by Morris West
From their talk I gathered that they were graduates from various disciplines in the humanities who came from southern and western U.S. campuses. They had been attending a seminar convened by the Academy in Rome and now were traveling to the major centers of art and culture in the northern provinces of the Republic. They had arrived late in the day, were staying at a modest hotel called the San Luca, and were trying to plan their next day’s tour. They were a lively bunch, eager and disputatious. They drank freely and aired their knowledge in a variety of regional accents without restraint. It was not long before they adopted me into their group. They were young enough to be centered on themselves and their own interests, so I was spared any too intense inquisition. I was an artist; fine!—I had no pretensions to fame; that was fine too. My name was Edgar and the woman next to me, whose name was Ellie, was as eager for my attention as I was grateful for hers.
We ate, we drank, we talked—God, how long and how confidently we talked! We sang or hummed or clapped or made la-la noises when the musicians strutted their numbers before and behind us. Then, somewhere near midnight, we decanted ourselves into the street and began what Ellie called the midnight tour of Verona.
I was drunk and floating happily on an ocean of Veronese wine. Don’t ask me what any of the academics said. I don’t remember. All I remember is that Ellie was lively and agreeable and her lips were willing and she smelled good, and all through our nighttime promenade we were as close as Siamese twins.
We stood together under Juliet’s balcony and recited snatches of the balcony scene, and what we couldn’t remember we improvised. We embraced in the shadows of old archways and threw pebbles into the Adige River. We straggled after the others, caught up with them, lost them again, and were finally reunited under the timeworn portico of the Hotel San Luca.
That was where it ended, at three in the morning, because the steam had gone out of the evening, the liquor had worn off, the women were sharing rooms, and—though nobody said it, everybody accepted it—lovemaking between strangers in a foreign place was not a recommended diversion. We all agreed it had been a great night. We made wafer-cake promises to meet again. Ellie and I had a lingering good-night embrace under the basilisk eye of the night porter. I made my solitary way back to the Due Torri, where I slept in celibate splendor until midday and woke with the worst hangover in the recorded history of Carl Emil Strassberger.
The hangover taught me a lesson. I was getting too old for drinking bouts and sessions of unsatisfied lust. In terms of simple survival, in my new uncertain world they were a risk I could no longer afford.
I looked with disgust at my image in the mirror: bloodshot eyes, dull skin, stubbled jowls, unsteady hands. I needed as much restoration as any ancient ruin. I rang room service with an urgent order for coffee and orange juice and fresh rolls. I requested politely that the rolls be crisp from the oven; otherwise I might be tempted to use them as missiles against the staff. It was suggested with a certain good humor that as it was already past noon I might care to consider a light luncheon instead. That prospect pleased me not at all. Please! Please! The client does know what he wants, if not always what he needs.
Then I had another saving thought. The best restorative in the world is a session with an old-fashioned Italian barber—hot towels, a razor honed like the scimitar of Saladin, lotions, frictions, a hair trim, a massage of face, neck, and shoulders, a manicure, the drowsy drone of conversation, the click of scissors, the buzz of clippers, the slap of steel upon the honing leather. When one steps into the street after a session like that it is like Resurrection Day for Lazarus.
Problem: where to find such a master barber at the butt end of the twentieth century? Once again my friend, the junior concierge, was instant to help. He knew exactly the place, a stone’s throw from the hotel: old management, spotless hygiene, instruments sterilized in a modern autoclave—and, yes, they offered manicures and pedicures. He would be happy to make an appointment for me. Say in one hour? And how had my evening at Pantalone turned out? More than a success, I told him, a riot of pleasure for which I was now paying dearly! While I had him on the line, could he recommend a good store for art supplies? In half a minute I had the address and the directions. My day, if not my destiny, was beginning to make sense—provided I wore sunglasses to take the glare off it.
The sunglasses prompted another thought. Instead of shedding my stubble, why not have the barber shape it and begin, at least, to nurse it into a beard? Beard and sunglasses together would provide a minimal shield against casual recognition, though it might raise a query or two at immigration barriers because my image would not match the photograph in my passport.
I was at least beginning to take Sergio Carlino seriously. So I opted for the beard and resigned myself to some uncomfortable days as the stubble grew into facial hair. With luck and enough time, it would be fully grown before Carlino picked up Larry’s trail and set me again on my pursuit of him.
The session with the barber was everything I had hoped. He charged mightily and I tipped generously, but I walked out a new-minted man with the shape of a handsome beard dark against my smoothly barbered skin. I made early morning appointments for the following days so that the master could nurture his creation. It was an expensive indulgence but our meetings would represent a break in my solitude, a small affirmation that I still held some control over my own destiny.
The purchase of the art materials was another agreeable diversion. The woman who served me was obliging and attractive. As we worked comfortably through my list, she told me she held down an evening job as a teacher of drawing. She understood my dilemma. I wanted to travel as lightly as possible but I had no idea where or how long I might decide to sojourn. I needed well-packaged, easily transportable materials, a collapsible easel and stool, papers for gouache and watercolor, canvases in manageable sizes, acrylics and oils and acquarelles, and an array of brushes for them all. It was a brief but pleasant rediscovery of that other self—egoist though he might be—whom I found much more pleasant to live with than the wary hunter I had become. I paid for the goods, which would be delivered before nightfall to my hotel. Then with sketchbook and crayons only, I set out to walk the city.
Once again, the need for change impressed itself upon me. I was an architectural artist trained in the long tradition of Piranesi, Vanvitelli, and Canaletto. I was anchored to the visible form. I had accepted what Andrea del Sarto had deplored in Browning’s version of him: “All is silver gray, placid and perfect in my art—the worse!”
Now, not for art but for a shabby trick of concealment, I had to wrench myself out of that frame of reference into another. I would have to quit the city and go out into the countryside, to the crags and torrents and the light on restless waters and the shifting patterns of cloud and shadow—but not yet. I needed this late afternoon under the fishtail battlements and ancient chimney pots of Verona and the time-worn Gothic symbols of the tomb of the Scaligeri. The mere exercise of architectural and sculptural drawing soothed and relaxed me. I felt that part of myself was restored to me even as I was going through the exercise of shedding it.
As I worked over the drawings, one part of my brain was rehearsing the details of the life of Edgar Francis Benson—a man I had never known, a life invented for me. Another part of my brain busied itself with translating the facts into French, so that hopefully I would not react too suddenly to questions addressed to me in English.
It sounds like a foolish and confusing exercise, but Oskar Kallman had taught me that up to a point it would work. It slowed down my instinctive reactions. It introduced elements of confusion into the memory process which might prove useful under a normal social interrogation. Kallman had impressed on me that, because we are all victims of information overload, one can with reasonable conviction plead in conversation a defective memory of people and events.
When one is working on open-air studies, people stop and stare. Some will attempt to engage you in conversation, which can sometimes tu
rn into a pleasant encounter. This afternoon, however, I was trying to cultivate a deliberate inattention, a certain grumpiness, a refusal of eye contact so that I would not raise my face from the sketchbook except to glance at the object in front of me.
There were moments when I felt very foolish, a gullible fellow conditioned by fear and ignorance to cringe at shadow shows upon the wall of his prison. However, there was a harsh logic in the drama which was unfolding itself in my life. Larry Lucas, by turns acutely rational and destructively psychotic, was the agent of disorder in our family life. We were playing by his rules and not our own. At the same time, he was the pawn and the victim in a more sinister money game, whose outlines were clear enough but of whose rules and players we knew very little.
Sergio Carlino, on the other hand, had played many such games with similar characters. Therefore, I had no ground on which to challenge his advice. I simply had to follow where he led me, knowing all the time that I was leaping from a high place into deep darkness.
I was working now on a sketch of the equestrian statue of Can Grande, Great-dog Scaliger, trying to catch his famous sinister smile and the way his dog-headed helmet was thrown back to lie between his shoulders. Out of nowhere a woman’s familiar voice hailed me: “Edgar!”
I kept my head down and continued laying in the shadows of Can Grande’s time-frozen face. Then a hand was laid on my shoulder and I was slewed around to face Ellie, my companion of the previous evening.
She bent and kissed me and then leaned close to me to make a critical appraisal of the sketch.
“Well! We were all flying so high last night I felt we’d never see each other again, but here you are! And that’s a very nice piece of drawing!”
“Thank you. It’s coming along. Where are your colleagues?”
She shrugged indifferently.
“Here and there, all doing their own things. Academics in full cry give me a pain in the butt. I needed a break and I half hoped I’d run into you again. You talked about this place. I took a chance and came…Please don’t stop. I’ll shut up and watch. This is too good to spoil.”
Last night she had been talkative and cheerfully rowdy. Now she was silent, standing a pace away, leaning against a stone buttress watching the sketch develop. Came a moment when I paused and held it at arm’s length to survey what I had done. Then, seeing me hesitate over the next strokes, she said quietly, “With great respect, maestro, enough. Leave it just as it is!”
It was a bolder act than it seems now as I record it. Try taking a bone from a puppy and you’ll get your fingers nipped. Pass judgment on a work while the maker is still uncertain of it and you risk a dusty answer. This time, however, a second glance convinced me she was right. Her eye was true and her tone too tactful to deserve a reproach. I took one more look at the sketch and closed the pad over it.
“You’ve got a good eye,” I told her.
She dismissed the compliment with an offhand statement.
“I teach art history. I design jewelry.”
“May I offer you some coffee—a drink perhaps?”
“Coffee, please. After last night I feel like a candidate for Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“That makes two of us.”
She took my arm and we walked together toward the forest of umbrellas and awnings in the Piazza dell’ Erbe. It was an intimate little promenade. We were comfortable together, but—how shall I say it? —close as we were, I was still not conscious of anything but her presence. I had taken no lasting note of her face, the contours of her body, the color of her hair, the texture of her skin. It was only when I faced her over the coffee cups that my mind began to assemble her into a physical image and I reached for the sketchbook and pencil to record it.
With her casque of jet-black hair and her honey-colored skin she looked like Isabella d’Este, whom Titian painted as a young girl and da Vinci as an older woman. There was the same sweep of the neck column, the same bone structure in the face, the same hint of mischief—and of temper, too—in the dark eyes. She was a good sitter, placid and patient in the pose I had asked her to take: chin cupped in her hands, looking past me toward the passage of folk in the square.
When the sketch was done, I pushed it across the table for her approval. She was obviously pleased.
“May I keep this?”
“Of course.”
“Will you sign it for me, please? And write a line or two on it?”
I had the pencil already poised to dash off the serpentine symbol which was my normal signature when suddenly I remembered my lesson with Oskar Kallman. I sat there, pencil poised, caught in a small heart-stopping moment of understanding. This was how easy it was to betray oneself, to surrender without a fight to the executioners.
“Something wrong?” Ellie asked. “Suddenly you weren’t with us!”
“I’m OK. I was just trying to think of a suitable inscription.”
I wrote it very carefully in that slow Gothic script which somehow contradicted the swift confident lines of the sketch: For Ellie, a reminder that we laughed a night away in Verona. E. F. Benson.
I passed the sketch back to her. She studied it carefully. She looked up, nodded, and smiled. She touched her fingers to her lips, reached across the table, and laid them on mine.
“Thank you. I’ll treasure this.”
“And I’ll remember the sitter.”
“I wanted you to have a richer memory. I hated to let you go last night.”
“I hated to leave.”
“Tomorrow we’re leaving for Venice. We’re booked for three days there. I wish I could get out of it.”
“First visit?”
“Yes.”
“Then you shouldn’t pass it up. There’s still a special magic that clings about the place.”
“How long will you be staying here in Verona?”
“I’m not sure. It may be only a few days. It may be longer.”
“You wouldn’t think of coming to Venice with us?”
“I can’t, I’m afraid. I’m waiting on word from my agent. He is discussing a commission for me. I have to be ready to meet the client at short notice.”
Again there was the uncomfortable reminder: every moment in the life of Edgar Francis Benson demanded its own little lie.
“So how will you spend your time?” Ellie asked again.
“As you saw today. I’ll probably fill a couple of sketchbooks. I’m trying to loosen up my style. Right now it’s too formal and tight. I have a car in the garage at the hotel. I can get out into the countryside and do some landscapes.”
I hoped Sergio Carlino and Oskar Kallman were listening to my performance. It wasn’t great theater but I was trying. Ellie gave me a slow, sidelong smile.
“If you’ve got a car, that changes things. You could take me along for the ride and drop me off at the nearest ferry station for Venice. Also you’d have a model on call.”
“It’s an interesting thought.”
“Is that all it is—interesting? What if I offered nude sittings as well?”
It was interesting and tempting. I had dropped out of my own world into another, which the Japanese call most aptly the world of flowers and willows, the floating world where nothing is permanent, where everything is permissible provided you can pay the score. If your mind changes there is no blame. If your inclinations change, no guilts accrue. That is why it is always a reckless world and sometimes dangerous. I was aware of the change in myself, though I could not yet put a name to it. I had proposed marriage to Arlette. She, wiser than I, perhaps, had deferred her answer. I was still free to roam among the flowers and the willows. Ellie was waiting for my response. She was posed now as I had sketched her, chin cupped in her hands; but her eyes were fixed on my face, challenging me. I had to tell her at least a fraction of the truth.
“It’s an attractive idea. It presents no problems for me, except that once I’m summoned I have to leave. That’s the way my life works. On the other hand, I don’t want to be responsi
ble for separating you from your colleagues and leaving you adrift in the lagoons!”
Her head lifted defiantly and there was fire in her dark eyes, even though her lips still smiled.
“Understand something, Mr. Benson! I am responsible for me. I offered the invitation. All you have to do is say yes or no. We enjoyed ourselves last night. I’d like to think we could have a few more laughs together. The day the laughter stops, we kiss good-bye. What do you say?”
“I say we have dinner tonight. Eight-thirty at the Due Torri. In case you like the place, I’ll get you a room for the night, so bring your passport and toothbrush and a change of clothes.”
“And if I don’t like it?”
“You return to your friends. Deal?”
“Don’t push your luck, Edgar Benson.”
“I’m not pushing it, believe me; but I’m damned if I’m staging another version of Rodin’s kiss for the doorman at the Due Torri—which, I have to tell you, is one very ritzy hotel.”
“You’re praying I won’t disgrace you, is that it?”
“I know you won’t.”
“Are you married?”
“You asked me that last night.”
“I know, but we’re both sober now.”
“I’m not married. Are you?”
“I used to be. I’m divorced.”
“Do you have any more questions?”
“Hundreds.”
“I think you should save them.”
“For what?”
“Until you really need the answers. Otherwise they’re just a load to carry.”
“What’s my last name?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t tell me. We seem to be doing quite well without it.”
“I find it strange that you didn’t bother to ask.”
“So how do you think we’ll survive as traveling companions with all these questions asked and unasked?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll think about it and let you know at dinner tonight.”
