The Blue Cat

by Roland Graeme

  “Francesca sounds like a treasure.”

  “She is. We inherited her from the previous owners. I’ve lost count of how many times she’s threatened to quit since then. That’s just one of her ways of keeping me in line. I’d marry her myself, if I thought, it would make her happy, although I doubt I could rise to the occasion. Instead, I let her mother me and boss me around, which is what she does to everybody else.”

  His blunt way of speaking amused me. I suspected he was more circumspect with his other guests and customers, at least until he got to know them. For whatever reason, he didn’t feel any need to choose his words carefully around me. Gay men who happen to meet abroad are like members of a secret society, although they don’t need to wear certain symbols or exchange special handshakes in order to recognize one another.

  “Sit down and join me, won’t you?” I invited him.

  He pulled out the chair opposite mine. “I will, for a minute. Anything to get away from that kitchen. It’s an inferno in there when all the pots get going on the stove at once. Not that I’m really needed in there. Francesca has everything under control, now that she and I have read her assistants the riot act.” He leaned back in his chair, visibly relaxing and smiled at me. “So…what do you think of The Blue Cat, so far?”

  “It lives up to its reputation. There’s a very pleasant ambience you’ve got going here. It suits the setting, which is beautiful. And I was admiring all of those pictures on the walls. Quite a collection.”

  He laughed. “They were all done by artists who visited our town. Many of them stayed here in the hotel. You would be surprised how many of them agreed to have the price of the painting subtracted from their bill.”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised by that at all.”

  “As a result, the collection keeps growing. Soon we’ll run out of wall space.”

  “I promise not to add to the congestion. I’ll pay my bill, in full.”

  “I’ll be interested to see some of your work. I knew diddly-squat about art when I first came to Italy. I’ve picked up an appreciation of it, over the years. Are you any good?” he asked me, bluntly.

  “I know I can be better. I want to try my hand at some marine painting while I’m here. I like working outdoors, which isn’t always convenient in England, because of the weather.”

  He nodded. “If you ever want a lunch or a snack to go, to pack in your plein air kit, just let us know. We can put together anything you want—within reason. Francesca is famous for her sandwiches, which are a meal all in themselves. A full-course dinner to go might be a bit of a stretch, even for her.”

  We exchanged a few more pleasantries, before he excused himself and went back to supervise his staff.

  What a beauty, I thought. Of course, beautiful men seemed to be thick on the ground here in Italy. I was looking forward to getting acquainted with some of them.

  Chapter Five

  Morning Light

  I was up before dawn the following morning and left the hotel to scout out possible painting locations in the immediate vicinity so I could select one and take advantage of the first strong light once the sun did come up.

  I learned long ago to take with me as little equipment as possible whenever painting outdoors.

  I had an old-fashioned wooden pochade kit mounted on a collapsible photographer’s tripod. Personally, I prefer the traditional wooden box, although a lot of painters like the more up-to-date aluminium or industrial-strength plastic ones because of their lighter weight.

  People who take up painting as a hobby are susceptible to a disease I call coloritis. They invest in every convenience colour that a paint manufacturer puts out and as a result, they never learn how to mix their own colours properly.

  Such amateur painters are often shocked when they get a look at my portable painting kit and see just how limited a choice of colours I use for most of my al fresco work. There’s nothing radical about it. On the contrary, it’s highly conservative. The selection of colours that I employ is nothing more than the traditional high-keyed palette that was in general use decades ago, when it served many fine painters of the old school well.

  I usually carry with me ultramarine blue and cerulean blue, zinc white, cadmium yellow light, cadmium orange, cadmium red light, cadmium red deep and alizarin crimson. There are no earth colours, greens or black.

  I believe that a limited palette with only the colours that you absolutely need is better than a palette with every conceivable pre-mixed colour on it. When, for example, you mix a green from cerulean blue and cadmium yellow light, you get more sparkle and vibration from the combination of the two colours than you would from a green that comes right out of the tube.

  However, it takes practice and study to match the colour and value of the objects you want to paint. To state the obvious, they look different in the light as opposed to in the shadows, to say nothing of indoors as opposed to outdoors. If you can really match a colour you see in front of you, you will be well on the way to painting a picture, as opposed to merely covering a canvas. Most beginners can identify a colour in front of them, all right, but they are unable to combine the colours on their palette in the proper proportions to reproduce the effect.

  It also took me a long time to learn not to mix my paint too much on the palette. You will get more colour vibration when you apply your paint to the canvas if it isn’t already too blended. You will get the effect of broken colour, which will give life to the picture.

  Right there on the waterfront of San Floriano, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of potential subjects presented themselves.

  In the early morning, the boats of the nocturnal fishermen would come in from the sea, and the men strode barefoot across the sand, carrying strings of snapper in their hands or boxes filled with smaller fish balanced on their heads. Sometimes the catch was eels, three to four feet long. The larger boats came in later, from trawling farther out to sea, and bore large tubs of whitebait or sardines. The fishermen spread out the nets to dry, and it was common as the afternoon wore on to see both men and women sitting on the sand, conversing as they repaired any torn meshes.

  In the past, I’d taken for granted that no subject could be more rewarding to draw or paint than the nude male. However, I hadn’t been long in San Floriano before I became convinced that the bows and sterns of fishing boats offered curves and planes every bit as interesting as a well-developed pair of pectoral muscles or buttocks. The boats also came in a much greater variety of colours than human skin tones.

  * * * *

  The Blue Cat was indeed a popular hangout. Artists and fishermen congregated there, either to play cards or dominoes at the small tables, or to sit and drink on the high stools at the bar.

  Everyone in San Floriano seemed to drop into the place at some hour or another of the day or night to have a drink or a meal, to read the house copies of newspapers, or simply to catch up on the latest gossip. In addition to the locals, there was a steady tide of tourists who came and departed by bus. Some of them spent only a few hours in San Floriano before catching the next bus and moving on. Others stayed longer, overnight or up to a week or longer, at either The Blue Cat or one of the other hotels or rooming houses in the town. Passing by the bus stop or through The Blue Cat’s public rooms, one could overhear a veritable Babel of different languages.

  I saw Rick often in the days that followed. He was usually behind the bar, where he rather reminded me of the captain of a ship. Even when he seemed to be standing there not doing anything, he was obviously in charge, and nothing escaped his attention. Once, when there was some sort of real crisis in the kitchen, as opposed to the imaginary ones that seemed to occur on a daily basis, he kept his head when his employees lost theirs and quickly calmed them down, efficiently, but with humour. Often, he circulated among the customers, joining them at their tables for a few minutes—rarely longer.

  He projected an odd combination of warmth and reserve. For all his fr
iendliness, I sensed that he was not an easy man to get to know well. He and I exchanged a few words each time our paths crossed. He, too, began to refer to me as Il Viscontino, and when he spoke to me, it was with the same rough, good-natured humour he had displayed before.

  Our first memorable one-on-one encounter took place very early one morning. I had set my alarm and dragged myself out of bed well before dawn, because I wanted to explore the part of the cove that lay north of the town. This area was, at first view, less attractive than the harbour and the main beach. The strip of sand here was narrow and strewn with rocks. I’d noticed that few bathers made their way there, and even the fishermen tended to avoid it as a landing place.

  At this time of the morning, the spot appeared deserted, as I’d predicted it would be. The town was silent, its inhabitants still asleep. There was no sound except for the waves and the cries of sea birds.

  I set up my easel a few steps away from the water and started work on the view to the north. Some outcroppings of rocks formed an irregular dark barrier between the sea and the sky. Both looked grey in the soft pre-dawn light and this was the quality I hoped to capture.

  I’d been working away industriously for about fifteen minutes, and the first pale pinks and oranges of the sunrise had begun to warm the horizon, before I became aware of the approach of another human being. A jogger was taking the same route I had followed from the town. He was running barefoot in the sand, wearing red gym shorts and a blue T-shirt. His long hair whipped about his head as he ran and gave me a clue to his identity before he came close enough for me to see his face. It was Rick, and as he neared me, I saw that his T-shirt was one of those offered for sale in his establishment, with The Blue Cat’s logo on the chest.

  A broad smile creased his sweaty face as he passed me.

  “Hello!” he gasped.

  “Hello there, yourself.”

  “I’ll stop and talk to you on my way back. Okay?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  He was already past me and I turned my head to watch him as he jogged on, leaving his footprints behind him in the sand. He was worth watching. It was a treat just to see his nicely chiselled legs in action.

  Our brief exchange could barely be called a conversation, and yet the sound of his voice and the image of him running lingered in my memory. I found my attention straying from my canvas. As the light grew ever stronger, however, my surroundings took on more colour and became ever more vibrantly beautiful. I concentrated on my painting.

  I did wonder how far Rick’s jog would take him. When I glimpsed him in the distance running back toward me, I estimated that about twenty minutes had passed.

  He drew up next to me dripping sweat and panting for breath, taking a moment to compose himself before he came nearer and looked at my canvas.

  “Very nice,” he said. “And before you start murmuring the usual modest disclaimers, take my word for it that I’m not in the habit of dishing out undeserved compliments. A few weeks ago there was a guy staying here, and when he showed me his work he told me, I know you won’t believe it, but I’m completely self-taught. Let’s just say I had no trouble believing it, although I didn’t say anything, one way or the other. I’m afraid my face gave me away. I think he was offended, and that was the end of any budding romance. Too bad, in a way, because he wasn’t bad-looking.”

  “He looked better than he painted?”

  “Much.”

  “And me? Is the opposite true, in my case?”

  “Hmm, you don’t strike me as the kind of man who needs to go fishing for compliments. Let’s just say that I find it annoying when an attractive man also turns out to be talented. It seems so unfair to the rest of us.”

  “False modesty doesn’t become you, either,” I dared to tell him. “I’m sure it takes a great deal of talent to run The Blue Cat as efficiently as you seem to.”

  “Okay, so we’re bedazzled by each other. Let’s move on and talk about something else.”

  Nevertheless, in fact, we didn’t speak again for a moment. I went on working and he watched me manipulating my brush.

  He stripped off his T-shirt, balled it up and mopped his sweaty face and chest with it. He glanced up and down the beach, as though to see whether anybody was around except the two of us. Satisfied that we were alone, he dropped the T-shirt onto the sand, then matter-of-factly pushed his shorts down his legs and stepped out of them. He was gloriously, breathtaking nude, but he seemed as unselfconscious about it as though he was in a locker room or in the privacy of his bedroom, getting ready to change his clothes, all by himself, with no prying eyes to see him. I could see him, and I can’t deny that my eyes were not only prying, they were practically boring into his flesh.

  “I’m going in,” he announced. “Why don’t you take a break and join me?”

  “I’m sure that water must still be cold.”

  “It is.” He dashed into the water and immersed himself waist-deep. “It’s refreshing.”

  “I prefer to take my liquid refreshments internally—at least this early in the day.”

  He laughed, then abandoned himself to the waves and began to swim, not too vigorously, splashing back and forth, making lazy circles and finally rolling over to float on his back. With his arms and legs spread, his head tilted back and his eyes closed against the sunlight, while his hair swirled about in the water, he looked like some sort of exotic sea creature bobbing up and down. His penis, too, bobbed up and down, like a fleshy buoy.

  “Do you always swim in the nude?” I asked him.

  “Always. That’s one of the advantages of living here. You can always find an isolated spot on the beach, like this one. And even if somebody did come along and see you—well, most of the men and women here aren’t the type who’d be shocked by the sight of a man’s dick and ass.”

  I was feeling very bold, for some reason. “Tell me something. Have you ever had sex on the beach?”

  “Of course. That’s another advantage.”

  “At night or during the daytime?”

  “Both.”

  “Which is better?”

  “Um, hard to choose. Daytime, with the hot sun beating down on you, making you sweat—that’s pretty intense—or night-time, when it’s cooler, with the moon and the stars overhead, especially if you’ve built a fire out of driftwood. Yeah, come to think of it, I’d have to say I’ve enjoyed that even more.”

  I wondered who his partners in these sandy romps had been…his lover Jed, of course, while they’d still been together, but since Jed’s return to America?

  I suspected that had I come right out and asked Rick about his recent sexcapades, he would not hesitate to enlighten me. However, now, I suddenly felt tongue-tied again.

  Finally, he got out of the water and came to stand beside me, using his T-shirt to dry himself as he studied my painting once more.

  “I like that kind of shimmery effect you’ve done with the water,” he said.

  “It’s just what we call an oil sketch. A study.”

  “You’re too modest. I’m glad to see you’re no dilettante. We get lots of those passing through here. They all have delusions of artistic grandeur.”

  “I don’t aspire to grandeur. I’d be happy to achieve adequacy, on a consistent basis.”

  To my disappointment, he pulled on his shorts.

  “Do you go for a run like this every morning?” I asked.

  “Just about. Sometimes I take a different route. I do like this stretch of the beach, though.” He paused to put his shirt back on. The damp cloth clung to his torso. “Now I have to head back, take my shower, get dressed and go to work.” He looked at me in a way that, unless I was flattering myself, I thought was slightly provocative. “Sometimes I go for a jog at night, too, before I go to bed. If I’m not already tired, that always tires me out and helps me to fall asleep. Maybe you’d like to join me, some morning or evening.”

  “I’d like that. Preferably
in the evening, though. I’ve got to admit that I’m not the dedicated athletic type. Too much exertion first thing in the morning, and I’ll get nothing accomplished the rest of the day.”

  He laughed. “We’ll do it some night, then. I may even be able to talk you into going for a swim.”

  “That wouldn’t require much persuasion, provided the water’s nice and warm. We might even collect some driftwood and start a fire,” I dared to suggest.

  “Sounds good. You’ll have to let me know when you’re in the mood.”

  After a few more inconsequential exchanges, Rick excused himself and jogged off. I watched his retreating figure again. Damn, he was a hot man. However, it was much too early in the day for me to allow myself the distraction of my libidinous thoughts. I forced myself to refocus my attention on my painting.

  I believe I have mentioned that San Floriano had its own small colony of artists. Inevitably, I soon made the acquaintance of many of them. There were both professionals and amateurs in residence, and I had little difficulty telling them apart.

  With a few exceptions, we professional artists tend not to be great conversationalists. The environment and the ebb and flow of current events influences an artist, like anybody else. He cannot express any of these things except in his own medium. He stands aside, so preoccupied with observing life that in a very real sense he can be incapable of living it itself.

  I noticed that the local Italian artists were different from their foreign counterparts. The foreigners almost invariably announced that they were artists, without waiting for someone to ask them, and they expected the people they met to be duly impressed and to pay them homage. They were glib about their training and their techniques. They also made sure to inform anyone within earshot that they made money from their art, but of course that was not the primary reason they practiced their craft. They talked a great deal among themselves and to anyone else who cared to listen about movements, periods, tendencies, lucky breaks, and agents.