,” he said. “What size do you wear?”
“Ten,” I said.
“Good. They’ll fit.”
His car, a sleek little blue, open two-seater Alfa Romeo was parked just outside the hotel, constricting traffic. A policeman was standing beside it, a look of pain on his face. The policeman remonstrated gently with Lorimer, his voice musical, as we climbed into the car. Lorimer waved him off good-naturedly and we headed into the traffic. He drove zestfully, like his fellow Romans, and we nearly scraped fenders a dozen times before we reached the tennis club, situated on the banks of the Tiber. Driving, especially at his speed, seemed to require all his attention, so there was no conversation. He spoke only once. “This is the Borghese Gardens,” he said as we turned into a green park. “You ought to look in at the museum.”
“I will,” I said. By now I had acquired a small addiction to museums. It would please Fabian when I reported that I had been to the Borghese. He, too, had told me to visit it. “Pay special attention to the Titians,” Fabian had instructed.
When we swung through the gates of the club, Lorimer parked the car in the shade of some poplars. There were other cars parked along the road, but nobody to be seen. I started to open the door on my side, but Lorimer put out his hand and touched my arm to stop me.
“Have you got it?”
“Yes.” I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket and pulled out the bulky envelope. I handed it to Lorimer. Without examining it, Lorimer stuffed it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Evelyn told me you’d turn up eventually,” Lorimer said. “Thanks for not calling me at the embassy.”
We got out of the car, Lorimer reaching in for a battered old tennis bag. As we walked toward the clubhouse, he said, “I’m glad you could come. It’s hard to arrange games at this hour. I like to play before lunch and Italians like to play after lunch. Fundamental differences in two civilizations. Never to be reconciled. We call to each other from opposite sides of an abyss.” He saluted two small dark men who were playing on one of the courts. “In a minute,” he shouted.
The two men were only rallying, but they looked pretty good. “I’m afraid I’m going to slow down your game a bit,” I said, watching them. “I haven’t played in years.”
“Don’t give it a thought,” he said, “Just keep moving up to the net. They crack under pressure.” He grinned. He had a nice, friendly, wolfish grin.
The sneakers fit me comfortably and the shorts and shirt approximately, flopping around me a bit, but playable.
“Take your valuables with you to the court,” Lorimer said. “You could leave them at the desk, but there have been incidents. And don’t leave your passport lying around anywhere, or one day you will be surprised to read that a Sicilian by the name of Douglas Grimes has been arrested for smuggling heroin.” I saw that along with his wallet and loose change and his watch, he also took Evelyn’s envelope out to the court with him.
I doubt that the two men we played with ever heard my name. Lorimer introduced us, but spoke in mumbled Italian, and I never got their names.
I enjoyed the game more than I thought I would. The skiing I had done that winter had kept me in shape and my reflexes were still there. And as Dr. Ryan had promised, my eyes were adequate for the sport. Lorimer loped all over the court, blasting everything. He was wild, but intermittently very effective. We split the first two sets with the Italian gentlemen, who, as Lorimer had predicted, cracked under pressure. I developed a blister on my thumb in the third set and had to quit. The blister was a small price to pay for the pleasure of playing in the balmy Roman sunshine alongside the river which Shakespeare had insisted Caesar had swum with all his armor on. It had been a dry season and the river looked small and innocent and as though I could have swum it, too.
While we were dressing, after our showers, the Italians invited us to lunch, which they were having at the club, before going back to their offices. “Tell me, partner,” Lorimer said to me, “is this your first time in Rome?”
“First day,” I said.
“We won’t eat here then. We’ll go to a tourist place. The Tre Scalini in the Piazza Navona.” I nodded. That was on Fabian’s list, too. “Whenever anybody comes to Rome,” Lorimer said, “I tell them not to pretend to be anything else but a tourist. Do and see all the standard things. The Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, the Castel Sant’-Angelo, the Moses, the Forums, et cetera. They haven’t been put in guidebooks for hundreds of years for nothing. Later on, you can pick your own way. For reading, I suggest Stendhal. Do you read French?”
“No.”
“Pity.”
“I wish I could go back to school all over again.”
“Don’t we all?” he said.
“How do you like your lunch?” Lorimer asked. We were sitting out on the terrace looking across at the great fountain, with the four enormous carved feminine figures of the Rivers. It was certainly a better idea than having a sandwich and a beer at the bar of the tennis club.
“I like it fine,” I said.
“Don’t spread it around,” Lorimer said. “In certain high-toned circles it is accepted doctrine that the food is inedible.” He grinned. “You’ll be marked as a crude yokel for life and you’ll only get to meet a principessa with difficulty.”
“Well, I can say I liked the view, can’t I?”
“Say you just happened to be strolling through the Piazza Navona by accident. At night. If the subject comes up.” He stared thoughtfully at the fountain. “Dwarfing, isn’t it?”
“What’s dwarfing?”
“Those big girls. That’s one of the reasons I prefer Rome to New York, say. Here you’re dwarfed by art and religion, not by the steel and glass fantasies of insurance companies and stockbrokers.”
“Have you been here long?”
“Not long enough. And the sons of bitches are trying to move me out.” He tapped the bulge in his jacket made by the envelope I had given him. He had taken it out, slit it open, and glanced through the pages hastily while we were waiting to be served.
When the first course and the wine appeared, he had jammed the pages back into his pocket without comment. “That’s what this is all about,” he said, tapping the jacket for the second time. “They’re after me. I know it and they know I know it and we’re all waiting for someone to make the wrong move. I sent along some recommendations that were not received—ah—with enthusiasm in certain quarters. I pushed through some contracts. Evelyn was in on it, too, in Justice and her head is on the block, too. We tried to get the money to the right people in this beautiful, lamentable country, with its desperate inhabitants, not the wrong people. A difference of opinion. Possibly fatal. Don’t boast that you know me. There’re spies everywhere. When I get back to my desk, the papers will have been moved. Do I sound paranoid?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, “although Evelyn hinted …”
“It happened before,” Lorimer said, “and it sure as hell can happen again, with what’s going on in Washington. What McCarthy did to the old China hands for coming in with an unpopular message will look like a tea party compared to what that bunch in the White House are capable of pulling off. Orwell was wrong. It shouldn’t have been nineteen eighty-four. It should have been nineteen seventy-three. Do you think they’ll get that second-story man out of the White House?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t been following it closely,” I said.
&n
bsp; Lorimer looked at me oddly. “Americans.” He shook his head sadly. “My bet is he’ll still be there till the next election. With his foot on all our necks. My next post will probably be in some small African country where they have a coup d’état every three months and shoot American ambassadors. Come and visit me.” He grinned and poured himself a full glass of wine. Whatever he was, he wasn’t frightened. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to devote any time to you this week. I have to go to Naples for a few days. But I can get back for tennis again on Saturday and there’s a poker game on Saturday night, mostly newspapermen, nobody from the embassy. … Evelyn wrote you were a devout poker player. …”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t be here. I have to be in Porto Ercole Saturday.”
“Porto Ercole?” he said. “The Pellicano?”
“As a matter of fact, I have a reservation there.”
“For a fellow who’s just arrived in Italy, you know your way around. The Grand in Rome, the Pellicano in Porto Ercole.”
“I’ve been briefed by a friend,” I said. “He knows his way around everywhere.”
“You’ll love it,” Lorimer said. “I go up there for weekends whenever I can. They have a nice tennis court. I envy you.” He looked at his watch, then started to pull out his wallet to pay.
“Please,” I said. “On me.”
He put his wallet back. “Evelyn wrote you were independently wealthy. Is that true?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Three cheers for you. In that case, it’s your lunch.” He stood up. “Do you want me to drive you back to the hotel?”
“I think I’d like to walk.”
“Well thought out,” he said. “I wish I had the time to walk with you. But the executioners await. Arrivederci, chum.” He strode off toward his car, brisk and American, the statues looming over him, toward the desk on which the papers had been moved in his absence.
I finished my coffee slowly, paid, and walked leisurely in the general direction of the hotel, reflecting that Rome, as seen by a pedestrian, was a different and much better city than Rome seen from an automobile. For that afternoon, at least. Lorimer’s description of Italy as a beautiful, lamentable country, peopled with desperate inhabitants, seemed only partially correct.
I found myself on a narrow busy street, the via del Babuino, where there were several art galleries. Faithful to Fabian, I peered in through the windows. In one of the windows there was a large oil of a deserted street in a small town in America, the familiar drugstore, barbershop, fake Colonial bank, a clapboard newspaper office, all in what looked like the last faded light of a cold evening in the middle of flat prairie country. It was painted realistically, but realism heightened by an obsessed attention to every smallest detail, which gave the impression of a distorted, fanatical vision of the country, loving and furious at the same time. The name of the painter who was having the one-man show in the gallery was not an American one—or perhaps half an American one, Angelo Quinn. Out of curiosity I went into the gallery. Aside from the man who ran the place, a wispy, gray-haired sexagenarian in a high collar, and a youngish, sloppily dressed man in need of a shave who sat in a corner reading an art magazine, I was the only one in the shop.
All the paintings were of small towns or dilapidated old sections of cities, with here and there a weather-worn farmhouse set on a bleak, windy hill, or a rusted line of railroad tracks, with frozen puddles reflecting a dark sky, the tracks looking as though they were going nowhere and as if the last train had passed that way a century before.
There were no little red stamps on the frames to indicate that any of the paintings had been sold. The owner of the gallery did not follow me around or offer to talk to me, but merely gave me a sad little dental-plate smile when he caught my eye. The young man with the art magazine never looked up.
I left the gallery saddened, but somehow also uplifted. I wasn’t certain enough about my taste to be able to pronounce whether or not the paintings were good or bad, but they had spoken to me directly, had reminded me, elusively but surely, of something I didn’t want to forget about my native country.
I walked slowly through the bustling streets, puzzling over the experience. It was very much like what I had felt about books at the age of thirty, when I had begun to read seriously, the sense that something enormous and enigmatic was being tantalizingly revealed to me. I remembered what Fabian had said the morning we had visited the Maeght Museum in St.-Paul-de-Vence—that after I had looked enough I would pass a certain threshold of emotion. I resolved to come back again the next day.
Near my hotel, by accident, I noticed that I was passing the shop that Fabian had told me was the place I should get my suits made. I went in and spent an interesting hour looking at materials and talking to the head tailor, who spoke a kind of English. I ordered five suits. I would dazzle Fabian when I saw him next.
The next day I got a directory of the art galleries in Rome that were having exhibitions that week and I visited all of them before going back to Quinn’s show. I wanted to see how the other contemporary works of art on view in the city affected me. They affected me not at all. Realistic, surrealist, abstract, my eye remained unmoved. Then I went back to the gallery on the via del Babuino and slowly drifted from painting to painting, studying each one carefully and critically, to make sure that what I had felt the afternoon before had not been the result of its having been my first day in Rome, following a good lunch with plenty of wine and the pleasure of conversation with a knowing young American after a week of silence.
The effect on me was, if anything, greater than it had been the day before. The gallery owner and the young man with the art magazine were again the only ones in the shop, looking as though they had not moved in the last twenty-four hours. If they recognized me, they gave no sign that they did so. If I can afford to buy suits, I decided suddenly, I can afford to buy a painting. I had never bought even as much as a print before and was unsure about how one went about it. Fabian had haggled with the dealer in Zurich, but I knew I wasn’t up to that.
“Excuse me,” I said to the wispy old gallery owner, who smiled automatically at me, “I’m interested in the painting in the window. And maybe this one, too.” I was standing in front of the oil of the disused railroad tracks. “Could you give me some idea of how much they might be?”
“Five hundred thousand lire,” the old man said promptly. His voice was strong and steady.
“Five hundred thousand …Uh …” It sounded monumental. I still suffered from fits of apprehension when dealing with the Italian decimal system. “How much is that in dollars?” Tourist, tourist, I thought bitterly as I asked the question.
“About eight hundred dollars.” He shrugged despondently. “With the ridiculous rate of exchange, less.”
I was paying two hundred and fifty dollars for each of the five suits. They would never give me as much pleasure as either of the paintings. “Will you take a check on a Swiss bank?”
“Certainly,” the old man said. “Make it out to Pietro Bonelli. The show closes in two weeks. We can deliver the paintings to you then at your hotel, if you wish.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “I’ll pick them up myself.” I wanted to walk out of the shop with the treasures under my arm.
“There should be a deposit, of course,” the old man said. “To confirm …”
I looked in my wallet. “Would ten thousand lire do the trick?”
“Twenty thousand would be more normal,” he said smoothly. I gave him twenty thousand lire and told him my name and he wrote out a receipt for me in flowing Italian script. It was Pietro Bonelli. Through all this the shaggy young man had not looked up from his magazine.
“Would you like to meet the artist?” the old man asked.
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Not at all. Angelo,” he said, “Mr. Grimes, who is a collector of your work, would like to say hello.”
The young man finally looked up. �
�Hi,” he said. “Congratulations.” He smiled. He seemed even younger when he smiled, with brilliant teeth and deep, dark eyes, like a mournful Italian child. He stood up slowly. “Come on, Mr. Grimes, I’ll buy you a coffee to celebrate.”
Bonelli was pasting the first red tab on the frame of the painting in the window as we went out of the shop.
Quinn led me to a café down the street and we stood at the bar as he ordered coffee. “You’re American, aren’t you?” I asked.
“As apple pie.” His accent was from no particular place in the States.
“Did you just come over?”
“I’ve been here for five years,” Quinn said. “Studying the Italian scene.”
“Did you do all those paintings in the gallery more than five years ago?”
He laughed. “No. They’re all new. They’re from memory. Or inventions. Whatever you want to call them. I paint out of loneliness and nostalgia. It gives a certain original aura to the stuff, don’t you think?”
“I would say so.”
“When I go back to the States I’ll paint Italy. Like most painters I have a theory. My theory is that you must leave home to know what home is like. Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No. Not if that’s the way they come out.”
“You like them, eh?”
“Very much.”
“I don’t blame you.” He grinned. “The Angelo Quinn optique on his native land. Hold onto them. They’ll be worth a lot. Someday.”
“I intend to hang on,” I said. “And not for the dough.”
“Nice of you to say so.” He sipped at his coffee. “If it was only for the coffee,” he said, “I wouldn’t consider my time in Italy wasted.”
“Where did you get the name Angelo?”
“My mother. She was an Italian war bride. My father brought her home. To a variety of homes. He was a small-time newspaperman. He’d get tired of one job and he’d move on to another god-forsaken, two-bit town until he got tired of that. I paint my father’s wanderings. Are you a collector, as old man Bonelli said?”