Bernard Malamud
THE LAST MOHICAN
Fidelman, a self-confessed failure as a painter, came to
Italy to prepare a critical study of Giotto, the opening chapter of
which he had carried across the ocean in a new pigskin leather brief
case, now gripped in his perspiring hand. Also new were his gum–
soled oxblood shoes, a tweed suit he had on despite the late-Sep–
tember sun slanting hot in the Roman sky, although there was a
lighter one in his bag; and a dacron shirt and set of cotton-dacron
underwear, good for quick and easy washing for the traveler. His
suitcase, a bulky, two-strapped affair which embarrassed him slightly,
he had borrowed from his sister Bessie. He planned, if he had any
money left at the end of the year, to buy a new one in Florence. Al–
though he had been in not much of a mood when he had left the
U.S.A., Fidelman picked up in Naples, and at the moment, as he
stood
in front of the Rome railroad station, after twenty minutes
still
absorbed in his first sight of the Eternal City, he was conscious
of a certain exaltation that devolved on him after he had discovered
that directly across the many-vehicled piazza stood the remains of
the Baths of Diocletian. Fidelman remembered having read that
Michelangelo had had a hand in converting the Baths into a church
and
convent, the latter ultimately changed into the museum that
presently was there. "Imagine," he muttered. "Imagine
all
that
history."
In the midst of his imagining, Fidelman experienced the sen–
sation of suddenly seeing himself as he was, to the pinpoint, outside
and
in, not without bittersweet pleasure; and as the well-known
image of
his
face rose before him he was taken by the depth of pure
feeling in his eyes, slightly magnified by glasses, and the sensitivity
of
his
elongated nostrils and often tremulous lips, nose from lips
di.
