by David Fiore
“Here boy,” he said, and slowly approached.
At once, Pucci Luca sprang into a crouch and stared at him under beetling brows. Scott almost collapsed from happiness. He went rushing up to it, but that made the dog dart off, farther down the field. It looked back, and he rushed toward it again, but that only drove the animal away even farther, deeper into the Emilian countryside. Stupidly, they stared at each other across the distance, until Scott finally threw up his hands.
“Good!”
He strode back to the ape. He was sliding the painting out of the truck bed, when Holly came up beside him.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
He faced her, holding the painting awkwardly while rooting around in his jacket pocket. Finally, he found her passport, flapped it up and down before her eyes, and tossed it onto the tailgate. Then he walked away, carrying the painting back up the road, back toward Bologna.
“What are you doing?” Holly said. “We can’t just leave our car here.”
“Keys are in the ignition,” he told her, and broke into a jog.
“Scott!” she called after him in alarm. “Where are you going?”
He continued jogging up the hill, and hollered over his shoulder, “Lakeland, Florida!”
“What?” Her voice sharpened. “What are you talking about? And why are you taking the painting?”
He went into a sprint, running pell-mell up the steep pavement. Wind filled his ears and drowned Holly out. His heart hammered but the painting floated.
Pucci Luca flew in from the fields to join him.
Epilogue
Luca and Pietro were walking through the grand, interconnected rooms of the old Jesuit convent that housed Bologna’s national art gallery.
“She was in love with someone else,” Luca said. “Just as I suspected. I knew him, too. A true spaccone. Then the fool gets himself shot while driving, and she weeps at his funeral like a dramatic widow, and then comes to me for comfort!” A guard asked him to lower his voice. In hushed tones, Luca added, “I was really hurt.”
Pietro shook his head. He’d never seen his friend like this. They passed under stormy, biblical depictions twelve feet high. In a small room that joined two larger ones, they came upon Stefano Tirozzi.
“Buongiorno,” said Luca somberly. He was in no mood to quarrel.
Tirozzi turned from the landscape painting on the wall. “Ciao, Luca. So, I heard you’re moving to England.”
A brief sigh. “Si.”
“Tell me. How are you going to do any work over there without me to put the finishing touches on it?”
Luca was cheered somewhat. “I think I’m hungry,” he said to Pietro. “Tirozzi, why don’t you go run off and make me a pizza? I’ll have una boscaiola.” Luca liked to call Tirozzi a pizza maker because the dust from his plaster sculptures made it look as if he were covered in flour. “How about you, Pietro?”
“Una napoletana.”
“Beh, too salty for me. One boscaiola and a napoletana, Tirozzi!”
Smiling thinly, Tirozzi went out of the room. Luca and Pietro finally turned to the painting on the wall.
“It’s incredible,” Luca said matter-of-factly.
They stood in silence a moment.
“Look at the composition!” Luca was holding his skull tightly.
Silence again.
“Oh, no,” he said in despair, and began to pace around. “It’s too much. I give up! It’s so simple. Almost revolutionary.” He stopped and pointed an accusatory finger at the artist photo. “This frock-coated motherfucker was decades ahead of Rothko.”
Pietro examined the photograph of the artist in his airy studio—a portly, bearded, average-looking man dwarfed by his own creations. Next to it was the caption:
KENSETT, Senza titolo,
c. 1872. Olio su tela, 18 X 36”
Anonimo donazione alla
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna
Though the donor was not aware of it, his generosity was only fitting. The work was a gift to begin with.
The End