The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  “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 anymore?”

  “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 × 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.”

  LUD: But where is your originality? Why are you so concerned with subject matter?

  F: I reject originality.

  LUD: What’s that? Please explain yourself.

  F: Maybe I’m not ready, not just yet.

  LUD: Mother of God! How old are you?

  F: About forty. A little more.

  LUD: But why are you so cautious and conservative? I’m fifty-two and have the mind of a youth. Tell me, what’s your opinion of pop art? Think before you speak.

  F: If it stays away from me, I’ll stay away from it.

  LUD: (garbled)

  F: What did you say?

  LUD: Please attend to the question at hand. I wish you would explain to me clearly why you paint.

  F: With my paintings I try to stop the flow of time.

  LUD: That’s a ridiculous statement, but go on anyway.

  F: I’ve said it.

  LUD: Say it more comprehensibly. The public will read this.

  F : Well, art is my means for understanding life and trying out certain assumptions I have. I make art, it makes me.

  LUD: We have a proverb: “The bray of an ass can’t be heard in heaven.”

  F: Frankly, I don’t care for some of your remarks.

  LUD: Are you saying the canvas is the alter ego of the artist’s miserable self?

  F: That’s not what I said and I don’t like what you’re saying.

  LUD: I’ll try to be more respectful. Maestro, once you spoke to me of your art as moral. What did you mean by that?

  F: It’s just a thought I had, I guess. I suppose I mean that maybe a painting sort of gives value to a human being as he responds to it. You might say it enlarges his consciousness. If he feels beauty it makes him more than he was; it adds, you might say, to his humanity.

  LUD : What do you mean “responds”? A man responds in rape, doesn’t he? Doesn’t that enlarge the consciousness, as you put it?

  F: It’s a different response. Rape isn’t art.

  LUD: An emotion is an emotion, no matter how it arises. In itself it is not moral or immoral. Suppose someone responds to the sunset on the Arno? Is that better or more moral than the response to the smell of a drowned corpse? What about bad art? Suppose the response is with more feeling than to a great painting—does that prove bad art is moral, as you call it?

  F: I guess not. All right, maybe the painting itself doesn’t have it, but putting it another way, maybe the artist does; that is he does when he’s painting—creating form, order. Order protects us all, doesn’t it?

  LUD: Yes, the way a prison does. Remember, some of the biggest pricks, if you will excuse the use of this word, have been great painters. Does that necessarily ma
ke them moral men? Of course not. What if a painter kills his father and then paints a beautiful Ascension?

  F: Maybe I’m not putting it exactly right. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I feel most moral when I’m painting, like being engaged with truth.

  LUD: So now it’s what you feel. I speak with respect, maestro, but you do nothing but assault me with garbage.

  F: Look, Ludovico, I don’t understand, if you don’t mind my saying so, why you brought this machine up here if all you want to do is insult me. Now take it away, it’s using up work-time.

  LUD: I am not a servant, maestro. I may have been forced into menial work through circumstance, but Ludovico Belvedere has kept his dignity. Don’t think that because you are an American you can go on trampling on the rights of Europeans. You have caused me unnecessary personal discomfort and sorrow by interfering in a business relationship between this unfortunate girl and myself, and the lives of four people have been seriously affected. You don’t seem to realize the harm you are doing—

  END OF INTERVIEW

  F had assaulted the tape recorder.

  Each morning he awoke earlier to paint, waiting for dawn though the light from the streaked sky was, of course, impossible. He had lately been capable of very little patience with the necessities of daily life: to wash, dress, eat, even go to the toilet; and the matter became most inconvenient when his nervous impatience seeped into painting itself. It was a burdensome business to take the canvas out of its hiding place behind the armadio and arrange it on the easel, select and mix his paints, tack up the old snapshot (most unbearable), and begin work. He could have covered the canvas on the easel at night and left the snapshot tacked on permanently, but was obsessed to remove it each time after he put the paints away, soaked his brushes in turpentine, cleaned up. Formerly, just picking up a brush and standing in thought, or reverie, or sometimes blankly, before painting would ease interior constrictions to the point where he could relax sufficiently to enjoy the work; and once he had painted for an hour, which sometimes came to no more than a stroke or two, he felt well enough to permit himself to eat half a roll and swallow an espresso Esmeralda had prepared, and afterwards go with lit butt and magazine to the gabinetto. But now there were days he stood in terror before “Mother and Son” and shivered with every stroke he put down.

  He painted out of anguish, a dark color. The canvas remained much the same, the boy as he had been, the fickle mother’s face daily changing; daily he scraped it off as Esmeralda moaned in the kitchen; she knew the sound of palette knife on canvas. It was then it occurred to F to use the girl as a model for his mother. Though she was only eighteen, it might help to have a living model for Momma as a young woman though she was touching middle age when Bessie took the photo, and was of course another sort of person; still, such were the paradoxes of art. Esmeralda agreed and stripped herself to the skin, but the painter sternly ordered her to dress; it was her face he was painting. She did as he demanded and patiently posed, sweetly, absently, uncomplaining, for hours, as he, fighting against his need for privacy in the creative act, tried anew to invent the mother’s face. I’ve done all I can with imagination, I mean on top of the snapshot. And though at the end of the day he scraped her face off as the model wept, F urged her to be calm because he now had a brand-new idea: to paint himself not with Momma anymore but Bessie instead, “Brother and Sister.” Esmeralda’s face lit up because “then you’ll stop using the snapshot.” But F replied, “Not exactly,” he still needed it to get the true relationship of them “in space as well as psychology.”

  As they were into the spaghetti at supper, the girl wanted to know if all artists had it so hard.

  “How hard?”

  “So that it takes them years to paint a picture?”

  “Some do and some don’t. What’s on your mind?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.

  He slammed down his fork. “Are you doubting my talent, you whore?”

  She got up and went into the gabinetto.

  F lay on his bed, his face engulfed in a pillowful of black thoughts.

  After a while Esmeralda came out and kissed his ear.

  “I forgive you, tesoro, I want you to succeed.”

  “I will,” he cried, springing up from the bed.

  The next day he rigged up a young boy’s costume—blouse and knee pants, and painted in it to get to the heart of bygone days, but that didn’t work either so he went back to putting Esmeralda into the painting and scraping her face off each night.

  To live, to paint, to live to paint he had to continue carving Madonnas; being impatient he made them more reluctantly. When Esmeralda pointed out they had some sauce but no spaghetti, in three days he hurried out a statuette then hurried it over to Panenero’s shop. The woodworker unfortunately couldn’t use it. “My apprentices”—he shrugged—“are turning them out by the barrelful. Frankly, they model each stroke on yours and work fast. Eh, that’s what happens to craft in these times. So the stuff piles up and the tourists won’t be here till spring. It’s a long time till the hackensacks and lederhosen come over the Alps, maestro. Still, because it’s you and I admire your skill, I’ll offer you two thousand lire, take it or leave it. This is my busy day.”

  F left without a word, in afterthought wondering whose yellow gloves he had seen lying on the counter. On his way along the riverbank he flung the Madonna into the Arno. She struck the green water with a golden splash, sank, then rose to the surface and, turning on her back, floated downstream, eyes to the blue sky.

  He later carved two more Madonnas, finely wrought pieces, and peddled them himself to shops on the Via Tornabuoni and della Vigna Nuova. No luck. The shelves were crammed full of religious figures, though one of the merchants offered him six thousand lire for a Marilyn Monroe, nude if possible.

  “I have no skill for that sort of thing.”

  “What about John the Baptist in shaggy skins?”

  “What about him?”

  “I offer five thousand.”

  “I find him an uninteresting figure.”

  Esmeralda then tried selling the statuettes. F wouldn’t let her offer them to Panenero, so the girl, holding a Holy Mother in each arm, stood in the Piazza del Duomo and finally sold one to a huge German priest for twelve hundred; and the other she gave to a widow in weeds at Santa Maria Novella for eight hundred lire. F, when he heard, ground his teeth and, though she pleaded with him to be reasonable, swore he would carve no more.

  He worked at odd jobs, one in a laundry, that tired him so he couldn’t paint at night. One morning he tried chalking blue-robed Madonnas with Child, after Raphael, on the sidewalks before the Baptistery, Santa Chiara, the Stazione Centrale, where he was almost arrested. Passersby stopped to watch him work but moved on quickly when he passed the hat. A few tossed small coins upon the image of the Holy Mother and F collected them and went to the next spot. A brown-robed monk in sandals followed him.

  “Why don’t you look for productive work?”

  “Advice is cheap.”

  “So is your art.”

  He went to the Cappella Brancacci and sat the rest of the day staring in the half dark at the Masaccio frescoes. Geniuses made masterworks. If you weren’t greatly gifted the way was hard, a masterwork was a miracle. Still, somehow or other art abounded in miracles.

  He borrowed a fishing pole from an artist neighbor and fished, amid a line of men with bent rods, off the Ponte Trinità. F tied the rod to a nail on the railing and paced back and forth, returning every few minutes to check his line as the float bobbed in the Arno. He caught nothing, but the old fisherman next to him, who had pulled in eight fish, gave him a one-eyed crippled eel. It was a cloudy November day, then rainy, patches of damp appearing on the studio ceiling. The cornucopia leaked. The house was cold, Fabio wouldn’t turn on the heat till December. It was hard to get warm. But Esmeralda made a tasty crippled-eel soup. The next night she cooked a handful of borrowed polenta that popped in the pot as it boi
led. For lunch the following day there was stale bread and half an onion apiece. But for Sunday supper she served boiled meat, green beans, and a salad of beet leaves. He suspiciously asked how come, and she admitted she had borrowed a few hundred lire from Ludovico.

  “How are we supposed to pay him back?”

  “We won’t, he owes me plenty.”

  “Don’t borrow from him anymore.”

  “I’m not afraid of him, he’s afraid of me.”

  “I don’t like him coming around. I’m at my most dishonest among dishonest men.”

  “Don’t trust him, Arturo,” she said, frightened. “He’d knife you if he could.”

  “He won’t get the chance.”

  Afterwards she asked, “Why don’t you carve a Madonna or two? Two thousand lire now and then is nothing to spit at. Besides you do beautiful work in wood.”

  “Not for the price, it’s not worth my time.”

  The landlord, wearing a woman’s black shawl, entered without knocking, shouting for his rent.

  “I’ll get the municipality to throw you both out, the puttana and you. You’re fouling up this house with your illicit activities. Your friend told me what goes on here. I have all the necessary information.”

  “You know where you can stick it,” said F. “If we weren’t here the flat would go to ruin. It was empty six years before I moved in, you’ll never rent it if I move out.”

  “You’re no Florentine,” Fabio shouted. “You’re not even an Italian.”

  F got himself a badly paid job as journeyman in a woodworking establishment, not Panenero’s. He worked long hours turning out delicate tapered legs for antique tables and did no painting. In the street, going back and forth from work, he looked for coins people might have dropped. He switched off the light after Esmeralda had washed the supper dishes, watched carefully what she cooked, and ate, and doled out shopping money sparsely. Once she sold six inches of her hair to a man with a sack who had knocked on the door, so she could buy herself some warm underwear.