The Art Lover

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “It falls out of my pocket when I run to the lake. It is my fault. But we must go back.”

  “We can’t go back,” I interjected. “Cosimo, it is impossible. We don’t have extra time, and we don’t want any unexpected encounters or additional difficulties. We cannot go back.”

  He nodded once, eyes on his feet. Then he gestured back to the truck. “Andiamo.” End of discussion.

  More food was distributed, but it was eaten with less praise and less abandon. Enzo brought out the wine bottle and passed it around—a sip for Cosimo, a few sips for me, and most of it for himself as he wallowed in the corner of the cab. Wanting to avoid eye contact at any cost, I stared out the windshield as if I were studying the landscape, memorizing it for some future sketch, though I hadn’t sketched a landscape in some time.

  “A little more wine?” Enzo asked after he had polished off more than half of it.

  “Grazie.” I reached for it casually, still avoiding eye contact. The wine warmed my stomach. It didn’t take much for me to feel a little tipsy, and the tipsiness felt good, especially after the bit of excitement we had endured.

  Ohne Zwischenfall. Without incident. Well, perhaps that wasn’t accurate. The day had been at least a little eventful. But everything would be fine. It sounded better in Italian, more melodious and certain: Tutto va bene.

  The sun’s slow descent had painted the rusty hills. Bowls of purple separated fields of red soil. Night was collecting; everything was becoming softer. Just when you thought the canvas was done, that the light had finished playing its games and now darkness would fall, there would be another ridge highlighted with sun, another valley cast into even deeper shadow. This countryside appealed to me much more than the countryside around Rome, but maybe it was my state of mind. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the fading, changing light and the natural colors that begged for artistic representation.

  I had tried watercolor painting for a year or so, on my own without a teacher, but I’d had no talent for it. I fought the flow of water against the page, the drip of changing hue obscuring my pencil guidelines. Any watercolors I attempted seemed to have their own ideas. I couldn’t relax and find inspiration from them. Worst of all was being pleased with some minor painting at the midpoint of its execution and then seeing it fully dry—there, changed again. Unsettling.

  I drank a little more wine, then I finished the bottle. Why not? Enzo had already had his share; Cosimo needed to be alert. There was nothing else to do but sip and watch the sun go down, appreciating our recent brush with disaster.

  Outside the window, there was an entire landscape with its own ideas, changing with every moment, so different from the statue we were transporting, a model of ideals that never changed, in a medium of reassuring solidity. A sculpture was what it was, not only mid-process, but before the chiseling had even begun. Michelangelo had believed that a statue’s shape was hidden within the stone, to be revealed rather than created. Much as a person’s true health, inner strength, character—call it what you will—is revealed.

  And yet, this ephemeral moment was beautiful, too; one could argue it was even more so, for its lack of permanence. There was more to see at this sunset hour, and more to imagine: that soft hill there could be the rounded hip of a woman lying on her side, with that shadow obscuring her sleeping face. Bella. Schön.

  There had been moments with Leonie, but no—we were looking only for reassurance from each other, for dull physical comfort, and the lack of chemistry was clear from the start. It had been best to discover that sooner rather than later. But why hadn’t I tried to find my better half, the person whose honesty and beauty would help me feel more open to moments like these? Why hadn’t I found someone to help me face what was not pleasant or beautiful in our lives? And how could I begrudge another man his eyes and heart for being more open than mine?

  When I set down the empty bottle safely near my feet, a guttural sound escaped from Enzo’s chest, and I peeked at his left hand on his left knee, flexing and tightening like a beating heart. Of course the hills reminded him of his girlfriend. They were all women, a nation of women—sleeping, dreaming, beckoning—out here beyond the noise and confusion, the scheming and ambition of cities, the stupid plans of men. And men did have such grand, ambitious plans: the acquiring, collecting impulse that could, unchecked, become something entirely different—a rapacious appetite for controlling things and ideas and posterity itself. And no matter how good it sounded—an “expanded homeland” or even an entire “city of art”—it somehow became the opposite of those things. The opposite of home and security, the opposite of culture and art. The opposite, too, of truth and beauty and love . . .

  “Perhaps—” I said, clearing my throat, “perhaps we have made good time. The stop for food was quick. We carry our own fuel. I don’t see how we could be far from Florence. We might even be ahead of schedule.”

  The justification, I thought, was sound: as long as the decision was mine, as long as the backward detour was a short one, I would be repaid in loyalty and efficiency. We would drive further into nightfall, and tomorrow there would be fewer unnecessary stops. Otherwise, I never would have compromised.

  The lake was at least sixty minutes behind us. Two hours round-trip, though Cosimo had made it clear he was going to cut the loss to one hour, give or take, by driving nearly twice our previous speed. The truck, which had been whining already on every uphill climb, responded unhappily to Cosimo’s increasing demands. Grinding the gears, he cursed under his breath. The whole truck was vibrating at this unwholesome speed—and that was not good at all. A constant vibration could do more damage to the statue than a single unfortunate bump.

  “An hour lost is really not so much,” I ventured, to an unresponsive audience. Clearing my throat, I made my point more plain: “We cannot drive so fast. You must slow down.”

  But Cosimo was barely in control of his own breathing. He inhaled, held it, and exhaled through his mouth in little bursts. His foot tapped the accelerator and we shimmied up the next hill, even faster than before.

  “Then again,” I said, feeling angrier now, the warm haze of the wine fading with every passing minute and every backward kilometer, “perhaps we should not have turned around for a ring, after all. Perhaps you should have gone searching for it on a subsequent journey.”

  “No, no,” Enzo reassured me. “Tonight. It must be tonight.” He glanced at his brother, speaking in German again for my benefit. “But yes, Cosimo, you must not go so fast.”

  When they resumed arguing in Italian, the dictionary was no help.

  “Cosimo, the truck,” Enzo said in German. “You are cooking the engine.” He turned to me, smiling weakly. “Yes, I lose the ring. But do not be angry with me if we have no truck tomorrow.”

  We passed the next hour silently, breathing in the smell of a hot engine, spilled olive oil, our appetites ruined. But then we saw the glimmer of the lake, the same shoulder where I’d run so hard to catch the man and his son, the place that already seemed to belong to a long-ago past. The vegetation seemed higher, wilder, impenetrable. The lake had darkened from silvery green to nearly black.

  Enzo hurried away from the truck and into the grass where he had first struggled free from his pants. He rummaged around in the dark, crawling on hands and knees. His lighter flicked on and off, on and off.

  “Of course, he wanted to take this route,” Cosimo muttered, watching his brother flit along the lakefront like an undaunted firefly. “Of course, we take the road to Siena. Of course, we park the night at the turn-off to Monterosso, conveniently. Of course!”

  “I thought we planned to drive as far as we could. You didn’t tell me that you and Enzo had already planned where we’d park for the night.”

  Cosimo didn’t answer.

  “You and Enzo—?”

  “And Mister Keller,” he conceded.

  But why hadn’t I been informed? “Don’t tell me that Monterosso is near Farfalla’s village. I thought it was o
nly a fanciful longing. I thought he realized we wouldn’t stand for it. Don’t tell me that Enzo is really thinking he’ll be proposing to Farfalla tonight.”

  “Let him have the nerve to try.”

  “I don’t care about nerve, Cosimo. I care about the statue. And about my own well-being—”

  “It doesn’t matter. He won’t find it,” Cosimo insisted.

  “Keller wouldn’t have agreed to that, given the importance—”

  But our conversation was interrupted. Enzo’s face appeared suddenly in the open passenger window, his entire face lit up with an ear-to-ear grin: “Lady Fortune!”

  He clambered back into the truck, shaking his head at his good luck. “Now I put it here. There she is. Good and safe.” And he made a grand display of pushing it deep into his front trouser pocket, patting the circlet affectionately.

  Cosimo grumbled, “Congratulazioni. à quasi un miracolo.”

  Then we were driving again, with an orange scar of sunset to our left, a deep purple sky overhead, and the hills to the north and east uniformly black. The air had gone from cool to cold. We rolled up our windows and Cosimo broke the silence with his brother. “You are coming with us all the way to the border, no excuses.”

  No answer.

  Cosimo dug deeper. “You are not leaving my sight.”

  A little shrug, lips turned down in distaste. Enzo lit a cigarette, failing to offer one to anyone else.

  We drove in silence. We passed the place where we had turned around two hours earlier. Our road took us through a valley, dark and quiet and oddly unpeopled, while up on the high ridges to the left and right, the dim lights of farmhouses were twinkling doubles of the stars overhead. But none of those lights were strong enough to puncture the gloom on the road we were traveling. It was a moonless night. A weathered sign loomed up, barely lit by our feeble headlamps: Siena, 30 KM.

  The road was so black, we couldn’t see far ahead, and when something did appear, it appeared suddenly: here, a sheep; there, a white-plastered shrine, forcing Cosimo to swerve or step on the brakes. But then he would accelerate again, aggressively.

  “Is there some particular place we are looking for?” I finally asked.

  In unison, Enzo and Cosimo answered: “Yes.”

  Enzo cleared his throat, affecting a casual tone. “There is a place, soon enough, a turn-off that is signed Monterosso. There is a shrine and a good place behind it to park, with a water tap. It is a well-known good place.”

  Cosimo added nothing.

  “And this,” I pressed for confirmation, “is where we’re stopping for the night? There are no other options, even if we are making good progress?”

  They were waiting for the right moment, anticipating a brothers’ showdown, long and slow in coming. But perhaps, it occurred to me, the battle could be thwarted.

  “Enzo, let me have the ring.”

  “Maybe later. When we park.”

  “If I hold onto it until we get to the border, there might be less temptation to make any additional side-trips. We might avoid a difficult situation.”

  “No, grazie. It is not helpful.”

  Cosimo took his eyes off the road briefly, glancing at me, and then, more skeptically, at his brother. A realization dawned; a decision was made. “At least you can show it to him, fratello,” he said, ridicule sharpening his voice. “Let him appreciate your romantic intentions.”

  Enzo returned Cosimo’s skeptical glance, then dug slowly into his pocket, inhaling, as if even he had doubts about the forces he was unleashing. The ring, cradled in the crease of his palm, was gold, set with a very small diamond and flanked by two even smaller glittering chips.

  “There,” Enzo said, speaking past me to his brother’s unreadable face, all cards on the table. “Is this what you wanted? Are you satisfied now?”

  We passed the sign to Monterosso. We passed the shrine. Still, no one spoke. Twenty minutes later, Cosimo found a small, dusty turn-off more to his liking—some compromise between conforming to an earlier plan with Keller and Enzo, while still exerting his own driver’s prerogative, unaware of the original parking place’s full significance. He pulled off the road. Then, spotting a larger tree, he continued a little farther, snugging up into the soft shoulder, under the low-hanging branches, refusing to set the brake until he had parked just where he wanted to park. “Va bene.”

  The rasp of Enzo’s hand against his unshaven jaw was audible. No one hurried to step outside.

  “You bring a razor in your suitcase, Mister Vogler?”

  “It was left behind at the pensione, when I wasn’t given the opportunity to pack my own things. But that was understandable. The statue was awaiting transport and we were in a great hurry,” I said, hoping now to communicate that sense of urgency we’d all shared not so very long ago. “Do you remember?”

  Enzo exited the truck, stretching and brushing the crumbs off his white shirt. Cosimo and I followed him around back. Enzo opened the back door, set up a wooden plank, and wheeled his scooter out of the truck. “More room for sleeping.” He gestured. “There.”

  But Cosimo was watching, too—wordlessly, arms over his chest.

  I was waiting for the confrontation, waiting for Enzo to admit what he was planning, waiting for Cosimo to demand more explanation and impose our shared opposition. But maybe I’d been misunderstanding Cosimo all along. Maybe, deep down, he did share some of Enzo’s way of thinking. If Enzo believed this was the best possible night for testing Farfalla’s love, Cosimo seemed to think it was the best possible night for testing Enzo’s fraternal loyalty.

  I tapped Cosimo on the arm and gestured for him to follow me around the side of the truck where we could talk privately.

  When we got there, he spoke first. “It isn’t Mamma’s ring. All that time in the truck, but he didn’t explain.” His voice was low and stern. “Hers was a simple band. No diamonds.”

  This should have been good news. There would be no argument over which brother should have the right to their mother’s ring. As for who had a right to Farfalla, that was another matter, but far beyond my influence.

  “You do plan to tell him again that he can’t leave us tonight.”

  “I can’t speak to him. Let him speak to me.”

  Behind us, the scooter started up.

  “He’s leaving right now,” I said, turning toward the scooter, which had—I realized only now—no functioning headlamp. Wherever Farfalla’s family farm was located, on steep side roads climbing into the black hills, it would be a long, dark trip on a moonless night. “We have to get going in the morning, early. What if he doesn’t come back tomorrow? What if we need his mechanical skills and the truck breaks down?”

  I took a few steps toward the scooter, a few steps back to Cosimo, pacing. “He went into that food shop and stayed for a half hour, and that was just flirting with a pretty stranger, never mind proposing to a woman and then trying to leave her family, her bed . . .”

  The scooter motor died; Enzo pushed it onto the kickstand with a metallic groan before approaching. I exhaled, so relieved I wanted to embrace him. But he walked past, ignoring me. He stood next to Cosimo, muttering into his shoulder, requesting something. Without making eye contact, Cosimo shrugged himself out of his own jacket and handed it to Enzo, took Enzo’s jacket and pulled it on, looking miserable.

  It took me a moment to find my voice. Enzo was already behind us again, back on his scooter, revving it.

  “Cosimo—you gave him your jacket? He’s still leaving, and you traded jackets?”

  “Mine was cleaner, maybe.” Dragging his hand across his nose, Cosimo angled his face toward the black sky as if willing the new moon into a fuller phase. “Maybe he’ll change his mind. He drives a little while, in the dark; he thinks a little while. I would change my mind.”

  “You told me how different you are. Two roads going two different ways, remember?”

  “Only the outside. Inside, we are almost the same.”

  “He isn
’t changing his mind, Cosimo. He’s on the scooter.” I stubbed my foot against the gravel of the road’s shoulder. “Keller shouldn’t have tempted him. There were other routes, other places to park. Keller knows about Enzo’s girlfriend?”

  Cosimo nodded. His eyes met mine, alight with a recognition he wouldn’t share, except to say: “I can’t stop him. I’ve never been able to stop him.”

  But it was too late for that, anyway. Our ears filled with the sound of spitting gravel, the whine of the scooter’s motor, and then the fading mosquito buzz of Enzo’s departure, leaving us both in silence on the road, only gradually aware of the insects chirruping, only gradually aware of the penetrating cold of a night in hilly country.

  Cosimo offered me the front cab, but I didn’t want any favors and I was edgy about being too far from the statue. I insisted on taking the back of the truck.

  First, though, I excused myself to empty my bladder, a little ways down the road. When I returned, Cosimo was in the back, pulling at wisps of straw sticking out of the crate. The slats were extremely narrow; he managed to harvest only a few wisps. In his hand was the burlap bag that had come with the lemons, with barely a handful of straw at the bottom.

  So this was why Enzo had to hurry off to propose, I thought to myself, less than charitably. And this was why, perhaps, the Italians were better off selling some of their national art. Because they too often thought: What’s the difference? A few kilometers off the main road, a few hours off schedule, a few pieces of straw from the crate. Everything was flexible, everything emotional. Decay and disaster, one small step at a time. There was no hard reasoning: the packing material had been there for a reason, just as the schedule had been there for a reason. One more bump and the statue might shift, an outstretched marble finger might make contact with wood—and break. That finger, Cosimo, outlasted the rise and fall of civilizations, outlasted attacks by barbarian hordes. But it might not outlast your brother’s desire to get under a woman’s skirt on a moonless night.