The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

Birdie drifts around to their side of the canvas, spilling forward and falling onto the picture, smearing paint everywhere. “Oopsy,” she says.

  Forearms flexed, Bear faces her. Natalie watches, hand over mouth, as Bear drags his daughter by the elbow to the studio door. “What are you doing?” Birdie cries. “What are you doing, Daddy?”

  Still clutching her, he gathers himself. “Bird, you can kick me as much as you like. But not them. Hear me?”

  Birdie struggles to open the iron door, battling the mechanism, finally shoving it wide, blinking at the light. She runs outside, clanging the door shut, her weeping muffled in the alley. Natalie hurries after her. The crying fades as Birdie is led back toward the apartment.

  Bear avoids Pinch’s gaze, mixing pigments. He opens the studio door. There’s only empty cobbles. “You should go back too.”

  “Are you coming?”

  “I don’t figure Bird wants me around too much!”

  As the iron door closes him out, Pinch hesitates by Dad’s oil barrel. After a few minutes, the boy stealthily pushes at the door, opening it just a crack, and peeps into the studio where his father drags out an unfinished painting. Bear stands before it, pulling his thin hair. He reaches for his pipe—then glimpses the spy. “Your father is a lousy sonofabitch,” Bear says, staring at Pinch. “Not because he wants to be. I don’t want to be. Understand me? Do you, kiddo?” He approaches, hand extended. Bear closes the door.

  That night, Pinch and Birdie lie head-to-toe, the only illumination a bar of light under his bedroom door. Pinch shuts one eye, attempting to flatten everything, turning her toes into geometry.

  “We’re like two dogs, supposed to fight it out,” she says.

  “Is that the name of a song, Birdie?”

  “Sometimes, Charlie, I wonder if you’re all there.”

  If Bear doesn’t come home soon, Birdie won’t see him before her early-morning departure. But time runs short: Natalie is already closing up the apartment for the night. Her heels click nearer.

  The hallway light goes out.

  “But we don’t, right?” Birdie whispers to her little brother.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Fight it out,” she says, voice cracking. “Do we, Charlie.” She pushes him. “We won’t.”

  13

  At the end of that summer, Bear departs for work in New York. Pinch finds out only after his father has left. Whenever he inquires into Dad’s return date, Natalie grows irritable. The school year starts and weeks pass. One evening, Pinch notices that his mother no longer wears a wedding ring. He hastens away from her, into the living room, and stands over the record player. She joins him, needing to explain—but he drops the needle, leaning his face into the dusty gramophone trumpet, the noise deafening him.

  Soon thereafter, a representative of Mishmish Shapiro appears at their door, explaining that this apartment, sadly, is no longer available—it was previously offered to support an artist, but that man is no longer in residence. Natalie and Pinch return to living in Bear’s studio. The space seems so different; everything does.

  At school, Pinch boasts of his father’s travels, saying he’s away temporarily, dragged abroad because of grand exhibits—such lies that the boy expects traces of them upon returning home: newspaper clippings or letters from afar. Instead, he pushes open the studio door to the stench of his mother’s cooking; strange soups, peculiar herbs. She crowds him, talking incessantly of pottery, which she has resumed.

  Before, they managed with the one tiny WC here. Now that he is older, Pinch is appalled to hear her pee in the middle of the night. And she seems hardly to sleep. In his cot, he wishes for daylight so he can escape this jail cell. But morning arrives, and he hides under the covers, dreading school.

  Early one Sunday, she plonks herself at the end of the couch, devouring a breakfast apple in her dressing gown, which hangs carelessly open, the gap between her two loose breasts visible, obscured by a black-bead necklace over freckled skin. “Get up, Pinchy!” She has become so obtrusive, mobbing him with cuddles, cavalier about her job search, and turning up with unwanted presents—a cat, for example, which immediately escaped down the alley. When he fails to share her highs, she lashes out, spitting fury for a minute, then prodding him to converse.

  Natalie settles at her potter’s wheel and kicks it to life, wetting her hands in muddy water from the bucket. Shoulders taut, arms rigid, elbows planted in her thighs, she forces the clay to comply, asserting herself over this gray lump, transforming it into a smooth puck, perfectly round, glistening—until she touches a finger to the spinning form and opens it up, raising the walls into a cylinder. His mother is so good at that. It astonishes Pinch, who hasn’t properly watched her working in years. Yet he does not praise Natalie, instead launching into a silly dance to draw her attention, an intrusion he’d never have contemplated when Bear was painting. Her clay cylinder pirouettes on the wheel. She slices a metal wire under its base. “Your turn.” Standing, she points to her wooden seat.

  Instead, he walks away, meandering toward the once-prohibited easels in the far corner. He gazes the length of his arm, then at the fruit bowl—everything evokes paintings now, as if the world existed to represent art, not the reverse.

  “You listening?” she repeats.

  “Not really.”

  “At least look, Pinch. I need an opinion. The show is soon.” Recently, she marched into a tiny gallery off Via del Babuino and asked if they’d consider exhibiting her work. When she gave the last name “Bavinsky,” the gallerist looked up. After years of inactivity, Natalie labors constantly, amazed to see that all her output is outstanding. Impulsively, she decides to show a series of intentionally broken jars, with radical glazes that she’ll wipe by hand onto once-baked clay.

  “I don’t care about stupid pottery!” he snaps, imitating the defiance of Birdie. But Pinch cannot pull it off—penitent, he looks to his mother. “Sorry.” In the alley, he sits on cobbles, pondering the foreign address on a letter he’s been composing for weeks, pages and pages in his head with little written down. He wants to ask about New York, about whether it’s better than here, about whether he’d like it (and could I come see you soon, Dad?).

  A month later, he still hasn’t sent the letter. But life at the studio has changed. Natalie is never at the potter’s wheel, hardly goes out, hardly talks to him.

  “When is your show happening?” he asks.

  “It’s over; it happened.”

  “What?” he snaps, to mask his guilt. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “You were interested? Since when?”

  “I said I wanted to see it,” he lies. “Did people like them?”

  She clears her throat. “I don’t know.”

  “How many sold?”

  “They didn’t.”

  “What? None? It’s that stupid gallery’s fault—they must’ve put the prices too high.”

  “Nobody asked for prices, I’m told. Now I have to go in there and disgrace myself, carrying it all out again.” She covers her face. “They were all so very helpful on the way in; nobody will see me when I go back there. I’ll be an embarrassment.”

  “No, you won’t. They should apologize to you.”

  “Maybe I never pick them up.”

  “You have to, Mom. Or people will hear.”

  “What possible fucking difference would that make?”

  He flushes.

  She says, “I’m not going back. It’s a humiliation.”

  “Could I go and get them?”

  “That’d be even worse: sending my kid.”

  “Could I come help at least?”

  “I’ll seem so pathetic.” Brow furrowed, she lights the umpteenth cigarette, looks to him for a twelve-year-old’s assurance. Fast, she walks away.

  That weekend, Pinch lugs boxes of unsold pottery to a wait
ing taxi, taking utmost care, wishing to treat her work with kindness. His pussyfooting causes Natalie, who waits outside the gallery, to slam the boxes into the back of the cab. “I don’t mind being reminded that I’m second-rate,” she says shakily. “It’s useful. It’s good.” As they pull away, she stares out the taxi window, kneading her stomach, hurting herself. The city passes, Romans streaming by. “Having people looking, staring at my things. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Don’t you do art for people to look at, Mom?”

  “Apparently not. The wife’s show—that’s why the gallery gave it to me. How disappointed they were. Didn’t I have more friends to come by? And where was Bear Bavinsky? They figured your dad would come, and how grand that’d be.”

  “Who cares about those stupid idiots? Anyone that didn’t buy your stuff is dumb!” Pinch blusters. He studies the taut side of her face, believing he’s gaining momentum, that he is helping. His eyes burn—a surge of emotion, remembering how he sniped at Natalie these past months because she was determined to raise his spirits. “Who even walks into that dumb gallery, Mom?”

  She touches his hand once, to silence him.

  “You can’t care what idiots think!” he persists. “Aren’t I right?”

  She turns sharply to him. “I’m right and the world is wrong? No. I am not good. And I should feel sick. Very, very fucking small.”

  “You’re just sad.”

  “I see clearly when I’m sad. The only time anything is clear.” She picks at dry skin on her lower lip, a dot of blood rising, and fumbles in her purse for a cigarette.

  “That’s just how you’re feeling, Mom. It’s not true.”

  “Why not? Why does everyone have the right to tell me what I’m really feeling?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “People always are,” she flames back. “Telling me: ‘You’re only sad. You’re just low. You’re only upset. It’s because you’re hungry. Or tired. Natalie, it’s just in your fucking head.’ What isn’t in your head? What isn’t?” She struggles to light the cigarette, ranting to the window now: “But, yes, yes: Discard any opinions of mine that are sad. Call me deluded.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Deluded because it’s not nice to hear. I’m not here to be nice and pretty and nice and pretty and nice and pretty.”

  “Mom, I didn’t say any of that.” His pulse races, a sickening flutter, for Natalie doesn’t hear him anymore, as if his statements and hers were out of sync by minutes. “I never said that.”

  1965

  14

  After quitting pottery, Natalie takes a full-time secretarial job at Olivetti, and socializes with a group of expats, none in the art world, mostly childless couples, the husbands old, the wives a younger version of old, perhaps with a parrot that’ll outlive them all. It’s a boozy circuit, so Pinch is often alone at night, when he takes to experimenting with Bear’s leftover art supplies. When Natalie returns late, she is often struck by his efforts. “You really are good,” she marvels, turning from the sketches to Pinch, as if he were someone new.

  By age fifteen, he is painting seven days a week. Her potter’s wheel is heaped with paint tubes and spattered rags, as it was during the occupancy of Bear (who has given Natalie his old studio for as long as they care to stay). Outside their home, the warren of alleys is still inhabited by the same push-and-shove Roman working class, housewives, and boisterous kid gangs that don’t consider Pinch, a weedy blondish teen, one of theirs, much as their parents don’t quite get his Canadian mother. Beatnik tourists sometimes wander through their quarter, talking loud English, searching for street signs. Pinch wants to intervene and show that he knows their language—only to dash back inside, taking refuge among his paints.

  Most evenings, he studies The Materials of the Artist by Max Doerner, a book of Dad’s that has become gospel, including revelations on intermediate varnish and underpainting, on the weight of pigments in Cremnitz white, sap green, Prussian blue. He mixes paints at length, deferring that frightful instant of decision. (As Bear once said, “What is art but decisions?”) Pinch hesitates at the brink—then kisses color to canvas, first a peck, bristles probing as he stoops to the easel, which he has not yet raised to his new adolescent height.

  “Should I keep my bad pictures too?”

  “Of course,” Natalie replies, a trifle forcefully, rising from her seat on the couch. “Sorry—I know I promised not to look. But it’s hard.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m excited. You pick up techniques so fast, Pinch,” she says. “So, yes: Keep everything. People will want to know how your style developed.”

  “Oh, come off it, Mom!” he scoffs. “Art historians will be dying to see another painting of our door!”

  “Maybe they’ll be researching the early years of Charles Bavinsky.” She grabs him. “Pinch?”

  Chuckling shyly, he pushes back—then scans her face for reassurance. He is a wary teen, assuming that everyone mocks him. Kids at the international school, even in younger grades, treat Pinch as if he were toxic. Partly because he hasn’t once left Italy (poor?). Because his parents aren’t married anymore; a deadbeat dad who flew the coop, a kooky mom who smells of garlic and wears chunky colored jewelry. In gym, Pinch doesn’t sprint so much as lollop breathlessly after the pack, his fine hair always greasy, his chin and forehead pimpled constellations. He speaks little, so they think him dim. But it’s because silence is safer. Once, last year, he bumped into three boys from the grade above larking around Piazza Farnese. They knew a secret entrance to catacombs, and led Pinch down, all of them scouting for skulls while sipping from a bottle—risqué because wine is a peasant beverage for the locals. The excursion was memorable, unforgettable, and Pinch had friends! Later, when he approached those boys at school, one kicked him hard in the shins, pinned him, and burned his eyebrows with a match, while the others stood there, laughing away, ridiculing remarks that he’d made underground. (“Imagine you were trapped down here, Eric, but you weren’t really dead, but they closed the opening, but you were alive and nobody knew!”) As for artsy kids at school, they have nothing to do with Pinch either, because they meet after-hours, sculpting soapstone or silk-screening or nailing together the Guys and Dolls set under teacher supervision. But Natalie keeps her son away from all that—she mistrusts schoolhouse art instructors, who remind her of Mr. Fontaine. Her child can paint at home, safeguarded by her.

  Before a canvas, he disappears, eliminating school indignities, even sweeping aside Natalie. He smirks in mumbled dialogue with Vincent van Gogh, as portrayed by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life, which Mom took him to see at that cinema whose roof opens during the intermission; Pinch gazing skyward, expecting a swirling starry night, finding slate clouds. Ever since that movie, Pinch sees the red-bearded Dutchman overseeing every paint stroke, offering advice in Bear’s American accent.

  Pinch and his father exchange letters now and then, Pinch trying to sound grown up, with all sorts of questions about New York and artists and baseball. Never does Pinch mention his own attempts to paint. He is saving that, a surprise for when they meet, when he’ll say, “Remember that lesson you gave me, Dad?” Meantime, Bear’s letters are warm and jovial, even if they rarely connect to his son’s questions. Bear mails a postcard whenever somewhere exotic, marked with a colorful stamp and his manly scribble across the back: “Write me soonest, Charlie boy!” So Pinch does, sending off an exuberant letter the next day, waiting months for his next snippet of Dad.

  Their telephone calls are rarer still. The Italian state monopoly phone operator refuses to run wires into the studio, so incoming calls must be arranged at the apartment of neighbors, a family of carpenters who, for generations, carved ornamental altarpieces but whose sons are now selling West German vacuum cleaners. On the rare occasions Pinch hears that voice down a crackly phone line, he is so overexcited that he can barely think what to say, allowing Bea
r to lead the conversation. Then it’s over: Pinch is back in Rome, in the neighbors’ living room, and he failed to ask about anything: When might he visit America? Will Dad be coming here again?

  “Enough of my lollygagging—I’ll leave you to it,” she says. To forget, Pinch hurries back to his easel, with Natalie lingering behind him. “I keep wanting to know what you’re thinking, why you did that bit. But, yes—I should get out of your hair.”

  He considers the tip of his brush, which tickles a purple blob on the palette.

  “Yes, yes,” Natalie mutters, and out she goes into the alley, without coat or destination. Pinch keeps working, until his mother pushes back inside. Three hours have passed, which seemed three minutes to him. She recounts her jaunt around the city center, how she stood on Ponte Milvio, watching the Tiber flow underneath. “Like a liquid forest.”

  “A liquid forest, Mom?”

  “That’s what it was like!” Natalie is thrumming again of late, that intrusive buzz. She speaks unguardedly about her job, how she hates everyone at Olivetti, how they are the idiots, not she.

  “Why are you out of breath?” he asks. “Did you run back?”

  “Yes, why not?” she answers, laughing, and wipes sweat from her upper lip, hastening to his side, studying the progress in his picture: a view out the studio door into the alleyway. “You,” she says. “Are really. Very! Good!” She pulls his shirt collar, yanking his neck. “Save everything, Pinchy. Even your so-called bad paintings. Or let me keep them. They’ll be worth a fortune.” Still the taller, she kisses him hard on his forehead, hugging him tight. In a whisper, her voice changes, normal for a moment: “You’re banned from throwing away anything. Please, Pinch?”

  Back when he started painting, Natalie’s praise, her clasped hands and glee—they plumped his hopes. Yet fervor has dwindling worth. Soon, he cared less for her approval, craving others’, painting primarily for those who snub him, teachers who never remember his name, classmates who’ll be shocked when it’s known that Charles Bavinsky is someone important, and always has been. In daydreams, he discusses art with his father, grinning at the scene. It’s better, he decides, that we lived apart—saved me from embarrassing myself by showing lousy early work. But I’m ready now. Aren’t I? Only, not this picture. He drags the canvas to the empty oil barrel in the alley, returning for Natalie’s matches.