The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  “Enough,” Marsden says, crouching beside Bear Bavinsky, his knuckles resting soothingly against the painter’s bearded cheek. “Enough of this life. It’s enough.”

  60

  Pinch sits in the supermarket parking lot, fogged from alcohol still, considering driving directly to the airport. But he must face what’s happening. He starts the engine, turns back toward the cottage. When he arrives, he waits in the parked vehicle, braced for his father’s wrath.

  Yet he hears nothing. He gets out and perceives movement at the edge of the forest: Marsden, covered in mud, walking closer.

  “Hey!” Pinch calls out. “Where’s Dad?”

  Marsden shakes his head, saying something about Bear collapsing, that nothing worked. Pinch can’t make sense of it. “But where is Dad right now?” Marsden’s response bounces off him. Pinch stands there, uncomprehending, saying, “We need to get help.” He hunts in the cottage for the cell phone. “Have you seen it?”

  “I don’t know. Charles, honestly—it’s too late.”

  A neighbor calls the emergency number on their behalf. When the paramedics arrive, a flurry of French conversation ensues, an ambulance in the driveway, a few nosy locals peeking around. Loud voices sound from up the path, men carrying down the body. Pinch glimpses his father on a stretcher—the last sighting. Marsden drives Pinch into town to deal with paperwork. Afterward, they hardly speak, hardly eat. Nothing seems appropriate.

  Two days later, Marsden leaves. It’s Pinch alone on the property. He awakens under his father’s duvet, looks around the stone walls of the cottage, imagining this place before electricity came, back when the late Cecil Ditchley lived here, forced to walk an hour to the village for bread and meat, reading by candlelight, throwing pots on his kick wheel.

  Pinch finds his father’s glasses, still on the kitchen table, and throws them away. He unlocks Bear’s studio, free to do so now, and surveys a cityscape of old brushes, its cemetery of mangled paint tubes. Dad, in his inventory, turned around every canvas—thighs, shoulders, throats. In the end, what did Bear think of all these paintings?

  Pinch locks up and walks toward the woods, taking Marsden’s stairs up the hillside, following the same muddy path where his father died. He steps over seedpods, dried pine needles, and plucks early wildflower buds, tucking each specimen into a piece of folded paper. A leaf floats down from a tree; it floats back up. “Lepidopterist” is the word that comes to Pinch—not “butterfly” or “butterfly collector,” nor even an idea of the insect, just the word. As that butterfly adapted to resemble a leaf, he thinks, so I adapted to resemble a language teacher.

  Nobody could find the mysteriously vanished mobile, so Pinch treks down to the village phone box to place calls—first to Birdie, so she may inform the rest of the family. Next, Connor Thomas, who agrees to write and circulate a news release whose purpose is to protect the Bavinsky clan from fact-checking reporters. Unfortunately, Connor fails to list all surviving offspring, causing the obituaries to cite Pinch as the only child. Bear’s will appears to have read the same bulletin, for the entire estate goes to Pinch alone.

  He learns this shortly before the memorial service in Key Biscayne and informs only Birdie. She—who arranged the event to unite Dad’s children for the first time—advises Pinch to play dumb. Telling everyone risks souring the memorial. A middle-aged schlub approaches. “This is your brother Jeff, from Idaho,” she tells Pinch. Jeff shakes hands, taking a name tag and a copy of the commemorative booklet, full of old photos of members of the Bear Bavinsky clan.

  In total, Dad fathered seventeen children, it transpires, many of them in attendance along with spouses and kids of their own. Pinch looks along the buffet table; nearly every stranger is a blood relative. “Holy mackerel!” someone exclaims. “I got a nephew called Hannibal.” More uncomfortable facts emerge too. Several of Bear’s families overlapped, including a few wives. Three children have become painters (none with success), one is a struggling sculptor in Mexico, another describes herself as “a weaver and astrologer.” Aside from Birdie, the only siblings whom Pinch has previously met are Widgeon and Owen. Widge never attempted to become Dad, but she did try to wed facsimiles, a series of shady charmers, which leads Pinch to wonder about her current hubby, a small-business owner who even resembles a younger Bear. As for Owen, he was expelled from medical school decades back and is still living off the wealth of his aged mother, Carol, while working on “a machine to cure diseases” that Widge is convinced will earn her brother a Nobel. Among Owen’s many boorish traits is that he ogles every female in attendance yet refuses to speak with any.

  In various guests Pinch discerns physical features of Bear. Several are of mixed races and some speak no English, which prompts Pinch to hasten over and interpret. During the service, siblings offer remembrances, most of which follow a pattern: slightly funny, slightly awful, plucky smile, throwaway conclusion: “But hey—that was Dad, right?”

  To everyone who asks, Pinch diminishes his role in Bear’s life. Yes, I sometimes had his phone number, but not always. Yes, I visited the French cottage, but it’s hardly a villa. Bit of a dump: freezing, full of bugs, miles from anything. His relatives resent him, and they’re not wrong to do so. For Pinch does consider his link to Dad more significant than theirs. He flashes to that final conversation with Bear. Dad chose me. Pinch’s stomach drops. And his gaze falls too, fixed on the floor, all these strangers’ shoes. Dad picked me. Queasily, he glances up, as if everyone could hear these thoughts.

  “To speak frankly, Charles, I cannot understand why you cremated the body without consulting anyone. I do not get how that was okay.”

  “Sorry, Ivor. I didn’t mean to upset anyone. I had to make a decision in the moment, and I was overwhelmed.”

  “But sprinkling Bear’s ashes in France, without even checking what I thought?”

  “Or what I thought?”

  “Yeah, not cool, man. Not cool.”

  That night, Pinch and Birdie meet at the hotel, escaping their siblings for a room-service dinner of roast chicken and buttered spinach. “The thing is, a nicer person, an easier person, would never have painted like that,” Pinch argues.

  Birdie grimaces. “What bull! I know this is supposed to be a mourning period, Charlie, but I am going to speak ill of Dad.”

  “Why change the habit of a lifetime?” he jokes.

  “You know I only bad-mouth him to you, right?”

  “I know,” he assures her. “I know you loved him.”

  “I was so busy trying to win an argument with Daddy that I hardly even think I met him. What pisses me off is I can’t help smiling sometimes when I think of him, goddamn it! Mostly stuff from when I was little. He loved us when we were cute, right? Not so much when we developed opinions.”

  “Luckily that never happened in your case.”

  She snorts with laughter.

  “There’s this thing my mother always said about Dad,” Pinch tells her. “Imagine if your neighbor was Leonardo da Vinci, okay? Only, he’s an absolute pain in the neck. Complaining about noise, about the smell of your food, writing complaint letters that he slides under your door. He’s awful every time you see him, whether you’re sick, with a broken leg—doesn’t matter. A nasty piece of work. But if you somehow knew what he was going to contribute to the world, how he treated you would seem minor. You wouldn’t even mind. It’s irrelevant.”

  “Wait, wait. Are you seriously comparing Daddy to Leonardo da Vinci?”

  “Of course not; there’s no equating artists. But Bear was significant in his way. The bad behavior only matters as art history now.”

  “Even if a man’s important,” she argues, “he doesn’t get to live by different rules.”

  “Isn’t society based on that premise?”

  “Well, then I don’t like society. And I didn’t even like this thing today—not that a memorial is for liking. B
ut I keep wondering what it was even for. Certainly not closure. And I arranged the damn thing!”

  “The purpose was to see you again, Bird,” he says. “Speaking of which, we need a toast. What do you say?” He raids the minibar, returning with a miniature bottle of bubbly.

  As her plastic cup froths over, she sips fast and raises it. “To the worst best artist I ever knew,” she says. “And to the son who takes over.”

  “I’m not taking over,” he scoffs.

  “Oh, you’ve taken over all right,” she retorts, twinkling. “The question is, Mr. Bavinsky: What becomes of you now?”

  1998

  61

  Art in America magazine runs an appreciation on Bear’s life and career. The article, by Connor, is written abominably in Pinch’s view, and rises to its preachy climax in the conclusion:

  When meeting him a few years ago, Bavinsky spoke to me of surviving the talons of Clement Greenberg, who mythically accused him of being a reactionary. Later, Bavinsky even overcame the embrace of Life magazine, whose photo editor published an image of a naked sitter. Gee whiz, shocking. Well, shocking for 1948.

  Throughout, Bavinsky painted “those meaty miracles,” as collector Mishmish Shapiro dubbed them in a BBC documentary on her phantasmagoric life. Even today, viewing Bavinsky behemoths such as Shoulder III (1954) is to ask oneself: By what alchemy can an artist paint a part of the body and depict more than the whole? Spread your eyes over 1961’s Thigh and Hip XII (pictured, above right). No feeling person can remain tearless when this painting is met with live. I use the word “live” advisedly, because the body almost literally moves off the canvas, whose materiality is stripped more bare, one swears, than the unclothed model herself.

  It is not only because of his unique facture that discussions of “a Bavinsky” envelop such auratic resonance, referencing both pictorial empathy and a depth of portraiture achieved by few during our current century. Bavinsky bypassed the tentacles of Pop Art and Op Art, Conceptualism, Fluxus, and Minimalism, and even bludgeoned away our fin de siècle anxiety, driving on through to the other side, untouched by the hype wafting from the coruscating distant shores of the so-called Art World. He was what only the greats have the courage to be: yourself.

  As the marketplace grew more all-comprising, never did he fall into the maw of mammon. The only Bavinskys to sell in years have been those on the secondary market, notwithstanding demand, which has turned from lukewarm to scalding since his untimely passing. Taking advantage of these saunalike conditions, a private deal for Hands IX (1952) just netted almost a half-million dollars for a noted Nebraska collector, sources close to the Petros Gallery say. Representatives of Bavinsky’s onetime dealer declined to comment on the record. But at the time of his death, Eva Petros issued a statement describing the artist as “an epoch in himself.”

  Well said. For Bavinsky never wasted time opposing frivolity in The Culture. His was the patience of ages. The road that he sailed renews every cynic’s faith in authenticity, and in beauty, however we choose to define that evading quarry.

  The screaming irony, of course, is that the so-called Art World is today thirsting to know what Bavinsky was fevering at during those decades in the wilderness. And, yes, the question arises—the wrong question, but a question of our times: Just how much will those paintings be worth?

  A photocopy of this article circulates among the Bavinsky children, with the big-money sale by a Nebraska collector highlighted in yellow. Siblings keep writing to Pinch, saying Dad erred by leaving everything to one son who doesn’t even have kids of his own to support. You need to share, buddy! To pacify them, he promises to hear everyone’s views. Some want the paintings themselves; others insist the artworks be displayed in museums, as per their father’s wishes; several don’t care and just want money. Complicating matters, none understands the market or art institutions.

  “Can’t you put them up for auction? Have museums buy them, and we all make out good.”

  “Museums can buy at auction,” Pinch answers. “But mostly it’s private buyers. And you’re subject to whoever bids highest. Which isn’t necessarily the museum of your choice.”

  “So we sell private to the museums we like; the top ones.”

  “But they have to want to buy. And you’re reliant on dealers who have priorities of their own.”

  “Donate them?”

  “What you’re perhaps imagining is that I’d hand the paintings over, and they’d go up on the walls of MoMA or wherever. But most of what major museums have is in storage. The likely outcome is I’d give away the paintings, and they’d end up in crates. We have a lot to think about.”

  “How come you keep saying ‘we’?”

  “Because I want to include all of us in this.”

  “Then tell us what paintings you got! I still don’t know, man. What’s to stop you selling on the down-low and never telling nobody?”

  “That’s the last thing I’d do. I’m just asking for a bit of patience. Lots of people are involved here.”

  “Lots of people are getting old and dying with jack shit! Is that what Pops intended? Let’s fuckin’ sell, and split it, bro!”

  What Pinch fails to mention is that he has already approached a few museum directors, but nobody will consent to a restricted donation—not for an artist like Bavinsky, who would constitute a decent addition but is hardly the megastar to boost attendance figures. Moreover, everyone is wary about so many disgruntled Bavinsky children. Who wants to accept midmarket artworks, when they could all end up in court?

  Most nights upon Pinch’s return from Utz, his answering machine light blinks with messages from relatives. “Charles, an update on your plans. Call me back.”

  But Pinch doesn’t know his plans, with the inheritance or anything. He keeps circling around his final exchange with Bear, when Dad implied that Pinch himself could’ve been a serious painter. That career is beyond him now—the gatekeepers of art are hardly yearning for a schoolteacher in his late forties with little charisma, less hair, not a single show to his name! He tries to laugh, but his spirits plunge—this life has hardly been his own.

  There is a flip side, however. During his Tube ride to work many mornings, ruminating over what in hell to do with his father’s art,Pinch clenches his eyes shut and sheepishly remembers something. Bear Bavinsky liked how I paint. He imagines compositions for his next trip to France, and ponders inviting someone to the studio. When she views his paintings, he’ll consider the side of her face, anticipating her response. Let her like it.

  It’s his Tube stop. He leaps to his feet, beaming just to imagine.

  62

  Students stream from her classroom, chatting loudly, calling farewells back to Francesca. In the hallway Pinch stands aside, nodding greetings to a few familiar ex-pupils. When they have scattered, he approaches her classroom, glancing around to ensure he is alone. He takes a deep breath and raises his hand to knock—just as Francesca emerges.

  “Che colpo!” she exclaims, hand on her chest, and tucks back her hair, long and black in springy curls, her round face broadening when she smiles, causing him to do the same. Francesca, who is twenty-nine, finds herself in a peculiar position in London. She left Italy in frustration with the lack of opportunities and the incivility, but is now employed not merely to teach the Italian language but to embody British fantasies about a carefree nation she never knew. In private, she is cutting about the follies of Utz, which allows Pinch to be the same. They’ve grown friendly, perhaps even fond of each other, especially since Salvatore quit.

  Everyone assumed that Pinch would take over as the Italian department chief. But the promotion went to Francesca. Briefly, this stung. But he accepted her suitability: bright, popular, organized. Also, Pinch hasn’t stepped foot in Italy since his teens (though he sometimes claims otherwise to students). His sense of modern Italy derives from reading La Repubblica most days, which enab
les him to speak journalese about bribery scandals in Milan or the burlesque of Berlusconi, though he remains prone to comically outdated slang, which entertains Francesca immensely.

  “Scusa, perdonami,” he responds for having startled Francesca, and touches her arm in apology, amazed that he’s doing so. Pinch commands himself to channel Dad: chin up, a wink. For weeks he has wanted to make an advance. Alone at Bear’s cottage, dealing with the French bureaucratic consequences of death, Pinch contemplated her daily, seeing himself driving Francesca around the area, explaining the local language groups, showing her the market, providing tasting boards of local cheeses, matching them with local wines (“Of which I know a tad too much,” he joked on his own in the car). When walking into the woods, he wondered whether, as a botanist, she could give a proper tour of his land. She’ll stay in the cottage, and I’ll take the studio. Unless. Unless.

  But each morning back at home in London, the bathroom mirror has dissuaded him, a reminder that he’s so much older than she, chubby, bald, frumpy. So today, he forwent his reflection, which explains the mussed hair and bad shave. The pretext for standing in her classroom door this evening is a long-standing promise. Francesca is moving into a larger office—that of the departed Salvatore. Pinch pledged to help her move her furniture, and he has kidded about lifting dumbbells to prepare. She keeps demurring, worrying that it’d be too heavy. Perhaps the janitor should do it?

  “I will not be deterred, Fra!” he tells her now, and marches toward her old office, where he stands before the bookcase, estimating dimensions with his arms.

  “We should take down the books first, no?” she notes.

  Grinningly, Pinch waves this away—he’s all bravado tonight, not least because of something amusing he’ll show her: a dried lump of paper in his pocket. At the cottage he picked wildflower buds to show her, folding them into a sketchbook page on which he jotted questions as a conversation-starter. Once home, he stupidly laundered those trousers, flowers and all! He’ll show her the lumpen result, adding, as if in passing, “You have to come see the place yourself. It’s amazing. What do you think?” For now he smirks at her bookcase. “Not too hard for a tough guy like me!” He rolls up his sleeves, jokingly flexes an aging bicep.