The Art Lover

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “No, Cosimo. You and he were not the same . . .” I found the anger building so suddenly, so irrationally, that it was hard to finish. “And he was not better. Don’t make it worse by believing that.”

  Cosimo was attending to his own obsessions, his own wounds: “But last night, she must have said no to him. That is what the dream meant, when he apologized and told me to look in his pocket. Not for the money, for the ring.”

  He continued to nod, trying to absorb all that had happened. It was like watching a heavy man pull himself, hand over hand, up a thick rope, feet kicking and sliding, failing to get solid purchase.

  “She said no. But that is the worst thing, because now, I can never ask her. I can never profit from this. I cannot be a replacement. So yes, it might as well have been me, lying there.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “They’ll be looking for us,” Cosimo said when he was behind the wheel again, eyes dry and engine running. “They don’t know about Enzo. They don’t know if I was helping him or helping you. But Keller and his men know we have the statue.”

  “You’re not well. Let me drive.”

  “You don’t know how to drive.”

  “It can’t be that difficult.”

  When Cosimo ignored me and began to turn the truck back toward the main road from which we’d come, I picked up the empty wine bottle from the floor near my feet and raised it shoulder high. “You will let me. That way, there will be two of us, driving day and night if necessary.”

  He leaned back, eyeing the raised bottle in my hand. Cosimo was a little bulkier than me. I was a little taller.

  “Your mistake,” he said after a moment, looking back at the road, “is not breaking the top of the bottle. I can tell that you’ve never hurt a man.”

  “And this means I never will?”

  He hesitated. “You’re right. I can’t tell. Sometimes a quiet man is the most violent because he has been holding back so much for so long.”

  Cosimo brought the truck to a gradual stop and got out so that I could slide over and take the wheel. He watched as I made an inventory of the dashboard, the view out the front window, the view out the sides—there couldn’t have been any lonelier section of road. The engine stalled and I restarted it. I tried again, got the truck rolling, struggling to remember how to shift and steer.

  “We’ll choose a route to the border, together,” I said over the screech of the grinding gears. “We’ll look at the map at our next stop.”

  I dared not take my eyes off the road in order to check his expression. I had driven forward only a hundred meters when the engine stalled again.

  “Enzo’s body—we’ll figure that out,” I said, trusting that Cosimo’s red-rimmed eyes were on me still. “We need to bring him somewhere close and then keep going. We’ve stolen nothing; we’ve done nothing. All we have to do is deliver the statue. If it goes missing, we’re suspect. But if we deliver it, they’ll believe us.”

  “The Italian government?”

  “The Germans. Der Kunstsammler himself—he wants only the statue.”

  Again, he said nothing. The gear stick wouldn’t respond to anything less than brute force. I grunted, trying to jam it into the correct position.

  “We still have two days to cover seven hundred kilometers. It isn’t impossible. Twenty to twenty-five hours of driving altogether, even on the roughest roads. Are you hearing me, Cosimo?”

  “The funeral,” he said under his breath.

  “Of course. After we get the statue to the border, or it will be our own funeral they’ll have to plan next.” There was a way to manage all this, to fit the pieces into place. “Should we have brought your brother’s body to Farfalla’s home? Weren’t we almost there? We could have left the body and then kept driving.”

  “No. I am not ready to see Farfalla. And more important, you are not thinking of my mother and my sister.”

  “But where do they live, Cosimo?”

  He reached out a hand toward the dashboard and rapped at a needle that appeared stuck under the scratched glass. As we struggled uphill, the truck lurched, gurgled, and bucked, aggravated no doubt by my incompetent shifting.

  “How far does your family live from here? I thought you said it was very far—the Piedmont, didn’t you say?”

  “Not enough benzina,” he muttered. “That is the bad sound.”

  “Yes?”

  “We have more in the back, if you could please . . .”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I was in the back, near the crate, handing over the fuel containers—one, then another, carefully, over the sprawled body of Enzo, crouched to one side of the truck, near the back door. Cosimo reached up for the second container and I stepped back slightly, strengthening my stance, and straining to hold the container high and level, not wanting to touch any part of the body as I leaned over it. Then suddenly, just when my hands were empty and I was standing up to stretch my back, the door rattled shut, plunging me into darkness.

  “Cosimo!”

  Metal rasped against metal—a latch securing the door.

  “Cosimo, what are you doing?”

  The truck started up, gurgling healthfully this time, not short on benzina at all.

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  I crouched, eyes wide, waiting for my vision to adjust, unable to see anything but a thin line of light where the retractable door didn’t perfectly match the frame. The truck started moving forward and I reached out a steadying hand. I couldn’t stay on my feet. I’d have to find some way to sit, without getting too close.

  I remembered Enzo’s lighter, which I’d slipped into my pocket after igniting Cosimo’s trembling cigarette. I opened the lid and struck the flint wheel, and there was the crate, taking up most of the truck’s cargo area; and there also, in the jumping shadows, was the body. I banged on the wall near the driver’s side of the truck.

  “Why are you doing this?” I slammed my fist against the wall. “You can’t leave me in here!”

  Three more slams, not nearly loud enough; three shooting pains that traveled from my knuckles up into my wrist and elbow.

  Finally, he called back, the words just audible: “If I let you out, you won’t let me put my brother properly to rest.”

  “To rest, where?”

  The muffled reply: “There is no point in arguing.”

  We had left Rome on a Saturday morning. Today was Sunday already—late morning, or perhaps noon already. Certainly, noon.

  “The statue, Cosimo. We can’t lose our focus. The border, by tomorrow night!”

  The back of the truck was uncomfortably warm. Hand aching, I sat down with my back up against the crate and alternately closed my eyes, to stop from straining to see, and opened them again, desperate to see, to make sure—what? That nothing had changed? That nothing had moved?

  Each time my mind wandered to Enzo’s body—and it did not need to wander far—my nose filled with the smell of spoiling milk. My heart accelerated, followed by my breathing.

  Think of something else.

  But it wasn’t easy.

  There is the crate, and the statue. Think of that.

  We should have turned him over. We should have covered him up.

  Create a mental sketch. Imagine each part.

  I pictured the outstretched hand and disc. I moved down to the shoulder, down the chest with its gently grooved and lightly sculpted ribs. I tried to slow myself down, to remember all I could so that I wouldn’t get to the bottom too fast. If I got to the bottom, I’d think of Enzo again.

  So often, a statue is praised as lifelike. But a statue must be more than life, which ends so easily here, in death. It must be more and better, not a mere representation. But that was the wrong direction to go.

  Not death, not life, just stone—think of that.

  Back to the stomach muscles, and the two horizontal creases at the statue’s waist, just where it bent forward, the navel and just above. The carved marble: an illusion of softness. Th
e human body: transforming via rigor mortis but only until softness returned again. Only until there was decay and putrefaction. How long did we have—two days? Three?

  My breathing quickened again. I couldn’t bear the darkness, but I didn’t want to waste the lighter. Cosimo’s family lived in the North. Perhaps a day from here? A very long day?

  I tried to remember the next part of the statue, but it had vanished from my mind. I tried to recall a turned foot, a knee, a hand. Nothing. I knew I’d feel better if I could just see the statue, in life or in my mind’s eye—something to concentrate on, something clean and cool, unsullied, unstained.

  Think—I told myself—of the eternal. By which I did not mean heaven, or wherever Enzo was going. I meant art.

  Gerhard had asked more than once, “Does it bother you, that someone, a few people, should gather up all these masterpieces—”

  I had deflected the question, but perhaps part of me was thinking: these few people, these powerful and politically connected art collectors, this entire regime—none of it would last long. So who cared if our Führer took some pieces here, and his head of secret police stored a few other pieces at his private estate? That was one generation. But we were speaking of paintings that were five hundred years old, and statues that were three or four times older than that. Whatever happened, the art would outlive the men. As long as it survived somewhere, it would survive.

  Is that what I was thinking? Or was I thinking only of my personal survival? Or was I thinking nothing at all?

  Di Luca was nearby—I recognized the padded cover under my blindly groping fingers—but even with better light, the book wasn’t what I needed. What I needed to see—and what I was at the same time afraid to see—was directly in front of me.

  I pushed my fingers into a narrow gap between the slats, halfway up the crate. I pulled out one piece of straw after another, pushing hard with my fingers to get deeper into the crate, scraping my knuckles as I pulled out more, thinking all the while that they hadn’t used enough straw, hadn’t packed it tightly enough, and I should have been there, on time, in Rome, to oversee things. The packing job had been insufficient. A truck hits too many bumps and ruts. A train at least travels a more smooth and predictable path. To trust a masterpiece to this kind of handling was insanity! But then again, of course—how many times did I need to remind myself?—Keller had not expected it to be on the road for long. Just the first day, just until Monterosso, and then it was meant to be intercepted and sent back. No wonder it wasn’t packed adequately, and no wonder it was being carried in a truck that lurched and shimmied all over the road.

  I pushed my hand in so hard between the crate’s splintering slats that several times I nearly got my fingers stuck, but still I pushed and pulled, pushed and pulled, my fingers tender and damp with blood I could not see, working my hand in just to the knob of the wrist bone, where it could go no further.

  Near the body, against one wall of the truck, I located Enzo’s tool kit. Inside, there was a claw hammer. Moving back to the crate, I stood cautiously, barely maintaining my balance, and started working a board free. Some were too tight, and working in the dark, I was wary of pulling too hard and whacking myself with a flying board or a slipping tool. Shoulder height was no good because I didn’t have purchase. I lowered myself to my knees and tried working another board free until it gave slowly.

  I held the lighter up to the gap and peered in: glowing marble, a pattern of shadow and light.

  Squinting into the dark crate, I could make out just a few illuminated inches, bare of straw: perhaps the triceps of the left arm at first, the lowered left arm. But no, the crate was turned the other way. It was the right hip. It was the right hip, and above that, the belt of muscle that bulges just up and over the statue’s right hip and down across its groin. The beautiful iliac crest.

  Few men are so perfectly proportioned, such the right mixture of muscular and slim, to have that kind of perfectly sculpted definition. The Greeks covered themselves with oil and exercised in the nude, scraping away the grime with a strigil when they were finished, their tanned bodies on full civic display—a testament not only to athleticism, but to a deeper kind of vitality and purpose. My own fellow countrymen, in search of answers and purpose and power, could find no better symbol than that kind of body, that kind of athleticism. “The Germans have joined anew the bond with the Greeks, the hitherto highest form of man.” Someone had written that—Nietzsche—or I had heard it in speeches at the Königsplatz, or most likely both.

  But philosophic mottos were nothing compared to what stood in front of me now, even if it stood in dark shadow. This was it. This was he. I was not disappointed; I was relieved and grateful, much as a religious person in desperation would be grateful for any sign or miracle that suggested something larger and more meaningful than his own wretched insignificance. I knew these centimeters of perfection better than I knew my own body. I loved this body more than my own body. But that was an easy comparison to make, when my own maturing body had brought me increasing grief, day by day.

  The smell came back to me in the back of the truck as I slept. First, the nameplate on the door, DR. SCHROEDER, and then the wafting antiseptic smell.

  I was fourteen years old. Greta, then seventeen, had been told nothing at all and made to stay at home. My father knew where we were going, but not what it cost, and Mother had not wanted him to know, because as much as he wanted the problem eliminated, he did not approve of spending any more than absolutely necessary.

  In the aromatic waiting room, my mother sat at my side, gripping my hand, while I tried to read the ornate calligraphy on the certificates and then to count the tongue depressors and cotton balls I could see in jars on a far shelf. But Mother’s hand kept squeezing and relaxing, a dying fish on my lap. When my fingers started to tingle, I looked up to see she had locked eyes with the woman opposite her, a woman who had arrived ahead of us with her son, an overweight, towering fellow who walked with a limp. Despite his height, he had the face of a boy, fat cheeks stained with tears. He was directed into the examination room, alone.

  The woman waited behind, clenching a handkerchief that appeared yellow next to the gray-white skin of her thin, tensed hand. From the next room came the sound of feet on the floor, the deep-voiced boy arguing with the doctor. The door began to open, then closed. The woman stood, her face pale, torn between going to help her son and staying put as she had been told.

  “Change places,” my mother whispered to me, and moments later she was holding a quiet and sympathetic conference with the woman next to her.

  “. . . yours?” I heard the woman say.

  “Just a very simple procedure, I’ve been told.”

  “That’s what I was told, before,” the woman said, twisting her handkerchief. “A simple examination. I brought him in last month with a rash.”

  “It couldn’t be treated?”

  “Yes, easily. But the doctor got to asking me questions, discussing the future, and then . . .”

  My eyes flickered to the poster above a desk on the far left side of the room. ANTHROPOMETRY, it said at the top, and there was photo after photo of a man in his underclothes being measured from every angle by a white-coated doctor.

  Across the room, a second poster shouted in blocky, self-assured capital letters: HEALTH, A NATIONAL RESOURCE. If health were a resource that a nation needed desperately in order to survive, then the healthiest of its citizens were heroes. The unhealthy were bad people, the kind we heard about so often on the radio: saboteurs. I looked back at the anthropometry poster, suspiciously eyeing the doctor’s large black calipers, long and curved like the back end of an earwig.

  In response to my mother’s well-meaning inquiries, the other woman responded, “It’s better this way.” She smoothed her skirt and patted her loose bun, which was sprouting black bobby pins that looked like tiny, electrocuted snakes. “It would only be harder in a few years, and that might be too late to hold off troubles.”


  “That makes sense.”

  “And anyway, he doesn’t understand it.”

  “Do you understand it, dear?”

  “Well enough.”

  We were made to wait a long time. When the woman was finally allowed in to see her boy, I moved back to the seat next to my mother. “What doesn’t he understand?”

  “He’s being sterilized.”

  “Is he covered with germs?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  The surgical room was open and we could see the doctor and the mother trying to help the wobbly boy to stand and proceed to a secondary recovery room in the back. But whatever anesthesia they had given him was still coursing through his veins, and the mildly degenerate young man—if that’s what he was—kept collapsing back onto the table. With every thump, I felt my mother’s grip tighten on my sleeve, and I finally understood her fear: that this eugenically minded doctor, full of new ideas and politically astute aspirations, was a danger to us, though I still didn’t quite understand why.

  “Hurry,” my mother said, dragging me by the arm, gesturing toward the way out.

  “But why?”

  “I want to leave.” The tension had finally overtaken her. Her face was damp and drops of tears were collecting at the tip of her red chin.

  “But I’m not being”—I searched for the word—“sterilized.”

  “No, you’re not. We came for our own procedure.”

  “But are they going to do it?”

  “Not now. Let’s go.”

  I wasn’t entirely relieved. I was confused. Because a part of me did want this done and finished—“a simple procedure,” my mother had been whispering in my ear all week, preparing me to be brave. A part of me was already looking ahead, thinking of the group hikes and swims I’d be able to attend later in the summer and feeling how much easier it all would be from this day forward. But there was also something about the smell in the air, the drunken stagger of the man-boy, and my mother’s own sudden loss of confidence that all merged into an unspeakable dread.