The Painter

By Lois Swann

THE PAINTER, inspired by the life of an Italian artist who emigrated to America after World War II, plunges the reader into the life of fictional Lorenzo Frasca, his life of daring achievement, grinding employment, moral struggle with the cruel insanity of his young wife, tender attachment to her fragile daughter, his transcendent love of an older woman, and his ultimate creation of a masterpiece for a Spanish prince who becomes his patron. American and European cultures nourish his maturation. The artists history is told to and through Luke Cosic, a chance dinner companion who is subsumed by the painter and his art. The fifteenth century classic, Cennino dAndrea Cenninis Il Libro dellArte, (The Craftsmans Handbook), is the foundation of Lorenzos character and work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491819845

Lois Swann

LOIS SWANN, novelist, is the author of the much praised historical novels, THE MISTS OF MANITTOO, TORN COVENANTS, and SIPPICON, comprising THE DOWLAND TRILOGY, and the contemporary novel, THE PAINTER. She has a background in theatre and corporate banking as well as in freelance teaching and editing. Her firm belief that a People’s language illustrates their character led her to interweave Narragansett with English dialogue and description in THE DOWLAND TRILOGY. A native New Yorker, she currently lives on Cape Cod with her husband, a sea captain

Book preview

© 2013, 2014 Lois Swann. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/26/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-1986-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-1985-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-1984-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013917186

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Acknowledgment

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

for

my Nicholas

my husband of the great heart

MULTUMESC!

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author is deeply indebted to the 1954, Dover Publications, Inc., edition of THE CRAFTSMAN’S HANDBOOK, Il Libro dell’Arte, by Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, translated by Daniel V. Thompson, Jr., for the technical foundation for works of the imagination forming the artistic production and soul of THE PAINTER’S protagonist.

CHAPTER 1

I was not immediately pleased with my table. It was one of two in a tiny, white room dangling like a nest above the front entry of an old house converted for public use as a restaurant.

The reason offered by the maitre d’ for my being consigned to the garret was that a large party was soon taking command of the ground-floor dining rooms. I prefer the clatter of silverware, aromas rising from the trays as they are carried in from the kitchen, bursts of laughter, pleasant streams of babble from strangers - people touchingly similar to myself whom I will very likely never see again. After a moment of strain, I accepted the climb to the upper floor. Punitive though this arrangement appeared at first, when seated, I had to admit it possessed the charm of exclusivity.

By the time my wine and a basket of breads and condiments were placed in front of me, I was scribbling in my journal in an attempt to communicate with somebody, even myself. My concerned host flicked a switch and the music meant for downstairs dropped over me out of a speaker in the outer room. He disappeared. I removed my sport coat, settled it over my chair, shut the French doors to block the assault of Big Band standards. I admit to filching a candle from the other table. To negate this petty thievery, I traded for it my small vase of red and yellow flowers. I switched off the overhead light. I wrote for a few moments by candlelight and then sampled my wine. Facing the night sky beyond the windowpanes, I consented to the blues, wishing the woman I happen to love were sitting across from me. Nice.

At this peak of lonesome pleasure, goblet in hand, I rose to stand close to the window as if I’d see her in the sky. Instead, I witnessed on the peaceful, residential street a car, slowly, with prescience, enter the artificial light cast on the pavement through the ground-floor windows. A Maserati sedan glided like a swan out of the blackness. I am a fancier of cars I will never own. I appreciate them as art in movement.

The low garden wall and the tree trunks fired in the light of the headlamps. Owing to a pause in the musical din, I heard the vehicle hum. It came to an eloquent halt - then fell silent and dark.

A driver quickly stepped out to open the curbside door. His passenger, a gentleman of long years, walked the path to the restaurant and disappeared under the glass awning. I lingered at the window for a moment, drinking in with my Sauterne the sight of the automobile. I presumed the old gent was one of the guests, perhaps the host of the party for whom the downstairs had been blocked off. I returned to my not terribly comfortable straight-backed white chair and studied the menu.

Deliberate footsteps outside my sanctum caused me to hunch more closely over the listing of Saturday’s fare. Then the barrier of the doors was breached. Reflected in the dark window were the maitre d’ and that same man, the passenger from the Quattroporte. He appeared to be well heeled, dressed in a pale cashmere topcoat to rival the paint color of his car which, in the 2009 model, his model, was called Bianco Eldorado, if I am not mistaken, which, I can certify, I am not. Bianco Eldorado is a white so rich in golden undertones it casts the spell of pale cashmere or of a delicate dessert of baked cream. He carried a dark brown fedora. He stood with his back to the glass. The host reached for the hat and helped the invader with the removal of his coat.

The man sat not wearily but soberly. He nodded, evidently inaugurating the serving of his supper without speaking a syllable. He sent a polite smile across the diagonal gap between our tables and apologized, I usually eat downstairs. Thank you for sharing this place.

The old fellow spoke with an accent – that precise-tongued, clear-voiced sound of the educated immigrant – certainly Italian. I was twice sure of this because I had grown up with that cadence in my ears; this was the vocal rhythm of my late, surrogate father, a Neapolitan journalist and a fish-out-of-water in the suburbs of Manhattan.

I responded, No problem, amending this unsociable statement with one equally inappropriate, Glad to have you.

He turned his head a bit to the side seeming charmed by my hospitality, then, with an eye to the bright blooms in front of him, sank into the false seclusion special to public places.

*

The leather apron, stiff, new, wrapped almost twice around the eight-year old, nearly scraped the hard earth as the boy scurried up the rocky hill chasing the master who strode ahead. The dark forest on the left pushed its boundaries.

The child had never been away from the town beneath them set like a gem in a bezel of evergreen. He caught up to the master, felt the master’s hand clamp the back of his neck, but immediately bolted into a flock of spotted rock doves nestling on the cliff. Wings and their delicate wind fluttered in the master’s face.

Lorenzo! The master reached and nearly caught a bird.

Lorenzo jumped with glee among the warm breasts and feathers and surprised eyes. He felt the clamp resume its hold. Joined to his painting master silently and definitely in this way, he left the promontory for a high valley sheltered by the mountain.

They came to a shelf of rock, a primordial divan, where the master sat and mutely released the boy. It was the colorless time of year when winter had abandoned the vicinity and spring was apparent only by its perfume.

Lorenzo rocked sideways, watching his chance to escape the ledge.

In a voice as gentle as the fragrance around them, the man said, Your skill of drawing brought you to me. A little of that every day and your hand will be so skilled you shall be able to render any scene, any face, every part of the body with no trouble.

The boy looked at the master’s face, not an old face, but old enough to possess lines like etching. At the corners of his eyes, the sun’s rays had dug shallow folds.

The master noticed the boy observing his face. Yet without painting what is drawing? In painting is the imagination called, as new life is called from the dead of winter….

The boy opened his mouth but held back from breaking into the master’s thought. Then unable to resist, he plunged into the abyss of his soul. I want to join the Circus!

The master sighed. Painting calls forth imagination and demands your skill of hand, and by these two together you will discover things not seen, things hiding under the shadows of natural objects…. his hand raised with his declaration.

The boy reached and the master gave him his hand and let him turn the palm to the sun.

In painting, with the skill of the hand and the imagination, you shall present to plain sight what does not actually exist.

The boy, Lorenzo, turned his aqua eyes full on his master’s face. What should exist?

The master smiled briefly, slapped his knees and got to his feet and bent for the spade, which he had toted up the hills. Never marry, Lorenzo. The master looked well past his apprentice. All will be well with your art. He scraped the flat rock with the steel. He said nothing about why he was doing such a thing or what could be expected from scarring the stone.

Lorenzo knelt, facing his master, watching his face and the tip of the spade. In no time at all the under-skin of the rock revealed wrinkles, like wrinkles in a human face, and each one was a different color, black, blue, brick-red sinoper, and yellow. And the child was astounded to see perfect white there existing in the stone.

*

The menu, printed in Italian, was wisely explained with interlinear translation in English. And although this repast had taken on some lustre with the inclusion of the stranger and his car and his hat and his coat and his familiarity with place, I settled on a risotto, which had something to do with shrimp, for it seemed complex of preparation and simple of consumption. And, shrimp and rice are favorites of mine, not that I am not a closet connoisseur of potatoes.

On the other hand, what quickly arrived at Table Two was a first-course of riotous orange and yellow bell peppers and elegant green beans cohesive with a red tomato sauce marked by iridescent strands of sautéed sweet onion and fresh green oregano. This brilliantly colored and delectable looking and smelling dish was not listed on the menu. It would be an overstatement to say that I was irked, yet my anticipation of my pale-pink porridge of rice and seafood was frankly lessened.

The host, himself, poured a ruby-hued, velvet Chianti for the senior man across from me. I clung to my Sauterne like a shield and fought my rising curiosity about the intruder who was giving no trouble, minding the invisible barrier erected by civilization – an oxymoronic notion but standing between us anyway.

The man ate well. By that I mean neatly yet with pleasure. He was an adept at depositing the long and slippery sweet peppers into his mouth. He chewed appreciatively as if their deliciousness prompted a memory as delectable. He finished, patted his lips with his white napkin, and spoke directly to me.

Young man, have you ever eaten their Pepperonata? I could make an entire meal of it. I recommend it.

His way of speaking with a lingering emphasis on the lovely word, pepperonata, his formal, honest wish for me to experience his pleasure, started an engine in me – ignited the pistons of my brain – memories flowed past me as if I were his glorious car and he was driving me to some place of delight only he knew. It certainly looked good! I said. I burned with embarrassment. I’d invaded his privacy, as he had not done mine.

Consistent with the personality drawn so far, the Italian ruminated, How true! When something looks good to eat – it nearly always is.

His prosaic remark, because it was his, rang with profundity like a mission bell. I strained to say something else, some dross to be turned into his gold but I laughed and agreed, You’re right.

I worked slowly at my risotto.

CHAPTER 2

My not entirely solitary dining room struck me more as a chapel in a cathedral than as an attic in an eating establishment. The dark blue sky beyond the two tables was its rose window, accentuated by faraway stars instead of glass insets stained in jewel-hues.

Sensing that sacerdotal quality led me to a closer examination of the interior. The stucco walls and plain tables and chairs spoke of a monk’s cell – better a refectory. We two, the Italian gent and I, with our silence, and our food, and our thoughts, and the dark blue sky, and a lonely night ahead, comprised a sect of our own – I savored my wine.

I permitted my glance to stray to the elderly man enjoying his main course of paper-thin beef rolled into aromatic wands, cooked somehow, and presented under a sauce of white asparagus. A glory of cress and carrot surrounded this delicate fare. I would never have seen the colors of his food had not the maitre d’, sending a canny glance my way, delivered, unsolicited, a second candle to our alcove and placed it on my neighbor’s table. I felt he owed me another bouquet of ranunculus.

My thoughts reverted from those bright petals to the woman I hold in mind as a way of holding her when she is not present. Her lips tinted tangerine or rose let off a fragrance. A masculine voice startled me from my vision of her mouth open slightly.

It is a pleasure to dine alone. Do you agree? I am sorry to be rude, speaking to you nameless. I am Lorenzo.

Swept by this onslaught of detail, I answered as if I were unsure of my own identity. My name is…Luke. Luke.

Ha! Lorenzo clapped his hands. Don’t you love Fate? Luke is the name of the first painter who knew the Christ! If you are familiar with the New Testament, you know to whom I refer. Are you a painter?

I could not claim that distinction for my haphazard sketches in my journal did not constitute the painterly persuasion. I shook my head in the negative.

Never mind that. Very nice for me it is that your name is Luke. They call me Larry in this country. Even my students.

I leapt at this scrap. You are a professor!

I am a painter!

We laughed.

His eyes sparked with white lights as if the stars behind him showed through his cranium. He could not resist long laughter. He shook his head as if separating thoughts jumbled. So many colors! His voice drifted.

Fighting to retrieve his lightheartedness, I ventured, What sort of things do you paint?

He looked at me and then at his colorful plate. Walls, my son. Walls. His chin lowered to his impeccably white shirtfront.

I was sure that my blunt question had cast him down and was equally unsure why this non-offensive and civilized person dismantled any pretension of mine to social grace.

*

Lorenzo! I recognize that girl!

Lorenzo peered over his scaffold for an instant. Naturally you do, Elio! This is the Virgin Mother! The goose-feather moved gently between his forefinger and thumb, the long, flexible filaments jutting from the quill leaving traces of a young female face in the smooth, wet plaster.

"Mother I can believe…. Lorenzo’s counterpart, rubbing the wall lower down with a small wooden block, created a dry sort of music in the duomo. But virgin!?" Elio sniggered.

Lorenzo, slender, steel-cable strong, drizzled his dish of perfect dark ocher on his Virgin’s detractor. Neither is your mother. Idiot!

Idiot! Elio laughed and wiped his face with his shirtsleeve. You keep your trousers buttoned, Lorenzo. This alley cat with the pretty face…

Young lady…

Dreamer! Young lady! Tulia’s sixteen and already crazy. She’s been passed around the neighborhood like a piss pot! You’d better watch out for yourself. Elio took up his smoothing of the plaster.

Lorenzo scowled but he recovered brightly, If it’s as you say, I’d better watch out for her, don’t you think? Having squandered his dark ocher, Lorenzo mixed the light one with lime white and a touch of black. The tip of his penknife made the measure for the cinabrese. He added clear water. I’m going to take her away from here. I’m leaving Italy, my friend.

What! No you’re not!

Yes, I am.

That’s lunacy! There is a law! There’s a law against anyone leaving Italy. You know it! Il Duce’ll grab you up with his long hook and set you down right in front of a firing squad!

I’m leaving for America where the streets are paved with gold and a man is free to walk as far as those roads take him.

You’re nuts! We’re going to Abyssinia. To fight. To get our guts blown out.

Lorenzo hooted, "And you preach to me about insanity? You throw down your brushes to pick up a gun to go to idiotic Abyssinia on the say-so of this Julius Caesar- impostor to kill or be killed – that’s insanity!" Lorenzo laughed until his scaffold swung like a high wire in the wind.

Elio paid closer attention to his work.

Lorenzo concentrated on his Virgin’s lips; he lifted one corner out of placidity into a patient smile.

CHAPTER 3

The walls of the duomo were lost in the withholding of light. Hundreds of tapers as erect as soldiers stood dormant in front of those walls. They lined the center aisle, by them made long like the road of life.

Lorenzo should have been waiting in the misty sanctuary for his bride, but Tulia was resisting her role, tearing at her gown and cursing in an anteroom. Her mother, warned of trouble by the maid-of-honor, nabbed her son-in-law to-be and propelled him to the rear of the church via a side passage, convinced that only he could tame the wildcat. What Lorenzo whispered in Tulia’s ear prompting peculiar laughter, the desperate mother was not interested to know. She turned from the averted calamity thinking to slip back with Lorenzo, the Godsend, to their places unnoticed.

The church should have progressed in darkness with the advance of the June night. But the groom and his mother-in-law to-be walked into a molten halo. A swarm of acolytes, their lace chasubles billowing over their cassocks, ran helter-skelter, armed with long brass rods with flaming tips, igniting each candlewick. This risk, this flouting the precautions of war, caused a gasp just as Tulia broke through the outer haze. At first, the throng saw nothing of the bride; they turned on Lorenzo, some shaking a fist, others protesting out loud, and then finally all applauding for the young painter’s bravura. Light at night!

Tulia entered the wax-fragranced miasma thinking the applause was for her. This was the only music for the war bride. She loved Lorenzo for that one moment and played her part in the way he had schooled her. She glided in her simple ice blue gown and mantle of satin toward the altar, her calm expression smudged with humor.

It seemed to the wedding guests that the walls had come alive, that Mary, the Virgin, stepped toward them right out of the plaster. They gaped at the pure and the impure flowing one into the other. The women lowered their eyes to rid themselves of the illusion that the innocent Virgin was, in fact, the wayward girl. The men clucked deep in their throats at Lorenzo’s picking their pockets to plaster their cathedral walls with the image of the loco adolescent they had rutted in the alleys or had known too well in their dreams. And some of them knew shame as this embodiment of the Virgin passed them by.

CHAPTER 4

Risotto never seems to go away. You cannot eat it enough. Simple and complex, as I’ve already observed, one of the few complete and essential foods, a staff of life, one chews and chews its softness trying to glean its flavor, and, like life in its eternity, there is always more on your plate. Doggedly one chews and swallows, cursing the painstaking chef. It is cold by the time everyone else is eager for dessert.

This was my predicament when Lorenzo’s main course had been accomplished and his empty dish swept away. He was waiting for me. He acknowledged my baleful perseverance in what had become to me a recognizable pattern of delicacy.

Rushing from course to course is nothing to do in a good restaurant. It is time to smoke but these days it is not allowed and that is O.K., Luke. Do you agree?

I was holding up his zabiglione, or his canolo, or his raspberries and cream, his blood orange sorbet. Or – ahh! his almond tart.

He went right on, I tell you that a pause in one’s meal is a privilege. A privilege of the princely class. He laughed peacefully. I know this for a fact as a person used to gulping his dinner out of a pail.

He had shocked me. The Continental gentleman had dropped his spiritual trousers in a revelation not elicited. A wall-painter who ate out of a lunch pail could not be the man seated at the opposite table. The image of slaving carriage-horses in Central Park with their feedbags hooked over their ears was inescapable. I no longer dug my fork into the pink mush.

Pardon me, Luke. I have disturbed your meal.

I regarded the small mass shivering against the rim of the china and announced, Not at all. I’ve had enough of it. Oh, it was good! But filling.

My polite protestation seemed to have induced a dream state in Lorenzo. He was staring past the doors. I know he saw actors there.

*

The khaki sand, lost to the white-hot sun, made a brilliant backdrop for the dark shrouds. Stiff with the dead boys they wrapped, and precisely arranged side-by-side, they appeared ludicrously like molded candy ready to be boxed.

With the other survivors in his battalion, Lorenzo saluted the casualties. His raised, sunburned hand appeared disembodied, so matched was his uniform to the desert. Indeed, he was invisible to himself except for his reddened skin. Nor could his soul fathom the glint of his bayonet at his side. A tick evinced itself in Lorenzo’s neck as Elio’s name was read from the roster of the dead.

Lorenzo dodged the mess that night in favor of casting his belongings into his kit, shouldering it, and stealing through the squid-ink blackness of the camp toward the huge and rambling mass of the officers’ tent.

Small golden stars embedded in the darkness beyond the raised flaps, actually kerosene flame, guided his steps. The voices of men determined that their conversation should not carry slapped him like flags in a wind because there was not the slightest grace of humidity that could tamp them down.

The inevitable gruff command to halt instigated Lorenzo’s smile. The arrogance of the Blackshirt reminded him of a film he had seen about the French Foreign Legion. Not wishing to be shot ingloriously, or at least cautious of creating a false impression that might get him dishonorably discharged, a circumstance quite the equal of being shot ingloriously, Lorenzo announced in perfect candor that he had come to talk to the general. A bayonet slanted hard across his chest and Lorenzo soon found himself in the brig minus his side arms and his pistol.

The brig was another large tent with a pole at center to which Lorenzo was tethered like a dog. The darkness floated him, suffocated him like a sea. Blind to everything but his foolishness, Lorenzo awaited slaughter. He and Elio had not done well that day. Enveloped by the arid blackness, he set his mind on his paints not to go mad at the phantasm of scorpions and serpents and ants creeping over his boots and seeking entry into his trousers. These boots were the most beautiful articles of clothing he had ever worn, tan, hand-sewn, cap-toed. He resolved to keep them, that is, appropriate them, if he could sidestep the consequences of his insubordinate foray across the camp. Could he have alerted the Aussies advancing with their superior tanks to crumble