“I am the only one that drives the truck.”
“But your brother knows how to drive a scooter.”
“It’s not the same. He is a very good mechanic, but …”
Enzo twisted to face me, tapping me on the knee to gain my full attention, grateful at last for some trivial conversation.
“This is how I meet Mister Keller. He has a touring car, Alfa Romeo, you know this?”
“Alfa Romeo,” I said, to stop the tapping. “Yes.”
“1930 Zagato Spider. Very red, very nice. When he visits Bologna last year, I come to see him, and I fix it. This visit, in Rome, I help him look at another car, more expensive.”
“He likes expensive cars, does he? I wonder how it is he can afford them.”
To the east, a low range of purple mountains faded into the distance as we curved west, climbing past more fields and dusty silver trees and the occasional rustic village with a bell tower. There was a disturbing lack of signs, but I supposed that many of these hamlets were too small to merit inclusion on a national road map.
“Well, it is same as art,” Enzo insisted, unfazed by my lack of engagement. “You want something, you find a way to pay. Your government pays a lot for this statue. They pay more than he pays for his new car.”
“Collecting art is not like collecting cars, Enzo.”
“Very special, very expensive—no matter, statue or good car. Someone has good taste; he knows what he likes.”
“Fine art is one of a kind.”
“Yes? But your statue is a copy.”
“It’s an ancient Roman copy. That makes it very different from a modern copy. It’s irreplaceable.”
Enzo asked Cosimo to translate something, but Cosimo was ignoring us, his eyelids heavy, the steering wheel tugging gently left and right between his loose fingers.
“So you are saying it is so special,” Enzo tried again. “So special that maybe Italy should not give it away.”
“Your government sold it. It was not given away.”
“But Italy should not sell it.”
“Past tense. Sold. Finished deal.”
“So Italy should not sold it, you are saying.”
“Obviously I’m not saying that.”
But we had not been talking about art or automobiles; we had been talking at first about the tired driver, and whether it made sense for someone else to help with the driving. It couldn’t be me. Except for one weekend of driving lessons, which only convinced me of the great value of public transportation, I didn’t know how to handle a motorized vehicle. “Your brother might need a break, I think, if you could take over for a short while.”
“He is a good mechanic, my brother—good enough for extra pay,” Cosimo commented placidly. “But my brother doesn’t know how to drive. It’s better. This way, we have different specialties, and we each have a job.”
“Well, that’s fine as long as we make unhampered progress. Florence by tonight, for example? That isn’t too much to expect?”
Enzo considered, frowning. “Florence maybe tomorrow. Earliest, morning.”
“But I should think that Florence is one-third of the way. Isn’t that true?”
Enzo began to nod, slowly at first, then with greater enthusiasm. He had found it in his heart to forgive me for previous disagreements, at least for the moment. “Florence is a magnificent city. You are there a while, on the way to Rome?”
“No. I traveled directly.”
“But you are a student of the history of art? Florence has more art than any place in the world!”
“I did not have time.”
“And you will be passing close by it again—and to not visit? To not see the art?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He tugged at a loopy curl over his ear, fatigued by my contradictions. “It does not matter?”
“I did not prepare for Florence.”
“You cannot prepare.”
“Yes. One can.”
“No,” he said, as if I simply hadn’t heard him. “For beauty, you cannot prepare.”
“You read, you study, you determine in advance—”
“No, no,” he objected, smiling.
“—you determine what you will see,” I said, finishing my thought, “and you prepare to understand and appreciate it.”
He shrugged. “So you do this next time. Soon. When you are in Italy again.”
“I don’t enjoy traveling.”
He tallied on his fingers the famous enchantments of Florence: “You have the Ponte Vecchio. You have the Botticelli, the da Vinci. You have, of course, the David. Your Discus Thrower is not even as tall as me. But the David, he is twice as tall.”
“It is three times as tall,” I corrected him. “It is just over five meters. It was started by Agostino di Duccio and the commission was taken over by Antonio Rossellino—”
“No, friend, it is by Michel—”
“—before the commission was given to the young Michelangelo, then twenty-six years old.” Just two years older than me, and already immortal. Not to suggest I had any lofty aims for myself, only that I recognized youth was a relative concept, and no excuse for anything.
“That is very good,” Enzo said, smiling at my recitation. “Very good.”
“That is nothing. I am unschooled in the finer points of Renaissance sculpture. These facts I have told you are just facts, as a tourist would memorize them from a guidebook. And anyway, more to the point”—I was speaking too quickly, causing Enzo to wrinkle his brow and lean toward me in an extra effort to catch and translate every word—“the point you are making about the David’s greater height is no point at all. We don’t judge art by its size. We are not selecting modern furniture.”
Even confused, he still managed to look at peace. Grinning, he said, “But to go to Florence and actually see. This is different from facts.” Eyebrows lifted, he affected the high-pitched tone of an adult trying to pique a child’s interest. “It is tempting.”
“It is not.”
And this made me feel better as well. Perhaps this was why I was chosen—not because there was no other choice, but because I was the kind of person who preferred to be home, who could not be lured by the exoticism of distant borders, the distraction of foreign offerings. I was not even inflamed by passion for art outside my classical specialty—and good thing, or I never could have crossed such a treasure-filled country on a deadline.
In the beginning, our Sonderprojekt department had been staffed by twice as many men as women, even in the clerical positions. But almost as soon as I’d joined, following certain new arrivals and departures, the balance had reversed. It occurred to me only now that Gerhard’s had not been the first unexplained change. There had been other quiet demotions and outright removals, less apparent to me then because I’d been so new, less worthy of reflection of any kind in Munich, with its day-to-day concerns and distractions—whereas here there was only the sound and rhythm of the wheels on the road, and more time—perhaps too much time—to think.
As it turned out, one could have too much knowledge and experience in the arts to be the best match for certain kinds of employment. Someone older than me, who had worked in the field longer and under a different zeitgeist, would have developed many ideas and tolerances that were no longer acceptable. When I first started working in our office there had been several modern art curators among us, but invariably, their tastes became problematic. Perhaps they defended an artist, living or dead, or had certain ideas about embracing new possibilities, or weren’t sympathetic to the anti-modern “degenerate” exhibitions supported by the government.
None of that involved me, not because of my own political or personal views, but only because I knew so little about modern art, had never written any papers, made any statements, or even attended many gallery openings of note. I had not been strategically avoiding controversy. I was simply not part of that intellectual sphere, due to my own inadequate schooling and my late discovery—one of thos
e doors that opens after another closes—of art itself. My ignorance, in a sense, had made me safe, even while my lack of broader knowledge pained me. But this wasn’t the time to be a Renaissance man. This was the time for the deep, clean, and relatively painless cut of narrow knowledge.
At this moment, I reminded myself, lest my own thoughts circle too endlessly, the statue was my only priority, followed by the job awaiting me back in Munich. Surely, regardless of Herr Keller’s intimations, the job still awaited. If I had erred during the first hours of my assignment, injuring my reputation in some way, then surely that error could be overcome. I had done nothing wrong, at any time in my young career or at any point in my young adult life. But if doing nothing was some kind of magic armor, why did I feel so exposed and out of sorts?
Enzo had picked up on my pensive melancholy, or perhaps he was simply trying to shed his own. He suddenly sat upright. Something had caught his attention out the window.
“Close your eyes,” he said to me.
“Your brother might need a nap, but I’m fine.”
“No, quickly. Close your eyes. It is something incredible coming, but you should see it only closer. Do this for me, please.”
I relented. I closed my eyes and kept them closed for several minutes, enjoying the heat on my eyelids.
“This is most incredible thing you will ever see in your life,” he said.
“Is it a fancy car?”
“No,” he laughed. “I am not only liking cars. This is something everyone likes.”
A minute passed.
“Is it a pretty girl?’
This made him laugh again. “Pretty girl? She is very big pretty girl if I see her from so far away and we are not passing her yet after this much time. Don’t you think?”
“Just tell me when you’re ready.”
“No. Not yet. It is better soon. Yes, now, open! Look!”
“I’m looking.”
They covered the horizon. Fields of tall sunflowers: dark faces fringed with bright yellow petals, nodding slightly, all facing one direction, bowing to some distant altar. I had never seen so many in one place. I had never seen such a broad expanse of yellow and green, on the left and on the right, ahead of and behind us. An ocean that turned toward the sun.
“Yes?”
“I see … flowers.”
His eyebrows were furrowed, his features clownishly collapsed. “That is all? You see flowers?” He reached across me to grab me by the shoulders, squeezing the shirt fabric of which he only somewhat approved.
“Yes, Enzo. I see flowers.”
He released my shoulders. His face said it all. It was done. He was done—with me and my refusal to be charmed, my refusal to be like him. For a moment, I experienced the thin, taut pleasure of having stood firm, followed by a slow and sighing deflation—the sinking realization that one has declined in another’s already-modest estimation.
Oddly, Enzo’s disappointment seemed to relax him. He glanced away. No more knee gripping. No more hair tugging. In being mildly difficult, in proving myself unworthy, I had made something easier for him.
The hills had softened; the terraced slopes that came into view as the day progressed were more neatly and densely planted. Fewer houses stood near the road, but more clustered on the ridges above us, both left and right—entire Tuscan hill towns, densely built and situated in high, defensible locations with views across valley after valley, land folding upon itself again and again, the discarded robes of a lovely, long-ago time.
If the roads just north of Rome had seemed wild, scrappy, and far from imperial, we’d now passed into some other zone with a different ambiance, more expansive vineyards, larger bell towers visible from a great distance, under a blue sky—pale but clear—whose precise shade I recognized from certain famous Florentine paintings. In some of these churches, priceless frescoes sat largely unadmired, hidden in shadow. Behind high walls painted red by the late-afternoon sun, the traces of remarkable history resided. And a different traveler might have had the time and inclination to turn off, to climb higher, to investigate the places where a Michelangelo or a Machiavelli had first set pencil to paper.
Even Der Kunstsammler, in those striking news photographs shot during his spring trip to Italy, had looked dreamy, wandering among the famous sites with his more sober companion, Il Duce. World leaders, busy as they were, could afford to look ahead and behind—but not the rest of us, who were merely living day to day, trying not to slip up, trying not to embrace the wrong historical lessons or even the wrong teachings from our own recent personal histories. All too often, a quick glance over the shoulder could turn into a risky detour.
Speaking of detours, there was a very brief one that Enzo, motivated by hunger, insisted on making.
“Lì,” he pleaded as we passed another village sign, and again as we passed a squat, black-garbed woman standing next to a donkey cart at an unmarked fork in the road.
“No.”
“Lì, lì, lì!”
“No, no, no,” Cosimo replied.
Frustrated, Enzo started to fold the map but then pushed the crumpled mass into the space near his feet. After muttering in irritation, he switched again to words I could understand: “I want a big dinner tonight. You say it, I have it. Meat, fish, soup, pasta, wine. Everything. This is where I am tonight.”
Cosimo corrected him in German, for my benefit. “This is where he would like to be tonight.”
Enzo narrowed his eyes. “Oh yes? Is this what I mean?” He switched his attention back to me. “Do you know what happens to a lady at a wedding? If she is married, she thinks of her wedding. If she is not married, she also thinks of her wedding.”
“She imagines her wedding, you mean,” I said.
Enzo’s grin widened so far that I could see past his six or so very white, straight teeth to the gap where his left molar was missing—the only imperfection in an otherwise perfect smile. “Every lady.”
Cosimo insisted on explaining. “The girl in the picture. Farfalla. Her sister is having a big wedding party tonight.” He pushed out his chin, preparing to swallow something that wouldn’t go down easily. “Enzo was expected there. But how could he be expected? This is a three-day drive for you—for us, even longer, with the return trip from the border. My brother feels that if he had gone, this would have been his lucky time with the girl—”
“My lucky time!”
I glanced over, surprised to see that the skin around Enzo’s eyes had grown red and patchy, his lips thinned by outrage.
“My brother,” Cosimo continued, his stare fixed on the road ahead, “accepted this trip to Rome and back, I think, forgetting he would be on duty for every hour and every kilometer until we deliver your statue.”
Enzo objected, “This is what you call it: my lucky time! Is this what love is, you think? Luck? Chance? One opportunity and then nothing?”
“But isn’t that what you’re trying to convince us?” Cosimo shot back. “Aren’t you telling us this is your only opportunity? If so, fratello mio, it isn’t love. It’s something else.”
Enzo started to speak again—then, uncharacteristically, decided to let his brother have the last word.
Cosimo shrugged. “Never mind. Do you have a cigarette?”
Enzo relented, unfolding his jacket to pull out the cigarette and his brass lighter. He leaned over my lap as he assisted his brother, smoke pouring into my eyes with the first puff, the smell of Enzo’s sweaty underarms released in full bloom as he continued to lean over me, brushing some ash from his brother’s shirtfront with a habitual tenderness.
Returning the lighter to his pocket, Enzo said, “I buy this for my brother yesterday. Does he accept? He says, ‘You spend too much. Matches are good enough for me.’ But see now who is lighting for whom?”
Cosimo objected. “Because I am driving.”
“Not only when you are driving.”
“So we’ll share it, then.”
“Not everything is for sharing.” Enzo
cast a meaningful glance in Cosimo’s direction, then in mine, making it clear we were not really discussing a cigarette lighter after all.
Ignoring the cloud of cigarette smoke enveloping us, I squinted at Enzo and tried to change the subject. “Did you get a good look at the Discobolus statue, in Rome?”
“I see it while we make it go lower, into the box, yes. Sure.”
“And what did you think of it?”
“I say before, it is not very big. A few cracks. It is old enough. That is why it is so expensive, yes?”
He was still playing with the lighter that took a dozen strikes to light—the crummy lighter that was manufactured last year and wouldn’t last until the next. Enzo wouldn’t understand workmanship. I was surprised he could judge the quality of an automobile, or, for that matter, the inner beauty of a woman, the one he loved—perhaps also the one his brother loved. There was no reason I should want him to appreciate the statue. Better that he didn’t appreciate it, one might have argued, given how many Italians protested the export to Germany.
“But what did you think?” I asked, ignoring my own common sense.
“What do I think—?”
“Yes. That’s my question.”
There was a long pause, long enough for Cosimo to flick his butt out the window and raise the pane halfway. “He doesn’t think. That is why Minister Ciano and Herr Keller like my brother.”
Enzo cocked his head, not sure if he was being teased or praised. He laughed. “True enough. But Cosimo, if we can’t get some food, at least can we take a break?”
“A very short break. But no town, no people, no trouble. I know a place.”
CHAPTER 4
Enzo started unbuttoning his shirt even before the truck came to a full stop. When he flung open the door, the pebble gray of the road’s shoulder was still a moving blur.
“Essere attento,” Cosimo cautioned, braking gently—but Enzo didn’t wait. The silvery glint of the roadside lake was too alluring. We were not yet fully stopped when he jumped, tumbling forward onto his knees, then sprang up again, running and hollering, pushing his pants down to his ankles.
The Detour Page 6
