The Monster of Florence (3 page)

“Sit down. I can’t offer you anything other than this hard chair. The room is cold because I work with clay. It can’t be allowed to dry out too rapidly. I rarely feel the cold myself.”

The Marshal could well believe it.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll bring another chair for myself. As you can see, comfort is not a priority.” He waved a hand vaguely. “This is my life …”

He turned and strode towards the back of the studio, presumably in search of another chair. As he retreated it was just possible to see that the top of his left ear was missing. The Marshal didn’t waste a second. Against the opposite wall was a large neatly made bed with a fur rug thrown over it and a screen partly obscuring it. A chest with a marble top and a lamp … those high cupboards along the rest of the wall might contain clothes but there was no other sign of domestic life in the room. The opposite wall was all shelving, tools, workbenches—but surely that was a cooker …

Benozzetti was back. The Marshal made no futile attempt to deceive him.

“Excuse me staring about a bit. I don’t get to meet many artists in my walk of life.”

“You don’t get to meet any”—Benozzetti adjusted the creases in his trousers and seated himself so that the damaged ear was out of sight—“because there aren’t any.”

“But surely you … I can see you’re dedicated to your work.”

“I’m dedicated to art. I’m not an artist because the current commercialization of so-called art feeds on the self-publicist, dedicated not to art but to instant fame through glossy magazines, fashionable parties, and prostitution to the critics, God help us, the critics.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure you’re right but, of course, I don’t know a lot about it—Landini, now …”

“Ha! You don’t know a lot about it but you’re a friend of the late lamented Landini! Isn’t that what you said? A friend of the family?”

“Well, more a friend to the son, you know, to be exact. I’m afraid I must have embarrassed you.”

“Embarrassed me? Why is that?” Benozzetti seemed highly amused by the idea.

“Oh, you know, assuming you were a friend of his—he wasn’t very specific in this business of the bequests so we’re rather working in the dark, contacting all the likely people, but if you can’t do with critics I suppose your relationship wasn’t what I thought …”

“Ha! I like that. Yes. Well, Marshal, I don’t know whether our relationship was what you thought since I don’t know what you thought, now do I?”

Those cold glittering eyes were so hypnotic that the Marshal almost found himself saying that he thought that he had something to do with that mysterious painting, especially as he felt quite sure of it by this time. He was also sure that if he did come out and say it Benozzetti wouldn’t care a bit. He was living on some other plane where it wouldn’t matter and where the Marshal couldn’t get at him. However, he didn’t say it. Apart from anything else he had a feeling that Benozzetti was quite capable of saying it himself. So he contented himself with murmuring, “Well, perhaps I’ve made a mistake and disturbed you for nothing …”

“Not in the least. I didn’t mean to tease you. Landini was a friend and colleague and, yes, he was a critic but not so much of a fool as most of them. Ah, the experts, Marshal, the experts! Have you ever given them much thought?”

“I—no, no. Art experts, you mean? No.”

Benozzetti leaned forward and whispered fiercely, “Naked!”

“What?” Was that why his eyes were so frightening? Was he a madman?

“Stark naked! The Emperor’s new clothes! Naked as the day they were born. Naked in their ignorance and arrogance. Tell me, did you ever hear of a musicologist who couldn’t play a note? A literary critic who couldn’t even read or write? Even a football manager who’d never played a game in his life? Have you?”

“I don’t suppose I have …”

“And
I
don’t suppose you have, either. But the art expert, now, there’s a really special man. He can’t draw, he can’t paint and he can’t sculpt but he feels himself qualified to pronounce judgement on Leonardo, on Botticelli, on Michelangelo. A miracle of a man, wouldn’t you say? He can’t express the simplest concept with any visual or manual skill of his own but he can sit in judgement on genius. Ah, where would the world be without the expert—you know what he’s there for, don’t you? He’s there at the service of the art dealer, not art or the artist. Now Landini, not being the worst of them, knew that was true. He wore the Emperor’s new clothes with considerable panache and made himself a fine career out of doing it, but he had no illusions. And he had taste, he wasn’t just a cataloguer. The rest of them might as well make laundry lists since lists are all they know how to make—you don’t have a list of your own in your pocket, by any chance?”

“A list?”

“All right. I just wondered. If I’m not mistaken you people have a specialist group that takes something of an interest in paintings.”

“Oh, I see … yes. No, no, I’m just—”

“A friend of the family.”

“That’s right,” said the Marshal, his gaze becoming duller and
blanker in retreat from those glittery cold eyes. Once, long ago in the early years of his marriage, his wife had screamed at him in exasperation, “Can’t you even quarrel? Answer me! Don’t just roll over and play dead!’ And he had been amazed. By this time he had seen his plump, peaceable son Giovanni do just that when attacked by his quick and nervous younger brother, so now he knew it was true. He also knew it was effective. “Though, as I said, more of a friend of young Marco’s. Landini himself, now, I only met him once and that’d be over ten years ago. You’re not a married man yourself?”

“No.”

“No, I thought not. That would be something you’re working on, would it, under all that polythene? Clay, you said?”

“A nude figure. That’s just one of the reasons why I never married. Everyone assumes that artists sleep with their models. A wife would have given me no peace.”

“Yes, well, you’ve certainly got it all worked out, this nice big space you can keep cool to suit your clay, nobody around to disturb you.” The Marshal shivered at the thought of such an existence. How odd a man he was. Such a fierce intelligence, incisive, aggressive even, and yet so easy to distract. Was that because so many things made him angry so that he attacked anything that caught his attention like a tormented bull? Or was he just so unused to social intercourse that he had no experience of controlling conversation? If that were the case then the Marshal had the advantage over him. He was very used to controlling the conversation, chiefly by power of inertia. How very different from Benozzetti, who was on his feet again now, perhaps anxious for his visitor to leave. So be it. The Marshal stood up and waited in silence to be sent away. But Benozzetti strode to the back of the long room.

“Come here.”

The Marshal was only too pleased to obey the summons which took him past the two great safes. There was no sense risking a question about those at this stage …

He pulled himself up mentally. What was he thinking about? This wasn’t a case he was on! He had to remind himself that the line
about being a friend of the family and so on was actually the truth as well. There was no reason why he should ever set foot into this place again; once he’d convinced Benozzetti to go round to Marco’s studio and see the painting, his part was finished.

“Over here!”

Well, there wasn’t time to work out whether he’d convinced him or not … where the devil had the man got to?

“Here, Marshal.”

He was behind a huge easel and was carefully lifting a cloth that shrouded the painting standing on it. The Marshal’s heart sank. There was little doubt that he was about to be shown a painting and even less doubt that if he opened his mouth about it he’d make a fool of himself. Every time he was obliged to attend the opening of some exhibition in the Palatine Gallery at the Palazzo Pitti where his station was, his wife would remind him, “Just keep quiet, Salva, and listen to what Dr. Biondini says. You might learn something.” And he did his best, but though what Dr. Biondini, the director of the gallery, said was very clear and sensible when he was saying it, the Marshal couldn’t remember anything of it for more than a few minutes. Then when Biondini was kind enough, as he always was, to come and welcome him and ask him what he thought of the exhibition he always seemed to say the wrong thing. Sometimes he just looked puzzled and kind and quickly spotted someone he was obliged to go and speak to. The thing about Biondini was that, though he knew such a lot, he never gave himself airs or made you feel badly about not knowing, so it wasn’t that much of an ordeal. The Marshal, rounding the easel, had a feeling that Benozzetti was a very different kettle of fish and that he’d do best to take his wife’s advice and keep his mouth shut.

“Ah …” The Marshal’s sigh of relief escaped him before he knew it.

“Yes, I’m glad you appreciate it. I’m showing it to you to demonstrate something. Of course it’s a beautiful painting.”

“Beautiful,” said the Marshal contentedly. He could manage this
one all right. What was beautiful about the painting, as far as he was concerned, was that he was as familiar with it as he was with his own face in the mirror. It was the one that hung on the wall of the second room in the Palatine Gallery and next to it stood a commodious chair in which reposed, for a large part of the day, his good friend and fellow Sicilian Mario Di Luciano, a custodian. Mario came from the same little town in the province of Siracusa and he liked to chat about old times down home. The Marshal reckoned he’d probably spent as much time standing in front of that picture as Titian had. What a stroke of luck.

Benozzetti was roaring on, working himself into a lather about the quality of modern painting—no, modern paint.

“Acrylics! In five years they deteriorate, in ten they disintegrate! Look at the flesh tones on this portrait! Look here, and here! Flesh tones of this quality continue to develop and grow to their full beauty over a period of two hundred years. A painter who uses materials like that cares about painting, not about seeing himself in the next issue of some fashionable art magazine!”

And so on and on in the same vein. Of course, he was probably right, there was no denying that. You only had to look around the studio to see the man was a professional and must know what he was talking about. Only that didn’t mean that anybody else knew what he was talking about and the Marshal soon gave up trying to follow him. Almost automatically, the way he did when Mario the custodian was deep in some long-winded family saga, he took a step back. Then another. Then a step forward.

“That’s funny …”

“I beg your pardon?”

The Marshal stepped back and then forward again, oblivious of his impolite interruption. “Now isn’t that a turn up … oh, it’s nothing, just … you know the way these pictures just look like blobs and splashes when you’re standing right up close to them and then you step back and all of a sudden they’re as real as a photograph—I’m sorry, I interrupted you …” And he’d no idea either what the fellow had been saying except that it was something about making
colours. He tried to pay attention but he couldn’t help edging back and forward a bit, just to check that he hadn’t been mistaken.

Determined to gain his attention, Benozzetti inserted himself between the Marshal and the easel and continued his angry discourse nose to nose. If the Marshal edged back he followed, beating the air with his right hand to mark the rhythm of his rhetoric and sending wafts of fine perfume into the Marshal’s face.

“When I was twenty years of age and a student at the academy …”

Lord, were they going to have his entire life story? What time would it be? No chance of that ferocious stare losing its grip for a second to permit a glance down at his wristwatch. Snake’s eyes …

“This is a man who calls himself a Professor of Fine Arts! I didn’t suffer it in silence, I can tell you. I stood up and interrupted him. I said, ‘Professor, you’ve made some comment about almost every painting in this end-of-year exhibition. Am I to understand that my own works are invisible to you, or is it that they are unworthy of your comments?’ Do you know what he answered?”

“I … no …” The Marshal tried to back away from the man’s hot breath and heavy perfume but Benozzetti closed in on him.

“ ‘The only thing worthy of comment in your work,’ he said, without so much as a glance at it or me, ‘is its extraordinary antiquated style.’ The other students laughed. They laughed!” He broke off. He seemed to be staring straight through the Marshal rather than at him now. A few beads of sweat broke at his temples and then, quite suddenly, he began to laugh. A harsh and cheerless noise, it might easily have been a sort of strangulated sobbing, so that it wasn’t until he spoke again that the Marshal could be sure.

“Well, I paid him back nicely for that one! It was so funny it kept me awake at night. I had to wait, of course, until October, but I didn’t mind. It gave me the summer to think out the best way to pay him back. Then I remembered. You have to understand that, though it wasn’t his subject, he often joined us in the life room if the model or the pose interested him—and more often it was the model, I can assure you. He kept an easel there and usually had a painting going. All I had to do was wait until everyone left for lunch, unscrew the supports
holding his canvas and let the painting fall on the floor face down! Simple, you see? Then there was the pleasure of watching him find it and his mystified face as he checked the supports. He cleaned it up that first time as best he could and carried on and I waited until he’d put in plenty of work on it before it hit the dust again! That time I couldn’t resist going over to him. I suggested that the easel was defective and offered him mine. The silly fool accepted it and
thanked
me. Doesn’t that show how idiotic people are? He should have suspected at once. What reason had I to help him? And a half-witted fool like that sets himself up in judgement on me! You can’t imagine how much I wanted to tell him the truth but I didn’t. I left him looking ruefully at his painting which was ruined beyond hope and I went and sat down.”

The Marshal wished he could do the same. It must be late because he was beginning to feel not only tired but quite hungry. Above Benozzetti’s finely tailored shoulder the eyes of the handsome young man in the portrait gazed down at him calmly. If he’d known his portrait was going to give rise to all this fury he would surely have been as baffled as the Marshal. What was the fellow going on about now?