Until this point, the problem had been a matter of surfaces and emotions—no small things, of course. My difference was a humiliation, but in some school circles, wearing the wrong outfit and hairstyle were nearly as problematic. But what if it went deeper? What if this thing, whether left in place or surgically removed, was a sign of something else, and that something required further treatment or quarantine? On the way out, I looked at the anthropometry poster again, and at the large calipers that the doctor in the picture was holding tight to the patient’s head. He was only measuring, I told myself. Not clipping, crushing, or rubbing him out.
I woke in the hot dark with my hand pressed against my face and my fingers clutched around something hard and square, and the smell of antiseptic—no, lighter fluid—strong on my fingers and in my nostrils.
“Air!” I shouted. “I need air! It’s too hot in here!
No answer.
“You can’t leave me in here all day, with a body! Cosimo!”
They say that kidnappers operate most comfortably in anonymity. I had made myself too anonymous to my captor, who had known me until now only by my last name, Vogler.
I took a deep breath and shouted: “Ernst!”
One syllable, lost to the whine of the engine.
“Ernst—that is my Christian name!”
Still no reply. I waited a few minutes, listening for any sound, and then gathered my energies to try again.
“Cosimo!”
But he was trying his best to ignore me. When I pounded on the wall, the engine sounds rose in pitch, as if he were accelerating slightly, and in that acceleration I perceived his stress as well. He could have left me on the road. He could have taken the statue and his brother’s body and left me. But he did not, so I reasoned that he did, in fact, plan to help me still—only later. But what he couldn’t realize, because he wasn’t thinking, was that “later” would not suffice. If we weren’t at the border by Monday at nightfall, we would be labeled as criminals. Keller would claim, conveniently, that we had evaded the Roman policemen in order the steal the statue—that we had planned all of it from day one—and that’s how it would seem.
The heat and the dark and the constant bouncing made me feel drugged, obscuring how much time was passing, or how much I had slept. I set up a rhythm of pounding my fist and calling out, followed by periods of rest, during which I listened for any signs of Cosimo’s attention. We slowed down, but it was only to make a sharp turn. We sped up later, coasting down a hill. Another steep turn, followed by another—we were zigzagging, the engine straining. A major left turn, perhaps heading west. Climbing further into the mountains.
I banged again and again with the edge of my aching fist, counting as I went—sieben, acht, neun—and was rewarded finally with a sound: not a voice, but a whistle.
It was tremulous and uncertain at first. Then it built, becoming the tune that Cosimo had whistled the day before at the lake. German opera. But what was that tune? Nothing epic or Wagnerian. It was simpler, lilting, and sweet. The association that came to mind was one of woods, children, a sandman and a dew fairy and angels, all watching and protecting. I could see the big old radio in our house and my mother next to it, with her hand resting on top of the wood because whenever she lifted her hand there was static. Somehow we thought it had to be her hand that was summoning music from the radio, that she was nearly magical, so Greta and I begged her not to shift. “Of course, you love this one,” she’d tell my sister. “It is named for you.”
Or nearly so. It was Hänsel und Gretel, by Humperdinck. The opera I couldn’t quite place before.
It was a message. Cosimo was telling me that he meant no harm. We were not abandoning the precepts of civilization; he was not a rule breaker at heart. He was only insisting on his own values, as I had to insist on mine.
If there is something I feared as a child, while listening to Hänsel und Gretel, it was the thought of being pushed into an oven. It happened only to the witch in the end, but still.
It took a half hour or so to build up the courage and several attempts to get the lighter started. As the smell on my fingers attested, the fluid had leaked as I slept, and now there was not enough to guarantee many more strikes. I found my suitcase and felt blindly through it, searching for something flammable. My sketchbook and my dictionary remained in the front of the truck.
I patted my pocket, locating a large, poorly folded piece of paper: the map. I ripped it into long sections, fashioning each into a twisted horn, then applied the lighter and began to add handfuls of straw, which ignited easily.
“Fire!” I yelled, my throat tight with apprehension until I cleared it and accepted what I had done. “Cosimo! Fire!”
I crouched near the door, next to Enzo’s body, ready to jump out. The pile of burning straw crackled. The burlap lemon bag had finally caught, filling the truck with smoke. I started to cough.
He shouted from the cab. “You’re lying to me!”
“I’m not!”
The response came back muffled. “Imbecille! Dummkopf! Everything back there will burn!”
But it wouldn’t. Not the statue made of marble. Ancient things have a way of outlasting us, as they should.
If the fire were left unchecked, the wooden crate would go up next. Then the body, or rather two bodies—but it wouldn’t come to that, I didn’t think. The crate was slow to catch, but catch it finally did—not blazing yet, only smoldering. Meanwhile, I could scarcely breathe.
“Fire! You must stop the truck!”
At the moment I reached out a hand and made contact with something I’d overlooked in my search for flammable paper—the padded cover. Di Luca. The most important reference in my collection. But more importantly, the only thing I owned that bore my mentor’s name. Why did this matter so much if he was still safe somewhere, to emerge someday from these confused times, dignified and healthy and whole? My instincts knew what my mind refused to admit. If there was a moment of uncontrolled panic, it hit then, and I leaned over the book, its corners pressed into my chest.
I was coughing uncontrollably when the truck braked to a halt. A moment later, Cosimo unlocked and threw open the retractable door. He ignored me, attending to the fire instead, beating it with his jacket. Briefly, I had the advantage: I could lock him inside the truck and either he would fight the blaze or fail to fight it, but either way the statue would survive. But I couldn’t do it. As duty-bound and determined as I considered myself to be, I could not do it, even then.
Smoke billowed but there was no visible flame. Cosimo’s face was dark with grime and exhaustion. It would not have taken much to subdue him. He approached me, lumbering in a soot-covered half crouch, so disappointed and so disheartened, readying himself to jump down from the edge of the truck, both fists curled with contempt.
He pulled the truck’s back door closed, leaving me standing as he returned to the driver’s side door. I followed, uncertain, calling out, “Someone has to be committed to the larger things—to art, to the future!”
“Go around,” he said, stabbing a finger at the passenger door. “Get in.”
The hour hand on my watch crept past three o’clock, and then four. I noticed the roominess of the truck bench, the gap between us, where before we’d been so crowded. I cleared my parched, smoky throat and asked Cosimo where we were, but he reminded me that I’d burned the only map. A sign pointed toward two names I didn’t recognize—Vignola and Maranello—but we continued along the smallest roads, always turning away from any town or larger strada. He would say only that we were heading northwest; that we had to avoid being seen; that he needed to concentrate to find his way on this indirect route he had traveled only a few times before.
The sun was low and hot in the burnished western sky when I patted my pocket and noticed the shape of the postcards meant for my sister. If I’d remembered them before, I would have used them for kindling. I took one out, and pushing hard against my thigh to keep the script smooth despite the road’s bumps,
I wrote:
We are past Florence . . .
Nothing else came to mind, until, with exasperation, I put pen to paper and scrawled quickly:
. . . which is a shame. It would have been wonderful to see, though I was not prepared to see it. But perhaps for beauty, one cannot prepare.
I read the card once and tore it up, ashamed of my own blatant ventriloquism. It would have been a gratifying notion, to think I had absorbed something from Enzo in the short amount of time I’d known him, that his impulsive nature, his gioia di vivere, had been somehow contagious. But it would not have been true.
Hearing the sound of tearing paper, Cosimo glanced at the ripped pieces accumulating in my lap. For the first time in hours, he tried to smile: “You’re not starting another fire, are you?”
Cosimo accepted a piece of bread left over from yesterday’s groceries, though I noticed he took one dry bite before pushing it back into the bag, his free hand pressed against his stomach.
He said, “I smell something.”
I sniffed my own sleeve. “Neither of us smells very good.”
“Worse than that,” he said, wrinkling his brow.
Earlier in the day, the rear compartment had been hot enough; many more hours had passed since with the sun beating against the metal, raising the temperature as we drove.
“Something rotting,” Cosimo said.
“The milk smell. It was on the ground. It probably splashed onto Enzo’s clothes.”
“Milk,” he repeated. “No, that isn’t it.”
He pushed a finger against his temple, massaging in hard circles. After a while, the same hand went to his nose, which he couldn’t stop rubbing. He tried unrolling the window and, weary of the clouds of hot midday road dust filling the truck, rolled it back again. Despite his attempt to be discreet, the compulsion built over time until I couldn’t stop watching and he couldn’t stop sniffing.
“Maybe a cigarette,” I suggested.
“In a few months, it will be truffling time again,” he said, ignoring me. “I have my best dog, Tartufa. Every autumn, we go . . .”
This was a good subject, neutral and safe, and I encouraged him for more details: the dog, the black and white truffles, the season, the sights and smells in the Piedmontese woods. And it seemed to work, for a few minutes at least, until Cosimo took what seemed at first to be a short detour but was really the path he was following all along, into a darker place.
“But Enzo never liked the woods,” he rambled. “And I think now—it makes sense—this is why he didn’t want to be a policeman. If it weren’t for a body we found one day in the woods—a corpse, you call it, yes?—he might not have been looking for other different jobs, he might not have worked for Keller . . .”
Scheisse, again. “That’s all right. You don’t have to talk about it.”
But he insisted. “It was already four days old, maybe five days. Flies lay their eggs, you know. Under the skin. Everywhere. When you find a body, you can tell when it died according to the insects. They teach us this in the training school.”
“You’re only smelling the milk, I’m sure of it,” I told him, making a face. “Don’t worry. If not a cigarette, maybe you could eat another piece of bread? Is your stomach bothering you?”
“They teach us about the little worms,” he continued. “I don’t know what you call them in German. They teach us about the stages, the problems you have, the third or fourth day.” He pressed on, trying to find the foreign words that eluded him for the tightening clothes and the collecting gas as the body became a dark and rotting balloon.
“Take it easy.”
“And when our mother, strong as she was, was ready to take the body—”
“Your mother?”
“I didn’t say my mother.”
“You did.”
He frowned. “An old, local woman. When she was ready to take the body and clean it and dress it for the funeral—because that’s what we do and what we’ve always done, we don’t leave it to others, no matter the difficulty—”
“All right, Cosimo.”
“So it was no wonder that Enzo did not want to be a policeman.”
“It’s only the milk smell that’s bothering you. The closed space and the heat and the milk. That’s all.”
We came to a fork in the road with a field to our right and a low, crumbling bluff to our left, and in a hollow of the bluff, a green and mossy spot, in which there seemed to be a sort of basin and a small white cross. I assumed Cosimo was going to say a prayer or empty his bladder, or perhaps vomit again. But then he walked slowly around the front, came to my side of the truck, opened the door, and gestured me to slide over into the driver’s seat.
“All right?” I asked him.
“Fine.”
I spent the next twenty minutes reacquainting myself with the shifting, the struggle to coordinate feet and hands and eyes. When Cosimo groaned, I assumed he was expressing anguish at the damage I was doing to the truck’s gears, until suddenly he called out and begged me to stop the truck. His door opened and I heard the retch and the splash, followed by a sighing moan.
He closed the door, wiping his mouth. “We should have wrapped the body.”
“Is it still the smell? Is that what’s getting to you?”
I started driving again, but he continued to press me about our need for a sheet or blanket, some kind of covering, especially with the sun nearing the horizon and the cold night coming soon. I stated the obvious: that Enzo wouldn’t feel the cold; that, in fact, the cold would be better for transporting him. But during all that talk, I kept my eyes glued to the road. It was only when I finally started feeling comfortable with the steering that I made myself look over at Cosimo and noticed he was shivering, his skin pale and clammy, the whites of his eyes gone yellow.
“Verdammt—the body isn’t too cold, you are.”
He whispered into his damp sleeve, “I have a terrible headache.”
“It’s more than that. You’re in shock.” In my flustered state, I let the truck veer off to one side where it rubbed against a low thicket of blackberry bushes until I corrected my course. The sudden scratching noise made Cosimo’s eyes flash open. “We need a doctor,” I insisted.
“I won’t talk to a doctor.”
“But you need help.”
“I only need a blanket.” He shifted uncomfortably. “My stomach hurts—and my head. I just need to lie down, somewhere, just a few minutes . . .”
“I’ll look for a town.”
“No town.” But after a minute, he relented. “A house. If you can find some farm, maybe . . .”
We passed alongside a field and, beyond it, a village of a dozen or so stone houses, huddled close, some of them with open animal stalls directly under human quarters. But as soon as we slowed down, dogs began to bark and a suspicious face glowered from an open doorway. There were too many people and too much life squeezed all together. Too much attention. Cosimo shook a dismissive, trembling hand and squeezed shut his eyes against the noise. We had to find someplace smaller. Someplace set apart.
“Don’t fall asleep,” I cautioned as I continued driving, my nose against the windshield now.
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure.” But I had a feeling he shouldn’t sleep yet, not without warmth and some food and a pair of eyes ready to watch over him better than I could manage while steering the truck down narrow roads.
“It’s not a tractor you’re driving there, friend,” he said, teeth chattering. “You can go a little faster.”
“I’m trying.”
Ten minutes later, I loosened the grip of one inexpert hand from the steering wheel and gave Cosimo a shake. He had been moaning again. “Talk to me.”
He opened one eye. “It’s not my brother’s fault that he was a romantic.”
“Open your eyes, please. I must be firm. Open your eyes.”
“You take everything so seriously, Mister Vogler. And I can tell you: I’ve seen worse than wh
at I saw today. I’ve seen terrible things.”
“Ernst. I think it is better now for you to call me Ernst.” What was the point of convincing him he was in shock? What was the point in telling him that anyone would be shocked to see his own double in a state of imminent decay? He’d said himself that it was not the same as seeing another corpse, but Cosimo was intent in his professional self-regard, and blinded by his sense of duty. In that, we had something in common.
“Enzo would have wanted me to get you to a proper doctor,” I said. “What do you think about that?”
Cosimo shook his head, not so easily fooled. A moment later, he asked in a groggy voice, “You think I was too easy with him?”
“Certainly. You gave him everything, even . . .” I was about to say, “even your girl,” before realizing it was too strong a reminder. I finished: “. . . even your own jacket.”
“That wasn’t a favor to him. You might want a lifetime with a woman, but sometimes you settle for a night.”
“Enzo didn’t get even that,” I said, if only to remind him of what he had not yet lost. But it didn’t work.
He asked, “What do you think a night is worth?”
Nichts was my answer. Absolutely nothing. But I didn’t want to upset him. I only wanted to keep him talking. “I don’t know. Maybe one night can be pleasant.”
His eyes were looking glassier; his speech was thick. “I wanted at least one night, but I settled for wanting my jacket back, smelling of her. He gets the girl; I get one smell. Her perfume—orange blossoms. Now you see?”
Cosimo tried to arrange his features in a grim smile, but the jostling over each deep rut pained him and he closed his eyes. We could take these bumps only slowly, and the little shack I’d spotted was high on the hill. Steering toward it with intense concentration, I told Cosimo that I thought he still had a chance with Farfalla. Now wasn’t the time to think about it, but someday, he’d see things differently. And as tempting as it might be to imagine that another person’s death required his own, the world didn’t really work that way: a banal lecture never fully understood by the one who hears it, or even by the one who speaks it, but so it was then, and so it remains.
The Art Lover Page 14
