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 MASONRY.
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?”
“And the price?”
“Eh. What can one do? As usual.”
F’s face fell an inch. “Is it fair to pay only five thousand lire for a statuette that takes two weeks’ work and sells on Via Tornabuoni for fifteen thousand, even twenty if someone takes it to St. Peter’s and gets it blessed by the Pope?”
Panenero shrugged. “Ah, maestro, the world has changed since the time of true craftsmen. You and I, we’re fighting a losing battle. As for the Madonnas, I now get most of the job turned out by machine. My apprentices cut in the face, add a few folds to the robe, daub on a bit of paint, and I swear to you it costs me one third of what I pay you and goes for the same price to the shops. Of course, they don’t approach the quality of your product—I’m an honest man—but do you think the tourists care? What’s more the shopkeepers are stingier than ever, and believe me they’re stingy in Florence. If I ask for more they offer less. If they pay me seventy-five hundred for yours I’m in luck. With that price, how can I take care of rent and my other expenses? I pay the wages of two masters and a journeyman on my other products, the antique furniture and so forth. I also employ three apprentices who have to eat or they’re too weak to fart. My own family, including a clubfoot son and three useless daughters, comes to six people. Eh, I don’t have to tell you it’s no picnic earning a living nowadays. Still, if you’ll put a bambino in the poor Madonna’s arms, I’ll up you five hundred.”
“I’ll take the five thousand.”
The proprietor counted it out in worn fifty- and one-hundred-lire notes.
“The trouble with you, maestro, is you’re a perfectionist. How many are there nowadays?”
“I guess that’s so,” F sighed. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of selling the Madonnas to the tourists myself, but if I have to do that as well as make them where’s my painting time coming from, I’d like to know.”
“I agree with you totally,” Panenero said. “Still, for a bachelor you’re not doing too badly. I’m always surprised you look so skinny. It must be hereditary.”
“Most of my earnings go for supplies. Everything’s shot up so, oils, pigments, turpentine, everything. A tube of cadmium costs close to thirteen hundred lire, so I try to keep bright yellow, not to mention vermilion, out of my pictures. Last week I had to pass up a sable brush they ask three thousand for. A roll of cotton canvas costs over ten thousand. With such prices what’s left for meat?”
“Too much meat is bad for the digestion. My wife’s brother eats meat twice a day and has liver trouble. A dish of good spaghetti with cheese will fatten you up without interfering with your liver. Anyway how’s the painting coming?”
“Don’t ask me so I won’t lie.”
The young whore with the baggy hat saw the flowers amid his bundles as he approached, and through her short veil smiled dimly up at him.
F, for no reason he could think of, gave her the marigold, and the girl—she was no more than eighteen—held the flower awkwardly.
“What’s your price, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“What are you, a painter or something?”
“That’s right, how did you know?”
“I think I guessed. Maybe it’s your clothes, or the flowers or something.” She smiled absently, her eyes roaming the benches, her hard mouth tight. “To answer your question, two thousand lire.”
He raised his beret and walked on.
“You can have me for five hundred,” called an old whore from her bench. “What she hasn’t heard of I’ve practiced all my life. I have no objection to odd requests.”
But F was running. Got to get back to work. He crossed the street through a flood of Fiats, carts, Vespas, and rushed back to his studio.
Afterwards he sat on his bed, hands clasped between knees, looking at the canvas and thinking of the young whore. Maybe it’d relax me so I can paint.
He counted what was left of his money, then hid the paper lire in a knotted sock in his bureau drawer. He removed the sock and hid it in the armadio on the hat rack. Then he locked the armadio and hid the key in the bureau drawer. He dropped the drawer key into a jar of cloudy turpentine, figuring who would want to wet his hand fishing for it.
Maybe she’d let me charge it and I could pay when I have more money? I could do two Madonnas sometime and pay her out of the ten thousand lire.
Then he thought, She seemed interested in me as an artist. Maybe she’d trade for a drawing.
He riffled through a pile of charcoal drawings and came on one of a heavy-bellied nude cutting her toenails, one chunky foot on a backless chair. F trotted to the benches in the market piazza where the girl sat with a crushed marigold in her hand.
“Would you mind having a drawing instead? One of my own, that is?”
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of cash because I’m short. It’s just a thought I had.”
It took her a minute to run it through her head. “All right, if that’s what you want.”
He unrolled the drawing and showed it to her.
“Oh, all right.”
But then she flushed under her veil and gazed embarrassed at F.
“Anything wrong?”
Her eyes miserably searched the piazza.
“It’s nothing,” she said after a minute. “I’ll take your drawing.” Then seeing him studying her she laughed nervously and said, “I was looking for my cousin. He’s supposed to meet me here. Well, if he comes let him wait, he’s a pain in the ass anyway.”
She rose from the bench and they went together toward Via S. Agostino.
Fabio, the landlord, took one look and called her puttana.
“That’ll do from you,” said F, sternly.
“Pay your rent instead of pissing away the money.”
Her name, she told him as they were undressing in his studio, was Esmeralda.
His was Arturo.
The girl’s hair, when she tossed off her baggy hat, was brown and full. She had black eyes like plum pits, a small mouth on the sad side, Modigliani neck, strong though not exactly white teeth, and a pimply brow. She wore long imitation-pearl earrings and kept them on. Esmeralda unzipped her clothes and they were at once in bed. It wasn’t bad though she apologized for her performance.
As they lay smoking in bed—he had given her one of his six cigarettes—Esmeralda said, “The one I was looking for isn’t my cousin, he’s my pimp, or at least he was. If he’s there waiting for me I hope it’s a blizzard and he freezes to death.”
They had an espresso together. She said she liked the studio and offered to stay.
He was momentarily panicked. “I wouldn’t want it to interfere with my painting. I mean I’m devoted to that. Besides, this is a small place.”
“I’m a small girl, I’ll take care of your needs and won’t interfere with your work.”
He finally agreed.
Though he had qualms concerning her health, he let her stay, yet felt reasonably contented.
“Il Signor Ludovico Belvedere,” the landlord called up from the ground floor, “a gentleman on his way up the stairs to see you. If he buys one of your pictures, you won’t have any excuse for not paying last month’s rent, not to mention June or July.”
If it was really a gentleman, F went in to wash his hands as the stranger slowly, stopping to breathe, wound his way up the stairs. The painter had hastily removed the canvas from the easel, hiding it in the kitchen alcove. He soaped his hands thickly, the smoke from the butt in his mouth drifting into a closed eye. F quickly dried himself with a dirty towel. It was, instead of a gentleman, Esmeralda’s seedy cugino, the pimp, a thin man past fifty, tall, with pouched small eyes and a pencil-line mustache. His hands and feet were small, he wore loose squeaky shoes with gray spats. His clothes though neatly pressed had seen better days. He carried a malacca cane and sported a pearl-gray hat. There was about him, though he seemed to mask it, a quality of having experienced everything, if not more, that gave F the momentary shivers.
Bowing courteously and speaking as though among friends, he was not, he explained, in the best of moods—to say nothing of his health—after a week of running around desperately trying to locate Esmeralda. He explained they had had a misunderstanding over a few lire through an unfortunate error, no more than a mistake in addition—carrying a one instead of a seven. “These things happen to the best of mathematicians, but what can you do with someone who won’t listen to reason? She slapped my face and ran off. Through a mutual acquaintance I made an appointment to explain the matter to her, with proof from my accounts, but though she gave her word she didn’t appear. It doesn’t speak well for her maturity.”
He had learned later from a friend in the Santo Spirito quarter that she was at the moment living with the signore. Ludovico apologized for disturbing him, but F must understand he had come out of urgent necessity.
“Per piacere, signore, I request your good will. A great deal is at stake for four people. She can continue to serve you from time to time if that’s what she wants; but I hear from your landlord that you’re not exactly prosperous, and on the other hand she has to support herself and a starving father in Fiesole. I don’t suppose she’s told you about him but if it weren’t for me personally, he’d be lying in a common grave this minute growing flowers on his chest. She must come back to work under my guidance and protection not only because it’s mutually beneficial but because it’s a matter of communal responsibility; not only hers for me now that I’ve had a most serious operation, or both of us for her starving father, but also in reference to my aged mother, a woman of eighty-three who is seriously in need of proper nursing care. I understand you’re an American, signore. That’s one thing but Italy is a poor country. Here each of us is responsible for the welfare of four or
five others or we all go under.”
He spoke calmly, philosophically, occasionally breathlessly, as if his recent operation now and then caught up with him. And his intense small eyes wandered in different directions as he talked, as though he suspected Esmeralda might be hiding.
F, after his first indignation, listened with interest although disappointed the man had not turned out to be a wealthy picture buyer.
“She’s had it with whoring,” he said.
“Signore,” Ludovico answered with emotion, “it’s important to understand. The girl owes me much. She was seventeen when I came across her, a peasant girl living a wretched existence. I’ll spare you the details because they’d turn your stomach. She had chosen this profession, the most difficult of all as we both know, but lacked the ability to handle herself. I met her by accident and offered to help her although this sort of thing wasn’t in my regular line of work. To make the story short, I devoted many hours to her education and found her a better clientele—to give you an example, recently one of her newest customers, a rich cripple she sees every week, offered to marry her, but I advised against it because he’s a contadino. I also took measures to protect her health and well-being. I advised her to go for periodic medical examinations, scared off badly behaved customers with a toy pistol, and tried in every way to reduce indignities and hazards. Believe me, I am a protective person and gave her my sincere affection. I treat her as if she were my own daughter. She isn’t by chance in the next room? Why doesn’t she come out and talk frankly?”
He pointed with his cane at the alcove curtain.
“That’s the kitchen,” said F. “She’s at the market.”
The Complete Stories Page 47