The Art Lover

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “The other truck? We’re not waiting for it?”

  Cosimo gripped the shuddering steering wheel, pushing the truck to its maximum speed.

  Enzo dug a finger into his watering eye, still smiling. “We cannot. The other truck—inaffidabile.”

  Seeing my confusion, he brought his fingers together and bumped the tips gently against his lips, trying to kiss the word that was eluding him. “Sospetto.”

  “Suspekt?”

  “Yes, it’s no good. Keller say to leave the other truck behind, in case they have friends who like this cargo.”

  “Like it? Want to steal it, do you mean?”

  “Yes, maybe.”

  “You mean, the same policemen who were helping us?”

  “No, no. But they turn their backs, they give information. You notice they want very much to stop in this place, even though we are just leaving the city. Let me tell you, some things that happen . . .”

  And Enzo proceeded to describe another incident a month earlier when a cargo of newly liquidated seventeenth-century paintings had gone missing from the back of a police truck like the one following us. The truck had stopped for a midday break. The driver and one partner had stepped into a small restaurant. A third man had stayed in the cab but conveniently fell asleep in the drowsy afternoon sun.

  “In any case,” Cosimo spoke up, eyes flickering to the side-view mirror, “we will not stop. We will go until we lose them.”

  “But how will you do that?”

  “It’s not as exciting or difficult as you think,” Cosimo explained. “We only take a smaller alternate route.”

  Enzo saw the turnoff to this lesser road ahead, and pointed with gusto.

  “Certo?”

  “Sì, certo.”

  Cosimo seemed less sure, but he took the turnoff without decelerating, pushing me hard into Enzo’s shoulder.

  I asked, “But don’t you need more benzina, too?”

  “In the back, we have containers. Out of the cities it is not always easy to find.”

  “But this alternate road, it must not go too far out of the way because we have very limited time. And it must not be too bumpy, do you understand? We can’t have the statue rattling and jostling the entire way.”

  “Ja, ja, ” Enzo agreed, unconcerned. “All roads have bumps. And the train, it rattles as well.” He tried to be reassuring. “Don’t worry. This is Mister Keller’s plan. Anyway, you have two good men traveling with you. They say you need us because my brother and I speak your language. But there is more. They ask us because we are from the North. We have different friends and responsibilities. Things in Rome are”—he paused—“very complicated.”

  “Complicated. That’s a pretty word for corruption.”

  Enzo misunderstood or misheard and thought I was praising the landscape out the window, which, to be honest, I had not bothered to evaluate. “Pretty? Yes very pretty. This is a good drive for you, much better than the train. We show you our Italy, where Cosimo and I grow up. It is much better than Rome.”

  I kept my eyes fixed on the road, watching for the simple stone kilometer markers shaped like little gravestones, which proved we were putting distance between ourselves, the second truck, and all of Rome.

  But Enzo suggested I was noticing the wrong things. He gestured toward scenic highlights—fields spread across rolling hills, a small church topping a rise. He had no facts to share, no history or architectural insights. He simply pointed and said, “There, look. There she is.”

  He said the same thing an hour or so later, when he pulled a creased photo from his pocket and showed it to me: a dark-haired girl, young and pretty, her lips—painted scarlet in real life—nearly black in the photograph. To be honest, she looked a little plump.

  “There.”

  “Yes. I see.”

  “Yes? There. Bella.”

  “That is her name?”

  “No—Bella. Schön.” Beautiful.

  Yes, well, to each his own.

  Cosimo interjected without taking his eyes from the road: “Farfalla. That is her name. Not Bella, not Schön. She is called Farfalla.”

  He loosened his grip on the wheel for a moment to flutter two fingers, for my benefit. Ah yes, Butterfly.

  “When you care for someone,” Cosimo scolded his brother, “you say her name. You see who she is—a real person. Not just ‘my girl’; not just ‘pretty girl.’”

  Enzo mocked Cosimo’s rebuke, linking his hands and fluttering crazily. “Of course, Farfalla. You want me to say it again, to our guest? You want me to say it again for you to hear because you don’t hear it enough? Farfalla. Farfalla.”

  Then he dropped his hands just as quickly, sighing, and smiled, his gaze occupied by the view out the window. “When I see the fields like this, in the country, I think of her.”

  Ahead of us, a thin carpet of greening crops struggled to break through a dry crust of mustard-colored soil, dotted with troublesome rocks. Higher on a slope, silver-leafed olive trees grew in five or six stubby rows, blocked at the boundary of a neighboring field, this one planted with grape vines, more woody than lush. The patchwork had a haphazard quality in this corrugated landscape and many steep gullies were completely wild, clotted with scrubby growth.

  “It is beautiful, yes?” Enzo persisted.

  We saw all too easily into the backyards of tiny farmhouses, with their lines of laundry, free-roaming goats, and kitchen gardens, scraggly with tomato plants. These were not the noble villas of antiquity. Parallel to the route we traveled, chalky white tracks switchbacked in a half-dozen directions. I had thought the farms would be larger. I had thought Romans built only straight roads. But maybe that was because we were off the main route, heading away from imperial roads toward obscure valleys known only by contadini and their donkeys.

  I gestured toward the accordioned map at Enzo’s feet. He reached forward, then sat up straight again. “More easy when we stop, I think.”

  “But,” I persisted, nudging the poorly folded map with my right foot, “please, if I could just see it.”

  Enzo made a halfhearted effort to lean forward, then sat back, shrugging. I reached again, doubled over, stretching myself across his lap, fingers splayed.

  “Please—”

  He studied me one more time, and then finally, seeing I was not going to give up, reached forward with good-natured enthusiasm, as if looking at the map had been his idea, after all, rather than my own. He wore a bemused smile, enjoying himself as he tested my irritation. With his golden locks and smooth, tanned skin and biceps, which challenged the fit of his dress shirt, I imagined that he got what he wanted most of the time and managed to quietly obstruct plans that were not to his liking.

  When I had the map in my hands, I inhaled deeply, trying to center myself. “Where are we, exactly?”

  “Outside Rome.”

  I made a guess, pointing at one junction where a thinner line veered away from the darker route.

  “Yes, probably there.” He turned to the window, bored, his energies sapped: first by hunger, and now by a bittersweet heartache of some kind.

  “Would you say we have gone a hundred kilometers by now?”

  Cosimo granted me a half nod.

  “Certainly more than sixty?”

  “Ja.”

  I looked past the driving wheel, searching in vain for an odometer or speedometer, and located only a moving needle under a scratched dome of glass, jumping wildly, as if recording earthquakes instead of motor speed.

  “We will call it eighty,” I said firmly.

  I reached for the unfinished postcard in my pocket and marked several lines along its edge using the map’s key, turning it into a rough ruler. With a pencil, I made a light tick on the map.

  “You don’t mind if I mark up your map, Enzo?”

  “Va bene.”

  And why should he have minded when there were marks all over this map already? No doubt, some of these notations had been made earlier that morning while I was
strolling the streets of Rome, eating a pastry and losing my favorite bookmark to a scheming toddler. Herr Keller—for I still assumed that he was a trusted contact, even if the policemen in the truck were suspect—stood around that conference table with Minister Ciano for a good hour, discussing how best to move the statue safely across Italy, and if I didn’t know where each road led, it was because I had not been present for the discussion.

  With every tick mark, I attempted to erase the sting of that failed meeting. Every hour, I would make a mark on that map again, estimating perhaps on the conservative side of kilometers covered, but there was no way to be perfectly accurate. One had to do something, after all. If one was demoted from curator to mere courier, then one had to be the best courier possible.

  With every tick mark, I felt more certain that my superiors had chosen well by assigning me to this task—someone scrupulous, with no personal agenda, apolitical, rule-abiding; more than a mere courier, really, because who else understood the value of the cargo we carried? At the ’36 Olympics, our nation had instituted the tradition of carrying a torch from Greece to the Berlin Games, in memory of the Olympics’ classical origins. The value of each torchbearer became clear to anyone who saw the final runner pass. A statue is more than a statue; a flame is more than a flame. To think any less, I told myself then, seeking a strength from the symbols around me that I could not locate in my own life or feel from within my own imperfect body, is to reject civilization.

  It was late afternoon when Cosimo’s eyes began to look glazed. I tapped on his shoulder. “Do you think you need a break? Perhaps the drivers should change every hour.”

  “I am the only one that drives the truck.”

  “But your brother knows how to drive a scooter.”

  “It’s not the same. He is a very good mechanic, but . . .”

  Enzo twisted to face me, tapping me on the knee to gain my full attention, grateful at last for some trivial conversation. “This is how I meet Mister Keller. He has a touring car, Alfa Romeo, you know this?”

  “Alfa Romeo,” I said, to stop the tapping. “Yes.”

  “1930 Zagato Spider. Very red, very nice. When he visits Bologna last year, I come to see him, and I fix it. This visit, in Rome, I help him look at another car, more expensive.”

  “He likes expensive cars, does he? I wonder how it is he can afford them.”

  To the east, a low range of purple mountains faded into the distance as we curved west, climbing past more fields and dusty silver trees and the occasional rustic village with a bell tower. There was a disturbing lack of signs, but I supposed that many of these hamlets were too small to merit inclusion on a national road map.

  “Well, it is same as art,” Enzo insisted, unfazed by my lack of engagement. “You want something, you find a way to pay. Your government pays a lot for this statue. They pay more than he pays for his new car.”

  “Collecting art is not like collecting cars, Enzo.”

  “Very special, very expensive—no matter, statue or good car. Someone has good taste; he knows what he likes.”

  “Fine art is one of a kind.”

  “Yes? But your statue is a copy.”

  “It’s an ancient Roman copy. That makes it very different from a modern copy. It’s irreplaceable.”

  Enzo asked Cosimo to translate something, but Cosimo was ignoring us, his eyelids heavy, the steering wheel tugging gently left and right between his loose fingers.

  “So you are saying it is so special,” Enzo tried again. “So special that maybe Italy should not give it away.”

  “Your government sold it. It was not given away.”

  “But Italy should not sell it.”

  “Past tense. Sold. Finished deal.”

  “So Italy should not sold it, you are saying.”

  “Obviously I’m not saying that.”

  But we had not been talking about art or automobiles; we had been talking at first about the tired driver, and whether it made sense for someone else to help with the driving. It couldn’t be me. Except for one weekend of driving lessons, which only convinced me of the great value of public transportation, I didn’t know how to handle a motorized vehicle. “Your brother might need a break, I think, if you could take over for a short while.”

  “He is a good mechanic, my brother—good enough for extra pay,” Cosimo commented placidly. “But my brother doesn’t know how to drive. It’s better. This way, we have different specialties, and we each have a job.”

  “Well, that’s fine as long as we make unhampered progress. Florence by tonight, for example? That isn’t too much to expect?”

  Enzo considered, frowning. “Florence maybe tomorrow. Earliest, morning.”

  “But I should think that Florence is one-third of the way. Isn’t that true?”

  Enzo began to nod, slowly at first, then with greater enthusiasm. He had found it in his heart to forgive me for previous disagreements, at least for the moment. “Florence is a magnificent city. You are there a while, on the way to Rome?”

  “No. I traveled directly.”

  “But you are a student of the history of art? Florence has more art than any place in the world!”

  “I did not have time.”

  “And you will be passing close by it again—and to not visit? To not see the art?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He tugged at a loopy curl over his ear, fatigued by my contradictions. “It does not matter?”

  “I did not prepare for Florence.”

  “You cannot prepare.”

  “Yes. One can.”

  “No,” he said, as if I simply hadn’t heard him. “For beauty, you cannot prepare.”

  “You read, you study, you determine in advance—”

  “No, no,” he objected, smiling.

  “—you determine what you will see,” I said, finishing my thought, “and you prepare to understand and appreciate it.”

  He shrugged. “So you do this next time. Soon. When you are in Italy again.”

  “I don’t enjoy traveling.”

  He tallied on his fingers the famous enchantments of Florence: “You have the Ponte Vecchio. You have the Botticelli, the da Vinci. You have, of course, the David. Your Discus Thrower is not even as tall as me. But the David, he is twice as tall.”

  “It is three times as tall,” I corrected him. “It is just over five meters. It was started by Agostino di Duccio and the commission was taken over by Antonio Rossellino—”

  “No, friend, it is by Michel—”

  “—before the commission was given to the young Michelangelo, then twenty-six years old.” Just two years older than me, and already immortal. Not to suggest I had any lofty aims for myself, only that I recognized youth was a relative concept, and no excuse for anything.

  “That is very good,” Enzo said, smiling at my recitation. “Very good.”

  “That is nothing. I am unschooled in the finer points of Renaissance sculpture. These facts I have told you are just facts, as a tourist would memorize them from a guidebook. And anyway, more to the point”—I was speaking too quickly, causing Enzo to wrinkle his brow and lean toward me in an extra effort to catch and translate every word—“the point you are making about the David’s greater height is no point at all. We don’t judge art by its size. We are not selecting modern furniture.”

  Even confused, he still managed to look at peace. Grinning, he said, “But to go to Florence and actually see. This is different from facts.” Eyebrows lifted, he affected the high-pitched tone of an adult trying to pique a child’s interest. “It is tempting.”

  “It is not.”

  And this made me feel better as well. Perhaps this was why I was chosen—not because there was no other choice, but because I was the kind of person who preferred to be home, who could not be lured by the exoticism of distant borders, the distraction of foreign offerings. I was not even inflamed by passion for art outside my classical specialty—and good thing, or I never could have crossed
such a treasure-filled country on a deadline.

  In the beginning, our Sonderprojekt department had been staffed by twice as many men as women, even in the clerical positions. But almost as soon as I’d joined, following certain new arrivals and departures, the balance had reversed. It occurred to me only now that Gerhard’s had not been the first unexplained change. There had been other quiet demotions and outright removals, less apparent to me then because I’d been so new, less worthy of reflection of any kind in Munich, with its day-to-day concerns and distractions—whereas here there was only the sound and rhythm of the wheels on the road, and more time—perhaps too much time—to think.

  As it turned out, one could have too much knowledge and experience in the arts to be the best match for certain kinds of employment. Someone older than me, who had worked in the field longer and under a different zeitgeist, would have developed many ideas and tolerances that were no longer acceptable. When I first started working in our office there had been several modern art curators among us, but invariably, their tastes became problematic. Perhaps they defended an artist, living or dead, or had certain ideas about embracing new possibilities, or weren’t sympathetic to the anti-modern “degenerate” exhibitions supported by the government.

  None of that involved me, not because of my own political or personal views, but only because I knew so little about modern art, had never written any papers, made any statements, or even attended many gallery openings of note. I had not been strategically avoiding controversy. I was simply not part of that intellectual sphere, due to my own inadequate schooling and my late discovery—one of those doors that opens after another closes—of art itself. My ignorance, in a sense, had made me safe, even while my lack of broader knowledge pained me. But this wasn’t the time to be a Renaissance man. This was the time for the deep, clean, and relatively painless cut of narrow knowledge.

  At this moment, I reminded myself, lest my own thoughts circle too endlessly, the statue was my only priority, followed by the job awaiting me back in Munich. Surely, regardless of Herr Keller’s intimations, the job still awaited. If I had erred during the first hours of my assignment, injuring my reputation in some way, then surely that error could be overcome. I had done nothing wrong, at any time in my young career or at any point in my young adult life. But if doing nothing was some kind of magic armor, why did I feel so exposed and out of sorts?