A Pimp's Revenge

F, Ravaged Florentine, grieving, kicked apart a trial canvas, copy of one he had been working on for years, his foot through the poor mother's mouth, destroyed the son's insipid puss, age about ten. It deserves death for not coming to life. He stomped on them both, but not, of course, on the photograph still tacked to the easel ledge, sent years ago by sister Bessie, together with her last meager check. "I found this old photo of you and Momma when you were a little boy. Thought you might like to have it, she's been dead these many years." Inch by enraged inch he rent the canvas, though cheap linen linen he could ill afford, and would gladly have cremated the remains if there were a place to. He swooped up the mess with both hands, grabbed some smeared drawings, ran down four rickety flights and dumped all in the bowels of a huge burlap rubbish bag in front of the scabby mustard-walled house on the Via S. Agostino. Fabio, the embittered dropsical landlord, asleep on his feet, awoke and begged for a few lire back rent, but F ignored him. Across the broad piazza, Santo Spirito, nobly proportioned, stared him in the bushy-mustached face, but he would not look back. His impulse was to take to the nearest bridge and jump off into the Arno, flowing again in green full flood after a dry summer; instead, he slowly ascended the stairs, pelted by the landlord's fruity curses. Upstairs in his desolate studio, he sat on his bed and wept. Then he lay with his head at the foot of the bed and wept.

He blew his nose at the open window and gazed for a reflective hour at the Tuscan hills in September haze. Otherwise, sunlight on the terraced silver-trunked olive trees, and San Miniato, sparkling, framed in the distance by black cypresses. Make an interesting impressionist oil, green and gold mosaics and those black trees of death, but that's been done. Not to mention Van Gogh's tormented cypresses. That's my trouble, everything's been done or is otherwise out of style--cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism. If I could only guess what's next. Below, a stunted umbrella pine with a headful of black and white chirping swallows grew in the landlord's narrow yard, over a dilapidated henhouse that smelled to heaven, except that up here the smell was sweetened by the cinnabar odor of red roof tiles. A small dirty white rooster crowed shrilly, the shrimpy brown hens clucking as they ran in dusty circles around three lemon trees in tubs. F's studio was a small room with a curtained kitchen alcove--several shelves, a stove and sink--the old-fashioned walls painted with faded rustic dancers, nymphs and shepherds, and a large scalloped cornucopia full of cracked and faded fruit.

He looked until the last of morning was gone, then briskly combed his thick mustache, sat at the table and ate a hard anise biscuit as his eyes roamed over some quotations he had stenciled on the wall.

Constable: "Painting is for me another word for feeling."

Whistler: "A masterpiece is finished from the beginning."

Pollock: "What is it that escapes me? The human? That humanity is greater than art?"

Nietzsche: "Art is not an imitation of nature but its metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it in order to overcome it."

Picasso: "People seize on painting in order to cover up their nakedness."

Ah, if I had his genius.

Still, he felt better, picked up a 14-inch Madonna he had carved and sanded it busily. Then he painted green eyes, black hair, pink lips and a sky-blue cloak, and waited around, smoking, until the statuette had dried. He wrapped it in a sheet of newspaper, dropped the package into a string bag and went again downstairs, wearing sockless sandals, tight pants and black beret. Sometimes he wore sunglasses.

At the corner he stepped into midstreet, repelled by the old crone's door, the fortuneteller, the eighth of seven sisters, to hear her talk, six thick gray hairs sprouting from the wart on her chin; in order not to sneak in and ask, for 100 lire, "Tell me. signora, will I ever make it? Will I finally finish my five years' painting of Mother and Son, my sure masterpiece--I know it in my bones--if I ever get it done?"

Her shrill sibylic reply made sense. "A good cook doesn't throw out yesterday's soup."

"But will it be as good as I want, I mean? Very good, signora, maybe a masterwork?"

"Masters make masterworks."

"And what about my luck, when will it change from the usual?"

"When you do. Art is long: inspiration, short. Luck is fine, but don't stop breathing."

"Will I avoid an unhappy fate?"

"It all depends."

That or something like it for 100 lire. No bargain.

F sighed. Still, it somehow encouraged.

A window shutter was drawn up with a chatter and a paper cone of garbage came flying out at him. He ducked as the oily bag split on the cobblestones behind him.

Beware of Falling Masonry.

He turned the corner, barely avoiding three roaring Vespas.

Vita pericolosa. It had been a suffocating summer slowly deflated to cool autumn. He hurried, not to worry his hunger, past the fruit and vegetable stalls in the piazza, zigzagging through the Oltrarno streets as he approached Ponte Vecchio. Ah. the painter's eye! He enjoyed the narrow crowded noisy streets, the washing hung from windows. Tourists were all but gone, but the workshops were preparing for next year's migration, mechanics assembling picture frames, cutting leather, plastering tile mosaics; women plaiting straw. He sneezed passing through a tannery reek followed by hot stink of stable. Above the din of traffic an old forge rumbling. F hastened by a minuscule gallery where one of his action paintings had been hanging downside up for more than a year. He had made no protest, art lives on accidents. His signature, F upside down, looked like a music notation.

At a small square, thick with stone benches where before the War there had been houses, the old and lame of the quarter sat amid beggars and berouged elderly whores, one nearby combing her reddish gray locks. Another fed pigeons with a crust of bread they approached and pecked at. One. not so old, in a homely floppy velvet hat. he gazed at twice: in fact, no more than a girl with a slender youthful body. He could stand a little sexual comfort, but it cost too much. Holding the Madonna tightly to his chest, the painter hastened into the woodworker's shop.

Alberto Panenero, the proprietor, in a brown smock smeared with wood dust and shavings, scattered three apprentices with a hiss and came forward, bowing.

"Ah. maestro, another of your charming Madonnas, let's hope?"

F unwrapped the wooden statuette of the modest Madonna.

The proprietor held it up as he examined it. He called together the apprentices. "Look at this workmanship, you ignoramuses," then dismissed them with a hiss.

"Beautiful?" F said.

"Of course. With this subject, who can miss?"

"And the price?

"Eh. What can one do? As usual." F's face fell an inch, "Is it fair to pay only five thousand lire for a statuette that takes two weeks' work and sells on the Via Tornabuoni for fifteen thousand, even twenty if someone takes it to St. Peter's and gets it blessed by the Pope?"

Panenero shrugged. "Ah, maestro, the world has changed since the time of true craftsmen. You and I. we're fighting a losing battle. As for the Madonnas. I now get most of the job turned out by machine. My apprentices cut in the face and a few folds to the robe, daub on a bit of paint, and I swear to you it costs me one third of what I pay you and goes for the same price to the shops. Of course, they don't approach the quality of your product--I'm an honest man--but do you think the tourists care? What's more, the shopkeepers are stingier than ever: and believe me. they're stingy in Florence. If I ask for more, they offer less. If they pay me seventyfive hundred for yours. I'm in luck. With that price, how can I take care of rent and my other expenses? I pay the wages of two masters and a journeyman on my other products, the antique furniture, and so forth. I also employ three apprentices who have to eat or they're too weak to fart. My own family, including a clubfoot son and three useless daughters, comes to six people. Eh. I don't have to tell you it's no picnic earning a living nowadays. Still, if you'll put a bambino in the poor Madonna's arms, I'll up you five hundred."

"I'll take the five thousand."

The proprietor counted it out in worn 50- and 100-lira notes.

The trouble with you. maestro, is you're a perfectionist. How many are there nowadays?"

"I guess that's so." F sighed. "Don't think I haven't thought of selling the Madonnas to the tourists myself. but if I have to do that as well as make them, where's my painting time coming from, I'd like to know?"

"I agree with you totally." Panenero said, "still. for a bachelor, you're not doing too badly. I'm always surprised you look so skinny. It must be hereditary."

"Most of my earnings go for supplies. Everything's shot up so, oils, pigments, turpentine, everything. A tube of cadmium costs me close to thirteen hundred lire, so I try to keep bright yellow, not to mention vermilion, out of my pictures. Last week I had to pass up a sable brush that cost three thousand. A roll of cotton canvas costs over ten thousand. If I have to pay such prices, what's left for meat?"

"Too much meat is bad for the digestion. My wife's brother eats meat twice a day and has liver trouble. A dish of good spaghetti with cheese will fatten you up without interfering with your liver. Anyway, how's the painting coming?"

"Don't ask me so I won't have to lie."

In the market close by. F pinched the tender parts of two Bosc pears and a Spanish melon. He looked into a basket of figs, examined some pumpkins on hooks, inspected a bleeding dead rabbit and told himself he must do a couple of still lifes. He settled for a long loaf of bread and two etti of tripe. He also bought a brown egg for breakfast, six (continued on page 126)Pimp's Revenge(continued from page 70) Nazionale cigarettes and a quarter of a head of cabbage. In a fit of well-being, he bought three wine-red dahlias, and the old woman who sold them to him out of her basket handed him a marigold. free. Shopping for food's a blessing, he thought, you get down to brass tacks. It makes a lot in life seem less important, for instance painting a masterwork. He felt he needn't paint for the rest of his life and nothing much lost: but then anxiety moved like a current through his belly as the thought threatened and he had all he could do not to break into a sweat, run back to the studio, set up his canvas and start hitting it with paint. I'm a time-ravaged man, horrible curse on an artist.

The young whore with the baggy hat saw the flowers amid his bundles as he approached, and through her short veil smiled dimly up at him.

F. for no reason he could think of, gave her the marigold, and the girl--she was no more than 18--held the flower awkwardly.

"What's your price, if you don't mind me asking?"

"What are you, a painter or something?" she asked.

"That's right, how did you know?"

"I think I guessed. Maybe it's your clothes or the flowers or something." She smiled absently, her eyes roaming the benches, her hard mouth tight. "To answer your question, two thousand lire."

He raised his beret and walked on.

"You can have me for five hundred." called an old whore from her bench. "What she hasn't heard of I've practiced all my life. I have no objection to odd requests."

But F was now running. Got to get back to work. He crossed the street through a stream of Fiats. carts. Vespas, and rushed back to his studio.

Afterward he sat on his bed, hands clasped between knees, looking at the canvas and thinking of the young whore. Maybe it'll relax me so I can paint.

He counted what was left of his money, then hid the paper lire in a knotted sock in his bureau drawer. He removed the sock and hid it in the armadio on the hat rack. Then he locked the armadio and hid the key in the bureau drawer. He dropped the drawer key into a jar of cloudy turpentine, figuring he wouldn't want to wet his hand fishing for it.

Maybe she'd let me charge it and I could pay when I have more money? I could do two Madonnas sometime and pay her out of the 10,000 lire.

Then he thought. She seemed interested in me as an artist. Maybe she'd trade for a drawing.

He riffled through a pile of charcoal drawings and came on one of a heavy-bellied nude cutting her toenails, one chunky foot on a backless chair. F trotted to the benches in the market piazza where the girl sat glumly with a crushed marigold in her hand.

"Would you mind having a drawing, instead? One of my own, that is?"

"Instead of what?"

"Instead of cash, because I'm short. It's just an idea I had."

It took her a minute to run it through her head. "Oh, all right, if that's what you want."

He unrolled the drawing and showed it to her.

"Oh, all right."

But then, as though she had made a mistake, she flushed under her veil and gazed embarrassed at F.

"Anything wrong?"

Her eyes miserably searched the piazza.

"It's nothing," she said after a minute. "I'll take the drawing": then seeing him studying her, she laughed nervously and said. "I was looking for my cousin. He was supposed to meet me here. Well, if he comes let him wait, he's a pain in the ass anyway."

She rose from the bench and they went together toward Via S. Agostino.

Fabio, the landlord, took one look and called her puttana.

"That'll do from you," said F. sternly.

"Pay your rent instead of pissing away the money."

"Mind your business."

Her name, she told him as they were undressing in his studio, was Esmeralda.

His was Arturo.

The girl's hair, when she tossed off her baggy hat, was brown and full. She had black eyes shaped like plum pits, a small mouth, on the sad side, a Modigliani neck, strong though not exactly white teeth, and a pimply brow. She wore long imitation-pearl earrings and kept them on. Esmeralda unzipped her clothes and they were at once in bed. It wasn't bad, though she apologized for her performance.

As they lay smoking in bed--he had given her one of his cigarettes--Esmeralda said. "The one I was looking for isn't my cousin, he's my pimp or at least he was. If he's there waiting for me now. I hope it's snowing and he freezes to death."

They had an espresso together. She said she liked the studio and offered to stay.

He was momentarily panicked. "I wouldn't want it to interfere with my painting. I mean. I'm devoted to that. Besides, this is a small place."

"I'm a small girl, I'll take care of your needs and won't interfere with your work."

He finally agreed.

Though he had qualms concerning her health, he let her stay yet felt reasonably contented.

• • •

"Signor Ludovico Belvedere," the landlord called up from the ground floor, "a gentleman on his way up the stairs to see you. If he buys one of your pictures, you won't have an excuse for not paying last month's rent, not to mention June or July."

If it was really a gentleman. F went in to wash his hands as the stranger slowly, stopping to breathe, wound his way up the stairs. The painter had hastily removed the canvas from the easel, hiding it in the kitchen alcove. He soaped his hands thickly, the smoke from the butt dangling from his mouth drifting into a closed eye. F quickly dried himself with a dirty towel. It was, instead of a gentleman. Esmeralda's seedy cugino. the pimp, a thin man past 50, tall, with pouched small eyes and a pencil-line mustache. His hands and feet were small, he wore loose squeaky shoes with gray spats. His clothes, though neatly pressed, had seen better than their day. He carried a Malacca cane and sported a pearl-gray hat. There was about him, though he seemed to mask it, a quality of having experienced everything, if not more, that gave F the momentary shivers.

Bowing courteously and speaking as though among friends, he was not, he explained, in the best of moods--to say nothing of his health--after a week of running around desperately trying to locate Esmeralda. He explained they had had a misunderstanding over a few lire through an unfortunate error, no more than a mistake in addition--carrying a one instead of a seven. "These things happen to the best of mathematicians, but what can you do with someone who won't listen to reason? She slapped my face and ran off. Through a mutual acquaintance I made an appointment to explain the matter to her, with proof from my accounts, but though she gave her word, she didn't appear. It doesn't speak well for her maturity."

He had learned later from a friend in the Santo Spirito quarter that she was at the moment living with the signore. Ludovico apologized for disturbing him, but F must understand he had come out of necessity and urgency.

"Per cortesia, signore, I request your good will. A great deal is at stake for four people. She can continue to serve you from time to time if that's what she wants, but I gather from your landlord that you're not exactly prosperous, and of course she has to support herself and a starving father in Fiesole. I don't suppose she's told you about him, but if it weren't for me personally, he'd be lying in a common grave this minute, growing flowers on his chest. She must come back to work under my guidance and protection not only because it's mutuallyers (continued on page 156)Pimp's Revenge(continued from page 126) beneficial but because it's also a matter of communal responsibility; not only hers for me now that I've had a most serious operation, or both of us for her starving father, but also in reference to my aged mother, a woman of eighty-three who is seriously in need of proper nursing care. I understand you're an American, signore. That's one thing, but Italy is a poor country. Here each of us has to be responsible for the welfare of four or five others or it doesn't work and we all go under."

He spoke calmly, philosophically a little breathlessly, as if his recent operation now and then caught up with him. And his intense small eyes wandered in different directions as he talked, as though he suspected Esmeralda might be hiding in the room.

F, after his first indignation, listened with interest although disappointed the man had not turned out to be a wealthy picture buyer.

"She's had it with whoring." he said.

"Signore," Ludovico said with emotion. "it's important to understand. The girl owes me much. She was seventeen when I came across her, a peasant girl living a wretched existence. I'll spare you the details because they'd turn your stomach. She had chosen this profession, the most difficult of all as we know, but lacked the ability to handle herself. I met her by accident and offered to help her. although this sort of thing wasn't in my regular line of work. To make the story short. I devoted many hours to her education and helped her find a better clientele--to give you an example, recently one of her newest customers, a wealthy cripple she sees weekly, offered to marry her. but I advised against it because he's really a contadino. Anyway, I took measures to protect her health and well-being. I advised her to go for medical examinations, scared off badly behaved customers with a toy pistol and tried in every way to reduce indignities and hazards. Believe me, I am a protective person and gave her my sincere affection. I treat her as if she were my own daughter. She isn't by chance in the next room? If she is, why doesn't she come out and talk frankly?"

He pointed with his cane at the alcove curtain.

"That's the kitchen." said F. "She's out shopping."

Ludovico paused, bereft, blew on his fingers, his eyes momentarily glazed as his glance mechanically wandered around the room. He seemed then to come to and gazed at some of F's pictures with sudden interest. In a moment his features were animated.

"Naturally, you're a painter! Pardon me for overlooking it, a worried man is half blind. Besides, somebody told me you were an insurance agent."

"No, I'm a painter."

The pimp borrowed F's last cigarette, took a few puffs as he studied the pictures on the wall with tightened eyes, then put out the barely used butt and pocketed it.

"It's a remarkable coincidence." He had once, it turned out, been a frame maker and later part owner of a small art gallery on the Via Strozzi, and he was of course familiar with painting and the painting market. But the gallery, because of the machinations of his thieving partner, had failed. He hadn't reopened it for lack of capital, and it was shortly afterward he had become seriously ill and had to have a lung removed.

"That's why I didn't finish your cigarette, though I still have a craving for a puff or two."

Ludovico coughed badly--F believed him.

"In this condition, naturally. I find it hard to make a living. Even frame making wears me out. That's why it's advantageous for me to work with Esmeralda."

"Anyway, you certainly have your nerve." the painter replied. "I'm not just referring to your coming up here and telling me what I ought to do vis-à-vis someone who happens to be here because she asked to be. but I mean actually living off the proceeds of a girl's body. All in all. it isn't much of a moral thing to do. Esmeralda might in some ways be indebted to you. but she doesn't owe you her soul."

The pimp leaned with dignity on his cane.

"Since you bring up the word, signore, are you a moral man?"

"In my art I am."

Ludovico sighed. "Ah, maestro, who are we to talk of what we understand so badly? Morality has a thousand sources and endless means of expression. As for the soul, who understands its mechanism? Remember, the thief on the cross was the one who rose to heaven with our Lord." He coughed at length. "Maybe I expressed myself poorly before. This is a complicated world. Keep in mind that the girl of her free will chose the calling she is engaged in, not I. She was in it without finesse or proficiency, which makes it almost impossible to succeed in such an enterprise, although she is of course adequate. Her advantage is her youth and a certain directness, but she needs advice and managerial assistance. Have you seen the hat she wears? Twice I tried to burn it. Obviously she lacks taste. The same is true for her clothes, but she's very stubborn to deal with. Still, I devoted myself to her and managed to improve conditions, for which I received a modest but necessary commission. Considering the circumstances, how can this be an evil thing? The basis of morality is recognizing one another's needs and cooperating. Mutual generosity is nothing to criticize other people for. After all. what did Jesus teach?"

Ludovico had removed his hat. He was bald with several gray hairs parted in the center.

He seemed, now, depressed. "You aren't in love with this girl, are you, maestro? If so, say the word and I disappear. Love is love, after all. I don't forget I am an Italian."

F thought for a minute.

"Not as yet. I don't think."

"In that case. I hope you will not interfere with her decision?"

"What decision do you have in mind?"

"As to what she will do after I speak to her."

"You mean if she decides to leave?"

"Exactly."

"That's up to her."

The pimp ran a relieved hand over his perspiring head and replaced his hat. "The relationship may be momentarily convenient, but for a painter who has his work to think of, you'll be better off without her."

"I didn't say I wanted her to go." said F. "All I said was I wouldn't interfere with her decision."

Ludovico bowed. "Ah, you have the objectivity of a true ."

On his way out, he tossed aside the alcove curtain with his cane and uncovered F's painting on the kitchen table.

He was at first unable to believe his eyes. Standing back, he had a better look. "Straordinario." he murmured and kissed his fingertips.

F snatched the canvas, blew the dust off and carefully tucked it away behind his bureau.

"It's work in progress." he explained. "I don't like to show it yet."

"Obviously it will be a very fine painting, one sees that at a glance. What do you call it?"

"Mother and Son."

"In spirit, it's pure Picasso."

"Is it? What do you mean?"

"I refer to his remark: 'You paint not what you see but what you know is there.'"

"That's right." F said, his voice husky.

"We all have to learn from the masters. There's nothing wrong with living to do better that which they do best themselves. Thus new masters are born."

"Thank you."

"When you finish, let me know. I am acquainted with people who are interested in buying fine serious contemporary work. I could get you an excellent price, of course for the usual commission. Anyway, it looks as though you are about to give birth to a painting of extraordinary merit. Permit me to congratulate you on your talent."

F blushed radiantly.

Esmeralda returned.

Ludovico fell to his knees.

"Go fuck yourself." she said.

"Ah, signorina, my misfortune is your good luck. Your friend is a superb artist. You can take my word for it."

• • •

How do you paint a Kaddish?

Here's Momma sitting on the stoop in her cotton house dress, awkward at having her picture taken yet with a dim smile on the dry old snapshot turning yellow that Bessie sent me years ago. Here's the snap. here's the painting of the same idea, why can't I make one out of both? How do you make art of an old photo, so to say? A single of a double image, the one in and the one out?

The painting. 51 x 38. was encrusted in places (her hands and feet) (his face) almost a quarter of an inch thick with paint, layer on layer giving it history, another word for thick past in the paint itself. The mystery was why in the five years he had been at it. on and off because he had to hide it away when it got to be too much for him. he hadn't been able to finish it though most of it was done already, except Momma's face. Five years' work here, mostly as he had first painted it. though he often added dibs and dabs, touches of brush or palette knife on the dry forms. He had tried it every which way, with Momma alone, sitting or standing, with or without him: and with Bessie in or out, but never Poppa, that living ghost; and I've made her old and young, and sometimes resembling Annamaria Oliovino, or Theresa, the chambermaid in Milan; even a little like Susskind, when my memory gets mixed up, who was a man I met when I first came to Rome; Momma apart and he apart, and then trying to bring them together in the tightly woven paint so they would be eternally mother and son as well as unique forms on canvas. So beautifully complete the idea of them together that the viewer couldn't help but think no one has to do it again because it's been done by F and can't be done better: in truth, a masterwork. He had painted her sad and happy, tall, short, realistic, expressionistic, cubistic, surrealistic, even in action splotches of violet and brown. Also in black and white, stark like Motherwell. Once he had molded a figure in clay from the old photo and tried to copy it, but that didn't work either.

The faces were changed almost every day he painted, his as a young boy, hers as herself (long since departed): but now though for a year he had let the boy be, his face and all, he was still never satisfied with hers--something always missing--for very long after he had put it down: and he daily or nightly scraped if off (another lost face) with his rusty palette knife, and tried once again the next day; then scraped that face the same night or the day after; or let it harden in hope for two days and then frantically, before the paint stiffened, scraped that face off, too. All in all he had destroyed more than a thousand faces and conceived another thousand for a woman who could barely afford one; yet couldn't settle on her true face --at least true for art. What was true for Bessie's old photo was true enough--you can't beat Kodak, but reduced on canvas, too much left out. He sometimes thought of tearing up the old snapshot so he would have only memory (of it?) to go by, but couldn't bring himself to destroy this last image of her. He was afraid to tear up the snap and went on painting the face on the dumpy body on the chair on the stoop, little F standing blandly by her side knowing she had died though pretending, at least in paint, that he didn't; then scraping it off as the rest of the painting slowly thickened into a frieze.

I've caught the boy. more or less, and sometimes I seem to have her for a few minutes, though not when I look at them together. I don't paint her face so that it holds him in her presence. It comes out at best like two portraits in space and time. Should I stand him on the left instead of right? I tried it once and it didn't work: now I have this hard-as-rock-quarter-of-an-inch investment in the way they are now. and if I scrap either of them (chisel? dynamite?), I might as well throw out the canvas. I might as well scrap what's left of my life if I have to start over again.

How do you invent whoever she was? I remember so little, her death, not even the dying, just the end mostly, alter a sickness they easily cure nowadays with penicillin. I was about six or seven, or maybe ten. and as I remember, didn't cry at the funeral. For years that never bothered me much, but when Bessie sent me the snap and I began painting Momma's pictures. I guess it did. Maybe I held it against her, I mean dying; either that or I am by nature a nonmourner, born that way whether one wants it or not. The truth is I am afraid to paint, like I might find out something.

I have not said Kaddish, though I could have looked up the words.

What if she were still a wandering figure among the stars, unable to find the Pearly Gates?

He hid the canvas and turned then to the statuette of the Madonna without child. Esmeralda liked to see the chips fly as the Holy Mother rose out of wood.

• • •

The girl had coffee with milk in the morning, slept on a borrowed cot in the kitchen alcove and stayed out of his way while he was painting. The back of the canvas was what she saw when she came into the studio each morning for a few lire to shop with. It was understood she was not to try to look as he painted. "Malocchio," he said, and she nodded and withdrew on tiptoe. Because he found it uncomfortable to work with someone around, after a few days he had thought of asking her to leave, but when he considered how young she was. hardly grown up. like a young child's big sister, he changed his mind. Only once she indirectly referred to the painting, asking what was the snapshot he pored over so much. "Mind your business," F said; she shrugged and withdrew. In the kitchen she was slowly reading a love-story serial in a movie magazine. She shopped, cooked, kept the studio clean, although she did not bathe as often as he. In the kitchen, as he was painting she sewed, mended his socks, underwear, and altered her dresses. She had not much clothing, a sweater and skirt and two trollop's dresses, from one of which she removed two silver roses, from the other some rows of purple sequins. She raised the necklines and lowered the hems. She owned a tight black sweater that looked good on her because of her bosom, long neck, dark eyes; also a few pieces of patched underwear, nothing enticing but a red chemise, not bad but too red, some baubles of jewelry she had bought on the Ponte Vecchio, and a modest pair of house shoes. Her gold high heels she had wrapped in newspaper and put away. How long for does she think? F thought. And the girl was a talented cook. She fed him well, mostly on macaroni, green vegetables cooked in olive oil, and now and then some tripe or rabbit. She did very well with a few lire, and, all in all, two lived cheaper than one. She made few complaints, though she could be sullen when, lost in his work or worry about his work, he paid scant attention to her for days. She obliged in bed when he wanted her, could be tender, and generally made herself useful. Esmeralda once suggested she would pose for him in the nude, but F wouldn't hear of it. Heavy-armed and long-footed, at times she reminded him of Bessie as he remembered her as a girl, though they weren't really much alike.

One October morning F sprang out of bed, terribly inspired. Before breakfast he got the painting out of its hiding place to finish it off once and for all, only to discover that Bessie's snapshot was gone from the easel ledge. He shook Esmeralda awake, but she hadn't seen it. F rushed downstairs, dumped the garbage bag on the sidewalk and frantically searched amid the hard spaghetti strings and mushy melon rinds, as the landlord, waving both arms, threatened suit. No luck. Upstairs, he hunted through the studio from top to bottom, Esmeralda diligently assisting, but they found nothing. He spent a terrible morning, not a single stroke painted.

"But why do you need a picture to paint from, it's all so ridiculous."

"Are you sure you didn't take it?"

"Why would I take it? It's not a picture of me."

"To teach me a lesson or something?"

"Don't be a fool." she said.

He trembled in rage and misery.

In his presence she searched through his chest of drawers--he had been through them a dozen times--and on top, under a book on Uccello he had been reading, discovered the lost snapshot.

F blushed.

"I forgive your dirty suspicions." she said, her eyes clouding.

"Not that I deserve it," he admitted.

After lunch she tried on the floppy hat she had worn when he had met her, to see how she could alter it.

The sight of the velvet hat on her excited his eye. F had another inspiration.

"I'll paint you in it--at least a drawing."

"What for? You said it's ugly on me."

"It's unique is why. Many a master in the past was enticed by a hat to do a portrait of the face beneath."

"Oh, all right," Esmeralda said. "It's immaterial to me, though. I thought you'd want to be getting back to your painting."

"The day's shot for that."

She agreed to pose. He did a quick charcoal for a warm-up that came out entrancing, especially the hat. He began then to sketch her in pencil, possibly for a painting.

As he was drawing, F asked, "How did you manage to fall into prosti---- Your former profession? What I mean is. was it Ludovico's doing?"

"Prosti---- Profession," she mimicked. "Once you've cackled, lay the egg."

"I was trying to be considerate."

"Try again. Keeping your mouth shut about certain things is a better consideration; still, if it's only your curiosity you're out to satisfy, I'll tell you why. Ludovico had nothing to do with it, at least then, although he was one of my earliest customers and still owes me money for services rendered, not to mention certain sums he stole outright. He's the only pure bastard I know, all the others have strains of decency, not that it makes much difference. Anyway, it was my own idea, if you want to know. Maybe I was working up to be an artist's mistress."

F, letting the irony pass, continued to sketch her.

"One thing I'll tell you. it wasn't because of any starving father, if that's what he's told you. My father is a farmer in Fiesole, he stinks of manure and is incredibly stingy. All he's ever parted with is his virginity. He's got my mother and sister drudging for him and is sore as a castrated bull that I escaped. I ran away because I was sick to my teeth of being a slave. What's more, he wasn't above giving me a feel now and then when he had nothing better to do. Thanks to him I can barely read and write. I turned to whoring because I don't want to be a maid and I don't know anything else. A truck driver on the autostrada gave me the idea. But in spite of my profession. I'm incredibly shy. that's why I let Ludovico pimp for me."

She asked if she could see the drawing of herself, and when she had. said, "What are you going to call it?"

He had thought, Portrait of a Young Whore, but answered. "Portrait of a Young Woman. I might do an oil from it."

"It's immaterial to me." Esmeralda said, but he saw she was pleased.

"The reason I stayed here is I thought you'd be kind to me. Besides, if a man is an artist. I figured he must know about life. If he does, maybe he can teach me something. So far, all I've learned is you're like everybody else, shivering in your pants. That's how it goes, when you think you have nothing, there's somebody with less."

F made three more drawings on paper, with and without the hat. and one with the black hat and Esmeralda holding marigolds.

The next morning he carved half a wooden Madonna in a few hours, and to celebrate, took Esmeralda to the Uffizi in the afternoon and explained some of the great works of art to her.

She didn't always understand his allusions. but was grateful. "You're not so dumb." she said.

"One picks up things."

That evening they went to a movie and afterward stopped for a gelato and espresso in a café off the Piazza della Signoria. Men looked her over. F stared them down. She smiled at him tenderly. "You're a lot more relaxed when you're working on the Madonnas. When you're painting with that snapshot in front of you, you haven't the civility of a dog."

He admitted there was some truth to it.

She confessed she had stolen a long look at his picture when he was downstairs going through the garbage bag for the snap.

To his surprise, he did not condemn her.

"What did you think of it?"

"Who is she, the one without the face?"

"My mother, she died young."

"What's the matter with the boy?"

"What do you mean?"

"He looks kind of sad."

"That's the way it's supposed to be. But I don't want to talk about it anymore. The worst thing you can do when you're painting is talk about it."

"To me it's as though you were trying to paint yourself back in your mother's arms."

He was momentarily stunned. "Do you think so?"

"It's obvious to me. A mother's a mother, a son's a son."

"On the other hand, it might be like an attempt on my part to release her from the arms of death. But that sort of stuff' doesn't matter much. It's first and foremost a painting, a potentially first-class work if I ever get it done. If I could complete it the way I sometimes see it in my mind's eye, I bet it could be something extraordinary. You know, if a man does only one such painting in his lifetime, he can call himself a success. I sometimes think that if I could paint such a picture, much that was wrong in my life would rearrange itself and add up to more, if you know what I mean."

"In what way?"

"I could forgive myself for past errors."

"Not me." Esmeralda said. "I'd have to paint ten great pictures."

She laughed at the thought.

As they were crossing the bridge. Esmeralda said, "You're really nutty. I don't see why a man would give up five years of his life just to paint one picture. If it was me, I'd put it aside and do something I could sell."

"I do once in a while, like this portrait of you I'm working on now. but I always go back to Mother and Son."

"Why does everybody talk about art so much?" she asked. "Even Ludovico, when he's not adding up his accounts, he's talking about art."

"Art's what it must be, which is beauty, and more, which is mostly mystery. That's what people talk about."

"In this picture you're painting of me, what's the mystery?"

"The mystery is that you've been captured, yet there's more--you've become art."

"You mean it's not me anymore?"

"It never was. Art isn't life."

"Then the hell with it. If I have my choice, I'll take life. If there's not that, there's no art."

"Without art there's no life to speak of, at least for me. If I'm not an artist, then I'm nothing."

"My God, aren't you a man?"

"Not really, without art."

"Personally, I think you've got a lot to learn."

"I'm learning," F sighed.

"What's so great about mystery?" she then asked. "I don't like it. There's enough around without making more."

"Being involved in it."

"Explain that to me."

"It's complicated, but one thing would be that a man like me--you understand --is actually working in art. The idea came to me late. I wasted most of my youth. The mystery of art is that more is there than you put down and every stroke adds to it. You look at your painting and see this eye staring at you though all you've painted is an old tree. It's also a mystery to me why I haven't been able to finish my best painting, though I am dying to."

"If you ask me," Esmeralda said, "my idea of a mystery is why I am in love with you. though it's clear to me you don't see me for dirt."

She burst into tears.

A week later Ludovico, come for a morning visit wearing a pair of new yellow gloves, saw the completed portrait of Esmeralda, 48 x 30, with black hat, long neck and marigolds. He was bowled over.

"Fantastic. If you pay me half. I can get you a million lire for this work of art."

F agreed. so the pimp, crossing himself, left with the painting.

• • •

One afternoon when Esmeralda was out. Ludovico, breathing badly after four flights of stairs, appeared in the studio lugging a tape recorder he had borrowed for an interview with F.

"What for?"

"To keep a record for the future. I'll get it printed in International Arts. My cousin is assistant to the business manager. It will help you get a gallery for your first one-man show."

"Who needs a gallery if all I can show is unfinished canvases?"

"You'd better increase your output. Sit down here and talk into the microphone. I've turned it on. Don't worry about the machine, it won't crawl up your leg. Just relax and answer my questions candidly. Also don't waste time justifying yourself. Are you ready?"

"Yes."

LUD: Very well. Ludovico Belvedere speaking, interviewing the painter Fidelman. Tell me, Arturo. as an American, what does painting mean to you?

F: It's my whole life.

LUD: What kind of person do you think an artist is when he's painting? Do you think he's a king or an emperor, or a seer or a prophet?

F: I don't know for sure. I often feel like a constipated witch doctor.

LUD: Please talk with good sense. If you're going to be scatological, I'll have to stop the machine.

F: I didn't mean anything bad.

LUD: As an American painter, what do you think of Jackson Pollock? Do you agree that he is a liberating influence?

F: He hasn't freed me. The truth is you have to free yourself.

LUD: Try to respond to the question. We're talking about painting, not your personal psychology. Jackson Pollock, as any cultured person will tell you, has changed the course of modern painting in the world. Don't think we don't know about him in this country, we're not exactly backward. We can all learn from him, including you. Do you agree that anyone who works in the modes of the past has only leavings to work with?

F: Only partly, the past is pretty rich.

LUD: Never mind. I go now to the next question. Who is your favorite painter?

F: Ah--well, I don't think I have one. 1 have many.

LUD: If you think that's an advantage, you're wrong. There's no need of hubris. If an interviewer asked me that question. I would reply "Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo," or someone else, but not the entire pantheon of painters.

F: I answered honestly.

LUD: Anyway, to go on, what is your avowed purpose in art?

F: To do the best I can. To do more than that. My momentary purpose is to create my uncreated masterpiece.

LUD: The one of your mother?

F: That's right. Mother and Son.

LUD: But where is your originality? Why are you so concerned with subject matter?

F: I reject originality.

LUD: What's that? Please explain yourself.

F: Maybe I'm not ready, not yet.

LUD: Mother of God! How old are you?

F: Forty-one plus.

LUD: Then why are you so cautious and conservative? I'm fifty-two and have the mind of a youth. Tell me. what's your opinion of pop ant? Think before you speak.

F: If it stays away from me, I'll stay away from it.

LUD: (garbled)

F: What did you say?

LUD: I said nothing.

F: I heard you mutter something.

LUD: Please attend to the question at hand. I wish you would explain to me clearly why you paint.

F: With my paintings I try to stop the flow of time.

LUD: That's a ridiculous statement, but go on anyway.

F: I've said it.

LUD: Say it more comprehensibly. The public will be reading this.

F: Well, art is my means for understanding life and trying out certain assumptions I have. I make art. it makes me.

LUD: We have a proverb: "The bray of an ass can't be heard in heaven."

F: Frankly. I don't like some of your remarks.

LUD: Are you saying the canvas is the alter ego of the artist's miserable self?

F: That's not what I said and I don't like what you're saying.

LUD: I'll try to be more respectful. Maestro, once you spoke to me of your art as moral. What did you mean by that?

F: Did I? It's just a thought I had. I guess. I suppose I mean that maybe a painting sort of gives value to a human being as he responds to it. You might say it enlarges his consciousness. If he feels beauty it makes him more than he was. it adds, you might say. to his humanity.

LUD: What do you mean "responds"? A man responds in rape. doesn't he? Doesn't that enlarge the consciousness, as you put it.

F: It's a different response. Rape isn't art.

LUD: An emotion is an emotion, no matter how it arises. In itself it is not moral or immoral. Suppose someone responds to the sunset on the Arno? Is that better or more moral than the response to the smell of a drowned corpse? What about bad art. suppose the response is with more feeling than to a great painting--does that prove bad art is moral, as you call it?

F: I guess not. All right, then maybe the painting in itself doesn't have it. but pulling it another way, maybe the artist does; that is. he does when he's painting--creating form, order. Order protects us all. doesn't it?

LUD: Yes, the way a prison does. Remember, some of the biggest pricks, if you will excuse the use of this word. have been great painters. Does that necessarily make them moral men? Of course not. What if a painter kills his grandfather and then paints a beautiful Ascension?

F: Maybe I'm not putting it right. Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I feel most moral when I'm painting. like through being engaged with truth.

LUD: So now it's what you feel. I speak with respect, maestro, but you do nothing but assault me with garbage.

F: Look, Ludovico, I don't understand, if you don't mind my saying so. why you brought this machine up here in the first place if all you want to do is insult me. You could have done that without the tape. Now take it away, it's using up work time.

LUD: Please speak with respect where respect is due. I am not a servant, maestro. I may have been forced into menial work through circumstance, but Ludovico Belvedere has kept his dignity. Don't think that because you are an American you can go on trampling on the rights of Europeans. You have caused me unnecessary personal discomfort and grief by interfering with a business relationship between this unfortunate girl and myself, and the lives of four people have been seriously affected. You don't seem to realize the harm you are doing----

End of Interview.

F had jumped on the tape recorder.

Ludovico broke down. He asked for mercy.

F said mercy for what.

• • •

Each morning he awoke earlier to paint: waiting for dawn though the light from the streaked sky was. of course, impossible. He had lately been capable of very little patience with the necessities of daily life: wash, dress, eat. even go to the toilet: and the matter became most inconvenient when his nervous impatience seeped into the painting itself. It had become a burdensome business to take the canvas from its hiding place behind the armadio and arrange it on the easel, select and mix his paints, tack up the old snapshot (most unbearable) and begin work. He could have covered the canvas on the easel every night and left the snapshot tacked on permanently, but was obsessed to remove it each time after he put the paints away, soaked the brushes in turpentine, cleaned up. Formerly, just picking up a brush and standing in thought, or reverie. or sometimes blankly, before a painting would case interior constrictions to the point where he would relax sufficiently to enjoy the work: and once he had painted for an hour, which sometimes came to no more than a stroke or two, he felt well enough to permit himself to eat half a roll and swallow an espresso Esmeralda had prepared, and afterward go with lit butt and magazine to the gabinetto. But now there were days he stood in terror in front of Mother and Son and shivered with every stroke he put down.

He painted out of anguish, a dark color. The canvas remained much the same, the boy as he had been, the fickle mother's face daily changing; daily he scraped it off as Esmeralda moaned in the kitchen; she had learned the sound of palette knife on canvas. It was then that F decided to use the girl as a model for his mother. Though she was only 18, it might help to have a living model for Momma as a young woman, though she was touching middle age when Bessie took the photo, and was of course another sort of person; still, such were the paradoxes of art. Esmeralda agreed and stripped herself to the skin, but the painter sternly ordered her to dress; it was her face he was painting. She did as he demanded and patiently posed, sweetly, absently, uncomplaining, for hours, as he, lighting against his need for privacy in the creative act, tried anew to invent the mother's face. I've done all I can with imagination. I mean on top of the snapshot. And though at the end of the day he scraped her face off as the model wept. F urged her to be calm because he now had a brand-new idea; to paint himself not with Momma anymore but Bessie instead, Brother and Sister. Esmeralda's face lit up because "then you'll stop using the snapshot." But F replied. "Not exactly." He still needed it as a tool to get the true relationship of them "in space as well as psychology."

As they were into the spaghetti at supper, the girl wanted to know whether all artists had it so hard.

"How hard?"

"So that it takes them years to paint a picture?"

"Some do and some don't. What's on your mind?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said.

He threw down his fork. "Are you doubting my talent, you whore?"

She got up and went into the gabinetto.

F lay on his bed, his face engulfed in a pillowful of black thoughts.

After a while Esmeralda came out and kissed his ear.

"I forgive you, tesoro, I want you to succeed."

"I will," he cried, springing up from the bed. The next day he rigged up a young boy's costume--blouse and knee pants, and painted in it to get to the heart of bygone days, but that didn't work so he went back to putting Esmeralda into the painting, and scraping her face off each night.

To live, to paint, to live in order to paint, he had to continue carving Madonnas; being impatient he made them more reluctantly. When Esmeralda pointed out they still had some sauce but no spaghetti, in three days he hurried out a statuette, then hurried it over to Panenero's shop. The woodworker unfortunately couldn't use it. "My apprentices," he shrugged, "are turning them out by the barrelful. Frankly, they model each stroke on yours and work fast. Eh, that's what's happened to craft in these times. So the stuff piles up and the tourists won't appear till spring. It's a long time till the Hackensacks and Leder-hosen come over the Alps, maestro. Still, because it's you and because I admire your skill, I'll offer you two thousand lire, take it or leave it. This is my busy day."

F left without a word, in afterthought wondering whose yellow gloves he had seen lying on the counter. On his way along the riverbank he flung the Madonna into the Arno. She struck the green water with a golden splash, sank, then rose to the surface, and turning on her back, floated downstream, eyes to the blue sky.

He carved two more Madonnas, finely wrought pieces and peddled them himself to shops on the Vie Tornabuoni and della Vigna Nuova. No luck. The shelves were crammed full of religious figures, though one of the merchants offered him 6000 lire for a Marilyn Monroe, nude if possible.

"I have no skill for that sort of thing."

"What about John the Baptist in shaggy skins?"

"What about him?"

"I offer five thousand."

"I find him an uninteresting figure."

Esmeralda then tried selling the statuettes. F wouldn't let her offer them to Panenero; so the girl, holding a Holy Mother in each arm, stood in the Piazza del Duomo and finally sold one to a huge German priest for 1200; and the other she gave to a widow in weeds at Santa Maria Novella, for 800 lire. F, when he heard, ground his teeth, and though she pleaded with him to be reasonable, swore he would carve no more.

He worked at odd jobs, one in a laundry, that tired him so he couldn't paint at night. One morning he tried chalking blue-robed Madonnas with Child, after Raphael, on the sidewalks before the Baptistery, Santa Chiara, the Stazione Centrale, where he was almost arrested. Passers-by stopped to watch him work but moved on quickly when he passed the hat. A few tossed small coins upon the image of the Holy Mother and F collected them and went to the next spot. A brown-robed monk in sandals followed him.

"Why don't you look for productive work?"

"Advice is cheap."

"So is your art."

He went to the Brancacci Chapel and sat the rest of the day staring in the half dark at the Masaccio frescoes. Geniuses made masterworks. If you weren't greatly gifted the way was hard, a master-work was a miracle. Still, somehow or other, art abounded in miracles.

He borrowed a fishing pole from an artist neighbor and fished, amid a line of men with bent rods, off the Ponte Trinita. F tied the rod to a nail on the railing and paced back and forth, returning every few minutes to check his lines as the float bobbed in the Arno. He caught nothing, but the old fisherman next to him, who had pulled in eight fish, gave him a one-eyed crippled eel. It was a cloudy November day, then rainy, patches of damp appearing on the studio ceiling. The cornucopia leaked. The house was cold, Fabio wouldn't turn on the heat till December. It was hard to get warm. But Esmeralda made a tasty crippled-eel soup. The next night she cooked a handful of borrowed polenta that popped in the pot as it boiled. For lunch the next day there was stale bread and half an onion apiece. But for Sunday supper she served boiled meat, green beans and a salad of beet leaves. He suspiciously asked how come, and she admitted she had borrowed a few hundred lire from Ludovico.

"How are we supposed to pay him back?"

"We won't, he owes me plenty."

"Don't borrow from him anymore."

"I'm not afraid of him, he's afraid of me."

"I don't like him coming around. I'm at my most dishonest among dishonest men."

"Don't trust him. Arturo." she said, frightened. "He'd knife you if he could."

"He won't get the chance."

Afterward she asked. "Why don't you carve a Madonna or two? Two thousand lire now and then is nothing to spit at. Besides, you do beautiful work in wood."

"Not for the price, it's not worth my time.

The landlord, wearing a woman's black shawl, entered without knocking, shouting for his rent.

"I'll get the municipality to throw you both out, the puttana and you. You're fouling up this house with your illicit activities. Your friend told me what goes on here. I have all the necessary information."

"You know what you can do with it," said F. "If we weren't here the flat would go to ruin. Look at the ceiling leaking. It was empty for six years before I moved in and you'll never rent it if I move out."

"You're no Florentine," Fabio shouted. "You're not even an Italian."

F got himself a badly paid job as journeyman assistant in a woodworking establishment, not Panenero's. He worked long hours turning out delicate tapered legs for antique tables and did no painting. In the street, going back and forth from work, he looked for odds and ends people might have dropped. At home he saved pieces of string tied together and rolled into a ball. He switched off the light after Esmeralda had washed the supper dishes, watched carefully what she cooked, and ate, and doled out shopping money sparsely. Once she sold six inches of her hair to a man with a sack who had knocked on the door, so she could buy herself some warm underwear.

Finally she could stand it no longer. "What are you going to do?"

"What can I do that I haven't?"

"I don't know. Do you want me to go back to my work?"

"I never said so."

"If I don't, you'll be like this forever. It's what you're like when you're not painting."

He remained mute.

"Why don't you speak?"

"What can I say?"

"You can say no."

"No," he said.

"It sounds like yes."

He went out for a long walk and for a while hung around the palazzo where Dostoievsky had written the last pages of The Idiot. It did no good. When he returned he said nothing to Esmeralda. In fact, he did not feel too bad, though he knew he ought to. In fact, he had been thinking of asking her to go to work, whatever she might do. It's circumstances, he thought.

Esmeralda had got out her black hat, the two dresses and her gold shoes. On the velvet hat she sewed the silver roses. She raised the hems of the dresses above her knees and lowered the necklines to expose the rounded tops of her hard breasts. The purple sequins she threw into the garbage.

"Anyway, I'll need protection," she said.

"How do you mean?"

"You know what I mean. I don't want those bastards hurting me or not paying in full. It's blood money."

"I'll protect you," F said.

He wore dark glasses, a black velour hat pulled low over one eye and a brown overcoat with a ratty fur collar, buttoned tight under the chin and extending to his ankles. He thought of growing a beard but gave that up. His bristly reddish mustache was thicker than it had ever been. And he carried a snappy cane with a slender sword inside.

They went together to the Piazza della Repubblica, almost merrily. "For art," she said, then after a moment, bitterly, "art, my ass."

She cursed him from the depth of her heart and then forgave him. "It's my nature," she said, "I can't bear a grudge."

"Neither can I," F said.

He promised to marry her once he had finished the painting.

• • •

F paints all morning after Esmeralda has posed; she bathes, does her nails and toes and makes herself up with thick mascara. After a leisurely lunch, they leave the house and go across the bridge to the Piazza della Repubblica. She sits on a bench with her legs crossed high, smoking: and F is at a bench nearby, sketching in a pad in which he sometimes finds himself drawing dirty pictures: men and women, women and women, men and men. But he doesn't consort with the other pimps, who sit together playing cards; nor does Esmeralda talk with the other whores, they call her hoity-toity. When a man approaches to ask whether she happens to be free she nods, or looking at him through her short veil, says yes as though she could just as well have said no. She gets up, the other whores regarding her with their eyes and mouths, and wanders with her client into one of the crooked side streets, to a tiny room they have rented close by so there's no waste of man hours getting back to the piazza. The room has a bed, a water bowl, a chamber pot.

When Esmeralda rises from the bench, F slips his drawing pad into his overcoat pocket and leisurely follows her. Sometimes it is a beautiful late-fall afternoon and he takes deep breaths as he walks. On occasion he stops to pick up a pack of Nazionales, and if he's a little hungry, for an espresso and a bit of pastry. He then goes up the smelly stairs and waits outside the door, sketching little pictures in the dim electric glow, as Esmeralda performs; or files his fingernails. It takes, as a rule, 15 or 20 minutes for the customer to come out. Some would like to stay longer but can't if they won't pay for it. As a rule there are no arguments. The man dresses and sometimes leaves a tip if it has been most enjoyable. Esmeralda is still dressing, bored with getting in and cut of her clothes. Only once thus far has she had to call F in, to deal with a runt who said it hadn't been any good so no sense paying.

F enters with the sword drawn out of his cane and points it at the man's hairy throat. "Pay," he says, "and beat it." The runt, gone two shades whiter, hurriedly leaves, assisted by a boot in the pants. Esmeralda watches without expression. She hands F the money--usually 2000 lire, sometimes 3000; and if she can get it from a wealthy-type client, or an older man especially fond of 18-year-old girls, 7000 or 8000. That sum is rare. F counts the money--often in small bills--and slips it into his wallet, wrapping a fat rubber band around it. In the evening they go home together. Esmeralda doing her shopping on the way. They try not to work at night unless it's been a bad day. In that case they go out after supper, when the piazza is lit in neon signs and the bars and cafés are doing business; the competition is stiff--some very beautiful women in extraordinary clothes. F goes into the bars and seeks out men who seem to be alone. He asks them if they want a pretty girl, and if one shows interest, leads him to Esmeralda. When it's rainy or freezing cold, they stay in and play cards, or listen to the radio. F has opened an account in the Banco di Santo Spirito so they can draw from it in the winter if Esmeralda should be sick and can't work. They go to bed after midnight. The next morning F gets up early and paints. Esmeralda sleeps late.

One morning F paints with his dark glasses on, until she wakes up and screams at him.

Later, when she is out buying material for a dress, Ludovico strides into the studio, incensed. His usually pale face is flushed. He shakes his Malacca at F.

"Why wasn't I informed that she had gone back to work? I demand a commission. She took all her instruction from me!"

F is about to run him out of the room by the seat of his overcoat but that has this interesting thought: Ludovico could take her over while he stays home to paint all day, for which he would pay him ten percent of Esmeralda's earnings.

"Per cortesia." says the pimp haughtily. "At the very least twenty-five percent. I have many obligations and am a sick man besides."

"Ten is all we can afford, not a penny more."

Esmeralda returns with a package or two and when she comprehends what the argument is, swears she will quit rather than work with Ludovico.

"You can do your own whoring." she says to F. "I'll go back to Fiesole."

He tries to calm her. "It's just that he's so sick is the reason I thought I'd cut him in."

"Sick?"

"He's got one lung."

"He has three lungs and four balls."

F heaves the pimp down the stairs.

In the afternoon he sits on a bench not far from Esmeralda's in the Piazza della Repubblica, sketching himself on his drawing pad.

• • •

Esmeralda burned Bessie's old snapshot when F was in the toilet. "I'm getting old," she said, "where's my future?" F considered strangling her but couldn't bring himself to: besides, he hadn't been using the photo since having Esmeralda as model. Still, for a time he felt lost without it, the physical presence of the decaying snap, his only visible link to Ma. Bessie, the past, Anyway, now that it was gone, it was gone, a memory become intangible again. He painted with more fervor yet detachment; fervor to complete the work, detachment toward image, object, subject. Esmeralda left him to his devices, went off for most of the afternoon and handed him the lire, fewer than before, when she returned. He painted with new confidence, amusement, wonder. The subject had changed from Mother and Son to Brother and Sister (Esmeralda as Bessie), to, let's face it, Prostitute and Procurer. Though she no longer posed, he was becoming clearer in his inner eye as to what he wanted. Once he retained her face for a week before scraping it off, I'm getting there. And though he considered sandpapering his own face off and substituting Ludovico as pimp, the magnificent thing was that in the end he kept himself in. This is my most honest piece of work. Esmeralda was the now-19-year-old prostitute; and he, with a stroke here and there aging himself a bit, a 15-year-old procurer. This was the surprise that made the painting. And what it means, I suppose, he thought, is I am what I became from a young age. Then he thought, It has no meaning, a painting's a painting.

The picture completed itself. F was afraid to finish it: What would he do next and how long would that take? But the picture was, one day, done. It assumed a completion: This woman and man together, prostitute and procurer. She was a girl with fear in both black eyes, a vulnerable neck and a steely small mouth: he was a boy with tight insides, on the verge of crying. The presence of each protected the other. A Holy Sacrament. The form leaped to the eye. He had tormented, ecstatic, yet confused feelings, but at last felt triumphant--it was done! Though deeply drained, moved, he was satisfied, completed--ah, art!

He called Esmeralda to look at the painting. Her lips trembled, she lost color, turned away, finally she spoke. "For me it's me. You've caught me as I am, there's no doubt of it. The picture is a marvel." She wept as she gazed at it. "Now I can quit what I'm doing. Let's get married, Arturo."

Ludovico, limping a little in his squeaky shoes, came upstairs to beg their pardons, but when he saw the finished painting on the easel, stood still in awe.

"I'm speechless," he said. "What more can I say?"

"Don't bother," said Esmeralda, "nobody wants your stinking opinion."

They opened a bottle of wine and Esmeralda borrowed a pan and baked a loin of veal, to celebrate. Their artist neighbors came in: Vitelli, an illustrator and his dark meager wife; it was a festive occasion. F afterward related the story of his life and they all listened, absorbed. When the neighbors left and the three were alone. Ludovico objectively discussed his weak nature.

"Compared to some I've met in the streets of Florence. I'm not a bad person, but my trouble is I forgive myself too easily. That has its disadvantages because then there are no true barriers to a harmful act if you understand my meaning. It's the easy way out, but what else can you do if you grew up with certain disadvantages? My father was criminally inclined and it's from him I inherited my worst qualities. It's clear enough that goats don't have puppies. I'm vain, selfish, though not arrogant, and given almost exclusively to petty evil. Nothing serious but serious enough. Of course I've wanted to change my ways, but at my age what can one change? Can you change, maestro? Yet I readily confess who I am and ask your pardon for any inconvenience I might have caused you. Either of you."

"Drop dead," said Esmeralda.

"The man's obviously sincere," F said, irritated. "There's no need to be so cruel."

"Come to bed, Arturo." She entered the gabinetto as Ludovico went on with his confession.

"To tell the truth. I am myself a failed artist, but at least I contribute to the creativity of others by offering fruitful suggestions, though you're free to do as you please. Anyway, your painting is a marvel. Of course it's Picassoid, but you've outdone him in some of his strategies."

F expressed thanks and gratitude.

"At first glance I thought that since the bodies of the two figures are so much thicker than their faces, especially the girl's, this destroyed the unity of surface, but when I think of some of the impastos I've seen, and the more I study your painting, the more I feel that's not important."

"I don't think it'll bother anybody so long as it looks like a spontaneous act."

"True, and therefore my only criticism is that maybe the painting suffers from an excess of darkness. It needs more light, I'd say a soupçon of lemon and a little red, not more than a trace. But I leave it to you."

Esmeralda came out of the gabinetto in a red nightgown with a black-lace bodice.

"Don't touch it," she warned. "You'll never make it better."

"How would you know?" F said.

"I have my eyes."

"Maybe she's right," Ludovico said, with a yawn. "Who knows with art? Well, I'm on my way. If you want to sell your painting for a handsome price, my advice is take it to a reliable dealer. There are one or two in the city whose names and addresses I'll bring you in the morning.

"Don't bother." Esmeralda said. "Nobody needs your assistance.

"I want to keep it around for a few days to look at," F confessed.

"As you please." Ludovico tipped his hat good night and left limping. F and Esmeralda went to bed together. Later she returned to her cot in the kitchen, took off her red nightgown and put on an old one of white muslin.

F for a while wondered what to paint next. Maybe a sort of a portrait of Ludovico, his face reflected in a mirror, with two sets of aqueous sneaky eyes. He slept soundly but in the middle of the night awoke depressed. He went over his painting inch by inch and it seemed to him a disappointment. Where was Momma after all these years? He got up to look, and doing so, changed his mind; not bad at all, though Ludovico was right, the picture was dark and could stand a touch of light. He laid out his paints and brushes and began to work, almost at once achieving the effect he sought. And then he thought he would work a bit on the girl's face, no more than a stroke or two around the eyes and mouth, to make her expression truer to life. More the prostitute, himself a little older. When the sun blazed through both windows, he realized he had been working for hours. F put down his brush, washed up and returned for a look at the painting. Sickened to his gut, he saw what he felt: He had ruined it. It slowly drowned in both his eyes.

Ludovico came in with a well-dressed paunchy friend, an art dealer. They looked at the picture and both laughed.

Five long years down the drain. F squeezed a tube of black on the canvas and with a thick brush smeared it over both faces in all directions.

When Esmeralda pulled open the curtain and saw the mess, moaning, she came at him with the bread knife. "Murderer!"

F twisted it out of her grasp, and in anguish, lifted the blade into his gut.

"This serves me right."

"A moral act," Ludovico agreed.