STILL LIFE
103
That I passionately adore each sweet-and-sour bit of her? He figured
it bored her to see so much of him. For a week Fidelman disappeared
during the day, sat in cold libraries or visited frosty museums. He
tried painting after midnight and into the early morning hours but
the pittrice found out and unscrewed the bulbs before she went to
bed. "Don't waste my electricity, this isn't America." He screwed
in
a dim blue bulb and worked silently from one a.m. to five. At
dawn he discovered he had painted a blue picture. Fidelman
wandered in the streets of the city. At night he slept in the studio
and could hear her sleeping in her room. She slept restlessly, dreamed
badly, and often moaned. He dreamed he had three eyes.
For two weeks he spoke to no one but a dumpy four-and-a–
half-foot female on the third floor, and to her usually to say no.
Fidelman, having often heard the music of Bach drifting up from
below, had tried to picture the lady piano player, imagining a quiet
blonde with a slender body, a woman of grace and beauty. It had
turned out to be Clelia Montemaggio, a middle-aged old-maid music
teacher, who sat at an old upright piano, her apartment door open to
let out the cooking smells, particularly fried fish on Friday. Once
when coming up from bringing down the garbage, Fidelman had
paused to listen to part of a partita at her door and she had lassoed
him in for an espresso and pastry. He ate and listened to Bach, her
plump bottom moving spryly on the bench as she played not badly.
"Lo spirito," she called to him raptly over her shoulder, "l'archi–
tettura!" Fidelman nodded. Thereafter whenever she spied him in
the hall she attempted to entice him with cream-filled pastries and
l.S.B., whom she played apparently exclusively.
"Come een," she called in English, "I weel play for you. We
wed talk. There is no use for too much solitude." But the
art
student,
burdened by his, spurned hers.
Unable to work, in a desolate mood he wandered in the streets,
his spirit dusty in a city of fountains and leaking water taps. Water,
water everywhere, spouting, flowing, dripping, whispering secrets,
love love love, but not for him.
If
Rome's so sexy, where's mine?
Fidelman's Romeless Rome. It belonged least to those who yearned
most for it. With slow steps he climbed the Pincia, if possible to raise
his spirits gazing down at the rooftops of the city, spire:s, cupolas,
towers, monuments, compounded history and past time. It was in
