Pictures of Fidelman

by Bernard Malamud

  Scarpio secretly feels Fidelman’s thigh.

  “Let go or I’ll tell the padrone.”

  Angelo returns and flips up a card. Queen. Seven and a half on the button. He pockets Fidelman’s last hundred lire.

  “Go to bed,” says Angelo, “it’s a long day tomorrow.”

  Fidelman climbs up to his room on the fifth floor and stares out the window into the dark street to see how far down is death. Too far, so he undresses for bed. He looks every night and sometimes during the day. Teresa, screaming, had once held onto his two legs as Fidelman dangled half out of the window until one of the girls’ naked customers, a barrel-chested man, rushed into the room and dragged him back in.

  Sometimes Fidelman weeps in his sleep.

  He awakes, cringing. Angelo and Scarpio are in his room but nobody hits him.

  “Search anywhere,” Fidelman offers. “You won’t find a thing except maybe half a stale pastry.”

  “Shut up,” says Angelo. “We want to make a proposition.”

  Fidelman slowly sits up. Scarpio produces the yellow sheet of scribbled fantasies. “We notice you draw.” He points a dirty fingernail at the nude figure.

  “After a fashion. I doodle and see what happens.”

  “Could you copy a painting?”

  “What sort of painting?”

  “Just a nude. Tiziano’s ‘Venus of Urbino.’ The one after Giorgione.”

  “Oh that one?” Fidelman thinks. “I doubt that I could.”

  “Any fool can.”

  “Shut up, Scarpio.” Angelo sits his bulk at the foot of Fidelman’s narrow bed. Scarpio, with his good eye, moodily inspects the cheerless view from the window.

  “On Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore, about an hour from here,” Angelo says, “there’s a small castello full of lousy paintings, except for one which is a genuine Tiziano, authenticated by three art experts, including a brother-in-law of mine. It’s worth half a million dollars but the owner is richer than Olivetti and won’t sell though an American museum has offered a fortune.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Exactly. Anyway it’s insured for at least $400,000. Of course if anyone stole it it would be impossible to sell.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “Bother what?”

  “Whatever it is,” Fidelman says lamely.

  “You’ll learn more by listening. Suppose it was stolen and held for ransom?”

  “Ransom?”

  “Ransom,” Scarpio says from the window.

  “At least $300,000,” says Angelo, “a bargain for the insurance company. They’d save a hundred thousand on the deal.”

  He outlines a plan. They had photographed the Titian on both sides from all angles and distances and had collected from various art books the best color plates. They also had the exact measurements of the canvas and every figure on it. If Fidelman could make a decent copy they would duplicate the frame and on a dark night sneak the reproduction into the castello gallery and exit with the original. The guards were stupid and the advantage of the plan—instead of slitting the canvas out of its frame—was that nobody would recognize the substitution for days, possibly longer. In the meantime they would row the picture across the lake and truck it out of the country; one had a better chance in France. Once the picture was securely hidden, Angelo back at the hotel, Scarpio would get in touch with the insurance company. Recognizing the brilliance of the execution, they would kick in at once with the ransom money.

  “If you make a good copy you’ll get yours,” says Angelo.

  “Mine? What would that be?” Fidelman asks.

  “Your passport,” Angelo answers cagily. “Plus two hundred American dollars and a quick goodbye.”

  “Five hundred dollars,” says Fidelman.

  “Scarpio,” the padrone says patiently, “show him what you have in your pants.”

  Scarpio unbuttons his jacket and draws a mean-looking dagger from a sheath under his belt.

  “Three fifty,” Fidelman says. “I’ll need plane fare.”

  “Three fifty,” nods Angelo. “Payable when you deliver the finished reproduction.”

  “And you pay for all supplies?”

  “All expenses within reason. But if you try any monkey tricks—snitch or double cross, you’ll wake up with your head missing, or something worse.”

  “Tell me,” Fidelman says after a minute of contemplation, “what if I turn down the proposition? I mean in a friendly way?”

  Angelo rises sternly from the creaking bed. “Then you’ll stay here for the rest of your life. When you leave you leave in a coffin, very cheap wood.”

  “I see.”

  “Then it’s settled,” says Angelo.

  “Take the morning off,” says Scarpio.

  “Thanks.”

  The padrone glares. “First finish the toilet bowls.”

  Am I worthy? Can I do it? Do I dare? He has these and other doubts, feels melancholy, and wastes time.

  Angelo one morning calls him into his office. “Have a Munich beer.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Cordial?”

  “Nothing now.”

  “What’s the matter with you? You look as if you buried your mother.”

  Fidelman sets down his mop and pail and says nothing.

  “Why don’t you put those things away and get started?” the padrone asks. “I’ve had the portiere move six trunks and some broken furniture out of the storeroom where you have two big windows. Scarpio wheeled in an easel and he’s bought you brushes, colors and anything else you need.”

  “It’s west light, not very even.”

  Angelo shrugs. “It’s the best I can do. This is our season and I can’t spare any other rooms. If you’d rather work at night we can set up some lamps. It’s a waste of electricity but I’ll make that concession to your temperament if you work fast and produce the goods.”

  “What’s more I don’t know the first thing about forging paintings. All I might do is just about copy the picture.”

  “That’s all we ask. Leave the technical business to us. First do a decent drawing. When you’re ready to paint I’ll get you a piece of sixteenth-century Belgian linen that’s been scraped clean of a former picture. You prime it with white lead and when it’s dry you sketch. Once you finish the nude, Scarpio and I will bake it, put in the cracks, and age them with soot. We’ll even stipple in fly spots before we varnish and glue. We’ll do what’s necessary. There are books on this subject and Scarpio reads like a demon. It isn’t as complicated as you think.”

  “What about the truth of the colors?”

  “I’ll mix them for you. I’ve made a life study of Tiziano’s work.”

  Fidelman’s eyes are still unhappy.

  “What’s eating you now?”

  “It’s stealing another painter’s ideas and work.”

  The padrone wheezes. “Tiziano will forgive you. Didn’t he steal the figure of the Urbino from Giorgione? Didn’t Rubens steal the Andrian nude from Tiziano? Art steals and so does everybody. You stole a wallet and tried to steal my lire. What’s the difference? It’s the way of the world. We’re only human.”

  “It’s a sort of desecration.”

  “Everybody desecrates. We live off the dead and they live off us. Take for instance religion.”

  “I doubt I can do it without seeing the original,” Fidelman says. “The color plates you gave me aren’t true.”

  “Neither is the original any more. You don’t think Rembrandt painted in those sfumato browns? As for painting the Venus, you’ll have to do the job here. If you copied it in the castello gallery one of those cretin guards might remember your face and next thing you know you’d be in trouble. So would we, which we wouldn’t want, naturally.”

  “I still ought to see it.”

  The padrone reluctantly consents to a one-day excursion to Isola Bella, assigning Scarpio to closely accompany the copyist.

  On the vaporetto to the island, Scarpio, wea
ring dark glasses and a light straw hat, turns to Fidelman.

  “In all confidence what do you think of Angelo?”

  “He’s all right I guess. Why?”

  “Do you think he’s handsome?”

  “Maybe he was once.”

  “You have many fine insights,” Scarpio says. He points in the distance where the long blue lake disappears amid towering Alps. “Locarno, sixty kilometers.”

  “Is that so?” With Switzerland so close freedom swells in Fidelman’s heart but he does nothing about it. Scarpio clings to him as to a virgin cousin, and sixty kilometers is a long swim with a knife in your back.

  “That’s the castello over there,” the major-domo says. “It looks like a joint.”

  The castello is pink on a high terraced hill amid tall trees in formal gardens. It is full of tourists and bad paintings. But in the last gallery, “infinite riches in a little room,” hangs the “Venus of Urbino” alone.

  What a miracle, Fidelman thinks.

  The golden brown-haired Venus, a woman of the real world, lies on her couch in serene beauty, her hand lightly touching her intimate mystery, the other holding red flowers, her nude body her truest accomplishment.

  “I’d have painted somebody in bed with her,” Scarpio says.

  “Shut up,” says Fidelman.

  Scarpio, hurt, leaves the gallery.

  Fidelman, alone with Venus, worships the painting. What magnificent tones, what extraordinary flesh that turns the body into spirit.

  While Scarpio is out talking to the guard, the copyist hastily sketches the Venus, and with a Leica Angelo has given him for the purpose, takes several new color shots.

  Afterwards he approaches the picture and kisses the lady’s hands, thighs, and breasts, but as he murmurs, “I love you,” a guard strikes him hard on the head with both fists.

  That night as they are returning on the rapido to Milano, Scarpio falls asleep, snoring. He awakens in a hurry, tugging at his dagger, but Fidelman hasn’t moved.

  The copyist throws himself into his work with passion. He has swallowed lightning and hopes it will strike whatever he touches. Yet he has nagging doubts he can do the job right and fears he will never escape alive from the Hotel du Ville. He tries at once to paint the Titian directly on canvas but hurriedly scrapes it clean when he sees what a garish mess he has made. The Venus is insanely disproportionate and the maids in the background foreshortened into dwarfs. He then takes Angelo’s advice and makes several drawings on paper to master the composition before committing it again to canvas.

  Angelo and Scarpio come up every night and shake their heads over the drawings.

  “Not even close,” says the padrone.

  “Far from it,” says Scarpio.

  “I’m trying,” Fidelman says, anguished.

  “Try harder,” Angelo answers grimly.

  Fidelman has a sudden insight. “What happened to the last guy who tried?”

  “He’s still floating,” Scarpio says.

  “I’ll need some practice,” the copyist coughs. “My vision seems tight and the arm tires easily. I’d better go back to exercises to loosen up.”

  “What kind of exercises?” Scarpio inquires.

  “Nothing physical, just some warm-up nudes to get me going.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” Angelo says. “You’ve got about a month, not much more. There’s an advantage to making the exchange of pictures during the tourist season.”

  “Only a month?”

  The padrone nods.

  “Maybe you’d better trace it,” Scarpio suggests.

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” says Angelo. “I could find you an old reclining nude you can paint over. You might get the form of this one by altering the form of another.”

  “It’s not honest, I mean to myself.”

  Everyone titters.

  “Well, it’s your headache,” says Angelo.

  Fidelman, unwilling to ask what happens if he fails, after they leave, feverishly draws faster.

  Things go badly for the copyist. Working all day and often into the very early morning hours, he tries everything he can think of. Since he always distorts the figure of Venus, though he carries it perfect in his mind, he goes back to a study of Greek statuary with ruler and compass to compute the mathematical proportions of the ideal nude. Scarpio accompanies him to one or two museums. Fidelman also works with the Vetruvian square in the circle, experiments with Dürer’s intersecting circles and triangles, and studies Leonardo’s schematic heads and bodies. Nothing doing. He draws paper dolls, not women, certainly not Venus. He draws girls who will not grow up. He then tries sketching every nude he can lay eyes on in the art books Scarpio brings him from the library; from the Esquiline goddess to “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Fidelman copies not badly many figures from classical statuary and modern painting; but when he returns to his Venus, with something of a laugh she eludes him. What am I, bewitched, the copyist asks himself, and if so by whom? It’s only a copy job so what’s taking so long? He can’t even guess, until he happens to see a naked whore cross the hall to enter a friend’s room. Maybe the ideal is cold and I like it hot? Nature over art? Inspiration—the live model? Fidelman knocks on the door and tries to persuade the girl to pose for him but she can’t for economic reasons. Neither will any of the others—there are four girls in the room.

  A red-head among them calls out to Fidelman, “Shame on you, Arturo, are you too good to bring up pizzas and coffee any more?”

  “I’m busy on a job for Angelo. Painting a picture, that is. A business proposition.”

  Their laughter further depresses his spirits. No inspiration from whores. Maybe too many naked women around make it impossible to draw a nude. Still he’d better try a live model, having tried everything else and failed.

  In desperation, on the verge of panic because time is going so fast, he thinks of Teresa, the chambermaid. She is a poor specimen of feminine beauty but the imagination can enhance anything. Fidelman asks her to pose for him, and Teresa, after a shy laugh, consents.

  “I will if you promise not to tell anybody.”

  Fidelman promises.

  She undresses, a meager, bony girl, breathing heavily, and he draws her with flat chest, distended belly, thin hips and hairy legs, unable to alter a single detail. Van Eyck would have loved her. When Teresa sees the drawing she weeps profusely.

  “I thought you would make me beautiful.”

  “I had that in mind.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “It’s hard to say,” says Fidelman.

  “I’m not in the least bit sexy,” Teresa weeps.

  Considering her body with half-closed eyes, Fidelman tells her to go borrow a long slip.

  “Get one from one of the girls and I’ll draw you sexy.

  She returns in a frilly white slip and looks so attractive that instead of painting her, Fidelman, with a lump in his throat, gets her to lie down with him on a dusty mattress in the room. Clasping her slip-encased form, the copyist shuts both eyes and concentrates on his elusive Venus. He feels about to recapture a rapturous experience and is looking forward to it but at the last minute it turns into a limerick he didn’t know he knew:

  “Whilst Titian was mixing rose madder,

  His model was crouched on a ladder;

  Her position to Titian suggested coition,

  So he stopped mixing madder and had’er.”

  Angelo, entering the storeroom just then, lets out a bellow. He fires Teresa on her naked knees pleading with him not to, and Fidelman has to go back to latrine duty the rest of the day.

  “You might as well keep me doing this permanently,” Fidelman, disheartened, tells the padrone in his office afterward. “I’ll never finish that cursed picture.”

  “Why not? What’s eating you? I’ve treated you like a son.”

  “I’m blocked, that’s what.”

  “Get to work, you’ll feel better.”

&n
bsp; “I just can’t paint.”

  “For what reason?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because you’ve had it too good here.” Angelo angrily strikes Fidelman across the face. When the copyist sobs, he boots him hard in the rear.

  That night Fidelman goes on a hunger strike but the padrone, hearing of it, threatens force-feeding.

  After midnight Fidelman steals some clothes from a sleeping whore, dresses quickly, ties on a kerchief, makes up his eyes and lips, and walks out the door past Scarpio sitting on a bar stool, enjoying the night breeze. Having gone a block, fearing he will be chased, Fidelman breaks into a high-heeled run but it’s too late. Scarpio has recognized him in afterthought and yells for the portiere. Fidelman kicks off his slippers and runs furiously but the skirt impedes him. The major-domo and portiere catch up with him and drag him, kicking and struggling, back to the hotel. A carabiniere, hearing the commotion, appears on the scene, but seeing how Fidelman is dressed, will do nothing for him. In the cellar Angelo hits him with a short rubber hose until he collapses.

  Fidelman lies in bed three days, refusing to eat or get up.

  “What’ll we do now?” Angelo, worried, whispers. “How about a fortune teller? Either that or let’s bury him.”

  “Astrology is better,” Scarpio says. “I’ll check his planets. If that doesn’t work we’ll try psychology. He’s a suggestible type.”

  “Well, make it fast.”

  Scarpio tries astrology but it doesn’t work: a mix-up of Venus with Mars he can’t explain; so the next morning he tries psychology. He comes into Fidelman’s room with a thick book under his arm. The art copyist is still in bed, smoking a butt.