“I’m busy on a job for Angelo.”
The girls laughed.
“Painting a picture, that is. A business proposition.”
They laughed louder.
Their laughter further depressed his spirits. No inspiration from whores. Maybe too many naked women around made it impossible to draw a nude. Still he’d better try a live model, having tried everything else and failed.
In desperation, practically on the verge of panic because time was going so fast, he thought of Teresa, the chambermaid. She was a poor specimen of feminine beauty but the imagination could enhance anything. Fidelman asked her to pose for him, and Teresa, after a shy laugh, consented.
“I will if you promise not to tell anybody.”
Fidelman promised.
She got undressed, a meager, bony girl, breathing heavily, and he drew her with flat chest, distended belly, thin hips, and hairy legs, unable to alter a single detail. Van Eyck would have loved her. When Teresa saw the drawing she wept profusely.
“I thought you would make me beautiful.”
“I had that in mind.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“It’s hard to say,” said Fidelman.
“I’m not in the least bit sexy,” she wept.
Considering her body with half-open eyes, Fidelman told her to go borrow a long slip.
“Get one from one of the girls and I’ll draw you sexy.”
She returned in a frilly white slip and looked so attractive that, instead of painting her, Fidelman, with a lump in his throat, got her to lie down with him on a dusty mattress in the room. Clasping her slipencased form, the copyist shut both eyes and concentrated on his elusive Venus. He felt about to recapture a rapturous experience and was looking forward to it, but at the last minute it turned into a limerick he didn’t know he knew:
Whilst Titian was mixing rose madder,
His model was crouched on a ladder;
Her position to Titian suggested coition,
So he stopped mixing madder and had ’er.
Angelo entering the storeroom just then, let out a furious bellow. He fired Teresa on her naked knees pleading with him not to, and Fidelman had to go back to latrine duty the rest of the day.
“You might just as well keep me doing this permanently,” Fidelman, disheartened, told the padrone in his office afterwards. “I’ll never finish that cursed picture.”
“Why not? What’s eating you? I’ve treated you like a son.”
“I’m blocked, that’s what.”
“Get to work, you’ll feel better.”
“I just can’t paint.”
“For what reason?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because you’ve had it too good here.” Angelo angrily struck Fidelman across the face. When the copyist wept, he booted him hard in the rear.
That night Fidelman went on a hunger strike but the padrone, hearing of it, threatened force-feeding.
After midnight Fidelman stole some clothes from a sleeping whore, dressed quickly, tied on a kerchief, made up his eyes and lips, and walked out the door past Scarpio sitting on a bar stool, enjoying the night breeze. Having gone a block, fearing he would be chased, Fidelman broke into a high-heeled run but it was too late. Scarpio had recognized him in aftermath and called the portiere. Fidelman kicked off his slippers and ran furiously but the skirt impeded him. The major domo and portiere caught up with him and dragged him, kicking and struggling, back to the hotel. A carabiniere, hearing the commotion, appeared on the scene but, seeing how Fidelman was dressed, would do nothing for him. In the cellar Angelo hit him with a short rubber hose until he collapsed.
Fidelman lay in bed three days, refusing to eat or get up.
“What’ll we do now?” Angelo, worried, whispered. “How about a fortune-teller? Either that or let’s bury him.”
“Astrology is better,” Scarpio advised. “I’ll check his planets. If that doesn’t work we’ll try psychology.”
“Well, make it fast,” said Angelo.
The next morning Scarpio entered Fidelman’s room with an American breakfast on a tray and two thick books under his arm. Fidelman was still in bed, smoking a butt. He wouldn’t eat.
Scarpio set down his books and took a chair close to the bed.
“What’s your birthday, Arturo?” he asked gently, feeling Fidelman’s pulse.
Fidelman told him, also the hour of birth and the place: Bronx, New York.
Scarpio, consulting the zodiacal tables, drew up Fidelman’s horoscope on a sheet of paper and studied it thoroughly with his good eye. After a few minutes he shook his head. “It’s no wonder.”
“What’s wrong?” Fidelman sat up weakly.
“Your Uranus and Venus are both in bad shape.”
“My Venus?”
“She rules your fate.” He studied the chart. “Taurus ascending, Venus afflicted. That’s why you’re blocked.”
“Afflicted by what?”
“Sh,” said Scarpio, “I’m checking your Mercury.”
“Concentrate on Venus, when will she be better?”
Scarpio consulted the tables, jotted down some numbers and signs, and slowly turned pale. He searched through a few more pages of tables, then got up and stared out the dirty window.
“It’s hard to tell. Do you believe in psychoanalysis?”
“Sort of.”
“Maybe we’d better try that. Don’t get up.”
Fidelman’s head fell back on the pillow.
Scarpio opened a thick book to its first chapter. “The thing to do is associate freely.”
“If I don’t get out of this whorehouse soon I’ll surely die,” said Fidelman.
“Do you have any memories of your mother?” Scarpio asked. “For instance, did you ever see her naked?”
“She died at my birth,” Fidelman answered, on the verge of tears. “I was raised by my sister, Bessie.”
“Go on, I’m listening,” said Scarpio.
“I can’t. My mind goes blank.”
Scarpio turned to the next chapter, flipped through several pages, then rose with a sigh.
“It might be a medical matter. Take a physic tonight.”
“I already have.”
The major domo shrugged. “Life is complicated. Anyway, keep track of your dreams. Write them down as soon as you have them.”
Fidelman puffed his butt.
That night he dreamed of Bessie about to bathe. He was peeking at her through the bathroom keyhole as she was preparing her bath. Openmouthed he watched her remove her robe and step into the tub. Her hefty well-proportioned body then was young and full in the right places; and in the dream Fidelman, then fourteen, looked at her with longing that amounted to anguish. The older Fidelman, the dreamer, considered doing a “La Baigneuse” right then and there, but when Bessie began to soap herself with Ivory soap, the boy slipped away into her room, opened her poor purse, filched fifty cents for the movies, and went on tiptoe down the stairs.
He was shutting the vestibule door with great relief when Arthur Fidelman woke with a headache. As he was scribbling down this dream he suddenly remembered what Angelo had said: “Everybody steals. We’re all human.”
A stupendous thought occurred to him: Suppose he personally were to steal the picture?
A marvelous idea all around. Fidelman heartily ate that morning’s breakfast.
To steal the picture he had to paint one. Within another day the copyist successfully sketched Titian’s painting and then began to work in oils on an old piece of Flemish linen that Angelo had hastily supplied him with after seeing the successful drawing. Fidelman underpainted the canvas and after it was dry began the figure of Venus as the conspirators looked on, sucking their breaths.
“Stay relaxed,” begged Angelo, sweating. “Don’t spoil it now. Remember you’re painting the appearance of a picture. The original has already been painted. Give us a decent copy and we’ll do the rest with chemistry.”
“I
’m worried about the brushstrokes.”
“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. Don’t worry about that. We don’t ask for perfection, just a good copy.”
He rubbed his fat hands nervously.
But Fidelman painted as though he were painting the original. He worked alone late at night, when the conspirators were snoring, and he painted with what was left of his heart. He had caught the figure of the Venus, but when it came to her flesh, her thighs and breasts, he never thought he would make it. As he painted he seemed to remember every nude that had ever been done, Fidelman satyr, with Silenus beard and goatlegs dancing among them, piping and peeking at backside, frontside, or both, at the “Rokeby Venus,” “Bathsheba,” “Susanna,” “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 the crowds at the Turkish bath, in every conceivable shape or position, while he sported or disported until a trio of maenads pulled his curly beard and he galloped after them through the dusky woods. He was 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 felt himself falling in love with the one he painted, every inch of her, including the ring on her pinky, bracelet on arm, the flowers she touched with her fingers, and the bright green earring that dangled 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 laid eyes on. Is there, Fidelman asked himself, a world where love endures and is always satisfying? He answered in the negative. Still she was his as he painted, so he went on painting, planning never to finish, to be happy as he was in loving her, thus forever happy.
But he finished the picture on Saturday night, Angelo’s gun pressed to his head. Then the Venus was taken from him and Scarpio and Angelo baked, smoked, stippled, and varnished, stretched and framed Fidelman’s masterwork as the artist lay on his bed in his room in a state of collapse.
“The Venus of Urbino, c’est moi.”
3
“What about my three hundred and fifty?” Fidelman asked Angelo during a card game in the padrone’s stuffy office several days later. After completing the painting the copyist was again back on janitorial duty.
“You’ll collect when we’ve got the Tiziano.”
“I did my part.”
“Don’t question decisions.”
“What about my passport?”
“Give it to him, Scarpio.”
Scarpio handed him the passport. Fidelman flipped through the booklet and saw all the pages were intact.
“If you skiddoo now,” Angelo warned 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 suggested, “I’ll gladly do the job myself. Alone, that is.”
“Why alone?” said Scarpio suspiciously.
“Don’t be foolish,” Angelo said. “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 apologized.
“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,” said Scarpio. He played a deuce and took the pot.
Fidelman laughed politely.
The next night, Scarpio rowed a huge weatherbeaten rowboat, both oars muffled. It was a moonless night with touches of Alpine lightning in the distant sky. Fidelman sat 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 majordomo docked the boat and secured it. Fidelman, peering around in the dark, tried to memorize where they were. They carried the picture up two hundred steps, both puffing when they got to the formal gardens on top.
The castello was black except for a square of yellow light from the caretaker’s turret window high above. As Scarpio snapped the lock of an embossed heavy wooden door with a strip of celluloid, the yellow window slowly opened and an old man peered down. They froze against the wall until the window was drawn shut.
“Fast,” Scarpio hissed. “If anyone sees us they’ll wake the whole island.”
Pushing open the creaking door, they quickly carried the painting, growing heavier as they hurried, through an enormous room cluttered with cheap statuary and, by the light of the majordomo’s flashlight, ascended a narrow flight of spiral stairs. They hastened in sneakers down a deep-shadowed, tapestried hall into the picture gallery, Fidelman stopping in his tracks when he beheld the Venus, the true and magnificent image of his counterfeit creation.
“Let’s get to work.” Scarpio quickly unknotted the rope and they unwrapped Fidelman’s painting and leaned it against the wall. They were taking down the Titian when footsteps sounded unmistakably in the hall. Scarpio’s flashlight went out.
“Sh, it’s the caretaker. If he comes in I’ll have to conk him.”
“That’ll destroy Angelo’s plan—deceit, not force.”
“I’ll think of that when we’re out of here.”
They pressed their backs to the wall, Fidelman’s clammy, as the old man’s steps drew nearer. The copyist had anguished visions of losing the picture and made helter-skelter plans somehow to reclaim it. Then the footsteps faltered, came to a stop, and, after a moment of intense hesitation, moved in another direction. A door slammed and the sound was gone.
It took Fidelman several seconds to breathe. They waited in the dark without moving until Scarpio shone his light. Both Venuses were resting against the same wall. The major domo closely inspected each canvas with one eye shut, then signaled the painting on the left. “That’s the one, let’s wrap it up.”
Fidelman broke into profuse sweat.
“Are you crazy? That’s mine. Don’t you know a work of art when you see it?” He pointed to the other picture.
“Art?” said Scarpio, removing his hat and turning pale. “Are you sure?” He peered at the painting.
“Without a doubt.”
“Don’t try to confuse me.” He tapped the dagger under his coat.
“The lighter one is the Titian,” Fidelman said through a dry 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 mopped his brow with a soiled handkerchief. “The trouble is with my eyes. One is in bad shape and I overuse the other.”
“Tst-tst,” clucked Fidelman.
“Anyway, hurry up. Angelo’s waiting on the lake. Remember, if there’s any mistake he’ll cut your throat first.”
They hung the darker painting on the wall, quickly wrapped the lighter, and hastily carried it through the long hall and down the stairs, Fidelman leading the way with Scarpio’s light.
At the dock the majordomo nervously turned 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 flashlight through your fingers.”
Scarpio knelt to undo the wrapping once more, and Fidelman, trembling, brought the flashlight down hard on Scarpio’s straw ha
t, the light shattering in his hand. The majordomo, pulling at his dagger, collapsed.
Fidelman had trouble loading the painting into the rowboat but finally got it in and settled, and quickly took off. In ten minutes he had rowed out of sight of the dark castled island. Not long afterwards he thought he heard Angelo’s putt-putt behind him, and his heart beat erratically, but the padrone did not appear. He rowed as the waves deepened.
Locarno, sixty kilometers.
A wavering flash of lightning pierced the broken sky, lighting the agitated lake all the way to the Alps, as a dreadful thought assailed Fidelman: had he the right painting, after all? After a minute he pulled in his oars, listened once more for Angelo, and, hearing nothing, stepped to the stern of the rowboat, letting it drift as he frantically unwrapped the Venus.
In the pitch black, on the lake’s choppy waters, he saw she was indeed his, and by the light of numerous matches adored his handiwork.
1963
The German Refugee
Oskar Gassner sits in his cotton-mesh undershirt and summer bathrobe at the window of his stuffy, hot, dark hotel room on West Tenth Street as I cautiously knock. Outside, across the sky, a late-June green twilight fades in darkness. The refugee fumbles for the light and stares at me, hiding despair but not pain.
I was in those days a poor student and would brashly attempt to teach anybody anything for a buck an hour, although I have since learned better. Mostly I gave English lessons to recently arrived refugees. The college sent me, I had acquired a little experience. Already a few of my students were trying their broken English, theirs and mine, in the American marketplace. I was then just twenty, on my way into my senior year in college, a skinny, life-hungry kid, eating himself waiting for the next world war to start. It was a miserable cheat. Here I was panting to get going, and across the ocean Adolf Hitler, in black boots and a square mustache, was tearing up and spitting at all the flowers. Will I ever forget what went on with Danzig that summer?
Times were still hard from the Depression but I made a little living from the poor refugees. They were all over uptown Broadway in 1939. I had four I tutored—Karl Otto Alp, the former film star; Wolfgang Novak, once a brilliant economist; Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff, who had taught medieval history at Heidelberg; and after the night I met him in his disordered cheap hotel room, Oskar Gassner, the Berlin critic and journalist, at one time on the Acht Uhr Abendblatt. They were accomplished men. I had my nerve associating with them, but that’s what a world crisis does for people, they get educated.
The Complete Stories Page 43