The Art Lover

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  But my reverie was interrupted. Enzo exploded out of the water a few meters away, shaking his golden mane. He laughed at my startled expression. “How can you wash your body while you are clothed?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He waded toward me, into increasingly shallow waters, chest bared first, then well-defined abdomen. “Come on now. The truck is hot. We are there soon again, back in the oven.” He dragged one leg at a time through the water, taking the slow-motion strides of a muscle-bound giant. Though I tried to avert my gaze, it was impossible not to see as his hips emerged, followed by his hairy pelvis, his penis shrunken by the cold water, his testicles shifting with each advancing step. When I turned further away, Enzo insisted even more loudly, “You feel better all the rest of the day. You want that we toss you in?”

  “No, thank you. Certainly not.” My hand went to the front of my buttoned shirt, clasping the cloth there, pulling it tight around my ribs like a nervous woman holding her bathrobe closed. Embarrassed by the gesture, I dropped my hands, dipped my wrists again quickly, then waded back a few steps and sat on the dry shore, pulling on my socks with difficulty. My feet were still wet. I was hurrying for nothing. Relax, relax, I told myself, and remembered the postcard to my sister in my shirt pocket, warped by my chest’s damp heat.

  We have stopped at a small lake, I began to write a few minutes later, safely distanced from the lakeshore, and with those words I could see this moment as it should have been seen and experienced: as a congenial, natural, unselfconscious diversion. Who wouldn’t have wanted to take a refreshing swim on a day like this?

  And as soon as I’d allowed the thought, as soon as I’d let myself think again of my sister not as she was but as she had once been, I imagined my mother. She was down on her knees so that we were face to face, lecturing me gently on the day I was to leave for a week of nature camp just outside Landshut. “If you refuse to take your shirt off, if you refuse to swim, the boys will notice and be more curious. Don’t let them start, and you will be fine.” But my heart was pounding as she gazed deeply into my eyes, attempting to make a gift of her own confidence. She glanced over her shoulder to be sure my father was out of earshot. He was talking to my uncle, who would drive my cousin and me to the boys’ camp, two hours away. My father had already been through my suitcase once, approving not only each item, but how it was folded and placed. Now my mother pressed something into my hand. Six small, tan bandages and a small roll of tape. The bandages would cover what must stay hidden, if I were to avoid shame, but every time one got wet, it would have to be replaced. “Only six?” I said, my voice breaking with pinched dread. She rested her forehead gently against mine and explained, “The seventh day, there is no swimming. Only youth assembly. Now quickly: pack them away.” My eyes welled up. I was dizzy with relief. She had thought of everything, as mothers do. And if we had lived alone, just the two of us—three, with Greta—we would have been happy.

  Enzo’s voice boomed across the water: “Are all Germans like you—embarrassed to take off their clothes?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Enzo,” Cosimo called from farther out, still floating. “Leave him alone. Let him make up his own mind.”

  “Va bene. But there is no lake again today, so close to the road. And the truck has a bad smell.”

  “Not because of me,” I muttered.

  Enzo was in water up to his knees—hands relaxed at his side, soaked pubic hair catching the light—staring at me, or past me, toward the road. I turned away, exaggerating the effort required to pull on each shoe, oppressed by his display—not the nudeness per se, I was no prude, but the arrogance of his ease.

  “Vogler . . .”

  I grumbled in reply, pretending to be focused on my laces, wishing almost that I had disrobed entirely—it really wasn’t worth all the fuss, not as it had been for me once, long ago. That was all over—forgotten, insignificant—the problem reduced to one small, residual blemish. The boys’ camp had been a problem, but I had survived six months of labor service just fine. I could tell you, labor service had been a lot more problematic than the boys’ camp. But now that I was fully dressed, it would have seemed more awkward to swim than to avoid swimming.

  “Vogler—” Enzo stopped short, only his feet submerged. “Do you see?”

  There was a distant figure—no, two figures—side by side, walking on the road. Toward the truck.

  I pulled the laces of my shoe so hard that one snapped. “Get your clothes!” I shouted, and took off running before I could tell if Cosimo had heard or if Enzo was following. The flat dress shoes tore into the grass. I slipped once, gained traction on the gravelly road, stirring dust as I sprinted toward the figures: one larger than the other, walking alongside the truck, tapping the side of it, pausing near the driver’s door. I ran so hard I couldn’t breathe, but there was no need to breathe for this short distance, only to run—fingers pressed together, palms gently cupped, elbows crooked, chin lowered, as our coaches had always instructed—as fast as I could, hobbled only slightly by one untied shoe and my untrained physique.

  The figures heard me pounding toward them. The old man’s lips parted beneath his gray mustache. The boy’s eyes grew wide.

  “Hallo! Halten Sie an!”

  The boy took a step closer to his father, eyes wide, clutching the burlap bag he was carrying.

  I interrogated them: “What are you doing? Why are you approaching the truck? What were you expecting to see here?”

  Cosimo had pulled on his boxers and rushed to catch up. Now he stood just behind me, one hand pressed to his side, panting as he rambled in Italian while I slowly took hold of my senses and remembered: of course these two couldn’t understand me. They’d never heard anything but Italian this far south. They were villagers. They’d mistaken me for a madman.

  Cosimo tapped me on the shoulder several times. In response, I slowly loosened my grip on the boy’s arm. I had been pinching that soft, thin arm so hard that there was sure to be a bruise to show when the boy told his mother, sometime that night, about the übergeschnappt foreigner who wanted to interrogate him.

  “But why are they so close to the truck?” I demanded when Cosimo seemed to be letting off the strangers too lightly. Cosimo stopped massaging the stitch in his torso and pointed to the burlap bag. “They thought we might buy some lemons. They were walking from their farm to the next village. That’s all.”

  He patted my back a few times now, a casual motion, but there was communication in every touch—a brisk pat at first, then softer, softer. Everything calmer now. He was in control. In that moment, I felt certain that Cosimo had avoided even more brawls than he had endured, that the coming age would be—would have been—a better place with more men like him. It was a different kind of masculine symmetry he presented—not the symmetry of a beautiful face, but the equilibrium of stance and situation. When Cosimo took a casual step forward, closer to the boy and the farmer, I took a step back. The boy nestled under his father’s arm, relieved to be out of my reach.

  Now Enzo—half dressed, curls dripping onto his bare chest—joined us, oblivious to the minor, evaporating drama. He chatted with the farmer, eyed what they were carrying, held up a finger, and returned a moment later with some money for the boy, taking the entire burlap bag.

  The lemony scent filled the truck. The edges of Enzo’s fingers were drying white from the strong juice. He had eaten five of them so far and was now squeezing a lemon into his damp curls, working the juice through with his fingers. “It is natural—good for adding light color to the yellow hair.”

  A fat seed was stuck to his temple, but I said nothing. What kind of man bleached his hair in this way?

  “You eat one?”

  “Maybe one,” I said, digging into the thick yellow rind and passing a wedge to Cosimo, enjoying the way the citrus scent chased away the odor of smoke.

  Enzo pressed his elbow into my side and winked, happy not only about the shared fruit but also about a shared
confidence. Just before we had pulled onto the road, while Cosimo had been placing our folded jackets in the back of the truck, Enzo had lowered his head and whispered urgently, “It is not true.”

  “What?”

  “I know how to drive. My brother thinks I can’t. This is what he tells you, before. It makes him feel better.”

  “Why?”

  “He does not want me to be”—he paused, looking for the word—“independent. He wants me to live in our family town, always. He wants to be partners and share, always. He does not want to be alone. But I can drive. He cannot fix truck, but I can drive very well. Of course!”

  Cosimo had pulled open the driver’s door, cutting short our conversation. But it had served its purpose in restoring Enzo’s manly confidence. Now Enzo seemed certain I’d share my own confession in return.

  “So, how did you do that?” he asked, after he had finger-combed all his sticky, golden-glazed curls.

  “Do what, frighten the boy?” Even I couldn’t help but smile at the memory of the boy’s wide eyes. The statue was safe and sound, we were not really being followed, and—hunger aside—this drive was turning out to be easy, after all.

  “No. How do you run so fast?”

  “It was important, for the security of our cargo.”

  Cosimo took his eyes off the road. “Don’t lie to us now. You are some kind of athlete.”

  “Well,” I said, looking at my dry, juice-whitened hands in my lap, “maybe years ago.”

  It came back to Enzo now. “Mister Keller says he meets you in the summer of the Olympics in Berlin, yes? He sees you there?”

  “No, no.” To my own surprise, my face was warming. “I wasn’t a participant in the Olympics. I was a sprinter when I was young, but I was not that talented. What Mr. Keller meant was that he was introduced to me through a friend, another man, an art collector—who saw me only in the audience at Berlin, only briefly. It’s complicated.”

  “But how does this other man recognize you? Because you are already a famous athlete?”

  “No, Enzo. I was never a famous athlete.”

  “Then how does he recognize you?”

  “He did not.”

  Enzo leaned on one haunch, twisting to face me, his forehead wrinkled with confusion. “But he knows you are an art expert?”

  “No. I chose to walk out of the stadium at a moment when everyone was watching to see a high jumper receive his gold medal, far below us.”

  Enzo waited for me to explain.

  “And my awkward exit attracted too much attention. From everyone, all around. It was an inconvenient time to leave.”

  Enzo’s brow smoothed. He granted me a complicit smile. “You are an aggravation. That is why Mr. Keller remembers. Mr. Keller hates aggravations.”

  “Actually . . .” I paused—but why had I begun? Enzo was clueless and unlikely to persevere. But then again, I was sick of the memory, which had not faded for lack of exposure. Additionally—and this was significant—there seemed to be no risk in telling this story. Germany seemed unreal enough here; Italy would seem even more unreal once I was back home, in less than three days. Nothing I could say or do here would change anything.

  “Actually,” I confessed, “people around me were expressing approval of my exit, some of them anyway. A few clapped.”

  “Sono confuso,” Enzo lamented, still perplexed.

  “Well, I should explain: the medalist was a dark-skinned man, a Negro from the United States.”

  “Jesse Owens?”

  I sighed. “That is the name people associate with the Olympics, but actually, this was a man named Cornelius Johnson. There were a dozen and a half of these dark-skinned fellows in Berlin, and two women also, if I’m not mistaken. Many of them very good, very fast. Many Germans applauded for Owens and for Johnson—excellence is attractive, charismatic. To everyone. It is recognizable in athletics, just as it is in art, which is precisely why the entire world can appreciate a Roman statue, not only Italians. But some of my countrymen were not happy to lose to him, not even happy to see his kind in Berlin—that should not be surprising. When I left, they thought—”

  Cosimo spoke up quietly: “That you were a racist, yes?”

  “I had never given a thought to racism, nationalism or internationalism, any of that,” I said, puzzling over the memory honestly, and feeling no sting in Cosimo’s question. “I was leaving because of an argument with the person next to me.”

  “A woman?” Enzo guessed, nodding to encourage me.

  “No.” I took a breath. “My father.”

  Enzo looked briefly disappointed, then nodded even more deeply than before, willing to accept this second-best answer. Of course. “Il padre. Il babbo.”

  “My father, who had bought our tickets—very rare and sought-after tickets. We were sitting not far below the most prized seats where some high-ranking government people and special guests were sitting.”

  “So, many government officials see you leave.”

  “Yes.”

  It was all as sharp as yesterday: the apologies as I squeezed past men, the woman standing to let me pass, the low murmur of disapproval, and that strange moment when the pitch changed, when the murmur rose to a higher register, and the crowd—as if a single organism—reappraised the situation, deciding that I was doing something notable, even noble. Two hands, somewhere, clapped—the quivering antennae of a large and unpredictable creature—and faces turned. Then more began to clap, and it became obvious that the applause—not scattered and swift and lighthearted, as the applause for the athletes had been, but slow, methodical, a telegraphic drumbeat of a message—was indeed for me. For my exit. And several—not all, but several—who were not clapping were looking around for their own jackets or purses or programs, preparing to copy what I’d done.

  How easy it is to start something. Too easy.

  Just before I squeezed out of my row, I looked up to see in the seats above us three faces studying me, one of them nodding in deep, if mistaken, accord. The most famous face, I found out later, had already left. He had had enough and refused to be present for the presentation of a gold medal to this American Negro. So I was merely adopting the style of the day, without intending to—without even knowing Der Kunstsammler had made his own exit before me. I’m sure at least one other man in the seats above me wished he had left before I did, so that he could have trumped my exit and perhaps garnered some reward. How many people left after me? I have no idea.

  “It was because of the misunderstanding,” I finished explaining, “that I was introduced to my current professional situation. The man who saw me, a friend of Keller’s, also spotted me later, outside the stadium, and then we happened to meet a third time, went to lunch, and had a conversation. There were inquiries about my background, my interests. Not much later, I had a new job.”

  Enzo considered, sorting through the details for the only points that mattered. “And you are here, in Italy, because of your job.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you are here in Italy because of a misunderstanding.”

  “Yes.”

  “That is not so bad.” Enzo smacked my leg, congratulatory. “That is only Lady Fortune smiling.”

  But there is balance in everything that happens, isn’t there? There is symmetry. The thrower leans further forward to balance the weight of the outstretched arm and the heavy disc behind him. Something bad is attended, we hope, with something good. And with greater certainty, when something good happens, it is followed by something bad—especially when the good was undeserved.

  The lake swim had refreshed Cosimo. The promised dinner stop was still an hour or more off. Enzo’s lemons—at last count, seven—had filled and upset his stomach enough that he had lost interest in chatting. Now his expression was pinched, his pursed lips reddened by the acid, the large white seed still plastered to his temple. So there was time, perhaps more time than I would have liked, to remember.

  My father was disconcertingly proud
of the Olympic track-and-field tickets. This was after Mother had taken to bed, the hard growth in her neck swelling, the doctors long ago sent away. But Vater had found a distraction of sorts. First: the pleasure of the hunt, when obtaining tickets seemed impossible. This phase lasted three or four months and involved evening visits to gymnastic clubs, beer halls, and the private homes of old acquaintances.

  I had tired long ago of boozy socializing with my father. From the age of twelve, he had tried to make a man of me by dragging me along to the Hofbräuhaus, where we’d endure the intense heat of the long tables crammed with three or four thousand men draining immense tankards. On those interminable evenings, I would sip my own cider and listen as the men discussed the only two subjects they relished—the war that had ended eight years earlier, leaving men like my father wounded and bitter, and the miserable economy that had followed it. Pushed into a sweltering corner, I occasionally sank into slumber, to be wakened suddenly by the blare of an oompah band starting up, or the stamp of feet and pounding of empty steins as someone stood on a table to give a political speech.

  By 1936, though, I’d done my time and had failed to develop any affection for either pilsner or political rhetoric; my father by this point made the rounds alone. One night when he returned home tipsy and empty-handed, Greta confided to me that she no longer believed he was trying to get tickets, only talking about it as a way to stay out of the house, away from the smell of disinfectant and chicken broth. Mother would rarely eat more than a spoonful, but it reminded her of winter days and the thin pancakes her own mother had once made—pancakes cut in narrow strips and arranged into pinwheels at the bottom of a shallow bowl and soaked in broth, which had to be eaten quickly, before the pancakes disintegrated. These were the things we talked about at the end, not about life or love or God or regrets, but only about a winter day’s Flädlesuppe.