The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  Also by Tom Rachman

  The Imperfectionists

  The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

  Copyright © 2018 Tom Rachman Limited

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  First published in Great Britain by riverrun, an imprint of Quercus Publishing

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Rachman, Tom, author

  The Italian teacher / Tom Rachman.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780385689601 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780385689618 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8635.A333I83 2018 C813’.6 C2017-904912-7

  C2017-904913-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design : Jaya Miceli

  Cover images: (paint) photominus; (canvas) Miroslav Boskov, both Getty Images

  Book design: Amy Hill

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Version_1

  For Alessandra

  Contents

  Also by Tom Rachman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Childhood Rome, 1955

  1961

  1965

  Youth Toronto, 1971

  1975

  London

  Toronto

  Evenlode, Pennsylvania, 1976

  Adulthood London, 1981

  1985

  1990

  1996

  1998

  Old Age 2002

  2007

  2010

  Portrait of an Artist 2011

  London, 2018

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Childhood

  OIL ON CANVAS

  68 X 160 INCHES

  Courtesy of the Bavinsky Estate

  Rome, 1955

  1

  Seated in a copper bathtub, Bear Bavinsky dunks his head under steaming water and shakes out his beard, flinging droplets across the art studio. He thumbs a bolt of shag into his pipe and flicks a brass Zippo lighter, sucking hard to draw down the flame, tobacco glowing devil-red, smoke coiling toward the wood-beam ceiling. He exhales and stands. Beads of water rain off his torso.

  His five-year-old son, Pinch, hoists a thick bath towel, arms trembling under the weight. Bear runs his fingers through receding reddish-blond hair and—hand on the boy’s head for balance—steps onto newspapers previously used for wiping paintbrushes. His wet footprints bleed across the print, encircling dabs of oily blue and swipes of yellow.

  “That’s final!” Natalie declares from across the studio, chewing her fingernail.

  “Final, is it? You certain?” Bear asks his wife. “Not the slightest doubt?”

  “All I’ve got is doubts.”

  He proceeds to the iron front door and shoulders it open, dusky light from the alleyway pushing past him, glinting off glass pigment jars, illuminating abused paintbrushes in turpentine and canvases drying along the bare-brick walls. In the early-evening air, he stands in place, a fortyish male animal, naked but for the towel twisted around his neck, his shadow narrowing up the studio, hurdling the tub, darkening his wife and their little boy. “Absolutely positive then?”

  Natalie yanks a strand of black hair over her eyes, wraps it around her baby finger, whose tip reddens. She darts into the WC at the back of the studio and closes the warped door, her head bumping the bare bulb, which alternates glare and gloom as she consults the mirror: emerald ball gown cinched at the waist, box-pleated skirt, polka-dot overlay. It’s as if she were wearing three outfits at once, none of them hers. She tucks her hair under a cream beret but it hardly helps, the same gawky twenty-six-year-old looking back, all elbows and knees, a manly jaw, deep-set black eyes, as uncertain as if drawn with smudged charcoal, the worry lines added in fine-nib pen.

  She joins Bear, who remains naked in the doorway, a puff of smoke released from his pipe. “I’m not even acceptable,” she tells him, and he rests a rough palm against the swell of her bosom, firmly enough to quicken her pulse. He strides to his leather suitcase and plucks out neckties, one for himself, one for their son. Bear raises the louder tie, holding it up as if considering a mackerel. He sends Pinch to fetch the canvas shears, with which he snips one of the ties in half, twirling it around the boy’s neck. “What do you say, kiddo?” Bear grins, the beard rising to his eyes, which disappear into slits. “Natty, I love the hell out of you. And I listen the hell out of you. But damn it, sweetie, we are going.”

  She clutches one hand in the other. “Well then, hurry!” she responds, quickstepping past her husband, nearly stumbling as she crouches to knot their son’s tie. Natalie touches Pinch’s forehead, her hand throbbing against his brow, jittery fingers like a secret message: “We waited all this time, Pinchy, and now he’s here!”

  Bear, who moved in only weeks earlier, approaches his son, mussing the boy’s fine sandy hair (quite like Dad’s), playfully flicking the kid’s nervous chin (like his mother’s), while Pinch’s blue eyes (with an urgency all their own) gaze up, awaiting his father’s command.

  2

  High above the cobbled streets between Trastevere and the Vatican, a cloud of starlings swings back and forth like a black pendulum across the sky. The three Bavinskys are speed-walking from the studio toward the center of Rome, with Natalie clasping Bear’s arm and pulling Pinch to her other flank. She raises her husband’s sleeve to read his scratched wristwatch.

  “Don’t fret, Natty,” he tells her. “Nothing but friends tonight.”

  “Yes, your friends.”

  When she was living here with Pinch alone, Natalie heard from nobody. Then Bear moved to Rome and the invitations gushed in. He avoids soirees but agreed for her sake—there’ll be fellow artists, and she needs to circulate, to find collaborators for her own work. This is her night, promised and planned, minutes away. “They’ll be busting to meet you,” he insists.

  Natalie has spent six years in Rome—an astonishing stretch given that there were days she scarcely endured, crumpling from isolation, especially after giving birth alone, a disastrous delivery that ruined her insides, meaning Pinch will be her only child. From the start, she clung to him, yet was clueless about child-rearing, rescued by Italian neighbors around whom she played the free-spirited Canadian lass, awaiting her famed American painter husband (even if she and Bear weren’t technically married at the start). He turned up each summer, painting compulsively, Natalie sitting for him in the sweltering heat, their son dozing by the wall. At summer’s end, she would pack his suitcase, bereft at the sight of Bear dragging himself back to New York again, where three daughters and a spouse wouldn’t let go. All that is done now. He pledged to move here for good, and proved true to his word.

&n
bsp; As they hurry over Ponte Mazzini, Bear leans over, smushing their boy between, and kisses his young wife flush on the mouth, smearing her lipstick. “Listen to me, rhubarb: I love you, and they will too.” As long as his gaze holds, she believes it.

  They arrive at a palazzo overlooking the weary green Tiber, and Bear thumps on its vast door with both fists, a syncopated jazz beat. The footman bursts forth, hurrying them in—late! late!—conveying the Bavinskys past a drizzling Renaissance fountain, up a marble staircase lined with ancient Roman statuary, into a ballroom of soaring ceilings frescoed with Mars and Venus in various stages of marital discord. At twin grand pianos, maestros in tailcoats tinkle Debussy while scores of revelers chortle and slurp from champagne coupes, their cigarettes leaking gray ribbons before rococo murals and avant-garde artworks by Guttuso, De Chirico, Burri.

  In attendance are sculptors, writers, and composers; Anglo women who married Italian nobility (gals from Wisconsin once, now princess-something); plus all the expat businessmen: the Procter & Gamble guy, the Aramco fella, the Coca-Cola man, alongside wives who, when their dearly beloved cracks a joke, either tilt forward uproariously or just sip a drink. “Well, he sure has your number, Joan!”

  Natalie can pick out the artists from their outfits—baggy suits, scuffed shoes—while the socialites wear shiny silk numbers, yanking up long gloves and yanking along portly menfolk in three-pieces, gold watch-chains swinging. The groups can also be distinguished by topic of conversation: The moneyed all speak of art, the artists all speak of money.

  “Wait just a second,” the middle-aged party hostess says. Squinting into pince-nez as if through peepholes, she sashays over, waving a clutch purse designed like a pink lobster and holding down a hat shaped like a high-heeled shoe. Mishmish Shapiro is an art collector of Californian provenance who, years before, escaped a bout of ennui by hurling herself into the beauty of Rome, landing in the arms of Count Ugobaldo, a shabby aristocrat who paints surrealist landscapes and cries. If she has an ulterior motive (and Mishmish always keeps a few handy) for having pressed Bear to attend, it’s to convince him to sell. She owns a couple of early Bavinskys, but he disavows those as juvenilia. His new paintings are the prize—they are truly something else, it’s said, and diabolically hard to lay one’s hands on.

  “I was scared half to death that your mob wouldn’t make it,” Mishmish says cheerily, clasping Bear’s hand and touching Pinch on the head. “Oh, what an adorable scamp! You found him in some dark vicolo, did you?” She nods to a butler, who has been hovering, to add this ankle biter to those already stashed in a distant nursery. Once the boy is dispatched, Mishmish appraises the big-boned young wife of Bear, from her shoe straps to her beret. “Well, you sure are a tall drink of water,” Mishmish concludes. “Speaking of, who’s thirsty?”

  “Oh, I would love a drink,” Natalie answers.

  “Patience,” Mishmish replies acidly. “You’re not speaking to the barman.”

  A flush rises up Natalie’s chest. She apologizes but is hardly heard: Guests keep noticing the celebrated painter in their midst and push closer, among them an oak of a man, branches aloft. “Well, if it ain’t big old Bear! How in the Sam Hill are you?”

  “Holy smoke! Rod, old man! What brings you to the Holy Roman Empire?”

  Natalie swipes two glasses off a waiter’s tray and hands one to her husband, who clinks distractedly, the crystal ting vibrating till her lips meet the rim. She holds her nose above the liquid, hiding herself in its fizz. As the scrum jostles her, strangers converge around Bear. A wall of backs closes before her.

  3

  Bear reaches through the crowd, dragging Natalie to his side. “My miraculous wife, a serious talent in her own right,” he says. “Tell them, sweetheart.”

  A mass of eyeballs turns to her.

  “Now listen here, Bear,” someone interrupts. “You’ve simply got to explain how . . .”

  Nobody came to meet an unknown lady potter. They’re here for Bear Bavinsky, creator of expressionistic masterworks, wild colors crashing across each composition, a bare throat filling the huge canvas, or a roll of tummy fat, or a pricked shoulder. His detail portraits are too intimate—uncomfortably penetrating despite never once including a subject’s face.

  In 1953, when Life magazine trumpeted Bear Bavinsky as “tomorrow’s action painter, conjoining twentieth-century dynamism with classical forms,” what it meant was, “Here’s an artist who doesn’t drizzle paints, as your kid could.” But what drew most attention was the photo of Bear’s New York studio with, in the foreground, the long leg of a female sitter, presumably undressed. And not just “presumably,” for the snapshot inadvertently included a mirror reflection of the woman’s right breast, the first occasion on which that eminent chronicle of Americana had featured a distaff nipple. Discovering its calamity, Life pulled the issue, turning a modest profile into “that notorious piece,” establishing Bear as the archetype of immoral Greenwich Village artist—precisely the type this expat crowd is itching to meet.

  “What you got brewing, Bear?” asks the saucy wife of a Chicago adman. “How’s about a show for us yokels here in the provinces?”

  “I fear you won’t get far,” Natalie warns her. “My husband never talks about his work.”

  But the crowd’s attention remains stuck on Bear, who makes a nearly identical comment to hers, prompting stern nods all around. “Fact is, I burn most everything,” he continues. “Maybe six canvases a year make the cut. Mishmish, you won’t like this, but I never painted to get on the walls of some palace.”

  Natalie adds, “Bear’s art is intended for the public—for museums, for places where regular people can see them.”

  “Regular people at museums?” Mishmish responds. “If they start turning up at museums, what possible reason would there be to go anymore?”

  Everyone laughs, after which Bear addresses the crowd. “My advice, folks? Don’t waste your time on a dope like me.” A wink, a half smile, a puff of his pipe. Everyone is beaming.

  Natalie knocks back another glass of champagne, bubbles burning her throat. She’s queasy, as if about to tumble. Everyone here is so much older and so sophisticated. On a passing tray she deposits the glass and steps back from everyone, clasping both hands atop her beret, cramming it down as if to stub herself into the marble floor. She watches these people yet sees only herself—big ugly hands, knobbled from making ceramics that nobody cares to see. Actually, the idea of them viewing her work fills Natalie with shame. She stops a passing man for a cigarette. He doles one out and moves on, never offering a match. Her unlit cigarette raised, she casts about, ignored. Cackles of laughter emerge around her husband. He may deplore these events, but he’s so skilled at them. Everybody solicits his views—about art in the Soviet bloc, about Ike’s health, about rival painters. “What I’d like know,” one gent says, “is whether you understand Señor Picasso’s work. I mean truly understand it.”

  Natalie wishes herself erased. Looking to a far wall, she glimpses something, her eyes narrowing. She stoops to see better. Among dangling purses and wobbly knees, Pinch is there, reaching up to a silver bowl, bringing down fistfuls of peanuts, gobbling them from cupped hands. He must’ve escaped the nursery, wanting away from his peers, much as she wants away from hers.

  She moves through islands and eddies of people, and Pinch sees her approaching. His expression brightens, matching hers. Natalie opens her skirt pocket, and he deposits the peanuts for safekeeping. He points to her ear, which she lowers to his height.

  “Mommy, can we go?”

  Out in the courtyard, they sit on the lip of a burbling fountain, Pinch recounting adventures from when lost in this palazzo, that he found an old man asleep in the library, and a staircase in the wall, and a giant marble foot in the basement. She deposits another peanut into his hot palm—the hand closes fast, snaffling it to salty lips. From above, the party echoes, cries of amusemen
t jabbing at her. She drags a strand of hair from under her beret, pulls it, straining the roots, her neck stiffening, jaw clenched against the pain.

  The five-year-old reaches into her dress pocket. She squeezes him around the middle, trying to mimic Bear’s rough cuddles, almost tight enough to crack a rib. “You saved me,” she tells him, nose to Pinch’s ear.

  Confused, the boy pushes back, looking at his snipped tie.

  Rebuffed, Natalie takes out that unlit cigarette, holds it out as if for a waiter—then crushes it, sprinkling tobacco in the fountain, brown threads bobbing on the frothy surface. “Don’t worry,” she tells Pinch. “Your father will get here soon. He’ll save you soon enough.”

  4

  Bear’s studio was once a grain depot at the walls of a sixteenth-century prison, but today is a cave of a workshop, dingy because Bear prefers it that way, seeking extremes of shadow in his paintings. It’s also where they live, Natalie having first posed on the drapery at the back, then moved in, now raising their son here. The only sources of illumination are three scorching metal spotlights that Bear picked up from a props guy at Cinecittà, plus whatever daylight sneaks through the iron door. When it swings open late one Sunday morning in December, Bear stands there, fresh from his favorite bakery near Campo de’ Fiori, which he visited after a late night out.

  “Hello, my reptiles,” he calls to them, lobbing a warm bignè toward his wife and another to the comic-reading Pinch, who fails to catch it, stumbling from bed to chase the bouncing pastry, which skitters down the paint-spattered stone floor. Bear quick-steps over and captures the custard-filled treat in a snatch, slapping it into his son’s hand, then flopping onto the boy’s narrow bed, the crunch of comic pages underneath. Grinning, Pinch stands by, stuffing in bignè, allowing Dad to poke him playfully in the ribs.