The Art Lover Read online

  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 a
n 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.

  “Lots of energy,” Cosimo sighed, turning off the ignition.

  “How many years younger is he?”

  “Years? No years.”

  “But isn’t he younger than you?”

  Cosimo sniffed once. “Most probably. No one knows for sure.”

  I turned, studying him closely for the first time. “How could you not know?”

  Outside the truck, Enzo hopped and laughed, freeing one foot from his pants. He raised a fist in celebration, then stumbled forward again to liberate the second foot. Abandoning the pants where he stepped out of them, he jogged forward a few paces, then reconsidered, doubling back to grab the pants. An hour later, he’d be rubbing at their grass stains with a lake-dampened handkerchief, grinding the stains further into the fabric.

  “Of course,” Cosimo continued, “one of us came out a minute before the other. But our mother did not expect. And in the surprise, and looking so much the same, it was never certain.”

  He did not know the correct phrase for identical twins, eineiige Zwillinge, but he assured me, “Yes, we were copies. We looked alike when we were little children. And even when we were big children. And then the first fight”—he touched his finger to his twisted nose—“and a few more.” He touched his cheekbone.

  “Not with Enzo . . .”

  “No.” He turned down his lips, lowering his eyelids to half-mast. “Never with Enzo. Only with the boys who tried to beat up Enzo. I got the tough reputation, he kept the looks. I was more tough; more wanted to fight me. I won; they only wanted to fight more. He was more pretty, he had more girls—why should he fight? He was one road going this way and I was the other road going that way. You know this—how sometime something happens a little and then, too late, it can’t be stopped?”

  When I nodded sympathetically, he asked, “You have a brother?”

  “A sister. Just one.” I explained that we lived in different cities, far apart, that she’d moved immediately after marrying.

  “So you must be angry at the husband.”

  “No. Grateful.”

  He seemed puzzled by my tone. “There was a particular time you and she stopped being close?”

  “A particular time? No, I don’t think so.” But it was a good question, because surely we had been close once. The image that came unbidden was the two of us, sitting under a nest of tipped-over wooden chairs covered by a quilt, and the feel of Greta’s fingernails digging into my skinny upper arm as we giggled, listening to our father entering the house, a little worse for wear, bumping into things.

  She must have been no more than twelve; her golden hair had been long still, not yet cut by my father’s dull scissors. That would happen a year later, when he noticed that her beauty was blooming and he decided that she was becoming flirtatious, though she was really still just a girl. Vater was always taking things into his own hands, impulsively. I was too young to stand between them, but surely, when she protested, “Vater, I never flirt!’ and turned to me to say something, I could have done more than what I did: nothing at all. As if my own turn wouldn’t come soon enough. How many times must we watch others suffer, in how many different ways, before we realize that our time, too, will come? Greta left Munich as soon as she had a chance, accepting the first marriage proposal that came her way.

  “The distance is preferable for us,” I told Cosimo, not wanting to think of my sister anymore, or at least not that vision of her—so small and slim and innocently pretty, so defenseless in her youth. “It helps.”

  “Yes? That is very interesting.” He patted his legs. “But I do not understand.”

  He wiped a hand across his nose again. “You want to look at me now? You are staring, now, in order to compare?”

  “What? No.” But he’d caught me.

  Cosimo pushed the door open, looking carefully for any sign of traffic, and stood on the road, refolding his jacket. “Wait, there is shade. It will be better for us.”

  He climbed back in with slow deliberation and drove the truck forward a hundred meters, parking it under the only large tree on this side of the road.

  “Maybe I was staring,” I conceded after he set the brake. “You and Enzo are just so different.”

  “We were always a little different.” He opened the door again, leaving it open as the fresh breeze blew past us, airing out the steaming truck cab. “I remember when we were small. Enzo was three years old. He got lost at the marketplace. The woman who found him almost kept him—she said she liked the yellow curls. But good thing he was a crybaby. She gave him back.”

  His lips twisted into a crooked smile. “Come to think of it, many women spend a little time with my brother, and then they like to give him back.”

  He waited for my reaction, his expression friendly but guarded. “Now I am more interesting to you. Before, just the driver. Now, a little more interesting. Like the statue.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Something to study, for an answer to something. The statue is perfect. Everything just right—the arms, the legs, the way he is about to throw. I am the opposite, yes? A good start, the same as Enzo, and then everything turned a little wrong.”

  He winked, but that only drew attention to the fact that one eye drooped more than the other.

  “The Discus Thrower we carry,” he continued. “This one is only a copy, yes?”

  “A copy of the lost Greek bronze.”

  “And if it’s so perfect, maybe the original was even more perfect? Because things go from good to bad, from bad to worse.” But he was grinning as he said this, as if sharing a private joke.

  “Why are you smiling? Do you think I believe everything goes from bad to worse?”

  “I don’t know. But I am thinking that you believe there is perfect, and then everything else. And you know the world is going a bad way, but you think perfect art will make it better, or maybe at least give you something to stare at, so you don’t see what is not so beautiful all around.”

  Determined, I stuck to my original inquiry. “Cosimo, I know your brother doesn’t care one way or another, but really, tell me what you truly thought about the statue.”

  He shook his head because he had no more to say and I hadn’t understood his point.

  I pleaded: “Try to remember, before it was in the crate, when you were waiting in the room with Keller and all the others.” Enzo and Cosimo had had all that time to regard a masterpiece while I had been out wandering like a foolish tourist, out of my element, feeling rattled, with time running out even then, in ways I couldn’t admit or understand.

  He relented. “It makes you . . .”

&n
bsp; “Yes?”

  “It is as if you must . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . hold your breath.”

  “Yes,” I said, satisfied with that reverential answer, pausing for a moment as my lungs stopped drawing air, as my own blemished rib cage and imperfect body remained statue-still, imagining. Yes.

  “But then,” he said—and I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me, trying to impart some great truth, or simply revealing his own lack of artistic appreciation—“that is good for only so long. Life is waiting. Then you must breathe again.”

  By the time I scooted out the passenger side, Enzo was standing naked at the edge of the lake. Before I could register my own discomfort at the spectacle he was making—so near the road, where anyone might have seen—he had plunged into the water, toes curling before they disappeared beneath the sparkling surface.

  Cosimo chuckled to himself, undressing more slowly. “Va bene. Fifteen minutes.”

  He walked slowly to the lake edge, dropping his white boxers. When he was knee deep in the water, he splashed at his armpits and then turned back. “Are you coming?”

  “Certo.” I rolled up the bottom of my pants and waded up to my ankles, toes squelching in the soft bottom of the lake.

  Cosimo floated on his back, eyes closed, letting the water lap over his forehead. “It’s not bad. Clean enough.”

  “Enjoy yourself.”

  A second time: “Are you coming?”

  When I didn’t answer, he called back with effort, “I don’t think we’ll see any cars. No one has passed for a long time.” Still floating on his back, he started to whistle. The tune was familiar and pleasant, something I’d heard Cosimo whistle for brief snatches while driving, but I couldn’t place it.

  I rolled up my sleeves, dipping my wrists in the cold water. On the far side of the lake, a solitary tree spread its branches over the lake. The water had a deep and musty algae smell, like the olive-colored water at the bottom of a neglected flower vase. The lake’s calm surface reflected the blue sky and cumulus clouds high above, creating a mirrored version that was, in fact, lovelier than the real sky, like a painting that allows one to see something unappreciated in everyday life—only one of art’s valuable qualities.