He did some more calculations in his head: “Tre milioni tre cento sessanta mille.”
“Easy,” I said. “I make almost that much in . . . six months.”
“This is your pearl of great price,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “except I’m selling, not buying.”
Tony came to my talk at the American Church, and after the reception that followed in the church basement we walked down to the river and then downstream toward the Cascine. The Arno had gouged large chunks out of the bank back in November, and though the bank had been shored up, the streetlights had not been replaced. It was very dark, and we had to be careful not to run into other strolling couples.
I was less concerned about strolling couples, however, than about papal couriers. Not really, not literally, but the story of the Sarezzano Bible had made me a little uneasy. I’d always found it hard to believe that anybody actually paid attention to these things, but clearly somebody was watching. I wasn’t exactly embarking on a life of crime, of course, I was simply redistributing some property according to my own notion of the way it ought to be distributed. Still, if the newspapers got wind of the Aretino . . . Would Sotheby’s protect my anonymity? Would the receipt from Buchhandlung Karl Schulze protect me? Would Herr Schulze remember me? Would he remember the Pilgrim’s Progress? Some doggy! Would he remember that I had not in fact bought a prayer book? Would he be able to produce his copy of the receipt (which wouldn’t match mine)?
I was tempted to confide in Tony, but I didn’t want to put him on the spot professionally. Not that I had any illusions about the high ethical standards of the auction trade. Sotheby’s, after all, was a multinational corporation that employed people to read the obituaries and send sympathy letters to distressed heirs, offering assistance in liquidating the estate of the deceased. But I didn’t want to ask him to lie directly. The lie was my own—the secret behind my secret.
“Say you’ve got twenty Picasso suites,” Tony was saying as we approached the lights of Ponte J. F. Kennedy. We’d been walking for almost an hour. “Identical. Worth about two thousand pounds apiece. You put one on a catalog cover and have somebody bid it up to eight thousand.” Tony stooped down and picked up a couple of sticks. “Then the next week you put up another and say that one sold the previous week for eight thousand. Say you get five, six, seven for the rest of them. People think they’re getting a bargain. You’re getting twice what they’re worth.”
“The whole thing sounds disgusting. What do you get out of it?”
“Beauty, for one thing.” He tapped his sticks together. “There are so many beautiful things in the world they take your breath away. Sotheby’s is like a bridge over a river; things flow through the salesrooms: Sienese intarsia, Chinese porcelain, illuminated manuscripts, old masters, Greek vases, Etruscan bronzes, Japanese netsuke, English pottery. The river never stops. There are three or four sales a day, and then next day there are more sales. I started dropping a line into the river myself. My apartment got to be like a museum. I had almost two thousand books. I had a collection of Etruscan bronzes. I couldn’t stop myself.”
“But you did stop?”
“I ran out of money, my inheritance.”
“You spent your inheritance?”
“Just about. And then Peter Wilson asked me if I wanted to have a go at setting up an office in Florence. It was like a dream. I realized I was tired of wanting things. Some people never get over it, especially the rich. Two years ago I had to sort out some jewels for Lady Boston in Somersetshire. The woman was on her deathbed. She was drooling. She could hardly talk. She wanted me to sort the jewels into three equal piles for her three daughters. But there was a pair of diamond earrings she couldn’t bear to part with, and then an emerald necklace and so on. Pretty soon we had four piles—one for each of her daughters and one to take with her. Unbelievable. And right now there’s a Frenchman living on a government pension in Pistoia; he’s at the opposite end of the scale. He hasn’t got enough to eat, but he’s got two Cézannes in his closet, wrapped up in a blanket. They were given to him by Cézanne’s daughter—they were lovers. He’s afraid someone will steal them. He didn’t want me to look at them.” He shrugged. “Things got to be too inconvenient. If I wanted a book I had to go to the library anyway because I could never find my own copy. So what was the point?”
“You could have organized your books systematically.”
“I did. Every year I had a new system. But I still couldn’t find anything. I didn’t really have room for everything. I couldn’t have a party—I was afraid someone would knock over a piece of Staffordshire or one of my Goss cows.”
“What happened to them, your things?”
“I sold the books and the pottery.”
“Did you lose a lot of money?”
“No, I made a nice profit, in fact, and I’ve still got the bronzes, in a vault in the Bank of England. They’re for my old age. They don’t have the romance of the Greek stuff. Yet. In twenty or thirty years . . . Well, you never know for sure, of course, but I think they’ll be worth a fortune. If I were an investment counselor and you were my client, I’d definitely recommend Etruscan bronzes.”
“Thanks for the tip.” I could see his face now under the lights on the bridge. I could see he was enjoying himself. “So you got tired of things,” I said. “Then what?”
“I didn’t get tired of things, I just got tired of owning them or worrying about them. I’d rather just stand in the river—about waist deep—and let them flow around me. I like to feel the current. It’s powerful. But I don’t try to stop it anymore; I don’t try to grab hold of things as they flow by. Let them wash ashore in museums and libraries.”
“I’d like to hold on to the Aretino,” I said. “I don’t want to let it go.”
“I made an extra set of prints,” he said; “for you. Sub rosa, of course. I was going to surprise you.”
“Thanks.”
We stood on the bridge and looked down at the Arno. I tried to connect it with the river of things flowing through Sotheby’s.
“Shall we play Pooh sticks?” Tony held out the sticks. “Pick one.”
“Don’t you need pine cones?”
“Sticks,” he said. “Pooh started with pine cones but it was too hard to tell them apart.”
“How will we tell the sticks apart? They’re not that different.”
“One’s got a knob on the end.”
“I’ll take that one,” I said.
We dropped our sticks into the river, crossed to the other side of the bridge and looked down over the side.
“But there’s something else, too. My whole identity’s gotten tangled up with that book. It’s my secret. It gives me a sense of being someone special. Like a spy or a secret agent. Someone on a top-secret mission. I don’t want to lose that sense. I don’t know who I’ll be without it. I can imagine things right up to the sale. I can imagine the hammer going down. And that’s it.”
“Everybody’s got to be somebody,” he said in the joking way he had. “You’ll still be who you are. And if it doesn’t meet the reserve you’ll be in debt besides.”
“Will they put me in debtor’s prison?”
“No, but they won’t let you have the book back till you pay up.”
“I see.”
“What are you going to do when it’s over?”
“My sister’s getting married in August. She wants me to be in the wedding. She’s marrying a Sikh. His parents are coming from Bombay, my sisters and I are going to wear special Punjabi dresses.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“The reception’s going to be in the packing shed—my father’s an avocado grower. In Texas.”
When the two sticks appeared beneath us, neck and neck, I couldn’t tell them apart. We watched them drift into the darkness, toward Pisa and the Mediterranean.
“People,” he said. “I like the intensity. People reveal their true natures when it comes to things. They try not to, but it’s impossible. You can see them as they really are.”
“You’re starting to sound like Signor Focacci: ‘See things as they really are, call them by their proper names, show strangers the way.’”
He laughed.
“But what kind of people do you have to deal with?” I was thinking of Lady Boston, unwilling to part with her jewels even on her deathbed. And the starving Frenchman in Pistoia with two Cézannes in his closet, wrapped up in a blanket.
We’d left the bridge behind us and were approaching the bus stop in Piazzale Kennedy.
“People like you,” he said.
He put his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye. I think he was trying to get up the nerve to ask me to come to his apartment. All he needed was an encouraging word, and I would have given him one, but I was stung by his remark.
“People like me?” I said. “What are you talking about? Do you think you can see me as I really am just because I want to get the best price for a very valuable piece of property?”
“I have very good eyesight,” he said. “You have to, to be an auctioneer. You don’t want to miss any bids.”
I knew I’d deliberately misinterpreted his remark, but it was too late to unmisinterpret it.
“What do you see?” I asked. “No, wait. Let me guess: a creature moving in darkness, a thief, timid and fearful, yet driven by lust and greed . . . and a desire to play God. Have I got it?”
“What do I see?” he said. “I see you as an Artemis type, the Minoan lady of wild things.”
“A cold fish, eh?”
“Not at all. But very dangerous, jealous of her own honor, mistress of her own destiny.”
A bus trundled across the bridge and pulled up to the stop. I got on, showed my pass to the driver and took a last look at Tony, who waited at the bus stop till we pulled out of sight. I was sorry now that I hadn’t given him an encouraging word. It would have been fun to thrash out our differences in bed. Artemis indeed!
Tony took the Sonetti to England in the middle of May. He had to go to London to go over the estimates on the Demidoff estate in Pratolino. The estate, which belonged to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, was the first major sale for Sotheby’s new Italian office. The cataloging had taken more than four months; the catalogers didn’t know how to value Italian Renaissance furniture—great huge credenzas and cassoni and tapestries that had been a drug on the market for years but were making a comeback; and Tony, who was going to take the sale himself, in Italian, was understandably nervous.
I was sorry to see him go, but I was very busy myself. The sizings meeting, originally envisioned as an informal get together of visiting experts, had turned into a congresso internazionale dealing with all aspects of the restoration work. A formal agenda had to be drawn up, programs printed, accommodations arranged, meeting rooms scheduled, translators engaged for two Russians who couldn’t speak Italian or English, and the French, who wouldn’t.
I was not planning to go to England for the sale. There was no reason for me to do so, and there were good reasons not to: it would be expensive, I didn’t want to be linked to the book in any public way, and Signor Giorgio was nervous about the congresso, which was really the first thing he’d undertaken on his own initiative since the flood. He was worried about making brutta figura.
But all the arrangements were in place—including some special equipment requested by the Russians to demonstrate a way to kill mold spores by bombarding them with ultrasonic waves, and at the last minute I called Tony at his sister’s in Hampstead and told him I was coming. He didn’t seem at all surprised.
I flew from Pisa to London on May 29, the day before the sale, and took the tube to Russell Square. Tony had arranged a bed-and-breakfast on Montague Street, about half a block from the British Museum. I’d never been in London before. What I knew about the city I knew from the way Mama used to talk about it, though she’d never been there either, but I didn’t have any trouble finding my way from Russell Square to Sotheby’s on New Bond Street.
All the books to be sold the next day were shelved in the salesroom on the second floor, at the top of a broad stairway. I bought a catalog and paged through it till I came to the Aretino:
214 Aretino (Pietro) I sonetti lussuriosi, roman letter, 8vo Venezia, F. Bindoni and M. Pasini 1525, newly restored, together with Preghiere cristiane preparate da Contessa Giuliana di Montepulciano, 8vo [Venezia] 1644.
*** Both volumes, which have been bound together since the early 17th century, have been newly restored. The Aretino volume is a unique copy of the 1525 edition containing 16 erotic engravings executed by Marcantonio Raimondi after drawings by Giulio Romano—fine impressions with margins, three laid down in upper corners. Each approximately 5-1/4 x 7 in., 12.6 x 16.8 cm.
About half the lots were from the private library of Lord Creighton, who had been an amateur conservator himself, though his own attempts at decorative bindings had not been entirely successful. The designs lacked a sense of proportion; the lettering was uneven. A beautiful Aldine Aeneid had been badly botched, and so on, though this was glossed over in the catalog.
Some of the more important items—including a copy of Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse, a Shakespeare first folio and the Aretino—were on display in a special case. I was rather surprised to see that the latter had been opened to the cunnilingus plate. This engraving was as firmly etched in my imagination as it had ever been on the printer’s plate, but it was a shock to see it nonetheless, to match the actual lines on the page with the ones in my imagination, and I thought, with a sharp pang of desire, of Sandro’s bald head, smooth and shiny as an egg, between my legs.
I met up with Tony about four o’clock and we had a cup of tea in the staff common room and looked over a file of newspaper clippings on the book, which was “news.” There was a long article in the Times Literary Supplement on the history of the book that included the fact that a copy had been listed in a secret catalog at the Vatican Library but had been missing since 1527, two years after its publication, and that someone had checked the locked cabinets of the British Museum but hadn’t turned up anything. A copy was rumored to have been removed from the National Library in Dresden at the end of the eighteenth century and destroyed. There was some speculation that it might have been sold to a private collector, in which case it just might be the copy that had turned up in Switzerland. There was nothing about the recent history of the book, however, though Tony told me that a man from the Italian Embassy had in fact turned up at Sotheby’s with an official paper of some sort, but that Mr. Harmondsworth had satisfied him that the present owner of the book had acquired it in Switzerland, not Italy. Later I found out that Tony had written most of the article himself.
Tony took me to dinner at Simpson’s that night, and afterward we walked from the Strand back to Sotheby’s and watched some workmen struggle with a painting so large that they’d had to cut a special slit in the wall. They were trying to winch the painting through the slit, but they hadn’t allowed quite enough room for the packing case and were debating what to do. I was too tired to stay to see how they solved the problem, but they must have solved it, because the next morning when I arrived, the painting—Tintoretto’s Adoration of the Magi—was hanging in the main gallery.
The first day of the sale went quickly. The salesroom—the same room in which the books had been displayed—was a small high-ceilinged gallery on the second floor at the top of the stairs. There was lots of coming and going and waiting around, the sort of thing that generally precedes public functions: men smoking cigarettes, gossiping, t
alking shop in several languages.
Tony pointed out the major dealers, men in dark, rumpled suits, a confraternity, an inner ring. Some of the names I’d heard at the Newberry, others had become familiar from looking at the Book Collector and Sotheby’s auction catalogs, so it was interesting to match names and faces. Doctor Wasserstein, the man who’d bought the Gardner manuscript of The Canterbury Tales back in 1928, looked very old and tired, but Hans P. Kraus—who’d arranged to buy the Purple Bible of Sarezzano in 1953, and who had paid sixty-five thousand pounds for the Saint Alban’s Apocalypse almost exactly a year before, in this very room, was a vigorous looking sixty. Maggs Brothers was represented by a Mr. Scott, and Bernard Quaritch by a Mr. Joseph Morton, and so on. There were about a dozen of them in all. Would these old men rise to the occasion? At the Newberry I’d seen a film of an auction at Sotheby’s—Doctor J. D. Hanson bidding on the Gold Collection (which the Newberry purchased). As far as I could tell, nothing much had changed. The major dealers wore the same rumpled suits and occupied the same reserved seats at a big horseshoe table, called the “pound,” directly in front of the rostrum. The rest of us—probably about a hundred people—settled for folding chairs in the back, the next to the last row, in my case, near one of the exits, in case my stomach acted up, though I’d dosed myself with Kaopectate. The dealers would buy lots for their own stock, of course. But for big items they would have lined up wealthy clients—major libraries as well as private individuals who wanted to establish themselves as serious collectors.
Once the sale was under way I started to look for a pattern, traces of an invisible hand guiding the bidding, and I was glad to see that it was not unusual for a lot to be knocked down for several times the catalog estimate, sometimes more; but I was more interested to notice that most of the important lots, including the Caxton and the Shakespeare folio, were going to three outsiders—three men sitting on folding chairs on the opposite side of the room—who didn’t seem to care what they paid. The men were not sitting next to one another, but they weren’t bidding against one another either, and the audience began to express its displeasure in small murmurings. The dealers grumbled more openly, turning in their seats to see where all the bids were coming from. Doctor Wasserstein scribbled a note and gave it to one of the porters to take to Mr. Harmondsworth, who looked at it but did not—as far as I could tell—do anything.
The Sixteen Pleasures Page 28